The Coming Storm

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The Coming Storm is a much-anticipated follow-up to Greg Mosse’s well-regarded 2022 debut thriller, The Coming Darkness. The new book takes up the complex, futuristic plot of the first novel. I hadn’t read the earlier book, and there were some situations I didn’t completely understand, at least at first, but that really didn’t affect my experience of this new book. Mosse so effectively establishes that the deteriorating social and political situation in his dystopian future matters greatly to the characters that a little ambiguity didn’t put me off.

Mosse writes about a future (the year is 2037) we can see, at least dimly, especially on our bad days. Eco-terrorism. Drought and a rapidly warming climate. Strange, difficult-to-treat infections. And hazards of any era: people in power who can’t be trusted and whose self-interest trumps any impulse to do good.

The action takes place mostly in France and North Africa. The main character, Alexandre Lamarque, is widely regarded as “the man who saved the world” from eco-terrorism. This is an embarrassing level of notoriety he’d just as soon do without. And it’s made him a target. But of whom? Or who all?

Three eco-terrorism plots are in play: opposition to the enlargement of a dam, a plot to destroy the Aswan dam which will practically annihilate Egypt, and sabotage in the lithium mining industry.(I was a bit puzzled by the references to lithium mining, as I thought lithium does not occur in concentrations that would allow it to be mined in any conventional way, but perhaps I missed that explanation.)

Cutting back and forth between these several ambitious plots and Lemarque’s efforts to discover and thwart them, the story speeds along. While Lemarque and his colleagues are strong characters, the terrorists themselves remain somewhat shadowy. Lurking way in the background is a man who seems to be the main plotter, living on a Caribbean island near Haiti, who is the least believable of all.

The unfolding of the terrorists’ plans is certainly exciting. Yet I couldn’t help a bit of a bait-and-switch feeling when I realized they wouldn’t be resolved by the end of the book. Of course, they’re all so significant that, realistically, they can’t be dealt with in any quick way, so perhaps, in spreading the action over several volumes, Mosse has made a good choice. One that will require Book Three, at least. People who read and enjoyed the first book will be happy to see this follow-up and will no doubt look forward to the story’s ultimate resolution. The Coming Storm terrorists are not finished, and neither is Lamarque. And certainly not Mosse.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine – July/Aug 2024

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Sister publication to the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, AHMM also has a reputation for bringing fine short mystery and crime stories to its avid readers. This particular issue is full of notable ones and leads off with one of my own. Here are my favorites.

This issue includes the winner of the 17th Annual Black Orchid Novella Award, and this year’s winner is Libby Cudmore’s story, “Alibi on Ice.” Girl-of-all-work Valerie holds down the desk at a low-budget private detective’s office. While running an errand, Valerie discovers a semi-conscious young woman, half-buried in snow. Valerie digs her out and calls the authorities, who whisk her away in an ambulance. Her boss Martin is out sick, and when Valerie tells him about her discovery, she also relays her conviction that the woman was purposefully left there. Abandoned. Thus her first investigation begins, and, between her own doggedness, some clever analysis, and encouragement from Martin’s sick-bed, Valerie solves a challenging case. He’s proud of her. You will be too. Nice one!

In “Time Lies” by Ken Linn, a seven-year-old girl, found asleep in a phone booth, says she’s a time-traveler from 1963. Who and why? It’s up to a part-time investigator and high school math teacher to help the sheriff discover the answers.

“Delivering the Egg MacGuffin” by Joslyn Chase is a masterful exercise in misdirection, appropriate to the plot device Alfred Hitchcock himself made famous. I laughed out loud!

“Home Game” by Craig Faustus Buck is another story moving along smoothly in one direction that takes a sudden tum and ends up somewhere else altogether. Very clever.

I really loved John M. Floyd’s romantic “Moonshine and Roses” about—well, about a lot of things. Lost fortunes, lost loves, and how they may be found again, along with justice for some notorious bad guys in the wilds of Kentucky.

“Among the Long Shadows” by Vicki Weisfeld (me!) is my fourth published story featuring young Sweetwater, Texas, reporter Brianna Yamato, fighting the good fight against crime in her community and the prejudices of the good ol’ boys. The story takes place at Avenger Field outside Sweetwater, the place where, during World War II, women pilots were trained to take on aircraft support missions, freeing up the men for combat. It’s now home to the Woman Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) World War II Museum. When I’m writing a story, I like to include an element that gives me the excuse to do some research, which always stimulates new ideas for plot and character—in this case, a murdered woman flying instructor and former stunt-pilot with the Aero-Belles. Read an excerpt here.

Weekend Movie Pick?? Firebrand

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It’s hard for me to dislike a movie about the Tudors. But not impossible. Firebrand, the new movie about Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, Katherine Parr, directed by Karim Aïnouz (trailer), could have almost as accurately been called The Somnambulist. The fact that four separate women are credited with the screenwriting could be part of the problem: no one vision dominates.

Alicia Vikander walks through her role as Katherine, never making a convincing queen, almost never showing much emotion. She’s married to a mercurial and dangerous man. Powerful people, including the reactionary Bishop Gardiner (played by Simon Russell Beale) oppose her liberal religious beliefs and want to bring her down. Yet she seems strangely unmovable.

Just about the only time she gets her emotions up is when she’s pleading with her friend, Protestant reformer Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), to flee England. Anne, one of England’s earliest female poets, was tortured and burned at the stake for her religious preaching. She does have fire and wit, and what ignites her passion is her belief that common people should be able to read the Bible in English for themselves, rather than be dependent on priests to translate the Latin and tell them what scripture says and means. The contrast between her and the impassive Catherine couldn’t be greater.

So let’s talk about Jude Law, who plays Henry VIII. Corpulent and capricious, he held my gaze every time he was on screen. I could not find the familiar actor in the appearance or increasingly paranoid behavior of this character. If Vikander is not a convincing royal personage, he embodies his position absolutely. He is a king.

Some aspects of the movie are historically accurate, such as Catherine’s close relationships with Henry’s children: Mary (daughter of Catherine of Aragon, Henry’s first wife); Elizabeth (daughter of Anne Boleyn, his second), and Edward (son of Jane Seymour). It acknowledges her authorship of prayer books—the first Englishwoman to have books published under her own name. A prayer she utters in support of Henry, ended up in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer where it remains today.

Alas, some aspects of the story are not historically accurate, including the dramatic yet unconvincing final scene, and a number of episodes created in the hope of increasing the film’s suspense. Given that so much is at stake for the people and causes of England at this time, it’s surprising that the movie, when Henry isn’t in it, is so turgid. Much is made cinematically about Henry’s ulcerating leg wound. Gruesome, but not suspenseful. I can’t recommend this, despite Law’s wonderful performance. Coming to streaming soon; that might be a good choice.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 54%; audiences: 69% (and that may be for the costumes).

Provence Poppies

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Too early for the fabled lavender fields in Provence last month, we were definitely in time for another dramatic floral display—fields and fields of poppies. Poppies by the roadside, poppies along the edges of farms. Poppies, poppies, poppies. It seemed as if you could stop the car anywhere and gather an armload of red, yellow, blue, and white flowers. Just beautiful.

Our tour guide explained that the poppy profusion is a bit unpredictable. They don’t always grow in such numbers, and they don’t always grow in the same places. They appear where the field hasn’t been cultivated—so this is why the edge of the roadway is a prime location, dotted with brilliant red.

But why wouldn’t one of the lush fields be cultivated?, I wondered. I could think of some reasons: the farmer was letting one of his fields rest for a season; he had retired or died or was visiting his daughter in California. Then I thought of another reason: the desire not to disturb the ground.

This brought back lines from Canadian poet John McCrae’s World War I work, written while he served in Ypres in 1915. “In Flanders Fields” is written as if by soldiers whose graves lie under the wild poppies:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow,
between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

Learning this about poppies added new resonance to the poem as well as the beautiful vistas of red fields–especially meaningful in France where so many lives were lost.

McCrae, of course, was not the only significant young poet who died in The Great War. Britain lost several: Wilfred Owen, Alan Seeger, and Rupert Brooke, for example. Nursing sister Vera Britain  survived the war, but her brother and fiancé were killed in action. She served in Gallipoli and wrote: “Poets praise the soldiers’ might and deeds of war, but few exalt the Sisters and the glory of Women dead beneath a distant star.”

Thanks to McCrae, the poppy has come to symbolize battlefield death. At the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, an installation of ceramic poppies cascaded down the hillside on which the tower of London stands, an overwhelming display with each flower representing one of the 888,246 British service members who died in the war.

poppy poppies Beefeater London

(The photograph up top is not mine; technical difficulties led me to use a photo from Pinterest instead. The photograph at the end of the article is by Shawn Spencer-Smith and carries a creative commons license.)

The Debt Collector

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Your expectations will be upended at every turn in Steven Max Russo’s new crime thriller, The Debt Collector. Supposedly, there are only two plots in all of literature: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. This story flows from the latter tradition, and Abigail Barnes is a stranger in almost every respect.

In the opening scene, Abby is driving her BMW through densely urban northern New Jersey, hears a gunshot, and sees what must be a robbery in progress. A man wearing only some dingy underwear and carrying a shotgun runs out of a liquor store and right in front of her car. Does she panic? Not at all. Does she slam the BMW into reverse? No way. She tells him to get in and drives him home. Confused, he leaves the shotgun behind. The next morning, she’s at his front door offering his gun.

That’s how Abby becomes acquainted with pleasantly inept Hector Perez. She’s a pretty, young, rather petite blonde, new in town and looking for work. She’s a debt collector on the dark side, hired by bookies, loan sharks, and others having difficulty collecting what they’re owed. Like Hector did, prospective clients take one look at her and laugh. They can’t believe this tiny woman could get their hard-case borrowers to pay up. She volunteers to demonstrate, and they laugh again. For the last time.

Abby has a saying that works for her, “It isn’t violence but fear of violence that gets people to pay.” Unfortunately, one person Abby collects from is murdered later that same night. Now it’s in everyone’s interest to identify the murderer. Because a big-time investment company is planning to build a fancy new building in the cash-strapped town, everyone from the governor, to the city’s mayor, to the police chief, to various local gang leaders wants to close the case pronto. But Abby realizes “close”’ does not necessarily mean “solve.” That will be her job.

The characters busily scheme against each other, explaining each new development in whatever way suits their own best interests. (I can’t help but think how tricky it must have been to write this, keeping straight everyone’s assumptions, right or wrong.) Their various stratagems make for a very entertaining plot, as well as strong character development, as you learn how each of them thinks. And Russo has some nifty surprises in store, too.

Abby is unsentimental; she just wants to get the job done. She’s an appealing and entertaining character, and author Russo provides some humorous banter, especially between Abby and Hector. But, truly, she can think rings around all of those guys.

Gritty, urban North Jersey, the narrow streets lined with cars, the low-budget hotels, the Italian restaurants, the walk-up offices—they all come through believably. Russo has had a long career as a New Jersey advertising executive, and puts his creative mind to good use now writing fiction. It’s a fun read with characters to believe in.

Provence through an Artist’s Eyes

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In case it slipped your mind, today, June 20, is #YellowDay. “How wonderful yellow is. It stands for the sun,” said Vincent Van Gogh. Sunflowers, grainfields, buildings, lights at night. His work dispenses yellow in abundance. Why? The sun-drenched south of France inspired him, and art research has demonstrated how his palette changed dramatically when he moved there.

So many charming vistas on our recent sojourn to the area—fields of poppies, mountains, charming villages set alongside canals or on vertiginous slopes. One of my favorite excursions was our visit to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where our guide had planned a four-hour shopping trip. It was market day, and the streets and squares would be packed with vendors.

One hour of shopping is about fifty-nine minutes too many for me, so since our group was small (five Americans), my husband suggested driving a very short way out of town to visit Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, the mental hospital where Van Gogh spent most of the last year of his life (1889-1890). Thankfully, everyone else was on board with that plan too. The hospital wing where Van Gogh stayed is still used by patients, but the compound’s other portion has been turned into a museum (and gift shop) that includes a recreation of his room and overlooks the garden.

Because he’d admitted himself to the hospital, he had the run of the grounds, and was even given an extra room to use as a painting studio. Reproductions of some of the 150 paintings he made there are on display outdoors against the backdrop of those same scenes as they are today, including precise profiles of distant mountains.

Our guide had an interesting take on one of his most famous paintings, “Starry Night” (pictured). While it’s often cited as evidence of his disordered mental state, she said that, as a resident of Provence, the swirling air and twisted cypresses remind her of the mistral winds, which blow so strongly and even violently at certain seasons.

Viewing Van Gogh’s work is always exhilarating, but tinged with sadness for his life cut short and for the lack of appreciation he received during it. I took heart from the quotation of his and hope it accurately expresses his feeling. It’s a great philosophy for struggling creative people everywhere: “If I am worth anything later, I am worth something also now, for wheat is wheat, even if people think it is grass in the beginning.”

What is Murder?

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England, Wales, and Northern Ireland have abolished this law. It’s been deemed unconstitutional in Canada, as breaching the principles of fundamental justice. Yet the United States still has it—at the federal level and in most states—and no other country relies on it more. Hawai`i, Michigan, and Kentucky are the only states to have abolished it. A few states are pulling back, but others still may impose the death penalty for it. And still others are trying to expand its scope.

Most Americans are unaware of this law, despite its draconian legal consequences. That includes most of the people charged under it.

As a writer of mystery and crime fiction, I see considerable opportunities for drama inherent in the “felony murder rule,” which punishes people for killings they didn’t actually commit. When a murder occurs during the commission of certain crimes (possibly kidnapping, robbery, rape, arson), not only are the main perpetrators held responsible, but also their accomplices, co-conspirators, or marginal participants. They can be convicted of murder, even if there was no intent to harm any victims.

In a recent New Yorker article, award-winning university professor, journalist, and MacArthur Fellow Sarah Stillman compiled a review of how a law like this can go wrong. Her article on felony murder garnered her a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting and is well worth a read in its entirety to unpack some of the complications and nuance.

Although you can imagine scenarios where more than one person is culpable in a murder case, Stillman provides some telling examples of when it hasn’t worked that way:

  • In Florida, Sadik Baxter was searching parked cars for cash, caught, handcuffed, and placed in a police car. His friend driving their car fled the scene, chased by the police. When he lost control, he killed two bicyclists. Both men were charged with felony murder. Read more here. Twelve years later, Sadik’s life sentence without parole is still under appeal.
  • Two men trying to steal copper wire from a Tulsa-area radio station tower electrocuted themselves. One died. Recovering from his burns in a hospital, the other man was charged with first-degree murder, as was the dead man’s girlfriend who was their driver.
  • Three teenage girls in Tennessee overdosed on fentanyl before their high school graduation ceremony; two died, the third was charged with murder.
  • Five Alabama youths were breaking into unoccupied houses; the police arrived, and one of the boys who had a gun was shot and killed by an officer. Three of the other boys pled down the felony murder charge, but LaKeith Smith insisted on a trial. His sentence was 65 years, reduced to 55, and most recently reduced to 30 years. Read more here.
  • Two young Minneapolis women are serving time after a man they had just met killed a drug dealer. They may be eligible for release after the Minnesota legislature last November revised its felony murder law retroactively to consider intent. Fully one-third of Minnesota prisoners serving time for murder had felony murder convictions. Read more here.

While authorities hope the felony murder rule will deter inherently dangerous crimes from occurring, given that most people don’t even know about it, its deterrent effect is questionable. Victims’ families themselves have protested the law’s unfair application. But prosecutors like it because, threatened with a first-degree murder conviction, those accused often plead guilty to a lesser charge or agree to testify against their confederates.

The full scope of the law’s impact is unknown, but unpublished state-level data suggest there have been more than 10,000 felony murder convictions nationwide.

The Murder of Mr. Ma by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan

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This new light-hearted crime adventure is a book I’ve been looking forward to for some months. I already admire SJ Rozan’s award-winning mysteries featuring New York City private detectives Bill Smith and Lydia Chin. Although it is The Murder of Mr. Ma, co-written with media executive John Shen Yen Nee, is vastly different from the Smith/Chin stories, but equally entertaining. It features my favorite fictional detective, Tang dynasty Judge Dee Ren Jie in a 20th century version.

Judge Dee arrives in 1924 London to investigate the murders of former colleagues from the Chinese Labour Corps. (During World War I, the British government recruited several hundred thousand workers from its colonies and elsewhere to perform non-military duties, in order to free up British soldiers for fighting. Some 96,000 of these workers were Chinese.) Judge Dee’s war role was to mediate when a Chinese worker ran afoul of the military authorities. Military man William Bard, now an inspector in London’s Metropolitan Police force, became Dee’s nemesis.

Soon after his arrival in London, Dee meets a young academic, Lao She, a man with little worldly experience but a good heart, who acts as Dee’s guide and sounding board. Lao is Watson to Dee’s Holmes, recording their adventures and asking the pertinent questions that let Dee’s intellectual powers shine. The affectionate and sometimes prickly relationship between them is also reminiscent of the Holmes/Watson duo.

It doesn’t take Dee long to find old friends and acquaintances in the London Chinese community. In particular, he encounters Sergeant Hoong Liang, whose father taught Dee a full menu of Chinese martial arts skills, something that comes in handy on numerous dramatic occasions throughout this story. Dee also reaches out to knowledgeable characters in London’s underworld. Like Holmes, his circle includes people high and low.

Between his fighting skills, his gift for mimicry and disguise, and his flawless logic, Dee is a real superhero. But he does have one serious flaw. The pain of his wartime injuries was treated with opium, and he’s become addicted. On top of trying to find the murderer of his friends and persuade the police—especially his old enemy, Bard—to take the murders of the Chinese men seriously, he’s suffering the ill effects of drug withdrawal.

The story moves at breakneck speed and involves a subculture of London life not usually dealt with in mystery stories, but full of atmosphere and (mostly) charming peculiarities. It is an exciting ride, and though some of the antics must be taken with a grain of salt, it remains great fun throughout.

Ellery Queen, May/June 2024

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Another winner! So many good stories in this issue of “The World’s Leading Mystery Magazine.” You can subscribe or order individual issues online.

Here are a few of my favorites from the May/June issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, several of which had great can’t-stop-reading opening lines:

  • “What do you know about Kool-Aid?” Clayton Ellicott asked. First line from Gregory Fallis’s “Where’s Dookie?” An art world mystery, which, along with Michael Bracken’s humorous “Bermuda Triangle” about a missing musical instrument, prove that shenanigans in the creative fields are not limited to those perpetrated by us authors. Bracken’s long first line puts you right in the scene and in the mood: “Erica Witherspoon had asked to meet at Coda’s, an upscale drinking establishment two blocks from the concert hall she managed, and I was sitting in a back booth finishing a gin and tonic when she walked in.”
  • “Poor Betsy might so easily have perished, only she didn’t. Her misfortune wasn’t quite of that magnitude.” From R.T. Raichev’s “Blind Witness,” in which a crime writer is cleverly lured into involving herself in a real-life case, much against her better instincts.
  • “Stepping out of her car, Miuri feels a wave of despondency wash over her.” In “Seppuku” by Geneviève Blouin, in which you get not only the cultural milieu of French-speaking Montreal, but also the Japanese cultural background of the detective and the sad, escalating crime itself, as foreshadowed in that grim first line.
  • “First I saw that snake-green car, long and low and not quite Christian.” In “When Baptists Go Bad,” by H. Hodgkins, a story that proves there’s a solution for everything, at least in fiction.

Happy Reading!

Weekend Movie Pick: Wildcat

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The award-winning author Flannery O’Connor is something of an acquired taste. You may be familiar with her Southern Gothic stories, her preoccupation with religion, especially Roman Catholicism (she attended mass daily), her deep understanding of human nature and its propensity to darkness and violence, and her startling candor. She said, for example, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” Lastly, we recall her suffering with the crippling autoimmune condition systemic lupus erythematosus, which took her father’s life, and whose inevitable difficult progression she knew all too well.

O’Connor died at age 39. Now she comes blazing back to life in this bracing movie directed and co-written (with Shelby Gaines) by Ethan Hawke and starring his daughter, Maya Hawke, as O’Connor and Laura Linney as her mother, Regina (trailer), both of whom do brilliant work here. Flannery lived with her mother almost all of her life, and their relationship was obviously pivotal to the author’s view of human nature and its shortcomings.

O’Connor never gave her stories’ characters an easy way out, they never defaulted to a formulaic happy ending or an excess of sentimentality. What comes through in the stories is how strongly she rejected the shallow “niceness” of the people around her. Under her characters’ good manners and professed propriety, she saw a core of racism and religious hypocrisy. Her own mother was the epitome of Southern graciousness and, naturally, did not understand Flannery’s writing at all.

The film weaves together scenes from O’Connor’s life and relationships with dramatized excerpts from her stories. (It helps probably to be somewhat familiar with the actual stories, but works, regardless.) Interestingly, the mostly awful male characters in these recreations are played by a succession of actors, whereas Hawke and Linney play the sparring (mostly) female characters. They approach each of these fictional relationships fresh and without condescension. Relationships are complicated; you can love and despise a person at the same time.

Critic Jeffrey M. Anderson wrote, “This fine depiction of a great author avoids typical biopic trappings, instead concentrating on the rhythms of the artistic process and capturing O’Connor’s voice in a visual way.” Some critics object to the intrusion of the stories in the narrative of her life, but to me they illustrate so much, so effectively, showing us what she thought and found important.

Below left is a photo of the Little Library outside O’Connor’s childhood home on Lafayette Square in Savannah, which we visited a few years ago. She loved birds, especially peacocks, and raised many of them. The movie scenes take place at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in New York with her publisher, and mostly around Milledgeville, Georgia, where the family relocated when she was a teenager. We visited the house (below right) and museum in Milledgeville last year.

Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 56%; audiences 74%.

bookshare, Flannery O'Connor, peacock
Bookshare box outside Flannery O’Connor’s girlhood home with an adored peacock (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)