Day 252: The Demon of Dakar

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Cover for The Demon of DakarA theme of this mystery novel is how crime affects the lives of innocent people. Manuel Alavez’s two younger brothers were lured from rural Oaxaca with the promise of money made by a fat man and a tall thin man from Sweden. Manuel turned down the offer and continued his hard labor on the family farm. His brother Angel was killed in Germany, and Patricio was arrested at the Swedish border carrying drugs he thought were important letters. Now, Manuel has traveled to Sweden to visit Patricio in prison and collect the money that was promised to him even if he failed.

Slobadan Andersson is the fat man, the owner of a restaurant named Dakar in Uppsala. He and his partner Armas, the tall man, also import and sell drugs. But Armas soon goes missing.

Eva Willman is the single mother of two teenage sons. She has been unemployed for a long time, ever since the post office laid her off, but she has heard that there is a waitress position open at Dakar. Shortly after she starts work, feeling a new sense of self-worth, she learns her oldest son Patrik was reported at the scene of the stabbing of a local drug dealer.

Johnny Kvarnheder is a chef who has just left his old life behind to start work at Dakar.

These characters and others are affected by the activities of the drug smugglers and sellers who are trying to open up the drug market in Uppsala. Ann Lindell and a host of her colleagues from several agencies end up trying to find out who murdered Armas, who stabbed the drug seller, and who is responsible for selling drugs to teenagers. At the same time, Ann still misses her ex-lover Edvard and tries to cope with the serious illness of her mentor.

This novel is more of an interesting police procedural than a mystery, since readers know who murdered Armas but don’t understand how all the pieces fit together. The fates of the Mexican men were especially compelling. One caveat is that there were far too many police officers to keep track of, which may be realistic but somewhat impedes the story.

Day 251: The Disorderly Knights

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Cover for The Disorderly KnightsBest Book of the Week!
The Disorderly Knights is the third novel in Dorothy Dunnett’s rousing Lymond Chronicles series. I previously reviewed the first two novels, The Game of Kings and Queen’s Play.

Upon his return to Scotland from his adventures in France, Francis Crawford of Lymond establishes a small fighting force of independent knights and begins training them. As their reputation spreads, the band begins to attract more knights, and he hears that they are to be joined by a renowned fighter, Sir Graham Reid Mallett, Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St. John. Many of the men who know Reid Mallet consider him almost a living saint. In disposition and talents he seems to be a perfect foil for Lymond, but they clash, and some of Lymond’s men begin to turn against him. As usual, Lymond’s behavior appears to put him in the wrong, and Reid Mallett seems to want to usurp the fighting force.

This conflict eventually leads to Malta, where Lymond arrives just before the Ottoman Turks attack. During the siege, Lymond becomes involved in the political maneuvering and feuds among the various national factions of the declining Order of St. John. He also hears that Oonagh O’Dwyer, the beautiful Irish rebel he encountered in Queen’s Play, is captive in another city on the island. After the siege, he follows her to North Africa in an attempt to free her.

It is difficult to write more about this novel because of spoilers, but also because the plot becomes increasingly complex from this point on, with threads that are not all explained until the sixth book. Suffice it to say that, although this is a slow-starting series, if you get this far, you will be hooked. The novel is suspenseful and exciting, and Lymond makes a complicated and compelling main character, almost an anti-hero at times. These books were written in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and I think the only series to compare with them might be George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice or Dunnett’s own House of Niccolo series.

Day 250: The Last Detective

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Cover for The Last DetectiveMy husband and I have been enjoying reruns of the older British TV series The Last Detective on Netflix, so I picked up this book. Unfortunately, I spent the first part of the novel bemoaning its lack of resemblance to the series. Since it has a strong message of lack of trust in “new” police methods and technology instead of reliance on the police’s judgment and intuition, I also couldn’t help thinking of recent cases such as that of Michael Morton, who spent 25 years in prison for murdering his wife based on very little but a scenario invented by the police and was last year found by DNA evidence to be innocent. However, since one of Lovesey’s hero’s traits is a dogged pursuit of the investigation rather than a rush to judgment, I got over that.

The body of a woman is discovered nude in a lake near Bath. Although the police aren’t certain of the cause of death, her clothes and possessions don’t turn up anywhere, and the pathologist believes she has been asphixiated. After some time, the body is identified as that of Geraldine Snoo, a soap opera star who had been written out of the plot months before.

One obvious suspect is Gregory Jackman, Gerry’s husband and a professor of English at the local college. Detective Superintendant Peter Diamond leads the investigation, which eventually seems to point toward another suspect, Dana Didrickson, a divorcee who seems to be in love with Jackman. The mystery also involves the whereabouts of letters purportedly written by Jane Austen.

My biggest problem with the novel is one of approach. It contains two long sections narrated first by Jackman and then Didrickson that are supposedly their statements to the police, an approach very similar to that used in older detective novels like The Moonstone. The Moonstone, though, had the excuse that its statements were written ones requested by the investigator to separately verify everyone’s statements of the crime. In the context of a more modern novel, I found them completely unlikely, written as they are like prose, containing too much detail, and with few questions interjected by the police.

Once the novel gets past these sections it improves a lot, though, and becomes lively and entertaining, including a chase through the Roman baths.

Day 249: The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

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Cover for The Physick Book of Deliverance DaneBest Book of the Week!
Connie Goodwin has just passed her orals in history at Harvard and is one thesis away from her doctorate when her advisor, Manning Chilton, challenges her to find an undiscovered primary source on which to base some subject about Colonial America. She is almost immediately side-tracked in her research by a request from her mother to sort out her grandmother’s long-abandoned house in Marblehead and sell it to pay off back taxes.

Connie finds a very old, filthy house with a gate so overgrown with vines that it’s hard to find the house. Almost immediately she has a few odd glimpses, as if she can vividly picture her grandparents and other people in the house.

While sorting through the objects and papers in the house, she finds evidence of a woman named Deliverance Dane, who was found guilty of witchcraft in the Salem trials and left behind a “recipe” book, possibly of spells. Chilton immediately begins putting pressure on Connie to find the book, as it could provide the first evidence that people were actually practicing witchcraft at that time in Massachusetts. As Connie searches for the book, she makes some astonishing discoveries about her family and herself.

Back in the 17th century, Deliverance Dane, a wise woman or healer, is called to attend a child she cannot save. When the child dies, her father accuses Deliverance of satanism.

Some small things at the beginning of the novel irritated me. In laying the foundation of some basic history, I think Howe condescends to the reader a bit too much. For example, she finds occasion to tell us what a familiar is. Although many people may assume that all familiars are cats and find out differently from this novel, I would be surprised if people didn’t know what they were, if only from remembering their grade school lessons about the Salem witch trials. But perhaps I’m wrong.

There are also a couple of instances where Connie takes awhile to figure out something that she, as a graduate history student, should already know. For example, she doesn’t immediately know that “receipt” is another word for “recipe,” and then she has to explain this term to her professor, supposedly an expert in Colonial America. I am no historian or even generally interested in this period of history, but I knew immediately what the word meant. She does the same thing with figuring out that “Deliverance Dane,” mysterious words on a piece of paper, is someone’s name, as if in all her studies of the period she never encountered such an unusual name.

It is also very easy to see where the novel is going and who will turn out to be a villain. However, I still found it interesting enough to regard it as a strong first novel, especially if you enjoy the mixture of historical fiction and the supernatural. The characters are believable, and both story lines kept my attention. The historical portion seems solidly researched.

And I won’t mention the tomatoes, because it’s just too picky.

Day 248: A Long Finish

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Cover for A Long FinishAurelio Zen’s assignment in A Long Finish reflects the corruption in the Italian police force and government that is always being pointed out in these books. Zen is assigned to go to Alba not by his superiors but by a famous movie producer. The producer wants him to investigate the murder of Aldo Vincenzo, a noted winemaker–more importantly, to free Vincenzo’s son Manlio so he can get the grape harvest in and oversee the production of the wine. Vincenzo was found stabbed in his own vineyards with his genitals removed. The producer is a wine connoisseur who wants to make sure this year’s vintage isn’t wasted.

Zen finds himself in a dreamy, unfocused state, having nightmares because of several successive personal losses. Unfortunately, I’ve read the Aurelio Zen novels in an entirely random order, so I was confused about the sequence of the events in his personal life. Zen also has a severe cold, and someone is leaving him anonymous phone messages.

The first scene in the book, however, was of the murder, so the readers know that just before his death, Vincenzo encountered a trespassing truffle hunter. But which person was it? The truth may lie 40 years in the past, as indicated by the method of Vincenzo’s death, with echoes of partisan fighting during World War II, or maybe that is just a ruse.

I may be tiring a little of Aurelio Zen. I couldn’t put my finger on anything definite, but throughout this novel I got the impression that Dibdin is just trifling with his readers.

Day 247: That Old Cape Magic

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Cover for That Old Cape MagicI was so excited by discovering Empire Falls earlier this year that I went right out and bought a more recent book by Richard Russo, That Old Cape Magic. This novel observes the thoughts of Jack Griffin as his marriage implodes and again a year later as he tries to make amends.

Griffin is obsessed with not becoming his parents, a couple of academic snobs who have spent their lifetimes criticizing everything, willfully ruining other people’s possessions, and making enemies in their Midwest university departments. Yet he has given up a successful screen-writing career to teach at a New England college that his parents always aspired to, and bought an old, charming house. These decisions make him feel like he is living the lives they wanted.

As Griffin carts around his father’s ashes on the way to a wedding on Cape Cod, he behaves spitefully to his wife Joy, whom he blames for the changes in his life. In his drives around the Cape, where he and his family spent all their summers, he thinks about his past, his parents, and his marriage.

In the second part of the novel, he returns to the Cape for his daughter’s wedding with his father’s ashes still in the car, along with his mother’s. He has come with a date but his real desire is to win back his wife.

I think several things hampered me from enjoying this novel as much as I did the other. First, Griffin isn’t very likeable and his parents seem repellant, although we have some evidence that his memories may not all be accurate. One of the difficulties in Griffin’s marriage is his dislike of Joy’s family, but Joy’s family is almost stereotypically drawn as wacky, loud, and obnoxious, so it’s hard to appreciate why Joy cares for them as much as she does. Aside from being uncaring about his wife’s family and her needs, Griffin seems to be clueless about many things in his own life. Generally, since I usually need to relate to at least one character and only Griffin is fully realized, I found the novel a little unsatisfying.

Day 246: Kindness Goes Unpunished

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Cover for Kindness Goes UnpunishedHere it is, the first review of my second year of blogging. I just had to say that. Now, on to the review.

As much as I enjoy Craig Johnson’s series about Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire, I find that I’ve been neglecting him and so am way behind in reviewing the series. One thing I admire most about this series is the sense of place–how Wyoming is depicted so clearly it is almost a character. Unfortunately, Kindness Goes Unpunished takes place in Philadelphia, so we miss that here, but the book is still action packed and lots of fun to read.

Sheriff Longmire and his best friend Henry Standing Bear travel to Philadelphia. Henry is setting up a collection of photos at a museum in preparation for giving a lecture, and Walt is visiting his daughter Cady, who works there as a lawyer.

Before Walt even gets a chance to see Cady, she is found at the bottom of some steps in a coma. Witness testimony seems to indicate that she was pushed down the stairs by her boyfriend, who turns out to have a drug habit. Shortly thereafter, however, the boyfriend is shoved off a bridge.

Philly cops wonder if Walt is responsible for the boyfriend’s death. Walt is torn between worry about Cady and his impulse to track down the killer, so Walt’s lippy deputy, Victoria Moretti, gets on a plane from Wyoming. It helps that she is a Philadelphia native and has relatives in the police force. Walt makes a deal with the Philly police to assist them in their investigation. (No, Brits, that doesn’t mean the same thing here as it does in the U.K.) We readers also get to meet the entire Moretti clan, including Victoria’s mother, who seems inclined to flirt with Walt.

Although I missed the Wyoming setting, Johnson effectively employs the fish-out-of-water technique to produce a novel that is as good as ever.

Extra Special Post! First Year’s Top Ten

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image of booksThis week marks the one-year anniversary of my blog, so I decided that would be the perfect time to announce my top ten books instead of doing it at the end of last year. My list is a little different from other lists in one other way. It is a list of the top ten books I’ve reviewed in the past year, not those that were published that year. Also, since it was difficult to narrow down my list even though I restricted myself to the best books list, I had to make some artificial rules for myself–for example, to only select one book from a series or by an author.

So, with no further ado, here is my list, in the order of appearance on this blog (earliest to most recent):