Tag Archives: mystery

****The Crossing

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watch works

(photo: readerwalker, creative commons license)

By Michael Connelly, narrated by Titus Welliver – What a pleasure it is to enter the Los Angeles airspace of Harry Bosch and his half-brother Mickey Haller. Teaming up his two protagonists from the Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer series was a brilliant move by Connelly, and I’ve enjoyed every story of the two of them, fighting crime and for justice. In this latest double-outing, Connelly does not disappoint.

In The Crossing, Bosch takes the lead. He’s retired, not by choice, and rattling around his garage doing not very much. Haller approaches him about serving as an investigator on a difficult case he’s undertaken: a man accused of a brutal murder based on supposedly irrefutable DNA evidence, but Haller is convinced his client is innocent. Bosch is doubtful. Worse, if he agrees to help the defense he’s “going over to the dark side” in his own eyes, and it will be seen as a betrayal by all his former police department colleagues. Still, reviewing the case files does raise a few unanswered questions and, as we might expect, Bosch’s investigatory instincts soon overrun his reservations, and, with nothing more than the box for a luxury wristwatch to go on, he’s off. But meanwhile, a couple of rogue cops are up to something, and the brothers are in their sights.

Seeing Bosch and Haller work in their respective roles—investigator and courtroom advocate—lets Connelly show off his characters’ different skill sets and keeps the reader (listener, in this case) well entertained. It’s instructive to hear Haller’s reminders that, while Bosch may be on a search for the truth, the client must be their uppermost concern.

As to the effectiveness of the audio version, Welliver’s excellent reading, combined with Connelly’s clear writing style, made it easy to keep track of the characters and the story. Welliver is super-prepared for this reading, as he played the character of Harry Bosch in the eponymous Amazon television series that premiered in 2015. An interview with Connelly and Welliver is included in this Crime Fiction Lover preview of the television series.

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***The Red Road

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UK Courtroom

(photo: fayerollinson, creative commons license)

By Denise Mina, narrated by Cathleen McCarron – Denise Mina has earned her place in the group of distinguished Scottish crime writers whose works are known collectively as Tartan Noir. This award-winning novel about the long, entangling tails of murder has its beginning in Glasgow in 1997, when a young boy is accused, convicted, and imprisoned for years for murdering his brother. Those events resurface in the current day, in which Detective Inspector Alex Morrow is increasingly dubious about her future with the police force and about her own testimony in the same man’s trial for arms-dealing. Her doubts come to the fore when the fingerprints of the accused turn up at a recent murder scene, one where it would have been impossible for him to have been present. The reader/listener knows from early on that he was falsely imprisoned and who the real killer was, a 14-year-old prostitute, but who mixed up the fingerprints? And why?

The tentacles of the conspiracy reach far and wide, and over the intervening 15 years. They even may extend as far as Morrow’s brother Danny, a known gangster, but one she’d rather not be involved in bringing to justice. Meanwhile, all the people involved in the earlier false accusation and coverup, if that’s what it was, have their own reasons to want to shut her investigation down. Despite their efforts to thwart her, Morrow is determined to persist. And in doing so, she must confront the crucial difference between justice and law enforcement.

Focusing on this as an audiobook, despite my cred as a devoted audiophile, it wasn’t totally satisfactory. The plot was so complicated—a plus in a print volume—and the characters so numerous that it was hard to keep the story straight. The narration was in part responsible for this, as there a was less sharp delineation among character voices than typical. Glaswegians may well be able to detect subtle differences in characters’ accents (class, etc.), but my American ears could not. Generally, authors stick with a particular narrator for all their books, at least in a series, so it’s surprising that Mina has had several readers, with McCarron her most recent.

****Everything I Never Told You

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Alone, teenager

(photo: Pierre Guinoiseau, creative commons license)

By Celeste Ng – In a perceptive Glimmer Train essay, summarized here, Celeste Ng talked about “comfortable ambiguity,” and how in her debut novel, she tried to give readers space to enter the world of the story and enough clues to come to their own conclusions about the fates of the characters. Since so many of her early readers had strong—and differing—opinions about what those fates were, her efforts were clearly successful.

The story centers around a family living in a small town outside Cleveland in the 1970s: honey-blonde Marilyn, the mother, estranged from her own mother, her would-be career, and the future she thought she would have; James, her Chinese husband in an era and a place where being Asian made him—at least in his mind—the perpetual outsider; and their three black-haired children, the only Asian-Americans in their school. Hannah, the acutely observant youngest, Nathan, the oldest, on his way to Harvard, and in the middle, Lydia—serious, responsible Lydia—her parents’ favorite. Their hopes are pinned on her.

New York Times reviewer Alexander Chee calls the story “a deep, heartfelt portrait of a family struggling with its place in history, and a young woman hoping to be the fulfillment of that struggle.” What went wrong? And something did go drastically wrong, as we learn in the book’s first irrevocable sentences: “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.”

The narrative moves from present to past in exploring these five lives and the different social forces and character traits that propelled them to where they are, one dead. Something they all have in common is secrets. Before Lydia is a year old, Marilyn notices her uncanny ability to keep secrets. In the aftermath of the disappearance, a desperate Marilyn pulls down from the bookcase the dozen diaries she’s given her to see what clues they may hide. She jams the flimsy locks open. Every page is blank.

As the story’s point of view shifts among family members, and each tries to piece together what happened to Lydia and why, the secrets, the alienation, and the deceptions in their own lives emerge. Even so, little is shared among them. Each must come to an understanding of Lydia’s tragedy in a unique, highly personal, and for some, devastating way. For the reader, the great pleasure of this novel is its uncluttered style. It easily draws you into deeper and deeper waters until you realize the surface is far above you.

Everything I Never Told You was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and named a “best book of the year” by many reviewers.

****Career of Evil

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package, box

(photo: Jonathan, creative commons license)

By Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling), narrated by Robert Glenister – Devotees of the heavy metal rock band Blue Öyster Cult will recognize that its allusive and sometimes violent lyrics give this book its title, chapter titles, and break headings. Chapter 1, for example, is “This Ain’t the Summer of Love.” Nor is it.

Former Army Special Investigator Cameron Strike runs a not-exactly-thriving London private detection business, aided by his attractive factotum Robin Ellacott. They have only two cases going when a delivery man shows up with a package addressed to Robin and containing the severed leg of a young girl. Strike can think of three people from his past with the misogynistic leanings, brutality, and sufficient grudge against him to make them suspects in such a crime and desirous to involve him in it. Sending a leg—instead of some other body part—seems a cruel reference to Strike’s own leg, lost in a land mine detonation in Afghanistan and replaced by a prosthesis.

Kinky theories also emerge, and Robin uncovers in their file of “nutter” letters one from a young woman who wanted to cut off her leg. Robin, a psychology major before leaving university, recognizes the syndrome. Her exploration of Internet sites for transabled people and Body Integrity Identity Disorder yields more leads.

Two of Strike’s suspects are people he encountered in the military. The third, Jeff Whittaker, is the much younger second husband of Strike’s mother. Strike is convinced Whittaker orchestrated her death from a heroin overdose, but he was acquitted. Strike and Robin reconstruct the decades-cold trails of their three suspects. They have plenty of time to do so, as publicity about the leg business has discouraged any other would-be clients. They are inevitably brought into conflict with the police, still smarting from previous cases in which Strike out-investigated them.

Meanwhile, Robin proceeds half-heartedly with her wedding plans, perpetually annoyed at fiancé Matthew’s repeated attempts to get her to quit her job and his apparent jealousy of Strike. Even her stalker can detect the chill between them. When Matthew reveals a secret of his own, she calls the wedding off. The book’s early action takes place around the time of the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, and those festivities are a painful counterpoint to the couple’s unhappiness.

Galbraith has constructed a well paced, compelling narrative. She leaves a few clues on the table and could have had the main characters learn more about themselves, but few thrillers do that. It works well as an audiobook, narrated by Robert Glenister, because there is not an overabundance of characters and the pacing keeps the listener well engaged throughout its nearly 18 hours.

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

***The Sudden Disappearance of the Worker Bees

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honeybee

(photo: James DeMers for Pixabay)

By Serge Quadruppani (A Commissario Simona Tavianello Mystery) – On vacation somewhere in the mountainous part of Italy, police Commissario Simona Tavianello and her husband Marco, himself a capo commissario (police chief) encounter the dead body of an engineer for a major—and highly secretive—agricultural research firm. Local activists suspect the victim’s company of contributing to the disappearance of the area’s honeybees, and he’s been shot on the premises of a deserted beekeeper’s shop. While this case ordinarily wouldn’t involve the vacationing couple, it soon emerges that the murder weapon was Simona’s own gun.

A smarmy television reporter . . . an eccentric local scientist . . . a shady government spy . . . a ruthless industrialist—the full deck of eccentric personalities is here, against the backdrop of a real-life crisis in agriculture and some interesting speculation on the promise (or is it the threat?) of nanotechnology.

Possibly it’s an artifact of the translation of this mystery, but a time or two I was unclear which of the book’s many characters was under discussion. More puzzling was the author’s habit of having characters openly blurt out a confession, subverting the mystery. Poor Simona (who ordinarily works for the anti-mafia squad) is involved in the case because of her gun, and she’s also in the way, as the local police try to sort things out.

Her husband is retired and she herself is described as white-haired and a little thick around the middle, yet she still has an eye for the handsome beekeeper that arouses her husband’s jealousy, mostly good-natured. They are old antagonists, locked in a lifelong battle that pleases them both. Their relationship is quite fun for the reader, too.

Quadruppani has a distinctive, somewhat breathless writing style, moving his characters rapidly from one scene to another, and a facility with description of the Italian countryside and lifestyle. Fans of previous books in this series may have developed a fondness for Simona and Marco. As a first-time reader, I found the pace a little frantic—too reminiscent of a bee flitting from flower to flower, gaining information pollen grain by grain, but still needing some serious processing to produce honey.

Kick Back TV Mysteries

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tv, television, relaxing

(photo: Caitlin Regan, creative commons license)

We may spend the week grappling with the critical affairs of the world and leaky plumbing, but come the weekend, we hope Netflix offers us something entertaining—and nothing’s better than a little crime! You know, something about people with real problems!

These five U.K. and Australian series take you out of the United States altogether, for an armchair vacation to boot. Here they are, from light to dark:

  • Mr. & Mrs. Murder – found CDs of this 13-part Australian series at the local library. It’s about a husband and wife team (Shaun Micallef and Kat Stewart) who clean up after a murder and, of course, end up solving it. The real police detective (Jonny Pasvolsky), is sweet on the Mrs. and never misses a chance to put the husband down. Not one bit serious, just fun.
  • Midsomer Murders – Based on books by Caroline Graham, this veeeeery long-running British series—it began in the late 1990s—has outlasted its original cast. More lately, John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon), the “cousin” of the long-running Tom Barnaby (John Nettles), is the lead detective. Tom should never have let wife Joyce out of the house. Whether she was at choir practice or off plein air painting, a murder inevitably ensued in these deceptively charming country villages. Lots of suspects. And, over the years, lots of entertaining sergeant side-kicks. Ever-amazed that the CME always arrives and the scene and already has some conclusions before Barnaby even gets there.
  • The Last Detective – great recommendation from a friend (thanks, B.T.!), based on novels by Leslie Thomas. In this London-base series, sweet, but hapless “Dangerous” Davies (Peter Davison) must deal with the breakup of his marriage, the couple’s shared custody of a very large dog, and the constant badgering of his doltish colleagues but always—yes!—solves the case. His boss, the self-medicating alcoholic DI Aspinwall (Rob Spendlove) is perfect. Friend and perpetual loser Mod (Irish comedian Sean Hughes) is the chief comic foil.
  • Case Histories – Several of Kate Atkinson’s excellent Edinburgh-based mysteries about protagonist Jackson Brodie (Jason Isaacs) have been made into television programs (three two-hour ones and three 90-minute ones), including One Good Turn and When Will There be Good News? Jackson is a defrocked policeman working as a P.I, who’s still called in to advise the Department’s DI Louise Munroe (Amanda Abbington) when he stumbles on a dead body or a juicy case. A little too much flashback about “why he cares,” when the fate of dead young women is involved. Why wouldn’t he? His secretary (Zawe Ashton) is priceless. Cute daughter, too.
  • Jack Irish – Three television movies (Bad Debts, Black Tide, and Dead Point)have been made from the Jack Irish mysteries by Australian writer Peter Temple, with more to come. Guy Pearce plays the eponymous character, and these are the grittiest in this list. I’ve not read Temple’s originals so don’t know whether the excessive plot complications come from the original, but the shows would be better if they were a half hour shorter and without one of two of the endless twists. Between that and the heavy accents, I’ve gone a bit past caring a time or two. Girlfriend journalist Linda Hillier (Marta Dusseldorp) is a charmer. Like the touts and horses.

Deadly Ink: “Get Your Facts Straight”

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crime-scene-30112_640A panel at last weekend’s Deadly Ink 2015 conference represented a spectrum of views about the research lengths mystery writers go to. At the “as factual as possible” end of the spectrum was K.B. Inglee, a writer of historical mysteries who is also a history museum docent and reenactor (talk about living your research!), closely followed by Kim Kash, who seeks a realistic recreation of Ocean City, Maryland, where her fictitious characters and stories play and play out. Setting her mysteries there began when she wrote a tour guide for the city, a compilation of facts and contacts that has since served her well.

Tim Hall, who writes cozy-ish mysteries set on Long Island said his kind of story is so character-driven that what’s needed is enough research to make sure they remain internally consistent. No blue eyes on page 30 and brown eyes 100 pages later. Similarly, S.A. Solomon does enough research to ensure plausibility. A big gaffe makes readers start to doubt the whole story—a disaster for mystery.

Surprisingly, the one author of “alternative universe” mysteries, Roberta Rogow, said the science fiction audience is one of the most demanding. Any would-be sci-fi authors who hope they can “just make it up” soon learn otherwise. That pleasure is reserved for another genre: fantasy. And even there, devoted readers patrol for consistency.

A key benefit of research the panelists agreed is that it helps the writer avoid stereotypes, generalities, and clichés in their characters, places, and actions. When you know the exact particulars of something, you can describe it with greater exactitude. “I took the bus” becomes “I caught the packed bus from the Weekly Breeze office uptown near the Delaware border, down to DaVinci’s around Fourteenth Street. There was only standing room on the bus, it being dinner hour with everybody heading out for crabs, fries on the boardwalk, and happy-hour drinks.” (from Kim Kash’s Ocean City Cover-up).

Although Wikipedia can provide a quick overview of a topic for writers, it’s more useful in terms of pointing them in the right direction for further research. Hyperlocal resources are readily available online, though there’s no substitute for visiting the place being written about. Several panelists are devotees of “just talking to people.” While people’s time is valuable, especially that of professionals (cops, investigators, medical examiner staff), these writers have found that all kinds of people—most of whom seem to be would-be novelists themselves!—are delighted to share their knowledge.

Recent books by these Deadly Ink panelists:

  • K.B. Inglee – Her story “The Devil’s Quote” leads off a 2015 story collection And All Our Yesterdays—mystery and crime through the ages
  • Kim Kash – Her other Ocean City mystery is Ocean City Lowdown, and the book that started it all: Ocean City: A Guide to Maryland’s Seaside Resort
  • Tim Hall – He grew up in the Long Island area he writes about, but still has to keep up with the changes! Dead Stock was his first book
  • S.A. Solomon – Read her fine story “Live for Today,” published in New Jersey Noir, published by Akashic Books
  • Roberta Rogow – Her most recent series involves an alternative history of the Island of Manatas (Manhattan), volume 3 of which is Mischief in Manatas

***The Storm Murders

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farm, snow, winter

(photo: M Pincus, creative commons license)

By John Farrow – Farrow is the pen name that acclaimed Canadian writer Trevor Ferguson selected when he decided to try his hand at writing genre fiction, and, if I have this right, this is his fourth book featuring detective Émile Cinq-Mars and the first of a planned “storm murders” trilogy.

In this mystery/thriller, prickly retired Montreal Sergeant-Detective Cinq-Mars finds himself flattered and cajoled and inevitably drawn into helping in the investigation of a rural Quebec double-murder that culminated in the additional slaying of two young Sûreté du Québec police officers lured to the remote farmhouse by a phone call.

Perhaps Cinq-Mars decides to aid this investigation because he is intrigued by the crime itself, the lack of apparent motive, and the absence of the killer’s footprints in the newly fallen snow around the house. Perhaps it is the puzzling entreaties of a senior FBI agent, looking for answers in a case that’s way out of his jurisdiction. Perhaps it is the bleak persistence of a Canadian winter making the days weigh heavy on Cinq-Mars’s insufficiently occupied brain. Or perhaps it is his wife Sandra’s startling intimation that she might leave him, making the investigation a welcome preoccupation that might enable him to in some way resurrect the man she’d fallen in love with.

The FBI agent, frustratingly close-mouthed, at least reveals that the deaths of the Quebec couple share certain grisly similarities with a series of murders in the United States. All have involved a married couple, always they’ve occurred after a major calamity. As none of the neighbors know much about the couple, relatively new arrivals to the area, and in the hope of finding out more details that would suggest a connection among these deaths, Cinq-Mars travels to New Orleans. The first pair of murders occurred there, shortly after Hurricane Katrina. Sandra accompanies him, because the trip promises to be a semi-vacation. Both she and Cinq-Mars hope a change of marital venue will help them reconnect.

Booklist has called the Cinq-Mars books “the best series in crime fiction today,” and this is the first of them I’ve read. Farrow’s writing style, honed by writing literary fiction, is confident and sophisticated, and the book starts strong. In general, the characters and setting are interesting and well-developed, especially good-humored multi-racial NOPD detective Pascal Dupree and ambitious hotel security chief Everardo Flores, who enliven every scene they’re in. Unfortunately, the plot was not as robust as these other elements. I guessed early on (and I’m not a particularly insightful guesser) why the FBI was interested in this series of murders. Farrow receives praise from some reviewers for writing character-driven mysteries, but for my taste, Cinq-Mars’s examinations of his feelings about religion, his wife, and retirement are rather too long. The denouement also was drawn out past the point of believability, including both conversation and events that seemed unlikely.

While this book has much to recommend it, especially for admirers of the series, in the end it requires some suspension of disbelief.

A slightly longer version of this review appears—along with reviews of many new crime and thriller novels—at the Crime Fiction Lover website.

Inherent Vice

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Inherent Vice, Joaquin Phoenix, Thomas PynchonWhen this film (trailer) of a Thomas Pynchon novel was released in 2014, critics said it was undoubtedly the ONLY Pynchon book that could be corralled into a film. I’m a big Pychon fan—loved V, The Crying of Lot 49, and Mason & Dixon—but I started Gravity’s Rainbow three times and never got past page 100. So I can sympathize with the difficulties director Paul Thomas Anderson must have faced.

Joaquin Phoenix plays “Doc” Sportell, a private investigator subject to regular harassment from a police detective called Bigfoot (Josh Brolin). Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta has taken up with a wealthy married property developer, and the developer’s wife wants her to cooperate in a plot to institutionalize him so she and her new boyfriend can raid his bank account. Then the magnate disappears. Doc uses is slight investigative skills to search for both the developer and Shasta in a stoner’s 1970s Southern California.

This set-up takes you down colorful and unexpected byways, which I couldn’t possibly reconstruct, and a multitude of stars provide performance gems: Owen Wilson as a mixed up dude-dad, afraid to leave the drug cult that’s captured him; Hong Chau as the hilariously matter-of-fact operator of a kinky sex club; Martin Short as a cradle-robbing dentist, with his clinic in a building shaped like a golden fang; Golden Fang itself, a mysterious criminal operation that . . . None of this probably matters. Neo-Nazi biker gangs, yogic meditation, stoners. You just have to go with it. Joaquin Phoenix, understandably, displays about a zillion different ways of looking confused.

If you have a taste for the absurd and what Movie Talk’s Jason Best calls “freewheeling spirit,” this is definitely the movie for you! I try to guess whether audiences or critics will like a movie better. Right on the money this time: Rotten Tomatoes Critics Rating: 73%; audiences, 53%.

**The French Detective: A Novel of New Orleans in 1900

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New Orleans, French Quarter

(photo: David Ohmer, Creative Commons license)

By O’Neil De Noux – A jambalaya of factors go into a reader’s enjoyment of a crime novel, and this one is definitely a (mostly) flavorful mix. De Noux has selected a time and place ripe for drama. New Orleans is consistently intriguing on many levels, most particularly for its diversity of strong cultures stewing together in the oppressive Louisiana heat. The time period, the turn of the last century, is filled with dramatic possibility, because of the city’s changing demographics and because of the real-life occurrence of the Robert Charles race riots, which De Noux draws into his story.

The challenges to New Orleans Police Detective Jacques Dugas begin when a four-year-old boy is kidnapped from the city’s Vieux Carré, at this point in its history an Italian and Sicilian district. Mostly recent immigrants, the residents have little use for the police and cooperation is scant, even when Dugas has the volunteer translating assistance of glamorous young Evelyn Dominici—Italian-speaking daughter of a Corsican jeweler and an English Lady. The Corsican is a New Orleans resident, but Lady Evelyn’s mother lives in England, ensconced in a drafty castle with her lover.

Dugas and his translator, rapidly falling for each other and flirting outrageously, pursue the many potential leads in the case until the investigation is derailed by the riots. The book is populated with white supremacists, Italian citizens committees, Sicilian mafia, Irish cops, and, always at the fringes, the blacks and the poor. Jambalaya. One delicious aspect of the book is how often Dugas, Evelyn Dominici, and their colleagues must stop to eat. Reading this book is enough to make the reader put on five pounds by literary osmosis.

Yet all is not well-served in this literary endeavor. This is a self-published book, which to me means the author-as-publisher takes on extra responsibilities. While De Noux attempts to absolve himself from any errors via a note saying “If you found a typo or two in the book, please don’t hold it against us. We are a small group of volunteers . . .” There are many, many more than a typo or two. The writer’s role, as John Gardner had it, is to create a fictional dream in which writer and reader are co-conspirators. Keep the dream going, and the reader continues to believe in the story created. Tyops wake you up.

Such lack of attention cannot help but make the reader wonder about the care expended on plot, characterization, and other literary matters. In this book, the plot raced hither and yon so often, I occasionally lost the thread, and it left loose ends (who wrote all those notes?). The character of Evelyn was, to me, unbelievable in her liberated attitudes for a woman of that era and an English Lady, no less. Nor was the attention devoted to the attractiveness of her figure interesting on a sustained basis.

Nevertheless, I actually enjoyed this book on its own terms, as a window into a pivotal time in one of America’s most fascinating cities.

A longer version of this review is available here on the Crime Fiction Lover website.