Archive for June, 2021
THE ABDUCTION OF PRETTY PENNY by Leonard Goldberg: Book Review
Is is possible? Can Jack the Ripper actually be back in London, brutalizing and murdering young women on the streets of the city?
Genes will tell, and Joanna Holmes Blalock, daughter of Sherlock Holmes, is now a highly regarded investigator herself. As the novel opens, Joanna looks out the window of the flat at 221B Baker Street that she shares with her husband John and his father, Dr. Watson, the colleague of her late father, and asks them to give her their impressions of the woman standing in front of the building. Although both men are physicians and are accustomed to making skilled medical diagnoses, their skill sets cannot compare to Joanna’s abilities in this specialized area.
After her husband minutely describes the woman’s clothing, he deduces that she is a housewife on a shopping tour. Joanna begins her response with complimenting his keen eye for colors. “But unfortunately,” she continues, “you have missed everything of importance.” So Holmesian, don’t you agree?
Joanna’s explanation of why the woman is there, looking up at their windows, is of course correct. Judging by the anxious expression on the woman’s face, she intuits she has come to seek help, and her deduction is proven correct when Miss Hudson, their landlady, enters and asks their permission to bring the woman upstairs.
Emma Adams introduces herself and explains that she is the owner of the Whitechapel Playhouse in London’s East End. The players are currently putting on a production of Romeo and Juliet, and Penny Martin, the young woman who plays Juliet, has disappeared. Mrs. Adams emphasizes that everyone loves the beautiful actress and that she was thrilled to star in the play, but she had confided to Mrs. Adams that she was fearful that she was surrounded by danger. And then she disappeared.
Penny’s disappearance is followed by a string of gruesome murders of young women, each one more horrifying than the one before. Joanna and Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard are fearful that the way in which the killings have been carried out indicate that they may have been committed by Jack the Ripper, who last plied his trade nearly three decades earlier, or possibly by a copycat killer who has studied the Ripper’s crimes only too well.
There can be no doubt that Joanna has inherited her father’s investigative talent as well as her mother’s intelligence, looks, and poise, her mother being Irene Adler, the only woman who ever outwitted Holmes. Combining the best attributes of both parents, Joanna has made a name for herself in London, and like her father she relishes solving cases that have stymied Scotland Yard. Jack the Ripper had evaded the law twenty-eight years earlier, and Joanna is determined that if he has returned he shall not escape justice this time.
Leonard Goldberg is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the UCLA Medical Center and an author whose books have been translated into a dozen languages. You can read more about him 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.
A ROGUE’S COMPANY by Allison Montclair: Book Review
The joint owners of the Right Sort Marriage Bureau are as different, as the British expression goes, as chalk and cheese.
Iris Sparks, dark and petite, is single, worked for an unnamed government agency during the Second World War, had several love affairs, and is currently single but sexually involved with a mid-level gangster.
Gwendolyn Bainbridge, tall and blonde, is the widow of an army officer and mother of six-year-old Ronnie, who is the heir to the Bainbridge family fortune. Heartbroken by the death of her young husband, Gwen spent a year in a sanatorium, held there against her will due to the influence of her father-in-law Lord Bainbridge, who has been given custody of her young son.
Lord Bainbridge’s return from Africa has put the entire household in a turmoil as he makes everyone from the lowliest housemaid to his wife unhappy and on edge. And something is taking him out of the house and to his club every night, even on his first night home after six months away, something he refuses to explain.
Although it was Gwen’s late husband’s express wish that their son not be sent to St. Frideswide’s, the boarding school all the male Bainbridges attended, Lord Bainbridge is insistent that the boy be sent there. Unfortunately for both Gwen and Ronnie, the boy’s grandfather has complete control over Ronnie’s care and eduction until Gwen’s psychiatrist certifies that she is completely recovered from the breakdown over her husband’s death, something the doctor is not willing to do, at least not yet.
There is a lot going on in the lives of Gwen and Iris, both in their private lives and their professional lives. While Gwen is trying to deal with her antagonistic father-in-law, Iris is trying to come to terms with her past career in espionage and the rather unsavory affairs she had at that time.
Both women are attempting to make their business venture a success. Working together at their nascent match-making bureau, the women meet a new client, Mr. Daile. He has arrived in England after serving in the Royal British Navy during the war, and he tells Iris and Gwen he wishes to meet a good Christian woman with proper values who is willing to live in a rural community in England or elsewhere. Perhaps even in Nyasaland, his home country, for Mr. Daile is the agency’s first African client, as well as its first non-white one.
Gwen is bothered by her feeling that Mr. Daile seems to be everywhere she is. Once could be a coincidence, she thinks, but the second or third time she is seriously unnerved by the man and his motorcycle. When she confides her feelings to her partner, Iris secretly contacts her boyfriend to see what he can find out about their new client.
Although the book takes place more than seventy years ago, there is a timelessness about Iris and Gwen. Both are living through a period of unprecedented change that has come about after World War II. It includes new opportunities for women but still encumbers them with the stereotypes they hoped had been left behind.
Allison Montclair is the pseudonym of an author who has written fantasy, horror, and science fiction. You can read more about her at various sites on the web.
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.
THIEF OF SOULS by Brian Klingborg: Book Review
Wuxi, a small town in China where the crime rate is extremely low, is the new home of Inspector Lu Fei. Exiled there because of disagreements with his former boss, Lu frequents the Red Lotus bar several times a week, mainly for lack of anything better to do, but also because its owner, Yanyan, is easy to look at and a pleasure to talk to.
It’s Lu’s night off, so he’s surprised when his cell phone rings. It’s a call from the paichusuo, the local Public Security Bureau station. The paichusuo has the same functions as a Western police station, being in charge of crime prevention, public safety, and traffic control, plus a few other duties that are essential in China–including keeping watch on foreigners and visitors in Wuxi.
Lu is informed that there’s been a murder in town, so he and several officers go to the scene. The house belonged to the murder victim,Yang Fenfang, a young woman from Wuxi whose mother recently died. So recently, in fact, that a funeral portrait of Yang Hong, Fenfang’s mother, is still on a shelf, near an altar with her ancestral tablet and offerings of food and drink to follow Mother Yang into the afterlife.
A neighbor informs Lu about Zang Zhaoxing, an admirer of Fenfang’s, and Lu goes to interview him. Zang tells the police that he works at the local pork processing plant, so it’s not too surprising when they find a set of coveralls in the yard with stains that could be blood. After Zang makes an unwise attempt to flee, Lu and the other officers capture him and bring him to the paichusuo for more interrogation.
But before the questioning can occur, Lu calls the Criminal Investigation Bureau and is told by Superintendent Song that he and his staff will arrive in Wuxi in the morning and take over the case. When Song arrives, he’s accompanied by Ma Xiulan, a forensic physician. When Dr. Ma begins her examination of Fenfang, she and the police discover that an autopsy has already been performed on the corpse. Or, at least someone has cut open the body and stitched it closed again.
Brian Klingborg has written a fascinating novel of life in today’s China. In Lu Fei he has created a character with intelligence, personality, and morality who must live within the authoritarian political system while maintaining his integrity in the face of those who more readily accept an easy solution to a crime. I hope that Lu Fei will appear in many more novels that provide readers insight into modern-day China.
Brian Klingborg has a master’s in East Asian Studies and lived and traveled in Asia for years. You can read more about him at various sites on the internet.
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.
WHAT DOESN’T KILL US by David Housewright: Book Review
It started off innocently enough, with a favor for a close friend. Rushmore McKenzie is approached by his long-time buddy David Deese, who has a problem that is becoming increasingly common in this internet age. Deese’s sister T (never Terry or Rese or any other logical nickname for her given name of Teresa) had sent a sample of her DNA to an ancestry-testing website and had been pestering her brother to do the same. He ignored her request for a while but then suddenly, and secretly, sent his DNA sample to the same company.
And, like many unexpected things, this one proves to have unexpected consequences. Instead of the result Deese expects, his DNA shows that he and T are only half-siblings, and that the man whom he believed was his biological father was, in fact, no relation to him at all. Severely shaken by this news, Deese tells neither his wife nor his sister, but instead confides in McKenzie and asks him to find out more about his new family. So McKenzie, who can never turn down a request for a favor, starts out to do just that.
What Doesn’t Kill Us has a storyline I haven’t come across before. In the book’s foreward called Just So You Know, the reader learns that in the course of his investigation McKenzie was shot in the back by a .32 caliber handgun “yet did not die, at least not permanently.” Because his heart stopped twice, the second time for four minutes and ten seconds, he was placed in a medically-induced coma, and much of the narrative consists of things that happened while he was unconscious and were told to him after the fact. It’s a very clever device.
Because McKenzie has done so many favors for so many people, his friends rush to find the person who attempted to kill him. Those friends are a disparate group–his closest friend Bobby Dunston, a police commander in St. Paul; “Chopper” Coleman, a former drug pusher, now a ticket scalper who is one step ahead of the law; Chopper’s assistant Herzog, who has been in and out of prison multiple times for burglary, manslaughter, and weapons charges; Riley Brodin-Mulally, a wealthy corporate executive; Dave Deese, of course; and several others who feel that they owe McKenzie big-time and will do anything to help him.
The only person who is less than enthusiastic about McKenzie is Jean Shipman, a detective on the St. Paul police force. She’d rather be investigating anything, even jaywalking, than looking into the shooting, but Bobby Dunston is adamant. You are my best investigator, he tells her, and I want you on the case to the exclusion of everything else. Put that way, she can hardly refuse.
The Rushmore McKenzie series is a long one, but What Doesn’t Kill Us, number eighteen, gives the reader enough information to understand McKenzie’s background, how he came to resign from the police force, become an unlicensed private investigator, and meet and marry his wife Nina. David Housewright is a skilled author whose plots are riveting and whose characters are alive and realistic. He never disappoints.
David Housewright is an Edgar-winning author and past President of the Private Eye Writers of America. You can read more about him 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.