Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Posts Tagged ‘multiple murders’

Magnus Craig, known by his nickname “Steps,” has a unique ability, one that sets him apart from other FBI agents who specialize in tracking people.  When Steps was eight years old, he got lost in a blizzard and nearly froze to death.  In fact he was clinically dead, but somehow he was revived; and afterward he was the recipient of either a blessing or a curse, he still hasn’t decided which one.

Steps can see what he calls “shine,” a type of residue that people leave anywhere they walk and on anything they touch.  Like fingerprints or DNA, no two shines are alike, and the only thing that saves him from constant, total overload is that lead-crystal glass blocks almost all shines.  So unless Steps is on a tracking case, he always wears a pair of glasses with the special lenses.

Only three people know about the shine–Steps’ father, his FBI partner Jimmy Donovan, and the director of the Bureau.  His fellow agents simply think he has an uncanny ability to track missing people and criminals regardless of the terrain.  And Steps wants to keep it that way.

In Shadows of the Dead, the third case in the Special Tracking Unit series, a car crash sends the local police into the Washington Olympic Peninsula woods.  When they investigate the crash and open the car’s trunk, they find a gagged and bound woman inside and a man running from the car into a nearby cabin.  That’s when the FBI is called.

The kidnapper is forced out of the cabin after a tear gas canister is flung inside.  When he is handcuffed and led through the woods to a police cruiser, he keeps talking in phrases that the police and federal agents can’t understand.  He calls himself Faceman, says he is a fixer, wonders where “Eight” is, and that “he” is going to be so mad.

When the man is brought to the closest hospital, he makes a reference to Onion King, the person he fears.   The officers realize that the “Eight” that Faceman is referring to is the woman who was in his truck.  That’s when the police and the FBI agents understand  that there must have been seven women previously kidnapped and that the “he” is the Onion King, a serial killer on the loose.

One of the features of Shadows of the Dead that I really enjoyed was the depiction of the close working relationship between the sheriff’s department, local police, and the FBI.  All too often in mystery novels there’s a great deal of jockeying for position and bad feeling among these groups, and it was refreshing to read that the capture of the criminal was paramount in everyone’s mind. 

In addition to writing mysteries, Spencer Kope is a crime analyst in Washington State.  You can read more about him at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

Mal Kershaw, owner of Boston’s Old Devils Bookstore, wants nothing more than a quiet life.  An only child, a widower, a man with almost no friends, his daily life consists of going to work and going home after closing the store.  He might occasionally stop off for a beer or a quick bite after work, but that’s basically the extent of his social life.  And he has no desire to change it.

Then, during a blizzard, FBI Special Agent Gwen Mulvey enters the store.  She’s here, she tells Mal, because of a blog post he wrote years earlier called “Eight Perfect Murders”; now it looks as if someone is using that blog as a blueprint to commit murders of his/her own.

The first murders appear to be an adapted version of Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders; in the current case, each victim’s name is somehow related to a bird–Robin Callahan, Jay Bradshaw, Ethan Byrd.  A fourth murder involves a man who appears to have been thrown from a commuter train, as was the victim in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity.

According to Agent Mulvey, nothing connects the four victims except for the fact that their deaths mimic those in two of the books on Mal’s list.  But, she continues, she also has a “gut feeling” about the case.  The victims weren’t bad people, but neither were they good.  ‘”I’m not sure any of them were really well liked.”

There’s another suspicious death that Mulvey tells Mal about, that of a woman who apparently died from a heart attack in her Maine home.  When Mal hears the woman’s name, Elaine Johnson, he doesn’t tell the agent that she had been a customer of Old Devils Bookstore and a particularly unpopular one.  He rationalizes this by thinking, “I was sure she was withholding information from me, so I planned on withholding this information from her.”

Their conversation makes Mal think about his blog with the list of books detailing perfect murders, so he goes online to check the site.  The blog originally had two comments, but now there is a third, posted less than twenty-four hours earlier.  The author writes that he/she is halfway through Mal’s list and promises to get in touch when done reading.  The post is signed Doctor Sheppard, the name of the unreliable narrator in Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Peter Swanson’s novel is an homage to many of the best writers of crime fiction–Dame Agatha, John D. MacDonald, Patricia Highsmith, A. A. Milne, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Ira Levin, and Donna Tartt–as well as being a thriller you won’t want to put down.  The author of five previous novels, he succeeds once again in coming up with a taut mystery that will have readers stunned at the ending.

You can read more about Peter Swanson at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

When Martin Scarsden enters the small town of Riversend, he is bent, if not broken.  He has been a journalist for his whole working life, reporting from hot spots all over the world.  He’s always been an outsider, a spectator to the death and destruction he’s seen around him, but his last assignment made him a victim rather than an observer.

When Martin was working on the Gaza Strip with a Palestinian driver/interpreter, the latter gets a call that there’s a roadblock ahead.  He and Martin decide it would be safer for Martin to hide in the car’s trunk, and that’s where he is when the car is stopped and the Palestinian is taken away.

Martin remained in the trunk for three days until the driver returned to the car.  He had no food but did have water, but naturally it was a terrifying experience.  His friend and editor at the newspaper, Max Fuller, has given him the Riversend assignment as a way to prove to his colleagues that he belongs back at work.  But the situation he finds himself in and the article he has come to write, a seemingly straightforward one about the effects of murder on a small town, will prove nearly as dangerous and bewildering as any he has covered.

Riversend might almost be called a ghost town, a place suffering from a devastating heat wave and drought, a diminishing population, and the closing of nearly every business in it.  Exactly a year earlier five horrific murders took place in the town, and it is that event that has brought Martin there.  The handsome and much-admired priest of St. James Church, Brian Swift, was greeting parishioners one Sunday morning when he went inside to answer a phone call.  When he came out, he had a rifle in his hands and started shooting.  Seconds later, five victims lay dead.

Martin is hearing these details from the town policeman, Robbie Haus-Jones, who was a close friend of the priest’s.  Robbie was on duty when he heard the first shot, which he took to be a firecracker or a car backfiring, “something like that,” he tells the reporter.  When he got to the church a couple of minutes later, the victims were already dead.  He called out to Brian to put down his rifle; instead the priest fired his gun and Robbie returned fire, fatally wounding Brian.

No one in Riversend has anything bad to say to Martin about the priest.  He was “a good man,” “he cared,” “he knew I was in pain and he helped me.”  How can that be reconciled with a man who shot five people in cold blood?

Martin is determined to uncover the truth, to get beyond the platitudes that the townspeople are giving him.  But the more he learns and writes about Riversend, the more he puts his own emotional recovery in danger.

Chris Hammer, himself a journalist for more than thirty years in Australia, has written a mystery that will keep you enthralled until the last page.  His characterizations of Martin and the various townspeople whose lives Brian touched are beautifully drawn, and the secrets they hide, from themselves and from others, make them believable as real figures.

You can read more about Chris Hammer at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

It’s hard to imagine anything more terrifying than waking up and finding oneself unable to move or speak.  That is what happens to Tara Berkley, a college student who is asked to drive a distinguished scientist, Dr. Amandi Oltamu, to a venue where he will deliver a keynote speech.

Dr. Oltamu seems strangely reluctant for Tara to bring him to the school auditorium, and he insists on stopping along the way and taking photos with his phone.  After snapping several shots, he gives her the phone and asks her to lock it safely in her car.  Then he further puzzles her by saying that she should drive on alone, and he will walk the rest of the way by himself and meet her at the college.

Admitting to herself that she is unnerved by the man’s odd behavior, Tara is about to step into her car when she hears the sound of a van’s engine behind her.  The van’s  headlights are off, and it is heading directly toward her and Dr. Oltamu.  Tara throws herself away from her car and toward the river, but as she does she can see that the doctor is pinned against her car.  That’s all she knows before she hits her head on a stone pillar and is catapulted into the water.

Although the police believe that what happened to Dr. Oltamu and Tara was a tragic accident, with the van’s driver admitting that he was at fault, there is no one to point out the discrepancies in his story.  Dr. Oltamu is dead from the impact of the collision, and Tara is in the hospital in a deep coma that will eventually be diagnosed as locked-in syndrome, leaving her unable to communicate.

If She Wakes is told in multiple voices.  The reader is privy to Tara’s thoughts, which are jumbled and confused at first but gradually become clearer as she begins to remember what happened at “the accident” scene.

A second voice belongs to Dax, a teenage psychopath who hired the man who killed Dr. Oltamu.

A third voice is Abby Kaplan’s, a rookie insurance investigator and former race car driver.  She was hired to look into the crash and make certain that the college has no liability in the case.  Even though the driver has admitted negligence, Abby’s boss wants all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, so she goes to the river bank to reconstruct the scene, her history as a driver making her the perfect investigator.

Her take-away is that it was no accident, that the crash was deliberate.  But then why would the driver take the blame?  It’s not until the next day that his body is found in what appears to be a suicide; although the college and Abby’s boss are satisfied that that proves he was at fault, Abby knows there must be more to the story and continues to try to find out the truth.

If She Wakes is a nail-biting thriller.  There are more deaths, and the people who seem trustworthy are not.  The tension continues to the last page, and the familiar advice don’t start this before you go to bed has never been more valid.

You can read more about Michael Koryta at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

Although I know nothing more about Robert Pobi than what I read in the brief, somewhat off-the-wall bio on his web page, I am pretty sure we have at least one thing in common:  neither one of us owns a microwave.  I say this because since this same bio states that Mr. Pobi does not do Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat, nor does he own a cellphone, the lack of a microwave seems a pretty safe bet.

Another thing we have in common is our love of mystery novels.  He writes them and I read them, and I hope he enjoyed writing City of Windows as much as I enjoyed reading it.

The book’s protagonist, Dr. Lucas Page, has a unique background.  He is a university professor, astrophysicist, textbook author, former FBI agent, television and radio commentator, NASA consultant–did I leave anything out?  And he also is a man with only one eye, one arm, and one leg.

Severely injured in the line of duty several years earlier, Lucas now leads a more prosaic life.  That he does so is a combination of factors, including the seemingly obvious limitations due to his injuries and a promise he made to his wife not to get involved in any FBI investigations, even as a consultant.

But when Special Agent Brett Kehoe comes to his door with the news that Lucas’ former partner and an innocent bystander were shot and killed not far from Lucas’ home in Manhattan, Lucas feels he has no choice but to use his unique skills to find the killer.

The book’s title comes from a statement that Kehoe makes to another agent as they try to locate the spot from which the shot was fired.  The agents are looking at over 1,600 yards of rooftop and nearly 3,000 windows in the immediate area of the murders and can’t work out where the shooter had stood.  That’s when Kehoe goes to Lucas.

Before the attack that nearly claimed his life, Page had the amazing ability to translate blocks and buildings into numerical components and units of measure.  Now, standing in a blizzard on 42nd Street and Park Avenue, he wonders if he still has that skill, but he doesn’t wonder for long.  Within minutes, mental algorithms start putting things together for him, and he turns to an agent standing near him.  “…tell Kehoe I know where the shot came from….The roof of number 3 Park Avenue.”

Not surprisingly, Page is not universally popular with agents in the Bureau.  Agent Grover Graves, in particular, uses every opportunity to downplay Lucas’ ability and his refusal to accept the official FBI profile of the killer.  The agency received a report from French authorities that the man they want is a wealthy young Frenchman who has been radicalized, and even though Kehoe doesn’t agree with that, he has been ordered by FBI higher-ups, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security to find Philippe Froissant.

So Kehoe turns to Lucas to support his view.  But it takes three more deaths for the powers-that-be to agree with this.  And in the meantime Lucas is drawn ever deeper into his old role, bringing danger not only to himself but to his family.

Robert Pobi has written a hold-your-breath thriller, one you won’t put down until you’ve turned the last page.  You can read more about him at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

After reviewing hundreds of books over the past nine and a half years, I can honestly say that I’ve never read one quite like Peter Swanson’s latest  mystery.  It is truly a one-of-a-kind novel.

Before She Knew Him starts calmly, slowly.  Two married, childless couples live side-by-side in identical Colonial houses in a suburban Massachusetts community.  Hen, short for Henrietta, and Lloyd have recently moved to West Dartford and have been invited by their neighbors to a block party.  Hen is reluctant to go, preferring to stay home rather than mingle with people she doesn’t know, but Lloyd persuades her and they get introduced to the couple next door, Mira and Matthew.

Several days later Mira invites Hen and Lloyd over for dinner.  Not seeing a polite way to refuse, Hen accepts, and a few evenings later the two couples get together.  After dinner, Mira offers the guests a tour of their house so they can perhaps get some decorating ideas.

It is when the four of them get to Matthew’s study that things go awry.  It’s very different from the other rooms, filled almost to overcrowding with knickknacks, photographs, and books.  When Hen sees, in the midst of an otherwise seemingly ordinary display of objects, the small figure of a fencer on top of a silver pedestal, she nearly faints.

She recognizes, or thinks she does, that figurine.  She asks Matthew if he fences, and he says that the statuette is just one of the many items he had bought because it caught his eye.  She passes off her reaction as dizziness, and she and Lloyd go home.  But the more Hen thinks about what she’s seen, the more uncomfortable she is.

In very small letters on the bottom of the figure were the words THIRD PLACE ÉPÉE and JUNIOR OLYMPICS, with a date too small for her to read.  Could it be a simple coincidence that Dustin Miller, a former neighbor of theirs when they lived in Cambridge, was a fencer and that Matthew teaches at the school Dustin attended before he was murdered years earlier?

Hen suffers from bipolar disorder, although she is currently on medication.  When she was in college she had a particularly violent episode and was hospitalized.  Although it has been years since the last manic event, both she and Lloyd are wary about her becoming obsessed with particular thoughts that perhaps would lead to a recurrence of mania.  And now she can’t stop thinking about Dustin and his still-unsolved murder.

Hen thinks her past mental illness will stop the police from taking her seriously, so she decides to investigate on her own before involving them or telling Lloyd her suspicions about their neighbor.  But tracking someone you believe is a killer is a dangerous business.

Peter Swanson has proved in his four previous novels that he is a master of suspense, and Before She Knew Him only reconfirms that.  The reader will be with Hen all the way as she tries to prove that Matthew did murder Dustin.  The book’s plot is taut and its characters totally believable.  You may never look at your neighbors the same way again.

You can read more about Peter Swanson at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

Shari Lapena’s new novel, An Unwanted Guest, works perfectly as both an homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None and as a totally original mystery.  It’s a terrific novel that will keep you guessing until the end.

A group of people, including several singles and three couples, one married and two not, make their way through a snowstorm to Michael’s Inn, a lovely small hotel situated at the end of a lonely road in New York’s Catskill Mountains.  Most of the guests are looking for a relaxing weekend away from work and family stress, although the only married couple among them has a different agenda.  The marriage of Beverly and Henry Sullivan is currently not a happy one, and Beverly has arranged what she hopes will be a romantic time away to start anew; unfortunately for her, Henry’s view of their upcoming stay is quite different.

The Inn’s other guests include Riley, a journalist back from covering the war in Afghanistan, and Gwen, her former college roommate who hopes the weekend will calm her friend’s PTSD; an engaged couple, Dana and Matthew, almost too gorgeous to be real; Candice, an author feverishly working on a new book; David, an attorney with a difficult past; and Lauren and Ian, two people hoping that this weekend will lead to a permanent relationship.  And then there is James, the owner of the Inn, and his twenty-something son Bradley.

Even during the first evening tension is in the air.  In addition to the Sullivans’ marital issues and Gwen’s worry about Riley’s drinking and anxiety, there is the question of David’s arrest for the murder of his wife and his subsequent release, which not surprisingly he would rather not discuss, and Candice’s guilt about leaving her ailing mother in order to work on her writing.

But the guests are making an effort to smooth everything over and enjoy their time at the Inn.  During the night, however, several people hear what they think is a scream, but they manage to convince themselves it’s part of a dream and do not investigate.  In the morning, however, reality strikes–the dead body of Dana, Matthew’s beautiful fiancé, is found crumpled at the foot of the elegant curving staircase.

Initially her death appears to be a tragic accident, although David, with his legal expertise, seems wary of the situation from the beginning.  Everyone’s first thought is to contact the police, but a glance out the windows shows an ice-covered scene with an obviously impassible road.  And there’s no way to call the police anyway, as the Inn boasts of not having Wi-Fi, cell phones are not permitted, and there is no electricity due to downed power lines.  Luckily there is plenty of food and drink available, so it appears they will simply have to wait a few hours or even a day to contact the outside world.  But then a second death convinces everyone that the first was not an accident and that there may be a killer in their midst.

Shari Lapena’s book is a suspenseful, well-written thriller, with carefully drawn characters, a taut plot, and an extra twist at the end that I, for one, did not see coming.  Everyone at Michael’s Inn has a secret, but who is willing to kill to protect it?

You can read more about Shari Lapena at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.

If anyone can write thrillers that keep you on the edge of your seat, it’s Gregg Hurwitz.  In Out of the Dark, the fourth book in the Orphan X series, the protagonist must discover why his first assignment twenty years ago may have a connection to why he is being targeted to be killed now.

We never learn exactly how X came to live in a group home for boys.  When he was twelve his foster father Jack took him from the home, gave him the name Evan Smoak, and began grooming him to be an assassin as part of a clandestine group run by the Department of Defense.

Evan is nineteen when he is ordered to assassinate the prime minister of an Eastern European country.  After he successfully completes that mission, Jack tells him to kill the man who sold him the gun used in the murder and the man who sold him the bullet’s cartridge with a mysterious fingerprint on it.  When Evan questions this order, Jack simply tells him to …”execute them.  Close the operation.”  And he does.

After about a decade in the Orphan Program, Evan begins to have doubts about the integrity of its purpose and flees the organization.  He has amassed a great deal of money and has no need to work, and he has decided to spend the rest of his life helping those without resources who have nowhere else to turn.  He calls himself the Nowhere Man.

Now, in 2019, Evan has an even more difficult assignment, one he has given himself.  He has determined to assassinate the president of the United States.

President Jonathan Bennett had been an undersecretary at the Department of Defense when Evan entered the Program.  Although the Program was extremely successful in its mission to assassinate those whom the DoD deemed to be its enemies, now that Bennett is president he needs to make certain that any trace of this top-secret operation is eliminated.  And that means eliminating all of the Orphans.

Evan is apparently on the top of Bennett’s kill list for reasons having to do with the 1997 murders in Europe, Evan’s first assignment.  Evan doesn’t understand why that project was so vital at the time and why his participation in it makes it necessary for him to be murdered now.  So, while Evan is planning to assassinate Bennett, Bennett is arranging to have Evan killed.

The success of Evan’s plan seems to be impossible, given the incredible level of security surrounding the president.  When Bennett travels from the White House, it is in a convoy of three identical cars to disguise which one is transporting him.  The presidential limo weighs nearly eight tons, its body covered in armor.  The windows are made of bullet-proof glass, and a steel plate beneath the car protects it from bombs.  This, of course, is in addition to the phalanx of Secret Service personnel surrounding him at all times.  Bennett would seem unreachable.

There is no let-up in the action in Out of the Dark, leaving the reader in suspense until the very end.  It is the very definition of the word thriller.

You can read more about Gregg Hurwitz at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.