Tag: mysteries

Review 2627: #RIPXX: The Strange Case of Harriet Hall

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

Since the beginning of September, I have looked for info about Readers Imbibing Peril, which I have participated in for years, since I couldn’t remember whether it started in September and went through October or started in October and went through November. Since I couldn’t find anything, I assumed it started in October. Well, it’s too bad that it actually started in September, because I missed marking three other mysteries for the challenge. It is usually advertised through Instagram, which I don’t use much.

So, despite this being my fourth book to qualify, it’s going to count as my first.

Well, there certainly are surprises in this book!

Amy Steer is a young woman looking for work, a necessity made worse by the empty state of her pockets and her landlady’s demands to raise her rent. She is looking through the want ads when she spots an ad looking for relatives of her father. She never knew her father, but she answers the ad and makes an appointment.

She meets a disturbing but seemingly kind woman who says she is Harriet Hall, Amy’s aunt. She says she is staying in a house in the country owned by friends and invites Amy to stay. She even gives Amy £100 to spend on nicer clothing.

On Monday, the day she is expected, nicely dressed Amy is on the train to her aunt’s. She meets a pleasant young man named Tony Dene who is getting off at the same station. They are getting along just fine until Amy tells him about Aunt Hall. Then he abruptly leaves the car. No one picks Amy up, so she is forced to walk five miles to Harriet Hall’s cottage, finding no one home. But the door is unlocked, so she stays.

The Denes lived with their uncle until he died the year before. Then Mary Dene, Tony’s mother, inherited everything and bought a property in the country. But soon Harriet Hall appeared. Mary has told her three children that Harriet is an old friend fallen on hard times. She lets Harriet live in the cottage rent-free, but Harriet comes over every day to sponge or take something. Tony and his sister Mollie hate her, but Lavvy, who is engaged to marry Sir Miles Lennor, only cares about her wedding.

Amy stays in the cottage Monday night, but Harriet never appears. Tony, who feels bad about abandoning her, drops by with his sister’s dog, and the dog’s barking at an old well in the back of the house causes Tony to remove the top. Inside the well is a body.

Tony calls the police, but once the body is identified as Harriet Hall and the police understand the relationship between her and the Denes, Tony is a suspect. He has no alibi because instead of driving home from the train station, he drove around aimlessly for hours.

Scotland Yard Inspector Collier is called in fairly quickly. Although more evidence comes out against Tony, Collier is reluctant to charge him. Then there is a shocking discovery followed by another death.

If Amy is supposed to be our heroine, we see remarkably little of her, spending more time with the Denes. However, she does get to be in peril.

There’s a little bit of a cheat here, as a person of interest doesn’t appear until page 150. But overall, we’re having so much fun we don’t care. Dalton’s books are well written and move along at a brisk pace. Some aspects of this one were obvious, but for 1936 the book seems fairly avant-garde.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2623: #RIPXX: Knock, Murderer, Knock

~ whatmeread ~ 13 Comments

The mostly elderly occupants of the Presteignton Hydro spa resort like nothing better than to gossip about the other guests. Lately, they’ve had fuel for their fire by the arrival of beautiful Miss Blake, who dares to wear makeup, shorts, and backless evening gowns (this is 1938). Their tongues are wagging even more with the advent of Sir Humphrey Chervil, assuming a connection because he is young and handsome, even if they hardly talk to one another.

All the men at the resort like Miss Blake, but none of the women do. Nurse Hawkins has her eye on Admiral Urwin, so she certainly doesn’t like Miss Blake seeking him out. Even Mrs. Napier, who spends a lot of time falling down on purpose to get attention, thinks Miss Blake is a floozy.

On the night of an entertainment, Sir Humphrey spends some time with Miss Blake, staying up late talking in the drawing room. The next day she is found dead in the same room, a knitting needle plunged through her skull.

Inspector Palk locks onto Sir Humphrey when he finds he went into Miss Blake’s room instead of escorting her to the door. His fate is sealed when her jewels are found in his closet.

However, a few days later, after young Winnie Marston was seen canoodling with her father’s chauffeur, she is also found dead of the same cause. Inspector Palk still thinks he has the right man for the first murder and wants to arrest the chauffeur for the second—until he finds out he has actually married Winnie.

Mr. Winkley appears on the scene after Winnie’s death. He says his hobby is murder and talks everyone into staging a re-enactment of the first crime—the one supposedly solved. But who is Mr. Winkley, anyway?

Although I found this novel entertaining enough, it doesn’t spend a lot of time on characterization (which is common for the time)—usually just giving the characters some defining trait—and it wasn’t enough for me. I kept getting the little old ladies mixed up and even confused the Admiral and the Colonel. Plus, in one instance Rutland only brings in a character right before killing him off, even though he’s been there all along. Still, the novel was fun, except the last chapter where everything is explained, which I felt was an anticlimax.

I received this book from the published in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2621: #RIPXX: The Body in the Road

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

I saw this book labeled Hermann Glide #1, but he actually appeared in Moray Dalton’s previous novel. Both times, he came in at the end. Or maybe I read them out of order by mistake.

Linda Merle takes a job playing the piano in a tearoom, and performing with her is the beautiful but not very talented Violet Hunter on the violin. The girls become friendly right away, and when Linda learns that Violet hates living with the oppressive friend of her mother, she invites her to move in with her. Miss Coleman has already taken a dislike to Linda and hates her when Violet moves out.

When Linda inherits a small sum, she decides to purchase a cottage in the country and open a tearoom, but she only feels she can do it with Violet’s help.

She and Violet spend a weekend working at the cottage. But Violet doesn’t help much and finally tells her she can do better for herself by going to London. Linda is angry that she didn’t tell her earlier, so they argue. Then on a walk they find a dog that’s been hit by a car. Linda sends Violet up to the main road to get help while she goes the other way, to a large house. Outside the house she meets a small, furtive man who says she’ll get no help at the house, where he works, and another man, David Chant, who is the new Lord Haringdon. Chant goes back with her, but the dog is gone and so is Violet.

Linda assumes Violet got a ride into town, but when she returns to their room, Violet isn’t there and she has taken nothing. Linda wants to go to the police, but Chant advises her to wait while he looks into it. He suspects that Violet’s disappearance may have something to do with the large house Linda went to. It is occupied by a Dr. Saigon, who is rumored to be running a mental hospital there.

While he is looking into that, the police get involved, and they clearly have trouble with Linda’s story. Then they find Violet’s body, buried in back of Linda’s cottage.

I thought that part of this novel was going to go way off the rails, but it didn’t. It becomes suspenseful as things start to stack up against Linda. It also does a good job of misdirection.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2615: The Widow of Bath

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

Hugh Everton is traveling around English seaside towns reviewing hotels and restaurants for a travel company when he meets an old flame, Lucy Bath, the glamorous wife of a judge. Hugh is immediately afraid, but we don’t understand why until later. Lucy is with an entourage, and when they all decide to return to her home, she invites Hugh, and he goes.

One of the men Hugh thinks he recognizes as a guy named Ronson, but Ronson is introduced as Atkinson. The judge, who has been looking for his missing dog, takes Hugh aside and seems to be intending to confide in him but changes his mind. He goes up early to bed.

The others are playing cards when they hear a shot, followed by a yelp from a dog. Lucy goes upstairs to investigate. When she doesn’t immediately return, Atkinson goes up, accompanied by Hugh. They find the judge dead with a hole in his head and no gun to be found.

When they try to call the police, the phone is dead, so Atkinson drives off to the police station. Hugh goes out to look for the dog and nearly catches a woman in the garden. He finds the dog with a broken leg. Soon Inspector Leigh arrives, but the body is gone.

Everton has found the entire evening to have a menacing undercurrent. However, he has had bad experiences with the police, so he is not as forthright as he could have been.

I hadn’t heard of Margot Bennett before reading Someone from the Past, but I think she has been seriously underrated to have almost disappeared from our knowledge. This novel has an interesting noirish plot with strong characterization and witty dialogue. Bennett moved away from crime fiction to writing for television after writing only a few books. I think that’s a shame.

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Review 2609: The Keeper of Lost Causes

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

My husband and I were recently transfixed by the Department Q TV series, so I set out to find the books it was based on. They are by the Danish writer, Jussi Adler-Olsen.

The mystery in the first book was the same one as in the first series, but lucky for me, the TV series changed it enough so that it wasn’t totally predictable. They also changed the personality of Merete Lynggard and the motive for the crime, which was even more senseless than in the TV series.

Following a shooting incident which wounded Carl Mørck, paralyzed his partner Hardy, and killed Officer Anker, the department doesn’t quite know what to do with Carl. The media has been out to get him, claiming that he hid behind Hardy when in actuality Hardy fell on top of him, and he is difficult and not liked by most of his colleagues. Then his boss is told to set up a special department to investigate cold cases and given a large budget to fund it. So, the boss takes most of the money for the homicide department and sticks Carl in a basement with only one assistant, a Syrian refuge named Assad, charged with cold cases.

At first, Carl is totally apathetic. He spends his days playing games on his phone and visiting Hardy in the hospital. When they finally get some files, it is Assad who reads them and encourages him to pick the case of Merete Lynggard.

Merete was a rising political star when she disappeared without a trace from a ferry on vacation with her disabled brother Uffe. The investigators eventually decided she had fallen overboard. But we readers know she is alive and being held captive, because occasionally the novel flashes back to events five years before, when she was taken, and to her situation in the present.

Despite my knowledge of many of the plot points, I found this novel intriguing. The characters are interesting—Carl is actually a tad more sympathetic than in the TV series (although probably not as handsome)—and the mystery is a good one, with a suspenseful climax and a touching ending. Now I just need to read the second book before the next series comes out.

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Review 2597: Death Under a Little Sky

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned, but there seems to be a vogue for calling characters just by their first names these days. But when we’re strangers, as we are to characters, we don’t often go straight to first names, do we? Yet, after reading many books, I have a hard time finding the main characters’ last names. This time, I had to look it up.

Jake Jackson has retired early from being a police detective because of the combination of a separation from his wife and an inheritance from his uncle. He has been left a house in the isolated countryside, not even a road to it, and quite a bit of money, his uncle wanting to give him the gift of solitude. The name of the house is Little Sky.

There were a few things about this house that I found hard to believe, since parts of it are very old and it is huge, so presumably at one time had servants. First, why is there no road to it if it’s been there a long time? How was it built? How did they get furniture to it? Second, why are there no bathing facilities? Third, why no laundry, however primitive? Even a rustic abode would have a big metal tub for baths and a place to wash clothes.

These are nitpicks, you might think, but then, of course, Abell needs his hero to live in a perfectly remote area (it could have been an island, Stig, that would be believable), he wants his scene where Jake is caught in the nude after his morning swim (Stig, he can swim even if he has a bathroom), but that doesn’t really explain the laundry.

Oh well. So, Jake begins living in this house, mostly being by himself but slowly getting to know his neighbors. His closest neighbor is the local vet, Livia. Livia what? I don’t know. No last names are exchanged. You can tell I find this irritating. Livia is a lovely mixed-race woman with a little girl named Diana. Jake is immediately interested. Since his home also has no phone or reception, Livia gets to take him by surprise when he is swimming nude.

One thing Livia does is encourage him to participate in a local custom, a hunt for St. Aethelmere’s bones. The local storekeeper hides a bag of sticks marked “bones,” and there’s a contest to see who can find it, if anyone can. Jake finds the bones, but they turn out to be really bones, and human, as judged by Livia and the local biologist, Dr. Peter.

Jake reports the bones to the police, and he meets the local man, Chief Inspector Gerald Watson, who seems happy to have Jake poke around and try to figure out who the bones might belong to. They are of a woman in her thirties and are about 10 years old. A look through his uncle’s old newspapers provides a possible name, that of Sabine Rohmer, a foreign farmworker who fell from a tower on the farm where she had worked for years. The death had been ruled misadventure.

However, when the police examine Sabine’s grave, they find bones in it. Watson seems inclined to think the whole thing is a wild goose chase, but Jake convinces him that perhaps Sabine’s death was not an accident, because someone, hearing the grave would be exhumed, has hastened to put bones in it to throw them off, and as it turns out, the bones in the grave are too old to be Sabine’s.

Jake’s investigations turn up little cooperation, just hostility, threats, and violence, principally from the people on Smith’s farm where Sabine had worked and from some lay-abouts and nogoodniks around the village, including Sabine’s old boyfriend, a man named Rose. Then Dr. Peter, who has been helping Jake, is killed.

This novel is really more of an action book than a mystery, as we’re given no hints to the identity of the killer until the same second Jake figures it out. And, although I don’t fall into the camp that believes mystery and romance don’t mix, I think there was too much emphasis on the romance, and it was a clunky one, with scenes that Abell obviously found sexy but left me cold. Usually, women who are trying to develop a relationship slowly because of their child don’t engage in salacious banter at an early meeting, even if they see a guy naked.

The novel is a very slow developer, which I didn’t mind. I enjoyed the descriptions of the countryside and the work Jake does to improve his property. However, my comments above have me wondering how interested I am in reading the second book in the series.

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Review 2592: Death Comes As the End

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

I have been trying to pick off Agatha Christie’s books I haven’t read without looking to see what they are about. So, I was surprised by this one. At first, I thought maybe the ancient Egyptian setting was the introduction to a more modern mystery, but then I realized it wasn’t.

Renisenb has returned with her young daughter to her father’s house on the lower Nile, her husband having died. At first, it seems as if everything is the same. Her father, Imhotep, a property owner and priest, is still watchful of his own authority and eager to have control of everything. Her oldest brother, Yahmose, is still dutiful and careful of Imhotep’s interests—his wife Satipy thinks too much so and nags him to be more assertive. Satipy argues with her sister-in-law Kait over precedence one moment, and they giggle together the next. Kait’s husband Sobek, the younger brother, is still full of big ideas and wasteful of his father’s money. Renisenb’s orphaned nephew Ipy is still young but disrespectful and spoiled by Imhotep. Esa, the grandmother, is frail but sharp.

Renisenb still cannot bring herself to like Henet, the servile but sneaking servant, and she still feels comfortable with Hori, her father’s main scribe. However, when she tells Hori that everything is still the same, he warns her that it is not.

Imhotep goes off on a business trip, and when he comes back he has brought two people—a young concubine named Nofret and a secondary scribe named Kamini, who claims some relationship to the family. It becomes clear that Nofret is malicious and means to make trouble. Almost immediately, she has problems with the two sisters-in-law. Renisenb tries to be friendly to her but feels she dislikes her.

Nofret begins to succeed in dividing Imhotep from his two sons. Imhotep, angry about an incident, threatens to send the sons and their families away. The next thing they know, Nofret is dead, having fallen from the cliff path that goes to the tomb Imhotep is responsible for keeping.

The two sisters-in-law suddenly change behavior. Satipy, formerly shrewish, becomes timid and withdrawn. Kait becomes more forceful. Renisenb and Hori wonder if Nofret’s death was an accident.

The next event seems clearly not an accident. The two brothers are poisoned after drinking some wine. Sobek, having drunk more, dies.

Renisenb, Esa, and Hori get together to try to figure out who the murderer is, but there are more evil events to come.

Christie doesn’t offer many hints to figure out the murderer, and I didn’t guess the solution. However, I also didn’t find this novel as interesting as some of the others. Perhaps Christie was trying a change of pace or just wanting to write something that reflected what she learned on her archaeological digs. Still, it worked almost wholly on an understanding of the characters rather than any real clues.

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Review 2588: Bluebird, Bluebird

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is on suspension after he went to the aid of Rutherford McMillan, a man who has worked for his family for years. He is also having trouble with his wife, Lisa, who wants him to return to law school. Then a friend, Greg Heglund, an FBI agent in Houston, asks Darren to look unofficially at a situation in Lark in East Texas. There, the body of a Black man, an outsider, was found in the bayou and later the body of a White woman, a local, was also found there. Usually in that part of the country it’s the other way around, plus Lark hasn’t had a murder for years.

An interest for Darren is the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, and he finds in tiny Lark a major presence. The only two businesses in town are Geneva Sweet’s café with mostly Black patrons and an icehouse up the road packed with members of the ABT. When he arrives at Geneva Sweet’s Sweets, he finds the locals nervous and unwelcoming. Missy Dale’s body was found right behind the café. At Jeff’s Juice House, just up the road, where Missy was a waitress, he finds the all-White clientele belligerent and violent.

Then Rainie Wright arrives. She’s the widow of Michael Wright, the first victim, and she is distraught. She worries Darren, because she is from Chicago and has no idea how to behave in the rural South (and no, this novel is not set in the past).

A person Darren finds of interest is Wally Jefferson, a rich White man whose mansion is right across the highway from Geneva’s café and who treats her and the café with a proprietorial air. But Geneva is prone to telling him to get out of her place.

Darren is inclined to suspect Missy’s husband of the murders, since Missy was seen talking to Michael at the icehouse. But that doesn’t quite satisfy him. There are connections here that he doesn’t understand.

I’ve been looking around for a new mystery series to follow, and this novel by Locke has me wanting to look for more. I am familiar with East Texas, and she has the atmosphere down. There is plenty of action and some suspense in this novel. I have to admit that my suspicions fell on a culprit pretty quickly, and I sensed that the story would have something to do with an earlier crime, which it did. But I certainly had some surprises coming. The only think I didn’t like was the cliché of the cop who drinks too much. Bluebird, Bluebird is listed as the first of Locke’s Highway 59 series, so I’m not sure if the others feature the same protagonist or just the locale or both. I have driven on that highway so many times!

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Review 2581: Murder at Gulls Nest

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

I messed up a bit with this book. What happened was that as soon as I heard about it, I pre-ordered it because I love Jess Kidd’s books. Then a few months later, although I am no longer active on NetGalley, I received an email from a publicist asking if I would like a review copy. I answered, as I have for other books, that I would love to if I could get a paperback rather than an ebook.

As usual when I make this request, I got no reply, so I dismissed it from my mind. Then, when I received a copy quite a bit later, I assumed it was my pre-order, not even noticing that it was a review copy. I put it at the top of my pile, which I have been ignoring while I try to finish A Century of Books (now complete!). I apologize to that publicist, because I have missed the dates. It wasn’t until my pre-order arrived that I realized my mistake, but then I read it immediately. So, here’s my review—better late than never.

It’s the 1950s. Nora Breen, looking disheveled, arrives in a seaside town in winter. She is a middle-aged ex-nun who has renounced her vows, and she has arrived because her friend Frieda, sent from the monastery for her health, has stopped writing. That is unlike Frieda, and Nora is worried about her.

Nora has taken a room at Gulls Nest, a sad rooming house, where she finds she is to occupy Frieda’s room. She learns that Frieda just disappeared one evening, no one apparently being surprised by it.

The occupants of the house are a mixed crew. Helena Wills, a widow, is the owner, but she spends almost all her time in bed and lets Irene Rawlings, the grim housekeeper who has lots of rules, run it. Helena also has a young daughter Dinah, who is all but feral. As she arrives, Nora watches a young couple from afar, Teddy and Stella Atkins, and notices them appearing to quarrel. She also sees another lodger, Karel Ježek, stomp on Teddy’s hat. Other lodgers are Bill Carter, an ex-Navy cook who works as a bartender, and Professor Poppy, an old Punch and Judy puppeteer who is rumored to be an aristocrat.

Although Nora goes immediately to the police, Inspector Rideout thinks there’s nothing unusual about someone who was living at Gulls Nest disappearing without warning. Nora has decided not to reveal to anyone else her friendship with Frieda, hoping she will learn more if no one is aware of it. However, she is feeling frustrated when Teddy is found dead in Poppy’s workshop behind the house, poisoned with cyanide in his coffee. Teddy often had coffee with Poppy before work. Inspector Rideout is thinking suicide, but Stella says not. She has just told him she is pregnant. So, did Teddy commit suicide or was he murdered? If he was murdered, was he the intended victim or was Poppy? Finally, is Teddy’s death related to Frieda’s disappearance?

Like Kidd’s other books, this one has some eccentric characters, although it is perhaps not as unexpected as her others. Still, it has some likable characters and some twists, as Nora begins to blossom out into this new world. A secret about the relationship between two characters was one I guessed fairly quickly, but I was unable to figure out a motive for what turns out to be not just one murder.

Fun stuff!

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2552: Malice

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

I have only read a few Japanese mysteries, and those, written in the 1990s, were more focused on the puzzle than motive and psychology. A couple featured eccentric buildings that no rational person would design, explicitly there to make the puzzle harder.

Malice, although written around the same time, 1996, is much more concerned with personality and motivation. It is also unusual because the murderer is arrested on about page 80.

Osamu Nonaguchi, a children’s book author, goes to visit his friend, Kunihiko Hidaka, a best-selling writer, shortly before Hidaka leaves the country to live in Vancouver, British Columbia. Later that day, Nonaguchi returns to the house when invited, only to find it shut up and the lights out. He is alarmed and calls Hidaka’s wife, Rei, who has moved to a hotel while Hidaka finishes some pages for his editor. When Rei arrives, they find Hidaka dead, possibly from hitting his head in a fall. But Hidaka, it turns out, was murdered.

When Nonaguchi is interviewed, he can only offer the information that Hidaka had an altercation with a neighbor about a cat, and that when Rei let the cat out of the house, the neighbor was talking to Masaya Fujio, who was suing Hidaka over one of his books.

Nonaguchi has known Hidaka since middle school. By coincidence, the detective, Kyiochiro Kaga, also knew Nonaguchi in school.

Although Kaga quickly identifies the killer, he is concerned with motive. Even though the killer eventually offers up a motive, Kaga is not satisfied.

This novel is written entirely in statements and interviews. Although Wilkie Collins used this method effectively many years before in The Moonstone, it makes this novel inert. Also, a problem I found in other Japanese mysteries, when the solution is finally revealed, Kaga goes over every little detail to explain it, sometimes more than once. I felt the novel was a good 50+ pages too long, and it dragged at times.

Although I liked this novel’s approach better than that of the other Japanese mysteries I’ve read, it didn’t have any action and moved too slowly.

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