Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for June, 2016

In the far north of Western Canada, there’s a refuge for those who have to flee their normal lives.  When Casey Duncan, a police detective in Ontario, first hears about this place from her close friend, Diana Berry, she’s disbelieving.  It’s another urban legend, she thinks.  But as things go from bad to worse for herself and Diana, she investigates and finds that such a town does indeed exist.

For five thousand dollars each, Casey is told, she and Diana can move to Rockton if they pass inspection.  They have to prove why they’re compelled to leave their current lives and move to the secret place, a location so totally off the grid that there’s no plane service, telephone lines, or Internet.  The people who live in Rockton must contribute their skills to the town–as cooks, medical personnel, storekeepers–or whatever the community needs at a given time.  As it turns out, at the moment it needs a detective.

Casey’s main reason for moving to Rockton is to get Diana away from her physically abusive husband Graham.  Time and again Graham has assaulted Diana, and each time she swears that she will never go back to him, but she does.  Indeed, she and Casey had moved from one city to another after a previous beating, hoping to leave him behind.  But Graham has found her again, and this time Diana says she’s made the final decision never to return to him and thus is desperate to leave no trail behind her for him to follow.  Casey, too, made a bad decision in the past that continues to haunt her and keep her in danger.  So Casey puts up the ten thousand dollars necessary for both of them to start new lives, hoping they can start over.  But can they?

For a town of two hundred people, there’s a lot going on.  The morning after Casey arrives, the body of a man who had been missing for a week is found.  The corpse was in the forest, a place Rockton people know better than to visit.  The sheriff, Eric Dalton, tells Casey that the council, a mysterious group that controls the community from outside and makes the decisions about who gets in and who doesn’t, sometimes is swayed by monetary factors.  Although people who’ve committed violent crimes aren’t supposed to gain admittance, they sometimes get through if they have enough money.  Harry Powys, the name the deceased was using in Rockton, had obviously bribed his way in.  His crimes, brutal as they were, are matched by the manner of his death.  He was dismembered, and Eric believes Harry was alive when it was done.

The people who live in this community are a varied lot, but of course they all have one thing in common–whatever they did or had done to them in the outside world didn’t allow them to stay there.  An ex-soldier who killed his commanding officer while the latter was asleep, a physician blamed for two deaths, several women fleeing abusive relationships, those are reasons for coming to Rockton.  But now it’s becoming clear that more than one person is living there under false pretenses, that the story he or she has been telling others about the reason for being in Rockton isn’t the true one.

Kelley Armstrong has written a taunt thriller with believable characters.  Casey Duncan is a terrific heroine, devastated by what she did years earlier but determined to be strong now for herself and her friend.  But her strength alone may not be enough to stop the carnage in their new home.

You can read more about Kelley Armstrong at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

The life of a national park ranger can be a wandering one.  Anna Pigeon has worked in Texas, Michigan, Colorado, and Minnesota, and in Boar Island she’s been assigned to temporary duty at Acadia National Park, 47,000 acres on Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine.  It’s beautiful, rugged, and an oasis where hiking and boating should be the reason why visitors come there, not because they are fleeing across the country to escape bullying and stalking.

Heath Jarrod, Anna’s closest friend, and her daughter Elizabeth are going through an extremely troubling time.  After much prodding, Elizabeth reveals that she’s the target of cyber bullying, to the point that the teenager has attempted suicide.  Desperate to get away from this, Heath, Elizabeth, and family friend and physician Gwen Littleton decide to join Anna in Acadia, hoping that a move from Colorado to Maine will halt the bullying and stalking.  It doesn’t.

Heath, Elizabeth, and Gwen are staying at the home of one of Gwen’s friends while the friend is off-island.  What they’re not quite prepared for is that the house is a reconfigured lighthouse, set on a rock one hundred feet above the Atlantic.  Not the easiest place to navigate, especially for wheelchair-bound Heath.  But she’s determined to keep Elizabeth safe, and if that means living on a remote island until the cyber bully is caught, so be it.  She and Elizabeth have both dealt with difficult things before.

In Acadia, park ranger Denise Castle is dealing with demons of her own.  She had been in a long-term relationship with another ranger when he abruptly broke it off and shortly thereafter got married.  Now he is a happy husband and father, and Denise can barely stand to be in the same room with Peter and his family.  An abandoned child who grew up in foster homes, Denise has had rejection issues her entire life, and Peter’s abandonment has only made them worse.  But now someone new and totally unexpected has entered her life, and it’s going to change forever.

Anna Pigeon is an amazing heroine, dedicated to both her career and her friends.  She’s definitely a loner, but via her marriage and her friendship with Heath she has become more involved with, and more interested in, other people than she was earlier in her life and career.  She’s still tough and independent, but now there’s a compassionate side to her that wasn’t there in the earlier novels.

Nevada Barr’s sense of place is wonderful, not surprising since she was a park ranger herself for several years.  In addition, her characters have multiple layers to them that go beyond their public personas.  In Boar Island you get to know and understand the inner workings not only of Anna and Heath, but also Denise, a lonely woman who is so overcome by the unexpected appearance of Pauline Duffy in her life that she becomes totally undone.

You can read more about Nevada Barr at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

A mother and her young son are walking home from his school on a rainy afternoon in Bristol, England.  Across the street from their house she lets go of his hand, knowing his eagerness to get into their kitchen for a snack and a few minutes of television.  As he shouts, “I’ll race you, Mummy,” he darts across the road and into the path of a speeding car.  Instead of stopping, the auto backs up the street, makes a quick U-turn, and vanishes into the darkness.

The hit-and-run case lands on the desk of Detective Inspector Ray Stevens.  He and his team, and especially his young protégée Kate, are determined to find the driver, but there are few clues to follow.  Jacob’s mother is in shock, understandably so, and there is no father in the picture.  There were no witnesses, and the car appears to have left no traces on the street.  The only thing of note is that Jacob’s mother says that the car was speeding, rather than attempting to stop, when it hit her son, but that really doesn’t help the investigators at all.

As is not uncommon in this age of social media, it doesn’t take long for a backlash to appear on various web sites.  Opinions were voiced about the mother’s carelessness, her unfitness, her faults.  And when the police return to question her again, she has disappeared.  The boy’s school, his doctor, their neighbors, no one has seen her in days.  So after several weeks, Ray gets the order from the police chief to close the case, and he has no choice but to obey.

At home, things are not much better.  Ray’s wife Mags, a former police officer and now a stay-at-home mother, is getting fed up with Ray’s seeming lack of involvement with his family.  He’s spending long hours at work and forgetting important appointments they made together.  Most seriously, their teenage son Tom is having difficulties at school, skipping classes, and refusing to say what’s bothering him.  Is it typical teenage behavior or something more serious?

To add to this is Ray’s growing attraction to his subordinate, Kate.  She’s everything that Mags is seemingly not.  Kate’s young, with a free lifestyle, and is obviously attracted to Ray.  He can feel himself sliding down a slippery slope, but does he want to stop himself before things go too far?

Clare Mackintosh has written a fantastic thriller.  The characters and plot are totally realistic, and the desperate situations in which people find themselves could have been taken from today’s newspaper headlines anywhere in the world.  Also, the way the book is narrated is perfect; I can’t say any more without spoiling it for you, so you’ll have to trust me.  I Let You Go is a novel you can’t stop reading.

You can read more about Claire Mackintosh at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Murchison House, London, is a dismal place.  Broken elevators, out-of-order closed circuit television cameras, disgusting stairwells.  Only the poorest and most hopeless people live there.  And when a fire runs through it, it brings even more despair and grief.

Maeve Kerrigan, a police detective on the Metropolitan force, is called at home with the news that a fire has broken out at the House.  It’s already known that three people are dead, and there’s a strong possibility of more deaths.  And when Maeve arrives at the scene, minutes later, it’s as horrific as she’d thought.

One corpse has already been found and identified, that of Geoff Armstrong, a racist, homophobic, xenophobic member of the House of Commons.  At first glance it appears that Geoff threw himself through a window to avoid the smoke and flames, but a closer examination shows that he was already dead when his body hit the cement.  Why this politician, with his extreme right-wing views, would be at Murchison House in the first place is a question without an answer.  No one seems to be devastated at his death, but it’s still a high-profile case that the authorities want solved immediately, if not sooner.

Two young women, both without identification, have been found burned to death in their locked apartment.  In addition, an elderly woman has been taken to the hospital on a stretcher, a young girl has been brought to the same hospital in critical condition, and a boy who doesn’t seem certain of his name is alone and asking for his mother.  All these living people are more important to Maeve and her supervisor, Detective Inspector Josh Derwent, than looking into the death of Geoff Armstrong, but they are under orders from Chief Inspector Una Burt to make the Armstrong case their priority.  But Burt can’t follow them everywhere, can she?

There are also other stresses in Maeve’s life.  Rob, her long-time partner, has left her, and although she has discovered that he was unfaithful, she still misses him and keeps making excuses for him in her mind.  She is also being stalked by a man who has been following her for years and now seems to know her every move.

Maeve Kerrigan is a fascinating heroine.  She loves her job and is very good at it, but she hides her insecurities behind a façade of toughness and extreme independence.  She’s been in a depressed state since the end of her romance with Rob, but she’s afraid to let anyone know how she feels.   She’s also conflicted about her feelings about Josh Derwent.  He’s certainly an impossible man, but he always has her back.

Jane Casey has written another spellbinding mystery.  As always, her characters and plot are well-developed and realistic and will keep you guessing until the very end.

You can read more about Jane Casey at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.