Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for July, 2016

The Branson Beauty is an old showboat cruising the lake in Branson, Missouri, a city famous for its country music and family entertainment.  The showboat is a big attraction in the city, or it was until it ran aground with a full complement of staff and passengers aboard.

Strange, thinks Sheriff Hank Worth, since the weather was clear and the boat has been on the lake for some thirty years without an accident.  It’s stranger still when Hank goes aboard to interview the captain, Albert Eberhardt, and finds him in the wheelhouse in what appears to be a kind of fugue state.

At first it looks as if all of the passengers have been led ashore safely, but Hank goes through the boat with first mate Tony Sampson doing one final check.  All is fine until they arrive at the captain’s dining room, which had been rented out for a private luncheon party.  There on the plush blue carpet lies the body of a young woman.

The corpse is that of Mandy Bryson.  She was a popular teenager in town, now a first-year student at the University of Oklahoma.  No one seems to know why she was back in Branson instead of on the University’s Norman campus.  Her parents didn’t know she was in town, nor did her boyfriend, Ryan Nelson.  He was on the ship with another girl, attending his grandmother’s birthday luncheon in that private dining room, and he tells Hank that he was unaware that Mandy was on board.  But is that true?

Hank Worth is new to his job, having been appointed sheriff when the former one resigned to become a state senator.  He’s not totally aware of all the ins-and-outs of the city’s politics, but he does know that Henry Gallagher, owner of the showboat and of much else in Branson, is an important man who doesn’t like to be crossed.  Despite Hank’s clear orders that Gallagher not talk to the captain, who is now in the hospital under police guard, that’s where Hank finds Gallagher when he himself goes to try to interview the captain.   And Gallagher is not at all apologetic about ignoring Hank’s orders.

Hank Worth is a great addition to the list of sheriffs in mysteries.  Although the position of sheriff is an elected one in the city, because of his predecessor’s departure for a higher office Hank has been appointed to fill the position until the next election.  He’s made friends in the short time he’s been in Branson, but there are some people who were happier when the former sheriff was in charge, including Gerald Tucker, one of the undersheriffs in the department who feels he should have been named sheriff; city counselor Edrick Fizzel, a man who lives to see his name in the newspaper; and, of course, Henry Gallagher, the wealthiest man in the city, one who’s not used to taking direction from anyone.

Claire Booth has made an impressive debut with The Branson Beauty.  The setting is terrific, and Hank Worth is a protagonist to watch.

You can read more about Claire Booth at this web site.

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

A mystery set in 18th-century Tibet and China.  What could be better?

Li Du is a brilliant man, a former librarian in China’s Forbidden City.  However, because Li Du was accused of being a friend to traitors of the emperor, he was exiled from the city and has spent the last five years traveling through the country.  He’s just arrived in the remote city of Dayan, close to the dangerous Tibetan border, anxious to continue his travels unimpeded.  First, however, he must get permission from the magistrate of the prefecture to proceed.

Magistrate Tulishen, granted honorary Manchu status by the emperor in recognition of his service to the empire, is ready to give Li Du the necessary papers.  But then things go awry due to a murder, missing valuables, and the imminent visit of the emperor, known as The Kangxi.

At the time Jade Dragon Mountain takes place, the emperor has many titles and is revered as a divine being, believed to have been chosen by the gods to rule the world.  It is thought by his subjects that nothing the Son of the True Dragon does could be unjust or incorrect, and there lies the reason that Tulishen needs Li Du to stay in Dayan through the royal visit.  The emperor, as his predecessors had done, has invited Jesuit priests from Europe to enter his kingdom, the only foreigners allowed to live in China.  It is not because he is interested in Christianity but because they bring scientific knowledge with them, knowledge that The Kangxi can use to impress the people of the country.

The Jesuits have predicted an eclipse of the sun on the day after the emperor is due to arrive.  The court has passed this forecast on to the citizens of the city as being the emperor’s own, so it must take place at the exact moment The Kangxi has said it would.  But murder and theft have thrown Magistrate Tulishen’s plans for an extravagant eclipse ceremony into chaos, so reluctantly acknowledging Li Du’s formidable intelligence and superior knowledge of the Jesuits, their scientific knowledge, and their religion, the magistrate compels him to stay and make certain that all goes smoothly.  Then Father Pieter is found dead.  The magistrate quickly declares it is a natural death owing to the priest’s advanced age, but Li Du is not so certain.

Jade Dragon Mountain has a wonderful cast of characters, each with his or her own agenda and secrets.  In addition to Li Du and Tulishen, there is the beautiful Lady Chen, the magistrate’s courtesan who wields a great deal of power in the palace; the elderly priest Pieter, whose knowledge of astronomy had made him eager to see the eclipse; Hamza, a traveling storyteller with an endless supply of tales; Brother Martin, another priest who has an impressive knowledge of botany but a surprising dearth of information about the funeral rites of his church; Nicolas Gray, an Englishman who has arrived in Dayan with a valuable, if secret, cargo; and Jia Huan, the secretary of the prefecture.

There is a wonderful sense of history and place in Jade Dragon Mountain, an amazing amount of knowledge beautifully expressed.  At the end of the novel is a question and answer section in which the author explains her interest in this area of China and how she came to write the book.  Her explanation is as fascinating as the novel itself.

You can read more about Elsa Hart at this web site.

You can check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Until reading Icarus, my main exposure to the South African mystery genre was through the wonderful novels of James McClure that featured the interracial police duo of Tromp Kramer and Mickey Zondi.  I took it as a personal loss when the series, which was not long enough in my opinion, ended more than twenty years ago.  But now I have a new South African author to follow.

Deon Meyer is very well-known in his home country but was unknown to me until I picked up his latest mystery.  If all his books are as brilliant as this one, I’ve really been missing out.

South Africa has obviously changed a great deal since the official end of apartheid in 1994.  Now the Cape Town police department is totally integrated, with men and women who are white, black, and coloured, the latter meaning people of mixed-race ancestry.   In Icarus, the two main characters are Captain Benny Griessel, who is white, and Vaughn Cupido, who is coloured; the two make the most professional team in the South African Priority Crimes Investigation unit.  There is a problem, however, that hangs over them.  Benny Griessel is a recovering alcoholic and on the verge of relapse after more than two years of sobriety.

The reason for his return to drinking is explained at the beginning of the novel.  His close friend and former colleague, Vollie Fish, has just murdered his wife and two daughters and then turned his gun on himself.  Benny understands only too well the reason for the murders and suicide, a reason that he’s afraid one day might cause him to do something similar.  That is what made Benny, nicknamed Benna, turn into the Fireman’s Arms and order, in quick succession, six double whiskies.  He drinks to kill the fear that never leaves him.

The body of social media magnate Ernst Richter has been found, more than a month after his disappearance.  Ernst was the founder and director of Alibi.com, an internet company that arranges alibis for people involved in extra-marital or illicit affairs.  The company can create forged airline tickets, receipts for rooms at conferences the clients were supposed to have attended, restaurant checks for alleged business dinners–you get the idea.  Alibi.com’s slogan is All pleasure.  No stress.  Not too subtle, but it attracted thousands of people eager to find a way to have their cake and eat it too.

Interspersed with the chapters following Benna and the department’s search for Ernst’s killer, there are chapters detailing the conversations of advocate Susan Peires and her latest client, François du Toit.  François is the fourth generation in his family to control a vineyard, the Klein Zegen Estate in Stellenbosch, in a town in the Western Cape Province of the country.  Although the lawyer is eager to get the details of why François wants to hire her, he tells her he must start at the beginning so that she’ll understand everything that led up to where he is today.  And that means a family saga of four generations of the du Toits.

Deon Meyer shifts his focus between Benna, the search for Ernst’s murderer, and the history of the wine farm.  They all connect in the end, but it’s the deft unraveling of the threads that connect them that makes Icarus such a great read.  When I got to the last pages I was figuratively holding my breath, waiting to see how it would all be resolved.

You can read more about Deon Meyer at this web site.

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

Talk about your hard-boiled mysteries.  Bad Country is one of the hardest-boiled ones I’ve read in a long time.

From the name Montana Estates, one might think it was a community of elegant houses, perhaps McMansions, on a scenic site in a gated community of Tucson.  Well, one would be quite wrong.  In reality, this section of the city is called El Hoyo, or The Hole.  It’s actually on the outskirts of Tucson, so far out that no one wants to acknowledge it.  It’s an almost-empty trailer park, with dirt roads, a never-completed nine-hole golf course, and piles of cinder blocks at the entrance.  Oh yes, also at the entrance is a corpse lying in a pool of blood.

Rodeo Grace Garnet is the only tenant of Montana Estates, unless you count his elderly dog.  A former rodeo champion, Rodeo (his given name) ekes out a living as a private detective.  But he has no idea about the spurt of murders that is going on in and around Los Jarros County.  There have been three in the last week, including the one by his front door, definitely too high a body count for such a sparsely populated area.

Rodeo’s friend Luis Azul Encarnacion, owner of the Twin Arrows Trading Post that Rodeo frequents, has a job for the private eye.  A cowboy has found the body of a teenage boy near a riverbed.  No one knows if the boy, Samuel Rocha, fell off the nearby bridge or was shot off, and the boy’s grandmother wants Rodeo to investigate.  Interestingly, though, Mrs. Rocha doesn’t appear very upset about her grandson’s death, so Rodeo is not quite sure why he’s being hired.  However, he desperately needs a job, so he accepts his new client and begins his investigation.

The cast of characters in Bad Country reads like a list of people you’d rather not know.  There’s Romeo’s former girlfriend Sirena Rae, a stripper with some severe mental health issues; her father, “Apache” Ray Molina, an ageing sheriff with too many dead bodies in his county; Ted Anderton, a member of the Arizona Department of Public Safety Highway Patrol, who can’t seem to forget or forgive that Romeo beat an escaped criminal to death several years ago; and Ronald Rocha, a psychopathic gunslinger determined to avenge the death of his cousin Samuel.

Definitely not for fans of cozy mysteries, Bad Country portrays a poor, rough part of Arizona, far from the natural beauty of the Grand Canyon or the elegant golf resorts of Scottsdale that the tourists see.  Life in Los Jarros county is, for most of its inhabitants, a struggle against poverty, drugs, and crime.  And Rodeo Garnet is in the midst of it all.

C. B. McKenzie has written a noir novel in gritty, street-wise prose.  No wonder Bad Country won the Tony Hillerman Prize for best first novel set in the southwest.  It’s an honor that is well-deserved.

You can read more about C. B. McKenzie at this web site. http://www.hillermanprize.com/#!mckenzie/c6yx.

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

Macy Greeley, a detective with the State Police in Montana, is nearing a house in Walleye Junction where the police believe a hostage is being held.  The hostage is Philip Long, a controversial radio personality in the area,  and Macy is slowing down her car and getting ready to search the building when Long staggers into the road.  Macy can’t stop quickly enough, however, and Long is thrown into her windshield and then flung on the ground.  Her car nearly careens into a ditch and she’s pinned upside down by the seat belt, unable to get loose, with her cell phone out of reach and her gun thrown out of the SUV.

Frantically trying to free herself, she hears a motor behind her and watches helplessly as a motorcycle plows into Long.  Macy watches in horror as a figure dismounts from the cycle, picks up her gun, and fires directly at Long.  As the shooter gets back on his machine and pulls away, Macy’s car spills over the ditch and she hits the water.  Somehow she’s able to pull herself out and limp toward the road, where a rescue vehicle picks her up, shaking, bruised, but thankfully alive.

Several days later she’s called to the scene of what at first appears to be the fatal drug overdoses of a local couple.  Walleye Junction police identify them as Carla and Lloyd Spencer, long-time drug addicts, although Carla had been in rehab recently.  The fingerprints on the van parked near the bodies match those in the house where Long had been kept, so it appears that there is a quick resolution to the abduction.  Then Macy notices gravel from the parking area on Lloyd’s cowboy boots, and she voices her opinion that Lloyd was dragged from the vehicle onto the field and that Carla was carried.  So it becomes apparent that a third person was involved in their deaths and probably in Long’s kidnapping as well.

Emma Long, Philip’s daughter, has returned for the funeral, twelve years after she left home.  She’d been in touch with her father during this time and had seen him several times, but the breach between Emma and her mother has only grown wider.  It’s been six years since they’ve seen each other, and it doesn’t look as if Emma’s homecoming is going to resolve any of the issues that drove them apart.  And now Emma also has to face her former boyfriend and the cruel taunting from her peers that drove her away in the first place.  It’s almost too much for her to handle.

Karin Salvalaggio has written a novel that will keep you guessing until the last chapter.  There are many undercurrents in the small town of Walleye Junction, conflicts that have gone on for years with no resolution.  But the murder of Philip Long and the deaths of the Spencers are bringing them to the surface.

You can read more about Karin Salvalaggio at this web site.

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