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Readingomnivore Reviews

THE MEMORY OF BLOOD is the ninth book in Christopher Fowler’s Peculiar Crimes Unit series. It was published in e-book format in 2011. Its protagonists are Arthur St John Bryant and John May, the Senior Detectives of the Peculiar Crime Unit.

The Peculiar Crimes Unit is called in when eleven-month-old Noah Kramer is killed during an opening-night party given by his father Robert Julius Kramer to celebrate the opening of the New Strand Theatre and the premiere of of its first production The Two Murderers. Young Noah had been severely shaken, then strangled, and his body thrown out a sixth-floor window; the marks on his neck fit the carved wooden hands of a Victorian Mr. Punch puppet found beside the baby’s crib. The door had been locked, and there’s no evidence that anyone had been in the room. The reason the PCU is to cover the death is the presence at the party of Gail Strong, Assistant Stage Manager for the play and the notorious daughter of the Minister for Public Buildings, who wants his daughter excised from the investigation. As the case continues, Kramer’s accountant dies by hanging, with a puppet of The Hangman from Punch and Judy left near the body; later one of the actresses in the play, Mona Williams, dies from being placed in a scold’s bridle, one used in the play, and finally, Kramer himself is killed. Bryant has an idea who’s guilty, but there’s no evidence. While the Kramer case develops, Anna Marquand, the biographer who’s working with Bryant on his memoirs, dies of what’s identified at autopsy as blood poisoning. She has his correction notes to the galleys, some of which are covered by the Official Secrets Act, and someone besides the PCU is looking for them. Re-examination shows death from strychnine poisoning. What did Bryant say that is worth killing her for?

I enjoy the Peculiar Crimes Unit for several reasons. One is the community of extremely different individuals who make up a unit that, despite its differences and dubious status, manages to sustain a clearance rate considerably better than the traditional police. Bryant and May are as different as chalk and cheese, but together, they’re successful. It’s been interesting through the series to see the members of the team change and evolve into a cohesive unit. I enjoy Bryant’s obsession with obscure subjects; as he says of himself to May, “ ‘You missed out my key attribute...my eidetic memory. It’s unconventionally arranged, but more useful than any of your fancy computers. The world seems so intent on erasing its past that someone has to keep notes. That’s why I’m good at my job. I make connections with my surroundings. It’s like throwing jumper cables into a junkyard and sparking off the things you find there. No-one else can do that. It’s why we’re still in business.’ Bryant was being a little disingenuous, and knew it. In truth, his mental connections were extremely haphazard and just as likely to short out.” (28)

The plot in THE MEMORY OF BLOOD is typical of the series, a series of seemingly impossible and/or improbable happenings that do turn out to have a logical explanation. This one involves much esoteric information on the evolution of Punch and Judy and on the development of the automata, once a major form of public entertainment. The killer in the Kramer murders is foreshadowed briefly, but the motive isn’t revealed until after the capture. The subplot of the missing notes is solved, the book closing with Bryant and May resolved to go after the person responsible despite his high place in the British power structure.

Fowler’s ability to evoke place is outstanding: “The gabled gingerbread house behind the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church was finished in orange bricks and maroon tiles, and appeared to have been designed by the Brothers Grimm. Plane trees and rowans hung over it with branches like claws that scrabbled at the windows, leaking sap and dripping rainwater so that moss and lichen grew in abundant clumps above the eaves, gradually consuming it. A miserable-looking heron balanced forlornly at its gate, and a pair of moorhens had bundled themselves against the downpour inside a bucket by the door. This bucolic night tableau was all the more remarkable for being just two miles from Piccadilly Circus, and no more than a three-minute walk from Europe’s largest railway terminus.” (65)

I enjoyed THE MEMORY OF BLOOD. (B)
 
VERTIGO 42 is the latest to date in Martha Grimes’s Richard Jury mystery series. It was published in 2014.

An old friend Sir Oswald Maples asks Superintendent Richard Jury of the Metropolitan Police at New Scotland Yard to meet with Tom Williamson to discuss the death some seventeen years before of Tess, Tom’s wife. She died from falling down terrace stairs at their country home Laburnum; the verdict of the inquest was open, but Tom and then-Detective Inspector Brian Maclavie (who was not in charge of the case) think she had been murdered. Tom asks that Jury investigate the case. Jury soon concludes that Tess’s death is connected the death five years before of young Hilda Palmer, who died from a fall into an empty pool at Laburnum during an afternoon party for six children. Tess had been tried and acquitted of killing Hilda. In the meantime, Belle Syms is found dead at the bottom of a tower in Northamptonshire; Diane Demorney finds a lost dog named Stanley; and an unknown young man with ties to dog fighting is shot. Do or how do these events fit together?

VERTIGO 42, at 320 pages, is longer than the story requires. It feels padded. Multiple theories of the crime(s) abound, explicated in full. Jury constantly reasons ahead of his evidence. The sudden failure of an alibi makes the climax anti-climatical. The dog fighting ring is a barely developed red herring.

There is a surfeit of characters and suspects in the deaths of both Tess Williamson and Belle Syms. Melrose Plant and the gang from the Jack and Hammer serve little purpose other than Diane’s involvement with Stanley. Many of the characters are names only with little or no development. Even Jury receives short shrift. He doesn’t realize until two-thirds through his investigation (strictly unofficial) of Belle Syms’s death that he should check her maiden name, to discover that she was Arabella Hastings, one of the children who’d been at Laburnum when Hilda Palmer died. He also has a cell-phone that he doesn’t keep charged.

The strongest element in VERTIGO 42, which is name of the bar in London in which the story opens and closes, is setting, which Grimes uses to illuminate character as well as to create a sense of place. “Hackney was always getting ripped off. There had been many instances of council corruption over the years. It would sell a street of little businesses to a developer or a private party with the assurance that everything would be rebuilt and restored to the owners. That, of course, never happened. Hackney was skirted by Newham and Tower Hamlets, a triple play in unemployment. To Jury, a London enigma. He lived in Islington, which had its own poor pockets. But he felt surprised by Plaistow Street, and naive in his surprise. He’d lived in London all of his life; he’d been with the Met for thirty years. He was used to the city’s differences. But he’d never felt as if he’d passed out of one century into another as he did turning the corner into Plaistow Street. It was like crossing over an unsealable crack in the city’s surface. The coming of darkness didn’t help, as it was a street of lamps that didn’t work. No leafy trees, no front gardens. It was a street of small, profitless shops; lock-up garages; gray, Soviet-style council flats; and red brick low-rise ones, narrow houses in a street already claustrophobic in its narrowness.” (165)

VERTIGO 42 is a disappointment. (C-)
 
Adam Hall’s QUEEN IN DANGER is one of his Hugo Bishop mystery series published in 1952. Its protagonist Hugo Bishop reminds me of the early Albert Campion. He’s apparently well born with no necessity of working for a living; he intervenes to assist people he doesn’t know. As he describes himself, “...I’m neither from the police nor of the police. I quite like them, but not sufficiently to make me join up. You must regard me as someone who’d like to do some good... In return I get a chance of seeing life--through other people’s minds. I’m fascinated by personal crises when I run out of my own. And the very least I can do is to help where I can. That isn’t generous, but at the worst it’s honest.” (87) His secretary is Miss Vera Gorringe, a middle aged, conservative, Oxford graduate whose duties include finding people for him to help.

Hall is good at using elements of setting to illuminate character: “Miss Gorringe did not move behind her desk. It was smaller than Bishop’s, but tidier. It accommodated files, records, indexes, writing paper and other ordinary equipment; it was not littered, like Bishop’s, with chess pieces, glass paper-weights, ivory miniatures, sheets of swing music, old theater programs, older pipes, ancient curios from Egypt, elastic bands, pipe-cleaners, and out-of-date copies of The Connoisseur, The Countryman, Autosport and London Life.” (179-80)

In QUEEN IN DANGER, Mervyn Speight escapes from Broadmoor Asylum and heads for London. He had been tried for the brutal murder of Joanna Martin, a woman no better than she should be, and found guilty but insane, so incarcerated two years before. His wife Thelma, who went abroad immediately following his trial, is back in London, living with but not married to Victor Tasman; Tasman doesn’t know her background. She’s convinced that Mervyn has escaped to kill her. Hugo Bishop offers to help. He finds Mervyn Speight and concludes that the reason for his escape is to find the man who killed Joanna Martin. He wants to help.

The plot is pretty much telegraphed, and there are only three viable suspects if one accepts Speight’s innocence. Even more limiting, there’s only one of the three who has enough to lose to make Joanna Martin’s death necessary. Bishop seems to intuit much of the information needed to solve the mystery. One point that bothers me is that in mid-twentieth century England, where gun controls were especially stringent, Thelma Speight is able to walk into a junk store and buy a handgun and ammunition with no paperwork whatsoever.

The strongest element in the book is the sense of place: “Delford Lane, Spitalfields, was composed in the main of yells and smells. The yells came fitrom the score of small boys and small girls and small children too dirty and too excited to claim even sex distinction, and the smells came from the small boys and small girls and particularly from the small sexless children, from their pets, from their mothers’ kitchens, their fathers’ pipes, and their communal food center, which was the fish-and-chip shop halfway down the lane.” (124)

While there are some interesting aspects of QUEEN IN DANGER, it is decidedly dated. (C+)
 
SOUTHERN PEACH PIE & A DEAD GUY is the first book in A. Gardner’s Poppy Peters series. It was published in e-book format in 2015.
I always check the reviews on a book before I order it even if it’s a free or inexpensive e-book edition. I’m almost 72 years old, and I don’t have time left to read poorly-written books. But sometimes I wonder if the reviews I read are for the same book that I’m sent. SOUTHERN PEACH PIE & A DEAD GUY is one of those. No formal review, just comments as they occur to me.

SPOILERS****SPOILERS****SPOILERS

Characterization is sketchy at best, even for Poppy Peters, the first person narrator. She’s a former ballerina forced to quit dancing by a back injury; she’s left her Portland, Oregon, home to attend the Calle Pastry Academy in Georgia. Her career as a ballerina seems more her mother’s idea than her own, so Poppy’s starting over to honor the love of baking instilled by her Brazilian grandmother. She’s nearly thirty years old but responds to situations more like a teenager than a mature woman with a reasonably successful career behind her.

If development of Polly is sketchy, the rest of the characters are almost invisible. None of the other students have a full name--all are first name only--except for Tom Fox, who disappeared the previous semester. This is mentioned in passing, it has something to do with the murder of Professor Stuart Sellers, but there’s no indication of what happened to him.

With no foreshadowing of his role, the plot pulls in a head criminal for a smuggling operation that’s gone on for years, with the smuggled goods all small enough to be hidden inside pastries from the student bakery at CPA. Black truffles worth twenty-thousand dollars, ordered for an institutional banquet, are stolen from the student kitchen--who would leave something that valuable where students could access it? The apparent climax of the plot, when Professor Sellers’s killer is captured, turns into anticlimax when the master criminal shows up in Portland during the holidays to poison Poppy and everyone at her parents’ holiday party. SOUTHERN PEACE PIE & A DEAD GUY may be more properly considered chick lit than mystery since Poppy’s love life, or lack thereof, gets more attention. A future romantic relationship with student Cole and/or with Detective Reid is implied.

Gardner is guilty of one of my pet peeves. She has set a story in Georgia, but she never names the town where Calle Pastry Academy is located. She mentions Georgia and Southern heat frequently, but there’s almost no other indication of locale. Students come from all over, so I don’t expect them to sound Southern, but CPA President Dixon and Cole are both locals. The only spoken indication for either is Dixon’s saying “y’all” one time. The only time Gardner attempts a Southern accent is in a waitress Cole and Poppy encounter on a road trip to an Alabama peach farm that supplies CPA for its signature peach pies, and she’s a parody, nowhere close to the real language of the rural South. In the scenery encountered on that road trip, Poppy talks about the mossy trees and standing water that remind her of her home in Oregon, but she doesn’t mention kudzu, which would be ubiquitous no matter what route they took. If an author can’t or won’t do Southern right, I resent its use as a setting.

I found errors in usage of nominative and objective case pronouns that should have been caught in editing. I wanted to like SOUTHERN PEACH PIE & A DEAD GUY, I really did. I only kept reading because I thought there must be something redeeming that I was missing out on. Nope. (F)
 
DEATH OF AN OBNOXIOUS TOURIST is one of Maria Hudgins’s Dotsy Lamb Travel mysteries. It was published in e-book format in 2006.

Dotsy Lamb and her best friend Lettie Osgood are traveling in Italy with a group that includes Lettie’s good friend Beth Bauer Hines; Beth’s older sister Meg, a nurse; Amy, the youngest of the sisters; mother and daughter Shirley and Crystal Hostetter; dairy farmer Jim Kelly and his wife Wilma, an animal activist; siblings Paul and Lucille Vogel; and other assorted tourists. The group is led by Amy Bauer’s friend from college Tessa D’Angelo. Meg Bauer is a thoroughly unpleasant woman who goes out of her way to hurt and embarrass others, especially her sister Beth. As the group members spend more time with each other, it becomes apparent Meg has negative history with many of them. So when someone cuts her throat in Florence, Captain Marco Quattrocchi of the Carabinieri has an abundance of suspects, including a local gypsy who stole Beth’s money, credit card, and hotel key card, and Beth herself. Because Lettie and Beth have been friends since school, Dotsy involves herself in trying to discover the murderer. Unfortunately Amy also dies before Dotsy figures out who killed Meg and why.

The action of the plot in DEATH OF AN OBNOXIOUS TOURIST takes part in about a week, but it seems so much longer. The pace drags. To be fair, the foreshadowing is adequate, enough so that an experienced reader may identify the killer before Dotsy; the motive is also referenced, and the alibi is neatly done. I find it difficult to believe that a city like Florence, considering the number of English-speaking tourists who visit annually, does not have translators attached to the police and to the courts but instead must rely on available part-timers.

Dotsy Lamb, the first-person narrator, is believable. She carries baggage from her recent divorce; she teaches ancient and medieval history at a community college in Staunton, Viriginia; she has diabetes; she hates liars and being lied to. She’s loyal to her friends. “I couldn’t allow an innocent man to go to prison, possibly for life, and I couldn’t allow a guilty Beth to go home on the same plane with me. I couldn’t allow an innocent Beth to be thrown to the vagaries of a court system whose language she didn’t even understand, and go home on the plane with the real killer. Lettie loved Beth like a sister, and Lettie was like a siser to me, so I reluctantly accepted the only course left. I wouldn’t leave Italy until I knew who really killed Meg Bauer.” Not all the tour group are well-rounded as characters, but most are individual. We do get the seemingly obligatory cliche of the female protagonist and the lead detective sexually attracted to each other.

Hudgins is adequate with setting. “...this was my first Tuscan hill town and I was entranced. The narrow streets were paved with flagstones, set in a herringbone pattern. Ancient stucco building were on both sides. As we traipsed along, we passed a produce market with a sign that said ALIMENTARI and I steeled myself for Lettie to add, ‘my dear Watson,’ which she did. Tessa led us around a corner, up a hill, and under a series of stone archways, which spread out into a broad plaza with a huge fountain in the middle. Water poured from the mouths of various wild animals and into a stone trough, worn down at intervals along its edge by centuries of people’s arms and animals’ necks. Around the perimeter of the plaza, stalls were set up with brightly-colored banners, sweets, sausages, trinkets, pottery, you-name-it, for sale.”

I noted a couple of editing problems. Is Jim and Wilma’s name Kelly or Kelley? Both spellings are used. Use of who and whom needs to be checked. DEATH OF AN OBNOXIOUS TOURIST is just average. (C)
 
Lauren Carr’s A WEDDING AND A KILLING is one of her Mac Faraday mystery series. It was published in e-book format in 2014.

Mac Faraday and Archie Monday plan to have a small, private wedding at Spencer Church on the Tuesday following Memorial Day, then a large formal wedding on New Year’s Eve to satisfy Archie’s mother’s expectations. When they arrive at the church, Gnarly, whom Archie has insisted be part of the wedding, goes .wild. Church office manager Edna Parker comes running out screaming. Eugene Newton, chairman of the church trustees, has been shot while counting the collection from Sunday and preparing the bank deposit. Eugene had been beloved in the church, a faithful hard-working man often called on because of his position to do hard things--like telling Chip Van Dorn that he isn’t suited to leadership roles in the church and shielding Edna from elderly men attracted by her warmth and charm. The motive must be personal, since the collection money had not been taken. Helga Thorpe, a harridan who’d tried to replace Eugene as chairman of the trustees and who’d reacted badly when she failed, goes missing. Did she kill Eugene and then run? Why is church custodian Ruth Buchanan so upset when her fingerprints are taken? And who, seven years before in New York, shot viciously abusive Jason Fairbanks?

The basic plot line of A WEDDING AND A KILLING is fine, involving the so-called modern “Underground Railroad,” the network which aids abused women, children, and men escape from their abusers into new lives and safety. Foreshadowing and resolutions for both murders are satisfactory. I do object to the multiple occasions for what seems to be testimony on the meaning of religion in life and dealing with being angry with God because bad things do happen to good people.

None of the characters are much developed. The story is stretched to include most of the characters who’ve ever been mentioned in the series, whether they serve any necessary purpose or not. For the continuing characters, the brief identifiers in the list of characters are cut and paste from previous books. The best part of A WEDDING AND A KILLING is a return to the humor associated with Mac’s inherited German shepherd Gnarly.

Nothing is made of the setting. A common word usage problem in the series is “discrete” (separate, distinct) and “discreet” (careful, circumspect). A WEDDING AND A KILLING reads like a draft that needs at least one more rigorous editing. (D) 27 March 2015
 
“The Gnarly Rehabilitation Program” is a short story featuring Gnarly, Mac Faraday’s German shepherd, a former Army dog dishonorably discharged, though no one knows why. The reason is officially classified, but it may have been for insubordination. It is available as a bonus with A WEDDING AND A KILLING, published in 2014.

Small time crooks Bert and Ernie have a sure-fire money making project in hand--they’re going to kidnap Gnarly from the Doggie Hut, Spencer’s most luxurious pet salon, and hold him for $100,000 ransom. Redoubtable receptionist Lizzie makes them pay $386.85 for Gnarly’s grooming and a leash. Gnarly’s biting through the leash on the way to their van should have given Bert and Ernie a heads-up on what’s coming. Among other things, “[Ernie] hurled the beer can at the large dog. Without flinching, Gnarly caught the can in his mouth. While the two men stood in disbelief, the German shepherd closed his mouth with its powerful jaws, popping out both ends of the can to send beer flying out in a sudsy explosion. He then went on to crush the can flat in his jaws before spitting it out onto the floor. With a roar, Gnarly charged at them from across the room to send them up onto the kitchen counter before returning to the sofa and lying down.” (297) After Gnarly shoots Ernie in the derriere, they surrender to Mac and David.

“The Gnarly Rehabilitation Program” is a riff on O. Henry’s famous short story “The Ransom of Red Chief.” It’s laugh-out-loud funny. (solid A)
 
HONOUR AMONG MEN is the fifth book in Barbara Fradkin’s Inspector Green mystery series set in Ottawa. It was published in 2006.

Green’s latest case opens with the murder of Patti Ross, who’s in Ottawa from Halifax to see someone apparently connected with the murder of her fiance Danny Oliver some ten years previously. As they investigate, the case expands to include Danny’s murder, still an open case; the suicide of Ian MacDonald, Danny’s friend; the disappearance of Twiggy, the street person who discovered Patti’s body; Canadian peacekeeping for the United Nations in Croatia in the early 1990s; the beating of Sue Peters, one of Green’s detectives; and high national politics.

The framework for the plot is a series of excerpts from Ian MacDonald’s diary that reveal the conditions under which the peacekeepers worked in Croatia and the motive for the murders. Fradkin plays fair in revealing information as the police uncover it, so the identity of the conspirators is never much in doubt; the suspense comes through whether Green will be able to find evidence on which to charge them and how they will be taken. Frequent shifts in viewpoints between characters sometimes slow the action.

One of the things I like about Fradkin’s Inspector Green series is the authentic community of the Major Crimes Unit, individuals who grow and change. Bob Gibbs, the young sergeant who’s so good with details, is overcoming his lack of self-confidence and becoming an effective leader. Newcomer Sue Peters “...may be blunt with no feeling for diplomacy or subtext, but she had proved herself to be bright and creative, and much of the progress in the investigation to date had been due to her. Green was always lecturing his men on using lateral thinking skills rather than doggedly tracking on one lead after another. Whatever Peters lacked in subtlety, she sure as hell knew how to think.” (120) Green is human enough to acknowledge his weakness for women and his (not acted upon) attraction to Kate McGrath of the Halifax police. An important chunk of Green’s back story is revealed in his nightmare about why Twiggy became a street person.

Fradkin uses setting effectively, including atmosphere that reveals character: “As he passed through the struggling farmsteads of the Ottawa Valley, Sullivan had to block his own aversion to the place. The sparse, rocky landscapes fostered a fierce combination of pride, independence and bitterness among those who hung on there. ‘This Land is Our Land; Back off, Government’ warned the huge signs staked in fields along the roadsides. He should have felt pride and sympathy for the families who clung to their land in defiance of bureaucratic red tape and urban ignorance. But for Sullivan, who had grown up in one of them, it evoked memories of isolation and helplessness, drunken violence and wanton neglect. Of starving and hiding and never knowing when he was safe. He’d been eighteen and on the first bus out of town after high school before he ever felt safe.” (165-6)

This is a well-written series, and HONOUR AMONG MEN is a worthy addition. (A-)
 
SHALLOW GRAVE, one of Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s Inspector Bill Slider series, was originally published in 1998 and then reissued as part of THE THIRD BILL SLIDER OMNIBUS in 2007. Its protagonists are Inspector Bill Slider and his legman Sergeant Jim Athenton of the Shepherd’s Bush CID.

When Eddie Andrews finds the dead body of his wife Jennifer Andrews, no better than she should be and a pushing, socially ambitious woman, in the trench at the Old Rectory where he’d expected to pour concrete, he is Bill Slider’s major suspect. Eddie’s story has no support from witnesses, and the evidence all points to him. But it doesn’t feel right, and so many other people had reason to wish Jennifer ill: Reverend Alan Tennyson, whom she pursued relentlessly; Cyril Dacre, elderly historian who despised her as common and predatory; David Meacher, whom she threatened to expose to his wealthy wife; Lady Diane Meacher, who’s tired of his catting around; Jack Potter, whom she blackmailed over their affair; Linda Potter, Jack’s wife; even Police Constable Defreitas, who’s unhappy with his wife. As the police investigate, theories form and dissolve as new evidence is uncovered, before Slider realizes he’d seen the solution but disregarded it.

The plot in SHALLOW GRAVE is police procedural in format, with appropriate foreshadowing and yet still a bit of a surprise ending. It moves briskly. The mystery is handled amidst a personal crisis in Slider’s life when his wife Irene, who moved out to live with another man, comes back seeking a reconciliation; Slider’s already moved on.

Characters are well developed, with Slider sensitive to his job: “He shivered a little, his mind working on, whether he liked it or not. It was his job to ttrack down the killer, but he didn’t like it--he never liked it--when he got close to the answer. He didn’t ever want to have to realise about anyone that they were capable of such a monstrous act as murder. And this murder--! There was something of the hunt in it. He saw Jennifer Andrews on her last day, increasingly frantic, running from place to place--no, not stock-taking, seeing escape. But one by one the earths were stopped, until finally she had gone to ground. No matter that her character had been flawed, her conduct faulty, her motives less than pure; she had still been dug out and killed. How much had she known about her own death? But he didn’t want to think about that.” (243) This series is one good to read in order because the lives of the major characters continue between books, which helps to create the sense of their being real people.

Sense of place is strong. “...That strange and lost part of Hounslow...lay under the flightpath of Heathrow. Once there had been only little villages, tile-hung farmhouses and rustic churches. Then arterial roads had linked them with ribbons of mock-Tudor semis, traffic lights and neat set-back arcades of shops. But the placid life still went on, in a world where people wore hats, and walked to the shops pushing babies in prams; for few had cars, and their sound was but as the trickle of a stream, and you could hear the birds when you went out of doors. And then the airport came. Now the great white bellies of arriving and departing jumbos flashed like monstrous fish above them, crushing down the sky and leaving a shimmering wake of hot kerosene like a snail’s trail over the frail roofs. Roaring cars and bellowing lorries sucked up whatever air was left, and, to prevent any pocket of peace taking root, satellite dishes on every house probed the sky for new sources of bedlam, while shops and pubs vomited endless loops of strident pop. In this insanity of noise and stink, a race of people clung to existence, like those bizarre microbe that manage to live inside volcanoes. The thirties semis had been armoured with triple-glazing and wall insulation, and a cheerful, and to all appearances normal, life went on, monument to man’s astonishing adaptability.” (201-2)

SHALLOW GRADE is a satisfying entry in a strong series. (B+)
 
A LESSON IN DYING is one of Ann Cleaves’s Inspector Ramsay series originally published in 1990. It was reissued in e-book format in 2013.

Harold Medburn, Headmaster of the Heppleburn School in southeast Northumberland, is the best-hated man in the village. He’s an arrogant, sarcastic tyrant who enjoys intimidating both teachers and parents; he runs the school as his own fiefdom, so everyone’s surprised when he agrees to a Hallowe’en party for the parents at the school. It turns out to be his doom, since his body is found hanging from the netball goal in the small playground. Inspector Stephen Ramsay of the Otterbridge CID is the officer in charge of the case, and he soon uncovers multiple motives for Medburn’s murder. Along with his general nastiness to all and sundry, Medburn has been carrying on an affair with Angela Brayshaw; he’s tried to drive young Matthew Carpenter out of teaching altogether; he’s told his long-suffering wife Kitty that he’s leaving her for another woman; and he’s a blackmailer. Who doesn’t want him dead?

The plot in A LESSON IN DYING concentrates much more on the effect of the murder and its investigation on the people of Heppleburn than on the investigation itself. Jack Robson, who’d loved Kitty Richardson before she married Medburn, and his bored, dissatisfied daughter Patty Atkins do most of the questioning that’s reported in the book. Practically all of Ramsay’s questioning and analysis occurs off-stage. The information necessary to identify the killer isn’t given until after the arrest, though there are some small bits of foreshadowing. The pace and suspense level are pedestrian.

Cleaves has some very realistic characters: Jack, Patti, Paul and Hannah Wilcox, Angela Brayshaw, Irene Hunt. Unfortunately, Inspector Ramsay stays a cipher. About all Cleaves tells us about him is that his wife left him, he’s middle-aged, and he’s attracted to Patty’s warmth. His method of investigating is to decide on a suspect and then to look for evidence supporting his theory. Unfortunately, when he rushes to arrest Kitty Medburn, she subsequently suicides in remand, and Paul Wilcox is murdered. “[Ramsay] had very little time. There had been calls in the press that he should be replaced on the case. He was only at work now because his superior was indecisive and weak, but Ramsay new that soon he would be forced into action. He must have a successful result by then. He had never been a sociable policeman. The practical jokes with which his colleagues had relieved the stress of their work had never amused him. He had never been particularly liked. Now he knew they were watching his discomfort with the same childish glee as they had used to plan their infantile pranks.”

It’s hard to understand why Ramsay is left so featureless because Cleaves clearly can use setting to illuminate character: “[Irene Hunt] lived in a small bungalow twenty miles north of Heppleburn on the coast. She had bought it the year before in preparation for her retirement. Everyone who saw it, and many who had never been near the place, said it was quite unsuitable for an elderly lady. It was built next to a farm at the top of a low cliff. The nearest village was two miles away at the end of a lane. She had views of Coquat Island, of ruined castles and bare hillsides, but it was cold and in a wind the draughts rattled underneath the doors, flapping rugs and curtains. Towards the sea there was an exposed garden, terraced and held back from the cliff by low stone walls. It was too big, her critics said, to be managed by one person. Miss Hunt had great plans for the garden. The bungalow suited her very well. For too long she had worried about what other people thought of her. Now for her last years she deserved to be allowed to live as she pleased.”

With its lack of emphasis on Inspector Ramsay, A LESSON IN DYING is more like a cozy mystery than a police procedural. His lack of distinguishing traits leaves me unwilling to follow up on the series. (C)
 
AN ACCIDENTAL DEATH is the first book in Peter Grainger’s mystery series featuring Detective Sergeant David C. “DC” Smith. It was published in e-book format in 2013.

Smith’s unusual in that he’s been in the police for thirty years and does not want to retire until age 65; he’d been a Detective Chief Inspector earlier in his career but voluntarily moved back down the ranks to Sergeant; he’s effective at his job, but he’s a maverick whose superior officers don’t always know how to handle. He’s just returned from some time off, which he insists should count against his accrued holidays, and been assigned low-level general duties, including mentoring new Detective Constable Chris Waters. Concerning the suspicious drowning death of young Wayne Fletcher, he tells Waters, “Death’s the end of all. But look at the misery we’ve seen today [at funeral]. And it’s endless, it goes on rippling back and forwards through all these lives forever. I don’t know about justice. I’ve never seen myself on a white charger, righting wrongs--but we have to catch people so they can’t create all this again. And so that other people get the message--you will be caught, you will pay. We never know how many selfish acts we prevent when we show people the consequences, but we have to keep showing them the consequences. These are the consequences.” Glimpses of Smith’s back story--his serving two tours in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the death of his wife Sheila, his virtuosity playing blues guitar--humanize him and add verisimilitude.

When Smith and Waters begin looking into Fletcher’s death, bruises on his head and body indicate that he’d been hit in the head with a canoe paddle, drowned, and someone had tried CPR on him. He’d last been seen swimming after a lone canoeist on the river. The canoeist doesn’t turn up, but witnesses say he had an Eastern European accent, and a packet from Bosnian cigarettes shows up near the burnt remains of a canoe on the river bank, just outside the high-tech security fence at Manley Hall, home to Captain Jonathan Hamilton, late of Her Majesty’s Army, who happened to have served in Bosnia in 1994. Then a high-level spook visits ACC Devine with major questions about Smith’s investigation of Wayne Fletcher’s death. What’s going on?

The plot develops almost organically, beginning from the small seed of a notation on the autopsy report on Fletcher, growing with the disappearance of the canoeist, sending out runners as the Bosnian element buds and grows. Grainger presents a believable police force, riddled with politics that prevent a truly honest cop to advance beyond Detective Inspector rank.

Despite the lack of a specific location for King’s Lake, Grainger creates a distinct sense of place: “Waters looked around as they waited. The flat was on the third level of a six storey block, one of three or four identical towers built sometime in the late sixties. The grey concrete of all of them was weathered, and stained where rust had seeped onto the surface, and the serried ranks of windows looked out over the city like tired eyes. The concrete walkways that they had come along to get here had graffiti so predictable that you didn’t notice it any more, very much like the people who had to live here, Waters guessed. Beyond the towers, rows of two up, two down terraces, accommodations for workers built a century ago when the docks were thriving, the largest and busiest on the east coast, before the cranes and containers came.”

AN ACCIDENTAL DEATH is enoyable. I will be following this series. (A-)
 
DUTY MAN is the second entry in William H. S. McIntyre’s Best Defense mystery series featuring Scots solicitor Robert Alexander “Robbie” Munro.

When Max Abercrombie, his good friend since school days, is shot and killed, Robbie is on rotation as duty man (legal aid lawyer) for the week, so he must appear in the first legal hearing for Sean Kelly, arrested for Max’s murder. But he wants no part of representing Sean at trial, despite the requests of Frankie McPhee, reformed hard man who’s a long-term client. Munro is in his accustomed state of economic collapse, owing three months’ rent to his criminal landlord Jake Turpie, kvetching about changes in legal aid payments that make it harder for him to earn a living. He’s determined that the correct person be tried for Max’s murder. As he keeps poking about, ties to the murder some ten years before of Lord James Hewitt of Muthill, Lord-Justice Clerk, by Sean’s father Chic Kelly, emerge. What on earth is going on?

It’s hard to do a brief summary of the plot in DUTY MAN because it is a layering of seemingly unrelated events that occurred over a period of years and of characters whose only connection seems to be Robbie Munro. McIntyre hides the killer in plain sight by playing on the reader’s preconceptions.

The strength of this series is in Robbie Munro as protagonist and first person narrator. McIntyre gives him an effective conversational voice, adding verisimilitude with bits of back story on various characters. Munro talks like a cynic about the law and justice, but “With Lorna Wylie acting in [Sean Kelly’s] defense, at least Max’s widow could be assured of a conviction. And there lay the problem: I had a doubt. Not a reasonable one, not yet, and a doubt nonetheless and until I was satisfied as to the boy’s guilt I would never rest; for if, as Frankie seemed convinced, the young man was truly innocent then someone else was guilty. I really had to keep acting. What better place to be than on the inside, speaking to witnesses, examining the crown productions, assessing all the evidence,making up my own mind? Surely that was better than leaving it up to fifteen people on a jury to consider some half-baked defense cobbled together by Lorna Wylie?” (64) Munro’s supported by a viable community of continuing characters: secretary Grace-Mary, assistant Andy Imray, father and former policeman Alex Munro, even the villainous landlord Jake Turpie and bane Detective Inspector Dougie Fleming.

The series is set in Linlithgow in West Lothian, Scotland, with frequent trips on legal business to Edinburgh. McIntyre is skilled at using details of history and physical location to create sense of place: “From the foot of Cockburn Street, I climbed the steps of Advocates Close, all one hundred and eighteen of them, and entered onto the High Street. At the Lawnmarket, a bunch of Japanese tourists kitted-out in a rainbow of plastic waterproof ponchos, were studying the statue of David Hume, thumbing through guide books, trying to work out who exactly he was and what he was doing sitting on a plinth opposite St Giles Cathedral. I’d always wanted to meet the town planner who out of ignorance,mischief or as part of some kind of philosophical balancing act, took the decision to park a monument to Scotland’s most famous atheist directly across the street from the High Kirk of Edinburgh.” (180)

DUTY MAN is a successful entry in an excellent series. (A-)
 
Ellery Adams’s A KILLER COLLECTION was originally published in 2006, then revised and published in a second e-book edition in 2014.

Molly, presumably named Appleby, is a former teacher now employed as a writer/reporter for Collector’s Weekly. She’s currently embarking on a series on art potters in the Asheboro, North Carolina, area. Her mother Clara Appleby, pottery dealer, takes Molly to a kiln-opening sale by C. C. Burle, one of the last of the traditional potters. His work is in high demand, so the opening is well attended. George-Stanley Staunton, rude, arrogant, physically assaulting to reach the pottery he wants, dies there of an overdose of insulin. His wife Bunny immediately puts his collection, which she hates and wants out of her house forthwith, up for sale. Molly’s convinced Staunton was murdered; she plans to use the series as a cover for investigating his death.

I’m giving up at 36%. I frankly don’t care enough to continue. There’s no reason except rampant curiosity for Molly to be involved. Police have no part in the story so far. It isn’t clear whether there’s been an autopsy. Staunton dies on Friday, and he’s buried on the following Monday. Coincidence plays a major role--Molly just happens to work with Matt Harrison, who went to medical school for a while, so he can talk to the ER doctors who examined Staunton; Bunny Staunton just happens to call Lex Lewis, an antiques dealer/auctioneer and Clara’s business partner, who gives Molly access to Staunton’s collection. It’s a bit much.

Molly had taught for eight years and worked for Collector’s Weekly for two years, and she’s still only thirty years old. Her reaction to Matt Harrison is more like that of a teenager, as is her sudden inspiration to play Nancy Drew. Nothing in the characterization makes her realistic despite events being seen through her eyes.

What bothers me most is another story set in the South, specifically the central region of North Carolina, and nothing feels or sounds like the area. Occasional mentions of sweet tea, heat, and antebellum-type homes do not create a sense of place.

No grade because not finished. No recommendation to read.
 
DIAMOND SOLITAIRE is the second book in Peter Lovesey’s mystery series featuring Peter Diamond, now ex-Detective Superintendent. It was published in 1992. He’d resigned from the Avon and Somerset CID at the end of THE LAST DETECTIVE.

When a little Japanese girl is discovered sleeping in the furniture department of Harrods after hours, it costs Diamond his job as a security guard because he’d been responsible for the search of that area after closing. Some six weeks later, the girl is still unidentified; she’s not spoken to give any help to the police, and no one has reported a missing child or claimed her. She’s placed in Kempsford Gardens School for autistic children. When Diamond discovers her still unresolved status, he involves himself with Naomi and is making progress, providing her with materials to draw, gaining her trust, but she’s claimed early one morning by a Japanese woman claiming to be her mother. They promptly disappear to America. In the meantime, the manufacturing plant of Manflex Pharmaceuticals in Milan, Italy, burns to the ground, suspected arson. Manflex is ready to announce widespread human trials of PDM3, a drug that stimulates dying nerve cells to grow and regenerate themselves. A successful anti-Alzheimer’s drug, especially one what can be taken by the general population to prolong mental acuity, is almost literally priceless. But what does these have to do with the appearance and disappearance of a small mute Japanese girl?

The plot in DIAMOND SOLITAIRE is complex, drawing together logically elements that initially appear unrelated. It’s set up more as procedural than as a “who dun it” mystery, with coincidence playing a major role. Diamond’s appeal on BBC’sWhat About the Kids? reaches visiting sumo wrestler Ozeki Yamagata, who’s touched by Naomi’s situation and offers to pay Diamond’s expenses to find her parents and return her; this enables Diamond to take the Concorde to New York and then to fly on to Tokyo, where Yamagata’s prestige and presence facilitate Naomi’s reunion with her mother and the capture of the criminals. I question whether the New York Police Department would work so closely with an ex-Superintendent who shows up acting on his own; surely they would check on his bonafides. But Lovesey makes it easy to suspend disbelief and just go along for the ride.

Peter Diamond is clearly the most important character in DIAMOND SOLITAIRE, with most of the action seen through his eyes. His softer side shows in his quest to identify Naomi: “He knew really that his motives in treating the matter as an emergency were more instinctive than rational. Naomi had eventually come to rust him--at least to the extent of holding his hand. He wouldn’t have admitted to Julia Musgrave or anyone else--bar Stephanie--that the child had captivated him. He’d felt that small hand in his own and now it was a self-imposed duty to find out whether she was safe. But he didn’t want anyone running away with the idea that he--the veteran of a dozen murder inquiries--was a soft touch, literally a soft touch. He didn’t particularly want to admit it to himself.” (162)

Little is made of the setting. Still, a good read. (B)
 
Patrick Philippart’s MORTAL AMBITIONS was published in translation by Patrick F. Brown in 2013. Its protagonist is Dimitri Boizot, a reporter for L’Actualite in Paris.

While on vacation in Batz on the Brittany coast, Boizot hears two gunshots from home of National Assembly Deputy Lionel Perdiou; after the police arrive, he discovers that Perdiou shot and killed a burglar who’d entered his home. The only problem is, Boizot heard two shots, ten minutes apart, more than half an hour BEFORE the time given to the police. Boizot gets an exclusive story for his newspaper and is assigned to continue covering the story.

I’m giving up on MORTAL AMBITIONS at 47% for several reasons. One is that there are so many characters I literally need a score card to keep them straight. None are much developed, including Boizot himself. He’s not a very attractive one--depressed, drinking too much, so wrapped up in work he forgets to pick up his children for the weekend, bad history with women.

Another is the lack of a sense of place. The names all indicate France, but most are not the familiar cities. A map would help, as would atmosphere that brings an area into focus for the reader.

At 47%, the plot is still expanding with almost no connection between any of the characters. Both Lionel Perdiou and Jean-Michel Flaneau worked as geologists for Palonnier, a mining company working primarily in Africa. However, Flaneau died in a one car accident a year before Perdiou’s burglary. This may be the vital connection, but I frankly don’t care enough to find out. No grade.
 
THE NEXT EX is the second in Linda L. Richards’s mystery series featuring day trader Madeline Carter. Its copyright is given as 2005-2011, so apparently there have been multiple editions.

When her friend and landlord, director Tyler Beckett volunteers Madeline Carter to teach Keesia Livingston about the stock market and investing, she goes along as a favor to him. Keesia’s husband Maxi Livingston is the most important producer in Hollywood, and Tyler needs his backing on his Race the Dawn project. To her surprise, she discovers Keesia is intelligent, goal-oriented, and unpretentious as well as startlingly beautiful; they become friends. The Livingstons live in Larkin Hall, the estate of mid-twentieth century film star and businesswoman Lolita Larkin. When Keesia is stabbed to death at a lavish party there, Maddie finds her body and becomes embroiled in the murders of two of Maxi’s ex-wives and attacks on the others. Three attempts on her life, one of which kills Gus Barclay, with whom she’d tentatively begun a relationship, occur before all becomes clear.

Madeline Carter is a heroine for modern women--she’s had the courage to leave her unsatisfying job as a stock broker in New York City and to move to Los Angeles as a day trader, responsible for her own investments only. She’s strong, has a good relationship with her mother and sisters in Seattle and with her friends Tyler and Tasya Beckett and Emily Wright, among others. She has confidence in her decision making: “There was a time in my life when I did not act on instinct. Life teaches you better, if you let it. One too many securities unpurchased. Or too many not sold. A course not taken, a word not followed, all of these--and so many more--can be cause for regret. But following the path, selling the stock--doing the thing my heart was telling me--has never given me reason to look over my shoulder with sadness. Even when things don’t turn out as I’d planned--even when things didn’t turn out well--it’s better, I’ve found, to take the advice my instincts give me. For me, life is just too short to do it any other way.” However, she is not exempt from TSTL moments: when she decides to go alone to Larkin Hall and finds herself locked in a crypt inside a maze, and when she takes (accidentally) papers found there and K eesia’s computer (deliberately), hopelessly breaking chain of evidence. She’d been involved in a previous murder case, so ignorance is not an excuse. Richards has surrounded Madeline with a believable circle of friends and associates. This is a series that improves with being read in order, since characters do grow and change over time.

Richards uses both physical location and descriptive details to evoke Los Angeles and its environs. She’s effective in using atmosphere to convey character and attitude: “The city glittered, at once inky black and jewel bright, beyond. On the verandah, the scent of evening on the west side of LA--the hint of oil and humanity, the odor of near tropical vegetation and a trace of sea air--mingled with the smell of the roes that had been trained to clamber up the edge of the verandah near where we stood. In all open parts of the mansion and grounds, cater-waiters wound their way between guests with trays heavy with food and drink. The canapes were ample and varied enough that you could pause to inspect what was on offer before making a commitment: chicken satay, California rolls, Swedish meatballs, delicate little taquitos, gyoza--both vegetarian and not--oysters on the halfshell, various types of bruschetta, goat cheese and caviar quiches, shrimp and prawns in half a dozen incarnations...it seemed as though if it could be conceived of as finger food it was here somewhere, traveling through the house on a tray. ... The food, as much as anything here, spoke volumes about the event. It wasn’t about perfect execution and an enhancement of the senses... Rather the point of it all was...excess. The menu--and the decor and the floral arrangements and even all those wives--said quite plainly: ‘see how powerful I am? I don’t have to make choices. Who cares what goes with what? I can have it all.’ “

The plot contains much information on stock trading and strategies by which stock prices may be manipulated, but it doesn’t become cloying. The story is layered, with questions of Keesia’s stock trading as well as who’s killing Max Livingston’s wives and why. There’s an effective surprise that takes the story to another level, one that makes the disclosure of the wives’ killer an anticlimax. In the denouement, one can almost hear Madeline singing, “I will survive.”

One small thing bothered me much in THE NEXT EX. Wireless personal telephones are consistently referred to as “cel” phones. Still, it’s a solid read. (A-)
 
HELL’S DRAGON is the fifth novella in Annis Ward Jackson’s mystery series featuring Ellis Crawford, Chief of Police in Battenburg, North Carolina.

Crawford’s day begins with a stench when he responds to a call to check on Grace Jacobs, an elderly cat-hoarder, but it gets worse when a business owner calls in two bodies in a car near his business. It’s rigged to look like a joint suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, but Crawford is doubtful. The woman’s missing a sandal, and it’s not in or near the car. All identification has been stripped from the bodies, and the car’s registration is missing though the license plate is in place. Most telling, the entire car has been wiped down thoroughly; there’s not a single fingerprint in or on the car. The license plate is registered to Billie Nance, a local woman in Battenburg, and the man’s fingerprints identify him as Bradley Turner, partner in Tripp and Turner Industrial Investigations, out of Richmond, Virginia. What’s he doing in Battenburg? Crawford’s investigation gets even more complicated when the autopsy reports come in. Both died from asphyxiation, but not from carbon monoxide poisoning. Toxicology screens show no drugs or alcohol; both have abrasions on their fingertips, concrete dust on their clothing and under their fingernails, and the heels of Turner’s boots are scrapped. How had they died, and who’s responsible? Past secrets come out as Crawford and his department find the killer.

Jackson makes good use of limited third person point of view in showing events through Ellis Crawford’s eyes. It effectively reveals his character. Crawford’s leg continues to improve as he and Lacy Sutton ride bikes; his PTSD nightmares and insomnia are increasingly rare. Jackson’s created a viable community of police personnel, realistic about the problems of a four man, one woman department. It’s good to read the series in order because it is character driven.

Jackson plays fair in providing the reader with information as Crawford finds it. The conclusion seems a bit improbable--I can’t say more without doing a spoiler--but it’s easy to suspend disbelief.

Considering the novella length, Jackson has constructed a believable town, using details of history as well as physical place to lend verisimilitude. “Farrier was a long street that ran all the way from the east to the west side of Battenburg. The east end was much newer, an upscale neighborhood of young professionals. After downtown, West Farrier gradually narrowed into a lane just wide enough for two vehicles to meet. Only every third or fourth buildings was occupied and those mostly by pool halls, pawn shops and other businesses that were equally vague and dubious.” (12)

HELL’S DRAGON is an enjoyable quick read. (B+)
 
Rebecca Moisio’s DEATH AT PENROSE HILL is more chick lit than mystery. It was published in e-book format in 2013.

Rebecca Highsmith and her aunt Miss Minerva Call are guests at a house party hosted by Henry and Charlotte Kernewek at Penrose Hill in March 1925. Miss Call and Charlotte are most concerned with finding a husband for 25-year-old Rebecca; Rebecca’s more interested in using the fortune left to her by her parents to open a dress shop in London. Charlotte’s rounded up young men and, with the help of house guest Amelia Whitehouse, daughter of a would-be partner in George Kernewek’s fishing business, plans for Rebecca to choose one. George Falkland seems swept off his feet, but Laura Green has designs on him. Rebecca is more interested in Charles “Mad” Dover, said to be shell-shocked following his service in World War I; Rebecca herself suffers from PTSD panic attacks after her parents were killed in a WWI bomb hit on their home. Then Amelia is poisoned with cyanide, and it’s unclear who can be trusted.

The mystery in DEATH AT PENROSE HILL is definitely secondary to the romance between Charles and Rebecca. There’s only one character shown with the duplicity to be the killer, so the only surprise involves the reasons for the murder of Amelia and later of her father.

It’s an interesting twist to have both protagonists suffering PTSD, and it’ s realistic that neither experiences a miracle cure. Unfortunately, none of the characters are very well developed or memorable.

Easily the strongest element of DEATH AT PENROSE HILL is the setting. “They were pulling up to the house now. It was a massive brick affair--at least, massive compared to the lavish townhouse where Rebecca and Minerva lived. It was big only because the countryside could afford the space. It was by no means as large as Buckingham. Rather, Rebecca felt as though this house was just big enough to be filled to the brim with a nobleman’s confidence. It was proud, with deep roots and few hints of shady dealings lingering in the foundations. It was neither pompous nor humble but settled somewhere in between. And it was most certainly steeped in wealth. Ivy clawed its way up the east corner of the house, slowly--almost spitefully--taking over the walls.”

DEATH AT PENROSE HALL is an okay but nothing special. (C)
 
Susanne O’Leary’s HOT PROPERTY is a romantic comedy published in e-book format in 2013.

Megan O’Farrell inherits a falling-down house and ten acres of land complete with a stream and ocean view, at Klshee, County Kerry, Ireland. Recently divorced, she’s surprised at the bequest from her great-uncle Pat. She visits briefly, loves the land and has warm memories of a visit, but there are offers to purchase. When Megan unexpectedly loses her job in Dublin, she decides to spend some time in Kilee while she thinks about her alternatives. She has a handsome young solicitor Dan Nolan, a crotchety but attractive neighbor Paudie O’Shea, and a disgruntled cousin by marriage who expected to inherit the house himself.

I’m giving up at approximately 30%. Megan is standard romantic heroine with few distinguishing characteristics. It’s clear that she’s going to keep the cottage and will probably wind up with Paudie, who’s already shown with an interesting back story. The high point of humor so far is Megan in mini-skirt and sequined tank top chasing a bullock through a field and falling into a fresh cow pat.

By far the strongest element is the sense of place. “She...looked to the north side of the peninsula and recognised Castlegregory, that lovely decrepit old village with its tangle of cottages and Victorian houses. Further out, the Maharees, with its low-lying landscape, a scimitar of sand edged with long golden beaches, pushed flat and green into the wind-ruffled water of Tralee Bay. The mountains of Dingle Peninsula, the long spine of Slieve Mish inland, the hills round Mount Brandon away in the west across Brandon Bay, outlined in dove grey and pink against the ever-changing sky. And the Atlantic spread out below; the intense blue meeting the sky at the horizon and the waves crashing onto the rocks.” (4)

It’s just not enough to hold my interest. (C)
 
A DEADLY AFFAIR AT BOBTAIL RIDGE is the fourth and latest to date in Terry Shames’s mystery series featuring Chief of Police Samuel Craddock of Jarrett Creek, Texas. It was released April 7, 2015.

When Jarrett Creek goes bankrupt, the mayor asks former police chief Samuel Craddock to resume the job since the retired Craddock wouldn’t have to be paid a salary. Craddock’s kept busy between Jarrett Creek and nearby Bobtail because Vera Sandstone, mother of his neighbor and good friend Jenny Sandstone, has had a stroke and is hospitalized in Bobtail. While Jenny’s with her, someone first lets her horses onto the road, then a timber rattlesnake (not indigenous to the Jarrett Creek area) turns up in one of the horse stalls in the barn. Truly Bennett, the local “horse whisperer” who’s looking after the stock is attacked with an iron pipe, hit in the head and his shoulder broken. Vera tells Craddock that Jenny may be in danger, asks him to find her husband Howard who’d walked out years before and never been heard from again, and to find “his” first wife. After her mother’s death from another stroke, Jenny’s run off the road and suffers a ruptured spleen in the wreck. Who wants to get Jenny, and why? Not only is she dealing with grief and surgery, she must cope with the return of her brother Edward Sandstone, estranged from her and her mother since the time of Howard Sandstone disappearance. Long buried secrets emerge before Craddock figures out what’s happening.

The plot in A DEADLY AFFAIR AT BOBTAIL RIDGE has several strands--the day to day activities of the police department: planning for the high-jinks associated with prom and graduation at Jarrett Creek High School, a local who specializes in multiple insurance claims for the same accident, and Seth Forester’s persistence in demanding that his divorced wife return to him, using intimidation and vandalism that she refuses to charge to him. In Bobtail, the Borlands, father Scott is out on parole after a long sentence for cooking methamphetamine, and son Jett has said he’ll get even with Jenny (as a lawyer in the District Attorney’s Office) for sending his father to prison. The format is police procedural, so the identity of the perpetrator isn’t hard to figure out; the question is more if and how Craddock can prove it. The ending is unsatisfactory because the villain doesn’t get what he deserves, but it is realistic. Police often know more than they can prove in a court of law.

Samuel Craddock as first person narrator has a good storytelling voice. He’s a protagonist that’s easy to like. He’s wise, cautious, sensitive to other’s feelings, and determined to do what he sees as his duty: “Maybe I’m making too much of the incidents with the horses. The snake could have hitched a ride on somebody’s pickup, or may have been somebody’s escaped snake. But the cut lock was no accident. I don’t want to intrude on Jenny’s privacy, but somehow I’ve got to find out who she thinks has a reason for the attacks, before they graduate to attacking her as well.” He also has a sense of humor and doesn’t take himself too seriously. “This afternoon I have a meeting with the students in the gymnasium to warn them to behave themselves [at the prom]. The principal talked me into it. I wonder if the students can sense how half-hearted my efforts are at issuing the warnings. I know they’re not listening anyway. No matter what I say, there will be a few students who sneak alcohol, and a few who refuse to adhere to the rules. But they can’t get away with much. If the NSA took lessons from the school PTA lades, they’d learn a thing or two about security.” I like the continuing characters in Jarrett Creek, but 44 characters (at a minimum) is excessive. It’s not necessary that every character who’s ever been mentioned in the series appear in each book or that each individual piece of information be provided by a new character.

Setting is strong, though not as well developed in A DEADLY AFFAIR AT BOBTAIL RIDGE as in earlier books in the series. “After I left Lyndall, I drive by to scout out the Borland place. According to Lyndall’s information, Borland has moved in with his son since leaving prison. Jett’s house, up on cinder blocks, hasn’t seen a coat of paint since it was built, and the windows are hung with venetian blinds, not one of which is straight. If they use the fireplace, they’re courting aphyxiation, because half the chimney’s bricks are missing. There are at least two unusable cars rusting in the long dirt driveway, and behind them is an old white Chevy that looks an awful lot like the one I saw sitting outside Jenny’s home. ... As I drove slowly by the house, a pair of scroungy dogs came scrabbling out from under the porch and take out after my truck howling and barking, as if they’ve been stung in the backside.”

A DEADLY AFFAIR AT BOBTAIL RIDGE is a pleasant, if slow-paced, read, but it’s not up to the other books (B-)
 
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