Marilyn's Mystery Reads

I’ve signed up for a course on mystery novels at Brandeis University’s BOLLI (Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute).  BOLLI is a nation-wide program offering dozens of courses during the year ranging from literature to politics to science to drama.  I have several friends who have been taking classes for years, and every report I heard was positive.  So now that I’m retired, I have the freedom to take some of the courses that are offered.

When I read the fall catalog I couldn’t believe my good luck.  On Thursdays, one of my “free” days, a course was being offered with the title “A Sense of Place:  Murder Mysteries ‘Round the World.” The course is ten weeks long, each week focusing on a different writer and country/city.  We’ll be reading Donna Leon (Death in a Strange Country, Venice), Agatha Christie (Murder in Mesopotamia, Mesopotamia), Batya Gur (The Saturday Morning Murder, Israel), Zoe Ferraris (Finding Nouf, Saudi Arabia), Georges Simenon (The Bar on the Seine, Paris), Tony Hillerman (Skinwalkers, Navajo Reservation), Louise Penny (Still Life, Quebec), Dana Stabenow (A Cold Day for Murder, Alaska), Boris Akunin (The Winter Queen, Russia), and Arnaldur Indridason (Jar City, Iceland).

The only writer in this group I haven’t read is Zoe Ferraris, but although I’ve read many books by the other authors I’ve only read four of the novels that we’ll be reading for the course.  So the majority of the books will be first-time reads, very exciting.

I’ll keep you informed as to how the class is going.  I’m really looking forward to it.

Marilyn

Reinventing oneself is not an easy thing to do. It’s not easy to leave behind your friends, family, home, and career and start over again.  But sometimes it has to be done.

Adam Kindred has just gone through what he believes is the most difficult time in his life. But it’s about to get worse, much worse.

A brilliant climatologist at an American university who has just invented a revolutionary cloud chamber that might aid drought-stricken countries, he has a one-night stand with a graduate student that wrecks his marriage and his career.  Unhappy and ashamed, he leaves the United States for England, the country of his birth, and has a job interview at an English college that he feels has gone very well.

He stops for a quick dinner at an Italian restaurant and is seated near another solitary diner.  They exchange some casual words and the other man leaves.  A few minutes later, as Kindred gets up to go, he sees that the other man left a transparent folder behind, filled with papers.

On the front of the folder is a business card with the man’s name and two addresses–one is obviously his office, so the other must be his home.  On the spur of the moment Kindred decides he’ll deliver the folder to the man’s home.   If  only he had  brought it to the man’s office instead, how differently things would have turned out.

When he arrives at the building and goes to the apartment, he’s surprised to find the door open.  Getting no response to his greeting, Kindred walks into the apartment and finds the man, a Dr. Wang, on his bed, bleeding from a knife wound.  The place has been trashed, obviously searched, with cabinet drawers open and clothes strewn all around.

Kindred wants to call the emergency services number, but Wang tells him to pull out the knife.  Kindred does so, and Wang dies.  As the frightened Kindred leaves the bedroom to find a phone, he hears the door from the balcony into the bedroom open–someone is there, and it’s a good bet it’s the murderer.  Kindred flees the building, but he’s all too aware that his signature is on the guest book he had to sign to enter the building and his fingerprints are on the knife he dropped in his haste to find a telephone.

The next day, after debating with himself all night long about calling the police and telling them what happened, he glimpses a newspaper headline:  ADAM KINDRED–WANTED. SUSPICION OF MURDER. That’s when Kindred decides he has to reinvent himself, leave his past behind, find the man who killed Dr. Wang, and clear his own name.

There’s a lot of plot in Ordinary Thunderstorms. There’s Adam Kindred’s step-by-step reinvention of himself; there’s the man who has been hired to find Kindred, kill him, and regain the briefcase that belonged to Dr. Wang; there’s the company executive whose firm is about to launch a drug that will cure asthma in children but who is having his own medical and emotional issues; and there’s the attractive policewoman who can’t understand Scotland Yard’s decision to release, without explanation, a man they arrested for gun possession.  This novel will keep you reading and guessing until the end.

William Boyd is the author of more than a dozen books, some mysteries and some not.  You can read more about him at his web site.

Once a Barnburner, always a Barnburner.  That’s how Conway Sax got hooked into the murder business.

In Purgatory Chasm Sax is a recovering alcoholic, and the Barnburners were his group within Alcoholics Anonymous. They formed a tight-knit group within the larger one, and if one Barnburner was in trouble, the others helped.  But some were able to be of more help than others.

When Tander Phigg needs help getting his Mercedes back from the auto mechanic who is supposedly repairing it, he calls on Sax.  Phigg tells Sax that he brought his car to Das Motorenwerk more than a year earlier, gave the mechanic $3500 as a down payment for repairs, but now he can’t get either his car or his money back.

Since Sax had been a NASCAR driver and had worked on Phigg’s car years before, he’s persuaded to try to get either the car or the money returned.  But his visit to Motorenwerk isn’t exactly what he expected–first the owner laughs at his request, then he’s hit so hard on the head that when he wakes up he’s several hundred feet from the garage, on the ground, with no memory of how he got there.

Sax’s life hasn’t been easy. His father, also an alcoholic, left the family in Minnesota when Sax was eleven, but the boy persuaded his mother to let him go to New York to live with his father several years later.  In retrospect, Sax thinks, it probably wasn’t the smartest move he ever made, literally or figuratively.

Time has passed since then, time during which Sax threw away his racing career, as his father had done before him, with alcohol and ended up in a Massachusetts prison for manslaughter.  He’s still on parole, with eleven months left to serve.

On the plus side, Sax is rehabbing a house to sell it, has a sharp girlfriend with a funny eleven-year-old daughter, and is still sober.  On the minus side, he hasn’t seen his father in years, not since he spotted him panhandling at a tollboth and left him standing there.

Sax can’t seem to stay out of trouble, so it’s not much of a surprise that he goes back to Phigg to tell him what happened at Motorenwerk and to get more of the story out of him.  But the surprise is that Phigg is hanging by the neck in a shack behind his semi-built house, hanging as in dead.

Sax’s motives are all over the place. He wants to get the car/money back, even after Phigg’s death, because he said he would.  When Phigg’s son, Trey, returns from Vietnam with a wife and child, he wants to get the money to give to Trey.  And when Sax’s father turns up after years of no contact, he wants to help keep the old man sober.

Steve Ulfelder, himself an amateur race car driver and co-owner of a company that builds race cars, is a natural storyteller. He’s written for trade journals and newspapers, but Purgatory Chasm is his first novel.  It’s a look into the tough men (and women) who drive around tracks at breakneck speeds, looking for their moment of glory.  This is a tough read about people who lead tough lives but whose humanity and caring will touch you as they try, with some successes and some failures, to straighten out their lives.

You can read more about Steve Ulfelder at his web site.

A man and his fiancee are driving in her hometown in New York state.  A sudden tornado-like storm whips his car off the road and down a ravine.  When he regains consciousness, he’s surrounded by police and emergency technicians, and he frantically asks them to help him find his fiancee.  But she’s nowhere to be found.

That’s the hook of On Borrowed Time by David Rosenfelt. Richard Kilmer, the novel’s protagonist, is distraught and insists on going back to his fiancee’s parents’ house, where he and Jen have just spent four days, on the chance that she somehow got out of his car and was able to make her way back there.

But when the police take him there the house looks slightly different, older and less well-kept, than the house Richard and Jen left only an hour earlier.  And the woman who answers the door says that she’s never seen Richard before and that her husband has been dead for many years.  When Richard asks about her daughter, she slaps him across the face and slams the door.

Richard returns to his apartment in New York City, still reeling from the accident.  He talks to his two closest friends with whom he and Jen spent several evenings, but they say they never met her.  He goes to the art gallery she and a friend owned, and there’s a different business in that location.  What is going on?

Richard is a free-lance investigative journalist, so he decides to make his next story the search for Jen. After the story appears, he’s contacted by hundreds of cranks–some say they know where Jen is, some claim to be Jen, and some tell him they could get in touch with Jen on the “other side.”

But one night Richard gets a call that is very believable. A woman phones to say she thinks she knows who Jen is and can prove it.  She sends a photo to Richard on his computer, and when he opens his e-mail he’s looking at a photo of his fiancee.

The woman who called Richard, Allison Tynes, claims that her identical twin sister has been missing for several months.  Allie flies to New York from Wisconsin, and when Richard meets her she is, in fact, the double of his missing fiancee.  Together they decide to find out if Julie Tynes and Jennifer Ryan are, or were, one and the same person.

The chapters narrated by Richard  are interspersed with chapters narrated by someone called The Stone.  He is the mastermind of the plot involving Richard, Jen, and a mysterious drug that will make him billions.  But who is he, and why is he having Richard followed and his apartment bugged?

David Rosenfelt has written a real page-turner, a mystery with a touch of medical science fiction built in.  I don’t know how much of what turns out to be the core of the plot is “science” or “fiction,” but it certainly makes for a thrilling ride.

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

After a wonderful trip to Greece two summers ago, I’ve become interested in all things Greek, both ancient and modern.  The Pericles Commission has only increased my interest.

Gary Corby’s first novel tells the story of how democracy came to Athens. The world’s first democratic city state didn’t have a smooth beginning.  In fact, it took 130 years from the first written constitution (about 590 b.c.e.) until the time that Athens finally became a one citizen (read male), one vote democracy (461 b.c.e.).

The novels opens in 461 with the murder of Ephialtes, an Athenian lawmaker who has just successfully pushed through reforms to bring democracy to the city-state. Three days after the laws are passed, he is shot by an arrow and his body falls in front of Nicolaos, son of Sophroniscus; apparently there were no last names in ancient Greece.

Nicolaos, a young man just out of his army training, isn’t certain what he wants to do with his life, but he is sure he doesn’t want to follow in the footsteps of his father, a sculptor. When Ephialtes’ friend, the renowned politician and orator Pericles, comes upon the scene a few moments later and offers Nicolaos a commission to find the person or persons responsible for the crime and who are thus imperiling the new democracy, Nico accepts.  To revert to traditional rule, Nico thinks, would mean he would have no chance  to rise in society and he would be “doomed” to be an apprentice to his father.  He would do anything, try anything, to avoid that.

Pericles believes that the Council of the Areopagus conspired to kill Ephialtes.  The only problem is that his own father, Xanthippus, is a member of that Council.  There is no government police force or investigative body in Athens; the family or friends of the victim must investigate the crime. And there are no jails, either; the punishment is execution, fine, or exile.

Ephialtes was married but also had a mistress and an illegitimate daughter. His hetaera, Euterpe, is a voluptuous, sensual woman who attracts every man she meets, but it is her daughter Diotima, a priestess-in-training to the Goddess Artemis the Huntress, who is intriguing to Nico.  She is as determined as he is to find the murderer of her father.

Gary Corby’s first novel is a delightful piece of writing. His greatest skill, I think, is incorporating the history of Athens, which probably isn’t well known to most readers outside Greece, into the story.  His explanations of marriage customs, funerary details, and daily life more than two thousand years ago are clear and fascinating.  Things that are so commonplace now, at least in the Western world, were unthinkable then–one person, one vote; marriage by choice, not via law; education for men and women;  all those things were unknown at the time of The Pericles Commission.

Corby gives a brief history of Athens at the beginning of the book, followed by a list of the characters and whether they are historical figures or not.  So skillful is he in his writing that without that list a reader would think that all the characters actually lived in ancient Greece.

You can read more about Gary Corby at his web site.

It’s not exactly two for the price of one, but it is two books that should be read consecutively.

The Butcher’s Boy won the Edgar in 1983 for Best First Novel, a wise decision on the part of the judges. Now, in his nineteenth novel, Thomas Perry finishes the story of the Butcher’s Boy, whose true name we never learn, and Elizabeth Waring, an attorney and researcher with the Department of Justice.

The Butcher’s Boy has been killing people since he was sixteen, under the tutelage of The Butcher, real name Eddie Mastrewski.  The Boy had been orphaned with no close relatives to take him in, so Mastrewski, a neighbor, unofficially adopted him and taught him two trades.  One was Mastrewski’s official trade, that of a butcher who owned his own shop, and the other a paid assassin for the Mafia.  The second one was more monetarily rewarding.

After blowing up the truck of a labor union man who is suspicious of the way his union’s pension fund is being handled, the B.B. is on his way to murder a U.S. senator when he is set upon by two muggers in a dark alley. He kills them both and then successfully kills the senator, completing the job he was hired for, but his face shows bruises and cuts made by the muggers.  That apparently sets off a wave of concern at the higher levels of the Mafia that he may be attracting too much attention, and a contract is put out on the B.B.

Elizabeth Waring, who has a desk job at the Department of Justice, is the only person there who begins to see a pattern in a number of suspicious death notices that pass through her desk every day. She sets off to investigate the labor union official’s death but is pulled off that job before she can accomplish anything.  She’s sent to investigate the death of the senator, which she originally resents, but then she comes to believe there is a connection between the two deaths.  But she’s the only one.

In The Informant, ten years have passed since we last saw the B.B. and Elizabeth Waring. It’s not giving away the ending of The Butcher’s Boy to say he wasn’t captured–if he had been, there would have been no Informant. The B.B., who is now calling himself Michael Schaeffer, has been living a quiet life in England when he’s spotted by two killers who are sent by the Mafia to assassinate the B.B. and his wife.  He decides he has to return to the States and take out the men who ordered his death.

Schaeffer’s killing of the first man sets off a Mafia meeting in Phoenix, where the second man he wants to kill is asking his fellow Cosa Nostra bosses to band together to kill the B.B. He gets the agreement he wants but is killed within an hour by Schaeffer.  When his body is discovered, the other bosses are even more determined in their quest to eliminate the B.B. from their lives once and for all.

In the meantime, Elizabeth Waring is fighting a losing battle with her supervisor to follow the clues leading to the B.B.  Frustrated, she decides to act first and ask permission later, certain that she can find the B.B. and get him to turn informer because she believes he won’t be able to outrun the Mob.

These two books are fascinating journeys into the lives and minds of two very different people. The chapters alternate between the Butcher’s Boy and Waring, and following their thoughts and plans makes for exciting reading.  And the ending of The Informant ties everything together believably.

You can read more about Thomas Perry at his web site.

About a month ago, my sister e-mailed to tell me about a new bookstore that had opened in the town she lives in.  When she said it was called Mainely Murders, she definitely got my attention.

On Saturday, Barbara Ann and I went to check it out.  Mainely Murders is located in a converted barn/carriage house behind the home of the two women who own it.  Paula Keeney and Ann Whetstone couldn’t have been friendlier or more helpful to us.  Paula walked us around the small store, explaining how the books are set up on the shelves–Maine novels, books by “dead American writers” to quote Paula, international mysteries, and niche mysteries such as those specializing in cooking, horse racing, knitting, etc.

The first book I picked up was The Demon of Dakar by Kjell Ericksson.  I had read the Princess of Berundi by him and enjoyed it, so I opened the flap to see how much The Demon was.  I was surprised by the low price and asked Ann how they could sell this $24.95 book for $7.50.  “Well,” she told me, “it’s been read before.”  All the books in the story are used, or pre-owned, or read before, or whatever term you prefer. The books all looked in pristine condition to me, and I could hardly believe that someone (or perhaps more than one person) had read them.  Even the paperbacks looked brand-new.  I guess not everyone reads while eating fried chicken, not mentioning names.

Anyway, I walked out of Mainely Murders with four hard covered books and three paperbacks, for a total of $71.00 dollars. Only the thought of my husband and brother-in-law waiting back at the house for us made me leave the shop.  I don’t know whether I was more excited by having bought three books by authors previously unfamiliar to me or having bought the second book (Trespasser) by Maine author Paul Doiron, whose book The Poacher’s Son I reviewed in June 2010.

At any rate, if you’re anywhere in Maine, especially if you’re close to Kennebunk, check out Mainely Murders.  They have a wonderful web site and newsletter too.

Marilyn

In 1994 Lawrence Block was named a Grand Master, the highest award given by the Mystery Writers of America. Agatha Christie was the first recipient, and others include John D. MacDonald, John LeCarre, Sue Grafton, Graham Greene, and this year’s recipient, Sara Paretsky.  Pretty good company to be keeping.

Block’s latest book is A Drop of the Hard Stuff, the seventeenth in the Scudder series.  It takes the reader back to the first year of Matt Scudder’s hard-won sobriety.

Scudder was a New York City policeman until a bullet he shot while chasing a suspect ricocheted off a wall and killed a little girl. Shortly after that, Scudder left his wife, two sons, and the police department.  He moved into a single room in a Manhattan hotel and tried to drink himself to death.

The first few books in the series take place during the time Scudder is drinking heavily and experiencing blackouts.  Eventually, after a number of tries, he pulls himself together and joins Alcoholics Anonymous and lives “one day at a time,” as they say in A.A.  At this point in time he has been sober for years.  A Drop of the Hard Stuff begins when Scudder and his friend Mick Ballou are talking over old times.

Scudder tells the story of his meeting up with a boyhood chum from The Bronx, Jack Ellery.  As Scudder sort of drifted into becoming a policeman, Ellery sort of drifted into becoming a criminal.  Ellery had been drinking for many years, and as he told Scudder, he never got into trouble when he was sober, only when he was drunk.  He’d been imprisoned several times but never did major time.

Now Ellery is out of jail, and he’s achieving sobriety through A.A.  One of the steps in the program is making amends, going to the people you hurt or injured when you were an alcoholic and asking them how you can make it right. Ellery is jumping ahead to the Eighth Step before he’s done all the previous steps, trying to make amends, and he has a list of all the people he’s wronged.  But the responses from those people aren’t what he’d hoped, and one of them wants him dead.

Block is an incredible writer.  I was caught from page one.  He has a way with dialogue that makes the reader think she’s/he’s part of the conversation in the book.  And some of his sentences simply jump out of the page at you.  Scudder, in remembering a new suit he’d bought years ago when he was still married:  “I’d bought the suit to impress…my wife had admired that suit, and so had my girlfriend.”

The Matt Scudder series needs to be begun, if not from the first novel, at least as close to the beginning as possible.  Otherwise the struggles Scudder has with alcohol can’t come across in a meaningful way, and his victory over drink won’t be as important to you as it should be.  You’ll find yourself rooting for him to overcome his dependence on alcohol, angry when he slips, and cheering him on when he succeeds.  But you know that every day is a struggle for him, and seeing it from the beginning heightens its impact.

Lawrence Block has written several other series as well as stand-alone novels, books for writers, and a memoir.  He’s a truly gifted author in every genre, but I like his Matthew Scudder books the best.

You can read more about Lawrence Block at his web site.

Imagine you’re in Spain, writing a travel book about Barcelona that is a follow-up to your guide on Madrid.  You get a phone call from the New York Police Department saying that your sister has been found dead in your apartment and that you need to come home to identify her body.

Claudia has always been in trouble, has been a drug addict for years, so although it’s sad that she’s died so young it’s not really surprising.  The surprise comes when the detective brings you to the city morgue and you look at the body and say, “That woman isn’t my sister….I’ve never seen her before in my life.”

That’s how The Damage Done opens. The older sister, Lily Moore, has always been the responsible one, the one who took charge after their father’s sudden death one Christmas, their mother’s descent into alcoholism and her suicide one New Year’s Eve.  But now Lily is bewildered, and things are spiraling out of control all around her.

Her former fiancee, wealthy hotel magnate Martin Sklar, still hasn’t given up pursuing her and is putting pressure on her to return to New York permanently and marry him.  Her sister’s neighbor, Sarah Lyons, is taking an extraordinary interest in Claudia’s disappearance.  The two detectives assigned to the case aren’t sure it’s not simply an accidental death, but they can’t explain why the woman found in the apartment introduced herself to the superintendent, who knew Claudia, as Claudia’s cousin, and to Sarah Lyons, who didn’t know Claudia, as Claudia Moore herself.

Lily tries to follow the trail that her sister left behind. It takes her to the apartment of her sister’s friend, a Pakistani man named Tariq, whom Lily has always suspected was involved in Claudia’s drug use; while she’s there, Tariq’s girlfriend attacks her.  Then Martin tells Lily that Claudia had been in touch with him, asking him for money for another attempt at rehab, but when he agreed and told her to pick up his check, she never showed.  And then there’s the mysterious woman from Hong Kong who spoke to the police about Claudia but now seems to have disappeared.

Hilary Davidson has created a very believable heroine in Lily Moore. At the beginning of the novel she appears to be the opposite of her sister, a very successful, put-together professional woman who has endured a life that would have destroyed someone weaker, as it appeared to have done to her sister.  But the more one reads, the more Lily’s own demons come out.

She’s still dealing with the deaths of her parents–her beloved father, who perhaps wasn’t quite as wonderful as she remembers; her emotionally disturbed mother, who used to lock Lily and Claudia in a closet for hours to protect them from some imagined harm; her off-again, on-again feelings for her former fiancee, whose business practices she abhors but whose touch still arouses her.

The supporting characters are well-drawn too–Jesse, a gay photographer, Lily’s best friend; the two police detectives; Tariq, a very successful businessman who travels with bodyguards; the ex-fiancee Martin; and Martin’s son Ridley, a sullen teenager with emotional problems that his father will not see.  This is a debut worthy of the three awards for which it has been nominated.

You can read more about Hilary Davidson at her web site.

“Do you believe in miracles”? That was the cry of Al Michaels, broadcasting at the final moments of the improbable, impossible win by  the U.S. hockey team in 1980.

Going for the Gold takes place at those same Olympics games. John Putnam Thatcher, senior vice president of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, the third largest bank in the world, has been dragooned by the bank’s president, a member of the International Olympics Committee, to attend the games.  There’s lot of excitement, of course, as the young athletes and their coaches swirl around the Olympic Village, and there’s a lot at stake.  Some of the athletes have been working for years for the possibility of winning a gold medal, while a few have somehow made their country’s team more by luck than by skill.  But all are excited and thrilled to be at the Games.

As Thatcher watches a practice run of alpine skiing, France’s number one skier, Yves Bisson, takes a flawless leap from the giant ski tower.  He hovers in the air, and then a shot rings out.  Bisson falls to the snow-covered ground below, dead.

What is uncovered after Bisson’s death is the discovery of fraud in European travelers’ checks, with Bisson behind it.  The resources of the Sloan are put to the test, as the bank is the official bank of the Games, and additional employees are brought to Lake Placid to try to uncover how the fraud was worked.

There’s more than simply bank fraud going on at the Games, however.  Someone is hijacking supplies meant for the athletes, a Swiss female skier is accused of taking forbidden drugs, and the blizzard of the decade is stopping all comings and goings out of upstate New York.

Emma Lathen is the pseudonym of Mary Jane Latsis, an economist, and Martha Hennisart, a lawyer. Together they wrote more than twenty novels featuring John Putnam Thatcher, a banker who could solve any crime that had a financial basis; and we all know that many of them do.  Each book focuses on a particular industry or organization with ties to the Sloan.  There are books on chocolate companies, Catholic schools, the automobile industry, and the garment business.  Each shows a detailed knowledge of that particular business or group and is written in such a way as to make all the financial dealings clear to the most financially unsophisticated reader, e.g., me.

There’s a short list of recurring characters in Lathen’s books:  Thatcher, of course; his devoted secretary, Miss Corsa; Walter Bowman and Everett Gabler, bank officials under Thatcher; and Brad Withers, the bank’s president who would rather be anywhere, doing anything but banking.

While most or all of Emma Lathen’s books are unfortunately currently out of print, they’re available at many libraries and can be bought used online. Even though no more novels were written after Mary Jane Latsis’s death in 1998, there are still enough available to keep anyone reading for a long time.  These are definitely cozies, with a minimum of murder and mayhem, but with plenty of suspense to keep the reader involved until the last page.

You can read more about Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart at The New York Times.

It’s a familiar beginning to a crime story. A woman, divorced from an emotionally and physically abusive husband, believes that she and her daughter are free of him.  Nevertheless, she continues to take steps to distance herself from him, changing her job and moving to a different apartment.  But still he finds her.

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino starts off with this premise. But within a few pages it changes direction.  When Yasuko Hanaoka’s former husband, Shinji Togashi, finds her and her daughter, he says he wants to reconcile with them.  Having gone through this routine with him before, Yasuko refuses to discuss it and gives him money, not for the first time, to get him to leave.

Before he goes he tries to talk to his teenage stepdaughter, but she wants nothing to do with him.  Infuriated, he begins hitting her, and Yasuko tries to pull him away.  The daughter then tries to come to her mother’s rescue and, even more angry, Togashi starts punching both of them.  Desperate to protect herself and her daughter, Yasuko grabs the cord that heats the kotatsu table (it’s a heated table, apparently very common in Japan) and strangles him from behind.  Togashi is dead.

Frightened, Yasuko starts toward the phone to call the police and confess her crime when there’s a knock on her door.  Her neighbor, a man she barely knows or has spoken to, appears there to say he heard a commotion and came over to see if Yasuko and Misato are all right.  When he sees the body on the floor, it’s obvious to him what has happened.

Ishigami, the neighbor who is almost always referred to only by his last name, is a brilliant mathematician teaching below his abilities at a local high school. He’s a man proud of his logical mind, and realizing that Yasuko and her daughter were protecting themselves and that the death was more accidental than deliberate, Ishigami devises a plan to help them get rid of the body.

He has only one condition, that the mother and daughter must follow his advice to the letter. When the police find out that Togashi is missing or dead, they will certainly question his ex-wife, Ishigami tells the mother and daughter, so they need to do exactly what he tells them to avoid suspicion.

And the police do come. Detective Kusanagi doesn’t exactly suspect Yasuko, but there’s something odd in her low-key yet completely alibied story that doesn’t quite ring true for him.  He goes for some help to an old friend, Professor Manabu Yukawa, a physicist who happens to  have been a classmate of Ishigami, and who is known as Detective Galileo as an acknowledgement both of his knowledge of physics and his assistance to the Tokyo police in previous cases.

Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s most famous mystery writers, and one can see why in this excellent novel. The plot is skillful and the characters believable.  The translation appears flawless, with the characters speaking so naturally that the reader doesn’t realize that the words were originally in another language.

Many of Higashino’s books have been made into films or television programs.  He doesn’t appear to have a dedicated web site, but you can read a brief biography about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keigo_Higashino.

A foster child without a name or birthdate.  A man who may or may not have fathered a child.  A missing young woman. They all come together in this fast-paced, hard-boiled mystery by Thomas Kaufman.

Willis Gidney, a name he made up himself, has had a tough life. Abandoned by his parents as an infant, he spent years in foster homes and state institutions that might have been found between the pages of a Charles Dickens novel.  The only thing that saved him from a life of crime was the intervention of a Washington, D.C. police captain.

During his first ten years Willis learned to lie, steal, play truant, and fight.  During his years with Captain Shadrack Davies, he learned to love books, slowly developed a moral code, and found a career for himself.

Now Willis is trying to make it as a private detective on the tough streets of our capital; Willis thinks its initials stand for Dysfunctional City. He’s approached by an old friend, jazz saxophonist Steps Jackson, to find a young woman Jackson may or may not have fathered twenty-five years ago.

Willis manages to track down the woman whom Jackson says is the mother of the young woman he’s looking for.  Collette Andrews, the woman who had a one-night affair with Steps Jackson, is now cool, beautiful, married to a wealthy State Department diplomat, and refusing to acknowledge that she’s the mother of Bobbie Jackson.  She demands that Willis leave her house.  A few hours later she calls Willis, saying she needs to talk to him, but when he arrives at her house the police are there and she’s dead.  And Willis is under arrest.

There’s a lot of plot in this debut novel. The agri conglomerates come in for bashing, as do corrupt congressmen, suspect political donations, inept or uncaring welfare officials, and mysterious “abandoned” city rental properties that are using extraordinary amounts of electricity each month.

And then there are the mobsters who first try to cajole, then threaten and beat up Willis, and finally try to force him off the road.  He’s used to the hard-knock life, but this is getting out of hand.

On the positive side, there’s a new romantic interest in his life. Lillian McClellan, cyber sleuth, wears her hair in dreads, has dimples, and smells of sandalwood.  Who could resist?  Willis tries for a while, but it’s a lost cause; he’s smitten.

Thomas Kaufman is an Emmy award-winning cinematographer, and I’m guessing he likes short, quick shots because that’s how he writes.  It can get a bit confusing, as Drink the Tea goes back and forth from Willis’ childhood to the present and back again, all in the same chapter.   It can be frustrating when you’re trying to find the name of a character who appeared in a scene several chapters back or trying to remember just how a particular minor character is related to Willis.

But that’s a small quibble about a very well-written, fast-moving novel.  It is not, however, a book for those who like cozies; it’s more a book that will make you shake your head about the cruelties people inflict on each other. Drink the Tea won the PWA’s (Private Eye Writers of America) award for the Best First Private Eye Novel in 2010.

You can read more about Thomas Kaufman at his web site.

I don’t know why I almost always find short stories less interesting than full-length novels, but I do.

I read somewhere that the short story is the perfect form in which to tell a story.  The writer must make every word count and, I suppose, can’t drift off-subject or bring in totally extraneous things that have nothing to do with the plot.

Now maybe I’m wrong, but I believe that bringing in things that (apparently) don’t have anything to do with the main plot is part of the joy of reading. It’s like talking to a friend, where one thing leads to another, and it’s more interesting that way.

It’s kind of like reading a map, although anyone who knows me knows that’s not one of my strengths.  My husband and I just returned from a wonderful vacation in Spain.  We were going from Barcelona to the Costa Brava; he was driving and I was reading the map.  Now even I knew that the town we were looking for, S’Agaro, being on the Costa Brava, would be on or very close to the coast.  You’d know that, right?  But in my anxiety about my lack of skill in reading the map of Spain, I never unfolded it all the way, and I kept telling my husband to follow the signs for Girona because that was the biggest town in the direction we were going and because we had plans to go there the day after our arrival on the coast.

Well, in fact Girona is miles inland from the coast, and because the Costa Brava didn’t appear on the portion of the map I had in front of me, of course I couldn’t find S’Agaro.  It took a couple of stops at gas stations and talks with one very sweet taxi driver to find S’Agaro and the hotel where we were staying.  Here let me say that the people in Spain are truly friendly and helpful and very patient with someone who was determined to practice her Spanish, even in conversations with people who obviously spoke English.

Now you’re probably wondering what my misadventure in Spain has to do with short stories. Well, if you’re honest you found that little detour (metaphorically and logistically speaking) interesting; at least I hope you did.  And it’s because the story didn’t take a straight route from Barcelona to S’Agaro–it was the stopping at gas stations and talking to a taxi driver that hopefully made our trip a bit real to you.  And that’s why I find mystery novels more enjoyable than mystery short stories.  It’s more interesting, if more time-consuming, to go from here-to-there-to-there-to-final destination than simply to go directly from here to final destination.  And a short story, by definition, can’t spend much time wandering about; it has to get to the conclusion within a given number of words or pages.

The only exception that comes to mind is Sherlock Holmes. While we were in Spain I read all of the Holmes stories on my Kindle.  The stories are superior to the four full-length novels, in my opinion.  They give me a clearer insight into Holmes than the novels do, and the stories never seem rushed or squeezed into a box.  But other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I can’t think of an author whose stories are better than his/her novels. Can you?

Marilyn

Talk about your dysfunctional families.  The Mackeys of the Liberties section of Dublin put most other families to shame.

Faithful Place is the street, ill-named as it may be, where the Mackeys live.  The protagonist, Francis (Frank) Mackey has managed to escape his family and his childhood home, but all the other members of his family either still live there or haven’t gone far.

Frank is now a member of Dublin’s Undercover Squad, divorced, and the father of a nine-year-old daughter. Both his sisters are married with homes of their own.  But Frank’s brothers, Shay and Kevin, are still unmarried and live with their parents although they are well into their thirties.  And the Mackeys’ overbearing mother and alcoholic father are still at each other’s throats as they were all the years their children were growing up.

What got Frank out of Liberties was his plan, as a nineteen-year-old, to run away with his sweetheart Rosie Daly.  Very much in love and forbidden by Rosie’s father to see each other, Rosie suggests boarding the ferry to England and getting jobs there.  It takes them several months to save the required money, but finally all the plans are in place.  Frank is waiting for Rosie at midnight on the specified night, but she never shows.  And she’s never seen again.

Still desperate to escape his family, Frank gets as far as the other side of Dublin and becomes a member of the police force.  And for twenty-two years he has kept his distance from his family, his only contact being his younger sister Jackie.  As the story opens, Jackie has contacted Frank with incredible news–Rosie’s suitcase was found in a derelict house on Faithful Place, hidden behind the fireplace.  And Rosie’s suitcase turns out to be a modern-day Pandora’s box.  Secrets that have been hidden for years burst into the open when it is discovered.

Faithful Place is not a part of Dublin on the tourist route. It’s changing a bit as the new economy brings Yuppies into the area, but by and large it’s still the same families living there who have lived there for generations.  The men work in factories or are on the dole; the lucky ones work on the line at Guinness.  There’s very much a sense of not getting above yourself, not trying to be better than your parents or your peers.  If you do that, you’re definitely under suspicion.

Frank has moved out and on successfully, and that doesn’t sit right with his family. His older brother Shay is resentful, dreaming of the day that he will buy the bicycle shop he’s worked in for years, but he’s still living in the flat above his parents.  His younger brother Kevin seems younger than his years, never venturing far from home.

Tana French paints a devastating portrait of a neighborhood and a people stuck in place. The same arguments, the same rivalries, the same unhappiness exist more than two decades after Frank has left home.  It’s no wonder he didn’t want his young daughter to even know of the existence of this family.  And he’s furious when he finds out that his sister Jackie and his ex-wife have been secretly bringing his daughter to Faithful Place to visit his family.  Ms. French’s portraits of a family and a community coming apart is vivid and frightening.

Strangely, Tana French’s web site is three years out of date.  But you can read more about her at http://www.bookreporter.com/authors/au-french-tana.asp.

It’s hard for me to believe that I’ve been blogging for more than a year without reviewing a book by one of my favorite authors.  I’m remedying that right now.

Caught, by Harlan Coben, is another of his outstanding stand-alone mysteries.  Most mystery writers who write both stand-alone and books in a series, I have found, seem to write better books in the latter.  But the opposite is true of Harlan Coben.  Although I enjoy his Myron Bolitar series, I find his non-series books to be more exciting and to have more believable plots.

Caught is two stories that eventually connect.  First is the one about Dan Mercer, a Princeton graduate who is now a coach and social worker. He’s very involved in working with teenagers, but he’s recently been accused by television reporter Wendy Tynes of seducing the young teenage girls he’s supposed to be helping.  She sets up a sting and Mercer is arrested.  He protests his innocence, but a search of his house finds child pornography on his computer.  Mercer’s career is over.  He’s threatened, beaten up, and is forced to move from his house to one seedy motel after the other to avoid those townspeople who believe he’s guilty.

When the trial judge tosses all the evidence that Wendy Tynes had found in Mercer’s house and reprimands her for the bias in her story about Mercer, Wendy loses her television job. A few days later she receives a call from Mercer; if she wants to find out the real story, she needs to meet him in the trailer park where he’s currently living.  She goes, but almost immediately after she walks inside, a masked gunman bursts in and shoots Mercer.  The floor is covered with blood, and Wendy escapes and calls the police.  When they arrive, there’s no body in the trailer.

The second plot revolves around the disappearance of sixteen-year-old Haley McWaid, the “perfect” daughter of a couple in the same town. She was popular, had good grades, came from a loving family, but one morning when her mother went into Haley’s room to wake her for school, the bed was empty.  As the story opens, three months have passed and there’s been no sign of the teenager.

Coban’s characters are superbly written. At the end of the novel you realize that there are few black-and-white characters, they are mostly shades of gray.  There’s the police detective who’s been looking for Haley McWaid for the entire time she’s been missing; Mercer’s ex-wife, whose defense of him has cost her friends in the town; Pop, the father of Wendy’s deceased husband; Haley’s parents, who went from having an angelic daughter whom they never worried about to living in a perpetual nightmare.

And there’s Wendy Tynes, a reporter who won’t let go of the story.  At first absolutely convinced of Dan Mercer’s guilt, she becomes less sure of it, especially after she discovers that in the group of men he shared a suite with in his college days, the other four have also been dogged by a year of personal misfortunes.

One is a financial advisor fired from his job because he was accused of embezzlement, the second had to withdraw from a congressional race due to a sex scandal, the third is a medical doctor accused of using and selling drugs, and the fourth is a schizophrenic patient in a mental hospital.  The financial advisor, the politician, and the doctor all proclaim their innocence, as did Mercer.  Can this all be coincidence, Wendy wonders, or is someone behind the scenes manipulating these people for an unknown reason?

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