Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Reviews

The houses are destroyed, the food is rationed, the nearly nightly bombing raids have the residents of the East End fearing for their lives.  This is London in 1940, as shown in Barbara Nadel’s crime novel Last Rights.

Francis (Frank) Hancock, third generation undertaker, is still reeling from his years in the trenches of The War To End All Wars. Except it didn’t, as the Luftwaffe’s bombings clearly show at the beginning of World War II.  Unlike most of the other East Enders, including his mother and sisters, Frank can’t be persuaded to go into the Anderson, the bunker-like corrugated steel paneled structure provided by the government outside his home.  Instead, Frank runs through the streets of his neighborhood during every air raid, recognized by his bemused neighbors as “the Morgue’s son,” until the bombing is over.

On one such night, Frank comes upon a man clawing at his chest and screaming that he has been stabbed.  Frank tries to stop him, not believing him, but the man curses and runs away.  But his body turns up at Frank’s undertaking parlor two days later.  The man turns out to have been a local tough named Kevin Dooley, with a vicious mother who is about to turn Kevin’s widow and her daughter out on the streets.

Although Pearl Dooley, Kevin’s widow, was abused by her late husband, she insists to Frank that she still loved him.  And maybe she did, Frank thinks.  Who knows what goes on between a man and his wife?  But the Dooley family, headed by Kevin’s mother, doesn’t want anything to do with Pearl, and when Frank tells the coroner that Kevin had told him he was stabbed, a further investigation proves that he indeed died from being stabbed with something long and thin put directly into his heart.

Even though Frank believes he did the right thing by telling the coroner that this might have been a murder rather than a result of the bombing, the undertaker is upset when Pearl Dooley is arrested for the crime. Given her family history, with a mother who had been hanged as a murderess, things don’t look good for Pearl.  And when Frank finds Pearl’s sister Ruby, whose own boyfriend has just died under suspicious circumstances, it simply adds more weight to the idea of “bad blood.”

Frank Hancock is a man who is still reliving his time in the trenches of Flanders. He’s an outsider in homogeneous England, having a white father and an Indian mother.  He’s a man who runs wildly and stutters during air raids.  He’s a man still dealing with his guilt at having killed German soldiers during the first World War, even though they were the enemy.

The characters created by Barbara Nadel are incredibly real. Frank’s sister Aggie has been left by her husband when he ran off with her best friend, and she dresses too provocatively for her sister Nan’s repressed tastes.  Fred, the neighborhood bobby, simply wants to clear the murder case without having to do much work in order to do so.  Pearl, Ruby, and the two other sisters of the dysfunctional Reynolds family have never recovered from their traumatic childhood and live in fear that someone is trying to get revenge for the killing more than twenty years earlier of their mother’s lover.  Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say one of their mother’s lovers, as each of her four daughters had a different father.  For its insights into war-torn London and its citizens’ psyches, Last Rights is a book to read.

You can read more about Barbara Nadel at http://www.twbooks.co.uk/authors/barbaranadel.html.

Imagine holding your breath for the last three chapters of a book. That’s what I did when I read The Sleepwalkers by Paul Grossman.

A thriller that takes place in Berlin in 1932, when the Brownshirts are walking the streets  and Jews, Communists, and gays are threatened, The Sleepwalkers gets more tense from chapter to chapter.

Jewish Willi Kraus, a celebrated Inspektor-Detectiv in the city’s police force, is called away from a party to the site where the Rivers Spree and Havel meet.  There lies the body of a young woman, head shaved, whose beautiful teeth mark her as an American.  The next day, when the city’s pathologist examines her, he reports to Kraus that the woman had had an unimaginable surgery–her fibula, the bone that runs from ankle to knee, had been surgically removed and replaced upside down, making it almost impossible for her to walk.

While following up on this case Kraus is told to give priority to the missing princess of Bulgaria, in Berlin for a visit with her husband.  Her husband tells Kraus that the couple went to a nightclub where his wife was hypnotized.  All was well until the princess’s husband woke in the middle of the night to discover that his wife was no longer in their hotel suite.

When Kraus interviews the hotel’s doorman, he is told that the princess indeed came to the lobby at midnight, said she had to go out for cigarettes, asked for the location of the nearest train station, and left the hotel.  She walked like a sleepwalker, the doorman says.

Then Kraus discovers that there have been three other cases in which young women have gone missing, and all appeared to be “going somewhere in their sleep.”  Interestingly, all three were foreigners.  No one had put the three cases together yet, but Kraus is sure there’s a connection if only he can find it.

In the midst of all this is the rising strength of the Nazi Party. Although the reader knows that 1932 is just the beginning, there are already many ominous signs in the city.   Brownshirts march unmolested through the streets holding signs with grotesque caricatures of Jews, chanting “Every time you buy from Jews, you harm your fellow Germans!”  Newspaper articles encourage mob violence against Jews and Communists.  Jewish children are beaten up in schools while teachers ignore the bullies.  And yet the Jews couldn’t or wouldn’t read the handwriting on the wall.

Willi Kraus, holder of an Iron Cross, First Class for bravery in World War I, is still disbelieving:  “Had fear overcome all logic?  They still had a constitution, yes? An army.  Laws.  Had (they) so little faith in Germany, in (his) fellow Germans that he thought they’d sell themselves out to a gang of criminals?” One wants to shout yes, yes, yes, but of course one can’t change the past.

The Sleepwalkers is similar to several other books about the Weimar Republic (see my reviews of If the Dead Rise Not, May 24 and The Garden of Beasts, April 16).  However, the fact that Willi Kraus is a Jew as well as a detective and a medal-winning World War I soldier gives this novel a different twist.  He’s both on the inside and the outside.  There’s decadence, suspense, and history a-plenty in Paul Grossman’s first book.

You can read more about Paul Grossman on this web site.

Back I go again to snowy, cold Sweden.  Don’t they commit murder in Sweden during the summer?

Be that as it may, The Ice Princess by Camilla Lackberg will surely chill your blood, regardless of the season in which you read it.

The novel takes place in the present time, but the source of the crimes goes back a quarter of a century. When Erica Falck returns to her hometown of Fjallbacka after her parents’ death, she is immediately confronted by the death of her girlhood friend, Alex.  Alex’s body was found frozen, with her wrists cut, in the bathtub of her home.

Alex is a woman who seems to have everything. The successful co-owner of an art gallery, she is a woman who has beauty, brains, and a very wealthy husband who adores her.  But what was bringing her from her sumptuous home in Stockholm to her former hometown of Fjallbacka nearly every weekend?  Her husband, who knew that his love for her greatly exceeded her love for him, was too fearful to ask questions; better to deal with the uncertainty than to end their marriage.

Erica, a successful writer of famous Swedish women’s biographies, is asked by Alex’s parents to write a eulogy for their daughter.  They are convinced that she would never have killed herself.  According to Alex’s father, “she didn’t have the inner strength.”  And it turns out her parents were right.

Erica is reluctant.  She protests that she and Alex were friends a long time ago and hadn’t had any contact in the intervening years.  But that opens up the question that has bothered Erica all this time–what made Alex drop out of Erica’s life and made her family pick up and leave in the middle of the school year without a word to anyone? 

Various other threads run through The Ice Princess. Erica’s younger sister, Anna, is trapped in an abusive marriage that she doesn’t seem to have the strength to leave.  Anders, the town’s brilliant painter and also its local drunkard, continues to waste his life and his talent.  And then there’s the twenty-five year old mysterious disappearance of the son of the town’s richest family–he was a teacher at the local elementary school and was simply gone one day.  Did he commit a crime and flee?  Was he murdered?  Did his despicable mother and/or his arrogant adopted brother have anything to do with his disappearance?

On the lighter side of this dark novel is the burgeoning romance between Erica and another childhood friend, Patrik Hedstrom, who is now a member of the town’s police force.  In love with Erica since they were children, Patrik can hardly believe his good luck at her interest in him now.

According to the book’s jacket, Camilla Lackberg is the author of four #1 best-sellers in her native country. With her stunning prose and her insights into small town life and its citizens, it’s easy to see why.

You can read more about Camilla Lackberg at her web site.

Imagine if someone told you to think of a number, any number, from one to one thousand. You do, and that person hands you a previously written note with the number you had in mind.  How did he do it?  It’s not your age, your house number, the number of children you have, the year you were born–it’s just a number that you pulled from the top of your head.  How did he know the number you would choose? This is the problem that opens Think of a Numb3r by John Verdon.

Retired police detective Dave Gurney is trying to settle down to a peaceful life with his wife in a small village in upstate New York. Out of the blue he gets an e-mail from a college classmate, a man he hasn’t heard from in more than twenty years.  The letter’s author is Mark Mellery, now a well-known author and director of a nearby spiritual retreat, and in his letter he asks for Gurney’s help.  Reluctantly Gurney agrees to see him the following day, and when Mellery arrives he explains what is troubling him.

Years ago Mellery had a serious alcohol problem, and there are black holes in his memory, weeks and weeks of which he has no memory.  It’s been years since he’s taken a drink, but now he has received a letter in which the letter writer appears to know some secret from that time.

To prove that he knows all about Mellery, the letter writer asked him pick a number from one to one thousand; Mellery picked six fifty eight, a number he swears to Gurney simply came to him with no association to any part of his life.  When he opened the envelope that was enclosed in the letter, the number six fifty eight is what was written.  Of course, part of Mellery’s problem is that the number has no association to any part of his life that he remembers, given the many alcoholic blackouts he had, and he’s now convinced that the letter writer knows some disreputable secret about his past.

He refuses Gurney’s suggestion that he go to the police, saying that that would be a lose-lose situation: either they’ll treat the whole thing as a joke or they’ll start poking around his Institute for Spiritual Renewal, upsetting his clients, and that would be worse.

Reluctantly Gurney tells Mellery he’ll look into the problem–there has to be a simple solution, no one could possibly have known what number he would choose. Then Mellery receives a phone call in which he’s asked to pick another number.  He chooses nineteen, again for no apparent reason, and is told to go to the mailbox outside his home and open the envelope that’s there.  He does, and there’s a slip of paper inside with the number nineteen written on it.  And then Mellery is killed.

This novel is truly a thriller. The reader knows there has to be some logical explanation for the numbers game and for the bizarre way that Mellery is murdered–shot, his throat slashed numerous times, footprints in the snow leading away from the body and then simply disappearing, and a chair abandoned in the middle of a snow-covered lawn with cigarettes strewn around it.  Unless you’re a believer in ESP, which Gurney isn’t, you have to believe there’s a logical explanation.  But what is it?

Think of a Numb3r is an incredible debut. The plotting is fast-paced, page-turning, and the various characters that Gurney encounters in his search for Mellery’s killer ring true.  And Gurney’s strained relationship with his wife and his difficulty in truly leaving behind his sleuthing days are well written and believable.

You can read more about John Verdon in this interview.

South Africa in the 1950s. Not a good place for blacks, Indians, Chinese, or anyone other than white.  But a fascinating, although very scary, place to visit via a novel.

Let the Dead Lie by Malla Nunn is the second novel in her series featuring Emmanuel Cooper, a South African of mixed blood who can and has passed for white. For writing a sympathy note to a black woman on the death of her son who was in police custody, Cooper had to leave the Johannesburg police force and move to Durban, where he has a low-level job in a shipyard.  Cooper’s former supervisor, Major van Niekerk, was also sent to Durban as punishment, but he has remained loyal to Cooper and has enlisted his help in ferreting out some corrupt members of the Durban police force, although Cooper’s operation must necessarily be covert.

Cooper is following these orders, trying to forget how much he misses being a police detective, when he stumbles across the body of a young boy on the docks.  The boy was a runner for some underworld thugs but was harmless himself, simply a poor white kid trying to support his family.  When two Indian teenage brothers are spotted at the scene of the murder, they fit perfectly into the racial intolerance of the time; before long there’s a city-wide police search for them.

Cooper gets caught  in the middle of this, knowing that the Indian boys are innocent. Then Cooper’s landlady and her housemaid are murdered, and an incriminating piece of evidence is found in Cooper’s apartment.  Van Niekerk makes a deal with him–find the actual murderer and Cooper can rejoin the police and obtain that all important white identity card.  It seems that in South Africa in the 1950s if you were light enough to “pass” and had the right connections, you could get a white ID.  That piece of paper allowed you to go to certain parks, the beaches, hospitals, and schools–it controlled your life.  Without it, you were a second-class citizen under the law.

There are some very interesting characters in Let The Dead Lie. In addition to Cooper and van Niekerk, there’s the bar girl, mistress of van Niekerk; a seriously ill former Russian spy and his very pregnant wife; an Indian gangster; and a Jewish doctor and a black police constable who were punished in the first novel for helping Cooper find out the truth about a murder.

In addition to the racial laws passed in 1948 that characterized the population as “white,” “colored,” “mixed-race,” and “Chinese,” there is also the ethnic division between the British and the Dutch or Afrikaans.  The British and the Afrikaans don’t trust or respect each other, and each group walks a dangerous tightrope to try to be in first place.

Let The Dead Lie lets us into a world that, thankfully, is in the past.  The sense of history in this mystery is overwhelming. The reader learns how precarious life was there, especially for non-whites but even for the white population.  Corruption and favoritism ruled, and once you were caught in a trap there was not an easy way out.  Being innocent wasn’t enough.

In addition to being a novelist, Malla Nunn is an award-winning filmmaker. You can read more about Malla Nunn and see a brief video of her at her publishers’ web page.

As much a snapshot of New York’s Chinatown in the 1970s as it is a mystery, Snakes Can’t Run by Ed Lin gives the reader an insight into the various factions of an ethnic community at a turning point in its history.

The snakes in the title are not of the reptile variety but rather snakeheads, what today we more commonly call coyotes.  They are Chinese American citizens who bring over illegal immigrants, in this case to lower New York City.   Not surprising is that both snakeheads and coyotes are the names of animals in that their treatment of the men and women they bring to the United States, whether it be via ships to New York’s Chinatown to work in restaurants and laundries or via trucks to Arizona to work in the fields, is inhumane.

Robert Chow is a New York City police detective whose late father was an illegal immigrant. Chow was a huge disappointment to his father when he decided not to go to college and joined the Army instead, then came home from Vietnam to become a policeman.  The elder Chow had higher aspirations for his son, aspirations that were out of his own reach as an immigrant with an incomplete grasp of English.

And Robert Chow has other demons besides his memories of his father.  He came back from Vietnam an alcoholic, and when the novel opens he’s only been sober for four months.

Now Chow is surrounded by illegals in his own neighborhood, where he’s the poster boy for diversity in the Police Department. Chinatown is split between two groups–the mainland Chinese and the Taiwanese Chinese.  Although Taiwan has been replaced by mainland China as a member of the United Nations, the United States still did not have full diplomatic relations with the Republic of China in 1976 when the novel takes place, and tensions among the Communists and the Taiwanese are running high.

Adding fuel to the fire is the increased number of illegals coming to New York from China, mainly Fukienese.  Like most immigrants, they arrived in America poor and uneducated and willing to do anything to stay here.  But by coming here illegally, with the help of Chinese Americans who owned businesses, they couldn’t object to low wages, poor working conditions, and lack of benefits.  And in order to pay back the money advanced by these merchants to the snakeheads, or owed by the immigrants themselves to the snakeheads, these illegal aliens were basically indentured servants, many working until their deaths trying to pay back what they owed.

Although there is a double murder early in the novel, I felt Snakes Can’t Run was more of a sociological study than a mystery.  There’s a great deal of history in it and a lot of background of Chinese and Chinese American feelings during the late 1970s, and the mystery takes second place to that.  But one of the reasons I love reading mysteries, as I have written before, is because they take me outside my own world.  I was pulled into the gritty world of Chinatown–its food, its superstitions, its people. And it made for very interesting reading.

You can read more about Ed Lin at his web site.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.  It’s certainly true in Julia Spencer-Fleming’s fourth novel in the Reverend Clare Fergusson/Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne mystery series.

I usually review the most recent book by an author, since I think that’s what most readers want.  In order to truly understand the dynamics of the priest and the police chief, though, this series should be read from the beginning.  That being said, To Darkness and To Death, the fourth Fergusson/Van Alstyne novel, will hopefully lead you to read the other books in order and thus gain a deeper insight into the characters of the two protagonists.

Clare Fergusson is an unmarried Episcopal priest in a small town north of Albany, New York. Russ Van Alstyne is a former soldier and the married police chief of this town, Millers Kill; kill is an old-fashioned word meaning a body of water such as a creek or river.

In Out of the Deep I Cry, the first book of the series, the two meet, and by the second book, A Fountain Filled with Blood, there is the beginning of a relationship that is slowly, slowly heading toward a place neither one wants it to go.

In To Darkness and To Death, many things in Millers Kill have reached the boiling point, including the relationship between Clare and Russ.

Millers Kill, like many other small towns, has been losing manufacturing businesses to other locations with cheaper labor and manufacturing costs. The two biggest businesses in town, Castle Logging and Reid-Gruyn Pulp and Paper Mill, are about to be sold by their reluctant owners to a joint ownership by a foreign company and a native conservancy group.  Economics being what they are, it’s simply not financially feasible for these two companies to stay in business, especially given the fact that the town’s huge timber tract, which they both need to stay in business, is owned by the van der Hoeven family and is also being sold.

So into the mix that is the core of the book’s one day events is 1) Millie van der Hoeven, member of the family that owns the 250,000 acre timber land, who is missing as the novel opens; 2) Randy Schoof, a logger who can’t think of any other way to make a living when he’s told the logging company will close; 3) Becky Castle, daughter of the logging company’s owner and a committed “tree-hugger” who’s putting together the sale of the timber tract; 4) Shaun Reid, fourth generation owner of the pulp mill who desperately wants his son to be the fifth generation owner; 5) Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne, whose platonic but emotionally charged relationship is about to come to a head.

What happens when law-abiding people don’t see any way out of their difficulties except murder? What happens when people who’ve always been law-abiding members of society decide to take the law into their own hands?  What has made them decide that their lives are worth so much more than anyone else’s?

What happens when two people who shouldn’t be attracted to each other, are?  Can anything good come of it?

Each of Julia Spencer-Fleming’s books shows a deep understanding of human nature. Most of us know the rules of behavior, but we can’t or don’t always abide by them.  And when we don’t, things go from bad to worse.

You can read more about Julia Spencer-Fleming at her web site.

M, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, humpback, humpback, I–How southern children are taught to spell Mississippi.

That sentence and its explanation open Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.  And Tom Franklin’s latest novel definitely takes the reader through a crooked path over a period of twenty-five years to right old wrongs and expose old secrets.

Larry Ott was always a loner, even before the traumatic event that shaped his life.  Not much that he did pleased his tough, hard-drinking father, and his dependent relationship with his mother didn’t help.  An outcast at school, he had but one friend, and that one had to be kept secret.

A young white boy in 1979 Mississippi, the last thing Larry could do or wanted to do was to befriend a black boy of his age.  But when Silas  Jones and his single mother moved into the rural town, there appeared to be a connection between the boys almost from the beginning.  Although Silas and Larry couldn’t be friends in public, they did maintain a secret friendship over a period of time.

Desperate to impress his father and his classmates, Larry accepted the offer from a popular girl in school to take her to the drive-in, strange as that seemed to him.  When they were together in the car, Cindy Walker told Larry she was pregnant and needed to be dropped off near her boyfriend’s house.  Larry was her cover, her beard.

Upset and unsure of himself, Larry did what she asked after she promised to meet him later that night so he could take her home, after swearing him to silence about their “date.”  But when he returned to the spot where he was supposed to meet Cindy, she wasn’t there, and she was never seen again. That began the complete ostracization of Larry Ott by the townspeople of Chabot and its surroundings.

Twenty-five years later, with Larry and Silas both back in Chabot, the story resumes.  It’s the present, and another young woman is missing.  The police have been dogging Larry’s footsteps for the past quarter-century, sure that he was responsible for Cindy Walker’s disappearance and death, and they are equally sure that he’s guilty this time around.

Larry has stayed in Chabot except for a brief stint in the army, operating the garage owned by his late father, visiting his mother in her nursing home; he is still an outcast in the community.  Silas left during high school for Oxford, was a star on the baseball team, and joined the navy.  Now he’s returned as town constable, and he’s ignoring the phone calls he’s received from his former friend.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter is a beautifully realized book.  It is a mystery, but it’s more than that.  It’s a picture of life in a small town in southern Mississippi, a place newly desegregated in its school but not in its neighborhoods or churches or attitudes.

I had never heard of Tom Franklin before, despite the fact that he won an Edgar award for his first book of short stories, Poachers.  Judging by his latest novel, he deserves to be read more widely.  His characters are real, their problems are real, and, as in life, there really are no easy answers.

You can read more about the author at:  http://www.harpercollins.com/books.

The Scent of Rain and Lightning should put Nancy Pickard on the list of must-read mystery authors; it’s where she deserves to be.  I’ve always felt that in spite of her many awards, Ms. Pickard wasn’t a household name, and I’m hoping her latest novel will change that.

The Linder family of Rose, Kansas seem to have it all in 1986.  The parents are the wealthiest people in their county, with ranches in the adjacent states of Colorado and Nebraska, and have three sons, a daughter, her fiancee, a daughter-in-law, and a granddaughter.  They’re well-respected and liked by all the townspeople and not just because many of them owe their livelihood to the Linders.   It’s because the Linders are kind, generous people.

But terrible things happen even to good people. As the book opens, the Linders’ granddaughter is unexpectedly visited by her three uncles–her father’s two surviving brothers and her aunt’s husband.  They’ve come to tell her that the prison sentence that put her father’s killer in prison for sixty years has been commuted after twenty-three and that Billy Crosby had been freed and was returning to Rose.

Everyone in town thought that the Linders were making a mistake by taking Billy under their wing and employing him on their ranch.  But they’d done this before and had turned around the lives of several young men, and they thought they could do the same for Billy.  But on a hot and steamy day, after downing one too many beers at lunchtime, Billy viciously attacked a cow that wasn’t docile enough for him and was sent home by patriarch Hugh Linder.  Later that night the cow was attacked and killed, a gate was left open so that painstaking ranch work would have to be redone, and small fires were started.

When Billy was arrested for these crimes later that day but released the next for lack of physical evidence, the whole town knew how angry he was at the family.  So when, in the midst of a terrible rainstorm the following night, the Linders’ oldest son, Hugh-Jay, was murdered and his wife nowhere to be found, Billy was arrested again.  This time he’s brought to trial and convicted.

With masterful storytelling, Nancy Pickard goes from 1986 when the crimes took place to the present when Billy is released from prison. The story is told from different points of view–that of Jody Linder, the granddaughter; Annabelle Linder, the matriarch of the family; and Laurie Linder, the spoiled wife of Hugh-Jay who’s not above flirting with all the men in town, including her two brothers-in-law.

The end of this novel came as a complete surprise to me.  I had composed several scenarios in my mind as to how it should end, but Ms. Pickard totally blindsided me. And her ending was, of course, the right one and the only one that made sense.

The small-town feel of Rose, Kansas and its surroundings are vividly portrayed.  And Testament Rocks, the geological marvel outside the town, does more than serve as a tourist marker for the town; it has its own place in the novel.

The Scent of Rain and Lightning is one of the finest mysteries I’ve read in some time.

You can read more about Nancy Pickard at her web site.

Laos is a country far from the United States.  Unless you’re a history buff or “of a certain age,” as they say in magazines and newspapers, you may not be familiar with its history in relation to the Vietnam War.  Reading this novel is like taking a mini-course in the aftermath of that war’s history.

“I celebrate the dawn of my seventy-fourth birthday handcuffed to a lead pipe.  I’d had something more traditional in mind….” That’s the opening of Love Songs from a Shallow Grave.

Dr. Siri is the hero, in every sense, of Colin Cotterill’s series of books set in the Laotian capital of Vientiane in the late 1970s.  The doctor is a passive Communist and ready to retire when the new regime takes over from the monarchy, but he’s forced into becoming the country’s one and only coroner.

In Love Songs he has recently married Madame Daeng and is looking forward to a relaxing weekend with her when he’s pulled out of the local cinema by the Vietnamese head of security.  Laos is an independent country, but it is very dependent on good relations with Vietnam, its more powerful neighbor.  So the doctor reluctantly follows Chief Phoumi to the former American compound where they find a young woman who has been run through with a fencing sword, an epee to be exact.

Then, a couple of days later, another young woman is found in a similar situation, run through with yet another epee.  What can be the connection between these two women, who as far as can be determined were strangers to each other?

The usual group of Dr. Siri’s friends appear in this novel.  There’s the police detective Phosy, his wife nurse Dtui, morgue assistant Mr. Geung, the doctor’s close friend Civilai, and of course the doctor’s new wife, Madame Daeng.  In addition to helping Dr. Siri, each has a story within the novel that helps bring the history of Laos into sharper focus. 

Although the reader knows from the beginning that Dr. Siri is in prison, it’s impossible to figure out how he got there and why. The mental diary in which Dr. Siri reveals his thoughts doesn’t tell us until nearly the end of the novel, and these thoughts are interspersed with the straightforward plot of the main novel.

Dr. Siri is a wonderful protagonist.  He’s smart, courageous, and pragmatic–he has to be to get along in the new Laos.  But he’s also caring and empathic, traits that are not highly valued at the time and place in which he lives.  It’s  the combination of both sides of his character that makes him so fascinating, as well as the multi-layered history of his country.

This novel, along with the others in the series, isn’t easy reading because the history of this country in the 1970s isn’t comfortable to read–it’s filled with torture and betrayals from all sides.  But knowing people like Dr. Siri and his friends are there fills the reader with hope.

You can read more about Colin Cotterill at his definitely off-beat web site and read an interview with him at the NPR web site.

It’s been three years and counting since Amos Walker traversed the mean streets of Detroit.  Welcome back.

The Left-Handed Dollar is the twentieth Walker novel.  And although Walker has aged, he doesn’t appear to be slowing down.

As the book opens, Walker is approached by famed defense attorney Lucille Lettermore–“Lefty Lucy” to the Michigan police and federal authorities for her political views.  Lucy wants Walker to find evidence to overturn the conviction of a Detroit mobster for a hit twenty years earlier; by erasing that conviction and doing some legal maneuvering, she can get the ankle bracelet off “Joey Ballistic,” re-model him as a first offender, and earn a substantial fee.

Joey B. comes from a Mafia family, has an ex-wife and two former mistresses, and a once-opulent house where nearly all the furnishings have been sold off.  He’s an old, sick man who’s still denying his role in the two-decades-old attack, a car bombing that left Walker’s close friend, Barry Stackpole, with a prosthetic leg and a hand with less than the usual number of fingers.

If he’s convicted of the minor crime he’s been arrested for now, Joey B. will go to prison for the rest of his life based on his record.  So Lucy wants Walker to prove that her client was innocent of the car bombing, thus clearing his record of that crime and allowing him to plead guilty to a lesser charge for the current crime.

Although Joey has certainly committed any number of violent crimes, he may not have been guilty of the attack on Stackpole.  Ever the bleeding heart, although he would never admit it, Walker takes the case.

As in all Loren Estleman’s books, there’s an interesting array of characters. There’s Lettermore, the foul-mouthed lawyer; Joey B.’s former wife Iona, now a successful interior designer; her partner Marcine, former model and former mistress of Iona’s ex-husband; Randolph Severin, the retired detective who investigated the original crime; and Lee Tan the younger, a physical therapist, and her aunt Lee Tan the elder, former heroin importer who worked with Joey B. years before.

In addition, Barry Stackpole and Detroit Police Inspector John Alderdyce return, the former the victim of the car bombing who is not happy that Walker is investigating the case, the latter the cop who is just an inch away from taking Walker’s P.I. license away for good.  Walker is losing friends fast, and he didn’t have that many to begin with.

It’s good to see Amos Walker again, although I do feel that the repartee between Walker and everyone else strikes a false note. It’s very arch and can be amusing, but reading page after page of it, it gets old.  “I’m riding the water wagon for a little, just to see what the Mormons are shouting about.”  “Next you’re going to tell me they’re breaking up the USSR.”  “Don’t teetotal just for me.  I left my hatchet in my other suit.”  It’s clever, but it gets a bit wearing after a while.  And not very realistic, I think.

That being said, I’m glad to see Walker again.  He’s a rare breed these days–a tough guy with a liberal interior who’s might bend the law but won’t bend his ethics.

You can read more about Loren D. Estleman at his web site.

Dr. Maura Isles is in hot water again. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say the hot water she’s in is located in the frigid Wyoming wilderness.

Ice Cold opens with a portrait of Kingdom Come, a religious community with a charismatic leader.  The village that the members of Jeremiah Goode’s church have carved out of the barren land is basically self-sufficient and closed to the surrounding cities and towns.  There’s no electricity, no running water in Kingdom Come, but there is one huge benefit, at least for the leader and the other men–polygamous marriages to young girls. And thirteen-year-old Katie Sheldon is one of those unwilling brides, forced down the aisle by the tight grip of her father to marry the reverend.

Maura, the Boston medical examiner who is a cool customer at all times, is definitely out of her big city element in Jackson Hole, Wyoming where she has gone to attend a conference.  She’s also still recovering from leaving her secret lover, Father Daniel Brophy. Maura and Daniel have been lovers for more than a year, and Daniel’s inability to choose between his two loves–his church and Maura–seems to have brought Maura to a crisis point.  Can she/they continue this way, or must Daniel at last make a choice?

At the conference Maura meets a former college classmate.  Doug Comley is attending the conference with two friends and his teenage daughter, and he persuades the not-very-spontaneous Maura to go with them on an overnight cross-country skiing trip.  Following his car’s GPS, the group becomes stranded on an icy, snowbound road with no habitation in sight.  Then they see a sign in the snow–Private Road, Residents Only, Area Patrolled–and realize they have chanced upon Kingdom Come, a name they’d only just heard from a local storekeeper.

When they finally make their way down to the village, it’s deserted.  The houses are empty of people, but there are cars in the garages and food on the tables.  What could have happened to make the inhabitants flee their homes, leaving pets behind to die, and simply disappear?

Back in Boston, Father Daniel is worried because he hasn’t heard from Maura and she didn’t catch her flight home.  The ever reliable doctor would never behave like this, he’s sure.  And now even her friend Detective Jane Rizzoli of the Boston Police Department and Jane’s husband, FBI agent Gabriel Dean, acknowledge that something is seriously wrong.

Tess Gerritsen, herself a physician, has created a very strong character in Dr. Maura Isles. In this, the eighth book featuring the medical examiner, Maura has reached a midlife crisis of sorts.  That’s one of the reasons she decides to do something out of the ordinary with her former college friend, a decision that nearly leads to her death.  By the end of the novel, the doctor has escaped death more than once and owes her life to a very unlikely duo.

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

Welcome to the world of post-revolution, pre-World War II Russia. It’s not a healthy place to live, it appears, from William Ryan’s debut novel.

Captain Alexei Dmitriyevich Korolev is the police inspector in The Holy Thief. He’s a loyal member of the new Soviet republic, a member of the Moscow Militia’s Criminal Investigation Division.  Although the CID is technically involved only in the investigation and prevention of criminal activity, in the Soviet Union of 1936 everything is political.

And when Korolev is assigned to investigate the brutal torture and murder of an unidentified young woman in a former Orthodox church (the church has become a Komsomol recreational and political agitation center), the political aspects of the crime become visible almost immediately.

Reading this novel is almost like taking a course in 20th-century Russian history.  The country is still reeling from what they call the German War (World War I to us) and, of course, the Revolution. Food and shelter are incredibly scarce, but the people are putting up with it because of the anticipation of a glorious future just around the corner.

There’s a strong sense of walking with Korolev through the dark, cold streets of his city, the detective wearing a slightly too tight coat several seasons old and a pair of felt books, valeni, to keep his feet warm.  The housing shortage is vividly portrayed too, with Korolev being very fortunate, due to his outstanding arrest record, to be allowed to move into an apartment that he has to share “only” with a young widow and her daughter.  But, of course, the high officials of the Party have taken over the former residences of the assassinated royal family.  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Korolev is a loyal citizen and an excellent investigator, but it’s hard for him to do a thorough job when his next step may be the wrong one. The case gets stranger when the body of the woman murdered in the former church is identified as a Russian-born nun who has lived in America for most of her life.  Her murder is quickly followed by the murder of a Thief, a member of the Moscow Mafia, whose tattoos on nearly every part of his body tell the story of his life both behind bars and outside.

Korolev is a wonderful character. He is decent and loyal to the state, but he is no innocent.  He’s aware of the brutalities and corruption that exist in the new government.  But what is harder for him to accept is that someone within the Party, perhaps one of his own superiors, is involved in this spate of killings, which soon add third, fourth, and fifth victims.

At a time when religion is outlawed in Russia, the inspector is still a believer, although of course a secret one.  And when he uncovers the fact that these murders are related to the Kazanskaya icon, the most revered holy object in Russia, it’s a double blow. The Madonna and Child icon was thought to have been destroyed, but what if it wasn’t?

William Ryan’s novel is a page-turner and The Holy Thief is obviously the beginning of a wonderful new series.

William Ryan doesn’t appear to have his own web site as yet, but you can read a very brief biography of him at panmacmillan.com.

California native, son of a Holocaust survivor, member of the Israeli armed forces, L.A. detective, surfer–that’s Asher Levine’s c.v.  In Miles Corwin’s debut novel, his protagonist is a man of many parts, tormented by most of them.

Ash was a highly respected member of the Los Angeles police department until a year before this book opens.  At that time he had promised protection to a very reluctant witness to a murder, but despite his best effort the woman was killed.  Torn by guilt and feeling unsupported by his superiors, Ash resigned from the force.

But as Kind of Blue opens, his former lieutenant Frank Duffy comes to Ash’s mother’s house where Ash is having shabbat dinner.  Duffy asks his former protegee to return to the force to investigate the murder of an ex-cop.

Ash is reluctant but he agrees, with the silent proviso that when he solves this case he’ll be able to return to the one where his witness was killed.  He had been hurt by the official reprimand Duffy had placed in his file after that murder, but he sees his reinstatement as a chance to go over once again all the parts of the crime that led to his resignation–the killing of a Korean shopkeeper and the subsequent elimination of the witness who saw the shooter.

By all reports Pete Relovich was a good detective who found too much solace in the bottle.   His marriage ended, and he was having trouble making child support payments for his beloved daughter, so he took a job as a driver for an escort service.  Did he see something/someone there that led to his murder?  Because there’s an unexpected treasure that Ash finds hidden under a tile in Relovich’s kitchen–two Japanese ivory carvings and $6,000 in cash.  Where did they come from?

And is a just a coincidence that when Ash is trying to locate Relovich’s former partner he discovers that he too is dead?  The official report says suicide, but Ash isn’t convinced.

Ash’s personal life is kind of a mess too.  Separated from his wife, he meets a beautiful art gallery owner who is an expert on Japanese art.  There’s romantic tension there, but will the fact that Nicole Haddad is of Lebanese descent be a stumbling block in their relationship?  Or is that a minor problem compared to the fact that Nicole already has a boyfriend and only wants Ash when her boyfriend isn’t around?

There are so many threads to follow in this novel that I almost needed paper and pencil to keep them straight.  There’s anti-Semitism in the detectives’ bureau, the various parts of the dead cop’s life, the demons that plague Ash’s sleep, and his determination to find the killer of his witness.

The picture Corwin paints of the Los Angeles police department isn’t a pretty one. There are inept detectives, crooked detectives, cover-ups at all levels.  No wonder Ash wants to go it alone; he doesn’t know whom he can trust.

Miles Corwin has written a taut, exciting first novel, and I’m sure there will be more to come in this series.

You can read more about Miles Corwin at his web site.

Dennis Lehane is one of the few contemporary mystery novelists whose books have been made into successful films.  Think Shutter Island, Mystic River, and the novel that precedes Moonlight Mile–Gone, Baby, Gone.

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro were the investigators in Gone, Baby, Gone. They found four-year-old Amanda McCready, who had been taken from her neglectful mother and was living with a loving couple who desperately wanted to keep her.  The problem was, little Amanda had been abducted, not taken legally via the Massachusetts Department of Social Services, and at the end of G,B,G the investigators were faced with a heart-wrenching decision–to keep Amanda in her new, caring home or return her to her drug-addicted mother.

Kenzie’s decision to return the girl to her mother caused the breakup of his relationship with Gennaro.  As Moonlight Mile opens, it’s twelve years later and Kenzie and Gennaro have reconciled, married, and are the parents of their own four-year-old daughter, Gabriella. They are struggling financially, as Kenzie is now the sole breadwinner while Gennaro has returned to school and is almost finished with her master’s in social work.  Then they get a call from Amanda’s aunt–the girl is missing again and the police aren’t interested in doing anything about it.

Much against Kenzie’s better judgment, he and his wife are again pressed into looking for the missing girl.  Amanda has seemingly turned her life around and is an outstanding student at a prestigious private school, but she is an aloof, hard-shelled girl whom no one seems to know.  And her mother is involved with another criminal type and not very interested in finding out what has happened to her daughter.

The case gets more involved than simply finding Amanda, as Kenzie and Gennaro apparently aren’t the only ones looking for her. Amanda’s best/only friend, Sophie, is also missing, and neither Sophie’s self-righteous father nor Amanda’s social worker, Dre Stiles, seems to have a clue as to the whereabouts of the girls.  And then a group of Russian mobsters enters the picture, determined to find Amanda, Sophie, and an antique cross of great interest to the boss of the mob.

Kenzie is still dealing with the issues from the twelve-year-old kidnapping case.  He believes he did the right thing by returning the child to her mother, although Gennaro strongly disagrees with him.  Can one do what he thinks is morally right and still be haunted by that decision? Would Amanda have been better served by leaving her with the people who would have been “better” parents, or would she have grown up and always wondered where her “real” mother was?  That decision affected not only Amanda but also the man and woman who took her in and her own aunt and uncle who placed her with them.

In Moonlight Mile Lehane explores these ideas, plus the reality of living in today’s economy. The Kenzie/Gennaro family lives from paycheck to paycheck, and Kenzie must weigh the appeal of accepting a secure job that means working for people only concerned with the bottom line or continuing to worry daily about finances and his family’s financial well-being.

As always, Dennis Lehane has crafted a fast-paced, realistic story about modern life, crimes past and present, and how the decisions of years ago impact on life today.

You can read more about Dennis Lehane at his web site.