Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Nick Heller calls himself a “private spy.” It’s not exactly a private investigator; it seems he’s more concerned with finding out secrets about the rich and powerful.  And he does a good job.

In Buried Secrets, Nick  is approached by an old friend, Marshall Marcus, to rescue Marshall’s  teenage daughter Alexa from kidnappers. Nick will do almost anything for Marshall, who gave Nick’s mother a job after her husband ran away to avoid being jailed for financial crimes, but he realizes soon enough that Marshall is holding something, or several somethings, back.  However, Nick believes that Marshall truly wants his daughter rescued, even as Nick believes that Marshall’s cold-as-ice wife couldn’t care less about the safety of her stepdaughter.

In addition to Alexa’s abduction, Marshall is facing another problem. His firm lost billion of dollars in investments through the embezzlement of a former employee. Reluctant to admit his firm’s bankruptcy, he had borrowed additional billions from drug dealers and armament dealers in a vain attempt to recoup the funds, and now he’s in a deeper hole than before.  So if it’s money the kidnappers want, his daughter Alexa is really in a tight spot.

This is the second time that Alexa has been abducted, although in the first instance she was simply picked up from a shopping mall, driven around Boston for several hours, and then released.  There was no ransom demand then, and no explanation for the kidnapping ever surfaced.

The more deeply Nick delves into the case, the more secrets he uncovers. Why, in the first place, does Alexa’s best friend Taylor lie about what happened on the night the two of them went out to a Boston nightclub and Alexa disappeared?  Why is FBI agent Gordon Snyder doing everything in his power to keep Nick off the case?  Why does the story of how Marshall met his wife change with every telling?

Nick’s only friend at the Boston office of the FBI is his former lover, Diana Madigan. She’s willing to use the information Nick shared with her to help him, but she is not involved in the search for Alexa.  However, Diana does tell Nick that the reason Gordon Snyder is so wary of Nick’s interest in the case is that the FBI is doing a major investigation into Marshall Marcus’s firm and financial crimes.  And Gordon is afraid that looking for Alexa will compromise that investigation.

As Nick continues his investigation, it gets more and more dangerous.  His loft is broken into, he’s tasered, and still his client won’t give him all the information he needs.  What is Marshall continuing to hold back, and why?

Buried Secrets is the second in the Nick Heller series. The characters are really well-written, portrayed with their human faults and foibles, and Nick is a fascinating protagonist.  Joseph Finder has a very impressive resume that includes a master’s degree from Harvard’s Russian Research Center, and his knowledge of behind-the-scenes international deals seems very accurate.  This is definitely a series that I hope will continue.

You can read more about him at his web site.

It is not often that I read a mystery with a sense of joy.  Interest, enthusiasm, excitement–all those things are to be expected.  But when I finished reading Death Comes to Pemberly, I was filled with the joy that comes from reading a totally enchanting book. 

The novel opens six years after Elizabeth Bennet’s marriage to Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. They reside at Darcy’s family estate, Pemberly, with their two young sons, surrounded by servants whose parents and grandparents were part of the Darcy family’s retinue.  They live close to Elizabeth’s older sister and best friend, Jane, and her husband, Mr. Bingley, Darcy’s closest friend.

The Darcys are preparing for the annual Lady Anne Ball when, amidst the pouring rain and howling wind, a chaise is heard outside the front door.  When the group of Darcys, Bingleys, and others go to see who could be arriving in this storm, they are surprised and bewildered to see Elizabeth’s and Jane’s younger sister, Lydia, nearly falling out of the chaise.  She cries, “Wickham’s dead.  Denny has shot him….”  But Lydia has it wrong.  It is Captain Dennis who is dead, and George Wickham will be accused of his murder.

Lydia’s elopement with Wickham several years earlier, scandalous in nature, has created a major rift between the sisters.  Lydia is reluctantly welcome at Pemberly, but her husband George Wickham is not.  Although he was a close childhood friend of Darcy’s, his lies and inappropriate behaviors have ended the friendship between the men, and neither Elizabeth nor Darcy has spoken to him in years.

Darcy and two guests hear from the chaise driver that Wickham and a friend, Captain Dennis, had been in the chaise with Lydia, in the process of dropping her off at Pemberly.  There apparently had been a quarrel between the men and Dennis had run out into the woods, closely followed by Wickham, and two or three shots were subsequently heard.  Darcy and his two friends quickly leave the house and go into the estate’s woods, where they find Wickham, covered with blood, leaning over the body of his friend, saying, “He’s dead…and I’ve killed him.”

P. D. James’ prose perfectly captures the writing of Jane Austen. So skillful is her style that I believe it would fool the most dedicated Austen scholar.  She has captured perfectly the various personalities that appear in Pride and Prejudice–the kind and compassionate Jane, the more volatile Elizabeth, the foolish and vulgar Lydia, the self-contained Darcy, and various other characters, major and minor, who were in Austen’s novel.  Even Darcy’s disagreeable maternal aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, is perfectly captured in her letter to Elizabeth:  “I have never approved of protracted dying.  It is an affectation in the aristocracy; in the lower classes it is merely an excuse for avoiding work….People should make up their minds whether to live or to die and do one or the other with the least inconvenience to others.”

The Baroness James of Holland Park will be 92 this August, and her writing is as clever and skillful as it was when I read her book An Unsuitable Job for a Woman more than thirty years ago. How fortunate we are that she continues to write and bring delight to her readers.

You can read more about P.D. James at this web site.

A mother and son are all that is left of what was once a family of four. The son, the leader of a famous rock band, has been estranged from his novelist mother for more than four years, forbidding her to call or contact him in any way.  Why?

Carolyn Parkhurst’s third novel is not exactly a crime novel, although there is a murder at the center of it. But it is also a novel about accidents, broken families, and the consequences of things that people do without realizing the far-flung effects they will have.

Otavia Frost is a middle-aged writer of novels; none has become a best seller but all have been respectably received.  When the book opens she is bringing her latest work to her editor in New York City.  As she’s passing through Times Square in a taxi, she views the giant video screen there and sees the name of her estranged son on it.  Getting out of the cab, she is horrified to read “Pareidolia singer Milo Frost arrested for the murder of girlfriend Bettina Moffett.”

Although Milo has totally cut off contact with her, Olivia flies out to San Francisco, the city where her son lives, the following day.  She’s not sure exactly why she’s there, as she doesn’t know whether Milo will want to see her, but she feels her place is to be near him.  She’s able to contact Milo’s bandmate and friend, Joe Khan, and he agrees to meet her.  When they meet, Joe tells Olivia that Milo still doesn’t want to see her, but Joe invites her to his home to meet his girlfriend Chloe and her daughter Lia.

When Octavia arrives and sees Lia, she knows at once that Lia is Milo’s daughter, not Joe’s.  Chloe admits this with no hesitation, saying that when she found out she was pregnant she told Milo she would raise the child herself.  Milo agreed, and now Lia believes that Joe is her father and Milo is Uncle Milo.

There are parts of Octavia’s own life that she would like to rewrite; this being impossible, she’s done the next best thing and rewritten the final chapters of her novels and sent them off to her publisher to comprise a new book. Perhaps it is her hope that this act will allow her relationship with her son to be rewritten.  It is only when the reader is more than halfway through the novel that the reason for Milo’s separation from his mother is revealed.  In the meantime, Milo has somewhat unwillingly allowed his mother to re-enter his life, and Octavia is walking on eggs to try to maintain this rapprochement.

The horrific murder of Bettina Moffett has made headlines around the world. Octavia and Milo must cope with the hordes of media pursuing them.  Twitter, Facebook, made-up interviews, all of these must be dealt with in today’s instant-access world.

Carolyn Parkhurst has written a moving novel in which her protagonist must look deep into herself to find out the reasons for her son’s wall of silence. Could their shared past have brought him to the point of murder?

You can read more about Carolyn Parkhurst at her web site.

Almost as exciting as it is for me to read the debut mystery novel of an author is finding an established author whose books I haven’t read. I’ve found the latter in Ace Atkins, author of The Ranger.

Although Atkins is a mystery writer with eight books prior to this one, I wasn’t familiar with his work until I read that he had been chosen to continue the Spenser novels.  But in reading The Ranger, the first of a new series, I’m delighted to have discovered him now.

Quinn Colson is a member of the Army’s elite Rangers. He’s come home to northeast Mississippi for the first time in six years for the funeral of his Uncle Hamp, sheriff in the rural town where Quinn grew up.  He’d been very close to his uncle, especially after Quinn’s father deserted the family and his parents divorced, and he’s finding it hard to believe that his uncle put a .44 in his mouth and pulled the trigger.  But that’s what everyone tells him.

When Quinn enlisted in the Army, he knew he wanted to be a Ranger.  He also wanted to leave as much of his past behind as possible–his missing father, his mother’s obsession with Elvis, his drug-addicted sister, his high-school sweetheart who jilted him while he was in Afghanistan.  But, of course, much of that is waiting for him when he returns to Jericho, Tibbehah County, Mississippi.

Quinn’s father is still nowhere around; his mother still plays Elvis’s songs night and day, except when she’s listening to gospel; his sister is turning tricks to pay for her drug habit and has left her toddler son with their mother; and his former sweetheart is married to the town’s very successful doctor.  It’s no wonder Quinn stayed away as long as he did.

But things will get even worse before they get better. The land that Hamp owned, which has been in the family for generations, is being claimed by Johnny Stagg, a bully with lots of seedy businesses.  Stagg shows Quinn a scrap of paper with Hamp’s signature on it that allegedly makes Stagg the owner of the land in lieu of repayment of a loan.  Quinn doesn’t believe that the document is valid, but even if it is he’s determined not to give the land away.  “I’d rather burn the house and timber,” he says.

Since Quinn’s father’s disappearance from his life, his uncle had been his mentor and guide.  It’s painful for Quinn to hear that corruption had flourished so blatantly while Hamp was sheriff, that he ran up huge gambling debts that he was unable to repay, and that the sleazy Stagg is now a power to be reckoned with in Jericho.  What had Hamp been thinking and doing while Quinn was away?

The characters in The Ranger are fascinating. As in real life, some have overcome and some have failed to overcome their problems, and the most sympathetic ones continue to fight to improve their lives.  The ones who don’t succeed, like Quinn’s sister, can almost break the reader’s heart when attempt after attempt fails.

Ace Atkins’s second book in the Quinn Colson series, The Lost Ones, has just been published, and you can read more about it on his web site.

June 2, 2012

I’m not sure who said it originally, but variety is definitely the spice of life.  And that’s one of the reasons I so enjoy reading mysteries.

Just taking a look at the books I’ve reviewed recently, I’ve gone from present-day Los Angeles to nineteenth-century New York City to twentieth-century China to nineteenth-century Scotland. And all without leaving home, unless you count my trips to the local library or book store.

Last month I attended a panel discussion that featured an author of several novels, two of which I’d read and thoroughly enjoyed.  She spoke passionately and eloquently about her latest novel, which indeed was excellent.  During her talk she mentioned that rarely had she read a mystery novel and never had finished reading one.

I could hardly believe her.  It’s as if she had said she’d never read a non-fiction book or never seen a foreign film or never gone to an art museum.  I’m certain she never would have said any of those things, so why did she think it was alright to say she’d never finished a mystery story?

The funny thing was that after she had said that, she kind of laughed and said that perhaps her latest novel, the one  she was discussing, was kind of a mystery. And indeed it was, I thought.  There was a crime involved, a person who may or may not have been guilty of that crime, and a violent ending to the story.  But it wasn’t about a murder or one that featured a private eye as its protagonist, so perhaps it didn’t fit into her definition of a mystery.

Did she not read mysteries because they scared her?  Because she felt they were not serious literature, only entertainment?  Or was there some other reason?

Of course, her decision is exactly that, her decision.  And although I didn’t question her during the question-and-answer session or approach her after that to ask for her reason, I felt like telling her that there are as many different kinds of novels in the mystery genre as in any other genre, and she was missing a lot of wonderful, well-crafted stories featuring funny heroines, dissipated private investigators, burned-out police officers, and a hundred or so other protagonists, written by authors who have a good tale to tell.

I admire her writing but not her closed vision. It’s her loss, but as I left the talk I felt sorry for her.

Marilyn

Portland, Maine, is a city dear to my heart, as my older son and his wife work there (flyte.biz).  But not all of Portland is a renovated waterfront and fabulous new restaurants.  Apparently there’s still plenty of nasty stuff going on behind the glitz.

A fight at a funeral sets Port City Shake Down in motion.  Brandon Blake is a part-time college student.  He is riding in a squad car with a veteran police officer as part of a criminology course he’s taking.  When a call comes over the police radio about a disturbance at a funeral home, Brandon and the police officer go to the scene.

Several women are kicking, punching, cursing, and biting each other next to the coffin, and Brandon rushes in to separate them.  Trying to protect himself as well as stop the fight, he elbows one of the women in the face and breaks her nose.  The woman’s son, who is also the grandson of the deceased, handcuffed and with a sheriff’s deputy by his side, tells Brandon, “Eye for an eye, dude…Times (expletive deleted) ten.”

Joel Fuller, the man in handcuffs, gets early release from prison from a sympathetic judge the following day.  Now he’s got the chance to make good his threat against Brandon.  

Brandon was five when his free-spirited mother left Portland on a boat with three men she had met a few days before.  It was supposed to have been a short voyage, but the boat never arrived at its intended port.  It was reported lost, no survivors.  Brandon’s father is unknown, so it’s always been just Brandon and his grandmother Nella.  But Nella hasn’t been the most stable of guardians–she’s never far from a bottle of wine.

Given his background, it’s not surprising that Brandon has always kept to himself and taken care of himself.  When his criminology professor asks him why he’s only taking one course, Brandon reluctantly explains that he works at a Portland marina.  The professor reminds him there is financial assistance available–loans, grants.  But Brandon isn’t having any of that.  “I don’t need any help…I pay as I go,” he responds.

But suddenly his life is opening up.  Mia, another student in the criminology course, makes it clear she’s interested in Brandon.  She’s smart, self-assured, and thinks Brandon is leading an adventurous life very different from her own.  Soon they’re a couple, and Brandon has someone in his life with whom to share his thoughts and even his secrets.

Then, as he and Nella are driving around the waterfront, Nella suddenly orders Brandon to stop the car.  She has seen, or thinks she has, one of the men on the boat that supposedly went down with everyone aboard, including her daughter. But when Brandon rushes out of the car to find the man Nella calls Lucky, he’s nowhere to be seen.  Did she really see him?

I’m always delighted when I come across what is for me a new writer, and that’s what happened in this case.  I was ordering a book from Amazon and they suggested, as they always do, that I might also want to purchase Port City Shake Down. I took a chance, and I’m pleased that I did.

Gerry Boyle has created a very interesting protagonist, a young man who has made himself what he is with not much help from anyone.  He’s smart, independent, and knows what he wants from life.  I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, Port City Black and White.

You can read more about Gerry Boyle at his web site.

When something has been around for your whole life (and longer than that), you often don’t think about its beginnings.  I certainly never thought about how the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came into being–it was just always there. But, of course, it had to start sometime, and that time was in 1861 in Boston (not Cambridge, another fact I hadn’t thought about).

The Technologists, Matthew Pearl’s latest historical mystery, takes place in 1868, the year the Institute will hold its first graduation. The middle of the nineteenth century is usually seen as the end of the Industrial Revolution and its incredible technological breakthroughs–the steam engine, the mechanization of cotton mills, the telegraph.

But, of course, these technologies impacted on the lives of workers, many of whom were fearful of losing their livelihood to these improved means of manufacture or transportation.  Then there were those who thought all technology and science was the work of the devil and vowed to oppose any advancements.  And to add to this mix was the immediate rivalry between Harvard College, then a mature two hundred and twenty years old, and the upstart Institute of Technology.

As the novel opens, the Institute is ready to graduate its first class, but it is rapidly running out of funds, its president will shortly suffer a major stroke, and some of its small faculty want to have the school incorporated into the vastly larger and more prestigious Harvard College. To add to these problems, someone is terrorizing Boston with a series of horrific events–a massive collision of boats in the harbor, glass melting in the windows of the Financial District, deadly explosions on the city’s streets.  Many of the citizens of the city are certain that the new Institute is to blame.

Four of the Institute’s students, led by Marcus Mansfield, a “charity scholar” and former worker in the Hammond Locomotive Works, band together to try to use their technical knowledge to find the perpetrator of these crimes. They are a diverse group that, in addition to Marcus, includes his close friend Bob Richards; the lone woman at the Institute, Ellen Swallow; and the student vying for the position of class scholar, Edwin Hoyt.  Working secretly in a basement room of the Institute, they race against time and prejudice to discover what is behind the disasters that are plaguing their city.

The Technologists is a fascinating book.  The city of Boston comes alive.  You can see what life was like in this proud City on a Hill that regarded itself as the Hub of the nation; along with New York, it was the financial center of the country in the nineteenth century.  The city was ruled by a small class of people who came to be known as the Boston Brahmins, people of social connections, money, and educational pedigrees, and many of those leaders were proud alumni of Harvard College.

Indeed, one of the themes running through The Technologists is the fact that Marcus Mansfield is a “factory boy” and, regardless of his expected degree from the Institute, he will never be seen as more than that.  Certainly not in Boston.  And to more than one of the Harvard men, it is inconceivable that Marcus’s friend Bob Richards would have chosen the Institute rather than the College that many of his family had attended.

Matthew Pearl has added to his previous books about Boston–The Dante Club, The Poe Shadow, The Last Dickens–with this excellent novel. You can read more about him at his web site.

The full title of this book is Midnight in Peking:  How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China. That says it all.

A dear friend of mine, Deborah Richardson, sent me this book because she thought it would interest me, and she was absolutely right.  This work of non-fiction is the spellbinding story of a very turbulent time, not only in China but throughout the world as the Second World War was approaching.

In fact, it was approaching China more rapidly than elsewhere.  The Japanese had invaded Manchuria several years earlier, and as this book opens it is 1938 and the Japanese are marching steadily toward Peking. The Chinese, split between communist sympathizers and the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek, was proving ineffective at halting the Japanese.  Peking itself, still home to the legations of the British, French, Japanese, and German governments, was powerless.  The city was crowded with its own citizens as well as diplomats from the above-mentioned countries and refugees pouring in from Europe–mainly White Russians and Jewish refugees.

On a January morning, an elderly Chinese man came across the body of a young white female. Even a cursory glance was enough to see that she had been badly beaten, stabbed multiple times, and had had some of her clothes torn off.  The location of the body was in itself particularly malevolent; it was found at the Fox Tower, which was believed to be haunted by evil fox spirits.

The investigation seemed to be in good hands at first. Colonel Han Shih-ching was a senior detective, and this was not the only foreign corpse he had come across.  Although the Fox Tower was in the Chinese section of Peking, since the girl was obviously of European descent Han called the head of the Legation Quarter Administration to view the body and possibly to identify her.

A closer look at the young woman’s body revealed a platinum and diamond wristwatch.  This was not the corpse of some penniless waif or prostitute, which had been the first thought of the police responding to the call. Then an elderly white man pushed his way through the crowd.  He looked at the broken body, exclaimed “Pamela,” and fell to the ground.  It was his daughter, home from school for the Christmas holiday.  The man was Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner, a British subject, former diplomat, author, and scholar of Chinese languages and literature.

Shortly afterwards the British diplomatic service loaned Detective Chief Inspector Richard Dennis to the Peking police as a favor, but he had his orders to limit his investigation to the Legation Quarter.  However, since the victim was a British subject but Pamela’s body was found outside the Quarter, and since the Fox Tower was under Chinese control but the victim was foreign, Han and Dennis were hindered from the start. It was politics as usual.

How the British and Chinese investigators interacted as they tried both to find the murderer and “save face” and “protect their own,” and how the eccentric Edward Werner refused to accept this flawed investigation as final, is a fascinating read. It involves good will, ill will, corruption, government cover-ups, lies, and more lies.  As the French proverb goes, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Paul French has done a wonderful job portraying the last days of a dissolute, crumbling empire. You can read more about him at this web site.

As usual, there’s a lot going on in Moscow. And Russian police inspector Arkady Renko is, unwillingly, in the middle of it.

Three Stations is where three railroad stations meet.  It’s a terminal that has proved to be terminal for a young woman whose half-unclothed body is found in a trailer in the station.  The illegal wiring in the trailer is connected to the railway police station and then to the nearby militia station.  Is it any wonder that the police call this death a suicide and forbid Arkady Renko to investigate?

The only clue that Arkady finds in the trailer is a pass to a luxury fair currently going on in the city. Having officially been taken off the case and told to expect his termination notice shortly, he feels he has nothing to lose and so goes to the fair.  It’s sponsored by billionaire (or is that former billionaire?) Sasha Vaksberg, aka the “Prince of Darkness.”

The fair features various items up for auction:  a rifle that had belonged to a Romanov child for $75,000; an emerald necklace for $275,00; a ride to the International Space Station for $25 million. This is the new Russia, a millionaire’s playground.  The fair is supposed to be a charity event for the homeless children of Moscow, but does it have a more sinister purpose?

Shortly before the young woman’s body is discovered, a teenage girl runs off the train that has just arrived at Three Stations.  Maya, no last name or home town, is frantically looking for her baby, whom she says was stolen while she slept on the train, but the railway police don’t believe her story. She has no personal identification, no picture of the baby, no witnesses who might have seen the alleged abduction.

Zhenya Lysenko, an unofficial ward of Arkady’s, is in Three Stations hustling games of chess, as usual. Zhenya isn’t sure he believes Maya’s story about the baby, but he can see that she’s alone and frantic, and he wants to help her.  She refuses to go with him to see Arkady, or any other police official, so he smuggles her into the abandoned Peter the Great gambling casino that he uses as a base while they try to find the infant.

Martin Cruz Smith’s series follows the history of the Soviet Union/Russia as much as it follows Renko’s.  The state corruption and mismanagement are different, yet the same.  Now there are millionaires and even billionaires in Russia, but crime, drunkenness, and a desperate underclass are still here.  The promise of the communist government was unfulfilled; the same can be said for its replacement.

Three Stations is a look into a society with multiple problems.  Arkady Renko is one of the few officials who cares, but the corrupt bureaucracy is against him.  Despite his successes, or perhaps because of them, in each novel his future becomes more precarious.

You can read more about Martin Cruz Smith at his web site.

Joseph O’Loughlin, a psychologist who is the protagonist in Bleed For Me, has a lot to contend with. He’s suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, is separated from his wife through no desire of his own, and his fourteen-year-old daughter Charlie can barely tolerate him.  And things are going to get worse for him, a lot worse.

Julianne, Joe’s estranged wife, calls him at 11:00 p.m., saying that Charlie’s best friend Sienna has appeared at her door, covered in blood.  Joe rushes over, just in time to see Sienna run from the house.  He follows her through the woods and into a nearby lake, pulling her out before she goes underwater permanently.  Sienna is rushed to a nearby hospital, and as Joe returns to his former home he is told by a neighbor that Sienna’s father, a retired homicide detective, has been murdered and the police think Sienna committed the crime.

Zoe, Sienna’s older sister, confirms that their father sexually abused them, but she is adamant that Sienna didn’t kill him.  However, the police see it differently, and Sienna is arrested and slated for trial.

Joe goes to talk to Gordon Ellis, the drama teacher at Charlie and Sienna’s school. Although Gordon is popular with all the girls, when Joe questioned Sienna at the hospital she refused to talk about him.  Gordon says he thought there might be a problem at Sienna’s house and arranged for the girl to see a counselor.  Joe has a “gut feeling”–that Sienna is protecting somebody and that Gordon knows more than he’s telling.  No proof, just a feeling that there’s something between the two of them, something inappropriate.

Sienna has also been close to the counselor at school, Annie Robinson.  Annie says she knew Gordon Ellis in college but wasn’t close to him.  She calls Gordon “too handsome for his own good” and promises to look into any conversations at school about possible sexual misconduct between Gordon and the female students.

One of the reasons that Julianne left Joe and wants a divorce is her feeling that he can’t separate himself from his work and his clients. And that certainly seems to be the case here.  His car is run off the road, his dog is killed, but still he persists in trying to help Sienna; true, she’s not a patient, but her closeness to his daughter makes her seem to Joe as nearly a member of his family.

Bleed for Me is a beautifully crafted, incredibly suspenseful book.  It’s not an easy read, dealing with parental sexual abuse and other sexual perversions, things that are unfortunately all too common in today’s news.  But the emotions of all the characters ring true–their fears, desires, lusts, loves–all the emotions that make us human.

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

It’s 1845 in New York City.  And lower Manhattan, as we now call it, is about to be engulfed in flames, spreading to a warehouse filled with saltpetre, an ingredient used in the making of gunpowder.  Hundreds of houses are destroyed, thirty people are killed, and the life of the hero of The Gods of Gotham is changed forever.

Timothy Wilde had been a barkeep, saving his money to buy a ferryboat to make the crossings from Manhattan to Staten Island.  After the fire, the bar he worked at is no more, the tenement where he lived is destroyed, the life savings he kept under his mattress is melted away, and his face is badly burned.  It’s time to look for a new line of work, and his older brother Valentine signs him up, without his permission, as a rookie in the newly-formed Police Department of New York City.  So, reluctantly, Timothy puts on the copper star and joins the force.

Shortly after becoming one of the “star detectives,” as police officers were originally known, Timothy is patrolling the infamous Sixth Ward when he’s nearly bowled over by a young girl running frantically down the street.  When he picks her up, he sees she’s covered with blood.  Unsure of what to do with her, but certain he doesn’t want to hand her over to an orphanage, he brings her to his new home, the one room he rents over a bakery.

Her given name is Aibhilin o Dalaigh, which translates from the Gaelic as Little Bird.  Being a ten-year-old vagrant in New York City is not a good thing to be, especially if you’re Irish.  Anti-immigrant and anti-Irish hysteria is building quickly in the city, fueled by the Protestant population’s fear of both the Catholic Church and of new immigrants eager to take on any job at a lower rate than the salary that would have to be paid to an American citizen.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Little Bird turns out to be a kinchin-mab, a child prostitute. She escaped from Madame Silkie Marsh’s brothel, and if the madam finds her she’ll be brought back to the brothel, or worse.  So Timothy keeps her hidden.

At the same time, Timothy becomes aware that there’s a serial killer loose in the city. Bodies of children have turned up in a mass grave, children marked with enormous crosses on their nude bodies.  And when it’s discovered that the children were Irish, the new chief of police, Justice George Washington Matsell, wants Timothy to get to the bottom of it without setting off a religious riot in the city.

While all this is going on, Timothy is dealing with his feelings for Mercy Underhill, a childhood friend.  He had hoped to tell her of his love when he had amassed enough money to buy the ferryboat, but now his financial independence seems unrealistic.  And Mercy is the daughter of Reverend Underhill, a well-respected and well-to-do clergyman,  which puts her in another social and economic class.

The Gods of Gotham is an incredibly well-researched novel, but it never feels like a treatise. The story carries the reader along with its fast-moving plot and fascinating characters.  Lyndsay Faye has written a terrific mystery.

You can read more about her at her web site.

Everybody counts or nobody counts. That’s the mantra that propels Harry Bosch.  The Los Angeles police detective is still in the Open-Unsolved Unit, better known as the Cold Cases Unit.  Any unsolved murder, even one going back fifty years, can be reopened.  There’s no statute of limitations on murder in California.

As the novel opens Harry receives a new case.  It’s one in which it looks as if someone made a serious error.  A young woman, Lily Price, was grabbed on her way home from the beach one day in 1989 and brutally raped and murdered.  Her killer left only one identifying mark, a spot of blood on her neck, apparently transferred by the belt he used to strangle her.  Now that blood spot is reexamined using today’s techniques, and it comes back identified as belonging to a convicted sexual offender.  There’s only one problem with this identification–at the time of the crime, the suspect whose blood was on the victim’s body was only eight years old.

Harry is called away from a meeting about this case by a phone call from his former partner Kiz Rider, who is now the assistant to the chief of police.  She tells Harry he’s about to be called onto a case involving Irvin Irving, a former deputy chief in the department who had been forced out and is currently a city councilman.  Irvin is now seen by the department as an enemy, getting his own back by cutting the department’s budget whenever possible.

Irvin’s only son, George, was found early that morning on the sidewalk in front of a hotel after a drop from the hotel’s seventh floor. Was it an accident, a suicide, or a murder?  In spite of the antagonistic past Harry and Irvin shared, Irvin claims he wants Harry as the chief investigator on this case.  He says he’s willing to accept whatever the truth is.  Harry is wary, but he has no choice–the case is his.

The Drop is as good as it gets. Harry Bosch is back in top form.  He’s a man who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, if at all, and he doesn’t bend.  When the Irving case takes him to places he doesn’t want to go, he’s aware of the dangers ahead but goes anyway.  It’s his job, and he’s going to do it right.

The “high jingo,” as Harry calls orders from his superiors, is that Harry should hold off on the cold case for a while and concentrate on the Irving case.  But that’s not Harry’s style, and he’s determined to handle both cases simultaneously.  When he sets out to interview Clayton Pell, whose blood was found on Lily, he also meets Dr. Hannah Stone, a psychologist who works with sexual offenders.  There’s an immediate spark between them, something Harry hasn’t felt in a long time, and in spite of their different views about sexual predators they begin a relationship.  But can it survive their opposing points of view toward Clayton Pell, plus a secret that Hannah is keeping?

Michael Connelly has again penned a fast-paced, well-written novel about Harry Bosch, a man with a many-faceted personality. He’s a loving father, an excellent policeman, but also a man who is unforgiving to his enemies.  He is certain of the right way to do his work and which path to take, and when others don’t meet his standards he writes them off.  There is my sense that in The Drop Harry Bosch is mellowing just a bit, but you’ll have to read the novel to see if you agree.

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

April 7, 2012

What’s missing and why do I care?

I’m taking two courses at Brandeis’ Osher Lifelong Learning Institute this semester, and in one of them a classmate asked an interesting question.  Why, she wanted to know, had the author not included a particular piece of information about the protagonist and his/her history that she wanted to know? She felt it would have greatly enriched the story if she had more information.

After some discussion around the table, the group leader noted that no matter how long any work is, it cannot encompass everything about the characters in the story. It doesn’t matter if the novel is 400 or 4000 pages, he said, something would be left out.  And perhaps, he added, what’s left out is as much a part of the story as what’s put in.

I totally empathize with my fellow student.  I too want to know everything about a character–his family, his past, his goals. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading mystery novels rather than the genre’s short stories.  Even if a book doesn’t completely satisfy my curiosity about the detective, I can hope the picture will get clearer in succeeding novels.  But I know that won’t happen to characters in a short story.

Although, of course, as there are exceptions to every rule, there’s an exception to what I just wrote.  Somewhere in the Sherlock Holmes canon there’s a throwaway line about his being distantly related to the French artist Emile Vernet, but there’s really almost nothing else about his family.  It’s not until “The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter” that the reader discovers that Sherlock has an older brother, Mycroft.  And aside from telling the reader about Mycroft’s eccentricities, there’s nothing in this story sheds light on Sherlock’s family or his background.

But because Doyle wrote so many stories about Holmes, if you read one after the other, it’s almost as if you’re reading a novel, so there’s the very slight possibility of learning more about Holmes and Watson as you continue to read about them.  But it’s a rare author who has written as many short mystery stories about one character as Doyle had; in fact, I’m sure no other author has.

Given this information gap, does that give the reader permission to, in effect, write his own history? As a friend in my book club has said on more than one occasion, we can only discuss what’s in between the covers of the book.  Anything else is our thought, not the author’s.  It’s only in fairy tales that the story closes with “And they lived happily ever after.”  For everything else we read, we don’t know how things will work out after we close the book, and we simply have to deal with that.

Marilyn

A truly fascinating look into medieval life in England comes through in the series featuring Brother Cadfael of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, at Shrewsbury.

The series begins in the twelfth century at the border between England and Wales.  Brother Cadfael, born in Wales, had traveled the world as a soldier in the first crusade and a sailor in the years following but now has found his calling as a member of the abbey. He is in charge of the abbey’s garden and herbarium, an important position at a time when home-grown medicines were almost the only ones available.

As the novel opens, a civil war between two cousins, Stephen and Maud, has been going on for three years; it eventually lasted nineteen. Henry I, Maud’s father, had named her his heir after the death of his only son, but many nobles rebelled at the thought of a woman leading the kingdom and thus supported the claims of Henry’s nephew, Stephen.  As Stephen comes to Shrewsbury with his forces, aristocrats and soldiers loyal to Maud flee the town to join her in France.

A fellow monk introduces Cadfael to Godric, a “young man” who is willing to help in the garden, but it doesn’t take Cadfael long to realize that Godric is actually a young woman, Godith Adeney by name.  Her father fled to France to support Maud, and if Godith is discovered she will be imprisoned and held for ransom in order to bring her father back to face Stephen.  Cadfael, although not taking sides in the fight for the kingdom, vows to keep Godith’s secret and protect her.

After a battle in which ninety-four of Stephen’s enemies are killed, the abbey’s abbot requests that the men be prepared for a proper Christian burial.  The abbot sends Cadfael to the castle to handle this task, but when the monk counts the dead, he discovers that there is one more body than he had been told. And this man was not killed in battle but strangled by a thin wire from behind.

In One Corpse Too Many we are introduced to Hugh Beringar, a soldier who, in later novels, becomes a close friend of Cadfael’s, and the woman who becomes Hugh’s wife, Lady Aline.  In addition, a number of Cadfael’s fellow monks whom we meet here continue to appear in other novels, while new members of the monastery join the cast of characters in later books.

The late Ellis Peters (real name Edith Mary Pargeter) created the character of Brother Cadfael when she needed “the high equivalent of a mediaeval detective, an observer and agent of justice in the center of the action.” She was a writer of some renown as a translator of Czech literature, but today she is best known for her mystery novels.  Unfortunately, Ms. Peters died shortly after the BBC television series got underway and thus did not see all the books made into television programs, but she was a strong supporter of Derek Jacobi, who played Cadfael with great wit and charm.

There is not a dedicated page for Ellis Peters, but there is a brief biography about her and a summary of all Brother Cadfael’s novels at Philip Grosset’s Clerical Detectives web page.

The Barber family could not be a more typical suburban family. The father is an attorney, the mother a former teacher, the son a fourteen-year-old middle school student.  They live near Boston, have friends, and a generally happy life.  And then the son is accused of murder.

William Landay, himself an attorney in Boston, tells a nail-biting story. Andy Barber is second-in-command in the Boston district attorney’s office and soon will probably be the head honcho.  Of course he and his wife are terribly upset when Ben, a classmate of their son Jacob, is knifed to death in a park on his way to school; after all, Jacob has known Ben since elementary school.  Andy takes over the case, dismissing the district attorney’s slight concerns over a possible conflict of interest.  Andy’s argument is that he, as the father of a fellow student at Ben’s school, has a greater interest in finding the murderer than any other assistant district attorney on the staff, an argument the district attorney reluctantly agrees to.

But then, several days later, Jacob is arrested and charged with the killing.

Of course Andy and his wife are outraged and disbelieving.  It’s true Jacob has had some problems, but they seem like typical adolescent ones–a kind of insolence, lack of respect, withdrawing into silence.  But isn’t that like all teenagers, they ask themselves?  However, the case against Jacob gets stronger with messages on Facebook and twitter.  Then Andy learns that Ben had been bullying Jacob over a period of time and that Jacob had told friends he’d take care of Ben.  But did he mean murder?

Andy has always considered himself an extremely fortunate man.  Married to the woman he fell in love with at first sight when they were both in college, living a comfortable life far different from the one he lived as a child, he seems to be sitting on top of the world.  However, Andy has a secret, one that he has never shared with anyone, even his wife. He comes from a violent family, and his father, whom he hasn’t seen in over forty years, is in prison for murder.

Andy is the book’s narrator.  He is a man who sees himself as strong, as a survivor, but inside him there is a well of fear.  Is it possible that there exists in his family a “murder gene,” something that has bypassed him but can be found in his son?

This is a story about more than a murder–it’s about a family being torn apart, being shunned by the community in which they have lived for years, of having former friends cross the street to avoid speaking to them.  Andy is put on paid leave from his job and Jacob is suspended from school.  And then comes the trial.

William Landay has written a powerful novel about the damage caused by keeping secrets, by ignoring signs of trouble, by pretending all is right when it isn’t. We are privy to Andy’s thoughts and actions, but not, I think, to his deepest feelings.  I wonder if even Andy allows himself to know his own secret thoughts and emotions; his control is so strong that I believe he thinks that if once he lets go he will cease to be the man he has made himself to be.  Behind the man’s strength is actually the vulnerability of the boy.

You can read read more about William Landay at his web site.