Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Reviews

What would you do if you thought that the man who had donated his sperm to you might be a serial killer?  It’s hard to imagine a worse scenario.

Christine and Marcus Nilsson have been trying to have a baby for several years, but without luck.  After various medical tests and procedures, they discover that Marcus does not have viable sperm, a blow to both of them but especially to Marcus and his self-esteem.  After much soul-searching the couple decide to use a donor from the highly reputable Homestead donor bank, a company endorsed by Christine’s doctor.

Then, on the afternoon of her going-away party from the Nutmeg Hill Elementary School where she has been teaching for eight years, Christine sees a CNN news video of a man who has just been arrested; to her he looks exactly like the photo of her sperm donor.  Marcus doesn’t agree and thinks she’s imagining the resemblance, but Christine can’t be reassured.  She watches the video over and over, obsessing over the man’s fine blond hair and round blue eyes that look exactly like those in the photo the donor was required to submit to Homestead.

When contacted, Homestead refuses to tell the couple whether their donor is the man who has been arrested.  It appears that a legally binding non-disclosure agreement was signed by the donor, and the company cannot disclose any additional information about him.  While Marcus gets angrier and angrier at what he sees as a coverup, Christine determines to discover on her own whether Zachary Jeffcoat is in fact her donor, a serial killer, or both.

The title, Most Wanted, is a clever double-play on words.  Its first meaning concerns the unborn baby, Christine and Marcus’ most wanted child.  The second meaning is the possibility that the man now being held for the murder of a nurse in Pennsylvania and suspected by authorities of being the murderer of two other nurses in two different states is most wanted for those deaths.

Emotions run deep throughout the novel.  Christine, who has wanted children as far back as she can remember, has gone from disappointment at not being pregnant to ecstasy at finally becoming pregnant to fear that the baby’s biological father is a criminal.  Marcus has gone from disappointment and shame at being unable to biologically father a child to anger at Christine’s doctor and the sperm bank and finally to anger at Christine.  What should have been the happiest time for them has now become the worst time, putting their marriage in danger from which it may not recover.

As always, Lisa Scottoline has written a novel that will challenge you to look beyond the excellent plot and focus on the issues that this couple is facing.  In spite of all the tests that Homestead has done, there is still the possibility that the mental instability of one of their donors has compromised the pregnancy of a recipient.  Donor banks are barely regulated by states or the federal government, and Most Wanted is a reminder that this may lead to horrific results.  And what happens when each parent has a different thought about what to do if, in fact, Zachary Jeffcoat turns out to be what they most fear?

You can read more about Lisa Scottoline at this web site.

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

Poet and opera librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte is busy in Vienna, writing the words to accompany the operas of Mozart and Salieri.  Da Ponte has achieved some fame in the operatic genre at this point in his life, but his hope is to be able to write poetry full time.  However, for the moment his main income is from the production of the operas, so he continues that work.

It’s 1788, and the Austrian empire, led by Emperor Joseph II, is at war with the Turks.  Students are protesting on street corners, and citizens are watching what they say in public lest they attract the attention of the emperor’s soldiers or police.

Having been exiled for fifteen years from his native Venice for immoral conduct, Lorenzo has assembled a small group of friends to replace his family.  Chief among them is Father Alois Bayer, who has become almost a father to the younger man; their mutual love of books is what brought them together.  But the day after the two men meet for lunch, the priest is murdered in front of the Capistran Chancel.

Father Alois’ murder was the second in Vienna in three days.  The first was General Peter Albrecht, an elderly military man known throughout the city.  He, thought Lorenzo, was someone who might have had enemies, given his absurdly high self-regard and the current feeling in the city about the military.  But why would Father Alois be a victim as well, Lorenzo asks himself?  There doesn’t seem to be a connection between the two men.  However, when he goes to the police to get more information, he’s informed that they both were killed in the same way, with a single knife thrust across the neck.

Into this mix comes Giacomo Casanova, best known today for having made his last name synonymous with seducer of women.  In addition to his romantic escapades, he was known during his lifetime as a writer, adventurer, and spy.  In Sent to the Devil, Casanova is a close friend of Da Ponte’s and aids him, although not as much as he himself would like to believe, in capturing the man responsible for the series of murders that have rocked Vienna.

Laura Lebow seamlessly blends historical facts with fiction.  Da Ponte was, as the novel tells, the lyricist for two of Mozart’s most famous operas, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro.  In creating a series in which Da Ponte is the hero, Ms. Lebow has an incredible amount of information to work with:  he was born a Jew, converted as a child to Catholicism in order to gain an education, fathered illegitimate children while a priest in Vienna, moved to London, went bankrupt, fled to the United States, and became the first professor of Italian literature at Colombia University.  Honestly, you couldn’t make this up.

Da Ponte is, at least in the first two books of what I hope will be a long series, a more honorable and likeable man than he probably actually was.  But no matter, it’s the author’s prerogative to fashion her protagonist any way she chooses, and in The Figaro Murders (reviewed on this blog) and Sent to the Devil Lorenzo Da Ponte is a man worthy of respect.  Ms. Lebow has brought him and eighteenth-century Vienna vividly to life.

You can read more about Laura Lebow at this web site.

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

It seems as if the Cold War will never end.  In The 14th Colony, Steve Berry takes readers on a journey from colonial times through World War II up to the present, with secret agreements and hidden agendas all around.

Cotton Malone is retired from the Justice Department, but now he’s been called on for a special mission.  He is asked to do a reconnaissance in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia, not the friendliest landscape on earth.  He’s flying an old World War II Russian plane in order to examine a group of buildings on the border of the lake when suddenly the plane is fired upon and he’s downed.  He manages to get out of the plane only to find himself facing two men in ski masks, carrying automatic rifles.  They fire at Cotton, he fires back, but before the men have a chance to respond, an explosion from a surface-to-air missile kills them both.

Back in the United States, it’s the next to last day of the second term of President Danny Daniels.  Stephanie Nelle is in the midst of an argument with the soon-to-be attorney general, Bruce Litchfield, about getting help to rescue Cotton, but Bruce is adamant.  He says she didn’t run this mission by him, and he sees no need to assist her or Cotton.

There’s no love lost between Bruce and Stephanie, especially since Bruce implemented Stephanie’s ouster as the head of the Justice Department’s Magellan Billet unit, which will take place immediately upon the inauguration of the new president.  In addition, the entire unit will be abolished.  Litchfield exits the office, leaving Stephanie to work out how to rescue Cotton.

At the same time, Department of Justice agent Luke Daniels is following a Russian named Anya Petrova.  Luke’s uncle, the president, has told him to trail the woman and find out what she’s doing.  She’s definitely a “person of interest,” as she’s the lover of Aleksandr Zorin, a former KGB officer.  Coincidentally, or perhaps not, it’s Zorin who lives in one of the builings ndear Lake Baikal and who sent the two men to shoot down Cotton’s plane.

The 14th Colony refers to Canada, and that wording goes back to the 1700s.  During the American Revolution, the colonists invaded Canada (then consisting only of Quebec and Ontario), certain that the Canadians would want to join the thirteen colonies and gain their freedom from England.  The colonists were defeated, but in 1781 (seven years before the colonies would become an independent nation), the Canadian Articles of Confederation stated that British-held Canada could join the U.S. automatically at any time they chose to do so, without even the agreement of the United States.

There’s an incredible amount of history in this novel, starting with the American Revolution and continuing up to today.  The story line  contains not only the plot to annex Canada but nuclear weapons, the 20th amendment to the Constitution, and a secret agreement between the president of the United States and the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

There’s a huge cast of characters in this novel; in addition to those listed above, Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II make an appearance.  The narration moves between Cotton, Stephanie, Aleksandr, and Luke, but thanks to Steve Berry’s excellent writing there’s never any confusion as to whose voice the reader is hearing.  The plot and the writing will hold you in a tight grip until the very end.

You can read more about Steve Berry at this web site.

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

Dove Carnahan (Named after the soap.  Seriously.) has been the chief of police in her rural home town for more than a decade.  It’s a place where the police work usually consists of dealing with domestic violence, DWIs, and minor vandalism.  But a call from a childhood friend brings Dove to Campbell’s Run, a deserted part of town, where she finds the burned body of a teenage girl lying in an abandoned mine pit.

The following day the girl is identified as Camio Truly, one of the members of the dysfunctional Truly clan.  Or should that really be one of the members of the Truly dysfunctional clan?  Camio is one of five children; the oldest brother died after running a red light on his motorcycle while drunk, another died after falling off a railroad trestle while drunk, and a sister is an unmarried sixteen-year-old with an infant.  The youngest brother isn’t quite old enough yet to get into trouble.

Camio was the only one with any ambition or drive in the family.  She received straight As in school and planned to go to college, two things that inspired jealousy and disdain within her family circle.  She also had a boyfriend whom her mother had forbidden to enter their house, probably because he came from the “right side” of the tracks.

There’s no obvious suspect once the boyfriend’s alibi is verified, and there appears to be no motive for any of Camio’s family members.  Dove is working hard on the case, along with the Pennsylvania state police, when she’s sidetracked by two events in her own family.  First there’s the reappearance of one of her mother’s lovers, the man Dove and her sister Neely accused of killing their mother.  He has just been released from jail after thirty-five years, convicted by the sisters’ testimony.

Second is another reappearance, that of Dove’s younger brother Champ.  He left town immediately after he graduated from high school, about ten years after their mother died.   Apart from a yearly post card saying he was okay, neither Dove or Neely has heard from him.  Now he’s back with his nine-year-old son Mason, with no explanation as to where he’s been or what he’s been doing all these years.

Angels Burning is a starkly powerful novel about the ways in which family members can destroy each other.   In addition to a terrific plot, what makes this book so special is the way Tawni O’Dell makes the reader understand why people do these things to each other.  And just when you think a character has no redeeming qualities or perhaps has some unexpected good ones, the author turns things on their head and makes you think differently.  Quite a talent.

You can read more about Tawni O’Dell at this web site.

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

Many of us are familiar with the concept of bridezilla, a bride going wild over her wedding, making impossible last-minute demands and behaving as if the entire world must stop to accommodate her wishes.  But is there a word for a mother of the bride who acts in a similarly outrageous manner?

Kelsey McKenna is a wedding planner who has to deal with a bride’s mother from hell.  The only decision that bride-to-be Nicole Abernathy has made, apart from choosing the groom, is where the nuptials, not in Napa as her mother wanted but in Mexico.  All the other choices are made by Mrs. Abernathy.  So the wedding party heads down to San Miguel Allende for the weekend.  Kelsey has planned everything to go perfectly and it does, until immediately after the ceremony when one of the bridesmaids falls down dead on the way out of the chapel.

Naturally, Nicole’s mother blames Kelsey for this.  When Kelsey says she has to tell Nicole and Vince that one of the attendants at their wedding is dead, Mrs. Abernathy forbids it.  Her first response is, “That’s unfortunate.”  It’s followed by “Well, okay, that means there’s an extra place at table twelve.”  And when Kelsey’s photographer Brody Marx hesitantly agrees with Mrs. Abernathy, saying that she’s the one paying the bills, Kelsey reluctantly agrees to postpone sharing the unhappy news.

In actuality, it seems as if no one at the wedding was especially close to Dana Poole or is heartbroken that she’s dead.  She and Nicole had been roommates years earlier, and after initially refusing to attend the wedding Dana changed her mind at the last minute and flew down to Mexico.  Demanding and annoying as Dana was to all concerned, how long can Kelsey go on covering up the bad news?  And finally, when it’s not possible to delay any longer, Mrs. Abernathy blames Kelsey for concealing the truth.  Have I coined a new word in motherzilla?

When Kelsey finally is permitted to call the police, she and the other members of the wedding party are in for a rude shock.  They’re packed and ready to return to the United States, but the police tell them they must remain.  At least to the authorities, it looks as if one of them may be responsible for Dana’s murder.

As may be seen from the title, Terror in Taffeta is a light-hearted mystery but a mystery nevertheless.  Marla Cooper has written an enjoyable cozy, a genre defined by: (1) having an amateur sleuth, almost always a woman, as the protagonist, (2) taking place in a small town, (3) local authorities discounting the amateur’s viewpoint or ideas, and (4) a lack of bodies and blood.  This book is a perfect example.

Terror in Taffeta has a delightful heroine, a beautiful setting, and a believable cast of characters.  Another essential part of the cozy mystery is that it’s usually part of a series; I hope that means that we can follow Kelsey McKenna to future weddings.

You can read more about Marla Cooper on various sites on the web.

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

A Bed of Scorpions brings us back for a second visit with the delightful Samantha Clair.  Happy in her career as an editor at a London publishing house, she’s on her way to meet her long-time friend and former lover, Aidan Merriam, for lunch.  Entering their favorite Lebanese restaurant and arriving at their regular table, she’s surprised to find Aidan already seated.  With his very tight schedule, he’s never late but always arrives exactly on time.

Sam immediately thinks that something must be wrong, and when Aidan covers his face with his hands she’s sure of it.  But still she’s not prepared for the awful news–his friend and partner in their art gallery, Frank Compton, was found a day earlier at his desk, an apparent suicide.  And the detective investigating the death is Sam’s significant other, Jake Field.

A note on Frank’s computer saying “I’m sorry” neither adds nor subtracts from the idea of suicide.  But Frank hadn’t been ill, had had the same romantic partner for decades, and a forensic search of the gallery’s assets doesn’t turn up anything suspicious.  Although no one is completely satisfied that Frank killed himself, there’s nothing to prove that someone else killed him.  And there the matter rests.

The gallery is involved in an upcoming Edward Stevenson show to tie in with a major exhibit at the Tate.  Stevenson was an eccentric English artist who vanished more than twenty years earlier, leaving a note for his wife saying he was going to an ashram in India.  Apparently he had been interested in Eastern religions, so his wife didn’t think his leaving was too strange.  But when he never wrote again, and an investigation in India found no trace that he had ever been there, it became an unsolved mystery.  That is, until this year, when his skeleton was discovered in a house in Vermont that was being renovated.

Now that there’s major interest in Stevenson’s work, there’s also a conflict between the gallery and Stevenson’s heirs, his widow and their daughter.  It turns out that Sam met the daughter of the late artist a few days earlier, without realizing at the time who she was.  Celia Stevenson Stein is much more involved with the late artist’s estate than her mother has been, and it looks as if there may be financial ramifications for Aidan’s gallery.

As I wrote in my review of A Murder of Magpies, I really, really like Sam Clair and the people around her.  Sam is smart, funny, unsure around people she doesn’t know, and can be a bit sarcastic, all totally believable characteristics in a book editor, I imagine.  Her solicitor mother, Helena, is equally smart, perfectly dressed, and comfortable in any situation.  Well, at least they have one thing in common.  And there’s Jake, Sam’s lover; Sam’s goth and very efficient editorial assistant Miranda; and the mysterious Mr. Rudiger, an elderly architect who seems to have had an unusual life before he rented the flat upstairs from Sam.

A Bed of Scorpions is just as enjoyable as A Murder of Magpies, and that’s high praise.

You can read more about Judith Flanders at this web site.

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

It’s 1813 in England.  In the seemingly quiet countryside of Ayleswick-on-Teme, Shropshire, villagers are talking about the death of a young woman who had arrived there only a week earlier.

Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, has traveled to the village for two reasons.  The first is to honor a request by a young friend, Jamie Knox.  Shortly before he died Jamie asked Sebastian to return a family heirloom to his grandmother, Heddie, and so the viscount goes to Ayleswick-on-Teme to do so.

Before Sebastian can visit the grandmother he’s approached by young Archie Rawlins, who has become the town’s justice of the peace upon the recent death of his father.  After viewing the body of the young woman, known to the townspeople as Emma Chance,  Archie asks Sebastian for help.  Archie isn’t certain that her death is the suicide it appears to be.  It was a criminal offense to kill one’s self in nineteenth-century England; the body of a suicide was buried at a crossroads, without church rites and with a stake through its heart.  And the justice of the peace, although having known the woman for only a few days, would like to avoid that ending for her.

Emma Chance had arrived in the village with only a female servant and the equipment that an artist would carry.  She was allegedly traveling through the countryside to sketch, although that was considered a strange and rather inappropriate thing for a young widow, as she presented herself, to do.  She didn’t appear to have any friends or family in the town but had been asking everyone she met about their family histories.

All of this resonates strongly with Sebastian, as this is the second reason for his visit to the village.  He too is on a quest.  Brought up to believe that he was the third son of Alistair St. Cyr, Earl of Hendon, two years earlier he had discovered that he was the son of his mother and one of her lovers.  His father had known this, but when Sebastian’s two older, legitimate, brothers died, the earl named his illegitimate son his heir.

When Sebastian met young Jamie Knox some time before this book opens, he was struck by their uncanny resemblance to each other; it was remarkable enough so that they might have been brothers.  Thus, upon Jamie’s death Sebastian eagerly seized the opportunity to pay his respects to Heddie Knox, to ask her questions and possibly find out more about his paternal family.

When Falcons Fall begins with one death but soon encompasses many more.  There’s a history in this town of young women meeting unusual ends, usually seen as suicides, that strikes Sebastian and his wife Hero as too frequent to be normal.  And then there are the strange deaths of the two most powerful men in Ayleswick-on-Teme, one having died when his manor home was engulfed in fire, the other in a riding accident.  And no one in the village seems to be particularly upset about either death.

Although When Falcons Fall is the eleventh book in the series, there is enough background given to make the plot easily understandable.  All the characters are vibrant and realistic, and the double searches of Emma Chance and Sebastian St. Cyr make for a gripping plot.

You can read more about C. S. Harris at this web site.

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

Detective Inspector Helen Grace is called to a remote portion of a Southampton beach to investigate the corpse found buried in the sand.  It’s the body of a young woman, pale and emaciated, with a bluebird tattoo on her right shoulder.  The force’s forensic officer, already on the scene, believes that the woman’s burial is not recent, that she could have been there for as long as two or three years.

What makes the scene even more painful for Helen is her immediate feeling that whoever placed the body there had done so with the knowledge that it wouldn’t be easily found.  Thus, she thinks, this is not the killer’s first victim and possibly, she fears, not his last.

Miles away in a basement is another young woman.  Ruby has no idea where she is or how she has gotten there.  The room is dark, without windows, and very cold.  Her last memory is of coming home to her apartment from a night out drinking with friends, gulping down a glass of water, and then….But how did she get from there to here?  And where is her inhaler, something she is never without?

At the same time as she tries to identify the body found in the sand, Helen is pursuing another search, a personal one.  She is trying to find her nephew Robert Stonehill, the only child of her sister Marianne.  Robert disappeared after learning the truth about his mother nearly a year earlier, and Helen has been unable to find any trace of him.

Using police computers and the confidential information on them to look for Robert is most definitely against the rules and would cause Helen serious problems if she were found out.  But she’s desperate to get information.  Her attempt to go through the proper channels has been stymied by her station chief, Ceri Harwood, a woman intensely jealous of Helen’s successes in past investigations who will do almost anything, legal or not, to discredit her subordinate.

Helen’s childhood was traumatically dysfunctional, and she brings a lot of heavy baggage with her to her personal life and her official position.  But none of that interferes with her drive to succeed or her ability to uncover clues that other detectives have missed.  If only she could regulate her personal life as well as she does her professional one.

I reviewed Eeny Meeny last year and thought it was one of the best mysteries of 2015.  Mr. Arlidge continues the high suspense in The Doll’s House, the third novel in this series, as well as giving readers a better look into what makes Detective Helen Grace tick.

You can read more about M. J. Arlidge on various sites on the web.

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

The Taylors’ marriage had warning signs from the beginning.  When seventeen-year-old Jean met the slightly older, more sophisticated Glen Taylor, she was swept away.  Eventually he won over her parents, and two years later Jean and Glen were married.

They were happy, as long as Glen got to make all the decisions.  He called it being protective, choosing the seat for her at a bar, deciding on her meals so she could taste new things, explaining to her that their kitchen wasn’t quite clean enough.  And Jean wanted to please him, to make things good between them, so she agreed with his decisions and their marriage went along smoothly.

Then things start to go wrong.  Glen is let go from his position at the bank.  He tells Jean he was terminated because the management was downsizing and that he is going to start his own business, but Jean finds a letter from the bank with the words “unprofessional behavior,” “inappropriate,” and “termination forthwith.”  It’s the beginning of serious trouble for the couple.

Dawn Elliot is a single mother to two-year-old Bella.  And one afternoon Bella disappears from their front yard.  “But I was just trying to get her tea ready,” Dawn tells Detective Bob Sparkes.  “She was out of sight for only a minute.”  But that’s all it took for the toddler to disappear.

All of England is looking for Bella, with telephone calls and CCTV coverage constantly updating the police.  Then a tip comes in from a delivery van driver who works for the company where Glen Taylor is temporarily employed.  That driver gives the police the name of the driver who was scheduled to work in the area near Bella’s home on the day she went missing; that driver in turn tells them that he didn’t do the last run of the day but passed it along to Glen.

The Widow covers a period of more than three years in three voices:  Jean Taylor, Glen’s wife; Kate Waters, a reporter at the Daily Post; and Detective Bob Sparkes.  The reader will be carried along by the story, understanding the events as they are seen by these three people.  Jean, who is happily married to Glen until the police come to their house and question him about Bella’s disappearance; Kate, sympathizing with Jean while at the same time doing everything in her power to obtain the exclusive story of the Taylors’ marriage for her paper; Bob, whose obsession with Bella’s case nearly undermines his career.

The novel is as real as today’s headlines.  Each of the above characters, along with many others in the book, has his/her own agenda, and finding out the truth about the kidnapping isn’t always uppermost in each person’s mind.

Fiona Barton has written a gripping mystery, filled with insights into the minds of those who buy child pornography and the slippery slope to which it may lead.  You won’t forget The Widow in a hurry.

You can read more about Fiona Barton at this web site.

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

Two women in the Colorado wilderness, one missing and the other trying to find her.  They couldn’t be less similar, but the search that connects them is stronger than the differences between them.

Amy Raye Latour is elk hunting in the woods with two friends.  Amy Raye, although skilled with a rifle, prefers to hunt with a compound bow.  Her husband and two children are at home, and now she’s preparing to leave her two fellow hunters at the camp and search for the elk herself.  Without telling Aaron or Kenny, she packs up food and water for the day and drives away in Aaron’s truck.  She thinks she’s prepared for every eventuality, but she’s not.

Pru Hathaway works for the Bureau of Land Management as an archaeological law enforcement ranger.  It’s a job she describes as being a police officer of the past, looking for disturbances to the land and the possible looting of historic artifacts.  Along with her dog Kona, she is part of a team that sometimes has to search for missing hikers and hunters, people who underestimate the difficulties of the Colorado terrain,  don’t carry the necessary food and water, or don’t listen to the area weather forecasts.  And sometimes, even when the hikers or hunters take all the proper precautions, they still run into trouble.  That’s what happened to Amy Raye.

The reader is pulled into the lives of these two women.  Amy Raye is a woman with a very troubled history, with many secrets she has kept from her husband.  It’s partly this past life that she’s running from, not certain she wants to continue her life with him or if she even deserves to, given all that she’s been hiding over the years.

Pru, too, is working through some issues.  She’s the single mother of a teenage boy, the result of a one-night stand.  Successful in her career, she’s facing the idea of being alone as her son will be leaving for college in the not-too-distant future.

Breaking Wild follows Amy Raye and Pru, the former fighting with all her strength to get back to civilization after her pride and a series of bad judgment calls leave her alone and injured in the wilderness, the latter determined to find the missing woman, or at least find her remains.  As the days stretch out into weeks, a happy outcome is unlikely, but the determination of both women is very strong.

The sense of place in this novel is wonderful, with the reader swept through harrowing conditions.  The author, herself skilled in backpacking, snowmobiling, and hiking through the woods surrounding her former home in Colorado, makes both the incredible survival skills of Amy Raye and the persistence of Pru come alive.

You can read more about Diane Les Becquets at this web site.

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

Miles from Iceland’s capital, a woman swimming in the mineral-laden waters of the Midnesheidi Moor lagoon comes across a badly bruised corpse.  The pathologist on call can’t even count all the broken bones and isn’t able to come to a conclusion as to the cause of death.  Not a drowning, not a fatal beating, not a traffic accident.

There’s no identification on the man, the only clues to his identity being the leather jacket and cowboy boots he had been wearing.  Does this mean the man was an American?  Or perhaps simply an Icelandic admirer of the United States?

It’s 1979 in Reykjavik.  The Cold War is still going strong, and there’s a big American military base in Iceland’s capital.  The base has split the country in two, with one side believing that the country needs strong defense during the Cold War and only the Americans can supply it, and the other side wanting the Americans to leave Iceland to manage on its own.  And that divisiveness is nowhere more strongly felt than between the American military and the Icelandic police.

The day following the announcement of the body’s discovery, a woman calls the police to say it’s possible that the man might be her brother Kristvin; she hasn’t heard from him for several days, a highly unusual occurrence.  A trip to the morgue verifies his identity, but his sister has no idea what took him to the remote moor or why anyone would want to kill him.  He was a worker at the military base, but when the police attempt to question the base’s supervisor, it ignites the already existing tension between the two countries.

Erlandur (it’s the Icelandic way to refer to people by their first names only) Sveinsson has just been promoted to the rank of detective on the Reykjavik police force.  At the same time he’s investigating Kristvin’s death, Erlandur is also looking into the decades-old disappearance of a teenage girl.  Spurred on by a newspaper obituary of the girl’s father and knowing that the girl’s mother had died years before, Erlandur contacts Dagbjørt’s aunt, the girl’s only surviving relative.

He is doing this on his own time, he stresses to the aunt, not because any new information has come up but because she might be the only one alive with any answers as to what happened to her niece.  What Erlandur doesn’t tell her is that the disappearance resonates only too strongly with an incident in his own life, one he has never been able to put behind him.

I have read all of Arnaldur Indridason’s novels.  The sense they give of Iceland, its people, its geography, and its culture are incredibly strong.  At the time this book takes place, the country has been independent of Denmark for only sixty years.  It’s basically a nation of “peasants and farmers,” as Erlandur tells an American soldier, still trying to find its way into the modern world.

Erlandur is a wonderful character, a sensitive, moody man with a strong sense of purpose.  Following his career has been a delight, and this flashback more than thirty years earlier answers some, if not all, of the questions as to what makes him the man he is.

You can read more about Arnaldur Indridason at various sites on the web.

Check out the https://www.marilynsmysteryreads.com.

Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, Cambridge student, poet, and expert with sword and knife, is plucked from his college by Rodrigo Lopez, royal physician to Queen Elizabeth, for a dangerous assignment.  The year is 1583, and nineteen-year-old Christopher has no idea what he’s getting into.  But, according to Dr. Lopez, he has no choice in the matter.

The queen, daughter of Henry VIII, has been on the throne for twenty-five years, and since the beginning of her reign there have been plots against her.  Lately they have intensified in nature, leading to Elizabeth’s belief that her half-sister Mary, Queen of Scots, and the pope are in league to remove her and either imprison her in the Tower of London or behead her.  Then Mary, a devout Catholic, would become ruler and reinstate the Catholic Church as the state religion of the country.

Two members of Elizabeth’s council–Dr. Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who has converted to Protestantism in order to become the monarch’s doctor, and Sir Francis Walsingham, for whom the term spymaster was invented–are trying to thwart this plan.  They tell Christopher part, but not all, of the scheme to unseat Elizabeth and that vital information to defeat the traitors is known only to a prisoner being held in Malta, a Catholic stronghold in the central Mediterranean.

Walsingham tells Marlowe that the island “is ruled by the Knights of Malta, ruthless, devious, brilliant men…(They) have built the most secure prison in the world.  Our man is in the bottom of that prison.”  Being young, flattered, and above all seeking excitement, Marlowe replies “I like a challenge,” and he sets off immediately to rescue the man.

Of course, there are plots within plots in sixteenth-century England, and there are many twists and turns in the story.  Like Marlowe, the reader doesn’t know whom to trust.  One’s friend today may be one’s enemy tomorrow, or even later the same day.  But Kit is, in his own way, the match for the Knights of Malta and whomever is behind the plot to gain the throne for Mary.  Rescuing the prisoner is only the first step in making the monarchy secure for Elizabeth.

My knowledge of Christopher Marlowe was nearly non-existant before reading A Prisoner in Malta.  I knew him only as a contemporary of Shakespeare; indeed, there is a small number of scholars who believe in the Marlovian conspiracy theory that Marlowe actually wrote many of the plays and poems for which Shakespeare is credited.  But Marlowe achieved so much on his own that there is no need to believe in that theory.  Being a poet, playwright, translator, and “spy” should be enough of a legacy for any man, especially for one who lived only twenty-nine years.

This is a terrific novel.  The author has brought every character to life, and, unfortunately, the intrigues and petty jealousies that he describes among those in power appear as common now as they were in Marlowe’s time.

Phillip DePoy has a brief summary at the end of the book that gives biographical details of the main characters of the book.  Please don’t read the summary before reading A Prisoner in Malta:  it will spoil the novel.

You can read more about Phillip DePoy at this web site.

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

A former police detective/former Coast Guard officer/former heroin addict, currently a virtually homeless photographer blessed and/or cursed with the ability to see ghosts, Jackie Lyons has more parts than a jigsaw puzzle.  Reduced to living in a lower-than-low budget motel and eating ramen noodles or nothing at all, she’s surprised by a call from a woman she met briefly a year earlier and hasn’t heard from since.

Jenny Loftin has called to say that the pastor of her church needs photos taken of an old house that he plans to turn into the parsonage of his new church.  Arriving at Stirling Estates, Jackie is waiting to meet Deacon Falgoust when she sees a man approaching her, his arms waving, his steps uncoordinated.  Suddenly he stumbles over a cliff into a body of water, and Jackie dives in after him.  His body is cold when Jackie pulls him out of the lake; in fact, Sam Loftin had already been for dead several hours when Jackie “saw” him on the cliff and then fall in the water.

Jackie has had visions all her life of people both recently dead and long deceased.  She no longer tries to explain this to others, and her hesitant description of what she saw, trying to avoid saying she saw the ghost of Sam Loftin, lands her in jail overnight.  In the morning she’s released and finds out that Sam’s death quickly has been ruled a suicide, allegedly due to his despair over the death of his young daughter five years earlier.

Deacon Falgoust is certain that Jackie will be able to help Jenny in her search for answers about her husband’s death.  To help them both, he suggests that Jackie move in with Jenny and her family in the Estates and pay a small amount of rent; it turns out that Sam has left a lot of unpaid bills, surprising in view of their upscale lifestyle and the fact that he never complained about business problems.  Nevertheless, Jenny is fearful of losing her home and seemingly wants more from Jackie, whom she suspects of having special powers, than Jackie is willing to give.

The title, The Covenant, refers to the rules, regulations, and restrictions that homeowners in Stirling Estates must agree to when they purchase their houses.  The restrictions are many and are clearly meant to tightly control who buys into the development and how they live.  But, as Deacon Falgoust tells Jackie, there are ways around anything, if the Lord is on your side.

Jackie Lyons is beset by demons, many of which are unexplained in this second novel of the series; that leads me to hope for an early third entry in the series.  Did she quit or was she fired from the Memphis Police Department?  Who was her husband and why did they divorce?  Why did she turn to heroin and how was she able to kick the habit?

The Covenant is a great read with a fascinating heroine and a gripping plot.  Its ending will have you wondering how you missed all the clues that led up to it…I certainly did.

You can read more about Jeff Crook at various sites on the web.

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

Doug Brock is a New Jersey police detective.  He’s honest, aggressive, and, some would say, a loose cannon in his pursuit of criminals.  So it’s no surprise that when Blackout opens he’s been suspended from the force for failing to follow orders.  But, Brock being Brock, that doesn’t deter him from following leads, even as he ends up in a hospital room, unable to remember the events of the past decade.

Doug had been mentoring an orphaned teenager whom he coached in baseball.  He was planning to adopt Johnnie Arroyo as soon as possible.  One night, as they walked along a Teaneck, New Jersey street after dinner, shots were fired at them from a passing car.  Despite Doug’s effort to shield Johnnie, two bullets passed through the young man’s body, killing him instantly.

Certain that he knows the man behind the murder, Doug disobeys orders and starts his own investigation.  Even being put on indefinite suspension doesn’t stop him, and in his downward spiral he has broken off his engagement to fellow officer Jessie Allen.  And then comes his phone call to his partner, Nate Alvarez.

Nate is frankly tired of the emotional basket case that Doug has become.  He’s received too many phone calls about Doug’s unofficial search for Johnnie’s killer, each one more strident and over-the-top than the one before, so only the fact that he’s Doug’s best friend keeps him on the line this time.  In the midst of the call, with Doug telling Nate to call the FBI, the phone on Doug’s end is dropped and Nate hears the devastating sound of two gunshots and then two more.  Then silence.

When Doug awakens five days later from his drug-induced coma, not surprisingly he’s exhausted and weak, barely able to speak.  However, much worse than that is the fact that he believes it is 2005, a decade earlier than the actual date, and that he is twenty-six, ten years younger than his true age.  He’s suffering from retrograde amnesia, with no guarantee that his memory of the last ten years will ever return.

Blackout is a gripping thriller that will captivate the reader from the first chapter.  The police department tells Brock that he apparently was investigating Nicholas Bennett, an important crime figure in the state, but as it’s obvious that Doug has no memory of Bennett or his probable connection to the shooting of Johnnie Arroyo, they withhold some pertinent information from him.

However, there’s enough information for Brock to disregard his captain’s orders to start back to work slowly; he’s frantically hunting his memory for his connection to Bennett and the reason why the crime boss would have tried to have him killed.

All the characters in the novel are terrific–Doug Brock, determined to regain his memory and discover what led to the shooting; Nate Alvarez, trying with little success to rein in his partner and finally agreeing to help him fill in the gaps in his memory; Jessie Allen, the woman Doug can’t remember he was engaged to; and Nicholas Bennett and Ahmat Gharsi, two men of widely disparate backgrounds who are working together to commit a horrific crime.

You can read more about David Rosenfelt at this web site.

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

We don’t know the home Orphan X came from or how he was found.  But we do know some facts–he came from East Baltimore, he was taken away in a luxury sedan, and apparently he was chosen because the Mystery Man, aka Jack Johns, saw something in this twelve-year-old standing on the broken concrete of a school playground that no one else was able to see.  And Orphan X, first name Evan, thought that wherever he was being taken would be better than where he was; as it happened, that turned out being trained to be an assassin for the United States government.

Fast forward about two decades, and Evan is now Evan Smoak, posing as a Los Angeles importer of industrial cleaning supplies, a “cover” presumably so boring as to deflect any intrusive questions as to his occupation.  He’s no longer working for the government, but having amassed a considerable fortune he is free to choose his own assignments.  He’s content to wait for his phone to ring to let him know there’s another job waiting for him, and so it does.

A teenage Latina girl named Morena tells Evan she has gotten his name from someone he helped previously, and when Evan validates that information he agrees to talk to her.  When they meet she tells him how she’s trying to protect her younger sister from the sexual abuse she’s been suffering from a member of the Los Angeles police department.  This man has a whole street of teenage girls in the barrio under his control for his own sexual use and for other men’s perversions as well.

Outraged and disgusted by this, Evan successfully rids Morena of her tormentor, but in doing so he places his own life in danger.  He is used to fighting and protecting himself, but this time it appears that his enemies are as skilled and determined as he is.

Evan has insulated himself from the world in his attack-proof condo, the penthouse suite in a building called Castle Heights.  The windows are bullet-proof, the walls have been reinforced, the door has steel inside its regulation wooden frame.  And there’s also the Vault, a specially built hidden room filled with multiple computers and video monitors, all to protect himself from his assailants.  He even goes by the name of The Nowhere Man; his encrypted private network phone number is 1-855-2-NOWHERE.

But now he is finding himself vulnerable, not only to a physical attack from his adversaries but to an emotional invasion from one of his neighbors and her eight-year-old son.  Somehow Mia Hall and her son Peter have innocently been intruding into Evan’s life, and the more interactions they have, the less he finds himself minding them.  In fact, he’s beginning to enjoy their company.

Evan Smoak is a terrific character, a man who came from nowhere and remade himself/was remade into a killing machine.  His targets are those who prey on the vulnerable, the needy, and for each case he takes he asks only one thing:  that the person who benefits from his aid give his name to one other person in need of help.  That’s all.  But that’s enough for someone to want to get rid of him.

Gregg Hurwitz has written a great thriller, filled with characters the reader will long remember and a page-turning plot that will hold you in suspense until the end.

You can read more about Gregg Hurwitz at this web site.

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