Category Archives: Crime

****Strange Gods: A Mystery

Posted on by
Lion cubs

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Annamaria Alfieri – Set in British East Africa in the early 20th century, this evocative mystery describes the colonial way of life, with all its pleasures and strains, its hypocrisy and search for cultural understanding, and the land’s lurking dangers and astonishing beauty. The murder of a white physician by a tribesman’s spear must be solved by a young, inexperienced colonial police officer, who argues (perhaps once too often) for a thorough investigation, in order to demonstrate the fairness of British justice. He’s opposed by the area’s District Commissioner who wants to summarily try and execute the first suspect who comes to light, the local medicine man.

While the sexual mores might be more elastic in that time and place than back home in Britain, the romantic interplay between the police officer and the dead man’s niece cannot escape the push and pull of social inhibitions and desire. Throughout the book the two trade the role of protagonist, augmented by insights from an African tribal lieutenant struggling to bridge the cultural gap.

The book was written with an obvious love for the land and its peoples and the complexity of life there. Not for nothing did Alfieri include an epigram from Isak Dinensen: “Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one.”

Are you as fascinated by Africa’s history and secrets as Alfieri is? Check out this African reading list by Swapna Krishna.

****Don’t Get Mad, Get Even

Posted on by
Christmas lights

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

By Barb Goffman – These “15 Tales of Revenge and More” are an amusing exploration of the way put-upon individuals’ revenge fantasies, carried out, can deliver juicy justice or go amazingly awry. Though some of the stories—many of which have been award-nominated—are told straight, in most, you can picture the diabolical twinkle in the author’s eye.

The collection offers a chance to reflect on the recent the holiday season, too, as a number of the stories feature the special opportunities for mayhem inherent in Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, and Christmas traditions—all that tricky family togetherness, all that food and gifts-with-a-message, that white carpet—as as well as tyro reporters with unorthodox ways of getting a story, deathbed confessions, and yard sale treasure.

If you enjoy clever short stories, the lively and refreshing reads in this Goffman’s tales will be right up your alley.

***Three Ellery Queens

Posted on by
Green Door, Arizona

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

The three latest Ellery Queen Mystery Magazines contain 31 short stories—historical, locked room, humorous, and many other splinter categories from U.S. and international authors. Reaching into this Santa’s bag of offerings, I’ll pull out some of my favorites:

  • “The Lure of the Green Door” by Norizuki Rintarō is a locked room mystery featuring a Japanese sleuth named, yes, Norizuki Rintarō and his humorously prickly girlfriend Sawada Honami. Says EQMM, he’s part of the “new traditionalist” movement in Japanese mystery writing, emphasizing puzzles, and he’s put together a good one here! (11/14)
  • Suzanne Arruda’s “Deep Shaft” effectively conjures Prohibition-era Kansas and the trouble city slicker outsiders can get themselves into. She’s the author of the mystery series featuring adventuresome, world-traveling photojournalist Jade Del Cameron Mysteries set in WWI and the 1920s. (11/14)
  • “Getaway Girl,” by Zoë Z. Dean, her first published story and one with a great last line: “there was something terrifying about a girl that good at living.” (11/14)
  • Joyce Carol Oates’s equivocal “Equatorial” is an accomplished cat-and-mouse game, but who is which? (12/14)
  • “Concrete Town” by Michael Wiley is set mostly in a bar, perhaps inspired by work on his irresistibly titled detective novel, The Bad Kitty Lounge. (12/14)
  • Another first story, “Chung Ling Soo’s Greatest Trick,” by Russell W. Johnson, was most entertaining, but then, I like mysteries featuring magicians! (1/15)
  • Accomplished novelist Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote the tension-filled “Christmas Eve at the Exit” about a woman’s attempted escape from an abusive husband. (1/15)

Always something to admire in these EQMM collections! Available in many bookstores and digitally.

*** New Jersey Noir

Posted on by

New Jersey NoirEdited by Joyce Carol Oates. It isn’t a coincidence that I’m reviewing this 2011 book of noir short stories in the middle of two weeks of Sunday blog posts about a celebration of JCO’s teaching. When I knew I was going to the event, I grabbed this book from the “to read” pile.

Noir is distinguished from other types of mystery and suspense fiction by having a protagonist who’s a suspect, a perpetrator, or even a victim—an insider to the situation. Pretty much anyone but a detective/investigator. Often the main characters have a boatload of problems, usually of their own making. My favorite definition of these protagonists is crime writer Dennis Lehane’s: “In Greek tragedy, they fall from great heights. In noir, they fall from the curb.”

I’ve been an “in principle” admirer of Akashic Books’ now lengthy series of place-based noir anthologies, and picked up New Jersey Noir at a local bookstore event, where Oates spoke about it and introduced (I think) one or two of the contributors. Now I’ve finally read it and am disappointed to say many of the 19 stories and poems felt as if they could have happened anywhere.

Sheila Kohler’s creepy “Wunderlich,” for example, is about the bleak territory of aging, not the peculiar dynamic of New Jersey. Various other tales have no more than a whiff of Garden State verisimilitude, which violates the underlying rationale of the series, I’d think. Collectively, these stories hardly scratch the surface of the state’s noir potential, as a glance at any of our daily newspapers would reveal. People in New Jersey fall from curbs like lemmings.

Too many of the stories (for my taste) lean heavily on substance abuse problems, which it won’t surprise the reader to learn cause all kinds of heartache. I rather liked the Bradford Morrow story set in Grover’s Mill, perhaps because I’d just spent considerable creative time there, myself. “Glass Eels” by Jeffrey Ford captures the loneliness of New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, but is too similar in action to Robert Arellano’s “Kettle Run.” A story by Oates, “Run Kiss Daddy,” delivers a sufficiently oppressive atmosphere and dark underbelly to be the setup for a longer piece of writing. To me, the most interesting story is Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Too Near Real,” in which the protagonist follows the Google street view vehicle around Princeton, then watches himself “on the map.” Fresh and entertaining.

****Sandrine’s Case

Posted on by

Sandrine's Case, Thomas H. CookBy Thomas H. Cook & narrated by Brian Holsopple. This psychological suspense novel provides a day-by-day recounting of the capital trial of Professor Samuel Madison, accused of the murder of his wife Sandrine. A first-person narration, Madison tells the reader up-front that he did kill her, which gives the author a tall mountain to scale in order to make this protagonist likeable, so he doesn’t try. The prosecutor, the police, his defense lawyer, possibly even Sandrine herself, and certainly the reader decide Sam is “one cold fish.”

Sam and Sandrine are erudite college professors at a second-rate college in a small Georgia town. He claims her death from too much alcohol and too many pills was suicide; the police and prosecutor think otherwise. He calls a note found by her deathbed a “suicide note,” but hasn’t read it. It turns out to be about her academic work, about Cleopatra, and when the police detective refers to “the Egyptian Queen,” Sam—instead of behaving like a recently bereaved husband, confronted with his dead wife’s last words—says, “Cleopatra was not Egyptian.” She was Greek, evidently. This and similar pedantics show how intellectually superior he feels to the authorities and the jury, an intellectual condescension that puts him, as he slowly realizes, in considerable risk of his life.

At first, the day in court punctuated by Sam’s lengthy flashbacks to his and Sandrine’s life together seemed awkwardly handled, though I got used to it. For the middle third of the book, I thought “too much Gone Girl,” but other readers will have to decide that for themselves. In a way, this book might not have worked if Gone Girl hadn’t preceded it. I can’t be sure, because I can’t unread those pages.

The plot is nevertheless intriguing and ends up in an interesting place. The characters—especially Madison’s attorney and several minor characters—are people the reader can imagine breathing real Georgia air. Not so much Sandrine and the daughter Alexandria, but that’s the thing with a first-person narration—is may just be that Madison’s view of them is not quite in focus, either. Holsopple does an excellent narration of most of the characters, especially the relentless prosecutor, but the venomous way his Alexandria spits out the word “Dad” in nearly every line of her dialog became like the jabbing bite of Cleopatra’s asp.

* The Highway

Posted on by

By C.J. Box – I met this popular and award-winning thriller author at a conference two years ago, and he was so highly praised there, I figured I was missing something by CJ Box, The Highwaynot having read any of his books. I still am. Box, a Wyoming native, sets his books in the West, with his series character, Joe Pickett, a Wyoming game warden. This book (a gift) isn’t part of that series, and it was a real disappointment. The book is told through the eyes of several of the characters, including long-haul trucker Ronald Pergram, who calls himself the Lizard King, for his well developed schemes for trapping, torturing, and murdering “lot lizards,” the prostitutes who prowl the parking areas of the big Interstate truck stops—and any other women he comes across when the need to “go hunting” overtakes him.

Being inside the head of this character and privy to his disturbed (and not very original) thoughts is some especially sordid category of TMI. It’s a relief when Box switches to the point of view of the women in the story. We follow Cassie Dewell, a new Investigator for the Lewis and Clark County (Montana) Sheriff’s Department. Inexperienced and unsure of herself, she ends up alone on the trail of disappeared teen sisters—disappeared, as the reader knows, by Pergram. And parts of the story are told from the perspective of the younger of the sisters, sixteen-year-old Gracie Sullivan. Box handles girl teen-speak rather well, and the girls seem plausible enough, as is Cassie.

The book doesn’t lack for tension. During the early scenes in which Pergram is chasing down the girls’ little red car in his 80,000-pound Peterbilt (teach your daughters to pay attention to the “check engine” light!), I wasn’t sure I could keep reading. A number of Amazon readers’ comments show mine was a common reaction: “I almost took an early exit from ‘The Highway.’” “I hope that ‘The Highway’ was just the result of [Box] taking a wrong turn on a bad day.” “I love the Pickett series, but I just couldn’t stomach this one.” I may have to try again.

The West is a great place to live in, but Ronald Pergram’s head is not.

****Standing in Another Man’s Grave

Posted on by

Ian Rankin, Standing in Another Man's Grave, mystery novel, John RebusBy Ian Rankin (read By James Macpherson) – Working my way through the mystery and thriller-writers’ “best of” lists for 2013, I found myself once again in the thrall of Edinburgh detective John Rebus. In this book he is retired and languishing as a civilian in the soon-to-be-dismantled Cold Cases unit but emerges into the light of day when the disappearances of two young women suggest a connection with one of his dusty files. Then we’re hurtle pell-mell into fine-honed police procedural territory. Rebus is one of those complex, cynical characters you never tire of, and Rankin’s story is a good one.

I was tempted to pair this review with that of C.J. Box’s The Highway (reviewed 9/29), partly because of superficial plot similarities, but mostly because of the profoundly different reader experiences they evoke. Both are about a serial killer of women, hiding in a small town where he’s known and the frantic effort to find him just in case his most recent victim is still alive. The similarity stops there. Now I know why agents and publishers tell authors not to send them manuscripts written from the evil protagonist’s point of view. The Highway put me off entirely.

Rebus scolds himself (ineffectually) for his bad behavior, and his long-time partner Siobhan Clarke despairs. “He’s not a team player—never was, never will be,” said New York Times reviewer Marilyn Stasio, and naturally that puts him perpetually on very thin ice in the police department and is an endless source of reader enjoyment as he skates circles around the plodding conformists. It will be interesting to see how Rankin triple Axels his way into cases henceforth. Also, Macpherson’s reading is super!

A number of Rebus novels have been turned into UK television programs. The ones featuring Ken Stott as Rebus are considered the best and the only ones I’ve seen. Also entertaining.

Related articles

Human Trafficking: An Everywhere Story

Posted on by

10/23 UPDATE: Hidden in Plain Sight, a new study released 10/21 by the Urban Institute and Northeastern University evaluates for the first time the comprehensive state of labor trafficking in the United States. Just one fact from the study shows how little most people understand about this problem. How do these trafficked people come to the United States? Most of us might guess they walk through the desert bordering Arizona and New Mexico. That’s wrong. Some 71 percent of them arrive by airplane. The study’s grim conclusion: “There’s a long way to go when it comes to thinking about how to prevent 21st-century slavery within American borders.”

Original Post:

city street, night, noir

(photo: farm3.staticflickr.com)

Once Governor Rick Snyder signs a series of new bills sent him last week by the Michigan legislature, minors involved in prostitution will be treated as victims instead of criminals, and children will be able to clear their records of crimes their traffickers forced them to commit. Amazingly, such laws are not universal in the United States, according to Rachel Lloyd, who created the New York-based Girls Educational and Mentoring Services (GEMS) to help girls and young women experiencing commercial sexual exploitation or domestic trafficking.

The message of a current exhibit at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, uses quotes and photos to tell the story of four people, three from the local area, to show that “human trafficking is a local problem, and there are things people can do in Eastern Iowa to fight it,” says exhibit organizer Mindy Pfab. She wants people to realize that even if they don’t know someone who is being trafficked, they may well know someone who is vulnerable—runaways and other children with unstable home lives, minority and low-income children, those with a history of sexual abuse, and young women involved with gang members—bearing in mind that the average age when a person is trafficked is 12.

A forum last Thursday in Lima, Ohio, focused on human trafficking in its annual Take Back the Night event at the Ohio State University-Lima campus. As the keynote speaker from the state Attorney General’s Office said, we will not “arrest our way out of” this problem. Reasons other simplistic solutions don’t work, including “why don’t they just leave?” arguments, are explored in Rachel Lloyd’s TEDxUChicago talk. Escape isn’t so easy. A little more than 12 years ago, Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped at knifepoint from her bedroom and found nine months later in a Utah town only 18 miles from her Salt Lake City home. As an articulate advocate for abused children, Smart provides compelling testimony (here in a New Yorker article by Margaret Talbot) about why the determination to survive sometimes means staying put.

It Happens Here

night walk

(photo: freeaussiestock.com)

I focused on these current stories from the American heartland to emphasize that no part of our country is immune from this problem. In the United States, several hundred thousand people—many of them children and teens—are sexually exploited and engaged in forced labor. This number includes both boys and girls, pre-teens, teens, and adults, native-born Americans, people smuggled in from other countries, and foreigners here legally. Journalist Faricour Hemani explores the range of countries and types of trafficking in a TEDx SugarLand talk that includes excerpts from situations uncovered in a 6-part BBC series.

Readers who work in the health care industry may be interested in a 10-minute Catholic Health Initiatives educational video introducing the topic of human trafficking (definitely safe for work). My friend Colleen Scanlon opens the video, which recognizes that many trafficked or sexually exploited individuals come into contact with the health care system, making it a potential point of intervention. Because these young people are living on the margins, solutions also must include economic empowerment, not just for current victims, but for preventing future victimization.

It Happens to Individuals

Prompted by Colleen’s video, I collected resources for this post, and they represent a sea of powerful individual stories, each one unique—stories of cruelty and resilience, tragedy and escape. These are real-life stories in numbers we don’t like to think about. Not just somewhere else. Here. And they are stories that need to be told until laws, such as Michigan’s change and society refocuses on prevention. Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell, shocked by the reality of human trafficking in his own country, took up the challenge in The Shadow Girls, reviewed here in 2013. There’s no bottom line to this, except for the greater need to be aware and beware. In Michigan, in Cedar Rapids, in Lima, Ohio, where you are.

Resources

Huffington Post’s “10 Things You Didn’t Know about Slavery and Human Trafficking and What You Can Do about It” – pleased to see New Jersey has some of country’s best anti-trafficking laws!

The Polaris Project – named after the North Star that guided slaves to freedom in the U.S.

GEMS – Girls Educational and Mentoring Services

Related articles

*** Three Ellery Queens

Posted on by
jaguar

“Spotted Ghost” by Lou Hedge

Finished three issues of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine recently—August 2014, September/October 2014, and, embarrassingly, August 2012. Some items in my reading pile are truly “aging in place”! For variety of locale and time, the monthly collections in this deliciously pulpy magazine can’t be beat. These three issues contain stories from Colonial America, to 1890s San Francisco, to modern Taiwan, to Belize City, where tourists hunt the elusive jaguar.

One of the scariest involved the escalating war of nerves between an adolescent boy and his new neighbor, written by popular short story writer David Dean, author of the novel The Thirteenth Child. A funny tale about a couple who owns a dry cleaners’ shop also appeared in the 8/14 issue, by British author Belinda Bauer, known for the “blackly funny” style of some of her books.

The most recent issue departs from longstanding EQMM tradition by including some stories with paranormal elements. Despite its title, “Ghost Town,” by Terence Faherty, does not. It refers to the near-abandoned Ocean City, New Jersey, in February, plagued by a series of mysterious break-ins. One of the shorter stories—“The Hard Type” by Carl Robinette—packed the most emotional punch. In it a young boy questions his actions when he sees a couple terrorized by a motorcycle gang.

I also enjoyed “Jaguar,” about a young girl brought to New York as part of a human trafficking ring. Short stories by its author, Joseph Wallace, have appeared in several anthologies, including the Best American Mystery Stories. His most recent novel, Invasive Species, is a science fiction thriller.

Related articles

****The Cottoncrest Curse

Posted on by

Michael H. Rubin, The Cottoncrest CurseBy Michael H. Rubin – Met this author—a Baton Rouge-based lawyer—at a recent mystery writers’ conference and was fascinated by the premise of his brand new book. (And a bit awed that it was published by the prestigious LSU Press, which has created a nice website for it.) The story takes place in three time periods—in 1893, with Reconstruction ended, and the wounds of the Civil War a decade fresher than the end of the Vietnam War is now; in 1961, when Freedom Riders went South to push the Civil Rights movement; and a much briefer framing story set in current time.

Cottoncrest is the eponymous plantation in which the novel’s inciting events take place—the murder-suicide of a respected Civil War Colonel and his beautiful young wife. The book’s hero, Jewish peddler Jake Gold, in the course of his itinerant business interacts with everyone for miles about—the erudite Colonel, as well as black shantytown residents, poor white sharecroppers, and wily Cajun trappers. And with Gold’s egalitarian streak, he gets along with most of them, too—the honest ones.

Rubin portrays these complicated Louisiana social milieux convincingly, though I hardly had time to fully enjoy the richness of the lives he portrays because the plot was speeding me through the burning cane fields and down the treacherous bayous. Breakneck plots have a way of reaching implausible velocity, but not this one. Every danger and twist he describes is absolutely believable. Though the reader ends up unraveling the mystery behind the murders and the recurrence of the curse, the characters from the present-day scenes will never know what we know, for good and certain.

Rubin’s accomplishment is all the more impressive because this is his first novel. An impressive debut!