Tag Archives: mystery

Looking for Something Good to Read?

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reading

(photo: Nico Cavallotto, Creative Commons)

The stack of books I’m excited to read in 2015 is already pretty high, and to make room, sorted the books of 2014—keep, donate, donate, keep, keep. Handling them again and in writing last week’s post on the 11 very best, I couldn’t help thinking how many more really good ones there were! All 22 **** books of the past year.

Mysteries & Thrillers

  • Sandrine’s Case by Thomas H. Cook – originally I gave this 3 stars, but when I couldn’t stop thinking about it, slapped on a fourth
  • The Golden Hour by Todd Moss—believable political thriller, awesome first novel
  • Standing in Another Man’s Grave by Ian Rankin—an always-satisfying outing with Edinburgh’s Inspector John Rebus
  • Mystery Girl by David Gordon—a wacky Hollywood tale with oddball characters and LOL dialog
  • The Cottoncrest Curse by Michael H. Rubin—I met Rubin, so bought his book about late-1800s murders on a Louisiana plantation. So glad I did!
  • Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger—won all the big mystery world prizes in 2013
  • Spycraft by Robert Wallace, H. Keith Melton, and Henry Robert Schlesinger—non-fiction, describing the technologies of espionage (and avoiding recent scandals entirely)
  • The Reversal by Michael Connelly—Harry Bosch AND Mickey Haller
  • The Cold, Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty—really makes his Belfast-during-the-Troubles setting work for him

Other Fiction

 Biography, History, Politics

Great Places

  • The White Rock by Hugh Thomson—adventurers still discovering lost Inca outposts
  • The Danube by Nick Thorpe—from the Black Sea to the river’s origins in Germany
  • The New York Nobody Knows by William B. Helmreich—this sociologist walked more than 6000 miles of NYC streets and talked to everybody

 Stephen King

book, imagination

(Cinzia A. Rizzo, flickr.com, CC license)

****Strange Gods: A Mystery

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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.

***How the Light Gets In

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Dionne quints, Louise Penny

The Dionne Quintuplets (photo: wikimedia)

By Louise Penny. Narrated by Ralph Cosham. Louise Penny’s Quebec-based Chief Inspector Gamache novels are wildly popular—this one was nominated for several awards, and it’s the second I’ve listened to. The story’s multilayered plot (no spoilers here) is a mix of the intriguing and barely plausible, but Penny’s characters and setting are nicely developed, not the cardboard cutouts that populate many mysteries. Penny’s first novels initially were called “The Three Pines Mysteries,” and this one brings in the remote village of Three Pines and its clutch of eccentrics quite believably.

In this book, ninth in the series, two investigations are under way. One involves the death of the last of the Ouellet (WEE-lay) quintuplets, modeled on Ontario’s exploited Dionne quintuplets from the same pre-fertility drug era. Penny might have been inspired by the photo of the real Dionne quintuplets, above, in devising a theme for her fictional quints of one being always a bit apart, separate, beginning even before birth.

The other, much shakier plot, is political. It suffers from the stakes-raising trend among mystery writers, who have decided an interesting death or two isn’t enough to capture readers’ attention.

Penny has a habit in this book of withholding from the reader. “He made two telephone calls before leaving the office.” Only later will we find out what those calls were. Use this device once or twice, OK, but it occurs so often, it starts to feel manipulative—I hear the author behind the scenes hammering together cliffhangers.

Apparently Ralph Cosham, who narrates the series, is well regarded for bringing Gamache to life, and he did grow on me a little, but generally I find him plodding. The book’s title comes from fellow Canadian Leonard Cohen’s song Anthem: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” I didn’t tumble to the Cohen connection, though I understood the title and the cracks, even without the author’s explanation near the end. Ironically, in a post-story conversation between Penny and Cosham, she talks about the kinds of things that should be left unsaid because “the reader has to do some of the work.” I totally agree, and thought the title, which captured the book’s entire theme, was work I could have done and had done.

****Sandrine’s Case

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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.

****Standing in Another Man’s Grave

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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.

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*** Three Ellery Queens

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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.

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****Mystery Girl

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Los Angeles, Hollywood

(photo source: farm9.staticflickr.com)

By David Gordon – This book
was a gift, so I knew nothing about it when I opened its pages and fell in love with its surprises. Funny, complicated, well-drawn characters—B-movie cinephiles—living on the tattered fringes of Hollywood. “Some things are inexplicable. The human heart is one. Los Angeles is another,” said the New York Post review. The story involves failed experimental novelist, abandoned husband, and tyro-detective Sam Kornberg’s search for Mona Naught, a woman of elusive identity and tenuous reality.

The first-person narrator’s voice, occasionally uncertain, is consistently insightful and entertaining. Here’s a description of a cemetery in Mexico: “a city of tiny palaces that the good citizens had constructed to house their souls, like elaborate birdcages or the dollhouses of spoiled girls, far more splendid than their own mortal homes. After all, we are alive a short while, dead forever.” That last tiny zinger is what makes it.

Or this unpromising exchange with the Korean housekeeper of his prospective employer, when she answered his knock:

“Warren?” she asked. “No, I’m not Warren. I’m Samuel. Sam really. Sam Kornberg.”

            “You show warrant?”

            “Oh, warrant,” I said. “I thought you said Warren. No, no warrant. I still don’t know what you mean.” . . .

“Norman?”

“No, not Norman either. I’m Sam.”

“No.” She spoke slowly, for my benefit, as if explaining a simple fact. “You are Mormon.”

“A Mormon? No, I’m not a Mormon. Sorry. Jewish, I’m afraid.”

Occasionally, the narration is interrupted by other narrators, with their critical observations about Sam and his shortcomings, which put his actions in a new light. Author Gordon, in a recent New York Times blog, describes writing as a “risky, humiliating endeavor.” No surprise, maybe that about his writing, the fictional Sam is skewering: “I myself could no longer stand to read these sorts of novels, the kind I couldn’t seem to stop writing . . . It seemed I had dedicated my life to a question whose point even I had forgotten along the way.” His detecting assignment from Solar Lonsky helped him find it again.

History, Mystery, or Miss-story?

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4th of July, early America, John Lewis Krimmel, Philadelphia

John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth of July in Centre Square, Philadelphia, 1819 (photo: wikimedia.org)

A panel of six mystery writers explored the elasticity of history at the Deadly Ink 2014 conference this weekend. They were, in chronological order by their topics:

One of the most interesting questions these panelists were asked is how comfortable they are changing facts to suit the fictional purposes of their story, and the division of opinion was striking. Belsky’s point of view seemed to be “It’s fiction—do what you want,” whereas others, including Alfieri and Inglee, especially, believed that if you incorporate real historical individuals, you have to be true to their attitudes and actions.

Belsky pointed out that we may never know the whole story or maybe even the true story of past events—and Irving pointed out that applies to current events as well—freeing the author to fill in the blanks. (My own opinion on this is there’s a big difference between not knowing a fact and making one up.)

When an author must change a fact, a date, or other detail, they can use author’s notes to describe what and why. With that manes, Scott Turow acknowledges some of the liberties he took in several pivotal event in the WWII novel Ordinary Heroes: “There was no ammunition dump at LaSaline Royale, which is actually situated a few miles from the site I describe . . . Heisenberg (Werner Heisenberg, physicist) did run from Hechingen, but not because anyone had attempted to blow up the secret location of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on Haigerlocherstrasse. FDR’s death was announced near midnight overseas, not in the afternoon of April 12, 1945.” This last detail seems to be one that could have been fictionally accommodated. It was an event, like the Kennedy assassination, that every American alive at the time remembers vividly.

Alfieri created a character drawn from life down to his toenails and gave him his own name, much as real people appear in the novels of E.L. Doctorow, but when her mystery plot required this character to commit a violent act for which there is no evidence, she renamed him. She was able to build the character in the first place because of the strength of her research, and several panelists endorsed immersive research for fiction, which must appeal to many writers’ innate inwardness.

When an author knows enough about a period—how people thought, what they thought about, what they ate, how they made a living, what they feared—new story elements arise organically from that substrate. They fit the story, the story isn’t made to fit them. Such an approach makes for an infinitely richer reader experience, even if most of that research never appears explicitly in the book. The writer moves forward with confidence.

Another reason to get the details right is that readers will be sure to ding them if they don’t. Errors can destroy a book’s credibility and readers’—and reviewers’—interest in it. To avoid mistakes, Kelly and Rubin said they work with historians. Rubin, especially, because he is published by LSU Press, has to meet scholarship standards.

A final difficulty for historical writers is language. The conversations among characters have to read as if they are of the period, yet a precise rendition of old-fashioned language—by writing “forsoothly”—may be unreadable. David Mitchell, discussing the language he used in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (I loved this book!), described writing dialog for characters who were native speakers of Japanese, who were Dutch and speaking Japanese, Dutch and speaking Dutch, English upper-class sea captains, English lower-class seamen, and so on. Plus, the book begins in 1799, with two hundred-plus years of language evolution in between. Mitchell developed a language he called “bygone-ish,” which had the ring of the old and the clarity of the current, with variants for each nationality and class.

Mitchell’s approach points out an important issue that applies not just for words and phrases. Even if an event actually did happen or a word actually was in use at the time a story is set, writers of historical mysteries may avoid it anyway, because it will sound too modern, out of place. In this way, truth is more powerful than fact. And if this seems like another way of saying, “it’s fiction—do what you want,” it isn’t.

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***The Killing Floor

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Greyhound bus, Cleveland

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Lee Child (narrated by Dick Hill) – This is the first Jack Reacher novel (1997), and the first I’ve read. They’re so popular, fans must either get past the flimsy logic behind Reacher’s choice to become a Greyhound-riding drifter or Child at some point strengthens that case. Like Jo Nesbo’s first Harry Hole novel (reviewed here), you know from the get-go that Reacher’s woman will be an endangered species before the plot runs out.

Maybe male writers just have to get that damsel-in-distress-rescue-fantasy-thing out of their system, but I wish they would. It’s too transparent an attempt to give their protagonists some depth via a meaningful, but brief relationship with really good sex. These relationships have to be short, though, so they don’t spill over into sequels and doing the laundry, picking up the kids, and the other minutia that would inevitably follow if the relationship continued.

The plot had a pretty big “huh?” in it, too, though I quite liked the image of homeless Jack Reacher tooling around the Georgia countryside in the borrowed Bentleys. (Spoiler alert: The “huh” was, if the Margrave powers-that-be hired detective Finlay because they mistakenly thought he was slow-witted—because of what Finlay says was the worst job interview in history—wouldn’t their FBI agent confederate, who knows Finlay, have set them straight?) Superb narration by Dick Hill!

*** The Bat

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Jo Nesbo, The Bat

(photo: wikimedia.org)

By Jo Nesbo–Having written about Scandinavia’s crimewave—in fiction—when I needed another book in Ottawa, I picked up Jo Nesbo’s The Bat, the first-written in his series of thrillers featuring Oslo detective Harry Hole (Harry emphasizes his name is pronounced Hoo-ley, not Hole). This book was published (at least in the U.S.) after many others in the series, and Booklist deemed it “an absolute must for devotees of the riveting train wreck that is Harry Hole.”

Oddly, the story takes place in Australia, where Harry has been sent to aid the Sydney police investigating the death of a young Norwegian woman. (The Aussies pronounce his name “Holy.”) Lots of effective humor survived translation.

The characters were nicely developed and Harry has obvious deep issues, one of which is staying on the wagon. My only problem was the plot. If you’re chasing a serial killer of beautiful young women with light hair, would you suggest your new girlfriend as bait? “It’s all right, we’ll be right behind you”? How many ways can that go wrong? And, of course, does. Some heavy-handed foreshadowing, as well. Still, though, Nesbo is so popular, he must have got his feet under him as the series developed. (It was Nesbo who was picked to rewrite Macbeth in an ongoing “Shakespeare reimagined” project.)

Here’s a juicy bit: “Was Evans White as tough as he was trying to make out, or was he suffering from deficient mental faculties? Or an inadequately developed soul, a typically Norwegian concept? Harry wondered. Did courts anywhere else in the world judge the quality of a soul?”

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