Readingomnivore Reviews

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THE MURDER AT ASTAIRE CASTLE is the fifth book in Lauren Carr’s mystery series featuring ex-policeman Mac Faraday, who inherited a $200,000,000+ fortune from his biological mother, noted mystery writer Robin Spencer. It was a free or inexpenive Kindle edition published in 2013.

While searching with David O’Callaghan, his half-brother and the chief of police of Spencer, Maryland, for a missing woman, Mac learns of the existence of Astaire Castle on the south side of Spencer Mountain, a part of his vast estate with which he’s completely unfamiliar. David seems afraid of the location, and Mac insists on hearing the story. The castle has been the site of repeated deaths, murders, disappearances, and hauntings since the suicides of the original owners in 1929. Nathan Hindman, a later owner killed his German-spy wife and her tennis pro lover, a Russian spy, in the 1950s; Hindman and his white German shepherd dog Nigel disappeared and were never found. Since that time, people have reported sightings of a Wolf Man at the castle and on Spencer Mountain. In 2000, at a Halloween party hosted by David O’Callaghan at the castle, his friend Riley Adams disappears, not to be found. In 2002, the housekeeper discovers the dismembered and burned bodies of Genevieve Wagner and Janson, daughter and editor of best-selling horror story writer Damian Wagner; Damian Wagner had disappeared. Rumors of the Wolf Man continue. When David and Mac discover the corpse of Damian Wagner in a turret of the castle with an axe in his skull, the whole story is again spread over the media; the story’s made even more sensational by the discovery of Riley Adams, who’s been living wild, convinced that he’s absorbed the spirit of Nigel and become the alpha protector of the mountain. Billionaire Stan Gould is determined to buy Astaire Castle from Mac as a wedding gift to his new bride Lacey (no last name), famous European lingerie model. Raymond Hollister, Damian’s agent who inherited the copyrights to Damian’s novels, arrives to claim the manuscript of the last book in Damian’s best-selling series, but nobody’s found it. Present-day craziness begins with David being shot; Stan Gould and Lacey die and their bodies are burned in an arson at Astaire Castle; a Spencer Inn server dies so her uniform can be used to take a poisoned breakfast to Hollister. What’s the connection between the current cases, and do they tie to the castle’s bloody history?

I like this series, but the plots are over the top, far beyond any real-life probability. THE MURDER AT ASTAIRE CASTLE is no exception. It’s impossible to be more explicit without doing spoilers. Suffice it to say, nothing and nobody are what they seem. An experienced reader may pick up on some of the convolutions ahead of Mac and David. Carr handles the paranormal elements with a light touch, making for a good Halloween read.

Characterization is good for the whole series. Mac Faraday is an attractive protagonist, ably supported by his brother David; Archie Monday, Robin Spencer’s editor and his own lover; Bogey, old friend of Mac and David’s father and deputy chief of police; various staff members at the Spencer Inn; and, of course, Gnarly. Gnarly is the giant German shepherd Mac inherited. Gnarly is super-intelligent, a former Army dog supposedly dishonorably discharged for insubordination; nobody knows what happened because the Army’s classified his service record. “Mac smiled back at Gnarly. ‘I can’t help but respect a dog with a mind of his own, and I kind of like not knowing what he’s going to do next. I’m addicted to the thrill of not knowing if I’m going to have all my fingers after handing him a biscuit. It’s the same type of thrill I get while working a case and finding out who is behind the murders and why.’ “ (156)

Carr also handles setting and sense of place with skill. “It was like something [Mac] had only seen in movies. A big old rundown castle rose up from the stony landscape. Only sky was visible from the front. In the back, the valley stretched out below. ... The castle wasn’t noticeable from the valley floor. The walls, built into the edge of the mountaintop, had been constructed of stone. It was further camouflaged by vines that had grown up to engulf and kill off the trees. The centerpiece of the circular driveway was a fountain, covered with green mold, with a statue of two winged nymphs holding a giant urn between them. Cracked and broken steps led up from the edge of the driveway to the main doors, which were caked with dirt and grime.” (43)

I do have three problems with THE MURDERS AT ASTAIRE CASTLE. One is trying to figure out David’s age. He’s younger than Mac, but the dates associated with his history don’t add up. The other two are expressions. At one point, Carr says “like a pack of wild hyenas who spot an elk separated from the herd.” It’s highly unlikely that a pack of wild hyenas, native to Africa, would encounter an isolated elk, native to North America and Eastern Asia. The other refers to “a generic country like Europe.” Last time I checked, Europe isn’t a country but a continent. Still, these are small matters. THE MURDERS AT ASTAIRE CASTLE is a satisfying quick read. (B)

 

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MY BIG OLD TEXAS HEARTACHE by Gwelyn Dawson was originally published in 2003 and re-issued as a free or inexpensive Kindle edition in 2011.

I’ve read 31%, and I’m not going to finish. The main reason is the lack of consistency in the main character Kate Harmon. From a small Texas town, Cedar Dell, she had the moral courage at age seventeen to refuse to marry the father of her unborn child, instead going it alone, estranged from her unsupportive family and the condemning town. Since then she’s made seven trips back to Cedar Dell, one of them to attend her mother’s funeral, to be turned away from the graveside services by her older brother. In the present, with her son Ryan now seventeen years old, she’s weak enough to let herself be manipulated by her sanctimonious brother and sister into returning to Cedar Dell to care for her father, who’d always favored her brother and rejected her. Which is she?

A “everybody lived happily ever after” ending is being set up, and I just don’t see it happening in anything approaching real life. Point of view shifts between Kate, Ryan, his father Max Collins, and Kate’s father without adding much to characterization. The story’s set in small-town Texas, but no one sounds remotely Texan or even Southern, one of my pet peeves.

No grade because not finished.

 

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SEEKING THE DEAD is the first book in Kate Ellis’s series featuring DI Joe Plantagenet of Eborby, Yorkshire. It was published in print and e-book format in 2008. Ellis is the author of the long-running Wesley Peterson mystery series. She seems to specialize in policemen with non-typical backgrounds; Peterson read archaeology at University, and Plantagenet trained a year for the priesthood. Like the Peterson series, there’s a strong historical element that produces effects in the present.

The police in Eborby are preoccupied with two murders perpetrated by what the media have dubbed the Resurrection Man because the bodies have been found nude, dead of suffocation with evidence that they’d been bound and confined in an enclosed space, in churchyards. There seems to be nothing connecting the killer’s victims Carla Yates and Harold Uckley, and progress in finding the killer is slow. Joe’s also dealing with a new boss, DCI Emily Thwaites, and keeping an eye on Carmel Hennessy, daughter of a police colleague who’d been killed on duty. Carmel moved into a flat owned by Peta Thewlis, her boss at the Archaeology Center, whose previous tenant Janna Pyke had done a midnight flit owing rent. When she’s finally reported missing, investigation ties Janna to a local tourist attraction, the House of Terrors, a Yorkshire version of Madame Tussaud’s, and the Black Hen, a pub with a reputation for involvement with murder and Satanism going back centuries. Quiet middle-aged Jack Wendal offers Gloria Simpson a ride when she’s stranded out of gas, only to have her go berserk and attack him, causing a wreck that leaves him in a coma. Wendal, Uckley, and Yates had all worked at Eborby Permanent Building Society--is that a connection? Janna’s body turns up as the third victim of the Resurrection Man, and the clothes of the victims are dropped outside the charity shop run by the Mirebridge Hospice, all in carrier bags from the Archaeology Center gift shop. Can the police find the killer in time to prevent more deaths?

The title SEEKING THE DEAD comes from the poor women called Seekers of the Dead, who in medieval times entered plague houses to bring out corpses. The plot is multi-layered with the motive well concealed. An experienced reader may discern the killer early on, but Ellis still manages an unexpected ending.

Joe Plantagenet is an unusual protagonist. Having left theological studies to marry, he was widowed within a few months; he has survivor’s guilt over the death of Kevin Hennessy, his mentor on the force, even though he’d also been shot. He’s non-judgmental. “Joe Plantagenet looked down at the dead woman, saying a swift, automatic prayer for her soul in his head while his heart twisted in compassion. She looked so young, this shell that had once been a living being. And the agony on the contorted face told of a hideous and painful death. He asked himself how anyone could do such a thing. It was something he’d always found hard to understand. Joe knew only too well that evil exists, robust and resilient, deep down in every human being, ready to ripen and emerge given the right conditions. And he knew that when they caught the killer he would look quite ordinary...just like everyone else.... It was this thought that frightened him most of all.” Ellis creates a believable group of professional colleagues for Plantagenet: DCI Emily Thwaites, new on the job and faced with a major case in which she may have a personal interest; DS Samson “Sunny” Porter, chauvinist with grave doubts about women police; and DC Jamilla Dal, Asian, keen and not best pleased with doing so much desk work. I look forward to getting to know them.

One of the pleasures of Ellis’s writing is the skill with which she uses setting, including its history, to illuminate character: “That was the trouble with Eborby--and its virtue. Everywhere you looked or trod had thousands of years of history imprinted on it. Roman, Viking, medieval, Civil War. The thought both exhaused and excited him. He [Joe] was just another link in the chain. Just another official trying to bring wrongdoers to justice. His Roman, Viking, and medieval counterparts must have faced the same problems. There would always have been wrongs to right--thieves and murderers to apprehend. It was the way of the world.”

Ellis’s atmospheric descriptions create a genuine sense of place: “[Joe] hurried on past the graceful Georgian symmetry of the cathedral choir school, and at eight o’clock precisely he arrived outside the cathedral’s south door, staring upwards at the towers reaching up to the wispy clouds that scuttled across the otherwise blue sky as the great bell tolled the hour. Until a few weeks ago the towers had been hidden by scaffolding, but now they could be seen in their full glory with their elaborate carved pinnacles and their impudent gargoyles that mocked the passers-by below as they had done for centuries. For a while Joe gaped at the fantastic building, anchored like a gigantic ship floating above the labyrinth of ancient streets....”

I found one editing problem--Joe’s driving himself and DCI Thwaites to Leeds, she’s specifically referred to as being in the passenger seat, then the next sentence says Emily turned off. So which is driving? SEEKING THE DEAD is a solid beginning for what I hope will be a long series. (A-)

 

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Anthea Fraser’s DEATH SPEAKS SOFTLY is one of her mystery series featuring DCI David Webb of the Broadshire CID. It was originally published in 1987 and re-issued in e-format in 2014.

DCI David Webb has ended his relationship with neighbor Hannah James with a one-night stand with his former wife, and he is bored because he’s not had an interesting case in some time. He hates paperwork. So when DC Chris Ledbetter calls him in on a missing persons case, he’s happy to help out. Ledbetter’s desk-bound with a broken ankle, already overburdened with a girl’s disappearance before Arlette Picard, postgraduate French student at Broadshire University goes missing. Little evidence about what happened to her turns up though Webb has doubts about Bernard Warwick, distinguished head of the French Department, who claims not to know Arlette and whose mental state seems precarious. Webb himself finds Arlette’s body on a ridge outside town, dead of an apparent fall. When her parents Gaston and Cecile Picard arrive to take their daughter’s body home, they trigger a response thirty years n the making.

I like DCI David Webb. He’s a good cop, very human in his mistakes in his relationship with Hanna and unhappy over them. “Was he worthy to be anyone’s godfather? It involved more than presents at Christmas and birthdays. God, he could do without his philosophizing. It had been plaguing him ever since he’d learned of the twins’ birth. He was alone too much, that was the trouble. Apart from work, he’d little contact with people. His principal hobbies of drawing and painting were solitary ones, involving hours spent in isolation. Alone, yes, but not lonely. Most of the time he was satisfied with his own company.” He’s surrounded with interesting people: DS Ken Jackson, for whose newborn twin David he stands godfather; DI Chris Ledbetter, so handsome and so proud of his mousy wife and beautiful daughter; young PAC Simon Marshbanks, whose parents live next door to Bernard Warwick, puttng him in the midst of the case. I look forward to getting to know them. Too many characters, hovever, are only tangential to the plot.

Fraser is good at showing character through details of the setting: “As [Hannah] came out of the forecourt, the thunderstorm, threatening for so long, finally broke. A deafening succession of crashes rolled across the sky, brilliantly illuminated by lightning, and the downpour of rain began with a roaring sound, rattling on the paving stone and half-blinding her as she struggled to open the car door. The pavements of Station Road, quite busy when she drove up minutes before, was deserted as pedestrians huddled in shop doorways until the worst of the storm had passed. Slowly, her windshield wipers struggling even on double speed, Hannah drove along what seemed like a raging riverbed. The few cars she saw were driving slowly along could have been empty, since the occupants were hidden behind the streaming windows. She felt alone and vulnerable, like a creature left behind by Noah’s Ark.”

The plot in DEATH SPEAKS SOFTLY is unusual in that the killings don’t happen until late in the book. One is easily foreseeable, the other comes as a surprise. Fraser does a good job of building suspense about Arlette’s fate and providing reasonable suspects for her disappearance. Despite its age, it’s a good read. (B+)

 

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A SPRIG OF BLOSSOMED THORN is the second book in Patrice Greenwood’s mystery series centering on the Wisteria Tearoom in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was a free or inexpensive Kindle edition published in 2013.

Ellen Rosings is happy to have her server Rosa’s grandmother Maria Garcia, one the pillars of the Hispanic community in Santa Fe, come to tea; she’s appalled when Mrs. Garcia dies during the meal. Detective Antonio Aragon, whom Ellen met during the first death at the tearoom, investigates. Mrs. Garcia died from wound botulism--a scratch from a rose thorn on her wrist became infected. Everything points to an unfortunate accident, but Ellen doesn’t think so. There are major tensions within the Garcia family. Older son Ricardo who manages one of the restaurants owned by Mrs. Garcia, resents his mother’s exaltation of her lawyer younger son Matt; daughter Estella is bitter because her mother disinherited her after she divorced her abusive husband. Mrs. Garcia had opposed Matt’s relationship with an Anglo woman; she disliked grandson Julio (who’s Ellen’s chef) having an Anglo roommate. She’d been the token Hispanic in the exclusive Rose Guild for twenty years, where some resent her as a troublemaker, belonging only because of her generous donations. Where does one obtain botulism, and who used it?

Ellen Rosings is an attractive protagonist and, because she’s first person narrator, well developed. She pulls a major TSTL when, discovering a likely suspect for Mrs. Garcia’s death, she goes to call on that person without telling anyone where she’s going. She spends much time musing on her relationship with Tony Aragon. “Why, I wondered, was I so strongly attracted to him? He wasn’t at all the sort of person I ordinarily spent time with. He liked motorcycles and rock music. I liked china and tea and Mozart. I spent my days creating a delightful place for people to enjoy a quiet cup of tea, while he devoted his to resolving some of humanity’s uglier problems. He did clean up quite nicely, though, when he cared to make the effort.” (41) She’s surrounded by a believable group with hints of interesting back stories: Julio Garcia, chef, with his Anglo roommate Adam; Kris Overland, Goth-dressing office manager for the tearoom; Willow Lane, who runs Spirit Tours of Santa Fe and promises to help Ellen research the building’s resident ghost, Captain Samuel Dusenberry, murdered in 1855; and Gina, Ellen’s best friend, who has a revolving-door policy on boyfriends. They will be neat to get to know.

Setting is mostly conveyed through physical locations in Santa Fe, but Greenwood produces some vignettes that develop both atmosphere and character. “In New Mexico, Hispanics and Anglos share a lot of things--political power, economic power, cultural influence--but there are sometimes invisible lines that one crosses at one’s own risk. A powerful woman like Mrs. Garcia would be able to draw such lines for those under her influence.” (77)

The murder plot seems secondary, more a device to get Ellen and Tony Aragon together than a serious investigation of a suspicious death. An experienced reader will probably pick up on the killer before Ellen since only one person is shown with the kind of hatred that provides a motive for murder. The plot does not require the number of characters introduced. Still, a neat quick read. (B)

 

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DALZIEL AND PASCOE, Season 10, was first broadcast in 2006 as five two-part episodes. Series regulars include Warren Clarke as Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel, aka the Fat Man; Colin Buchanan as Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe, his assistant and friend; Wayne Perrey as DC Parvez Lateef, a young Asian; Joe Savino as medical examiner Dr. Frank Mason; Naomi Bentley as WPC Maria “Janet” Jackson; and Jennifer James as WPC Kim “Posh” Spicer. They are ably supported by outstanding British character actors, many of them familiar faces even if we don’t always know their names.

HOUDINI’S GHOST, the first two episodes, were first shown 6-7 March 2006. When Pal Miclean is found dead in his study at long-deserted Moscow House, everything points to suicide: he’d been shot in the head with a shotgun, the trigger pulled by a string around his toe, the door locked from the inside. He’d been separated from his wife Kay for five years, and he’d been depressed since the sale of his construction / development business to Bill Walker. Dalziel is obviously emotionally involved with the case, knowing of Pal’s previous abuse of Kay that almost killed her. Rob Miclean refuses to accept his father’s death as suicide; his poking about and the police’s investigation lead to the first major Council building project Miclean and Walker had together, tearing down an old hospital and erecting the high-rise Cherwell Towers. Something fishy there, but what? There’s a touching moment at the end when Dalziel admits he was mistaken about a witness, and Pascoe refers to him as his best friend. A big part of the pleasure of this long-running series has been the development of their relationship. Familiar faces include Cherie Lunghi as Kay Miclean and John Rowe as Bill Walker; actors to look for in future roles are Daniel Evans, who plays Rob Miclean, and Rocky Marshall, who plays Jason Chapman. (A-)

GLORY DAYS was broadcast 13-14 March 2006, focusing on the Wetherton Wanderers football (soccer to us Yanks) team, who’s set to move into the Premiere League under the brilliant management of Martin Bendelow. The team, wives, and girlfriends are on a coach (bus) headed for a celebration dinner; interchanges make it clear that there’s much ill-feeling--between teammates, between players and management, and within the Bendelow family, all the members of which work for the Wanderers. When the coach driver deliberately stalls in the path of an oncoming train, three people die in the ensuing crash. One of the dead is Martin Bendelow, but he suffocated when someone stuffed a silk scarf down his throat as he lay helpless in the confusion. As Dalziel and Pascoe investigate, others die, and secrets emerge concerning Martin’s management style and his dominance of his family that explain his murder. There’s a question at the end about who killed Martin, but, as Dalziel says, “Sometimes justice and the truth don’t add up to the same thing.” The viewer needs a scorecard for this episode because there are so many male characters, all about the same age, build, and hair color, and few names are included in the dialogue. Familiar faces include George Costigan as Martin’s father and Andrew Dunn as Jack Farady, assistant manager of the Wanderers. A couple of actors to be on the watch for are Jonie Brown, who plays Adam Osbourne, and Vidal Sancho, who plays Juanito Torres. (B-)

WRONG TIME, WRONG PLACE was first broadcast 28-29 March 2006. Dalziel and Pascoe are in Amsterdam to attend a police conference where Dalziel must give a lecture on murder. The body of an Engltishman is fished out of a canal as they pass en route to their hotel, shepherded by DS Anna Breukink. Her boss DI Hans Boersma seems a Dutch version of Dalziel; Detective Superintendent Wilm de Kuiper persistently mispronounces Daziel’s name and isn’t best pleased when fat Andy returns the favor, then gives a rousing speech. Following the session, delegates go to the Blue Parrot, a nightclub where Dalziel meets Yorkshire woman Tracey Baxter who sings there; she’d reported the disappearance of friends that day. Dalziel goes back to her apartment; he awakens obviously having been drugged, covered in blood next to Tracey, who’s been savagely stabbed to death. Dalziel’s the chief suspect, arrested, but released on highly restricted bail. He promptly disappears, leaving Pascoe outside his jurisdiction, being stonewalled by the Dutch police with Boersma in charge. Pascoe uses his team at home in Yorkshire to uncover the roots of the murders deep in Dalziel’s past and in the blood diamond trade. This episode seems padded, convoluted to the point of improbability, not as crisp as usual. It is nice to see some great Dutch actors: Jeroen Krabbe as DS de Kuiper and Pierre Bokma as D Boersma; an actor to look for is Dennis Rudge, who pays an unnamed African hitman. (C)

GUARDIAN ANGEL was broadcast 3-4 April 2006. Someone puts Teltroxin, a skin contact poison similar to Sarin, on Susan Goodman, and she dies. Is this part of a terrorist plot? in Wetherton? Her husband Paul is bitter about the Fairmile family, responsible for a major pension scandal that left him penniless when he was made redundant; he and other victims of the Fairmile scam have been sent invitations to a New Age-type retreat called Arcadia, run by son Brian Fairmile, with other women of the group killed the same way. Each of the women has £20,000 missing. Why, and where is the killer obtaining the classified, highly restricted poison? In the meantime, Rosie Pascoe is on a visit to her father and is shoplifting repeatedly. What’s going on with her? The motive for the murders is unusual. This episode is packed with familiar faces: Kelly Hunter as Laura MacAlpine, Christopher Fulford as Terry Parker, Stephen Tompkinson (Inspector Banks) as Brian Fairmile, Anton Lesser as Paul Goodman, Tony Haygarth as Michael Veitch, Gerard Horan as Jim Webster, and Jimmy Yuill as Robert MacAlpine. (A)

The final episodes A DEATH IN THE FAMILY was broadcast 10-11 April 2006. It begins with the robbery of a security transfer center which nets the raiders £600,000 in used bills. Dave Compton, an ex-cop who went back thirty years with Dalziel, is killed in the raid and turns out to have been the inside man on the job. Cut to First Night, a restaurant owned by Steve Pitts and a group of friends who’ve been together since York University in the 1990s, in various permutations of male-female. It’s clear from the beginning that the men of the group are the robbers; the suspense comes from the group’s past and present relationships, their disputes over the share and use of the stolen money, and how to launder it. It comes to multiple murder, kidnapping and torture, the Hawallah (method used to transfer money between countries without going through banks), and what goes on in so-called “families.” There’s a neat surprise ending. Art Malik as Aahail Khan is about the only familiar face, but Burn Gorman, Phalut Sharma, and Gillian Wright are young actors to watch for. (A-)

DALZIEL AND PASCOE, Season 10, is well worth the time.

 

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AUSTENLAND by Shannon Hale was a free or inexpensive Kindle e-book. It updates Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Jane Hayes is a 32-year-old graphics designer for a magazine in New York. She’s had a sorry successfion of boy friends, none of whom came close to matching Fitzwilliam Darcy, especially as played in a wet shirt by Colin Firth. When her great-aunt Carolyn dies, she leaves Jane a three-week stay at Pembrook Park in Kent. where she will in effect be transported back to the world of Elizabeth Bennet, 1815. She will participate in a house party in which every person will assume the dress and manners of Austen’s world. Jane dithers about whether to go, but it’s paid for and nonrefundable. She has study materials to master, lessons in dancing, cards, manners, and how to deal with servants, and fittings for an appropriate Regency wardrobe before arriving. Sure enough, there’s an actor portraying Mr. Nobley, rich and prestigious friend of Colonel Andrews, second son of the Earl of Denton, who’s very much like Darcy. Perversely, Jane’s most taken with Martin Jasper, who plays “Theodore, the gardener.” She slips off to the cottage where the “servants” live, to enjoy NBA basketball, root beer, and making out.

I am giving up at 39%. Jane is like the man who wanted an elephant until he got it and then didn’t know what to do with it. The infatuation with Darcy is unrealistic at her age. She emotes more like a teenager than a grown woman. After multiple petting sessions, she’s surprised that Martin expects to take it further. She’s bored with the restrictions on women’s behavior and manners; she finds her status as lowest in precedence, stifling. Frankly, I just don’t care enough about her to continue.

I found three major anachronisms in the portion of AUSTENLAND that I read. In a house where authenticity is so highly regarded that anyone detected in contravening it will be asked to leave, the lighting is from flame-bulbed electric lamps and from kerosene lamps. Kerosene for lighting came into widespread use only after the mid-nineteenth century. In Austen’s time, lighting came from candles or from whale-oil lamps for upstairs; downstairs would most likely use tallow candles. Jane goes riding in one of her day dresses; no young lady would ride horseback in 1815 unless properly attired in a riding habit. Nothing is said about her riding side-saddle, difficult enough for an experienced horseworman but the only manner acceptable for a Regency lady. Jane also experiences a craving for chocolate and laments that it’s not available. Chocolate was introduced into Europe with Columbus’s fourth voyage and was widespread in use by the mid-sixteenth century. Chocolate was a luxury, but drinking chocolate, chocolate candies, and chocolate desserts were available by Austen’s time.

Not recommended. No grade because not finished.

 

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I just watched MISS MARPLE: ENDLESS NIGHT, and I’m going to reread the novel to see if the adaptation is as bad as I think now. I never got how Miss Marple (Julia McKenzie) came to be involved with Mike Rogers (played by Tom Hughes) to begin with. From the beginning, it’s clear that he’s on the make and probably none too particular about his methods. The story line cut around so much it is hard to follow the events in the plot. The sets are so poorly lit that at times it is difficult to tell who’s present. Background music is overblown. This is a big disappointment.

 

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NORTHANGER ABBEY is Val McDermid’s entry in the series of modern adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels. It is available in both print and e-format, published in 2014.

Presuming familiarity with the original Northanger Abbey, I will not attempt a plot summary. McDermid is remarkably faithful to its story line, mainly updating details of the setting. Instead of Gothic novels, Catherine Morland, who prefers to be called “Cat,” is into the paranormal, especially the Twilight series. Where Austen’s characters send letters, Cat and her friends and family text each other and send e-mails, post on FaceBook and on Twitter. Instead of Bath, the Allens take Cat as Mrs. Allen’s companion to the Edinburgh Festival, where Mr. Allen seeks out new theatrical works to bring to the London stage. James Moreland and Henry Tilney are both in training to become lawyers. General Tilney is a hero of the Falklands, while Captain Freddie Tilney is in his second tour of duty in Afghanistan, home on leave. Cat plans to train as a nanny, and Eleanor Tilney wants art school; together they plan for Cat to write and Ellie to illustrate books for children. John Thorpe tells General Tilney not that Cat’s poor, but that she’s a lesbian.

Cat Morland is lifted bodily from the original, just as foolishly romantic and ignorant of the world and people, seventeen years old. Everything she knows is filtered through her novel-reading; she’s convinced that the Tilneys are a family of vampires. McDermid doesn’t change the personality or behavior of the original characters. One of the delights of her NORTHANGER ABBEY is the use of humor in her characterization: “...Bella [Thorpe] swept Cat along. Before she knew it, they were gossiping about the things that entertain young women of a certain age and type. It was all new to Cat, but as they strolled in the sunshine, she managed to appear as if she were entirely familiar with a conversational world that encompassed intimate gossip about people neither of them had ever met, current fashions and where the cool people were hanging out in Edinburgh. In short, a range of subjects that had no useful application whatsoever.” (40-1)

McDermid has several passages that sound like authentic Austen: “...Cat was so deeply mired in her admiration for the Tilneys that not even the potential approbation of her parents could divert her.” (143) “Engrossing and enthralling though the Hebridean Harpies were, horrifying and heart-stopping though the fictional worlds of vampires was, they were not source books on the life and habits of the Scottish landed classes. There might be distant and exotic places where such things were commonplace, but here in the Borders, the chances were slim that life was ever going to imitate art.” (283-4) I especially enjoy the contrast between Cat’s expectations for the Gothic ambiance of the abbey and its reality: “Although Northanger was built from a dark red sandstone that reminded her of blood oranges, in style and scale the portico was very similar to that of the parish church in Piddle Dummer, where her father held evening services every other Sunday. The only things missing were the parish noticeboard and the Oxfam posters. (217-8)

I was initially put off by the gap in age between Henry Tilney and Cat--he’s already out of Oxford and is within two months of qualifying as an advocate (Scottish attorney), and she’s seventeen and remarkably inexperienced. However, McDermid has them wait four years before marrying. Cat’s trained and worked as a nanny, and she and Ellie have had two children’s books accepted for publication.

Doubtful as I generally am about prequels, sequels, variants, and modernization of Austen’s novels, I must say that McDermid’s adaptation is a hoot. Definitely recommended for Austen fans. (A)

 

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Agatha Christie’s ENDLESS NIGHT was originally published in 1967 and was reissued in e-book format in 2010.

ENDLESS NIGHT is narrated by Michael Rogers. He’s a young ne-er-do-well who’s knocked around in many dead-end jobs despite his miother’s slaving to provide him with a good education and respectability. When driving for an elderly couple, he discovers in Kingston Bishop a for-sale notice on a derelict house called The Towers; he visits the site and becomes obsessed with it. He’s warned by Mrs. Esther Lee, a local gipsy, that the land known as Gipsy’s Acre is cursed. Years before the house had been the scene of a double murder; many accidents happen on a blind curve in the road below the house; several families had lived in The Towers briefly before the house had been abandoned. He leaves his driving career in Hamburg when he becomes incurably bored with his passengers. Some time later, back at Gipsy’s Acre, he meets Fenella Guteman, an American heiress, not quite of age, whom he charms, not knowing of her wealth. Soon after she turns 21, with the help of her secretary/companion Greta Andersen, they marry; Ellie’s already bought Gipsy’s Acre and has genius architect Rudolf Santonix, who’s dying of a blood disease, at work on their new house. As construction progresses and they move into Gipsy’s Acre, they receive warnings from Mrs. Lee and from Santonix about the evil associated with the place. Ellie and Mike ignore the warnings, happy in their love and marriage, but Ellie dies from what the inquest thinks is heart failure brought on by a fall while riding. Mike buries Ellie with her forebears in the United States, a trip necessary for him to deal with the legalities of his inheriting her entire estate. Meanwhile, in England, Mrs. Lee has gone missing, and Ellie’s riding companion Claudia Hardcastle dies in a fall from her hunter. Two deaths from riding accidents in a two-week period seems excessive. Are we sure that they were accidents?

Mike Rogers is an unreliable narrator, with this apparent from early on. He’s frank about being on the make: “I didn’t want all the senseless rich things. I wanted--there was the words again, my own particular words--I want, I want.... I could feel all the feelings surging up in me. I wanted a wonderful woman and a wonderful house like nobody else’s house and I wanted my wonderful house to be full of wonderful things. Things that belonged to me. Everything would belong to me.” (102) Christie uses atmosphere effectively to disclose character: “I’m not superstitious. I believe in luck, of course, who doesn’t? But not a lot of superstitious nonsense about ruined houses with curses on them. And yet I had an uneasy feeling that the sinister old creature [Mrs. Lee} had seen something in my hands. I looked down at my two palms spread out in front of me. What could anyone see in the palms of anyone’s hands? Fortune-telling was arrant nonsense--just a trick to get money out of you--money out of your silly credulity. I looked up at the sky. The sun had gone in, the day seemed different now. A sort of shadow, a kind of menace. Just an approaching storm, I thought. The wind was beginning to blow, the backs of the leaves were showing on the trees. I whistled to keep my spirits up...” (9-10)

The murders are uncovered in ENDLESS NIGHT by the local squire, Major Phillpot, with Ellie’s lawyer Andrew Lippincott also aware of what happened.

ENDLESS NIGHT is well constructed. (A-)



The 2013 adaptation MISS MARPLE: ENDLESS NIGHT makes several major changes to the original. Miss Marple is in Kingston Bishop, visiting her friend, the widowed Mrs. Phillpot. Miss Marple, of course, is the investigator. Rudolf Santonix is renamed Robbie Hayman, and his relationship (half-brother) to Claudia Hardcastle is dropped. Instead Hayman’s younger brother had drowned when he fell through the ice while skating on a pond; the young Mike Rogers had been unable to save him. In a final judgment on Mike, the dying Hayman burns down the house he’d designed. A previous murder is omitted. The denouement is modified to increase tension by having the killer threaten Miss Marple’s life.

The adaptation mostly smoothes over the unreliable narrator, though Mike Rogers tells much of the story. This shifts the overall focus. The TV version seems jerky and episodic, not flowing. Lighting for almost all the interior shots is very dark; characters are often silhouetted against a day-lit window, so that faces and expressions are hidden. The music doesn’t enhance the action as much as overpower it. (C)

 

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Jonnie Jacobs’s EVIDENCE OF GUILT is the second of her mystery series featuring Kali O’Brien. It was released in print in 1997, then reissued in e-format in 2012.

Kali O’Brien had returned to Silver Creek, California, temporarily to settle up her father’s estate but, when her high-powered law firm in the Bay Area imploded, she remained to set up in practice for herself. When Sam Morrison, the well-respected lawyer who’s mentored her during this process, asks for her to help him with defending Wes Harding, she can’t refuse him. The prosecutor thinks he has a slam dunk case against Harding--multiple bits of circumstantial evidence, including bloodstains, tire tracks and dirt traces in his motorcycle; sympathetic victims, well-though-of young mother Lisa Cornell and her five-year-old daughter Amy, brutally killed; and Wes’s wild, dangerous reputation going all the way back to high school. His step-father Dr. Jack Harding is Sam’s good friend, and he’s paying for Wes’s defense. Wes, however, isn’t cooperating with them. As Kali does Sam’s legwork, questions emerge about Lisa. Why had she lied about going to a chronic pain support group on Wednesday nights? What recovered memories are coming back in her hypnosis sessions with Dr. Donna Markley? Has she been planning to sell the property left her by her aunt Anne Drummond, on condition that it not be sold for development? Does someone want the property enough to kill for it? Why did she postpone her marriage to older, wealthy Philip Stockman? When Dr. Markley dies in an unexplained automobile accident, Kali suspects she too was murdered. Can Kali find the killer in time to save Wes?

Kali O’Brien is a satisfying protagonist. She is gutsy, smart, and hard-working, with adult emotional baggage and enough trials of daily life to be authentic. She has a self-deprecating sense of humor: “The first thing Sam and I were going to have to settle was a filing system that made sense. I’d no neatness freak, believe me. My underpants and bras get tossed together in the drawer with my running shorts; my makeup bin looks like it ought to go out with the trash; and the stack of clean laundry in the corner doesn’t look much different from the stack of dirty stuff. But I like my paperwork organized. My brain requires all the assistance it can get.” Of Sabrina, Kali says, “...I could hear the clink of ice cubes. Diet Coke? Or a vodka tonic? At three o’clock in the afternoon, it could have been either, depending on her mood. My sister sometimes found it difficult to deal with the demands of a privileged lifestyle.” Important characters are vividly developed.

The plot in EVIDENCE OF GUILT is a gradual unraveling of what seems a solid case against Wes Harding, despite no direct physical evidence--no fingerprints, no witnesses, no murder weapon. The police haven’t looked beyond him. As Kali digs, looking for alternative theories to raise reasonable doubt in the mind of a jury, she keeps discovering details of Lisa’s life and her associates that open the field of suspects. An experienced reader may discern the killer and motive ahead of Kali because Jacobs does play fair with appropriate foreshadowing. The conclusion, however, does not match the character of the killer as it was shown through previous action.

Jacobs is good with details of physical setting that evoke real places: “The building [barn where bodies found] was a weathered gray, and listed slightly to the left. The roof was bare in spots, the siding warped. I suspected that the wide double door at the end hadn’t budged since the last horse trotted out many years earlier. ... The interior had a musty, sickly-sweet smell that caught in my throat, but it wasn’t as gloomy as I’d expected. Sunlight filtered through cracks in the siding and several large gaps in the roof, revealing nothing more ominous than neglect and ruin. Floating in the hot, dry air, particles of dust caught the light like microscopic June bugs, infusing the stillness with an otherworldly quality. From outside I heard the far-off, hollow tapping of a woodpecker.”

EVIDENCE OF GUILT convinces me to continue with the series. (A-)

 

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DIRECTOR’S CUT is the second in Keri Knutson and Susan Branham’s mystery series featuring Madeline Pryor, manager of the Orpheus Theater in Los Angeles. It was published in 2011 as a free or inexpensive e-book.

Maddie Pryor lives in the castle built by 1930s legendary film director Otto Von Strasser; under suspicion of collaborating with the Nazis to sell stolen arts and antiquities, his body was found hanging in the turret room of what became Maddie’s apartment. She occasionally perceives his spirit. When a cache of Von Strasser’s effects. including his last, unfinished film, comes to light, she’s proud that the Orpheus is chosen to premiere the film. This involves her in a chaotic period in which someone breaks into her home; she rescues a young woman from a skinhead; Von Strasser’s journals are stolen; the burglar runs down Dylan Honig, who’s restoring the film; the burglar is killed and left hanging in Maddie’s apartment; Phillip Sylvain, the antiques expert whose father was a friend of Von Strasser, is murdered. The Brandenburg Cross, stolen by Nazis and shown in Von Strasser’s film, is one of the objects being sought. Nobody is who or what he or she seems.

The plot is over the top in DIRECTOR’S CUT, in that there are so many levels of what happened to Von Strasser and the cross in the 1940s and what’s happening in the present time, the reader needs a score card or a flow chart to keep it straight. Practically everyone except the continuing characters in the series is a villain of some sort. Few clues point to specific individuals for specific actions. The denouement is a parade in which each wrongdoer reveals himself/herself to Maddie and the previous villain.

Maddie is an interestingly flawed protagonist. “It might seem strange that while Raymond Avery kept a portrait of a man he’d never known on the wall out of some bizarre sense of obligation, I had no pictures of my parents on display in my home. It didn’t make me a bad daughter, only a cautious one, unwilling to be caught in an unguarded moment where memory might rush back. I slid the picture into the wood frame of my bureau mirror. It seemed to belong there. I smiled back at my mother for the first time in years.” The probability of one innocent person being involved in finding so many dead bodies is slim. Even with boyfriend Kyle Oberman who’s a detective in LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division, she’d normally be a suspect, not one who’s allowed to prowl around the edges of multiple murder cases. She’s not terribly perceptive about people and their motives. The number of characters exceeds even the enlarged requirements of the plot, and few are much developed.

Sense of place is good in DIRECTOR’S CUT: “A Saturday morning in L.A. is a surreal cartoon. Th trendsetters head for Melrose Avenue, the chic to the Rodeo Drive shops. Children crowd onto the Griffith Park merry-go-round or the carousel on the Santa Monica Pier, while the college kids pack Westwood Boulevard. Skaters thread between magicians and mimes in Venice Beach and all around the air shimmers with heat. Elsewhere, tempers flare with the first hint of the Santa Ana winds and shots ring out, sirens slice the air, and screaming matches echo in front of stucco apartments the color of Pepto-Bismol.”

The amount of suspension of disbelief required for DIRECTOR’S CUT means that I probably won’t be reading any more of the series. (C-)

 

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Julie Anne Lindsey’s MURDER BY THE SEASIDE was a free or inexpensive Kindle download.

Patience Peace Price, known to her parents as “Peepee”, has returned home to Chincoteague Island after being downsized from her job as a Human Resources manager for the FBI. She’s earned her M.A. and plans to become a family counselor, convinced that the island needs one. She arrives on the day that Sheriff Murray is trying to find her high school sweetheart Adrian Davis to arrest him for the murder of Brady McGee. Adrian had broken her heart when he left the island to play football, without having told Peepee he had even applied to colleges. Because of her FBI background, Adrian’s mother demands that Peepee clear her son of suspicion, and Adrian shows up both at her apartment and on the beach to get her help in proving him innocent.

I give up at 23%. The plot is obvious at this point, though it’s not clear whether Peepee will end up with Adrian or with hunky FBI Special Agent Sebastian Clark. We’re got the victim’s wife and his business partner, both obviously with way too much money; the high school football coach with a gambling problem; and a victim that everyone disliked for good reason. How hard should it be to find a man known to all the locals on an island seven by three miles in area? The most uncertain thing to date is how long it will take Peepee to adopt the little gray kitten and what she’ll name it. I do like the kitten.

It’s hard to take seriously a character called “Peepee.” She’s standard romantic suspense female protagonist, as Adrian is standard high school hunk who made good. Like many stories set in the South, most of the characters are quirky, neurotic, or outright crazy. Law enforcement is represented by Deputy Doofus and his boss Sheriff Murray, who was Deputy Doofus to the former sheriff.

None of the characters exhibit Southern patterns of speech or thought. Writers who can’t or won’t create Southern ambiance ought not to set their books in the South. There is some good description of setting, however: “Tugboats bleated on the shimmery blue water that reflected a perfect sky. Seagulls squawked at fishermen, demanding their share of the day’s haul, and a comforting layer of brine tinged the otherwise clean and flower-scented air. All these things spelled h-o-m-e. Houses on the harbor and along the causeway were newer than the rest. The few original homes were weathered to almost black. Along the inside roads, most homes dated back to the eighteen hundreds. Beds-and-breakfasts spilled purple flowers from barrels onto sidewalks. Signs on every corner boasted the home’s age and owner’s surname. History mattered on Chincoteague. “

No grade because not finished. Life’s too short, and there are too many better books.

 

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Margaret Maron’s DEATH IN BLUE FOLDERS is the third in her mystery series featuring Lieutenant Sigrid Harald of the NYPD Homicide Squad. It was published in print in 1985 and in e-format in 2011.

Attorney Clayton Gladwell plans an immediate retirement due to ill health and a closedown of his practice when he’s shot and killed; his office files are ransacked, and an effort made to burn the private files he’d kept in blue folders in his desk. Lt. Harald and her partner Detective Tildon soon discover discrepancies in Gladwell’s finances, including $46,000 in cash in his desk at home and a Swiss bank account of $750,000. They soon conclude that the blue folders represented clients whom the lawyer had been blackmailing. But what do an elderly Austrian nursing-home patient, the suicide years before of a has-been young starlet, husband and wife Pakistani doctors, a wealthy man whose grandson had been kidnapped four years before, an elderly former member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, and an art gallery owner, have to be blackmailed over? As Harald and Tildon investigate, they uncover many secrets, three more murders, and the lengths to which some people will go.

Characterization is strong in DEATH IN BLUE FOLDERS. Maron is skillful in using shifts in point of view to develop her characters and to eliminate large sections of exposition. She creates a viable law enforcement community. “In the time that they’d been working together, Sigrid had come to rely on Tillie’s penchant for detail and preferred him, with his dogged, by-the-book thoroughness, to others in the department with flashier reputations for brilliance, Together, they were making a quiet reputation of their own for competence and a high percentage of closed cases.” Sigrid is a loner, self-contained, but with hidden depths in her relationship with Roman Tremegra, with whom she shares her apartment, and with her lover, noted abstract artist Oscar Nauman, who pulls her into social circles where she’s otherwise uncomfortable. Details of Sigrid and Tillie’s home life, including Sigrid’s search for another apartment, add to the sense of their being real people. Major characters are individuals.

The plot is police procedural with the reader getting evidence and information as the detectives uncover it. Maron provides an interesting assortment of suspects, but an experienced reader may pick up on the killer’s motive before the denouement. Physical locations and atmosphere put the story firmly in New York City.

DEATH IN BLUE FOLDERS is an oldie but goodie. (A-)

 

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Julia George’s GALYA POPOFF AND THE DEAD SOULS was published in 2012 as a free or inexpensive e-book. It centers on Galya Popoff, tenured professor in the foreign languages department of Lobo del Mar College in Santa Maria del Lobo, California, and her actor son Pavel Popoff, aka Lance Steele. She’d engineered their escape from the USSR nearly forty years before when her husband was sent to Siberia for supporting the Czechoslovakian revolt.

Galya is walking her apricot poodle Kroshka (“Breadcrumb”) on campus before dawn when they are nearly struck by the falling body of Chancellor Siegfried Nottbeck. He’d been free climbing the Campanile and apparently fell to his death. But Galya heard bangs, and Kroshka chased after someone in the bushes, snagging blue cloth. Detective Sergeant Mike Lewis, aka Misha, knows Professor Popoff, but he thinks she’s imagining things when she says Nottbeck was murdered. This means she, Pavel, and local reporter Tiffany Ryan (aka Tanya) must prove him wrong and solve the mystery. Nottbeck, referred to as “Nazi Nottbeck,” is thoroughly despised. Suspects include his young wife Roxanne (aka Sonya), who fast becomes a merry widow; his identical twin brother Parsifal, who thinks Siegfried always got first choice and himself what was left; former student Kimberly Kendall, who claims that Siegfried had sexually harassed her; Kimberly’s father John Kendall, who was infuriated when the Board did nothing about Siegfried; and Tom Larson, refused tenure because he was a non-native speaker and teacher of Spanish.

Pavel Popoff is the first person narrator of GALYA POPOFF AND THE DEAD SOULS, which gives insight into his personality. He doesn’t take himself too seriously: “...when I was growing up, my mother ordered me to speak only Russian at home. So, like Kroshka, I’m bilingual. Mama and I hung out with Russian emigres, and I had a lot of Russian friends. Hanging out with Russian guys can teach you a lot. And that’s how I know exactly what Roxannee ws murmuring to Misha. All I can say is, she and Misha must have done some extra vocabulary work on their own, because she didn’t learn this by reading Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in Professor Popoff’s Russian Lit class.” (49-50)

The most important character is Professor Galya Popoff, who’s larger than life. “Before he became Chancellor, Nazi Nottbeck had run the language department like the German high command. My mother, never a woman to mince words, thought his bossiness was matched only by his vanity and told him so every chance she got. This delighted the craven faculty who were totally cowed by Nottbeck’s winning-through-intimidation tactics. Clothed in her invincible Armour of Tenure, my mother was the only professor who wasn’t afraid to stand up to him. Whenever Nazi Nottbeck saw her marching down the hall he would mutter, ‘Mein Gott! The Eastern Front!’ Then he would turn on his heels and retreat into his office bunker.” (6) Many of the characters have been in Professor Popoff’s Russian classes because she publishes in the catalog that no one fails her class; what she doesn’t say is that she pushes and hounds every student until they do the work to earn at least a D+. She calls them by the Russian diminutive of their names, and she actively recruits: “Dima’s expression went blank for a moment as he tried to figure out how to escape Russian class when football season was over. Profesor Popoff would surely track him down if he didn’t sign up. My mother was the only professor at Lobo del Mar College who could make a two-hundred-seventy pound lineman quake in his cleats.” (78) She’s fun to get to know.

The plot is straight forward, in that the most likely suspect is the killer, but George does a good job at keeping the motive hidden, concealing the identity. She plays fair with foreshadowing. Three long sequences involving Pavel’s nightmares about the murder seem like padding to make up a specified number of pages.

Sense of place is good with both physical setting and atmosphere, some of which exposes character: “An aromatherapeutic mix of sage and rosemary, kelp and salt spray, mingled on the breeze wafting from the ocean. California poppies, blue-eyed grass, and pink lupine danced in the sunlight with wild abandon. Kroshka barked at a couple of brown pelicans soaring overhead. Like pterodactyls on the hunt, they pointed their long sharp beaks, folded their enormous wings and dropped like rocks into the water. I had a sudden, inexplicable surge of optimism. Life was good.” (63)

It’s easy to suspend disbelief and just go along for the ride with GALYA POPOFF AND THE DEAD SOULS. (B)

 

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Jill Paterson’s MURDER AT THE ROCKS is the second in her mystery series set in Sydney, Australia, featuring Detective Chief Inspector Alistair Fitzjohn of the New South Wales Police. It was a free or inexpensive e-book published in 2011.

Laurence Harford and his older brother Edward, partners in Brayshaw’s Jewellers , have been enemies for as long as Edward’s son Nicholas remembers. At odds with his father himself because he’s chosen an academic career in geosciences over the jewelry business, Nicholas has been out of the country for a year; his father’s letter doesn’t reach him until after Edward’s death. Upon his return, Nicholas finds that his father’s will has left everything except some bequests to servants to him, including 51% ownership of Brayshaw’s. Laurence demands that Nicholas turn the business over to him or he will contest the will and take the entire estate. In his letter, Edward had told Nicholas of a deterrent that would prevent Laurence’s contesting the will, but what? Then, the evening after an altercation in which Nicholas punches his uncle for calling his mother a whore, Laurence is stabbed to death. Who wanted him dead? He’d been a wmanizer, a gambler, a bully, and a blackmailer, involved in fraud on building developments. Many secrets are exposed before Fitzjohn and Nicholas Harford discover who killed Laurence and why.

The plot seems unnecessarily dragged out, with many twists that seem more for their own sake than essential to the action. The motive for Laurence’s murder lies far in the past, but that event is never explained--we’re just told it happened. A second murder, that of Laurence’s mistress, is thrown in as a red herring. Likewise the conclusion drags out into almost anticlimax.

Fitzjohn is an believable character, a widower who’s tending his dead wife Edith’s orchids, not wanting to deal with his sister’s ideas of how he should be living. “Part of the old guard of detectives, Fitzjohn’s methodical, painstaking methods were, no doubt, viewed by some as archaic. Nevertheless, over the years, they had brought him success as well as the respect of all but one of his colleagues; Superintendent Grieg, the man Fitzjohn regarded as his nemesis.” (28-9) He’s ably supported by Detective Sergeant Martin Betts. Nicholas Harford carries about half the story, with point of view shifting between him and Fitzjohn. Paterson uses indirect characterization, only seldom direct statements.

Setting is clearly Sydney, with streets, buildings, and surrounding areas all clearly identified, but Paterson doesn’t develop the atmosphere needed for a great sense of place. (C)

 

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DARK HORSE is the first book in J. R. Rain’s mystery series featuring Jim Knighthorse, former college football star, now private investigator since his dreams of NFL glory faded with a devastating injury in his last collegiate game. It was published in e-book format in 2010.

Charles Brown, defense attorney for Derrick Booker, hires Jim Knighthorse to investigate the case against his client. Booker, an African-American academic and athletic star at the almost totally white Huntington High School, has been arrested for stabbing to death his seventeen-year-old girlfriend Amanda Peterson. The only evidence against him is the murder weapon found in the back seat of Derrick’s car, found by the police after an anonymous tip, and he has no alibi. No fingerprints, no other physical evidence. Knighthorse takes the case and soon is convinced that Derrick is innocent, especially after a hitman makes a visit to his office to warn him off. He uncovers the suicide of the football coach, further threats from the hitman, physical and sexual abuse of his wife and children by a public official, sexual harassment and stalking by a teacher, and a long distant murder tied to Amanda’s death.

The plot of DARK HORSE is more violent than I prefer. It includes the senseless killing of a little girl’s cat as a warning message, Knighthorse’s beating of the abuser, and his killing the hitman in cold blood. It’s worsened because a LAPD homicide officer sets the beating victim up, and the same officer gets Knighthorse the name and address of the man he kills. There’s no foreshadowing of the relationship that’s key to identifying the killer. Much of the story concerns Jim’s determination at age thirty to get himself ready physically for a tryout with the San Diego Chargers, his relationship with Cindy Darwin (yes, she is a descendant of THE Charles Darwin), dealing with his father Cooper Knighthorse, and with solving the murder of his mother when he was ten years old.

Jim Knighthorse is unusual, combining as he does many of the traits of the old pulp-fiction private eye with a philosophical bent that has him talking in a McDonald’s on Beach Boulevard with a homeless man named Jack, who says he’s God. He’s touched by the sufferings of others: “I needed something to do with my hands, because Amanda’s mother was making me nervous. She was in a bad place, a place i had emerged from years ago after the murder of my own mother. I knew what she was going through, but I did not want to empathize too much. I did not want to return to the bad place myself.”

Sense of place is good, and Rain uses atmosphere to add to characterization: “I watched the ocean. Flat and black in the night. The lights of Catalina twinkled beyond a low haze. Farther out the lights of a half dozen oil rigs blinked. And somewhere below the water was a cold world filled with life. The secret world, where sharks ate seals, where manta rays glided, where whales sang their beautiful songs. Sometimes I wanted to jump into that cold world and never emerge, especially after the destruction of my leg.”

DARK HORSE is okay, but I don’t think I’ll follow up on the series. (B)

 

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Mike Ripley uses a partial manuscript left by Philip Youngman Carter at his death in 1969 to complete MR. CAMPION’S FAREWELL. It is authorized by the Margery Allingham estate, published in 2014. It is set in 1969 in Lindsay Carfax, Suffolk, and features a now elderly, but fit, Albert Campion.

Something strange is going on in Lindsay Carfax, according to DCI Bill Bailey of Bury St Edmonds, talking to his friend Superintendent Charlie Luke of the London CID. Luke passes along to his friend Albert Campion Bailey’s belief that there’s not enough crime in Lindsay Carfax; some organization is handling the complaints that would normally come to the police. Since Lady Amanda Fitton Campion’s niece Eliza Jane Fitton resides in Lindsay Carfax, making her living as a commercial artist, Campion goes to investigate. He discovers an idyllic-appearing village where everything is controlled by the ancient organization, the Woolcarders of Lindsay Carfax, referred to as the Carders, where everything is associated with the number nine. Two Cambridge archaeology students had died there the previous summer from unusually concentrated doses of LSD, and now Lemuel Walker, local schoolteacher, has gone missing on a modern “Nine Days’ Wonder.” The first Nine Days’ Wonder occurred in 1910, when Reverend Austin Bonus disappeared for nine days,to return with monies to replace the church roof and install a splendid new organ, but never to speak a word of where he’d been; the second happened in 1937, when local Johnnie Sirrah went missing, only to turn up nine days later dead in the Saxon Mills, a disused quarry. Now Lemuel Walker has gone missing, and someone rigged a booby trap that could have killed Eliza Jane. What on earth is going on? Who are the Carders, and what are they up to? Before the mystery’s solved, someone peppers Campion’s derriere with buckshot during a partridge shoot, both Lady Amanda Fitton Campion and son Rupert Campion are involved, and Campion’s recuperation at his alma mater St Ignatius College, Cambridge, leads to the information he needs.

I’m always leery of sequels to the works of well-known authors written by other people. I’m pleased to say that Ripley has done a fine job of preserving the characters and catching the tone of Allingham and Carter’s writing. His Campion is definitely the older, more sober version written by Carter. Lugg appears only tangentially. Ripley uses humor well to develop character: “...the rough oak tabletop had suffered from that curse which befalls any piece of plain wood where there are men or boys around armed with a penknife or a pen nib. On close observation, [Campion] was delighted to detect that the most common graffiti consisted not of the traditional whereabouts of ‘Kilroy’ or the affairs of star-crossed lovers, but rather complex algebraic equations. He allowed himself a smile and felt reassured that in Cambridge the vandals still had ambitions.”

The plot in MR. CAMPION’S FAREWELL resembles several in Allingham’s canon: the secret criminal gang operating with impunity but committed to following its own self-imposed rules. I think especially of 1931’s Look to the Lady, published in the US as The Gyrth Chalice Mystery. Campion potters about, poking his nose in, and uncovers the whole operation. My only complaint is that it’s a bit unrealistic to have a seventy-year-old man (and Campion must be at least that old) exploring the passageways and engaging in physical struggle with a gigantic, enraged criminal.

Ripley deserves full credit for developing sense of place in MR. CAMPION’S FAREWELL. He describes the French village of Gorbio, visited by Rupert and Perdita Campion: “...they walked slowly down the Rue Garibaldi which curved around to their left and sloped gently downhill. The houses were of a similar design and age, stone built into the hillside, of two stories with front doors straight off the narrow street and firmly shuttered windows, each separated from its neighbours by a patch of land to the side which was guarded by a stone wall at least seven feet in height containing wooden gates wide enough--just--to accept a vehicle. It was impossible to tell whether the space enclosed by the walls was used as a garden or a parking space or something more suspicious, for their height and the ubiquitous signs saying Attention au chien insured a considerable degree of privacy. And the citizens of Gorbio seemed to value their privacy to the extent that only the occasional whiff of cooking or the muffled rattle of pots and pans escaping through ground-floor shutters suggested that the town was inhabited at all.”

MR. CAMPION’S FAREWELL is an excellent addition to the canon, one that encourages me to look forward to another Ripley Campion novel early in 2015. (A-)

 

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Terry Shames’s DEAD BROKE IN JARRETT CREEK is the third book in her mystery series featuring Samuel Craddock. It was published in e-book format in 2014.

Jarrett Creek, Texas, is broke. Former Mayor Alton Coldwater, in an effort to increase the tax base, invested city money in building a water park to attract tourists and provide jobs. The park never materialized, and Jarrett Creek can no longer pay its police. Samuel Craddock, former police chief, agrees to work for $1 per year; he has two part-time employees. The night this solution is debated, Gary Dellmore is murdered. Dellmore’s father Alan owns and runs Citizens Bank, and Gary had been his heir apparent. Who wanted Gary dead? As Samuel Craddock investigates, he finds Gary to have a long history of arrogance, bad business decisions that bankrupted his father-in-law, womanizing, taking kickbacks, and fraud.

Shames keeps attention focused firmly away from Gary’s killer and produces a good surprise ending, though an experienced reader may pick up on subtle clues pointing in the right direction. Events in the news in the past couple of years lend verisimilitude to the plot. I can’t say more without doing spoilers.

Craddock as first person narrator is believable, especially because he doesn’t hide his own doubts: “...I’m not ready to admit to the way I really feel--past my prime and maybe biting off more than I can chew. I keep reminding myself that murder doesn’t happen all that often in a small town. But maybe I’m remembering the way things were in the past. In the last few years we’ve had quite a bit of mayhem. Greed, jealousy, and fear have always been around, but there seems to be more willingness to bring violence into the mix these days.” Shames is good at creating interesting townspeople to support Craddock: young, enthusiastic cop Bob Odum; retired Houston cop Zeke Dibble, the other part-timer; Mayor Rusty Reinhardt who owns the Qwik Mart grocery store; even alcoholic former chief Rodell Skinner, out of rehab and anxious to help.

Sense of place is less well-developed than in the previous books, but it’s clearly small town and rural: “I’ve never seen McClusky’s resort. I’ve always heard it’s for people with a lot of money, not the sort of thing people around here can afford--and wouldn’t do if they could. When Jarrett Creek folks go hunting, they do it to put meat on the table--and they don’t need to go to a fancy resort to do it.” Shames is good at using atmosphere to reveal character. Craddock says, “I don’t know why I felt obliged to defend Rodell [against comments about his drinking], but what goes on in our small town is our problem, and I don’t need somebody from Bobtail gossiping about our incorrigible lawman, even if the one doing the gossiping is a judge.”

DEAD BROKE IN JARRETT CREEK is a worthy entry in what I hope will be a long series. (A-)

 

[readingomnivore]

Mel Taylor’s DEATH BY DEADLINE was a free or inexpensive e-book download. I’m glad I didn’t spend much, if anything, on it.

The premise is interesting. A photographer at the Elbow Clearing on the edge of the Everglades near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is attacked and killed, apparently by a Florida panther. A couple of days later, a cyclist in the same area is also attacked and killed. The story follows Matt Bowens, a television reporter for Channel 14 News as he covers the story. Passions run high between protestors who want the panther protected and developers who want the panthers in the area rounded up and removed. Someone releases a Florida panther from the zoo, adding hysteria about a panther loose in the suburbs. But following up on Brock Molgan, the original victim, Matt discovers he was not whom he seemed, and he was definitely up to something.

SPOILERS****SPOILERS****

As interesting as the premise is, it simply doesn’t hold up. The second chapter reveals that, when Brock’s body is found, the film had been removed from his camera. While a Florida panther might attack a human (no known human deaths from panther attack are known, according to Taylor), it’s not likely to take its victim’s film. Additionally, neither body showed any sign of being consumed. The state takes over the examination of the bodies and gets what is persistently called “toxicology reports” unrealistically quickly. The tests are actually for panther DNA from saliva and wound examination. Turns out it’s all part of a plan to get the panthers removed from the Elbow Clearing area so that a housing development might go in. The mechanical cruncher equipped with a panther’s skull is unexplained; nothing indicates that the killer had the expertise in hydraulics to build the murder weapon.

None of the characters, including Matt Bowens, the first person narrator, become more than names. There’s an attempt to humanize him by showing a relationship with a divorced mother with two children; her son is sick, she turns out not to be divorced after all, and her husband is released from prison and shows up at her house. There are way more characters than needed for the story.

Despite its setting of the Everglades, necessary because that’s where Florida panthers are found, there’s little sense of place. Descriptive passages are few, and some of them are almost word-for-word repetitions. Writing style is simplistic.

Don’t waste your time. (D-, including credit for premise)