Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for July, 2017

Milo Cavelli, the son of a Norwegian father and an Italian mother, is a detective in the Oslo Police Department.  The only one on the force who is fluent in Italian, he’s asked by a superior officer to fly to Rome to bring home the body of a Norwegian woman who was killed there.

That’s straightforward enough, although it doesn’t seem as if the death of Ingrid Tollefsen is connected to Milo’s area of expertise, financial crimes.  But the truth of the adage follow the money is proved once again, for in fact the strangulation of the young scientist is more than the tragic local murder it seems at first; it is a crime with repercussions that will spread across the globe.

The Tollefsen family would seem to be under a devastating curse, with early deaths following three of its four members.  Ingrid’s mother died in childbirth, putting the thirteen-year-old girl in the position of being a mother to her newborn brother.  All went well until the night that her brother, then a high school student, was killed by a street gang; another victim of the gang was a popular high school teacher who was thought to have been trying to protect young Tormod.  The police knew the killers were the Downtown Gang but were unable to prove it, and its members went free.

Ingrid seems to have had no enemies, according to the executives at the pharmaceutical giant where she worked.  She was in Rome to attend a conference, Milo and his fellow officer Sørensen are told by her boss in Research and Development, Anders Wilhelmsen.  During the interview Anders tells them that  after the death of her brother two years earlier, she had received the customary two weeks’ leave of absence; however, after that, she had asked for an additional two months’ leave.  She didn’t explain why or what she was doing during that time, and Milo thinks that this may be an important part of the puzzle.

But there are many other parts of the puzzle that also need to be solved.  Was it Ingrid’s medical vial that is found on the street outside the hotel room where she died?  What does Verba on the vial’s torn label mean?  Is it simply a terrible coincidence that two members of the Tollefsen family were murdered, or is there a connection that has yet to be found?

There are other questions in the novel too, although they may not have a direct bearing on Ingrid’s death.  Who was the woman who bequeathed a Manhattan apartment to the Cavalli family?  Who is the person Milo’s semi-estranged father wants him to meet?  What is the connection between Milo’s family and a merchant ship that exploded in Italian waters in the 1970s?

Asle Skredderberget has written the third Milo Cavalli thriller, and it’s outstanding.  Milo is an original protagonist, brilliant in his field but conflicted in his personal life.  The other characters are totally realistic, with believable motives for their actions that move the plot along at a fast pace.  The Oslo Conspiracy will keep you spellbound until the end.

You can read more about Asle Skredderberget at this web site.

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

Once again Julia Dahl brings readers to Jewish Brooklyn, but this time with a twist.  It’s the Crown Heights section of the borough, a neighborhood that years ago was totally Jewish and now is an uneasy mix of ultra-Orthodox Jews and Blacks, the neighborhood that was the scene of a riot in 1991 and still bears the violent scars of those three days.

Rebekah Roberts, a reporter at the sleazy tabloid the New York Trib, is looking for a news story to write, one that she’s hoping will get her a boost up the career ladder.  At a cocktail party she connects with Amanda Button, who writes the Homicide Blog, a newsletter that tracks every homicide occurring in New York City.  Rebekah and Amanda arrange to meet a couple of days after the event, and Amanda offers Rebekah the opportunity to go through letters she’s received from prisoners in the state’s penitentiaries who declare their innocence.  Perhaps there’s a real story in there, both women think.

Of course, she tells Rebekah, everyone who writes her tells her he’s been unjustly punished.  However, given that many of these men were convicted in the 80s and 90s, when DNA technology was in its infancy and the murder rate was soaring, it’s certainly possible, Amanda continues, that some of the cases weren’t investigated properly.  So Rebekah takes home several boxes of letters and is intrigued by one in particular.

DeShawn Perkins was a teenager when he was convicted of murdering his foster family–mother, father, and young sister.  At first he protested his innocence but couldn’t offer any alibi for the time the crime was committed; later, after brutal questioning that included the hint that if he didn’t confess his younger “brother” might be charged with the crime, DeShawn said he had committed the murders.  But in his letter to Amanda, he refutes his confession, tells her his alibi, and asks for her help.  He closes the letter by saying, “…somebody else killed my family and I’m paying for his crime.”

Conviction is the third in the Rebekah Roberts’ series, and it’s as strong a novel as the previous two.  Rebekah is a young woman with a past that will not let go, including the many questions she has for her mother, who abandoned her when she was a baby.  Even now that she has reunited with her mother, her mother still refuses to explain why she fled New York and left her husband and infant Rebekah behind.  So perhaps Rebekah’s choice of a career, asking questions and trying to find answers to things people would prefer to keep hidden, is a reaction to the secrets in her own life.

Julia Dahl’s characters are like people you know–people trying to do their best but with problems and emotions that get in the way.  They are all too human, and thus they make the reader respond not only to the excellent plot in this book but to the people in it, foibles and all.

Conviction is a moving story of the collision of people and cultures and the devastation that misunderstandings can bring.  It strongly resonated with me because I grew up in Crown Heights, although I left it years before this book takes place.  I know the neighborhood streets and lived only four or five blocks from where the riots began.  But you don’t need to have that personal involvement to become totally engrossed in this outstanding mystery.

You can read more about Julia Dahl at this website.

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

Into the mix:  a manipulative mother, an unknown father, world-wide fame, world-wide fall, marriage, divorce, perfect second husband, suspicion of same–they all make for a thrilling ride in Dennis Lehane’s latest novel, Since We Fell.

Rachel Childs grows up desperate to know the identity of her father, a man whose presence in her life she barely remembers.  Her mother, noted author and professor Elizabeth Childs, steadfastly refuses to give her the information, taking his name to her grave.  After Elizabeth’s death, Rachel finds her mother’s journals containing notes on her father that could help in the search.  She goes to the office of Brian Delacroix, a private investigator, whom she had tried to hire several years earlier in her attempt to find her father.  At that time he had refused to take the case, saying that there was simply not enough information for him to even begin the search.  Now, with the journals giving possible clues, he agrees to look.

However, he has no luck now even with the journals to help him.  Rachel continues with her life, graduating from college and getting a job as a reporter with several small papers before landing at the Boston Globe.  But along with her professional success come more personal problems–intermittently-occurring panic attacks and agoraphobia.   Doing her best to ignore them, she leaves the Globe and becomes an internationally-known television reporter until she has a very public breakdown while reporting on the aftermath of the huge earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010.

Now Rachel is almost never seen in public.  She has become virtually housebound, partly because of her agoraphobia and partly because she is still recognized in public as the reporter who had had an emotional meltdown in front of millions of viewers.  Either way, inside is safer for her than outside.  Her career in shambles, her marriage over, Rachel’s runs into Brian at a bar where she has gone to “celebrate” her divorce. They had been in touch sporadically, once a chance meeting on a Boston street and then through an email or two.  But now she recognizes her attraction to Brian, and the two become a couple.

The first half of the book is deceptively straightforward, but the suspense quickly builds in the second half when you least expect it.  After Rachel finds out the truth of her father’s disappearance, the novel veers into new and unexpected territory.

Since We Fell has more twists and turns than a roller coaster, each one blindsiding the reader and making it compulsory to continue reading.  The plot is spellbinding, and if I tell you that I’ve described less than one-third of the novel, you can see how complicated the story is.  Rachel is a fascinating protagonist, capable and bright on one hand, struggling with terrifying insecurities and fears on the other.

Dennis Lehane has written another outstanding novel about people searching for the truth, for happiness, and all the other meaningful things in life.  We learn how crippling an unhappy childhood can be and the difficult steps Rachel tries to take to overcome her past.  Life isn’t easy for her, but, as the song says, she’s doing her best, movin’ on down the road.

You can read more about Dennis Lehane at this web site.

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

Did you know that there’s really an invasion of feral hogs coming up the east coast from the south?  It has reached the woods of northern Maine, beginning to impact the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and most particularly game warden Mike Bowditch.

Mike and his girlfriend Stacey, a biologist for the same state agency, are in the woods hoping to kill a sow and her piglets.  Feral hogs are huge, often weighing over two pounds and are extremely destructive to the environment, tearing up whole whole forests and polluting streams with their waste.  They also carry several diseases and parasites, which is why the U.S. Department of Agriculture has advised killing them on sight.

Stacey quickly dispatches the two sows in the group, and when she and Mike go over to get a closer look they find the remains of an infant buried in the mud.  Near the baby’s body the initials KC have been scratched into the bark of a tree.  Two days earlier, Mike had been at this very spot looking for the swine and neither the corpse nor the initials had been there.

Returning to the area the next day, Mike talks to the owner of the local convenience store, Eddie Fales.  Eddie tells him he knows everyone who lives in the area and that no one is living in the woods.  He sounds convincing, but still Mike decides to drive a bit farther down the road and check things out.  Just about at the end of the road there’s a house, almost abandoned-looking but showing tire marks that someone has tried to brush away from the driveway.  Calling the state police detective in charge of the case, he is told she’ll send a trooper in the morning to look into who might be living in the house and that Mike should stay away in the meantime.  But, Mike being Mike, he’s not able to leave the puzzling question unanswered.

Thus starts the harrowing adventure that is Knife Creek, the eighth in the Mike Bowditch mystery series.  Mike is a great protagonist, dedicated to his job, caring and compassionate to his friends, definitely not afraid to break a few rules when he thinks it’s necessary.  The latter is what got him into trouble early in his career, and it’s something he’s still dealing with–when to follow his superiors’ orders and when not to.  And in this novel there are plenty of occasions he decides to go his own way, for better or worse.

Paul Doiron has written another powerful book in this series, one that will keep you on edge until the very end.  The setting, the plot, and the characters are all first-rate; of course, by this time I expect nothing less from the author.  FYI, I’ve chosen Trespasser, the second Mike Bowditch novel, to represent the state of Maine in the course on New England mysteries I’m teaching in the fall at Brandeis University’s BOLLI Program.

You can read more about Paul Doiron at this website.

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

Assistant district attorney Abby Endicott is facing a number of personal challenges in her life.  There’s her mother’s refusal to deal with alcohol abuse, Abby’s out-of-control financial debts, the two-edged sword of possibly being named district attorney now that the current one is running for mayor, and her confused feelings about her live-in boyfriend.  Then the perfect storm–all these challenges come together when a body is found.

Still on a leave of absence following a homicide, Abby simply can’t stay away from the action.  So when she gets a call from Boston police detective Kevin Farnsworth that a corpse has been found in an alley in the city’s Eastie section, Abby is on her way.  The victim is a young woman with what look like strangulation marks on her neck, a death that is very similar to that of a Boston University student whose body was found a few weeks earlier.  Both women had similar bruises, both apparently had been raped and their bodies moved from where the murders took place.

There’s no identification with the second body, but there is an ink stamp on the back of one hand.  It’s the design of a bar in Cambridge that Abby knows from her days at Harvard Law School, so she and Kevin head over to the Crazy Fox to see if someone knew the woman.  The bar’s manager says he can’t identify her from the cell phone video that Kevin shows him, but the bar’s security camera confirms that she had been there that night.  She apparently entered the Crazy Fox alone, but she left with a man, and when the manager tells Abby and Kevin that man’s name, Abby knows the case has just entered dangerous territory.  The man is Tommy Greenough, the son of a senator and a member of one of Boston’s richest families.

What makes Abby a particularly interesting heroine is the mix of positive and negative attributes she has; she’s most decidedly not a one-dimensional character.  On the positive side:  she’s bright, determined, not awed by authority.  On the negative:  she’s deeply in debt, spoiled by the life she’s led thus far, and facing attractions to other men besides the one with whom she’s living.  At times you will admire her, at other times you’ll want to shake her into recognition of how the real world works for most people.  There are a great couple of sentences near the end of the book that encapsulate my point:  “On the way home from work, I stop by Macy’s,  I’ve walked past the store a million times, but have never been inside.  I’m desperate since I had to let go of my housekeeper….”  You get the point.  But so does she, and she’s working on changing her life to fit her new circumstances.

The Graves is an excellent follow-up to Mission Hill, the first book featuring Abby Endicott.  I’m looking forward to the third novel in the series to see where Abby’s next case takes her.

You can read more about Pamela Wechsler at this website.

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