Tag: mysteries

Day 261: Blue Monday

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Cover for Blue MondayI never read Nicci French before and was at first irritated by Blue Monday because the reader is introduced to several characters, using a shifting third-person limited narration, without understanding who they are or why they’re important. Eventually, though, I was able to fasten on Frieda Klein as the main character.

The novel begins in 1985, with nine-year-old Rosie going home from school, followed by her five-year-old sister Joanna. Rosie takes her eyes off Joanna briefly, and the little girl is gone.

Twenty-two years later, a little boy, Matthew Faraday, disappears on his way home from school after his mother is late picking him up. Although at first the crimes don’t seem to be connected, Detective Chief Inspector Karlssen thinks they may be.

Psychiatrist Frieda Klein has recently taken on a new patient, Alan Dekker, who claims to be having such troubling obsessions that he can’t sleep or function correctly. They are about having a son, a boy he can play ball with. He is unable to have children but he doesn’t want to adopt. He obsessively wants a son, one who looks like him as a boy–exactly like the missing Matthew Faraday.

Confidentiality laws apparently not being exactly the same in England as they are in the states, after some soul searching, Frieda feels she must go to the police. Karlssen is impatient with her until she tells him that Alan had these feelings once before about having a daughter but they went away–just around the time of Joanna’s disappearance.

This psychological thriller, which is the first in a series, turns out to have a couple of twists I have never before encountered, so proved to be very interesting. Frieda is an unusual heroine, a cold, analytical person who roams the streets of London at night because of insomnia. I think it would be well worth it to continue reading books in this series.

Day 258: Busman’s Honeymoon

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Cover for Busman's HoneymoonI have always thought that, with a few exceptions, the arrival of Harriet Vane into the Lord Peter Wimsey series pretty much ruined it. Some of those mysteries are not so bad, and Have His Carcase (wherein Lord Peter meets Harriet) and Gaudy Night (wherein Harriet solves a mystery on her own) are very good, but Busman’s Honeymoon is just too sappy. It is hard to know if Peter and Harriet’s marriage is Sayers’ idea of an ideal relationship or a reflection of some relationship she actually had, but I find that Lord Peter’s galumphing happiness contrasts strangely with Harriet’s odd undertones.

Lord Peter and Harriet are married and travel for their honeymoon to a house they bought in the country. But when they arrive, they find the house is not ready for them and the previous owner, Mr. Noakes, is nowhere to be found–until next morning when Bunter finds him dead in the basement. In the meantime, the servants have been cleaning, and all the clues are gone.

One positive point for the novel is that the Dowager Duchess shows up, a favorite character. We also get a little more background on the relationship between Wimsey and Bunter.

I guess this isn’t the best selection for Valentine’s Day, since I’m criticizing it for sappiness, but if you have different tastes than mine, you might like it. I see that the reviewers on Amazon are remarking at how romantic it is. And also commenting on the subtle humor. Well, I didn’t find it so subtle.

Day 256: The Truth-Teller’s Lie

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Cover for The Truth-Teller's LieIn The Truth-Teller’s Lie, Sophie Hannah has written another perplexing, dark tale. (Caution, book buyers: as with some other of Hannah’s book, this one was previously published under another title–Hurting Distance.)

Naomi Jenkins has a secret she has never told anyone–that a few years ago she was viciously raped. Lately, she has been having an affair with a married man, Robert Haworth. When he doesn’t turn up for their weekly meeting, she is convinced that something has happened to him, but she can’t get Detectives Charlie Zailer and Simon Waterhouse to do more than ask his wife about him. So, she decides to tell a bizarre lie–that Robert was the man who raped her.

When Simon searches Robert’s house, he finds him lying bleeding on the bed and his wife Juliet behaving strangely. Juliet refuses to tell what happened. As the police investigate, they begin to think that there is a serial rapist abducting women and raping them in front of an audience and that there is some connection between these incidents and the attack on Robert.

As usual in a Sophie Hannah novel, everyone is a bit strange. Even the innocent parties seem to be quite batty, and the police have their own, very odd problems. But her novels are dark and complex, and that’s what I like about them.

Day 254: Vulture Peak

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Cover for Vulture PeakBurdett’s Bangkok series is dark, but Vulture Peak is much more twisted than the others. Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep of the Royal Thai Police is ordered by his powerful superior, Colonel Vikom, to investigate a triple murder in a luxurious villa on Vulture Peak, a steep hill above the seaside town of Phuket.

Sonchai realizes that this investigation is linked to Vikom’s stated intention of wiping out trafficking in body parts, part of his campaign for governor of Bangkok. But Sonchai is puzzled by two things: he has never heard before that Thailand is a center of trafficking for body parts and he doesn’t understand why Vikom wants to be governor. Still, it is certainly true that the three bodies have been harvested of every possible organ, including their faces.

Sonchai believes the murders are connected to a trip he took at Colonel Vikom’s command a few weeks before, during which he was posing as an organ merchant. He was dispatched to Dubai to meet Lily and Polly Yip, a pair of Chinese twins who are rich, spoiled, and very odd–and engaged in organ trafficking.

Soon Sonchai is enmeshed in a complicated case that involves trips to Hong Kong and Shanghai, possible involvement of Colonel Vikom’s biggest rival General Zinna, a wandering lunatic with a badly disfigured face who is raping women in Bangkok, and a schizophrenic Chinese cop.

As usual, the pace is fast, the atmosphere is edgy, the characters are interesting, and the insight into Thai and Buddhist culture fascinating.

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 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 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.

Day 244: The Killings on Jubilee Terrace

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Cover for The Killings on Jubilee TerraceThe cast of a long-running British soap opera, “Jubilee Terrace,” is perturbed. Director Reggie Friedman has just informed them that a detested former cast member will be rejoining the show.

Not only is Hamish Fawly extremely nasty, he loves to cause trouble. In this case, he announces to everyone that he is engaged to marry Bet Garrett, an occasional cast member who is the real-life wife of Bill Garrett, the bartender on the show. Bet, who loves to make Bill miserable, promptly dispatches a letter from her lawyer claiming custody of their three daughters, even though she doesn’t really want them.

Detective Charlie Peace arrives on set because the police have received an anonymous letter claiming that the death of a previous cast member, Vernon Watts, was no accident. Finding no substance for the claim, Peace thinks he’s seen the last of the cast when someone sets Hamish’s house on fire, burning to death Hamish and a woman, presumed to be Bet. But shortly, it becomes clear that the victim is another woman, who also had a connection to Vernon Watts.

The novel has many characters, and they are so one-dimensional that I found it difficult to keep them straight, especially as most of them are called by two names, their character’s name and their own. I found The Killings on Jubilee Terrace only mildly interesting, even though it has a difficult solution.