Marilyn's Mystery Reads

East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Rudyard Kipling certainly knew what he was writing about.  Almost.

The Runner by Peter May is what the author calls The Fifth China Thriller.   It was written in 2003 but published in the United States only this year.  I had read one book in the series previously, but it would be better to read the books in order to follow the story line.

Li Yan is a Deputy Section Chief in the Beijing Police Department, a high-ranking position.  He is more modern and innovative than most of his colleagues, having spent time in America and picked up some of its investigative techniques.  This, of course, does not always make him popular, especially with his deputy, the more traditional and very jealous Tao Heng.  When Li went to Washington as a liaison at the Chinese embassy, Tao succeeded him in Beijing and hoped to be appointed permanently to the Deputy Section Chief position.  But when Li returned he received the appointment, and this has colored the relationship between the two ever since.

The plot of The Runner involves the mysterious deaths of several outstanding Chinese athletes–runners, a weight lifter, and a swimmer–all of whom were destined to be medal winners in the Chinese-American Games taking place as the novel opens and that are a prequel to the upcoming Olympics.  Remember, this book was published in 2003.   There seems to be no common denominator among the deaths–a heart attack, a car accident, a suicide.  But there are too many deaths in too short a time not to arouse Li’s suspicions.

Alongside the athletes’ deaths is the upcoming marriage of Li and Margaret Campbell, the American pathologist who met Li years ago when she visited Beijing to give a series of lectures.  Theirs has been a difficult on-and-off-again romance, given the cultural differences and geographical distances between them.  By the time this novel opens much of that has been resolved, and the two are planning their wedding for the upcoming week, shortly before Margaret is due to deliver their baby.

What Margaret does not know is that once married, Li will automatically be fired from his job, as no one in his high position is allowed to marry a foreign national.

In addition to this unknown, there is the known–the fact that both Margaret’s mother, who is coming from Connecticut to Beijing for the wedding, and Li’s father, who is coming to Beijing from the countryside for the wedding, are against the marriage for the same reason.  Neither thinks their child’s upcoming marriage partner is appropriate.  Racism and xenophobia abound here, but there also is a very interesting dynamic that shows the long-standing tensions between parent and child in both families.

Both Li and Margaret are headstrong, not easy people to get along with in their relationships with their parents.  It’s a sidelight that makes both of them, and their parents, more interesting, more human.  And Peter May does an excellent job showing these tensions and the long-standing issues that separate generations in the same family.

While I strongly recommend starting this series with the first novel, The Firemaker, each book may be read independently.  But May makes his characters so fascinating and the culture of China’s capital city so intriguing that it’s worth going back to the beginning to follow Li and Margaret, in both their public and private lives.

You can read more about Peter May at his web site.

Stefanie Pintoff’s debut novel, In the Shadow of Gotham, takes the reader back in time more than 100 years.  It’s 1905 in New York in a small town just north of Manhattan.  Simon Ziele, a former detective in New York City, has moved to Dobson to find a less violent life and to get away from the memory of the death of his fiancee who drowned when the ferry she was on sank and burned.  But his search for the quiet life is disturbed when the brutalized body of a young female graduate student, visiting her aunt, is found in his town.  And at the same time, the aunt’s housemaid disappeared, leaving all her belongings behind.

The following day, Professor Alistair Sinclair, noted criminologist at Columbia University, enters Ziele’s office stating that he may know who committed the murder.  He has a patient with violent fantasies, some of which he has already acted upon, but Sinclair is torn between believing Michael Fromley is guilty and needs to be arrested and his belief that he has been helping the young man to channel his violent tendencies via talking to the criminologist about them.  It’s the early days of profiling and psychology, and Sinclair desperately wants to continue his research, so he is at war with himself over the correct path to follow.

Ziele is less interested in Sinclair’s research than in finding the killer, whether or not that proves to be the psychologist’s patient.  Clues both point to Fromley and away from him, with Ziele believing more and more than the doctor is being less than candid.  Is Sinclair’s research more important to him than human life?  If he had gone to the police with his suspicions about Fromley’s involvement in an earlier attempted murder, would Sarah Wingate still be alive?

Ms. Pintoff has obviously done a great deal of research into the early 20th-century New York City scene. Horse-drawn carriages still ride over the cobblestones as Ziele takes his first ride in an automobile.  Grand Central Depot is in the process of becoming Grand Central Station, spewing dirt and soot all around the construction site.  The only Chinese restaurants in the city are in lower Manhattan, ostensibly because other neighborhoods fear the gambling and drug use that exist in Chinatown would spread if those ethnic eateries were allowed to go uptown.  “Silent” Charlie Murphy’s Tammany Hall has just stolen the election from reform mayor Seth Low.  The subway is only one year old.  And fingerprints are not yet accepted as evidence in the courtroom.

It’s a time of great changes, but human motivation hasn’t changed all that much since then.  There’s still rivalry among colleagues, corruption in the city, payoffs to keep prominent people out of the news, and violence against innocents.  But there also is a more scientific model of detection as evidenced by Ziele’s new position in Dobson.  He is open to new ideas, if not completely convinced by them, and in his search for Michael Fromley he has to balance the new scientific methods against the tried-and-true investigative techniques he knows.  Should he follow his experience down one investigative road or take the other road and listen to the psychology professor, firm in his belief in his ability to change the mind of a criminal? This Edgar-award winner for Best First Novel is a fascinating look back in time.

You can read more about Stefanie Pintoff at her web site.

Maine is only two states north of where I live, but there are parts of it that seem in a different world.  The Poacher’s Son, by Paul Doiron, takes us into the northernmost section of the Pine Tree State, far from the busy, tourist-visited city of Portland.  Mike Bowditch has lived in Maine north and south, but his heart (and his career) are in Down East’s dark woods.

Bowditch is twenty four, new to his job as a member of the Maine Warden Service. As he explains it, he’s not a forest ranger but a policeman whose duties are to enforce laws relating to game and fisheries.  He carries a gun and is a graduate of Colby College, the Maine Criminal Justice Academy, and the Advanced Warden Academy.  In the winter he investigates snowmobiling accidents, ice fishing, and hunting with hounds; in the summer it’s boating infractions, secret marijuana gardens, and poaching.  Actually, it’s poaching all year round, and he’s very familiar with poachers, as the title tells us.

Bowditch’s parents divorced when he was nine, and he saw his father only infrequently after that.  Jack Bowditch is a poacher, a heavy drinker, and a barroom brawler.  Father and son hadn’t spoken in two years when Mike comes home to a call on his answering machine.  It’s from his father, but there’s no message, no phone number at which to reach him.  So Mike doesn’t know what his father wants, but he’s pretty sure it’ll bring him trouble.  And he’s right.

The next morning Mike reads about a killing in the North Woods:  a policeman and a real estate developer were shot to death.  And later that day the man who owns the camp where Jack Bowditch worked calls to say, “They arrested him, Mike.  I don’t know how else to say it.”  The senior Bowditch was in trouble again.

Jack Bowditch makes it worse, of course, by fighting with the cop who comes to talk to him about the shootings.  The policeman places him under arrest, but somehow during their ride to jail Bowditch overpowers him and escapes.  Now there’s a state-wide manhunt for Bowditch–he’s wanted for resisting arrest, assault on a police officer, and the two shootings.  Mike holds no brief for his father, but he refuses to believe that he’s a killer.

Doiron gives the reader an incredible sense of place in this novel, and his love for his state comes through.  He takes you up almost to the Canadian border and then down to Scarborough, a suburb of Portland where my older son’s family happens to live.  Doiron himself has had an interesting career path:  he’s a native of Maine, a graduate of Yale University, has an MFA from Emerson College, is a Registered Maine Guide, and is the editor-in-chief of Down East:  The Magazine of Maine.  This is the first novel of what obviously is planned to be a series, and Doiron is off to an excellent start.

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

Another Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr, another winner.  If the Dead Rise Not, the sixth and latest in the series featuring a Berlin police detective/private investigator in 1930’s-40’s Germany, takes the reader from that Nazi-infested city in 1934 to the Mob-infested city of Havana in 1954.  Different criminals, different motives, same endings–death.

Bernie Gunther first appeared in March Violets and went on to appear in several other novels.  In If the Dead Rise Not the scene is pre-Olympics Berlin, with Adolf Hitler already in power and determined to show the world that his country is able to stage the greatest Games ever. But already the world is suspicious of him, with arrests and worse of German Jews, communists, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.  So an American “businessman” is sent to Berlin to convince Avery Brundage, who is visiting the city and is in charge of deciding whether the Americans will participate in the upcoming Olympics, that all the rumors of Nazi terrors are unfounded.  If you want an efficient, well-run Games, Max Reles tells Brundage, this is the city for you.

Similar to a mystery I reviewed earlier, The Garden of Beasts by Jeffrey Deaver, If the Dead Rise Not pulls the reader into pre-World War II Germany.  And this between war time period is very important to the plot.  The country is still suffering from its total defeat in the Great War.  Inflation is rampant, Teutonic pride has been hurt, territory has been lost, the British, French, and Amis (Americans) seem to have it all.  Someone (or many someones) must be to blame for all of that, and that appears to be anyone in the country who is not 100% Aryan through at least three generations.

Gunther is a throw-back to an earlier time, when there was law, as well as order, in the country, when shops didn’t have signs in front of them telling Christians not to buy from Jewish shops, when informers didn’t make neighbor fear neighbor.  Not to say that Bernie’s perfect–he knows how to go along to get along.  Bernie’s no Nazi and he does his job, which is now hotel detective at the famed Adlon Hotel, as well as he can without overtly antagonizing the Brown Shirts that seem to be on every corner.  But he tries to do the right thing, even when that comes back to bite him, as in the case of getting a young woman off the streets and into a respectable job with the afore-mentioned American businessman.  That backfires, and the murders begin.

Then the scene switches to Havana and the story of two other tyrants, Fulgencio Batista and Raul Castro. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose; the more things change, the more they stay the same (Alphonse Karr, 1849).  How right he was.  It seems as if no matter where Bernie goes, his past follows him.

I strongly suggest reading this series in order, which will allow the reader to follow the path of Bernie Gunther as well as the history of Germany.  It’s not a pretty read, but it’s a true one.

Unfortunately, Philip Kerr doesn’t have a designated web site, but you can read more about him at various sites on the Internet.

The Chicago Way seems to be a tough, corrupt way if Michael Harvey’s series opener is any indication.

Michael Kelly, a former Chicago detective who left the force after cocaine was planted in his car, is now a private investigator. His former partner, John Gibbons, approaches him in an attempt to get Kelly to help him find out the truth about a nine-year-old case in which a woman was brutally raped and stabbed.  The day after the attack, when Gibbons went to the hospital to interview the woman, she’s gone, and so is any indication that the attack took place.  Instead, he’s given a medal, a raise, and a promotion, and told to forget that anything had happened the night before.

Now retired, Gibbons’ conscience is bothering him and he wants to find out the truth of the rape.   All this time Gibbons had thought the victim had been killed in the attack, but she has just come back “from the dead” in a letter addressed to him, and he wants Kelly to investigate.  Kelly agrees, but the next morning he gets a phone call that his former partner has been found dead at the Navy Pier.  And when Kelly returns home from seeing the body, the rape victim is waiting for him, gun in hand.

The city of Chicago is brought vividly to life in this book, almost another character, with its buildings, highways, eateries, and bars.  It’s definitely a city that can both enthrall you and frighten you, depending on whether you’re a tourist or a resident, living on the Gold Coast or in the slums.

Harvey has a nice style, reminiscent of Robert B. Parker’s early Spenser books, with a fine mix of violence and humor.  It’s hard to combine these two, but Harvey does it.  He also does a wonderful job with the many characters that inhabit the novel; each one is given a separate and distinct voice. And there are a lot of supporting characters–Nicole, the crime tech whom Kelly has known since childhood; Diane, the news anchor who’s covering the Gibbons murder and provides a bit of sexual tension; Elaine, the rape victim who comes to life after nine years; Bennett, the assistant D.A. with an unrequited longing for Nicole; and two cops, Rodriguez and Masters.

The Chicago Way is the first in this series, with two other novels following. I plan to pick them up very soon and read my way back to the Windy City.

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

Translators are some of my favorite people. Since reading Jo Nesbo’s books in the original Norwegian would be difficult (okay, impossible) for me, Don Bartlett has come to the rescue and translated Nemesis.

This is the third book I’ve read in Nesbo’s series featuring Harry Hole (I wish I knew how to pronounce his last name properly; I doubt it rhymes with mole).   He’s your typical Scandinavian detective–a slightly depressed, former alcoholic, renegade police officer who’s usually on the outs with his department chief but who manages to keep his job because he gets the crime solved. His reasoning and methods are unorthodox, but he refuses to accept pat answers and digs deeply into each mystery with the hope not only of solving it but finding out the criminal’s motive.

There are three distinct threads in this story, although they all tie together at the end.  In Nemesis Harry is waiting to hear from his girlfriend about whether she will be able to retain custody of her young son whose Russian father now wants the boy to live with him in Russia.  While the trial is going on in Moscow, Harry hears from an old girlfriend, a woman he hasn’t seen or been in contact with in some time, who insists they get together to say a proper goodbye.  And then there’s a series of bank robberies in Oslo, the robber’s M.I. looking like that of a famous bank robber who is believed to have died some time ago.  So what’s going on?

In addition, Hole has to contend with two adversaries on the force. One is Rune Ivarsson, the head of the Robbery Division that is heading the investigation into the bank robberies even though a murder occurred during the first one.  He’s an officious power-seeker who dislikes Harry and his nonconformist ways.  The other is Tom Waaler, a homicide detective and a much more dangerous enemy.  He’s the man who killed Harry’s partner in a previous novel, a man with neo-Nazi and drug-related ties, a very dangerous adversary indeed.  And he seems to have blindsided Harry’s new partner, a naive young detective who literally never forgets a face.

This novel is close to 500 pages, and there’s enough action in it for another hundred.  For a small capital city in a small, law-abiding country, Oslo seems to be filled with unsavory police officers and murderous criminals.  There’s also a lot of “doubling” going on–with brothers being mistaken for and taking the blame for crimes committed by their siblings.

Harry Hole is a protagonist who grows on you. At points in the novel I wanted to shake him and say, “What do you think you’re doing?”  But he’s real, sometimes painfully so, and the mistakes he makes come from his heart.  His feelings for his girlfriend and her son, both of whom are painfully aware that their future happiness resides with a judge in a foreign country, are strong and realistic, even as he sometimes acts in a way he wouldn’t like his girlfriend to see.  That’s human, and Harry certainly is that.

Jo Nesbo’s books are part of a strong series, and I look forward to the next one.  I’m hoping another translation of his novels is in the works and will appear on our shores very soon.

You can read more about Jo Nesbo at his web site.

A Bad Day for Sorry is a very good day for mystery lovers.

A middle aged woman who killed her abusive husband with a wrench while he was fixing their kitchen sink, Stella Hardesty knows about good women and bad men.  Now she’s making it her (part-time) business to right a few wrongs in rural Missouri.

Despite having come from a loving home, Stella sure picked a loser when she married Ollie.  He was an abusive husband, both physically and emotionally, and a neglectful father.  Stella put up with him for more years than she now believes she should have.  She was strong enough to get rid of him, albeit in a non-legal way, but she knows that most women in her situation don’t have her courage and continue to wear long sleeves, make up excuses for bruises, and pray that a bolt of lightning will hit their errant spouses and make them see the error of their ways.  They come to realize that Stella Hardesty is that bolt of lightning.  She doesn’t really deserve the tough, take-no prisoner reputation she has, but she’s not about to set the record straight.  She wants the wife-beaters of her area to be afraid of her, very, very, afraid.

When young and not-too-bright Chrissy Shaw returns to ask Stella for help again, Stella is a bit surprised.  She didn’t think that Chrissy’s ex, Roy, had the courage to go up against her one more time.  But it’s not physical abuse that has brought Chrissy back.  “I think this time I might a brung you a problem you ain’t had before,” she tells Stella.  She believes that Roy abducted her two-year-old son, Tucker, although for what reason she can’t imagine.

Looking for Roy brings Stella into contact with a number of unsavory characters in the region.  Could what Roy’s brother Arthur Junior says be true?  That’s there’s a mob connection in their small town, coming all the way from Kansas City and bringing drugs with them? Stella finds it hard to believe, but there seems no other reason for Roy to have so thoroughly disappeared, apparently taking the boy with him.  Life in small-town America doesn’t seem all that different from life in the big city these days.

This is Sophie Littlefield’s first novel, and it’s a gem.  It was nominated for an Edgar this year but lost to In the Shadow of Gotham, which I haven’t read yet.  But Shadow has to be some book to be better than A Bad Day for Sorry. Writing a mystery on a subject as difficult as domestic abuse and yet somehow keeping it humorous requires real talent.  In Stella, to coin a pun, Sophie Littlefield has created a star.

She has also created a bit of romance, and Sophie has a crush on the sheriff and he apparently has one on her.  When the author writes the next novel in the series, and I’m crossing my fingers that she will, perhaps we’ll get to see the beginning of a relationship between these two; I certainly hope so.  And I hope it’s not too long before I see Stella Hardesty in action again.

You can read more about Sophie Littlefield at her web site.

Odds are, you’ll really enjoy The Odds.  Oh, that was bad, wasn’t it?  But truly, Kathleen George’s Edgar-nominated mystery is excellent.

I haven’t read any of her other books and chose The Odds because of its nomination.  It’s the third in a series of police procedurals that take place in Pittsburgh’s North Side, an area totally unfamiliar to me as I’ve never been to the Steel City.  It seems like a gritty place, with plenty to keep the city’s police busy.

Colleen Greer is the heroine, a police detective in the Homicide Bureau.  She’s got an unrequited crush, if one can use that word to describe the feelings of an adult, on her captain, a married man and father of two who is beginning a treatment of chemo for cancer.  This has upset the balance of power in the department and Colleen and fellow detective John Potocki are taken from Homicide and added to the Narcotics roster to help with a big drug bust, much against Colleen’s will.

At the same time, four children in the neighborhood, the oldest being fourteen, are left to their own devices after their stepmother leaves them virtually penniless to find an old flame in New York.  The children’s mother abandoned them several years ago and later died, and their late father made a hasty, unwise marriage so his children would have a mother.  But this stepmother is less mature than any of her stepchildren, and after the father’s death in an auto accident she decides the responsibility is too much for her.  The children, fearful of being sent to foster care and thus separated, decide not to tell the authorities they’re on their own and do their best to keep themselves a family.  And their best is outstanding.  But can they beat the odds?

The children and the police intersect when the only boy, twelve-year-old Joel, goes into an abandoned house and finds two men–one badly wounded and one dead.  When fourteen-year-old Meg goes back to the house with her brother, she recognizes the wounded man as the one in the corner pizza place who gave her a free pizza the day before. Given these kids’ sense of fairness and goodness, they decide to help him, even if that means not telling the cops about the dead man.

Although I felt that the children’s abilities and resourcefulness were a bit too much, the author does make all of them, especially Meg, believable.  Perhaps because the alternative to success is a failure that would break up the family, the children rise to incredible heights to keep their family unit intact.  All gifted in school, they prove their resourcefulness by car-washing, babysitting, clerking in a market, anything to keep bodies and souls together.  And that resourcefulness helps them with Nick, the wounded man.

There’s a lot of tension in this novel, and a lot of tenderness too.  Any reader must be on the children’s side as they work hard to keep teachers and neighbors from knowing that they’re living without adult supervision.  Dad and mom are always “working” when people ask for a parent-teacher conference, and it’s sad and probably true that the adults in this world never follow up.  But one only has to read the papers to find that children’s welfare has slipped through the cracks of bureaucracy too many times.  So perhaps the Philips children are better off on their own.  Kathleen George has certainly succeeded in bringing both the children and the police to life and in making the reader care about them all.

You can read more about Kathleen George at her web site.

2009-10 was a sad year for mystery fans.  Dick Francis, Stuart M. Kaminsky, Robert B. Parker, and William G. Tapply all died within the last year.  I’d like to share my thoughts about each, beginning with Dick Francis.  Other columns will follow.

To my mind, Dick Francis was an absolute master.  I’ve ridden horses fewer than a dozen times in my life, including one weekend more than thirty years ago at a dude ranch.  I never was into the “young girl and horses” mania, although that may be because I grew up in Brooklyn and horses were few and far between on my street.  So why would Francis’s books resonate with me, and why did I await each new one so eagerly?

Dick Francis had an incredible knack for letting us into his characters’ minds. Most of his heroes (and yes, they are all men) were basically average men, not tough private investigators or policemen. They were actors (Edward Lincoln in Smokescreen), bookmakers (Ned Talbott in Even Money), chefs (Max Moreton in Dead Heat), glass blowers (Gerald Logan in Shattered) and other occupations not commonly associated with the racing world.  Each man was innocently involved in a criminal event connected to racing, and each had to find not only the solution to the crime but also the personal courage to deal with the situation.  It’s the resourcefulness and integrity of each of Francis’s characters that grabbed me years ago when I first started reading his novels.

Although as I’ve said in other posts on this blog, I prefer mysteries with a recurring character that I can follow, Francis’s books were so well written, so thoughtful, that even though most of his books are stand-alones (only two of his heroes appear in more than one book), I loved every one.  I don’t believe he ever wrote a bad book.  Actually, I don’t think he ever wrote a “good” book; they were all wonderful and I, along with many others, will miss him.

You can read more about Dick Francis at his web site, which is one of the very best sites of any type I’ve ever seen.

“Cops put things right.   They look after people.”

That’s the quote three pages from the end of Persuader by Lee Child.  It was Jack Reacher’s answer to a question posed to him ten years ago, when he was still an Army MP.  The question was asked by a young sergeant just posted to his staff.  Ten years later, that’s still his answer when he’s asked that question, although the sergeant was killed the day after she asked it.

Persuader is the twelfth novel in the Reacher series, and like all the others it’s masterful.   Reacher had gotten to the rank of major before he was rifed (let go, downsized, or, as the Brits say, made redundant).  The army was getting smaller and he had risen as far as he was going to, so he left.  Now he criss-crosses the country with, if I remember correctly, his wallet, passport, and toothbrush, nothing more.  And he finds trouble wherever he goes.

The novel has one of the greatest opening chapters I’ve ever read, with first and last sentences that make sure you won’t put the book down.  First–“The cop climbed out of the car exactly four minutes before he got shot.”  Last–“The message said, I’m in.”  Between those two sentences is a set-up in which Reacher and DEA agents foil the staged kidnapping attempt of a college student.  During the attempt Reacher “shoots and kills” a campus cop so that he can “rescue” the young man and thus get into his father’s house.  The father is a suspected drug dealer who is believed to have abducted a federal agent.  But getting in turns out to be the easy part.

The book goes back and forth between this present-day situation and one a decade earlier when Reacher unwittingly sent his sergeant to her death.  At that time Reacher thought he had killed the man responsible for the sergeant’s death, but now he sees the man on a Boston street.  A phone call that Reacher makes gives him information that connects him to the killer who appears to be connected to the college student’s father.  If all this sounds unbelievably entangled, Child makes you believe it.  In my opinion he writes the most realistic dialogue in any of today’s crime novels.

Child’s books are not for the squeamish.  There’s always a lot of blood and killing.  But somehow the violence never seems gratuitous.  There are bad guys out there, and when Reacher confronts them it’s them or him. And we’re always rooting for him.

As I was writing this review, I went to Child’s web site to check on something.  I clicked on to his Appearances page and found to my delight that he will be autographing 61 Hours, his latest novel, at Borders Books in South Portland, Maine, on the same day I’ll be there visiting family.  Guess where I’ll be on June 4th?

You can find out more about Lee Child at his web site http://www.leechild.com.

Disclaimer: I’m from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and my late father was a police captain, for a time working out of the 71st precinct in Brooklyn; his father was a Russian immigrant.   Jack Leightner, the protagonist of Neptune Avenue, works out of the 71st precinct in Crown Heights, Brooklyn; his late father was a Russian immigrant.  Could I pass up this novel?  No way!

Leightner is an unhappy man, recovering from a two-year-old gunshot wound and the resultant stay in a hospital and a very recent betrayal by the woman he wanted to marry.  In the hospital he shared a room with a Russian immigrant, Daniel Lelo, and now, two years later, Lelo was shot again and this time it was fatal.

The case draws Leightner into a neighborhood that is both familiar and strange to him. Familiar because although Brooklyn has a population of 2.72 million people, it’s made up of neighborhoods.  People, especially immigrants, tend to stay in comfortable environs, surrounded by those who speak their native language and share their Old World customs; as a child Leightner spent a lot of time in this part of the borough.  Strange because the detective has been living outside of his old neighborhood for years, and his only contact with it has been his late father’s brother, with whom he has a somewhat strained relationship.

Lelo’s death brings Leightner into contact with his friend’s wife, a beautiful Russian woman to whom Leightner is immediately attracted. He is irresistibly drawn into a sexual relationship with Zhenya, but he feels she is hiding something.  Is it guilt over their affair so soon after the death of her husband?  Is it fear of a Russian mob boss who may have had ties to her husband?

The novel starts off with an unrelated case of two young black women who are found hanging, one in an apartment and the other in a garden.  Although this crime is solved, the author seems to have been glad to leave it behind and concentrate on the Russian connection.  I’m not quite sure why he began the book with that crime, perhaps only to show the different groups living within a relatively small neighborhood, sometimes getting along and sometimes at war.

Cohen makes Leightner a complicated man with an interesting back story. His father was a longshoreman in Red Hook, a notoriously tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, a man who was fine when sober but vicious when drunk.  Leightner’s mother was passive, afraid of her husband.  He had a much loved brother who died young.  And he’s divorced, with a grown son with whom he has a very tentative relationship.  He’s a man with a lot of baggage, and he knows it.  But so too has Zhenya, and perhaps that’s what brings them together.

Neptune Avenue pulls the reader right into Brooklyn, its streets, criminals, and ethnicities.  Leightner’s uncle asks him at one point, “How is it that you work so close to here but know so little about (your own people)?”  Leightner’s response is, “Your own people-–it sounded like such a burden.”  Coming back to Little Odessa, as Brighton Beach is called, has brought back memories he would just as soon have kept buried.

You can find out more about the author at http://www.gabrielcohenbooks.com.

I want to go to Italy.  I want to go to Venice.  And I definitely want to read more Guido Brunetti mysteries.

I had seen Donna Leon’s mysteries in my local library and on bookstore shelves many times, but somehow I never picked one up.  I love novels that take me to faraway places, and I knew that this series was set in Venice; nevertheless, I passed them by and found other books to read.

A few months ago, a close friend and mystery connoisseur recommended the series to me.  I promised myself I would get one the next time I had a chance, and returning home this weekend from New York City I bought a copy of Through A Glass, Darkly and read it on the train back to Boston.  My only regret is coming to the series so late because it’s obvious that Guido Brunetti has had a long life as a member of the Venetian police department.  At this point in the series he has a wife and two children, and I wish I could have met him earlier in his career and gotten to know him at an earlier age.   Well, better late than never, and I plan to go back to Venice and spend more time with Signore Brunetti.

As the story open one of his colleagues asks Brunetti to meet with a friend of his who has been arrested in a demonstration outside a factory in Venice.  The police are eager to release the man as no charges have been filed against him, and when the three men exit the police station they are accosted by the man’s irate, out-of-control father-in-law.  The father-in-law hates his son-in-law and has been heard to threaten his life.

A second thread is the story of a worker in the father-in-law’s factory whose daughter suffered severe birth defects.  Is it, as the man believes, that the defects were caused by poisons discharged into the water by the factory owner, or is the truth that the father, in his insistence on a home birth against the advice of doctors, is responsible for his daughter’s physical and mental condition?

Is there an Italian word for mensch? This Yiddish word literally means a man, but it has come to mean someone who is good, kind, caring, empathic.  All those words fit the commissario.  Brunetti’s interactions with his wife and children are beautiful to behold.  No loner, no tough-talking cop, Brunetti is a warm man trying to do a difficult job.  It’s obvious that there are several recurring characters in this series whom the reader would enjoy meeting again and again, but that does not include his sly, out-for-himself superior officer, Vice-Questore Patta.

Ms. Leon’s descriptions of Venice make the reader want to hop on the next plane and rush to the canals of the city.  The food, too, is described wonderfully, and the love of the author for her adopted city comes through.  Through A Glass, Darkly is the fifteenth novel in a series that now numbers nineteen.  I look forward to meeting Comissario Brunetti again.

You can find out more about the author at http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/minisites/donnaleon.

Perhaps some readers of this blog have noticed that all my reviews are positive.  Are you asking yourself, “Is Marilyn so fortunate in the books she chooses to review that all of them are winners?” or “Does the woman like everything she reads?”

Well, the answer to both questions  is negative.  I’ve read plenty of mysteries that I don’t enjoy.  But I decided to write reviews only of books that I believe are worth reading. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m exasperated when I read a review and at the very end I find that the reviewer tells me not to bother reading the book.  I don’t want to find out what not to read–there are too many novels in the world that aren’t worth the time it takes to turn the pages.  I want to find out what I should read, or at least what someone whose opinion I respect suggests that I read.

This past week I read two mysteries that were so poorly written and so completely unconvincing that I was amazed that they were published.  I’m sure that this has happened to everyone at one time or another.  But I don’t want to waste valuable internet space and your time by reviewing them.  I’ll just chalk it up to a waste of time (my time, not yours) and pick up another book and hope for the best.

I used to have a sweat shirt with the logo, “So many books, so little time.” So let’s not waste time reading about mysteries that aren’t worth reading.  Our time is more valuable than that.

Marilyn

The Garden of Beasts is a fascinating read!  It is definitely a crime novel, but it goes outside the genre to become a historical work as well.

It takes place in 1936 in Berlin, immediately before the Olympics that Hitler hosted. Paul Schumann is a New York City free-lance hit man. He’s a third generation German-American from a family that emigrated to the United States before The Great War.  When his father was killed because he refused to give his printing business to some local mobsters, Schumann seeks revenge by killing the men.  He’s then approached by various gangsters in the city to be a “button man,” a killer of the enemies of Manhattan mobsters, and that’s what he has been doing for the past dozen years or so.  He’s meticulous in his work, which he justifies to himself by killing only criminals, never innocents.

One slip-up, however, gets him noticed by federal officials.  They make him an offer he can’t refuse–go to Germany, pose as a journalist covering the Olympics, and kill Colonel Reinhard Ernst, a Nazi official in charge of rebuilding Germany’s military.  Schumann is chosen both because of his excellent marksmanship and his fluency in German.  If he succeeds in killing the colonel, his criminal record will be cleared and he will receive $10,000 with which to restart his life.

I started out disliking Schumann intensely.  How could anyone feel anything positive for a man who has killed over twenty times, even if those he killed were killers themselves?  What gave him the right to be the executioner?  But as the novel progressed and I got into Schumann’s head, I came first to respect him and then to admire him. He’s smart, quick on his feet, and begins to understand exactly what is happening in Germany.

Even more remarkable than the insights Deaver gives the reader into Schumann’s mind is his ability to make the reader understand the thinking of the various Germans involved.  There are high level Nazis, anonymous members of the S.S. and Gestapo, and non-Party police investigators trying to solve a killing that leads them to Schumann without knowing the greater purpose that brought him to Germany.  The humiliation that Germany suffered during the War has warped the minds of its leaders, and they must find scapegoats to hold responsible–the Jews, the gypsies, the communists, the pacifists.  They are all viewed as guilty in a conspiracy against the Aryans, and now the Aryans must rid the country of these enemies of the state to begin the Thousand Year Reich.

America’s blindness during the early Hitler years is explained as well.  From lack of interest in the fate of the Jews and other minorities in Germany, to the desire to avoid a European war so soon after the “war to end all wars,” to a monetary interest from those who have invested in rearming Germany, the reader gets inside the minds of the characters in the book.  And all the bad guys aren’t on one side, much as we would like to think so.

Both the characters and the plot make this novel an extraordinary read.

I have read several of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme mysteries and enjoyed them, but The Garden of Beasts is a deeper, more thoughtful book than any in that series.  The subject it explores makes it so.

You can learn more about Jeffrey Deaver at his web site.

Say the name “Dr. Crippen,” and every reader of crime novels, thrillers, and detective fiction will know who you’re talking about.  Hawley Crippen, M.D., was one of the most notorious criminals in British history. Although he is accused of murdering “only” one person, that person was his second wife, and the thought of a medical man committing such a crime shocked 1910 Edwardian society to its core.  But was he guilty?

Dancing For The Hangman is told mostly in the doctor’s voice, using the journals he kept in prison plus some newspaper articles.  As the story opens, Crippen has just been tried and convicted for his wife’s murder and is awaiting death by hanging.  The book goes back and forth in time, starting with Crippen’s early life in America, his first marriage, and his romance and marriage to Cora Turner, an aspiring if not very talented singer/actress.  At first, after his unhappy marriage with his first wife who died of a stroke while pregnant with their second child, the relationship with Cora fulfills his sexual dreams.  He leaves (perhaps abandons is a more accurate word) his young son with his parents and he and his new bride leave for Europe to pursue his desire for wealth and social position.  He’s a homeopathic physician with little compassion for his patients and a great desire to push pills to enrich himself.

After a few years living with a bipolar Cora who herself was unfaithful, he begins a relationship with a young typist in his office, Ethel LeNeve.  And that leads to murder.  Or does it?

To the very end Crippen was certain his death sentence would be reversed, that it was a miscarriage of justice.  His wife’s death was an “accident,” his dismembering her body and burying part of it in their garden was a “necessity,” his flight with his lover to Canada was done only in “self-defense.”

Edwards does an excellent job bringing the doctor to life.  Crippen has so many blind spots and faults that it’s hard to know where to begin.  To me he was narcissistic, self-absorbed, unprofessional, an unscrupulous business partner, an uncaring father and son; I could go on and on.  But was he a murderer?

To this day, there is dispute over Hawley Crippen’s guilt or innocence. What weighed most heavily against him was his common-law marriage to the young Ethel, some 17 years his junior, and their flight aboard the S.S. Montrose, with Ethel disguised as a young boy.  But as they approached Father Point, Quebec, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Dew came out on deck to arrest Crippen.

An afterward by the author gives the reader the follow-up of what happened to the various personae in Crippen’s life–the ship’s captain, who alerted Scotland Yard; Inspector Dew; Ethel Le Neve, among others.  But as Edwards notes, no one knows for certain what truly happened at the infamous 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Camden Road, Holloway, London, England.

You can find more information on Martin Edwards at his web site.