Marilyn's Mystery Reads

There’s a new profession in 19th-century London, that of private enquiry agent.  Cyrus Barker and his assistant, Thomas Llewelyn, have been very successful solving crimes that the police do not have the time to deal with or cannot clear up.  Cyrus and Thomas previously worked with Scotland Yard, but a rift had grown between the official agents of the law and the non-official, so the two men are extremely surprised when they are approached by Robert Anderson, England’s spymaster general and assistant commissioner at the Yard.

Robert is ill and is being forced to take a medical sabbatical by his wife and his doctor.  He wants his interests safeguarded while he’s gone and asks Cyrus, an old friend, to take a temporary position at Scotland Yard to help the force on a very delicate matter.

There have been two brutal murders in the East End of the city.  Two prostitutes, or “unfortunates” as they were also called at the time, were strangled and had their throats cut.  Although murders in that part of the city are not uncommon, and murders of prostitutes even less so, the horrific nature of these crimes has been noted, and there is fear among the police that they have a serial murderer on their hands.

Cyrus and Thomas agree to take the case, understanding that there will be considerable resentment on the part of most of the Yard’s detectives.  Nevertheless, the two continue to search for the knife-wielding killer, treading softly so as not to unduly antagonize those who are hoping and anticipating that they will fail, either because they are private detectives or because they are known to be friends of Robert Anderson, who has made his own enemies on the force.

The East End of London is where newly-arrived immigrants and other outsiders settle.  Israel Zangwill, an actual historical journalist and writer, is portrayed in the novel as a friend of Thomas’s, and one of Israel’s fears is that the Jewish community will be blamed for the murders.  In fact, the three main suspects the police officials are investigating are Polish Jews newly arrived in London.

At first Thomas thinks that given the manpower of the government, finding the murderer will be an easy matter.  But Cyrus is not so sure.  “I suspect several more women will be killed before this case is over,” he states, and of course he will be proven right.

One of the things that makes Anatomy of Evil so interesting is the well-known fact that the man who became known as Jack the Ripper has never been positively identified.  Dozens of men were considered as possibilities, but in the years before DNA testing and fingerprinting, no proof to convict an individual was ever found.  So how will this novel end?  Will the ending be satisfying?

I won’t answer the first question, but the answer to the second is yes.  Through the clever writing of Will Thomas, we are led to discover the killer as well as the reason that his identity was never made public.  Anatomy of Evil is a tour de force that is very satisfactory indeed.

You can read more about Will Thomas at this web site.

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

What happens when you can’t trust yourself to distinguish between fact and fantasy?

That is the dilemma that faces Dana Catrell after she staggers home from a neighbor’s house, having had too much to drink.  Waking several hours later from a restless sleep, she hears the sound of sirens getting closer and closer.  Going outside to find out what’s happening, she sees an ambulance in front of Celia Steinhauser’s home, which she had left several hours before.

At the Steinhausers’ door she sees Celia’s husband Ronald, apparently in a state of shock, standing next to the bloodied body of his wife.  Celia is still alive, but she won’t be by the time she reaches the hospital.

Belatedly, Dana realizes that she must be the last person to have seen her friend before she was attacked.   She remembers Celia showing her a photo on her cell phone, a photo of Dana’s husband Peter sitting in a compromising way next to a buxom blonde.  What happened between the time Celia yelled at her to come over because “it’s life or death,” and the last thing Dana remembers saying to her, “I don’t ever want to see you again?”  It’s all so hazy.

Dana has bipolar disorder, and when she doesn’t take her meds and goes into a manic phase, she loses control.  Everything is bigger, brighter, larger than life, but in that state her reality often slips.  Now she truly can’t remember if Celia was mortally injured when she left her house, and she’s not sure exactly what the photo on Celia’s phone showed.  Was it really Peter?  And why was Celia so distraught about it?

Dana is not surprised that her husband could be having an affair.  Her relationship with Peter has spiraled downhill over the past couple of years, but she lacks the strength to confront him.  Instead, that night she waits until he’s asleep and accesses his phone, looking for numbers that seem out of place.   Under “C” she presses a number with no name attached; stunned, she sees it go to Celia’s voice mail.  It’s a second cell phone belonging to Celia, not the one which Dana used to call her.  So that’s why Celia was so upset seeing Peter and the unknown woman together, Dana thinks; she’s been having an affair of her own with him.

The Pocket Wife is Susan Crawford’s first novel, and it’s a terrific one.  The characters and the plot are totally believable, and Dana is a sympathetic main character.  While at times the reader may want to shake her for not taking her medications, it’s understandable in the context of the drugs making her life dull and gray.  She doesn’t want to live in that dullness, but the manic stage brings its own dangers and problems.

You can read more about Susan Crawford at this web site.

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

You know that feeling when you begin reading a mystery and know from page one that it’s going to be a winner?  That’s the experience I had after reading the first paragraph of Little Black Lies, and the rest of the novel didn’t let me down.

Little Black Lies takes place in the Falkland Islands, an archipelago off the eastern coast of South America.  Catrin Quinn is a life-long resident of the islands, and she is at her emotional breaking point.  Three years earlier her two children were in the car of her best friend, Rachel Grimwood, and were left alone for just a minute when the car slid down a cliff.  Both boys were killed instantly.  Naturally, Catrin’s life fell apart–she and her husband Ben divorced shortly afterwards, and she hasn’t spoken to Rachel since the accident.

Now, only two days before the third anniversary of her sons’ death, Catrin has made a decision.  “I believe just about anyone can kill in the right circumstances, given enough motivation,” she says to herself.  “The question is, am I there yet?”

Stanley, the island’s capital, is a small place, and it’s very difficult for Catrin to avoid both her ex-husband and her ex-best friend, but she tries.  She cannot stop herself, however, from frequently driving past Rachel’s house late at night, imaging Rachel inside with her three children, doing the mothering things that Catrin can no longer do.  With each drive-by she gets closer to her ultimate desire, punishing Rachel as she herself has been punished.

Events in Stanley are spiraling out of control.  As the novel opens, there is a hunt on for a young boy, the third boy to go missing in three years.  Little Archie West is out picnicking with his family when they lose sight of him for a few minutes; then he is gone.  An all-island search is being conducted, with no one wanting to give voice to the fear that, like the other two boys, Archie will never be found.

At the same time the search for the youngster is going on, there’s another disaster in the making on the small island of Speedwell.  There is a mass beaching of pilot whales, hundreds of them, leaving the water and going aground on the sand.  Of course, once they’re on the sand, they’re unable to breathe and will die unless they can be forced/guided back to the ocean.  Scientists have various theories about what causes these beachings–one of the whales can have a virus, be hit by a ship, have its navigational system go wrong–but the results are fatal for them.  If one whale swims into shallow water and can’t get back into deeper water, the whole pod will follow.

Sharon Bolton has written a terrific thriller that will hold you enthralled until the last page.  And even then, I promise you will be totally unprepared for the book’s ending.

You can read more about Sharon Bolton at this web site.

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

Life in the middle years of 16th-century England is vividly portrayed in The Alchemist’s Daughter.  The novel takes place in Southwark, a borough just across the river Thames from London, a poor, filthy, dangerous place for anyone, especially young women. 

Bianca Goddard is the daughter of an alchemist father and an herbalist mother.  She decides to use the skills she has learned from her mother to help people, and thus she has become a creator and purveyor of various medicines and pesticides.

Her friend Jolyon Carmichael comes to Bianca’s one room home/apothecary in Southwark to update her on her life.  Jolyon was formerly a muckraker, a woman who uses a rake to comb through piles of trash and manure in the hope of finding something valuable to use or sell.  She is doing this when she finds a gold ring, a piece of jewelry she believes has brought her luck and changed her life for the better.

While wearing the ring she catches the eye of Mrs. Beldam, proprietor of Barke House, formerly a house of ill repute but now a rooming house for young women.  Getting a job at Barke House as an errand girl and laundress has greatly improved Jolyon’s life and allowed her to meet the mysterious man who has become her beau, despite the objections of Mrs. Beldam.

While Jolyon is explaining this to Bianca, she also tells her that she has been feeling ill lately.  Bianca fixes Jolyon a tonic to soothe her stomach, but shortly after drinking the mixture Jolyon falls to the floor of the apothecary and dies.  Bianca immediately becomes the obvious suspect for not-too-bright Constable Patch, so she urgently needs to find out what actually killed her friend and how it was done.

Although The Alchemist’s Daughter is the first in a series, a great deal of backstory is given to explain Bianca’s history and how she became interested in creating herbal mixtures and opening her business of Medicinals and Physickes.   She has estranged herself from her parents, dismissing her father whom she views as having wasted his life trying to convert worthless metals into gold, pitying her mother for having to live with such a man.  As Bianca tells Jolyon, “At least what I do benefits the sick and ailing, so it has some purpose.”

Mary Lawrence has done an excellent job in bringing the reader to London during the period Henry VIII was king.  Bianca is a fascinating heroine, a woman centuries ahead of her time in her determination to pursue the path she wants to follow as opposed to, as Constable Patch puts it, living in a nunnery or becoming a wife.  She has a suitor who wants to marry her, but Bianca is afraid that marriage will put a stop to her work, and that is something she is unwilling to allow.

You can read more about Mary Lawrence at this web site.

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

Martine LeDuc, public relations director for the city of Montréal, is called into the mayor’s office and told she would be the liaison to the police for the four murders that have shaken the city.  This sounds important, but Martine knows that she was chosen by the mayor just to get her out of his way; everyone else on his staff has important jobs to do, as he sees it, so Martine can best be spared.

She is paired with police detective Julian Fletcher, scion of a wealthy Anglo family in the city.  At first the two believe what seems obvious to everyone, that these four crimes were sexual in nature, all of the women having been raped before being murdered.  But while most serial rapists/killers attack women with similar lifestyles or looks, that’s not the case here.  One was a prostitute, one an investigative journalist, one a librarian, and the fourth a philanthropist.  They varied in age, looks, positions in life–so why were they victims?

When Martine and Julian find what they believe the women have in common, they have to work to put it all together.  And once they’re on the road to proving it, Julian is taken off the case, which may well reach into the highest levels of the Québec government and the Catholic Church.

The actual crimes committed by the church and the Québécois prime minister Maurice Duplessis in the 1940s and 1950s form the basis for this book. As the nuns and the Québec government became partners with the Central Intelligence Agency at the height of the Cold War, crimes against children were justified for that self-serving concept, “the greater good.”  I have never before read an Author’s Note that moved me to tears, but the last two pages of this novel did just that.

The novel is told in two voices, one being Martine’s in the present and the other excerpts from an unknown child’s diary written decades ago.  We are able to follow the story of this girl and the other orphans as they are moved from their homes, first to orphanages and then to asylums for the benefit of the church, the physicians who “cared” for them, and the mysterious firm that paid for the drugs that were used on them.

In the middle of the last century, the government of Québec paid the church $1.25 daily for each child in an orphanage and $2.25 for each person in a mental hospital.  So children were transferred to the asylum of Cité de Saint Jean-de-Dieu that was run by nuns; these children became, overnight, legally insane.  They were put into restraints, left for hours in cold water baths, and given mind-altering drugs to see how they were affected.  If this sounds like some horrific fantasy by George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, unfortunately it’s not; it was all too true.

Martine LeDuc is a terrific heroine.  She’s bright, good at her job, and obviously distraught at what she and Julian have discovered went on in Québec more than seventy ago.  She’s determined to right the wrongs committed by those in power as best she can, in part by making her discoveries public.  But, of course, that leads to great danger for herself.

Jeannette De Beauvoir has written other novels under various pseudonyms, but Asylum is the first featuring Martine LeDuc.  I hope it is the beginning of a series.

You can read more about Jeannette de Beauvoir at  this web site.

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

There’s a good reason that The Girl on the Train is a #1 New York Times best-seller.  It’s a fabulous read.

Rachel is the girl on the train and one of the book’s narrators.  She’s been fired from her job in the city but still tells her best friend, in whose house she’s renting a room, that she goes to work every day.

This daily train trip creates a problem for her.  The train passes the house she and her ex-husband Tom lived in when they were married and where he lives now with his new wife and child.  It also passes another house on that street where a young couple named Megan and Scott live; although she doesn’t even know their names, Rachel has created a fantasy life for them in her mind.

Megan is the second narrator we meet.  She’s outwardly happy, but she’s hiding a secret from years ago that is tormenting her and making her put herself in dangerous situations.  Rachel doesn’t know Megan and Scott, but in her imaginary world she has re-named them Jess and Jason and made them the perfect couple, and her obsessive fascination with them is the spark for the novel’s tragedy.

Anna is the third narrator.  Anna was Tom’s mistress during his marriage to Rachel, and she has no regrets about her part in their breakup.  She does regret that she has to live in the house that Tom lived in during his first marriage, but he tells her they can’t afford to move.  In addition, she is bothered because Tom can’t seem to get rid of Rachel, who calls and texts him constantly, going so far as to enter their house without their knowledge or permission.  Why does she persist in these behaviors, Anna wonders, when she knows Tom doesn’t want her?

The tensions in the three women grow to the breaking point.  Each is intertwined in the others’ lives both knowingly and unknowingly.  Rachel and Anna, of course, are aware of each other, but Rachel doesn’t know Megan or anything about her until well into the novel.  However, when Rachel does get entangled in Megan’s life, it leads to the climax that pulls all the threads together.

The Girl on the Train is a terrific thriller, with characters the reader can relate to and in whom they can believe.  We may not want to have any of these women or the men in their lives as friends, but we can understand their foibles and problems, even sympathizing with them while at the same time condemning their actions.  That’s real life, and Paula Hawkins shows it to us.

You can read more about Paula Hawkins at this web site.

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

Felix Francis, son of the three-time Edgar recipient Dick Francis, co-authored several novels with his father.   Since his father’s death in 2010, Felix Francis has written four mysteries, the latest of which is Damage.  To use a cliché (which neither Francis would do), the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree.  Although he started his professional life as a physics teacher, the younger Francis now is a notable author himself.

Damage is the story of an undercover racing inspector.  A former member of the British Army Intelligence Corps, Jeff Hinkley knows how to go about finding solutions to various types of crimes, aided by an incredible memory for faces and facts.  Now working for the British Horseracing Authority, he’s called into a secret emergency meeting of that body to solve an extortion threat that the board members view as catastrophic, possibly forcing the end of the BHA.

The BHA automatically tests a certain number of horses that run in each race in Britain.  When the board tests the horses that ran in the Cheltenham Festival, every animal tested returns a positive result for a banned substance.  Immediately after that, the board receives a letter stating that the same thing would happen at the upcoming Ascot races unless five million pounds were paid.  The BHA wants Jeff to go undercover to investigate and stop the extortion, without, of course, the public knowing the situation.

Jeff wants the police brought into the investigation, but the board is adamant that they must not be involved.  They are fearful that any publicity leaking out would undermine the public’s confidence in their oversight and might cause a return to the group previously governing racing, the Jockey Club.  And the BHA members definitely don’t want that to happen.

In addition, Jeff has been asked by his brother-in-law Quentin to get charges of drug possession dropped against Quentin’s son Kenneth.  Kenneth swears that he’s innocent, that the witness against him deliberately set him up by planting crystal meth in his flat.  But the witness has disappeared, so Quentin prevails on Jeff to locate him and either prove that he’s lying or else buy him off.

No one can bring horse racing to life like a Francis, father or son.  Felix Francis brings the steeplechase racing community alive, and his love of the sport is evident throughout the novel.  Jeff Hinkley is a winning protagonist, a man with outstanding investigatory skills who is doing a balancing act, trying to find the blackmailer, the witness against his nephew, and at the same time deal with his own uncertainty about his personal life.

Even for a person who has never attended a horse race, the Francis novels are exhilarating.  Damage is a page-turner in the truest meaning of the phrase.

You can read more about Felix Francis at this web site.

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

It all starts with a simple dare.  Fourteen-year-old Jace Wilson, fearful of heights, is challenged by a fellow student to jump from the Rooftop quarry into the water below, a sixty-five-foot drop.  Not only is there one hundred dollars riding on the challenge, money that Jace couldn’t pay if he lost the bet, but he would be shamed in front of the other students, particularly the girls.  No, he’d rather face death, or so he thinks, than let that happen.

So Jace dives into the water and hits a body, an even worse outcome than the rocks he feared.  Frantic, he looks around for the best way to exit the water and call for help when he hears a car’s motor.  Looking up, he’s relieved to see three men, two in police uniforms; he’s just about to shout out when he notices a third man, in handcuffs and wearing a hood.  Jace manages to slip into a crevice and is thus hidden when he sees the uniformed men push the handcuffed one into the water.

Ethan Serbin is a Montana mountain guide who has worked with the military to train people to survive extreme conditions.  Now he runs a program for troubled teenage boys, taking them on treks in the wilderness to turn them away from a life of crime.   Jamie Bennett, who was one of his students when he was working with the armed forces, drives through a blizzard to reach him and ask for his help in adding Jace to his summer program.  She tells Ethan that she has a witness to a horrendous crime and he needs to be “off the grid” until the trial begins after the summer.  Ethan agrees to add him to the program, not knowing which of the seven boys in this year’s summer program is Jace.

Hannah Faber is beginning work at a fire-tower cabin after a horrendous experience on Shepherd Mountain the previous year.  A member of a Hotshot Crew, a team of professional firefighters who work in the hottest spots of wildfires, Hannah is the survivor of a fire that killed fellow members of her crew as well as the family caught in the blaze.  Now too traumatized to continue as a hotshot, she’s taken a job as a lookout in search of fires.  It’s less stressful, but Hannah has brought her stress with her.

The novel is told in the third person from various points of view–Jace’s, Ethan’s, Hannah’s, and the two men who are looking for Jace in order to make certain that he doesn’t testify against them.  The men, remorseless killers who leave a number of bodies in their wake, are somehow getting closer each day to Jace, despite Jamie’s assurance to Ethan that she is “one hundred percent” certain that the murderers will never be able to locate the teen.

Michael Koryta has written a spellbinding page turner, the kind of book that you should not start before bedtime.  His characters are realistic, his plot will hold your interest to the last page.

You can read more about Michael Koryta at this web site.

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

Dr. Jenna Ramey is a forensic psychiatrist with the FBI.  She brings years of experience to her job, but she also brings something that no other agent/profiler can match–she has synesthesia, a neurological condition causing her to visualize various colors that she has learned correspond to what people are saying or how they are behaving.

A shooting is taking place in a grocery store filled with senior citizens.  But the caller to the 911 emergency line is a six-year-old girl who came to the store with her grandmother.  Young Molly Keegan is almost unbelievably calm when talking to the emergency dispatcher Yancy Vogul, but everything she tells him can be verified.  She has counted the seven shots and, sure enough, there are seven victims dead when the police and FBI agents arrive on the scene.

Yancy, Jenna’s significant other, is still recovering from the accident that left him with a prosthetic leg.  Unable to work as a field agent for the Bureau, he now is behind the desk of the local police station, grateful that he still has some connection to law enforcement but despondent about not having the career he wanted.  So, although he knows better, he’s become emotionally invested in CiCi Winthrop, a woman who has called 911 several times about her abusive husband but has refused to press charges.  So now Yancy is just going a little out of his way, he tells himself, “just to check.”  What harm could it do?

After a second interview with Molly, Jenna and her colleagues become fearful that the man they are looking for is the serial murderer they are calling the Triple Shooter.  As Jenna tells the other agents, “This isn’t a random shooter.  We’ve seen him before.”  There are differences between this shooting and the previous ones, but Jenna still believes the UNSUB (unknown subject) has committed the previous murders.  He has killed women only before, and this mass shooting included both sexes.  But there’s something about all the crimes that connect them in Jenna’s mind, although she’s not sure what that is.

There are significant pieces in Jenna’s backstory.  Her mother, Claudia, is a serial killer who has escaped from a mental hospital, and no one knows her whereabouts now.  And Jenna’s daughter’s father, Hank, was murdered a year ago, and some members are contesting the will in which he named Ayana in both his insurance policies; Hank’s mother, in particular, is demanding proof that Ayana is actually her granddaughter.

Is Jenna’s condition a neurological aberration or a gift, an additional hidden sense?  Sometimes it seems to Jenna that it’s both, helping her when she’s working a crime scene or interviewing witnesses, interfering with her work when the colors she visualizes don’t seem to make sense.  But overall she confident that synesthesia works well for her, a “sixth sense” that can help her tell truth from fiction.

Color Blind is the second novel in the series featuring Dr. Jenna Ramey.  I’m looking forward to the third one.

You can read more about Colby Marshall at this web site.

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

Harlan Coben has done it again, writing a mystery that will grab you from the first line and not let you go.  “The stranger didn’t shatter Adam’s world all at once”–how’s that for an attention grabber?

Adam Price is a successful lawyer in a wealthy New Jersey suburb, a place where, to quote Garrison Keillor, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”  Adam is having a drink with friends when a stranger comes up to him and says, “You don’t have to stay with her,” and with those seven words Adam’s life as he has known it comes to an end.

The stranger tells Adam that his wife, the mother of his two sons, faked a pregnant test two years ago.  When Adam protests, the man tells him to check his Visa bill; there he’ll find the “fake a pregnancy” website that Corinne used.  Corinne is away for the day at a teachers’ conference so, after fighting the urge, Adam goes online to check out the stranger’s information.  And, sure enough, he finds the proof that his wife created a fictitious pregnancy and then “had a miscarriage.”  But why would she do that?

Heidi Dann is getting into her car after a luncheon with friends when she hears a whisper in her ear, another life-changing message to an unsuspecting person.  “There’s a website called FindYourSugarBaby.com,” she’s told.  

Dan Molino is at his son’s football game when the stranger says, “You know, don’t you?”  And all the stranger wants is ten thousand dollars not to make public the contents of the manila envelope he hands Dan.

These three strands are all important to this novel, but most of the emphasis is on Adam and what follows the stranger’s whispered remarks to him.  Adam is trying to hold his family together as best he can, but the ties are weakening.  How could anyone could have discovered her deception?  Why won’t Corinne explain the reason she did what she did?  

Harlan Coben is an absolute master of suspense.  The people in his novels are your neighbors, your friends, even you yourself, caught in a maelstrom of terror.  One day you are going about your business, with your life continuing as usual, and the next day everything is turned upside-down.   And whatever steps you take seem useless.

Harlan Coben is the winner of mystery’s trifecta–the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Anthony awards–for his novels, which have sold over sixty million copies.  Let me predict that The Stranger will add many more to that total.

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

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

Opera, history, and murder meet in this debut novel, and it’s an inspired meeting.  Laura Lebow’s The Figaro Murders brings readers to 18th-century Vienna, home to the acclaimed composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his lesser-known librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte.

Lorenzo is Venetian-born but is forced to leave his home due to political intrigues and accusations of immoral behavior.  After traveling to several city-states he lands in Vienna, home of the newly-crowned emperor Joseph II.  There Lorenzo becomes the court librettist; as the novel opens he is completing The Marriage of Figaro, which is due to open in a week.

His official work is interrupted by a commission from his friend Johann Vogel, which he reluctantly accepts.  Johann had accepted a large loan from the housekeeper in Count Gabler’s palais in order to purchase a barber shop.  The housekeeper, Rosa Hahn, now wants repayment, and Johann is taken to debtor’s prison as he does not have the money.

He begs Lorenzo to find out who his birth mother was, finding out as an adult that he was adopted as an infant.  He believes that his biological mother may have been from a wealthy family, that he was kidnapped and given up for adoption, and that perhaps there is some money available to him to enable him to pay his debt.

Lorenzo makes a brief visit to the Gabler palais where he meets young Prince Florian, who is acting as a page to the count.  Lorenzo and Florian have a brief argument, ending with the young man fleeing the palais, and the next day two policemen arrive at Lorenzo’s home to take him into custody for the prince’s murder.

Lorenzo Da Ponte is a historical figure, although much less familiar to modern readers than is Mozart.  Born a Jew, he converted along with his brother and his father to Catholicism when his widowed father decided to marry a Catholic woman.  Lorenzo was thus able to receive a classical education from the clergy, something he would not have been able to do had he remained a Jew.  He later became a priest but led a dissolute life, incurring gambling debts and fathering two children, which led to his being exiled from Venice for fifteen years. 

The Figaro Murders is told through Lorenzo’s eyes.  He is frank about his desire for fame and money, but he is a gifted writer and wants desperately to continue working with the best composers of the era, especially Mozart.  He is easily distracted by the beautiful Countess Elizabeth Gabler but at the same time is committed to his search for his friend’s parentage.  In short, this is the true portrait of a man, with all the flaws and virtues that men possess.

Laura Lebow has written an excellent novel, with fascinating characters and a remarkable sense of history.  I look forward to Lorenzo Da Ponte’s next adventure.

You can find more information about the incredible but true life of Lorenzo Da Ponte at this web site.  You can read more about Laura Lebow at this web site.  

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

Like many immigrants, Ranjit Singh came to the United States hoping for a better life.  But, also like many immigrants, he found it harder than expected to achieve that life.  A former Indian army officer and an adherent of the Sikh religion, he arrived in the U.S. with his wife and daughter, but his wife soon took their daughter and returned to India.  

Ranjit is now working as a taxi driver during the day and as a security guard in an import firm at night in order to earn enough money to rent a bigger apartment because his teenage daughter is coming to live with him on a trial basis for a year.

The combination of his two jobs, seemingly separate, lead Ranjit into trouble and danger.  On a routine taxi run he picks up the beautiful Indian actress Shabana Shah and delivers her to the famous Dakota condominium in Manhattan.  As the Dakota’s doorman opens the taxi door, he and Ranjit recognize each other from their days in the army, and Mohan Jumar invites Ranjit to come back to the building after he’s through with his night-time job.  

When Rajit returns to the Dakota, Mohan takes him up to Shabana’s condo, explaining that the movie star is out of town and that he is looking after the apartment for her.  He and Ranjit share a meal from the food in Shabana’s refrigerator and Ranjit leaves, only to be charged the following day with the brutal murder of the actress.  Her bludgeoned body was found on the floor of her apartment by her sister, and the weapon has Ranjit’s fingerprints all over it.  And the doorman Mohan is nowhere to be found.

As I’ve written in previous blogs, one of the joys of reading is discovering new countries, new cultures, new ways of life.  The Sikh religion, a monotheistic religion that is the fifth-largest in the world, was one I knew very little about.  The Last Taxi Ride explains some of their beliefs and quotes prayers that its devotees say when requesting help from their Gurus, the embodiments of Ultimate Reality.  

Sikhism is only five hundred years old, yet it has over thirty million adherents worldwide.  And although Ranjit Singh isn’t always regular in his practices, he believes in his religion and calls upon the Lord for help in difficult situation.  Unlike Western religions, with books such as the Bible or the Quran as its source, Sikh practitioners read about their religion predominantly in poems and hymns, and there are some beautiful examples in the novel.  

A. X. Ahmad’s Ranjit Singh is a fascinating protagonist, a man who has made mistakes in his life but is constantly trying to better himself and help those around him.  The Last Taxi Ride is the second in the series, and I’m on my way now to the nearest bookstore to buy the first one, The Caretaker.  

You can read more about A. X. Ahmad at this web site. 

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

March 14, 2015

As I begin my sixth year of writing Marilyn’s Mystery Reads, I need to give a shout out to public libraries, and the Minuteman Library Network in particular.  I believe at its start it had 19 participating libraries, and now it has 43 in total, 36 public and seven college libraries.  I patronize bookstores, of course, but libraries are my “go to” resource.

I am very fortunate to live in Needham, a town with a wonderful library.  When I first moved here, there was a main library and a very small storefront library, the latter within easy walking distance of my home.  I remember pushing my toddler son in his stroller to the branch, located conveniently at the railroad crossing so he could watch for passing commuter trains from inside the library while I chose my books. 

The small library closed a few years later, leaving the main library as the repository of all the town’s books and collections.  While I loved the library I was aware that it was quite outdated and overcrowded, made for a population much smaller than the town’s size at that time. 

In 1991, Needham had an override to fund library expansion, and it failed by twenty votes.  The resulting shortfall had the effect of shortening the library’s hours to below the state minimum required for funding, as it was open only twenty-six hours a week.

This had a double effect on the town’s readers.  Not only were we deprived of our own library, but surrounding ones refused to let us participate in inter-library loans.  We could read books while we were there, but we couldn’t take them home.  And, really, who could blame them?  Why should their taxpayers, in effect, be paying for us to read the books they had purchased when we refused to fund our own?  This “borrowing freeze” had the desired effect on Needham voters, and at the next election the override passed and normal hours were resumed.  

I don’t believe there’s ever been a request that I made to the library personnel that hasn’t been fulfilled.  I’ve borrowed books from across the state and beyond when my own library didn’t have what I wanted or needed.  And all kinds of events are held at the site, including children’s reading programs, senior exercise classes, speakers on topics from parenthood to military history, and an annual Art in Bloom weekend, featuring floral arrangements by three local garden clubs paired with art by our town’s high school students.

At the moment, I have twenty books on reserve.  What would we ever do without our public libraries?   I, for one, never want to find out.

Marilyn

Small-town England in the eighteenth century might seem a very different place from twentieth-century America.  But theft, murder, and greed know no boundaries in time or space.

Titus Cragg is a lawyer and the coroner in the town of Preston.  As the novel opens he receives a letter from Phillip Pimbo, a seller of gold and silver in Preston and a respected citizen.  At this time in England, banks in small towns were almost unheard of, and valuables were kept in strongboxes in people’s homes or temporarily given to pawnbrokers who had secure safes until the valuables were needed.  Phillip has boasted to Titus in the past that his strong room was as safe as “the Bastille of Paris lodged inside the Tower of London.”

But Phillip also said that most of the money deposited with him and belonging to the town wasn’t in the strong room at all.  Instead, he has loaned the money out to a source that has promised a huge return.  The town, anxious to secure as much funding as possible in order to celebrate the Preston Guild, a once-every-twenty-year festival, agreed to this, but only Phillip knows to whom the money was loaned.  Now Titus has received a letter from Phillip referring to a “matter of wrong-doing,” and Titus wonders, as he makes his way to the pawnbroker’s office, if the matter pertains to the town’s money left in his care.

When Titus arrives at Phillip’s office to discuss the letter, the man is nowhere to be seen.  A sign on his office door says that he is not to be disturbed, but at Titus’s insistence Phillip’s chief cashier knocks on the door.  

There’s no answer, and the door is locked.  A locksmith is called but is unable to open it, so finally the door is battered down.  And there is Phillip Pimbo’s body, lying across his desk, a blood-caked hole on the top of his bald head.

Titus and everyone else in the office see the case as a case of suicide, although they don’t know of any reason that the respected businessman would kill himself.  But when the town’s doctor, Luke Fidelis, appears, he isn’t so quick to make the same judgment.  If, he asks Titus, Phillip killed himself, where is the wig he always wore?

The interaction between the two main characters, Titus Cragg and Luke Fidelis, adds to the strength of the novel.  Both men are smart and dedicated to finding the truth, but narrator Titus doesn’t delve into matters as deeply as does the more scientific Luke.  There’s the slightest bit of Watson and Holmes here, but Titus is much brighter than Watson, and there’s no hero worship in Titus’s relation to Luke.  There’s just friendship, and that’s perfect.

You can read more about Robin Blake at this web site. 

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

The powerful Boston team of Rizzoli and Isles is back, working on a murder that spans two continents.  Jane Rizzoli, police detective, and Maura Isles, medical examiner, are brought into a case that seems bizarre from the beginning, but they have no idea of just how strange it’s going to get.

Die Again opens with a safari in Botswana, consisting of a party of three men and four women plus their tracker and guide.  This section of the novel is told by Millie Jacobson, the girlfriend of Richard Renwick, a well-known British novelist.  It was Richard’s idea to go on a safari, the better to write another of his macho adventure books.

Millie has reluctantly come along, but she’s not enjoying herself; her idea of a vacation runs to hotels and spas, not flimsy tents and outdoor “bathrooms.”  But Richard and the others are enjoying themselves until the morning that the remains of their South African guide are found.  He had been killed and eaten, probably by hyenas.

Back in Boston, Jane and her partner Barry Frost are called to the home of an internationally known hunter and taxidermist, Leon Gott.  Surrounded by the many animals he shot and mounted on his walls, Leon’s body is found hanging upside down, his insides removed.  Not a view for the faint of heart.

When Dr. Maura Isles arrives, one look at the eviscerated body tells her something is seriously wrong besides the obvious fact that Leon is dead.  Searching the garage she finds remains, including two hearts (one human, one animal) and two complete sets of lungs.  Leon had received threats in the past, but those had been verbal, never physical.  His wife and only son were dead, and he wasn’t close to any of his neighbors, so no one seems to have a clue what brought about his brutal death.

In addition to working on Leon’s murder, Jane also is trying to help her mother get through a difficult time.  Several years earlier, Jane’s father left his wife for another woman.  Some time later, Jane’s mother fell in love with another man, and they got engaged.  Now her husband wants to return home and let bygones be bygones.  Jane’s brothers are in favor of this and want their parents to reconcile.  It’s obvious to Jane that her mother is very unhappy with the situation, but she’s having a hard time going against her husband and their sons.

Maura is still reeling from the end of her romance with Daniel Brophy, a Catholic priest.  Even though Maura knew that their relationship couldn’t end well, she continues to mourn the loss of the man she loves.

Tess Gerritsen has written another spellbinding novel.  Readers of previous novels in the series and viewers of the television show, now in its sixth season, will want to read Die Again to see Rizzoli and Isles together once more.

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

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