Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Reviews

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.

“Cops put things right.   They look after people.”

That’s the quote three pages from the end of Persuader by Lee Child.  It was Jack Reacher’s answer to a question posed to him ten years ago, when he was still an Army MP.  The question was asked by a young sergeant just posted to his staff.  Ten years later, that’s still his answer when he’s asked that question, although the sergeant was killed the day after she asked it.

Persuader is the twelfth novel in the Reacher series, and like all the others it’s masterful.   Reacher had gotten to the rank of major before he was rifed (let go, downsized, or, as the Brits say, made redundant).  The army was getting smaller and he had risen as far as he was going to, so he left.  Now he criss-crosses the country with, if I remember correctly, his wallet, passport, and toothbrush, nothing more.  And he finds trouble wherever he goes.

The novel has one of the greatest opening chapters I’ve ever read, with first and last sentences that make sure you won’t put the book down.  First–“The cop climbed out of the car exactly four minutes before he got shot.”  Last–“The message said, I’m in.”  Between those two sentences is a set-up in which Reacher and DEA agents foil the staged kidnapping attempt of a college student.  During the attempt Reacher “shoots and kills” a campus cop so that he can “rescue” the young man and thus get into his father’s house.  The father is a suspected drug dealer who is believed to have abducted a federal agent.  But getting in turns out to be the easy part.

The book goes back and forth between this present-day situation and one a decade earlier when Reacher unwittingly sent his sergeant to her death.  At that time Reacher thought he had killed the man responsible for the sergeant’s death, but now he sees the man on a Boston street.  A phone call that Reacher makes gives him information that connects him to the killer who appears to be connected to the college student’s father.  If all this sounds unbelievably entangled, Child makes you believe it.  In my opinion he writes the most realistic dialogue in any of today’s crime novels.

Child’s books are not for the squeamish.  There’s always a lot of blood and killing.  But somehow the violence never seems gratuitous.  There are bad guys out there, and when Reacher confronts them it’s them or him. And we’re always rooting for him.

As I was writing this review, I went to Child’s web site to check on something.  I clicked on to his Appearances page and found to my delight that he will be autographing 61 Hours, his latest novel, at Borders Books in South Portland, Maine, on the same day I’ll be there visiting family.  Guess where I’ll be on June 4th?

You can find out more about Lee Child at his web site http://www.leechild.com.

Disclaimer: I’m from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and my late father was a police captain, for a time working out of the 71st precinct in Brooklyn; his father was a Russian immigrant.   Jack Leightner, the protagonist of Neptune Avenue, works out of the 71st precinct in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; his late father was a Russian immigrant.  Could I pass up this novel?  No way!

Leightner is an unhappy man, recovering from a two-year-old gunshot wound and the resultant stay in a hospital and a very recent betrayal by the woman he wanted to marry.  In the hospital he shared a room with a Russian immigrant, Daniel Lelo, and now, two years later, Lelo was shot again and this time it was fatal.

The case draws Leightner into a neighborhood that is both familiar and strange to him. Familiar because although Brooklyn has a population of 2.72 million people, it’s made up of neighborhoods.  People, especially immigrants, tend to stay in comfortable environs, surrounded by those who speak their native language and share their Old World customs; as a child Leightner spent a lot of time in this part of the borough.  Strange because the detective has been living outside of his old neighborhood for years, and his only contact with it has been his late father’s brother, with whom he has a somewhat strained relationship.

Lelo’s death brings Leightner into contact with his friend’s wife, a beautiful Russian woman to whom Leightner is immediately attracted. He is irresistibly drawn into a sexual relationship with Zhenya, but he feels she is hiding something.  Is it guilt over their affair so soon after the death of her husband?  Is it fear of a Russian mob boss who may have had ties to her husband?

The novel starts off with an unrelated case of two young black women who are found hanging, one in an apartment and the other in a garden.  Although this crime is solved, the author seems to have been glad to leave it behind and concentrate on the Russian connection.  I’m not quite sure why he began the book with that crime, perhaps only to show the different groups living within a relatively small neighborhood, sometimes getting along and sometimes at war.

Cohen makes Leightner a complicated man with an interesting back story. His father was a longshoreman in Red Hook, a notoriously tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, a man who was fine when sober but vicious when drunk.  Leightner’s mother was passive, afraid of her husband.  He had a much loved brother who died young.  And he’s divorced, with a grown son with whom he has a very tentative relationship.  He’s a man with a lot of baggage, and he knows it.  But so too has Zhenya, and perhaps that’s what brings them together.

Neptune Avenue pulls the reader right into Brooklyn, its streets, criminals, and ethnicities.  Leightner’s uncle asks him at one point, “How is it that you work so close to here but know so little about (your own people)?”  Leightner’s response is, “Your own people-–it sounded like such a burden.”  Coming back to Little Odessa, as Brighton Beach is called, has brought back memories he would just as soon have kept buried.

You can find out more about the author at http://www.gabrielcohenbooks.com.

I want to go to Italy.  I want to go to Venice.  And I definitely want to read more Guido Brunetti mysteries.

I had seen Donna Leon’s mysteries in my local library and on bookstore shelves many times, but somehow I never picked one up.  I love novels that take me to faraway places, and I knew that this series was set in Venice; nevertheless, I passed them by and found other books to read.

A few months ago, a close friend and mystery connoisseur recommended the series to me.  I promised myself I would get one the next time I had a chance, and returning home this weekend from New York City I bought a copy of Through A Glass, Darkly and read it on the train back to Boston.  My only regret is coming to the series so late because it’s obvious that Guido Brunetti has had a long life as a member of the Venetian police department.  At this point in the series he has a wife and two children, and I wish I could have met him earlier in his career and gotten to know him at an earlier age.   Well, better late than never, and I plan to go back to Venice and spend more time with Signore Brunetti.

As the story open one of his colleagues asks Brunetti to meet with a friend of his who has been arrested in a demonstration outside a factory in Venice.  The police are eager to release the man as no charges have been filed against him, and when the three men exit the police station they are accosted by the man’s irate, out-of-control father-in-law.  The father-in-law hates his son-in-law and has been heard to threaten his life.

A second thread is the story of a worker in the father-in-law’s factory whose daughter suffered severe birth defects.  Is it, as the man believes, that the defects were caused by poisons discharged into the water by the factory owner, or is the truth that the father, in his insistence on a home birth against the advice of doctors, is responsible for his daughter’s physical and mental condition?

Is there an Italian word for mensch? This Yiddish word literally means a man, but it has come to mean someone who is good, kind, caring, empathic.  All those words fit the commissario.  Brunetti’s interactions with his wife and children are beautiful to behold.  No loner, no tough-talking cop, Brunetti is a warm man trying to do a difficult job.  It’s obvious that there are several recurring characters in this series whom the reader would enjoy meeting again and again, but that does not include his sly, out-for-himself superior officer, Vice-Questore Patta.

Ms. Leon’s descriptions of Venice make the reader want to hop on the next plane and rush to the canals of the city.  The food, too, is described wonderfully, and the love of the author for her adopted city comes through.  Through A Glass, Darkly is the fifteenth novel in a series that now numbers nineteen.  I look forward to meeting Comissario Brunetti again.

You can find out more about the author at http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/minisites/donnaleon.

The Garden of Beasts is a fascinating read!  It is definitely a crime novel, but it goes outside the genre to become a historical work as well.

It takes place in 1936 in Berlin, immediately before the Olympics that Hitler hosted. Paul Schumann is a New York City free-lance hit man. He’s a third generation German-American from a family that emigrated to the United States before The Great War.  When his father was killed because he refused to give his printing business to some local mobsters, Schumann seeks revenge by killing the men.  He’s then approached by various gangsters in the city to be a “button man,” a killer of the enemies of Manhattan mobsters, and that’s what he has been doing for the past dozen years or so.  He’s meticulous in his work, which he justifies to himself by killing only criminals, never innocents.

One slip-up, however, gets him noticed by federal officials.  They make him an offer he can’t refuse–go to Germany, pose as a journalist covering the Olympics, and kill Colonel Reinhard Ernst, a Nazi official in charge of rebuilding Germany’s military.  Schumann is chosen both because of his excellent marksmanship and his fluency in German.  If he succeeds in killing the colonel, his criminal record will be cleared and he will receive $10,000 with which to restart his life.

I started out disliking Schumann intensely.  How could anyone feel anything positive for a man who has killed over twenty times, even if those he killed were killers themselves?  What gave him the right to be the executioner?  But as the novel progressed and I got into Schumann’s head, I came first to respect him and then to admire him. He’s smart, quick on his feet, and begins to understand exactly what is happening in Germany.

Even more remarkable than the insights Deaver gives the reader into Schumann’s mind is his ability to make the reader understand the thinking of the various Germans involved.  There are high level Nazis, anonymous members of the S.S. and Gestapo, and non-Party police investigators trying to solve a killing that leads them to Schumann without knowing the greater purpose that brought him to Germany.  The humiliation that Germany suffered during the War has warped the minds of its leaders, and they must find scapegoats to hold responsible–the Jews, the gypsies, the communists, the pacifists.  They are all viewed as guilty in a conspiracy against the Aryans, and now the Aryans must rid the country of these enemies of the state to begin the Thousand Year Reich.

America’s blindness during the early Hitler years is explained as well.  From lack of interest in the fate of the Jews and other minorities in Germany, to the desire to avoid a European war so soon after the “war to end all wars,” to a monetary interest from those who have invested in rearming Germany, the reader gets inside the minds of the characters in the book.  And all the bad guys aren’t on one side, much as we would like to think so.

Both the characters and the plot make this novel an extraordinary read.

I have read several of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme mysteries and enjoyed them, but The Garden of Beasts is a deeper, more thoughtful book than any in that series.  The subject it explores makes it so.

You can learn more about Jeffrey Deaver at his web site.

Say the name “Dr. Crippen,” and every reader of crime novels, thrillers, and detective fiction will know who you’re talking about.  Hawley Crippen, M.D., was one of the most notorious criminals in British history. Although he is accused of murdering “only” one person, that person was his second wife, and the thought of a medical man committing such a crime shocked 1910 Edwardian society to its core.  But was he guilty?

Dancing For The Hangman is told mostly in the doctor’s voice, using the journals he kept in prison plus some newspaper articles.  As the story opens, Crippen has just been tried and convicted for his wife’s murder and is awaiting death by hanging.  The book goes back and forth in time, starting with Crippen’s early life in America, his first marriage, and his romance and marriage to Cora Turner, an aspiring if not very talented singer/actress.  At first, after his unhappy marriage with his first wife who died of a stroke while pregnant with their second child, the relationship with Cora fulfills his sexual dreams.  He leaves (perhaps abandons is a more accurate word) his young son with his parents and he and his new bride leave for Europe to pursue his desire for wealth and social position.  He’s a homeopathic physician with little compassion for his patients and a great desire to push pills to enrich himself.

After a few years living with a bipolar Cora who herself was unfaithful, he begins a relationship with a young typist in his office, Ethel LeNeve.  And that leads to murder.  Or does it?

To the very end Crippen was certain his death sentence would be reversed, that it was a miscarriage of justice.  His wife’s death was an “accident,” his dismembering her body and burying part of it in their garden was a “necessity,” his flight with his lover to Canada was done only in “self-defense.”

Edwards does an excellent job bringing the doctor to life.  Crippen has so many blind spots and faults that it’s hard to know where to begin.  To me he was narcissistic, self-absorbed, unprofessional, an unscrupulous business partner, an uncaring father and son; I could go on and on.  But was he a murderer?

To this day, there is dispute over Hawley Crippen’s guilt or innocence. What weighed most heavily against him was his common-law marriage to the young Ethel, some 17 years his junior, and their flight aboard the S.S. Montrose, with Ethel disguised as a young boy.  But as they approached Father Point, Quebec, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Dew came out on deck to arrest Crippen.

An afterward by the author gives the reader the follow-up of what happened to the various personae in Crippen’s life–the ship’s captain, who alerted Scotland Yard; Inspector Dew; Ethel Le Neve, among others.  But as Edwards notes, no one knows for certain what truly happened at the infamous 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Camden Road, Holloway, London, England.

You can find more information on Martin Edwards at his web site.

“For years, I envied my friend Jeff Conklin, who, at the age of eleven, found a dead guy.” I ask you, who could resist a line like that?

Bad Move, by Linwood Barclay, has that as its opening line.  And it just gets better.

Writing a humorous mystery is obviously very hard to do since so many writers fail at doing it.  Barclay, in what was his first novel, does a perfect job combining laugh-out-loud humor with a cleverly plotted story.  There are so many seemingly throw-away lines in the novel that end up tying the story into a perfect package that at the end I was truly impressed by Barclay’s cleverness.  Backpacks thrown down where they shouldn’t be, a teenager’s desire for a tattoo, a man lacking a sense of smell–the items of real importance are mixed so cleverly with the red herrings that I didn’t recognize them for what they were. Barclay must be familiar with Anton Chekhov’s line, “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”  All of Barclay’s rifles were aimed well and fired.

Zack Walker and his family have moved from Toronto, although that city isn’t named in the book, to the suburbs for what he views as a safer life.  Zack sees danger everywhere–keys left in the car in the driveway (a car thief might be lurking), a hair blower in the bathroom sink (possible electrocution), a front door left unbolted (a burglar’s dream).  But his every effort to try to impart cautionary tales to his wife and teenage son and daughter lead them to see him as a paranoid control freak, if not worse.  But, unable to stop himself from “teaching them a lesson,” he blunders on and eventually lands in the middle of corruption and murder in his safe, suburban environment.

It’s clear that Zack only wants to teach his family important lessons, but each one makes him appear more foolish than the one before. In his attempt to show his wife that she shouldn’t leave her purse in her shopping cart when she moves to another aisle, he slips the bag under his jacket and goes to his car to hide it in the trunk.  He waits there for his wife to leave the store, upset that her bag has been stolen.  But when she gets into his car, she has no purse and isn’t upset.  She tells him that she’s realized that wearing a fanny pack is easier than carrying her heavy purse while she’s shopping, so in fact she didn’t have her purse with her at all.  So who’s purse does Zack have in his car?  The story goes on from there.

Chapter 15, in which Zack and his son attend a parent-teacher meeting with the son’s science teacher, is the funniest piece of writing I’ve read anywhere in years. The beauty of it is that it’s totally a part of the story.   It’s not humorous lines gratuitously thrown in to make the reader laugh but rather a deeper look into the mind of the hero and his total obliviousness to how his son and the teacher view his actions during the meeting.  It’s funny and true at the same time.

My only regret after reading Bad Move was that I had never heard of the author until he was recommended to me a couple of weeks ago.  He’s a top-selling novelist in Canada and the United Kingdom and the author of several more books following Zack Walker, in addition to stand alone thrillers.  I guess I’ve got a lot of catching-up to do.

You can learn more about Linwood Barclay at his web site.

Snow Angels is the first in a new series by James Thompson, an American author who has been living in Finland for many years.  I must confess to having a strong desire to visit Lapland, the northernmost part of Finland, where this mystery is set.  This is despite the fact that during kaamos, the polar night, it’s totally dark for months at a time and the temperature can fall to -50 degrees Celsius, and my favorite season is summer.  The only reason I can give to explain my fascination with the country is that I did a report on Lapland during my elementary school days.  Somehow the foreignness of the place has always stayed with me.

So of course I thoroughly enjoyed reading Snow Angels.   The story takes place during the above-mentioned kaamos, right before Christmas.  Police detective Kari Vaara is called to the scene of the murder of a Somali movie actress who has been living in Lapland. A racial epithet is carved into the stomach of the actress, leaving little doubt of the racial hatred that was at least part of the motive for her death.  When Somali immigrants first came to Finland in the 1990’s, there was a lot of good feeling among the Finns; they saw themselves as welcoming a band of people fleeing a murderous country.  But, as Vaara notes, racial intolerance soon reared its ugly head, as the hard-drinking Finns began to distrust the alcohol-abstaining Muslims and resent the government aid they received.

Looking into the private life of the actress, the police learn that she has been intimate with more than one man, including the lover of Vaara’s first wife.  Is it her adultery that got Sufia killed or is it a racially motivated murder?

Vaara is also dealing with the emotional upheavals of his second wife, an American who fell in love with Lapland during the summer but now is having problems living in a land where the sun doesn’t rise for weeks at a time and the language and customs are so different from what she is used to in America.  Plus there’s the not-so-subtle political pressure of the police commissioner who can’t decide which will be more detrimental to the country’s image now that the crime is receiving international attention–leaving Vaara on the case or removing him.

There’s a lot of Lapland lore in this novel, probably written to explain a culture quite unfamiliar to many readers.   Did you know that ninety-five percent of murders in Lapland are solved?  That the sami (the preferred name for natives of Lapland, as Lapps is somewhat derogatory) rarely call each other by name?  That the usual gift for a child confirmed in the Lutheran Church (to which nearly all Finns belong) a generation ago was a set of dentures because by the time of their confirmations, most teenagers had lost their adult teeth due to nonexistent dental care?

There’s a lot going on in this novel–past and present wives, sexual encounters, political pressures, racial bigotry, rampant alcoholism, and more.   Sometimes it’s a bit overwhelming and a bit over the top.   Could so much be going on in such a small community?  But Thompson pulls it off.  His writing style is enjoyable, and he keeps you turning the pages.  All in all, you’ll want to read the novel to get a glimpse of this land touching the Arctic Circle.  And, like me, you’ll be waiting for another visit to northern Finland.

You can learn more about James Thompson at the Penguin web site.

It’s strange how one series by an author can capture your interest from the beginning and another one can’t.  I read one or two of  the novels in the Sigrid Harald series by Margaret Maron, but they somehow didn’t catch fire for me.  But as soon as I read Bootlegger’s Daughter, I was hooked for the rest of the Deborah Knott series.  And I haven’t been disappointed yet.

The series started out with Deborah as an attorney/investigator, but over time she has become a judge on the circuit in Colleton County, North Carolina.  She’s the only daughter and the youngest child of the infamous bootlegger of the title in the first novel in the series; the bootlegger was married and widowed twice and the father of eleven sons before he met the woman who would become his third wife and Deborah’s mother.

This is definitely a series you want to start at the beginning because it follows a time line for Deborah’s life and loves.  Spoiler alert–in this book Deborah is married and a stepmother.  You need to start reading the series if you haven’t already, because Hard Row is number thirteen and you’ve got a lot of catching up to do!

Deborah and Dwight, who is the country sheriff, were married just a few weeks when Dwight’s ex-wife was murdered and their son came to live with the newlyweds.  At home, Deborah is finding that being a stepmother is definitely a learning curve.  Although she and Cal generally get along well, having an eight-year-old child was unexpected and provides a number of challenges that she hadn’t anticipated.

On the bench, the judge is dealing with a very hostile divorce case in which the husband can’t be found, while at the same time a number of body parts are strewn around the county.  I don’t think I’m giving too much away when I say I wasn’t surprised to find out who the dismembered corpse was, but the motive for this gruesome crime was quite ingenious.  Also, there’s tension between the native North Carolinians and the newly arrived Latinos who are working in their fields.  These two issues seem to have nothing to do with each other, but Maron ties them together very neatly and believably.

There’s a definite down-home feel to the Deborah Knott books, partly because of the rural North Carolina setting and partly because of the heroine’s family.  There are a passel of family members–brothers, sisters-in-law, nieces, nephews, aunts, and uncles, to say nothing of the family’s patriarch.  Although most of them do not play major roles in these books, they do give balance to Deborah’s life.  As I wrote in my March 9th column, www.marilynsreads.com/about/, I find I enjoy books more when I know the back story.

There’s a similarity here to the Marcia Muller books about Sharon McCone, with that heroine also having a large family who sometimes play a part in the mystery.  But each author has her own voice, and the differences in the settings between country North Carolina and city San Francisco definitely add to the differences between the two female protagonists.

One of Margaret Maron’s greatest strengths is the way she makes her characters so vivid. You feel as if you’d know Deborah if you met her anywhere and you’d like her right away.  Her characters are human, believable, and fit comfortably in their own skin.  They make mistakes, but they  learn from them, and they have a code that keeps them true to their values.  You’d like to meet them and get to know them, and that’s the highest praise a reader can give to an author.

You can learn more about Margaret Maron at her web site.

It’s always a pleasure to discover a new series by a favorite author.  Charles Todd, actually Caroline and Charles Todd, a mother and son who author the Inspector Rutledge novels, has written the first in what I hope will be a long series.  A Duty to the Dead features Elizabeth (Bess) Crawford, a nurse during the First World War, who has made a promise to a mortally wounded soldier to return to his family and tell one of his brothers to “set things right.”

Just what Arthur Graham means by that Bess isn’t sure, but her uncomfortable feeling about it leads her to postpone carrying out Graham’s last request for several weeks.  Finally she writes to the family and receives a note asking her to visit them for a weekend.  There she finds his mother, two younger brothers, and a half-brother about whom Arthur never spoke.  Peregrine, the oldest of the four sons and the only one from their father’s first marriage, has been in a mental asylum since he was fourteen, about half his life, after having killed a young female servant in London.  But did he truly commit the crime?  It’s obvious that the family wants nothing to do with this errant son and won’t allow either the village doctor or the village rector to see him; nor does any member of his own family ever visit him except for one brief visit from Arthur years before.

Bess Crawford comes from a military family; indeed, she calls her father Colonel Sahib, if only in her mind.  Her call to duty is strong, and that is what finally persuades her to go to Kent and face the Graham family, even as she believes there’s a meaning to Arthur Graham’s last request that will make her an unwelcome guest.

I didn’t find the mystery especially difficult to solve.  Naturally, once Bess gets involved with the Peregrine, the “mad” brother, the reader knows there will be more to his story than everyone has believed for years.  What I found fascinating were Bess’s beliefs; very much the proper British woman, although stubborn and courageous at a time when these were not viewed as positive attributes, she still is unable to believe that there can be anything truly wrong in this family.  Every time there’s an incident which casts the mother and brothers in a unfavorable light, Bess finds an excuse to explain it.  There’s a kind of naivete in this young woman that would be impossible to believe were this a contemporary crime story.  Our outlook today is that there is no crime so horrendous that we cannot imagine that people could commit it.  After World War II, numerous other genocides, and 911, to say nothing of individual murders, today’s heroines would not have much trouble accepting that families would commit evil acts without a backward glance or a feeling of regret.  More’s the pity, I think.

This is a very strong “first novel,” although of course Todd has written eleven mysteries featuring Rutledge, so he’s hardly a neophyte.  But A Duty to the Dead shows us a strong, believable heroine quite different from Rutledge, one I hope will go on to be the lead in a series as long and successful as his.

You can also find out more about Charles Todd at his web site.

The recent death in October 2009 of Stuart M. Kaminsky left a huge void in the mystery world. He was the author of more than 60 mysteries, featuring four fascinating and different protagonists. His Toby Peters series features a down-at-the-heels private eye circa World War II who solve crimes involving such movie luminaries as Clark Gable, Gary Grant, Bette Davis, and Judy Garland. His Lew Fonesca series has as its hero a depressive process server in Florida trying to deal with the hit-and-run death of his wife. The Abe Lieberman series (the only one I’m not familiar with) features a Chicago police detective (called the rabbi) and his partner Bill Hanrahan (called the priest) as they walk the streets of the Windy City. And his Porfiry Rosnikov novels portray a Moscow police officer starting during the Soviet communist regime and continuing to present-day Russia.

A Whisper to the Living is the last of Mr. Kaminsky’s books about Rosnikov, who, in the words of the book’s jacket, is “one of the last honest civil servants in a very dishonest post-Soviet Russia.” The system may have changed in these post-communist times, but the struggle for power continues among those who have survived. Rosnikov is often given cases that no one else wants or will take, and very often his superior, known as The Yak, gives him a case with the unvoiced hope that he will fail to bring the perpetrator to justice if that would in any way bring trouble to The Yak or to the untouchables in power. The Yak, much as he admires Rosnikov, is willing to sacrifice him and his team if that proves necessary for his own protection and advancement.

In A Whisper to the Living Rosnikov and his team, as usual, are dealing with several crimes. The Maniac is a serial killer strangling mostly elderly men in a Moscow park; Ivan Medivkin, also known as The Giant, is a professional wrestler whom the police believe has killed his wife and her lover; and the detective’s team is trying to protect an English journalist investigating a story of prostitution in Russia. Kaminsky weaves the stories back and forth effortlessly, and his characters, both good and evil ones, are incredibly alive.

The death of Stuart Kaminsky was one of five in the past year that, in my mind, removed a major talent from this genre. The others are Philip R. Craig, author of the Vineyard mysteries featuring J. W. Jackson; Dick Francis, author of many stand-alone racing novels; Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser, Jesse Stone, and Sunny Randall novels; and William Tapply, author of the Brady Coyne series that features a Boston lawyer. It’s painful to realize that we have either read the last works by these gifted writers or from now on we will read novels that are published posthumously. How lucky we were that they shared their literary gifts with us.

There is no dedicated web site about Kaminsky, but there are many interviews with him and reviews of his books available on the web.

The recent death of Robert B. Parker came as a shock to mystery lovers everywhere. I’ve been a fan of Parker’s since The Godwulf Manuscript and have read each Spenser novel as soon as it was published, although I strongly believe that Parker’s first dozen books were his best.

I’ve not been so enamored of the Jesse Stone or Sunny Randall novels, although I have read several in each series.  Split Image reinforces my belief that Stone is a faint copy of  the “later” Spenser. The too-cute sexual repartee between Spenser and Susan Silverman is identical to that of Stone and whomever he’s bedding.  In addition, there’s always some soft-core verbal sexual talk between Stone and Molly Crane, the sole woman in the Paradise P.D.  In Split Image, Stone, the police chief of the afore-mentioned town, and Sunny Randall, a former Boston detective and current private investigator, try to comfort themselves by hopping into bed.   Again.

Parker portrays each of them as trying to get over their former spouses, and he does a credible job combining Stone’s efforts at moving on with his life while trying to solve two murders that involve beautiful twin sisters, each one married to a crime boss.  What’s so upsetting to Stone, and what nearly derails him, is the question how come these guys (read:  undeserving) got such beautiful, devoted wives while I (read:  deserving) got stuck with a woman who felt being rich and famous was more important than being married to me.  It takes Stone a few sessions with his psychologist and a few talks with Sunny to work out his feelings.   I wanted to say to Stone:  get over yourself, it’s not about you, it’s about solving the crimes in your town.

While Stone is dealing with his psyche, two murders take place in Paradise.  (Not so aptly named, perhaps?  It’s hard to resist taking shots at a town with a name like that.)   There’s too much angst and not enough mystery in Split Image.  In fact, there’s not much mystery at all.  The book, with its wide margins and mini-chapters, is 277 pages, but it probably could have been reformatted to 200.

In the Spenser novels, food plays a big part; in the Stone novels, it’s alcohol.  Although Stone tries to deal with his drinking with various degrees of success, the problem is always with him.  He denies he’s an alcoholic, but as he says here, he drinks when he’s happy and he drinks when he’s sad. If that’s not a good definition of an alcoholic, I’d like to know a better one.

Split Image is not a bad book, it’s just a book that feels like a retread. The mob bosses from Boston, the sexy women who find Stone irresistible, the sly sex talk–we’ve heard it all before.  I borrowed this book from a close friend.  He’s a very knowledgeable reader of mysteries and had given up reading Parker years ago, making fun of me for continuing.  However, on hearing of Parker’s death, he bought Split Image as a sort of homage to the late author.  It was a worthy thought, and I wish it had been for a better book.

You can also find out more about Robert B. Parker at his web site.