Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Reviews

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.

Dr. Jenna Ramey is a forensic psychiatrist with the FBI.  She brings years of experience to her job, but she also brings something that no other agent/profiler can match–she has synesthesia, a neurological condition causing her to visualize various colors that she has learned correspond to what people are saying or how they are behaving.

A shooting is taking place in a grocery store filled with senior citizens.  But the caller to the 911 emergency line is a six-year-old girl who came to the store with her grandmother.  Young Molly Keegan is almost unbelievably calm when talking to the emergency dispatcher Yancy Vogul, but everything she tells him can be verified.  She has counted the seven shots and, sure enough, there are seven victims dead when the police and FBI agents arrive on the scene.

Yancy, Jenna’s significant other, is still recovering from the accident that left him with a prosthetic leg.  Unable to work as a field agent for the Bureau, he now is behind the desk of the local police station, grateful that he still has some connection to law enforcement but despondent about not having the career he wanted.  So, although he knows better, he’s become emotionally invested in CiCi Winthrop, a woman who has called 911 several times about her abusive husband but has refused to press charges.  So now Yancy is just going a little out of his way, he tells himself, “just to check.”  What harm could it do?

After a second interview with Molly, Jenna and her colleagues become fearful that the man they are looking for is the serial murderer they are calling the Triple Shooter.  As Jenna tells the other agents, “This isn’t a random shooter.  We’ve seen him before.”  There are differences between this shooting and the previous ones, but Jenna still believes the UNSUB (unknown subject) has committed the previous murders.  He has killed women only before, and this mass shooting included both sexes.  But there’s something about all the crimes that connect them in Jenna’s mind, although she’s not sure what that is.

There are significant pieces in Jenna’s backstory.  Her mother, Claudia, is a serial killer who has escaped from a mental hospital, and no one knows her whereabouts now.  And Jenna’s daughter’s father, Hank, was murdered a year ago, and some members are contesting the will in which he named Ayana in both his insurance policies; Hank’s mother, in particular, is demanding proof that Ayana is actually her granddaughter.

Is Jenna’s condition a neurological aberration or a gift, an additional hidden sense?  Sometimes it seems to Jenna that it’s both, helping her when she’s working a crime scene or interviewing witnesses, interfering with her work when the colors she visualizes don’t seem to make sense.  But overall she confident that synesthesia works well for her, a “sixth sense” that can help her tell truth from fiction.

Color Blind is the second novel in the series featuring Dr. Jenna Ramey.  I’m looking forward to the third one.

You can read more about Colby Marshall at this web site.

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

Harlan Coben has done it again, writing a mystery that will grab you from the first line and not let you go.  “The stranger didn’t shatter Adam’s world all at once”–how’s that for an attention grabber?

Adam Price is a successful lawyer in a wealthy New Jersey suburb, a place where, to quote Garrison Keillor, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”  Adam is having a drink with friends when a stranger comes up to him and says, “You don’t have to stay with her,” and with those seven words Adam’s life as he has known it comes to an end.

The stranger tells Adam that his wife, the mother of his two sons, faked a pregnant test two years ago.  When Adam protests, the man tells him to check his Visa bill; there he’ll find the “fake a pregnancy” website that Corinne used.  Corinne is away for the day at a teachers’ conference so, after fighting the urge, Adam goes online to check out the stranger’s information.  And, sure enough, he finds the proof that his wife created a fictitious pregnancy and then “had a miscarriage.”  But why would she do that?

Heidi Dann is getting into her car after a luncheon with friends when she hears a whisper in her ear, another life-changing message to an unsuspecting person.  “There’s a website called FindYourSugarBaby.com,” she’s told.  

Dan Molino is at his son’s football game when the stranger says, “You know, don’t you?”  And all the stranger wants is ten thousand dollars not to make public the contents of the manila envelope he hands Dan.

These three strands are all important to this novel, but most of the emphasis is on Adam and what follows the stranger’s whispered remarks to him.  Adam is trying to hold his family together as best he can, but the ties are weakening.  How could anyone could have discovered her deception?  Why won’t Corinne explain the reason she did what she did?

Harlan Coben is an absolute master of suspense.  The people in his novels are your neighbors, your friends, even you yourself, caught in a maelstrom of terror.  One day you are going about your business, with your life continuing as usual, and the next day everything is turned upside-down.   And whatever steps you take seem useless.

Harlan Coben is the winner of mystery’s trifecta–the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Anthony awards–for his novels, which have sold over sixty million copies.  Let me predict that The Stranger will add many more to that total.

You can read more about Harlan Coben at this web site.

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

Opera, history, and murder meet in this debut novel, and it’s an inspired meeting.  Laura Lebow’s The Figaro Murders brings readers to 18th-century Vienna, home to the acclaimed composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his lesser-known librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Lorenzo is Venetian-born but is forced to leave his home due to political intrigues and accusations of immoral behavior.  After traveling to several city-states he lands in Vienna, home of the newly-crowned emperor Joseph II.  There Lorenzo becomes the court librettist; as the novel opens he is completing The Marriage of Figaro, which is due to open in a week.

His official work is interrupted by a commission from his friend Johann Vogel, which he reluctantly accepts.  Johann had accepted a large loan from the housekeeper in Count Gabler’s palais in order to purchase a barber shop.  The housekeeper, Rosa Hahn, now wants repayment, and Johann is taken to debtor’s prison as he does not have the money.

He begs Lorenzo to find out who his birth mother was, finding out as an adult that he was adopted as an infant.  He believes that his biological mother may have been from a wealthy family, that he was kidnapped and given up for adoption, and that perhaps there is some money available to him to enable him to pay his debt.

Lorenzo makes a brief visit to the Gabler palais where he meets young Prince Florian, who is acting as a page to the count.  Lorenzo and Florian have a brief argument, ending with the young man fleeing the palais, and the next day two policemen arrive at Lorenzo’s home to take him into custody for the prince’s murder.

Lorenzo Da Ponte is a historical figure, although much less familiar to modern readers than is Mozart.  Born a Jew, he converted along with his brother and his father to Catholicism when his widowed father decided to marry a Catholic woman.  Lorenzo was thus able to receive a classical education from the clergy, something he would not have been able to do had he remained a Jew.  He later became a priest but led a dissolute life, incurring gambling debts and fathering two children, which led to his being exiled from Venice for fifteen years. 

The Figaro Murders is told through Lorenzo’s eyes.  He is frank about his desire for fame and money, but he is a gifted writer and wants desperately to continue working with the best composers of the era, especially Mozart.  He is easily distracted by the beautiful Countess Elizabeth Gabler but at the same time is committed to his search for his friend’s parentage.  In short, this is the true portrait of a man, with all the flaws and virtues that men possess.

Laura Lebow has written an excellent novel, with fascinating characters and a remarkable sense of history.  I look forward to Lorenzo Da Ponte’s next adventure.

You can find more information about the incredible but true life of Lorenzo Da Ponte at this web site.  You can read more about Laura Lebow at this web site.  

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

Like many immigrants, Ranjit Singh came to the United States hoping for a better life.  But, also like many immigrants, he found it harder than expected to achieve that life.  A former Indian army officer and an adherent of the Sikh religion, he arrived in the U.S. with his wife and daughter, but his wife soon took their daughter and returned to India.  

Ranjit is now working as a taxi driver during the day and as a security guard in an import firm at night in order to earn enough money to rent a bigger apartment because his teenage daughter is coming to live with him on a trial basis for a year.

The combination of his two jobs, seemingly separate, lead Ranjit into trouble and danger.  On a routine taxi run he picks up the beautiful Indian actress Shabana Shah and delivers her to the famous Dakota condominium in Manhattan.  As the Dakota’s doorman opens the taxi door, he and Ranjit recognize each other from their days in the army, and Mohan Jumar invites Ranjit to come back to the building after he’s through with his night-time job.  

When Rajit returns to the Dakota, Mohan takes him up to Shabana’s condo, explaining that the movie star is out of town and that he is looking after the apartment for her.  He and Ranjit share a meal from the food in Shabana’s refrigerator and Ranjit leaves, only to be charged the following day with the brutal murder of the actress.  Her bludgeoned body was found on the floor of her apartment by her sister, and the weapon has Ranjit’s fingerprints all over it.  And the doorman Mohan is nowhere to be found.

As I’ve written in previous blogs, one of the joys of reading is discovering new countries, new cultures, new ways of life.  The Sikh religion, a monotheistic religion that is the fifth-largest in the world, was one I knew very little about.  The Last Taxi Ride explains some of their beliefs and quotes prayers that its devotees say when requesting help from their Gurus, the embodiments of Ultimate Reality.  

Sikhism is only five hundred years old, yet it has over thirty million adherents worldwide.  And although Ranjit Singh isn’t always regular in his practices, he believes in his religion and calls upon the Lord for help in difficult situation.  Unlike Western religions, with books such as the Bible or the Quran as its source, Sikh practitioners read about their religion predominantly in poems and hymns, and there are some beautiful examples in the novel.  

A. X. Ahmad’s Ranjit Singh is a fascinating protagonist, a man who has made mistakes in his life but is constantly trying to better himself and help those around him.  The Last Taxi Ride is the second in the series, and I’m on my way now to the nearest bookstore to buy the first one, The Caretaker.  

You can read more about A. X. Ahmad at this web site. 

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

Small-town England in the eighteenth century might seem a very different place from twentieth-century America.  But theft, murder, and greed know no boundaries in time or space.

Titus Cragg is a lawyer and the coroner in the town of Preston.  As the novel opens he receives a letter from Phillip Pimbo, a seller of gold and silver in Preston and a respected citizen.  At this time in England, banks in small towns were almost unheard of, and valuables were kept in strongboxes in people’s homes or temporarily given to pawnbrokers who had secure safes until the valuables were needed.  Phillip has boasted to Titus in the past that his strong room was as safe as “the Bastille of Paris lodged inside the Tower of London.”

But Phillip also said that most of the money deposited with him and belonging to the town wasn’t in the strong room at all.  Instead, he has loaned the money out to a source that has promised a huge return.  The town, anxious to secure as much funding as possible in order to celebrate the Preston Guild, a once-every-twenty-year festival, agreed to this, but only Phillip knows to whom the money was loaned.  Now Titus has received a letter from Phillip referring to a “matter of wrong-doing,” and Titus wonders, as he makes his way to the pawnbroker’s office, if the matter pertains to the town’s money left in his care.

When Titus arrives at Phillip’s office to discuss the letter, the man is nowhere to be seen.  A sign on his office door says that he is not to be disturbed, but at Titus’s insistence Phillip’s chief cashier knocks on the door.  

There’s no answer, and the door is locked.  A locksmith is called but is unable to open it, so finally the door is battered down.  And there is Phillip Pimbo’s body, lying across his desk, a blood-caked hole on the top of his bald head.

Titus and everyone else in the office see the case as a case of suicide, although they don’t know of any reason that the respected businessman would kill himself.  But when the town’s doctor, Luke Fidelis, appears, he isn’t so quick to make the same judgment.  If, he asks Titus, Phillip killed himself, where is the wig he always wore?

The interaction between the two main characters, Titus Cragg and Luke Fidelis, adds to the strength of the novel.  Both men are smart and dedicated to finding the truth, but narrator Titus doesn’t delve into matters as deeply as does the more scientific Luke.  There’s the slightest bit of Watson and Holmes here, but Titus is much brighter than Watson, and there’s no hero worship in Titus’s relation to Luke.  There’s just friendship, and that’s perfect.

You can read more about Robin Blake at this web site. 

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

The powerful Boston team of Rizzoli and Isles is back, working on a murder that spans two continents.  Jane Rizzoli, police detective, and Maura Isles, medical examiner, are brought into a case that seems bizarre from the beginning, but they have no idea of just how strange it’s going to get.

Die Again opens with a safari in Botswana, consisting of a party of three men and four women plus their tracker and guide.  This section of the novel is told by Millie Jacobson, the girlfriend of Richard Renwick, a well-known British novelist.  It was Richard’s idea to go on a safari, the better to write another of his macho adventure books.

Millie has reluctantly come along, but she’s not enjoying herself; her idea of a vacation runs to hotels and spas, not flimsy tents and outdoor “bathrooms.”  But Richard and the others are enjoying themselves until the morning that the remains of their South African guide are found.  He had been killed and eaten, probably by hyenas.

Back in Boston, Jane and her partner Barry Frost are called to the home of an internationally known hunter and taxidermist, Leon Gott.  Surrounded by the many animals he shot and mounted on his walls, Leon’s body is found hanging upside down, his insides removed.  Not a view for the faint of heart.

When Dr. Maura Isles arrives, one look at the eviscerated body tells her something is seriously wrong besides the obvious fact that Leon is dead.  Searching the garage she finds remains, including two hearts (one human, one animal) and two complete sets of lungs.  Leon had received threats in the past, but those had been verbal, never physical.  His wife and only son were dead, and he wasn’t close to any of his neighbors, so no one seems to have a clue what brought about his brutal death.

In addition to working on Leon’s murder, Jane also is trying to help her mother get through a difficult time.  Several years earlier, Jane’s father left his wife for another woman.  Some time later, Jane’s mother fell in love with another man, and they got engaged.  Now her husband wants to return home and let bygones be bygones.  Jane’s brothers are in favor of this and want their parents to reconcile.  It’s obvious to Jane that her mother is very unhappy with the situation, but she’s having a hard time going against her husband and their sons.

Maura is still reeling from the end of her romance with Daniel Brophy, a Catholic priest.  Even though Maura knew that their relationship couldn’t end well, she continues to mourn the loss of the man she loves.

Tess Gerritsen has written another spellbinding novel.  Readers of previous novels in the series and viewers of the television show, now in its sixth season, will want to read Die Again to see Rizzoli and Isles together once more.

You can read more about Tess Gerritsen at this web site.

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

Ice Shear is M. P. Cooley’s debut novel, and it’s terrific.  June Lyons is a former FBI agent, now a police officer, who has come back to live in the upstate New York town where she was born, Hopewell Falls.  If you change the second syllable of the first word to less, you have a description of this small town; it has fallen on hard times without much hope for the future.

June is living with her young daughter, Lucy, and her father, a retired detective on the Hopewell Falls’ police force.  June’s husband, Kevin, also a former FBI agent, died three years ago, prompting her return home. 

It’s a place where murder is rare, perhaps one per year, but today is the day for the body of Danielle Brouillette, daughter of the town’s representative to the U.S. Congress, to be found on the frozen banks of the Mohawk River.  At first glance it looks as if Danielle might have fallen from the cliffs above the river, but a closer examination shows that she was dead before hitting the ice spike that tore her body apart.

Danielle was a beautiful, bright, and troubled young woman.  Exceedingly headstrong, she was expelled from college in California for unacceptable behavior and substance abuse issues.  She didn’t get in touch with her parents for several months after this, and when she did it was to turn up on their doorstep with her new husband.  Her well-to-do and politically powerful parents refused to accept him, and so the estrangement between Danielle and her parents continued.

Danielle’s husband, Marty Jelickson, is a former member of the outlaw motorcycle gang the Abominations.  Marty’s father, Zeke, is the head of the gang, and Marty’s younger brother Ray is also a member.  Now the Abominations, including Marty’s parents, are headed to Hopewell Falls for Danielle’s funeral, and June is certain there will be a major confrontation between the two sets of parents.

Ms. Cooley draws a wonderful picture of this small New York town, financially devastated by the Great Recession.  The downtown is nearly nonexistent, jobs are few and menial, and young people move out as soon as they can.  So why was Danielle so eager to leave California and return home?

The characters are extremely well-drawn.  June has the problems of most single mothers, not enough time with her child and stress at work.  There’s tension between the police force, the district attorney Jerry Defoe, and the FBI, which has been called to join the investigation since the victim was the daughter of a congresswoman. 

The FBI agent sent to assist the police is Hale Bascom, who was a close friend of June’s and Kevin’s until the latter got cancer; then he disappeared from their lives.  June hasn’t spoken to or seen Hale since before Kevin’s death, and she has bitter feelings toward him now.

Ice Shear marks the beginning, I hope, of a new series.  You can read more about M. P. Cooley at this web site.

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

There must be something wonderful in the state of Maine to product such amazing mystery authors.  I’ve blogged about books written by Tess Gerritsen, Julia Spencer-Fleming, Paul Doiron, and Gerry Boyle, and now I’m adding D. A. Keeley to my list.

Bitter Crossing introduces Peyton Cote, a U.S. Border Patrol agent, recently back from her posting in Texas to her home state of Maine.  Although there is more action in El Paso than in tiny Garrett, it doesn’t take long after Peyton’s return for things to start happening in this part of Aroostook County, across from New Brunswick, Canada.  She receives a tip that a major shipment of marijuana is being dropped in an open area in the forest, and when she goes there she sees a bundle in the middle of the field.  But when she opens the package, there’s a baby girl inside, barely alive.

Peyton requested the transfer to her hometown mainly for personal reasons.  She wants her seven-year-old son to have more contact with his father, although she has doubts about Jeff’s commitment to Tommy.  Her ex is great at promises to Tommy, promises he rarely keeps.  Jeff would like to reconcile with Peyton, and she’s torn between wanting to have as little as possible to do with him and feeling that their son needs his father in his life.

Life isn’t easy in this northern part of Maine, and times are bad financially.  Years of hard work in the potato fields, once the mainstay of Aroostook County, can be gone in a flash when a blight decimates the harvest.  It’s no wonder that some members of Peyton’s generation look for easier ways to make money, including buying and selling drugs.

Peyton is using Kenny Radke, a former schoolmate, as a snitch.  Under a not-so-subtle threat of reporting to his parole officer that she found drugs in his car, she gets Kenny to tell her about the drug drop.  But now that there were no drugs found in the forest, only the infant whose presence doesn’t come under Border Patrol jurisdiction, an angry Peyton talks to Kenny again.  This time she’s trying to find out where Kenny’s tip came from, and he reluctantly gives her the scant information he has about a tall white guy he played poker with and the names of two locals who were at the game.

Peyton is also trying to help her younger sister, Elise, with her marital issues.  Elise got married young to her college professor, a man who was later convicted of two drug-related felonies.  He’s gone from job to job, with infidelities along the way, and now Elise is keeping her own secret from Peyton. 

Bitter Crossing is a terrific novel, filled both with an exciting plot and believable characters.  Peyton Cote is a strong woman, devoted to her family and her job.  The problem is, sometimes it seems almost impossible to balance the two.  This is a mystery that will keep you reading until the last page.

You can read more about D. A. Kelley at this web site.

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

Linda Wallheim is a typical Mormon wife and mother.  Her husband Kurt is the bishop of a ward, the community’s leader, and Linda is a stay-at-home wife, with the youngest of their five sons about to graduate from high school.  She is a devoted member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, although a questioning one, and events in their small Utah town are going to give her more reasons to question than she ever had before.

An early morning visit by a member of their ward, Jared Helm, and his young daughter Kelly brings the news that Jared’s wife has left their home.  He claims that he doesn’t know where Carrie is, only that she left a note saying that she wasn’t going to return.  Jared has come to see the bishop to get his reassurance that he hasn’t done anything wrong and that the church is behind him.

Then Carrie’s parents, Judy and Aaron Weston, come to the bishop for help.  They are certain, they say, that Jared is behind Carrie’s disappearance and possibly her death.  They tell Linda and Kurt that Carrie was desperately afraid of her husband, that he had threatened and abused her, keeping her away from her parents. 

They have gone to the police but were told that Carrie wasn’t gone long enough to declare her a missing person.  Linda suggests calling a press conference and asking for the public’s help, and the Westons agree to do that.  In the meantime, Linda has formed a strong attachment with five-year-old Kelly, and she is upset and disturbed when Jared’s father moves into Jared’s house and seems reluctant to let Linda spend any time with his granddaughter.

At the same time, the Wallheims’ neighbor, Tobias Torstensen, is very ill but refusing to go to the hospital for treatment despite entreaties from his wife Anna.  Anna is his second wife, the stepmother of his two sons.  And when Tobias dies shortly afterwards, he leaves a number of unanswered questions about his first wife and the plans for his burial.

Mette Ivie Harrison has written a fine novel, interspersing doctrines of the Mormon church with the stories of the Helms and the Torstensens.  Explanations are needed, because much of the novel depends on understanding the rules of the church, many of which are different from other Christian sects. 

As the bishop’s wife Linda Wallheim has no direct power, but she tries to be aware of issues surrounding her.  She is angry at herself for not seeing the trouble between Carrie and Jared Helm, thinking she might have been able to prevent the young wife from running away, and she is concerned about her own intense interest in young Kelly.  Is it because she is worried about the type of father and grandfather the girl has or is it because in Kelly she sees the child she might have had if her only daughter had not been stillborn?

The Bishop’s Wife is a fascinating look into a religion unfamiliar to many of us.  Linda Wallheim’s doubts and concerns are real, as are the sudden, strong feeling she gets about people, either pro or con.  She is sure of herself one minute, doubting herself the next.  She is a very human character.

You can read more about Mette Ivie Harrison at this web site. 

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

I had a habit when I was a child–if a book was too suspenseful, I would turn to the last page to see how it ended.  Reading A String of Beads brought back that memory because I had to stop myself from doing it again.  Thomas Perry knows how to write a novel that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very end.

Jane Whitefield, born of a white mother and a Seneca Indian father, is now a doctor’s wife, ostensibly living a quiet life as a volunteer teacher of the Seneca language and a fund-raiser for her husband’s hospital in New York State.  But all of her adult life she has had a secret–she helps innocent people who are in danger leave their current lives and begin again with new names, new jobs, new habits.  She’s best described as a guide to a new life.  When she married Dr. Carey McKinnon she promised to give up that part of her life, but she keeps being drawn back into it when she knows someone is in danger.

In A String of Beads, Jane is approached by the eight clan mothers of the various branches of her tribe.  Jane’s activities have been known to the mothers for some time, they tell her, but there hasn’t been a reason until this moment for them to ask for her help.  The string of beads in the title is called by the Senecas ote-ko-a.  The giving of the ote-ko-a symbolizes the mothers’ request for Jane to find one of their tribe members; her acceptance of the beads is her agreement to do so.  

Jimmy Sanders, a childhood friend of Jane’s, is being sought by the police as a suspect in a murder.  All the mothers agree with Jane that Jimmy could never have killed a man, but foolishly he has run away, and they are asking Jane to find him.  She sets out the following morning to retrace the trip that she and Jimmy took when they were teenagers, thinking that in his desire to evade the police he may have have gone back to that familiar trail; in fact she finds him there.

However, the police aren’t the only ones searching for Jimmy, and in fact they aren’t the most dangerous ones.  The man who is the murderer and who set Jimmy up for the crime is anxious for Jimmy to be found and jailed, or else simply killed.  The question before Jane and Jimmy is why has someone gone to so much trouble to incriminate him.   

A String of Beads is the eighth Jane Whitefield novel.  As with all series mysteries, we know that the protagonist will survive, but the author must make us care that she does so.  With Jane, the reader is in awe of her cleverness and determination to protect her charge from whomever is trying to kill him.  In this book, the childhood that Jane and Jimmy shared makes her even more determined to keep him safe and find out who is behind the murder and why Jimmy was chosen to be the “fall guy.”

Thomas Perry will keep you turning the pages ever more quickly with his inspiring heroine and brilliant plot.  This is another terrific mystery from the author.  He never disappoints.

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

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