Tag: mysteries

Day 220: The Water’s Edge

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Cover for The Water's EdgeOut on a hike in a park, Reinhardt and Kristine Ris find a child’s body shortly after they pass a nervous man in the parking lot. We know all along that this man murdered the boy, but even after the witnesses see him at the grocery store and notify the police of who he is, lazy police work makes them rule him out. In the meantime, another boy disappears.

As Inspectors Sejer and Skarre investigate, they are fairly sure of the identity of the perpetrator but have limited evidence to go on. They also find that the abuser has himself a history of abuse.

In contrast to Karin Fossum’s excellent The Indian Bride, I feel that The Water’s Edge is a fairly pedestrian effort. It is more about exploring the psychology of pedophilia than about solving the crime, than actually about developing the plot at all. I also don’t feel like I get to know the characters very well, even the police. However, I have not had the luxury of reading Fossum’s books in order, which might make a difference in my feelings about the characterizations. A side plot about the witnesses’ marriage promises to be more interesting than it actually turns out to be.

Karin Fossum is considered the Queen of Norwegian crime fiction. If you haven’t read any of her books, I suggest that The Indian Bride is a more interesting place to start.

Day 216: Bangkok 8

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Cover for Bangkok 8Previously, I gave a bemused review to Bangkok Haunts by John Burdett. I wish I had started the series with Bangkok 8, the book I am reviewing today, because it provides a lot of context. In this book, we are introduced to Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a half-caste Bangkok cop. He and his partner Pichai are lifelong friends and arhat, devout Buddhists and uncorrupted police officers in a city where corruption is rife.

Sonchai and Pichai have been ordered to follow William Bradley, a retired marine. He picks up a beautiful woman before they lose him in traffic. Later, they find him in his car, where the doors have been jammed shut and a python is attempting to eat his head. After they open the door, they discover too late that his car has been filled with cobras. Pichai is bitten in the eye and dies. Sonchai then vows to find and kill the person responsible.

He is soon requested to meet with the FBI, who are investigating a powerful American associate of Bradley’s–a jeweler named Sylvester Warren who supplies magnificent gems and artifacts to the wealthy of the world. The FBI agents believe that Warren hired Bradley to import jade and commission replicas of ancient sculptures so that Warren can sell them as authentic. However, Warren’s connections make him too powerful to touch either in the US or in Thailand.

The woman who was on the motorcycle proves difficult to locate or identify, even though she is strikingly tall and has unusual multi-colored hair. As Sonchai investigates further, he finds a tangle of secrets and dark deeds.

This novel provides a lot of background about Sonchai and is full of rich descriptions of the city and its occupants. It is also darkly funny. Burdett does an excellent job of conveying the flavor of the city. The mystery is dark and complex, involving the sex industry, drug smuggling, and connections to the Russian mafia and Cambodian thugs, but it is also entertaining. Sonchai’s insights into, for example, the other characters’ past lives, lend additional spice to the mix. This series is not a traditional one but offers something fresh.

Day 212: Roseanna

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Cover for RoseannaApparently Roseanna is a classic of Swedish crime fiction. Written in 1965 by the team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, it is a compelling police procedural that has sent me to the book stores looking for more.

Lake Vattern is being dredged on a July afternoon when up comes the naked body of a young woman. Autopsy results find she has been violently sexually assaulted and strangled. Detective Inspector Martin Beck and his colleagues Ahlberg, Kollberg, and Melander at first have difficulty even identifying the body.

After months of inquiries, they learn she is a librarian from Nebraska named Roseanna McGraw.  Once they know that, it takes awhile longer to deduce that she must have been killed on a canal boat named the Diana, during a trip when engine trouble delayed her passage through the lake until midnight.

As with other Scandinavian mysteries I have read, the pace is slower and probably more realistic than American procedurals until the police finally identify a suspect. Then, in that time when forensic evidence is so much more limited than at present, they find no evidence linking him to the murder except some hazy snapshots of the two together on the boat. Martin and his team must find some other way to prove he is the murderer.

It’s hard to define why I found this novel so much more enjoyable than some of the more recent Swedish mysteries. It is written in a spare, tight prose. The solution is plausible instead of too convoluted. The characters seem fully defined. The book drew me in, and I was not disappointed.

Day 209: A Darker Domain

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Cover for A Darker DomainAt the beginning of A Darker Domain, Michelle Gibson comes into the police station to report that her father, Mick Prentice, is missing, actually has been missing for 25 years. He was believed to have left his small mining village during a miner’s strike to scab for another mine in Nottingham years ago, which was considered an act of betrayal. Now that his daughter is trying to find him, she learns he isn’t in Nottingham and never has been.

In the meantime, a case from the same period is being reopened, the kidnapping of Catriona Grant and her baby son Adam, during which Catriona was killed. Someone has found a copy of the ransom poster and a large pool of blood in a deserted Tuscan villa.

Detective Inspector Karen Pirie, head of the cold case group in Fife, is working both cases. The memories of the various witnesses appear as flashbacks and parallel narrations, and the story moves swiftly forward as Karen’s cases begin to converge. Val McDermid usually writes complex and exciting thrillers, and this novel is no exception.

Day 208: The Quiet Twin

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Cover for The Quiet TwinThe Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta seems to start out as a standard mystery, but it turns out to be something else entirely. I was attracted to it because in reviews it was compared to Rear Window, one of my favorite movies.

In a 1939 Viennese neighborhood, there is a rumor of a serial killer. A man was murdered not far away, and someone has killed Professor Speckstein’s old dog in a similar manner.

The courtyard behind Dr. Beer’s more respectable apartment building is shared by some tenements occupied by poverty-stricken tenants. The view that some apartments have into others sets up the situation reminiscent of Rear Window.

Dr. Beer is called to treat Professor Speckstein’s niece Zuzka, a college student who suffers from periodic paralysis. Speckstein is a disgraced former college professor who was once accused of child molestation but has hung onto his social position by becoming a Nazi party informant. Dr. Beer, a student of Freud, diagnoses Zuzka with hysteria.

Zuzka is bored and sleepless, so she watches the courtyard from the window in the middle of the night. She has seen a man across the way washing off makeup and what appears to be blood, so she decides to investigate whether he is the killer.

Also living in the courtyard is a drunken man and his little girl Lieschen, whose body is badly deformed from an accident. Zuzka befriends Lieschen while Dr. Beer worries what may happen to her under the Nazis, having heard about some of their ideas.

A brutish police detective named Teuben appears to investigate the murders, but his actual plan is to pin them on some hapless person.

Although Vyleta has tried to depict the atmosphere among the common people of Vienna under the Nazis, I am not so sure he succeeds. Dr. Beer seems to be one of the few characters who is aware of any threat. An aura of dread persists, but it seems more dependent upon my knowledge of coming events than on any feeling from the novel, although the novel is certainly bleak. Perhaps because I read In the Garden of the Beasts only a few weeks before, I expected an atmosphere that was much more fraught with peril.

Day 206: Special Assignments: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin

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Cover for Special AssignmentsI have been following Boris Akunin’s Erast Fandorin series for several years. At first I liked Akunin’s shy, skinny, intellectual young hero. But then Fandorin transformed himself into a muscle-bound Putinesque superhero wannabe, so I lost most of my affection for him.

Set in Tsarist Russia, Special Assignments is actually two novelettes about Fandorin cases. The first, “Jack of Spades,” is a silly case where Fandorin is pursuing a clever con artist. It is supposed to be funny, I think, but I mostly missed the humor and found it ridiculously overcomplicated.

The second story I did not finish once I grasped where it was going. Called “The Decorator,” it is about Jack the Ripper moving his operations to Moscow. However, it becomes quickly obvious that Jack is supposed to be not only a woman but one who is murdering prostitutes because they are defiling their bodies. The whole idea was so abhorrent to me that I refused to read any more of it.

Day 204: Unspoken

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Cover for UnspokenAs you have probably figured out by now if you have been following this blog, I have spent a lot of time trying mysteries written by Scandinavian authors. Unspoken by Mari Jungstedt is probably one of the less successful of them, although it has an interesting plot.

The novel is set in winter on the island of Gotland. Fourteen-year-old Fanny is missing. She seems to have no friends and only an unstable mother to care about her. She spends most of her time caring for the horses at the local racing stable.

Seemingly unconnected is the murder of an alcoholic photographer named Henry Dahlström. But Dahlström recently won a large sum of money at the race track. Inspector Anders Knutas and his team are investigating both incidents.

As I said, the plot for this novel is interesting, but the writing is so choppy as to be distracting, and the characters seem undefined. In addition, a love affair between Johan Berg, a reporter who gets involved in the investigation, and a married woman seems completely pointless, although I understand this is a continuing relationship from a previous book.

I noticed recently that there is a blog that evaluates book cover art, so I’ll just say this, sort of tongue in cheek. I was struck by how atmospheric the cover to this book was and just wish that half of that atmosphere spilled over into the novel.

Day 201: The School of Night

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The School of NightCoincidentally, this summer I read and reviewed Shadow of Night, and The School of Night by Louis Bayard is another novel that deals with the School of Night, a group of Elizabethan scholars who pursued forbidden knowledge. Its members were Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, and Kit Marlowe, among others. The School of Night follows events in two time periods, the present and 1603.

Ten years ago Henry Cavendish was an Elizabethan scholar with a promising future, but he was disgraced when he accepted as legitimate a forged letter supposedly by Sir Walter Raleigh and presented it at a conference. Since then, he has barely eked out a living, teaching part-time, doing editing work, and taking whatever jobs he can get. His only true friend is the eccentric Alonzo Wax, a collector and purveyor of rare books.

But Alonzo is dead, having drowned himself after trying to contact Henry, and Henry finds himself the estate executor. Shortly after the funeral, Henry is contacted by another collector, Bernard Styles, who shows him the second page of a letter by Raleigh that he alleges Alonzo stole from him. This letter makes a rare reference to the School of Night. Styles offers Henry a lot of money to find the letter in Alonzo’s papers and give it to him.

Henry also meets Clarissa Dale, who claims to have made Alonzo’s acquaintance after a lecture about the School of Night. Although she is not an academic, she has been having visions of Thomas Harriot and an assistant named Margaret and wants to find out why.

Henry has barely begun to work with Alonzo’s papers when Alonzo’s secretary, Lily Pentzler, is murdered and all of Alonzo’s books are stolen. This incident makes Henry and Clarissa wonder if Alonzo was murdered, too. Soon, Henry and Clarissa find themselves investigating the secrets of the letter.

Alternating with the present-time story is that of Thomas Harriot, the leader of the School of Night, as he explores Virginia and later works on his forbidden experiments while hidden away on the estate of the Earl of Percy. Finding that his maid servant Margaret can read, he begins to train her to assist him in his experiments.

Although I guessed one important secret early on, I found this novel deeply satisfying. It is full of twists and betrayals and has interesting characters. It treats the historical plot intelligently, and although this comment is not meant as a criticism of Shadow of Night, it deals more seriously with the School of Night than does Shadow of Night (which of course has a completely different focus).

I had not read Bayard before, but he is known for writing historical mysteries that feature such characters as a grown-up Tiny Tim (Mr. Timothy) and Edgar Allan Poe (The Pale Blue Eye). I am interested in reading more.

Day 198: The Princess of Burundi

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Cover for The Princess of BurundiJohn Jonsson, an unemployed welder, small-time crook, and expert on tropical fish, is found tortured and beaten to death at the beginning of The Princess of Burundi by Kjell Eriksson. A deranged man is roaming the town, his behavior escalating in violence. He has attacked one of his former classmates, and Jonsson is another. The attacks seem to be related.

Ann Lindell is on maternity leave while her colleage Ola Haver runs the investigation. But Ann is so interested, she returns from leave to help. Although the police think that the demented man, a victim of bullying years ago in school, is a likely suspect, they cannot find any proof that he is the murderer and begin wondering if they are off base. Does the murder have to do with Jonsson’s school days, the tangled relationships in the Jonsson family, or perhaps the tropical fish?

Although this was the second Ann Lindell mystery I read, I had the same difficulty I reported before in keeping the various police officers straight. However, I am still interested and want to get to know them better. The crime story was complex, and I was unable to tell where the novel was going until the very end.

Day 196: The Secret Keeper

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Cover for The Secret KeeperI loved The Forgotten Garden so much that Kate Morton’s other books, although very good, have not been able to hold their own against it. At first I thought The Secret Keeper would also be good but not great, but a terrific surprise at the end of the book made me change my mind.

The novel begins in 1961, when sixteen-year-old Laurel Nicolson is up in the treehouse on the family farm dreaming about her boyfriend. She sees her mother Dorothy go into the house with her baby brother Gerry. It is Gerry’s birthday, and Laurel knows her mother has left the birthday picnic to fetch the family’s special birthday knife so she can cut the cake. A few minutes later, a stranger goes to the door, and Laurel sees her mother stab the man with a knife. He is assumed to be the man who has been attacking women in the area.

Fifty years later, Laurel is a famous character actor who has come home to visit her ill mother. Her mother’s memory is failing, but she has asked Laurel’s sister Rose to get some things out of a box that has always been private. Among them is a photograph of Dorothy and her friend Vivien, who died during the Blitz.

Laurel’s memory of the long-ago incident with the stranger has become muddied and even inaccurate, but she begins to remember it more clearly when she decides to look into it further. She finds that the attacker was Henry Jenkins, Vivien’s husband. Since Dorothy must have known Henry, there is obviously more to the story.

From here the story alternates between Laurel’s investigation in the present and the war years of young Dorothy (Dolly) Smitham. Dolly is madly in love with Jimmy Metcalfe, a newspaper photographer who also has sole care of his senile father. Dolly wants to marry immediately, but Jimmy thinks they can’t afford it yet, so Dolly takes a job as a companion to a wealthy old lady in London. At a war effort volunteer job, she meets Vivien, who lives across the street with her husband, a successful novelist. Dolly, who comes from a lower middle class background, gets carried away with the idea of leading a more exciting, fashionable life. After a series of misunderstandings, she hatches a plan to get money for her marriage and talks the reluctant Jimmy into helping.

At this point, my major problem with the novel was a growing dislike for Dolly, who seems narcissistic and lacking in conscience. I kept wondering how she was going to develop into the beloved mother of five children. But the novel goes on to unearth secrets. With Morton’s gift for storytelling and excellent writing, I think this novel is as good or better than The Forgotten Garden.