Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for July, 2011

It’s not exactly two for the price of one, but it is two books that should be read consecutively.

The Butcher’s Boy won the Edgar in 1983 for Best First Novel, a wise decision on the part of the judges. Now, in his nineteenth novel, Thomas Perry finishes the story of the Butcher’s Boy, whose true name we never learn, and Elizabeth Waring, an attorney and researcher with the Department of Justice.

The Butcher’s Boy has been killing people since he was sixteen, under the tutelage of The Butcher, real name Eddie Mastrewski.  The Boy had been orphaned with no close relatives to take him in, so Mastrewski, a neighbor, unofficially adopted him and taught him two trades.  One was Mastrewski’s official trade, that of a butcher who owned his own shop, and the other a paid assassin for the Mafia.  The second one was more monetarily rewarding.

After blowing up the truck of a labor union man who is suspicious of the way his union’s pension fund is being handled, the B.B. is on his way to murder a U.S. senator when he is set upon by two muggers in a dark alley. He kills them both and then successfully kills the senator, completing the job he was hired for, but his face shows bruises and cuts made by the muggers.  That apparently sets off a wave of concern at the higher levels of the Mafia that he may be attracting too much attention, and a contract is put out on the B.B.

Elizabeth Waring, who has a desk job at the Department of Justice, is the only person there who begins to see a pattern in a number of suspicious death notices that pass through her desk every day. She sets off to investigate the labor union official’s death but is pulled off that job before she can accomplish anything.  She’s sent to investigate the death of the senator, which she originally resents, but then she comes to believe there is a connection between the two deaths.  But she’s the only one.

In The Informant, ten years have passed since we last saw the B.B. and Elizabeth Waring. It’s not giving away the ending of The Butcher’s Boy to say he wasn’t captured–if he had been, there would have been no Informant. The B.B., who is now calling himself Michael Schaeffer, has been living a quiet life in England when he’s spotted by two killers who are sent by the Mafia to assassinate the B.B. and his wife.  He decides he has to return to the States and take out the men who ordered his death.

Schaeffer’s killing of the first man sets off a Mafia meeting in Phoenix, where the second man he wants to kill is asking his fellow Cosa Nostra bosses to band together to kill the B.B. He gets the agreement he wants but is killed within an hour by Schaeffer.  When his body is discovered, the other bosses are even more determined in their quest to eliminate the B.B. from their lives once and for all.

In the meantime, Elizabeth Waring is fighting a losing battle with her supervisor to follow the clues leading to the B.B.  Frustrated, she decides to act first and ask permission later, certain that she can find the B.B. and get him to turn informer because she believes he won’t be able to outrun the Mob.

These two books are fascinating journeys into the lives and minds of two very different people. The chapters alternate between the Butcher’s Boy and Waring, and following their thoughts and plans makes for exciting reading.  And the ending of The Informant ties everything together believably.

You can read more about Thomas Perry at his web site.

About a month ago, my sister e-mailed to tell me about a new bookstore that had opened in the town she lives in.  When she said it was called Mainely Murders, she definitely got my attention.

On Saturday, Barbara Ann and I went to check it out.  Mainely Murders is located in a converted barn/carriage house behind the home of the two women who own it.  Paula Keeney and Ann Whetstone couldn’t have been friendlier or more helpful to us.  Paula walked us around the small store, explaining how the books are set up on the shelves–Maine novels, books by “dead American writers” to quote Paula, international mysteries, and niche mysteries such as those specializing in cooking, horse racing, knitting, etc.

The first book I picked up was The Demon of Dakar by Kjell Ericksson.  I had read the Princess of Berundi by him and enjoyed it, so I opened the flap to see how much The Demon was.  I was surprised by the low price and asked Ann how they could sell this $24.95 book for $7.50.  “Well,” she told me, “it’s been read before.”  All the books in the story are used, or pre-owned, or read before, or whatever term you prefer. The books all looked in pristine condition to me, and I could hardly believe that someone (or perhaps more than one person) had read them.  Even the paperbacks looked brand-new.  I guess not everyone reads while eating fried chicken, not mentioning names.

Anyway, I walked out of Mainely Murders with four hard covered books and three paperbacks, for a total of $71.00 dollars. Only the thought of my husband and brother-in-law waiting back at the house for us made me leave the shop.  I don’t know whether I was more excited by having bought three books by authors previously unfamiliar to me or having bought the second book (Trespasser) by Maine author Paul Doiron, whose book The Poacher’s Son I reviewed in June 2010.

At any rate, if you’re anywhere in Maine, especially if you’re close to Kennebunk, check out Mainely Murders.  They have a wonderful web site and newsletter too.

Marilyn

In 1994 Lawrence Block was named a Grand Master, the highest award given by the Mystery Writers of America. Agatha Christie was the first recipient, and others include John D. MacDonald, John LeCarre, Sue Grafton, Graham Greene, and this year’s recipient, Sara Paretsky.  Pretty good company to be keeping.

Block’s latest book is A Drop of the Hard Stuff, the seventeenth in the Scudder series.  It takes the reader back to the first year of Matt Scudder’s hard-won sobriety.

Scudder was a New York City policeman until a bullet he shot while chasing a suspect ricocheted off a wall and killed a little girl. Shortly after that, Scudder left his wife, two sons, and the police department.  He moved into a single room in a Manhattan hotel and tried to drink himself to death.

The first few books in the series take place during the time Scudder is drinking heavily and experiencing blackouts.  Eventually, after a number of tries, he pulls himself together and joins Alcoholics Anonymous and lives “one day at a time,” as they say in A.A.  At this point in time he has been sober for years.  A Drop of the Hard Stuff begins when Scudder and his friend Mick Ballou are talking over old times.

Scudder tells the story of his meeting up with a boyhood chum from The Bronx, Jack Ellery.  As Scudder sort of drifted into becoming a policeman, Ellery sort of drifted into becoming a criminal.  Ellery had been drinking for many years, and as he told Scudder, he never got into trouble when he was sober, only when he was drunk.  He’d been imprisoned several times but never did major time.

Now Ellery is out of jail, and he’s achieving sobriety through A.A.  One of the steps in the program is making amends, going to the people you hurt or injured when you were an alcoholic and asking them how you can make it right. Ellery is jumping ahead to the Eighth Step before he’s done all the previous steps, trying to make amends, and he has a list of all the people he’s wronged.  But the responses from those people aren’t what he’d hoped, and one of them wants him dead.

Block is an incredible writer.  I was caught from page one.  He has a way with dialogue that makes the reader think she’s/he’s part of the conversation in the book.  And some of his sentences simply jump out of the page at you.  Scudder, in remembering a new suit he’d bought years ago when he was still married:  “I’d bought the suit to impress…my wife had admired that suit, and so had my girlfriend.”

The Matt Scudder series needs to be begun, if not from the first novel, at least as close to the beginning as possible.  Otherwise the struggles Scudder has with alcohol can’t come across in a meaningful way, and his victory over drink won’t be as important to you as it should be.  You’ll find yourself rooting for him to overcome his dependence on alcohol, angry when he slips, and cheering him on when he succeeds.  But you know that every day is a struggle for him, and seeing it from the beginning heightens its impact.

Lawrence Block has written several other series as well as stand-alone novels, books for writers, and a memoir.  He’s a truly gifted author in every genre, but I like his Matthew Scudder books the best.

You can read more about Lawrence Block at his web site.

Imagine you’re in Spain, writing a travel book about Barcelona that is a follow-up to your guide on Madrid.  You get a phone call from the New York Police Department saying that your sister has been found dead in your apartment and that you need to come home to identify her body.

Claudia has always been in trouble, has been a drug addict for years, so although it’s sad that she’s died so young it’s not really surprising.  The surprise comes when the detective brings you to the city morgue and you look at the body and say, “That woman isn’t my sister….I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

That’s how The Damage Done opens. The older sister, Lily Moore, has always been the responsible one, the one who took charge after their father’s sudden death one Christmas, their mother’s descent into alcoholism and her suicide one New Year’s Eve.  But now Lily is bewildered, and things are spiraling out of control all around her.

Her former fiancee, wealthy hotel magnate Martin Sklar, still hasn’t given up pursuing her and is putting pressure on her to return to New York permanently and marry him.  Her sister’s neighbor, Sarah Lyons, is taking an extraordinary interest in Claudia’s disappearance.  The two detectives assigned to the case aren’t sure it’s not simply an accidental death, but they can’t explain why the woman found in the apartment introduced herself to the superintendent, who knew Claudia, as Claudia’s cousin, and to Sarah Lyons, who didn’t know Claudia, as Claudia Moore herself.

Lily tries to follow the trail that her sister left behind. It takes her to the apartment of her sister’s friend, a Pakistani man named Tariq, whom Lily has always suspected was involved in Claudia’s drug use; while she’s there, Tariq’s girlfriend attacks her.  Then Martin tells Lily that Claudia had been in touch with him, asking him for money for another attempt at rehab, but when he agreed and told her to pick up his check, she never showed.  And then there’s the mysterious woman from Hong Kong who spoke to the police about Claudia but now seems to have disappeared.

Hilary Davidson has created a very believable heroine in Lily Moore. At the beginning of the novel she appears to be the opposite of her sister, a very successful, put-together professional woman who has endured a life that would have destroyed someone weaker, as it appeared to have done to her sister.  But the more one reads, the more Lily’s own demons come out.

She’s still dealing with the deaths of her parents–her beloved father, who perhaps wasn’t quite as wonderful as she remembers; her emotionally disturbed mother, who used to lock Lily and Claudia in a closet for hours to protect them from some imagined harm; her off-again, on-again feelings for her former fiancee, whose business practices she abhors but whose touch still arouses her.

The supporting characters are well-drawn too–Jesse, a gay photographer, Lily’s best friend; the two police detectives; Tariq, a very successful businessman who travels with bodyguards; the ex-fiancee Martin; and Martin’s son Ridley, a sullen teenager with emotional problems that his father will not see.  This is a debut worthy of the three awards for which it has been nominated.

You can read more about Hilary Davidson at her web site.

“Do you believe in miracles”? That was the cry of Al Michaels, broadcasting at the final moments of the improbable, impossible win by  the U.S. hockey team in 1980.

Going for the Gold takes place at those same Olympics games. John Putnam Thatcher, senior vice president of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, the third largest bank in the world, has been dragooned by the bank’s president, a member of the International Olympics Committee, to attend the games.  There’s lot of excitement, of course, as the young athletes and their coaches swirl around the Olympic Village, and there’s a lot at stake.  Some of the athletes have been working for years for the possibility of winning a gold medal, while a few have somehow made their country’s team more by luck than by skill.  But all are excited and thrilled to be at the Games.

As Thatcher watches a practice run of alpine skiing, France’s number one skier, Yves Bisson, takes a flawless leap from the giant ski tower.  He hovers in the air, and then a shot rings out.  Bisson falls to the snow-covered ground below, dead.

What is uncovered after Bisson’s death is the discovery of fraud in European travelers’ checks, with Bisson behind it.  The resources of the Sloan are put to the test, as the bank is the official bank of the Games, and additional employees are brought to Lake Placid to try to uncover how the fraud was worked.

There’s more than simply bank fraud going on at the Games, however.  Someone is hijacking supplies meant for the athletes, a Swiss female skier is accused of taking forbidden drugs, and the blizzard of the decade is stopping all comings and goings out of upstate New York.

Emma Lathen is the pseudonym of Mary Jane Latsis, an economist, and Martha Hennisart, a lawyer. Together they wrote more than twenty novels featuring John Putnam Thatcher, a banker who could solve any crime that had a financial basis; and we all know that many of them do.  Each book focuses on a particular industry or organization with ties to the Sloan.  There are books on chocolate companies, Catholic schools, the automobile industry, and the garment business.  Each shows a detailed knowledge of that particular business or group and is written in such a way as to make all the financial dealings clear to the most financially unsophisticated reader, e.g., me.

There’s a short list of recurring characters in Lathen’s books:  Thatcher, of course; his devoted secretary, Miss Corsa; Walter Bowman and Everett Gabler, bank officials under Thatcher; and Brad Withers, the bank’s president who would rather be anywhere, doing anything but banking.

While most or all of Emma Lathen’s books are unfortunately currently out of print, they’re available at many libraries and can be bought used online. Even though no more novels were written after Mary Jane Latsis’s death in 1998, there are still enough available to keep anyone reading for a long time.  These are definitely cozies, with a minimum of murder and mayhem, but with plenty of suspense to keep the reader involved until the last page.

You can read more about Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart at The New York Times.

It’s a familiar beginning to a crime story. A woman, divorced from an emotionally and physically abusive husband, believes that she and her daughter are free of him.  Nevertheless, she continues to take steps to distance herself from him, changing her job and moving to a different apartment.  But still he finds her.

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino starts off with this premise. But within a few pages it changes direction.  When Yasuko Hanaoka’s former husband, Shinji Togashi, finds her and her daughter, he says he wants to reconcile with them.  Having gone through this routine with him before, Yasuko refuses to discuss it and gives him money, not for the first time, to get him to leave.

Before he goes he tries to talk to his teenage stepdaughter, but she wants nothing to do with him.  Infuriated, he begins hitting her, and Yasuko tries to pull him away.  The daughter then tries to come to her mother’s rescue and, even more angry, Togashi starts punching both of them.  Desperate to protect herself and her daughter, Yasuko grabs the cord that heats the kotatsu table (it’s a heated table, apparently very common in Japan) and strangles him from behind.  Togashi is dead.

Frightened, Yasuko starts toward the phone to call the police and confess her crime when there’s a knock on her door.  Her neighbor, a man she barely knows or has spoken to, appears there to say he heard a commotion and came over to see if Yasuko and Misato are all right.  When he sees the body on the floor, it’s obvious to him what has happened.

Ishigami, the neighbor who is almost always referred to only by his last name, is a brilliant mathematician teaching below his abilities at a local high school. He’s a man proud of his logical mind, and realizing that Yasuko and her daughter were protecting themselves and that the death was more accidental than deliberate, Ishigami devises a plan to help them get rid of the body.

He has only one condition, that the mother and daughter must follow his advice to the letter. When the police find out that Togashi is missing or dead, they will certainly question his ex-wife, Ishigami tells the mother and daughter, so they need to do exactly what he tells them to avoid suspicion.

And the police do come. Detective Kusanagi doesn’t exactly suspect Yasuko, but there’s something odd in her low-key yet completely alibied story that doesn’t quite ring true for him.  He goes for some help to an old friend, Professor Manabu Yukawa, a physicist who happens to  have been a classmate of Ishigami, and who is known as Detective Galileo as an acknowledgement both of his knowledge of physics and his assistance to the Tokyo police in previous cases.

Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s most famous mystery writers, and one can see why in this excellent novel. The plot is skillful and the characters believable.  The translation appears flawless, with the characters speaking so naturally that the reader doesn’t realize that the words were originally in another language.

Many of Higashino’s books have been made into films or television programs.  He doesn’t appear to have a dedicated web site, but you can read a brief biography about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keigo_Higashino.