Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Reviews

In 1920 India, everything is political.  The British, still rulers of “the jewel in the crown,” were desperate to keep this country, incredibly rich in spices, cotton, and cheap labor, to say nothing of its geographical location, valuable for trading.  In order to do so, they were willing to pretend that the over five hundred princes in the country were still in charge of their mini-kingdoms; the Indian princes joined in this deceit so that they could maintain nominal control of the vast areas that had been in their families for uncounted years.

Twenty of these princes are meeting with the Viceroy, and Captain Sam Wyndham and his assistant, Sergeant “Surrender-not” Banerjee, are there as well.  Crown Prince Adhir Singh Sai had gone to school in England with Surrender-not, and when the prince sees his former schoolmate in the crowd, he invites the detectives back to his hotel to discuss a troubling matter.

His Highness is opposed to what the British are calling the Chamber of Princes.  Adhir tells Sam and Banerjee that most of his fellow rulers are in favor of the British idea, being content with “a few fine words, fancy titles, and scraps from your table.”  Despite the fact that his father, the Maharaja of Sambalpore, wants to join the group, the prince has made his opposition to the plan well known.

Adhir is probably only months away from ascending the throne, given that the Maharaja is very ill, so his stubbornness and recalcitrance in resisting the Chamber have earned him enemies in the government and in his own family as well.  Is there a connection between his opposition and the two anonymous notes that he found in his private chambers?

The prince wants to discuss this issue, so he, Sam, and Surrender-not get into His Highness’s silver-topped Rolls Royce to drive to Adhir’s hotel suite to talk about it.  But as they approach the hotel, a man in the robes of a Hindu priest steps out in front of the Rolls, so suddenly that the chauffeur is barely able to stop.  The car lurches to a halt, the driver opening the door to see if the priest has been injured.  Suddenly the priest pulls a gun from inside his robes, shoots through the car’s windscreen, and the prince dies instantly, two bullets lodged in his chest.

Sam Wyndham had left London a year earlier, after a series of traumatic events, and is working hard to adjust to his new home in Calcutta.  But his life here is proving just as difficult as the one he left behind.  He is only really comfortable in his relationship with his sergeant which, given the inherent inequality of the races in India, may have reached an unbreakable barrier.  Added to the mix is his interest in Annie Grant, an Anglo-Indian woman who, for the second time, has become involved in one of Sam’s cases.

Like its predecessor, A Necessary Evil is a rich description of India nearly a century ago, showcasing the enormous disparity between the royalty and the underclass, the racial and the political issues, and the politics that are never far from its surface.  This novel is an outstanding follow-up to Abir Mukherjee’s equally brilliant A Rising Man, which I reviewed earlier this year.

You can read more about Abir Mukherjee 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, hopefully not when, I am arrested for murder, I will hire Eddie Flynn as my attorney.  This former con man turned defense lawyer has more tricks up his sleeve than Houdini ever did, and I would definitely want him sitting next to me at the defense table.

The Plea, the third in the series by Steve Cavanagh, opens as Eddie sees a flashlight moving around what should be his empty law office.  Inside he finds three members of the FBI, including Special Agent Bill Kennedy, searching through his file cabinet.  Then another man enters the office.  He introduces himself as Lester Dell, admitting, after Eddie has guessed it, that he works for the CIA.

Dell tells Eddie that he’s been tracking a group of individuals who are involved in the largest money-laundering scheme in the country.  These men are almost untouchable because of who they are–top attorneys in one of the oldest and most respected law firms in New York City.  And the threat that the agencies are using to convince Eddie to work with them is that Christine Flynn, Eddie’s estranged wife, is an attorney with that firm, and she has unwittingly signed a document that implicates her in the fraud.

The only way out for Christine, Flynn is informed, is for him to take a murder case, get the defendant to fire his current counsel, get himself hired as the new counsel, and have the defendant plead guilty.  Then the FBI and the CIA will make certain the document she signed disappears.  So who is the client and who are his current attorneys?  The client is David Child, a twenty-two-year-old social media wunderkind and one of the richest men in the world, and his lawyers are from Harland and Sinton, the firm where Christine is employed.

To say this puts Flynn in a tough place is to understate his situation.  But things get even worse when David refuses to plead guilty and insists, despite seemingly overwhelming evidence, that he’s innocent of the crime he’s accused of, the murder of his girlfriend.  Therein lies Eddie’s dilemma, having to choose between saving his wife from a jail term and disbarment and forcing his client, whom he comes to believe is innocent, to plead guilty.

The Plea is filled with more twists and turns than a roller coaster and is just as exciting.  Because Eddie was a con man, as was his late father, he always has a plan that can be changed at a moment’s notice when the situation changes.  As Eddie explains it, there are three types of cons:  the short con (which usually takes between five minutes and five seconds to complete), the long con (which requires weeks or months to come to fruition), and the bullet con.  This last one has two explanations.  “I heard old-timers call it a bullet con because it’s launched so quickly–like pulling the trigger,” Eddie thinks.  But it’s also because “if the con fails, the hustler can expect to eat a bullet.”

Steve Cavanagh’s characters are perfect, as is the novel’s plot.  I thought I had caught on after a few false guesses, but I was wrong.  I didn’t see the entire picture/con until the last page.  The Plea is a terrific, suspenseful, and completely satisfying read.

You can read more about Steve Cavanagh 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.

The Navajo Way.  It’s a culture whose people recognize the importance of nature, are respectful of their elders, think carefully before talking, and hold the belief that the Holy People are the ones who created the earth and its population.  This set of beliefs permeates every part of the lives of the three protagonists in Anne Hillerman’s series about the Navajo Tribal Police–Bernadette Manuelito, Jim Chee, and Joe Leaphorn–and the people they serve on the reservation.

Bernie’s latest case begins with an invitation to speak at a Wings and Roots program.  Wings and Roots is an agency devoted to helping young people who are in trouble, perhaps with the legal system or in a domestic abuse situation or as truants.  However, when she arrives at the campsite where a group of girls and the staff are camped for a night in the lava fields, there’s a search going on for one of the girls, Annie Rainsong, and for Dom Cruz, a staff member of the program.

Annie returns to base camp almost immediately after Bernie’s arrival, but Cruz remains missing.  As he is an experienced hiker who is very familiar with the area, the two other staff members can’t understand how he could have gotten lost.  Bernie gets Annie to tell her of the night she spent lost, and the girl reveals that she disobeyed the program’s instructions to remain in the spot she was assigned and instead went wandering.  Cold and frightened, she entered a small cave where she spent the night, and when she awoke in the morning she saw a small bundle of old bones on the cave’s floor.

Naturally, Annie is horrified by her discovery, especially given the Navajo beliefs regarding death.  These hold that evil spirits, the chindi, will return to the earth if a corpse is not properly buried and the appropriate traditions are not carried out.  Thus, these unburied bones constitute a sacrilege and could possibly prove a threat to the person finding them.

Caves of Bones is a wonderfully crafted mystery that follows Bernie and Jim as their investigations verge from the search for Cruz to the search for another Navajo man, to possible drug trafficking, the illegal sale of the tribe’s pottery, and alleged mismanagement at Wings and Roots.  It’s all connected, but unraveling the threads is not easy.  This fourth novel will make its readers eagerly awaiting its sequel.

Bernie Manuelito and Jim Chee are beautifully brought to life in Cave of Bones, as is retired detective Joe Leaphorn who plays a smaller part in this mystery.  The reader understands, especially in Bernie’s case, where she came from and how and why she became the dedicated police officer she is.  Her personal life is a very important part of these books:  her marriage to Chee, her sometimes strained relationship with her younger sister, and the beginning of her fear that all is not well with her mother.

You can read more about Anne Hillerman 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.

In 1987, three young children are removed from their home in Iceland by the local child protection agency.  All three have the same mother, although possibly not the same father.  After much debate, it’s decided that the three will have to be sent to separate homes, as no placement can be found to take all of them together.  The two brothers are four and three, the sister is only one.

In 2015, the first in a series of murders take place.  Elísa Bjarnadóttir, the mother of three young children, is brutally murdered in her home while her husband is overseas.  Only her little girl, Margrét, has seen the murder take place, although she hasn’t seen the face of the killer.  To say she is traumatized is an understatement.  Interviews by psychologists aren’t able to gain much information from her, except for her statement that the man is black and has a big head.  Given the infinitesimally small number of black men in Iceland, this seems like something the child has imagined.

Nothing helpful comes of the police investigation, no reason or motive for the crime can be found.  The only unusual thing the police discovered is an envelope taped to the victim’s refrigerator; it reads “So tell me,” followed by a huge series of seemingly unrelated numbers.  It’s not a code that the authorities can decipher.

Then a second murder occurs, even more gruesome and bizarre than the first.  This time the victim is a widowed math teacher who apparently has no connection with Elísa.  Astrós Einarsdóttir has been a bit of a recluse since her retirement two years ago, so she’s surprised to receive a text reading “Not long till my visit,” along with another string of seemingly random numbers.  She readies herself for the uninvited guest, although there’s no time or date given in the text, and when her visitor does arrive he’s the last person she’ll ever see.

The two protagonists in the novel are psychologist Freyja and police detective Huldar (often only single names are used in Icelandic books).  Shortly before the first murder took place, Freyja and Huldar had a one-night stand, which ended with Huldar leaving before Freyja woke in the morning.  When they meet again during the interrogation of Margrét there is understandable tension between the two:  Huldar is embarrassed and ashamed of his behavior, Freyja is hostile and unforgiving.  But they must work together to try to protect the child from both the psychological repercussions of the crime and the possibility that the murderer views her as a possible witness to be eliminated.

Every one of Yrsa Sigurdardóttir’s books has been outstanding, and The Legacy is no exception.  The many threads in the story seem unrelated until the end, when everything is deftly and logically connected.  And the look into Icelandic culture, which has many of the same problems as we do in the United States, although on a much smaller scale, is a reminder of the universality of human emotions.  Parental neglect, anger, revenge, and loneliness all play out to the eventual tragic ending that such unhappiness must cause.

You can read more about Yrsa Sigurdardóttir at various sites on the web.

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.

Edmond Locard was a scientist known as the “French Sherlock Holmes.”  The Locard Exchange Principle states that one who commits a crime leaves something behind at the scene–hair or fabric or (now) DNA–that will connect him to the act.  In Whispers of The Dead, the second in the Magnus “Steps” Craig series, that principle is taken to supernatural ends, as Steps has the ability to find and follow trails that even fellow agents in the FBI’s Special Tracking Unit cannot.

The reason for this skill is known only to three people beside Steps:  his father, his partner Jimmy Donovan, and the head of the FBI.  Steps has a form of synesthesia, an unexplainable ability to see what we might call an “aura” that a person leaves behind.  In other words, if he has an object that was worn by a suspect he can see the person’s aura, or shine as he calls it.  He can follow that shine via footprints or handprints on any place the suspect has touched.

Of course, something so outré, so bizarre, can’t be explained very easily, and trying to would seriously compromise Steps’ place in the Special Tracking Unit.  But it is this ability that has allowed him success after success in finding criminals; the difficult part is to account for how he has found them after other agents or police have not.

Steps and Jimmy are called to investigate a particularly gruesome item left in the living room of a judge’s home in El Paso.  Jonathan Ehrlich’s reputation as a member of the bench is that he unfairly favors the defendant and either dismisses cases that shouldn’t be dismissed or hands down the lightest sentence he can.

So it’s definitely possible that someone is outraged at a decision that Ehrlich made and is showing his displeasure in an especially dramatic way with a Styrofoam box, like those available in every supermarket or big box store to keep items cold, containing a pair of feet, partially frozen and wearing white socks and gray sneakers.

The two agents fly back and forth across the country from Washington to El Paso to Tucson to Albuquerque, investigating two other deaths that involve boxes with similarly gruesome contents.  The killer, now being called The IBK or Ice Box Killer, is on the move and leaving no clue of his identity except for the shine he leaves behind.  And that’s a clue that only Steps can see.

When, if ever, is murder legitimate?  If the law doesn’t mete out what one considers justice, is a person permitted to take things into his own hands?

Spencer Kope now is a crime analyst in Washington State and was formerly an intelligence operations specialist with the office of Naval Intelligence; in the latter position he traveled throughout the world.  Whispers of the Dead is a thriller that will keep you in suspense, reading until the last page explains it all.

You can read more about Spencer Kope 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.

Do wars ever really end?  That’s one of the questions to be answered in It Begins in Betrayal, the fourth book in the Lane Winslow series by Iona Whishaw.

As the novel opens, it’s 1947 and life has moved on in western Canada.  Lane Winslow, who is keeping her past life as part of the British Special Branch secret, and Frederick Darling, former British Royal Air Force pilot and current police inspector in King’s Cove, British Columbia, are about to become involved in two unrelated incidents that have long-buried tentacles in England.

The first is the apparently motiveless murder of Agatha Browning, an elderly woman originally from the British Isles.  Although she’s lived in King’s Cove for decades, no one seems to know much about her early life or what brought her to the far western part of Canada.  Her body is found in the woods near her remote cabin by the priest of the village’s Catholic Church.  Although it’s possible that the woman stumbled to her death on the rocky soil, neither the priest nor Constable Ames likes the look of the way the body has fallen.

At virtually the same moment that Inspector Darling receives the phone call from Father Lahey about his discovery of the corpse, Darling gets a visitor from the British government who has arrived to ask him questions about the crash of the plane he was piloting in 1943.  Darling had made a very complete report of this crash, which ended in tragedy with the death of one of his crew and the disappearance of another, presumably captured by Nazi soldiers.  In fact, he had received a medal for bringing the plane down safely and bringing the rest of his crew safely out of German-occupied France.  So why is this incident being investigated again, and why must he return to England to answer questions about it?

Darling (he’s always called by his last name) and Lane are romantically involved, but even he doesn’t know that she was an intelligence agent during the war.  But when he’s recalled to London for the re-opened investigation into the crash and what followed, Lane determines to follow him and find out the reason that the case has been reopened.  Certain events that took place during the war are still hidden under the Official Secrets Act, making it difficult for Darling and Lane to get to the truth of why he was asked, aka commanded, to return to England.  Meanwhile, the investigation into Agatha Browning’s death continues, with its own secrets and roots deep in the English countryside.

Iona Whishaw has written a mystery with a wonderful sense of time and place in It Begins in Betrayal.  The characters are alive and vibrant, the settings realistic, and the plot will pull you along until you find the reasons for the death of the Englishwoman in Canada and the forced return of the Canadian police inspector to England.

You can read more about Iona Whishaw 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.

Three and a half years after P. D. James’ death her estate has given her readers six short stories to delight us.  Sleep No More, these previously unpublished “murderous tales” as the jacket cover calls them, are quite different from the late author’s novels, but they are as engaging and engrossing as any of them.

Several of the stories are set in the Golden Age of mysteries, the decades starting in the 1920s and ending in the 1940s, when Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, and G. K. Chesterton wrote their most famous books.  Baroness James of Holland Park, to give P. D. James the title bestowed on her in 1991, didn’t start writing until after the Golden Age had passed, but two of the stories have dates that put them in the decades when the so-called classic mysteries were being written, and the four others in this collection are non-specific enough to have been set in that era as well.

Baroness James’ wry sense of humor is evident in “The Murder of Santa Claus,” a story told in the first person by a “workmanlike” writer of detective stories.  Charles Mickeldore knows he’s not a first-class author like, in his words, “Dick Francis…not even a P. D. James.”  His amateur detective, the Honorable Martin Carstairs, is considered by some critics to be a “pallid copy” of Lord Peter Wimsey, but Mickeldore is successful enough to support himself as a writer.  “The Murder of Santa Claus” takes place in a 17th-century manor house in 1939, with the required assortment of eccentric guests.  There’s a housekeeper, the very strange uncle of the narrator, an air force pilot, a sexy actress, and the elderly couple who used to own the house.  It’s the perfect Golden Age setting.

“Mr. Millcroft’s Birthday” is a tale of two warring generations that pits an elderly man’s wishes against those of his son and daughter.  His children are certain they know what housing is best for him; the fact that the housing they choose is gloomy and not at all what he wants doesn’t bother them as it’s substantially less expensive than his choice.  Matters come to a head as the three celebrate his birthday with a picnic lunch, at which surprise after surprise is revealed.

All six narratives are written in the elegant style for which Ms. James was famous.  Whether told in the first person or in the third, the  storyline captures the reader immediately.  Sleep No More is an unexpected and totally welcome treat, as enjoyable as the author’s famous Adam Dalgliesh novels.

You can read more about the late P. D. James at my Past Masters and Mistresses section.

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.

Imagine Susie Banks.  She’s a teenage violinist on the stage of the Kennedy Center, about to perform a solo with the National Symphony Orchestra.  She is halfway through her performance, playing perfectly as usual, when suddenly her body goes into spasms.  Her arms and legs are gesturing uncontrollably, and her instrument falls to the floor.  Several frightening moments pass, and through her tears she picks up the violin and makes her way to the wings.

In another part of Washington, Dr. Lee Blackwood is visiting a patient at MediCenter of D. C.  As he is making his rounds, a Secret Service agent comes into the room and tells Lee to follow him.  Lee’s former wife Karen is an agent, and she has asked the first lady, Ellen Hilliard, to bring Lee to the White House for a consult.

Ellen is concerned about her son Cam.  Cam has become withdrawn and moody, his complexion is ashen, he has huge circles under his eyes, and he is sweating inappropriately.  These emotional and physical symptoms are affecting his life to the point where his parents and the White House physician, Fred Gleason, fear he is depressed.  Most importantly, as far as Cam is concerned, his ability to play chess at the international level is being compromised, just in time for a major tournament he has hopes of winning.

Gleason thinks Cam should see a psychiatrist, but the teenager is insistent that his problem is physical, not mental.  Cam tells Lee that he’s not sleeping well, is tired all the time, and that his vision is sometimes blurred.  Lee agrees with Cam that the symptoms seem more physical than emotional, but the parents are conflicted about which physician to trust.

Polite battle lines are drawn between the two doctors, with nothing being decided.  Several days later, when Cam is playing a game of touch football with friends, he’s knocked out.  The White House doctor doesn’t think it’s anything more than bruising, but Karen is concerned enough to ask Lee for a diagnosis over the phone.  Hearing the concern in his ex-wife’s voice, Lee suggests bringing the boy to the MediCenter at once, which Karen does after consulting the first lady rather than Dr. Gleason.

In the meantime, Susie Banks has also been admitted to the MDC.  In what appears to the police to be a horrific accident, a faulty furnace allowed carbon monoxide into the Banks’ house, killing her parents and bringing Susie close to dying.  And now, the bizarre symptoms she had experienced at the Kennedy Center will have Lee trying to make a connection between her and Cam.

Right from the beginning Lee Blackwood’s skills are called into question by Fred Gleason.  Is it the simple jealousy of one doctor to another, or is his behavior in objecting to Lee’s every suggestion covering something more sinister?  And does the TPI, the True Potential Institute, an after-school program for the very best and the brightest that both Susie and Cam attend, have any part in this?

Daniel Palmer has written what truly is a page-turner.  You will be caught in the action from the beginning as Lee and Karen try to figure out what is bringing  these two formerly healthy teenagers to the point of death.

You can read more about Daniel Palmer 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.

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People think of watches, and they think of Switzerland.   Artisans in Holland and France were the premier watchmakers in the sixteenth century, but then the Swiss overtook them and never looked back.

The watch industry comes into play in the cleverly titled A Well-Timed Murder, the second in a series featuring Swiss-American detective Agnes Lüthi.  Agnes is a member of the Financial Crimes department in the Lausanne police department, currently on leave as she recovers from the wound she received in the first novel.  As the book opens she is at Baselworld, the world’s premier watch and jewelry trade show, overlooking the arrest of a much-wanted thief, when she is asked to investigate a week-old suspicious death.

Guy Chavanon, one of the country’s master watchmakers, died several days before the show opened, and a police investigation concurred with what every eyewitness agreed had happened:  Guy, who had a well-known life-threatening allergy to peanuts, somehow had ingested peanut dust or spores and died within seconds.  A frantic attempt by his friend, Narendra Patel, to inject him with an Epi-Pen didn’t work, and Chavanon died in front of a horrified group of teachers and parents at a reception at his son’s boarding school.  It was simply a tragic accident according to everyone except his daughter Christine; she suspects murder.

Guy had been working on an invention that he said would change the watch-making world, much as quartz did in the 1970s.  Because he was inordinately secretive, no one knew exactly what this invention was or where its explanatory notes were located.

Further complicating matters after Guy’s death is the disagreement between Christine and his wife Marie, Christine’s stepmother.  Although Christine had left the family’s firm of Perrault et Chavanon Frères several years earlier over a disagreement with her father about the company’s direction, she now wants to find out what he was working on and is hoping to bring it to fruition.  However, Marie wants to sell the generations-old firm immediately, and the two of them cannot come to any agreement about the future.

In addition, at Baselworld Agnes sees Julien Vallotton, a man she met several months previously on a case that involved his family.  It’s obvious that Julian is interested in her, but Agnes is conflicted.  She likes him, but dealing with the recent death of her husband and the anticipated reactions of her two young sons and her mother-in-law to Julien make it difficult for her to act on any attraction.  But Julien’s close relationship with the Chavanon family, in his role as Guy’s son’s godfather, makes it nearly impossible to avoid him.

Tracee de Hahn is breaking new ground in placing her detective, and a woman detective at that, in Lausanne’s police department.  Judging from Agnes’ ability in solving the deaths in A Well-Timed Murder, she will be solving more crimes in that city in the future.

Tracee de Hahn studied architecture and European history and lived for several years in Switzerland.  You can read more about her 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.

Several years ago I reviewed When Bad Things Happen, Harry Dolan’s first novel, and I wrote that I was struck by the twists and turns of the plot.  Mr. Dolan hasn’t lost his touch in the intervening years, as is evidenced by his latest mystery.  You almost need a scorecard to keep track of what’s going on, but a bit of confusion is well worth it; The Man in the Crooked Hat is an outstanding novel.

Jack Pellum is deep in grief over the murder of his wife.  At the time of her death, nearly two years earlier, he was a Detroit police detective, but his obsession with finding Olivia’s killer led first to his suspension and then to his quitting the force.  He doesn’t care about that; in fact, he doesn’t care about anything at all except finding the killer.  He spends his days and nights looking for any thread that might lead him to a man in the crooked hat, a man he saw the day his wife died.  He has papered his neighborhood with flyers asking for information about him, but so far there have been no results.

Then a young man in a Detroit neighborhood commits suicide, leaving a bizarre note on his living room wall–There’s a killer, and he wears a crooked hat.  That’s all the incentive Jack needs to look into Dan Cavanaugh’s death, and with that he becomes immersed in investigating a series of deaths in the area that may or may not be connected to his wife’s.  There doesn’t seem to be anything similar about these deaths–two of which have been deemed accidents–but the fact that there are so many has Jack convinced, or almost convinced, that if he’s able to untangle the strands he will find Olivia’s murderer.

Finally Jack gets a response to the posters.  Paul Rook, a man whose mother was murdered nine years ago, contacts him.  Her killer was never found, and he is convinced that the man who murdered her wore a hat, a man he saw near his house only two days before his mother’s death.  He tells Jack to stop looking for a thread that connects all the murders because there is none.

“But if you look for him,” Paul says, “if you’re patient, you can find him.”  Paul has been doing his own research into murders in the greater Detroit area.  The earliest murder he can find that he’s sure this man committed goes back twenty years, and that victim was the older brother of Dan Cavanaugh, the man who just killed himself.

Jack is a man who has given up virtually everything in his search for his wife’s killer.  His job, his friends, his relationship with his parents have all faded away beside his need to find Olivia’s murderer and the reason for her death.  Is it justice he seeks, or is it vengeance?

The Man in the Crooked Hat is a brilliant look into the dangers of obsession and where they can lead.

You can read more about Harry Dolan 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 took 165 years for the Texas Rangers to admit the first black man to its law enforcement agency.  It’s nearly thirty years after that event, but Darren Matthews still gets unbelieving looks when people see the star pinned onto his uniform’s shirt.

Barely avoiding suspension from the Rangers for his part in a standoff between an old friend and a man who has been harassing and threatening the man’s granddaughter, Darren gets a call from another friend, Greg Hegland, a member of the F.B.I.

The town of Lark, Texas, has had two suspicious deaths in less than a week.  The first, a black man, died under suspicious circumstances; whether he was murdered or accidentally drowned is unclear.  The second, a young white woman, was definitely a homicide victim.

Lark is situated in Shelby County, a place where members of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas have a strong presence.  It’s not a town where a black man would feel comfortable walking into an unfamiliar bar.  But that appears to have been what Michael Wright, a lawyer from Chicago, did.  What was this man, with no known ties to the tiny hamlet where he met his death, doing in Lark, much less in Jeff’s Juice House where he obviously wouldn’t have been welcome?  The white woman, Melissa Dale, was a waitress at that bar, and Darren is having a hard time putting together any script which connects the two victims.  No one in either of Lark’s gathering places, the white-owned Juice House or the black-owned Geneva Sweet’s Sweets, is talking.

Hoping to ride out his almost-suspension from the Rangers while looking into these deaths, Darren faces opposition from several quarters–the local sheriff, the Rangers, and the townspeople, both black and white, who are used to handling things by themselves and don’t want him investigating.  But Darren’s deep roots into the east Texas landscape and his feeling that this is indeed a racial incident compel him to look into the deaths regardless of the opposition and danger he’s facing.

Attica Locke has written a searing portrait of life in small-town Texas, showing the problems endemic in much of America–racial tensions, drugs, and mistrust of police authority.  Darren is a man trying to do his job despite his own issues–a failing marriage, a drinking problem, and a possible forced leave from a job he loves–and the author’s writing allows us to get inside his head as he tries to deal with them.

The novel crackles with tension, the writing is vibrant, and Darren will have you rooting for him even when he’s not exactly following the rules.  Bluebird, Bluebird is a nominee for the 2018 Edgar Best Novel.

You can read more about Attica Locke 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.

Harper McClain has the job she loves in the city she adores.  She’s the crime reporter on the Daily News in Savannah, her home town, and she relishes every crime that comes in over her scanner.  That may sound heartless, but multi-car accidents, abductions, and murders are what get her blood flowing, as she would be the first to admit.

A call from Miles Jackson, a photographer on the paper, brings Harper to a part of the city that usually doesn’t get much violence.  But today is different, as she sees at least half a dozen detectives surrounding a house when she arrives at the address Miles gives her.  Talking to the neighbors, she learns that the victim is Marie Whitney, a divorced woman with an eleven-year-old daughter.  And when Harper sees young Camille gently being led to a waiting police car, the crime becomes very personal.

For Harper, this is déjà vu.  When she was twelve years old, she came home from school to find the bloody, nude body of her mother on the kitchen floor.  Despite an intensive investigation, the killer was never found.  Now Harper is frantic to get a look inside the home to see if this murder scene is reminiscent of the one that destroyed her family.

Circumventing the police and other reporters, she makes her way through a neighbor’s yard to a spot where she’s able to look into the Whitneys’ kitchen window.  And, confirming her worst fears, the scene is identical to the one in her head.  Marie Whitney is nude, with three stab wounds visible on her back and arms; even her hair was almost the same color as Harper’s mother’s had been.  Can it be the same killer at work more than a decade later?

The kitchen has been wiped clean of any clues, Harper learns.  There are no clothing threads, no fingerprints, no footprints, no DNA on any of the surfaces.   According to one police source, the killer must have been a professional.  But the reporter wonders why a hired killer would have murdered Marie, a secretary at the local college, a woman who surely didn’t have ties to any criminal group.  And certainly Harper’s mother wasn’t involved in anything illegal.

What has Harper determined to look into the crime, regardless of prohibitions by the police and her close friend Lieutenant Smith, is the look on Marie’s daughter’s face as she is led into a detective’s car.  That’s the same look that Harper knows she had when she was taken away from her mother’s corpse.  She needs to find the killer, both for young Camille and for herself.

There’s a very clever twist at the end of The Echo Killing that I certainly didn’t see coming.  Christi Daugherty has written what I hope will be the first in a series featuring a young professional woman who’s ready to go after what she wants, even if it means heading into a dangerous situation, to learn the truth.

You can read more about Christi Daugherty 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.

Clare Mackintosh’s latest mystery, Let Me Lie, will hold you from the first page until the last.  It is as good as I Let You Go, her novel I reviewed in June, 2016, something I didn’t think was possible.

Let Me Lie opens with the voice of a dead person, but we don’t know who that person is.  That voice is interspersed between chapters told in two other voices–Anna Johnson’s and Murray Mackenzie’s.

Anna is a new mother.  She’s thrilled with her lovely daughter Ella and happy with her partner Mark, but she is grieving the loss of her parents.  Both committed suicide seven months apart at the infamous cliff at Beachy Head, and as the novel opens it’s the first anniversary of Anna’s mother’s death.  Neither body was recovered, but witnesses saw both husband and wife on top of the Head, loading their pockets with stones.  Her mother’s suicide was an exact replica of her father’s, something that is making Anna even more distraught.  Knowing how her mother had suffered after her husband’s death, Anna wonders how she could have done the same thing herself, leaving Anna bewildered and lost.

On this sad day, Anna is horrified to receive a Happy Anniversary card in the mail.  Who would do such a cruel thing, she wonders?  And the message inside is even worse.  Suicide?  Think again.

Both Mark and Anna’s Uncle Billy think the card is a despicable “joke” someone with a warped sense of humor is playing on her.  But Anna, who never felt that her parents were suicidal types, now thinks she has something concrete to go on.  She and Ella go to the local police station where they encounter Murray Mackenzie, a recently retired detective who is now a civilian volunteer on the force.

Bored with his retirement and moved by Anna’s sincerity in her belief that her parents were murdered, he agrees to look into the matter, although he does not plan to share his investigation with the active detectives.  Time enough to tell them when I find something significant, if in fact I do, he thinks.

Now for my confession:  at least four times while reading this novel I “knew” the next turn the story would take and how the book would end.  In each case I was totally wrong.  Just when I was certain someone was guilty and just when I could tell what the next wrinkle in the plot would be, I was wrong again.  Let Me Lie is like a roller coaster ride, but every twist and turn is believable.

Clare Mackintosh is a master in leading you astray so skillfully that you don’t even realize what’s happening.  Not until I had finished the book did I realize how much I had misread and how often I had jumped to conclusions.  I am delighted to have been so mislead so cunningly.

You can read more about Clare Mackintosh 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.

“The sky had fallen in Aleppo.  No corner of the city was spared.”  That is the thought of one of the Syrian men who has made it to Greece; it sums up the despair of the victims of the seven-year civil war that has torn his Middle Eastern nation apart and displaced, both externally and internally, over twelve million of his countrymen.

Inspector Esa Khattak and Sergeant Rachel Getty of the Toronto Police Force are sent to Greece by the Canadian prime minister to help search for Audrey Clare.  Audrey is the younger sister of Esa’s closest friend, Nathan Clare, and she has gone to the Greek island of Lesvos (Lesbos) as part of her duties as chief operating officer for Woman to Woman, an NGO dedicated to helping women across the world.

Suddenly her emails and phone calls to her brother stop.  What Nate tells Esa and Rachel is that two murders were committed in the Woman to Woman tent in the refugee camp on Lesvos; Audrey disappeared that same night and hasn’t been seen since.  Since the Clare family is known throughout Canada, the disappearance of one of its members has national repercussions.  There were international repercussions to be considered as well, since one of the dead was a French Interpol agent.  The other was a young male Syrian refugee.

When Esa and Rachel arrive in Lesvos, they are appalled by the conditions.  Their previous case had taken them to Iran, and the conditions in that country had been terrible, especially in the state-run prison system.  But the refugee camp in Lesvos is worse.  No running water, no heat, no roads, no schools for the children or job training for the adults.  The Greek government is doing its best, Esa and Rachel are assured, but the sheer amount of people in the Cara Tepe and Moria camps has overwhelmed all facilities.

And there is no way of knowing whom to trust.  Are the Greek and Italian boatmen who go out nightly to rescue migrants what they seem?  What about the Interpol agent who appears not to be very interested at all in Audrey’s disappearance, only in the death of her own colleague?  And why did a volunteer worker come to help all the way from Australia when that country is having its own refugee crisis?

Ausma Zehanat Khan’s fourth novel brilliantly weaves all these strands together–the overwhelming migrant crisis, the murder of the French Interpol agent and the young Syrian boy, the disappearance of Audrey Clare–into a story that is much, much more than a typical mystery.  The plight of those fleeing Syria and other war-torn countries is painfully recounted, but the search for the missing Canadian woman is equally in the forefront of the book.  Reading A Dangerous Crossing brings the headlines we read every day into a clearer, more personal focus.

You can read more about Ausma Zehanat Kahn 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 is difficult to be a spy, or at least a former spy, these days.  The enmity was clear between the West and the Soviet Union during the Cold War; although those days are long over, deep suspicion remains on both sides.

A Divided Spy is like a tree with a lot of branches.  The branches may appear separate, but in fact they all come together to form the tree.  It’s only when you see the complete picture that it all makes sense.

Thomas Kell is still tenuously connected to the SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service.  He has given his life to the service, but he is now in disgrace due to several assignments that resulted in death and failure, including the one that ended with the assassination of his lover, Rachel.  His ex-wife Claire has told him frequently that his job was more important to him than his marriage, and he concedes that she is right.

Even as he acknowledges that he’s no longer a valued member of the Service, he continues, almost unconsciously, to see enemy agents trying to shove him in front of a moving train or listening to his phone calls or reading his emails.  He knows that the surveillance is probably all in his mind, but that doesn’t mean he’s stopped looking for it.

Thomas gets a call from a former colleague who tells him he’s seen the man whom Kell holds responsible for Rachel’s murder, a man Thomas has long been searching for.  Alexander Minasian has been a top Russian espionage agent for years, and Thomas believes that Minasian knowingly sent Rachel to her death in retribution for an act that Thomas committed.  Now that Alexander has been located, Thomas has his chance to make him pay.

The novel follows the incredibly complex business of espionage.  For every plan Kell makes, there are four or five that are considered and discarded.  First there’s murder, followed by blackmail, followed by detailed preparations to make certain that all goes according to his scheme.  He’s getting virtually no help from the SIS, which considers that his desire for revenge has overwhelmed his rational thought process.  A former colleague, Harold Mowbray, is the man who set all this in motion with his identification of Miasian.  But Kell wonders why he did so and if he can be trusted.

A Divided Spy is more than just a thriller.  It’s a deep look into what a life of lying and spying does to the agent.  As Thomas looks back on his life and its activities, he wonders if perhaps there are compromises that are simply more than the end object is worth.

You can read more about Charles Cumming at this website.