Tag: mysteries

Day 74: A Caribbean Mystery

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Cover for A Caribbean MysteryAgatha Christie is one of the best mystery writers of the so-called Golden Age of mystery writing because she so skillfully sketches believable characters and plots. Although many of the Golden Age mysteries concentrate on perplexing puzzles such as figuring out railway timetables, Christie was much more interested in the personality of the murderer and his or her motivations.

A Caribbean Mystery begins after Miss Marple has suffered a serious bout of pneumonia. Her affectionate nephew Raymond has arranged a vacation for her on an island in the Caribbean, where she can recover. But of course her vacation isn’t as restful as her nephew had hoped.

She is only half listening to boring Major Palgrave when he offers to show her the snapshot of  a murderer, but just then he sees something and quickly begins chatting about something else. That night he is found dead, apparently of a heart attack.

Miss Marple is having grave doubts about that heart attack when the chambermaid reports that before his death the Major Palgrave did not have the heart medication found in his room. Shortly thereafter, she is found stabbed to death.

Miss Marple begins sizing up her suspects. Molly Kendal, owner of the hotel with her husband Tim, has been behaving oddly, having nightmares and reporting blackouts and feelings of paranoia. Years ago, Greg Dyson’s wife died and he married her cousin Lucky within a month. Colonel Hillingdon and his wife Evelyn appear close, but are they really? And are they as friendly with the Dysons as they seem to be? The elderly and wealthy Mr. Rafiel is too feeble to be a murderer, but his secretary Esther Walters is secretive and Miss Marple spots his attendant Jackson skulking around.

As usual, Christie does a deft job of quickly limning believable characters and a complex mixture of motives and red herrings in a brief novel that is fun to read. I spotted the killer quickly but still enjoyed the book.

Day 72: The Indian Bride

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Cover for The Indian BrideI previously read one book by Karin Fossum and felt neutral about it, but then I read The Indian Bride. I was extremely touched and involved by this Norwegian small-town mystery.

A naive and uncomplicated bachelor farmer, Gunder Jomann, sees a picture of an Indian woman in a book and decides to go to India to find a wife. This journey is a daunting prospect for a man who has hardly ever left his small town of Elvestad, but he is determined. The story of his journey is brief but touching. He is successful and returns home to prepare for the arrival of his new wife, Poona, while she settles her affairs in India.

Just as he is leaving for the airport to pick Poona up, Gunder gets a call from the hospital. His beloved sister has been in a terrible accident. From the hospital, he calls the local taxi driver and asks him to pick up Poona, but the driver misses her at the airport. The next day Poona’s body is found in a field near Gunder’s house.

Inspector Konrad Sejer and his partner Jacob Skarre are assigned to solve the crime. Most crime novels since Sherlock Holmes deal with solving puzzles posed by clever criminals, but this novel is unusual in reflecting the type of crime that is probably more often dealt with by the police, random violence by people who are not professional criminals and not particularly clever. Some of the suspects are a local café owner, a muscle-bound young man, and an attention-seeking teenager. In a strange way, the focus of the novel reflects a more innocent world, which is exactly how I felt when reading about Gunder and Poona’s romance. I kept hoping the body would turn out to be that of some other Indian woman, not Poona.

The setting is rich, the characters are complex, the puzzle is interesting. I find Inspector Sejer not as well developed as some of his suspects, but perhaps I just need to read more Fossum.

Day 69: The Information Officer

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Cover for The Information OfficerI really enjoyed Mark Mills’s book Amagansett from a few years ago and liked The Savage Garden. However, I did not find his third book, The Information Officer, as satisfying.

It is World War II during the siege of Malta. The British are trying to get their Spitfires to Malta to defend it, but in the meantime the strategic island is being heavily bombed. Major Max Chadwick’s job as information officer is to deliver updates to the local newspaper that are as positive as possible and figure out what is truth and what fiction.

Max’s good friend Freddy comes to him with information that someone is murdering Maltese dance hall girls, and there is evidence that the murderer is a British submariner. Freddy, a doctor, has already raised the problem with the high command and gotten nowhere, so Max decides to investigate. In the meantime, the murderer is plotting his moves.

The novel was interesting enough, with good descriptions of Malta and a fairly involving plot. However, I did not grow to care very much about the characters. I figured out the murderer, although not his motive, fairly easily.

Day 65: Arcadia Falls

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Cover for Arcadia FallsArcadia Falls by Carol Goodman is a gothic novel about a young widow, Meg Rosenthal, who has been left without much money after leading a well-to-do married life. She accepts a job at a remote high school for the fine arts where she has been able to enroll her teenaged daughter. The school was founded by two artists and authors of fairy tales, Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt. Lily died under mysterious circumstances by falling into a ravine during a snowstorm. The first night Meg and her daughter are installed in their new home in a secluded cottage on the grounds, one of the students also falls into the ravine.

As Meg’s thesis concerns the school, she begins digging into the death of Lily, especially trying to figure out why the current headmistress, Ivy St. Clare, disliked her so. She is aided by her accidental discovery of Lily’s diary in a hiding place in the cottage.

This book is interesting and engaging, but the solution to all the campus goings-on has a major fault that makes it difficult to accept. It hinges on the identities of three different women. I don’t want to say more, but this problem makes the ending completely unlikely.

Day 62: Interred with Their Bones

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Cover for Interred with their BonesInterred with Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell is excellent fun, the first of a literary mystery series. Kate Stanley is directing a production of Hamlet at the Globe when her estranged mentor, Rosalind Howard, a Harvard professor of Shakepeare, gives her a small box and hints that she has made an important discovery. Later that night after a fire at the Globe, Kate finds Roz dead in her office. The box turns out to contain a Victorian mourning brooch decorated with flowers associated with Ophelia.

Kate teams up with her friend, the renowned actor Sir Henry Lee, determined to solve the mystery of Roz’s discovery. She begins to believe that she is searching for the manuscript of a play called Cardenno that was produced in 1613 and that may be the same as a play with a similar name registered in 1653 but never published by William Shakespeare and John Beaumont. In her pursuit of the truth, she keeps running into Ben Pearl, a security expert, and another man who says he is related to Rosalind.

The book is a cross between traditional mystery and thriller with an admittedly ridiculous plot. Kate travels from London to Harvard to Utah and then to Spain and Washington, D.C., running down clues in a sort of parody of The Da Vinci Code. Lots of bodies pile up, and we hear about most of the crackpot theories about Shakespeare that have been vaunted over the years. The story is full of literary allusions, action-packed, witty, and fun to read. I guessed part of the mystery as soon as one character appeared, but I was too interested in the plot and characters for that to be disappointing.

Day 60: Mind’s Eye

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Cover for Mind's EyeMind’s Eye is the first of the Inspector Van Veteren series by Swedish mystery writer Håkan Nesser, although it is the third published in English. Mostly a police procedural, the book also is somewhat of a psychological thriller.

A woman is drowned in her bath tub and her husband, Janek Mitter, is on trial for her murder, but Inspector Van Veteren is not quite sure the police got it right. Mitter, whose only alibi is that he was asleep and who cannot remember what happened that night, is found guilty and incarcerated in a mental hospital.

One night when Mitter is not given his drugs, he remembers someone in his house the night of the murder and trieds to call Van Veteren. He also sends a note to that person. That night he is murdered. Now Van Veteren thinks the police need to start over by examining the woman’s past.

The book was interesting enough, and I am ready to read more about Van Veteren. I was able to guess the solution–although not the exact identity of the murderer–well before the end, but the book kept my attention.

Day 58: Grave Goods

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Cover for Grave GoodsBest Book of Week 12!

In the year 1154 a dying monk sees what he thinks is a vision of the burial of King Arthur after an earthquake at Glastonbury Abbey. He tells his nephew about it as he dies. Twenty years later when King Henry II is putting down a Welsh rebellion, the nephew, a Welsh bard, tells him the story hoping to save his own life. Henry sends a message to Glastonbury, which has just suffered a great fire, and the monks find a coffin buried in the described location that seems to contain the corpses of a man and a woman.

The penurious Henry would love to announce that they had found the bodies of Arthur and Guinever, because the resulting monies from pilgrimages would save him having to pay to rebuild the abbey. But how can he be sure someone won’t come to claim the bones belonging to his Uncle Tom and Aunt Gladys? By summoning his “mistress in the art of death,” Adelia Aguilar, he hopes to determine at least their antiquity.

Grave Goods is a novel in Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death series. Adelia Aguilar is a graduate of the School of Medicine in Salerno, at the time the only such facility that would accept women, and an expert on the causes of death. She arrived in England on a previous matter, but Henry has found her so valuable that he has never granted her a passport to leave the country. Since she is a woman, her word is not respected by most men, so she pretends she is a translator for her Arab servant Mansur, who pretends to be the doctor.

Henry’s soldiers find Adelia and take her away as she is travelling with her friend Lady Emma Wolvercote to Wells to claim Emma’s son’s property from his grandmother. But when she arrives in Glastonbury after meeting with Henry in Wales, Emma has disappeared. The monks give Adelia’s party an unfriendly greeting, and while she and Mansur are looking in a crypt to find samples to compare with the corpses, someone tries to bury them alive. Something is not right at the abbey, and Adelia is not best pleased to be saved by Rawley, the Bishop of St. Albans, her ex-lover.

I have been reading this series for awhile. At first, I wasn’t sure I bought the premise, but the books are rich with historical details and the forensics information available at the time, and Ariana is a likeable heroine. It’s not her or Rawley’s fault that he was made a bishop (he was a soldier when she met him), and the blending of romance and mystery works fairly well here, which is unusual. The romance is played down in favor of action and suspense. If you like a good historical mystery, you’ll probably enjoy these books.

Day 56: The Redbreast

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cover for RedbreastThe Redbreast by Norwegian mystery writer Jo Nesbø starts out with Detective Harry Hole embarrasing his government by shooting an unidentified secret service officer during the American president’s visit. Naturally, he is “promoted” to a political office and assigned to investigate neo-Nazi activities in Norway.

He begins tracking Sverre Olsen, a neo-Nazi who recently escaped prosecution on a technicality. But that investigation is derailed when he comes upon evidence that someone has purchased an extremely powerful, rare rifle and may be planning an assassination attempt. At the same time, someone is killing old men who fought on the Eastern Front for the Germans in World War II, believing that they would prevent their country from being annexed by the Soviet Union.

In her attempts to help Harry with the investigation of who bought the gun, his ex-partner Ellen is murdered.

The novel was interesting and complex, with the story from WWII interleaved with that of Harry’s investigation. However, I didn’t find Harry very developed as a character. This lack of character development may be because this is the seventh Harry Hole book, but I believe that series books must find a way to balance the demands of new readers without being too repetitive for readers following the series. One way is to make sure that the main characters always seem like real people. That said, I may try reading some others to see if I get to like Nesbø’s work more.

Day 54: Started Early, Took My Dog

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Cover for Started EarlyKate Atkinson’s mysteries featuring Jackson Brodie are always complex and carefully plotted. The somewhat hapless Brodie is a “semi-retired” private investigator who usually works in Edinburgh, but Started Early, Took My Dog takes him back to his home town of Leeds in Yorkshire.

Jackson Brodie is trying to locate the family of Hope McMasters, a woman who was adopted in the 1970’s at the age of two. In doing so, he has stumbled upon the story of an old crime–a prostitute was murdered and the child found with her disappeared.

Tracy Waterhouse, a retired detective who works as a security guard at a mall, was originally on that case and always worried about the child. On impulse, Tracy purchases another abused child from a junkie prostitute. When Jackson tries to find her to ask her about the old crime, she thinks he is after her for kidnapping and flees.

Two separate groups of people appear to be chasing Tracy–or maybe Jackson. And what does Tracy’s friend Barry know about the crime? And how is Tillie Squires, an old actress who is going senile, involved in everything? And then there’s the dog.

Atkinson’s mysteries are edgy and well written, as well as humorous. She spends more time on characterization than the usual mystery novel, creating interesting individuals. The novel changes between viewpoint and time to tell the complex, interweaved stories about identity.

Day 52: Winter’s Bone

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Cover for Winter's BoneI became interested in reading Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell after seeing the powerful, gritty movie. If anything, the book is grittier and more compelling.

Winter’s Bone is a grim, yet touching, sparsely written tale of a young girl’s attempt to save her home. Ree Dolly is a high school student who has been supporting her mentally ill mother and two younger brothers in an area of the Ozarks that except for some modern-day conveniences doesn’t seem like it could be much different from it was a hundred years ago or more. One day the sheriff arrives to tell her that her father put their house and property up as collateral for his bail, and that if he doesn’t make his court date in a week, the family will lose their home. To Ree, this would mean a loss of all hope.

Ree sets out to find her father, whom she hasn’t seen in several months. Although almost everyone she visits is related to her in some way, most of the men are meth cookers, and her quest among the Ozark hollows is fraught with danger. Some of the women are even scarier than the men. Ree begins to feel that there is some greater mystery–that others know where her father is and aren’t telling. Initially resistant to her efforts, her terrifying Uncle Teardrop finally decides out of family loyalty to help her.

Woodrell’s prose is both lyrical and spare. You are rooting for Ree, her honest, uncorrupted spirit in stark contrast to the endemic criminality of the community.