Tag: mysteries

Day 242: The Tuesday Club Murders

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Cover for The Tuesday Club MurdersThe Tuesday Club Murders is a collection of Miss Marple short stories structured around a club in which the members tell each other about crimes or mysteries and the others try to solve them. Of course, Miss Marple is the only member to get the right solution, even though some of the club members are eminent jurists and a Scotland Yard detective. As usual, the other members of the club, except a few most in the know, completely underestimate her.

I’m not that fond of crime short stories because there isn’t really enough room to develop much of a plot. In particular, the format chosen for this book is even more sketchy than usual because the characters involved are only described by the story tellers. You don’t end up with a mystery so much as a puzzle, and one that you probably don’t have enough information about to solve. But then, Christie often withholds information in her novels, too.

That being said, Christie’s biggest talent is her ability to sketch believable characters with just a few words. Of course, her humor is another asset. I may have only solved half the crimes, but I laughed a few times.

Day 240: A Murderous Procession

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Cover for A Murderous ProcessionWhen I first started reading Ariana Franklin’s “Mistress of the Art of Death” series, I had mixed feelings about the premise, which is that a 12th century Jewish woman doctor is trapped in England because of her usefulness to Henry II and is in love with a bishop. However, these books are well written and show a great deal of knowledge of the time and place. Ultimately, I find the books interesting and the characters compelling.

Adelia Aguilar is a medieval forensic pathologist trained in Italy who is forced in England to pretend that her Moorish servant Mansur is the doctor and she is his interpreter, since no one would believe a woman could be a trained doctor. In A Murderous Procession, Adelia is living a retired life in the countryside with her daughter when she is ordered to accompany Henry II’s daughter Joanna to her marriage with the King of Sicily. Adelia must leave her own daughter with Queen Eleanor until she returns.

However, Adelia herself is being followed, by a vengeful madman whose bandit lover she killed in a previous book. Unfortunately, I read and reviewed these books out of order. The previous book is Grave Goods, I believe.

Adelia’s lover Rawley is also a member of the party, but he is required to leave periodically on missions of diplomacy. In his absence, the madman incites the entire party, particularly the church men, against Adelia and Mansur, blaming them for the procession’s many mishaps.

Franklin was only able to write a few books in this series before she died. A Murderous Procession is the last. She also wrote the excellent pre-World War II book set in Berlin, City of Shadows, which I reviewed a few months ago. Her death is a sad loss to the fans of good historical fiction.

Day 238: And Then You Die

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Cover for And Then You DieI started reading Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series after seeing the mysteries about the hapless Italian detective on Masterpiece Mystery. In And Then You Die, Zen is more hapless than usual. I had some problems reading this book because it is apparently a sequel to a book I had not read, and it requires some knowledge of the previous book. I felt this one boiled down to a series of unfocused mishaps.

At the beginning of the novel, Zen is staying under cover in a beach community waiting to be a witness against the Mafia, who apparently tried to kill him in the previous book. He has been a long time recovering from the murder attempt and has not been home for a year.

At the beach, families have reserved places, and someone has occupied the place that goes with his apartment, so he takes another and proceeds to carry on a flirtation with the woman across from him, Gemma. Later on, he finds out the man in his place is dead.

His minders move him, saying that the dead man was killed in mistake for him. Then the plan changes and they put him on a plane to the U.S. to testify there. But the plane has to force land in Iceland after he changes seats and the man who takes his seat dies.

It’s obvious that someone is trying to kill Zen throughout the book, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. I don’t know whether this is Dibdin’s idea of humor or not, but generally Zen is a little sharper than this. Moreover, the episode in Iceland is decidedly odd. In all, the plot seemed very unfocused, with Zen wandering all over the place. I honestly felt as if Dibdin was not putting much effort into this novel.

Day 235: The Eloquence of Blood

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Cover for The Eloquence of BloodIn the second of Judith Rock’s series, the Louis le Grand school run by the Jesuits is under financial hardship in this cold winter of 1686. On a visit to Monsieur Callot to ask for a contribution to the alms budget, rhetorician Charles du Luc meets a lovely young woman, Martine Mynette.

Martine’s mother Anne has recently died, and Martine is very concerned, because Henri Brion, a notary and Monsieur Callot’s nephew, has been unable to find a copy of Martine’s donation entre vifs. Because Martine is adopted, according to French law of the time she cannot inherit, so the only way her mother could leave her an inheritance is through this document. The copy usually hidden in the house is gone, and M. Brion is looking for his own copy.

When Charles relates this story to the school’s rector, Pére le Picart, the rector is dismayed because the Jesuit order was expecting the money through a bequest by Anne Mynette’s father. If a donation entre vifs exists, the school will not be entitled to the bequest. Another concern is that M. Brion is the same person who has supposedly been following up on the order’s claim. The rector sends Charles to the Brion’s house to find out what is going on.

Charles finds the area in disorder. Martine–a neighbor of the Brion’s, and Isabelle Brion’s best friend–has been murdered. No one has seen M. Brion. Isabelle is concerned because her father was trying to force her brother Gilles to marry Martine, which gives Gilles a motive for murder.

In addition to finding out about the bequest, Charles is assigned to follow the investigation into Martine’s murder. There are rumors on the street that the Jesuits murdered Martine for the money, and Paris seems to be entering one of its periodic convulsions against the Jesuit order.

As usual for the two books in this series, the historical details seem convincing and interesting. The novel is well written and keeps you involved. One very small caveat that I did not notice in the first book–Rock explains even the simplest French, which is annoying.

Day 232: Darkside

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Cover for DarksideThe holidays are over and it’s time to get my act back in gear!

Darkside is a mystery with an unusual twist and an even more unusual ending. Belinda Bauer again sets this novel in the town of Shipcott on the edge of the moor in the area of Exmoor explored in Blacklands.

An old, helpless woman seems to have died in her sleep, but the death turns out to be murder. The local constable, Jonas Holly, who is a resident of the town, is being sidelined and even ridiculed by police detective Marvel, who dislikes him on sight. With another death, the police begin to figure out that a serial killer may be murdering sick and mentally ill people.

Frighteningly, Jonas’s beloved wife Lucy has multiple sclerosis. Jonas begins getting notes from someone that say he is not doing his job, so he decides to investigate on his own.

The ending of the novel is ambiguous. Does Jonas know who the killer is or not?

Bauer manages as she did in her first book to create a tense, atmospheric thriller. Characters are plausibly drawn, and the writing is tight. I have been very pleased with Bauer’s dark psychological thrillers so far.

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.