Tag: mysteries

Review 2581: Murder at Gulls Nest

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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 Then a few months later, although I am no longer active on NetGalley, I received an email from a publicist asking if I would like a review copy.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

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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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Review 2548: The Shape of Water

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No, this is not a movie review. Andrea Camilleri is a Sicilian writer of the Inspector Montalbano series. The Shape of Water is the first in the series.

The body of a prominent politician with an impeccable reputation is found by two city street cleaners in his car in an area of town known for sex and drugs. (In Sicily, at least in the 90s, they had people who walk around and pick up trash? If only they would do that here.) Although it appears he died from natural causes, Inspector Montalbano thinks something is off. Lupanello died with his pants around his ankles. It is his wife who notices later that his underpants are on backwards. (This is the only thing that seemed unlikely to me—that the coroner wouldn’t notice that.)

Lupanello’s second almost immediately takes his position. Everyone wants Montalbano to close the case, but he asks for two more days.

Other complications turn up. One of the street cleaners finds an expensive necklace near the site. Also, the car apparently got to the site using an almost impossible route.

Montalbano is an honest cop, but he is cynically aware of the levels of corruption in city government. He has some slyly funny thoughts.

I wouldn’t say this novel is telegraphic in style, but portions of it are told only with telephone calls, and we don’t often learn what Montalbano is thinking. Also, Camilleri holds back some of the detective’s findings to the end. Cheating a little, but this series is very popular in Europe and so far seems promising. I like Montalbano, who has his own ideas about justice.

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Review 2536: The Trees

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The Trees is not a book for everyone. It is black satire, very dark, and it covers shameful events in American history that took place over centuries.

In Money, Mississippi, a dismal small town, a brutal murder occurs, or maybe two. A White man is found bound in barbed wire, his testicles removed. With him is the body of a Black man unknown to anyone in town, his hand wrapped around the testicles.

Shortly, the Black man’s body is stolen from the morgue and ends up at the scene of another murder, holding another White man’s testicles. Both White men are descendants of Granny C, an old lady who turns out to be the woman who claimed Emmett Till disrespected her, resulting in the famous lynching. Then Granny C is found dead.

And this is what the novel is about, in its sly, sometimes stereotyped (at least in the case of the White redneck characters), brutal way. It’s about the history of lynchings that continued in this country up until not that long ago (Wikipedia says, shockingly, 1981), thousands of them, mostly Black males, but also some women, as well as Chinese, Native Americans, and even one Japanese man.

The novel has a strange, sort of overdone anti-Southern humor that leads to additional gruesome scenes as two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation come to investigate.

I read this novel for my Booker Prize project.

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Review 2535: A Death in Summer

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A Death in Summer is the fourth of Black’s series about Quirke, an Irish pathologist in the 1950s who helps his friend Inspector Hackett in some investigations. Although these are interesting mysteries, I’m beginning to be irritated by the cliché of Quirke’s drinking problem. This is the second book in a row where Quirke dries out or is already dried out at the beginning and then falls off the wagon.

Wealthy and powerful Richard Jewell is found dead in his home office. It is supposed to look like he committed suicide by blowing his head off with his shotgun, but it is obvious to both Quirke and Hackett that the man wouldn’t be still holding the gun if he had done it himself.

Jewell’s sister Dannie was at home as were some servants, but no one heard the shot. Mrs. Jewell, a French woman, says she arrived home after the house manager discovered the body. Françoise thinks her husband’s only enemy is another wealthy man, a Canadian named Carlton Sumners. Quirke attended university with both these wealthy men.

At this point, I began to wonder if Quirke was related to Inspector Morse (apparently the TV version only), because he immediately falls in love with Françoise, dumps his friend Isabel, and begins to have an affair with F. And by the way, you wonder how these male authors think, because the way Black describes Quirke, you wouldn’t think an elegant, wealthy Frenchwoman would want to jump into bed with him.

Quirke invites his assistant, David Sinclair, to dinner with his daughter Phoebe. Although both resent what they see as a clumsy attempt to pair them up, they begin seeing each other. David is a friend of Dannie Jewell, quite a disturbed young woman, and through him Phoebe meets Dannie.

As in a previous case, Quirke is warned off his investigations by a thug, Costigan. In the previous instance, when Quirke ignored him, he was badly beaten. This time, Sinclair begins receiving threatening phone calls.

Of course, there is a big secret that I personally didn’t find hard to guess once some of the pieces were in place. I might read the last book, but I am not sure if I will. Black is an excellent writer, but to have Quirke behave so stupidly in this one turned me off a little.

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Review 2529: Sparkling Cyanide

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This novel begins in an unusual way for Christie, with sections on six people, each of whom had a motive to kill Rosemary Barton. There’s her younger sister, Iris Marie, who would inherit a fortune. There’s her husband George’s secretary, Ruth Lansing, who would like to take her place. There’s Anthony Browne, whose secret Rosemary has discovered, that he is really Tony Morelli. There’s Stephen Faraday, whose career as a policeman will be finished if his wife learns of his affair with Rosemary. There’s Sandra Faraday, who already knows about the affair. Finally, there’s her husband, George Barton, who also knows about the affair. Almost a year ago, these six were together at a party when Rosemary suddenly died from cyanide poisoning.

Rosemary’s death was ruled a suicide. Now, nearly a year later, someone has mailed George letters saying that Rosemary was murdered, so George decides to set a trap by reconvening the same people at the same table. But first, he asks in his friend, Colonel Race. Race things it’s a foolish idea, and it is—for George dies that night, also poisoned.

Colonel Race teams up with Inspector Kemp to try to figure out what happened. Was Rosemary poisoned? Who wrote the letters? How could anyone have poisoned George without touching his drink?

I don’t think the approach used in this novel was very successful. The writing seemed oddly static. It is only when we leave the character bios that the novel snaps back to life, with Christie’s usual clever dialogue and interesting action. Then, it’s quite good and makes you forget the first part.

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Review 2522: Broken

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A women is walking around a lake on a freezing day. Suddenly, she is knocked down, her head forced into the mud.

Officer Lena Adams is investigating a report of a suicide at the lake. The police have found a pair of shoes on the shore and a note that says, “I want it over.” Eventually, they pull up the body of a woman who has been weighed down with cement bricks and chains.

Her ID says she is Allison Spooner, a student at the nearby campus. The death is possibly a suicide, but she was stabbed in the back of the neck, which would almost be impossible to do to yourself.

With an officer dispatched to the girl’s home, Lena and her boss, Frank Wallace, go there to continue the investigation. Lena can tell that Frank has been drinking, and when the police find a young man in the garage listed as Allison’s address, the situation is bungled, resulting in the stabbing of Brad, a young officer, and injuries to both Lena and Frank.

Dr. Sara Linton now enters the story. She has returned home for Thanksgiving for the first time since her husband Jeffrey’s death. She blames Lena, who was Jeffrey’s partner, for the death. The first evening, Frank calls to ask her to come to the jail because Tommy Braham has been arrested for murder and he is hysterical. Sara vaguely remembers Tommy as a cheerful boy of limited intelligence, but this is oddly the second call she has received about Tommy. When she gets to the jail, she finds Tommy is dead, having cut his wrists using a pen refill cartridge.

Will Trent has had his holiday leave canceled so that he can investigate the custody death. He finds a sullen crew of small-town police who are not at all cooperative. Lena has wanted to admit to the mistakes she made at both the arrest and custody sites, but she has been threatened by Frank to follow the story he’s made up.

Very quickly Will finds problems with the small-town team’s theory of the crime. They think Tommy killed Allison in her garage apartment and took her to the lake, but Will quickly finds the crime scene at the lake and also discovers that Tommy was in his own home when they arrested him.

I can see where the relationship is going between Will and Sara, and I’m not that happy about it. Sara was apparently a major figure in a previous series by Slaughter, and Slaughter has brought her into this series. Perhaps it’s because I like Angie, Will’s long-time love, from the TV series. I don’t see her as the negative figure Slaughter seems to be making her. Same with Lena, since I don’t know what she did in the previous series.

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Review 2511: Tropical Issue

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Tropical Issue is the sixth of Dorothy Dunnett’s Johnson Johnson novels, published in 1980 as Dolly and the Bird of Paradise. Somehow I accidentally am rereading these books completely out of order. (In this case, I typed in “Dunnett Johnson Johnson books in order” and then assumed that the search page, which showed me the covers, was showing me them in order. My mistake, obviously.)

Rita Geddes, a punk Scottish makeup artist, first meets the famous portrait painter Johnson Johnson when her friend Ferdy Braithwaite, a well-known photographer, borrows Johnson’s flat for a photo shoot of political journalist Natalie Sheridan and asks Rita to do the makeup. Johnson has been reported as the only survivor of a plane crash, so when Ferdy deserts her there after the photo shoot, having dismissed Johnson’s exhausted housekeeper, Rita ends up having to take care of him for a couple of days and develops a dislike of him.

Natalie offers Rita a provisional job on Madeira, where she gets to see her friend Kim-Jim again. Kim-Jim is getting ready to retire, and he has set things up so that Rita will most likely be offered his position as full-time makeup artist for Natalie. However, on her way from the airport, Rita is assaulted by a man who seems to believe that she and Kim-Jim are plotting against Natalie.

Rita figures out that her attacker is Roger van Diemen, a banana industry executive, who is supposed to be leaving the island for rehab. When she goes to the airport to make sure he gets on the plane, she meets Johnson Johnson again. Next, she, Fergy, and Kim-Jim take a sledge ride down a steep hill, a tourist offering, but the sledge has been tampered with, and they are almost killed. Finally, a death makes Rita determined to find out what’s happening.

This novel is fast-paced and includes murder, spying, piracy, a hurricane, and even an encounter with a volcano after all of the characters end up in St. Lucia. It has a complicated plot and witty dialogue as Rita tries to figure out what’s going on. And Rita has her own secrets.

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Review 2510: The Dark Wives

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Detective Vera Stanhope’s team is still grieving after the death in the last book of (reverse spoiler) Holly. Now they have a new member, brash Rosie Bell from Newcastle.

They also have a new case. A worker in a children’s home, Josh Woodburn, was killed in a vacant lot just outside the home. Round about the same time, 14-year-old Chloe Spence, a resident of the home, goes missing. Is she the murderer? A witness? Is her disappearance a coincidence? All they know is that they must find her and soon.

Joshua’s parents appear unaware that he was working at the home. He’s a student, and he’s supposed to be working on his art and film project. Apparently, he told his ex-girlfriend Stella that he was working on an important project.

At Chloe’s school, the staff seem to be more worried about Chloe’s grades and behavior than that her mother has been put into mental care and she herself is in a group home and missing. To Vera, the home looks like it doesn’t have a penny spent on it, and it is understaffed.

In their search for Chloe, the team finds that she liked going to a village in the hills where her grandfather once owned some land and they used to do rough camping. When the team goes to the small camping hut on the property, they find someone—not Chloe but Brad, another resident of the home, dead from an apparent overdose.

The solution to this mystery isn’t really possible to figure out, because vital information is withheld from the reader. Early on, I guessed what Josh’s project might be, sort of, but I couldn’t see how it would lead to murder. Then I more or less forgot about it. Still, Cleeves really rivets you to the page. You have to keep reading.

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Review 2503: Death of a Hollow Man

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Caroline Graham does something interesting in Death of a Hollow Man. She spends half the book with an amateur theater group preparing to perform Amadeus, letting readers get to know her characters.

Inspector Barnaby’s wife Joyce works on costumes and plays minor characters. Harold Winstanley is the director, with a high regard for himself. Esslyn is playing Salieri. He has an eye for the ladies and recently dumped his wife Rosa for 19-year-old Kitty. When Rosa finds out Kitty is pregnant, a state Esslyn denied her, she is furious.

Others of the group are Deirdre, much-put-upon assistant director, whose father has dementia, putting her into a constant fret. There are David and Colin, son and father set designers and technicians. Tim and Avery are a gay couple who do lighting. The Everard brothers are Esslyn’s toadies. And young Nicholas is playing Mozart and trying to get into drama school.

Many in the group thrive on rumor and innuendo, and the atmosphere is toxic, what with Harold’s rudeness and his ego that must be constantly fed, Esslyn’s coldness, and the tension between Rosa and Kitty. Nicholas comes in early one day and sees Kitty having sex with someone in the light booth. He thinks it is David because he’s the only other person he meets that early. Rumors about this create more tension and end in a misunderstanding that makes havoc on opening night. But does it have anything to do with the death at the end of the play? For the taped straight razor that Salieri uses to cut his own throat has had its tape removed.

People who want a quick start to their mysteries might not appreciate Graham’s technique in this one of following the group over days, but it really helps develop the characters. I enjoyed this mystery, although being used to the character of Cully from the TV series, I was a little taken aback to find her depicted as acerbic.

Midsomer Murders made Joyce discover many of the bodies. I don’t know if Graham did that or not, but Joyce is right there on the spot for Essyn’s death.

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