A Bed of Scorpions brings us back for a second visit with the delightful Samantha Clair.  Happy in her career as an editor at a London publishing house, she’s on her way to meet her long-time friend and former lover, Aidan Merriam, for lunch.  Entering their favorite Lebanese restaurant and arriving at their regular table, she’s surprised to find Aidan already seated.  With his very tight schedule, he’s never late but always arrives exactly on time.

Sam immediately thinks that something must be wrong, and when Aidan covers his face with his hands she’s sure of it.  But still she’s not prepared for the awful news–his friend and partner in their art gallery, Frank Compton, was found a day earlier at his desk, an apparent suicide.  And the detective investigating the death is Sam’s significant other, Jake Field.

A note on Frank’s computer saying “I’m sorry” neither adds nor subtracts from the idea of suicide.  But Frank hadn’t been ill, had had the same romantic partner for decades, and a forensic search of the gallery’s assets doesn’t turn up anything suspicious.  Although no one is completely satisfied that Frank killed himself, there’s nothing to prove that someone else killed him.  And there the matter rests.

The gallery is involved in an upcoming Edward Stevenson show to tie in with a major exhibit at the Tate.  Stevenson was an eccentric English artist who vanished more than twenty years earlier, leaving a note for his wife saying he was going to an ashram in India.  Apparently he had been interested in Eastern religions, so his wife didn’t think his leaving was too strange.  But when he never wrote again, and an investigation in India found no trace that he had ever been there, it became an unsolved mystery.  That is, until this year, when his skeleton was discovered in a house in Vermont that was being renovated.

Now that there’s major interest in Stevenson’s work, there’s also a conflict between the gallery and Stevenson’s heirs, his widow and their daughter.  It turns out that Sam met the daughter of the late artist a few days earlier, without realizing at the time who she was.  Celia Stevenson Stein is much more involved with the late artist’s estate than her mother has been, and it looks as if there may be financial ramifications for Aidan’s gallery.

As I wrote in my review of A Murder of Magpies, I really, really like Sam Clair and the people around her.  Sam is smart, funny, unsure around people she doesn’t know, and can be a bit sarcastic, all totally believable characteristics in a book editor, I imagine.  Her solicitor mother, Helena, is equally smart, perfectly dressed, and comfortable in any situation.  Well, at least they have one thing in common.  And there’s Jake, Sam’s lover; Sam’s goth and very efficient editorial assistant Miranda; and the mysterious Mr. Rudiger, an elderly architect who seems to have had an unusual life before he rented the flat upstairs from Sam.

A Bed of Scorpions is just as enjoyable as A Murder of Magpies, and that’s high praise.

You can read more about Judith Flanders at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

It’s 1813 in England.  In the seemingly quiet countryside of Ayleswick-on-Teme, Shropshire, villagers are talking about the death of a young woman who had arrived there only a week earlier.

Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, has traveled to the village for two reasons.  The first is to honor a request by a young friend, Jamie Knox.  Shortly before he died Jamie asked Sebastian to return a family heirloom to his grandmother, Heddie, and so the viscount goes to Ayleswick-on-Teme to do so.

Before Sebastian can visit the grandmother he’s approached by young Archie Rawlins, who has become the town’s justice of the peace upon the recent death of his father.  After viewing the body of the young woman, known to the townspeople as Emma Chance,  Archie asks Sebastian for help.  Archie isn’t certain that her death is the suicide it appears to be.  It was a criminal offense to kill one’s self in nineteenth-century England; the body of a suicide was buried at a crossroads, without church rites and with a stake through its heart.  And the justice of the peace, although having known the woman for only a few days, would like to avoid that ending for her.

Emma Chance had arrived in the village with only a female servant and the equipment that an artist would carry.  She was allegedly traveling through the countryside to sketch, although that was considered a strange and rather inappropriate thing for a young widow, as she presented herself, to do.  She didn’t appear to have any friends or family in the town but had been asking everyone she met about their family histories.

All of this resonates strongly with Sebastian, as this is the second reason for his visit to the village.  He too is on a quest.  Brought up to believe that he was the third son of Alistair St. Cyr, Earl of Hendon, two years earlier he had discovered that he was the son of his mother and one of her lovers.  His father had known this, but when Sebastian’s two older, legitimate, brothers died, the earl named his illegitimate son his heir.

When Sebastian met young Jamie Knox some time before this book opens, he was struck by their uncanny resemblance to each other; it was remarkable enough so that they might have been brothers.  Thus, upon Jamie’s death Sebastian eagerly seized the opportunity to pay his respects to Heddie Knox, to ask her questions and possibly find out more about his paternal family.

When Falcons Fall begins with one death but soon encompasses many more.  There’s a history in this town of young women meeting unusual ends, usually seen as suicides, that strikes Sebastian and his wife Hero as too frequent to be normal.  And then there are the strange deaths of the two most powerful men in Ayleswick-on-Teme, one having died when his manor home was engulfed in fire, the other in a riding accident.  And no one in the village seems to be particularly upset about either death.

Although When Falcons Fall is the eleventh book in the series, there is enough background given to make the plot easily understandable.  All the characters are vibrant and realistic, and the double searches of Emma Chance and Sebastian St. Cyr make for a gripping plot.

You can read more about C. S. Harris at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Detective Inspector Helen Grace is called to a remote portion of a Southampton beach to investigate the corpse found buried in the sand.  It’s the body of a young woman, pale and emaciated, with a bluebird tattoo on her right shoulder.  The force’s forensic officer, already on the scene, believes that the woman’s burial is not recent, that she could have been there for as long as two or three years.

What makes the scene even more painful for Helen is her immediate feeling that whoever placed the body there had done so with the knowledge that it wouldn’t be easily found.  Thus, she thinks, this is not the killer’s first victim and possibly, she fears, not his last.

Miles away in a basement is another young woman.  Ruby has no idea where she is or how she has gotten there.  The room is dark, without windows, and very cold.  Her last memory is of coming home to her apartment from a night out drinking with friends, gulping down a glass of water, and then….But how did she get from there to here?  And where is her inhaler, something she is never without?

At the same time as she tries to identify the body found in the sand, Helen is pursuing another search, a personal one.  She is trying to find her nephew Robert Stonehill, the only child of her sister Marianne.  Robert disappeared after learning the truth about his mother nearly a year earlier, and Helen has been unable to find any trace of him.

Using police computers and the confidential information on them to look for Robert is most definitely against the rules and would cause Helen serious problems if she were found out.  But she’s desperate to get information.  Her attempt to go through the proper channels has been stymied by her station chief, Ceri Harwood, a woman intensely jealous of Helen’s successes in past investigations who will do almost anything, legal or not, to discredit her subordinate.

Helen’s childhood was traumatically dysfunctional, and she brings a lot of heavy baggage with her to her personal life and her official position.  But none of that interferes with her drive to succeed or her ability to uncover clues that other detectives have missed.  If only she could regulate her personal life as well as she does her professional one.

I reviewed Eeny Meeny last year and thought it was one of the best mysteries of 2015.  Mr. Arlidge continues the high suspense in The Doll’s House, the third novel in this series, as well as giving readers a better look into what makes Detective Helen Grace tick.

You can read more about M. J. Arlidge on various sites on the web.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

The Taylors’ marriage had warning signs from the beginning.  When seventeen-year-old Jean met the slightly older, more sophisticated Glen Taylor, she was swept away.  Eventually he won over her parents, and two years later Jean and Glen were married.

They were happy, as long as Glen got to make all the decisions.  He called it being protective, choosing the seat for her at a bar, deciding on her meals so she could taste new things, explaining to her that their kitchen wasn’t quite clean enough.  And Jean wanted to please him, to make things good between them, so she agreed with his decisions and their marriage went along smoothly.

Then things start to go wrong.  Glen is let go from his position at the bank.  He tells Jean he was terminated because the management was downsizing and that he is going to start his own business, but Jean finds a letter from the bank with the words “unprofessional behavior,” “inappropriate,” and “termination forthwith.”  It’s the beginning of serious trouble for the couple.

Dawn Elliot is a single mother to two-year-old Bella.  And one afternoon Bella disappears from their front yard.  “But I was just trying to get her tea ready,” Dawn tells Detective Bob Sparkes.  “She was out of sight for only a minute.”  But that’s all it took for the toddler to disappear.

All of England is looking for Bella, with telephone calls and CCTV coverage constantly updating the police.  Then a tip comes in from a delivery van driver who works for the company where Glen Taylor is temporarily employed.  That driver gives the police the name of the driver who was scheduled to work in the area near Bella’s home on the day she went missing; that driver in turn tells them that he didn’t do the last run of the day but passed it along to Glen.

The Widow covers a period of more than three years in three voices:  Jean Taylor, Glen’s wife; Kate Waters, a reporter at the Daily Post; and Detective Bob Sparkes.  The reader will be carried along by the story, understanding the events as they are seen by these three people.  Jean, who is happily married to Glen until the police come to their house and question him about Bella’s disappearance; Kate, sympathizing with Jean while at the same time doing everything in her power to obtain the exclusive story of the Taylors’ marriage for her paper; Bob, whose obsession with Bella’s case nearly undermines his career.

The novel is as real as today’s headlines.  Each of the above characters, along with many others in the book, has his/her own agenda, and finding out the truth about the kidnapping isn’t always uppermost in each person’s mind.

Fiona Barton has written a gripping mystery, filled with insights into the minds of those who buy child pornography and the slippery slope to which it may lead.  You won’t forget The Widow in a hurry.

You can read more about Fiona Barton at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

March 12, 2016

My first Golden Oldies column was an homage to what I believe to be the greatest mystery novel ever–And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie.  I rate it at the top because, as I said in my February 18, 2011 column, I’ve read it numerous times and still can’t find the clues to the murderer amidst all the red herrings Mrs. Christie so temptingly lays out for us.  Of course I know who committed the crimes, but I try to read it each time as if it were new to me, and I’m puzzled every time.

I’m writing about it again because the Lifetime channel is showing a two-part adaptation of And Then There Were None that airs Sunday and Monday nights.

The 1945 English film, which I’ve seen, was true to the novel until the last scene.  When the book was adapted for London’s West End in 1943, Ms. Christie and the producers agreed to change the book’s original ending to make it less grim, and the film used that ending.   Just goes to show you that even “geniuses” can make mistakes.

Interestingly, the book’s history is almost as complex as the book’s plot.  It was originally published in November of 1939 in Britain under the title Ten Little N——, a word that did not have the same racist connotations in England as it did in the United States.  When it was published in the U.S. a month later, the title was changed to And Then There Were None and still later to Ten Little Indians.

In its other incarnations, it has been a radio play, a board game, a television series, and a graphic novel.  It has sold over 100 million copies, making it the best-selling mystery novel in history and the seventh best-selling book in all publishing history.  In addition to being translated into all the “usual” languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc.), it’s also available in Ukrainian, Thai, Icelandic, Basque, and Bengali, plus dozens more!

So of course I’m very eager to see the 2015 BBC version that will be on Lifetime.  For more information about the film and Agatha Christie’s career, go to http://www.mylifetime.com/movies/and-then-there-were-none.  And happy watching.

Marilyn

Two women in the Colorado wilderness, one missing and the other trying to find her.  They couldn’t be less similar, but the search that connects them is stronger than the differences between them.

Amy Raye Latour is elk hunting in the woods with two friends.  Amy Raye, although skilled with a rifle, prefers to hunt with a compound bow.  Her husband and two children are at home, and now she’s preparing to leave her two fellow hunters at the camp and search for the elk herself.  Without telling Aaron or Kenny, she packs up food and water for the day and drives away in Aaron’s truck.  She thinks she’s prepared for every eventuality, but she’s not.

Pru Hathaway works for the Bureau of Land Management as an archaeological law enforcement ranger.  It’s a job she describes as being a police officer of the past, looking for disturbances to the land and the possible looting of historic artifacts.  Along with her dog Kona, she is part of a team that sometimes has to search for missing hikers and hunters, people who underestimate the difficulties of the Colorado terrain,  don’t carry the necessary food and water, or don’t listen to the area weather forecasts.  And sometimes, even when the hikers or hunters take all the proper precautions, they still run into trouble.  That’s what happened to Amy Raye.

The reader is pulled into the lives of these two women.  Amy Raye is a woman with a very troubled history, with many secrets she has kept from her husband.  It’s partly this past life that she’s running from, not certain she wants to continue her life with him or if she even deserves to, given all that she’s been hiding over the years.

Pru, too, is working through some issues.  She’s the single mother of a teenage boy, the result of a one-night stand.  Successful in her career, she’s facing the idea of being alone as her son will be leaving for college in the not-too-distant future.

Breaking Wild follows Amy Raye and Pru, the former fighting with all her strength to get back to civilization after her pride and a series of bad judgment calls leave her alone and injured in the wilderness, the latter determined to find the missing woman, or at least find her remains.  As the days stretch out into weeks, a happy outcome is unlikely, but the determination of both women is very strong.

The sense of place in this novel is wonderful, with the reader swept through harrowing conditions.  The author, herself skilled in backpacking, snowmobiling, and hiking through the woods surrounding her former home in Colorado, makes both the incredible survival skills of Amy Raye and the persistence of Pru come alive.

You can read more about Diane Les Becquets at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Miles from Iceland’s capital, a woman swimming in the mineral-laden waters of the Midnesheidi Moor lagoon comes across a badly bruised corpse.  The pathologist on call can’t even count all the broken bones and isn’t able to come to a conclusion as to the cause of death.  Not a drowning, not a fatal beating, not a traffic accident.

There’s no identification on the man, the only clues to his identity being the leather jacket and cowboy boots he had been wearing.  Does this mean the man was an American?  Or perhaps simply an Icelandic admirer of the United States?

It’s 1979 in Reykjavik.  The Cold War is still going strong, and there’s a big American military base in Iceland’s capital.  The base has split the country in two, with one side believing that the country needs strong defense during the Cold War and only the Americans can supply it, and the other side wanting the Americans to leave Iceland to manage on its own.  And that divisiveness is nowhere more strongly felt than between the American military and the Icelandic police.

The day following the announcement of the body’s discovery, a woman calls the police to say it’s possible that the man might be her brother Kristvin; she hasn’t heard from him for several days, a highly unusual occurrence.  A trip to the morgue verifies his identity, but his sister has no idea what took him to the remote moor or why anyone would want to kill him.  He was a worker at the military base, but when the police attempt to question the base’s supervisor, it ignites the already existing tension between the two countries.

Erlandur (it’s the Icelandic way to refer to people by their first names only) Sveinsson has just been promoted to the rank of detective on the Reykjavik police force.  At the same time he’s investigating Kristvin’s death, Erlandur is also looking into the decades-old disappearance of a teenage girl.  Spurred on by a newspaper obituary of the girl’s father and knowing that the girl’s mother had died years before, Erlandur contacts Dagbjørt’s aunt, the girl’s only surviving relative.

He is doing this on his own time, he stresses to the aunt, not because any new information has come up but because she might be the only one alive with any answers as to what happened to her niece.  What Erlandur doesn’t tell her is that the disappearance resonates only too strongly with an incident in his own life, one he has never been able to put behind him.

I have read all of Arnaldur Indridason’s novels.  The sense they give of Iceland, its people, its geography, and its culture are incredibly strong.  At the time this book takes place, the country has been independent of Denmark for only sixty years.  It’s basically a nation of “peasants and farmers,” as Erlandur tells an American soldier, still trying to find its way into the modern world.

Erlandur is a wonderful character, a sensitive, moody man with a strong sense of purpose.  Following his career has been a delight, and this flashback more than thirty years earlier answers some, if not all, of the questions as to what makes him the man he is.

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

Check out the https://www.marilynsmysteryreads.com.

Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, Cambridge student, poet, and expert with sword and knife, is plucked from his college by Rodrigo Lopez, royal physician to Queen Elizabeth, for a dangerous assignment.  The year is 1583, and nineteen-year-old Christopher has no idea what he’s getting into.  But, according to Dr. Lopez, he has no choice in the matter.

The queen, daughter of Henry VIII, has been on the throne for twenty-five years, and since the beginning of her reign there have been plots against her.  Lately they have intensified in nature, leading to Elizabeth’s belief that her half-sister Mary, Queen of Scots, and the pope are in league to remove her and either imprison her in the Tower of London or behead her.  Then Mary, a devout Catholic, would become ruler and reinstate the Catholic Church as the state religion of the country.

Two members of Elizabeth’s council–Dr. Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who has converted to Protestantism in order to become the monarch’s doctor, and Sir Francis Walsingham, for whom the term spymaster was invented–are trying to thwart this plan.  They tell Christopher part, but not all, of the scheme to unseat Elizabeth and that vital information to defeat the traitors is known only to a prisoner being held in Malta, a Catholic stronghold in the central Mediterranean.

Walsingham tells Marlowe that the island “is ruled by the Knights of Malta, ruthless, devious, brilliant men…(They) have built the most secure prison in the world.  Our man is in the bottom of that prison.”  Being young, flattered, and above all seeking excitement, Marlowe replies “I like a challenge,” and he sets off immediately to rescue the man.

Of course, there are plots within plots in sixteenth-century England, and there are many twists and turns in the story.  Like Marlowe, the reader doesn’t know whom to trust.  One’s friend today may be one’s enemy tomorrow, or even later the same day.  But Kit is, in his own way, the match for the Knights of Malta and whomever is behind the plot to gain the throne for Mary.  Rescuing the prisoner is only the first step in making the monarchy secure for Elizabeth.

My knowledge of Christopher Marlowe was nearly non-existant before reading A Prisoner in Malta.  I knew him only as a contemporary of Shakespeare; indeed, there is a small number of scholars who believe in the Marlovian conspiracy theory that Marlowe actually wrote many of the plays and poems for which Shakespeare is credited.  But Marlowe achieved so much on his own that there is no need to believe in that theory.  Being a poet, playwright, translator, and “spy” should be enough of a legacy for any man, especially for one who lived only twenty-nine years.

This is a terrific novel.  The author has brought every character to life, and, unfortunately, the intrigues and petty jealousies that he describes among those in power appear as common now as they were in Marlowe’s time.

Phillip DePoy has a brief summary at the end of the book that gives biographical details of the main characters of the book.  Please don’t read the summary before reading A Prisoner in Malta:  it will spoil the novel.

You can read more about Phillip DePoy at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

A former police detective/former Coast Guard officer/former heroin addict, currently a virtually homeless photographer blessed and/or cursed with the ability to see ghosts, Jackie Lyons has more parts than a jigsaw puzzle.  Reduced to living in a lower-than-low budget motel and eating ramen noodles or nothing at all, she’s surprised by a call from a woman she met briefly a year earlier and hasn’t heard from since.

Jenny Loftin has called to say that the pastor of her church needs photos taken of an old house that he plans to turn into the parsonage of his new church.  Arriving at Stirling Estates, Jackie is waiting to meet Deacon Falgoust when she sees a man approaching her, his arms waving, his steps uncoordinated.  Suddenly he stumbles over a cliff into a body of water, and Jackie dives in after him.  His body is cold when Jackie pulls him out of the lake; in fact, Sam Loftin had already been for dead several hours when Jackie “saw” him on the cliff and then fall in the water.

Jackie has had visions all her life of people both recently dead and long deceased.  She no longer tries to explain this to others, and her hesitant description of what she saw, trying to avoid saying she saw the ghost of Sam Loftin, lands her in jail overnight.  In the morning she’s released and finds out that Sam’s death quickly has been ruled a suicide, allegedly due to his despair over the death of his young daughter five years earlier.

Deacon Falgoust is certain that Jackie will be able to help Jenny in her search for answers about her husband’s death.  To help them both, he suggests that Jackie move in with Jenny and her family in the Estates and pay a small amount of rent; it turns out that Sam has left a lot of unpaid bills, surprising in view of their upscale lifestyle and the fact that he never complained about business problems.  Nevertheless, Jenny is fearful of losing her home and seemingly wants more from Jackie, whom she suspects of having special powers, than Jackie is willing to give.

The title, The Covenant, refers to the rules, regulations, and restrictions that homeowners in Stirling Estates must agree to when they purchase their houses.  The restrictions are many and are clearly meant to tightly control who buys into the development and how they live.  But, as Deacon Falgoust tells Jackie, there are ways around anything, if the Lord is on your side.

Jackie Lyons is beset by demons, many of which are unexplained in this second novel of the series; that leads me to hope for an early third entry in the series.  Did she quit or was she fired from the Memphis Police Department?  Who was her husband and why did they divorce?  Why did she turn to heroin and how was she able to kick the habit?

The Covenant is a great read with a fascinating heroine and a gripping plot.  Its ending will have you wondering how you missed all the clues that led up to it…I certainly did.

You can read more about Jeff Crook at various sites on the web.

Checking out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

February 6, 2016

This month marks the sixth year anniversary of my writing this blog.  As people always say when celebrating anniversaries of various types, I can’t believe that so much time has passed.  But I truly can’t, as it seems more like months than years since I began reviewing new mystery novels, honoring writers who have passed away, mentioning favorite books from years ago, and occasionally writing about things that fascinate or annoy me.

I have many things to be grateful for that have come to me through this blog.  One is my connection with the wonderful Mainely Murders bookstore (www.mainelymurders.com) in Kennebunk, Maine, run by two former publishing executives.  Paula and Ann have made their garage-cum-bookstore a delightful place to visit, not only to find current best sellers but also hard-to-find older mysteries from around the United States and the world.  Putting aside their own comfort, these two intrepid women have braved such places as Santa Barbara, Scotland, and Paris, all to get their customers access to the best books available.  How much we owe them!

And speaking of owing people, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the publicists who have been sending me review copies of their firms’ latest mysteries for the past couple of years.  As I sit at my computer with ten novels to be read in the next few weeks, I’m overwhelmed with their generosity.  They’ve sent me thrillers, hard-boiled novels, and cozies too.  I’m feeling really fortunate right now.

My especial thanks to all those who read these weekly columns, tell me that they’re glad to get recommendations, and even sometimes let me know that they don’t agree with my reviews.  That’s okay–not every book strikes every reader the same way.  I’m just delighted they continue to follow the blog.

Here’s looking forward to my sixth year of blogging; I hope you’ll share the journey with me.

Marilyn

Doug Brock is a New Jersey police detective.  He’s honest, aggressive, and, some would say, a loose cannon in his pursuit of criminals.  So it’s no surprise that when Blackout opens he’s been suspended from the force for failing to follow orders.  But, Brock being Brock, that doesn’t deter him from following leads, even as he ends up in a hospital room, unable to remember the events of the past decade.

Doug had been mentoring an orphaned teenager whom he coached in baseball.  He was planning to adopt Johnnie Arroyo as soon as possible.  One night, as they walked along a Teaneck, New Jersey street after dinner, shots were fired at them from a passing car.  Despite Doug’s effort to shield Johnnie, two bullets passed through the young man’s body, killing him instantly.

Certain that he knows the man behind the murder, Doug disobeys orders and starts his own investigation.  Even being put on indefinite suspension doesn’t stop him, and in his downward spiral he has broken off his engagement to fellow officer Jessie Allen.  And then comes his phone call to his partner, Nate Alvarez.

Nate is frankly tired of the emotional basket case that Doug has become.  He’s received too many phone calls about Doug’s unofficial search for Johnnie’s killer, each one more strident and over-the-top than the one before, so only the fact that he’s Doug’s best friend keeps him on the line this time.  In the midst of the call, with Doug telling Nate to call the FBI, the phone on Doug’s end is dropped and Nate hears the devastating sound of two gunshots and then two more.  Then silence.

When Doug awakens five days later from his drug-induced coma, not surprisingly he’s exhausted and weak, barely able to speak.  However, much worse than that is the fact that he believes it is 2005, a decade earlier than the actual date, and that he is twenty-six, ten years younger than his true age.  He’s suffering from retrograde amnesia, with no guarantee that his memory of the last ten years will ever return.

Blackout is a gripping thriller that will captivate the reader from the first chapter.  The police department tells Brock that he apparently was investigating Nicholas Bennett, an important crime figure in the state, but as it’s obvious that Doug has no memory of Bennett or his probable connection to the shooting of Johnnie Arroyo, they withhold some pertinent information from him.

However, there’s enough information for Brock to disregard his captain’s orders to start back to work slowly; he’s frantically hunting his memory for his connection to Bennett and the reason why the crime boss would have tried to have him killed.

All the characters in the novel are terrific–Doug Brock, determined to regain his memory and discover what led to the shooting; Nate Alvarez, trying with little success to rein in his partner and finally agreeing to help him fill in the gaps in his memory; Jessie Allen, the woman Doug can’t remember he was engaged to; and Nicholas Bennett and Ahmat Gharsi, two men of widely disparate backgrounds who are working together to commit a horrific crime.

You can read more about David Rosenfelt at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

We don’t know the home Orphan X came from or how he was found.  But we do know some facts–he came from East Baltimore, he was taken away in a luxury sedan, and apparently he was chosen because the Mystery Man, aka Jack Johns, saw something in this twelve-year-old standing on the broken concrete of a school playground that no one else was able to see.  And Orphan X, first name Evan, thought that wherever he was being taken would be better than where he was; as it happened, that turned out being trained to be an assassin for the United States government.

Fast forward about two decades, and Evan is now Evan Smoak, posing as a Los Angeles importer of industrial cleaning supplies, a “cover” presumably so boring as to deflect any intrusive questions as to his occupation.  He’s no longer working for the government, but having amassed a considerable fortune he is free to choose his own assignments.  He’s content to wait for his phone to ring to let him know there’s another job waiting for him, and so it does.

A teenage Latina girl named Morena tells Evan she has gotten his name from someone he helped previously, and when Evan validates that information he agrees to talk to her.  When they meet she tells him how she’s trying to protect her younger sister from the sexual abuse she’s been suffering from a member of the Los Angeles police department.  This man has a whole street of teenage girls in the barrio under his control for his own sexual use and for other men’s perversions as well.

Outraged and disgusted by this, Evan successfully rids Morena of her tormentor, but in doing so he places his own life in danger.  He is used to fighting and protecting himself, but this time it appears that his enemies are as skilled and determined as he is.

Evan has insulated himself from the world in his attack-proof condo, the penthouse suite in a building called Castle Heights.  The windows are bullet-proof, the walls have been reinforced, the door has steel inside its regulation wooden frame.  And there’s also the Vault, a specially built hidden room filled with multiple computers and video monitors, all to protect himself from his assailants.  He even goes by the name of The Nowhere Man; his encrypted private network phone number is 1-855-2-NOWHERE.

But now he is finding himself vulnerable, not only to a physical attack from his adversaries but to an emotional invasion from one of his neighbors and her eight-year-old son.  Somehow Mia Hall and her son Peter have innocently been intruding into Evan’s life, and the more interactions they have, the less he finds himself minding them.  In fact, he’s beginning to enjoy their company.

Evan Smoak is a terrific character, a man who came from nowhere and remade himself/was remade into a killing machine.  His targets are those who prey on the vulnerable, the needy, and for each case he takes he asks only one thing:  that the person who benefits from his aid give his name to one other person in need of help.  That’s all.  But that’s enough for someone to want to get rid of him.

Gregg Hurwitz has written a great thriller, filled with characters the reader will long remember and a page-turning plot that will hold you in suspense until the end.

You can read more about Gregg Hurwitz at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Once a Crooked Man is a terrific read.  Starting with an overheard conversation outside the Fiery Dragon Chinese restaurant in New York City, traveling to South America and London and back again to Manhattan with corpses everywhere, David McCallum will have you hooked all the way.

It all begins when Carter Allinson II stops by a Starbucks in New York City and shares a table with a beautiful young woman.  Fiona Walker comes from a wealthy family, and shortly after their meeting the couple become engaged and Carter is welcomed into Fiona’s father’s investment firm.  As a college student Carter had supported himself by a little drug dealing, but with his upcoming wedding he wants to leave that behind him.

Not so fast, says gangster Sal Bruschetti, head of the organization that has been supplying Carter.  You don’t need to be doing any more minor-league dealing, but we need you for another reason.  We’ll be investing money with your father-in-law’s firm, and you’ll be handling all the investments in legitimate ways.  Otherwise, we’ll let the Walkers know about your history.  Carter doesn’t see that he has a choice in the matter, and so begins the long-term relationship between Carter and the three Bruschetti brothers.

None of this has anything to do with Harry Murphy, a fairly successful actor who works in television, on Broadway, and does voiceovers for commercials.  He’s on a Manhattan street when he has an immediate need for a bathroom.  Spotting the Fiery Dragon, he walks in on the Bruschettis in the midst of a “business” talk.  They order him out, but his need is so great that he decides to use the alley outside the building to relieve himself.  Thus he can’t help overhearing their conversation concerning a man in London that the trio is going to have killed.

The plot of Once a Crooked Man is a great one.  Ever impetuous, when Harry learns what the brothers have planned he decides to fly to England and warn the victim.  Once there, there’s no controlling the events that follow.  But Harry is a resourceful man with many talents.  Sometimes he’s a step ahead of the Bruschettis, sometimes a step behind, but he’s always in the midst of the action.

All the characters in this novel are terrific.  I was constantly surprised by the twists and turns the book took because of the things the individuals said and the ways they responded to events.  Carter, Harry, the British detective Lizzie Carswell, and Sal, Enzo, and Max Bruschetti are wonderfully drawn.  The plot goes from one cliffhanger to another, keeping the reader totally engaged up to the last page.

You may remember David McCallum from his many roles, starting with The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and continuing to the present in NCIS.  Now he is an author as well.  Let’s hope for many more books from this talented man.

You can read about David McCallum at various sites on the web.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

The Bosnian war ended more than two decades ago, but its tremors are still being felt.  In Toronto, police detective Esa Khattak and his partner Rachel Getty are about to relive the massacres that occurred when the former Yugoslavia split into three warring nations, and the Bosnian Serb forces began the killing of 100,000 citizens, the majority of them Yugoslavian Muslims.  It was the worst European genocide since World War II.

Christopher Drayton, a Canadian citizen and wealthy entrepreneur, is found at the bottom of a cliff near his home of Scarborough Bluffs.  Why, Esa wonders, has the Community Policing Section that he heads been called to investigate what would seem to be an unfortunate accident, given the dark night and the unstable grounds from which Christopher fell?

Esa asks Rachel to meet him at Winterglass, the home of famed author Nathan Clare, since Nate was a neighbor of the late Christopher Drayton.  It becomes obvious to Rachel, early in their visit, that Nate and Esa have known each other for years; indeed, Nate tells Rachel that the two of them went to college together.  So why, she wonders, is the air so filled with tension?

Following the visit to Nate’s home, the two detectives search Drayton’s house, and Rachel finds a file with a number of papers inside.  Each one has a sentence or two on it, not exactly threats, but certainly unpleasant thoughts.  This is a cat-and-mouse game.  As you took everything from me, you asked if I was afraid.  Can you right all the wrongs of the past?  What are they doing in Drayton’s house?  Were they written by him?  Were they sent to him?  Either way, there’s something about Drayton’s life that doesn’t seem to fit the picture that he presented to the world.

There appear to be two major parts to Drayton’s life.  First, he was engaged to Melanie Blessant, a divorced mother of two young daughters.  Second, he was about to give a very sizable donation to a local history museum, Ringsong, that specializes in the Andalusian traditions of art and poetry.  Could the murdered man’s substantial wealth have been a factor in his death?  His fiancée certainly seems to be more distraught at the thought of missing the huge wedding she had been planning than she is at Christopher’s death.  And was Drayton’s interest in the history of Andalusia simply self-aggrandizement, a genuine interest in Andalusia, or did he have a darker motive?  And how does this all connect to the Bosnian war of the 1990s?

The Unquiet Dead is an amazing book, both beautifully written and painful to read.  The author has a doctorate in international human rights law and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in law.  All this background comes into play in this deeply felt novel.  Ms. Kahn’s characters are realistic, both heroic and flawed, each with his or her own agenda that takes precedence over everything else in life.

Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty will be appearing in the second book of the series in February, and I am very much looking forward to reading it.

You can read more about Ausma Zehanat Khan at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.

Elvis Cole, the private investigator who is the protagonist of many of Robert Crais’ crime novels, has a very mysterious client.  Meryl Lawrence comes to him with a strange request–she wants him to find her colleague, Amy Breslyn, who has been missing for a couple of days, but she insists that the search must be conducted in complete secrecy.

She hands Elvis two thousand dollars in cash, an address for a friend of the missing woman’s late son, and a personnel file that she believes will help locate Amy.  Meryl’s desire for secrecy is so over-the-top that she won’t even come to Elvis’ office; instead, they meet in a parking lot behind a book store in Pasadena.

Both Amy and Meryl work at Woodson Energy Solutions, a chemical firm where Amy is employed as an engineer.  Meryl tells Elvis that because their work is classified, no indication of his investigation must get out and insists that Elvis make this promise.  “Swear to me.  Swear you won’t breathe a word.”  “I promise.” Bound by his word, Elvis is finding it increasingly difficult to probe into Amy’s disappearance.

Amy’s only son Jacob was a photographer who was killed, along with thirteen other people, by a terrorist explosion in Nigeria.  That was nearly a year and a half before the book opens, and since then Amy has become more and more reclusive.  Now she has disappeared.

Elvis goes to the address that Meryl has given him and is surprised to find it surrounded by Los Angeles police, with a helicopter overhead.  As he’s deciding how to handle the situation a man comes running out of the house, and Elvis gives chase.  He’s not able to catch him and is forced to stop when a policeman with a pistol confronts him.  Believing that Elvis has acted suspiciously, the cop puts him in a squad car without explanation.  But when Elvis sees the words on the police car he begins to understand what all the commotion is about:  they read Bomb Squad.

Cole is joined in the case by his long-time friend and colleague, Joe Pike, plus two relatively new characters to Elvis’ world:  Scott James and Jon Stone.  Scott is a former Marine who is presently a dog handler in the L. A. police department’s K-9 division; Jon Stone, a friend of Pike’s, is a former Delta Force member turned mercenary, with expertise in technology.  Together, the four men, with assistance from Scott’s dog Maggie, team up to find Amy Breslyn and solve the mystery surrounding her.

As always, it’s a delight to reconnect with Elvis Cole.  He’s a protagonist who has grown with the series, a fascinating man with his own set of quirks and strengths.  He is perfectly described by Raymond Chandler’s famous quote about mean streets (my edits):  “a man…who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.  He is the hero; he is everything….If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

You can read more about Robert Crais at this web site.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her web site.