Marilyn's Mystery Reads

December 7, 2013

Majority rules?  Or one lonely voice?

I recently started reading three mystery novels, each of which had glowing endorsements on the front and back covers.  “Wonderful”– “thrilling”– “a writer to watch”–you get the idea.   And not only were the endorsements glowing but, to continue the metaphor, they were written by stars in the mystery field.  And yet I couldn’t get past fifty pages in two of the books, and when I finally finished the third one I was extremely disappointed.

So now I’m wondering what happens when a well-known writer is asked by a friend/a friend of a friend/his or her own publisher/for an endorsement, reads the book, and doesn’t like it.  Does the “star”admit that she/he didn’t enjoy the book?  Give a less-than-glowing endorsement?  Bite the bullet (particularly apropos for a mystery) and write something positive, if not totally truthful?

Or is it me, unwilling to believe that my own opinion could be so diametrically opposed to those who actually write books as opposed to reviewing them and that I could be wrong?

I am certainly aware of valid differences of opinion; I’ve blogged about a book that I’ve enjoyed, only to have a close friend tell me that she didn’t like it at all.  I’ve read mysteries recommended by others that I decided not to review because I didn’t think they were worth it.

But when it comes down to putting my own opinion against those of authors I admire, my confidence slips.  Am I being too judgmental, too harsh?

I’ve decided to keep giving my own opinion, flawed though it may be at times.  After all, this is my blog, so my readers know that the thoughts are my own.  If they want to they can read other columns and blogs to get the ideas of others about books, and I’m sure many do.

After nearly four years of blogging, I definitely know what I like.  But if you don’t agree with my reviews, feel free to let me know.

Marilyn

Kinsey Millhone is back, and I’m delighted to see her.  There’s a lot going on in W is for Wasted–a will, long-lost relatives, an unethical private eye, a returning former lover–but it all hangs together, given Sue Grafton’s always excellent character studies and plots.  The story is told in the first person by Kinsey and in the third person by Pete Wolinsky, whom we discover is dead in the third sentence of the prologue.

It’s 1988, and Kinsey is taking a brief vacation from investigating.  Her bank balance is healthy, her needs are modest, and she’s delighted to have a few days to herself.  Then she gets a call from a friend at the coroner’s office, asking her to identify a body.  The deceased was homeless, and a slip of paper found in his pocket bore Kinsey’s name and phone number.

When Kinsey goes to view the body in the morgue she tells the coroner’s assistant she has never seen the man before.   Intrigued by why the deceased was apparently trying to contact her, she decides to try to find out who this man was.  From small acorns do mighty oaks grow.

Kinsey’s first stop is the area where the body was found, and there she meets three of the man’s friends.  After a bit of verbal sparring, one of the trio tells her Terrence was the dead man’s name, and Kinsey’s investigation begins.

Deceased private investigator Pete Wolinsky’s story is told by an unknown narrator.  He was a P.I. without a moral compass, a man who got others to do his investigating, falsified his expense accounts, owed money to countless businesses, didn’t file tax returns, and wasn’t above subtle extortion attempts.  That last one was a big mistake on his part.

As readers of the alphabet series know, Kinsey was orphaned at an early age and raised by her maternal aunt.  Aunt Gin wasn’t much of a warm-and-fuzzy person, and she apparently had no use for the members of her family other than Kinsey.  Thus Kinsey didn’t know, until years after her aunt’s death, that she had a large family on her mother’s side living not far from her home in Santa Teresa, California.

She’d never been much interested in them and had seen no reason to look into her father’s side of the family.  But now they’ve entered her life with a vengeance.

Several familiar characters are in W, and very welcome they are.  Of course there’s Henry Pitts, the octogenarian landlord, former baker, and current provider of delicious meals and desserts for Kinsey; his older brother William, a confirmed hypochondriac; Rosie Pitts, recently married to William and owner of the nearby Hungarian restaurant where Kinsey eats most of her meals; and Kinsey’s former lover, Robert Dietz.  And there’s a new addition:  Ed the cat, who soon has Kinsey and Henry eating out of his hand (or paw).

W is for Wasted is another winning novel by Sue Grafton.  It’s fun for me, who knew Kinsey from the beginning (A is for Alibi), to follow her personal and professional life.  She has not remained a stagnant figure, stuck in time, but has grown into a mature woman who still has the recognizable quirks that made her a success from the beginning of the series.

You can read more about Sue Grafton at this web site.

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

I’m usually not a huge fan of short series, generally finding them less satisfying than novels.    The exception to this is the Sherlock Holmes canon of stories, which I think are greatly superior to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s full-length books.  So I picked up The Mystery Box not expecting to be overwhelmed by the contents.  But I was wrong, very wrong.

Several of the authors were familiar to me (Jan Burke, Laura Lippman, Joseph Finder), while others were  new to me (C. E. Lawrence, Mary Anne Kelly).  But each story was a gem, perfectly written and totally satisfying.

The unifying theme of the collection is given away in the title–no mystery there.  Every story had to contain a mystery box.  What the box contained was obviously up to each author.

I’ll start with Jan Buke’s “The Amiable Miss Edith Montague,” the first story in the collection.  The narrator’s great-aunt, Miss Edith Montague, has been murdered.  Very wealthy and popular with all the people in the town, she raised the narrator after the death of his parents.  She was so generous with her time and money that no one seems to have benefited by her death…except for the person whose secret lay in the box and who killed to protect it.

Then there’s “Heirloom” by Joseph Finder.  An ordinary middle-aged couple is invited to the home of their new neighbors, a young and wealthy couple who bought the house next door to them on Nantucket.  No sooner does the older couple arrive for a barbecue than the husband starts inserting sly remarks into the conversation about the many problems the house has and why it took so long for it to be sold.  And no, the heirloom in the title refers not to jewels or valuable manuscripts but to tomatoes!  You’ll have to read the story to find out why.

The final story of the twenty-one is probably the funniest short story I’ve ever read.  “Remmy Rothstein Toes the Line (annotated)” by Karin Slaughter is so clever, so unexpected, so wild…I’m stumped for how to describe it.  I’ll simply say that it’s a story about an adjudicator for a records-setting book trying to re-establish herself as reliable after an episode she refers to only as “the domino debacle.”

Remmy Rothstein is attempting to set a new world record for the Longest Tongue in the World (man)–I kid you not.  The story’s characters include Mindy Patel, the adjudicator; Remmy Rothstein, aka the Cajun Jew, trying to get into the world book of records; his one-legged albino African-American half-brother, Buell Rabinowitz; and their incredibly foul-mouthed mother, Rebekkah.  Oh yes, and the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia, is a “character” essential to the story.  And about the mystery box in this story?  Read it and cringe.

I’ve described only three stories in The Mystery Box, leaving you to discover the other eighteen on your own.  Brad Meltzer did a fabulous job in bringing this group of authors together for our reading pleasure.  In addition to enjoying the contents of this collection, an added plus is discovering new authors to add to our reading lists.  I know I’ve added to mine.

You can read more about Brad Meltzer at this web page.

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

Virgil Cain needs a few dollars to pay his tax bill, so when two men from the production company that’s shooting a movie nearby ask to rent his two Percherons for the film at five hundred dollars a day, he agrees.  Then it turns out that they need a wrangler to handle the horses, given that their leading man has a horse phobia, so Virgil is going to get an additional five hundred dollars a day for himself.  Sounds good, even though Virgil probably hasn’t seen a Hollywood film made after 1970.  Easy money, right?

Shoot the Dog is the third Virgil Cain mystery.  Virgil is a farmer and cattle rancher in upstate New York, a man without a plasma television set, a cell phone, or an answering machine/voice mail on his landline.  But he’s content with his life and very happy about his relationship with Claire, a New York state trooper.

He doesn’t quite see what all the fuss regarding the film is about, just because Olivia Burns is coming to town to star in “Frontier Woman.”  In fact, even after he’s hired, he remains unmoved by the hoopla surrounding the movie.  That is, until Olivia’s body is found in the river.

Olivia was the nicest person involved in the film.  The clueless director, Robb Fetterman, hasn’t read the book on which the movie is based; the director’s wife and the film’s co-producer, Samantha Sawchuk, will do anything to get the necessary funding for the film, including lying, backstabbing, and firing people who are in her way; Levi Brown is another producer and is the self-absorbed, self-proclaimed “money man”; and Ronnie Red Hawk, a pseudo-Indian and multi-millionaire, is the latest addition to the list of producers.

Brad Smith’s ear for dialog is terrific, as are his depictions of the characters in the novel.  The movie-town threesome of Robb, Sam, and Levi is brilliantly written.  It’s hard to decide which member of the trio is more unappealing; I found myself fervently rooting against each one of them.  And Ronnie Red Hawk, with his delusions of grandeur and his preparation for his acceptance speech at the Oscars based upon his twenty-four hours as a movie backer and producer, is a masterful portrait.  Indeed, a scummier group would be hard to find.

On the other hand, you will find yourself totally delighted by Virgil Cain.   He’s down-to-earth, hard-working, and intelligent enough to know when to appear a trifle slow.  If the movie people want to see him as a rube, a small town nobody, that’s okay with him, as long as they pay him a thousand dollars a day for himself and his horses.  His put-downs of the Hollywood types are swift and to the point.

How did Brad Smith write two previous books that got past me?  I’m going to place my order for Crow’s Landing and Red Means Run right now.

You can read more about Brad Smith at this web site.

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

Life in mid-sixties Brooklyn was tough, especially for the lower middle class.  Like Haight-Ashbury, Brooklyn had hippies and drugs.  But it also had bombings and murders.

In 1966, Moe Prager was a student at Brooklyn College, an urban commuter school that was one of New York City’s prestigious tuition-free colleges.  You had to be smart to gain entrance into Brooklyn College, and Moe is smart.  But he’s unhappy too, unhappy with his uninteresting social life, unhappy to be still living with his mother and father and two siblings while he knows that other, more fortunate twenty-year-olds are living in dorms on green campuses and having a true college experience.

Moe’s closest friend is Bobby Friedman, another Brooklyn College student but one who’s not as serious or rule-bound as Moe.  Bobby is out to make money, lots of money, as quickly as possible.  Bobby had been dating the beautiful Samantha Hope, another college student, when she and a friend were blown to pieces in an explosion.  The police believe that the two were killed when a bomb they were planning to throw exploded too soon.  But none of their friends in the college leftist movement believes that their two friends would have been planning to injure innocent people.

Then Moe’s girlfriend tells him to keep away from Bobby, that Bobby’s in danger.  Moe doesn’t believe her, but the following night a car tries to run Bobby down.  Moe pushes him out of the way, and Bobby makes light of the situation in his usual style.  Was it an accident caused by the icy streets, or, impossible as it seems, did someone deliberately try to run the man down?

Moe Prager is a wonderful protagonist.   Onion Street is the eighth book in this series.   There’s always a lot of backstory by the time there are seven previous books in a series, but because this novel is told in flashback, except for the first and last chapters, it will tell you all you need to know about Moe and his relationships.  He’s actually telling this story to his daughter Sarah after they’ve been to Bobby’s funeral, where the rabbi has given the departed a fulsome sendoff.  Obviously, the rabbi didn’t know Bobby as well as Moe did.

Sarah has asked Moe numerous times why he became a cop in the first place, and he’s always avoided telling her the reason.  After the funeral he finally does, starting with the events of 1967.  When he’s finished telling Sarah his story, she says, “I guess those were very different times.”  Moe’s response is succinct:  “Sometimes, when I think back to those days, I can’t even imagine I lived through them.”

I gave a rave review to Innocent Monster, the sixth Moe Prager novel, on this blog in July 2010.  I missed reviewing Hurt Machine, but I’m back in the Moe Prager fold once again.

You can read more about Reel Farrel Coleman at his web site.

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

Alexandra James, red-haired Cambridge journalist, is always working on a story.  That’s how she keeps her life in order, because if she has too much free time, the memories come barreling back.

Alexandra is employed by the New England Chronicle, and her beat is education.  In a city with Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to say nothing of other universities across the river (Boston University, Boston College, Simmons, and others too numerous to count), there’s always something going on.  But the new assignment she’s given by the paper’s editor, Hyde Rawlins, is the most intriguing and dangerous one she’s ever covered.

Waiting for a friend at a Cambridge bar, Alex gets a text sent to all Chronicle reporters that a body has been found outside the Eliot House residence at Harvard and asking for a reporter to get there ASAP.  Since Alex is practically around the corner, she texts the editor that she’ll go.

Never a shrinking violet, Alex manages to get past the police lines and into Eliot House but isn’t able to get much information.  Later the university puts out a statement that an alumnus has fallen to his death from one of the House windows; the body is that of Thomas Carlyle, son of the legal adviser to the president of the United States.

Because Thom had just returned from a year at Cambridge University in England and Alex had also been a student there, she convinces Hyde to send her to England to follow the story, to find out why this bright and well-liked young man fell to his death only hours after he returned from his graduate year abroad.  Finding the answers to this question proves much harder and more dangerous than Alex had supposed.

At Cambridge, Alex meets Petronella Black, Thom’s former girlfriend.  She’s a “right piece of work,” according to the “bedder,” or chambermaid, at the college.  When Alex knocks on Petronella’s door there’s a man in her room, Lucien Sly, and it’s very obvious that the two had been in bed together.  It’s only three days after Thom’s death, Alex thinks.  Not much heartbreak here.

The plot line takes the reader from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Cambridge, England, with a stop in Pakistan along the way.  The characters include the wealthy and politically connected Carlyle family, the glamorous and spoiled Petronella Black, the attractive and aristocratic Lucian Sly, Alex’s demanding yet compassionate editor Hyde Rawlins, and the mysterious Pakistani scientist Nadeem Siddiqui.  Each has a distinctive voice and an important presence in the novel.

Alex James is a very appealing heroine.  She’s tough, definitely not shy, and extremely confident in the way she goes about getting a story.  But deep inside her there’s a secret that she’s hidden from nearly everyone.  And, as every mystery reader knows, secrets have a way of not staying hidden.  They often emerge at the most inauspicious times.

Mary Louise Kelly is a broadcast journalist and has the background to make Alex a true-to-life protagonist.  The plot is totally believable, as are the characters.  Anonymous Sources is the first book in what I hope will be a long-running series.

You can read more about Mary Louise Kelly at this web site.

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

Bell Elkins is a small-town girl who has made good.  She managed to leave the coal-mining town of Acker’s Gap, where she grew up in a motherless home with an abusive father, get herself a law degree, and work in Washington, D. C. with her husband.  A perfect professional and personal life, it would seem.

But after a few years, Acker’s Gap, with all its problems of poverty, unemployment, and drug use drew her back.  Bell felt she could make a difference there that she couldn’t in the nation’s capital.  So she and her daughter returned to West Virginia, a place her husband, a highly successful attorney, was only to happy to leave behind.

A second reason for returning home for Bell is her superstition/belief that her older sister would someday return there to find her.  Shirley had protected Bell from their father’s sexual advances during her childhood, and when it became impossible to continue doing that, Shirley murdered their father and set fire to their home.  Shirley was released from prison two years before this novel opens but never returned to Acker’s Gap; Bell fears that if she left town permanently, her sister would never be able to find her.

As Bitter River, the second book in this series, opens, Bell is driving home from Washington.  During the trip, she receives a call from Nick Fogelsong, sheriff of Raythune Country and a close friend.  The body of Lucinda Trimble has been found in the Bitter River.  Lucinda, a shining academic and sports star at the local high school, was dead before her car hit the water, Nick says, so this is not an accident.  It’s murder.

Although still in high school, Lucinda was engaged to Shawn Doggett, son of the town’s wealthiest family.   The Doggetts, particularly Mrs. Doggett, were less than thrilled with this, especially given the fact that Lucinda was pregnant and was resisting all attempts by the Doggetts and her own mother to give the baby up for adoption.

While all this is going on, an old friend of Bell’s, Matt Harless, a CIA agent, presumably retired, has come to town for a brief respite.  He tells Bell he remembers her talking about her town, about the beauty of the mountains, and he’s decided that a visit is what he needs before he makes any future plans.  But strange things start happening shortly after his arrival, leaving Bell to wonder if they’re coincidental or somehow related to Harless.

Julie Keller paints a vivid picture of Acker’s Gap and the people in it.  It’s a place that, on the surface, seems removed from the rest of 21st-century America, but a deeper look reveals the same problems that the rest of the country has–high school dropouts, high unemployment, drug abuse, and domestic violence.

Bell Elkins is a tough, determined protagonist.  Her roots in her home town are strong, even with the memories of the abusive childhood she and her sister shared.  This novel makes me hope that the third entry in the series won’t be long in coming.

You can read more about Julia Keller at this web site.

You can read my post of A Killing in the Hills, the first in the Bell Elkins series, on this blog.  Check out the complete Marilyn’s Reads blog at her web site.

The Corpse Reader is an incredible book.  Its author calls it a historical novel, which of course it is, as its protagonist is the real-life scholar and scientist Cí Song.  But it’s also a mystery because crimes are what propel the story.

Cí is a teenaged boy in 13th-century China.  He comes from a humble background in a rural town but gets a taste of city life when his family moved to Lin’an and his father began working for Judge Feng.  That magistrate, recognizing Cí’s extraordinary intelligence, took him under his wing to help discover causes of death among the city’s deceased.  However, due to the death of his paternal grandfather, Cí’s family is forced by custom to return to their small village and take over the family farm.

Ci’s older brother Lu, who hadn’t gone with the family to the city but stayed in their hometown to manage the farm, now views himself as the head of the Song family; he has become cruel and overbearing and disrespectful to his father, a terrible breach of manners in Chinese society.  When a family friend is robbed and murdered, Lu is accused of the crime, and before a thorough investigation can take place, Lu is imprisoned and tortured to death.  Almost immediately following this, Cí’s home is torched, and his parents die in the fire.

Desperate and fearful, Cí and his sister, his only surviving sibling, head back to Lin’an.  But when they finally arrive, having passed through a series of devastating misadventures, the magistrate is nowhere to be found, and Cí is at a loss as to what to do.  His dream is to enter the university and become a magistrate and what we would today call a coroner or medical examiner, but with no family to support him and his former mentor out of the city, Cí must take any job to survive.

Antonio Garrido has brought the figures and customs of thirteenth-century China to life in The Corpse Reader.  In the author’s note at the end of the novel, Señor Garrido tells the reader that today Cí Song is considered to be the founder of forensic science.  Think  of it–more than eight centuries ago in medieval China a man wrote five books on forensics that are still used today.

The characters in The Corpse Reader are fascinating, and so are the customs.  The reader learns about family practices, differences in cuisine in northern and southern China, the punishment of criminals, and many more facts.  But nowhere are these facts presented dryly or simply inserted into the story; instead, each custom is a natural outgrowth of the scene in which it is presented.

In addition, the characters are so well described that, in spite of the unfamiliarity that most westerners have with Chinese names, each character is easy to remember and differentiate from others in the novel.

I have long been a fan of Robert Van Gulik’s series of Judge Dee mysteries (see my review of The Golden Nail Murders under Golden Oldies on this blog), and The Corpse Reader is a wonderful addition to the world of long-ago China.

There is no web site devoted to Antonio Garrido, although reviews of The Corpse Reader are available on the web.

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

By now pretty much every reader in the world is aware that Robert Galbraith is the pen name of J. K. Rowling.  You know, the author of the Harry Potter books.  Her idea was to see if she could depart from the Potter series and receive good reviews on her own, with reviewers having no knowledge of who she was.

I love Mark Billingham’s blurb on the back cover of The Cuckoo’s Calling.  He writes in part, “…Strike [the protagonist] is so compelling that it’s hard to believe this is a debut novel.”  He was right on, wasn’t he?

The novel’s hero is Cormoran Strike, a British war veteran who was wounded Afghanistan and now has an artificial leg.  He’s just been thrown out of the sumptuous flat he shared with his very wealthy girlfriend and, having nowhere else to go, he’s living in the small London office where he’s eking out a living as a private investigator.

The novel opens with the “suicide” of supermodel Lula Landry.  It’s a media sensation for a while, but then the buzz dies down and the world goes about its business.  Three months later, Lula’s older brother, John Bristow, comes into Strike’s office with a plea for the detective to investigate his sister’s death.  He tells Strike that the police investigation was perfunctory, that given Lula’s history of depression and drug use it was “apparent” to the authorities than she had thrown herself out of the window of her fourth floor flat.

Strike tries to persuade Bristow to comes to terms with his sister’s suicide, but Bristow will not be dissuaded.  He insists that Strike take the case, offering him twice the usual retainer.  Bristow reminds the detective that Strike and Bristow’s younger brother had been childhood friends before the brother’s tragic death.  Now, Bristow tells Strike, his father is dead, both his siblings are dead, his mother is dying, and soon he’ll be the last of his family.  “All I want,” he says, “is justice.”  So Strike decides to take the case.

The second most interesting character, after Strike, is Robin Ellacott, who comes to Strike’s office for a temporary position as a secretary while waiting for a full-time job to open up.  The opening chapter has the newly-engaged Robin just about to enter Strike’s office when the door bursts open from the inside and Robin is propelled backward toward the metal flight of stairs behind her.  When I tell you I let out a loud gasp and said “oh, no” aloud, you will see what an incredible picture J. K. Rowling had painted of Robin in less than four pages.  That was my aha moment, the instant I knew that I was about to read one fabulous story.

All kudos to Ms. Rowling for being willing to be judged on her merits as a mystery author rather than as the author of the Potter series who also writes mysteries.  The Cuckoo’s Calling proves that her risk paid off.

You can read more about Ms. Rowling’s reasons for writing this novel under a pen name at this web site.

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

October 5, 2013

All mystery readers know that there are three things that police and district attorneys in novels look for when they accuse someone of a crime.  Does that person have the motive, opportunity, and means to commit the crime?

I’ve recently read two novels in which motive was nearly completely absent.  The books were really well-written and suspenseful, and I was looking forward to blogging about them.  But when I finished the final chapter in each book, I had to go back and re-read it.  I must have missed something, I thought.  There’s no reason that this person would have committed these crimes.  Because in both cases, there were multiple murders.  But why?

In both books, there was absolutely no reason for the follow-up murders.  There was an original crime, for which there was a reason, but then the author continued the killing spree.  Perhaps the thinking was that if there were a series of murders, then the reader would be so overwhelmed that he/she wouldn’t notice the the missing motive/s.

Unlike real life where sometimes we never know what caused someone to murder someone else, in a book it’s a cheat to disregard the motive.  It leaves the reader both unsatisfied and dissatisfied, feeling that the several hours spent reading were wasted.  Giving the reader multiple crimes to read about doesn’t make up for this.

In real life, it’s my understanding that the prosecution doesn’t have to provide a motive for the defendant in order to try him/her for a crime.  But I imagine it would be hard to convince a jury to convict someone without some sort of plausible motive brought forth.  It could be greed, jealousy, fear, even mental illness, but there must be a reason for the crime.  While in real life the reason that caused the crime may be undiscoverable,  that doesn’t, or shouldn’t, hold true in mysteries.

In books, it’s the author’s job to give the reader a believable motive to commit a crime, especially the crime of murder or multiple murders.  Without such motivation on the criminal’s part, the novel falls apart.  I don’t expect to come across many more books like the two I mentioned at the beginning of this post, at least I hope not.

Marilyn

Could Sutton refer to anyone but Willie Sutton, bank robber extraordinaire?  Google “Willie Sutton,” and you get nearly four million hits.  His life has been the subject of a television episode on “Gang Busters” in 1952 and a documentary entitled “In the Footsteps of Willie Sutton” in 2011.  And now his life has produced a book, and an excellent one it is.

Sutton opens on Christmas Eve, 1969, when Willie was pardoned and released from Attica Correctional Faculty where he had been serving a fifty year sentence.  His unexpected release caused, in the author’s words, “a media frenzy,” but Willie granted only one interview.  J.R. Moehringer states in the Author’s Note that the published interview was a superficial one, and this book is his attempt to write what he thinks happened, or wishes had happened, on the day of the interview.

Willie was born into a poor Irish-American family, the fourth of five children, in 1901 in New York City.  According to the book, he was brutalized by his two of his older brothers, and that’s when he learned, at a young age, not to “squeal” or “be a rat,” the worst possible things one could do or be in his neighborhood.  Forced by family financial woes to leave school after the eighth grade, Willie turned to crime after he was let go from a series of dead-end jobs due to the Great Depression.  Starting out robbing jewelry stories, Willie soon was living the high life in a fancy hotel, dressing like a gentleman, eating in New York City’s finest restaurants.

The story is told both “in the present,” that being Christmas Day, the day after Willie leaves prison, and flashbacks to the past, when Willie thinks about his life.  He makes the two newspaper men, referred to only as the Reporter and the Photographer, drive all over the city so that he can relive his life in chronological order.

The romance in Willie’s life was Bess Endner, the daughter of a wealthy New York family.  When Willie was eighteen and Bess was sixteen, the two began a Romeo-and-Juliet romance that ended, as it could only do, badly.  The two of them, plus a friend of Willie’s, stole $16,000 from Bess’ father’s safe and fled to Massachusetts in an unsuccessful attempt to get married.  For the rest of Willie’s life he was haunted by his memories of Bess and the life they could have had together.

J.R. Moehringer has written a fascinating novel about a man who, as they say, needs no introduction.  Sutton, like Dillinger and Capone, doesn’t even need a first name to be identified; his incredible robberies, which netted him more than two million dollars over his lifetime, made him famous, or infamous, in the annals of twentieth-century crime.

All the characters in Sutton jump out from the novel’s pages:  Willie’s brutal brothers, his indifferent parents, the beautiful Bess, and the myriad accomplices who either remained loyal to Willie or betrayed him.  This is a beautifully written book, with its look into the heart-breaking poverty that many faced, even before the Depression, and Willie’s attempts to find happiness by accumulating immense wealth.

Mr. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, doesn’t have a web site, but there are many articles about him and this book on the Internet.

Special thanks to Lorry Diehl who recommended Sutton to me.  Lorry is the author of four books about Manhattan, her home town.  You can read more about her at this web site.

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

It’s always a delight for me when I check Craig Johnson’s web site and find that he’s written a new Walt Longmire mystery.  His latest one, A Serpent’s Tooth, is a wonderful addition to the series.

Walt is the sheriff of rural Absaroka County, Wyoming.  Attending the funeral of one of its citizens, Walt gets into a conversation with Barbara Thomas.  The subject is angels, and Barbara tells Walt how angels have been coming to her house and doing all the minor repairs and clean-ups that make home owning difficult for a widow of advancing years.  They have cleaned her gutters, fixed the door on her porch, and various other small jobs.   They don’t ask for money, but Barbara leaves a list of jobs for them and a plate of food, and pretty soon the repair is done and the food is gone.

Naturally, Walt doesn’t believe in home-repair angels, and when he and his deputy Victoria Moretti drive out to Barbara’s home they find a teenage boy repairing the trap under the kitchen sink.  When the boy hears Walt’s greeting, he bolts from the house and Walt and Vic are unable to catch him.  Walt tries to follow up with the local high school and social services department, but no one has heard of this boy.

When Walt and Vic return to search the outbuildings around Barbara’s house, they find evidence of someone living in the small dilapidated pump house–a cot, a blanket, and an 1889 copy of the Book of Mormon.  And when Walt finally catches up with the boy, whose name is Cord, he finds him to be half-starved and nearly totally unaware of many of the aspects of modern living.

Thus begins the sheriff’s involvement with the Apostolic Church of the Lamb of God, a rogue offshoot of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.  Several branches of this church have been established in the rural west, and one has set down roots in the mountains of Walt’s county.  The boy is a runaway from this group.  Apparently his mother was looking for him a few weeks earlier in South Dakota, but when that county’s sheriff went to the address she had given him to tell her her son was found, no one there would admit knowing the mother or the son.  And the South Dakota group is the same Apostolic Church that is in Walt’s county.

In addition to Cord, another mysterious stranger has appeared in town, the self-proclaimed Orrin Porter Rockwell, Danite, Man of God, Son of Thunder.  The only problem is that the real Orrin Porter Rockwell was born in 1813.  The 21st-century Orrin proclaims himself Cord’s bodyguard, and the two of them together are almost too much for the law in Absaroka County.

Walt Longmire is a fabulous character, a lawman who tempers justice with mercy and understanding.  He is a widower, and his romantic relationship with his deputy Vic, given the difference in their ages and backgrounds, is a problem for him but not for her.  His relationship with his only child, Cady, who is married to Vic’s brother, is also difficult, and the upcoming birth of Cady’s first child is filling Walt with both joy and trepidation.

Craig Johnson is a terrific writer who knows how to make all of his characters alive.  You can read more about him at his web site.

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

I’m finding that books about small-town sheriffs, both working and retired, are a delight to read.  There are many, both male and female, but three of my favorites are William Kent Kreuger’s Cork O’Connor series, Linda Castillo’s Kate Burkholder series, and Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series (all reviewed on this blog).   Now I’ve met Samuel Craddock, retired sheriff of Jarrett Creek, Texas, and he’s definitely been added to my favorites list.

Jarrett Creek is like most small towns, a place where everyone knows everyone else.   When Samuel finds out that an old friend, Dora Mae Parjeter, was found murdered, he has an overwhelming feeling of guilt as well as sadness at the loss.  The sadness is obvious, the guilt less so.  But the night before Dora Mae’s death she called him to say she thought someone was sitting in a car outside her house, watching her; because she had called Samuel previously with similar statements, he told her to call him in the morning if she still was worried.  Unfortunately, this time there was obviously something to be worried about.

Samuel’s replacement as sheriff is Rodell Skinner, an alcoholic who was appointed to the office by his cousin, the mayor.  Knowing Rodell’s incompetence and desire for a quick and easy solution to any crime, Samuel goes to Dora Mae’s farm and finds that her grandson, Greg, is Rodell’s main suspect.

It appears that Greg and his grandmother had an argument a few days before the murder, so it’s easy for the new sheriff to make a case against Greg.  Samuel promises Greg he’ll get him out of jail the next morning, and Samuel vows to himself to investigate the case thoroughly.

Greg is one of Dora Mae’s two living descendants.  Greg’s mother, who was Dora Mae’s daughter, and his father were killed in an automobile accident when Greg was a child, and he came to live with his grandmother.  Dora Mae’s other daughter, Caroline, was known as the “wild one” and left home as a teenager, some twenty years earlier.  Now Samuel finds information that leads him to believe that Caroline has returned to Texas and made contact with her mother, but Samuel is having no luck tracking Caroline down.

Going over Dora Mae’s accounts, Samuel is stunned to realize how close to the bone she had been living.  Her very talented grandson wanted to leave the farm and go to Houston to study art, but Dora Mae told him she didn’t have the money to send him.  However, Dora Mae’s new neighbors seem to be interested in buying the farm, an unseemly rapid interest given the circumstances of her death.

Jarrett Creek is home to a number of interesting citizens, much like an English village in a Golden Age mystery.  Here, as in many small towns and cities, the younger people leave for what they view as the greener pastures of big cities, leaving farms to lie fallow and local stores to go out of business.  One can hardly blame Greg, a talented artist, for wanting to pursue a career in Houston or beyond, but is that enough motive to kill his grandmother, assuming she really wanted to and was able to prevent him from leaving?

A Killing At Cotton Hill is a wonderful debut novel.  I eagerly look forward to the next Sheriff Samuel Craddock mystery.

You can read more about Terry Shames at her web site.

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

It’s a fearful scene that Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch is called to by his friend Billy Cronk.  “Wicked bad,” is Billy’s description of what he’s taking Mike to see, and that’s an understatement.

The first site Billy takes Mike to is where a young male moose has been killed, the second is where a cow bull, a female moose, is lying dead next to her three slaughtered calves.  As Mike says to Billy, “It’s a serial killing, Billy.  I don’t know what else to call it.”

The dead moose are on the property of multimillionaire Elizabeth Morse, a businesswoman who has bought thousands of acres of forest in eastern Maine to fulfill her dream of making the land a national park.  Elizabeth’s plan has run into steep opposition, however, from businessmen and loggers in the area who fear the end of their jobs.  Elizabeth’s promise that tourists will bring money into the area is falling on deaf ears, and she has received dozens of hostile letters and death threats.

Mike Bowditch isn’t the most popular game warden in Maine.  He’s a college graduate from a Portland suburb, as opposed to most of the other rangers who were brought up in the remote northern counties of the state, and he’s not very good at taking orders that he believes are unreasonable.  That’s why he’s been exiled to Washington County by Lieutenant Marc Rivard, his supervisor in the Maine Warden Service.

Marc takes Mike off the case, putting him out in the field with busywork that has little or no relevance to the animal shootings.  But, after a few days with no results in the investigation, Elizabeth Morse forces the lieutenant to put Mike back on the case as liaison between herself and the Service.  Marc isn’t happy about this, and actually neither is Mike, but Elizabeth wields a lot of power in Maine, even with all her enemies.

Then the case goes from animal slaughter to murder.

Mike Bowditch is a man who wants to do his job but who is continuously frustrated by the politics and small-mindedness of his superior officers.  He sees Marc Rivard for what he is, a self-aggrandizing man who is petty enough to try to keep Mike from handing a case that by rights belongs to Mike and to take credit for anything his troops do.

His view of Elizabeth Morse isn’t much more positive.  He sees that she uses her power, in her case monetary power, to get the things done that she wants, regardless of the impact it has on others.  She either doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to understand that her plan of making a national park in this poverty-stricken area of Maine will put hundreds of people out of work.

Paul Doiron has written a wonderful mystery, the fourth in the Mike Bowditch series (see my review of The Poacher’s Son on this blog).  Mike Bowditch is a terrific protagonist, and the supporting characters are equally well-written.  Reading Massacre Pond will take you to the woods of Maine, with all its beauty, poverty, and problems.

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

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

When a “good” man turns bad, there are bound to be questions.  Was he always evil and kept it hidden, or were circumstances too much for him to deal with, forcing him to turn evil?  Such are the questions that every reader of Criminal Enterprise will ask, and each reader will have to answer for herself or himself.

Carter Tomlin was a happy man.  He had an important job with a big salary, a loving wife, and two darling daughters.  He lived in a mini-mansion in Minneapolis and drove a Jaguar.  But then came the economic downturn in 2007-08.  Carter was laid off from his job and things started to turn bad.  He was about to fall behind on his mortgage payments, his wife took a temporary teaching job she hated, and his daughters had a long list of Christmas presents they had to have.  He felt like a failure, that he was “less of a man” for not supporting his family.

He started a small accounting business but that wasn’t able to bring in the amount of money he felt he needed.  So, on the spur of the moment, he bought a clumsy disguise, walked into a Bank of America branch, and came away with eighteen hundred dollars.  His second robbery yielded three thousand dollars, but that still wasn’t sufficient to cover his expenses.  So Carter got some guns, and things escalated from there.  Like a road map, readers can follow the step-by-step moral disintegration of Carter Tomlin.

Criminal Enterprise brings together the two protagonists in Own Laukkanen’s first novel, The Professionals (reviewed on this blog).  FBI Special Agent Carla Windermere and Special Investigator Kirk Stevens of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehensions teamed together to bring down Arthur Pender and his accomplices.  After that, Kirk’s wife Nancy made it clear that she didn’t want him working with the FBI again. “I married a cop…I knew what I was getting into.  But this hero stuff doesn’t work.  Not for me, Kirk.”  And Kirk totally understands.  It’s just that his state job now seems so tame by comparison, and he doesn’t have the camaraderie with his BCA officers that he had with Carla.

Carla is feeling the same way about her fellow FBI agents, most particularly her current partner.  He seems to have trouble with a female partner, especially one who made headlines on her last case.  He’s the one with seniority, and he wants her to follow in his footsteps, not step out on her own.

The novel is told from three main points of view, and each one pulls the reader more deeply into the story.  Carter Tomlin takes the reader into the world of entitlement that he is losing, his fear of letting his family down, his growing need for more action and violence in his criminal enterprises.  Kirk Stevens is a man who loves his wife and his children but is still tempted by the excitement he felt on the Pender case.  Carla Windermere is sure that her feelings about Carter are right and that her partner’s shooting of the man he thinks is the criminal they’re looking for is wrong.

Owen Laukkanen has written a terrific follow-up to The Professionals.  His characters and their motivations are right on; you won’t be able to put this novel down.

You can read more about Owen Laukkanen at his web site.

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