Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Reviews

If the mystery novel had been invented in the late 1700s or the early 1800s and Jane Austen had written one, this would have been her book.

Dido Kent is an unmarried woman of “five and thirty,” an age at which a woman’s chances of romance and marriage are virtually nil during this era. Luckily for Dido, she appears to have enough money so that she’s not concerned about her unmarried state; perhaps unluckily, she’s a woman with determination and brains, a combination that is not highly respected in the enclosed society in which she lives.

Dido is visiting her cousin Flora in Richmond when Flora’s neighbor dies suddenly, under somewhat suspicious circumstances.  Mrs. Lansdale, a wealthy middle-aged woman, dies after an argument with her nephew and heir, Henry Lansdale.  He is the gentleman of fortune of the title.

Henry left his aunt’s house against her wishes that night, as did Mrs. Lansdale’s other relation who lives in the house, Miss Neville.  What killed Mrs. Lansdale was an overdose of a sleeping draught (to use the British term), the Kendal Black Drop, four times the usual amount she took, according to the apothecary.

Henry Lansdale is obviously the chief suspect, partly due to the fact that he is his aunt’s only heir and partly due to the vicious gossip of a neighbor, Mrs. Midgely. Why Mrs. Midgely is so determined to blacken Henry’s name is part of the mystery, as she hardly knows him and wouldn’t appear to benefit by his imprisonment.

Henry is in love with Mrs. Midgely’s ward, Mary Bevan, and Mary is about to be sent north to become a governess after having lived with Mrs. Midgely and the late Mr. Midgely for nearly all her life.  Life as a governess is a difficult one, but it is one of only two professions open to decent women, the other being a teacher.  And for a woman who has never worked nor expected to, life as a governess would be a cruel descent down the social ladder.

But Mary has an “out,” another possibility.  Henry has proposed, and after some consideration she has accepted.  However, they need to keep their engagement secret, for public knowledge of it would only fuel the gossip that Henry poisoned his aunt so he could inherit her money and marry Mary.   Since Mary is a young woman without a fortune, she probably would not have been acceptable to the difficult Mrs. Lansdale.

Life at the time of George III was severely restricted. Dido is very circumscribed in trying to find out what happened to her neighbor, as gentlewomen don’t interest themselves in such things.  She’s also somewhat held back by her interest in William Lomax, a man who appears to care for her but not for her unseemly interest in crime.  Should she continue to look for the truth about Mrs. Lansdale’s death and thus possibly incur William’s displeasure, or should she be true to herself and her feeling that she alone cares enough to discover the facts of the case?

A Gentleman of Fortune is a charming mystery. Simply reading the title tells the reader about the time and place and even the circumstances surrounding the crime.  Anna Dean has gone back more than two hundred years to let readers know that with all the differences in society and a woman’s place in it, some things haven’t changed all that much.

You can read more about Anna Dean at her web site.

Salonika, Greece, in October 1940. World War II has been going on for a year, and Greece is not yet involved.  But the population knows that the invasion by the Nazi or Fascist troops cannot be far behind.  By 1941, Germany has overrun Slovakia, Hungary, Roumania (the old spelling), and Bulgaria.  Greece, with its huge coastline and its proximity to the Balkans, cannot be allowed to remain neutral.

Constantine Zannis, known as Costa, is a police detective in the port city of Salonika. He is involved with a British woman who is ostensibly in Salonika to run a ballet school, but that is merely her cover.  In fact, she is an espionage agent, a spy, and she is given orders to return to England as soon as it becomes obvious that Greece will soon by invaded by the Nazis.

Her replacement, Francis Escovil, has heard how Costa was able to help a German-Jewish woman slip two young children out of Germany and into Turkey.  Now Escovil wants Costa to give him the names of people in Germany who are working against the Nazis.  He doesn’t want to apply pressure on Costa, doesn’t think that will work, but he wants those names.  And Costa doesn’t want to give them to him, he just wants to go on helping Jews escape in his own way.

The characters in Spies of the Balkans are international. In addition to Costa (Greek) and his lover Roxanne (British), the reader is introduced to Celebi, the Turkish consul; Emilia Krebs, a Jewish woman helping others out of Germany; Salmi Pal, a Hungarian criminal living in Salonika; Ivan Lazareff, a friend in Bulgaria.  All these disparate people are working willingly or not to stop the Nazis.

Spies of the Balkans is a look back to the beginning of the Second World War in Greece. It was a poor country, very much unprepared to face the enormous armies of Germany and Italy.  But its people were fearless fighters, and the overwhelming odds against them did not stop them from trying to protect their homeland from invasion.

The novel traces the steps taken by the various individuals to get Jews and other resisters out of Germany and the occupied countries.  Money was needed, of course, to obtain forged papers–birth certificates, visas–and to be used for bribes, when necessary.  What is fascinating is those who helped people escape without asking for, or accepting, money.

When Emilia Krebs comes to Costa to ask for his help in getting two children out of Germany and into neutral Turkey, she says, “I can never thank you enough.  For helping me.”  “You don’t have to thank me,” he said.  “Who could say no?”  The goodness and naivete in his statement still resonate more than seventy years later.

Alan Furst has written a book that is difficult to put down. Each clandestine operation that Costa takes part in is different from those before it, and each one depends not only on him but others.   One misreading by Costa of someone he has asked for help and his life and those of the refugees would be forfeit.

Calling Spies of the Balkans a thriller is calling it by its true name. It’s a great read from first page to last, and that’s no hyperbole.  The last page will bring you to tears.

You can read more about Alan Furst at his web site.

They called it The Great War or The War to End All Wars, but it was neither. The better name for it, the name that obviously could come only after 1939, was World War I.  It was a horror.  In Great Britain alone, over half a million men died in action or from wounds, and a quarter of a million more were missing in action, their bodies never recovered.

Many men returned home in pitiable condition, with mental and physical problems that British society had difficulty coming to terms with.  One of these men is the one whose name appears in the title of this novel, Captain John Emmett.

As the story opens, Captain Emmett has been dead for several months, dead by his own hand. His sister Mary writes to Laurence Bartram, a former schoolmate and friend of her brother’s, wanting to meet him to see if he can shed some light on why her brother, having endured the war, had to be institutionalized upon his return and then committed suicide.

Faced with his own problems, Laurence Bartram is reluctant to investigate.  While he was at the front, his young wife and their newborn son died in the hospital.   That tragedy propelled Laurence into a mild depression, and he also has a total lack of interest in making any plans for his future.  However, remembering the kindness of the Emmett family when he and John attended the same school as adolescents, Laurence agrees to investigate the circumstances that led to John’s death.

There’s an incredible amount of social and military history in this novel.  I find the era of World War I fascinating, as it led to so many changes in British society. The rigid class system was very much in effect before, during, and even after the war, and it’s amazing to read of the stratification of men according to their birth.  Only men who graduated from “public” schools (which Americans call “private” schools) could become officers, no matter how incompetent they might be or how much more worthy the lower caste men under them might be.

The main issue around Captain John Emmett’s death seems to revolve around the execution he was forced to be part of, the almost unheard execution of an Army officer. Only three British officers were executed during World War I; over 300 British and Commonwealth non-commissioned soldiers were sentenced to death, although most sentences were commuted.  However, the disparity was still great, as if the military minds could barely conceive of an officer doing something that warranted the ultimate punishment.

Laurence’s investigation proves more difficult than he had imagined.  Every person he speaks to in the course of trying to unravel the reason behind John’s death has lost someone in the war–a son, brother, or husband.  Talking about it three years later only reopens the wounds, and many don’t want that.  But Laurence persists, along with his friend Charles, partly because his friend’s sister has asked him to, partly due to guilt over his own relatively safe war, and partly because he has nothing else to occupy his time.  But Laurence finds that his questioning takes him to places he’d rather not go.

Elizabeth Speller’s The Return of Captain John Emmett is a fascinating read. The novel was chosen as one of the Wall Street Journal‘s Top Ten Mysteries of 2011, and it’s easy to see why.  The writing is moving, the book is well researched, and the story of the men who went to war and the families they left behind resonates today.

You can read more about Elizabeth Speller at her web site.

There’s a reason the Mississippi Delta gave birth to The Blues. Rick Gavin’s picture of life there is pretty dismal.  His protagonist, repo man Nick Reid, has given up a job with the police in a small Virginia town for reasons that are not explained.  For another unexplained reason, he’s moved to Indianola, Mississippi, a dismal small Delta town surrounded by towns that are even deeper into poverty and despair.

When Nick goes to the place where Percy Dwayne Dubois lives (calling it a home would be an over-the-top compliment) to repossess a forty-two inch plasma television set on which Percy Dwayne has neglected to make payments, his arrival isn’t greeted happily.  Percy Dwayne hits Nick over the head with a shovel, and while Nick is lying stunned on the kitchen floor, Percy Dwayne’s wife suggests that they should hack him up and pack him off to the woods in a sack.

After tying Nick up, to add insult to injury Percy Dwayne, his wife, and their diaper-clad toddler son make their getaway in the Ranchero, a beautiful 1969 vehicle that Nick borrowed from his landlady. A Ranchero is “sort of a low-slung, boxy coupe in the front and a shallow truck in the back,” and apparently this particular vehicle was in mint condition, its coral-colored paint gleaming as if it had just come off the assembly line at Ford.

Before going off in the Ranchero to repossess the TV, Nick had promised his landlady that he would take scrupulous care of her late husband’s car, and that’s the premise of the novel.  All Nick really wants to do is to recover the car and repossess the television, but life is much more complicated than that.

This is a very low-key premise on which to write a mystery novel–no kidnapping, no murder, no rape.  But in Rick Gavin’s extraordinarily capable hands, there’s as much tension here as in any high-concept novel or movie. And there is an incredible amount of humor as well.

Nick Reid is very much a man of mystery in this first novel, which I hope will soon be followed by others. His new job is definitely a come-down from his previous one, he seems to have no family or friends left behind in Virginia, and the reader doesn’t know anything about his background.  What we do know is that he’s a man who keeps his promises, regardless of the “tussling” it costs him.  He pursues Percy Dwayne across the Delta, meeting up with various characters who make the fugitive seem like a gentleman and a scholar.

The author’s descriptions of the houses and scenery of the Delta are staggering.  Percy Dwayne’s “front room was shin-deep in trash and pieces of cast-off clothing.”  Describing how he got out of the ropes with which the couple had tied him, Nick says, “Because they were shiftless trash, I was almost half a minute working loose.”  And going to find a man named Luther, who may or may not know where Percy Dwayne and his wife have fled, Nick and his friend Desmond drive down Lee Boulevard in Webb, Mississippi, where instead of statues of Confederate luminaries on horseback there are car engines rigged to live oaks with blocks and tackles.

This first novel is too good to put down, so be prepared to read it straight through. Unfortunately, there’s no biography or web page I could find for Rick Gavin, only a brief blurb on the novel’s back cover.  “Rick Gavin frames houses and hangs Sheetrock in Ruston, Louisiana, when he’s not writing.  This is his first novel.”  I’m hoping he puts down his framing tools and goes back to his computer as soon as possible.

Returning war veteran Spero Lucas is trying to find himself after Iraq. He knows he doesn’t want a nine-to-five job, doesn’t want to return to college, doesn’t want a complex romantic relationship, at least not now.  So what does he want?

While trying to figure that out, Spero takes a job as an unlicensed investigator for a D.C. attorney.  The attorney’s client, Anwan Hawkins, is awaiting trial for selling drugs, but Anwan doesn’t appear to be worried about that.  What he’s worried about is two packages of drugs that have disappeared while under the care of his two subordinates.

Anwan has a scheme going that has worked well until now.  His suppliers send him the drugs via FedEx, to homes that Anwan has previously scouted out as being unoccupied during the day.  The packages are left on porches and are tracked on the Internet by Anwan’s associates; within five minutes of the deliveries they’re picked up.  The owners of the homes never even realize that packages were delivered to their houses; after all, they didn’t order anything.  A foolproof scheme, it would seem, except that these two boxes have been intercepted.

Spero’s cut is forty percent, which in this case would amount to fifty-two thousand dollars per package, not too shabby for what he thinks will be a job that’s not too difficult.  He meets Anwan’s two business associates, young men in their late teens or early twenties–Tavon Lynch and Edwin Davis.

What Spero finds hard to understand is how Anwan’s scenario has unraveled since he’s been jailed. If, as Tavon tells Spero, no one other than himself and Edwin knew about the package deliveries, which they were following via a GPS, how did someone manage to steal the boxes in less than the five minutes it took Tavon and Edwin to get to the houses?

Spero starts investigating and finds a young man who may be a witness to one of the highjackings.  He’s Ernest Lindsay, a student at the high school where Spero’s brother teaches.  When Spero attempts to interview him, Ernest bolts.  But encouraged by Spero’s brother, Ernest agrees to talk to Spero and tell him about the FedEx package he saw taken from a neighbor’s porch.

In Cut, George Pelecanos has introduced an interesting, nuanced protagonist. There’s much to admire about Spero–his devotion to his mother and respect for his brother, his admiration for his late father, and his insistence on seeing the job he was hired for through to the end, even though Anwan tells him he’s done his best and should let it go.  On the other hand, Spero has some less-than-admirable characteristics–his casual approach to the women in his life, his disregard for the law when it suits his purpose.  How much of Spero’s behavior can be attributed to the things he saw in Iraq is hard to know, but that experience certainly had an influence on him.

There’s definitely a wonderful sense of place in this novel. As the author has Spero drive around the capital you can follow him from street to street, almost as if there were a map on the book’s pages.  The scenes of the two young gangsters, in over their heads in an underworld they don’t understand, are extremely well done; even though these two men have broken numerous laws, there’s still a sense of sympathy for the plight in which they find themselves.  They think they’re tough, but they’re babes in the woods compared to others out there.

You can read more about George Pelecanos at his web site.

Mary DiNunzio is a successful lawyer in an all-women law firm in Philadelphia. She’s smart, compassionate, hasn’t forgotten where she came from, and is the rainmaker of the firm.  So why is she so intimidated by a visit from her high school nemesis, Trish Gambone, who led the Mean Girls and made Mary’s life miserable at St. Maria Goretti High?   But then, don’t we all carry our high school memories with us forever?

Trish is in trouble, big time, which is why she found her way to Mary’s office. She’s been living with Bobby, her high school sweetheart for years, but he’s become more and more abusive toward her.  She’d love to leave him, but he’s “connected” (a low-level member of the Philadelphia mob).  And Trish is afraid that Bobby is going to propose tonight, as it’s her birthday.

She’s come to Mary for help, but she doesn’t like the options that Mary offers:  get a restraining order against Bobby or leave Philly for a while in hopes that Bobby will cool off and forget her.  She storms out of the office, leaving a stunned Mary behind.  What Trish doesn’t know is that Mary and Bobby went out together for a short while in high school, and he was Mary’s first love.  Mary’s upset that Bobby has become a brutal man, upset to find out that she’s still afraid of Trish and the Mean Girls, upset to find that she still harbors feelings for Bobby for a reason that doesn’t become clear until well into the novel.

And that night, the night of her birthday, Trish disappears. The remaining three Mean Girls stomp into Mary’s office the next day, furious at Mary for not helping Trish.  They’d gone to the police, but since Trish was an adult and hadn’t been missing for the required forty-eight hours, they couldn’t do anything yet.  So the Mean Girls want Mary to fix everything.  They refuse to admit that Trish might be dead, they just want her found.

Feeling guilty, Mary agrees to help and enlists the M.G.s in her search. But her involvement means putting off several of her clients from her old neighborhood, and before she knows what’s happened her former neighbors are turning against her.  They’re mad she didn’t help Trish, one of their own, and mad that her search for Trish means she’s putting off their cases.  It doesn’t make sense, but then emotions rarely do.

In addition to looking for Trish, Mary is also involved with a young boy who’s being bullied at school and whom his mother feels has significant learning disabilities.  Mary’s attempts to try to find a psychologist to test him speak to the all-too-real inadequacies and limitations of today’s schools, given the economic times and the number of children who need help.

And then there’s the possibility of a romance with the son of a neighbor. Mary’s husband died several years ago, but she’s not sure she’s ready for another romance in her life.  But Anthony is good looking, smart, and a terrific cook.  What should she do?  And why did he have to come along when Mary is frantic over the possibility that she is partly responsible for Trish’s disappearance and possible death?

Lisa Scottoline is a prolific writer, the author of eighteen novels, many featuring the women of Rosato and Associates, the firm where Mary works. She also writes a weekly column called “Chick Wit” for the Philadelphia Inquirer.   Although her books tackle serious subjects, they’re written with a sense of humor that keeps them somewhat closer to the “cozy” path than the “violent” one.

You can read more about Lisa Scottoline at her web site.

Twenty-five years after the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in what was then the Soviet Union, anti-nuclear protesters haven’t forgotten it. Now the scene of the struggle is New Hampshire, with power plant executives and unions on one side and the students and conservationists on the other.

Lewis Cole is a former Department of Defense operative currently living the quiet life in rural New Hampshire. Due to the sensitive nature of his past career, the DoD has been paying him a salary, with his cover being a reporter for a monthly magazine.  But now that magazine has changed editors, and the new editor is a hard-nosed woman who wants more stories from Lewis, ones with more bite.  Reluctantly Lewis agrees to continue working on the magazine, and as luck would have it his first assignment under this editor, Denise Pinchett-Volk, is the protest at the Falconer nuclear plant.

Lewis meets up with a friend, Paula Quinn, at the protest; she is a reporter and assistant editor for the local paper.  Lewis is content to hang back and see what happens, but Paula wants to be at the front of the crowd to get some photos of the anti-nuke leader, Bronson Toles.  He’s a charismatic leader of the protesters and also the owner of a local nightclub.

Paula pushes her way up to the stage and starts snapping photos, with Lewis staying as close to her as possible because he’s feeling some very bad vibes from the audience.  In the midst of Bronson’s speech, two radical young men mount the stage with cries of “Bronson’s too weak,” and Paula jumps up on the stage to get “a great photo.”  A moment later a shot rings out–Bronson falls to the stage floor with his head shattered, and Paula falls next to him.

At this point in his life Lewis is surrounded by women.  Paula, taken to the hospital for treatment of shock, was his former lover and is now a close friend.   Haleigh Miller is a University of New Hampshire student who’s attending the protest but is appalled by the violence she sees.  Diane Woods, a member of the town’s police department, is another close friend; she’s having problems with the woman she loves.  Lewis is seriously involved with Annie Wynn, a staff member of a U.S. senator who is running for president.  And of course there’s Denise Pinchett-Volk,  the editor from hell.

Deadly Cove is the seventh book in the Lewis Cole series. Brendan DuBois is an excellent writer with a knack for making his characters so realistic that you are sure you must have met them in person before reading about them in his books.  They have real problems and emotions, and the solutions aren’t cut and dried.  Even the protest between the two sides isn’t black and white, but gray.  The power plant officials believe they’re running a needed and clean operation; the union men and women want and need the jobs that the new power plant will create; the students and conservationists believe that every nuclear plant has a built-in potential for catastrophe.  There’s right and wrong on every side of the argument, and DuBois doesn’t patronize his readers with facile answers.

You can read more about Brendan DuBois at his web site.

Iceland in the fall–it’s cold, dark, and rainy. A perfect setting for a “typical Icelandic crime” that turns out to be anything but.

Just a word of explanation at the beginning, taken from “A Note on Icelandic Names” that prefaces Jar City:  “Icelanders always address each other by first names…People are listed by their first names even in the telephone directory.”  So the following names are all first names.

Inspector Erlandur is called to investigate the murder of an elderly man after a neighbor’s young son discovers the body.  The apartment in which the victim is found is on the lower floor in a small apartment building, dark and dank.  It appears that Holberg was killed by a heavy glass ashtray being thrown at his head, not exactly a certain way to kill anyone.  As Erlandur’s assistant, Detective Sigurdur Oli comments, “Isn’t this your typical Icelandic murder?  Squalid, pointless and committed without any attempt to hide it, change the clues or conceal the evidence.”

But there are two strange items in the apartment.  The first is the note left on the dead man’s body:  “I Am Him.”  The second is a faded photo hidden in a drawer; it’s a headstone over a little girl’s grave with the name Audur on it and the dates 1964-1968.

When Erlandur returns home after seeing Holberg’s body, he’s surprised by a visit from his daughter.  Eva Lind is a young woman with many problems, most notably drugs.  Erlandur and Eva Lind’s mother have been divorced for many years, and he’s had very little contact with her or her brother.  She comes to her father for money, which he refuses to give her.  Then she throw out her surprise–she’s pregnant.

Simultaneously, another crime is reported at the other end of the Icelandic social order.  A bride has disappeared on her wedding day, actually from the sumptuous wedding itself, leaving only the cryptic note “He’s a monster.  What have I done?”  The bride’s parents and her new husband profess to know no reason why she should have disappeared the way she did.  But for Erlandur, this needs to take a backseat to the murder of the old man.

A little investigation shows that Holberg was not a model citizen, to put it kindly. Many years ago he was accused of raping a young woman he met at a dance.  When the woman went to the police with her accusation, a hostile police officer refused to investigate, saying she had made the whole thing up.

In the background of the crimes is the question of what it means to be a father. Can one be a father if all he did was contribute his sperm during a rape?  Can one be a father if he sexually assaults his daughter?  Can one be a father if he has little or no contact with his children because of a divorce?  Like other Nordic writers, Indridason writes about social issues that arise in his country, issues of violence and domestic problems that are world-wide.

This book was one of the novels I read for the course I took this fall entitled “A Sense of Place:  Murder Mysteries ‘Round the World.” Jar City was written with an incredible sense of place.  The city of Reykjavik and the country of Iceland are brought fully to life.  It’s a place of great homogeneity, but it’s filled with secrets.  It’s not a novel for the faint of heart, but it is so beautifully written that it’s worth reading past the violence to delve into the culture of a country that is unfamiliar to many of us.

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

Lydia Chin and Bill Smith are together again. They are private investigators in New York City; given Lydia’s ethnicity, they do a lot of investigating in Chinatown.

Quietly drinking tea in a Lower East Side tearoom, Lydia is approached by a new client.  He introduces himself as Jeff Dunbar, a man interested in contemporary Chinese art.  Lydia is a bit put off by this, wondering if he has chosen her for her “Chineseness” or her knowledge of Chinese art; if so, she thinks, he’s in for a rude surprise.  Her lack of knowledge of art, most especially contemporary Chinese art, is profound.

Dunbar tells her it’s not her knowledge of the art scene that made him come to her but her reputation at finding people or things. What he wants her to look into is a rumor circulating around the city’s galleries that several previously unknown paintings by Chau Chun, a Chinese artist who was killed in Tiananmen Square in the 1989 uprising, have surfaced in New York.  Dunbar portrays himself as a new collector who wants to find out if these painting exist and, if they do, to get them, authenticate them, and sell them.

But Lydia isn’t taking him at his word.  After he gives her a retainer and leaves, she searches through the web for information about him–no hits.  He gave her a card with his name and cell phone number but no company name, address, or e-mail.  And his clothing and demeanor don’t shout money to her either.  Her suspicions are aroused.

Intrigued by Lydia’s description of and questions about Dunbar, Bill Smith brings her to a friend of his, another Chinese-American private detective, Jack Lee. After hearing Lydia’s story about her new client, Jack shares his own–he too has just been approached by a client to find these paintings.  But his client wants to find the paintings, if they exist, to declare them fraudulent.  The client, a Professor Yang at New York University, was a friend of Chau Chun’s in Beijing, and he knows there are no recent or undiscovered paintings by the artist because he was there when the artist was killed.

There’s a strong sense of Chinatown in this novel, with its winding streets and myriad restaurants; the food descriptions alone make the book worth reading.  There’s also a fair amount of humor in this novel, more than I remember in previous books in this series.  The art scene is portrayed as a dog-eat-dog one, with money being the prime motivator.  Lydia’s stereotypical mother makes an appearance, as does her cousin, a nineteen-year-old techie who can find out just about anything Lydia want to know.

The only problem I had with the book with the lack of a crime. It’s really a “cozy” in the sense that there’s little violence, little crime, and no deaths.  The mystery and the plot are strong, but I would have enjoyed a bit more tension than was present.

You can read more about S. J. Rozen at her web site.

A woman is struggling with the heavy suitcase she’s just removed from a storage locker.  She manages to get it to her car, but before putting it in the trunk she decides to open it.  “In the suitcase was a boy:  naked, fair-haired, rather thin, about three years old….Not until she saw his lips part slightly did she realize he was alive.”

This first-time collaboration by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis is a terrific read. Taking place both in Denmark and Lithuania, it tells the story from various points of view.  There are several main characters, but so skillfully is the story told that there’s no confusion about who is who or whose voice the reader is listening to.

After the one-page prologue, the first voice is that of Jan, obviously a successful businessman in Copenhagen who is doing something that he must keep secret from his wife. Whatever it is involves something either illegal or immoral, but something is driving Jan to do it “whatever the price.”

The second voice is that of a man named Jucas.  He’s an unknown quantity, driving in the Lithuanian countryside with his lover and dreaming of their future together. But there’s “just one little thing to be done first.”

We then hear from Sigita in Taurage, Lithuania. She’s at a playground with her young son when a woman comes to the playground’s gate to offer young Mikas a piece of chocolate.  Upset by this intrusion, Sigita chases her away and continues playing with her son and drinking coffee from her thermos.  And then everything goes black.

The fourth main character is Nina, a nurse at a Red Cross immigrant center in Copenhagen, who receives a call from a friend. Nina is caring and compassionate, perhaps overly so.  Although she and her friend Karin have not been close in recent years, when Karin asks to meet her as soon as possible, Nina agrees.  Karin needs a favor, a suitcase to be picked up.  When Nina demurs, Karin retorts, “You’re always so keen on saving people, aren’t you?…Well, here’s your chance.”

The plot weaves back and forth between these four characters, plus several others, and between the two countries.  On the periphery is a bewildered husband whose wife is gone without explanation, foreign teenage prostitutes in Denmark, a frightened child, a reluctant policeman.

The central mystery, of course, is why this child has been kidnapped. We learn that he is the son of a single mother who was drugged and attacked so that he could be taken.  But there are no ransom notes, no demands of any kind.  And if there were, Sigita has no money to pay.  So why would her child have been abducted?

I often don’t enjoy stories told in very short chapters by a variety of people.  That style of writing makes me think that the author didn’t know how to segue from one scene or one character to the other.  But that’s not how I felt reading The Boy in the Suitcase. Lene Kaaberbol is the author of numerous fantasy books, and Agnete Friis is a journalist and author of children’s books.  Together they are a marvelous pair.  The first page of this novel grabbed me, and that feeling continued through to the very end.

Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friss don’t have a web page together, but you can read very brief biographies of them at various web pages.

Every once in a while I open a first novel by an author and know within a few pages that I’m going to love that book. That happened to me when I read the opening chapter of Fall From Grace.

Wayne Arthurson’s protagonist is Leo Desroches, a journalist in Edmonton, Alberta.  He’s half Cree Aboriginal and half French Canadian, a man who takes medicine for an unnamed emotional illness, a divorced father of two who hasn’t seen his children in five years, and a compulsive gambler.  There’s only one problem, or at least it’s his most troubling one–whenever he’s stressed or trying to avoid his gambling compulsion, he robs banks.  Some people do yoga, Desroches steals money.

He’s also a first-rate newspaper reporter, trying to take advantage of a lucky break to get his career back on track.  He’s gotten another chance with an Edmonton daily because years earlier he had worked with the paper’s current managing editor at a small town weekly.  Shortly before the novel opens Desroches was a scab who crossed union picket lines during a month-long strike.  When the strike was over, he was invited to stay on as a reporter on the police beat.

As the book begins, Desroches is viewing the body of a young Indian woman who was strangled. Although assured by the police detective in charge of the case that all murder victims are equal and all police efforts are expended to find the murderer, Desroches believes that when the victim is “known to the police for her high-risk life style” (p. c. talk for being a prostitute), there is the feeling that she was partly responsible for her own death.

The more Desroches finds out about Grace, the murdered young woman, the more involved he gets.  After some additional research, he believes that the city of Edmonton has been stalked over a period of years by a serial killer whose victims are prostitutes, mostly Native Americans.  The police decry this theory, mainly because the city has never had a serial killer before; the murder of Grace Cardinal seems to fall through the cracks.

Following this story is proving hazardous to Desroches’ mental and physical health. During the course of the novel he’s beaten up and Tasered; so, of course, to relieve his stress, he robs two banks.  But nothing stops him from continuing to follow the story of the dead women.

Desroches is also trying to make amends to his wife and children for his abandonment of them.  Although he respects his wife and her ability to create a warm and safe home for their two children without him, he calls her in hopes that she will allow him a brief meeting with the children.  His evening with his adolescent son is one of the most touching in the novel.

Wayne Arthurson puts the reader into a big city in the Canadian prairie.  It has some of the problems that similar-size American cities have, but there are differences too.  Arthurson makes the most of his own ethnic background of Cree and French-Canadian parents by giving Desroches the same mix.  Desroches is battling a lot of demons, not all of which we understand, but we do understand that he’s pretty much an outsider in this Western Canadian place.  That can make it easier to be an objective journalist and make it harder to simply be a man.

You can read more about Wayne Arthurson at this web site.

We need to go back in time over four hundred years, to 1592 to be exact. To the city of Prague, where the semi-benevolent Kaiser Rudolph II rules Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in an ethnic mix that can boil over at the slightest provocation.  And the fact that the first night of the Jewish Passover and the Christian Good Friday fall on the same day this year is exactly that provocation.

The title character in The Fifth Servant is a shammes (sexton) named Benyamin Ben-Akiva, newly arrived from a small town in western Poland to the big city of Prague. Although of course an observant Jew, he nonetheless is a follower of Rabbi Judah Loew, a reformist rabbi who stands slightly outside of the tight circle of rabbis who head the various synagogues within the walled ghetto where all Jews are forced to live.

As The Fifth Servant opens, Benyamin is awakened by a piercing cry that turns out to be that of a father looking for his missing daughter.  After Benyamin runs out of his shared bedroom (three people to a bed) in a rooming house and across the street, he comes upon the body of a Christian girl lying dead on the floor of a Jewish butcher shop.

The old familiar charge of blood libel is being tossed around the small shop, that being the term for the belief that at Passover time Jews kill Christian children for their blood to make matzoh, something that the enraged crowd all-too-easily believes. But before the people can erupt into violence against the butcher and his family, the shammes reminds them that the Jews of Prague are vassals of the emperor and under his protection.  So the city’s sheriff allows Benyamin and several rabbis to go to emperor and plead their case for the butcher to be transferred from the city’s jail to the emperor’s, where he presumably will be safer.  The emperor then gives Benyamin three days, until the night of Easter Sunday, to produce the killer; otherwise, it is certain that the butcher will be killed.

The Fifth Servant is as much a historical novel as it is a mystery. There is an incredible amount of research that has obviously gone into the writing of this novel.  There’s the combination of Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, and Czech languages; the detailed explanation of Jewish prayers and beliefs; the conflict between the fifteen-hundred-year-old Catholic church and its upstart rival, the Protestant church; and the story of the Jewish people, always subject to the whims of whatever man happened to be in power in the country where they lived.

Kenneth Wishnia does a masterful job in creating not only this broad landscape but also the miniature sketches of the characters who people the city, some major and some minor. In addition to the shammes Benyamin and his teacher Rabbi Loew, there is a cast of dozens:  the visiting Catholic bishop who has come to Prague to ferret out the witches and sorcerers he knows live there; the sheriff of Prague who is willing to listen to Benyamin protesting the blood libel; the Christian servant Anya who is in love with a young rabbi; the emperor who wants to learn the secrets known only to his Jewish subjects; and the Jewish residents of the ghetto and the Christian residents of the city who view each other with suspicion and enmity.

You can read more about Kenneth Wishnia at his web site.

Alice Humphrey has been unemployed for eight months, and she’s desperate for a job. Her career in the art world has been a rather undistinguished one, so when a chance meeting at a New York City art gallery produces a job offer from a charming stranger, she accepts despite the warnings of her best friend Lily.

Alice comes from a prominent, wealthy family, but not a particularly happy one.  Her father is an Oscar-winning director, her mother a former actress who also won an Oscar.  But their marriage has always been a rocky one, what with her father’s alcoholism and sexual affairs and her mother’s refusal to deal with anything that would disturb her life.  And Alice’s older brother, Ben, is a drug addict, perhaps recovering, perhaps not.

The gallery Alice has been hired to run will open under two conditions, according to Drew Campbell, the man who offered her the position. The first is that the man whose money is funding the gallery must remain anonymous; the second is that his young protegee must have a three week solo show of his photographs to open the gallery.  Alice is somewhat mystified by these conditions, but she agrees.  When she sees the photographer’s work she’s upset by his evident lack of talent, but she decides to make the best of it–after all, it’s only for three weeks, then she’s free to choose the art for the gallery.

But when the show opens, it’s picketed by the Reverend George Hardy of the Redemption of Christ Church because he says it’s showing pornographic photos of underage girls.  There’s nothing to be done, according to Alice’s call to the New York City’s 311, non-emergency, line; the picketers are entitled to express their First Amendment rights.

And two days later Alice gets a phone call from Drew, saying there are some problems and he has to see her the next morning at the gallery.  When she arrives and lets herself in, she trips over his corpse.

Alafair Burke does an excellent job of combining Long Gone’s various story lines. In addition to Alice’s problems, there’s the F.B.I. detective who has been following, against orders, the man he holds responsible for his sister’s death.  There’s also the teenage girl who’s gone missing from her New Jersey home.  When all three story lines converge, the entire picture becomes clear.  The sense of scene is excellent, whether the author is describing the Highline Gallery, named for the newly constructed High Line Park on the lower west side of New York City, or a suburban New Jersey high school filled with jocks and cheerleaders.

Alice Humphrey is a very appealing heroine. She’s led a protected, if not especially happy, life, cosseted by her family’s position and money.  She knows that her father’s money paid for her previous job, and now she’s very determined to make it on her own.  No more favors, thank you.

She been having an on-again, off-again romance for some time; at the moment it’s on, but there’s a very substantial stumbling block in the relationship just waiting for someone to trip over it.  Her relationship with her brother has its own difficulties.  He’s happy to talk against their parents, but he lives in a condo his father pays for and hasn’t had a real job for years.  And Alice’s fear of her brother’s drug use has added an additional emotional toll to every conversation they have.

Alafair Burke is also the author of two series; Long Gone is her first stand-alone. You can read more about her at her web site.

Can one ever recover from an unhappy childhood? This novel is full of people whose sad memories still haunt them, and to some extent control them, many years later.

In The Black  Path, Asa Larsson brings back two of her characters from previous books:  police inspector Anna-Maria Mella and attorney Rebecka Martinsson. Up in Tornetrask, northern Sweden, the two are brought together to work on the brutal murder of business executive Inna Wattrang. Her body was found abandoned in an ark, a wooden hut used in ice fishing.  Inna was beautiful, intelligent, successful, but someone hated her enough to both torture her and then stab her to death.  Why?

Anna-Maria is the head of the homicide force in the small city of Kiruna.  She’s happily married, the mother of four children.  Rebecka Martinsson is a well-respected attorney in Stockholm, originally from Kiruna, who has just been released from a mental hospital, having suffered a breakdown after seeing the murdered body of a close friend and then being forced to kill three men in self-defense.  Now Rebecka wants nothing more than to return to the house in which she grew up and to be left alone.  But that is not to be.

Inna’s boss and her brother, his business partner, are brought in to identify her body.  Her boss, Mauri Kallis, is a self-made multi-millionaire, a rarity in a country where one’s birth still counts in society. Abandoned by a father he never knew, neglected by a mother with a mental illness, brought up in a foster family with a vicious older foster “brother,” Mauri has tried to put all that behind him by pretending it never happened.  Never given love or attention during his childhood, he’s unable to give them to his wife and two young sons.  There’s a cold core in his center, and he’s not interested in thawing it out.

All he’s interested in is making money–it’s money, after all, that has given him the clout to build both physical and metaphysical walls between himself and the rest of the world.  So far Mauri has had the Midas touch, always knowing when to put money into a business and when to take it out, but with his new mining venture in Uganda, he may be in over his head.

Inna’s brother Diddi has slid through life with his good looks and charming manner, despite his own unhappy upbringing. But his dissolute ways are catching up to him.  He’s been a partner with Mauri in their firm–Mauri is Mr. Inside, Diddi is Mr. Outside–but he’s losing his touch with the important, rich people the firm needs in order to continue to make its risky investments.

Can the possible business problems and the cooling personal relationship between her boss and her brother explain why Inna was killed?  Are those issues central to her murder or merely peripheral?

There’s a strong friendship building between Anna-Maria and Rebecka, two women who don’t have much in common. Anna-Maria’s life, in her opinion, is just about perfect, giving her both a happy family and professional success.  On the other hand, Rebecka’s demons, brought about in great part by a neglectful mother (they’re everywhere in this novel), have made her successful in work but fearful in her personal life.  Attracted to a colleague in her Stockholm law firm, she’s convinced herself that she’s not worthy of his attention, much less his love, and is almost suicidal in her despair at ever finding someone with whom to share her life.

A wonderful character study as well as an engrossing, if very dark, novel, Asa Larsson’s series continues to bring northern Sweden closer to us.

Ms. Larsson doesn’t appear to have an English web page, but you can read more about her at this web page.

I don’t know of any other mystery series that takes place in Saudi Arabia. Author Zoe Ferraris has definitely found a niche of her own, and judging by her debut novel she’s doing an excellent job.

Nouf, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a fabulously wealthy Saudi Bedouin family, has been missing for several days when her brother Othman contacts his friend, desert guide Nayir ali-Sharqi, to find her. Nayir is in the desert with a search party when he’s informed that the girl’s body has been found by another family member.

Wanting to make certain that the body found is indeed Nouf’s, Nayir goes to the medical examiner’s office.  Nayir is upset to learn that the examiner, apparently following the family’s instructions, finds that Nouf’s death was a tragic accident; the examiner’s assistant, Katya Hizari, isn’t so sure.

Nayir is completely taken aback by Katya. In a country where a woman is forbidden to drive, where she needs her father’s or husband’s permission to hold a job, where there are religious police patrolling the streets to make certain that a woman’s face, hands, and ankles can’t be seen beneath her burkqa, the assistant examiner seems far too free for Nayir’s comfort.  What kind of a woman would work in a medical examiner’s office anyway, assisting at autopsies?

What was Nouf doing in the desert in the first place, Nayir wonders? How could she have left her controlling family, evaded her escort (a combination of chauffeur and guardian), stolen a truck and a camel from the family compound, and made her way to the desert, only to drown in a wadi?  And what about that bruise on her head and those marks on her wrists?

Nayir is a man who is ill-at-ease with women in general.  That’s not surprising in a society in which parents make matches for their children, men and women cannot eat together in most restaurants, and public beheading is the punishment for unmarried sex.  Nayir has no parents to make a match for him and no opportunities to meet women of his class, so it’s quite natural that his feelings about Katya are not very positive.  The only thing in her favor, in Nayir’s mind, is that she is engaged to marry his close friend Othman.

One of the mot intriguing aspects of Finding Nouf is the character development in both Nayir and Katya, but especially in the former.  As the novel begins Nayir is a rigid Palestinian/Saudi citizen, surprised and shocked by the most trivial transgression of Islamic law or culture.  But at the book progresses, and he is able to have what might loosely be called a friendship with Katya, he begins to realize that the walls between men and women in his country are harmful to both sexes and rarely lead to the warm family relationship that he himself desires but has no way of achieving.

Finding Nouf is one of the books I’ve read for the mystery course I’m currently taking, A Sense of Place:  Murder Mysteries ‘Round the World, in Brandeis University’s BOLLI program. The sense of Jeddah and the surrounding desert, Saudi Arabia’s unrelenting heat (hot enough to melt the heels of one’s shoes into the pavement), the different inter-personal relationships in Nouf’s Bedouin family, the incredible wealth of this oil-rich nation, and the low status of women are beautifully delineated.  I felt as if I had spent weeks in this country, going from the private island that Nouf’s family owns to the crowded souks to buy food and clothing, to the inhospitable desert where a sudden thunderstorm can bring death to the unwary traveler.

You can read more about Zoe Ferraris at her excellent web site.