Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Reviews

It’s a familiar beginning to a crime story. A woman, divorced from an emotionally and physically abusive husband, believes that she and her daughter are free of him.  Nevertheless, she continues to take steps to distance herself from him, changing her job and moving to a different apartment.  But still he finds her.

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino starts off with this premise. But within a few pages it changes direction.  When Yasuko Hanaoka’s former husband, Shinji Togashi, finds her and her daughter, he says he wants to reconcile with them.  Having gone through this routine with him before, Yasuko refuses to discuss it and gives him money, not for the first time, to get him to leave.

Before he goes he tries to talk to his teenage stepdaughter, but she wants nothing to do with him.  Infuriated, he begins hitting her, and Yasuko tries to pull him away.  The daughter then tries to come to her mother’s rescue and, even more angry, Togashi starts punching both of them.  Desperate to protect herself and her daughter, Yasuko grabs the cord that heats the kotatsu table (it’s a heated table, apparently very common in Japan) and strangles him from behind.  Togashi is dead.

Frightened, Yasuko starts toward the phone to call the police and confess her crime when there’s a knock on her door.  Her neighbor, a man she barely knows or has spoken to, appears there to say he heard a commotion and came over to see if Yasuko and Misato are all right.  When he sees the body on the floor, it’s obvious to him what has happened.

Ishigami, the neighbor who is almost always referred to only by his last name, is a brilliant mathematician teaching below his abilities at a local high school. He’s a man proud of his logical mind, and realizing that Yasuko and her daughter were protecting themselves and that the death was more accidental than deliberate, Ishigami devises a plan to help them get rid of the body.

He has only one condition, that the mother and daughter must follow his advice to the letter. When the police find out that Togashi is missing or dead, they will certainly question his ex-wife, Ishigami tells the mother and daughter, so they need to do exactly what he tells them to avoid suspicion.

And the police do come. Detective Kusanagi doesn’t exactly suspect Yasuko, but there’s something odd in her low-key yet completely alibied story that doesn’t quite ring true for him.  He goes for some help to an old friend, Professor Manabu Yukawa, a physicist who happens to  have been a classmate of Ishigami, and who is known as Detective Galileo as an acknowledgement both of his knowledge of physics and his assistance to the Tokyo police in previous cases.

Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s most famous mystery writers, and one can see why in this excellent novel. The plot is skillful and the characters believable.  The translation appears flawless, with the characters speaking so naturally that the reader doesn’t realize that the words were originally in another language.

Many of Higashino’s books have been made into films or television programs.  He doesn’t appear to have a dedicated web site, but you can read a brief biography about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keigo_Higashino.

A foster child without a name or birthdate.  A man who may or may not have fathered a child.  A missing young woman. They all come together in this fast-paced, hard-boiled mystery by Thomas Kaufman.

Willis Gidney, a name he made up himself, has had a tough life. Abandoned by his parents as an infant, he spent years in foster homes and state institutions that might have been found between the pages of a Charles Dickens novel.  The only thing that saved him from a life of crime was the intervention of a Washington, D.C. police captain.

During his first ten years Willis learned to lie, steal, play truant, and fight.  During his years with Captain Shadrack Davies, he learned to love books, slowly developed a moral code, and found a career for himself.

Now Willis is trying to make it as a private detective on the tough streets of our capital; Willis thinks its initials stand for Dysfunctional City. He’s approached by an old friend, jazz saxophonist Steps Jackson, to find a young woman Jackson may or may not have fathered twenty-five years ago.

Willis manages to track down the woman whom Jackson says is the mother of the young woman he’s looking for.  Collette Andrews, the woman who had a one-night affair with Steps Jackson, is now cool, beautiful, married to a wealthy State Department diplomat, and refusing to acknowledge that she’s the mother of Bobbie Jackson.  She demands that Willis leave her house.  A few hours later she calls Willis, saying she needs to talk to him, but when he arrives at her house the police are there and she’s dead.  And Willis is under arrest.

There’s a lot of plot in this debut novel. The agri conglomerates come in for bashing, as do corrupt congressmen, suspect political donations, inept or uncaring welfare officials, and mysterious “abandoned” city rental properties that are using extraordinary amounts of electricity each month.

And then there are the mobsters who first try to cajole, then threaten and beat up Willis, and finally try to force him off the road.  He’s used to the hard-knock life, but this is getting out of hand.

On the positive side, there’s a new romantic interest in his life. Lillian McClellan, cyber sleuth, wears her hair in dreads, has dimples, and smells of sandalwood.  Who could resist?  Willis tries for a while, but it’s a lost cause; he’s smitten.

Thomas Kaufman is an Emmy award-winning cinematographer, and I’m guessing he likes short, quick shots because that’s how he writes.  It can get a bit confusing, as Drink the Tea goes back and forth from Willis’ childhood to the present and back again, all in the same chapter.   It can be frustrating when you’re trying to find the name of a character who appeared in a scene several chapters back or trying to remember just how a particular minor character is related to Willis.

But that’s a small quibble about a very well-written, fast-moving novel.  It is not, however, a book for those who like cozies; it’s more a book that will make you shake your head about the cruelties people inflict on each other. Drink the Tea won the PWA’s (Private Eye Writers of America) award for the Best First Private Eye Novel in 2010.

You can read more about Thomas Kaufman at his web site.

Talk about your dysfunctional families.  The Mackeys of the Liberties section of Dublin put most other families to shame.

Faithful Place is the street, ill-named as it may be, where the Mackeys live.  The protagonist, Francis (Frank) Mackey has managed to escape his family and his childhood home, but all the other members of his family either still live there or haven’t gone far.

Frank is now a member of Dublin’s Undercover Squad, divorced, and the father of a nine-year-old daughter. Both his sisters are married with homes of their own.  But Frank’s brothers, Shay and Kevin, are still unmarried and live with their parents although they are well into their thirties.  And the Mackeys’ overbearing mother and alcoholic father are still at each other’s throats as they were all the years their children were growing up.

What got Frank out of Liberties was his plan, as a nineteen-year-old, to run away with his sweetheart Rosie Daly.  Very much in love and forbidden by Rosie’s father to see each other, Rosie suggests boarding the ferry to England and getting jobs there.  It takes them several months to save the required money, but finally all the plans are in place.  Frank is waiting for Rosie at midnight on the specified night, but she never shows.  And she’s never seen again.

Still desperate to escape his family, Frank gets as far as the other side of Dublin and becomes a member of the police force.  And for twenty-two years he has kept his distance from his family, his only contact being his younger sister Jackie.  As the story opens, Jackie has contacted Frank with incredible news–Rosie’s suitcase was found in a derelict house on Faithful Place, hidden behind the fireplace.  And Rosie’s suitcase turns out to be a modern-day Pandora’s box.  Secrets that have been hidden for years burst into the open when it is discovered.

Faithful Place is not a part of Dublin on the tourist route. It’s changing a bit as the new economy brings Yuppies into the area, but by and large it’s still the same families living there who have lived there for generations.  The men work in factories or are on the dole; the lucky ones work on the line at Guinness.  There’s very much a sense of not getting above yourself, not trying to be better than your parents or your peers.  If you do that, you’re definitely under suspicion.

Frank has moved out and on successfully, and that doesn’t sit right with his family. His older brother Shay is resentful, dreaming of the day that he will buy the bicycle shop he’s worked in for years, but he’s still living in the flat above his parents.  His younger brother Kevin seems younger than his years, never venturing far from home.

Tana French paints a devastating portrait of a neighborhood and a people stuck in place. The same arguments, the same rivalries, the same unhappiness exist more than two decades after Frank has left home.  It’s no wonder he didn’t want his young daughter to even know of the existence of this family.  And he’s furious when he finds out that his sister Jackie and his ex-wife have been secretly bringing his daughter to Faithful Place to visit his family.  Ms. French’s portraits of a family and a community coming apart is vivid and frightening.

Strangely, Tana French’s web site is three years out of date.  But you can read more about her at http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-french-tana.asp.

It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been blogging for more than a year without reviewing a book by one of my favorite authors.  I’m remedying that right now.

Caught, by Harlan Coben, is another of his outstanding stand-alone mysteries.  Most mystery writers who write both stand-alone and books in a series, I have found, seem to write better books in the latter.  But the opposite is true of Harlan Coben.  Although I enjoy his Myron Bolitar series, I find his non-series books to be more exciting and to have more believable plots.

Caught is two stories that eventually connect.  First is the one about Dan Mercer, a Princeton graduate who is now a coach and social worker. He’s very involved in working with teenagers, but he’s recently been accused by television reporter Wendy Tynes of seducing the young teenage girls he’s supposed to be helping.  She sets up a sting and Mercer is arrested.  He protests his innocence, but a search of his house finds child pornography on his computer.  Mercer’s career is over.  He’s threatened, beaten up, and is forced to move from his house to one seedy motel after the other to avoid those townspeople who believe he’s guilty.

When the trial judge tosses all the evidence that Wendy Tynes had found in Mercer’s house and reprimands her for the bias in her story about Mercer, Wendy loses her television job. A few days later she receives a call from Mercer; if she wants to find out the real story, she needs to meet him in the trailer park where he’s currently living.  She goes, but almost immediately after she walks inside, a masked gunman bursts in and shoots Mercer.  The floor is covered with blood, and Wendy escapes and calls the police.  When they arrive, there’s no body in the trailer.

The second plot revolves around the disappearance of sixteen-year-old Haley McWaid, the “perfect” daughter of a couple in the same town. She was popular, had good grades, came from a loving family, but one morning when her mother went into Haley’s room to wake her for school, the bed was empty.  As the story opens, three months have passed and there’s been no sign of the teenager.

Coban’s characters are superbly written. At the end of the novel you realize that there are few black-and-white characters, they are mostly shades of gray.  There’s the police detective who’s been looking for Haley McWaid for the entire time she’s been missing; Mercer’s ex-wife, whose defense of him has cost her friends in the town; Pop, the father of Wendy’s deceased husband; Haley’s parents, who went from having an angelic daughter whom they never worried about to living in a perpetual nightmare.

And there’s Wendy Tynes, a reporter who won’t let go of the story.  At first absolutely convinced of Dan Mercer’s guilt, she becomes less sure of it, especially after she discovers that in the group of men he shared a suite with in his college days, the other four have also been dogged by a year of personal misfortunes.

One is a financial advisor fired from his job because he was accused of embezzlement, the second had to withdraw from a congressional race due to a sex scandal, the third is a medical doctor accused of using and selling drugs, and the fourth is a schizophrenic patient in a mental hospital.  The financial advisor, the politician, and the doctor all proclaim their innocence, as did Mercer.  Can this all be coincidence, Wendy wonders, or is someone behind the scenes manipulating these people for an unknown reason?

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

Bindlestiff.  A hobo or tramp, especially one with a bedroll. It’s in the subtitle–Big Wheat:  A Tale of Bindlestiffs and Blood–of a mystery novel by Richard A. Thompson.

Charles Krueger isn’t a bindlestiff when the novel begins. He’s a young man of 23 in 1919 North Dakota, the only surviving son on his parents’ farm.  He’s got a girlfriend, or so he thinks, but it turns out that Mabel Boysen was only using him.  She’s intent on marrying a neighboring well-to-do farmer whom she thinks may be sterile, so she’s gotten herself pregnant with Charlie’s child whom she intends to pass off as the other man’s; obviously she’s been burning the candle at both ends.

Charlie is devastated and distraught.  Out on the prairie late at night shortly after this revelation, he sees a man who looks as if he’s burying something.  As Charlie gets closer the man runs, or rather limps, quickly away.  What Charlie doesn’t know, of course, is that the man has just raped and buried Mabel.  And although the man doesn’t know who Charlie is, he’s fearful that Charlie can recognize him and determines to find him and kill him.

The man with the limp calls himself The Windmill Man. He’s a serial killer stalking the Great Plains, convinced that man is destroying the land with his farms and cities and that the only way to cleanse the land is through blood, the blood he spills each time he kills someone.  There’s so much he needs to do to atone for everyone else’s sins.

Charlie has put up with his father, a brutal alcoholic man, for years, but one day it’s simply too much.  After being threatened with yet another beating, Charlie picks up a kitchen knife and stabs it through his father’s hand, pinning the hand to the kitchen table.  Then he packs a bag and leaves.  It’s the day after Mabel is killed, and the townspeople think they ran off together.  But when the young woman’s body is discovered a few days later, their opinion changes to viewing Charlie as a murderer, and the hunt for him is on.

He doesn’t have much formal education and has never been to a city, but Charlie is a genius with machinery.  He’s picked up on the road by a man named Jim Avery who’s the leader of a group of wanderers with histories they’d rather forget–bindlestiffs, abused women, an almost-veterinarian.  Charlie joins them and soon proves his worth as a thresher and mechanic. He also begins to fall for Emily, one of the walking wounded in the Ark, as Avery calls his group.  But the Windmill Man and the sheriff from Charlie’s home county are still looking for him, and he’s not sure how long he can evade them.

There are plenty of other interesting characters in this novel.  Dishonest and corrupt sheriffs and greedy bankers are there, but so are generous farmers and mystical Indians.  The Great Plains are big enough to encompass them all.

Richard A. Thompson has written a fascinating novel about a time and a place that was unfamiliar to me. His characters are vibrant, and the prairie is alive with men and women working together to hold onto a type of life that is fast-disappearing.

You can read more about Richard A. Thompson at his web site.

The Ottoman Empire. Harem girls, the bazaar, the sultan, the eunuchs, the pashas.  What could be more romantic?  Or deadly?

An Evil Eye takes the reader into the Turkey of 1836, a time of turbulent change. The old sultan has just died, and his young nephew is about to ascend the throne.  But Turkey is caught in the middle of various countries’ plots.  Russia, on the east, lies in wait for Turkey to ask for her aid, which she was forced to do several years earlier.  At that time the Russian army returned home, but this time they may decide to stay.  Egypt, to the southwest, has just gotten control of Turkey’s navy via the Turkish admiral’s hard-to-understand defection.  And England and France are not going to help Turkey, apparently, no matter what happens.

In the midst of all the political intrigue is Inspector Yashim, a eunuch in the service of the palace and sultan. He is called by the grand vizier to investigate rumors of a body being found in the well of the city’s Greek monastery.  Relations being what they are between Turkey and Greece, Yashim must quiet the mob he finds at the gates of the monastery when he arrives, or he will have a full-fledged riot between the Christians and Muslims in Istanbul.

At the palace, there are intrigues within intrigues. The old sultan’s girls (some as young as eleven or twelve) are forced out, sent either to arranged marriages or to live their lives in another palace without the protection of the sultan.  The new sultan’s girls are entering, some coming from out in the country and new to the more sophisticated, cunning ways of the city.  And soon after arriving, several of the girls in the royal orchestra become ill, and one dies as the result of a inexplicable pregnancy.

The valide, the mother of the old sultan and the grandmother of the new sultan, appears to be losing her grip on life. Formerly sharp and in charge of all the women in the seraglio, she appears to be fading away before Yashim’s eyes.

With the old sultan dead and the new one an unknown quantity, losing the valide would be a major blow to Yashim’s autonomy and independence.  He considered her a friend, or at least as much as friendship could exist between royalty and commoner.  Yashim still has his closest friend, Stanislaw Palewski, the Polish ambassador, to help him with his investigations, but in Europe of the 1830s, Poland as a country is non-existent.  Palewski has no real power and absolutely no money, only the nobility he has had from birth.

Yashim is a charming protagonist. He is smart, both intellectually smart and street smart, and he is caring and compassionate at the same time.  His own tragic background makes him sympathize with those less fortunate and less powerful than himself, and he works to help them.  At the same time, he is very aware that his power may be stripped from him by the slightest word of those more powerful–the grand vizier, the valide, the sultan himself.  So he walks a narrow line to the best of his ability.

An Evil Eye is the fourth novel featuring Inspector Yashim. The book is filled with the sights and sounds and smells of the city that straddles Europe and Asia.  No detail is too small to be mentioned–the food that Yashim eats, the music that the royal orchestra plays, the clothes and shoes that are worn by the citizens of Istanbul.  All of this brings the city vividly to life.

Jason Goodwin is a scholar of the Ottoman Empire and the author of non-fiction books on Turkey as well as the Inspector Yashim series. You can read more about Jason Goodwin at his web site.

“Dear Bruce, MALICE is a nice little story.  In fact, it could serve as the outline for a novel.  Have you considered this?”

Imagine receiving such positive feedback for a short story you wrote.  Now imagine receiving that note from Evan Hunter, a/k/a Ed McBain, author of the 87th Precinct mysteries.  Of course you would have no choice but to write that novel.

Well, it took Bruce DeSilva more than twenty years to do that, but the result is Rogue Island.  It’s worth the wait.

Rhode Island may be the smallest state in the United States based on area, but apparently it’s quite large in terms of corruption, political chicanery, active mob bosses, and the like. Liam Mulligan, who answers only to his last name, is a reporter for a Providence paper which is quickly shrinking the size of its staff due to lowered circulation.  But Mulligan is a newspaperman through and through, and even though he’s worried about his job, he’s more worried about the rash of fires plaguing his old neighborhood, Mount Hope.  As the book opens the fires have destroyed unoccupied buildings only, but soon things take a turn for the worse as two squatters are killed in an abandoned house in the neighborhood.

Arson seems the only explanation, but Mulligan can’t figure out a reason.  Some of the house are vacant, some are occupied, and at least five different companies are the insurers.  There doesn’t appear to be a reason for anyone to want Mount Hope aflame.

Polecki and Roselli, the city’s inept arson investigators, aren’t making any progress.  Called “Dumb and Dumber” by insurance investigators, their animosity toward Mulligan seems to be more important to them than looking into the causes of the fires.

Mulligan’s personal and professional lives are messy. He’s romantically involved with Veronica Tang, a reporter on the newspaper, but he’s being stalked via his cell phone by his soon-to-be ex-wife.  At work he’s been saddled with the son of the newspaper’s publisher, a recent Columbia J-School grad who needs a mentor.  And his editor keeps assigning him fluff pieces instead of letting him work on the arson case.  Doggie stories, anyone?

Then comes the night when five fires on four streets are set simultaneously. That makes it less certain that a pyromaniac is setting the fires, as there’s no way he could watch them all at the same time.  But where does that leave the investigation?

Bruce DeSilva’s first mystery is utterly absorbing. After forty-one years as an investigative journalist, part of that on the Providence Journal, his prose is tight and honed.  There’s not an extra line in the book.  His characters are believable, whether they’re good or bad.  And when the good characters got hurt or worse in the story, I felt a rush of sympathy as if they were real people.

Publishers Weekly named Rogue Island as one of the top ten first mysteries of 2010, and it won an Edgar for best first novel of the year.

You can read more about Bruce DeSilva and watch an interview with him at his web site,

Two sisters, separated by 3,000 miles, careers, personalities.  Two sisters, joined by DNA, shared childhoods, memories.  So are they separate or intertwined?

Arabella Beatrice, known to her younger sister Tess as Bee, narrates the novel.  Bee is in London, helping to search for Tess who has been missing for four days.  Bee has transplanted herself to New York City, is a successful career woman with an equally successful fiancee.  Tess is an art student who has become pregnant by her university art tutor, a married man who quickly told her that he’d have nothing to do with the baby.  Undeterred, Tess is still thrilled by her pregnancy, worried only by the fact that their brother Leon died in childhood from cystic fibrosis, and tests have diagnosed her expected child with the same fatal disease.

Luckily, or so it seems at the time, a local hospital is trying out a new drug to cure the disease in utero. But Tess’s pregnancy ends three weeks earlier than it should have, and her infant son is stillborn.  That’s when she disappears.

Frantic with guilt because she hadn’t returned Tess’s phone calls on the day of the baby’s birth and death, Bee flies to London to help in the search.  But when Tess’s body is found in an abandoned public restroom in a park, the police, the media, and even Bee and Tess’s mother believes that postpartum depression had caused Tess to commit suicide.  And the few loose ends that Bee uncovers do nothing to convince them otherwise.

Bee cannot believe her sister killed herself. She points to Tess’s excited e-mails, the baby clothes she bought, her making Bee promise to come to London to be her doula during the birth.  The police point to her lack of resources, the baby’s death, her single session with a psychiatrist who diagnosed her depression, and her possible drug use.  Neither side can convince the other.

When Bee finds out that the women in the CF tests have been paid three hundred pounds each to participate, and that the doctor in charge is denying those payments, she’s sure that there’s an institutional coverup.  But with each claim that she makes to the police, Bee looks more and more unreliable.  She’s accused Tess’s lover, another art student who obsessively followed Tess around with his camera, and now Tess’s physician of being involved in Tess’s death.

Bee is constantly talking to Tess throughout the novel, telling her about the upcoming television re-enactment of the crime in the hope of finding a witness to the murder, her interviews with an attorney who is helping her prepare for the upcoming trial of the murderer, trying to expurgate her guilt for being too busy on the day that Tess kept trying to reach her in New York.  If only she had taken Tess’s call that morning instead of going into a meeting with her boss, if only she and her fiancee hadn’t taken a spontaneous weekend trip to a cabin where there was no landline and no cell service, if only….But the only way to help Tess now, Bee believes, is to convince the police that she was murdered and force them to find her killer.

Rosamund Lupton’s debut novel is an engrossing page-turner. There is a strong sense of love between the sisters, even given their different lifestyles and personalities.  Characters change in the book, and seemingly minor characters at the beginning take on important roles as the book progresses.  And Bee’s mother and fiancee show their true personalities as Bee’s determination grows.

You can read more about Rosamund Lupton at her web site.

Gas fixtures, apple and pear trees, wooded riverbanks, and striped bass and bluefish swimming alongside a meandering river. It sounds a bit like paradise, but it’s Manhattan in the 1850s.

31 Bond Street by Ellen Horan takes the reader back in time to tell a story of deception, murder, and the law.  Based on an actual case that was a cause celebre at the time, 31 Bond Street is a look into the lives of a small group of people, all of whom are touched and/or changed by the murder of Dr. Harvey Burdell.

Emma Cunningham is a widow with two teenage daughters, and she is fast running out of the funds left to her by her late husband.  A woman of slightly tarnished virtue, Emma meets Harvey Burdell, a middle-aged dentist visiting Saratoga Springs, New York, and accepts his offer of a position as his housemistress in Manhattan, along with his promise of an upcoming engagement to be followed quickly by marriage.  Seeing this as the best opportunity available to her, and seeing his home as a meeting place for her daughters’ future suitors, Emma agrees to his proposal and moves her small family into Dr. Burdell’s house.

At the same time, Burdell persuades Emma to give him $10,000, a significant part of her older daughter’s dowry, to purchase a plot of marshland in New Jersey.  He’s convinced that he will be able to sell this plot, which ajoins one of his own, for a huge profit.  Eager for the money and reluctant to tell him how little savings she actually has, Emma buys the property and hides the deed in her bedroom in Burdell’s house.

But the dentist’s behavior becomes stranger and stranger, with days passing when he doesn’t return home. His business opportunities seem never-ending, and then comes the day that Emma sees him enter a hotel with another woman.  She rushes back to his house, convinced he means to cheat her out of the New Jersey property, but her ever-more-frenzied search of her room doesn’t turn up the precious deed.  Furious, she confronts Burdell when he returns; he ignores her and leaves again, and the next morning he is found in his bedroom with his throat cut.

Although we find out in the opening chapter that Dr. Burdell is dead, the timeline isn’t a straight one, and bit by bit we learn about Emma’s past and how it has influenced the choices that brought her to her cell in The Tombs, New York City’s infamous prison. The book’s chapters alternate between Emma’s story and that of her attorney, Henry Clinton, who gets involved after Emma is arrested by a power-hungry coroner and the district attorney who is planning to run for mayor.  There is deep insight into the lives of the book’s characters, many of whom are based on the actual characters involved–the house servants, the mother and her daughters, the very disagreeable Harvey Burdell, and the defense attorney who puts his livelihood at risk in defending his client.

Slavery, abolition, the looming break between the North and the South, and women’s rights (or lack thereof) all feature prominently in the novel.  And all have an impact of the story of Emma Cunningham.

The epilogue tells the story of what happened to the “real” people involved in the case. I found all the characters in the novel so credible that I was amazed to find out that some of them were the creation of the author.  The sense of place in 31 Bond Street is palpable, so much so that the reader may well look up from a page and be astonished at the sound of a car passing by or by the electric light next to her reading chair.

You can read an interview with Ellen Horan at http://redladysreadingroom-redlady.blogspot.com/2011/03/guest-post-with-ellen-horan-author-of.html.

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.