This is the sixth of the 24 Wall Street mysteries starring amateur sleuth John Putnam Thatcher. An investment banker at the Sloan Guarantee Trust, he finds himself embroiled in shenanigans in high finance and murder.

The plot involves an early trading treaty between the US and USSR, set in 1967. On the basis of the treaty that sent surplus US grain to the inefficient USSR, an elaborate theft cheats the Sloan bank out of nearly a million dollars. Lathen takes Thatcher through a typical series of absurd situations. The Cuban Navy buzzes ships in New York harbor. Ukrainian nationalists protest. The Leningrad Symphony practices in the CCNY basketball arena. A stage-Russian impresario imports a troupe of Russian otters that eat only smelt marinated in vodka. After a Russian trade delegation tours a US potato chip factory, where they are served various dishes involving chips, one member concludes nobody could defect after having potato chip soup.

Emma Lathen was the pen-name of Mary Jane Latsis, an economist, and Martha Henissart, an economic analyst. They bring much knowledge of business transactions and office life to their novels, which give them authenticity. The theme of “Money makes the world go ‘round” is very strong. They also have a keen sense of the absurd. Thatcher is a committed capitalist although he knows that human fallibility is real enough that lying, cheating, and stealing must be constantly guarded against. Latsis and Henissart, probably both Republicans, were conservative enough not to kid themselves about the ability of Wall Street to “self-regulate.”

I have a confession to make:  I don’t think I ever read a book by Judy Blume when I was an adolescent.  I am an anomaly in my generation, a generation that learned some of the facts of life by reading Judy Blume growing up.  Yet somehow I missed out.  So when I saw In the Unlikely Event advertised on a “must reads for the summer” list online, I was more attracted by the cover image than who the author was.

Although the story revolves around many characters, the main character is a teenager named Miri Ammerman and starts in 1951.  Technically the story starts (very briefly) and ends in 1987 but majority of the book takes place in 1951 and 1952.  Miri lives in Elizabeth, NJ in a two family house with her mother, Rusty, upstairs and her beloved Uncle Henry and grandmother, Irene, living downstairs.  Miri lives a relatively normal life.  She baby-sits, has two best friends, and knows that she is loved by her family.  The only abnormality in her life is that she doesn’t know who her father is since her mother was never married and she refuses to talk about how Miri came to be.  Miri only knows bits and pieces of her origin based on overheard conversations over the years.  Yet this mystery isn’t what unravels Miri’s life.  Miri’s life changes forever after a series of plane crashes over the course of 58 days happen in Elizabeth.

Blume tells this story by separating each chapter across several different characters.  Chapter 1 alone starts describing the experiences of ten different characters across eight separations (I’d say point of view, but I associate that with first person narration rather than third person, and this story is told in the third person).  Having to keep all of these characters straight can be a challenge, sometimes I felt like I needed a cheat-sheet to reference.  Some of the characters have their stories told throughout the book like Miri and others close to her, and some characters only appear once or twice.  But Blume masterfully weaves together each of the characters’ stories and shows how their lives manage to overlap in some way due to these plane crashes.  I found this book difficult to put down, and read it over the course of about 24 hours, even though it is nearly 400 pages long.  In part, I think I also read the book quickly so I wouldn’t forget which character was which from chapter to chapter.

Although Miri and the other characters are fictional, the three commercial plane crashes in Elizabeth, NJ in the early 1950s really happened.  I live in New Jersey and grew up less than an hour from Elizabeth, yet I had never heard about these events.  Granted, these were before my time, but I would have thought that I would have at least heard of something as tragic as three commercial passenger planes crashing in a town not far from where I live.  In an odd turn of events, I was going to take this book on vacation with me earlier this summer, but decided against it due to the cover and title (I figured it wasn’t the best thing to bring on a plane).  I started reading it when I came home, and the first plane that crashed was coming from Buffalo to Newark, the same trip I had just taken to get home from my trip (technically the flight in the book had two stops between Buffalo and Newark, but still, it was weird to read that and really made me glad I didn’t bring it on my trip).

I’m not sure how to classify the genre of this book.  Do the 1950s count as historical fiction or is that too contemporary (stories set in WWII are classified as historical fiction and this book takes place only a few years after WWII)?  I guess I could best classify this as a coming of age or self-discovery story since Miri and many of the other characters, including the adult characters, experience something so big that the paths their lives were on ended up getting altered forever.

Maigret goes after the culprit, but he must examine deeper human truths along the way, as part psychologist and part anthropologist. He contrasts his own culture (French, urban, Catholic) with that of the Protestant bourgeoisie in a small Dutch town. He realizes the behavior of the characters is profoundly influenced by a strict and austere environment against which some – like Conrad and Beetje – must rebel. Plus, he must contend with an unspoken attitude that doubts the social utility of denouncing and punishing the guilty if the guilty one belongs to the upper classes. Such a bad example for the lower classes, after all. As for comic relief, Maigret, the bull in the china shop, must deal with the delicate sensibilities of the Dutch police and Professor Duclos, who wants Maigret to do as the Dutch do when in Holland.

Fans count this one, the eighth Maigret novel, as one of the better early novels, written in the Depression era. Simenon’s powers lie in his economical style, his simple vocabulary, his way of setting scenes to evoke atmosphere, his probing of the psychology of his characters, and his awareness of and icy compassion for fallibility.