Tag: mysteries

Day 586: Wit’s End

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Cover for Wit's EndRima Lansill finds herself suddenly without a family. Both her parents are dead: her mother when she was young and her father just recently of cancer. It is not so much her father’s death that has rocked her, though, but that of her younger brother Oliver in a drunk-driving accident. Rima is upset enough to want to get away from Cleveland for awhile, so she is happy to accept the invitation of her godmother to stay at her house of Wit’s End in Santa Cruz, California.

Rima’s godmother is the famous mystery writer A. B. Early—Addison—whose sleuth is Maxwell Lane. Rima has read all of Addison’s books but has never actually met her, as there was some sort of rift between Addison and Bim, Rima’s father. Rima wonders if it was caused by Addison having used Bim’s name for the murderer in one of her books.

Taking sleuthing tips from Maxwell Lane himself, Rima decides to try to find out what happened and just what her father’s relationship to Addison was. Addison herself is not very forthcoming, but some letters Rima finds in Maxwell’s fan mail show knowledge of the real Bim, not the fictional murderer. And these letters arrived from the home of what used to be a cult.

I have now read three Fowler novels, and they all construct an interesting tale full of well-meaning characters (although We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves leaves the others in its dust). There are some alarming moments in Wit’s End, but mostly what it offers is comfort and a new home for the main character. I have categorized it as a mystery, but the mystery is really only something to hang the characters and atmosphere on, as the book club is in The Jane Austen Book Club. Wit’s End is a fun bit of very light reading.

 

Day 584: The Shining Girls

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Cover for The Shining GirlsBest Book of the Week!
The Shining Girls is a clever, clever novel, a hybrid of a fantasy novel and a crime thriller. I read rave reviews of it, and it deserves them.

Harper has just killed a man in a Chicago Hooverville in 1931. He is being pursued in the freezing cold when he murders a blind woman for her coat. Inside the pocket he finds a house key, and somehow he knows the way to the house. It is a boarded up old wreck on the outside, but inside it is warm and comfortable, even prosperous looking. When Harper goes into an upstairs room, he finds souvenirs and girls’ names written on the wall. He understands that the house wants him to kill these girls. When he goes back outside, he finds himself in another time.

In 1993, Kirby Mazrachi interviews for an internship at the Chicago Sun-Times. She has asked to work with Dan Velasquez, a former crime writer who now covers sports. Her goal is to find the man who attacked her and nearly killed her in 1989. She believes he is a serial killer, and she is planning to use the paper’s resources to find more of his murders.

As Kirby continues her investigation, finding evidence that doesn’t make sense, Harper tracks down his shining girls one by one, visiting them when they are young and then going back for them as adults, over a time period of 60 years. He takes something from each one and gives it to the next.

This novel is completely absorbing, well written, and suspenseful. It is also haunting and unusual, with everything cleverly linked up. In the larger context, it explores the issues of fate and free will, but as entertainment, it keeps you pinned to your seat.

 

Day 582: The Secret Place

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Cover for The Secret PlaceDetective Stephen Moran has been stuck on the Cold Case squad ever since he made his move to claim responsibility for a solved case in Tana French’s last book, Broken Harbor. But when Holly Mackey comes to see him, he thinks he’s found his opportunity to join the Murder squad.

A witness in a previous case, Holly is now 16 and attending St. Kilda’s, a private girl’s school where Chris Harper, who attended a nearby boy’s school, was found dead the year before on the grounds. It is so far an unsolved case, and Holly has information about it.

Holly explains that the school has a bulletin board called the Secret Place, where the girls can post anonymous messages. The school thinks this board is preferable to allowing the girls to use a social media site. That morning Holly found a message that said, “I know who killed him.” As she is a cop’s daughter, she removed it carefully with gloves and put it in a plastic bag to bring to Moran.

Moran takes the note to Antoinette Conway, the lead on the Harper case, hoping she’ll allow him to work with her. She has not had a lead in the case for awhile and is eager to follow it up. Once the two detectives begin looking into it, they find their suspects for posting the note and for being the murderer limited to two groups of four girls—one Holly’s group of close friends and the other a bunch of mean girls lead by a girl named Joanne.

Although this is not my favorite of French’s novels, she writes a strong, atmospheric mystery. I believe she is the premier writer of contemporary Irish crime fiction, and her work in many ways reminds me of that of Gillian Flynn. I like that her books are not series, yet they are linked by a minor character in one novel being the major character of another.

http://www.netgalley.comIn The Secret Place, French evokes an eerie atmosphere in the grounds of this posh girl’s school. This novel creates a fascinating psychological portrait of these two groups of teenage girls.

Day 578: Tethered

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Cover for TetheredBest Book of the Week!
Clara Marsh has been wounded by life. She is a mortician who spends her days preparing bodies for burial, caring for them tenderly and tucking a symbolic bouquet of flowers into the coffin of each. But she herself is isolated, afraid to look people in the eye, unable to touch. Her frame is skeletal, her scalp scarred from pulling out her own hair. The only people who seem to care for her are her boss and his wife, Linus and Alma Bartholomew.

One day Clara finds a little girl in the funeral home named Trecie, who says she has been visiting Linus. When Clara asks Linus about the girl, he asks Clara to help her. Soon after, at the scene of a death, Clara finds evidence that Trecie is the victim of child pornographers. When she tells Detective Mike Sullivan that she knows Trecie, he asks her to call him when she sees Trecie again. But Trecie gets away from them.

Mike believes there is a connection between the pornographers and the death of Precious Doe, an unidentified child found murdered after being badly beaten three years before. Soon it begins to look as if he may be right. Unfortunately, a fragile friendship between Clara and Mike is threatened when Mike begins to believe that Trecie doesn’t exist.

Although this novel is framed within a mystery, its soul is within the persona of Clara and her story. Tethered is precisely and beautifully written and absolutely haunting. I was transfixed by it.

Day 570: Murder in Pigalle

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Cover for Murder in PigalleParis during the sticky summer of 1998 is in chaos because of the impending World Cup. Private detective Aimée Leduc is in her office worrying about paying her taxes when her 13-year-old neighbor Zazie comes to see her. Zazie explains that some girls her age, including her friend Melanie, were raped, and that she has a lead on the rapist.

Aimée promises to meet with Zazie about it later that day, all the while planning to warn Zazie’s mother Virginie about her daughter’s sleuthing activities. But Aimée doesn’t make it to Virginie’s until that evening, and by then Zazie is already an hour late coming home. A visit to the friend Zazie said she was seeing turns up another crime scene—Zazie’s friend Sylvaine has just been raped. All of these girls were home alone.

Aimée is convinced that Zazie somehow found the rapist and he took her. But the police think Zazie is a teenage runaway.

In what at first appears to be a side plot, a parolee named Zacharíe is being forced to commit a crime. His client has kidnapped Zacharie’s daughter Mary Jo to keep him from abandoning the job. With Mary Jo was a little friend, Zazie.

Aimée doggedly pursues her investigation despite her condition—she is six months pregnant. Helping her are her partner René and their cyber expert Saj.

I had heard good things about this series but wasn’t really impressed. Although Black may have developed the main characters in earlier books, she certainly doesn’t do much with them here. The book races from action to action, leaving a lot of loose ends untied or ignored. Right from the beginning, Aimée has some photos Zazie tells her were taken using her friend’s telephoto lens. Yet no one follows up by trying to figure out who the friend is. When they eventually find out it is Mary Jo, Aimée spends no effort on finding the girl, just making a few feeble efforts to contact her parents.

Another example—later in the novel, Aimée kills a man in self-defense, then she and another person flee the scene. Yet we never hear about the dead man again.

These omissions all go to my feeling that Aimée’s world is not fully realized. Paris is not much of a presence in the novel, even though Black mentions various locations. We hear, for example, about the dangers of Pigalle, but we don’t really learn what it is like. We don’t really get a flavor of Aimée’s world.

Day 545: Twelfth Night

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Cover for Twelfth NightFans of the Lady Julia Grey mystery series will probably enjoy this novella, which seems as if it was written for Christmas even though published in June. It is a simple little holiday story, a bagatelle.

The Marches, Lady Julia’s family, have gathered together during the holidays to celebrate Twelfth Night. Every decade the family itself performs the Revels, which are attended by the countryside around. During the rehearsals, an abandoned baby is found in the stables.

Lady Julia’s father asks her husband Brisbane to try to find the mother, but Brisbane’s initial inquiries turn up nothing. Lady Julia has heard her young niece and nephew buzzing about a witch living in an abandoned cottage, and then Lady Julia catches her niece Perdita sneaking out at night to see the witch.

http://www.netgalley.comThis short piece doesn’t involve much of a mystery, but it is always enjoyable to spend time with Julia and Brisbane.

Day 536: Any Other Name

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Cover for Any Other NameSheriff Walt Longmire is supposed to be on his way to Philadelphia for the birth of his first grandchild, but he’s been sidetracked. Old Lucian, the former sheriff, has asked his help for a friend. The two travel to a neighboring county to call on Phyllis Holman, whose husband Gerald has been deemed a suicide. Phyllis does not believe he committed suicide and thinks the local police are covering something up. Connie Holman, the couple’s daughter, wants Walt to drop the investigation.

It seems from the investigation photos that Holman must have shot himself. But Walt would like to find out why, and why he shot himself twice. Holman was on the Cold Case squad investigating the disappearance of an exotic dancer named Jone Urrecha. But Walt learns there have been three disappearances of local women within the last three months.

Despite his daughter Cady’s repeated summonses, Walt finds himself caught up in the case. Soon he’s involved in several shoot-outs, a close encounter with a herd of buffalo in a snowstorm, a chase through an abandoned lodge, a short visit with his dead friend Virgil White Buffalo, a bar fight, and the pursuit of a coal train. He also finds out someone has hired a hit man to kill him.

http://www.netgalley.comAssisted by his best friend Henry Standing Bear and his deputy and lover Vic Moretti, Walt tries to wrap up the complicated case and make his plane flight. As usual with Johnson’s mysteries, the characters are interesting, the writing is excellent and the dialogue witty, and there is plenty of action.

Day 521: The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

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Cover for The Dead in Their Vaulted ArchesThe tone of The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches is a little more somber than in the previous Flavia de Luce mysteries. Just as Buckshaw was about to be sold out from under the family in the previous novel, we learned that Flavia’s mother was found. Years ago lost in a mountaineering accident, Harriet de Luce was the owner of the house. Her fortune could not be passed along to her family without proof of her death. Now, her body is on the way home.

Flavia is surprised to find her mother’s remains have received a military escort. In fact, ex-prime minister Churchill is at the village’s small train station when the body arrives.

A tall man approaches Flavia at the station and asks her to tell her father that “the Gamekeeper” is in jeopardy. Moments later he is dead, having been pushed under a train.

I was a little surprised to find Bradley playing a few of the tricks that I associate with less skillful mystery writers. One of them is to spin out the story by having a character delay doing what is obviously urgent. Flavia waits quite awhile to convey this message from the tall man.

Part of the charm of these novels is always 11-year-old Flavia, who combines high intelligence with childish naïveté and some wild ideas. This time she decides to bring her mother back from the dead using some old chemistry experiments. While trying to do this, she finds her mother’s will inside her jacket. She doesn’t pass that on right away, either.

Flavia’s adventures this time include flying in a Gipsy Moth and getting involved in espionage. Of course, there is a murderer to capture and family secrets to explore.

Still, I didn’t find this novel as much fun as I usually do. Probably because of the subject matter, Bradley has to step back quite a bit from the humor.

Flavia is growing more thoughtful, although she is still as reckless. The novel hints at a change of scene in upcoming books, and although I think Buckshaw is wonderful, perhaps we need one.

Day 514: The Vanishing Point

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Cover for The Vanishing PointI’ve found the last few Val McDermid novels I’ve read disappointing, and The Vanishing Point is no exception. First, it begins by using a contrivance that is not at all successful.

Stephanie Harker’s adoptive son Jimmy is kidnapped from the secure area of O’Hare Airport while she is in the full body scanner. After an initial frantic period of activity, she sits down with FBI agent Vivian McKuras to tell the long tale of how she became Jimmy’s guardian.

Even though this story is necessary to understand the novel, its context within a police interview during a search for a missing child is not at all convincing. I doubt very many police interviews consist of one person talking for hours without any questions from the police. Then there is the issue of how McKuras can lead the investigation if she is interviewing Stephanie all night long. Presenting this information as a series of flashbacks would have taken care of the problem. This is an unusual misjudgment for McDermid.

The bulk of the novel centers around Stephanie’s relationship with Scarlett Higgins, a reality TV star who hires Stephanie to ghostwrite a memoir for her. Although Scarlett maintains a persona of a dumb blonde, Stephanie quickly realizes that Scarlett is a lot smarter than she seems and grows to like her. Stephanie becomes involved in Scarlett’s life, her marriage to a popular D.J., and all the difficulties of her celebrity.

When Scarlett dies of cancer, she leaves her young son Jimmy to Stephanie’s care. The story is long and complicated but doesn’t turn up many suspects in the kidnapping except Stephanie’s own stalker ex-boyfriend Pete. In fact, the novel gets fairly involving and does a good job of leading its readers down the garden path for quite some time.

I won’t give away the ending, but it is so completely far-fetched that it left me gasping. Despite its rough beginning, McDermid as ever writes a gripping novel, but this one ends up in the stratosphere.

Day 505: The Red Road

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Cover for The Red RoadIt is 1997. Young Rose Wilson is waiting for her pimp Sammie one night when Pinkie Brown, a young man she knows, asks her to hide a knife for him. Although she has had a crush on him, she suddenly understands he is attempting to use her. She tries to push him away and ends up accidentally stabbing him to death. Terrified about what Sammie will do to her, she attempts to hide from him that she is covered in blood as they drive away from the area. But he finally sees the blood, so she attacks him in panic, killing him. Then she realizes she has nowhere to go and no way to hide her crime, so she sits in the car and waits for the police.

In the present time, Detective Inspector Alex Morrow is set to testify against Michael Brown. He was found guilty years ago of the murder of his older brother Pinkie. Now he is up on weapons charges, as caches of guns with his fingerprints on them were found buried in his back yard. But Alex soon learns something puzzling. Brown’s fingerprints were found at the scene of a murder that happened three days before in an abandoned building on the Red Road, when Brown was in custody. Although Alex is inclined to believe this is some ploy by Brown’s defense, Anton Atholl, she can’t figure out what they have to gain from it. In any case, court is dismissed because of news of the death of another defense attorney, Julius McMillan.

Back in the past, it is Julius McMillan who saves Rose. After Rose admits everything she did, he figures out a way for her to serve minimal time for Sammie’s death, as long as no one connects her to the killing of Pinkie Brown. To save her, he is forced to make a deal with some powerful but unscrupulous men.

Alex’s investigation is taking some unexpected detours, and eventually she figures out that there was a conspiracy to pin Pinkie’s murder on Michael years ago. Michael’s fingerprints were switched for those of the real murderer, who has just killed again. Although Alex begins to realize she will be up against some powerful people, she just can’t let something like that go.

Denise Mina’s mysteries are set in a gritty Glasgow. Alex is an abrasive and stubborn heroine whose career keeps being dead-ended because she insists on going up against corrupt politicians and police. The novels are smart and interesting, with convincingly drawn characters.