Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Reviews

In a major departure from his Inspector Kurt Wallender series, Henning Mankell takes us to four continents in this thriller–Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.  So skillfully does he write, it seems as if Mankell has actually been to all of the above places at the times the events he’s writing about occur, although that’s obviously impossible; the first Chinese segment and the North American segment take place three quarters of a century before Mankell was born.

The Man from Beijing begins with the massacre of eighteen elderly people and one child in a tiny village in Sweden.  A photographer is the first person to happen on the scene.  Frightened and stunned he drives off and crashes his car, but before he dies he manages to impart the news of the killings.  The police arrive in the village, of course, and they and everyone in the country are appalled and bewildered by the carnage. Who and why are the questions on everyone’s lips.

Birgitta Roslin is a judge in a city far from Hesjovallen where the killings took place.  Although she, like everyone else, is horrified when she hears about the murders, she would seem to have no personal ties to the village.  But the next day, when she reads the names of the victims, she is reminded that her late mother had lived in Hesjovallen and realizes that two of the people killed were her mother’s foster parents.  She contacts the police and makes a visit to the town, scarcely aware of why she is doing so.

Once there, Roslin gets a cool reception from the local police who are overwhelmed investigating the biggest bloodbath in modern Sweden. At night in a nearby hotel, unable to sleep, Roslin breaks into the cottage where her mother lived and takes a diary from one of the drawers.  The diary was written by a man she assumes to be a relative of the Andren family who took her mother in.  “JA” had emigrated to the United States from Sweden in the 1860s and had become a foreman for one of the railroad companies engaged in building the tracks for the trains that crossed the continent.  His diary shows JA to be a tough, brutal overseer, bigoted against the freed slaves, American Indians, Irish immigrants, and Chinese indentured servants who are laying the tracks.  And it’s the Chinese/Swedish connection that forms the plot of The Man from Beijing.

In each section of the book, whether it takes place in Sweden, the United States, China, or Mozambique, Mankell makes the reader feel what it’s like to be there. It takes a while for the connections between these various points to appear, and I must confess that not everything is made clear.

I do have some “nitpicking” with this novel.  The reader can understand the motive for the crimes, but I didn’t find the motive as convincing as I would have liked.  I also felt that Birgitta Roslin was a bit too naive, too passive for a woman with her life experiences.  SPOILER ALERT: And I thought the way her life was saved was not believable.

These caveats aside, The Man from Beijing is a page-turner in the best sense.  It has a terrific plot, believable characters, and a sense that many of the political beliefs that Roslin and other characters have come straight from Mankell’s heart.  Like every other book by this author, it’s a mystery worthy of your time.

You can read more about Henning Mankell at his web site.

“…The (coal) seam was no bigger than thirty inches and often narrowed to twenty-six. Miners here spent their working lives in a space no taller than a coffee table…its operators all lay prone.  Miners had to bring straws with their lunches because there was rarely enough room to tilt a Coke can over their heads.”

The cliche life imitates art is unfortunately too true, for this novel’s story closely parallels the tragedy in a West Virginia coal mine earlier this year.

This first novel by Gardiner Harris has the very dysfunctional Murphy family at its center.  They are third generation miners in Perry County, Kentucky.  Will Murphy is the novel’s protagonist, for hero is too positive a word to describe him.  Will’s father and uncle started mining in a small way, and after the oil crisis in the 1970s the demand for coal increased and so did the family fortunes.  Then Will’s father forced Will’s uncle Elliott out, creating a family rift that never healed.

Years ago Will was responsible for causing an explosion in the family mine; as a result his younger brother died, and Will suffered severe burns over much of his body.  Will has never forgiven himself, so partly to make amends he gave up mining and is now an inspector for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.  Just before the book opens Will’s father died, and the reading of his will gives complete control of the Blue Gem mine to Will’s brother Paul.  As the novel begins, there is an explosion in the Blue Gem in which nine miners drown; the investigation has been given to Will.  Is the official thinking that he won’t find fault with his brother’s mine?

Mining is an incestuous business, with miners, mine owners, and mine inspectors all members of the same families.  The miners are dependent on the mine being open and operating, the owners are dependent on the slack enforcement of safety standards by MSHA to ensure high profits, and the inspectors all have relatives who work or own the mines.  It’s not a good recipe for honest inspections and rigid adherence to safety regulations.

Will is very much a flawed man.  He’s tormented by the accident he caused, and everything he has done since then has been impacted by that event.  His relationship with his mother is cool, his relationship with Paul almost non-existent, his relationships with his superiors in MSHA difficult because they want to close the case, his relationship with his wife and teenage daughter problematic because his wife has moved out of their home so their daughter can attend a different high school and have the chance to win a basketball scholarship.

There’s so much going on that several times Will is ready to give up the investigation, but each time something comes up to cause him to try to make sense of why the miners were cutting in an old mine area which shouldn’t have contained water but did.

Harris uses his background as an investigative reporter in coal mining Kentucky to bring to life a community where there’s nothing else but mines, no other way to earn a living.  It’s all most people in the area know, and their lives have been so restricted for generations that it’s almost impossible for them to think about leaving and finding another way of life.  Will Murphy has managed to leave the mine, but the mine hasn’t left him.

You can read more about Gardiner Harris at this web site.

I haven’t met a tough-talking British female private eye in a long time, but now Charlie Fox is here. Second Shot is the second book in a series featuring a former member of the Women’s Royal Army Corps, a martial arts expert and crack shot.  But Charlie was court-martialed out of the corps in a bogus trial, and now she’s working as a private investigator in a small London firm.

There’s quite a backstory to Charlie, formally known as Charlotte, but it’s pretty much only hinted at here.  The reader finds out that she comes from a well-to-do English family with cold, unloving parents; what we don’t know is why this semi-estrangement has taken place.  Her father, an internationally known orthopedic surgeon, is very upset with her career choices, both past and present; her mother’s reasons aren’t explained at all.  So all we know is that Charlie is pretty much alone in the world, except for her professional and personal relationship with her boss, Sean Meyer.

Meyer’s agency is approached when Simone Kerse wins a thirteen million pound lottery in England. She plans to use part of that money to travel to America to find her long-lost father, whom she hasn’t seen since she was a child.  Now Simone is a single mother with her own child, but the child’s father has been stalking her, trying to persuade her not to try to find the man who ran out on Simone and her mother more than twenty years ago.  Simone doesn’t want Charlie’s interference or protection, but when the child’s father bursts into a restaurant where Simone, her daughter, and the two investigators are having lunch and seemingly tries to grab the child, she reluctantly agrees to let Charlie accompany her and her daughter to Boston while she searches.

The opening chapter of the book has Charlie in a ditch, hiding from a gun-wielding Simone who is shot dead before she can shoot Charlie. The book then flashes back to how the detective was hired, how Simone’s father was located, and how money can’t buy happiness, even thirteen million pounds of money.

To the author’s credit, Second Shot is a definite page-turner.  Charlie is an interesting heroine who comes with lots and lots of baggage.  I would have enjoyed the book more if some of that baggage had been unpacked instead of merely being hinted about, to flesh out Charlie’s character.  There’s a lot of talk about Charlie not wanting to take the assignment as it means going to America where she obviously had had a terrible experience some time before, but we’re never told what it is.  Is that information in First Drop, the beginning of the series, or is it a teaser that will only be explained later?  I think it’s an important enough piece of information about the heroine to warrant an explanation.

And Zoe Sharp doesn’t seem to have a strong handle on her characters’ emotions and personalities–they changed from chapter to chapter, not always convincingly.  That said, there were some things that totally surprised me.  There was one that I was sure I had figured out, but I was wrong (yes, sometimes that happens).

I’d like to see more of Charlie Fox.  She’s an interesting woman, and the series has a lot going for it.  It needs a bit of tweaking in terms of characters, but Ms. Sharp is definitely on the right track.

You can read more about Zoe Sharp at her web site.

Malaysia, here we come!  Inspector Singh Investigates:  A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder is the debut novel featuring Singaporean police detective Inspector Singh.

So here’s my confession–I needed to look up Google Maps to find Singapore and Malaysia. And when I did, I was even more confused, so I needed to read the attached text to figure out the story of the Malay Peninsula.   The Dutch established trading posts there in the 17th century, the British later colonized it, the Japanese invaded it during World War II.   In 1948, the British-ruled territories on the Malay Peninsula formed the Federation of Malaya, and in 1957, after a decade of intense negotiations, it gained independence from Britain and renamed itself Malaysia.   In 1963 Singapore and two other states joined the Peninsular Malaysia Federation, but Singapore left in 1965 (or was expelled, depending on which source you believe) to become a separate nation, a city-state.

Be honest, did you know all that?  If so, you must have been paying more attention in Geography class than I was.  Well, maybe all that background isn’t strictly necessary to enjoy Inspector Singh Investigates, but it does help one understand some important aspects of the story.

The maverick inspector has been sent from Singapore to protect the rights of Chelsea Liew, a Singapore citizen who marred a Malaysian man twenty years ago and now is about to be tried for his murder.  The picture-perfect marriage of the beautiful model and the wealthy tycoon spiraled into an abusive relationship with adultery on the side. The birth of three sons did nothing to help Chelsea’s marriage to Alan Lee, and she now stands before the court accused of his death.

Before the murder came the divorce with its custody issues.  Popular opinion favored Chelsea, as Alan’s extra-marital affairs were well known.  It looked as if Chelsea had a good chance to gain custody of their children, even though she was not Muslim; although Malaysia is a strongly male-dominated culture and officially a Muslim state, there is freedom of religion.  However, when things begin to go badly for Alan Lee during the trial, his lawyer requests and is given a two-week recess.  When the trial resumes it is announced that Lee has converted to Islam and has unilaterally converted his three sons as well.  According to Islamic law, this conversion automatically gives him custody of the boys to raise them as Muslims.  Was the threat of losing custody of their sons enough of a motive for murder?

This is a very strong first novel.  The characters are well-defined, easy to remember.  And the insights into the Malaysian culture and the city of Kuala Lumpur are well done.  It’s a “foreign” country, even to neighboring Singaporeans.  Singapore is a tightly run country, famous for outlawing chewing gum in public and for caning people as punishment.  Malaysia, on the other hand, is looser, overcrowded, and ecologically unaware, or so it seems from the picture of its capital city.  The description of Kuala Lumpur is a fascinating one.   And Inspector Singh is a wonderful addition to the world of police detectives.

You can read more about Shamini Flint on her web site.

The mother-daughter team of P. J. Tracy has written another Monkeewrench novel about two winning teams: the computer geeks/hackers/geniuses at Monkeewrench and the Minneapolis detective team of Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth.  And the entertaining style of Patricia Lambrecht (mother) and Traci Lambrecht (daughter) combines to make this book hard to put down.

In Shoot to Thrill, it appears that the Web has spawned a new kind of evil, pre-posts of murders that are then carried out. There seems to be a Wisconsin connection, a strange thing in a state where nothing bad ever happens, or hardly ever.  But it all comes to light in nearby Minneapolis, the home of the Monkeewrench group and Magozzi and Rolseth.

The F.B.I., being legally unable to hack into sites that may be hiding these killers, sends its agent, John Smith, to Minneapolis to work with Monkeewrench to uncover the web sites that are posting the murders on YouTube for the whole world to watch.  Straight as an arrow, Smith is nearly at the Bureau’s mandatory age of retirement of 57 and is thinking back over his lackluster career.  He had dreams of heroic exploits that never came to pass, and his association with Monkeewrench may be the “slippery slope” that will make him look outside the box he has created for himself.

Magozzi, meanwhile, is still dealing with his unrequited love for Grace McBride, the founder of the Monkeewrench computer experts.  Grace, in turn, is unable to commit to any relationship due to her feelings of guilt over the deaths of close friends and associates for which she blames herself.

During the national search for the killers who are posting the murders on the Internet, the Minneapolis P.D. is also confronted with a series of possible bombs planted at various locations around the city. Is this the work of a terrorist group or simply some copycat teenagers out to disrupt the city as a joke?  F.B.I. profiler Chealsea Thomas thinks the latter but can’t be certain.

Even though the plot is a serious one, there’s a lot of humor in this series. There’s a lot of clever repartee between Magozzi and Rolseth, two typical cops who can’t let on how fond they are of each other.  The Monkeewrenches are oddball characters who have made a fortune with their video games and now can pick and choose what they want to do.

The authors have given each member an offbeat vibe:  Harley Davidson (yes!) owns the mansion where the group works and is a fabulous cook; Grace McBride also cooks but locks herself in her house with its barred windows and steel door; Annie Belinsky wears costumes rather than clothes; and Roadrunner (no first name given) lives in Lycra jogging outfits.

The Monkeewrench series is an enjoyable one, and this mother and daughter team have a lot on the ball.

You can read more about P. J. Tracy at her/their web site.

A friend recently sent me an e-mail about the current craze for international mysteries.  It seems that publishers are rushing all over the globe to find the next Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and they’re including the African continent in their search.  I don’t know if Bait will be among the next world-wide best sellers, but it’s certainly a fascinating, well-written thriller that looks deeply into a country not too well known to most American readers.

Kenya is a country that has been independent for decades, but it is a country that has been rife with tribal rivalries, riots, crime, and corruption in recent years. Enter Mombassa detective Daniel Jouma, perhaps the only honest cop in that city.  Enter from the other side of the stage ex-detective Jake Moore, who left England five years ago after a bullet wound and ended up in Mombassa running a charter fishing boat with a partner.  But now Moore’s business is in deep financial trouble, and his partner Harry is dealing with some very dangerous characters in order to keep afloat (pardon the pun).

The book opens with the death of another fishing boat captain, Dennis Bentley, and his young African assistant in a suspicious explosion that the police of the nearby city of Malindi are quick to call an accident.  What follows is another string of murders, all seemingly unconnected but which are, in fact, part of the underworld of Mombassa. When Bentley’s daughter Martha flies in from New York to see about her late father’s business and learn the details of his death, more murders and attempted murders follow.  There’s an unsavory cast of characters in Mombassa–an unctuous hotel owner, a former South African policeman kicked off the force for brutality in the post-apartheid days, a city crime boss who thinks he’s benevolent because instead of murdering one of the prostitutes he controls he merely cuts off one of her fingers–all of whom are involved in the city’s corrupt ways.  And then Martha’s boyfriend flies in from New York despite her wishes, bringing a new set of of complications.

The corruption in Mombassa is deep and wide and reaches throughout the country and abroad.   Where there’s money to be made, apparently, there’s no level too low to go to in order to get a piece of the action.  But as is made clear in the book, corruption is an equal opportunity employer.  Although we see the effect of crime in Kenya, the repercussions actually reach around the world to Europe and America.  No country’s hands are clean, it seems.

Brownlee’s characters are well-described and their motives are realistic. There are some clear lines between “good” and “bad” behavior and some fuzzy ones, as is true in life.  The author’s description makes the city and its people come alive, and the poverty that is almost everywhere makes the corruption easier to understand, if not to justify.  Two other books follow Jouma and Moore’s adventures in Mombassa, and I hope there will be more.

Jouma and Moore are an interesting pair, reminding me in some ways of a latter-day Kramer and Zondi by James McClure, an excellent series that takes place in pre-apartheid South Africa.  I hope Nick Brownlee will follow in McClure’s footsteps and give readers more insight into another African country.

You can read more about Nick Brownlee at his web site.

I always wonder why an author chooses to stop writing a particular series.  Between 1987 and 1996 Walter Satterthwait published five books about Santa Fe private detectives Rita Mondragon and Joshua Croft, and then he stopped.  Did he tire of the pair?  Did he feel he had said all he needed/wanted to?   Although he has written other mysteries and some Westerns too, his official web page was lasted updated in 2007.  Has he stopped writing completely?  If you know the answer to any of these questions, please let me know.

Wall of Glass is the first of this series.  In it, Rita Mondragon, the owner of the Mondragon Agency, is wheel chair-bound, having been paralyzed from the waist down by a bullet that killed her husband two years earlier.  Joshua Croft is her assistant and “legs.”  He would obviously like to be more, but Rita is still dealing with the injury and is determined to keep their relationship on a professional, not physical, level.

The story revolves around a missing diamond necklace that had been stolen from the home of a Santa Fe builder and his wife a year earlier. The insurance company had paid the Leightons for their loss and considered the case closed although the necklace was never recovered.  Now Frank Biddle comes to the detective agency with a “hypothetical” story about possibly being able to recover a valuable piece of jewelry and needs Croft’s help in getting a finder’s fee from the insurance company.  Croft’s not interested in this bit of double dealing, but he plays along to find out more, and Biddle promises to contact him with more information.  But the next day the man is found dead.

The Leighton family, from whom the necklace was stolen, is dysfunctional at its core.  The husband and wife have an “open marriage,” the teenage son is drinking and doing coke while his parents are away with their “friends,” and their teenage daughter is cowed by her mother’s demeaning behavior toward her.  And Stacey Killebrew, a former convict and former friend of the murdered man, definitely doesn’t want Croft asking questions.

There’s a nice amount of description of the beautiful Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco, The City Different.  Satterthwait obviously loves this city, and he brings the clear blue skies and cinnamon colored hills to life.  Having been to both Santa Fe and Albuquerque, I can see why the state’s license plates read “The Land of Enchantment.”

There’s a fair amount of violence in Wall of Glass, but it’s realistic, not gratuitous.  There are three murders, two attempted murders, a near-fatal barroom brawl, and a car chase.  But Croft keeps his cool throughout, and the ending is believable and quite surprising.

You can read more about Walter Satterthwait at his web site.

East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Rudyard Kipling certainly knew what he was writing about.  Almost.

The Runner by Peter May is what the author calls The Fifth China Thriller.   It was written in 2003 but published in the United States only this year.  I had read one book in the series previously, but it would be better to read the books in order to follow the story line.

Li Yan is a Deputy Section Chief in the Beijing Police Department, a high-ranking position.  He is more modern and innovative than most of his colleagues, having spent time in America and picked up some of its investigative techniques.  This, of course, does not always make him popular, especially with his deputy, the more traditional and very jealous Tao Heng.  When Li went to Washington as a liaison at the Chinese embassy, Tao succeeded him in Beijing and hoped to be appointed permanently to the Deputy Section Chief position.  But when Li returned he received the appointment, and this has colored the relationship between the two ever since.

The plot of The Runner involves the mysterious deaths of several outstanding Chinese athletes–runners, a weight lifter, and a swimmer–all of whom were destined to be medal winners in the Chinese-American Games taking place as the novel opens and that are a prequel to the upcoming Olympics.  Remember, this book was published in 2003.   There seems to be no common denominator among the deaths–a heart attack, a car accident, a suicide.  But there are too many deaths in too short a time not to arouse Li’s suspicions.

Alongside the athletes’ deaths is the upcoming marriage of Li and Margaret Campbell, the American pathologist who met Li years ago when she visited Beijing to give a series of lectures.  Theirs has been a difficult on-and-off-again romance, given the cultural differences and geographical distances between them.  By the time this novel opens much of that has been resolved, and the two are planning their wedding for the upcoming week, shortly before Margaret is due to deliver their baby.

What Margaret does not know is that once married, Li will automatically be fired from his job, as no one in his high position is allowed to marry a foreign national.

In addition to this unknown, there is the known–the fact that both Margaret’s mother, who is coming from Connecticut to Beijing for the wedding, and Li’s father, who is coming to Beijing from the countryside for the wedding, are against the marriage for the same reason.  Neither thinks their child’s upcoming marriage partner is appropriate.  Racism and xenophobia abound here, but there also is a very interesting dynamic that shows the long-standing tensions between parent and child in both families.

Both Li and Margaret are headstrong, not easy people to get along with in their relationships with their parents.  It’s a sidelight that makes both of them, and their parents, more interesting, more human.  And Peter May does an excellent job showing these tensions and the long-standing issues that separate generations in the same family.

While I strongly recommend starting this series with the first novel, The Firemaker, each book may be read independently.  But May makes his characters so fascinating and the culture of China’s capital city so intriguing that it’s worth going back to the beginning to follow Li and Margaret, in both their public and private lives.

You can read more about Peter May at his web site.

Stefanie Pintoff’s debut novel, In the Shadow of Gotham, takes the reader back in time more than 100 years.  It’s 1905 in New York in a small town just north of Manhattan.  Simon Ziele, a former detective in New York City, has moved to Dobson to find a less violent life and to get away from the memory of the death of his fiancee who drowned when the ferry she was on sank and burned.  But his search for the quiet life is disturbed when the brutalized body of a young female graduate student, visiting her aunt, is found in his town.  And at the same time, the aunt’s housemaid disappeared, leaving all her belongings behind.

The following day, Professor Alistair Sinclair, noted criminologist at Columbia University, enters Ziele’s office stating that he may know who committed the murder.  He has a patient with violent fantasies, some of which he has already acted upon, but Sinclair is torn between believing Michael Fromley is guilty and needs to be arrested and his belief that he has been helping the young man to channel his violent tendencies via talking to the criminologist about them.  It’s the early days of profiling and psychology, and Sinclair desperately wants to continue his research, so he is at war with himself over the correct path to follow.

Ziele is less interested in Sinclair’s research than in finding the killer, whether or not that proves to be the psychologist’s patient.  Clues both point to Fromley and away from him, with Ziele believing more and more than the doctor is being less than candid.  Is Sinclair’s research more important to him than human life?  If he had gone to the police with his suspicions about Fromley’s involvement in an earlier attempted murder, would Sarah Wingate still be alive?

Ms. Pintoff has obviously done a great deal of research into the early 20th-century New York City scene. Horse-drawn carriages still ride over the cobblestones as Ziele takes his first ride in an automobile.  Grand Central Depot is in the process of becoming Grand Central Station, spewing dirt and soot all around the construction site.  The only Chinese restaurants in the city are in lower Manhattan, ostensibly because other neighborhoods fear the gambling and drug use that exist in Chinatown would spread if those ethnic eateries were allowed to go uptown.  “Silent” Charlie Murphy’s Tammany Hall has just stolen the election from reform mayor Seth Low.  The subway is only one year old.  And fingerprints are not yet accepted as evidence in the courtroom.

It’s a time of great changes, but human motivation hasn’t changed all that much since then.  There’s still rivalry among colleagues, corruption in the city, payoffs to keep prominent people out of the news, and violence against innocents.  But there also is a more scientific model of detection as evidenced by Ziele’s new position in Dobson.  He is open to new ideas, if not completely convinced by them, and in his search for Michael Fromley he has to balance the new scientific methods against the tried-and-true investigative techniques he knows.  Should he follow his experience down one investigative road or take the other road and listen to the psychology professor, firm in his belief in his ability to change the mind of a criminal? This Edgar-award winner for Best First Novel is a fascinating look back in time.

You can read more about Stefanie Pintoff at her web site.

Maine is only two states north of where I live, but there are parts of it that seem in a different world.  The Poacher’s Son, by Paul Doiron, takes us into the northernmost section of the Pine Tree State, far from the busy, tourist-visited city of Portland.  Mike Bowditch has lived in Maine north and south, but his heart (and his career) are in Down East’s dark woods.

Bowditch is twenty four, new to his job as a member of the Maine Warden Service. As he explains it, he’s not a forest ranger but a policeman whose duties are to enforce laws relating to game and fisheries.  He carries a gun and is a graduate of Colby College, the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, and the Advanced Warden Academy.  In the winter he investigates snowmobiling accidents, ice fishing, and hunting with hounds; in the summer it’s boating infractions, secret marijuana gardens, and poaching.  Actually, it’s poaching all year round, and he’s very familiar with poachers, as the title tells us.

Bowditch’s parents divorced when he was nine, and he saw his father only infrequently after that.  Jack Bowditch is a poacher, a heavy drinker, and a barroom brawler.  Father and son hadn’t spoken in two years when Mike comes home to a call on his answering machine.  It’s from his father, but there’s no message, no phone number at which to reach him.  So Mike doesn’t know what his father wants, but he’s pretty sure it’ll bring him trouble.  And he’s right.

The next morning Mike reads about a killing in the North Woods:  a policeman and a real estate developer were shot to death.  And later that day the man who owns the camp where Jack Bowditch worked calls to say, “They arrested him, Mike.  I don’t know how else to say it.”  The senior Bowditch was in trouble again.

Jack Bowditch makes it worse, of course, by fighting with the cop who comes to talk to him about the shootings.  The policeman places him under arrest, but somehow during their ride to jail Bowditch overpowers him and escapes.  Now there’s a state-wide manhunt for Bowditch–he’s wanted for resisting arrest, assault on a police officer, and the two shootings.  Mike holds no brief for his father, but he refuses to believe that he’s a killer.

Doiron gives the reader an incredible sense of place in this novel, and his love for his state comes through.  He takes you up almost to the Canadian border and then down to Scarborough, a suburb of Portland where my older son’s family happens to live.  Doiron himself has had an interesting career path:  he’s a native of Maine, a graduate of Yale University, has an MFA from Emerson College, is a Registered Maine Guide, and is the editor-in-chief of Down East:  The Magazine of Maine.  This is the first novel of what obviously is planned to be a series, and Doiron is off to an excellent start.

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

Another Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr, another winner.  If the Dead Rise Not, the sixth and latest in the series featuring a Berlin police detective/private investigator in 1930’s-40’s Germany, takes the reader from that Nazi-infested city in 1934 to the Mob-infested city of Havana in 1954.  Different criminals, different motives, same endings–death.

Bernie Gunther first appeared in March Violets and went on to appear in several other novels.  In If the Dead Rise Not the scene is pre-Olympics Berlin, with Adolf Hitler already in power and determined to show the world that his country is able to stage the greatest Games ever. But already the world is suspicious of him, with arrests and worse of German Jews, communists, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.  So an American “businessman” is sent to Berlin to convince Avery Brundage, who is visiting the city and is in charge of deciding whether the Americans will participate in the upcoming Olympics, that all the rumors of Nazi terrors are unfounded.  If you want an efficient, well-run Games, Max Reles tells Brundage, this is the city for you.

Similar to a mystery I reviewed earlier, The Garden of Beasts by Jeffrey Deaver, If the Dead Rise Not pulls the reader into pre-World War II Germany.  And this between war time period is very important to the plot.  The country is still suffering from its total defeat in the Great War.  Inflation is rampant, Teutonic pride has been hurt, territory has been lost, the British, French, and Amis (Americans) seem to have it all.  Someone (or many someones) must be to blame for all of that, and that appears to be anyone in the country who is not 100% Aryan through at least three generations.

Gunther is a throw-back to an earlier time, when there was law, as well as order, in the country, when shops didn’t have signs in front of them telling Christians not to buy from Jewish shops, when informers didn’t make neighbor fear neighbor.  Not to say that Bernie’s perfect–he knows how to go along to get along.  Bernie’s no Nazi and he does his job, which is now hotel detective at the famed Adlon Hotel, as well as he can without overtly antagonizing the Brown Shirts that seem to be on every corner.  But he tries to do the right thing, even when that comes back to bite him, as in the case of getting a young woman off the streets and into a respectable job with the afore-mentioned American businessman.  That backfires, and the murders begin.

Then the scene switches to Havana and the story of two other tyrants, Fulgencio Batista and Raul Castro. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose; the more things change, the more they stay the same (Alphonse Karr, 1849).  How right he was.  It seems as if no matter where Bernie goes, his past follows him.

I strongly suggest reading this series in order, which will allow the reader to follow the path of Bernie Gunther as well as the history of Germany.  It’s not a pretty read, but it’s a true one.

Unfortunately, Philip Kerr doesn’t have a designated web site, but you can read more about him at various sites on the Internet.

The Chicago Way seems to be a tough, corrupt way if Michael Harvey’s series opener is any indication.

Michael Kelly, a former Chicago detective who left the force after cocaine was planted in his car, is now a private investigator. His former partner, John Gibbons, approaches him in an attempt to get Kelly to help him find out the truth about a nine-year-old case in which a woman was brutally raped and stabbed.  The day after the attack, when Gibbons went to the hospital to interview the woman, she’s gone, and so is any indication that the attack took place.  Instead, he’s given a medal, a raise, and a promotion, and told to forget that anything had happened the night before.

Now retired, Gibbons’ conscience is bothering him and he wants to find out the truth of the rape.   All this time Gibbons had thought the victim had been killed in the attack, but she has just come back “from the dead” in a letter addressed to him, and he wants Kelly to investigate.  Kelly agrees, but the next morning he gets a phone call that his former partner has been found dead at the Navy Pier.  And when Kelly returns home from seeing the body, the rape victim is waiting for him, gun in hand.

The city of Chicago is brought vividly to life in this book, almost another character, with its buildings, highways, eateries, and bars.  It’s definitely a city that can both enthrall you and frighten you, depending on whether you’re a tourist or a resident, living on the Gold Coast or in the slums.

Harvey has a nice style, reminiscent of Robert B. Parker’s early Spenser books, with a fine mix of violence and humor.  It’s hard to combine these two, but Harvey does it.  He also does a wonderful job with the many characters that inhabit the novel; each one is given a separate and distinct voice. And there are a lot of supporting characters–Nicole, the crime tech whom Kelly has known since childhood; Diane, the news anchor who’s covering the Gibbons murder and provides a bit of sexual tension; Elaine, the rape victim who comes to life after nine years; Bennett, the assistant D.A. with an unrequited longing for Nicole; and two cops, Rodriguez and Masters.

The Chicago Way is the first in this series, with two other novels following. I plan to pick them up very soon and read my way back to the Windy City.

You can read more about Michael Harvey at his web site.

Translators are some of my favorite people. Since reading Jo Nesbo’s books in the original Norwegian would be difficult (okay, impossible) for me, Don Bartlett has come to the rescue and translated Nemesis.

This is the third book I’ve read in Nesbo’s series featuring Harry Hole (I wish I knew how to pronounce his last name properly; I doubt it rhymes with mole).   He’s your typical Scandinavian detective–a slightly depressed, former alcoholic, renegade police officer who’s usually on the outs with his department chief but who manages to keep his job because he gets the crime solved. His reasoning and methods are unorthodox, but he refuses to accept pat answers and digs deeply into each mystery with the hope not only of solving it but finding out the criminal’s motive.

There are three distinct threads in this story, although they all tie together at the end.  In Nemesis Harry is waiting to hear from his girlfriend about whether she will be able to retain custody of her young son whose Russian father now wants the boy to live with him in Russia.  While the trial is going on in Moscow, Harry hears from an old girlfriend, a woman he hasn’t seen or been in contact with in some time, who insists they get together to say a proper goodbye.  And then there’s a series of bank robberies in Oslo, the robber’s M.I. looking like that of a famous bank robber who is believed to have died some time ago.  So what’s going on?

In addition, Hole has to contend with two adversaries on the force. One is Rune Ivarsson, the head of the Robbery Division that is heading the investigation into the bank robberies even though a murder occurred during the first one.  He’s an officious power-seeker who dislikes Harry and his nonconformist ways.  The other is Tom Waaler, a homicide detective and a much more dangerous enemy.  He’s the man who killed Harry’s partner in a previous novel, a man with neo-Nazi and drug-related ties, a very dangerous adversary indeed.  And he seems to have blindsided Harry’s new partner, a naive young detective who literally never forgets a face.

This novel is close to 500 pages, and there’s enough action in it for another hundred.  For a small capital city in a small, law-abiding country, Oslo seems to be filled with unsavory police officers and murderous criminals.  There’s also a lot of “doubling” going on–with brothers being mistaken for and taking the blame for crimes committed by their siblings.

Harry Hole is a protagonist who grows on you. At points in the novel I wanted to shake him and say, “What do you think you’re doing?”  But he’s real, sometimes painfully so, and the mistakes he makes come from his heart.  His feelings for his girlfriend and her son, both of whom are painfully aware that their future happiness resides with a judge in a foreign country, are strong and realistic, even as he sometimes acts in a way he wouldn’t like his girlfriend to see.  That’s human, and Harry certainly is that.

Jo Nesbo’s books are part of a strong series, and I look forward to the next one.  I’m hoping another translation of his novels is in the works and will appear on our shores very soon.

You can read more about Jo Nesbo at his web site.

A Bad Day for Sorry is a very good day for mystery lovers.

A middle aged woman who killed her abusive husband with a wrench while he was fixing their kitchen sink, Stella Hardesty knows about good women and bad men.  Now she’s making it her (part-time) business to right a few wrongs in rural Missouri.

Despite having come from a loving home, Stella sure picked a loser when she married Ollie.  He was an abusive husband, both physically and emotionally, and a neglectful father.  Stella put up with him for more years than she now believes she should have.  She was strong enough to get rid of him, albeit in a non-legal way, but she knows that most women in her situation don’t have her courage and continue to wear long sleeves, make up excuses for bruises, and pray that a bolt of lightning will hit their errant spouses and make them see the error of their ways.  They come to realize that Stella Hardesty is that bolt of lightning.  She doesn’t really deserve the tough, take-no prisoner reputation she has, but she’s not about to set the record straight.  She wants the wife-beaters of her area to be afraid of her, very, very, afraid.

When young and not-too-bright Chrissy Shaw returns to ask Stella for help again, Stella is a bit surprised.  She didn’t think that Chrissy’s ex, Roy, had the courage to go up against her one more time.  But it’s not physical abuse that has brought Chrissy back.  “I think this time I might a brung you a problem you ain’t had before,” she tells Stella.  She believes that Roy abducted her two-year-old son, Tucker, although for what reason she can’t imagine.

Looking for Roy brings Stella into contact with a number of unsavory characters in the region.  Could what Roy’s brother Arthur Junior says be true?  That’s there’s a mob connection in their small town, coming all the way from Kansas City and bringing drugs with them? Stella finds it hard to believe, but there seems no other reason for Roy to have so thoroughly disappeared, apparently taking the boy with him.  Life in small-town America doesn’t seem all that different from life in the big city these days.

This is Sophie Littlefield’s first novel, and it’s a gem.  It was nominated for an Edgar this year but lost to In the Shadow of Gotham, which I haven’t read yet.  But Shadow has to be some book to be better than A Bad Day for Sorry. Writing a mystery on a subject as difficult as domestic abuse and yet somehow keeping it humorous requires real talent.  In Stella, to coin a pun, Sophie Littlefield has created a star.

She has also created a bit of romance, and Sophie has a crush on the sheriff and he apparently has one on her.  When the author writes the next novel in the series, and I’m crossing my fingers that she will, perhaps we’ll get to see the beginning of a relationship between these two; I certainly hope so.  And I hope it’s not too long before I see Stella Hardesty in action again.

You can read more about Sophie Littlefield at her web site.

Odds are, you’ll really enjoy The Odds.  Oh, that was bad, wasn’t it?  But truly, Kathleen George’s Edgar-nominated mystery is excellent.

I haven’t read any of her other books and chose The Odds because of its nomination.  It’s the third in a series of police procedurals that take place in Pittsburgh’s North Side, an area totally unfamiliar to me as I’ve never been to the Steel City.  It seems like a gritty place, with plenty to keep the city’s police busy.

Colleen Greer is the heroine, a police detective in the Homicide Bureau.  She’s got an unrequited crush, if one can use that word to describe the feelings of an adult, on her captain, a married man and father of two who is beginning a treatment of chemo for cancer.  This has upset the balance of power in the department and Colleen and fellow detective John Potocki are taken from Homicide and added to the Narcotics roster to help with a big drug bust, much against Colleen’s will.

At the same time, four children in the neighborhood, the oldest being fourteen, are left to their own devices after their stepmother leaves them virtually penniless to find an old flame in New York.  The children’s mother abandoned them several years ago and later died, and their late father made a hasty, unwise marriage so his children would have a mother.  But this stepmother is less mature than any of her stepchildren, and after the father’s death in an auto accident she decides the responsibility is too much for her.  The children, fearful of being sent to foster care and thus separated, decide not to tell the authorities they’re on their own and do their best to keep themselves a family.  And their best is outstanding.  But can they beat the odds?

The children and the police intersect when the only boy, twelve-year-old Joel, goes into an abandoned house and finds two men–one badly wounded and one dead.  When fourteen-year-old Meg goes back to the house with her brother, she recognizes the wounded man as the one in the corner pizza place who gave her a free pizza the day before. Given these kids’ sense of fairness and goodness, they decide to help him, even if that means not telling the cops about the dead man.

Although I felt that the children’s abilities and resourcefulness were a bit too much, the author does make all of them, especially Meg, believable.  Perhaps because the alternative to success is a failure that would break up the family, the children rise to incredible heights to keep their family unit intact.  All gifted in school, they prove their resourcefulness by car-washing, babysitting, clerking in a market, anything to keep bodies and souls together.  And that resourcefulness helps them with Nick, the wounded man.

There’s a lot of tension in this novel, and a lot of tenderness too.  Any reader must be on the children’s side as they work hard to keep teachers and neighbors from knowing that they’re living without adult supervision.  Dad and mom are always “working” when people ask for a parent-teacher conference, and it’s sad and probably true that the adults in this world never follow up.  But one only has to read the papers to find that children’s welfare has slipped through the cracks of bureaucracy too many times.  So perhaps the Philips children are better off on their own.  Kathleen George has certainly succeeded in bringing both the children and the police to life and in making the reader care about them all.

You can read more about Kathleen George at her web site.