Tag: mysteries

Review 2227: The Silver Swan

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In this second Quirke novel set in 1950s Dublin, Quirke doesn’t do that much investigating, the results of the last case having been hushed up. However, his poking around does stir things up.

Quirke, a pathologist, is contacted by a distraught Billy Hunt, a man he can barely remember from school days. The body of Billy’s wife Deirdre has been discovered naked in the water, assumed drowned. Billy begs Quirke not to perform an autopsy, because he can’t bear the idea of it. Quirke says he’ll do what he can, but he does do an autopsy and finds an injection site in her neck. However, he hides this information, and the coroner brings in a verdict of suicide. Quirke has assumed she took an accidental overdose, but he would like to know more about her, so he lets Detective Inspector Hackett in on enough to know everything is not straightforward.

The novel returns a bit in time to tell the story of Deirdre Hunt, who has been calling herself Laura Swan since she opened a beauty salon called The Silver Swan. Alternately, it follows several characters in the novel’s current time. One of the first things Quirke discovers is that Deirdre was having an affair with her partner, Leslie White, a silver-haired, languid man who affects a style that emphasizes his hair color and paleness. Quirke thinks he is dangerous and is disturbed to find that his daughter, Phoebe, knows him through her slight acquaintance with Deirdre. In fact, she is also drawn to him (although he seems singularly repulsive).

Deirdre has met White through her acquaintance with the mysterious Hakeem Kreutz, who offers “spiritual healing” to women clients and has been instructing Deirdre in Sufism. But she is just visiting him because she’s attracted to the exotic, as she is with White. The connection between the two men is much more complicated.

This novel is dark, with a slow-growing suspense as it reveals more information. It is not really a traditional mystery, but it makes compulsive reading.

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Review 2217: The Last Remains

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Things seem to be in flux for Dr. Ruth Galloway. Her university in Norfolk has decided to close its archaeology department. Detective Harry Nelson’s wife Michelle has finally left him, and he wants Ruth and Kate to move in with him. But Ruth is reluctant to leave her cottage and doesn’t know what to do.

In a wall of a building being renovated, a skeleton is found. Ruth identifies it as modern because of a plate in its leg, and it turns out to be a woman missing for 20 years. Nelson is dismayed to learn that their friend Cathbad was present at an archaeological campout from which she disappeared all those years ago.

It is still the time of Covid. Cathbad nearly died from it and is having problems recovering. As Nelson’s team questions the former owners of the building where the skeleton was found and the participants of the campout, DC Tony Zhang is exposed to the virus and must isolate.

Nelson’s team finds that the victim, Emily Pickering, was having an affair with Leo Ballard, the archaeology professor leading the campout. He took her to the train station early Monday morning on her way home, but there were puzzling sightings of her on CCTV in other places that day.

Ruth has made a trip to Grimes Graves, ancient mines where the campout took place, and noticed she got a lot of chalk on her pants. The cloths wrapping Emily’s remains also being coated with chalk, Ruth plans to return to Grimes Graves to take soil samples. But she has a lot to deal with at the university, helping with protests initiated by David Brown, who, if the department closes, wants her to move to Uppsala with him.

This is another excellent mystery in this series, and followers may be happy to know that the inertia in the relationship between Ruth and Nelson finally gets unstuck. I won’t say in which direction.

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Review 2212: Crimes of Cymru: Classic Mystery Tales of Wales

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This latest British Library Crime Classics collection features mystery and crime short stories written by Welsh authors or located in Wales. The stories were written from 1908 to the mid-1980s, and some of them are quite eerie in nature.

For example, in the 1936 story “Change” by Arthur Macken, holiday makers scoff when Vincent Rimmer tells them lights are on all night in the cottages of Tremant to keep the fairies away. Yet later a child is apparently exchanged by the fairies. Or is he?

In “The Way Up to Heaven,” Roald Dahl (born in Wales) tells the story of Mrs. Foster, whose husband purposefully torments her by being late even on the way to her flight to Paris to see her grandchildren for the first time. She figures out a way to take care of that problem.

In “No More A-Maying” by Christina Stead, the lies of two children with a guilty secret create an injustice in rural Wales.

Although most of the earlier stores are more traditional, “Water Running Out” by Ethel Lina White explains how Harvey deals with his aunt, who has been preventing his marriage to Annie for years by blackmail.

And another attempt to prevent marriage is perpetrated in “The Chosen One” by Rhys Davies. Rufus, whose family has occupied his cottage for hundreds of years, gets a note from his eccentric landlady, Audrey P. Vines, telling him his lease is up and she’s throwing him out.

This was one of the more entertaining and atmospheric of these collections that I have read. I usually like them, but prefer getting into a longer work.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2205: Nemesis

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Unfortunately, because my husband and I went on a Christie series TV binge last summer, I eventually remembered how Nemesis was going to end. Otherwise, I hadn’t read it before.

Miss Marple reads an obituary for Mr. Rafiel, a wealthy man whose assistance she requested to prevent a murder in A Caribbean Mystery. Some time later, his lawyers summon her. He has left her £20,000 if she will take on a project for him and get a result. The catch is that he doesn’t say what the project is.

She decides to take the project and a few days later receives tickets for a home and garden tour. At one of the stops, she receives an invitation to stay with three sisters, who have invited her at the posthumous urging of Mr. Rafiel. Here, she begins to get a sense of her mission when she learns from another tour participant, Miss Temple, that a former student, Verity Hunt, had been murdered by Michael Rafiel, Mr. Rafiel’s son, and she had been killed by love. Soon after this conversation, Miss Temple is killed by a falling boulder.

Mr. Rafiel wanted to right an injustice, Miss Marple decides. But can she figure out what it is and finish her mission?

I at first thought the writing of this one was a little choppy—lots of subject-verb-object sentences in a row with no variation. But eventually I got caught up into another clever and interesting tale.

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Review 2202: Twice Round the Clock

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Young Helen Manning is astonished when Anthony Fane asks her father for her hand and he agrees. Not only does he agree, but he invites the Fanes and their friends over to celebrate.

The reason Helen is astonished is because she has always been terrified of her father. But her friends, Sir Anthony and his wife, daughter Kay, friends Doctor Henderson, Teddy Fraser, and Bill Brent, accompany Tony to the Mannings for dinner.

All the guests find Manning disturbing, especially when the famous scientist shows them an experiment where he brutally poisons a kitten belonging to the cook, Mrs. Geraint. Unfortunately, a tremendous storm strands them all there for the night.

Bill Brent is awakened at four by a noise downstairs in Manning’s office. When he goes down, he finds Manning dead at his desk with a carving knife between his shoulder blades. The French doors behind him are broken, and the room is in chaos.

This is a lively novel that goes some surprising places, including espionage and hidden family relationships. It has some unlikely plot points, and why everyone’s tires are slashed is never explained. But it’s a quick, fun read.

I received this book from the publishers in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2190: Bleeding Heart Yard

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Detective Inspector Harbinder Kaur has transferred to London, where she is just meeting her two flatmates and her new team. Then she gets a high-profile case—while attending a school reunion, Conservative MP Garfield Rice, called Gary by his friends, has died of an apparent cocaine overdose. The only thing is, his friends say he doesn’t take drugs.

Attending the reunion are some notable figures—Isabelle Ister, a famous actress; Kris Foster, a rock star; Henry Skep, Labour MP—who used to belong to a popular group in school called The Group. Also members of The Group were Anna Vance, a teacher now living in Italy who is in London caring for her dying mother, and Cassie Fitzberbert, Harbinder’s Detective Sergeant. We know right from the beginning that Cassie believes she killed a boy when she was in school.

Of course, it turns out that Gary was murdered by an injection of insulin. His friends find it hard to believe, because Gary was liked by everyone.

There turns out to be more than one line of inquiry. Gary had received several anonymous letters featuring a bleeding heart, and he was regularly meeting other Conservative leaders at a restaurant in Bleeding Heart Yard. Also, the team learns that during exam week before the reunion attendees graduated years ago, a boy named David died when he fell in front of a train, and Gary was the principal witness. Harbinder wonders if David was actually pushed.

The book alternates narrators with members of The Group in first person and Harbinder in third person. I don’t remember if Griffiths used this form of narration in the other Kaur novels, but it began to irritate me. First, the first-person narrators should each sound different, but they don’t. More importantly, with the narration skipping around across very short chapters, the novel started to feel choppy.

So far, I have enjoyed the Harbinder Kaur series, but I didn’t like this one as much, despite it having an unpredictable ending. I still like Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series best.

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Review 2178: Triptych

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I have to admit, I looked for this first Will Trent novel after getting hooked on the TV series. Just a little warning: if you have already watched the series, the TV folks have made one major change from the book that may surprise you.

In Atlanta, young teenage girls have been found after being raped, beaten, and having their tongues either partially or completely bitten off. Detective Michael Ormewood is called out to a similar case, only this time the woman is dead, and she’s not a teenage girl but a middle-aged prostitute.

The next day, Ormewood meets Will Trent, a Special Agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He will be working the case with Ormewood. Will is unusual because he is dyslexic, although he tries to keep this problem a secret.

In the meantime, John Shelley has been recently released from prison, where he served 25 years for a similar crime, committed when he was 16. John has always maintained his innocence, right up to his last parole hearing when he wanted to get out before his mother died of cancer. John has been out for only a short time when he learns that someone has stolen his identity, but curiously, used it to apply for credit cards and buy things while keeping a good credit score.

Angie Polaski, a detective on the vice squad, has gotten peripherally involved in the investigation. She has ties to both Ormewood and Trent that she’s keeping secret.

This is a well-written, fast-paced novel that is part mystery, part thriller. It has interesting characters, and I enjoyed it very much.

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Review 2174: The Black Spectacles

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Detective Inspector Andrew Elliot is vacationing in Italy when he overhears an English party discussing some poisonings in a town back home. He is struck at first sight by Marjorie Wills. This proves to be unfortunate, because when he returns home, he is assigned the poisoning case and Marjorie is a suspect.

The poisoning case involves someone substituting poisoned chocolates for harmless ones in a local shop. One boy has died. However, this case is soon overshadowed by the murder of Marcus Chesney, Marjorie’s uncle, under bizarre circumstances. Chesney has a hobby horse that people aren’t observant, so he designs a demonstration of his point. During the demonstration, a bizarrely dressed man comes in to the room where Chesney is manipulating objects at a desk and forces a capsule down his throat. Although this is part of the demonstration, it is not part of it for the capsule to be poisoned. Chesney dies and his assistant is found outside bashed over the head. Later, the unconscious assistant is also poisoned.

Present are Chesney’s friend Dr. Ingram, the assistant, Marjorie, and Marjorie’s fianceé, George Harding, whom she met on the trip. Not present is Dr. Joe Chesney, Marcus’s brother, out on a house call.

As Elliot investigates, things keep pointing to Marjorie, but he can’t prove anything. Finally, he asks Gideon Fell for help.

The Black Spectacles is supposedly Carr’s most popular book, even though it doesn’t feature a locked door mystery, his specialty. I enjoyed it a lot, more than the other books I’ve read by Carr, although I immediately picked out the killer and never wavered. Still, I never figured out exactly what was going on during the demonstration.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2166: In Place of Fear

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It’s 1948 Edinburgh, and it’s Helen Downie’s first day in her job as almoner for the brand new National Health Service. Her bosses are young Dr. Strasser and Dr. Deuchar—previously the partner of Dr. Strasser’s father—who share a house and a practice. Although Dr. Deuchar is friendly and humorous, Dr. Strasser is abrupt and sometimes rude. However, Dr. Strasser unexpectedly gives Helen and her husband Sandy a place to live—a flat in a house that was used as a fever hospital during the war. That’s good, because just that morning Helen’s quarrelsome mother threw them out.

Helen completes her first busy day and is delighted with the upstairs flat, which is clean, bright, and has an inside bathroom. When she and Sandy are trying to pull together a few odds and ends to make the flat minimally habitable, Helen finds the body of a young woman out back in the Anderson shelter. She thinks the woman is Fiona Sinclair, the daughter of her benefactor, Mrs. Sinclair.

After she alerts the police, Dr. Deuchar says the woman died from poisoning herself. He and Helen go to notify Mrs. Sinclair, but Fiona is okay. Then Helen thinks the body might be her other daughter, Caroline. She and Dr. Deuchar try to find the misidentified body but are told it was sent to Glasgow because it was the body of a notorious Glasgow criminal. However, on a second visit to the morgue, Helen learns that the girl was hanged, not poisoned, and a famous criminal by the name she was given is unknown in Glasgow.

Persistent Helen begins to uncover widespread corruption involving leading citizens in the city. Something is going on very close to home.

It wasn’t clear to me whether this book marks the start to another series by McPherson, but it has hallmarks of it. Helen is a feisty and likable heroine, and although I thought she was blind to the identity of the killer, what was actually going on in the city was harder to figure out. If this is a series, I’m looking forward to seeing more of Helen.

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Review 2154: #1940 Club! Sad Cypress

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Elinor Carlisle is on trial for murdering Mary Gerrard at the beginning of this Christie novel. A doctor who knows her hires Hercule Poirot to find some evidence that will save her.

It all begins when Elinor receives an anonymous letter telling her that her inheritance from her Aunt Laura may be in jeopardy. Elinor isn’t really worried about that, since she and her cousin Roddy have long understood from her aunt that they will inherit. However, she realizes she should go down for a visit because her aunt is not well, and Roddy goes with her. They have always planned to marry, no matter who gets the money, and they decide to become formally engaged.

The note warned against Mary Gerrard, a lodge keeper’s daughter, whom Aunt Laura has had educated. Mary has been visiting Aunt Laura frequently since she returned from school. No sooner does Roddy see Mary than he falls in love with her. Elinor, who has always hidden how much she loves Roddy, sees this and breaks the engagement.

When Elinor is there on another visit, summoned because her aunt has had another stroke, the county nurse misses a vial of morphine. Aunt Laura asks Elinor to summon her lawyer, but she dies that night.

Elinor is surprised to learn that Aunt Laura died intestate and that as her closest relative, she gets everything. However, she gives £2000 to Mary and tries to give money to Roddy, but he won’t take it. When she is there to go through her aunt’s things, Mary is poisoned while eating sandwiches with Elinor and the county nurse, and dies.

Things look bad for Elinor, and at first everything Poirot can discover seems to point to her guilt. But the answer may lie in the past.

I began to have an inkling of the truth but not until the very end of the novel. However, I was sympathetic to Elinor and wanted her to be innocent. This was a Christie I hadn’t come across before and may not have read had it not been for the 1940 Club.

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