Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Lydia Chin and Bill Smith are together again. They are private investigators in New York City; given Lydia’s ethnicity, they do a lot of investigating in Chinatown.

Quietly drinking tea in a Lower East Side tearoom, Lydia is approached by a new client.  He introduces himself as Jeff Dunbar, a man interested in contemporary Chinese art.  Lydia is a bit put off by this, wondering if he has chosen her for her “Chineseness” or her knowledge of Chinese art; if so, she thinks, he’s in for a rude surprise.  Her lack of knowledge of art, most especially contemporary Chinese art, is profound.

Dunbar tells her it’s not her knowledge of the art scene that made him come to her but her reputation at finding people or things. What he wants her to look into is a rumor circulating around the city’s galleries that several previously unknown paintings by Chau Chun, a Chinese artist who was killed in Tiananmen Square in the 1989 uprising, have surfaced in New York.  Dunbar portrays himself as a new collector who wants to find out if these painting exist and, if they do, to get them, authenticate them, and sell them.

But Lydia isn’t taking him at his word.  After he gives her a retainer and leaves, she searches through the web for information about him–no hits.  He gave her a card with his name and cell phone number but no company name, address, or e-mail.  And his clothing and demeanor don’t shout money to her either.  Her suspicions are aroused.

Intrigued by Lydia’s description of and questions about Dunbar, Bill Smith brings her to a friend of his, another Chinese-American private detective, Jack Lee. After hearing Lydia’s story about her new client, Jack shares his own–he too has just been approached by a client to find these paintings.  But his client wants to find the paintings, if they exist, to declare them fraudulent.  The client, a Professor Yang at New York University, was a friend of Chau Chun’s in Beijing, and he knows there are no recent or undiscovered paintings by the artist because he was there when the artist was killed.

There’s a strong sense of Chinatown in this novel, with its winding streets and myriad restaurants; the food descriptions alone make the book worth reading.  There’s also a fair amount of humor in this novel, more than I remember in previous books in this series.  The art scene is portrayed as a dog-eat-dog one, with money being the prime motivator.  Lydia’s stereotypical mother makes an appearance, as does her cousin, a nineteen-year-old techie who can find out just about anything Lydia want to know.

The only problem I had with the book with the lack of a crime. It’s really a “cozy” in the sense that there’s little violence, little crime, and no deaths.  The mystery and the plot are strong, but I would have enjoyed a bit more tension than was present.

You can read more about S. J. Rozen at her web site.

A woman is struggling with the heavy suitcase she’s just removed from a storage locker.  She manages to get it to her car, but before putting it in the trunk she decides to open it.  “In the suitcase was a boy:  naked, fair-haired, rather thin, about three years old….Not until she saw his lips part slightly did she realize he was alive.”

This first-time collaboration by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis is a terrific read. Taking place both in Denmark and Lithuania, it tells the story from various points of view.  There are several main characters, but so skillfully is the story told that there’s no confusion about who is who or whose voice the reader is listening to.

After the one-page prologue, the first voice is that of Jan, obviously a successful businessman in Copenhagen who is doing something that he must keep secret from his wife. Whatever it is involves something either illegal or immoral, but something is driving Jan to do it “whatever the price.”

The second voice is that of a man named Jucas.  He’s an unknown quantity, driving in the Lithuanian countryside with his lover and dreaming of their future together. But there’s “just one little thing to be done first.”

We then hear from Sigita in Taurage, Lithuania. She’s at a playground with her young son when a woman comes to the playground’s gate to offer young Mikas a piece of chocolate.  Upset by this intrusion, Sigita chases her away and continues playing with her son and drinking coffee from her thermos.  And then everything goes black.

The fourth main character is Nina, a nurse at a Red Cross immigrant center in Copenhagen, who receives a call from a friend. Nina is caring and compassionate, perhaps overly so.  Although she and her friend Karin have not been close in recent years, when Karin asks to meet her as soon as possible, Nina agrees.  Karin needs a favor, a suitcase to be picked up.  When Nina demurs, Karin retorts, “You’re always so keen on saving people, aren’t you?…Well, here’s your chance.”

The plot weaves back and forth between these four characters, plus several others, and between the two countries.  On the periphery is a bewildered husband whose wife is gone without explanation, foreign teenage prostitutes in Denmark, a frightened child, a reluctant policeman.

The central mystery, of course, is why this child has been kidnapped. We learn that he is the son of a single mother who was drugged and attacked so that he could be taken.  But there are no ransom notes, no demands of any kind.  And if there were, Sigita has no money to pay.  So why would her child have been abducted?

I often don’t enjoy stories told in very short chapters by a variety of people.  That style of writing makes me think that the author didn’t know how to segue from one scene or one character to the other.  But that’s not how I felt reading The Boy in the Suitcase. Lene Kaaberbol is the author of numerous fantasy books, and Agnete Friis is a journalist and author of children’s books.  Together they are a marvelous pair.  The first page of this novel grabbed me, and that feeling continued through to the very end.

Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friss don’t have a web page together, but you can read very brief biographies of them at various web pages.

Every once in a while I open a first novel by an author and know within a few pages that I’m going to love that book. That happened to me when I read the opening chapter of Fall From Grace.

Wayne Arthurson’s protagonist is Leo Desroches, a journalist in Edmonton, Alberta.  He’s half Cree Aboriginal and half French Canadian, a man who takes medicine for an unnamed emotional illness, a divorced father of two who hasn’t seen his children in five years, and a compulsive gambler.  There’s only one problem, or at least it’s his most troubling one–whenever he’s stressed or trying to avoid his gambling compulsion, he robs banks.  Some people do yoga, Desroches steals money.

He’s also a first-rate newspaper reporter, trying to take advantage of a lucky break to get his career back on track.  He’s gotten another chance with an Edmonton daily because years earlier he had worked with the paper’s current managing editor at a small town weekly.  Shortly before the novel opens Desroches was a scab who crossed union picket lines during a month-long strike.  When the strike was over, he was invited to stay on as a reporter on the police beat.

As the book begins, Desroches is viewing the body of a young Indian woman who was strangled. Although assured by the police detective in charge of the case that all murder victims are equal and all police efforts are expended to find the murderer, Desroches believes that when the victim is “known to the police for her high-risk life style” (p. c. talk for being a prostitute), there is the feeling that she was partly responsible for her own death.

The more Desroches finds out about Grace, the murdered young woman, the more involved he gets.  After some additional research, he believes that the city of Edmonton has been stalked over a period of years by a serial killer whose victims are prostitutes, mostly Native Americans.  The police decry this theory, mainly because the city has never had a serial killer before; the murder of Grace Cardinal seems to fall through the cracks.

Following this story is proving hazardous to Desroches’ mental and physical health. During the course of the novel he’s beaten up and Tasered; so, of course, to relieve his stress, he robs two banks.  But nothing stops him from continuing to follow the story of the dead women.

Desroches is also trying to make amends to his wife and children for his abandonment of them.  Although he respects his wife and her ability to create a warm and safe home for their two children without him, he calls her in hopes that she will allow him a brief meeting with the children.  His evening with his adolescent son is one of the most touching in the novel.

Wayne Arthurson puts the reader into a big city in the Canadian prairie.  It has some of the problems that similar-size American cities have, but there are differences too.  Arthurson makes the most of his own ethnic background of Cree and French-Canadian parents by giving Desroches the same mix.  Desroches is battling a lot of demons, not all of which we understand, but we do understand that he’s pretty much an outsider in this Western Canadian place.  That can make it easier to be an objective journalist and make it harder to simply be a man.

You can read more about Wayne Arthurson at this web site.

All I know about the Navajo I learned from Tony Hillerman.

As soon as I read my first Hillerman novel, The Blessing Way, I was hooked. For several more books I was under the impression that Hillerman himself was a Native American, so knowledgeable did he seem.  Also, given his last name, I imagined a whole scenario in which the first male of his family was born within sight of a big hill, hence the name.  Ultimately I read that he was not a member of the Navajo tribe, or indeed any other tribe, simply a man who knew and respected the culture of the American Indian and wanted others to join him in appreciation of their culture.

Hillerman’s two detectives, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, are members of the Navajo Tribal Police who work out of the Four Corners area of Arizona and New Mexico. It’s a barren but beautiful area, and Hillerman’s prose puts the reader right there.  The huge open spaces, the day’s heat and the night’s cold, the dryness of the desert, the hope when black clouds come into view and the disappointment when they don’t drop any moisture on the parched land–all of that comes through vividly in each novel.

Hillerman’s first book, written in 1970, featured Joe Leaphorn, and Jim Chee came along exactly ten years later.  Each one was the protagonist in three books, and then Leaphorn and Chee combined forces in 1986 in an even dozen mysteries.

Leaphorn is the older, more experienced detective, and somewhat surprisingly is the less traditional of the two.  Chee is more conversant with the customs of his people, and indeed in some novels he is working toward becoming a singer of some of the Navajo blessing or curing ceremonies.  Both men are college graduates who have returned to Four Corners to put their skills and their understanding of the white culture to work for the Navajos.   Although Leaphorn and Chee differ in age and personality, essential goodness and compassion shine through both men.

As with many series, it’s best to begin at the beginning of the books, or at least as close to the beginning as possible.  Both men age and undergo personal highs and lows, and the books will be more meaningful if they’re read in the order in which they were written.

It speaks volumes about Hillerman that there is a Tony Hillerman middle school and a Tony Hillerman branch library, both in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He left behind a wonderful legacy in his books, and his memory is honored in his adopted state.  He died in 2008 at age 83.

Although Tony Hillerman didn’t have his own web page, there is a great deal of information about him on the web.  One good source is this web page.

We need to go back in time over four hundred years, to 1592 to be exact. To the city of Prague, where the semi-benevolent Kaiser Rudolph II rules Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in an ethnic mix that can boil over at the slightest provocation.  And the fact that the first night of the Jewish Passover and the Christian Good Friday fall on the same day this year is exactly that provocation.

The title character in The Fifth Servant is a shammes (sexton) named Benyamin Ben-Akiva, newly arrived from a small town in western Poland to the big city of Prague. Although of course an observant Jew, he nonetheless is a follower of Rabbi Judah Loew, a reformist rabbi who stands slightly outside of the tight circle of rabbis who head the various synagogues within the walled ghetto where all Jews are forced to live.

As The Fifth Servant opens, Benyamin is awakened by a piercing cry that turns out to be that of a father looking for his missing daughter.  After Benyamin runs out of his shared bedroom (three people to a bed) in a rooming house and across the street, he comes upon the body of a Christian girl lying dead on the floor of a Jewish butcher shop.

The old familiar charge of blood libel is being tossed around the small shop, that being the term for the belief that at Passover time Jews kill Christian children for their blood to make matzoh, something that the enraged crowd all-too-easily believes. But before the people can erupt into violence against the butcher and his family, the shammes reminds them that the Jews of Prague are vassals of the emperor and under his protection.  So the city’s sheriff allows Benyamin and several rabbis to go to emperor and plead their case for the butcher to be transferred from the city’s jail to the emperor’s, where he presumably will be safer.  The emperor then gives Benyamin three days, until the night of Easter Sunday, to produce the killer; otherwise, it is certain that the butcher will be killed.

The Fifth Servant is as much a historical novel as it is a mystery. There is an incredible amount of research that has obviously gone into the writing of this novel.  There’s the combination of Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, and Czech languages; the detailed explanation of Jewish prayers and beliefs; the conflict between the fifteen-hundred-year-old Catholic church and its upstart rival, the Protestant church; and the story of the Jewish people, always subject to the whims of whatever man happened to be in power in the country where they lived.

Kenneth Wishnia does a masterful job in creating not only this broad landscape but also the miniature sketches of the characters who people the city, some major and some minor. In addition to the shammes Benyamin and his teacher Rabbi Loew, there is a cast of dozens:  the visiting Catholic bishop who has come to Prague to ferret out the witches and sorcerers he knows live there; the sheriff of Prague who is willing to listen to Benyamin protesting the blood libel; the Christian servant Anya who is in love with a young rabbi; the emperor who wants to learn the secrets known only to his Jewish subjects; and the Jewish residents of the ghetto and the Christian residents of the city who view each other with suspicion and enmity.

You can read more about Kenneth Wishnia at his web site.

Alice Humphrey has been unemployed for eight months, and she’s desperate for a job. Her career in the art world has been a rather undistinguished one, so when a chance meeting at a New York City art gallery produces a job offer from a charming stranger, she accepts despite the warnings of her best friend Lily.

Alice comes from a prominent, wealthy family, but not a particularly happy one.  Her father is an Oscar-winning director, her mother a former actress who also won an Oscar.  But their marriage has always been a rocky one, what with her father’s alcoholism and sexual affairs and her mother’s refusal to deal with anything that would disturb her life.  And Alice’s older brother, Ben, is a drug addict, perhaps recovering, perhaps not.

The gallery Alice has been hired to run will open under two conditions, according to Drew Campbell, the man who offered her the position. The first is that the man whose money is funding the gallery must remain anonymous; the second is that his young protegee must have a three week solo show of his photographs to open the gallery.  Alice is somewhat mystified by these conditions, but she agrees.  When she sees the photographer’s work she’s upset by his evident lack of talent, but she decides to make the best of it–after all, it’s only for three weeks, then she’s free to choose the art for the gallery.

But when the show opens, it’s picketed by the Reverend George Hardy of the Redemption of Christ Church because he says it’s showing pornographic photos of underage girls.  There’s nothing to be done, according to Alice’s call to the New York City’s 311, non-emergency, line; the picketers are entitled to express their First Amendment rights.

And two days later Alice gets a phone call from Drew, saying there are some problems and he has to see her the next morning at the gallery.  When she arrives and lets herself in, she trips over his corpse.

Alafair Burke does an excellent job of combining Long Gone’s various story lines. In addition to Alice’s problems, there’s the F.B.I. detective who has been following, against orders, the man he holds responsible for his sister’s death.  There’s also the teenage girl who’s gone missing from her New Jersey home.  When all three story lines converge, the entire picture becomes clear.  The sense of scene is excellent, whether the author is describing the Highline Gallery, named for the newly constructed High Line Park on the lower west side of New York City, or a suburban New Jersey high school filled with jocks and cheerleaders.

Alice Humphrey is a very appealing heroine. She’s led a protected, if not especially happy, life, cosseted by her family’s position and money.  She knows that her father’s money paid for her previous job, and now she’s very determined to make it on her own.  No more favors, thank you.

She been having an on-again, off-again romance for some time; at the moment it’s on, but there’s a very substantial stumbling block in the relationship just waiting for someone to trip over it.  Her relationship with her brother has its own difficulties.  He’s happy to talk against their parents, but he lives in a condo his father pays for and hasn’t had a real job for years.  And Alice’s fear of her brother’s drug use has added an additional emotional toll to every conversation they have.

Alafair Burke is also the author of two series; Long Gone is her first stand-alone. You can read more about her at her web site.

Can one ever recover from an unhappy childhood? This novel is full of people whose sad memories still haunt them, and to some extent control them, many years later.

In The Black  Path, Asa Larsson brings back two of her characters from previous books:  police inspector Anna-Maria Mella and attorney Rebecka Martinsson. Up in Tornetrask, northern Sweden, the two are brought together to work on the brutal murder of business executive Inna Wattrang. Her body was found abandoned in an ark, a wooden hut used in ice fishing.  Inna was beautiful, intelligent, successful, but someone hated her enough to both torture her and then stab her to death.  Why?

Anna-Maria is the head of the homicide force in the small city of Kiruna.  She’s happily married, the mother of four children.  Rebecka Martinsson is a well-respected attorney in Stockholm, originally from Kiruna, who has just been released from a mental hospital, having suffered a breakdown after seeing the murdered body of a close friend and then being forced to kill three men in self-defense.  Now Rebecka wants nothing more than to return to the house in which she grew up and to be left alone.  But that is not to be.

Inna’s boss and her brother, his business partner, are brought in to identify her body.  Her boss, Mauri Kallis, is a self-made multi-millionaire, a rarity in a country where one’s birth still counts in society. Abandoned by a father he never knew, neglected by a mother with a mental illness, brought up in a foster family with a vicious older foster “brother,” Mauri has tried to put all that behind him by pretending it never happened.  Never given love or attention during his childhood, he’s unable to give them to his wife and two young sons.  There’s a cold core in his center, and he’s not interested in thawing it out.

All he’s interested in is making money–it’s money, after all, that has given him the clout to build both physical and metaphysical walls between himself and the rest of the world.  So far Mauri has had the Midas touch, always knowing when to put money into a business and when to take it out, but with his new mining venture in Uganda, he may be in over his head.

Inna’s brother Diddi has slid through life with his good looks and charming manner, despite his own unhappy upbringing. But his dissolute ways are catching up to him.  He’s been a partner with Mauri in their firm–Mauri is Mr. Inside, Diddi is Mr. Outside–but he’s losing his touch with the important, rich people the firm needs in order to continue to make its risky investments.

Can the possible business problems and the cooling personal relationship between her boss and her brother explain why Inna was killed?  Are those issues central to her murder or merely peripheral?

There’s a strong friendship building between Anna-Maria and Rebecka, two women who don’t have much in common. Anna-Maria’s life, in her opinion, is just about perfect, giving her both a happy family and professional success.  On the other hand, Rebecka’s demons, brought about in great part by a neglectful mother (they’re everywhere in this novel), have made her successful in work but fearful in her personal life.  Attracted to a colleague in her Stockholm law firm, she’s convinced herself that she’s not worthy of his attention, much less his love, and is almost suicidal in her despair at ever finding someone with whom to share her life.

A wonderful character study as well as an engrossing, if very dark, novel, Asa Larsson’s series continues to bring northern Sweden closer to us.

Ms. Larsson doesn’t appear to have an English web page, but you can read more about her at this web page.

As I wrote in my August 27th post, I’m taking a course on international murder mysteries. So far we’ve read books set in Italy, Mesopotamia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and France, and we still have several more weeks of class.  Yeah!

One of the handouts that our instructor, Nancy Rawson, gave to the class is a piece by John Ydstie, a host on National Public Radio. Mr. Ydstie talks about the “spoiler alert,” something I’m sure we’ve all come across in reading reviews of movies, books, plays, etc.

Basically, Mr. Ydstie says that researchers have found that good writing trumps plot and that people who read stories where they know the end enjoy those stories just as much as people reading the story for the first time. I agree and disagree at the same time, if that’s possible.

I’ve taken to reading only the first third or half of movie and books reviews, fearful that the reviewer is going to tell me more than I want to know.  That has happened on more than one occasion, and it did spoil the book/movie for me; if it’s a movie I want to see or a book that’s new to me, I don’t want to know the ending.

That being said, once I’ve read a mystery and (hopefully) have been surprised, I’m very willing to read that book again at a later date, perhaps more than once. I’ve read all of the books in my Golden Oldies section more than once; indeed, I’ve read a couple of them more than twice.  And I’ve enjoyed each one each time I’ve read it.

So I guess I do agree with the psychologists who say that knowing the ending of a book doesn’t spoil it for the reader; it all depends on whether or not the book is well-written.  And sometimes the second reading is better than the first.

Marilyn

I don’t know of any other mystery series that takes place in Saudi Arabia. Author Zoe Ferraris has definitely found a niche of her own, and judging by her debut novel she’s doing an excellent job.

Nouf, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a fabulously wealthy Saudi Bedouin family, has been missing for several days when her brother Othman contacts his friend, desert guide Nayir ali-Sharqi, to find her. Nayir is in the desert with a search party when he’s informed that the girl’s body has been found by another family member.

Wanting to make certain that the body found is indeed Nouf’s, Nayir goes to the medical examiner’s office.  Nayir is upset to learn that the examiner, apparently following the family’s instructions, finds that Nouf’s death was a tragic accident; the examiner’s assistant, Katya Hizari, isn’t so sure.

Nayir is completely taken aback by Katya. In a country where a woman is forbidden to drive, where she needs her father’s or husband’s permission to hold a job, where there are religious police patrolling the streets to make certain that a woman’s face, hands, and ankles can’t be seen beneath her burkqa, the assistant examiner seems far too free for Nayir’s comfort.  What kind of a woman would work in a medical examiner’s office anyway, assisting at autopsies?

What was Nouf doing in the desert in the first place, Nayir wonders? How could she have left her controlling family, evaded her escort (a combination of chauffeur and guardian), stolen a truck and a camel from the family compound, and made her way to the desert, only to drown in a wadi?  And what about that bruise on her head and those marks on her wrists?

Nayir is a man who is ill-at-ease with women in general.  That’s not surprising in a society in which parents make matches for their children, men and women cannot eat together in most restaurants, and public beheading is the punishment for unmarried sex.  Nayir has no parents to make a match for him and no opportunities to meet women of his class, so it’s quite natural that his feelings about Katya are not very positive.  The only thing in her favor, in Nayir’s mind, is that she is engaged to marry his close friend Othman.

One of the mot intriguing aspects of Finding Nouf is the character development in both Nayir and Katya, but especially in the former.  As the novel begins Nayir is a rigid Palestinian/Saudi citizen, surprised and shocked by the most trivial transgression of Islamic law or culture.  But at the book progresses, and he is able to have what might loosely be called a friendship with Katya, he begins to realize that the walls between men and women in his country are harmful to both sexes and rarely lead to the warm family relationship that he himself desires but has no way of achieving.

Finding Nouf is one of the books I’ve read for the mystery course I’m currently taking, A Sense of Place:  Murder Mysteries ‘Round the World, in Brandeis University’s BOLLI program. The sense of Jeddah and the surrounding desert, Saudi Arabia’s unrelenting heat (hot enough to melt the heels of one’s shoes into the pavement), the different inter-personal relationships in Nouf’s Bedouin family, the incredible wealth of this oil-rich nation, and the low status of women are beautifully delineated.  I felt as if I had spent weeks in this country, going from the private island that Nouf’s family owns to the crowded souks to buy food and clothing, to the inhospitable desert where a sudden thunderstorm can bring death to the unwary traveler.

You can read more about Zoe Ferraris at her excellent web site.

This is a book unlike any other I’ve reviewed, or perhaps even read. Written by an “anti-Mafia prosecutor in Bari,” according to the book’s back cover, this award-winning novel has become the basis for an Italian television series.

Gianrico Carofiglio’s debut novel features Bari attorney Guido Guerrieri, a successful thirty-eight-year-old who accepts, if not with comfort, the Italian legal system that includes client retainers that don’t show up as income, biased judges, and malevolent police. He’s adept at getting his clients off, although he acknowledges to himself the pain of the victims as his guilty clients walk free.

As the book opens his marriage has just unraveled, with his wife of several years demanding a legal separation.  He has become “a mediocrity,” in her words, and her leaving sends Guerrieri into a year-long bout of insomnia,  panic attacks, and depression.  On the day of their separation, an African woman walks into his office with a retainer for him to use to free her friend, a Senegalese living legally in Italy.  Abdou Thiam, who makes his living selling counterfeit watches, handbags, and such on the Bari beaches, is accused of abducting and killing a nine-year-old Italian boy visiting his grandparents.

Circumstantially, the case appears strong.  The defendant admits to knowing the boy, saying they were friends.  He has a photo of the child in his apartment, has children’s books in the apartment although he has no child of his own, and has no alibi for the day of the crime.  Although the prosecutor doesn’t include it in his charge against Thiam, there’s a strong presumption of pedophilia underlying his case.

There are two types of trials in Italy, the shortened procedure or a trial in the Assize Court.  If a public prosecutor believes he has sufficient cause for a trial, he can go before a judge and request a shortened procedure in which the defendant is tried by a single judge who then decides his guilt or innocence.  No witnesses are called and usually the only evidence presented is that offered by the prosecution.  The advantage of this type of trial to the prosecution and the court is its brevity; it is much less time-consuming than a full trial at the Assize.  The advantage for the defendant, if he chooses it, is that his willingness for a speedy trial usually results in a significantly reduced sentence, as opposed to what he may expect if found guilty in the Assize.

But Abdou Thiam says that he is innocent and refuses to have the shortened procedure, insisting that he wants a full trial. In Italy that consists of a six-person jury and two judges.  The novel doesn’t explain what is needed for a guilty verdict.  Does it have to be unanimous or can it be a majority?  What if the jury votes one way but the judges vote another?

Involuntary Witness is definitely an off-the-beaten-track mystery, but if I explain why I will give away the ending. The book is almost more of a novel featuring a crime than a crime novel.  It gives the reader a deep look into the attorney’s life and the way the court system works, but it leaves unanswered many questions I wish it had addressed.  Since the book was written for an Italian audience, it assumes that its readers are familiar with that country’s trial system.  I would have appreciated a note somewhere in the novel explaining this and several other aspects of the courts.  But it’s a fascinating book regardless.

Finding information about Gianrico Carofiglio is not easy if you don’t read Italian. There is a very brief biography of him at Amazon.com.

It’s difficult for an author to write a trilogy featuring a former police detective that goes from just after World War I to the middle of World War II and make it believable. After all, the question facing authors as to whether or not to have their characters age is a hard one.  But in the third book in this series featuring former Scotland Yard inspector John Madden, Rennie Airth shows that it can be done, and done convincingly.

The Dead of Winter opens with a prologue. It’s 1940 in Paris, and Maurice Sobel, a French Jew, is getting ready to leave his country, one step ahead of the invading Nazis. His wife and sons have already reached America, but Sobel wants and needs to close his business and bring some capital with him to the United States.  He converts the money he receives for his business into easy-to-carry diamonds he purchased from a Dutch dealer working in Paris.

Two nights before his planned leave-taking he receives a phone call from a friend who knows that Sobel is getting ready to leave France, asking if he would be willing to take two Polish refugees along with him to Portugal.  Sobel agrees, and on the night he receives the diamonds and is doing last-minute preparations prior to departure, he hears his doorbell ring.  Sobel opens the door, expecting to see his traveling companions, and it is the last thing he does.  His throat is encircled by a thin wire, and Sobel drops to the floor, dead.

Now it’s November 1944, and the war has been going on for more than five years in Europe. Men too old to fight have been given jobs on the Home Front.  One of these air wardens, whose job it is to see that the blackout in London is strictly observed, is walking his beat when he sees a young woman in front of him carrying a basket and a bundle.  She seems apprehensive but refuses his offer to walk with her and help her carry the items, saying her destination is just around the corner.  When he turns that same corner less than a minute later, he stumbles over her; her slight body is twisted, and she has a broken neck.

Scotland Yard is almost ready to call the murder one of the too-frequent acts of violence that have come to the city since the beginning of the war.  The only reason the Yard hesitates is that the girl, Rosa Nowak, is identified as a land girl, a farm helper, who is working for former Inspector John Madden of the Yard.

Rosa came to England as a refugee, having lost her parents and siblings to the Nazis, and her quiet demeanor and inexpressible sadness had touched Madden’s family.  Madden wants to make certain that Scotland Yard is doing all it can to find her killer.  When a prostitute comes forward several days later to say she may have seen the man who killed Rosa, the police are anxious to get a complete description of the man.  But before they can call her in for a second interview, her landlady calls the Yard to tell them that she has been killed, garrotted.

Other murders follow, and Scotland Yard fears it has a paid assassin on its hands, perhaps the first that the country has seen.

Rennie Airth’s trilogy seamlessly takes the reader from World War I England to World War II England.   Years have gone by, but John Madden is as interesting a character as he was in the first novel.

You can read more about Rennie Airth at his web site.

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

Copacabana. The word brings up pictures of a beautiful beach, bikini-clad bodies, and Brazil’s national drink, the caipirinha.  So where do police corruption and murder fit into this picture?

Inspector Espinoza, chief of the 12th precinct in the city, has seen three policemen, one in his own precinct, killed within a few days.  Strangely enough, there doesn’t seem to be a big effort on the part of their fellow officers to find the killer or killers.  Espinoza decides to form a small task force with three of his subordinates to look into the deaths further, but they are stymied by the lack of cooperation they’re receiving.  It’s obvious there’s a coverup going on, but why?

More investigation turns up the fact that all three men were married but had mistresses.  Each lived a double life, one at home with his wife and children, the others without them in a nearly empty apartment.  Plus each of their mistresses had her own apartment.  What were they hiding?

Then two of the policemen’s mistresses are murdered. Across the street from the third mistress’s apartment, a woman named Serena sees what she thinks is a third murder.  She sees a woman directly opposite her window arguing with someone, a purse flying out the widow, almost immediately followed by the woman’s body.    She’s sees a police car and an ambulance at the scene a few minutes later, but when she questions the building’s doorman the next morning, he tells a different tale.  The woman was alone, there was no purse, and the woman threw herself out of the window.  Case closed.

Upset at the differences between what she thinks she saw and what the doorman tells her, Serena tells the story to her husband, a high official in the government, but he tells her it’s her imagination getting the best of her.   And even if it happened the way she tells it, it’s not her business.  If the police are satisfied, that’s the end of it.

But Serena isn’t satisfied, so she calls Inspector Espinoza to tell him her story. And that leads to even more complications.

The reader has been led to believe that it was the third mistress who went out the window.  But, in fact, it was not.   The third mistress, Celeste, in a later  interview with the police acknowledges that she and the other women knew their lovers were taking “tips,” or bribes, to supplement their salaries.  She doesn’t know the details, but since she’s the only one of the mistresses alive, she’s sure she’s next on the killer’s list.  Then she disappears.

Garcia-Roza paints a picture of a city with a culture of corruption. It’s easy for murders, even of policemen, to be only superficially investigated, and as for their mistresses, who really cares?  Perhaps it’s easy for Espinoza to get so involved with his police work since his personal life is rather empty.  Married and divorced, with a son who lives with his mother in the United States, he has a relationship with a woman that seems to go no further than a night of sex when it’s convenient for both of them.   He’s a man who’s cold inside.

You can read more about Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza at this web site.

A good/great novel for me is one in which I truly care about the characters.

I just read When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson, whose mystery One Good Turn I reviewed last week.  I don’t plan to review When Will There Be Good News? other than to say it’s wonderful.  What I want to do is to comment on the importance of characters in a novel, even in the mystery genre where the plot is usually paramount.

As readers of my blog know, I’m a huge fan of Agatha Christie and Rex Stout (see my appreciations in Past Masters and Mistresses) and other Golden Age writers, but most of their characters, except for the detectives, are cardboard, interchangeable pieces who are important to the plot but who don’t touch you as real people.  But Ms. Atkinson’s characters are so real, so human, that you can empathize or criticize or admire them as if they existed in real life. When you are reading a book and one of the characters is shot, kidnapped, or otherwise hurt, and you hear yourself give a gasp of fear or horror or surprise–then you know that the author has created living, breathing characters. Conversely, when one of the characters you like falls in love, escapes from a perilous place, or solves the crime, and you find you have a smile on your face–you know the author knows how to touch his/her readers.

The two mysteries by Kate Atkinson that I’ve read (there’s another one in between these two) seem to me to be complete circles. I mean that in the best possible way, that the novels are complete.  When you get to the end you feel the story has reached its natural conclusion.  Even if, as is the case in When Will There Be Good News? and One Good Turn, the very last lines are a complete surprise, they make perfect sense and complete the novels’ circles.

It’s a joy to read books like these.

Marilyn

It’s not too often that I laugh at the last line of a mystery novel, but One Good Turn made me do just that. This book somehow is mysterious, funny, and touching all at the same time, not an easy feat.

The story opens with a man, who calls himself Ray, driving in Edinburgh during the city’s yearly Fringe Festival. He’s lost in the maze of unfamiliar streets and crowds, and as he tries to avoid hitting a pedestrian standing in the middle of the road, a Honda rear-ends his car.  From that car comes a huge man wielding a baseball bat, and the next thing Ray knows he’s down on the ground with the bat poised for another strike at him.  But just then someone throws something at Ray’s attacker, throwing him to the ground as well.  A crowd gathers, the police arrive, and a kind of pandemonium ensues.  When the smoke clears, so to speak, Ray and the man who threw the missile are taken away in one ambulance, and the attacker gets into his Honda and leaves the scene.

The only reliable witness, the only person to have taken down the Honda’s license plate, is Jackson Brodie, a former army officer, policeman, and now a private detective. Jackson’s main problem is that he doesn’t need to work, having inherited two million pounds, but despite having a beautiful home in France and an enchanting girlfriend who’s acting in a Fringe play, he’s bored.  Then, later that same day, as he’s walking down a dark street near where his girlfriend’s play will be performed, he’s set upon by the “Honda man,” as Jackson thinks of him, and the man’s vicious dog.

While all this is going on, the reader meets Gloria Hatter.  She’s married to Graham, whose sleazy construction firm is known throughout Scotland by the motto Real Homes for Real People.  Unhappily married, with two ungrateful grown children who don’t appear to like either of their parents, Gloria spends her time agonizing over the tragic fates that befall innocent people and animals.  Thinking of leaving her loveless marriage, Gloria has been siphoning money from their joint bank account, five hundred pounds daily, with an eye toward leaving Graham and the crookedness he represents behind her.  And then she gets a call.  Graham is in a coma, having been brought to a hospital by the prostitute he’d been in bed with, a Russian dominatrix complete with handcuffs and chains.

How, you may ask, do all these disparate characters get together?  What can possibly be the connection between the mysterious Ray, aka Paul Bradley; Martin Canning, aka Alex Blake, the man who threw what turns out to be his laptop at the Honda man; Jackson Brodie, middle-aged millionaire who still want to be a policeman; Julia, the actress whose rehearsals keep getting longer and longer; and Gloria Hatter, meek housewife/embezzler.

The way Kate Atkinson ties everything together is a marvel.  Everything seems illogical at first–did I mention that there are a lot of Russian prostitutes/house cleaners running around this novel–but it all makes sense at the end.  Although the story takes place over only a few days, there’s enough plot in it for a month.  This is a truly enjoyable novel, even for readers who don’t ordinarily enjoy mysteries.

You can read more about Kate Atkinson at her web site.

Dexter Bolzjak was a Pittsburgh high school ice hockey phenom. College scouts came to see him play in goal, and the night of the state championship was his golden opportunity to shine.  The score was zero-zero in the third period when slap, slap, slap–three goals slid past Bolzjak in the final eight minutes.  That was the end of his dream of a college scholarship, but his night only got worse from that point on.

Years later, when we meet Bolzjak, his mother is long gone; he hasn’t spoken to his father, who lives in the same neighborhood as he does, for six years; he works in a vegetable market separating good onions from bad ones; and he lives in a windowless basement in the house of his only friend.  Not much of a life.

Michael Ayoob’s first novel takes the reader to some very, very dark places. The night he lost the game was the night Bolzjak realized that his parents were splitting up and the night that he was abducted by four masked men and sodomized.  Not surprisingly, his life went downhill from then on.

While Bolzjak is eating lunch one day at a restaurant, in walks Lou Kashon, part-owner of a Pittsburgh food warehouse.  With bloodshot eyes and filthy clothes, Kashon doesn’t look like a man who has either self-respect or money.  But he lays a $100 bill in front of Bolzjak and walks out.  The next day Bolzjak sees him again, and this time Kashon tells him to come by his house–he’s got a job for him.

Bolzjak already has two jobs, to his way of thinking.  Number 2 is his job at the veggie warehouse; number 1 is building a shelter of straw, sticks, and bricks to keep himself from remembering the night of his attack and its aftermath.

And the job Kashon wants Boljzak to take is anything but simple. He tells Bolzjak that years ago, just before World War II, he was in love with a local girl and she with him.  They were engaged, and she was going to wait for him to come home from overseas.  The local girl didn’t stay local for long, though, and she didn’t wait.  She changed her name from Agnes Zabrowski to Mercy Carnahan and became one of Hollywood’s most famous movie stars.  She was glamorous, sexy, mysterious–all the things that made an actress a star in the 1940s and ’50s.  And then she walked off a stage and disappeared, and no one has heard from her or seen her since.  Certainly not Lou Kashon.

Now he wants Bolzjak to find Mercy Carnahan. Although Kashon lives in a house with holes in the floors, filthy dishes in the sink, and dead cats in the freezer, he also has a drawer full of money in his bedroom.  Find Mercy Carnahan, he tells Bolzjak, and it’s all yours.

In Search of Mercy is a novel of self-discovery, as well as a mystery.  It’s the story of Dexter Bolzjak trying to come to terms with why his life has gone so far off the rails.  Has he been using the horrific events of the championship night as an excuse to do the things he’s done–drop out of school, estrange himself from his father, lose a relationship because of the nightmares that have lingered for years and for which he refuses to get help?  Or is all that simply beyond his ability to change?

Michael Ayoob’s novel is a voyage that is dark, dark, dark. It takes the reader into places that are truly uncomfortable, not only for his hero but for other characters in the book as well.  But it’s well worth the trip.  In Search of Mercy won the 2009 Private Eye Writers of America award for best first private eye novel.

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