Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for November, 2018

Every novel by Sara Paretsky is wonderful, and her latest is no exception.  Shell Game brings Chicago-based private detective V. I. Warshawski into the all-too-timely issue of immigration, both legal and illegal, that is facing the United States now.

Shell Game opens with V. I. (Vic) making her way through the woods with a Cook County deputy sheriff and Felix Herschel, the nephew of her dearest friend Lotty.  Felix was contacted by the authorities to identify the brutalized body of a dead man who had Felix’s name and phone number on a note in his jean pocket.  His response to the officer in charge, Lieutenant McGivney, and V. I. when seeing the body strikes them both as strange.  “I don’t know him.  Where is he from?”

Felix, a Canadian citizen, is a graduate student at the Illinois Institute of Technology and is active in the university’s Engineers for a Free State.  He tells Vic that he and several other international students had been picked up by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities a few weeks earlier, and he had been held for several hours by ICE without benefit of legal representation before he was released.  Although ICE said it was checking on the immigration status of all foreign students, Felix said that only students from the Middle East or South America were actually detained.  As a favor to Lotty, Vic is willing to look into the case, but Felix will tell her nothing, and without his help there’s not much she can do.

The next morning V. I. is greeted at her apartment house by an unexpected visitor.  It’s her niece Harmony, the daughter of her former husband’s sister.  Harmony has come to Chicago to look for her sister Reno who had arrived in the city several weeks earlier to look for a job.  She got one through her Uncle Dick, Vic’s ex, but he was less than enthusiastic to see his niece and told her that this was the only favor he was doing for her and not to bother him again.

All Harmony knows about what happened to Reno is that she obtained a job at Rest EZ, a payday loan company, and that shortly after she started she received a promotion and the opportunity to fly to the Caribbean for the company’s Mardi Gras party.  When Reno returned she was upset and agitated but wouldn’t tell her sister more than that.  Becoming upset herself, Harmony flew from Oregon to Chicago to talk to Reno, but Reno is no longer working for Rest EZ nor is she at her apartment.  Their Uncle Dick professes to know nothing about this and to care less, so it’s up to “Auntie Vic” to find Reno.

As always, Vic is the person you want if you need a private investigator.  She is smart, determined, loyal, and tough.  And she’s always on the side of the  underdog.

Ms. Paretsky joins current authors who infuse their mysteries with current events; these include Julia Keller’s novels concerning drug abuse and Auzma Kahanet Khan’s on war refugees.  In addition to being exciting books with strong protagonists and stories, they bring readers issues straight from the headlines.  Shell Game is another example of Sara Paretsky’s skill in invoking a strong heroine in today’s world.

You can read more about her at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

Ragnar Jónasson has started a new series, and like his previous “Dark Iceland” series it’s a winner.  While the first series features a male protagonist who is a detective in a small town in a remote part of the country, The Darkness introduces a female detective inspector in the capital.

Hulda Hermannsdóttir is a few months away from her much-dreaded mandatory retirement.  Being a police detective has been her entire life, and she can’t imagine what she will do when she’s no longer working.  Then she’s called into her boss’ office and given the worst possible news–her replacement has arrived and she must clear out her desk immediately.

Hulda is able to bargain for two more weeks, which is reluctantly granted, but since all her cases have already been allocated to other officers, she can only look into “cold cases,” those that were never solved at the time the crime was committed.

Determined to stay until the last possible day, Hulda begins looking into one from a year earlier, a case that she believes was never properly investigated.  Maybe, she thinks, that’s because Elena was a young asylum-seeking woman, with no command of either Icelandic or English, who apparently had no one interested enough to make a fuss over the lack of police diligence.

In Hulda’s opinion, the investigating officer had gone out of his way to portray the death as accidental.  Given the low number of murders annually in Iceland, one or two on average, and the much higher incidence of accidents, it was easy for the police to conclude that the death had been simply an unfortunate event.

When Hulda starts investigating, she meets with Elena’s solicitor and discovers that the woman was almost certainly going to be granted political asylum.  The detective gets the name of the translator whom the solicitor employed to get the facts for the asylum application; since the lawyer spoke no Russian, Elena’s only language, the lawyer needed a Russian speaker.

The translator, Bjartur, tells Hulda that he never spoke to any other member of the police and only met with Elena once or twice.  However, he tells her that Elena had confided to him that she was a prostitute, and he thinks she may have been brought to Iceland specifically for that reason.  When Hulda asks him why he never mentioned this before, he says, apologetically, “Nobody asked.”

Now certain that the initial investigation was poorly handled, Hulda is more determined than ever to find out the truth behind Elena’s untimely death.

Ragnar Jónasson is one of a group of Icelandic writers who have made that small country an important part of the current international mystery scene.  In addition to his writing, he is also the co-founder of Iceland Noir, an annual conference held in Reykjavik featuring authors in the mystery genre.

You can read more about Ragnar Jónasson at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

David Hazard is one of only a handful of transgender protagonists in the mystery genre, at least to my knowledge.  A native of Little Compton, Rhode Island, he has just been fired as an assistant professor at Xavier College because the school’s authorities have discovered his sexual identity.

Born as Rosalie Hazard, even as a child David felt he was in the wrong body, and when he was able to do so he began the surgeries and medical procedures to change his female body into a male’s.  He’s happy about that, but he doesn’t fool himself into believing that he will be able to obtain another teaching position easily.  Thus, without a salary, his only option is to return to his childhood home and to the problems that await him there.

The main problem is that his grandmother, Maggie, is slipping away from the world due to dementia.  From moment to moment her mind wanders from past to present, not recognizing her grandson one minute and knowing who he is the next.

It’s not surprising, then, that when David receives a phone call from Maggie to say that she’s found a dead body with blood all around it, he assumes it’s a symptom of her disordered mind.  When he drives to her house and finds nothing out of place, that seems to confirm it.  But when he goes next door to see his “Aunt” Emma, who has taken on a major role in caring for Maggie, there is Emma’s body on the kitchen floor, just as his grandmother had said.

At first it appears that her death is due to a tragic accident that might well happen to an elderly woman while she was in her kitchen–a heavy pot falls from a shelf, lands on her head, and cracks her skull.  But Billy Dyer, the small town’s chief of police, doesn’t buy that.  He thinks someone stood over Emma and deliberately brought the pot down on her.  Then whoever it was pulled the rest of the pots from the shelf to make it appear an accident.

Little by little old secrets are revealed.  There’s the matter of the three million dollar legacy that Emma left to an Arabella Johnson, who turns out to be the daughter no one knew Emma had.  There’s the story of Teddy Johnson, Emma’s fiancé, who was drafted and went off to Korea and never returned.  There’s the mysterious couple who arrived in Little Compton shortly before Emma’s death and stood, according to the town’s mourners, much too close to the casket than was proper for outsiders.  Little Compton is a bastion of Yankeeness (a word I just coined).

Doug Burgess has written an outstanding first novel.  His characters are realistic, his plot tight, and his dialogue rings true.  And, in David Hazard, he has created an appealing protagonist who, I hope, will be featured in other mysteries.

You can read more about Doug Burgess at this site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

When I came across this quotation on Google, it seemed the perfect description of the politicians in Paper Goods, Goldie Taylor’s debut mystery novel.  “Politics have no relations to morals,” said Niccolò Machiavelli, often called the father of modern political science.  His cynical view is seen on every page of Ms. Taylor’s excellent book.

Victoria Dobbs is the mayor of Atlanta and a protégée of Ezra Hawkins, a United States representative for the district that covers Georgia’s capital.  The two go way back, both in city hall politics and in their membership in the fabled Ebenezer Baptist Church where Martin Luther King, Jr. preached.  Their politics have mostly been in accord over the years, but now it appears that a major division has taken place over a bill that is due for a vote in Congress, and neither one will give way to the other.

Mayor Dobbs is seated in the church’s sanctuary, listening to remarks by Hawkins, when a rifle shot shatters the building’s ceiling and kills Hawkins and three other parishioners, with more critically injured.  The F.B.I. and the Atlanta Police Department are immediately on the scene, but it is the mayor who becomes the spokesperson for the massacre.  “There will be justice,” she promises.

Victoria rules the city with an iron hand and doesn’t take orders from anyone on any topic.  When she is called several hours after the shooting and informed by her police chief that his officers have surrounded the house with the suspected shooter inside and are trying to take him into custody, she gives the command to “Put him down….I said shoot him.”

On the mayor’s trail is Hampton Bridges, an investigative journalist who is definitely a persona non grata at City Hall or anywhere else under Victoria’s control.  He is writing a series of articles about corruption in her office, including questions about her brother’s conflicts of interest while controlling billions in public spending.  That finally prompted Victoria to remove her brother from her mayoral campaign but did nothing to improve the already tense relationship between the reporter and the mayor.  And Victoria’s not-so-secret desire to take Ezra’s place in a special election for Congress is pushing Hampton to work ever more feverishly to lay bare her secrets and make certain she loses.

Hampton is not the only one eager to make sure that Victoria doesn’t get to D. C.  Virgil Loudermilk, the white power broker in Atlanta, had been behind Victoria in previous elections, but since she’s stymied a bill he wanted passed that would have earned him millions, he has become her enemy.  And he is a powerful one.

Goldie Taylor, editor at The Daily Beast, former political consultant and filmmaker, obviously knows whereof she writes.  Paper Goods is a close look into the not-very-pretty state of politics in America today, rife with corruption and back-room deals.  No one in this novel is totally innocent, and the reader’s sympathies will go from one character to another with each discovery of dirty dealing.  The plot is tight and the characters totally believable.  Ms. Taylor will keep you reading until the last page.

You can read more about Goldie Taylor at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.