Tag: mysteries

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.

Day 195: The Water’s Lovely

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Cover for The Water's LovelyRuth Rendell is not for the faint of heart. She is certainly capable of building her readers’ sense of dread, and I felt one from the beginning of The Water’s Lovely, to the point where I almost couldn’t enjoy it.

Ismay suspects that her sister Heather drowned their stepfather Guy in the bathtub years ago to save Ismay from his advances. She and their mother assumed Heather’s guilt at the time but never spoke of it, and their mother is now mentally ill. When Heather gets seriously involved with a coworker, Edmund, Ismay begins to worry that she should tell him what Heather did. She stupidly records her theory on a cassette tape.

Rendell does a great job of portraying a slew of repellent characters, including self-obsessed Ismay; Edmund’s clinging, whiny mother; and Ismay’s selfish, manipulative boyfriend Andrew. The worst is Marion, the woman Edmond’s mother would like him to date. She likes to befriend elderly people she thinks will put her in their wills, and then she perhaps poisons them.

I worried what was going to happen with that tape, because Heather and Edmund were practically the only likeable characters in the book, except for the girl’s aunt Pamela and her friend Michael. Happily, the ending wasn’t as dreadful as I feared.

Day 193: The Drop

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Cover for The DropSeveral people asked me recently if I had read any Michael Connelly. I hadn’t, so I read The Drop.

Harry Bosch is a cop who retired and then returned to work on the Open Unsolved unit. He is asked to take over another team’s case when DNA tests on the blood from an old rape and murder show that it comes from a sex offender who was only eight years old at the time.

Harry thinks he has a viable suspect in a man who was briefly the boyfriend of the sex offender’s mother, when he is told to drop the case. A city councilman who has always been his enemy has asked for him to investigate the apparent suicide of his son.

Harry begins to find what looks like corruption in city government, so he must tread carefully. In the course of the case, he also has reason to doubt both his current partner, David Chu, and his previous one, Kiz Rider.

The plot is reasonably interesting if you can get past the choppy writing, tendency to state the obvious, and unconvincing dialog. The problems in Harry’s growing affection for a program director for a rehabilitation center also seem contrived and premature, given the newness of their relationship. After all the raves about Connelly, I found him a disappointment.

Day 191: The Wrong Mother

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Cover for The Wrong MotherAgain, Sophie Hannah uses the technique of multiple narrations in the enthralling mystery/thriller The Wrong Mother, featuring Simon Waterhouse.

Sally Thorning is married with two children, and although she is happy, she feels worn out with working and child rearing. When a business trip is cancelled, she lies to her husband so that she can take some time at a spa. There she meets a man named Mark Bretherick and has a brief affair.

A year later she is out shopping when someone pushes her into traffic. When she arrives home, she sees a news report about a woman who apparently killed herself and her child. The woman’s husband is supposed to be Mark Bretherick, but the man on the television is not the man Sally met at the hotel. She does not want to go to the police because she doesn’t want her husband to find out about her fling.

In the meantime, police constable Simon Waterhouse thinks there is something wrong with the diary found for Geraldine Bretherick, in which she writes about how much she hates being a mother.

Although Hannah seems to have a very dark idea of human behavior if you look at the totality of her work, I always enjoy her twisty plots and her grasp of psychological manipulation. Her two recurring characters, Simon and Charlie, are also almost completely disfunctional in their abortive romance and occasionally behave very oddly as police officers. Still, if you like dark mysteries, her books are fun to read.

Day 185: Haunt Me Still

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Cover for Haunt Me StillHaunt Me Still (published as The Shakespearean Curse in Britain) is another enjoyable literary mystery by Jennifer Lee Carrell. Shakespearean scholar and theatre director Kate Stanley visits Lady Nairn to discuss a production of Macbeth. Lady Nairn, once a renowned actress, plans a production of the play at the foot of Dunsinane Hill using some props from her own collection and wants Kate to direct.

Once the cast arrives at Lady Nairn’s Scottish castle, though, Kate sees a vision of Lady Nairn’s fifteen-year-old granddaughter Lily being murdered and finds the body of a local woman dead at the scene of what appears to be a pagan sacrifice. Then Lily is kidnapped. The ransom demanded is an earlier version of Macbeth that is reputed to include actual magical ceremonies.

On the romantic side, Kate and Ben Pearl have broken up, but Ben reappears, dating an actress in the play.

This novel is loaded with action, as well as witches, curses, cauldrons, crazed killers, some 16th century history, and an exploration of the myths surrounding the play. In other words, it’s a lot of fun.