Tag: mysteries

Day Fifteen: Britten and Brülightly

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Cover for Britten and BrulightlyAnd now for something completely different!

Britten and Brülightly by Hannah Berry is a noir graphic novel. I haven’t read many graphic novels, but this one seems to be outstanding. Most of them look like superhero comic books to me.

Britten is a depressed detective whose partner is a tea bag (I can’t believe I just got the pun of his name! I am so dense sometimes!) who makes humorous comments from inside the pocket of Britten’s (of course) trench coat. Britten takes a case from Charlotte Maughton, who doesn’t believe her fiancé, Berni Kudos, committed suicide. She is convinced he was actually murdered. Britten begins investigating Kudos’s job at Maughton Publishing, because Charlotte thinks Kudos’s death might be connected to a blackmailing scheme aimed at her father. During the investigation, he begins to uncover family secrets.

Although I became confused by the plethora of characters, I was impressed by the drawings, which are detailed and gorgeous. I am no expert on art, but I think they are stunning. To match with the noir theme, they look like watercolors in shades of gray with muted, subtle touches of color.

Reading this book made me more interested in exploring graphic novels, but so far I haven’t seen anything that looked as interesting. Two other highly lauded graphic novels, Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, and Maus, by Art Spiegelman, have compelling themes but much more primitive drawings (in the case of Maus, I couldn’t tell one character of a certain type from another), and I was attracted to Berry’s book mostly by the beautiful art and witty dialogue. Unfortunately, Berry doesn’t seem to have published anything else yet.

Day Seven: Bury Your Dead

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Cover for Bury Your DeadLast fall I read about the series of mysteries by Louise Penny, some of which have received numerous mystery book awards. They all take place in Quebec and feature Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Bury Your Dead is not the first in the series, but it is the first one I read, and I wrote the most about it in my book diary. However, if you decide to read these books, you should make a special effort to read them in order, starting with Still Life. I did not, and I was sorry at times, because most of the books are set in the same small, charming village and you can sometimes tell who the murderer of a previous book is just by who is missing from the village in a later book. Also Bury Your Dead in particular reveals the outcome of the previous book, because Inspector Gamache decides that he perhaps did not get it right that time and sends his second to re-investigate.

That being said, I think I liked Bury Your Dead best of all the Penny books I have read, because it partly takes place in the fascinating Quebec City. That is where Inspector Gamache is recovering from a case that turned out horribly, during which he was badly injured.

He discovers a delightful building in the city, the Literary and Historical Society, full of old books and documents about the English population of the city, and he meets some of the historians. Then the body of a French-heritage historian who has been obsessed with finding the missing remains of Samuel de Champlain is found in the society’s basement, and the board of the society asks him to investigate. The board is particularly worried because there has been some strain between the English minority and the French majority in the city, some of it fostered by the dead historian.

In the meantime, Gamache has asked his second, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, who is also on leave, to return to the small village of Three Pines and find what they missed in the last case, as he is convinced they made a mistake.

While this is all happening, Gamache is haunted by the memories of the young agent who was held captive and died during the incident that injured both Gamache and Beauvoir.

The book skillfully follows both plots and flashbacks to the investigation that went wrong. The characters in this series are well developed and interesting. The plots are tight and the mysteries difficult to figure out. The small village setting could become problematic, because the cast of characters is limited, but so far I have been enjoying the books.

Day Three: The Darkest Room

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Cover for The Darkest RoomTie for Best Book of Week 1!

I love dark mysteries, good ghost stories, and books about family secrets. The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin, a Swedish mystery writer, is one of my discoveries from the past year. It is an excellent book, atmospheric, absorbing, part mystery and part ghost story.

Katrine and Joachim move to Öland, a large island off the coast of Sweden, with their two children. Katrine has been living on the island with the children for several months and remodeling their house while Joachim finishes up his teaching job. Katrine lived in an outbuilding of the house as a child with her artist mother.

The house itself is almost a character in this book, and the first few chapters are about its history. It was built to be the home for the families of lighthouse keepers, and two lighthouses are nearby. The walls of the house are actually built from the wood salvaged from a ship wreck, and as with any old house, many people have died there. There are local stories about the house.

Joachim has just arrived to live permanently in the house, but he needs to make one more trip to pick up a load of things from their home in an upscale neighborhood of Stockholm, a home that they had also bought and restored. On his way back to the island, he gets a confused call from the Öland police who tell him that his daughter has drowned off the pier near the house. But when he gets home, he finds it is not his daughter but Katrine who has died. The police told him the wrong name. As he tries to take care of his young children and cope with his grief, Joachim begins to think the house is haunted. And his daughter is having strange dreams about her mother.

In the meantime, a policewoman starts work at the new police post on the island. Her first investigation involves a rash of robberies of summer cottages. Another point of view is of one of the housebreakers, who is becoming dismayed by the growing violence of his partners, who have decided that they will get more by breaking into occupied houses. The atmosphere and our sense of dread builds as Joachim gets a little odder and the housebreakers become more vicious.

And let’s not forget that we don’t actually understand the circumstances of Katrine’s death.

I was especially impressed by Theorin’s skill in revealing important pieces of information naturally throughout the book instead of laying them out at the beginning. For example, early on Joachim has a few stray thoughts about a woman. He feels some guilt about her but we don’t know why or who she is. We find out later, naturally, as Joachim thinks about her, in addition to some other facts that turn out to be important to the plot. This technique doesn’t seem artificial at all, but more organic and reflective of how thoughts and memory actually work.

I’ve read one other book by Theorin, also set on Öland. I can’t wait to read more.

Day Two: The Cold Dish

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Cover for The Cold DishMy intention is to review a book a day. Of course, I don’t read a book a day, but I have a book journal, so I am cribbing my reviews from that.

Today’s book is a great mystery set in present-day Wyoming, The Cold Dish by Craig Johnson. I have been loving this series, which is full of interesting characters. The setting is almost a character in itself.

The main character is Walt Longmire, the sheriff of a rural Wyoming county, who is a widower nearing retirement. (I understand that A&E will be broadcasting a series based on these books, called Longmire, sometime this year, something to look forward to.) I often tire of series mysteries, principally because of the secondary characters, who are often one-dimensional. Johnson’s characters seem more like the actual inhabitants of a smallish western town.

In The Cold Dish, Cody Pritchard is shot to death at long range by someone using an unusual rifle. Two years before, he and some other high school boys participated in a brutal rape of a young Cheyenne girl, and he and his co-defendents got off lightly. Despite his abhorrence of their crime, Walt is worried that the other boys may be at risk, so he must try to keep them safe. He is also worried about what his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, might know, since Henry is the girl’s uncle.

The book features a good mystery, some exciting action, characters that you really care about, and perhaps even the ghosts of long-dead Cheyenne warriors (although Walt doesn’t think so).