Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for December, 2014

War has a long reach, way past the time of its supposed end.  This is made abundantly clear in Val McDermid’s latest mystery, The Skeleton Road.

Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie, head of the Historic Cases Unit in Edinburgh, is familiar with the Balkans War as something that happened years ago.  That much is true, since the war ended in 1995, but the memories of those who lived through the murders, rapes, and ethnic cleansings are still vivid.

A surveyor examining the roof of a building scheduled for demolition in Edinburgh finds a human skull hidden in a turret.  It becomes a case for the police when a bullet hole is discovered in the middle of the remains and a case for the HCU (what Americans call cold cases units) because forensic examination dates the skull as having been on the roof for about seven or eight years.

Maggie Blake is a professor of geopolitics at Oxford, an internationally known expert on the Balkans War.   She was teaching in Dubrovnik when she met Colonel Dimitar Petrovic, nicknamed Mitja, of the Croatian Army.  The two became lovers and spent the beginning of the war together in Dubrovnik, he doing intelligence work and she continuing to teach and write, until the situation in the city became so dangerous that he made her leave.  After the war they lived together in Oxford, until one day Mitja left their apartment and never returned.

Then the reader is introduced to two men working at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.  Alan Macanespie and Theo Proctor haven’t been overly diligent in doing their jobs, but their new boss is about to change that.  Wilson Cagney knows that the tribunal is about to wind up its work, and he wants to clear up all the loose ends.

What is apparent to Wilson is that there were too many cases where a suspected war criminal was about to be captured and tried when the suspect was assassinated.  Whether the killer is a mole in the tribunal or someone from the war seeking personal vengeance, Wilson doesn’t care.  He wants the assassin found before the tribunal is history.

Val McDermid weaves these three seemingly disparate stories into a totally cohesive novel.  The country formerly called Yugoslavia had a long and difficult history, with territories from the former Austro-Hungarian empire being joined, forcibly or otherwise, by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes.  The country was ruled by the fascists during World War II, then by the communists after the war.  But even seventy years after the end of the Second World War, memories of who was on what side linger, and the Croats and the Serbs remember particularly well.  And all roads seem to lead to the skull in Edinburgh.

The Skeleton Road is a wonderfully engaging read, combining not only an excellent plot but an important history lesson skillfully woven into the story.  The characters and their motivations are real, and the reader will be drawn into this novel from the beginning and will stay involved until the very last page.

You can read more about Val McDermid at this web site.

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

North of Boston is an excellent title for Elisabeth Elo’s debut mystery novel.  But it could also be called Here, There, and Everywhere because the story ranges from Boston to Florida to Labrador.  It’s a terrific, fast ride that will leave the reader breathless.

Pirio Kasparav has just survived four hours in the freezing waters of Boston harbor after a collision between her friend’s lobster boat and a huge freighter/tanker.  Both she and the lobster boat’s owner, Ned Rizzo, are thrown into the water, but while Pirio survives, Ned’s body is never found, even after hours of searching by the Coast Guard.

Now Pirio has become a sort of instant mini-celebrity due to her survival in water with temperature no human “should” have been able to endure.  She doesn’t have any explanation for why her body didn’t shut down, but the Navy is interested and wants to fly her down to Florida for a series of physical and mental tests.  Pirio thinks she had enough tests as a defiant adolescent to last a lifetime, but a weekend in sunny Florida sounds too good to miss.

In the meantime, there is Ned’s funeral to deal with, along with the alcoholism of Pirio’s best friend Thomasina, the mother of Noah, the ten-year-old child resulting from the brief romance of Thomasina and Ned.  With a history of drugs and alcohol, Thomasina is certainly not the ideal mother, and Pirio is reluctantly forced to pick up the slack when her friend is put in jail overnight, leaving Noah on his own.

After an interview with a commander from the Coast Guard, Pirio believes that the authorities are too willing to call the collision an accident and investigate no further.   Angry and frustrated by the government’s lack of concern, Pirio decides to look into the matter herself.  “Because if a child’s parent has to be killed in a freak accident, that child deserves to see an aftermath of concern and accountability,” she thinks.  We empathize as Pirio is drawn into the investigation, tracking down how Ned became the owner of the lobster boat immediately after quitting his job at Ocean Catch, as she puts herself in danger while trying to find the answers to give to Noah.

Elisabeth Elo has surrounded Pirio with a group of fascinating characters.  Thomasina, whom Pirio has known since they were adolescents in boarding school together, is a mess–a woman with a genius  I.Q. who drinks, takes drugs, and is available for nearly any man who is close by; Noah, her gifted son, bereft by his father’s death and wondering how the collision between his father’s lobster boat and the never-found freighter/tanker could have happened; the mysterious “Larry Wozniack,” who crashes Ned’s funeral, pretending to have been a friend of the deceased; and Johnny O, a friend and co-worker with Ned at Ocean Catch and formerly Pirio’s lover.  

North of Boston is an exciting read, a novel that’s hard to put down.  In this, the author’s first novel, she has introduced a charismatic heroine to the Boston mystery scene.

You can read more about Elisabeth Elo at this web site. 

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

How much do you know about anyone, even the person you’ve married?  And what happens when his/her past isn’t what you expected?

Hannah and Mark are practically newlyweds, having been married only eight months.  They met in New York, where Hannah was working at the time, and he was on a business trip.  After their wedding she decides to move back to London, her birthplace, reluctant to have an international marriage; in doing so she is giving up a successful advertising career in Manhattan.

The company Mark started more than a decade earlier, DataPro, is doing extremely well, and although Hannah has been looking for work ever since she returned to England, they appear to be doing very well financially and have an extremely comfortable lifestyle.

As the novel opens Hannah is driving to pick up Mark at Heathrow Airport in London after his business trip to New York, but although his plane arrives he’s not on it.  Getting more anxious by the hour as Mark doesn’t return her phone calls, she finally hears from him the next morning.  He’s full of apologies for his no-show, citing business, and promises to return in three days.

But before Hannah had heard from him, she had called his assistant Neesha at DataPro, who was surprised that Hannah and Mark weren’t together.  When Neesha lets slip that she had thought they were spending the weekend in Rome, Hannah’s anxiety grows stronger.

Still disturbed, but also angry at herself for her worry/distrust, Hannah starts going through Mark’s personal papers in his home office. She knows where his papers are kept, but his personal file isn’t where she had last seen it.  Seeking to put her mind at ease, Hannah goes to his office to look for it.  She looks through his desk until she locates the file and is stunned to learn that Mark has just taken out a huge second mortgage on their home; he had told her the house was virtually mortgage-free.

Even more upsetting, toward the bottom of the file she discovers that her husband has closed all of his savings accounts.  Then there’s the final piece of paper:  her personal account, holding all of the savings she’d accumulated during her years in New York and which Mark had told her was strictly for her own use, has been cleared out.  From the £46,800 she’d deposited, only £29.02 remain.

Before We Met is the story of what seems to be a perfect courtship and marriage.  When Mark returns, he has an answer for every question that Hannah asks, but her uneasiness never completely goes away.  She realizes how little she really knows about her husband.  His parents are dead, he and his younger brother are estranged, all of the friends he has introduced her to are people he has recently met.  Is there more to his past than he has told her?

Lucie Whitehouse has written a true thriller, with an exciting plot and perfectly drawn characters.  The story is told from Hannah’s perspective in the third person, and we are totally aware of all her thoughts.  Her worries seem legitimate, but so do Mark’s answers to her questions.  And the more questions she asks, the more questions she has.

Lucie Whitehouse doesn’t have a web site of her own, but there are several posts about her on the Internet.

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

Jack Reacher is back, and that’s a good thing.  Actually, it’s a great thing because no matter how quickly Lee Child adds another novel to this series, it’s not often enough for me.

 Although Reacher has been out of the army for years (he was in military intelligence) and has no fixed address, the powers-that-be are able to find him.  As Reacher says, “You can leave the army, but the army doesn’t leave you.”  Especially when you have talents that organization needs.

An unknown sniper has tried to assassinate the president of France, and the U.S. military is afraid the gunman might be an American.  When Reacher is taken to meet with his former commander, General O’Day, he’s told that the list of possible gunmen has been narrowed down to four–one from Russia, one from Israel, one from Great Britain, and John Knott, the American that Jack Reacher put in prison to serve a fifteen year sentence. 

But now it’s sixteen years later, and Knott has been released.  Naturally he’s been under close surveillance, but although he returned to his Arkansas home when he completed his prison term his home is empty and his whereabouts unknown.  Knott was an expert sniper when he was in the army, and while he was in prison he devoted himself to vigorous exercise to keep in combat-ready shape.

The army believes that the sniper is going to attack one of the members of the G8, the organization of eight leading industrial countries, to redeem himself after his failed attempt on the French president.   Knott is known to be able to shoot to kill at fourteen hundred yards; if he is the gunman, he is a very dangerous man indeed.

When Reacher and CIA employee Casey Nice get to Knott’s home it’s deserted, as expected.  But inside the run-down house there are multiple photos of Reacher with bullet holes and knife wounds in various parts of his body.  It’s all too clear that if Knott is the sniper who is trying to assassinate a member of the G8, Reacher is another of his targets.   As Reacher recognizes, the army’s plan is for him to be used as bait to get to John Knott.  As the novel’s title says, it’s very personal.

Lee Child’s novels are nearly impossible to put down.  It’s not that the reader doesn’t know that Reacher will be victorious (after all, he’s the hero of the series), but the cleverness of the plotting and the incredible detail keep one riveted.  Even if you, like me, are totally unfamiliar with the military or snipers, Personal will have you hooked until the last page.

You can read more about Lee Child at this web site. 

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