Marilyn's Mystery Reads

August 3, 2012

Sometimes it’s painful to revisit old friends.

I’ve been listening to Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming, on my car’s cd player this week.  I was a big fan of the James Bond books and films; I believe I’ve either read or seen all of them. They were light and fluffy, utterly unrealistic, what we’d call today a “beach read,” and lots of fun.   A couple of weeks ago I took Goldfinger out of my local library to enjoy while I was driving.

Well, it turned out enjoying was the wrong word.  I have been absolutely taken aback by some of the words coming out of the mouths of James Bond and other characters.  They express emotions that are anti-Semitic, anti-woman, anti-homosexual, and racist. Given the totally unappealing looks of Auric Goldfinger, Bond’s contact at the venerable Bank of England thought that of course “he was a Jew,” although it turns out he isn’t.  In Bond’s view, woman have become masculine and assertive, men have become passive and quiescent, and both have become “pansies” since World War II, much to the detriment of society.

And Bond’s view of Japanese and Koreans cannot be printed here; it’s an incredibly stereotypical, negative portrait.

It’s hard to know whether Fleming’s views were truly those he believed or those he thought would resonate most closely with his reading public.  Vast sections of the book were changed in the movie, which came out five years after the book was published.  It must have been obvious to the producers that the depiction of Bond as a racist and mysogynist would not go over well with an international audience.

Either way, whether it was Fleming whose views were accurately displayed in the book or Bond’s, it’s disturbing to see such animosity when reading a book that is supposed to provide entertainment. I’d like to think that this book would not have been publishable now, whether because no reputable author would espouse those beliefs or because he/she knew they would greatly diminish readership.  Let’s hope I’m right.

Marilyn

In today’s down economy, a group of four college graduates don’t want to settle for low-paying, entry-level jobs. No, they have dreams, and the dreams require money.  So these enterprising friends decide on a Five Year Plan, an “easy” way to make big bucks–they’ll stage a series of abductions across the country, ask the families for an amount of money that is easy for the families to access overnight, release the abducted person, and then be on their way to another state, another job, with no one looking for them.  No one gets hurt, either physically or financially, except for the overnight scare of being kidnapped.  After a few such jobs, they can divide the loot, split up (except for one of the men and his girlfriend), and live the lives they desire.  Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?  And it is.

In Owen Laukkanen’s debut novel, The Professionals, all goes well for a time, thanks in part to meticulous planning on the part of the group’s leader, Arthur Pender. But when one of the abductions doesn’t work out, they quickly decide to abduct another man in the same city.  After all, they’d driven to Detroit to do a job, and they want to do one.  So they don’t do their homework, and everything goes wrong.  The man they kidnap is the son-in-law of a mob boss, and when one of the gang gets panicked and kills the man, things quickly fall apart.  And then they just keep getting worse.

Kirk Stevens of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and Carla Windermere of the Federal Bureau of Investigation are working together to find the people responsible for these kidnappings. Kirk is brought into the investigation because a previous abduction, a non-violent one, took place in Minneapolis; when it becomes obvious that the case is bigger than this one crime, the FBI is brought in.

Together they make a very good pairing.  Kirk is an experienced veteran, formerly on the Minneapolis police force, and Carla is a lawyer who is relatively new to the F.B.I.  The case, which to Kirk had seemed easy at first, veers almost out-of-control as the four kidnappers flee from state to state one step ahead of the investigators.   And the gang of four find themselves deeper and deeper into trouble.

The Professionals is a terrific novel for any writer, new or established. It is peopled by fascinating characters, nearly all of whom have a claim on your sympathy.  And when four kidnappers and a mob killer can be made sympathetic, for at least part of the time, the author has done an incredible job.

Set in Minnesota at the beginning of the novel, Kirk Stevens remarks several times that there’s not too much crime there.  For the sake of Owen Laukkanen’s readers, I hope he’s wrong. I’m looking forward to the next novel in the series featuring Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere, and I hope it’s not too far off.

You can read more about Owen Laukkanen at his web site.

Iceland–a country with a lot of differences from the United States. Police do not carry guns, and there are no handguns in the country; citizens are listed in the phone directory under their first names; most sons have the last name of their father with the addition of “son”–Teddy Douglasson; most daughters are given the last name of their mother with the Icelandic addition of “daughter”–Lyla Suzannedottir (Teddy and Lyla being siblings with the same parents); women keep their original last names after marriage.

Although Magnus Jonson (his American name) knows some of these customs, he’s still feeling a bit off-kilter when he returns to the land of his birth after twenty years in the United States. Actually, Magnus Jonson isn’t even his real name.  His real name is Magnus Ragnarsson, since he was the son of Ragnar.  But the American bureaucracy couldn’t cope with this when they realized that his father’s name was Ragnar Jonsson and his mother’s name was Margret Hallgrimsdottir–his name should be one of those.  So, in desperation, Magnus took Jonson as his last name; sometimes, he thought, it’s just not worth the battle.  But upon his return to Iceland, he introduces himself as Magnus Ragnarsson, and the people he meets nod approvingly.

As the novel opens, Magnus is a police detective in Boston who is supposed to testify against three crooked colleagues in his department in a drug-related arrest.  There have been two attempts on his life, generally thought to be related to his upcoming testimony. So his supervisor tells him that, in response to a request from the Reykjavik police department for the loan of an experienced homicide detective, Magnus will be going to Iceland until the trial begins. The fact that Magnus speaks Icelandic is definitely an added bonus.  Against his will, but understanding the necessity for his transfer, Magnus leaves his adopted home and heads north.

Although crime is rare in Iceland and murder even rarer, there was a murder just days before Magnus arrived in Reykjavik.  A university professor was killed at his summer home, and investigation shows that the reason for his death points to his involvement with an ancient Icelandic saga that has been offered for sale.  The saga has been handed down from father to eldest son in a family for generations.   Now, due to the economic downturn that has hit Iceland hard, Ingileif Asgrimsdottir, the daughter of this family, has reluctantly decided to sell the saga; the professor was very interested in buying it.  Her decision brings new deaths and reopens investigations into old ones.

In addition to the saga itself, there is another very important and nearly priceless artifact involved.  The family lore is that there is a gold ring that, like the saga, has been passed down from generation to generation, a ring that has unequaled power.  It is similar to the gold ring in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and there is correspondence from the author of those books, J. R. R. Tolkien, to an ancestor of Ingileif’s.   Her father fell to his death searching for the ring, and she wants no part of it.  But it seems as if someone else does.

The plot and characters in this novel are outstanding, and the unusual locale simply adds to the pleasure of reading this book.

Where the Shadows Lie is the first of Michael Ridpath’s Icelandic crime novels.  Although it was published in 2010, I just discovered it this month.  His second in the “Fire and Ice” series was published as 66 Degrees abroad but may be found under the title Far North in the United States.

You can read more about Michael Ridpath at his web page.

Winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Best First Crime Novel Award for 2011, A Simple Murder is a simply wonderful book.

Eleanor Kuhns takes the reader to post-Revolutionary War Maine, where former soldier William Rees had been a farmer living with his wife Deborah and their young son David. Following Deborah’s death several years before the novel opens, William left his son and his farm in the care of his sister Caroline and her husband with the understanding that the farm and its livestock were to remain as is and that they would take care of David as if he were one of their own children.  On his visit to the farm after a year’s absence, William is stunned to learn that thirteen-year-old David has left the farm and gone to the nearby Shaker community and that many of the farm animals have been sold.

The Shakers, also called the United Society of Believers, were a group founded in the 1770s in England who came to America to live in communities where they could freely practice their beliefs. Known for their simple lifestyle, celibacy, and care of orphans, the Shakers lived in enclaves outside cities and towns, but their unique way of life sometimes led to persecution and hostility from their neighbors.  Thus William rushes to the Shaker village to make certain his son is there willingly and is safe.

William has became an itinerant weaver in recent years, traveling the northern states and plying his trade.  But his freedom has cost him the closeness he would have liked with his son; indeed, when he first sees David the youth wants nothing to do with him.

Assured by an angry and distant David that it was his choice to enter the community, although as yet he has not signed the Covenant to become a full member, William spends the night at a nearby farm and is stunned when approached by the town’s sheriff the following morning and placed under arrest for the murder of a young Shaker woman, Sister Chastity.

The next day, following the farmer’s statement that William had indeed spent the night in his barn and could not possibly have returned to the Shakers and committed a murder, William is released.  But then he is asked by Elder White, co-leader of the Shakers, to return to the community and help them find the murderer.  When William questions the Elder as to how and why he’s been chosen to do this, White replies that William’s son David has told the Elder that William has solved several murders since his release from the Continental army.  Heartened by this show of respect and possible affection by his son, William accepts the commission and returns to Durham to find the culprit.

The young woman who was killed left a prosperous husband to join the Shakers, although some in the community questioned her commitment to them and to the two young children she brought with her.  Was there another reason, other than Sister Chastity’s alleged interest in the Shaker faith, that brought her to Durham?

And Lydia Jane Farrell, an attractive woman who lives just outside the Society in a home provided by the Shakers, is another enigma; what is keeping her there?  William is faced with many secrets, both within the Shaker community and without.

Eleanor Kuhns’ debut novel is a fascinating read, both because of the time period in which she has set the book and the interesting characters she has created.

You can read more about her at this web site.

A deceased multi-millionaire, his unappealing family, a possible illegitimate child–these are the main ingredients in The Codicil, Tom Topor’s fascinating study of the Vietnam War and its aftermath.

Matt Marshall was a self-made man who became wealthy due to his brains, charm, and business acumen.  He had a beautiful wife, three grown children, and seats on the boards of charities, museums, and hospitals around the country.  But he also had a secret, one which he shared with no one in the over twenty-five years since the war ended.  He believed he had fathered a child with a young Vietnamese woman when he was overseas, while his wife and first-born child were in the United States.

The novel opens as the attorneys for the Marshall family hire Adam Bruno, lawyer turned private investigator, to look into the validity of the will’s codicil made by Marshall three months before his unexpected death; the will itself had been made years before. In the codicil, Matt Marshall stated that while he was in the army in Vietnam, in 1971, he was told that he was the father of a child being carried by a young Vietnamese woman.  Due to the upheavals at the end of the war, the two were separated and never reunited.

Marshall couldn’t find out for certain if the woman, whom he had nicknamed Cricket, gave birth to the child, and he was unable to find out her location or situation after the war.  In the codicil Matthew commanded his family to continue to search for Cricket and/or her child, should there be one.  If a child is found, that child is entitled to half of his estate, and should any of the will’s other recipients challenge this in any way, they would be automatically disinherited.   Quite a codicil.

The very, very wealthy Marshall family, all politeness on the surface, is definitely upset by the fact that they may have to share their father’s $105 million estate with this Asian-American child, assuming that he/she exists.  Although Adam is hired to find the mother and child, it is obvious to him that the Marshalls don’t want to believe in the child’s existence. Or, if Adam discovers there is such a child, the Marshalls don’t want that child found. And really, who can blame them?

New people are introduced throughout the book, men who were with Marshall during the war and four years after it ended when he returned to Vietnam for a final search for Cricket.  Where they are twenty-five years after the war speaks to the horrors they endured, or sometimes caused.  As we know, the men who were “in country” returned to the United States to find a public that was often hostile and/or embarrassed–those who were hostile felt the returning soldiers were “baby-killers”; those who were embarrassed were furious that we had lost the war and the country.

The Codicil is gripping up to and including its final page. But a word of warning–this is not a novel for the faint-of-heart.  There is a lot of profanity, and there are graphic descriptions of wartime atrocities committed by both sides.  It’s a book that brings the pain of the Vietnam War back again.

Tom Topor is the author of several screenplays.  You can read more about him at this web site.

Nick Heller calls himself a “private spy.” It’s not exactly a private investigator; it seems he’s more concerned with finding out secrets about the rich and powerful.  And he does a good job.

In Buried Secrets, Nick  is approached by an old friend, Marshall Marcus, to rescue Marshall’s  teenage daughter Alexa from kidnappers. Nick will do almost anything for Marshall, who gave Nick’s mother a job after her husband ran away to avoid being jailed for financial crimes, but he realizes soon enough that Marshall is holding something, or several somethings, back.  However, Nick believes that Marshall truly wants his daughter rescued, even as Nick believes that Marshall’s cold-as-ice wife couldn’t care less about the safety of her stepdaughter.

In addition to Alexa’s abduction, Marshall is facing another problem. His firm lost billion of dollars in investments through the embezzlement of a former employee. Reluctant to admit his firm’s bankruptcy, he had borrowed additional billions from drug dealers and armament dealers in a vain attempt to recoup the funds, and now he’s in a deeper hole than before.  So if it’s money the kidnappers want, his daughter Alexa is really in a tight spot.

This is the second time that Alexa has been abducted, although in the first instance she was simply picked up from a shopping mall, driven around Boston for several hours, and then released.  There was no ransom demand then, and no explanation for the kidnapping ever surfaced.

The more deeply Nick delves into the case, the more secrets he uncovers. Why, in the first place, does Alexa’s best friend Taylor lie about what happened on the night the two of them went out to a Boston nightclub and Alexa disappeared?  Why is FBI agent Gordon Snyder doing everything in his power to keep Nick off the case?  Why does the story of how Marshall met his wife change with every telling?

Nick’s only friend at the Boston office of the FBI is his former lover, Diana Madigan. She’s willing to use the information Nick shared with her to help him, but she is not involved in the search for Alexa.  However, Diana does tell Nick that the reason Gordon Snyder is so wary of Nick’s interest in the case is that the FBI is doing a major investigation into Marshall Marcus’s firm and financial crimes.  And Gordon is afraid that looking for Alexa will compromise that investigation.

As Nick continues his investigation, it gets more and more dangerous.  His loft is broken into, he’s tasered, and still his client won’t give him all the information he needs.  What is Marshall continuing to hold back, and why?

Buried Secrets is the second in the Nick Heller series. The characters are really well-written, portrayed with their human faults and foibles, and Nick is a fascinating protagonist.  Joseph Finder has a very impressive resume that includes a master’s degree from Harvard’s Russian Research Center, and his knowledge of behind-the-scenes international deals seems very accurate.  This is definitely a series that I hope will continue.

You can read more about him at his web site.

It is not often that I read a mystery with a sense of joy.  Interest, enthusiasm, excitement–all those things are to be expected.  But when I finished reading Death Comes to Pemberly, I was filled with the joy that comes from reading a totally enchanting book. 

The novel opens six years after Elizabeth Bennet’s marriage to Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. They reside at Darcy’s family estate, Pemberly, with their two young sons, surrounded by servants whose parents and grandparents were part of the Darcy family’s retinue.  They live close to Elizabeth’s older sister and best friend, Jane, and her husband, Mr. Bingley, Darcy’s closest friend.

The Darcys are preparing for the annual Lady Anne Ball when, amidst the pouring rain and howling wind, a chaise is heard outside the front door.  When the group of Darcys, Bingleys, and others go to see who could be arriving in this storm, they are surprised and bewildered to see Elizabeth’s and Jane’s younger sister, Lydia, nearly falling out of the chaise.  She cries, “Wickham’s dead.  Denny has shot him….”  But Lydia has it wrong.  It is Captain Dennis who is dead, and George Wickham will be accused of his murder.

Lydia’s elopement with Wickham several years earlier, scandalous in nature, has created a major rift between the sisters.  Lydia is reluctantly welcome at Pemberly, but her husband George Wickham is not.  Although he was a close childhood friend of Darcy’s, his lies and inappropriate behaviors have ended the friendship between the men, and neither Elizabeth nor Darcy has spoken to him in years.

Darcy and two guests hear from the chaise driver that Wickham and a friend, Captain Dennis, had been in the chaise with Lydia, in the process of dropping her off at Pemberly.  There apparently had been a quarrel between the men and Dennis had run out into the woods, closely followed by Wickham, and two or three shots were subsequently heard.  Darcy and his two friends quickly leave the house and go into the estate’s woods, where they find Wickham, covered with blood, leaning over the body of his friend, saying, “He’s dead…and I’ve killed him.”

P. D. James’ prose perfectly captures the writing of Jane Austen. So skillful is her style that I believe it would fool the most dedicated Austen scholar.  She has captured perfectly the various personalities that appear in Pride and Prejudice–the kind and compassionate Jane, the more volatile Elizabeth, the foolish and vulgar Lydia, the self-contained Darcy, and various other characters, major and minor, who were in Austen’s novel.  Even Darcy’s disagreeable maternal aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, is perfectly captured in her letter to Elizabeth:  “I have never approved of protracted dying.  It is an affectation in the aristocracy; in the lower classes it is merely an excuse for avoiding work….People should make up their minds whether to live or to die and do one or the other with the least inconvenience to others.”

The Baroness James of Holland Park will be 92 this August, and her writing is as clever and skillful as it was when I read her book An Unsuitable Job for a Woman more than thirty years ago. How fortunate we are that she continues to write and bring delight to her readers.

You can read more about P.D. James at this web site.

A mother and son are all that is left of what was once a family of four. The son, the leader of a famous rock band, has been estranged from his novelist mother for more than four years, forbidding her to call or contact him in any way.  Why?

Carolyn Parkhurst’s third novel is not exactly a crime novel, although there is a murder at the center of it. But it is also a novel about accidents, broken families, and the consequences of things that people do without realizing the far-flung effects they will have.

Otavia Frost is a middle-aged writer of novels; none has become a best seller but all have been respectably received.  When the book opens she is bringing her latest work to her editor in New York City.  As she’s passing through Times Square in a taxi, she views the giant video screen there and sees the name of her estranged son on it.  Getting out of the cab, she is horrified to read “Pareidolia singer Milo Frost arrested for the murder of girlfriend Bettina Moffett.”

Although Milo has totally cut off contact with her, Olivia flies out to San Francisco, the city where her son lives, the following day.  She’s not sure exactly why she’s there, as she doesn’t know whether Milo will want to see her, but she feels her place is to be near him.  She’s able to contact Milo’s bandmate and friend, Joe Khan, and he agrees to meet her.  When they meet, Joe tells Olivia that Milo still doesn’t want to see her, but Joe invites her to his home to meet his girlfriend Chloe and her daughter Lia.

When Octavia arrives and sees Lia, she knows at once that Lia is Milo’s daughter, not Joe’s.  Chloe admits this with no hesitation, saying that when she found out she was pregnant she told Milo she would raise the child herself.  Milo agreed, and now Lia believes that Joe is her father and Milo is Uncle Milo.

There are parts of Octavia’s own life that she would like to rewrite; this being impossible, she’s done the next best thing and rewritten the final chapters of her novels and sent them off to her publisher to comprise a new book. Perhaps it is her hope that this act will allow her relationship with her son to be rewritten.  It is only when the reader is more than halfway through the novel that the reason for Milo’s separation from his mother is revealed.  In the meantime, Milo has somewhat unwillingly allowed his mother to re-enter his life, and Octavia is walking on eggs to try to maintain this rapprochement.

The horrific murder of Bettina Moffett has made headlines around the world. Octavia and Milo must cope with the hordes of media pursuing them.  Twitter, Facebook, made-up interviews, all of these must be dealt with in today’s instant-access world.

Carolyn Parkhurst has written a moving novel in which her protagonist must look deep into herself to find out the reasons for her son’s wall of silence. Could their shared past have brought him to the point of murder?

You can read more about Carolyn Parkhurst at her web site.

Almost as exciting as it is for me to read the debut mystery novel of an author is finding an established author whose books I haven’t read. I’ve found the latter in Ace Atkins, author of The Ranger.

Although Atkins is a mystery writer with eight books prior to this one, I wasn’t familiar with his work until I read that he had been chosen to continue the Spenser novels.  But in reading The Ranger, the first of a new series, I’m delighted to have discovered him now.

Quinn Colson is a member of the Army’s elite Rangers. He’s come home to northeast Mississippi for the first time in six years for the funeral of his Uncle Hamp, sheriff in the rural town where Quinn grew up.  He’d been very close to his uncle, especially after Quinn’s father deserted the family and his parents divorced, and he’s finding it hard to believe that his uncle put a .44 in his mouth and pulled the trigger.  But that’s what everyone tells him.

When Quinn enlisted in the Army, he knew he wanted to be a Ranger.  He also wanted to leave as much of his past behind as possible–his missing father, his mother’s obsession with Elvis, his drug-addicted sister, his high-school sweetheart who jilted him while he was in Afghanistan.  But, of course, much of that is waiting for him when he returns to Jericho, Tibbehah County, Mississippi.

Quinn’s father is still nowhere around; his mother still plays Elvis’s songs night and day, except when she’s listening to gospel; his sister is turning tricks to pay for her drug habit and has left her toddler son with their mother; and his former sweetheart is married to the town’s very successful doctor.  It’s no wonder Quinn stayed away as long as he did.

But things will get even worse before they get better. The land that Hamp owned, which has been in the family for generations, is being claimed by Johnny Stagg, a bully with lots of seedy businesses.  Stagg shows Quinn a scrap of paper with Hamp’s signature on it that allegedly makes Stagg the owner of the land in lieu of repayment of a loan.  Quinn doesn’t believe that the document is valid, but even if it is he’s determined not to give the land away.  “I’d rather burn the house and timber,” he says.

Since Quinn’s father’s disappearance from his life, his uncle had been his mentor and guide.  It’s painful for Quinn to hear that corruption had flourished so blatantly while Hamp was sheriff, that he ran up huge gambling debts that he was unable to repay, and that the sleazy Stagg is now a power to be reckoned with in Jericho.  What had Hamp been thinking and doing while Quinn was away?

The characters in The Ranger are fascinating. As in real life, some have overcome and some have failed to overcome their problems, and the most sympathetic ones continue to fight to improve their lives.  The ones who don’t succeed, like Quinn’s sister, can almost break the reader’s heart when attempt after attempt fails.

Ace Atkins’s second book in the Quinn Colson series, The Lost Ones, has just been published, and you can read more about it on his web site.

June 2, 2012

I’m not sure who said it originally, but variety is definitely the spice of life.  And that’s one of the reasons I so enjoy reading mysteries.

Just taking a look at the books I’ve reviewed recently, I’ve gone from present-day Los Angeles to nineteenth-century New York City to twentieth-century China to nineteenth-century Scotland. And all without leaving home, unless you count my trips to the local library or book store.

Last month I attended a panel discussion that featured an author of several novels, two of which I’d read and thoroughly enjoyed.  She spoke passionately and eloquently about her latest novel, which indeed was excellent.  During her talk she mentioned that rarely had she read a mystery novel and never had finished reading one.

I could hardly believe her.  It’s as if she had said she’d never read a non-fiction book or never seen a foreign film or never gone to an art museum.  I’m certain she never would have said any of those things, so why did she think it was alright to say she’d never finished a mystery story?

The funny thing was that after she had said that, she kind of laughed and said that perhaps her latest novel, the one  she was discussing, was kind of a mystery. And indeed it was, I thought.  There was a crime involved, a person who may or may not have been guilty of that crime, and a violent ending to the story.  But it wasn’t about a murder or one that featured a private eye as its protagonist, so perhaps it didn’t fit into her definition of a mystery.

Did she not read mysteries because they scared her?  Because she felt they were not serious literature, only entertainment?  Or was there some other reason?

Of course, her decision is exactly that, her decision.  And although I didn’t question her during the question-and-answer session or approach her after that to ask for her reason, I felt like telling her that there are as many different kinds of novels in the mystery genre as in any other genre, and she was missing a lot of wonderful, well-crafted stories featuring funny heroines, dissipated private investigators, burned-out police officers, and a hundred or so other protagonists, written by authors who have a good tale to tell.

I admire her writing but not her closed vision. It’s her loss, but as I left the talk I felt sorry for her.

Marilyn

Portland, Maine, is a city dear to my heart, as my older son and his wife work there (flyte.biz).  But not all of Portland is a renovated waterfront and fabulous new restaurants.  Apparently there’s still plenty of nasty stuff going on behind the glitz.

A fight at a funeral sets Port City Shake Down in motion.  Brandon Blake is a part-time college student.  He is riding in a squad car with a veteran police officer as part of a criminology course he’s taking.  When a call comes over the police radio about a disturbance at a funeral home, Brandon and the police officer go to the scene.

Several women are kicking, punching, cursing, and biting each other next to the coffin, and Brandon rushes in to separate them.  Trying to protect himself as well as stop the fight, he elbows one of the women in the face and breaks her nose.  The woman’s son, who is also the grandson of the deceased, handcuffed and with a sheriff’s deputy by his side, tells Brandon, “Eye for an eye, dude…Times (expletive deleted) ten.”

Joel Fuller, the man in handcuffs, gets early release from prison from a sympathetic judge the following day.  Now he’s got the chance to make good his threat against Brandon.  

Brandon was five when his free-spirited mother left Portland on a boat with three men she had met a few days before.  It was supposed to have been a short voyage, but the boat never arrived at its intended port.  It was reported lost, no survivors.  Brandon’s father is unknown, so it’s always been just Brandon and his grandmother Nella.  But Nella hasn’t been the most stable of guardians–she’s never far from a bottle of wine.

Given his background, it’s not surprising that Brandon has always kept to himself and taken care of himself.  When his criminology professor asks him why he’s only taking one course, Brandon reluctantly explains that he works at a Portland marina.  The professor reminds him there is financial assistance available–loans, grants.  But Brandon isn’t having any of that.  “I don’t need any help…I pay as I go,” he responds.

But suddenly his life is opening up.  Mia, another student in the criminology course, makes it clear she’s interested in Brandon.  She’s smart, self-assured, and thinks Brandon is leading an adventurous life very different from her own.  Soon they’re a couple, and Brandon has someone in his life with whom to share his thoughts and even his secrets.

Then, as he and Nella are driving around the waterfront, Nella suddenly orders Brandon to stop the car.  She has seen, or thinks she has, one of the men on the boat that supposedly went down with everyone aboard, including her daughter. But when Brandon rushes out of the car to find the man Nella calls Lucky, he’s nowhere to be seen.  Did she really see him?

I’m always delighted when I come across what is for me a new writer, and that’s what happened in this case.  I was ordering a book from Amazon and they suggested, as they always do, that I might also want to purchase Port City Shake Down. I took a chance, and I’m pleased that I did.

Gerry Boyle has created a very interesting protagonist, a young man who has made himself what he is with not much help from anyone.  He’s smart, independent, and knows what he wants from life.  I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, Port City Black and White.

You can read more about Gerry Boyle at his web site.

When something has been around for your whole life (and longer than that), you often don’t think about its beginnings.  I certainly never thought about how the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came into being–it was just always there. But, of course, it had to start sometime, and that time was in 1861 in Boston (not Cambridge, another fact I hadn’t thought about).

The Technologists, Matthew Pearl’s latest historical mystery, takes place in 1868, the year the Institute will hold its first graduation. The middle of the nineteenth century is usually seen as the end of the Industrial Revolution and its incredible technological breakthroughs–the steam engine, the mechanization of cotton mills, the telegraph.

But, of course, these technologies impacted on the lives of workers, many of whom were fearful of losing their livelihood to these improved means of manufacture or transportation.  Then there were those who thought all technology and science was the work of the devil and vowed to oppose any advancements.  And to add to this mix was the immediate rivalry between Harvard College, then a mature two hundred and twenty years old, and the upstart Institute of Technology.

As the novel opens, the Institute is ready to graduate its first class, but it is rapidly running out of funds, its president will shortly suffer a major stroke, and some of its small faculty want to have the school incorporated into the vastly larger and more prestigious Harvard College. To add to these problems, someone is terrorizing Boston with a series of horrific events–a massive collision of boats in the harbor, glass melting in the windows of the Financial District, deadly explosions on the city’s streets.  Many of the citizens of the city are certain that the new Institute is to blame.

Four of the Institute’s students, led by Marcus Mansfield, a “charity scholar” and former worker in the Hammond Locomotive Works, band together to try to use their technical knowledge to find the perpetrator of these crimes. They are a diverse group that, in addition to Marcus, includes his close friend Bob Richards; the lone woman at the Institute, Ellen Swallow; and the student vying for the position of class scholar, Edwin Hoyt.  Working secretly in a basement room of the Institute, they race against time and prejudice to discover what is behind the disasters that are plaguing their city.

The Technologists is a fascinating book.  The city of Boston comes alive.  You can see what life was like in this proud City on a Hill that regarded itself as the Hub of the nation; along with New York, it was the financial center of the country in the nineteenth century.  The city was ruled by a small class of people who came to be known as the Boston Brahmins, people of social connections, money, and educational pedigrees, and many of those leaders were proud alumni of Harvard College.

Indeed, one of the themes running through The Technologists is the fact that Marcus Mansfield is a “factory boy” and, regardless of his expected degree from the Institute, he will never be seen as more than that.  Certainly not in Boston.  And to more than one of the Harvard men, it is inconceivable that Marcus’s friend Bob Richards would have chosen the Institute rather than the College that many of his family had attended.

Matthew Pearl has added to his previous books about Boston–The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, The Last Dickens–with this excellent novel. You can read more about him at his web site.

The full title of this book is Midnight in Peking:  How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China. That says it all.

A dear friend of mine, Deborah Richardson, sent me this book because she thought it would interest me, and she was absolutely right.  This work of non-fiction is the spellbinding story of a very turbulent time, not only in China but throughout the world as the Second World War was approaching.

In fact, it was approaching China more rapidly than elsewhere.  The Japanese had invaded Manchuria several years earlier, and as this book opens it is 1938 and the Japanese are marching steadily toward Peking. The Chinese, split between communist sympathizers and the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek, was proving ineffective at halting the Japanese.  Peking itself, still home to the legations of the British, French, Japanese, and German governments, was powerless.  The city was crowded with its own citizens as well as diplomats from the above-mentioned countries and refugees pouring in from Europe–mainly White Russians and Jewish refugees.

On a January morning, an elderly Chinese man came across the body of a young white female. Even a cursory glance was enough to see that she had been badly beaten, stabbed multiple times, and had had some of her clothes torn off.  The location of the body was in itself particularly malevolent; it was found at the Fox Tower, which was believed to be haunted by evil fox spirits.

The investigation seemed to be in good hands at first. Colonel Han Shih-ching was a senior detective, and this was not the only foreign corpse he had come across.  Although the Fox Tower was in the Chinese section of Peking, since the girl was obviously of European descent Han called the head of the Legation Quarter Administration to view the body and possibly to identify her.

A closer look at the young woman’s body revealed a platinum and diamond wristwatch.  This was not the corpse of some penniless waif or prostitute, which had been the first thought of the police responding to the call. Then an elderly white man pushed his way through the crowd.  He looked at the broken body, exclaimed “Pamela,” and fell to the ground.  It was his daughter, home from school for the Christmas holiday.  The man was Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner, a British subject, former diplomat, author, and scholar of Chinese languages and literature.

Shortly afterwards the British diplomatic service loaned Detective Chief Inspector Richard Dennis to the Peking police as a favor, but he had his orders to limit his investigation to the Legation Quarter.  However, since the victim was a British subject but Pamela’s body was found outside the Quarter, and since the Fox Tower was under Chinese control but the victim was foreign, Han and Dennis were hindered from the start. It was politics as usual.

How the British and Chinese investigators interacted as they tried both to find the murderer and “save face” and “protect their own,” and how the eccentric Edward Werner refused to accept this flawed investigation as final, is a fascinating read. It involves good will, ill will, corruption, government cover-ups, lies, and more lies.  As the French proverb goes, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Paul French has done a wonderful job portraying the last days of a dissolute, crumbling empire. You can read more about him at this web site.

As usual, there’s a lot going on in Moscow. And Russian police inspector Arkady Renko is, unwillingly, in the middle of it.

Three Stations is where three railroad stations meet.  It’s a terminal that has proved to be terminal for a young woman whose half-unclothed body is found in a trailer in the station.  The illegal wiring in the trailer is connected to the railway police station and then to the nearby militia station.  Is it any wonder that the police call this death a suicide and forbid Arkady Renko to investigate?

The only clue that Arkady finds in the trailer is a pass to a luxury fair currently going on in the city. Having officially been taken off the case and told to expect his termination notice shortly, he feels he has nothing to lose and so goes to the fair.  It’s sponsored by billionaire (or is that former billionaire?) Sasha Vaksberg, aka the “Prince of Darkness.”

The fair features various items up for auction:  a rifle that had belonged to a Romanov child for $75,000; an emerald necklace for $275,00; a ride to the International Space Station for $25 million. This is the new Russia, a millionaire’s playground.  The fair is supposed to be a charity event for the homeless children of Moscow, but does it have a more sinister purpose?

Shortly before the young woman’s body is discovered, a teenage girl runs off the train that has just arrived at Three Stations.  Maya, no last name or home town, is frantically looking for her baby, whom she says was stolen while she slept on the train, but the railway police don’t believe her story. She has no personal identification, no picture of the baby, no witnesses who might have seen the alleged abduction.

Zhenya Lysenko, an unofficial ward of Arkady’s, is in Three Stations hustling games of chess, as usual. Zhenya isn’t sure he believes Maya’s story about the baby, but he can see that she’s alone and frantic, and he wants to help her.  She refuses to go with him to see Arkady, or any other police official, so he smuggles her into the abandoned Peter the Great gambling casino that he uses as a base while they try to find the infant.

Martin Cruz Smith’s series follows the history of the Soviet Union/Russia as much as it follows Renko’s.  The state corruption and mismanagement are different, yet the same.  Now there are millionaires and even billionaires in Russia, but crime, drunkenness, and a desperate underclass are still here.  The promise of the communist government was unfulfilled; the same can be said for its replacement.

Three Stations is a look into a society with multiple problems.  Arkady Renko is one of the few officials who cares, but the corrupt bureaucracy is against him.  Despite his successes, or perhaps because of them, in each novel his future becomes more precarious.

You can read more about Martin Cruz Smith at his web site.

Joseph O’Loughlin, a psychologist who is the protagonist in Bleed For Me, has a lot to contend with. He’s suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, is separated from his wife through no desire of his own, and his fourteen-year-old daughter Charlie can barely tolerate him.  And things are going to get worse for him, a lot worse.

Julianne, Joe’s estranged wife, calls him at 11:00 p.m., saying that Charlie’s best friend Sienna has appeared at her door, covered in blood.  Joe rushes over, just in time to see Sienna run from the house.  He follows her through the woods and into a nearby lake, pulling her out before she goes underwater permanently.  Sienna is rushed to a nearby hospital, and as Joe returns to his former home he is told by a neighbor that Sienna’s father, a retired homicide detective, has been murdered and the police think Sienna committed the crime.

Zoe, Sienna’s older sister, confirms that their father sexually abused them, but she is adamant that Sienna didn’t kill him.  However, the police see it differently, and Sienna is arrested and slated for trial.

Joe goes to talk to Gordon Ellis, the drama teacher at Charlie and Sienna’s school. Although Gordon is popular with all the girls, when Joe questioned Sienna at the hospital she refused to talk about him.  Gordon says he thought there might be a problem at Sienna’s house and arranged for the girl to see a counselor.  Joe has a “gut feeling”–that Sienna is protecting somebody and that Gordon knows more than he’s telling.  No proof, just a feeling that there’s something between the two of them, something inappropriate.

Sienna has also been close to the counselor at school, Annie Robinson.  Annie says she knew Gordon Ellis in college but wasn’t close to him.  She calls Gordon “too handsome for his own good” and promises to look into any conversations at school about possible sexual misconduct between Gordon and the female students.

One of the reasons that Julianne left Joe and wants a divorce is her feeling that he can’t separate himself from his work and his clients. And that certainly seems to be the case here.  His car is run off the road, his dog is killed, but still he persists in trying to help Sienna; true, she’s not a patient, but her closeness to his daughter makes her seem to Joe as nearly a member of his family.

Bleed for Me is a beautifully crafted, incredibly suspenseful book.  It’s not an easy read, dealing with parental sexual abuse and other sexual perversions, things that are unfortunately all too common in today’s news.  But the emotions of all the characters ring true–their fears, desires, lusts, loves–all the emotions that make us human.

You can read more about Michael Robotham at his web site.