Marilyn's Mystery Reads

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Two couples, the Brauns and the Liégeans, live near each other outside Geneva, Switzerland.  When Wild Animal opens, the four are casual friends, with  children of the same age; by the end of the novel, their lives are intertwined in ways not one of them could have imagined.

Sophie and Arpad Braun are living a luxurious life, fueled by their salaries as a successful attorney and an international banker plus generous gifts from Sophie’s father.  They live in what they call the Glass House with their two children, secluded in the woods, where they feel totally secure and free to indulge in any behaviors they desire without nearby neighbors peering in.  But unknown to them, someone is watching.

Greg and Katrine Liégeans live in a decidedly more modest home.  Greg is a police officer, a member of the city’s SWAT team, and Katrine is a clerk in a clothing store.  They also have two children, which is how the two mothers met.  The Liégeans’ lives are going smoothly until the night of Arpad’s 40th birthday party, when Greg sees Sophie up close for the first time and becomes obsessed with her.

It starts with Greg taking their dog for a walk through the woods to the Brauns’ house every morning, then finding a spot where he can look into their bedroom window, and it escalates to the point where he puts a stolen surveillance camera into the room to see Sophie in greater detail.  He simply can’t stop himself.

And who is the man driving the gray Peugeot who is following Sophie?  And why?

Wild Animal is written in a non-linear style, with a robbery at the center of the novel.  The reader doesn’t know what will be robbed or by whom, and the writing is so clever that, at least for me, the thieves’ identities came as a complete surprise.

In addition, the novel is told in various voices, so we learn about the events from different perspectives.  Readers can never be certain what they’re reading is accurate or simply what that character wants them to believe, which adds to the suspense of this outstanding novel.

Joël Dicker is a Swiss author whose novels have been translated into over forty languages.  You can read more about him on various sites on the internet.

Former police officer Evander “Andy” Mills is hired by the Mattachine Society in 1950s San Francisco, a group of gays working to “pursue equality for the homophile movement” according to Myrtle Bolton, a member of the Society.  She wants Andy to find three of the group’s members who’ve gone missing.

Myrtle explains that there was a conference between the San Francisco and the Los Angeles members, the two having very different ideas about what the Mattachines should focus on.  Since that meeting ended, three participants in the San Francisco group haven’t been seen.  She explains that because of official persecution and the fear of prosecution, she has no way of contacting the three; she doesn’t even know if Edward, Hank, and Daphne are their real names.

Since she has no addresses or phone numbers for them, Andy insists on attending the Mattachine’s next meeting in hopes that one of the group knows more about the three missing members than Myrtle does.  The members use code words, secret names, and masks to hide their identities.  Andy understands their fears, but their secrecy will definitely make his job more difficult.

After meeting with the San Francisco group and getting nowhere, Andy reluctantly decides he has to go to Los Angeles to continue his investigation.  He’s hesitant to visit the City of Angels for two reasons.

First, he’s happy in his San Francisco home, where he lives and has his office over the Ruby, a gay club where his boyfriend works; Andy has found a definite sense of community and friendship there.  He has no desire to leave it, even for a day or two.

Second, Los Angeles is where he grew up and where his mother lives.  She and Andy are not quite estranged, but they haven’t seen each other in a couple of years.  It’s a six hour car ride from his home, certainly doable, but Andy has been happy to keep their interactions restricted to a few phone calls a year.  His mother doesn’t know about his sexual orientation, and he’d like to keep it that way.  But he heads for Los Angeles in spite of his misgivings.

Mrs. Mills is delighted to see her son.  She is a nurse at a psychiatric facility and wants Andy to see the clinic, proud of the work they’re doing.  But when Andy visits it he’s disturbed and shocked by what he finds, and he determines to deal with it while he continues his search for Hank, Edward, and Daphne.

Mirage City is the fourth book in the Andy Mills series.  It’s a fascinating and disturbing look into 1950s culture, in which homophobia is rampant even in supposedly “enlightened” communities.  Sadly, these feeling are still present today, which makes this series an important read.  Andy is a realistic and engaging protagonist, forced out of his former career as a San Francisco detective when he’s discovered in a gay bar, and thus readers will understand his desire to stay within the Ruby community where he feels safe and respected.

You can read more about Lev AC Rosen at this website.

Okay, here is my confession.  Too Old For This is a book about a woman who is a serial killer, with five or six (I kind of lost count) murders behind her when the novel opens.  And I was rooting for her throughout the book!

Lottie Jones is a woman in her mid-seventies, living a quiet life.  Her only pastime is going to her church twice a week, once for Thursday bingo games and once for Sunday services.  A more blameless life is hard to imagine.

But all this is threatened when she opens her door to Plum Dixon, a young woman who wants to do a documentary about Lottie, whom she believes was falsely accused of murders more than forty years earlier, and set the record straight.  That would be admirable except for the fact that Lottie was not falsely accused, and she has no desire to have her life reopened for public scrutiny.

The two women sit down at Lottie’s kitchen table and talk about the project that Plum has in mind, and while Plum is searching her phone for clips of her work to share with the older woman, Lottie stands behind her and hits her over the head with an umbrella.  It’s not the situation she wants but the one she has to deal with.  And so the murders continue.

It’s hard to put my finger on why I was rooting for Lottie.  Looking at it objectively, here is a woman who has no qualms about murder if it helps her keep her life private.  She has been using a false name for more than forty years with great success, and she sees no reason why that should change.  If only those pesky people–police investigators, Plum’s mother, Plum’s boyfriend, and others whom we meet–would leave Lottie alone to live the remainder of her life.

Lottie narrates Too Old For This, but she doesn’t make excuses for the murders she commits.  In her mind, she’s justified because all she wants is her privacy, and the people she kills just won’t let her be.  Can you condemn her for getting them out of the way?

Samantha Downing has written a spellbinding book, one that captivated me from the first chapter.  Her characters, good and not so good, make you understand their motivations.  Why can’t they leave Lottie alone?

Too Old For This is brilliantly written, with a main character whose moral compass is definitely skewed in the wrong direction.  But you can’t stop reading about her, or at least I couldn’t.

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

Owner and guide of SF Killer Crime Tours, Capri Sanzio knows the history of the city’s criminal past better than most.  From San Francisco’s Tenderloin District to its Barbary Coast, there have been murders, robberies, abductions, and more since the first settlement in 1776.  Capri is aware that the people on her tours enjoy the frisson of danger they get from hearing the details of such crimes, but when the danger hits closer to home, it’s a different story.

Lorraine, one of the women on the Barbary Coast tour, has made herself a bit of a nuisance, asking Capri numerous questions, but the tour guide is patient.  Suddenly Lorraine screams and points to a building on a side street.  “Someone’s attacking that woman.”

Capri calls the police on her cell phone, but when they arrive and enter the building they don’t find anyone in the apartment Lorraine has pointed to.  After giving Lorraine a stern warning about wasting police time, the officers leave, but Capri now has several questions she’s turning over in her mind.  Could Lorraine have seen a rehearsal for a play and misinterpreted it?  Was she on medication that had her imagining things?  Could she have created the entire incident to put herself in the spotlight?

Still bothered by the discrepancy between Lorraine’s story and the fact that the police found an empty apartment at the site of the alleged violence, Capri contacts Inspector Dan Petito, a friend and romantic interest, who promises he will look into the situation and let her know what he discovers the following day.  However, when Capri calls Lorraine to update her, the latter is bothered by the time lag.  She tells Capri, “God only knows what could happen to her by then.”

Upset by Lorraine’s response to her phone call, Capri decides to do some investigating on her own.  She starts with the landlady of the building where the alleged crime took place, and although the woman won’t let Capri into the apartment, she does tell Capri that the tenant, Leeya Styles, had a boyfriend.  Then Leeya’s body is found in a dumpster outside her art studio.

In addition to dealing with Leeya’s death, Capri is also facing a major problem revolving around her ex-husband and his finances.  While part of her would like Todd to figure out the solution to his problems on his own, his financial instability directly impacts on their daughter Morgan.  That makes it something Capri is forced to handle.

A Tour to Die For is the second in the Serial Killer Guide to San Francisco Mystery series.  As she did in the first novel, Michelle Chouinard gives readers an attractive, believable heroine with a fascinating backstory.  Capri, her ex-husband Todd, their daughter Morgan, and all the other characters are realistic and credible and make this book well worth reading.

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

This is the second Past Masters and Mistresses I’ve written in the past two months, and I hope I won’t have to write another one for a long, long time.

Thomas Perry passed away on September 15 in Los Angeles, age 78.

Thomas Perry was born in Tonawanda, New York.  He received his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Rochester.   Before starting his writing career he worked as a laborer, maintenance man, commercial fisherman, weapons mechanic, university administrator, and teacher.

His debut novel, The Butcher’s Boy, won the 1983 Edgar Allan Poe award for Best First Novel, and he went on to write three more books in the series that features a professional assassin.  He then created the Jane Whitefield series about a Native American woman who gives people in trouble new identities and assists them in starting their new lives.  Mr. Perry also wrote stand-alone thrillers, for a total of 32 novels.  In addition, he wrote and produced television episodes of “Simon & Simon,” “Snoops,” “The Oldest Rookie,” and “Sidekicks” with his wife, Jo Lee Perry.

Earlier this year, in an interview with Writers’ Digest, an excerpt of which appears in his obituary in the Boston Globe, Mr. Perry said, “I’ve been working at developing narratives in which we see and understand the complexity of motive, temperament, and history that a character brings when he comes into collision with other characters.”

He was greatly admired by his peers.  Robert B. Parker called him “quite simply, brilliant“; Stephen King said he was a writer “who can be depended upon to deliver high voltage shocks, vivid, sympathetic characters, and compelling narratives”; and Lawrence Block commented, “No one makes killing bad guys more fun.”

The Tree of Life and Flowers, the author’s final book, will be published posthumously in February.

Mr. Perry received numerous honors and awards, including the Barry Award and the Anthony Award.  In closing, I will quote Booklist: Mr. Perry is “the ultimate thinking person’s writer.”  He was surely a writer’s writer, and he will be missed.

The Killing Stones is the first in what apparently will be a new series by Ann Cleeves.  It features Jimmy Perez, the Detective Inspector in her Shetland series, but adds his significant other, Willow, a detective and his supervisor.  This duo, in love with each other and with their new home on Westray, a small island belonging to Orkney, an archipelago off the coast of Scotland, makes a formidable pair.

Willow is returning home from a brief visit to Aberdeen when she gets a phone call from Jimmy.  His best friend and cousin, Archie Stout, has been murdered, and Jimmy finds his body.  Archie was a larger-than-life figure on the island, with both friends and enemies.  He’d been out visiting friends, his wife Vaila tells Jimmy, but when he didn’t come home after delivering wood to some neighbors, she became concerned and drove to the hotel where she thought he’d be, having a few drinks with friends.  But Archie wasn’t there, and soon the entire island is looking for him.

The murder weapon is one of a pair of Neolithic stones on display in the Westray Heritage Centre.  To Jimmy, this speaks of premeditation.  How did the killer get the stone?  Why use that stone when there were so many other accessible weapons available?  And now the other stone has disappeared.

There are certainly enough suspects on the island.  One is Rosalie Greeman, a newcomer to Westray, a recent widow with whom Archie was eager to begin an affair.  When Perez interviews her, she admits the attraction but is adamant that there had not been anything physical between them.  Then there are Tony and Barbara Johnson.  They had worked on a dig when they were teenagers and returned now to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their meeting.  Tony is quite well known to the British public thanks to his television appearances, but Willow finds him aloof and condescending when she interviews the couple.

Archie’s death left Vaila and his two teenaged sons, Iain and Lawrie, in charge of the family farm.  Iain is the intellectual son, happy at school and destined for university, while Lawrie, the older, is happy working on the farm.  But whether he can keep the farm afloat is another issue.

Then there’s a second murder.  The victim is George Riley, a teacher who has taught the children on the island for years, including Archie and his sons.  Jimmy has been trying to reach him since Archie’s murder, only to find out that he’s been off-island at a teachers’ conference.  They arrange to meet at the visitors’ centre, which had housed the two special stones, but when Jimmy arrives he can’t find George anywhere.

When he finally enters the centre’s burial chamber he finds George’s body.  It had been crammed into a small circular chamber, and the second Neolithic stone was near him, covered in blood and pieces of bone.

Ann Cleeves’ love of the Orkney islands is clear on every page of this novel.  Her descriptions of the various places on the islands are beautiful and vivid.  And her accounts of the people on the islands, with their strengths and quirks, make the book come alive.

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

The real-life friendship of Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein is brilliantly brought to life in Paul Levine’s historical mystery Midnight Burning.

The year is 1937, the setting Hollywood, and the creeping horror of fascism is spreading over America.  Though their friendship might seem strange on the surface, the movie star/director and the physicist had both differences and similarities in their lives that help bring them together.

Both were born in Europe, Chaplin in England and Einstein in Germany, and both emigrated to the United States.  While Chaplin lived a childhood of poverty and deprivation, being sent to a workhouse on two occasions before he was nine, Einstein was recognized at an early age as a prodigy and received a doctorate in physics.  Chaplin was brought to America by a vaudeville company and became an entertainer; Einstein fled Europe to avoid Nazi persecution and became a professor at Princeton.  But it is their shared love of democracy and hatred of dictatorship that cements their friendship.

As war clouds hover over Europe, the strength of American fascists grows.  Hollywood movie studio executives are told to portray Germany in positive ways; otherwise, their films will be banned in Germany, Italy, and Spain.  Father Coughlin spews anti-Semitic rants to an audience of 30 million listeners each week.  Aviation pioneer and hero Charles Lindbergh urges the United States to keep out of European affairs, misleading his followers about the outsized influence of Jews in politics, and mulls the possibility of running for president with the backing of the Nazis.

A group of American Nazis, led by screenwriter William Dudley Pelley, hatches a plan to assassinate twenty three celebrities, Jews and Christians alike, who speak out against fascism.  To do this, his group called the Silver Shirts plots to break into an army warehouse and steal that number of machine guns, planning on using one weapon for each death.  But the talents of Chaplin, with his background as an acrobat, and Einstein, whose knowledge of theoretical physics is unsurpassed, combine to thwart them.

Midnight Burning is filled with the names of people who were known to everyone in this era, from movie stars (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Janet Gaynor) to Nazis or Nazi sympathizers (Joseph Goebbels and United States Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota).  And the scene in which the Hindenburg, a German airship, attempts to land in New Jersey brings the horror of that disaster through the commentary of journalist Herbert Morrison.  His comment of “Oh, the humanity,” expresses his shock at the 36 lives lost instantly in the explosion.

A helpful Afterward lists the figures, both historical and fictional, who appear in the book, some of whom may not be familiar to everyone.  So skillfully are the novel’s characters drawn that readers may be surprised to learn who was a “real” person and who was not; I know I was.

Paul Levine, perhaps best known for his Jake Lassiter legal series, has written what I hope is the first in a new series.  The characters of Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein deserve another outing.

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

Imagine yourself as a nine-year-old girl discovering that your father, a butcher by profession, is dismembering a corpse in the basement of your house.  And realizing that this isn’t the first time he’s done this.  What would you do?

This is Daisy Bellon’s story.  She’s the only child of a severely depressed mother and a father whom she has come to understand is a serial killer.  Now he demands that she “go fishing” with him, which she recognizes as a euphemism for disposing of the body of the woman he killed the previous night.  “You’re an accomplice, guilty as me,” he informs her, and she knows what he means.  She must never tell anyone their secret.

Then two things happen almost simultaneously.  The first is the appearance of Marina, the woman her father killed the night before.  Her ghost is not visible to anyone except Daisy, but the two are able to talk.  Marina tells the young girl that she would like to leave but can’t, and the two become bound together for years.

The second event is the collision between Daisy and Caleb Garcia, a boy three years older than she is.  They bump into each other, literally, in the livestock market in Hellene, Nebraska, Daisy’s favorite place, and the next day Caleb and his family move into the house next door to hers.  Theirs is a perfect friendship until the age difference between them becomes insurmountable.

Although Daisy cannot know it then, Marina and Caleb will prove to be the two most important people in her life.

One positive thing her father gave her was a respect for animals, particularly cows.  They live in pastures, graze on fresh grass, and upon their death they bring nourishment to people, he explains to Daisy.  That’s more that can be said for humans, “because we leave nothing behind.”  Perhaps that explains his disregard for human life.

The novel is told in alternating flashbacks.  It opens with Daisy deciding to return to her hometown after seventeen years of avoiding it, going back in time to her childhood, and jumping ahead to her adult life.  Her life is filled with difficulty, of which her father’s serial killings are only a part, but Daisy has incredible strength, even if she is not always able to recognize it in herself.

The Butcher and the Liar is a brilliant tour de force, telling Daisy’s story in such a way that you’re always rooting for her, even if/when she does the wrong or hurtful thing.  S. L. Woeppel takes what could be a simple horror story and makes it a compelling coming of age story instead, featuring realistic people who have to deal with their complicated lives as best they can.

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

In July I wrote about the passing of Martin Cruz Smith, an author I have been reading for years.  In that Appreciation I noted that his last novel, the final one in the Arkady Renko series, was published just three days before Mr. Smith’s death.  Thus writing this blog is bittersweet.

Hotel Ukraine could have been taken out of today’s headlines.  It opens with the Russian bombing of Kyiv and a crowd of Russians demonstrating in Pushkinskaya Square.  Arkady is there because he knows his adopted son Zhenya will be part of the group protesting the beginning of the war or, as the Russians are insisting on calling it, the “special military operation.”  Calling it a war is forbidden.

The following day Arkady is called to police headquarters where he learns of the murder of Alexei Kazasky, a minister of defense.  He will be the lead investigator for the MVD, the Russian Police Force, and to his dismay but not to his surprise, he will be paired with the Russian Security Service in the person of Marina Makarova.  The two have a long history, starting with an investigation into Chechen organized crime, morphing into an intimate relationship, and ending on an unhappy note.  That is in the distant past, however, although Renko wonders what that means for their present partnership.

The investigation begins with Marina telling Arkady that they’ve arrested a suspect for the murder, a diplomat at the Ukranian Embassy; since Ukraine broke off diplomatic relations a few hours earlier, Yuri Blokhin no longer has immunity from arrest.  Marina interrogates Blokhin for hours without getting past his denials, but she’s determined to break him.

She tells Renko that she had three operatives following Blokhin the night before, but the detective is suspicious.  He tells Marina he wants to interrogate the operatives separately to be certain that he can give his supervisor the complete testimony, and Marina can’t think of a logical way to stop him.  When Renko questions the men, each one tells him a slightly different story with varying details–different car models are mentioned, different drinks itemized, their descriptions of how Blokhin looked at the end of the evening don’t match.  Marina has no option but to free him.

Receiving a copy of Kazasky’s itinerary for the days preceding his murder, the only item that stands out is a visit to the 1812 Judo Club, owned by Lev Volkov.  The club’s name is an obvious reference to the Russian victory over Napoleon in that year, a date that every Russian knows.  The club is, in reality, a private army run by Volkov, with a membership of several thousand.  The members receive high pay from the government as well as medals for Orders of Courage and Services to the Motherland.  The comrades are involved not only in countries that were former Soviet bloc members but in a number of African nations as well, namely Mali and the Central African Republic.

Lev Volkov is an influential man, and now Arkady has two powerful opponents to deal with as he attempts to discover the truth about Alexei Kazasky’s death.

Martin Cruz Smith’s final novel is a brilliant coda to the Arkady Renko story.  You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

A single woman in the early 1900s in New York City, Margot Baxter Harriman is the head of B&H Foods.  She inherited this position on the death of her father, and although she has been at the company her entire working life there are those who question her right as a woman to be its president.  Still, as the third generation of Harrimans involved in the food business, Margot has been educated in the field since childhood and is confident that she belongs at the head of the table.

When Margot enters the company’s building after hours to pick up a report the company’s accountant left for her, it’s totally silent.  Of course there’s no one here, she thinks, that’s why it’s so quiet, but it’s still unnerving when compared to the usual clamor of people and machines she’s accustomed to.  Taking her master key from her pocket, she slides it into the accountant’s office and only then realizes that the door was already unlocked.  Sitting at the desk with her head at a strange angle is Giana Gilroy, the highly respected assistant to Margot’s father before her retirement.  But now Mrs. Gilroy is dead, and a note addressed to Margot is in her hand.

Margot says nothing about the note to the police, who have ruled that Mrs. Gilroy died of natural causes.  The note is almost inexplicable to her, as it says that Mrs. Gilroy and the late Mr. Harriman were “involved in a situation” at the company and that people got sick, some dying.  Margot knows that there are food companies that use fillers and cheap additions to prolong the life of their products, even though these practices are unlawful under the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, but she never knew or even suspected B&H of such activities.  Could she have been so naive, so trusting of her father, when it now appears he may have been involved in illegal practices?

Determined to find the truth and not knowing whom to trust in the company, Margot hires the firm of Mancini & Associates to investigate if there is any truth to what is inferred in the note.  Margot and Rhett Mancini decide that the best way to look into the situation is to have someone join the company as a worker, and when Margot asks whom Rhett is thinking of, the latter replies, “Why, me of course.”

Their first joint venture is checking out Mrs. Gilroy’s home before her cousin, Letitia Jacobs, gets the house ready to be sold.  The two women enter the house and begin their search; the late homeowner’s bedroom yields a book with notations in code and a key that looks like one for a safe deposit box in a New York City bank.  They are interrupted by another intruder, and as Rhett reaches into her pocket for her brass knuckles, Margot heaves a ceramic pitcher across the room and the man falls to the floor.  Thus the partnership begins.

A Murderous Business is a winning combination of an exciting plot, realistic characters, queer romance, and a fascinating look into Manhattan in the early part of the 20th century.  Cathy Pegau has written what is subtitled “A Harriman & Mancini Mystery,” so this is obviously the first in the series.  I look forward with much anticipation to the second one.

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

Now that the summer is almost over and my course is going to start on September 8, it’s time to let you know what I’ll be teaching this fall at the Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (BOLLI).  It’s titled WHODUNIT?:  MURDER IS EVERYWHERE.

The class will be reading eight novels that I chose both to highlight countries on several continents and to explore the differences between the various types of protagonists.  These books showcase police detectives, private investigators, and amateurs who find themselves involved in crimes.  We’ll discuss how the differences in their roles play a part in the investigations.  Do police officials make better crime solvers because of the weight of their governments behind them, or are private individuals (licensed or amateur) more efficient because they are not bound by laws and official statutes and thus have more freedom to investigate?

We start with The Dry (Jane Harper), which features an Australian police officer returning to his home town in the Outback to attend a funeral and then becomes involved investigating the murders of a family that he knew from childhood.  In Finding Nouf (Zoe Ferraris), we go Saudi Arabia to follow a desert guide looking for a missing woman.  Next it’s Tokyo; in Newcomer (Keigo Higashino) we learn how an experienced police officer has his own unique methods of solving a crime.  In  Whip Hand (Dick Francis) we’ll read how an English champion jockey becomes a private investigator after suffering a life-altering injury.  We will come face to face with anti-Muslim and anti-foreigner hatred in Québec in A Deadly Divide (Ausma Kehanat Khan).  In The Mist (Ragnar Jónasson), a policewoman tries to break through the anti-female feelings of her fellow officers by looking into a missing person case in an isolated Icelandic village.  The Kind Worth Killing (Peter Swanson) starts with two strangers on a plane from London to Boston plotting the murder of the man’s wife.  And we’ll complete our course with Norwegian by Night (Derek B. Miller) which tells the story of an elderly man who moves from the United States to Oslo to live with his granddaughter and her husband and finds himself protecting a young boy from foreign killers.

I hope I’ve piqued your interest and that you’ll read along with my class as we come to the painful truth that yes, MURDER IS EVERYWHERE.

Marilyn

Annie Blunt is a successful author of children’s books, but now her life is in tatters.  Her husband John was killed in a hit-and-run accident and her famous cartoon character, Pierce the Penguin, inadvertently led to the death of a young boy who was trying to replicate the penguin’s flight by taping cardboard wings to his arms and leaping to his death from an apartment balcony.

She is so distressed that she tells her editor that she must get away from New York City with her young son Charlie.  He says he’ll find a place for her and he does, a house in the small town of Lucknow in upstate New York.  When she and Charlie see it, it’s love at first sight.  Annie hopes that this summer home, even if temporary, will help her son deal with the death of his father and control the episodes of sleepwalking that started after John’s death.

Right from the beginning of their stay, however, there are some strange happenings.  When Annie sees an elderly woman on a front porch across the road, she starts to walk over to introduce herself.  But the woman gets out of her chair, turns her back on Annie, and goes into her own house and slams the door.

The woman’s husband Daniel comes over to Annie to explain his wife’s behavior.  He tells her that one day, more than twenty years earlier, his wife had entered the house Annie is renting and began screaming and couldn’t or wouldn’t stop.  The doctors told her husband she had a psychotic break, and although medication is controlling her symptoms, she has never been the same since.

Trying to turn the conversation to a more pleasant topic, Annie tells Daniel that she misses the New York City noises but loved hearing the train whistle in the middle of the previous night.  Daniel tells her there hasn’t been a train going through the town for several years, that she must have heard something else.  Not wanting to get confrontational with her neighbor, she says “maybe so,” because she doesn’t think it’s worth an argument.  But Annie knows what she heard.

Then there’s the mysterious shed in the backyard.  Its door is sealed with a padlock, but by climbing on top of a pile of wood Charlie can see inside.  There are boxes inside that he would like to investigate, but first he has to find a way inside.  Then he has a dream in which his father tells him to look inside a basement drawer for the key to the shed.  When he wakes up he goes down to the basement and finds the key exactly where it was in his dream.  He goes outside, puts the key in the padlock, and the door opens.

Whistle is told in two voices–Annie’s and Harry Cook’s, the police chief of Lucknow.  Although Harry has lived his entire life in the town, things are happening now that he can’t explain.  First two men in the town go missing, and one is found dead with all the bones in his body gone.  Then the town vagrant disappears, leaving no trace.  And why does a backyard barbecue explode, leaving traces of the man at the grill strewn across his lawn?

Linwood Barclay, a master of suspense, has written another outstanding thriller.  Although I’m generally not a fan of the supernatural, this novel is so realistic and the characters so well drawn that I read it believing every word!

You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

The saying “bad things come in threes” is coming true for Liam Hirsch.   Just a few months earlier Liam had everything he dreamed of–a loving wife, a successful business, good health.  Then it all fell apart.

First he discovers that his wife Celeste is unfaithful, having an affair with their contractor.  Then TransScend, the artificial intelligence company that he founded, has some strange budgetary problems.  Most frightening of all, he receives a diagnosis of ALS that explains the muscle twitches in his legs, shoulders, and tongue.

Liam is torn between telling his family about his disease or keeping the news to himself until he can decide what to do.  Living in Washington state, he has the option of the Death with Dignity Act, but he’s not quite ready for that.

Liam has found out about his wife’s affair by hiring private investigator Andrea DeWalt after becoming suspicious of Celeste’s behavior.  He loves his wife and recognizes that he probably has been paying more attention to TransScend than to his family, but the betrayal still hurts deeply.  And then there’s the emotional bond he’s experiencing with Andrea, something that’s growing deeper each time they meet.

Making a mockery of the bad things being limited to threes, Rudy Ziegler reenters Liam’s life.  Two brilliant students, Liam and Rudy were in graduate school together, working on joint projects and planning their futures.  Then Rudy accused Liam of stealing his ideas, culminating in multiple lawsuits, all of which Rudy lost.

Now Liam wants to try to reconcile with Rudy, not by admitting he may have used some of the latter’s ideas without giving him credit but by offering him a ten percent interest in TransScend, but Rudy laughs at that.  It’s fifty-one per cent or nothing, he tells Liam.  As Liam stalks out of Rudy’s condo, Rudy calls after him, perhaps noting the way Liam’s body is twitching,”don’t underestimate karma.”

The reader will find it painful following Liam as he navigates the treacherous paths of his failing marriage, the major problems within his company, his ever-weakening body, and his interactions with Rudy.  He is a sympathetic protagonist, overwhelmed by these issues and not knowing where to turn.

The problems he faces are ones we can all recognize.  The characters in The Deepest Fake are beautifully drawn, and their thoughts and feelings make them, in this AI inspired mystery, recognizably human.

Daniel Kalla is an emergency room physician and the author of fifteen books.  With The Deepest Fake, he has written an impressive thriller.  You can read more about him at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

John Wilkins and his wife May are most definitely a mismatched couple.  Given his background dealing with a controlling mother and her background as the daughter of an alcoholic ex-convict father, they didn’t have a healthy framework to guide their marriage.

The two met at a dance and started dating.  John is a very good tennis player, May doesn’t like the game; May likes to play bridge, John thinks it’s a waste of time.  May is socially ambitious, John is not.  In this way they slowly drift apart.  As he put it, “What can you say about a marriage?  You peel off the years…like the skin of a onion, and there’s nothing inside.”  Still, he doesn’t think he is really unhappy until he meets Sheila.

John is immediately attracted to Sheila, a librarian at the local library, where he takes takes books out for May but tells Sheila they’re for his invalid sister.  He pretends to have gotten complimentary tickets to a local theater production and invites Sheila to go with him, which she does.  As is usual with John’s luck, always bad, he runs into his mother’s friend at the play, and of course she’s aware that the woman he’s with is not his wife.  He’s certain that she can’t wait to give the news to his mother.

Then, after a disastrous day with Sheila at the tennis club, she tells him she knows he’s married.  Somehow he convinces himself that if he were single things would be different, then he and Sheila could become a couple.  At that point he starts thinking about murder, although he tells himself it’s nothing he would ever do.

The novel is divided into two parts.  In Part One, John is giving his statement to Dr. Max Andreadis, a consulting psychiatrist, and he tells the doctor the story of his marriage and his infatuation with Sheila.  In Part Two, a young couple comes across Sheila’s body, and John is put on trial.  We see the inner workings of John’s mind, or at least as much of it as he himself is aware of.  One of the issues in his life is recurring blackouts, after which he has no memory of what has occurred during those times.  That, of course, makes any legal defense very difficult.

The Colour of Murder was written in 1957 and won that year’s Gold Dagger Award, given by the British Crime Writers Association.  It was republished in 2018.  The novel is a deep look into John Wilkins’ life, or at least the part he tells both the psychiatrist and himself.  The characters–including John, May, John’s mother, and Sheila–all have hidden parts of their lives that don’t allow them to fully function as adults.  Reading it, one is struck by the emptiness and futility of their lives and their inability to address what is holding them back and to start anew.

JULIAN SYMONS (1912-1994) was a notable writer of British crime fiction from the 1940s and ’50s until his death, publishing more than thirty novels. He served as President of the prestigious Detection Club, won two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, and is well known as the author of Bloody Murder, a classic history of crime fiction.  You  can read more about him at several sites on the web.

This column, Past Masters and Mistresses, is very difficult to write for obvious reasons.  When someone appears here, it’s a final farewell.  There will be no more books by that author.

Martin Cruz Smith died on July 11, leaving behind a rich legacy of unforgettable characters and a penetrating and clear-eyed look into Russian history.

I discovered Mr. Smith in 1972 when I came across Canto for a Gypsy in my local library.  I loved it,  but  sadly for me, Canto was the second and last book in that brief series, and I don’t think I read any more of his books until Gorky Park was published in 1982.  Then I was not the only reader to follow him voraciously, waiting eagerly for Arkady Renko’s next adventure.  Time magazine called this novel “the first thriller of the ’80s,” and it won the Gold Dagger award from the British Crime Writers’ Association.  Nine other Renko novels followed, and the last, Hotel Ukraine, was published just three days before Mr. Smith’s death.

Renko was an incorruptible hero in a very corrupt Russian society.  Years after the book was published, when Mr. Smith applied for a visa to visit the Soviet Union it was denied.  Obviously those in charge had read the novel.  In later years, however, he was able to travel to Russia multiple times to do additional research.

One can actually follow the history of the Soviet Union/Russia through Mr. Smith’s novels.  He described the collapse of the Soviet Union (Red Square), the toll of the Chechen War (Stalin’s Ghost), and finally concluded with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Hotel Ukraine).

Martin Cruz Smith has left readers a wonderful legacy of novels to be read and reread, combining the importance of history with outstanding prose.  He will be missed.