Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for December, 2020

Troubled Blood, the fifth novel featuring Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, is, to put it simply, a masterpiece of mystery fiction.  It’s a long masterpiece, weighing in (and I don’t use that expression carelessly) at 927 pages, but it’s worth every page.

Strike’s private investigations agency is doing very well after a rocky start.  Robin is now his partner, they have hired two additional investigators and a secretary, and there is a waiting list for their services.  But although professionally things are going well for Strike and Robin, their personal lives are not so smooth.

Strike’s aunt Joan, who basically brought up Strike and his sister following the many times their unstable mother disappeared from their lives, is dying of cancer, and Strike is teetering between wanting to spend time with her and his inability to know how to behave with her at this difficult time.

He is also being bombarded by requests from his half-brother Al to join the family in celebrating their famous father’s 80th birthday and the release of his latest rock album.  Strike has absolutely no desire to see his father again; the two have met only twice in Strike’s life, and he tells Al not to call him again about this get-together.  But Al is persistent.

Robin, meantime, has her own issues.  She is separated from her husband, but Matthew seems determined to make their divorce as difficult as possible.  Even her attorney agrees.  “I’ve never known a childless divorce to be so contentious,” she tells Robin, as Matthew cancels mediation meeting after mediation meeting.  But Robin is determined to see the procedure through to the end.

While visiting his aunt in St. Mawes, Cornwall, Strike is approached by a woman with an unusual request.  She introduces herself as Anna and tells the detective that she’d like to talk with him about her mother, Margot Bamborough, who disappeared more than forty years earlier.  Although reluctant to get involved, Strike’s curiosity overtakes him and he agrees to visit Anna and her wife the following day to hear the entire story.

The search for Margot is at the center of Troubled Blood, but there are many, many subplots to the novel in addition to the story of Strike’s estrangement from his father and his step-siblings, his aunt’s imminent death, and Robin’s attempts to put her marriage behind her.  What is the true story of Margot’s medical practice?  Her marriage?  Her husband’s remarriage to their nanny?  Strike’s ex-girlfriend’s barrage of texts to him, each one more desperate than the one before?  Robin’s ill-at-ease feeling with one of the firm’s employees?

Troubled Blood is a fascinating novel in its own right that is made even better by being the fifth in the series.  If you start at the beginning with The Cuckoo’s Calling and read all the books, you can see the characters develop and grow.  Robert Galbraith/aka J. K. Rowling, is a master in describing the dozens of characters in this story, as well as writing a plot with an amazing ending.  This is a book worth spending time with, perhaps starting at Christmas and going straight through to New Year’s Day.

You can read about Robert Galbraith 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.

Moonflower Murders is a mystery novel with another mystery novel tucked inside it, a tour de force.  The talented and extremely prolific Anthony Horowitz has done it again.

Susan Ryeland was first introduced in Magpie Murders, a novel I greatly enjoyed but strangely didn’t review in this blog.  Well, I’m not about to make that same mistake with Susan’s second appearance.

In Magpie Murders, Susan was working in a publishing house and editing Alan Conway’s most recent novel.  Several years have gone by since then, and Conway has died.  Difficult as he was in life, he remains equally so in death.  One of Conway’s novels is what brings Susan to Branlow Hall at the request of the hotel’s owners, Lawrence and Pauline Treherne, to investigate the disappearance of their older daughter Cecily.

Eight years before Moonflower Murders opens, Cecily Treherne marries Aiden MacNeil at the family’s hotel.  Immediately after the ceremony the body of a guest, Frank Parris, is discovered in his room, and the wedding dissolves into chaos.  After a brief investigation, one of the hotel’s employees, a Romanian immigrant named Stefan Codrescu, confesses to the murder.  Stefan has been imprisoned ever since, but Cecily has continued to insist that he is innocent of the crime.

Just before she went missing, as the British say, Cecily calls her parents to tell them that she has proof that Stefan is innocent, proof that she found at the beginning of Alan Conway’s murder mystery Atticus Pünd Takes the Case.  The Trehernes tell Susan that several weeks after Parris was murdered, Conway came to Branlow Hall and stayed for a few weeks, interviewing family members and staff; he later published Atticus Pünd Takes the Case, obviously basing his book on the murder that took place at the hotel.

Now the Trehernes want to hire Susan to look into their daughter’s disappearance because she was the editor of Conway’s book.  They offer Susan ten thousand pounds to return to England from Greece, where she and her almost-fiancé own a small and less luxurious hotel than Branlow Hall, and find their daughter.  They don’t agree with Cecily’s belief that Stefan is innocent and don’t want her to investigate Parris’ death; their only wish is for Susan to locate the missing woman.

In true Golden Age style, there is a small group of people with a motive for murder, or, in this case, possibly a motive for murders.  This includes, but is not limited to Lisa, Cecily’s sister; Aiden, Cecily’s husband; Joanne and Martin Williams, sister and brother-in-law of Frank Parris; Eloise Radmoni, Cecily and Aiden’s daughter’s nanny; and Derek Endicott, an employee of Treherne’s hotel.  And the motives are the usual ones–jealousy, greed, and fear.

The most fascinating part of Moonflower Murders is that there is another complete book inside it–the aforementioned Atticus Pünd novel.  It’s a really clever conceit, so you’re actually reading two novels in one.  If you enjoy Golden Age mysteries that conclude with the protagonist confronting all the suspects in the library, or in this case the hotel’s lounge, you will love Moonflower Murders.

Anthony Horowitz, in addition to being the author of several adult mysteries, also writes the Alex Rider series for young adults and created both “Midsomer Murders” and “Foyle’s War” for PBS.  You can read more about him at this site.

It’s been exactly five years since Susan Cox’s debut mystery, The Man on the Washing Machine, was published, but now, happily, Theo Bogart has returned in The Man in the Microwave Oven.

Theo, an English ex-pat, moved to San Francisco to escape the publicity surrounding two deaths.  Her upper-class family was the subject of intense tabloid coverage after her father killed her mother and then hanged himself while awaiting trial.  Theo fled to San Francisco, changed her hair color and her name, bought a run-down building that now houses her apartment and her shop Aromas, and is trying to keep a low profile and stay out of the news.  But somehow she keeps stumbling into murders.

Theo’s neighborhood, around Polk Street, is a mixture of two- and three-story apartment buildings, but now the threat of a fifteen-story condo coming to their community has started bitter disputes within the formerly friendly neighborhood association.  Katrina Dermody, one of the neighbors, is the lawyer representing Amos Noble, the man who wants to put the condo in Fabian Gardens, and Katrina has a scorched-earth policy to stop everyone opposing her.  She’s even been keeping files on her neighbors, Theo discovers, making notes on their vulnerabilities.  For blackmail purposes, Theo wonders?

Trying hard to live by her grandfather’s advice, “Courtesy costs nothing,” Theo sees Katrina’s car and decides to say hello.  She bends down at the driver’s side window and sees it’s covered with blood, and a closer look shows Katrina staring straight ahead, obviously dead.

There are many people with whom Katrina feuded, so there is no shortage of people who disliked her.  But enough to murder her, Theo wonders?

At the memorial service, Theo discovers a side to the attorney she had never known.  A distant cousin of Katrina’s who had been living with her tells the people attending the service that the deceased had been funding a small orphanage in her home town of Kiev for years.  “Katrina didn’t want her philanthropy to be widely known,” Gavin says, “but I feel she wouldn’t mind me telling you about it now.”  It’s almost enough to make Theo sorry for her dislike of the late lawyer…almost, but not quite.

Then a stranger comes into Aromas, a man with a thick Russian accent, who tells Theo that he’s an old friend of a man he thinks she knows.  He shows her a newspaper photo of her grandfather, but she is reluctant to tell the man of their relationship.  She promises to ask around but instead calls her grandfather directly, and she finds out that there are even more family secrets than she had suspected.

Theo Bogart is a delightful heroine, a woman trying to reinvent herself in a new country.  But she’s finding out that, like the story of her grandfather and her mother, once you pull on a thread in a story everything begins to unravel.  The novel’s plot and the many interesting and unusual characters make The Man in the Microwave Oven a terrific read.

You can read more about Susan Cox 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.