Book Reviews

The Taylors’ marriage had warning signs from the beginning.  When seventeen-year-old Jean met the slightly older, more sophisticated Glen Taylor, she was swept away.  Eventually he won over her parents, and two years later Jean and Glen were married.

They were happy, as long as Glen got to make all the decisions.  He called it being protective, choosing the seat for her at a bar, deciding on her meals so she could taste new things, explaining to her that their kitchen wasn’t quite clean enough.  And Jean wanted to please him, to make things good between them, so she agreed with his decisions and their marriage went along smoothly.

Then things start to go wrong.  Glen is let go from his position at the bank.  He tells Jean he was terminated because the management was downsizing and that he is going to start his own business, but Jean finds a letter from the bank with the words “unprofessional behavior,” “inappropriate,” and “termination forthwith.”  It’s the beginning of serious trouble for the couple.

Dawn Elliot is a single mother to two-year-old Bella.  And one afternoon Bella disappears from their front yard.  “But I was just trying to get her tea ready,” Dawn tells Detective Bob Sparkes.  “She was out of sight for only a minute.”  But that’s all it took for the toddler to disappear.

All of England is looking for Bella, with telephone calls and CCTV coverage constantly updating the police.  Then a tip comes in from a delivery van driver who works for the company where Glen Taylor is temporarily employed.  That driver gives the police the name of the driver who was scheduled to work in the area near Bella’s home on the day she went missing; that driver in turn tells them that he didn’t do the last run of the day but passed it along to Glen.

The Widow covers a period of more than three years in three voices:  Jean Taylor, Glen’s wife; Kate Waters, a reporter at the Daily Post; and Detective Bob Sparkes.  The reader will be carried along by the story, understanding the events as they are seen by these three people.  Jean, who is happily married to Glen until the police come to their house and question him about Bella’s disappearance; Kate, sympathizing with Jean while at the same time doing everything in her power to obtain the exclusive story of the Taylors’ marriage for her paper; Bob, whose obsession with Bella’s case nearly undermines his career.

The novel is as real as today’s headlines.  Each of the above characters, along with many others in the book, has his/her own agenda, and finding out the truth about the kidnapping isn’t always uppermost in each person’s mind.

Fiona Barton has written a gripping mystery, filled with insights into the minds of those who buy child pornography and the slippery slope to which it may lead.  You won’t forget The Widow in a hurry.

You can read more about Fiona Barton at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Two women in the Colorado wilderness, one missing and the other trying to find her.  They couldn’t be less similar, but the search that connects them is stronger than the differences between them.

Amy Raye Latour is elk hunting in the woods with two friends.  Amy Raye, although skilled with a rifle, prefers to hunt with a compound bow.  Her husband and two children are at home, and now she’s preparing to leave her two fellow hunters at the camp and search for the elk herself.  Without telling Aaron or Kenny, she packs up food and water for the day and drives away in Aaron’s truck.  She thinks she’s prepared for every eventuality, but she’s not.

Pru Hathaway works for the Bureau of Land Management as an archaeological law enforcement ranger.  It’s a job she describes as being a police officer of the past, looking for disturbances to the land and the possible looting of historic artifacts.  Along with her dog Kona, she is part of a team that sometimes has to search for missing hikers and hunters, people who underestimate the difficulties of the Colorado terrain,  don’t carry the necessary food and water, or don’t listen to the area weather forecasts.  And sometimes, even when the hikers or hunters take all the proper precautions, they still run into trouble.  That’s what happened to Amy Raye.

The reader is pulled into the lives of these two women.  Amy Raye is a woman with a very troubled history, with many secrets she has kept from her husband.  It’s partly this past life that she’s running from, not certain she wants to continue her life with him or if she even deserves to, given all that she’s been hiding over the years.

Pru, too, is working through some issues.  She’s the single mother of a teenage boy, the result of a one-night stand.  Successful in her career, she’s facing the idea of being alone as her son will be leaving for college in the not-too-distant future.

Breaking Wild follows Amy Raye and Pru, the former fighting with all her strength to get back to civilization after her pride and a series of bad judgment calls leave her alone and injured in the wilderness, the latter determined to find the missing woman, or at least find her remains.  As the days stretch out into weeks, a happy outcome is unlikely, but the determination of both women is very strong.

The sense of place in this novel is wonderful, with the reader swept through harrowing conditions.  The author, herself skilled in backpacking, snowmobiling, and hiking through the woods surrounding her former home in Colorado, makes both the incredible survival skills of Amy Raye and the persistence of Pru come alive.

You can read more about Diane Les Becquets at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Miles from Iceland’s capital, a woman swimming in the mineral-laden waters of the Midnesheidi Moor lagoon comes across a badly bruised corpse.  The pathologist on call can’t even count all the broken bones and isn’t able to come to a conclusion as to the cause of death.  Not a drowning, not a fatal beating, not a traffic accident.

There’s no identification on the man, the only clues to his identity being the leather jacket and cowboy boots he had been wearing.  Does this mean the man was an American?  Or perhaps simply an Icelandic admirer of the United States?

It’s 1979 in Reykjavik.  The Cold War is still going strong, and there’s a big American military base in Iceland’s capital.  The base has split the country in two, with one side believing that the country needs strong defense during the Cold War and only the Americans can supply it, and the other side wanting the Americans to leave Iceland to manage on its own.  And that divisiveness is nowhere more strongly felt than between the American military and the Icelandic police.

The day following the announcement of the body’s discovery, a woman calls the police to say it’s possible that the man might be her brother Kristvin; she hasn’t heard from him for several days, a highly unusual occurrence.  A trip to the morgue verifies his identity, but his sister has no idea what took him to the remote moor or why anyone would want to kill him.  He was a worker at the military base, but when the police attempt to question the base’s supervisor, it ignites the already existing tension between the two countries.

Erlandur (it’s the Icelandic way to refer to people by their first names only) Sveinsson has just been promoted to the rank of detective on the Reykjavik police force.  At the same time he’s investigating Kristvin’s death, Erlandur is also looking into the decades-old disappearance of a teenage girl.  Spurred on by a newspaper obituary of the girl’s father and knowing that the girl’s mother had died years before, Erlandur contacts Dagbjørt’s aunt, the girl’s only surviving relative.

He is doing this on his own time, he stresses to the aunt, not because any new information has come up but because she might be the only one alive with any answers as to what happened to her niece.  What Erlandur doesn’t tell her is that the disappearance resonates only too strongly with an incident in his own life, one he has never been able to put behind him.

I have read all of Arnaldur Indridason’s novels.  The sense they give of Iceland, its people, its geography, and its culture are incredibly strong.  At the time this book takes place, the country has been independent of Denmark for only sixty years.  It’s basically a nation of “peasants and farmers,” as Erlandur tells an American soldier, still trying to find its way into the modern world.

Erlandur is a wonderful character, a sensitive, moody man with a strong sense of purpose.  Following his career has been a delight, and this flashback more than thirty years earlier answers some, if not all, of the questions as to what makes him the man he is.

You can read more about Arnaldur Indridason at various sites on the web.

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Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, Cambridge student, poet, and expert with sword and knife, is plucked from his college by Rodrigo Lopez, royal physician to Queen Elizabeth, for a dangerous assignment.  The year is 1583, and nineteen-year-old Christopher has no idea what he’s getting into.  But, according to Dr. Lopez, he has no choice in the matter.

The queen, daughter of Henry VIII, has been on the throne for twenty-five years, and since the beginning of her reign there have been plots against her.  Lately they have intensified in nature, leading to Elizabeth’s belief that her half-sister Mary, Queen of Scots, and the pope are in league to remove her and either imprison her in the Tower of London or behead her.  Then Mary, a devout Catholic, would become ruler and reinstate the Catholic Church as the state religion of the country.

Two members of Elizabeth’s council–Dr. Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who has converted to Protestantism in order to become the monarch’s doctor, and Sir Francis Walsingham, for whom the term spymaster was invented–are trying to thwart this plan.  They tell Christopher part, but not all, of the scheme to unseat Elizabeth and that vital information to defeat the traitors is known only to a prisoner being held in Malta, a Catholic stronghold in the central Mediterranean.

Walsingham tells Marlowe that the island “is ruled by the Knights of Malta, ruthless, devious, brilliant men…(They) have built the most secure prison in the world.  Our man is in the bottom of that prison.”  Being young, flattered, and above all seeking excitement, Marlowe replies “I like a challenge,” and he sets off immediately to rescue the man.

Of course, there are plots within plots in sixteenth-century England, and there are many twists and turns in the story.  Like Marlowe, the reader doesn’t know whom to trust.  One’s friend today may be one’s enemy tomorrow, or even later the same day.  But Kit is, in his own way, the match for the Knights of Malta and whomever is behind the plot to gain the throne for Mary.  Rescuing the prisoner is only the first step in making the monarchy secure for Elizabeth.

My knowledge of Christopher Marlowe was nearly non-existant before reading A Prisoner in Malta.  I knew him only as a contemporary of Shakespeare; indeed, there is a small number of scholars who believe in the Marlovian conspiracy theory that Marlowe actually wrote many of the plays and poems for which Shakespeare is credited.  But Marlowe achieved so much on his own that there is no need to believe in that theory.  Being a poet, playwright, translator, and “spy” should be enough of a legacy for any man, especially for one who lived only twenty-nine years.

This is a terrific novel.  The author has brought every character to life, and, unfortunately, the intrigues and petty jealousies that he describes among those in power appear as common now as they were in Marlowe’s time.

Phillip DePoy has a brief summary at the end of the book that gives biographical details of the main characters of the book.  Please don’t read the summary before reading A Prisoner in Malta:  it will spoil the novel.

You can read more about Phillip DePoy at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

A former police detective/former Coast Guard officer/former heroin addict, currently a virtually homeless photographer blessed and/or cursed with the ability to see ghosts, Jackie Lyons has more parts than a jigsaw puzzle.  Reduced to living in a lower-than-low budget motel and eating ramen noodles or nothing at all, she’s surprised by a call from a woman she met briefly a year earlier and hasn’t heard from since.

Jenny Loftin has called to say that the pastor of her church needs photos taken of an old house that he plans to turn into the parsonage of his new church.  Arriving at Stirling Estates, Jackie is waiting to meet Deacon Falgoust when she sees a man approaching her, his arms waving, his steps uncoordinated.  Suddenly he stumbles over a cliff into a body of water, and Jackie dives in after him.  His body is cold when Jackie pulls him out of the lake; in fact, Sam Loftin had already been for dead several hours when Jackie “saw” him on the cliff and then fall in the water.

Jackie has had visions all her life of people both recently dead and long deceased.  She no longer tries to explain this to others, and her hesitant description of what she saw, trying to avoid saying she saw the ghost of Sam Loftin, lands her in jail overnight.  In the morning she’s released and finds out that Sam’s death quickly has been ruled a suicide, allegedly due to his despair over the death of his young daughter five years earlier.

Deacon Falgoust is certain that Jackie will be able to help Jenny in her search for answers about her husband’s death.  To help them both, he suggests that Jackie move in with Jenny and her family in the Estates and pay a small amount of rent; it turns out that Sam has left a lot of unpaid bills, surprising in view of their upscale lifestyle and the fact that he never complained about business problems.  Nevertheless, Jenny is fearful of losing her home and seemingly wants more from Jackie, whom she suspects of having special powers, than Jackie is willing to give.

The title, The Covenant, refers to the rules, regulations, and restrictions that homeowners in Stirling Estates must agree to when they purchase their houses.  The restrictions are many and are clearly meant to tightly control who buys into the development and how they live.  But, as Deacon Falgoust tells Jackie, there are ways around anything, if the Lord is on your side.

Jackie Lyons is beset by demons, many of which are unexplained in this second novel of the series; that leads me to hope for an early third entry in the series.  Did she quit or was she fired from the Memphis Police Department?  Who was her husband and why did they divorce?  Why did she turn to heroin and how was she able to kick the habit?

The Covenant is a great read with a fascinating heroine and a gripping plot.  Its ending will have you wondering how you missed all the clues that led up to it…I certainly did.

You can read more about Jeff Crook at various sites on the web.

Checking out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Doug Brock is a New Jersey police detective.  He’s honest, aggressive, and, some would say, a loose cannon in his pursuit of criminals.  So it’s no surprise that when Blackout opens he’s been suspended from the force for failing to follow orders.  But, Brock being Brock, that doesn’t deter him from following leads, even as he ends up in a hospital room, unable to remember the events of the past decade.

Doug had been mentoring an orphaned teenager whom he coached in baseball.  He was planning to adopt Johnnie Arroyo as soon as possible.  One night, as they walked along a Teaneck, New Jersey street after dinner, shots were fired at them from a passing car.  Despite Doug’s effort to shield Johnnie, two bullets passed through the young man’s body, killing him instantly.

Certain that he knows the man behind the murder, Doug disobeys orders and starts his own investigation.  Even being put on indefinite suspension doesn’t stop him, and in his downward spiral he has broken off his engagement to fellow officer Jessie Allen.  And then comes his phone call to his partner, Nate Alvarez.

Nate is frankly tired of the emotional basket case that Doug has become.  He’s received too many phone calls about Doug’s unofficial search for Johnnie’s killer, each one more strident and over-the-top than the one before, so only the fact that he’s Doug’s best friend keeps him on the line this time.  In the midst of the call, with Doug telling Nate to call the FBI, the phone on Doug’s end is dropped and Nate hears the devastating sound of two gunshots and then two more.  Then silence.

When Doug awakens five days later from his drug-induced coma, not surprisingly he’s exhausted and weak, barely able to speak.  However, much worse than that is the fact that he believes it is 2005, a decade earlier than the actual date, and that he is twenty-six, ten years younger than his true age.  He’s suffering from retrograde amnesia, with no guarantee that his memory of the last ten years will ever return.

Blackout is a gripping thriller that will captivate the reader from the first chapter.  The police department tells Brock that he apparently was investigating Nicholas Bennett, an important crime figure in the state, but as it’s obvious that Doug has no memory of Bennett or his probable connection to the shooting of Johnnie Arroyo, they withhold some pertinent information from him.

However, there’s enough information for Brock to disregard his captain’s orders to start back to work slowly; he’s frantically hunting his memory for his connection to Bennett and the reason why the crime boss would have tried to have him killed.

All the characters in the novel are terrific–Doug Brock, determined to regain his memory and discover what led to the shooting; Nate Alvarez, trying with little success to rein in his partner and finally agreeing to help him fill in the gaps in his memory; Jessie Allen, the woman Doug can’t remember he was engaged to; and Nicholas Bennett and Ahmat Gharsi, two men of widely disparate backgrounds who are working together to commit a horrific crime.

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

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

We don’t know the home Orphan X came from or how he was found.  But we do know some facts–he came from East Baltimore, he was taken away in a luxury sedan, and apparently he was chosen because the Mystery Man, aka Jack Johns, saw something in this twelve-year-old standing on the broken concrete of a school playground that no one else was able to see.  And Orphan X, first name Evan, thought that wherever he was being taken would be better than where he was; as it happened, that turned out being trained to be an assassin for the United States government.

Fast forward about two decades, and Evan is now Evan Smoak, posing as a Los Angeles importer of industrial cleaning supplies, a “cover” presumably so boring as to deflect any intrusive questions as to his occupation.  He’s no longer working for the government, but having amassed a considerable fortune he is free to choose his own assignments.  He’s content to wait for his phone to ring to let him know there’s another job waiting for him, and so it does.

A teenage Latina girl named Morena tells Evan she has gotten his name from someone he helped previously, and when Evan validates that information he agrees to talk to her.  When they meet she tells him how she’s trying to protect her younger sister from the sexual abuse she’s been suffering from a member of the Los Angeles police department.  This man has a whole street of teenage girls in the barrio under his control for his own sexual use and for other men’s perversions as well.

Outraged and disgusted by this, Evan successfully rids Morena of her tormentor, but in doing so he places his own life in danger.  He is used to fighting and protecting himself, but this time it appears that his enemies are as skilled and determined as he is.

Evan has insulated himself from the world in his attack-proof condo, the penthouse suite in a building called Castle Heights.  The windows are bullet-proof, the walls have been reinforced, the door has steel inside its regulation wooden frame.  And there’s also the Vault, a specially built hidden room filled with multiple computers and video monitors, all to protect himself from his assailants.  He even goes by the name of The Nowhere Man; his encrypted private network phone number is 1-855-2-NOWHERE.

But now he is finding himself vulnerable, not only to a physical attack from his adversaries but to an emotional invasion from one of his neighbors and her eight-year-old son.  Somehow Mia Hall and her son Peter have innocently been intruding into Evan’s life, and the more interactions they have, the less he finds himself minding them.  In fact, he’s beginning to enjoy their company.

Evan Smoak is a terrific character, a man who came from nowhere and remade himself/was remade into a killing machine.  His targets are those who prey on the vulnerable, the needy, and for each case he takes he asks only one thing:  that the person who benefits from his aid give his name to one other person in need of help.  That’s all.  But that’s enough for someone to want to get rid of him.

Gregg Hurwitz has written a great thriller, filled with characters the reader will long remember and a page-turning plot that will hold you in suspense until the end.

You can read more about Gregg Hurwitz at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Once a Crooked Man is a terrific read.  Starting with an overheard conversation outside the Fiery Dragon Chinese restaurant in New York City, traveling to South America and London and back again to Manhattan with corpses everywhere, David McCallum will have you hooked all the way.

It all begins when Carter Allinson II stops by a Starbucks in New York City and shares a table with a beautiful young woman.  Fiona Walker comes from a wealthy family, and shortly after their meeting the couple become engaged and Carter is welcomed into Fiona’s father’s investment firm.  As a college student Carter had supported himself by a little drug dealing, but with his upcoming wedding he wants to leave that behind him.

Not so fast, says gangster Sal Bruschetti, head of the organization that has been supplying Carter.  You don’t need to be doing any more minor-league dealing, but we need you for another reason.  We’ll be investing money with your father-in-law’s firm, and you’ll be handling all the investments in legitimate ways.  Otherwise, we’ll let the Walkers know about your history.  Carter doesn’t see that he has a choice in the matter, and so begins the long-term relationship between Carter and the three Bruschetti brothers.

None of this has anything to do with Harry Murphy, a fairly successful actor who works in television, on Broadway, and does voiceovers for commercials.  He’s on a Manhattan street when he has an immediate need for a bathroom.  Spotting the Fiery Dragon, he walks in on the Bruschettis in the midst of a “business” talk.  They order him out, but his need is so great that he decides to use the alley outside the building to relieve himself.  Thus he can’t help overhearing their conversation concerning a man in London that the trio is going to have killed.

The plot of Once a Crooked Man is a great one.  Ever impetuous, when Harry learns what the brothers have planned he decides to fly to England and warn the victim.  Once there, there’s no controlling the events that follow.  But Harry is a resourceful man with many talents.  Sometimes he’s a step ahead of the Bruschettis, sometimes a step behind, but he’s always in the midst of the action.

All the characters in this novel are terrific.  I was constantly surprised by the twists and turns the book took because of the things the individuals said and the ways they responded to events.  Carter, Harry, the British detective Lizzie Carswell, and Sal, Enzo, and Max Bruschetti are wonderfully drawn.  The plot goes from one cliffhanger to another, keeping the reader totally engaged up to the last page.

You may remember David McCallum from his many roles, starting with The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and continuing to the present in NCIS.  Now he is an author as well.  Let’s hope for many more books from this talented man.

You can read about David McCallum at various sites on the web.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

The Bosnian war ended more than two decades ago, but its tremors are still being felt.  In Toronto, police detective Esa Khattak and his partner Rachel Getty are about to relive the massacres that occurred when the former Yugoslavia split into three warring nations, and the Bosnian Serb forces began the killing of 100,000 citizens, the majority of them Yugoslavian Muslims.  It was the worst European genocide since World War II.

Christopher Drayton, a Canadian citizen and wealthy entrepreneur, is found at the bottom of a cliff near his home of Scarborough Bluffs.  Why, Esa wonders, has the Community Policing Section that he heads been called to investigate what would seem to be an unfortunate accident, given the dark night and the unstable grounds from which Christopher fell?

Esa asks Rachel to meet him at Winterglass, the home of famed author Nathan Clare, since Nate was a neighbor of the late Christopher Drayton.  It becomes obvious to Rachel, early in their visit, that Nate and Esa have known each other for years; indeed, Nate tells Rachel that the two of them went to college together.  So why, she wonders, is the air so filled with tension?

Following the visit to Nate’s home, the two detectives search Drayton’s house, and Rachel finds a file with a number of papers inside.  Each one has a sentence or two on it, not exactly threats, but certainly unpleasant thoughts.  This is a cat-and-mouse game.  As you took everything from me, you asked if I was afraid.  Can you right all the wrongs of the past?  What are they doing in Drayton’s house?  Were they written by him?  Were they sent to him?  Either way, there’s something about Drayton’s life that doesn’t seem to fit the picture that he presented to the world.

There appear to be two major parts to Drayton’s life.  First, he was engaged to Melanie Blessant, a divorced mother of two young daughters.  Second, he was about to give a very sizable donation to a local history museum, Ringsong, that specializes in the Andalusian traditions of art and poetry.  Could the murdered man’s substantial wealth have been a factor in his death?  His fiancée certainly seems to be more distraught at the thought of missing the huge wedding she had been planning than she is at Christopher’s death.  And was Drayton’s interest in the history of Andalusia simply self-aggrandizement, a genuine interest in Andalusia, or did he have a darker motive?  And how does this all connect to the Bosnian war of the 1990s?

The Unquiet Dead is an amazing book, both beautifully written and painful to read.  The author has a doctorate in international human rights law and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in law.  All this background comes into play in this deeply felt novel.  Ms. Kahn’s characters are realistic, both heroic and flawed, each with his or her own agenda that takes precedence over everything else in life.

Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty will be appearing in the second book of the series in February, and I am very much looking forward to reading it.

You can read more about Ausma Zehanat Khan at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Elvis Cole, the private investigator who is the protagonist of many of Robert Crais’ crime novels, has a very mysterious client.  Meryl Lawrence comes to him with a strange request–she wants him to find her colleague, Amy Breslyn, who has been missing for a couple of days, but she insists that the search must be conducted in complete secrecy.

She hands Elvis two thousand dollars in cash, an address for a friend of the missing woman’s late son, and a personnel file that she believes will help locate Amy.  Meryl’s desire for secrecy is so over-the-top that she won’t even come to Elvis’ office; instead, they meet in a parking lot behind a book store in Pasadena.

Both Amy and Meryl work at Woodson Energy Solutions, a chemical firm where Amy is employed as an engineer.  Meryl tells Elvis that because their work is classified, no indication of his investigation must get out and insists that Elvis make this promise.  “Swear to me.  Swear you won’t breathe a word.”  “I promise.” Bound by his word, Elvis is finding it increasingly difficult to probe into Amy’s disappearance.

Amy’s only son Jacob was a photographer who was killed, along with thirteen other people, by a terrorist explosion in Nigeria.  That was nearly a year and a half before the book opens, and since then Amy has become more and more reclusive.  Now she has disappeared.

Elvis goes to the address that Meryl has given him and is surprised to find it surrounded by Los Angeles police, with a helicopter overhead.  As he’s deciding how to handle the situation a man comes running out of the house, and Elvis gives chase.  He’s not able to catch him and is forced to stop when a policeman with a pistol confronts him.  Believing that Elvis has acted suspiciously, the cop puts him in a squad car without explanation.  But when Elvis sees the words on the police car he begins to understand what all the commotion is about:  they read Bomb Squad.

Cole is joined in the case by his long-time friend and colleague, Joe Pike, plus two relatively new characters to Elvis’ world:  Scott James and Jon Stone.  Scott is a former Marine who is presently a dog handler in the L. A. police department’s K-9 division; Jon Stone, a friend of Pike’s, is a former Delta Force member turned mercenary, with expertise in technology.  Together, the four men, with assistance from Scott’s dog Maggie, team up to find Amy Breslyn and solve the mystery surrounding her.

As always, it’s a delight to reconnect with Elvis Cole.  He’s a protagonist who has grown with the series, a fascinating man with his own set of quirks and strengths.  He is perfectly described by Raymond Chandler’s famous quote about mean streets (my edits):  “a man…who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.  He is the hero; he is everything….If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

You can read more about Robert Crais at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Theophania Bogart has fled England, where her aristocratic father hanged himself in his cell while awaiting trial for murder.  She’s taken a new last name, moved to San Francisco, found an apartment, and opened a gift shop featuring luxury items for bed and bath.  She’s content in her new home, fervently trying to guard her privacy.  Then a death that occurs literally before her eyes changes everything.

Tim Callahan, Theo remarks in the opening sentence of The Man on the Washing Machine, was a petty thief, a cheat, and a bully.  He was also the neighborhood handyman, so going in and out of the various apartments gave him lots of opportunity for pilfering.  In fact, he stole a pair of earrings that belonged to Theo’s late mother, and even though she had gotten them back she never allowed him in her apartment again.

The San Francisco police department immediately suspects that someone pushed Callahan out of the third story window directly opposite Theo’s apartment, and Inspector Lichlyter starts to interrogate everyone in the immediate vicinity.  Since Theo is the only one who saw Callahan fall, she becomes the main object of the police inquiry, making her wonder just how much longer her background and her secret will be safe.

Distracted by the divisiveness of her neighborhood association’s meeting following Callahan’s death, Theo’s antenna for self-preservation slips a little, and when she returns from walking her dog Lucy she’s not paying as much attention as usual to her surroundings.  As she climbs up the back stairs to her apartment and opens the door to the utility room, her thoughts are wandering.  In the room’s bright overhead light she sees, to her complete astonishment, a man in a business suit standing on top of her washing machine.

Theo Bogart is a feisty heroine with a fascinating background.  Daughter of a wealthy English family, she was a well-known paparazza and had photographed celebrities around the world.  But she changed her life when she arrived in the United States, giving away her Christian Louboutin heels and Chanel handbags to charity and clothing herself in long-sleeved T-shirts and jeans.  She’s determined to stick to these changes and to her new name, but a second murder makes that even more difficult.

The Man on the Washing Machine won the 2015 Minatour Books/Mystery Writers of America prize for First Crime Novel.  It’s easy to see why.  Heroine Theo is delightful, smart, and determined to succeed in her new life.  And the mix of neighbors–her Japanese-American gardener, her gay best friend who is having romantic problems with his partner, her own business partner who seems to be more and more removed from the business–all add to the quirkiness around her.  And when a new neighbor enters the picture, with the possibility of a romance that Theo would like to avoid, things get really interesting.  All the characters and the author’s familiarity with the San Francisco scene make this debut novel stand out.

You can read more about Susan Cox at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Claire Talbot is the youngest prosecutor in the state of Florida, only a few months into her new job.  She’s working long hours with no time for a personal life, but she’s convinced herself she doesn’t need or want one.

The day following a successful trial, her secretary hands her a package that she says was given to her by a man who wouldn’t leave his name.  Inside the envelope Claire finds newspaper clippings related to eight missing persons cases that took place three decades earlier.  In little more than a year, eight women from Central Florida had disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.  With one exception, all were in their twenties and brunette, the only exception being a blonde woman about a decade older than the others.  And even though the articles were written in a formal, factual manner, Claire becomes violently upset after reading them.

This brings up a familiar feeling for Claire, one she has had all her life.  It’s a sense that something unexpected is about to happen, and it manifests itself in a tightening in her stomach, a strange vibration in her body, an increased pulse.  But nothing ever happens, or at least has never happened so far, so why is she  feeling this way again?  Shaking it off, she leaves her office and gets into her car only to have the front passenger door flung open by a man holding a knife.  Before Claire can obey his order to drive, the passenger’s door is opened again and the assailant is pulled out.  A couple of quick punches to his face leave him flat on the cement, those punches coming from a middle-aged man whom Claire had noticed attending the trial she won the day earlier.

The man identifies himself as Mark Hastings, a former police officer and the person who had left Claire the envelope of newspaper clippings.  He tells her that the missing persons cases date to the time he was on the force and that he’s never been able to forget them.  Claire tells him to make an appointment to discuss this with her, but before he can do so there is a break in the cold case.  It appears that the body of one of the women has just been found.

Time of Departure is a mystery novel with fantasy overtones.  Or is it a fantasy novel with mystery overtones?  Either way, it’s a great read.  Claire Talbot is an engaging heroine, trying to come up with answers to the chilling series of crimes that took place when she was a child but also trying to understand the strange feeling that she has whenever she’s around Mark Hastings.  And Mark, a wounded soul, knows more about Claire than he can let on without alienating her completely.  Each one is engaged in a delicate maneuver, trying to come at a past truth while still maintaining a hold on a present reality.

You can read more about Douglas Schofield at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

It’s interesting how language changes over time.  Take the words Philadelphia lawyer, a term I read years ago.  I remember it as a compliment, expressing approval of an attorney’s ability.  In fact, that’s how the expression came about, an acknowledgement of the outstanding reputation of lawyers from that Pennsylvania city in the early days of the colonies.

But now it apparently has a pejorative meaning, that of an attorney who uses the technicalities of the legal system to win, ignoring the spirit of the law.

If we stick to the original meaning then Bennie Rosario is definitely a Philadelphia lawyer, which in fact she is.  Head of the small, successful firm of Rosario and DiNunzio, she’s in the office when she receives a call from a man being held for murder at the Philadelphia Police Department, or the Roundhouse as it’s known to locals.

Thirteen years have gone by since Bennie last saw Jason Lefkavick.  He was twelve at the time, and Bennie had been called by Jason’s father to get his son out of jail.  Matthew Lefkavick tells Bennie that Jason was taken out of school after a brief fight in the lunchroom and brought to the town’s holding cell.  The presiding judge, known as Judge Zero Tolerance, sentenced both Jason and the boy he fought with, a bully named Richie Grusini who had been tormenting Jason for years, to prison time.

But due to a variety of circumstances and against her will, Bennie soon is removed from the case by Matthew and forbidden to see the boy again.  She has not forgotten him, and when she sees Jason now, again in jail and again protesting his innocence, she’s determined that this time justice will prevail and she’ll get her client freed.

Jason tells her that he saw Richie again, this time in a neighborhood bar, and how he became upset watching Richie having a good time with a friend while downing a few drinks.  Jason went up to him, the two started to fight and were thrown out of the bar.  Jason followed Richie down an adjacent alley to “have it out with him,” as he admits to Bennie, and the next thing he remembers is passing out and, when he awakes, seeing Grusini lying on the ground, covered in blood.  The police arrived and arrested Jason, who had blood on him and a knife in his hand.  A pretty damaging scene, Bennie thinks.

Corrupted tells the story of Jason, past and present, but also tells the reader the story of the failed juvenile justice system in Pennsylvania from which the novel gets its name.  It’s a moving and extremely upsetting account of how venal judges worked with for-profit prisons; instead of sending juvenile offenders to some sort of rehabilitation, the judges were paid for each youth they sent to jail.  It became known as the “Kids for Cash” scandal, and two sitting state judges were sentenced to lengthy jail terms.

Lisa Scottoline’s excellent novel retells this dramatic story, bringing to life how everyone in the case was impacted.  It also gives readers of Ms. Scottoline’s previous books a closer look into Bennie’s earlier life and the reasons she’s so consumed by her profession.

You can read more about Lisa Scottline at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

William Fletcher, formerly a professional boxer and currently a private eye, isn’t finding life easy.  Fletcher was working in New York City in the early 1920s after the end of his boxing career led him to become “muscle” for Bill Storm, a low-level gangster.  Storm had become desperate in seeking ways to make money after his unpredictable behavior led other criminals to avoid giving him jobs, so he kidnapped the son of a wealthy family and was holding him for ransom.

When he called on Fletcher to watch the boy while he left them to obtain the ransom, Fletcher freed the boy and waited for Storm’s return.  A fight ensued with Fletcher being badly beaten, but both men were able to escape before the police arrived.

Fifteen years later, Fletcher has relocated to New Orleans, earning a precarious living as the only licensed black investigator in the city.  He hasn’t been in touch with Storm during all those years, but now Storm has tracked him down and is looking for a favor.  He tells Fletcher he has a daughter whom he hasn’t seen since she was an infant, more than twenty years earlier.  Now he’s dying and wants to meet with her before his death.  He’s been told that his former wife is now living in New Orleans, and he has convinced himself that if his wife is found, their daughter will be with her.

Fletcher reluctantly agrees to look for Storm’s wife, Frieda Rae.  Armed only with a photograph of the woman that was taken years before, Fletcher locates a woman who recognizes the woman in the photo.  She tells the detective that Frieda Rae died just a few months earlier, but she’s heard that the woman’s daughter is singing at some low-down blues joint on Bourbon Street.  So Fletcher heads that way to locate her.

He finds the young woman, as he was told, singing in a club that is really more of a brothel.  But she’s simply a vocalist, not a prostitute, and goes by the name Lady Storm.  When she’s told that her father wants to see her, she tells Fletcher she’ll have to think about it.  Feeling he’s done his job, Fletcher leaves, only to get a call a few hours later from his friend Brawley, a detective on the city’s police force.

The police have discovered Bill Storm’s body with a bullet hole in the back of his head on a street in the French Quarter.  In his pocket there’s a note saying “Meet me in Congo Square at 11:30 tonight.–Zella.”  That’s Storm’s daughter’s real name.

The Red Storm is a great read, due in part to its terrific characters and its sense of place.  The Crescent City of the 1930s is alive with jazz, blues, ladies of easy virtue, corrupt cops, and more.  William Fletcher is a flawed hero but a real man.

You can read more about Grant Bywaters at various sites on the Internet.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Is Fat Bob Dead Yet? is a crime caper par excellence.  It involves quarreling police detectives, con artists, gangsters, beautiful women, and more name changes than one would have thought possible.  It’s a terrific read.

New London, Connecticut police detectives Manny Streeter and Benny Vikström are partners who can hardly bear to be in the same room or the same police car.  They’re called to an accident on the city’s Bank Street involving a dump truck and a motorcycle that ended with the cyclist’s death.  The truck backed up in an alley and rode over the Harley and its driver, separating the driver’s head from his body.

Benny and Manny investigate, but it seems to have been simply a tragic accident.  The truck driver, Leon Pappalardo, says it was his first time driving the truck and he mistakenly hit the gas instead of the brake, crashing into a nearby car and then driving over the motorcyclist.  Benny, the more dogged of the two detectives, feels there’s something strange about how the accident happened, but he can’t put his finger on it.  “I’m not saying the accident was premeditated…but neither am I saying it wasn’t premeditated.”  So Manny reluctantly agrees with his partner that they should look more closely into the accident.

Connor Raposo is an almost-witness to the crash.  He was inside a cobbler’s shop, picking up the Bruno Magli shoes his older brother passed down to him.  When he goes onto the street to see the crash’s aftermath, he makes the acquaintance of Sal Nicoletti, another almost-witness.  Sal’s car’s battery died during the wait for the accident scene to be cleared, so Connor offers him a ride home.  Connor is almost certain that he’s seen Sal before, but Sal denies knowing him.  Connor, who is almost never completely certain of anything, seems to acquiesce, but the thought keeps nagging at him.

Connor has recently moved from the west coast to New London to be a part of a family business.  Well, sort of a family business.  Now called Bounty, Inc., in its previous incarnations it was known as Step Up, Inc. and A Shot in the Arm, Inc.  Whatever it’s called, it’s phony, preying on credulous people to contribute to the most outrageous charities:  e.g., Childhood Victims of Hoof-and-Mouth Disease and Organ Grinder Monkey Retirement Ranch.  And no, I’m not making these names up; I don’t have the imagination.

Besides the terrific plot and interesting/bizarre characters, another delight of the novel is the narrator’s voice.  Every once in a while the narrator showed up with a pertinent comment, making me laugh out loud.  He’s kind of shadowing the action, urging it to move along when he feels it’s too slow or explaining something that’s not quite clear from the dialog.  It’s a truly clever device.

And if you’re wondering about Fat Bob and his possible death, like many other things in the novel it involves two names:  Fat Bob is the nickname of the man who owns the motorcycle that was involved in the accident, and it’s also the name of the cycle.

Stephen Dobyns is the author of many novels, works of non-fiction, and award-winning poetry.  You can read more about him at various sites on the web.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.