Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for December, 2011

Mary DiNunzio is a successful lawyer in an all-women law firm in Philadelphia. She’s smart, compassionate, hasn’t forgotten where she came from, and is the rainmaker of the firm.  So why is she so intimidated by a visit from her high school nemesis, Trish Gambone, who led the Mean Girls and made Mary’s life miserable at St. Maria Goretti High?   But then, don’t we all carry our high school memories with us forever?

Trish is in trouble, big time, which is why she found her way to Mary’s office. She’s been living with Bobby, her high school sweetheart for years, but he’s become more and more abusive toward her.  She’d love to leave him, but he’s “connected” (a low-level member of the Philadelphia mob).  And Trish is afraid that Bobby is going to propose tonight, as it’s her birthday.

She’s come to Mary for help, but she doesn’t like the options that Mary offers:  get a restraining order against Bobby or leave Philly for a while in hopes that Bobby will cool off and forget her.  She storms out of the office, leaving a stunned Mary behind.  What Trish doesn’t know is that Mary and Bobby went out together for a short while in high school, and he was Mary’s first love.  Mary’s upset that Bobby has become a brutal man, upset to find out that she’s still afraid of Trish and the Mean Girls, upset to find that she still harbors feelings for Bobby for a reason that doesn’t become clear until well into the novel.

And that night, the night of her birthday, Trish disappears. The remaining three Mean Girls stomp into Mary’s office the next day, furious at Mary for not helping Trish.  They’d gone to the police, but since Trish was an adult and hadn’t been missing for the required forty-eight hours, they couldn’t do anything yet.  So the Mean Girls want Mary to fix everything.  They refuse to admit that Trish might be dead, they just want her found.

Feeling guilty, Mary agrees to help and enlists the M.G.s in her search. But her involvement means putting off several of her clients from her old neighborhood, and before she knows what’s happened her former neighbors are turning against her.  They’re mad she didn’t help Trish, one of their own, and mad that her search for Trish means she’s putting off their cases.  It doesn’t make sense, but then emotions rarely do.

In addition to looking for Trish, Mary is also involved with a young boy who’s being bullied at school and whom his mother feels has significant learning disabilities.  Mary’s attempts to try to find a psychologist to test him speak to the all-too-real inadequacies and limitations of today’s schools, given the economic times and the number of children who need help.

And then there’s the possibility of a romance with the son of a neighbor. Mary’s husband died several years ago, but she’s not sure she’s ready for another romance in her life.  But Anthony is good looking, smart, and a terrific cook.  What should she do?  And why did he have to come along when Mary is frantic over the possibility that she is partly responsible for Trish’s disappearance and possible death?

Lisa Scottoline is a prolific writer, the author of eighteen novels, many featuring the women of Rosato and Associates, the firm where Mary works. She also writes a weekly column called “Chick Wit” for the Philadelphia Inquirer.   Although her books tackle serious subjects, they’re written with a sense of humor that keeps them somewhat closer to the “cozy” path than the “violent” one.

You can read more about Lisa Scottoline at her web site.

Twenty-five years after the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in what was then the Soviet Union, anti-nuclear protesters haven’t forgotten it. Now the scene of the struggle is New Hampshire, with power plant executives and unions on one side and the students and conservationists on the other.

Lewis Cole is a former Department of Defense operative currently living the quiet life in rural New Hampshire. Due to the sensitive nature of his past career, the DoD has been paying him a salary, with his cover being a reporter for a monthly magazine.  But now that magazine has changed editors, and the new editor is a hard-nosed woman who wants more stories from Lewis, ones with more bite.  Reluctantly Lewis agrees to continue working on the magazine, and as luck would have it his first assignment under this editor, Denise Pinchett-Volk, is the protest at the Falconer nuclear plant.

Lewis meets up with a friend, Paula Quinn, at the protest; she is a reporter and assistant editor for the local paper.  Lewis is content to hang back and see what happens, but Paula wants to be at the front of the crowd to get some photos of the anti-nuke leader, Bronson Toles.  He’s a charismatic leader of the protesters and also the owner of a local nightclub.

Paula pushes her way up to the stage and starts snapping photos, with Lewis staying as close to her as possible because he’s feeling some very bad vibes from the audience.  In the midst of Bronson’s speech, two radical young men mount the stage with cries of “Bronson’s too weak,” and Paula jumps up on the stage to get “a great photo.”  A moment later a shot rings out–Bronson falls to the stage floor with his head shattered, and Paula falls next to him.

At this point in his life Lewis is surrounded by women.  Paula, taken to the hospital for treatment of shock, was his former lover and is now a close friend.   Haleigh Miller is a University of New Hampshire student who’s attending the protest but is appalled by the violence she sees.  Diane Woods, a member of the town’s police department, is another close friend; she’s having problems with the woman she loves.  Lewis is seriously involved with Annie Wynn, a staff member of a U.S. senator who is running for president.  And of course there’s Denise Pinchett-Volk,  the editor from hell.

Deadly Cove is the seventh book in the Lewis Cole series. Brendan DuBois is an excellent writer with a knack for making his characters so realistic that you are sure you must have met them in person before reading about them in his books.  They have real problems and emotions, and the solutions aren’t cut and dried.  Even the protest between the two sides isn’t black and white, but gray.  The power plant officials believe they’re running a needed and clean operation; the union men and women want and need the jobs that the new power plant will create; the students and conservationists believe that every nuclear plant has a built-in potential for catastrophe.  There’s right and wrong on every side of the argument, and DuBois doesn’t patronize his readers with facile answers.

You can read more about Brendan DuBois at his web site.

Iceland in the fall–it’s cold, dark, and rainy. A perfect setting for a “typical Icelandic crime” that turns out to be anything but.

Just a word of explanation at the beginning, taken from “A Note on Icelandic Names” that prefaces Jar City:  “Icelanders always address each other by first names…People are listed by their first names even in the telephone directory.”  So the following names are all first names.

Inspector Erlandur is called to investigate the murder of an elderly man after a neighbor’s young son discovers the body.  The apartment in which the victim is found is on the lower floor in a small apartment building, dark and dank.  It appears that Holberg was killed by a heavy glass ashtray being thrown at his head, not exactly a certain way to kill anyone.  As Erlandur’s assistant, Detective Sigurdur Oli comments, “Isn’t this your typical Icelandic murder?  Squalid, pointless and committed without any attempt to hide it, change the clues or conceal the evidence.”

But there are two strange items in the apartment.  The first is the note left on the dead man’s body:  “I Am Him.”  The second is a faded photo hidden in a drawer; it’s a headstone over a little girl’s grave with the name Audur on it and the dates 1964-1968.

When Erlandur returns home after seeing Holberg’s body, he’s surprised by a visit from his daughter.  Eva Lind is a young woman with many problems, most notably drugs.  Erlandur and Eva Lind’s mother have been divorced for many years, and he’s had very little contact with her or her brother.  She comes to her father for money, which he refuses to give her.  Then she throw out her surprise–she’s pregnant.

Simultaneously, another crime is reported at the other end of the Icelandic social order.  A bride has disappeared on her wedding day, actually from the sumptuous wedding itself, leaving only the cryptic note “He’s a monster.  What have I done?”  The bride’s parents and her new husband profess to know no reason why she should have disappeared the way she did.  But for Erlandur, this needs to take a backseat to the murder of the old man.

A little investigation shows that Holberg was not a model citizen, to put it kindly. Many years ago he was accused of raping a young woman he met at a dance.  When the woman went to the police with her accusation, a hostile police officer refused to investigate, saying she had made the whole thing up.

In the background of the crimes is the question of what it means to be a father. Can one be a father if all he did was contribute his sperm during a rape?  Can one be a father if he sexually assaults his daughter?  Can one be a father if he has little or no contact with his children because of a divorce?  Like other Nordic writers, Indridason writes about social issues that arise in his country, issues of violence and domestic problems that are world-wide.

This book was one of the novels I read for the course I took this fall entitled “A Sense of Place:  Murder Mysteries ‘Round the World.” Jar City was written with an incredible sense of place.  The city of Reykjavik and the country of Iceland are brought fully to life.  It’s a place of great homogeneity, but it’s filled with secrets.  It’s not a novel for the faint of heart, but it is so beautifully written that it’s worth reading past the violence to delve into the culture of a country that is unfamiliar to many of us.

You can read more about Arnaldur Indridason at various web sites.

December 9, 2011

Last week was the final session of my course A Sense of Scene: Murder ‘Round the World. The course consisted of ten sessions, ninety minutes each, in which we discussed a mystery novel that we had read for that week.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we covered a lot of ground–France, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, a Navajo Reservation, Quebec, Venice, Jerusalem, Alaska, Russia, and Iceland.

We had wonderful class discussions led by our group leader, Nancy Rawson, a former librarian.  I had read several of the novels previously, although most of those some time ago.  What struck me was that, in discussing many of the books, there was a huge difference of opinion. Several of the novels (Finding Nouf, Death in a Strange Country, and Jar City) received almost unanimous praise from the class members.  But some of others (The Bar on the Seine, A Cold Day for Murder, The Winter Queen) provoked a variety of opinions among us.

Some people thought a particular book had a great sense of scene, others didn’t.  Some liked the narrative in a book, others thought that same narrative was not very well written.

As someone who has strong opinions about which books are worth reading and recommending and which are not, I was surprised by the differences of opinion, especially when they differed from mine.  It’s definitely humbling to realize that although one may feel that she has made her point so clearly, others are not convinced.

What I also found interesting was that Nancy hadn’t always chosen the strongest book in a series or the strongest book by a certain author.  As per the title of the course, she said she chose a book more for its setting than its plot or its characters.  I don’t know that it made a difference in too many instances, but it definitely did in one case.

The Agatha Christie novel that we read, Murder in Mesopotamia, was probably the least favorite book of the majority of the class.  As a devoted A.C. fan this saddened me, although I had to agree that this mystery certainly was not one of her best; actually, it was one of her weakest.

But it did prove an important point to me, that just as the cliche “you can’t judge a book by its cover” is true, so it is true that you can’t judge an author by only one of his/her works. Even Shakespeare didn’t write a masterpiece every time.

So, in parting, I’d say that if a friend enthusiastically recommends an author and/or a book and you read it and don’t agree, give that author another chance. You may be pleasantly surprised by the next book.  And if you’re not, just chalk it up to an honest difference of opinion.  Then recommend your favorite author to that friend and see what happens.

Marilyn

Lydia Chin and Bill Smith are together again. They are private investigators in New York City; given Lydia’s ethnicity, they do a lot of investigating in Chinatown.

Quietly drinking tea in a Lower East Side tearoom, Lydia is approached by a new client.  He introduces himself as Jeff Dunbar, a man interested in contemporary Chinese art.  Lydia is a bit put off by this, wondering if he has chosen her for her “Chineseness” or her knowledge of Chinese art; if so, she thinks, he’s in for a rude surprise.  Her lack of knowledge of art, most especially contemporary Chinese art, is profound.

Dunbar tells her it’s not her knowledge of the art scene that made him come to her but her reputation at finding people or things. What he wants her to look into is a rumor circulating around the city’s galleries that several previously unknown paintings by Chau Chun, a Chinese artist who was killed in Tiananmen Square in the 1989 uprising, have surfaced in New York.  Dunbar portrays himself as a new collector who wants to find out if these painting exist and, if they do, to get them, authenticate them, and sell them.

But Lydia isn’t taking him at his word.  After he gives her a retainer and leaves, she searches through the web for information about him–no hits.  He gave her a card with his name and cell phone number but no company name, address, or e-mail.  And his clothing and demeanor don’t shout money to her either.  Her suspicions are aroused.

Intrigued by Lydia’s description of and questions about Dunbar, Bill Smith brings her to a friend of his, another Chinese-American private detective, Jack Lee. After hearing Lydia’s story about her new client, Jack shares his own–he too has just been approached by a client to find these paintings.  But his client wants to find the paintings, if they exist, to declare them fraudulent.  The client, a Professor Yang at New York University, was a friend of Chau Chun’s in Beijing, and he knows there are no recent or undiscovered paintings by the artist because he was there when the artist was killed.

There’s a strong sense of Chinatown in this novel, with its winding streets and myriad restaurants; the food descriptions alone make the book worth reading.  There’s also a fair amount of humor in this novel, more than I remember in previous books in this series.  The art scene is portrayed as a dog-eat-dog one, with money being the prime motivator.  Lydia’s stereotypical mother makes an appearance, as does her cousin, a nineteen-year-old techie who can find out just about anything Lydia want to know.

The only problem I had with the book with the lack of a crime. It’s really a “cozy” in the sense that there’s little violence, little crime, and no deaths.  The mystery and the plot are strong, but I would have enjoyed a bit more tension than was present.

You can read more about S. J. Rozen at her web site.