Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Josephine Tey is an author who is not too familiar to American readers of crime novels. She was 56 when she died in 1952 and had written only a handful of novels, but every one of them is worth reading or, in my case, re-reading.

Elizabeth Macintosh, Tey’s real name, used an “old proverb” that can’t be found anywhere, according to a review of Tey’s works in the Washington Post, for the title of this book.   “Truth is the daughter of time” is the saying, and I must admit I’m not sure exactly what it means.  Perhaps it means that “truth will tell,” which would certainly fit with the novel’s story.

Alan Grant, the British police detective who is the hero in several of Ms. Tey’s novels, is, as the English say, “in hospital” with a broken leg. Cranky and bored, he welcomes an old friend, Marta Hallard, a well-known stage actress, who brings him a pile of posters from the British Museum.   Each one is a portrait of a murderer or evil-doer.  In that pile is a portrait of a man whom Grant believes doesn’t belong there, and Grant is famous at Scotland Yard for his ability to “pick them at sight.”  The portrait is of Richard The Third, infamous king of England, best known for killing his two nephews in the Tower of London to preclude any claims they might have to be king.

The more Grant looks at the portrait, the more he is certain that the man with the sensitive face could not be the monster that English history says he is.  So obsessed does he become with this portrait that Marta brings a young American friend of hers, Brent Carradine, to do a bit of research for him to find out more about the king.  And the more deeply Grant and Carradine get into it, the more certain they both become that “history is bunk” and that Richard had no reason to kill his nephews and didn’t do it.

There’s a great deal of history in this book that apparently is known to the English but totally unknown to most Americans.  Names such as Eleanor Neville, the Cat and the Rat, and Lord Morton of “Morton’s Fork,” for example, are seemingly as well known in that country at Benjamin Franklin and Betsy Ross would be to students of American history.  But Tey explains her country’s history beautifully, and what might in other hands have become a dry treatise is instead a wonderful look into kings, queens, and court villains.

Fighting the battle at Bosworth in 1485 between the Yorks (Richard’s family) and the Lancastrians (followers of Henry Tudor, soon to become the first Tudor king), Richard was defeated and killed.  How amazing is it that Tey brings not only Richard but all of the members of his family and his court to life more than 500 years after his death?

Unfortunately, Josephine Tey doesn’t appear to have a web page, but you can read about her at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Tey.

Back I go again to snowy, cold Sweden.  Don’t they commit murder in Sweden during the summer?

Be that as it may, The Ice Princess by Camilla Lackberg will surely chill your blood, regardless of the season in which you read it.

The novel takes place in the present time, but the source of the crimes goes back a quarter of a century. When Erica Falck returns to her hometown of Fjallbacka after her parents’ death, she is immediately confronted by the death of her girlhood friend, Alex.  Alex’s body was found frozen, with her wrists cut, in the bathtub of her home.

Alex is a woman who seems to have everything. The successful co-owner of an art gallery, she is a woman who has beauty, brains, and a very wealthy husband who adores her.  But what was bringing her from her sumptuous home in Stockholm to her former hometown of Fjallbacka nearly every weekend?  Her husband, who knew that his love for her greatly exceeded her love for him, was too fearful to ask questions; better to deal with the uncertainty than to end their marriage.

Erica, a successful writer of famous Swedish women’s biographies, is asked by Alex’s parents to write a eulogy for their daughter.  They are convinced that she would never have killed herself.  According to Alex’s father, “she didn’t have the inner strength.”  And it turns out her parents were right.

Erica is reluctant.  She protests that she and Alex were friends a long time ago and hadn’t had any contact in the intervening years.  But that opens up the question that has bothered Erica all this time–what made Alex drop out of Erica’s life and made her family pick up and leave in the middle of the school year without a word to anyone? 

Various other threads run through The Ice Princess. Erica’s younger sister, Anna, is trapped in an abusive marriage that she doesn’t seem to have the strength to leave.  Anders, the town’s brilliant painter and also its local drunkard, continues to waste his life and his talent.  And then there’s the twenty-five year old mysterious disappearance of the son of the town’s richest family–he was a teacher at the local elementary school and was simply gone one day.  Did he commit a crime and flee?  Was he murdered?  Did his despicable mother and/or his arrogant adopted brother have anything to do with his disappearance?

On the lighter side of this dark novel is the burgeoning romance between Erica and another childhood friend, Patrik Hedstrom, who is now a member of the town’s police force.  In love with Erica since they were children, Patrik can hardly believe his good luck at her interest in him now.

According to the book’s jacket, Camilla Lackberg is the author of four #1 best-sellers in her native country. With her stunning prose and her insights into small town life and its citizens, it’s easy to see why.

You can read more about Camilla Lackberg at her web site.

Imagine if someone told you to think of a number, any number, from one to one thousand. You do, and that person hands you a previously written note with the number you had in mind.  How did he do it?  It’s not your age, your house number, the number of children you have, the year you were born–it’s just a number that you pulled from the top of your head.  How did he know the number you would choose? This is the problem that opens Think of a Numb3r by John Verdon.

Retired police detective Dave Gurney is trying to settle down to a peaceful life with his wife in a small village in upstate New York. Out of the blue he gets an e-mail from a college classmate, a man he hasn’t heard from in more than twenty years.  The letter’s author is Mark Mellery, now a well-known author and director of a nearby spiritual retreat, and in his letter he asks for Gurney’s help.  Reluctantly Gurney agrees to see him the following day, and when Mellery arrives he explains what is troubling him.

Years ago Mellery had a serious alcohol problem, and there are black holes in his memory, weeks and weeks of which he has no memory.  It’s been years since he’s taken a drink, but now he has received a letter in which the letter writer appears to know some secret from that time.

To prove that he knows all about Mellery, the letter writer asked him pick a number from one to one thousand; Mellery picked six fifty eight, a number he swears to Gurney simply came to him with no association to any part of his life.  When he opened the envelope that was enclosed in the letter, the number six fifty eight is what was written.  Of course, part of Mellery’s problem is that the number has no association to any part of his life that he remembers, given the many alcoholic blackouts he had, and he’s now convinced that the letter writer knows some disreputable secret about his past.

He refuses Gurney’s suggestion that he go to the police, saying that that would be a lose-lose situation: either they’ll treat the whole thing as a joke or they’ll start poking around his Institute for Spiritual Renewal, upsetting his clients, and that would be worse.

Reluctantly Gurney tells Mellery he’ll look into the problem–there has to be a simple solution, no one could possibly have known what number he would choose. Then Mellery receives a phone call in which he’s asked to pick another number.  He chooses nineteen, again for no apparent reason, and is told to go to the mailbox outside his home and open the envelope that’s there.  He does, and there’s a slip of paper inside with the number nineteen written on it.  And then Mellery is killed.

This novel is truly a thriller. The reader knows there has to be some logical explanation for the numbers game and for the bizarre way that Mellery is murdered–shot, his throat slashed numerous times, footprints in the snow leading away from the body and then simply disappearing, and a chair abandoned in the middle of a snow-covered lawn with cigarettes strewn around it.  Unless you’re a believer in ESP, which Gurney isn’t, you have to believe there’s a logical explanation.  But what is it?

Think of a Numb3r is an incredible debut. The plotting is fast-paced, page-turning, and the various characters that Gurney encounters in his search for Mellery’s killer ring true.  And Gurney’s strained relationship with his wife and his difficulty in truly leaving behind his sleuthing days are well written and believable.

You can read more about John Verdon in this interview.

After slightly more than a year of blogging, I’ve come to the conclusion that there really is an art to the perfect review. I’m not saying I’ve mastered perfection yet, but I do know what not to do.

When I read a review of a novel or a film, I frequently stop after the first paragraph or two.  That’s because too often I’ve had the experience of finding out more of the plot from the review or synopsis than I wanted to know.

I recently read a mystery, nameless here to protect the author of the back cover’s blurb, which gave away the fact that there was a second murder and told the reader who the victim was.  What made this especially upsetting was the fact that the novel was 350 pages long and the second murder didn’t take place until more than half way through, on page 182.

As it happened in this case, I hadn’t looked at the back cover at all before starting the book.  In fact, I had just finished the chapter in which the second killing took place when I decided to read the back of the novel.

What was the point of giving the reader or prospective reader such a plot spoiler before he or she read the book? It certainly would have killed the suspense for me if I hadn’t already reached that chapter.

There’s a fine line between not giving the potential reader enough of a teaser to whet that person’s interest versus giving out too much information and spoiling everything.  I hope I usually manage to get it right; if I don’t, please let me know.

Marilyn

South Africa in the 1950s. Not a good place for blacks, Indians, Chinese, or anyone other than white.  But a fascinating, although very scary, place to visit via a novel.

Let the Dead Lie by Malla Nunn is the second novel in her series featuring Emmanuel Cooper, a South African of mixed blood who can and has passed for white. For writing a sympathy note to a black woman on the death of her son who was in police custody, Cooper had to leave the Johannesburg police force and move to Durban, where he has a low-level job in a shipyard.  Cooper’s former supervisor, Major van Niekerk, was also sent to Durban as punishment, but he has remained loyal to Cooper and has enlisted his help in ferreting out some corrupt members of the Durban police force, although Cooper’s operation must necessarily be covert.

Cooper is following these orders, trying to forget how much he misses being a police detective, when he stumbles across the body of a young boy on the docks.  The boy was a runner for some underworld thugs but was harmless himself, simply a poor white kid trying to support his family.  When two Indian teenage brothers are spotted at the scene of the murder, they fit perfectly into the racial intolerance of the time; before long there’s a city-wide police search for them.

Cooper gets caught  in the middle of this, knowing that the Indian boys are innocent. Then Cooper’s landlady and her housemaid are murdered, and an incriminating piece of evidence is found in Cooper’s apartment.  Van Niekerk makes a deal with him–find the actual murderer and Cooper can rejoin the police and obtain that all important white identity card.  It seems that in South Africa in the 1950s if you were light enough to “pass” and had the right connections, you could get a white ID.  That piece of paper allowed you to go to certain parks, the beaches, hospitals, and schools–it controlled your life.  Without it, you were a second-class citizen under the law.

There are some very interesting characters in Let The Dead Lie. In addition to Cooper and van Niekerk, there’s the bar girl, mistress of van Niekerk; a seriously ill former Russian spy and his very pregnant wife; an Indian gangster; and a Jewish doctor and a black police constable who were punished in the first novel for helping Cooper find out the truth about a murder.

In addition to the racial laws passed in 1948 that characterized the population as “white,” “colored,” “mixed-race,” and “Chinese,” there is also the ethnic division between the British and the Dutch or Afrikaans.  The British and the Afrikaans don’t trust or respect each other, and each group walks a dangerous tightrope to try to be in first place.

Let The Dead Lie lets us into a world that, thankfully, is in the past.  The sense of history in this mystery is overwhelming. The reader learns how precarious life was there, especially for non-whites but even for the white population.  Corruption and favoritism ruled, and once you were caught in a trap there was not an easy way out.  Being innocent wasn’t enough.

In addition to being a novelist, Malla Nunn is an award-winning filmmaker. You can read more about Malla Nunn and see a brief video of her at her publishers’ web page.

Not to keep you in suspense, I’m writing my first post in this section about what I consider the most golden of all Golden Oldies–And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie.

I have read this mystery at least five times over the years, each time with the thought that this time I’d see the red herrings and clues that I hadn’t noticed the previous times I had read the book.  After all, I knew after the first reading what had happened and why.

But that didn’t happen.  With each reading I was more impressed by the author’s ability to completely mystify me, to lead me down paths that definitely led me away from the murderer, all the while being convinced that I knew exactly what she was doing. In my mind there’s no one like Dame Agatha  (she was named a Commander of the British Empire in 1956).

For those not familiar with the novel’s plot, ten people, a very disparate group, are invited to a deserted island off the coat of Devon. There seems to be nothing in common among them–there’s a judge, a rich young racing car enthusiast, a married couple who are the servants on the island, a retired military man, a governess, a former policeman, an elderly woman, a mercenary, and a physician.

Each had received a somewhat cryptic invitation from someone who professed to be an acquaintance, inviting them to spend a few days on the island.  But when the group was assembled, it turned out that no one knew exactly who had invited them, and there was no host or hostess there.

All was set for their arrival however, and they anticipated that the next day would bring the owner of the island to the house.  But after dinner, the manservant played a recording that accused each of the guests of being a murderer. They all vehemently denied the accusations with various excuses or reasons for the deaths that were described, and all claimed they were innocent.

The young race car enthusiast admitted that he had run down and killed two pedestrians some time ago, but he said that certainly wasn’t murder, just an accident that was “beastly bad luck.”  He picked up his drink at the bar, swallowed it in a gulp, convulsed, and died in front of the group.

And then the other guests started dying, one by one. At first there was denial, the guests saying that the deaths were natural–suffocation, a weak heart.  But soon there was the realization that someone had decided that these people literally had gotten away with murder and needed to be punished.

And Then There Were None is a masterpiece. Perhaps it’s dated, as a Sherlock Holmes story may be dated, but that doesn’t take away one bit from its perfection.  If you haven’t read it, put it on your reading list.  If you have, you know why it’s heading the G. O. list.

As much a snapshot of New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s as it is a mystery, Snakes Can’t Run by Ed Lin gives the reader an insight into the various factions of an ethnic community at a turning point in its history.

The snakes in the title are not of the reptile variety but rather snakeheads, what today we more commonly call coyotes.  They are Chinese American citizens who bring over illegal immigrants, in this case to lower New York City.   Not surprising is that both snakeheads and coyotes are the names of animals in that their treatment of the men and women they bring to the United States, whether it be via ships to New York’s Chinatown to work in restaurants and laundries or via trucks to Arizona to work in the fields, is inhumane.

Robert Chow is a New York City police detective whose late father was an illegal immigrant. Chow was a huge disappointment to his father when he decided not to go to college and joined the Army instead, then came home from Vietnam to become a policeman.  The elder Chow had higher aspirations for his son, aspirations that were out of his own reach as an immigrant with an incomplete grasp of English.

And Robert Chow has other demons besides his memories of his father.  He came back from Vietnam an alcoholic, and when the novel opens he’s only been sober for four months.

Now Chow is surrounded by illegals in his own neighborhood, where he’s the poster boy for diversity in the Police Department. Chinatown is split between two groups–the mainland Chinese and the Taiwanese Chinese.  Although Taiwan has been replaced by mainland China as a member of the United Nations, the United States still did not have full diplomatic relations with the Republic of China in 1976 when the novel takes place, and tensions among the Communists and the Taiwanese are running high.

Adding fuel to the fire is the increased number of illegals coming to New York from China, mainly Fukienese.  Like most immigrants, they arrived in America poor and uneducated and willing to do anything to stay here.  But by coming here illegally, with the help of Chinese Americans who owned businesses, they couldn’t object to low wages, poor working conditions, and lack of benefits.  And in order to pay back the money advanced by these merchants to the snakeheads, or owed by the immigrants themselves to the snakeheads, these illegal aliens were basically indentured servants, many working until their deaths trying to pay back what they owed.

Although there is a double murder early in the novel, I felt Snakes Can’t Run was more of a sociological study than a mystery.  There’s a great deal of history in it and a lot of background of Chinese and Chinese American feelings during the late 1970s, and the mystery takes second place to that.  But one of the reasons I love reading mysteries, as I have written before, is because they take me outside my own world.  I was pulled into the gritty world of Chinatown–its food, its superstitions, its people. And it made for very interesting reading.

You can read more about Ed Lin at his web site.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.  It’s certainly true in Julia Spencer-Fleming’s fourth novel in the Reverend Clare Fergusson/Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne mystery series.

I usually review the most recent book by an author, since I think that’s what most readers want.  In order to truly understand the dynamics of the priest and the police chief, though, this series should be read from the beginning.  That being said, To Darkness and To Death, the fourth Fergusson/Van Alstyne novel, will hopefully lead you to read the other books in order and thus gain a deeper insight into the characters of the two protagonists.

Clare Fergusson is an unmarried Episcopal priest in a small town north of Albany, New York. Russ Van Alstyne is a former soldier and the married police chief of this town, Millers Kill; kill is an old-fashioned word meaning a body of water such as a creek or river.

In Out of the Deep I Cry, the first book of the series, the two meet, and by the second book, A Fountain Filled with Blood, there is the beginning of a relationship that is slowly, slowly heading toward a place neither one wants it to go.

In To Darkness and To Death, many things in Millers Kill have reached the boiling point, including the relationship between Clare and Russ.

Millers Kill, like many other small towns, has been losing manufacturing businesses to other locations with cheaper labor and manufacturing costs. The two biggest businesses in town, Castle Logging and Reid-Gruyn Pulp and Paper Mill, are about to be sold by their reluctant owners to a joint ownership by a foreign company and a native conservancy group.  Economics being what they are, it’s simply not financially feasible for these two companies to stay in business, especially given the fact that the town’s huge timber tract, which they both need to stay in business, is owned by the van der Hoeven family and is also being sold.

So into the mix that is the core of the book’s one day events is 1) Millie van der Hoeven, member of the family that owns the 250,000 acre timber land, who is missing as the novel opens; 2) Randy Schoof, a logger who can’t think of any other way to make a living when he’s told the logging company will close; 3) Becky Castle, daughter of the logging company’s owner and a committed “tree-hugger” who’s putting together the sale of the timber tract; 4) Shaun Reid, fourth generation owner of the pulp mill who desperately wants his son to be the fifth generation owner; 5) Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne, whose platonic but emotionally charged relationship is about to come to a head.

What happens when law-abiding people don’t see any way out of their difficulties except murder? What happens when people who’ve always been law-abiding members of society decide to take the law into their own hands?  What has made them decide that their lives are worth so much more than anyone else’s?

What happens when two people who shouldn’t be attracted to each other, are?  Can anything good come of it?

Each of Julia Spencer-Fleming’s books shows a deep understanding of human nature. Most of us know the rules of behavior, but we can’t or don’t always abide by them.  And when we don’t, things go from bad to worse.

You can read more about Julia Spencer-Fleming at her web site.

M, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, humpback, humpback, I–How southern children are taught to spell Mississippi.

That sentence and its explanation open Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.  And Tom Franklin’s latest novel definitely takes the reader through a crooked path over a period of twenty-five years to right old wrongs and expose old secrets.

Larry Ott was always a loner, even before the traumatic event that shaped his life.  Not much that he did pleased his tough, hard-drinking father, and his dependent relationship with his mother didn’t help.  An outcast at school, he had but one friend, and that one had to be kept secret.

A young white boy in 1979 Mississippi, the last thing Larry could do or wanted to do was to befriend a black boy of his age.  But when Silas  Jones and his single mother moved into the rural town, there appeared to be a connection between the boys almost from the beginning.  Although Silas and Larry couldn’t be friends in public, they did maintain a secret friendship over a period of time.

Desperate to impress his father and his classmates, Larry accepted the offer from a popular girl in school to take her to the drive-in, strange as that seemed to him.  When they were together in the car, Cindy Walker told Larry she was pregnant and needed to be dropped off near her boyfriend’s house.  Larry was her cover, her beard.

Upset and unsure of himself, Larry did what she asked after she promised to meet him later that night so he could take her home, after swearing him to silence about their “date.”  But when he returned to the spot where he was supposed to meet Cindy, she wasn’t there, and she was never seen again. That began the complete ostracization of Larry Ott by the townspeople of Chabot and its surroundings.

Twenty-five years later, with Larry and Silas both back in Chabot, the story resumes.  It’s the present, and another young woman is missing.  The police have been dogging Larry’s footsteps for the past quarter-century, sure that he was responsible for Cindy Walker’s disappearance and death, and they are equally sure that he’s guilty this time around.

Larry has stayed in Chabot except for a brief stint in the army, operating the garage owned by his late father, visiting his mother in her nursing home; he is still an outcast in the community.  Silas left during high school for Oxford, was a star on the baseball team, and joined the navy.  Now he’s returned as town constable, and he’s ignoring the phone calls he’s received from his former friend.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a beautifully realized book.  It is a mystery, but it’s more than that.  It’s a picture of life in a small town in southern Mississippi, a place newly desegregated in its school but not in its neighborhoods or churches or attitudes.

I had never heard of Tom Franklin before, despite the fact that he won an Edgar award for his first book of short stories, Poachers.  Judging by his latest novel, he deserves to be read more widely.  His characters are real, their problems are real, and, as in life, there really are no easy answers.

You can read more about the author at:  http://www.harpercollins.com/books.

The Scent of Rain and Lightning should put Nancy Pickard on the list of must-read mystery authors; it’s where she deserves to be.  I’ve always felt that in spite of her many awards, Ms. Pickard wasn’t a household name, and I’m hoping her latest novel will change that.

The Linder family of Rose, Kansas seem to have it all in 1986.  The parents are the wealthiest people in their county, with ranches in the adjacent states of Colorado and Nebraska, and have three sons, a daughter, her fiancee, a daughter-in-law, and a granddaughter.  They’re well-respected and liked by all the townspeople and not just because many of them owe their livelihood to the Linders.   It’s because the Linders are kind, generous people.

But terrible things happen even to good people. As the book opens, the Linders’ granddaughter is unexpectedly visited by her three uncles–her father’s two surviving brothers and her aunt’s husband.  They’ve come to tell her that the prison sentence that put her father’s killer in prison for sixty years has been commuted after twenty-three and that Billy Crosby had been freed and was returning to Rose.

Everyone in town thought that the Linders were making a mistake by taking Billy under their wing and employing him on their ranch.  But they’d done this before and had turned around the lives of several young men, and they thought they could do the same for Billy.  But on a hot and steamy day, after downing one too many beers at lunchtime, Billy viciously attacked a cow that wasn’t docile enough for him and was sent home by patriarch Hugh Linder.  Later that night the cow was attacked and killed, a gate was left open so that painstaking ranch work would have to be redone, and small fires were started.

When Billy was arrested for these crimes later that day but released the next for lack of physical evidence, the whole town knew how angry he was at the family.  So when, in the midst of a terrible rainstorm the following night, the Linders’ oldest son, Hugh-Jay, was murdered and his wife nowhere to be found, Billy was arrested again.  This time he’s brought to trial and convicted.

With masterful storytelling, Nancy Pickard goes from 1986 when the crimes took place to the present when Billy is released from prison. The story is told from different points of view–that of Jody Linder, the granddaughter; Annabelle Linder, the matriarch of the family; and Laurie Linder, the spoiled wife of Hugh-Jay who’s not above flirting with all the men in town, including her two brothers-in-law.

The end of this novel came as a complete surprise to me.  I had composed several scenarios in my mind as to how it should end, but Ms. Pickard totally blindsided me. And her ending was, of course, the right one and the only one that made sense.

The small-town feel of Rose, Kansas and its surroundings are vividly portrayed.  And Testament Rocks, the geological marvel outside the town, does more than serve as a tourist marker for the town; it has its own place in the novel.

The Scent of Rain and Lightning is one of the finest mysteries I’ve read in some time.

You can read more about Nancy Pickard at her web site.

I don’t believe I know any girl or woman who didn’t grow up reading Nancy Drew.  Just mention her name and a whole host of other names pops into one’s mind–her father, Carson Drew; her housekeeper, Hannah Gruen; her two best friends, Bess Marvin and George Fayne; and her sometimes boyfriend, Ned Nickerson.

I started reading the series when I was about nine or ten.  As I remember it, I started with the first one, The Secret of the Old Clock, and continued on, in no particular order, until The Ringmaster’s Secret.  That was number 31, and at that point I had “outgrown” the series.

But I never forgot it, and I think I can still tell you the plots of most, if not all, of the books.  And I certainly remember which were my favorites.  Everything I know about Gypsies (Roma) I learned from The Clue in the Jewel Box; everything I know about campanology I learned from The Mystery of the Tolling Bell. Hmm, I wonder if the people writing the series under the name Carolyn Keene got their facts straight.

What brought this to mind was the the book my book club is currently reading, Infidel. It’s the fascinating memoir of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s journey from her homeland in Somalia to Kenya and Ethiopia, then her flight to Holland to avoid living with the husband her father had chosen for her over her objections, and finally to the United States.

Her education in Africa was sporadic, learning a different language in each country, sometimes being home-schooled and sometimes going to all-girls or co-ed Muslim schools, depending on where she lived.  It was in Nairobi that Ms. Ali discovered Nancy Drew and “the stories of pluck and independence.” I imagine the novels must have seemed like fairy tales, with Nancy dressed in Western clothes, driving her own car, traveling by herself, and generally doing what she pleased.  This was a life so different from the life that the young Ayaan saw all around her that it would have seemed incredible.  But something in these books touched her and awakened a curiosity about the world outside the one she knew.

This is what I find wonderful about reading in general and mysteries in particular.  My own life has very little in common with Agatha Christie’s English villages, Alexander McCall Smith’s Botswana, or Colin Cotterill’s war-torn Laos.  But reading takes me to all these places and gives me a glimpse of lives lived there. And I feel richer for it.

Marilyn

Laos is a country far from the United States.  Unless you’re a history buff or “of a certain age,” as they say in magazines and newspapers, you may not be familiar with its history in relation to the Vietnam War.  Reading this novel is like taking a mini-course in the aftermath of that war’s history.

“I celebrate the dawn of my seventy-fourth birthday handcuffed to a lead pipe.  I’d had something more traditional in mind….” That’s the opening of Love Songs from a Shallow Grave.

Dr. Siri is the hero, in every sense, of Colin Cotterill’s series of books set in the Laotian capital of Vientiane in the late 1970s.  The doctor is a passive Communist and ready to retire when the new regime takes over from the monarchy, but he’s forced into becoming the country’s one and only coroner.

In Love Songs he has recently married Madame Daeng and is looking forward to a relaxing weekend with her when he’s pulled out of the local cinema by the Vietnamese head of security.  Laos is an independent country, but it is very dependent on good relations with Vietnam, its more powerful neighbor.  So the doctor reluctantly follows Chief Phoumi to the former American compound where they find a young woman who has been run through with a fencing sword, an epee to be exact.

Then, a couple of days later, another young woman is found in a similar situation, run through with yet another epee.  What can be the connection between these two women, who as far as can be determined were strangers to each other?

The usual group of Dr. Siri’s friends appear in this novel.  There’s the police detective Phosy, his wife nurse Dtui, morgue assistant Mr. Geung, the doctor’s close friend Civilai, and of course the doctor’s new wife, Madame Daeng.  In addition to helping Dr. Siri, each has a story within the novel that helps bring the history of Laos into sharper focus. 

Although the reader knows from the beginning that Dr. Siri is in prison, it’s impossible to figure out how he got there and why. The mental diary in which Dr. Siri reveals his thoughts doesn’t tell us until nearly the end of the novel, and these thoughts are interspersed with the straightforward plot of the main novel.

Dr. Siri is a wonderful protagonist.  He’s smart, courageous, and pragmatic–he has to be to get along in the new Laos.  But he’s also caring and empathic, traits that are not highly valued at the time and place in which he lives.  It’s  the combination of both sides of his character that makes him so fascinating, as well as the multi-layered history of his country.

This novel, along with the others in the series, isn’t easy reading because the history of this country in the 1970s isn’t comfortable to read–it’s filled with torture and betrayals from all sides.  But knowing people like Dr. Siri and his friends are there fills the reader with hope.

You can read more about Colin Cotterill at his definitely off-beat web site and read an interview with him at the NPR web site.

It’s been three years and counting since Amos Walker traversed the mean streets of Detroit.  Welcome back.

The Left-Handed Dollar is the twentieth Walker novel.  And although Walker has aged, he doesn’t appear to be slowing down.

As the book opens, Walker is approached by famed defense attorney Lucille Lettermore–“Lefty Lucy” to the Michigan police and federal authorities for her political views.  Lucy wants Walker to find evidence to overturn the conviction of a Detroit mobster for a hit twenty years earlier; by erasing that conviction and doing some legal maneuvering, she can get the ankle bracelet off “Joey Ballistic,” re-model him as a first offender, and earn a substantial fee.

Joey B. comes from a Mafia family, has an ex-wife and two former mistresses, and a once-opulent house where nearly all the furnishings have been sold off.  He’s an old, sick man who’s still denying his role in the two-decades-old attack, a car bombing that left Walker’s close friend, Barry Stackpole, with a prosthetic leg and a hand with less than the usual number of fingers.

If he’s convicted of the minor crime he’s been arrested for now, Joey B. will go to prison for the rest of his life based on his record.  So Lucy wants Walker to prove that her client was innocent of the car bombing, thus clearing his record of that crime and allowing him to plead guilty to a lesser charge for the current crime.

Although Joey has certainly committed any number of violent crimes, he may not have been guilty of the attack on Stackpole.  Ever the bleeding heart, although he would never admit it, Walker takes the case.

As in all Loren Estleman’s books, there’s an interesting array of characters. There’s Lettermore, the foul-mouthed lawyer; Joey B.’s former wife Iona, now a successful interior designer; her partner Marcine, former model and former mistress of Iona’s ex-husband; Randolph Severin, the retired detective who investigated the original crime; and Lee Tan the younger, a physical therapist, and her aunt Lee Tan the elder, former heroin importer who worked with Joey B. years before.

In addition, Barry Stackpole and Detroit Police Inspector John Alderdyce return, the former the victim of the car bombing who is not happy that Walker is investigating the case, the latter the cop who is just an inch away from taking Walker’s P.I. license away for good.  Walker is losing friends fast, and he didn’t have that many to begin with.

It’s good to see Amos Walker again, although I do feel that the repartee between Walker and everyone else strikes a false note. It’s very arch and can be amusing, but reading page after page of it, it gets old.  “I’m riding the water wagon for a little, just to see what the Mormons are shouting about.”  “Next you’re going to tell me they’re breaking up the USSR.”  “Don’t teetotal just for me.  I left my hatchet in my other suit.”  It’s clever, but it gets a bit wearing after a while.  And not very realistic, I think.

That being said, I’m glad to see Walker again.  He’s a rare breed these days–a tough guy with a liberal interior who’s might bend the law but won’t bend his ethics.

You can read more about Loren D. Estleman at his web site.

Dr. Maura Isles is in hot water again. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say the hot water she’s in is located in the frigid Wyoming wilderness.

Ice Cold opens with a portrait of Kingdom Come, a religious community with a charismatic leader.  The village that the members of Jeremiah Goode’s church have carved out of the barren land is basically self-sufficient and closed to the surrounding cities and towns.  There’s no electricity, no running water in Kingdom Come, but there is one huge benefit, at least for the leader and the other men–polygamous marriages to young girls. And thirteen-year-old Katie Sheldon is one of those unwilling brides, forced down the aisle by the tight grip of her father to marry the reverend.

Maura, the Boston medical examiner who is a cool customer at all times, is definitely out of her big city element in Jackson Hole, Wyoming where she has gone to attend a conference.  She’s also still recovering from leaving her secret lover, Father Daniel Brophy. Maura and Daniel have been lovers for more than a year, and Daniel’s inability to choose between his two loves–his church and Maura–seems to have brought Maura to a crisis point.  Can she/they continue this way, or must Daniel at last make a choice?

At the conference Maura meets a former college classmate.  Doug Comley is attending the conference with two friends and his teenage daughter, and he persuades the not-very-spontaneous Maura to go with them on an overnight cross-country skiing trip.  Following his car’s GPS, the group becomes stranded on an icy, snowbound road with no habitation in sight.  Then they see a sign in the snow–Private Road, Residents Only, Area Patrolled–and realize they have chanced upon Kingdom Come, a name they’d only just heard from a local storekeeper.

When they finally make their way down to the village, it’s deserted.  The houses are empty of people, but there are cars in the garages and food on the tables.  What could have happened to make the inhabitants flee their homes, leaving pets behind to die, and simply disappear?

Back in Boston, Father Daniel is worried because he hasn’t heard from Maura and she didn’t catch her flight home.  The ever reliable doctor would never behave like this, he’s sure.  And now even her friend Detective Jane Rizzoli of the Boston Police Department and Jane’s husband, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, acknowledge that something is seriously wrong.

Tess Gerritsen, herself a physician, has created a very strong character in Dr. Maura Isles. In this, the eighth book featuring the medical examiner, Maura has reached a midlife crisis of sorts.  That’s one of the reasons she decides to do something out of the ordinary with her former college friend, a decision that nearly leads to her death.  By the end of the novel, the doctor has escaped death more than once and owes her life to a very unlikely duo.

You can read more about Tess Gerritsen at her web site .

Welcome to the world of post-revolution, pre-World War II Russia. It’s not a healthy place to live, it appears, from William Ryan’s debut novel.

Captain Alexei Dmitriyevich Korolev is the police inspector in The Holy Thief. He’s a loyal member of the new Soviet republic, a member of the Moscow Militia’s Criminal Investigation Division.  Although the CID is technically involved only in the investigation and prevention of criminal activity, in the Soviet Union of 1936 everything is political.

And when Korolev is assigned to investigate the brutal torture and murder of an unidentified young woman in a former Orthodox church (the church has become a Komsomol recreational and political agitation center), the political aspects of the crime become visible almost immediately.

Reading this novel is almost like taking a course in 20th-century Russian history.  The country is still reeling from what they call the German War (World War I to us) and, of course, the Revolution. Food and shelter are incredibly scarce, but the people are putting up with it because of the anticipation of a glorious future just around the corner.

There’s a strong sense of walking with Korolev through the dark, cold streets of his city, the detective wearing a slightly too tight coat several seasons old and a pair of felt books, valeni, to keep his feet warm.  The housing shortage is vividly portrayed too, with Korolev being very fortunate, due to his outstanding arrest record, to be allowed to move into an apartment that he has to share “only” with a young widow and her daughter.  But, of course, the high officials of the Party have taken over the former residences of the assassinated royal family.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Korolev is a loyal citizen and an excellent investigator, but it’s hard for him to do a thorough job when his next step may be the wrong one. The case gets stranger when the body of the woman murdered in the former church is identified as a Russian-born nun who has lived in America for most of her life.  Her murder is quickly followed by the murder of a Thief, a member of the Moscow Mafia, whose tattoos on nearly every part of his body tell the story of his life both behind bars and outside.

Korolev is a wonderful character. He is decent and loyal to the state, but he is no innocent.  He’s aware of the brutalities and corruption that exist in the new government.  But what is harder for him to accept is that someone within the Party, perhaps one of his own superiors, is involved in this spate of killings, which soon add third, fourth, and fifth victims.

At a time when religion is outlawed in Russia, the inspector is still a believer, although of course a secret one.  And when he uncovers the fact that these murders are related to the Kazanskaya icon, the most revered holy object in Russia, it’s a double blow. The Madonna and Child icon was thought to have been destroyed, but what if it wasn’t?

William Ryan’s novel is a page-turner and The Holy Thief is obviously the beginning of a wonderful new series.

William Ryan doesn’t appear to have his own web site as yet, but you can read a very brief biography of him at panmacmillan.com.