Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for July, 2013

Fidel Castro’s Cuba takes center stage in Peggy Blair’s debut mystery The Beggar’s Opera.  As I say in my slightly-less-than-fluent Spanish, the book is muy, muy bueno.

Mike and Hillary Ellis, visitors to Cuba from Ottawa, are having a tough week.  The Ellises have been followed by a group of small boys begging for change, one of whom is more persistent than the others.  When Mike gives the child some pesos in spite of Hillary’s admonition not to, that seems to be the last straw for her, and she announces that she’s changed her reservation and will be flying home alone that evening.

Mike, who is a police detective, was on disability leave following the murder of his partner and his own attack by a knife-wielding suspect who was killed.  Now on vacation, Mike is determined to finish the rest of his week in Havana.  He goes into El Bar mi Media Naranja (Half an Orange), Hemingway’s favorite drinking place, and before long is approached by a jinetera, a prostitute; after downing several drinks, Ellis leaves the bar with her.  In the morning he awakes, alone, and his wallet and badge are gone.

Ricardo Ramirez is a police detective in Havana.  Early on Christmas Day he receives a phone call that the body of a young boy has been found on the rocks beneath the Malecon, Havana’s promenade.  The father of two young children, Ricardo is particularly anxious to solve this case, and it looks as if it will be easy.  A wallet was found on the boy’s body, and the passport with it is in the name of Mike Ellis.

When Ricardo and his colleague Rodriguez Sanchez bring Mike to the police station to interview him, he begins to understand how much trouble he is in.  At first he thinks he’s there because he asked the doorman at his hotel to report his missing wallet, badge, and passport to the police, and he is surprised by the amount of time the police are putting into the case.

“I broke the law by giving him money?” Mike asks.  “I’ll pay the fine then. I had no idea you people took this kind of thing so seriously.”  Detective Sanchez gives the suspect a disgusted look.  “The rape and murder of a child, Senor Ellis, is taken very seriously in Cuba.  We punish it by firing squad.”

The detectives have already searched Mike’s hotel room, no search warrant being needed in that country if a crime is suspected.  Mike is not entitled to a lawyer, but Ricardo does allow him to call his chief of police in Ottawa.  And although it’s Christmas Day, the chief arranges for Celia Jones, the police department’s attorney, to fly down to Havana to find out what’s going on.  Mike is slightly reassured, but his memory of the night before is so vague; can he really be certain that he didn’t kill young Arturo Montenegro?

The Beggar’s Opera is a fascinating book, with well-drawn characters and a city that is both familiar and exotic to most Americans.  There are three surprises at the end of the book, and each one is believable and satisfying.

You can read more about Peggy Blair at this web site.

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

Leonard Rosen is now two for two.  The Tenth Witness is a masterful follow-up to his debut novel, All Cry Chaos (reviewed on this blog).

The Tenth Witness, a prequel, opens with a prologue by the protagonist, Henri Poincare.  In All Cry Chaos he was a man approaching retirement, an inspector with Interpol.  In The Tenth Witness he is a young consulting engineer, a partner in the firm of Poincare & Chin, called in 1978 to oversee extracting gold from outdated computers for Kraus Steel, a global steel manufacturer.  The story is told in a single flashback.

Almost from his introduction to the Kraus family, Henri experiences split emotions.  He is immediately attracted to Liesel Kraus, who handles the publicity and charitable giving for the business’ foundation.  And he likes her brother Anselm and Anselm’s wife and young children.  But he is disturbed, unnerved, by meeting the original co-partner in Kraus Steel and now Anselm’s father-in-law, Viktor Schmidt.  Henri doesn’t know quite why, at least not yet.

Liesel Kraus makes no secret of how the family got started during the Hitler era.  Her father was a member of the Nazi party and ran his steel mills with slave labor.  But like Oskar Schindler, Liesel tells Henri, he saved people’s lives.  And when the war trials began, ten Kraus Steel laborers came forward and signed an affidavit in her father’s favor.  But still, she admits, “My father wore a swastika lapel pin.”

Henri travels with Viktor to see a facility the company owns in Hong Kong.  Viktor explains that when the ship is broken apart, every section of it is remade by the steel mill–pipes, wires, furniture–and reused.  The profits are enormous.  But what Henri sees are the incredibly dangerous conditions, conditions that never would be allowed in Europe.  He leaves Hong Kong with the thought that he doesn’t want to do business with the Kraus company, regardless of the profits that his engineering firm would make.  But when he sees Liesel again he changes his mind, and he accepts the commission.  And so Henri becomes involves with the Kraus family, their business and their secrets.

Just in case the readers are thinking that the Nazis were a special group of vermin, that other people didn’t do those things/have those kind of thoughts, Leonard Rosen sets them straight.  There are two scenes in the book that are so realistic, taking place more than two decades after the war, as to be unbearably painful.

In the first, after Henri has basically uncovered most of the dirty history of the Kraus Steel company, he and Liesel are outside a church when confronted by a Gypsy woman and her child who are begging for coins.  Liesel gives the child a coin, but Henri brushes past the woman and child.  He thinks to himself, A whole (expletive deleted) of cows.  He washes the sleeve where the Gypsy touched him, and then he understands what he was thinking.

I’ll leave the second scene, equally disturbing, for you to discover.

No such thing as a sophomore slump when it comes to Leonard Rosen’s second novel.  The writing is outstanding, clear and crisp, and the author holds your attention from the first page to the last.  The characters are real, and the decisions they make about life and business are real also.  Do not miss reading The Tenth Witness.

You can read more about Leonard Rosen at his web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Reads blog at this web site.

I’m not aware of any other mystery novels featuring a gray-haired fifty-nine-year-old female retired F.B.I. agent.  That’s one of the reasons that Rage Against the Dying is a most enjoyable read.

Brigid Quinn is trying to start a new life for herself in Tucson.  She’s happily married to Carlo, a charming ex-Catholic priest whom she met while taking his Buddhism course.  They’ve been married just a year, her first marriage and his second.  But Brigid is keeping lots of secrets from her husband because a former lover wasn’t able to deal with the violent and dangerous aspects of her job, and she’s worried that Carlo will feel the same way.

So even though Brigid is no longer an active agent, she’s fearful of letting Carlo know all the details of her past career.  Her specialty, she tells him as she tells anyone who asks, was copyright fraud, dull enough to stop inquisitive conversations dead in their tracks.

Her carefully kept secret life starts to unravel when Brigid is accosted in the desert by Gerald Peasil, who takes her by surprise and drags her into the cab of his truck.  When she sees the blood on the cab’s floor, she realizes she’s not his first victim. Surprising Gerald by her strength, in the ensuing fight she stabs his leg with the blade of her specially-designed walking stick, and he dies. Terrified at having to explain the homicide to Carlo, even though it was justified, Brigid manages to tip the truck into a nearby wash and heads home to clean herself off.

A week afterwards, deputy sheriff Max Coyote comes to the house to tell Brigid that they have caught the infamous Route 66 killer.  A man arrested two weeks earlier on a minor charge has now confessed to killing six young women, including Jessica Robertson, an F.B.I. agent who was Brigid’s protege.  Brigid has never forgiven herself for allowing Jessica to be used as a decoy to trap the Route 66 killer; she has agonized for years, fearing that she sent the young agent out before she was ready.  Jessica’s body was never recovered.

At first Laura Coleman, the young agent who interrogated the prisoner, Floyd Lynch, has no doubt of the truth of his confession and his guilt of the several murders abutting Route 66.  But as the interrogation tape is replayed, she begins to have doubts.  However, no one will listen to her; even Floyd’s own defense attorney believes in his admitted guilt.  So Laura turns to Brigid for help.

Brigid Quinn is a very interesting heroine.  A successful federal agent, she was forced to resign after an outcry to her fully justified shooting of a murderer.  That, in combination with her feelings of guilt over Jessica’s disappearance and presumed death, has made her a keeper of secrets, fearful that those closest to her will be horrified and unable to love her.  So her lies keep getting more and more involved, even as she agrees with Laura that Floyd Lynch is not the true Route 66 killer.  But if he’s not, who is?  And how did Floyd come to know details about those killings that were never released?

Becky Masterman has created a fascinating cast of characters in her debut novel, and Brigid Quinn is a protagonist worth following.  You can read more about her at this web site.

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

A recently blinded psychiatrist, a young man with severe developmental disabilities, and a dysfunctional married couple all come together to provide Lynn Raimondo’s fascinating debut novel, Dante’s Wood. 

Mark Angelotti was a successful psychiatrist in New York before some bad decisions and one tragic event forced him to leave that city and relocate to Chicago.  No one at his new hospital knows anything about his personal background, only his outstanding professional abilities, so it’s a chance for him to start over.

Two years after Mark arrives in Chicago, he is diagnosed with Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy, a gene mutation passed on from mother to son.  He gradually loses the sight in one eye, then a few weeks later in the other.  By incredible determination and hard work, he manages to learn Braille (very difficult to do after adolescence) and to relearn the many other things that he must do to have a normal life:  cook, travel alone via public transportation, dress himself.

Now that thirteen months have passed since the onset of his disease, Mark is back at work.  In his own words, he is “the same arrogant, uncaring, self-deceptive bastard I’d always been.”

His supervisor assigns him a case involving Charlie Dickerson, the eighteen-year-old son of a fellow physician at the hospital.  Charlie has Fragile X syndrome, the leading cause of mental retardation, and has the I.Q. of a six to nine year old.  His mother Judith believes that Charlie is being sexually abused by one of the staff members at the adolescent day care facility he attends, while his father Nate says he doesn’t believe this, and that is one of the many things about which this couple cannot agree.

After talking to Charlie, Mark believes he has found the answer to the issues that made his parents bring him to the psychiatrist, and the problem seems resolved.  Six months pass, and although Mark’s prowess in handling his blindness has improved, his mental state has not.  He feels as if his judgments are off, that he’s missing something.  His supervisor wonders if he has forced Mark to come back to work too soon, but Mark insists that that’s not the problem.  He’s just working things through.

Then he receives a call from the Dickersons.  Charlie has been arrested for murdering a staff member at his day care facility.  And yes, it’s the woman Judith Dickerson thought had been molesting him.

Mark is a very interesting character.  He’s bright, dedicated, and determined to live as close to a normal life as possible, all of which are admirable qualities.  But he has a secret that is tormenting him, not allowing him to be open and share his life with anyone.

And then, when Charlie is arrested, it makes even his professional abilities open to question.  Given his lack of a personal life, and the secret he has been holding onto since his move from Manhattan, if he loses his license to practice medicine he feels he will have nothing left.

The author’s description of Mark’s inner turmoil and his determination to get his life back on track make for a compelling novel.  I’m looking forward to the second in the Mark Angelotti series.

You can read more about Lynne Raimondo at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Reads blog at this web site.