Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for May, 2024

Influencers are everywhere, promoting everything.  Gemma Jorgenson is the face and body behind @GymmaGemma, with almost half a million followers hanging on her every word about how she shed one hundred pounds and became a fitness model, personal trainer, and bodybuilder.  Now she’s at the Olympia, the world’s most prestigious bodybuilding competition.  She placed second in the Bikini contest two years in a row, got blown out of the water last year, and decided against competing this year.  However, she hasn’t yet told Rick, her coach, or Chuck, the owner of REIGN, the exercise clothing brand Gemma represents, about her decision.

Then her close friend and fellow competitor, Bianca, is murdered, and Gemma discovers that her husband has a major part of his life that he’s not sharing with her.  Dealing with depression over her friend’s death and anger over her husband’s secrets, she changes her mind and decides to compete in the Olympia, Bikini category, after all.  In addition she’ll try to cope with what she calls Fat Gemma, the part of her that is left over from when she was heavy and had no control over her eating.

Ashley is where Gemma was a year earlier.  She’s always been overweight, a fact she’s frequently reminded of by her mother, a slim woman who watches everything she eats and everything Ashley eats as well.  Ashley’s tried various diets over the years, only to fall off the wagon and regain the weight she lost or even more.  And then she has an “accidental” meeting with Lydia, who is promoting her own agenda, one which is totally opposed to the perfect (i.e., skinny) body.  Before she knows it, Ashley is volunteering for Lydia’s group that is against the Diet Culture.

Ashley’s day job is a software engineer, and she’s very good at it.  Lydia hires her, stressing the need for them to fight against society’s idealization of the ultra-thin body, and Ashley installs ransomware on a clothing network, shuts down a pro-anorexia site, and puts malware on a fat-shaming account.  Now she’s being asked to hack into the patient records of the medical center A New You and steal its patient files.  She’s having second thoughts about this, but Lydia is very persuasive and Ashley is desperate for her approval.

As with all good mysteries, there is more to Bodies to Die For than simply the plot.  The novel raises interesting points about how we view people and make assumptions based on their appearance–their race, their attire, and most definitely their bodies.  We all know that being overweight is a major health problem, leading to many physical illnesses and possibly an early death, but when does society’s attempts to deal with obesity with extreme diets and weight loss pills become an obsession that may become just as detrimental to one’s health as being overweight?

With recognizable characters and a fast-moving story, Bodies to Die For is a book that readers will keep thinking about long after they’ve finished it.  Lori Brand has written a compelling mystery that resonates all too well in today’s world.

You can read more about the author 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.

Johnny Reddy has been gone for four years, and not many people have missed him.  A good-looking charmer from childhood, he was always looking for something that his hometown of Ardnakelty couldn’t provide, always working on some plan or con to make himself rich.  Now he’s come back, bringing trouble with him.

Trey is the oldest Reddy daughter living at home.  At fifteen, she’s the one who remembers what it was like before her father went away and how much more peaceful the last four years have been.  For the past two years she’s been working after school with Cal Hooper, a Chicago police detective who took early retirement and found the town pretty much by looking at a map of Ireland, then deciding to move there.

Returning home alone, Johnny tells the town the reason he’s there and who will be following him.  He had met an Englishman in a London pub who was looking for someone from Ardnakelty, which is where he says his own family is from.  This man, Cillian Rushborough, heard from his grandmother that there was gold buried in the mountains surrounding the town.

Johnny tells his daughter and the men of the town that he has a plan to make certain Rushborough finds gold, or at least enough of it to assure him that there’s more to be found.  His plan is to “salt” the river with gold; the next step is to convince Rushborough that there’s gold in the fields and that he needs to buy digging rights from the men who own them.  As he says to the townsmen, “If Mr. Rushborough wants gold, then we’ll have to make sure he finds gold.”

As the plan goes, the Englishman will end up buying the rights to a portion of each man’s fields for a couple of thousand pounds, of which Johnny will get a percentage.  If there’s gold to be found, that will be great; if not, the men will have gotten money they didn’t have before, and Rushborough, although disappointed, will go home with stories about his Irish heritage to tell his friends.

After meeting Rushborough, the men of the town seem won over.  He appears unassuming but polished, fascinated by the stories he’s told of generations gone by.  Slowly but surely they appear to be drawn into the plan.

But then things slowly begin to go awry.  The townspeople are more savvy than it appears at first, Trey has her own ideas for working on this con, and Cal, an outsider, has to decide between keeping his own counsel or trying to protect Trey from the fallout when the Englishman discovers that there’s no gold to be had except for that deliberately placed in the river to persuade him to part with his money.

The Hunter is an engrossing story of a small town trying to get the better of a stranger in their midst, egged on by someone they know isn’t trustworthy but whom they still want to believe.  There’s greed, betrayal, kindness, and caring enough for readers to wish they could be hiding in the mountains surrounding the town to find out what is really going on in Ardnakelty.  The characters are believable, and the plot will keep you turning page after page.

Tana French is an American-Irish author living in Dublin.  Her novels have won the Edgar and Anthony awards, among others.  You can read more about her at this website.

A familiar scene–high school seniors Ryan and Ali are sitting in a car in a secluded spot.  Then, out of nowhere, one of the doors opens, Ryan is knocked out with a blow to his head.  When he regains consciousness, Ali and the car are gone.

Five years later, Ryan has completed his first year of law school at Georgetown.  He’s on an alumni-funded trip to Italy, a perk for the editorial board of the school’s law review, and when he returns to his room after a few hours at a local bar, there’s an envelope under his door.  “I need to see you.  Tomorrow, 10 a.m. at the palazzo.  I know who you are.”

After the terrifying episode with Ali, Ryan was the suspect in her disappearance.  The police found it hard to believe that he had been attacked so severely that he didn’t regain consciousness until the next morning, that he hadn’t put up any fight, that he didn’t know what happened to his girlfriend.  The official police questions and the comments from internet trolls eventually quieted down, but Ryan couldn’t put it all behind him.

Trying to start college with a clean slate he legally changed his last name, so that the name that his college and law school friends know him by is not his birth name.  But now apparently there’s someone out there who knows.

Back in Ryan’s home town of Lawrence, Kansas, Poppy McGee is the new deputy sheriff.  She’s hoping that her military experience will help her in her new job, but she’s not sure of herself and her skills.  Then, on her first day on the job, a car is found submerged in a local lake, and when it’s pulled out it’s discovered that it’s Ali’s car.

If Something Happens to Me is told in several voices, all of them compelling.  The first is Ryan’s, who has never forgotten his first love and now, despite the possible danger, is determined to follow the clues left in the unsigned letter.

The second voice is Poppy’s, and she’s discovering some upsetting things about how the investigation into Ali’s disappearance was handled five years earlier, the first that the lake hadn’t been searched when the young woman disappeared.  Poppy has liked and trusted the sheriff since her childhood, especially since her father was in Iraq with him, but now she’s beginning to have some uncomfortable questions.

Shane O’Leary’s voice is the third.  He’s the father of Anthony, a teenaged boy who doesn’t fit in anywhere.  Then, surprisingly, Anthony is invited to a school party where the “cool kids” are; it turns into a violent, humiliating evening with him as the victim.  But those other teenagers don’t know who Anthony’s father is and what he will do to even the score.

Alex Finlay brings all these threads together into a spellbinding mystery that skillfully combines murder, revenge, and love.  The plot is brilliant, the characters totally believable, and the suspense just keeps building and building.

You can read more about the author at this website.

The Final Curtain is the last mystery featuring Tokyo police detective Kyoichiro Kaga.  Thus, it’s totally appropriate that this novel gives the reader the definitive look into Kaga’s somewhat mysterious past and how it intersects with the present-day investigations of a series of seemingly unconnected deaths.

Yasuyo Miyamoto is the owner of Seven, a restaurant and bar in the city of Sendai.  She’s approached by a woman in need of a job who has left her husband and child and now has to support herself.  Yasuyo offers this woman, Yuriko Tajima, a position, and it proves to be an excellent decision, as Yuriko is definitely an asset to Seven.

There is something mysterious about the new hire, but Yasuyo believes that whatever it is, it’s up to Yuriko to share it when she’s ready.  That time, however, never comes, although Yuriko does confide to Yasuyo that she is in a relationship with one of the bar’s patrons, Shunichi Watabe.

The years go by, and eventually Yuriko becomes ill and quits working at the bar.  Concerned about her, Yasuyo decides to visit her apartment but gets no response from calling her on the building’s intercom.  Yasuyo prevails upon the landlord to open the apartment door and finds her friend’s body on the floor; it’s obvious that Yuriko has been dead for some time.

Watabe refuses to either pick up Yuriko’s ashes or arrange for a funeral service, and the sad tasks fall on Yasuyo.  However, Watabe does reveal one vital piece of information.  Yuriko was the mother of Kyoichiro Kaga.  When Yasuyo tracks down Kaga and informs him of his mother’s death, he agrees to take his mother’s ashes and tells Yasuyo the story of his mother’s abandonment of himself and his father.  She left when Kaga was a teenager and never contacted them again.

Ten years pass before we meet Kaga again.  He is now a detective in the Tokyo Police Department, and through his cousin, also a detective, he becomes involved in one murder case and then a second, with only the fact that both victims were strangled tying the two cases together.  When Kaga begins his investigation he finds that strands of the case appear to go back to his childhood and involve another disappearance, this time a father and his daughter.

Kyoichiro Kaga is an insightful detective, and he is able to weave the strands together and solve three mysteries that have their beginnings in the past but their solutions in the present.  Following his career path through the previous novels gives the reader an excellent look into Japan’s culture and people, and The Final Curtain is a fitting finale to this outstanding series.

You can read more about Keigo Higashino 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.

Purity, Maine, is the small town that former CIA agent Maggie Bird has moved to, consciously because she has several friends there, and perhaps unconsciously because of its name.  Above all Maggie desires peace and safety, and for two years she’s relished having both in her new home.  Then comes a figure out of her past that changes everything.

Maggie finds out from her neighbor’s granddaughter that a woman had been in town the day before, asking for the owner of Blackberry Farm.  Although the woman hadn’t mentioned Maggie by name, she’s given directions to the farm, and the following day Maggie, returning from her errands, gets an alert on her phone that her home’s security has been breached.

When Maggie enters her kitchen, she sees a young woman who is calmly pulling out a chair and making herself  comfortable, not at all frightened by the gun pointing at her.  She calls herself Bianca, although Maggie doubts that’s her real name, and she tells Maggie that she needs her help in find another former CIA agent, Diana Ward.  Diana has “dropped off the radar,” last seen a few days earlier in Thailand.

Diana and Maggie were two of the people involved in Operation Cyrano sixteen years earlier, an episode that did not end well for a number of people, including Maggie.  When Bianca persists in her efforts to get her to join the search for the missing woman, that she may be in trouble, Maggie is unmoved.  Thinking of the history she and Diana shared during Cyrano, Maggie tells her visitor, “I don’t give a ____ what happens to her,” and closes the door in Bianca’s face.

When Maggie goes to a meeting of her bookclub/Martini Club that night with her friends who were also agents or otherwise involved with the Agency, she learns that they all know about her visitor.  Ben Diamond and Declan Rose are unapologetic about sharing the news with Ingrid and Lloyd Slocum, with Ben saying to Maggie, “I felt they needed to know. When an outsider shows up in our little town, it causes ripples.”

The five have just finished drinks and dinner but haven’t begun to discuss the book chosen for that month when Maggie’s cell phone rings.  It’s her neighbor, who tells her something is going on at her house.  When she arrives home, she sees Purity’s two patrol cars, three police officers, and Bianca’s dead body in her driveway.

To acting police chief Jo Thibodeau, Maggie is taking the discovery of a tortured and shot woman outside her home much too calmly.  Maggie’s excellent security system and the fact that four Purity residents can vouch for her presence during the time the murder was committed doesn’t give Jo any reason to suspect Maggie of the crime.  Still, she wonders, how can this middle-aged woman take this horrendous event without any apparent alarm?

Then it’s up to Maggie, with a little help from her friends, to go back sixteen years to discover why Bianca was sent to Purity and what that means for the owner of Blackberry Farm.

Master storyteller Tess Gerritsen has written an excellent thriller, with a captivating protagonist and cast of characters.  You can read more about her 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.