Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Reviews

Flat out, I must say this is a totally engaging book!

I googled the word for a group of magpies, and murder is one of them, along with tiding and gulp.  The last two names are interesting, but how much better murder works with a mystery!

Samantha Clair is an editor at a London publishing house, hoping to release a book by one of her favorite authors, Kit Lovell.  He is a fashion writer and, according to Sam, “the best gossip on the planet.”

Kit’s writings have never caused a problem before, but this tell-all story is different.  The subject of his manuscript is Rodrigo Alemán, Spain’s world-famous fashion designer.  In addition to the very public wild parties Rodrigo hosted and the over-the-top life he led, there was a private side uncovered by Kit that is the crux of his book.

According to Kit, “everyone” has agreed that Rodrigo was murdered, everyone except his family, the Vernet fashion house he worked for, and the French police, who went along with the cover-up because of the pressure the House of Vernet put on them.  But Kit has proof, he tells Sam, that Rodrigo’s murder was an organized crime affair, probably resulting from the information that Kit discovered about the firm’s money laundering.  So, after Sam sends the manuscript to her legal team for a reading and gets their okay that it isn’t libelous, she plans to publish the book.

But then Sam’s flat is burglarized, the motorcycle messenger thought to be bringing the hard copy of the manuscript to her is killed by a hit-and-run driver, Kit doesn’t show up for an important meeting, and she’s unable to reach him after numerous attempts.  All this brings in the police, in the person of Inspector Jacob Field.  Sam’s concerns about the missing Kit escalate, and she begins to investigate the charges he made in his manuscript about Rodrigo and the House of Vernet.

A Murder of Magpies has two wonderful main characters.  First there’s Sam, a forty-year-old woman content to stay single until her meetings with Jacob get more and more interesting.  Sam’s mother Helena, a top barrister, is another terrific creation.  In a great role reversal, here it is the mother who is dynamic, energetic, sexy, and a force to be reckoned with.

Perhaps it is this very list of attributes that has made Sam more reserved, a woman who is content to blend into the background, whether at a meeting of colleagues and in her choice of clothes, which are white, black, and gray.  Every other color is too bright for her, she thinks, and may cause people to look at her.  As Sam puts it, when she’s with her mother she’s “awed into silent astonishment that we could be even distantly related.”

Judith Flanders’ A Murder of Magpies is a fun read, a fact which doesn’t take away from the mystery to be solved.  I hope that there’ll be more mysteries featuring Samantha Clair and her friends to follow.

You can read more about Judith Flanders at this web site.

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

Is it blasphemy for me to say that I enjoyed The Late Scholar, a novel by Jill Paton Walsh based on the characters of Dorothy L. Sayers, more than the works of Ms. Sayers herself? 

Decades ago, I read all of the original Lord Peter Wimsey novels and short stories and enjoyed them.  But trying to re-read them years later, I couldn’t do it.  They seemed so dated, so annoying to me, that I soon gave up and put them in a mental bookcase along with the works of Freeman Wills Crofts, Gladys Mitchell, Father Reginald Knox, and other Golden Age mystery writers whose works are no longer read by many fans of the genre.

That being said, Lord Peter has survived better than most of his generation, and he has been wonderfully revived, and to my mind greatly improved, by Jill Paton Walsh.  The fourth book in Ms. Walsh’s series brings Peter, now the Duke of Denver due to the death of his older brother, and his wife Harriet Vane to 1953.

The dukes of the Wimsey family have been Visitors for St. Severin’s College, Oxford dating back to the seventeenth century, and now Peter must take on that responsibility.  One of the Visitor’s duties is to act as the arbiter when the Warden (dean) and the Fellows of the College cannot agree on an issue.  This is currently the case, for Lord Peter has been called to St. Severin’s to decide an urgent matter.  The College has a manuscript ascribed to King Alfred the Great, and it has caused a great division among the members of the college.

The college is in dire financial straits, and one group of the Fellows believes that the only way to obtain sufficient funds is to sell the manuscript.  By doing this, St. Severin’s would have the money to buy a large tract of land nearby, which they would then be able to sell later at a large profit and thus secure the finances of the college.  The problem is that an equal number of Fellows are opposed to selling the work; vote after vote has resulted in a tie.  The Warden would normally cast the deciding vote, but now the Warden is missing.  Thus the need for the Visitor to decide the issue.

So Peter, Harriet, and Bunter leave home and head to the college, only to encounter several deaths that seem to be related to the manuscript.  But can such high feelings actually be due to a manuscript a thousand years old, Peter wonders.  Or is there a more mundane reason for the emotions and deaths at St. Severin’s?

Jill Paton Walsh has done a wonderful job in bringing Dorothy L. Sayers’ characters into the second half of the twentieth century without losing what made them significant in the first place.  She has made them stronger, more believable, and, to my mind, more interesting than they were before.  The Late Scholar is an excellent addition to the Lord Peter Wimsey series.

You can read more about Jill Paton Walsh at this web site.

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

Life in Hollywood must be great, right?  Your friends, or the friends of your parents, are famous actors and actresses, known around the world.  You’re invited into their homes, swim in their pools, are friends with their families.  What could be better?

Actually, a lot of things.  When Deirdre Unger reluctantly drives to her father’s Hollywood home to help him put it on the market, her mind is filled with memories of her parents and of her own childhood.  Arthur and Gloria Unger had been successful screenwriters, maybe not at the top of the list but not too far from it.

But for some years now Arthur’s career has been stalled, he and his wife are divorced, and it’s time for him to sell the house and downsize, that hated word.  However, before his daughter arrives, Arthur will take his regular nighttime swim in the pool.  He was always a good swimmer, and he wants to indulge himself before he has to sell the house.  One final indulgence, and it proves to be his last.

Deirdre arrives at the home that her father and brother share, but at first no one answers the door.  When her brother finally lets her in, they start to look for their father.  And then they find him, down at the bottom of the deep end of the pool.  Who could have made certain Arthur never surfaced?  And why?

When Deirdre was a teenager, her best friend was Joelen Nichol, daughter of the beautiful actress Elenor “Bunny” Nichol.  The two girls spent days together and often had sleepovers at each other’s houses.  They were together the night that changed the lives of both of them forever.

Bunny had thrown one of her famous parties, and after it was over she and her live-in boyfriend, Tito Acevedo, got into a fight.  Deirdre and Joelen heard angry words, glass being broken.  Joelen went to the kitchen, picked up a knife, and climbed the stairs to her mother’s bedroom.  Then she plunged the weapon into Tito’s chest.

Deirdre was driven home after the police and ambulance arrived.  On the way, the car went off the road; Deirdre was severely injured and is unable to walk without crutches.  While Deirdre was in the hospital, Joelen was put on trial for Tito’s death.  The verdict was justifiable homicide.  First Joelen was sent to a juvenile facility and then went to live with her aunt out of state.  By the time Deirdre was released from the hospital after her first operation, she wasn’t able to find her friend.

But apparently Arthur knew, or had known, where Joelen was.  Because Joelen is the real estate agent Arthur was using to sell his house, and  now she and Deirdre have their first face-to-face meeting in more than twenty years.

Night Night, Sleep Tight is loosely based on the true story of Hollywood star Lana Turner, her daughter Cheryl Crane, and Turner’s lover Johnny Stompanato, a reputed mobster.  Hallie Ephron has brought to life the Hollywood of the 1980s, its famous and its flawed.  It’s an exciting read, with fascinating characters, written by a woman who herself was the daughter of movie scriptwriters as well as a neighbor of Turner’s.  Fiction based on real life doesn’t get more compelling than this.

You can read more about Hallie Ephron at this web site.

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

Two young musicians are hitchhiking home from a gig in London.  It’s pouring, but cars keep passing them by until a white van stops in front of them.  The woman at the wheel beckons them to come inside, then offers the couple a thermos of coffee to ward off the chill.  The next thing Amy and Sam know, they’re in a drained swimming pool, fifteen feet below its rim, with no way of climbing out.

Then the cell phone that’s been left on the pool’s floor rings.  A woman’s voice calls Amy by name, telling her there is one way, and only one way, out of their prison.  One of them has to pick up the gun, also lying on the pool’s bottom, and use it to kill the other one.  Then the survivor will live.

Eeny Meeny is a thriller in every sense of the word.  For no apparent reason, twosomes are being picked up by a woman, drugged, and abandoned without food or water at totally inaccessible locations.  Hours after they’re left there, a call comes in on a cell phone left at the site, telling whichever one of them answers what the conditions are–one must kill the other, the survivor will be rescued.  No killing, no rescue–they’ll both die.

It’s obvious that these crimes are not spur-of-the-moment ones.  Careful planning has gone into them, from knowing the schedules of the people chosen, picking the remote and secure places to hide them, and being able to rescue the survivors from their prisons.  Why would someone go to so much trouble to target these unlikely victims?

Helen Grace is a Detective Inspector of the Southampton Police, the officer in charge of what will become the hunt for a serial predator.  The  unknown suspect is not doing the killing herself, she is arranging for someone to do the killing for her.  As the abductions continue and the death toll rises, there seems to be no reason, no motive.  Until D. I. Grace discovers one.

Although Eeny Meeny is the first in a series, a lot of background is given to acquaint the reader with Helen Grace.  We learn early on that her job is her life.  She is “…six feet of driving ambition.  Never late, never hungover, never sick.  She lived and breathed her job….”  That seems admirable, until one asks why is her life so empty otherwise?  And there’s a good, if unnerving, reason for that.

Helen’s colleagues form an interesting group.  There’s Detective Sergeant Mark Fuller, formerly her most trusted assistant, now reeling from a nasty divorce which has separated him not only from his former wife but also from his young daughter.  Detective Charlene “Charlie” Brooks is the newcomer on the team, determined to prove her worth as an officer but holding onto her own personality by wearing her not-according-to-regulation outfits on the job.  And there’s Detective Superintendent Whittaker, annoyed at Helen’s outstanding record of arrests and convictions, just waiting for a reason to take her off the case.

Warning:  don’t start Eeny Meeny before bedtime if you want a good night’s sleep.  But definitely do start it; you won’t be able to put it down.

You can read more about M. J. Arlidge at this web site.

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

Will Rees, the traveling weaver of Eleanor Kuhns’ three previous novels, has left his home and family in Maine to travel to Salem, Massachusetts to buy material to make into cloth.

In 1796, the port city of Salem was the state’s second most populous city.  Will knows that he can obtain beautiful material there, both for his family and to sell. Supporting his second wife Lydia, their five adopted children, their baby on the way, and Will’s teenage son David, the only child from his first marriage, requires more income than Will’s farm can produce, so he travels to Salem to buy what he needs.

On the main roadway of the city, Will is stopped by a funeral procession. The deceased is Anstiss Boothe, the wife of one of Salem’s leading citizens.  Leading the wagon bearing the coffin is Stephen Eaton, a man who saved Will’s life when they fought in the Revolutionary War nearly two decades earlier.  Will hasn’t seen Twig, as his former comrade was nicknamed, in years and is surprised to learn that he’s the city’s undertaker.

Will’s buying trip is taking longer than he expected, in part because of another death in the Boothe family.   It occurs the day after his arrival in Salem and is that of the family’s patriarch, Jacob. But unlike the death of Anstiss, who had been an invalid for nearly twenty years, Jacob was murdered–stabbed through with a sword-like weapon in the tunnel beneath his home.

Knowing that Will had solved a crime when they were both soldiers in the Continental Army, Trig prevails upon him to look into the murder because the woman he plans to marry is a servant in the Boothe home and a possible suspect.  Reluctant as he is to stay away from his family any longer, Will agrees to meet with with Xenobia, Trig’s woman friend, and then with the Boothe children.

Only Peggy Boothe seems to want Will to investigate.  William, the oldest of the four Boothe children, is openly contemptuous of Will’s abilities; Betsy, the older daughter, is so involved with her upcoming wedding and her clothes that she doesn’t appear to have any interest in discovering who murdered her father; Mattie, the second son, wants only to be left alone to pursue his theatrical plans.  But Peggy, who helped her father run the family shipping business, prevails, and the other siblings reluctantly accept her desire to have Will look into their father’s murder.

Once again Eleanor Kuhns has written a mystery that transports the reader to the late eighteenth century.  The sense of a young country, not even two decades past its birth, is beautifully brought to life.  Its characters present emotions that are as real today as they were more than two hundred years ago.

You can read more about Eleanor Kuhns at this web site.

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

When Rick Hoffman returns to his family home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it’s not by choice.  Unemployed except for freelance writing for a so-called journalism website, newly separated from his fiancée, nearly broke, his only option is to move into his childhood home.  The house has been uninhabited for nearly twenty years because of his father’s stroke and subsequent move to a nursing facility.  But, as they say, beggars can’t be choosers, so Rick consoles himself with the thought that things will shortly turn around for him and he’ll be able to afford a place of his own.

It appears that Jeff Hollenbeck, a neighbor and childhood friend of Rick’s, has been keeping an eye on the property so that high school kids don’t destroy it during the drinking parties they’ve been holding in it for years.  Jeff is now a building contractor, and he and Rick agree to make some major repairs to the house before putting it on the market.  Given the property market in Cambridge, home to Harvard University and other colleges, Jeff assures Rick that “…you could get two mil easy.  More, even.”

The two men take a quick tour of the decaying house.  Hearing what sounds like squirrels behind a bedroom closet, Jeff crowbars a hole into the wood and Rick crawls into the space.  Even in the dim light, Rick can see boxes piled high under the cover of a black plastic tarp.  Rick reaches into one of the boxes and comes out with a packet with a band around it.  It’s $10,000 in cash.

Trying to act casual and unsure what Jeff has seen, Rick backs out of the closet, asks Jeff to draw up a plan for the renovation, and hustles him out of the house.  Then Rick goes back into the crawl space and looks in all the boxes.  There are three hundred and ninety eight packets of bills in all, totaling nearly three and a half million dollars.

Where on earth, Rick wonders, could that money come from?  His father was an attorney with a small practice; he certainly didn’t make the kind of money that Rick has found.  Desperate to discover the source of the cash, he goes to see his father in the nursing home, although Leonard Hoffman hasn’t been able to speak in nearly twenty years and it’s unknown whether he is able to understand what is said to him.  But Rick has to try.

As Rick will soon discover, sometimes we find out things we wish we hadn’t.  But once the money is found, there’s really no going back.  And with each step he takes, the journey becomes more dangerous.

The Fixer is a terrific thriller, as the reader watches Rick develop from a rather self-centered man into a caring, compassionate one.  The questioning force that propelled him in his journalistic career is still driving him, in this case to figure out the source of the hidden money and his father’s relation to it.  Joseph Finder has written a book that you won’t want to put down.

You can read more about Joseph Finder at this web site.

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

In this tale of mid-century Kentucky, there’s a lot going on.  There are family feuds, women with second sight, a girl’s “mother” who isn’t her mother, and a long-gone woman with an aura so evil that town’s citizens crossed the street rather than walk alongside her.

Let Me Die In His Footsteps is told in chapters that are nearly twenty years apart.  The novel opens in 1952 with Annie Holleran on the eve of her ascension, a ritual in her town that takes place on the day a girl becomes fifteen and a half.  The legend is that the girl must go to a well at midnight, and the face she sees in the water is that of the man she will marry.  Annie, despite her public stance that the ritual is nonsense, still plans to sneak out for a glimpse of her intended.

Rather than go to the well that most girls go to, Annie decides she’ll go to the well of her neighbor.  The only problem is that the neighbor is Mrs. Baine, and the Hollerans and the Baines have been feuding for years.  Nevertheless, shortly before midnight Annie leaves her bedroom with her younger sister Carolyn silently following behind her.  And at the well the sisters see a slender arm, lying still on the grass.

Sarah and Juna Crowley are teenagers in 1936.  Their mother has died, and they live in a shanty with their father and younger brother Dale.  It’s Sarah, the “good” sister, who tells this part of the story, and although she loves Juna, she is wary of her.  There is something about Juna, when she looks at you, that can freeze your blood.  And when young Dale disappears, the terror begins.

Written in the genre of a Southern gothic novel, Let Me Die In His Footsteps is spellbinding.  According to Wikipedia, the genre is filled with “deeply flawed, disturbing, or eccentric characters,” and this book certainly has those.  There is a sense of pervading menace in this small Kentucky town, mostly because of the events following Dale’s disappearance and the fear with which the citizens regard Juna.

Of course, a valid question is whether Juna is truly gifted with the “know-how,” a sort of second sight, and is intrinsically bad or whether the townspeople’s strange animosity toward her brought out an inclination on her part to do terrible things to repay them.  The answer is part of the novel’s mystery.

It’s not giving anything away to let readers know that Juna is Annie’s biological mother; it’s one of those things that everyone in Hayden County knows but nobody mentions.  People, including those in Annie’s family, recognize that she has the “know-how” that her mother had, and although she has never used it, it’s still a part of her.

As they did with Juna, people avoid looking directly at Annie, fearful of the power she could have over them, should she choose to employ it.  After all, it was her mother who caused Joseph Carl Baine to be hanged publicly, the last man in America to receive that punishment.

The characters in Let Me Die In His Footsteps are beautifully written.  Small-town America in the thirties and fifties comes alive, both its good and bad aspects.  Lori Roy, an Edgar winner for Bent Road, succeeds again in writing a masterful mystery.

You can read more about Lori Roy at this web site.

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

There’s a new profession in 19th-century London, that of private enquiry agent.  Cyrus Barker and his assistant, Thomas Llewelyn, have been very successful solving crimes that the police do not have the time to deal with or cannot clear up.  Cyrus and Thomas previously worked with Scotland Yard, but a rift had grown between the official agents of the law and the non-official, so the two men are extremely surprised when they are approached by Robert Anderson, England’s spymaster general and assistant commissioner at the Yard.

Robert is ill and is being forced to take a medical sabbatical by his wife and his doctor.  He wants his interests safeguarded while he’s gone and asks Cyrus, an old friend, to take a temporary position at Scotland Yard to help the force on a very delicate matter.

There have been two brutal murders in the East End of the city.  Two prostitutes, or “unfortunates” as they were also called at the time, were strangled and had their throats cut.  Although murders in that part of the city are not uncommon, and murders of prostitutes even less so, the horrific nature of these crimes has been noted, and there is fear among the police that they have a serial murderer on their hands.

Cyrus and Thomas agree to take the case, understanding that there will be considerable resentment on the part of most of the Yard’s detectives.  Nevertheless, the two continue to search for the knife-wielding killer, treading softly so as not to unduly antagonize those who are hoping and anticipating that they will fail, either because they are private detectives or because they are known to be friends of Robert Anderson, who has made his own enemies on the force.

The East End of London is where newly-arrived immigrants and other outsiders settle.  Israel Zangwill, an actual historical journalist and writer, is portrayed in the novel as a friend of Thomas’s, and one of Israel’s fears is that the Jewish community will be blamed for the murders.  In fact, the three main suspects the police officials are investigating are Polish Jews newly arrived in London.

At first Thomas thinks that given the manpower of the government, finding the murderer will be an easy matter.  But Cyrus is not so sure.  “I suspect several more women will be killed before this case is over,” he states, and of course he will be proven right.

One of the things that makes Anatomy of Evil so interesting is the well-known fact that the man who became known as Jack the Ripper has never been positively identified.  Dozens of men were considered as possibilities, but in the years before DNA testing and fingerprinting, no proof to convict an individual was ever found.  So how will this novel end?  Will the ending be satisfying?

I won’t answer the first question, but the answer to the second is yes.  Through the clever writing of Will Thomas, we are led to discover the killer as well as the reason that his identity was never made public.  Anatomy of Evil is a tour de force that is very satisfactory indeed.

You can read more about Will Thomas at this web site.

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

What happens when you can’t trust yourself to distinguish between fact and fantasy?

That is the dilemma that faces Dana Catrell after she staggers home from a neighbor’s house, having had too much to drink.  Waking several hours later from a restless sleep, she hears the sound of sirens getting closer and closer.  Going outside to find out what’s happening, she sees an ambulance in front of Celia Steinhauser’s home, which she had left several hours before.

At the Steinhausers’ door she sees Celia’s husband Ronald, apparently in a state of shock, standing next to the bloodied body of his wife.  Celia is still alive, but she won’t be by the time she reaches the hospital.

Belatedly, Dana realizes that she must be the last person to have seen her friend before she was attacked.   She remembers Celia showing her a photo on her cell phone, a photo of Dana’s husband Peter sitting in a compromising way next to a buxom blonde.  What happened between the time Celia yelled at her to come over because “it’s life or death,” and the last thing Dana remembers saying to her, “I don’t ever want to see you again?”  It’s all so hazy.

Dana has bipolar disorder, and when she doesn’t take her meds and goes into a manic phase, she loses control.  Everything is bigger, brighter, larger than life, but in that state her reality often slips.  Now she truly can’t remember if Celia was mortally injured when she left her house, and she’s not sure exactly what the photo on Celia’s phone showed.  Was it really Peter?  And why was Celia so distraught about it?

Dana is not surprised that her husband could be having an affair.  Her relationship with Peter has spiraled downhill over the past couple of years, but she lacks the strength to confront him.  Instead, that night she waits until he’s asleep and accesses his phone, looking for numbers that seem out of place.   Under “C” she presses a number with no name attached; stunned, she sees it go to Celia’s voice mail.  It’s a second cell phone belonging to Celia, not the one which Dana used to call her.  So that’s why Celia was so upset seeing Peter and the unknown woman together, Dana thinks; she’s been having an affair of her own with him.

The Pocket Wife is Susan Crawford’s first novel, and it’s a terrific one.  The characters and the plot are totally believable, and Dana is a sympathetic main character.  While at times the reader may want to shake her for not taking her medications, it’s understandable in the context of the drugs making her life dull and gray.  She doesn’t want to live in that dullness, but the manic stage brings its own dangers and problems.

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

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

You know that feeling when you begin reading a mystery and know from page one that it’s going to be a winner?  That’s the experience I had after reading the first paragraph of Little Black Lies, and the rest of the novel didn’t let me down.

Little Black Lies takes place in the Falkland Islands, an archipelago off the eastern coast of South America.  Catrin Quinn is a life-long resident of the islands, and she is at her emotional breaking point.  Three years earlier her two children were in the car of her best friend, Rachel Grimwood, and were left alone for just a minute when the car slid down a cliff.  Both boys were killed instantly.  Naturally, Catrin’s life fell apart–she and her husband Ben divorced shortly afterwards, and she hasn’t spoken to Rachel since the accident.

Now, only two days before the third anniversary of her sons’ death, Catrin has made a decision.  “I believe just about anyone can kill in the right circumstances, given enough motivation,” she says to herself.  “The question is, am I there yet?”

Stanley, the island’s capital, is a small place, and it’s very difficult for Catrin to avoid both her ex-husband and her ex-best friend, but she tries.  She cannot stop herself, however, from frequently driving past Rachel’s house late at night, imaging Rachel inside with her three children, doing the mothering things that Catrin can no longer do.  With each drive-by she gets closer to her ultimate desire, punishing Rachel as she herself has been punished.

Events in Stanley are spiraling out of control.  As the novel opens, there is a hunt on for a young boy, the third boy to go missing in three years.  Little Archie West is out picnicking with his family when they lose sight of him for a few minutes; then he is gone.  An all-island search is being conducted, with no one wanting to give voice to the fear that, like the other two boys, Archie will never be found.

At the same time the search for the youngster is going on, there’s another disaster in the making on the small island of Speedwell.  There is a mass beaching of pilot whales, hundreds of them, leaving the water and going aground on the sand.  Of course, once they’re on the sand, they’re unable to breathe and will die unless they can be forced/guided back to the ocean.  Scientists have various theories about what causes these beachings–one of the whales can have a virus, be hit by a ship, have its navigational system go wrong–but the results are fatal for them.  If one whale swims into shallow water and can’t get back into deeper water, the whole pod will follow.

Sharon Bolton has written a terrific thriller that will hold you enthralled until the last page.  And even then, I promise you will be totally unprepared for the book’s ending.

You can read more about Sharon Bolton at this web site.

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

Life in the middle years of 16th-century England is vividly portrayed in The Alchemist’s Daughter.  The novel takes place in Southwark, a borough just across the river Thames from London, a poor, filthy, dangerous place for anyone, especially young women. 

Bianca Goddard is the daughter of an alchemist father and an herbalist mother.  She decides to use the skills she has learned from her mother to help people, and thus she has become a creator and purveyor of various medicines and pesticides.

Her friend Jolyon Carmichael comes to Bianca’s one room home/apothecary in Southwark to update her on her life.  Jolyon was formerly a muckraker, a woman who uses a rake to comb through piles of trash and manure in the hope of finding something valuable to use or sell.  She is doing this when she finds a gold ring, a piece of jewelry she believes has brought her luck and changed her life for the better.

While wearing the ring she catches the eye of Mrs. Beldam, proprietor of Barke House, formerly a house of ill repute but now a rooming house for young women.  Getting a job at Barke House as an errand girl and laundress has greatly improved Jolyon’s life and allowed her to meet the mysterious man who has become her beau, despite the objections of Mrs. Beldam.

While Jolyon is explaining this to Bianca, she also tells her that she has been feeling ill lately.  Bianca fixes Jolyon a tonic to soothe her stomach, but shortly after drinking the mixture Jolyon falls to the floor of the apothecary and dies.  Bianca immediately becomes the obvious suspect for not-too-bright Constable Patch, so she urgently needs to find out what actually killed her friend and how it was done.

Although The Alchemist’s Daughter is the first in a series, a great deal of backstory is given to explain Bianca’s history and how she became interested in creating herbal mixtures and opening her business of Medicinals and Physickes.   She has estranged herself from her parents, dismissing her father whom she views as having wasted his life trying to convert worthless metals into gold, pitying her mother for having to live with such a man.  As Bianca tells Jolyon, “At least what I do benefits the sick and ailing, so it has some purpose.”

Mary Lawrence has done an excellent job in bringing the reader to London during the period Henry VIII was king.  Bianca is a fascinating heroine, a woman centuries ahead of her time in her determination to pursue the path she wants to follow as opposed to, as Constable Patch puts it, living in a nunnery or becoming a wife.  She has a suitor who wants to marry her, but Bianca is afraid that marriage will put a stop to her work, and that is something she is unwilling to allow.

You can read more about Mary Lawrence at this web site.

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

Martine LeDuc, public relations director for the city of Montréal, is called into the mayor’s office and told she would be the liaison to the police for the four murders that have shaken the city.  This sounds important, but Martine knows that she was chosen by the mayor just to get her out of his way; everyone else on his staff has important jobs to do, as he sees it, so Martine can best be spared.

She is paired with police detective Julian Fletcher, scion of a wealthy Anglo family in the city.  At first the two believe what seems obvious to everyone, that these four crimes were sexual in nature, all of the women having been raped before being murdered.  But while most serial rapists/killers attack women with similar lifestyles or looks, that’s not the case here.  One was a prostitute, one an investigative journalist, one a librarian, and the fourth a philanthropist.  They varied in age, looks, positions in life–so why were they victims?

When Martine and Julian find what they believe the women have in common, they have to work to put it all together.  And once they’re on the road to proving it, Julian is taken off the case, which may well reach into the highest levels of the Québec government and the Catholic Church.

The actual crimes committed by the church and the Québécois prime minister Maurice Duplessis in the 1940s and 1950s form the basis for this book. As the nuns and the Québec government became partners with the Central Intelligence Agency at the height of the Cold War, crimes against children were justified for that self-serving concept, “the greater good.”  I have never before read an Author’s Note that moved me to tears, but the last two pages of this novel did just that.

The novel is told in two voices, one being Martine’s in the present and the other excerpts from an unknown child’s diary written decades ago.  We are able to follow the story of this girl and the other orphans as they are moved from their homes, first to orphanages and then to asylums for the benefit of the church, the physicians who “cared” for them, and the mysterious firm that paid for the drugs that were used on them.

In the middle of the last century, the government of Québec paid the church $1.25 daily for each child in an orphanage and $2.25 for each person in a mental hospital.  So children were transferred to the asylum of Cité de Saint Jean-de-Dieu that was run by nuns; these children became, overnight, legally insane.  They were put into restraints, left for hours in cold water baths, and given mind-altering drugs to see how they were affected.  If this sounds like some horrific fantasy by George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, unfortunately it’s not; it was all too true.

Martine LeDuc is a terrific heroine.  She’s bright, good at her job, and obviously distraught at what she and Julian have discovered went on in Québec more than seventy ago.  She’s determined to right the wrongs committed by those in power as best she can, in part by making her discoveries public.  But, of course, that leads to great danger for herself.

Jeannette De Beauvoir has written other novels under various pseudonyms, but Asylum is the first featuring Martine LeDuc.  I hope it is the beginning of a series.

You can read more about Jeannette de Beauvoir at  this web site.

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

There’s a good reason that The Girl on the Train is a #1 New York Times best-seller.  It’s a fabulous read.

Rachel is the girl on the train and one of the book’s narrators.  She’s been fired from her job in the city but still tells her best friend, in whose house she’s renting a room, that she goes to work every day.

This daily train trip creates a problem for her.  The train passes the house she and her ex-husband Tom lived in when they were married and where he lives now with his new wife and child.  It also passes another house on that street where a young couple named Megan and Scott live; although she doesn’t even know their names, Rachel has created a fantasy life for them in her mind.

Megan is the second narrator we meet.  She’s outwardly happy, but she’s hiding a secret from years ago that is tormenting her and making her put herself in dangerous situations.  Rachel doesn’t know Megan and Scott, but in her imaginary world she has re-named them Jess and Jason and made them the perfect couple, and her obsessive fascination with them is the spark for the novel’s tragedy.

Anna is the third narrator.  Anna was Tom’s mistress during his marriage to Rachel, and she has no regrets about her part in their breakup.  She does regret that she has to live in the house that Tom lived in during his first marriage, but he tells her they can’t afford to move.  In addition, she is bothered because Tom can’t seem to get rid of Rachel, who calls and texts him constantly, going so far as to enter their house without their knowledge or permission.  Why does she persist in these behaviors, Anna wonders, when she knows Tom doesn’t want her?

The tensions in the three women grow to the breaking point.  Each is intertwined in the others’ lives both knowingly and unknowingly.  Rachel and Anna, of course, are aware of each other, but Rachel doesn’t know Megan or anything about her until well into the novel.  However, when Rachel does get entangled in Megan’s life, it leads to the climax that pulls all the threads together.

The Girl on the Train is a terrific thriller, with characters the reader can relate to and in whom they can believe.  We may not want to have any of these women or the men in their lives as friends, but we can understand their foibles and problems, even sympathizing with them while at the same time condemning their actions.  That’s real life, and Paula Hawkins shows it to us.

You can read more about Paula Hawkins at this web site.

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

Felix Francis, son of the three-time Edgar recipient Dick Francis, co-authored several novels with his father.   Since his father’s death in 2010, Felix Francis has written four mysteries, the latest of which is Damage.  To use a cliché (which neither Francis would do), the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.  Although he started his professional life as a physics teacher, the younger Francis now is a notable author himself.

Damage is the story of an undercover racing inspector.  A former member of the British Army Intelligence Corps, Jeff Hinkley knows how to go about finding solutions to various types of crimes, aided by an incredible memory for faces and facts.  Now working for the British Horseracing Authority, he’s called into a secret emergency meeting of that body to solve an extortion threat that the board members view as catastrophic, possibly forcing the end of the BHA.

The BHA automatically tests a certain number of horses that run in each race in Britain.  When the board tests the horses that ran in the Cheltenham Festival, every animal tested returns a positive result for a banned substance.  Immediately after that, the board receives a letter stating that the same thing would happen at the upcoming Ascot races unless five million pounds were paid.  The BHA wants Jeff to go undercover to investigate and stop the extortion, without, of course, the public knowing the situation.

Jeff wants the police brought into the investigation, but the board is adamant that they must not be involved.  They are fearful that any publicity leaking out would undermine the public’s confidence in their oversight and might cause a return to the group previously governing racing, the Jockey Club.  And the BHA members definitely don’t want that to happen.

In addition, Jeff has been asked by his brother-in-law Quentin to get charges of drug possession dropped against Quentin’s son Kenneth.  Kenneth swears that he’s innocent, that the witness against him deliberately set him up by planting crystal meth in his flat.  But the witness has disappeared, so Quentin prevails on Jeff to locate him and either prove that he’s lying or else buy him off.

No one can bring horse racing to life like a Francis, father or son.  Felix Francis brings the steeplechase racing community alive, and his love of the sport is evident throughout the novel.  Jeff Hinkley is a winning protagonist, a man with outstanding investigatory skills who is doing a balancing act, trying to find the blackmailer, the witness against his nephew, and at the same time deal with his own uncertainty about his personal life.

Even for a person who has never attended a horse race, the Francis novels are exhilarating.  Damage is a page-turner in the truest meaning of the phrase.

You can read more about Felix Francis at this web site.

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

It all starts with a simple dare.  Fourteen-year-old Jace Wilson, fearful of heights, is challenged by a fellow student to jump from the Rooftop quarry into the water below, a sixty-five-foot drop.  Not only is there one hundred dollars riding on the challenge, money that Jace couldn’t pay if he lost the bet, but he would be shamed in front of the other students, particularly the girls.  No, he’d rather face death, or so he thinks, than let that happen.

So Jace dives into the water and hits a body, an even worse outcome than the rocks he feared.  Frantic, he looks around for the best way to exit the water and call for help when he hears a car’s motor.  Looking up, he’s relieved to see three men, two in police uniforms; he’s just about to shout out when he notices a third man, in handcuffs and wearing a hood.  Jace manages to slip into a crevice and is thus hidden when he sees the uniformed men push the handcuffed one into the water.

Ethan Serbin is a Montana mountain guide who has worked with the military to train people to survive extreme conditions.  Now he runs a program for troubled teenage boys, taking them on treks in the wilderness to turn them away from a life of crime.   Jamie Bennett, who was one of his students when he was working with the armed forces, drives through a blizzard to reach him and ask for his help in adding Jace to his summer program.  She tells Ethan that she has a witness to a horrendous crime and he needs to be “off the grid” until the trial begins after the summer.  Ethan agrees to add him to the program, not knowing which of the seven boys in this year’s summer program is Jace.

Hannah Faber is beginning work at a fire-tower cabin after a horrendous experience on Shepherd Mountain the previous year.  A member of a Hotshot Crew, a team of professional firefighters who work in the hottest spots of wildfires, Hannah is the survivor of a fire that killed fellow members of her crew as well as the family caught in the blaze.  Now too traumatized to continue as a hotshot, she’s taken a job as a lookout in search of fires.  It’s less stressful, but Hannah has brought her stress with her.

The novel is told in the third person from various points of view–Jace’s, Ethan’s, Hannah’s, and the two men who are looking for Jace in order to make certain that he doesn’t testify against them.  The men, remorseless killers who leave a number of bodies in their wake, are somehow getting closer each day to Jace, despite Jamie’s assurance to Ethan that she is “one hundred percent” certain that the murderers will never be able to locate the teen.

Michael Koryta has written a spellbinding page turner, the kind of book that you should not start before bedtime.  His characters are realistic, his plot will hold your interest to the last page.

You can read more about Michael Koryta at this web site.

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