Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Racial tensions are on the rise in Prosperity, North Carolina.  A small rural town, populated for years by white farming families, it is now host to new people:  wealthy Anglos from a nearby town looking to build McMansions on former farm land and Mexican workers, many of them illegal, coming there to get a better life for themselves while doing the work that the Anglos won’t do for themselves.  So sooner or later, there’ll be trouble.

In Six Mile Creek, it’s Police Chief Judd Wheeler who needs to keep things cool in his small town.  He’s a hometown boy who left to go to college and then became a policeman in Atlanta.  But he returned home for a quieter life, which he’s pretty much had up until now.

Opening with a fight at the high school between a Mexican immigrant and the son of a wealthy white businessman whose family has been in Prosperity for generations, the tensions escalate when the body of a pretty Mexican teenage girl is found in Six Mile Creek.  The girl was last seen three days earlier leaving a party where she and another Latina had been brought to have sex with the white boys on the high school’s football team.  Gypsy Camarena was willing to do this but left angrily when her demands for payment were laughed at.  She never made it home.

The members of the Town Council, Chief Wheeler’s bosses, are important members of the community.  They want a quick resolution to the case but not one that will involve the boys on the football team as that will hurt their chances for college scholarships.   And why did the parents of the murdered girl leave town so suddenly, with no forwarding address, when they hadn’t even claimed their daughter’s body for burial?

In the midst of his investigation, Wheeler is tormented by nightmares relating to his wife’s death.  She also died at Six Mile Creek, several years earlier.  Was it a coincidence that Gypsy was found in almost exactly the same spot as Susan Wheeler?  Or was she placed there for a reason?  The chief’s current relationship with a teacher at the high school is in jeopardy because of his inability to move past the events on the night his wife died, and this, plus the racial tensions in town, emerging drug trafficking, the girl’s death, and two vicious beatings that follow are taking their toll on Wheeler.

Richard Helms has written a fast-paced, enjoyable novel.  There’s a lot going on here, perhaps too much so.  I felt that the introduction of drugs, although realistically portrayed, took attention away from the main plot and from the racial issues that dominated the first two-thirds of the novel.  I think the novel would have been stronger without bringing drugs into it; the racial tensions, Wheeler’s flashbacks, and his intense romantic relationship with his son’s English teacher were enough to keep the reader’s interest at a high level.  However, Six Mile Creek is a very good read and a fine introduction to a strong-willed, ethical police chief who knows right from wrong and always comes down on the side of right.

You can read more about Richard Helms at his web site.

One of the first mystery authors I read was Rex Stout.  I was captivated immediately by his incredible creations–Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.  The former was a transplanted Montenegrin, the latter a transplanted Ohioan, but they became the quintessential New Yorkers.  Ah, if only the walls of Wolfe’s Manhattan brownstone could talk!

Although Rex Stout wrote other mysteries, it is the Wolfe series that made him famous and sealed him into my Mystery Hall of Fame.

More than 30 years ago I took a course on mysteries given by John McAleer, Professor of English at Boston College.  He had just written the biography of Rex Stout, and the thought of being in a room with someone who had actually met the author was an incredible experience for me.  I felt as if Stout might walk into our classroom at any moment.  He didn’t, but Professor McAleer made him real for me and everyone else in the class.

He told us that Stout wrote four pages every day and never made any corrections to his writing.  He thought it all out in his head beforehand and simply put it down on paper.  I still find that amazing.

I’ve seen a couple of old Nero Wolfe movies and the television series with the late Maury Chaykin as Wolfe and Timothy Hutton as Archie.  Fine actors they may be, but I could never get into the series.  The same holds true for the very brief series of Wolfe mysteries with William Conrad as Wolfe and Lee Horsley as Archie; it was a non-starter for me.   I had such a strong feeling for what Wolfe and Archie (that’s how I think of them; last name for Nero Wolfe, first name for Archie Goodwin) would look like and talk like, neither series rang true.  The script writers couldn’t match Stout’s prose, and Wolfe and Archie without Stout just didn’t work.

But Wolfe and Archie were not the only fabulous characters that Stout invented.  Anyone familiar with this series knows Fritz Brenner, the chef who cooks the incredible meals that Wolfe and Archie eat; Inspector Cramer, the always exasperated police detective who can never get the best of Wolfe; Lily Rowan, the wealthy society “girl” and Archie’s love interest; and Saul Panzer, a private eye second only to Archie in his abilities.  And who could forget the master criminal, Arnold Zeck?  He was the only man ever to come close to beating Wolfe.

There have been adaptations of Nero Wolfe mysteries in Germany, Italy, and Russia.  I can only imagine the liberties the writers of those scripts took with Stout’s words, if the American writers, obviously more familiar with U.S. slang and New York City, couldn’t get it right.  Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin need the words of Rex Stout, and no one else, to truly be who they are.  No adaptations or abridgments work.

So the bottom line is, if you want to visit this first-class detective series, you need to read the books.   Among my favorites are The Golden Spiders, Fer-de-Lance, A Family Affair, Too Many Cooks, and The Doorbell Rang.

You can read more about Rex Stout at the Wolfe Pack web site.

Among Thieves is my third David Hosp mystery this year, which certainly proves his books are great reads.

Scott Finn is the protagonist in this series.  In the first book, Dark Harbor, Finn is an associate in a huge law firm in Boston, working practically 24/7 in his bid to become a partner.  In Among Thieves, the fourth in the series, he’s a successful attorney in private practice with a recent law school graduate, Lissa Krantz, and a former police detective, Tom Kozlowski, on his payroll.

Finn has an interesting background.  An orphan, he was in the foster care system growing up, and he ran with a criminal crowd in Southie, the Irish section of Boston.  That’s the lead-in to Among Thieves, in which a man Finn knows from childhood contacts him from jail to represent him.  Although Devon Malley has served time in prison for robbery, he’s never been a killer or a top man in the mob, and Finn takes the case.

In doing so, he also takes on Devon’s teenage daughter Sally who was dropped on Devon’s doorstep a year ago by her drug-addicted mother.  While Finn may be ready to deal with the robbery charges against Devon, he’s not quite sure about the child care.  But, having gone through the foster care system himself, he’s determined to keep Sally out of it.

The background of the story is Devon’s involvement with Whitey Bulger, former boss of Boston’s Winter Hill Gang.  Bulger, who in real life has been on the run for more than 15 years, was a major crime figure in Boston and was protected by FBI agents in that city without the knowledge of the Boston police department or the Massachusetts state police.  He is still on the FBI’s Most Wanted list,  charged with 19 murders as well as various other crimes.

Again, in real life, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was robbed in 1990, with 13 works of art stolen; they have never been recovered.  So what’s the connection between a recent spate of murders in the city (seven in number), a small-time thief in Boston, and a murderer from Ireland who has never given up the cause of the IRA?

Hosp’s numerous characters are real and vibrant.  In Among Thieves, the offbeat romance of Finn’s staff members/friends, Lissa and Tom, continues and deepens.  Devon Malley is shown as a man out of his depth, always looking for the big score but doomed to a life of financially unrewarding crime, who finally has one good thing in his life, his newly-discovered daughter.  And Sally Malley (she says her mother always had an unusual sense of humor) is a strong girl who has learned the hard way that no one can be relied on or trusted.

Hosp’s sense of place is excellent too.  He knows his way around Boston, much as Robert B. Parker did, but his novels are grittier and Finn is a lawyer, not a private eye like Spencer.  Finn would rather be writing briefs and appearing in court than dealing with a brutal murderer, but he has taken a stand to defend Devon and does it.   Among Thieves is a strong novel in an excellent series.

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

I must stop reading mysteries about foreign places–my “must visit” list is getting way too long.  Now I’ve added Florence, Italy to it.

If you like the Inspector Brunetti series by Donna Leon, you’ll definitely enjoy The Drowning River.   Christobel Kent has created Sandro Cellini, a middle-aged former police detective, soft–spoken and much in love with his wife, a man with a great deal of humanity. Perhaps too much, as it was his humanity that caused his forced resignation from the Florence police.

After a child was kidnapped and found murdered, Sandro Cellini kept the child’s father informed about the suspect’s life, the suspect against whom there was not enough evidence to bring charges although the police knew he had killed the child.  Then, years later, the suspect was found murdered, and the breach of trust that Cellini had committed came to light.  He was allowed to resign so as to not blacken the reputation of the police force.  Unhappy and guilt-ridden, Cellini is at loose ends until his wife Luisa tells him his skills should be put to use as a private investigator.

Four days after he opens his office, a woman walks in and tells her story.  Her husband was found dead in the river, and the police believe it was a suicide.  Lucia Gentileschi doesn’t.  Her husband was eighty-one, considerably older than she, and had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, but she is sure he wouldn’t have killed himself.  “Why,” asks Cellini, “are you so sure?”  Her answer is simple.  “He never would have left me behind.” But, of course, although they were married for more than forty years, she doesn’t know everything about him.

At the same time, Cellini’s wife brings him a case of a missing English girl, Ronnie Hutton, who has disappeared from her Florence apartment and the art school where she was a student.   The owner of the apartment the girl and her roommate were renting told Luisa Cellini about her disappearance, how the girl’s mother was in Dubai and couldn’t leave, and could Luisa’s husband look into the matter?  Sandro Cellini doesn’t want to, but when he sees a photo of the missing girl in the newspaper he realizes that he had actually seen her in person, from his office window, early on the day she disappeared.  So he’s already involved and has no choice but to get more involved.  And then the two cases intersect.

There are several subplots going on as well.  Luisa Cellini has found a lump on her breast, and there’s the obvious dread of what the biopsy will bring.  And Ronnie Hutton’s roommate feels the police are getting nowhere and that she should become a small part of the investigation.

There’s an amazing sense of place in The Drowning River.  The author takes you street by street, piazza by piazza, until the reader feels that she’s actually walking through the city.  That apparently is due to the fact that English Ms. Kent has spent quite a bit of time in Florence, speaks Italian, and obviously loves the city.  The novel is slow-paced, the story going back and forth between the man who drowned and the girl who disappeared.

This is definitely not your typical private eye mystery, with guns and violence, but a thoughtful look into a city and its people, both natives and visitors.

Unfortunately, Christobel Kent doesn’t have her own web site, but you can read more about her at International Noir.

In a major departure from his Inspector Kurt Wallender series, Henning Mankell takes us to four continents in this thriller–Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America.  So skillfully does he write, it seems as if Mankell has actually been to all of the above places at the times the events he’s writing about occur, although that’s obviously impossible; the first Chinese segment and the North American segment take place three quarters of a century before Mankell was born.

The Man from Beijing begins with the massacre of eighteen elderly people and one child in a tiny village in Sweden.  A photographer is the first person to happen on the scene.  Frightened and stunned he drives off and crashes his car, but before he dies he manages to impart the news of the killings.  The police arrive in the village, of course, and they and everyone in the country are appalled and bewildered by the carnage. Who and why are the questions on everyone’s lips.

Birgitta Roslin is a judge in a city far from Hesjovallen where the killings took place.  Although she, like everyone else, is horrified when she hears about the murders, she would seem to have no personal ties to the village.  But the next day, when she reads the names of the victims, she is reminded that her late mother had lived in Hesjovallen and realizes that two of the people killed were her mother’s foster parents.  She contacts the police and makes a visit to the town, scarcely aware of why she is doing so.

Once there, Roslin gets a cool reception from the local police who are overwhelmed investigating the biggest bloodbath in modern Sweden. At night in a nearby hotel, unable to sleep, Roslin breaks into the cottage where her mother lived and takes a diary from one of the drawers.  The diary was written by a man she assumes to be a relative of the Andren family who took her mother in.  “JA” had emigrated to the United States from Sweden in the 1860s and had become a foreman for one of the railroad companies engaged in building the tracks for the trains that crossed the continent.  His diary shows JA to be a tough, brutal overseer, bigoted against the freed slaves, American Indians, Irish immigrants, and Chinese indentured servants who are laying the tracks.  And it’s the Chinese/Swedish connection that forms the plot of The Man from Beijing.

In each section of the book, whether it takes place in Sweden, the United States, China, or Mozambique, Mankell makes the reader feel what it’s like to be there. It takes a while for the connections between these various points to appear, and I must confess that not everything is made clear.

I do have some “nitpicking” with this novel.  The reader can understand the motive for the crimes, but I didn’t find the motive as convincing as I would have liked.  I also felt that Birgitta Roslin was a bit too naive, too passive for a woman with her life experiences.  SPOILER ALERT: And I thought the way her life was saved was not believable.

These caveats aside, The Man from Beijing is a page-turner in the best sense.  It has a terrific plot, believable characters, and a sense that many of the political beliefs that Roslin and other characters have come straight from Mankell’s heart.  Like every other book by this author, it’s a mystery worthy of your time.

You can read more about Henning Mankell at his web site.

“…The (coal) seam was no bigger than thirty inches and often narrowed to twenty-six. Miners here spent their working lives in a space no taller than a coffee table…its operators all lay prone.  Miners had to bring straws with their lunches because there was rarely enough room to tilt a Coke can over their heads.”

The cliche life imitates art is unfortunately too true, for this novel’s story closely parallels the tragedy in a West Virginia coal mine earlier this year.

This first novel by Gardiner Harris has the very dysfunctional Murphy family at its center.  They are third generation miners in Perry County, Kentucky.  Will Murphy is the novel’s protagonist, for hero is too positive a word to describe him.  Will’s father and uncle started mining in a small way, and after the oil crisis in the 1970s the demand for coal increased and so did the family fortunes.  Then Will’s father forced Will’s uncle Elliott out, creating a family rift that never healed.

Years ago Will was responsible for causing an explosion in the family mine; as a result his younger brother died, and Will suffered severe burns over much of his body.  Will has never forgiven himself, so partly to make amends he gave up mining and is now an inspector for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.  Just before the book opens Will’s father died, and the reading of his will gives complete control of the Blue Gem mine to Will’s brother Paul.  As the novel begins, there is an explosion in the Blue Gem in which nine miners drown; the investigation has been given to Will.  Is the official thinking that he won’t find fault with his brother’s mine?

Mining is an incestuous business, with miners, mine owners, and mine inspectors all members of the same families.  The miners are dependent on the mine being open and operating, the owners are dependent on the slack enforcement of safety standards by MSHA to ensure high profits, and the inspectors all have relatives who work or own the mines.  It’s not a good recipe for honest inspections and rigid adherence to safety regulations.

Will is very much a flawed man.  He’s tormented by the accident he caused, and everything he has done since then has been impacted by that event.  His relationship with his mother is cool, his relationship with Paul almost non-existent, his relationships with his superiors in MSHA difficult because they want to close the case, his relationship with his wife and teenage daughter problematic because his wife has moved out of their home so their daughter can attend a different high school and have the chance to win a basketball scholarship.

There’s so much going on that several times Will is ready to give up the investigation, but each time something comes up to cause him to try to make sense of why the miners were cutting in an old mine area which shouldn’t have contained water but did.

Harris uses his background as an investigative reporter in coal mining Kentucky to bring to life a community where there’s nothing else but mines, no other way to earn a living.  It’s all most people in the area know, and their lives have been so restricted for generations that it’s almost impossible for them to think about leaving and finding another way of life.  Will Murphy has managed to leave the mine, but the mine hasn’t left him.

You can read more about Gardiner Harris at this web site.

There is only one Queen of Crime, and Agatha Christie is her name.

From The Mysterious Affairs at Styles (1920) to Sleeping Murder (1976), she wrote.  Think of it, more than fifty years of writing.  Not only novels but plays, short stories, her biography, romances under the name Mary Westacott.  She began when there were probably more horses than cars in England and you needed an operator to make a telephone call and finished when men had stepped onto the moon and satellites spun around the earth.

Not every book she wrote was great.  Actually, on the advice of a friend I’ve never read Nemesis, because she told me it was so bad I’d never want to read another Christie afterward.  And I never liked Tommy and Tuppence, a married couple who seemed outdated to me even after Mrs. Christie tried to modernize them in the 1970s.

But, when she was good she was great.  If I had to choose one mystery to take along on the proverbial desert island, there’d be no hesitation…And Then There Were None.  I must have read that novel at least five times, and each time I’m amazed by it.  How did she do it, I’d ask myself.  The identity of the murderer is right there, it’s clear from the first chapter, and yet the reader is totally surprised at the end.  You may think that a mystery is a “beach read,” to use the popular phrase, but that’s not true for a really great one.  You need to read every word if you want to catch the villain.  And in Mrs. Christie’s books, to coin a metaphor, the floors are slippery with red herrings…you need to watch your step or you’ll fall into the trap she sets for you.

Monsieur Hercule Poirot was her masterpiece.  Ms. Jane Marple, the elderly lady from St. Mary Mead, was featured in a number of outstanding books (At Bertram’s Hotel, A Pocket Full of Rye, The Murder at the Vicarage), but it is Hercule Poirot who brought the author her greatest fame.  In 1975, the year before her death, Mrs. Christie released Curtain, which told the story of Poirot’s last case and his death.  I remember reading his obituary in The New York Times that day, the first (and maybe to this day still the only) time the death of a fictional character was headlined in that newspaper.

If you haven’t already read them, or even if you have, please do yourself a favor and (re)read the following:  And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, and The ABC Murders, just to (re)discover what outstanding storytelling is.

You can read more about Agatha Christie at her web site.

I haven’t met a tough-talking British female private eye in a long time, but now Charlie Fox is here. Second Shot is the second book in a series featuring a former member of the Women’s Royal Army Corps, a martial arts expert and crack shot.  But Charlie was court-martialed out of the corps in a bogus trial, and now she’s working as a private investigator in a small London firm.

There’s quite a backstory to Charlie, formally known as Charlotte, but it’s pretty much only hinted at here.  The reader finds out that she comes from a well-to-do English family with cold, unloving parents; what we don’t know is why this semi-estrangement has taken place.  Her father, an internationally known orthopedic surgeon, is very upset with her career choices, both past and present; her mother’s reasons aren’t explained at all.  So all we know is that Charlie is pretty much alone in the world, except for her professional and personal relationship with her boss, Sean Meyer.

Meyer’s agency is approached when Simone Kerse wins a thirteen million pound lottery in England. She plans to use part of that money to travel to America to find her long-lost father, whom she hasn’t seen since she was a child.  Now Simone is a single mother with her own child, but the child’s father has been stalking her, trying to persuade her not to try to find the man who ran out on Simone and her mother more than twenty years ago.  Simone doesn’t want Charlie’s interference or protection, but when the child’s father bursts into a restaurant where Simone, her daughter, and the two investigators are having lunch and seemingly tries to grab the child, she reluctantly agrees to let Charlie accompany her and her daughter to Boston while she searches.

The opening chapter of the book has Charlie in a ditch, hiding from a gun-wielding Simone who is shot dead before she can shoot Charlie. The book then flashes back to how the detective was hired, how Simone’s father was located, and how money can’t buy happiness, even thirteen million pounds of money.

To the author’s credit, Second Shot is a definite page-turner.  Charlie is an interesting heroine who comes with lots and lots of baggage.  I would have enjoyed the book more if some of that baggage had been unpacked instead of merely being hinted about, to flesh out Charlie’s character.  There’s a lot of talk about Charlie not wanting to take the assignment as it means going to America where she obviously had had a terrible experience some time before, but we’re never told what it is.  Is that information in First Drop, the beginning of the series, or is it a teaser that will only be explained later?  I think it’s an important enough piece of information about the heroine to warrant an explanation.

And Zoe Sharp doesn’t seem to have a strong handle on her characters’ emotions and personalities–they changed from chapter to chapter, not always convincingly.  That said, there were some things that totally surprised me.  There was one that I was sure I had figured out, but I was wrong (yes, sometimes that happens).

I’d like to see more of Charlie Fox.  She’s an interesting woman, and the series has a lot going for it.  It needs a bit of tweaking in terms of characters, but Ms. Sharp is definitely on the right track.

You can read more about Zoe Sharp at her web site.

If something is perfect, why change it?

My husband and I were on Cape Cod on July 11, and I read in The Boston Globe that Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express would be shown on PBS that night.  Now, as far as I’m concerned, Ms. Christie was/is The Queen of Mysteries.  I know, I know, the Golden Age style is no longer in vogue.  Now we need serial killers (see my July 7 post), sexual perversions, and child abuse to make a best seller.  But no one, past or present, could toss those red herrings around like Dame Agatha.

Very excited to see a new version of this classic novel, I sat through an hour-long promo of David Suchet going for a ride on the Orient Express.  I’m guessing he’s a Method Actor and needed to experience the train before he “became” Hercule Poirot.  I must admit that I’ve never been the biggest Suchet fan, but then I’ve never seen a Poirot I thought was authentic.

Anyhow, at 9 p.m. I was ready to view this mystery classic.  And was I disappointed! I thought that Suchet was acting as if he had a hyperactivity problem.  His facial expressions, his gestures, were so unlike the refined, mannered Belgian detective as to be almost (almost) humorous.  I keep waiting for him to calm down, to remember the character he was playing, but no such luck.

Of course, I don’t know if this (mis)characterization of the great detective was the author’s fault or the director’s.  But either way it was wrong, wrong, wrong.  There wasn’t a bit of Christie’s character in this production.

My feeling is, if you’re going to change the character or plot of a novel when you bring it to film or television, perhaps you should simply invent a new character.  Leave the old one alone and come up with your own idea.

And that way you won’t even have to pay royalties!

Marilyn

Malaysia, here we come!  Inspector Singh Investigates:  A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder is the debut novel featuring Singaporean police detective Inspector Singh.

So here’s my confession–I needed to look up Google Maps to find Singapore and Malaysia. And when I did, I was even more confused, so I needed to read the attached text to figure out the story of the Malay Peninsula.   The Dutch established trading posts there in the 17th century, the British later colonized it, the Japanese invaded it during World War II.   In 1948, the British-ruled territories on the Malay Peninsula formed the Federation of Malaya, and in 1957, after a decade of intense negotiations, it gained independence from Britain and renamed itself Malaysia.   In 1963 Singapore and two other states joined the Peninsular Malaysia Federation, but Singapore left in 1965 (or was expelled, depending on which source you believe) to become a separate nation, a city-state.

Be honest, did you know all that?  If so, you must have been paying more attention in Geography class than I was.  Well, maybe all that background isn’t strictly necessary to enjoy Inspector Singh Investigates, but it does help one understand some important aspects of the story.

The maverick inspector has been sent from Singapore to protect the rights of Chelsea Liew, a Singapore citizen who marred a Malaysian man twenty years ago and now is about to be tried for his murder.  The picture-perfect marriage of the beautiful model and the wealthy tycoon spiraled into an abusive relationship with adultery on the side. The birth of three sons did nothing to help Chelsea’s marriage to Alan Lee, and she now stands before the court accused of his death.

Before the murder came the divorce with its custody issues.  Popular opinion favored Chelsea, as Alan’s extra-marital affairs were well known.  It looked as if Chelsea had a good chance to gain custody of their children, even though she was not Muslim; although Malaysia is a strongly male-dominated culture and officially a Muslim state, there is freedom of religion.  However, when things begin to go badly for Alan Lee during the trial, his lawyer requests and is given a two-week recess.  When the trial resumes it is announced that Lee has converted to Islam and has unilaterally converted his three sons as well.  According to Islamic law, this conversion automatically gives him custody of the boys to raise them as Muslims.  Was the threat of losing custody of their sons enough of a motive for murder?

This is a very strong first novel.  The characters are well-defined, easy to remember.  And the insights into the Malaysian culture and the city of Kuala Lumpur are well done.  It’s a “foreign” country, even to neighboring Singaporeans.  Singapore is a tightly run country, famous for outlawing chewing gum in public and for caning people as punishment.  Malaysia, on the other hand, is looser, overcrowded, and ecologically unaware, or so it seems from the picture of its capital city.  The description of Kuala Lumpur is a fascinating one.   And Inspector Singh is a wonderful addition to the world of police detectives.

You can read more about Shamini Flint on her web site.

The mother-daughter team of P. J. Tracy has written another Monkeewrench novel about two winning teams: the computer geeks/hackers/geniuses at Monkeewrench and the Minneapolis detective team of Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth.  And the entertaining style of Patricia Lambrecht (mother) and Traci Lambrecht (daughter) combines to make this book hard to put down.

In Shoot to Thrill, it appears that the Web has spawned a new kind of evil, pre-posts of murders that are then carried out. There seems to be a Wisconsin connection, a strange thing in a state where nothing bad ever happens, or hardly ever.  But it all comes to light in nearby Minneapolis, the home of the Monkeewrench group and Magozzi and Rolseth.

The F.B.I., being legally unable to hack into sites that may be hiding these killers, sends its agent, John Smith, to Minneapolis to work with Monkeewrench to uncover the web sites that are posting the murders on YouTube for the whole world to watch.  Straight as an arrow, Smith is nearly at the Bureau’s mandatory age of retirement of 57 and is thinking back over his lackluster career.  He had dreams of heroic exploits that never came to pass, and his association with Monkeewrench may be the “slippery slope” that will make him look outside the box he has created for himself.

Magozzi, meanwhile, is still dealing with his unrequited love for Grace McBride, the founder of the Monkeewrench computer experts.  Grace, in turn, is unable to commit to any relationship due to her feelings of guilt over the deaths of close friends and associates for which she blames herself.

During the national search for the killers who are posting the murders on the Internet, the Minneapolis P.D. is also confronted with a series of possible bombs planted at various locations around the city. Is this the work of a terrorist group or simply some copycat teenagers out to disrupt the city as a joke?  F.B.I. profiler Chealsea Thomas thinks the latter but can’t be certain.

Even though the plot is a serious one, there’s a lot of humor in this series. There’s a lot of clever repartee between Magozzi and Rolseth, two typical cops who can’t let on how fond they are of each other.  The Monkeewrenches are oddball characters who have made a fortune with their video games and now can pick and choose what they want to do.

The authors have given each member an offbeat vibe:  Harley Davidson (yes!) owns the mansion where the group works and is a fabulous cook; Grace McBride also cooks but locks herself in her house with its barred windows and steel door; Annie Belinsky wears costumes rather than clothes; and Roadrunner (no first name given) lives in Lycra jogging outfits.

The Monkeewrench series is an enjoyable one, and this mother and daughter team have a lot on the ball.

You can read more about P. J. Tracy at her/their web site.

A friend recently sent me an e-mail about the current craze for international mysteries.  It seems that publishers are rushing all over the globe to find the next Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and they’re including the African continent in their search.  I don’t know if Bait will be among the next world-wide best sellers, but it’s certainly a fascinating, well-written thriller that looks deeply into a country not too well known to most American readers.

Kenya is a country that has been independent for decades, but it is a country that has been rife with tribal rivalries, riots, crime, and corruption in recent years. Enter Mombassa detective Daniel Jouma, perhaps the only honest cop in that city.  Enter from the other side of the stage ex-detective Jake Moore, who left England five years ago after a bullet wound and ended up in Mombassa running a charter fishing boat with a partner.  But now Moore’s business is in deep financial trouble, and his partner Harry is dealing with some very dangerous characters in order to keep afloat (pardon the pun).

The book opens with the death of another fishing boat captain, Dennis Bentley, and his young African assistant in a suspicious explosion that the police of the nearby city of Malindi are quick to call an accident.  What follows is another string of murders, all seemingly unconnected but which are, in fact, part of the underworld of Mombassa. When Bentley’s daughter Martha flies in from New York to see about her late father’s business and learn the details of his death, more murders and attempted murders follow.  There’s an unsavory cast of characters in Mombassa–an unctuous hotel owner, a former South African policeman kicked off the force for brutality in the post-apartheid days, a city crime boss who thinks he’s benevolent because instead of murdering one of the prostitutes he controls he merely cuts off one of her fingers–all of whom are involved in the city’s corrupt ways.  And then Martha’s boyfriend flies in from New York despite her wishes, bringing a new set of of complications.

The corruption in Mombassa is deep and wide and reaches throughout the country and abroad.   Where there’s money to be made, apparently, there’s no level too low to go to in order to get a piece of the action.  But as is made clear in the book, corruption is an equal opportunity employer.  Although we see the effect of crime in Kenya, the repercussions actually reach around the world to Europe and America.  No country’s hands are clean, it seems.

Brownlee’s characters are well-described and their motives are realistic. There are some clear lines between “good” and “bad” behavior and some fuzzy ones, as is true in life.  The author’s description makes the city and its people come alive, and the poverty that is almost everywhere makes the corruption easier to understand, if not to justify.  Two other books follow Jouma and Moore’s adventures in Mombassa, and I hope there will be more.

Jouma and Moore are an interesting pair, reminding me in some ways of a latter-day Kramer and Zondi by James McClure, an excellent series that takes place in pre-apartheid South Africa.  I hope Nick Brownlee will follow in McClure’s footsteps and give readers more insight into another African country.

You can read more about Nick Brownlee at his web site.

True to my promise in the April 22^nd post, I’m still refusing to post reviews of books I’ve read but haven’t enjoyed or thought worth recommending. That doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t think about those books and why I didn’t like them.  So now I’m going to vent a bit.  Okay, a lot.

I read three books in the last couple of weeks, all of which featured serial killers.  Honestly, I am really tired of serial killers. It’s so easy for an author to make a S.K. the villain.  You don’t need any motive, or at least any realistic motive, if your killer just keeps killing seemingly random people—sort of like the Energizer Bunny on steroids.

The author can blame everything on the killer’s childhood, which is what these three authors seemed to do, without actually explaining what it was in their childhoods that caused the man (the S.K. is almost always a man, almost always white, almost always in his 30s or 40s).  Actually, after I read these three books, I thought I could quit my day job and become a profiler for the FBI. Once the authorities have decided a S.K. is on the loose, they turn to S.K. 101 in their textbooks and come up with the above description, a one size fits all label.

So your parents made you eat all your veggies before you got dessert?  So you couldn’t have your own television/computer/car and all the other kids did?  So you got punished for coming home ten minutes past curfew?  That explains your compulsion to slice and dice women who are runners, men with beards, women over 50 with bleached hair the color of your late mother’s.  It’s easy, simplistic, and not at all convincing, at least to me.

I want a motive that’s realistic—love, hate, greed—all the old standbyes that make a person commit the unforgivable crime.

Do you feel the same?

Marilyn

I always wonder why an author chooses to stop writing a particular series.  Between 1987 and 1996 Walter Satterthwait published five books about Santa Fe private detectives Rita Mondragon and Joshua Croft, and then he stopped.  Did he tire of the pair?  Did he feel he had said all he needed/wanted to?   Although he has written other mysteries and some Westerns too, his official web page was lasted updated in 2007.  Has he stopped writing completely?  If you know the answer to any of these questions, please let me know.

Wall of Glass is the first of this series.  In it, Rita Mondragon, the owner of the Mondragon Agency, is wheel chair-bound, having been paralyzed from the waist down by a bullet that killed her husband two years earlier.  Joshua Croft is her assistant and “legs.”  He would obviously like to be more, but Rita is still dealing with the injury and is determined to keep their relationship on a professional, not physical, level.

The story revolves around a missing diamond necklace that had been stolen from the home of a Santa Fe builder and his wife a year earlier. The insurance company had paid the Leightons for their loss and considered the case closed although the necklace was never recovered.  Now Frank Biddle comes to the detective agency with a “hypothetical” story about possibly being able to recover a valuable piece of jewelry and needs Croft’s help in getting a finder’s fee from the insurance company.  Croft’s not interested in this bit of double dealing, but he plays along to find out more, and Biddle promises to contact him with more information.  But the next day the man is found dead.

The Leighton family, from whom the necklace was stolen, is dysfunctional at its core.  The husband and wife have an “open marriage,” the teenage son is drinking and doing coke while his parents are away with their “friends,” and their teenage daughter is cowed by her mother’s demeaning behavior toward her.  And Stacey Killebrew, a former convict and former friend of the murdered man, definitely doesn’t want Croft asking questions.

There’s a nice amount of description of the beautiful Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco, The City Different.  Satterthwait obviously loves this city, and he brings the clear blue skies and cinnamon colored hills to life.  Having been to both Santa Fe and Albuquerque, I can see why the state’s license plates read “The Land of Enchantment.”

There’s a fair amount of violence in Wall of Glass, but it’s realistic, not gratuitous.  There are three murders, two attempted murders, a near-fatal barroom brawl, and a car chase.  But Croft keeps his cool throughout, and the ending is believable and quite surprising.

You can read more about Walter Satterthwait at his web site.

I’ve been going through my book shelves recently to decide what books I want to keep and what books I want to donate to our local library.  Doing this, I’ve come across several mysteries that I read years and years ago and now remember fondly.

One of the most enjoyable series I had read were the Judge Dee mysteries by Robert van Gulik.  Judge Dee (his Chinese name was Ti Jen-chieh) was an actual personage who lived during the T’ang dynasty from A.D. 630 to 700, although van Gulik has placed the stories in the Ming period.  Donald F.  Lach, who wrote the forward to The Chinese Nail Murders, says that the judge and other magistrates were often the heroes of popular literature because of their detective ability and outstanding moral conduct.

This novel was written in 1961 and takes place midpoint in the series.  Dee was a magistrate who was assigned by the Imperial Court to various districts during his career, bringing with him several assistants whom the reader meets repeatedly over the course of the series:  Hoong Liang, Ma Joong, Chiago Tai, and Tao Gan.  The judge also has three wives and several children who travel with them, but they are very much in the background in most of the books, while Dee’s adviser and lieutenants play pivotal roles in many of the novels.

In The Chinese Nail Murders, Judge Dee has been assigned to a remote outpost on the northern edge of the Chinese Empire.  The book takes place during a snowy, brutally cold winter, and the weather plays a part in the story.

The book has a page called Dramatis Personae, as was the custom in many Golden Age mysteries.  Here it identifies the many characters in the book, an excellent idea as the names can be confusing to readers unfamiliar with Chinese names.  It’s good to know that in China, as in other Asian countries, the person’s family name comes before the individual name, as the family name is considered the more important one.

As in all the other novels in the series, the judge is confronted by several problems at the same time–a missing young woman, a decapitated body, a missing man, a death that had been declared natural by Dee’s predecessor but may not be.  On the Dramatis Personae page, the cases are given their own titles:  The Case of the Headless Corpse, The Case of the Paper Cat, and The Case of the Murdered Merchant.  The solution ties all of these mysteries together but not without the magistrate risking his career and possibly his life in an effort to find out the truth about the murdered merchant.

The most entertaining thing about this series is the way the reader is transported back to ancient China.  Details of people’s clothing, their meals, methods of transport, marriage customs, all these are beautifully detailed and explained.  The reader enters into daily life as it was more than a thousand years ago.

Van Gulik was a man of numerous accomplishments:  a linguist who spoke Dutch, Sanskrit, Chinese, English, and the language of the Blackfoot Indians of America; a calligrapher; an artist who illustrated his own books; a musician who played the Chinese lute; and a secretary in the Netherlands mission to China during World War II.

You can read more about Robert van Gulik at various web sites, including Wikipedia.