Tag: crime fiction

Day 231: I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

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Cover for I Am Half-Sick of ShadowsAnother comic mystery starring the eleven-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows is the usual fun, even though the clues don’t add up until after the murderer is revealed.

Flavia’s father has rented out the house for Christmas to a film company in an effort to save the estate, since the family is so badly in debt. On Christmas Eve, the lead actors, Phyllis Wyvern and Desmond Duncan, perform a small benefit concert for the village of Bishop’s Lacey, after which everyone is snowed in by a blizzard. During the night, Wyvern is murdered, strangled to death with a length of film. This situation leaves the entire film crew and population of the village as potential suspects.

Although Flavia doesn’t know who the killer is, she becomes trapped on the roof where she has gone to shoot off fireworks and perform a scientific experiment. She has devised a super-sticky bird lime and has spread it all over the roof in an effort to capture Father Christmas, if he exists. Unfortunately, the murderer finds some reason to suspect that Flavia might be on his or her trail.

Day 229: Death Without Company

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Cover for Death Without CompanyLucius Connally, the ex-sheriff of Absaroka County and Walt Longmire’s old boss, asks Walt to look into the death of an old Basque woman named Mari in an assisted-living home. Before he even finds out she was poisoned, Walt discovers she used to be Lucius’s wife. Her brute of a second husband, who left the family in the 50’s, does not respond to phone calls.

In investigating the crime, Walt is brought into the life of the Basque sheepherders. He finds himself chasing a mysterious large man and rescues the old woman’s granddaughter after she is attacked in her own bakery.

With a backdrop of the stunning Wyoming vistas and the usual recurring characters, the Longmire series continues to be entertaining.

Day 227: At Bertram’s Hotel

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Cover for At Bertram's HotelMiss Marple’s nieces and nephews don’t have much luck sending her off for a rest. At her niece’s expense, she is spending a week at Bertram’s Hotel, a place she remembers from her childhood. Although at first the hotel seems exactly the same as it was when she was young, Edwardian in appearance and yet offering every comfort despite the intercession of the war, Miss Marple can’t help feeling something isn’t right.

Another guest at the hotel is the dashing Bess Sedgwick, who has lived a life of excitement and glamor. By coincidence, her daughter Elvira, whom she deserted at the age of two, also is staying there. Soon Miss Marple has spotted them meeting separately with the notorious race car driver Ladislaus Malinkowski.

Befuddled Canon Pennyfeather goes to the airport to fly to his conference in Switzerland on the wrong day. Returning unexpectedly to his room at Bertram’s, he opens the door to find–something–but is knocked out and disappears.

In the meantime Chief Inspector Davy is investigating a huge crime network responsible for a series of robberies. In two of the incidents a witness claimed to see a reputable citizen who was actually somewhere far away from the crime at the time, but both of these men were staying at Bertram’s Hotel.

And soon there is a murder to solve. As with much of Agatha Christie’s work, the plot is overcomplicated and somewhat silly. Still, At Bertram’s Hotel is a lot of fun.

Day 225: The Devil All the Time

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Cover for The Devil All the TimeTruly gritty noir seems to come out of rural settings these days instead of the city. Such is the case with The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock.

Arvin Russell is having a tough childhood in the backwoods town of Meade in southern Ohio. His mother is dying of cancer, and his grief-crazed father Willard has set up a “praying log” where he sacrifices animals and makes Arvin pray for hours on end. When his mother dies, his father commits suicide by hanging himself at the praying log.

Back in Willard Russell’s home town of Coal Creek, Virginia, Brother Roy Laferty is a preacher who eats bugs for the glory of God and travels around with his crippled friend Theodore, a gay pedophile. Roy marries Helen, the woman Willard’s mother wanted him to marry, but later, egged on by Theodore, he murders her. The two start off on a spree of serial killing.

As Arvin grows up in Coal Creek with his grandmother, another couple from Meade haunts the highways of the midwest. Carl and Sandy Henderson pick up hitchhiking men. Carl has Sandy seduce them so that he can murder them and take photographs of Sandy with their bodies.

Lee Bodecker, the policeman who accompanied Arvin back to his father’s body when he was a boy, is now the corrupt sheriff of Meade, Ohio. He knows his sister Sandy is a prostitute but is unaware of her more sinister activities with Carl.

Now grown, Arvin has spent his high school years protecting his unattractive, devout cousin Leonora from the taunts of his school fellows. The town is excited because of the arrival of the new preacher, Preston Teagardin, a nephew of the dedicated Reverend Sykes. But Teagardin is not quite as dedicated as his uncle, and he also has an eye for the young girls. He decides that a naive, religious girl might be a good place to start.

The fates of all these people are soon to converge in a way that won’t be pretty. The flavor of the grotesque and perverse echoes of Flannery O’Connor and other Southern Gothic writers. With hardly a redeeming character to be found, we have to wonder if Pollock is simply revelling in his ability to produce such depravity.

Day 223: 206 Bones

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Cover for 206 BonesPerhaps I am outgrowing Kathy Reichs’ Tempe Brennan series because I don’t pick them up as often as I used to, but I still occasionally enjoy the novels about the forensic anthropologist who shares her work time between Montreal and her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. At the beginning of 206 Bones, Brennan wakes up buried in a tunnel and most of the book is a flashback.

On a case in Chicago with her on-again, off-again romantic partner Andrew Ryan of the Sûreté du Québec, Brennan is accused of botching the autopsy of a Canadian heiress named Rose Jurmain. Brennan eventually realizes that someone in the Montreal office is sabotaging her career by replacing bones in her lab. Tempe begins to suspect that the heiress’s death is linked to that of three more women on Canada, but she is impeded in her investigations by the drama at her workplace.

I find the Tempe Brennan books that take place in Montreal more interesting than those in Charlotte for some reason, perhaps because they seem more atmospheric. The Tempe Brennan series is the very lightest of mystery reading, but the books are rapidly turning into action novels rather than the interesting explorations in forensics that they started out to be.

Day 220: The Water’s Edge

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Cover for The Water's EdgeOut on a hike in a park, Reinhardt and Kristine Ris find a child’s body shortly after they pass a nervous man in the parking lot. We know all along that this man murdered the boy, but even after the witnesses see him at the grocery store and notify the police of who he is, lazy police work makes them rule him out. In the meantime, another boy disappears.

As Inspectors Sejer and Skarre investigate, they are fairly sure of the identity of the perpetrator but have limited evidence to go on. They also find that the abuser has himself a history of abuse.

In contrast to Karin Fossum’s excellent The Indian Bride, I feel that The Water’s Edge is a fairly pedestrian effort. It is more about exploring the psychology of pedophilia than about solving the crime, than actually about developing the plot at all. I also don’t feel like I get to know the characters very well, even the police. However, I have not had the luxury of reading Fossum’s books in order, which might make a difference in my feelings about the characterizations. A side plot about the witnesses’ marriage promises to be more interesting than it actually turns out to be.

Karin Fossum is considered the Queen of Norwegian crime fiction. If you haven’t read any of her books, I suggest that The Indian Bride is a more interesting place to start.

Day 216: Bangkok 8

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Cover for Bangkok 8Previously, I gave a bemused review to Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett. I wish I had started the series with Bangkok 8, the book I am reviewing today, because it provides a lot of context. In this book, we are introduced to Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a half-caste Bangkok cop. He and his partner Pichai are lifelong friends and arhat, devout Buddhists and uncorrupted police officers in a city where corruption is rife.

Sonchai and Pichai have been ordered to follow William Bradley, a retired marine. He picks up a beautiful woman before they lose him in traffic. Later, they find him in his car, where the doors have been jammed shut and a python is attempting to eat his head. After they open the door, they discover too late that his car has been filled with cobras. Pichai is bitten in the eye and dies. Sonchai then vows to find and kill the person responsible.

He is soon requested to meet with the FBI, who are investigating a powerful American associate of Bradley’s–a jeweler named Sylvester Warren who supplies magnificent gems and artifacts to the wealthy of the world. The FBI agents believe that Warren hired Bradley to import jade and commission replicas of ancient sculptures so that Warren can sell them as authentic. However, Warren’s connections make him too powerful to touch either in the US or in Thailand.

The woman who was on the motorcycle proves difficult to locate or identify, even though she is strikingly tall and has unusual multi-colored hair. As Sonchai investigates further, he finds a tangle of secrets and dark deeds.

This novel provides a lot of background about Sonchai and is full of rich descriptions of the city and its occupants. It is also darkly funny. Burdett does an excellent job of conveying the flavor of the city. The mystery is dark and complex, involving the sex industry, drug smuggling, and connections to the Russian mafia and Cambodian thugs, but it is also entertaining. Sonchai’s insights into, for example, the other characters’ past lives, lend additional spice to the mix. This series is not a traditional one but offers something fresh.

Day 212: Roseanna

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Cover for RoseannaApparently Roseanna is a classic of Swedish crime fiction. Written in 1965 by the team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, it is a compelling police procedural that has sent me to the book stores looking for more.

Lake Vattern is being dredged on a July afternoon when up comes the naked body of a young woman. Autopsy results find she has been violently sexually assaulted and strangled. Detective Inspector Martin Beck and his colleagues Ahlberg, Kollberg, and Melander at first have difficulty even identifying the body.

After months of inquiries, they learn she is a librarian from Nebraska named Roseanna McGraw.  Once they know that, it takes awhile longer to deduce that she must have been killed on a canal boat named the Diana, during a trip when engine trouble delayed her passage through the lake until midnight.

As with other Scandinavian mysteries I have read, the pace is slower and probably more realistic than American procedurals until the police finally identify a suspect. Then, in that time when forensic evidence is so much more limited than at present, they find no evidence linking him to the murder except some hazy snapshots of the two together on the boat. Martin and his team must find some other way to prove he is the murderer.

It’s hard to define why I found this novel so much more enjoyable than some of the more recent Swedish mysteries. It is written in a spare, tight prose. The solution is plausible instead of too convoluted. The characters seem fully defined. The book drew me in, and I was not disappointed.

Day 209: A Darker Domain

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Cover for A Darker DomainAt the beginning of A Darker Domain, Michelle Gibson comes into the police station to report that her father, Mick Prentice, is missing, actually has been missing for 25 years. He was believed to have left his small mining village during a miner’s strike to scab for another mine in Nottingham years ago, which was considered an act of betrayal. Now that his daughter is trying to find him, she learns he isn’t in Nottingham and never has been.

In the meantime, a case from the same period is being reopened, the kidnapping of Catriona Grant and her baby son Adam, during which Catriona was killed. Someone has found a copy of the ransom poster and a large pool of blood in a deserted Tuscan villa.

Detective Inspector Karen Pirie, head of the cold case group in Fife, is working both cases. The memories of the various witnesses appear as flashbacks and parallel narrations, and the story moves swiftly forward as Karen’s cases begin to converge. Val McDermid usually writes complex and exciting thrillers, and this novel is no exception.

Day 208: The Quiet Twin

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Cover for The Quiet TwinThe Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta seems to start out as a standard mystery, but it turns out to be something else entirely. I was attracted to it because in reviews it was compared to Rear Window, one of my favorite movies.

In a 1939 Viennese neighborhood, there is a rumor of a serial killer. A man was murdered not far away, and someone has killed Professor Speckstein’s old dog in a similar manner.

The courtyard behind Dr. Beer’s more respectable apartment building is shared by some tenements occupied by poverty-stricken tenants. The view that some apartments have into others sets up the situation reminiscent of Rear Window.

Dr. Beer is called to treat Professor Speckstein’s niece Zuzka, a college student who suffers from periodic paralysis. Speckstein is a disgraced former college professor who was once accused of child molestation but has hung onto his social position by becoming a Nazi party informant. Dr. Beer, a student of Freud, diagnoses Zuzka with hysteria.

Zuzka is bored and sleepless, so she watches the courtyard from the window in the middle of the night. She has seen a man across the way washing off makeup and what appears to be blood, so she decides to investigate whether he is the killer.

Also living in the courtyard is a drunken man and his little girl Lieschen, whose body is badly deformed from an accident. Zuzka befriends Lieschen while Dr. Beer worries what may happen to her under the Nazis, having heard about some of their ideas.

A brutish police detective named Teuben appears to investigate the murders, but his actual plan is to pin them on some hapless person.

Although Vyleta has tried to depict the atmosphere among the common people of Vienna under the Nazis, I am not so sure he succeeds. Dr. Beer seems to be one of the few characters who is aware of any threat. An aura of dread persists, but it seems more dependent upon my knowledge of coming events than on any feeling from the novel, although the novel is certainly bleak. Perhaps because I read In the Garden of the Beasts only a few weeks before, I expected an atmosphere that was much more fraught with peril.