Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Reviews

Bell Elkins is a small-town girl who has made good.  She managed to leave the coal-mining town of Acker’s Gap, where she grew up in a motherless home with an abusive father, get herself a law degree, and work in Washington, D. C. with her husband.  A perfect professional and personal life, it would seem.

But after a few years, Acker’s Gap, with all its problems of poverty, unemployment, and drug use drew her back.  Bell felt she could make a difference there that she couldn’t in the nation’s capital.  So she and her daughter returned to West Virginia, a place her husband, a highly successful attorney, was only to happy to leave behind.

A second reason for returning home for Bell is her superstition/belief that her older sister would someday return there to find her.  Shirley had protected Bell from their father’s sexual advances during her childhood, and when it became impossible to continue doing that, Shirley murdered their father and set fire to their home.  Shirley was released from prison two years before this novel opens but never returned to Acker’s Gap; Bell fears that if she left town permanently, her sister would never be able to find her.

As Bitter River, the second book in this series, opens, Bell is driving home from Washington.  During the trip, she receives a call from Nick Fogelsong, sheriff of Raythune Country and a close friend.  The body of Lucinda Trimble has been found in the Bitter River.  Lucinda, a shining academic and sports star at the local high school, was dead before her car hit the water, Nick says, so this is not an accident.  It’s murder.

Although still in high school, Lucinda was engaged to Shawn Doggett, son of the town’s wealthiest family.   The Doggetts, particularly Mrs. Doggett, were less than thrilled with this, especially given the fact that Lucinda was pregnant and was resisting all attempts by the Doggetts and her own mother to give the baby up for adoption.

While all this is going on, an old friend of Bell’s, Matt Harless, a CIA agent, presumably retired, has come to town for a brief respite.  He tells Bell he remembers her talking about her town, about the beauty of the mountains, and he’s decided that a visit is what he needs before he makes any future plans.  But strange things start happening shortly after his arrival, leaving Bell to wonder if they’re coincidental or somehow related to Harless.

Julie Keller paints a vivid picture of Acker’s Gap and the people in it.  It’s a place that, on the surface, seems removed from the rest of 21st-century America, but a deeper look reveals the same problems that the rest of the country has–high school dropouts, high unemployment, drug abuse, and domestic violence.

Bell Elkins is a tough, determined protagonist.  Her roots in her home town are strong, even with the memories of the abusive childhood she and her sister shared.  This novel makes me hope that the third entry in the series won’t be long in coming.

You can read more about Julia Keller at this web site.

You can read my post of A Killing in the Hills, the first in the Bell Elkins series, on this blog.  Check out the complete Marilyn’s Reads blog at her web site.

The Corpse Reader is an incredible book.  Its author calls it a historical novel, which of course it is, as its protagonist is the real-life scholar and scientist Cí Song.  But it’s also a mystery because crimes are what propel the story.

Cí is a teenaged boy in 13th-century China.  He comes from a humble background in a rural town but gets a taste of city life when his family moved to Lin’an and his father began working for Judge Feng.  That magistrate, recognizing Cí’s extraordinary intelligence, took him under his wing to help discover causes of death among the city’s deceased.  However, due to the death of his paternal grandfather, Cí’s family is forced by custom to return to their small village and take over the family farm.

Ci’s older brother Lu, who hadn’t gone with the family to the city but stayed in their hometown to manage the farm, now views himself as the head of the Song family; he has become cruel and overbearing and disrespectful to his father, a terrible breach of manners in Chinese society.  When a family friend is robbed and murdered, Lu is accused of the crime, and before a thorough investigation can take place, Lu is imprisoned and tortured to death.  Almost immediately following this, Cí’s home is torched, and his parents die in the fire.

Desperate and fearful, Cí and his sister, his only surviving sibling, head back to Lin’an.  But when they finally arrive, having passed through a series of devastating misadventures, the magistrate is nowhere to be found, and Cí is at a loss as to what to do.  His dream is to enter the university and become a magistrate and what we would today call a coroner or medical examiner, but with no family to support him and his former mentor out of the city, Cí must take any job to survive.

Antonio Garrido has brought the figures and customs of thirteenth-century China to life in The Corpse Reader.  In the author’s note at the end of the novel, Señor Garrido tells the reader that today Cí Song is considered to be the founder of forensic science.  Think  of it–more than eight centuries ago in medieval China a man wrote five books on forensics that are still used today.

The characters in The Corpse Reader are fascinating, and so are the customs.  The reader learns about family practices, differences in cuisine in northern and southern China, the punishment of criminals, and many more facts.  But nowhere are these facts presented dryly or simply inserted into the story; instead, each custom is a natural outgrowth of the scene in which it is presented.

In addition, the characters are so well described that, in spite of the unfamiliarity that most westerners have with Chinese names, each character is easy to remember and differentiate from others in the novel.

I have long been a fan of Robert Van Gulik’s series of Judge Dee mysteries (see my review of The Golden Nail Murders under Golden Oldies on this blog), and The Corpse Reader is a wonderful addition to the world of long-ago China.

There is no web site devoted to Antonio Garrido, although reviews of The Corpse Reader are available on the web.

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

By now pretty much every reader in the world is aware that Robert Galbraith is the pen name of J. K. Rowling.  You know, the author of the Harry Potter books.  Her idea was to see if she could depart from the Potter series and receive good reviews on her own, with reviewers having no knowledge of who she was.

I love Mark Billingham’s blurb on the back cover of The Cuckoo’s Calling.  He writes in part, “…Strike [the protagonist] is so compelling that it’s hard to believe this is a debut novel.”  He was right on, wasn’t he?

The novel’s hero is Cormoran Strike, a British war veteran who was wounded Afghanistan and now has an artificial leg.  He’s just been thrown out of the sumptuous flat he shared with his very wealthy girlfriend and, having nowhere else to go, he’s living in the small London office where he’s eking out a living as a private investigator.

The novel opens with the “suicide” of supermodel Lula Landry.  It’s a media sensation for a while, but then the buzz dies down and the world goes about its business.  Three months later, Lula’s older brother, John Bristow, comes into Strike’s office with a plea for the detective to investigate his sister’s death.  He tells Strike that the police investigation was perfunctory, that given Lula’s history of depression and drug use it was “apparent” to the authorities than she had thrown herself out of the window of her fourth floor flat.

Strike tries to persuade Bristow to comes to terms with his sister’s suicide, but Bristow will not be dissuaded.  He insists that Strike take the case, offering him twice the usual retainer.  Bristow reminds the detective that Strike and Bristow’s younger brother had been childhood friends before the brother’s tragic death.  Now, Bristow tells Strike, his father is dead, both his siblings are dead, his mother is dying, and soon he’ll be the last of his family.  “All I want,” he says, “is justice.”  So Strike decides to take the case.

The second most interesting character, after Strike, is Robin Ellacott, who comes to Strike’s office for a temporary position as a secretary while waiting for a full-time job to open up.  The opening chapter has the newly-engaged Robin just about to enter Strike’s office when the door bursts open from the inside and Robin is propelled backward toward the metal flight of stairs behind her.  When I tell you I let out a loud gasp and said “oh, no” aloud, you will see what an incredible picture J. K. Rowling had painted of Robin in less than four pages.  That was my aha moment, the instant I knew that I was about to read one fabulous story.

All kudos to Ms. Rowling for being willing to be judged on her merits as a mystery author rather than as the author of the Potter series who also writes mysteries.  The Cuckoo’s Calling proves that her risk paid off.

You can read more about Ms. Rowling’s reasons for writing this novel under a pen name at this web site.

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

Could Sutton refer to anyone but Willie Sutton, bank robber extraordinaire?  Google “Willie Sutton,” and you get nearly four million hits.  His life has been the subject of a television episode on “Gang Busters” in 1952 and a documentary entitled “In the Footsteps of Willie Sutton” in 2011.  And now his life has produced a book, and an excellent one it is.

Sutton opens on Christmas Eve, 1969, when Willie was pardoned and released from Attica Correctional Faculty where he had been serving a fifty year sentence.  His unexpected release caused, in the author’s words, “a media frenzy,” but Willie granted only one interview.  J.R. Moehringer states in the Author’s Note that the published interview was a superficial one, and this book is his attempt to write what he thinks happened, or wishes had happened, on the day of the interview.

Willie was born into a poor Irish-American family, the fourth of five children, in 1901 in New York City.  According to the book, he was brutalized by his two of his older brothers, and that’s when he learned, at a young age, not to “squeal” or “be a rat,” the worst possible things one could do or be in his neighborhood.  Forced by family financial woes to leave school after the eighth grade, Willie turned to crime after he was let go from a series of dead-end jobs due to the Great Depression.  Starting out robbing jewelry stories, Willie soon was living the high life in a fancy hotel, dressing like a gentleman, eating in New York City’s finest restaurants.

The story is told both “in the present,” that being Christmas Day, the day after Willie leaves prison, and flashbacks to the past, when Willie thinks about his life.  He makes the two newspaper men, referred to only as the Reporter and the Photographer, drive all over the city so that he can relive his life in chronological order.

The romance in Willie’s life was Bess Endner, the daughter of a wealthy New York family.  When Willie was eighteen and Bess was sixteen, the two began a Romeo-and-Juliet romance that ended, as it could only do, badly.  The two of them, plus a friend of Willie’s, stole $16,000 from Bess’ father’s safe and fled to Massachusetts in an unsuccessful attempt to get married.  For the rest of Willie’s life he was haunted by his memories of Bess and the life they could have had together.

J.R. Moehringer has written a fascinating novel about a man who, as they say, needs no introduction.  Sutton, like Dillinger and Capone, doesn’t even need a first name to be identified; his incredible robberies, which netted him more than two million dollars over his lifetime, made him famous, or infamous, in the annals of twentieth-century crime.

All the characters in Sutton jump out from the novel’s pages:  Willie’s brutal brothers, his indifferent parents, the beautiful Bess, and the myriad accomplices who either remained loyal to Willie or betrayed him.  This is a beautifully written book, with its look into the heart-breaking poverty that many faced, even before the Depression, and Willie’s attempts to find happiness by accumulating immense wealth.

Mr. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, doesn’t have a web site, but there are many articles about him and this book on the Internet.

Special thanks to Lorry Diehl who recommended Sutton to me.  Lorry is the author of four books about Manhattan, her home town.  You can read more about her at this web site.

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

It’s always a delight for me when I check Craig Johnson’s web site and find that he’s written a new Walt Longmire mystery.  His latest one, A Serpent’s Tooth, is a wonderful addition to the series.

Walt is the sheriff of rural Absaroka County, Wyoming.  Attending the funeral of one of its citizens, Walt gets into a conversation with Barbara Thomas.  The subject is angels, and Barbara tells Walt how angels have been coming to her house and doing all the minor repairs and clean-ups that make home owning difficult for a widow of advancing years.  They have cleaned her gutters, fixed the door on her porch, and various other small jobs.   They don’t ask for money, but Barbara leaves a list of jobs for them and a plate of food, and pretty soon the repair is done and the food is gone.

Naturally, Walt doesn’t believe in home-repair angels, and when he and his deputy Victoria Moretti drive out to Barbara’s home they find a teenage boy repairing the trap under the kitchen sink.  When the boy hears Walt’s greeting, he bolts from the house and Walt and Vic are unable to catch him.  Walt tries to follow up with the local high school and social services department, but no one has heard of this boy.

When Walt and Vic return to search the outbuildings around Barbara’s house, they find evidence of someone living in the small dilapidated pump house–a cot, a blanket, and an 1889 copy of the Book of Mormon.  And when Walt finally catches up with the boy, whose name is Cord, he finds him to be half-starved and nearly totally unaware of many of the aspects of modern living.

Thus begins the sheriff’s involvement with the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God, a rogue offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  Several branches of this church have been established in the rural west, and one has set down roots in the mountains of Walt’s county.  The boy is a runaway from this group.  Apparently his mother was looking for him a few weeks earlier in South Dakota, but when that county’s sheriff went to the address she had given him to tell her her son was found, no one there would admit knowing the mother or the son.  And the South Dakota group is the same Apostolic Church that is in Walt’s county.

In addition to Cord, another mysterious stranger has appeared in town, the self-proclaimed Orrin Porter Rockwell, Danite, Man of God, Son of Thunder.  The only problem is that the real Orrin Porter Rockwell was born in 1813.  The 21st-century Orrin proclaims himself Cord’s bodyguard, and the two of them together are almost too much for the law in Absaroka County.

Walt Longmire is a fabulous character, a lawman who tempers justice with mercy and understanding.  He is a widower, and his romantic relationship with his deputy Vic, given the difference in their ages and backgrounds, is a problem for him but not for her.  His relationship with his only child, Cady, who is married to Vic’s brother, is also difficult, and the upcoming birth of Cady’s first child is filling Walt with both joy and trepidation.

Craig Johnson is a terrific writer who knows how to make all of his characters alive.  You can read more about him at his web site.

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

I’m finding that books about small-town sheriffs, both working and retired, are a delight to read.  There are many, both male and female, but three of my favorites are William Kent Kreuger’s Cork O’Connor series, Linda Castillo’s Kate Burkholder series, and Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series (all reviewed on this blog).   Now I’ve met Samuel Craddock, retired sheriff of Jarrett Creek, Texas, and he’s definitely been added to my favorites list.

Jarrett Creek is like most small towns, a place where everyone knows everyone else.   When Samuel finds out that an old friend, Dora Mae Parjeter, was found murdered, he has an overwhelming feeling of guilt as well as sadness at the loss.  The sadness is obvious, the guilt less so.  But the night before Dora Mae’s death she called him to say she thought someone was sitting in a car outside her house, watching her; because she had called Samuel previously with similar statements, he told her to call him in the morning if she still was worried.  Unfortunately, this time there was obviously something to be worried about.

Samuel’s replacement as sheriff is Rodell Skinner, an alcoholic who was appointed to the office by his cousin, the mayor.  Knowing Rodell’s incompetence and desire for a quick and easy solution to any crime, Samuel goes to Dora Mae’s farm and finds that her grandson, Greg, is Rodell’s main suspect.

It appears that Greg and his grandmother had an argument a few days before the murder, so it’s easy for the new sheriff to make a case against Greg.  Samuel promises Greg he’ll get him out of jail the next morning, and Samuel vows to himself to investigate the case thoroughly.

Greg is one of Dora Mae’s two living descendants.  Greg’s mother, who was Dora Mae’s daughter, and his father were killed in an automobile accident when Greg was a child, and he came to live with his grandmother.  Dora Mae’s other daughter, Caroline, was known as the “wild one” and left home as a teenager, some twenty years earlier.  Now Samuel finds information that leads him to believe that Caroline has returned to Texas and made contact with her mother, but Samuel is having no luck tracking Caroline down.

Going over Dora Mae’s accounts, Samuel is stunned to realize how close to the bone she had been living.  Her very talented grandson wanted to leave the farm and go to Houston to study art, but Dora Mae told him she didn’t have the money to send him.  However, Dora Mae’s new neighbors seem to be interested in buying the farm, an unseemly rapid interest given the circumstances of her death.

Jarrett Creek is home to a number of interesting citizens, much like an English village in a Golden Age mystery.  Here, as in many small towns and cities, the younger people leave for what they view as the greener pastures of big cities, leaving farms to lie fallow and local stores to go out of business.  One can hardly blame Greg, a talented artist, for wanting to pursue a career in Houston or beyond, but is that enough motive to kill his grandmother, assuming she really wanted to and was able to prevent him from leaving?

A Killing At Cotton Hill is a wonderful debut novel.  I eagerly look forward to the next Sheriff Samuel Craddock mystery.

You can read more about Terry Shames at her web site.

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

It’s a fearful scene that Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch is called to by his friend Billy Cronk.  “Wicked bad,” is Billy’s description of what he’s taking Mike to see, and that’s an understatement.

The first site Billy takes Mike to is where a young male moose has been killed, the second is where a cow bull, a female moose, is lying dead next to her three slaughtered calves.  As Mike says to Billy, “It’s a serial killing, Billy.  I don’t know what else to call it.”

The dead moose are on the property of multimillionaire Elizabeth Morse, a businesswoman who has bought thousands of acres of forest in eastern Maine to fulfill her dream of making the land a national park.  Elizabeth’s plan has run into steep opposition, however, from businessmen and loggers in the area who fear the end of their jobs.  Elizabeth’s promise that tourists will bring money into the area is falling on deaf ears, and she has received dozens of hostile letters and death threats.

Mike Bowditch isn’t the most popular game warden in Maine.  He’s a college graduate from a Portland suburb, as opposed to most of the other rangers who were brought up in the remote northern counties of the state, and he’s not very good at taking orders that he believes are unreasonable.  That’s why he’s been exiled to Washington County by Lieutenant Marc Rivard, his supervisor in the Maine Warden Service.

Marc takes Mike off the case, putting him out in the field with busywork that has little or no relevance to the animal shootings.  But, after a few days with no results in the investigation, Elizabeth Morse forces the lieutenant to put Mike back on the case as liaison between herself and the Service.  Marc isn’t happy about this, and actually neither is Mike, but Elizabeth wields a lot of power in Maine, even with all her enemies.

Then the case goes from animal slaughter to murder.

Mike Bowditch is a man who wants to do his job but who is continuously frustrated by the politics and small-mindedness of his superior officers.  He sees Marc Rivard for what he is, a self-aggrandizing man who is petty enough to try to keep Mike from handing a case that by rights belongs to Mike and to take credit for anything his troops do.

His view of Elizabeth Morse isn’t much more positive.  He sees that she uses her power, in her case monetary power, to get the things done that she wants, regardless of the impact it has on others.  She either doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to understand that her plan of making a national park in this poverty-stricken area of Maine will put hundreds of people out of work.

Paul Doiron has written a wonderful mystery, the fourth in the Mike Bowditch series (see my review of The Poacher’s Son on this blog).  Mike Bowditch is a terrific protagonist, and the supporting characters are equally well-written.  Reading Massacre Pond will take you to the woods of Maine, with all its beauty, poverty, and problems.

You can read more about Paul Doiron at his web site.

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

When a “good” man turns bad, there are bound to be questions.  Was he always evil and kept it hidden, or were circumstances too much for him to deal with, forcing him to turn evil?  Such are the questions that every reader of Criminal Enterprise will ask, and each reader will have to answer for herself or himself.

Carter Tomlin was a happy man.  He had an important job with a big salary, a loving wife, and two darling daughters.  He lived in a mini-mansion in Minneapolis and drove a Jaguar.  But then came the economic downturn in 2007-08.  Carter was laid off from his job and things started to turn bad.  He was about to fall behind on his mortgage payments, his wife took a temporary teaching job she hated, and his daughters had a long list of Christmas presents they had to have.  He felt like a failure, that he was “less of a man” for not supporting his family.

He started a small accounting business but that wasn’t able to bring in the amount of money he felt he needed.  So, on the spur of the moment, he bought a clumsy disguise, walked into a Bank of America branch, and came away with eighteen hundred dollars.  His second robbery yielded three thousand dollars, but that still wasn’t sufficient to cover his expenses.  So Carter got some guns, and things escalated from there.  Like a road map, readers can follow the step-by-step moral disintegration of Carter Tomlin.

Criminal Enterprise brings together the two protagonists in Own Laukkanen’s first novel, The Professionals (reviewed on this blog).  FBI Special Agent Carla Windermere and Special Investigator Kirk Stevens of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehensions teamed together to bring down Arthur Pender and his accomplices.  After that, Kirk’s wife Nancy made it clear that she didn’t want him working with the FBI again. “I married a cop…I knew what I was getting into.  But this hero stuff doesn’t work.  Not for me, Kirk.”  And Kirk totally understands.  It’s just that his state job now seems so tame by comparison, and he doesn’t have the camaraderie with his BCA officers that he had with Carla.

Carla is feeling the same way about her fellow FBI agents, most particularly her current partner.  He seems to have trouble with a female partner, especially one who made headlines on her last case.  He’s the one with seniority, and he wants her to follow in his footsteps, not step out on her own.

The novel is told from three main points of view, and each one pulls the reader more deeply into the story.  Carter Tomlin takes the reader into the world of entitlement that he is losing, his fear of letting his family down, his growing need for more action and violence in his criminal enterprises.  Kirk Stevens is a man who loves his wife and his children but is still tempted by the excitement he felt on the Pender case.  Carla Windermere is sure that her feelings about Carter are right and that her partner’s shooting of the man he thinks is the criminal they’re looking for is wrong.

Owen Laukkanen has written a terrific follow-up to The Professionals.  His characters and their motivations are right on; you won’t be able to put this novel down.

You can read more about Owen Laukkanen at his web site.

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

Sarah Woolson is the third woman licensed as an attorney in California.  Everywhere she goes, men and women are astonished to find out there is such a being–a woman and a lawyer, an impossible combination to many in San Francisco in the year 1882.  But Sarah is intelligent, ambitious, and not about to give in to those who believe it’s impossible for a woman to be a lawyer.  And once she takes a case, she will not give up.

Sarah lives with her parents, her single younger brother, and her married older brother and his family in the elegant Woolson family home.  Much as she loves her family, Sarah is anxious for her practice to be successful enough for her to rent her own rooms, away from the over-anxious eyes of her parents.  But that day isn’t here yet.

As Sarah and her brother Samuel are returning with a group from a literary function featuring the Irish poet Oscar Wilde at the home of newspaper publisher Mortimer Remy, Samuel is shot and wounded.  The police and several others in the party believe it to be an accident, a resident of Telegraph Hill shooting at a small animal in the dark, not an unusual occurrence.  Sarah’s not convinced and is even less willing to believe in the accident theory when, several days later, the body of a Telegraph Hill resident who also attended Mortimer’s party is found hanging from a tree.

The police lieutenant in charge of the case calls the death a suicide, but Sarah’s friend Sergeant George Lewis of the city’s police department agrees with Sarah. However, there’s little to go on until another body turns up.

Death on Telegraph Hill paints a detailed picture of San Francisco more than a century and a quarter ago.  Sarah is definitely a woman ahead of her time, a woman who has coolly decided on a career rather than marriage and children.  But then there’s Robert Campbell, another attorney, who is trying to change her mind about the marriage part of her decision.  There’s a large cast of characters including younger brother Samuel; Sarah’s friend, the woman she rents office space from, Fanny Goodman; the young Eddie Cooper, a teenaged carriage driver who is always anxious to help Sarah; and the several people who were at the reception the night that Samuel was shot.  Each one has a distinct personality and helps bring the novel to life.

And the picture of Oscar Wilde is hilarious.  Although well-known in literary circles, he’s definitely not what people are used to in San Francisco; the locals don’t know what to make of him.  “Attired in a maroon velvet smoking jacket edged with braid, a lavender silk shirt, flowing green cravat, knee breeches, and black shoes with silver buckets….”  Well, you get the idea.  Apparently his sexual preferences have made their way across the ocean, and some rude comments about that were also voiced by his audience.  However, Oscar remains impervious; he probably has heard similar jeers and insults before.

This is the fifth mystery in the Sarah Woolson series but only the first I’ve read.  So the good news is that I have four more novels in this excellent series waiting for me.

You can read more about Shirley Tallman at this web site.

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

Can you imagine being a lawyer who cannot speak in court?  Such is the case for former big-time attorney Parker Stern who suffers from glossophobia, the fear of public speaking.  In Parker’s case this fear shows itself only in court, but that has been enough to virtually end his career.

When Parker’s former law firm dissolved following the suicide of its founder, Harmon Cherry, the firm’s attorneys went their different ways.  Palmer now is a sole practitioner with no clients, Deanna Poulos owns a coffee shop, Rich Baxter continues as an attorney with a large firm, Grace Trimble has disappeared, and Manny Mason is a law professor.  It is Manny who has gotten Palmer his new job as an adjunct professor at St. Thomas More School of Law, teaching trial advocacy to three third-year law students.

Deanna comes to Parker to request that he talk to his former colleague and friend, Rich Baxter, who has been arrested on charges of illegal money transactions and embezzlement from his biggest client, the Church of the Sanctified Assembly.  The government alleges Rich stole seventeen million dollars, had it transferred out of the country, and was planning to leave the United States with a false passport found in his home.  Rich, through Deanna, begs Parker to take his case, swearing that he’s innocent of all the charges.  He also tells Parker that although Harmon’s death has been ruled a suicide, he knows it was murder.

Parker has his own sad history with the Assembly.  He was famous as Parky Gerald, a child movie star, pushed into a show business career by his mother.  Although there are laws protecting the earnings of minors, Parker’s mother managed to take nearly all of his earnings and give them to the Assembly.  When Parker was fifteen he sued to be an emancipated minor, and he hasn’t seen his mother in more than twenty years.

After meeting with Rich in jail Parker agrees to take the case, at least on a preliminary basis.  But when he arrives at court, his client is nowhere to be seen.  As the judge asks where the defendant is, a marshal comes into the courtroom, whispers to the judge, and the judge orders all attorneys into his office.  The news the marshal brings is that Rich Baxter has been found in his cell, a suicide.  So of the six partners of Macklin and Cherry, two have allegedly committed suicide.  Parker isn’t buying it.

Robert Rotstein is himself an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, and he knows the milieu well.  Parker Stern is a fascinating protagonist, reluctant at first to get back into the courtroom because of his disability.  But his loyalty to the remaining members of his former firm finally outweighs his fears.  The book’s other characters are equally interesting:  the bohemian Deanna, Parker’s former lover; his beautiful and bright law student, Lovely Diamond; the mysterious Grace Trimble, whom Parker hasn’t seen in years; and the members of the Assembly, where Parker is known as the First Apostate.

Corrupt Practices is a book that’s nearly impossible to put down.  There’s action on every page, and the insights into people’s characters are deep and well thought-out.  According to his web site, Robert Rotstein is at work on the second Parker Stern novel, and I’m looking forward to reading it when it’s published.

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

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Reads blog at this web site.

Fidel Castro’s Cuba takes center stage in Peggy Blair’s debut mystery The Beggar’s Opera.  As I say in my slightly-less-than-fluent Spanish, the book is muy, muy bueno.

Mike and Hillary Ellis, visitors to Cuba from Ottawa, are having a tough week.  The Ellises have been followed by a group of small boys begging for change, one of whom is more persistent than the others.  When Mike gives the child some pesos in spite of Hillary’s admonition not to, that seems to be the last straw for her, and she announces that she’s changed her reservation and will be flying home alone that evening.

Mike, who is a police detective, was on disability leave following the murder of his partner and his own attack by a knife-wielding suspect who was killed.  Now on vacation, Mike is determined to finish the rest of his week in Havana.  He goes into El Bar mi Media Naranja (Half an Orange), Hemingway’s favorite drinking place, and before long is approached by a jinetera, a prostitute; after downing several drinks, Ellis leaves the bar with her.  In the morning he awakes, alone, and his wallet and badge are gone.

Ricardo Ramirez is a police detective in Havana.  Early on Christmas Day he receives a phone call that the body of a young boy has been found on the rocks beneath the Malecon, Havana’s promenade.  The father of two young children, Ricardo is particularly anxious to solve this case, and it looks as if it will be easy.  A wallet was found on the boy’s body, and the passport with it is in the name of Mike Ellis.

When Ricardo and his colleague Rodriguez Sanchez bring Mike to the police station to interview him, he begins to understand how much trouble he is in.  At first he thinks he’s there because he asked the doorman at his hotel to report his missing wallet, badge, and passport to the police, and he is surprised by the amount of time the police are putting into the case.

“I broke the law by giving him money?” Mike asks.  “I’ll pay the fine then. I had no idea you people took this kind of thing so seriously.”  Detective Sanchez gives the suspect a disgusted look.  “The rape and murder of a child, Senor Ellis, is taken very seriously in Cuba.  We punish it by firing squad.”

The detectives have already searched Mike’s hotel room, no search warrant being needed in that country if a crime is suspected.  Mike is not entitled to a lawyer, but Ricardo does allow him to call his chief of police in Ottawa.  And although it’s Christmas Day, the chief arranges for Celia Jones, the police department’s attorney, to fly down to Havana to find out what’s going on.  Mike is slightly reassured, but his memory of the night before is so vague; can he really be certain that he didn’t kill young Arturo Montenegro?

The Beggar’s Opera is a fascinating book, with well-drawn characters and a city that is both familiar and exotic to most Americans.  There are three surprises at the end of the book, and each one is believable and satisfying.

You can read more about Peggy Blair at this web site.

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

Leonard Rosen is now two for two.  The Tenth Witness is a masterful follow-up to his debut novel, All Cry Chaos (reviewed on this blog).

The Tenth Witness, a prequel, opens with a prologue by the protagonist, Henri Poincare.  In All Cry Chaos he was a man approaching retirement, an inspector with Interpol.  In The Tenth Witness he is a young consulting engineer, a partner in the firm of Poincare & Chin, called in 1978 to oversee extracting gold from outdated computers for Kraus Steel, a global steel manufacturer.  The story is told in a single flashback.

Almost from his introduction to the Kraus family, Henri experiences split emotions.  He is immediately attracted to Liesel Kraus, who handles the publicity and charitable giving for the business’ foundation.  And he likes her brother Anselm and Anselm’s wife and young children.  But he is disturbed, unnerved, by meeting the original co-partner in Kraus Steel and now Anselm’s father-in-law, Viktor Schmidt.  Henri doesn’t know quite why, at least not yet.

Liesel Kraus makes no secret of how the family got started during the Hitler era.  Her father was a member of the Nazi party and ran his steel mills with slave labor.  But like Oskar Schindler, Liesel tells Henri, he saved people’s lives.  And when the war trials began, ten Kraus Steel laborers came forward and signed an affidavit in her father’s favor.  But still, she admits, “My father wore a swastika lapel pin.”

Henri travels with Viktor to see a facility the company owns in Hong Kong.  Viktor explains that when the ship is broken apart, every section of it is remade by the steel mill–pipes, wires, furniture–and reused.  The profits are enormous.  But what Henri sees are the incredibly dangerous conditions, conditions that never would be allowed in Europe.  He leaves Hong Kong with the thought that he doesn’t want to do business with the Kraus company, regardless of the profits that his engineering firm would make.  But when he sees Liesel again he changes his mind, and he accepts the commission.  And so Henri becomes involves with the Kraus family, their business and their secrets.

Just in case the readers are thinking that the Nazis were a special group of vermin, that other people didn’t do those things/have those kind of thoughts, Leonard Rosen sets them straight.  There are two scenes in the book that are so realistic, taking place more than two decades after the war, as to be unbearably painful.

In the first, after Henri has basically uncovered most of the dirty history of the Kraus Steel company, he and Liesel are outside a church when confronted by a Gypsy woman and her child who are begging for coins.  Liesel gives the child a coin, but Henri brushes past the woman and child.  He thinks to himself, A whole (expletive deleted) of cows.  He washes the sleeve where the Gypsy touched him, and then he understands what he was thinking.

I’ll leave the second scene, equally disturbing, for you to discover.

No such thing as a sophomore slump when it comes to Leonard Rosen’s second novel.  The writing is outstanding, clear and crisp, and the author holds your attention from the first page to the last.  The characters are real, and the decisions they make about life and business are real also.  Do not miss reading The Tenth Witness.

You can read more about Leonard Rosen at his web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Reads blog at this web site.

I’m not aware of any other mystery novels featuring a gray-haired fifty-nine-year-old female retired F.B.I. agent.  That’s one of the reasons that Rage Against the Dying is a most enjoyable read.

Brigid Quinn is trying to start a new life for herself in Tucson.  She’s happily married to Carlo, a charming ex-Catholic priest whom she met while taking his Buddhism course.  They’ve been married just a year, her first marriage and his second.  But Brigid is keeping lots of secrets from her husband because a former lover wasn’t able to deal with the violent and dangerous aspects of her job, and she’s worried that Carlo will feel the same way.

So even though Brigid is no longer an active agent, she’s fearful of letting Carlo know all the details of her past career.  Her specialty, she tells him as she tells anyone who asks, was copyright fraud, dull enough to stop inquisitive conversations dead in their tracks.

Her carefully kept secret life starts to unravel when Brigid is accosted in the desert by Gerald Peasil, who takes her by surprise and drags her into the cab of his truck.  When she sees the blood on the cab’s floor, she realizes she’s not his first victim. Surprising Gerald by her strength, in the ensuing fight she stabs his leg with the blade of her specially-designed walking stick, and he dies. Terrified at having to explain the homicide to Carlo, even though it was justified, Brigid manages to tip the truck into a nearby wash and heads home to clean herself off.

A week afterwards, deputy sheriff Max Coyote comes to the house to tell Brigid that they have caught the infamous Route 66 killer.  A man arrested two weeks earlier on a minor charge has now confessed to killing six young women, including Jessica Robertson, an F.B.I. agent who was Brigid’s protege.  Brigid has never forgiven herself for allowing Jessica to be used as a decoy to trap the Route 66 killer; she has agonized for years, fearing that she sent the young agent out before she was ready.  Jessica’s body was never recovered.

At first Laura Coleman, the young agent who interrogated the prisoner, Floyd Lynch, has no doubt of the truth of his confession and his guilt of the several murders abutting Route 66.  But as the interrogation tape is replayed, she begins to have doubts.  However, no one will listen to her; even Floyd’s own defense attorney believes in his admitted guilt.  So Laura turns to Brigid for help.

Brigid Quinn is a very interesting heroine.  A successful federal agent, she was forced to resign after an outcry to her fully justified shooting of a murderer.  That, in combination with her feelings of guilt over Jessica’s disappearance and presumed death, has made her a keeper of secrets, fearful that those closest to her will be horrified and unable to love her.  So her lies keep getting more and more involved, even as she agrees with Laura that Floyd Lynch is not the true Route 66 killer.  But if he’s not, who is?  And how did Floyd come to know details about those killings that were never released?

Becky Masterman has created a fascinating cast of characters in her debut novel, and Brigid Quinn is a protagonist worth following.  You can read more about her at this web site.

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

A recently blinded psychiatrist, a young man with severe developmental disabilities, and a dysfunctional married couple all come together to provide Lynn Raimondo’s fascinating debut novel, Dante’s Wood. 

Mark Angelotti was a successful psychiatrist in New York before some bad decisions and one tragic event forced him to leave that city and relocate to Chicago.  No one at his new hospital knows anything about his personal background, only his outstanding professional abilities, so it’s a chance for him to start over.

Two years after Mark arrives in Chicago, he is diagnosed with Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy, a gene mutation passed on from mother to son.  He gradually loses the sight in one eye, then a few weeks later in the other.  By incredible determination and hard work, he manages to learn Braille (very difficult to do after adolescence) and to relearn the many other things that he must do to have a normal life:  cook, travel alone via public transportation, dress himself.

Now that thirteen months have passed since the onset of his disease, Mark is back at work.  In his own words, he is “the same arrogant, uncaring, self-deceptive bastard I’d always been.”

His supervisor assigns him a case involving Charlie Dickerson, the eighteen-year-old son of a fellow physician at the hospital.  Charlie has Fragile X syndrome, the leading cause of mental retardation, and has the I.Q. of a six to nine year old.  His mother Judith believes that Charlie is being sexually abused by one of the staff members at the adolescent day care facility he attends, while his father Nate says he doesn’t believe this, and that is one of the many things about which this couple cannot agree.

After talking to Charlie, Mark believes he has found the answer to the issues that made his parents bring him to the psychiatrist, and the problem seems resolved.  Six months pass, and although Mark’s prowess in handling his blindness has improved, his mental state has not.  He feels as if his judgments are off, that he’s missing something.  His supervisor wonders if he has forced Mark to come back to work too soon, but Mark insists that that’s not the problem.  He’s just working things through.

Then he receives a call from the Dickersons.  Charlie has been arrested for murdering a staff member at his day care facility.  And yes, it’s the woman Judith Dickerson thought had been molesting him.

Mark is a very interesting character.  He’s bright, dedicated, and determined to live as close to a normal life as possible, all of which are admirable qualities.  But he has a secret that is tormenting him, not allowing him to be open and share his life with anyone.

And then, when Charlie is arrested, it makes even his professional abilities open to question.  Given his lack of a personal life, and the secret he has been holding onto since his move from Manhattan, if he loses his license to practice medicine he feels he will have nothing left.

The author’s description of Mark’s inner turmoil and his determination to get his life back on track make for a compelling novel.  I’m looking forward to the second in the Mark Angelotti series.

You can read more about Lynne Raimondo at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Reads blog at this web site.

Ordinary Grace is a wonderful, brilliant novel.  I’ve written about William Kent Krueger’s earlier book, Trickster’s Point, and Ordinary Grace surpasses even that excellent one with its beauty and understanding of family and human dynamics.

The book’s narrator, Frank Drum, is thirteen during the summer of 1961.   Frank’s father is a Methodist minister in the small town of New Bremen, Minnesota, a man of God in the best sense.  Frank’s mother conducts the choir in New Bremen and in two other small churches where her husband is the clergyman.  Although she has a beautiful voice and had hoped for a professional career, she is now resigned, but not happily, to living the life of a minister’s wife.

Frank’s eighteen-year-old sister Ariel is a talented pianist and composer who has been accepted to the Julliard School of Music, her lifelong dream.  But now, for some unstated reason, she tells her family she doesn’t want to go, that she would rather stay home and go to the local college and study music.

Frank’s younger brother is Jake, eleven years old.  Jake has a terrible stutter, making him the object of teasing and bullying to the point where he almost never speaks in public or in school.  At home his stutter disappears, but outside that safe environment he becomes almost mute.

Ordinary Grace opens with two deaths in a matter of hours.  The first is that of Bobby Cole, a young developmentally challenged boy who was killed on the town’s railroad trestle.  Did he simply not hear the train coming, or did something more sinister happen?  The next day Frank and Jake find the body of an itinerant man in nearly the same place.  That’s a lot of death for such a small town, but there are more deaths to come.

There’s a great deal of tension in New Bremen.  The relationship between Ruth and Nathan Drum is not an easy one, and she is unable or unwilling to understand the importance of God in her husband’s life, how he can keep his faith no matter what tragedies befall the town or the family.

There is an uneasy relationship between Ruth and her daughter’s piano teacher, Emil Brandt.  Ruth and Emil had been engaged very briefly years earlier, but he abandoned her and fled to New York City to pursue his career.  Now he’s returned home, badly scarred and blinded in a fire, his house kept by his sister Lise.  Lise is autistic, and her devotion to her brother is extreme.

But ordinary grace is seen throughout the book, especially in the person of Nathan Drum.  As a clergyman he doesn’t pretend to have all the answers when bad things happen to good people, but his faith in God remains secure. And through his goodness his family and his town manage to survive.

William Kent Krueger has written another outstanding novel, a coming-of-age story that will resonate with the reader long after the last page is read.  His characters are beautifully drawn, and life in a small town in the mid-twentieth century is detailed and accurate.

You can read more about him at this web site.

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