Category Archives: Reading . . .

***Charleston

Posted on by
Longwood, Christmas, poinsettias

photo: Vicki Weisfeld

By Margaret Bradham Thornton – There’s something about a man who’s “too perfect.” The feeling that something will go wrong hangs over your head as you turn the pages, waiting . . .

In this debut novel, Eliza Poinsett is the daughter of an old Charleston family. (Supposedly, she’s a descendant of  diplomat Joel Roberts Poinsett, a Charlestonian who introduced the flower that became the ubiquitous Christmas plant.) Educated at Princeton and Columbia, Eliza decamped to England after the love of her life, Henry Heyward, told her he was marrying someone else. His wife-to-be Issie was pregnant, and the marriage lasted not much longer than it took for her to produce young Lawton. Henry sued for custody and got it, and Issie departed for less socially correct climes.

At the start of the book, Eliza has established herself in England with a job, a pending fellowship, and Jamie, her proper English boyfriend. Then she runs into Henry at a wedding. He’s available, Jamie doesn’t really move her, and she’s on the verge of her first return trip to Charleston in years, to attend her step-sister’s coming out party.

She waffles about going, but of course she does, straight into the snares Henry quite cheerfully admits he’s setting for her. At one point, she tells now nine-year-old Lawton that she prefers tennis to sailing, because “I could never figure out which way the wind was blowing.” Ah, but the reader can.

Nevertheless, Eliza dithers half-heartedly, weighing the pain of missed opportunities in England against the hope of second chances. Since the book is written from Eliza’s point of view, it would have been helpful to explore more deeply what underlies her ambivalence.

The author does a wonderful job of evoking Charleston—its geography, weather, history, architecture, and most of all, culture. That part of the book I enjoyed a lot. In other areas, the text signals “research!” or some obvious error plants a seed of doubt about the whole enterprise. For example, she refers to a pastel portrait as a “painting” or to a watercolor “canvas.” Those are slip-ups a good editor should have helped her avoid and they would have mattered less if Eliza weren’t an art historian, supposedly up on such basics.

For my taste, the book is too much of a soap opera romance, moving at a soap opera pace, with only its admirable atmospherics to sustain it. The ending, which I won’t reveal, shouldn’t burst out of the blue as it does; it needed some careful foreshadowing. Again, an editor should have helped with that.

I was puzzled about the naming of the principal characters Henry H. and Eliza, since the parallel with the more famous duo stops with the names. The explanation is in an author interview with Adam Parker in The (Charleston) Post and Courier. Thornton said,

“When we restored our house, we found on the original paint layer of a door jamb the names and heights of the Heyward children who had lived in the house in the 1830s. I liked the idea of taking the name of one of the children for one of the main characters. In Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion,’ Henry Higgins brings Eliza Doolittle into the mannered world of aristocratic London. In ‘Charleston,’ Henry goes in the opposite direction and brings Eliza into the untamed world of Lowcountry swamps.”

OK, but without that explanation, and perhaps with it, it’s a confusing choice.

I wish there were perfect men like Henry in the world waiting to sweep us gals off our feet, but, meanwhile, we have the fascinating city of Charleston. As New York Times reviewer Meghan Daum says, in this book, “the real femme fatale is the city itself, a place where the breeze in the laurel oak sounds ‘like a slow kind of applause.’” The story takes place around 1991, and I wonder how much Charleston—whose ways and mores here seem set in amber—has changed in the interim.

***Cold Blood, Hot Sea

Posted on by
Maine, lobstermen, boat

David Nicholls, creative commons license

By Charlene D’Avanzo – This story, billed as “A Mara Tusconi Mystery,” introduces Mara, age 31, whose work at the Maine Oceanographic Institute (MOI) centers on the timely subject of climate change. D’Avanzo deserves credit for taking on the difficult task of making a science topic accessible to a general audience and taking advantage of the possibilities for drama inherent in this contentious field.

The story holds several key points of friction. First, between Mara and an aquaculture startup corporation up the Maine coast a short distance, which she believes may be fudging its data—anathema for any reputable scientist. And, second, between her fellow climate researchers and an apparently well funded cadre of climate change deniers who increasingly resort to spying, sabotage, and threats of physical violence. She has her personal issues as well: she gets seasick easily and she’s a behind-the-scenes player, deathly afraid of public speaking. At the same time, she’s trying to persuade Maine lobstermen that her research isn’t the threat, but the underlying changes in sea temperatures that could jeopardize their livelihoods.

As the novel begins, Mara and other MOI researchers head out to sea on their ship Intrepid to launch huge data-gathering buoys that will reveal ocean temperature trends. The buoy of her friend and colleague Harvey (a woman) goes into the water without incident. Because Mara is seasick, she turns the launch of her buoy over to Peter Riley, a young MOI PhD. Something goes disastrously wrong with the winch, the buoy slips, and fatally injures Peter.

An old MOI hand advises Mara to investigate Peter’s death on her own, secretly. She says the organization’s administrators may try to cover up any problems, in order not to scare off potential funders. Thus amateur sleuth Mara starts on a bit of a whirlwind of plot-driven activity.

D’Avanzo gives Mara a large cast of potential allies and antagonists, almost too many to flesh out in sufficient detail. Partly because the novel is told strictly from Mara’s point of view, we don’t get to know these other characters in very well. Stronger characters would create more unpredictability in the outcome and make me more invested in it.

When the opportunity arises for Mara to play a more prominent role in the climate change debate, she must weigh the risks of harassment along with the opportunities to make a vital contribution, and her personal strengths against her fears.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.

*****The Far Empty

Posted on by
Chisos Mountains, West Texas

photo: Robert Dees, creative commons license

Written by J. Todd Scott – It’s hard to believe this well-crafted crime thriller is a debut novel. The author’s experience as a DEA agent lends authority to his prose, and his meticulous rendering of the Big Bend country south and east of El Paso, Texas, and its fictional town, Murfee, takes you to that dusty back-of-beyond. Outlaw country.

The two key voices in this multiple point-of-view novel are those of 17-year-old Caleb Ross, son of Big Bend County’s despotic sheriff, who’s called “the Judge,” and new deputy Chris Cherry, once a local high school football star. Caleb’s mother disappeared 13 months before the novel begins, and he’s convinced his father killed her, which colors their every interaction. Cherry lost any hope of a football career when he blew out a knee and still isn’t sure where his new future lies.

Caleb and Cherry are lost souls, floating under the brilliant West Texas stars, staying out of the deadly orbit of the sheriff, and trying to find out what kind of men they will be. Scott does not give them an easy path, and you’ll hold your breath as they are repeatedly tested.

These two narrators are joined by another deputy, Duane Dupree—a living, violence-addicted, coked-up example of why it’s best to steer clear of the Judge’s snares. You also hear from the Judge himself. One way or another, he knows everyone’s secrets.

Not only are these male characters convincingly portrayed, but Scott does a good job with his women too. You get part of the story from the perspectives of Caleb’s friend America, his teacher Anne, and Cherry’s live-in girlfriend Melissa. Their problems are believable and compelling enough for the characters to take the actions they do.

You have to root for Deputy Cherry, who has a bad habit of actually trying to investigate stuff. Early on, he responds to a call from a rancher who’s found a dessicated corpse and, while the Judge’s other deputies would gladly assume the deceased was “just another beaner” who died in the desert, Cherry isn’t sure. Because of the extent of the sheriff’s corruption as well as his confidence in his absolute authority, he reacts to Cherry’s probes like a horse responds to flies. They warrant a twitch, maybe, but no more.

The chili really starts bubbling when a gunshot couple is found in a burning SUV, far from anything.

Scott keeps his plot threads alive and moving at a clip. I never lost interest for a moment and even forgive a little deus ex Máximo at the end. (Not a typo. Trust me.) Readers who enjoyed The Cartel, which appears on many lists of the best thrillers of last year, will appreciate this sharp view from the northern side of the border.

A longer version of this review appeared recently here on CrimeFictionLover.com.

*****Redemption Road

Posted on by
rural church

photo: Wayne Stadler, creative commons license

Written by John Hart, narrated by Scott Shepherd. You’d never guess this crime thriller is award-winning author John Hart’s first novel with a female protagonist. He writes from her point of view compellingly and expertly slips himself into her high heels where gender perspective makes a difference—as a detective partner, as a daughter, and as unofficial guardian to two troubled teens.

Elizabeth Black is a detective in a mid-sized North Carolina city who over 13 years has proved herself a good cop, though the men around her seem anxious to dismiss all that as soon as she encounters difficulties. And she encounters them by the bushel.

When a radio call leads her to an abandoned house where a missing 18-year-old girl, Channing Shore, might be hidden away, Elizabeth doesn’t wait for backup. A few hours later, Elizabeth and Channing walk out. In the basement are the bodies of Brendan and Titus Monroe with 18 bullet wounds. Bullets lodged in the floor suggest at least some of the shots occurred after the men were down.

There’s no question Channing was raped and tortured for 40 hours and that Elizabeth saved her. But the case has drawn the attention of the North Carolina attorney general, who sends state police investigators to determine whether the brothers’ death involved police brutality. A newspaper headline says it all: “Hero Cop or Angel of Death?”

As a rookie, Elizabeth looked up to and perhaps even loved a detective named Adrian Wall, a detective’s detective whom other cops and the media admired. Wall has spent the last dozen years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He’s released just as the pressure on Elizabeth Black is mounting, but he’s no sooner out than a second woman’s body is found killed in the same way. Then a third.

From that point on, the two stories—Elizabeth’s quest to clear her reputation and be reinstated on the force and her desire to prove Adrian Wall’s innocence of the women’s murders are intertwined.

One consistent ally is retired lawyer Faircloth “Crybaby” Jones, nearly 90, who unsuccessfully defended Wall during his trial and has regretted that failure ever since. Crybaby is a wonderful character who combines the courtliness of the Old South with a fox’s wily instincts.

In a post-book interview, author Hart revealed that he’d basically written the book—some 300 pages—before discovering that the protagonist was not whom he had chosen. He found that the center of the book, its heart, was Elizabeth. Changing the point of view of a novel involves a lot more than changing “he’s” to “she’s.” That was a decision with time-gobbling consequences that has really paid off for readers.

Actor Scott Shepherd does a brilliant job narrating this novel with its range of characters. Often a female narrator is selected for a book with a female protagonist, but his rendering of Elizabeth is perfect. She’s female, but not in any clichéd way. The same goes for Channing and the several other women. He has just the right amount of easygoing South in his voice and avoids caricature. Amazing how one talent can produce all these different people! Just terrific.

*****Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story

Posted on by
war damage, bomb

photo: Feyrouz at English Wikipedia, creative commons license

During the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon in the late 1980s and 1990s, the army gave its outposts botanical names, which led to an otherwise undistinguished hill’s being called “Pumpkin.” In military radio traffic, a dead soldier was an “oleander” and an injured soldier merely a “flower,” species undefined.

Pumpkinflowers, then, refers not to a bucolic late-summer farm field, but rather to the soldiers physically and sometimes mentally wounded by service in a hostile land, where their presence became increasingly indefensible. Matti Friedman tells the stories of these young men and their challenges feelingly and at close hand, as he was one of them.

Friedman is a journalist born in Canada, who lamented the lack of writing about that occupation and its impact on the young Israeli men who served there, most of them fresh out of high school. So he set about telling their story himself, believing today’s Middle East situation had some of its seeds in this unnamed and largely ignored security zone conflict.

Initially, as so often happens in military history, the generals were fighting the last war. They thought the enemy comprised somewhat ragtag Palestinian guerrillas, but before long, the occupiers faced local Shiites, who called themselves the Party of God, Hezbollah. This group was generously funded by Iran and Syria and able to call on a seemingly endless supply of would-be suicide bombers. Hezbollah also soon seized the lead in the propaganda war.

That the TV images were the real weapons, that the Hezbollah fighters and Israeli soldiers had been turned into actors in an attack staged for the camera—these weren’t things anyone understood yet. . . . Within a few years elements of the security zone war would, in turn, appear elsewhere and become familiar . . . : Muslim guerrillas operating in a failed and chaotic state; small clashes in which the key actor is not the general but the lieutenant or private; the use of a democracy’s sensitivities, public opinion, and free press as weapons against it.

(The Body of an American, a prize-winning play reviewed here, makes a similar point.)

Hezbollah was not interested in a negotiated withdrawal of Israeli troops or achievement of some limited goal: “It is a vision and an approach, not only a military reaction,” one of its leaders has written. Subsequent actions continue to demonstrate this larger view, which suggests limits on a strictly military response.

Through discussion of the Four Mothers movement, which supported withdrawal from Lebanon, Friedman explores the political conflict between the leftists of the dwindling kibbutz movement who in the 1990s believed in compromise and thought peace was possible and the rightists who believed peace was a dangerous illusion and who currently dominate Israeli politics.

The last section of the book describes Friedman’s return to Lebanon (using his Canadian passport) and his rediscovery of the remains of the Pumpkin, a place as tangible to him today, in its continued importance, as it ever was when he served there.

Not a long book at 225 pages, it’s insightful and well written, condensing both human interest and political analysis into the story of a single lost outpost. Author Lucette Lagnado says Friedman’s prose “manages to be lyrical, graceful, and deeply evocative even when tackling the harshest subjects imaginable,” and I certainly found it so.

 

****The Birdwatcher

Posted on by
birds

photo: Alan Schmierer, public domain

By William Shaw – “There were two reasons why William South did not want to be on the murder team. The first was that it was October. The migrating birds had begun arriving on the coast.The second was that, though nobody knew, he was a murderer himself.”

Birdwatching is an avocation that instills in its practitioners the virtues of patience, keen observation, and meticulous attention to detail, traits that police sergeant South brings to his work as well. He’s a Local District lead based in Kent and generally works with neighborhood groups, drug busts, traffic accidents. A good, solid copper. Murder, by contrast, is something a person can be driven to in a moment of panic and loss of control. The murder South committed took place when he was only 13 years old, and you soon understand whom he killed—his own father—and eventually you learn why.

South was born in Northern Ireland, son of a brutal enforcer in the Ulster Volunteer Force during the Troubles, and his father’s death was blamed on internecine rivalries within the UVF. To escape the violence all around them and with the intervention of a police sergeant sweet on his mum, mother and son were safely transplanted to Kent. Though he has become a policeman, South avoids any more contact with killing.

However, a new murder case changes all that, and South has been assigned to it, like it or not. The victim is South’s neighbor, retired school teacher Robert Rayner, a nice man living in a quiet place who’s been viciously beaten to death. The two bachelors have spent many hours together birding along the coast where they live. Despite the many hours spent and the friendship South thought they shared, it soon emerges that he actually knew very little about Rayner, and what he knows is faulty.

The rage that would produce a death such as Rayner’s is terrifyingly familiar to South, and in this well constructed plot, you understand it is destined to reverberate in unexpected ways. Overall, Shaw’s writing is clean and unlabored. The banter among members of the police team also are good, and much of it is funny. The characters are ones you come to care about, too.

***Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine – May & June 2016

Posted on by
scarecrow

photo: Brady Wahl, creative commons license

The first mystery when dealing with “The World’s Leading Mystery Magazine” is, what’s the name of this publication stuffed with short stories, anyway? The cover says Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, but the website calls it Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Best just to do what the cognoscenti do and call it EQMM and be done. Always a treasure-trove for mystery lovers, it’s in its 75th year, and all year long is publishing celebratory content.

The International Issue

The May issue is devoted to stories from international authors. Some of those I enjoyed most were:

  • “The Scarecrow’s Revenge” by Paul Halter (France) – this story is copyright 2016, but reads as if it is a Golden Age classic—in style, plot, and theme. Deadly fun.
  • “The Miracle on Christmas Eve” by Szu-Yen Lin (Taiwan) – a sweet story about a widowed father’s determination to preserve the myth of Santa Claus for his young son.
  • “An Elderly Lady Has Accommodation Problems” by Helene Tursten (Sweden) – you shouldn’t underestimate the determination of an old lady to cling to her apartment, in Scandinavia, as elsewhere!

Other stories are from Argentina (Jorge Luis Borges), Angola, Switzerland, Canada, Japan, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and Belgium and prove, in case proof were needed, that mystery is a universal language.

Mystery Writers of America Issue

In the June issue, the editors pay their respects to the Mystery Writers of America and feature new stories from authors who have won at least one of MWA’s several awards. Again, many riches to choose among, with special appreciation from me of:

  • “Puncher’s Chance” by Doug Allyn, who is not only an MWA winner but a frequent and highly popular author in EQMM. This was one of the best of his I’ve read. He captured the boxing world and the psychology of fighters superbly.
  • “The Unit” by T.J. MacGregor, whose 2002 novel Out of Sight won an Edgar Allen Poe award. I love how her website confesses upfront that her publisher advised her to use initials, not her name (Trish) because, and she quotes, “mysteries by men or androgynous people [think JK Rowling] were outselling mysteries by women”!
  • “The Night Watchman’s Wife” by William Dylan Powell. I’ve read a previous story about boat-dwelling, Lone Star-swilling, unlicensed Texas private investigator Billie and his pet monkey Ringo. Ringo is a charmer. Billie, too. Funny & fun.

Subscribe to EQMM with the link below or find single-issues in the magazine section of your local B&N.

***A Tapping at My Door

Posted on by
The Raven, MWA, Poe

Page by Ian Burt (photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

By David Jackson, narrated by Jonathan Keeble – The early chapters of this police procedural are tremendously intriguing. A woman copper in Liverpool is murdered in her back garden, with a dead raven splayed over her face. Only when the crime scene investigators remove the bird do they learn her eyes have been gouged—pecked?—out. And that the raven has a note attached to its leg saying ‘nevermore.’

Even for people who are not fans of Edgar Allen Poe, that’s spooky. And, it’s a puzzle the police must struggle to work out. Not too long afterward, another police officer is found murdered in his home, again with a dead bird nearby, carrying a new message.

While these crimes are bizarre, at least there’s something to work with. Both murdered officers were implicated in the death in custody of a mentally challenged youth a few years earlier. An investigation cleared the two officers of wrongdoing, but the family and a large segment of the public still blame them for this death. Accordingly, the family is questioned, with all the renewed mutual hostility one might anticipate.

When two more police are killed who seem to have no connection to the earlier tragedy, what are the investigators to think? Are these new deaths merely a diversion? Jackson does a good job portraying the fractured relationships between the community and the coppers, writ small in this family tragedy, and writ large. He presents the action through alternating perspectives, mostly those of DS Nathan Cody and the unknown murderer, whose motives ultimately—well, you can pass judgment on that.

Cody is the principal investigator of the crimes, and to his surprise he’s teamed up with a new murder unit detective, Megan Webley. Unbeknownst to the powers that be, Cody and Webley were once an item, engaged to be married even, until his love of the job put a wedge between them. They dance around each other, not wanting to bring up the past and wanting to get on with their current assignment. There’s a cop-killer out there, after all.

But Cody become unhinged in several run-of-the-mill situations and Webley is starting to doubt his mental stability. His strange outbursts and reckless self-endangerment hearken back to an experience a year earlier in which he was held and tortured by a mysterious group of kidnappers.

About the time of the lengthy flashback in which Cody relives this hostage situation for the sympathetic Webley—an experience he has refused to seek any counseling for—I began to lose interest. The gruesome nature of the torture seemed intended to titillate, not interest me in Cody as a character. From there on out, the plot followed the well-trodden path of escalating craziness and bad decisions, woman-of-interest in danger, and drawn-out final resolution, with a particularly ham-handed, flashinglightsallaround ‘sequel!!’ signaled at the end.

Since this was an audiobook, the narration inevitably affected my reaction. In some passages Jonathan Keeble was terrific, but in others, it was as if he were narrating a silent film (you can listen to a bit through the Amazon link below). They were jarringly melodramatic. In other words, a mixed bag.

****Love & Treasure

Posted on by
peacock

photo: kansaikate, creative commons license

By Ayelet Waldman – This lovely novel opens with a prologue set in 2013, involving elderly Jack Wiseman and his granddaughter Natalie. Her new husband has abandoned her, and she’s just quit her Manhattan attorney’s job to come stay with Jack in Red Hook, Maine, and her beloved grandfather is dying. It’s questionable which of them needs more tender care.

Searching a drawer, Jack runs across a worn black pouch containing a jeweled peacock dangling on a chain. “Whose was it?” Natalie asks, her curiosity aroused. “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know.” He charges her with the near-impossible task of returning it to its rightful owner, which will require unraveling its history.

The book then reveals how the pendant came into Jack’s hands at the close of World War II. It had been one item among thousands and thousands on the Hungarian Gold Train, a 42-car freight train the Germans were using to remove valuables—most of them looted from Hungarian Jews—to Berlin. The train was seized by French troops and finally came under U.S. military control and the contents warehoused in Salzburg, Austria. (The U.S. government kept most details about the Hungarian Gold Train secret for 50 years.)

Items were pilfered from the horde by thieves and the soldiers guarding it; U.S. military commanders used the warehouse as a department store for outfitting their quarters with fine china, silverware, crystal, furniture, and oriental rugs. Jack, in charge of the loot, had to comply with his superiors’ orders and was constantly frustrated at his inability to protect and preserve these treasures, much less return them to their rightful owners. His responsibilities as a soldier and as a Jew are at war within him.

Waldman writes compellingly about Jack’s situation and the treatment of the Displaced Persons flooding Salzburg, many of whom were concentration camp survivors. He meets one, a Hungarian with flame-red hair, Ilona Jakab, and falls in love. Jack keeps the peacock pendant in her memory, but never loses the feeling that taking it was dishonorable.

In her quest to fulfill her grandfather’s charge to find the pendant’s rightful present-day owner, Natalie travels to Budapest and finds much more than she expects. That section of the book is a treasure hunt, a mystery story, and a romance.

The last major section of the book dips back in time to 1913. It’s narrated by a libidinous psychiatrist charged with “treating” Nina S., an early suffragist who wears the pendant, and whom he rapidly concludes is quite sane, just at odds with her repressive father.

Natalie, Ilona, and Nina are interesting, compelling characters in challenging situations. Waldman doesn’t tell a good story once, but three times. Descriptions are vivid, characters’ motivations heartfelt, and conversations witty and spirited. Occasionally, she may be a little heavy-handed, and occasionally a verbal anachronism or clunky love scene sneaks in, but overall, the stories have strong narrative power. I don’t quite understand all the carping about this book in the mainstream media—each reviewer seeming to fixate on some different issue. I found it not only an exploration of conflicting loyalties, identity, and the struggle to be honorable, but also a fascinating historical mystery.

Love & Treasure is certainly timely, given recent renewed attention to the issue of Nazi plunder. The peacock pendant, silent witness to the pain and abuse of history, is the treasure in Waldman’s story, but love is the constant.

****Little Sister

Posted on by
Lake District

photo: Vicki Weisfeld.

By David Hewson – This third police procedural in Hewson’s Netherlands series again features Amsterdam police brigadier Pieter Vos and his misfit Frieslander colleague, Laura Bakker. The story centers on the plight of Mia and Kim Timmers—two from an original set of three. Mia and Kim have been institutionalized for a decade in a remote facility for young female mental patients deemed dangerous.

Ten years earlier, when the girls were 11, their parents and the third triplet, Little Jo, were murdered by parties unknown. That same night lead singer of the local pop band The Cupids was murdered and the girls accused of the crime.

The girls have aged out of their facility, and the psychiatrist in charge says they are no longer a danger. They are released. A male nurse assigned to drive them to an Amsterdam halfway house is found murdered, the girls have disappeared, and before long, another corpse is discovered. Did they do all this? Any of it? Secrets highly placed people have tried to hide for a decade are bursting to come out.

It’s a good study of the kinds and extent of evil that can occur when society judges some people not worth caring about and turns its back. Is what happens to the girls hidden or just not seen? Locating the institution on the island of Marken, connected to land (and reality, normalcy) by only a thin thread of road atop a grassy dyke, is symbolic as well as plot-relevant.

As in the earlier books in the series, Vos lives on his decrepit houseboat with wire-haired terrier Sam. Hewson’s descriptions of Amsterdam when Vos is walking Sam, for example, and of the part of the country where the sisters are from—the Waterland—are created with admirable atmospherics. He ably summons the low flat green country, its dykes and lakes, a land criss-crossed with sparkling channels where “life teemed beneath the emerald surface and nothing was quite what it seemed.”

Hewson provides plenty of interesting suspects, though some of them appear rather intermittently, and I had occasional difficulty recalling their identities. Although I enjoyed this book, it seemed about fifty pages longer than it needed to be, with some motivational untidiness around the climactic scene.

Hewson is an accomplished crime writer and has worked with Shakespeare scholar AJ Hartley on novelizations of Hamlet and Macbeth. I listened to Macbeth: The Novel, narrated by Alan Cumming, and Hewson’s prose—description of the witches, for example—was riveting. He brings that same ability to describe an environment in which difficult choices become inevitable to the story of Mia and Kim Timmers.

A longer version of this review appeared on CrimeFictionLover.com.