Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Archive for August, 2011

I’ve signed up for a course on mystery novels at Brandeis University’s BOLLI (Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute).  BOLLI is a nation-wide program offering dozens of courses during the year ranging from literature to politics to science to drama.  I have several friends who have been taking classes for years, and every report I heard was positive.  So now that I’m retired, I have the freedom to take some of the courses that are offered.

When I read the fall catalog I couldn’t believe my good luck.  On Thursdays, one of my “free” days, a course was being offered with the title “A Sense of Place:  Murder Mysteries ‘Round the World.” The course is ten weeks long, each week focusing on a different writer and country/city.  We’ll be reading Donna Leon (Death in a Strange Country, Venice), Agatha Christie (Murder in Mesopotamia, Mesopotamia), Batya Gur (The Saturday Morning Murder, Israel), Zoe Ferraris (Finding Nouf, Saudi Arabia), Georges Simenon (The Bar on the Seine, Paris), Tony Hillerman (Skinwalkers, Navajo Reservation), Louise Penny (Still Life, Quebec), Dana Stabenow (A Cold Day for Murder, Alaska), Boris Akunin (The Winter Queen, Russia), and Arnaldur Indridason (Jar City, Iceland).

The only writer in this group I haven’t read is Zoe Ferraris, but although I’ve read many books by the other authors I’ve only read four of the novels that we’ll be reading for the course.  So the majority of the books will be first-time reads, very exciting.

I’ll keep you informed as to how the class is going.  I’m really looking forward to it.

Marilyn

Reinventing oneself is not an easy thing to do. It’s not easy to leave behind your friends, family, home, and career and start over again.  But sometimes it has to be done.

Adam Kindred has just gone through what he believes is the most difficult time in his life. But it’s about to get worse, much worse.

A brilliant climatologist at an American university who has just invented a revolutionary cloud chamber that might aid drought-stricken countries, he has a one-night stand with a graduate student that wrecks his marriage and his career.  Unhappy and ashamed, he leaves the United States for England, the country of his birth, and has a job interview at an English college that he feels has gone very well.

He stops for a quick dinner at an Italian restaurant and is seated near another solitary diner.  They exchange some casual words and the other man leaves.  A few minutes later, as Kindred gets up to go, he sees that the other man left a transparent folder behind, filled with papers.

On the front of the folder is a business card with the man’s name and two addresses–one is obviously his office, so the other must be his home.  On the spur of the moment Kindred decides he’ll deliver the folder to the man’s home.   If  only he had  brought it to the man’s office instead, how differently things would have turned out.

When he arrives at the building and goes to the apartment, he’s surprised to find the door open.  Getting no response to his greeting, Kindred walks into the apartment and finds the man, a Dr. Wang, on his bed, bleeding from a knife wound.  The place has been trashed, obviously searched, with cabinet drawers open and clothes strewn all around.

Kindred wants to call the emergency services number, but Wang tells him to pull out the knife.  Kindred does so, and Wang dies.  As the frightened Kindred leaves the bedroom to find a phone, he hears the door from the balcony into the bedroom open–someone is there, and it’s a good bet it’s the murderer.  Kindred flees the building, but he’s all too aware that his signature is on the guest book he had to sign to enter the building and his fingerprints are on the knife he dropped in his haste to find a telephone.

The next day, after debating with himself all night long about calling the police and telling them what happened, he glimpses a newspaper headline:  ADAM KINDRED–WANTED. SUSPICION OF MURDER. That’s when Kindred decides he has to reinvent himself, leave his past behind, find the man who killed Dr. Wang, and clear his own name.

There’s a lot of plot in Ordinary Thunderstorms. There’s Adam Kindred’s step-by-step reinvention of himself; there’s the man who has been hired to find Kindred, kill him, and regain the briefcase that belonged to Dr. Wang; there’s the company executive whose firm is about to launch a drug that will cure asthma in children but who is having his own medical and emotional issues; and there’s the attractive policewoman who can’t understand Scotland Yard’s decision to release, without explanation, a man they arrested for gun possession.  This novel will keep you reading and guessing until the end.

William Boyd is the author of more than a dozen books, some mysteries and some not.  You can read more about him at his web site.

Once a Barnburner, always a Barnburner.  That’s how Conway Sax got hooked into the murder business.

In Purgatory Chasm Sax is a recovering alcoholic, and the Barnburners were his group within Alcoholics Anonymous. They formed a tight-knit group within the larger one, and if one Barnburner was in trouble, the others helped.  But some were able to be of more help than others.

When Tander Phigg needs help getting his Mercedes back from the auto mechanic who is supposedly repairing it, he calls on Sax.  Phigg tells Sax that he brought his car to Das Motorenwerk more than a year earlier, gave the mechanic $3500 as a down payment for repairs, but now he can’t get either his car or his money back.

Since Sax had been a NASCAR driver and had worked on Phigg’s car years before, he’s persuaded to try to get either the car or the money returned.  But his visit to Motorenwerk isn’t exactly what he expected–first the owner laughs at his request, then he’s hit so hard on the head that when he wakes up he’s several hundred feet from the garage, on the ground, with no memory of how he got there.

Sax’s life hasn’t been easy. His father, also an alcoholic, left the family in Minnesota when Sax was eleven, but the boy persuaded his mother to let him go to New York to live with his father several years later.  In retrospect, Sax thinks, it probably wasn’t the smartest move he ever made, literally or figuratively.

Time has passed since then, time during which Sax threw away his racing career, as his father had done before him, with alcohol and ended up in a Massachusetts prison for manslaughter.  He’s still on parole, with eleven months left to serve.

On the plus side, Sax is rehabbing a house to sell it, has a sharp girlfriend with a funny eleven-year-old daughter, and is still sober.  On the minus side, he hasn’t seen his father in years, not since he spotted him panhandling at a tollboth and left him standing there.

Sax can’t seem to stay out of trouble, so it’s not much of a surprise that he goes back to Phigg to tell him what happened at Motorenwerk and to get more of the story out of him.  But the surprise is that Phigg is hanging by the neck in a shack behind his semi-built house, hanging as in dead.

Sax’s motives are all over the place. He wants to get the car/money back, even after Phigg’s death, because he said he would.  When Phigg’s son, Trey, returns from Vietnam with a wife and child, he wants to get the money to give to Trey.  And when Sax’s father turns up after years of no contact, he wants to help keep the old man sober.

Steve Ulfelder, himself an amateur race car driver and co-owner of a company that builds race cars, is a natural storyteller. He’s written for trade journals and newspapers, but Purgatory Chasm is his first novel.  It’s a look into the tough men (and women) who drive around tracks at breakneck speeds, looking for their moment of glory.  This is a tough read about people who lead tough lives but whose humanity and caring will touch you as they try, with some successes and some failures, to straighten out their lives.

You can read more about Steve Ulfelder at his web site.

A man and his fiancee are driving in her hometown in New York state.  A sudden tornado-like storm whips his car off the road and down a ravine.  When he regains consciousness, he’s surrounded by police and emergency technicians, and he frantically asks them to help him find his fiancee.  But she’s nowhere to be found.

That’s the hook of On Borrowed Time by David Rosenfelt. Richard Kilmer, the novel’s protagonist, is distraught and insists on going back to his fiancee’s parents’ house, where he and Jen have just spent four days, on the chance that she somehow got out of his car and was able to make her way back there.

But when the police take him there the house looks slightly different, older and less well-kept, than the house Richard and Jen left only an hour earlier.  And the woman who answers the door says that she’s never seen Richard before and that her husband has been dead for many years.  When Richard asks about her daughter, she slaps him across the face and slams the door.

Richard returns to his apartment in New York City, still reeling from the accident.  He talks to his two closest friends with whom he and Jen spent several evenings, but they say they never met her.  He goes to the art gallery she and a friend owned, and there’s a different business in that location.  What is going on?

Richard is a free-lance investigative journalist, so he decides to make his next story the search for Jen. After the story appears, he’s contacted by hundreds of cranks–some say they know where Jen is, some claim to be Jen, and some tell him they could get in touch with Jen on the “other side.”

But one night Richard gets a call that is very believable. A woman phones to say she thinks she knows who Jen is and can prove it.  She sends a photo to Richard on his computer, and when he opens his e-mail he’s looking at a photo of his fiancee.

The woman who called Richard, Allison Tynes, claims that her identical twin sister has been missing for several months.  Allie flies to New York from Wisconsin, and when Richard meets her she is, in fact, the double of his missing fiancee.  Together they decide to find out if Julie Tynes and Jennifer Ryan are, or were, one and the same person.

The chapters narrated by Richard  are interspersed with chapters narrated by someone called The Stone.  He is the mastermind of the plot involving Richard, Jen, and a mysterious drug that will make him billions.  But who is he, and why is he having Richard followed and his apartment bugged?

David Rosenfelt has written a real page-turner, a mystery with a touch of medical science fiction built in.  I don’t know how much of what turns out to be the core of the plot is “science” or “fiction,” but it certainly makes for a thrilling ride.

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

After a wonderful trip to Greece two summers ago, I’ve become interested in all things Greek, both ancient and modern.  The Pericles Commission has only increased my interest.

Gary Corby’s first novel tells the story of how democracy came to Athens. The world’s first democratic city state didn’t have a smooth beginning.  In fact, it took 130 years from the first written constitution (about 590 b.c.e.) until the time that Athens finally became a one citizen (read male), one vote democracy (461 b.c.e.).

The novels opens in 461 with the murder of Ephialtes, an Athenian lawmaker who has just successfully pushed through reforms to bring democracy to the city-state. Three days after the laws are passed, he is shot by an arrow and his body falls in front of Nicolaos, son of Sophroniscus; apparently there were no last names in ancient Greece.

Nicolaos, a young man just out of his army training, isn’t certain what he wants to do with his life, but he is sure he doesn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his father, a sculptor. When Ephialtes’ friend, the renowned politician and orator Pericles, comes upon the scene a few moments later and offers Nicolaos a commission to find the person or persons responsible for the crime and who are thus imperiling the new democracy, Nico accepts.  To revert to traditional rule, Nico thinks, would mean he would have no chance  to rise in society and he would be “doomed” to be an apprentice to his father.  He would do anything, try anything, to avoid that.

Pericles believes that the Council of the Areopagus conspired to kill Ephialtes.  The only problem is that his own father, Xanthippus, is a member of that Council.  There is no government police force or investigative body in Athens; the family or friends of the victim must investigate the crime. And there are no jails, either; the punishment is execution, fine, or exile.

Ephialtes was married but also had a mistress and an illegitimate daughter. His hetaera, Euterpe, is a voluptuous, sensual woman who attracts every man she meets, but it is her daughter Diotima, a priestess-in-training to the Goddess Artemis the Huntress, who is intriguing to Nico.  She is as determined as he is to find the murderer of her father.

Gary Corby’s first novel is a delightful piece of writing. His greatest skill, I think, is incorporating the history of Athens, which probably isn’t well known to most readers outside Greece, into the story.  His explanations of marriage customs, funerary details, and daily life more than two thousand years ago are clear and fascinating.  Things that are so commonplace now, at least in the Western world, were unthinkable then–one person, one vote; marriage by choice, not via law; education for men and women;  all those things were unknown at the time of The Pericles Commission.

Corby gives a brief history of Athens at the beginning of the book, followed by a list of the characters and whether they are historical figures or not.  So skillful is he in his writing that without that list a reader would think that all the characters actually lived in ancient Greece.

You can read more about Gary Corby at his web site.