Readingomnivore Reviews

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A NECESSARY END is one of Anthea Fraser’s Detective Chief Inspector David Webb mysteries. It was originally published in 1986 and reissued in e-book format in 2015. The series is set in the area around Shillingham in Broadshire; much of the action of A NECESSARY END takes place in the villages of Chedbury and Frecklemarsh.

Oliver and Nancy Pendrick’s marriage is in trouble. He’s disappointed because Nancy spends too much time in London and refuses to use her culinary expertise to build the already outstanding reputation of his hotel the Gables; she’s isolated from her London culinary school and catering business while in Frecklemarsh, where she has no friends. Henry and Rose, Oliver’s children from his first marriage, resent her presence. A few days after a not very successful New Year’s Eve party at which Oliver is reunited with his long-lost love Heather Jarvis Frayne, Nancy Pendrick’s body is found in Chedbury Woods. She’d been struck in the face and manually strangled. Does her death have to do with Henry’s gambling debts that Nancy refused to loan him money to repay? What about her ne’er-do-well ex-husband Danny Dean, who’d been working at the Gables and who still touched her for money? Has Rose’s latest sexual conquest, an older man that she’d asked Nancy to have stop stalking her, something to do with it? What about Oliver and Heather, determined to begin their relationship anew? Motives and suspects abound.

Fraser deftly keeps attention focused firmly away from the motive for Nancy’s death and thus from the identity of her killer. She characterizes and foreshadows a conclusion that is logical and satisfying.

Fraser creates a believable police team headed by David Webb, who sketches crime scenes and suspects to focus his subconscious and aid his ability to see patterns in cases. He respects his subordinates’ ideas and recognizes newcomers with detective potential, insuring that they have mentors. There are bits that humanize the team members, including Sergeant Jackson’s son’s birthday party, Webb’s ongoing relationship with Hannah, and the team’s selectivity in the pubs they frequent for lunch. Reading the series in order heightens the characterization.

Fraser is good at using elements of setting and atmosphere to show personality. “Frecklemarsh was not one of Webb’s favourite villages; it had about it a self-conscious charm that irritated him. You came upon it around a bend at the top of a hill, stretching down the gentle slope and fanning out at the foot into the main village. In that first bird’s eye view, all its salient features were visible, the river Darrant spanned by stone bridges, and over to the right the cobbled square with its cluster of specialist shops, none of which, Webb felt, had any place in a village--winestore, delicatessen, craft gallery. Even the church, reputedly Norman, was too pretty for his taste, set artistically on a green mound with its marble tombstones glinting in the sun.”

A NECESSARY END is a good story. (A-)

 

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Joseph Heywood’s “The Second Day” is a short story in his anthology HARD GROUND: WOOD COP STORIES published in 2013.

Kirby Halter, retired from professional basketball in Spain a year before, is on his second day as a Michigan conservation officer working in Schoolcraft County on the Upper Peninsula. He’s eager to do a good job, enjoying himself thoroughly, looking forward to 25 years, when he gets a call about a missing person. Ben Koski had gone out hunting and failed to return. His beaten wife Asia “like the country” (2) reports him missing, making it clear that she doesn’t particularly care if he doesn’t come back. When Halter finds Koski’s body, shot in the head with a .410 shotgun, and returns to tell the widow, she’s more concerned that Koski’s last words had been to his dog, not his wife or four children. The medical examiner cheerfully signs off on the death of a “widely known and much-loathed sh**tbag” (5) and, when Halter comments on Asia, tells him she’s worse than Koski. “Halter got back into his truck and tried to conjure dancing hares. Twenty-five years, he told himself. This is your second day.” (6)

“The Second Day” is interesting because the real story is implied, having occurred before the Kirby Halter comes on the scene. Had I known this story while still teaching English, I would have used it as the basis for a writing assignment, to construct what happened leading up to the situation Halter finds. I enjoy stories that require use of the imagination. (A)

 

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PAINTED TRUTH is the second novel in Lise McClendon’s series featuring art gallery owner and appraiser Alix Thorssen of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Originally published in 1995, it was reissued in e-book format in 2009.

Alix’s friend Eden Chaffee who runs Timberwolf Arts has mounted a major show of the paintings of Ray Tantro. Tantro had been a major new talent in the 1970s but had disappeared for years. Eden’s hoping that his return will put her gallery on the map, but arson destroys her building and stock, and the dead man found in the ruins is identified as Ray Tantro. Former insurance agent, now chief of police Charlie Frye is anxious to get the case solved before the re-election of Mayor Buck Bayle, who appointed him. The death is ruled suicide, since the man had been full of barbiturates and alcohol, but he’d been dead when the fire started. Frye thinks Eden behind the arson. Alix finds a cache of Tantro’s paintings from the 1970s in his cousin Wally Fortney’s garage, and there are disturbing hints that Ray is still alive. When she discovers the body of the “second” Ray Tantro in his cabin, Alix becomes the major suspect; her .22 pistol is the murder weapon, found on the scene. She and her partner Paolo Segundo discover that Wally’s Tantro paintings are forgeries, and Ray’s mother confirms he’d died of liver disease over a year before and been buried on her farm outside Jackson Hole. How does a man die three times? What on earth is going on?

The plot in PAINTED TRUTH is over the top in its multiple deaths of ostensibly the same man. There’s little reason to suspect the eventual killer until the setup for the climax of the plot. Without doing a spoiler, the conclusion involves the death of a major character that seems more like clearing the decks for new directions in the series than essential to the plot of PAINTED TRUTH.

Alix Thorssen is a believable first person narrator with emotional baggage and enough details of her personal life to lend verisimilitude. She’s strong emotionally but has trouble expressing her feelings: “I put my arm around [Eden’s] shoulders and tried to think of comforting words. None came to mind. None ever came to mind on the spot, the curse of the Norwegian. To be stoic, calm, rational in the face of chaos and tragedy: that was the ideal growing up with my mother. If the possibility existed for something awful, she would become rigid and start to clean. By the time the outcome was clear, good or bad, the baseboards were wiped, the kitchen floor shining, and the simple pine furniture rubbed with lemon oil. No time was wasted on emotion that might not be appropriate and certainly was unwelcome and embarrassing.” She pulls major TSTLs in failing to report two attempts on her life to the police, in having her gun readily accessible to anyone who enters Second Sun Gallery, and in going alone to “Ray Tantor’s” cabin when she could have waited a few minutes and arrived with witnesses.

Sense of place is outstanding in PAINTED TRUTH, with McClendon adept at infusing atmosphere with characterization. “Jackson’s town square is a grassy park framed by arches on each corner built years ago from zillions of elk and deer antlers, lit up with twinkle lights at night. Boardwalks crisscross the grass. A bronzed bronc rider is installed in the center, with the names of war veterans below, just like any small town. The square is the part of Jackson that changed the least, and because of that I liked it the most. The city planned to cut down a tree for purely aesthetic reasons last year and I made six urgent pleas to the city council before they reconsidered. I would have trapped myself to the old elm before they would change the square.”

PAINTED TRUTH is a good read in a strong series. (B+)

 

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SHOW STOPPER is Mary Monica Pulver’s mystery novel involving Kori Brichter, who breeds and shows the Arabian horses of her Treetower Ranch. It was originally published in 1992 and since reissued in e-book format.

I’m giving up at 29%. So far, trainer Keith Bulward, who has a reputation for mistreating horses and people, which he’s renewed by his behavior at the Lafite All-Arabian Horse Show, is found dead in the Treetower Ranch’s preparation stall by temporary groom Brittany Morgan. First responders think Brit’s the killer. Kori promises to get her a lawyer. Detective Eleanor Ritter has come on the scene to take over from the uniformed cops, and she’s already certain that Bulward wasn’t killed where Brit found the body.

There are many reasons I’m not continuing to read SHOW STOPPER. For one, there’s way more information about showing horses than necessary to carry the story. It detracts from other aspects of the book. For another, time is shown passing minute by minute, way too much extraneous detail. Characters, including the protagonist Kori, are not developed beyond name and a bit of physical description. The victim Keith Bulward is the only exception. Granted that most murder victims have done something to bring about their own deaths, but he’s in a class by himself--he’s so vile that bystanders should be taking up a collection to pay for Brit a good lawyer. There are too many names that appear not to be necessary to the plot. Point of view shifts between Kori and Brit without doing much to individualize either. In addition, there’s absolutely no sense of place, including the location of any of the horse farms mentioned or the locale of the horse show.

SHOW STOPPER should have been scratched from the lineup. No grade because not finished.

 

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OPEN AND SHUT is the first book in David Rosenfelt’s legal-mystery series featuring defense attorney Andy Carpenter, who practices in Paterson, New Jersey. It was published in e-book format in 2002. I inadvertently read the second book RELATIVELY GUILTY first, and I do recommend that the series be read in order.

Andy Carpenter is involved in two apparently unconnected situations when OPEN AND SHUT begins. His father, former District Attorney Nelson Carpenter, has convinced him to handle an appeal for a new trial for death-row felon Willie Miller. Seven years before, Carpenter Sr. had secured his conviction for the murder of Denise McGregor, a young reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger. The evidence of Miller’s guilt had been overwhelming, but one of the jurors had lied in voir dire, so Miller is entitled to a new trial. Andy has only a month to prepare for the retrial. How to overcome the physical and eyewitness evidence that convicted Miller in the first trial? The second situation arises when Nelson dies unexpectedly, leaving Andy some $22,000,000 unaccounted for, and Andy finds a photo of his father with three other men dating from June 1965. Who are they? Are they connected with the money? What, if anything, does the photo have to do with Willie Miller’s case?

The series is definitely character driven. Andy Carpenter is an attractive protagonist with a good story-telling first person narrative voice. He’s smart, willing and able to think outside the box, and willing to push the limits in courtroom tactics; the stakes are too high for his clients to do less. “Visiting death row is something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to, and I don’t recommend it at all. The first thing I notice about it, the first thing I always notice about it, is that it is so clean. It’s ironic. The people housed here are deemed the filth of society, not even worthy of life, yet their ‘house’ is kept clean with a zeal unmatched this side of Disneyland. The place seems entirely gray, as if I am looking at it through black and white eyes. The stench of hopelessness is everywhere; it feels like the animal shelter in which I found Tara. Everybody in cages, just waiting until it’s time to die, knowing no one is coming to set them free.” (74-5) Rosenfelt gives Andy a strong supporting cast in Laurie Collins, ex-cop who’s his investigator and sometimes lover; Edna, his crossword puzzle-addicted secretary; and legal associate Kevin Randall, who operates a laundromat/ free legal clinic. Characterization is good, though the number of characters is greater than necessary.

The plot develops slowly, with evidence and information disclosed as it’s discovered, much as in a police procedural. Police, judge, and prosecutor are depicted as professionals who do not want to arrest or to wrongfully convict for the sake of closing a case. The conclusion is satisfying.

Sense of place is good, with description often laced with humor: “...I head out to the prison, which is about twenty-five minutes from Paterson, near Newark Airport. It seems a sadistic placement, as the prisoners must constantly listen to those living in freedom literally soaring off into the sky. It must make their cagelike existence seem that much more confining. On the other hand, they never have to eat airline food.” (24)

OPEN AND SHUT is the opener in a long-running series, one that I plan to follow. (A-)

 

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MY CLOCKWORK MUSE is the first in D. R. Erickson’s Poe Files mystery series featuring Edgar Allan Poe as detective. It was published in e-book format in 2011.

I’m giving up at 20% for several reasons. For one, I do not like unreliable narrators, and Poe’s character as sketched in MY CLOCKWORK MUSE is the utmost in unreliability. The setting is 1847, just after the death of his young wife Virginia from tuberculosis. He’s having fits of delirium, sleep walking, despair, migraine headaches complete with auras, as well as the effects of the “blind interaction of chemicals that was the cause of my usual torment.” Poe recounts how he’d blinded Virginia’s cat Pluto in one eye, as had the narrator in “The Black Cat.” Poe’s identified by an eye witness as the man who carried Billy Burton, Poe’s critic and creditor, into the basement of a boarding house where his body was later found walled up, as in “The Cask of Amontillado.”

There’s no indication yet of intended direction in the plot. Only a handful of characters have been named, and none with a motive for the murder. Poe has a puncture wound on his neck that he cannot explain, similar to one on Virginia’s neck shortly before she died. Do I detect a vampire in the offing? I don’t like supernatural elements. There’s even a question whether the murder victim is Billy Burton, since Poe says he’d gone to the offices of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and seen the “dead man” there, very much alive and dunning him for repayment of a debt.

Erickson does a reasonable job of using Poe’s nineteenth-century literary language, but he’s inconsistent. Poe has a raven Tap who apparently gave him the poem “The Raven.” Tap carries on intelligent conversation with Poe, not simple repetition of words, but Tap talks more like a Damon Runyon wise guy than anyone contemporary with Poe. I admit that I’m whimsy-challenged, but Tap is just too much for me. No grade because not finished.

 

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PALE HORSE, DARK HORSE is the fifth in J. J. Salkeld’s Lakeland Murders mystery series featuring now Detective Chief Inspector Andy Hall of the Cumbria Constabulary. It was published in e-book format in 2013.

When an archaeological dig at a stone circle near Little Salkeld known as Long Meg and Her Daughters turns up the body of a man killed by a shotgun blast, DCI Andy Hall and his team out of Kendal are called to investigate. There’s no identification on the body; he’d been buried for about a year, so no fingerprints; he’d had no dental work. The only clue is a heavy gold necklace similar to those worn by Travellers (gypsies) who congregate at the Appleby Horse Fair nearby. Long Meg is located on an estate owned by Christopher Plouvin, where his brother David Plouvin lives on the home farm with his older brother Rupert’s wife Barbara. Rupert signed over the estate to Christopher some two years before and removed to South Africa, where he’s lived without further family contact (except for ￡5000/month). Is he really alive and well in South Africa? Through the Travellers, the murder victim is identified as Cliff Morrow, a would-be Traveller and a petty criminal who, inexplicably, came into money about two years before; he’d been last seen during the Horse Fair the previous year. Hall’s convinced that Morrow is connected with the Plouvins, but how to prove, especially when Christopher and David Plouvin are identical twins?

Salkeld has created a viable team of police officers working under Andy Hall, bringing them to life by focusing on one of them in each of the books. This time DC Jane Francis receives her promotion to Detective Sergeant. She becomes involved in a case of sexual touching that preoccupies her because she’s convinced that the offender, who was scared off, will escalate and make other, worse attacks. “[Jane] read the crime report on screen as she waited for it to be printed off. The case had been logged as an ABH, but as she read it Jane became increasingly annoyed. It was obviously a Sexual Touching, had to be. Whoever logged it, and it was a PC she didn’t know, just didn’t want to record a target crime where there was no realistic chance of an arrest. Jane understood why that was, and she wasn’t above doing much the same herself with minor offenses, but there were limits. And so, when she picked up the crime report from the printer, she felt the tightening in her stomach that she always felt when she knew that her colleagues hadn’t done as much as they could for a victim.” I like that Salkeld shows disappointments and miscues by the team as well as their successes, thus creating a sense of truth.

The plot is slow moving, especially the process of getting the murder victim identified, but it comes to a realistic, if not very satisfying, conclusion based on prosecution decisions rather than complete justice. Lack of forensic evidence makes this somewhat old-fashioned in the crime-solving techniques used.

Sense of place in PALE HORSE, DARK HORSE is good, though not as strong as in earlier books in the series. Two problems bother me. One is the format of the pages. New paragraphs are not indented, and there are no vertical spaces between them. This creates one solid block of text for the entire page, which makes it easy to lose one’s place. The second is that proofreading is needed for homophones: “discreet” and “discrete”, “taught” and “taut’, and “sown” and “sewn” are different words, errors in usage that spell checking will not catch.

PALE HORSE, DARK HORSE is another good entry in a strong series. (B+)

 

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MARGARITA NIGHTS is the first in Phyllis Smallman’s mystery series set on Cypress Island, off the Gulf Coast of Florida between Naples and Tampa. It features bartender Sherri Travis as first person narrator; it was published in e-book format in 2011.

Sherri works at the Sunset Bar and Grill in Jacaranda, Florida, on Cypress Island. She’s separated from her husband Jimmy, who drinks, drugs, cheats, and cons, but comes from Society, while Sherri is from a trailer park. “I’m a cracker born and bred, although from the size of my butt there was more bread than cracker involved and though I try to hide the drawl and drop the Piney woods talk, in times of stress it comes back in spades. It was back now; thick as year-old honey.” (48) When Jimmy’s boat the Suncoaster explodes with him on it, Sherri is convinced he’s not dead but pulling an insurance scam or faking his death to escape vengeful husbands, victims of his cons, or creditors with physical methods of collection. Detective Styles of the Jacaranda Police Department has a witness who puts Sherri on the Suncoaster a couple of hours before the explosion, she’d threatened to kill Jimmy the weekend before, and she’s the beneficiary of his $250,000 insurance policy. Is it any wonder that he’s not looking too hard for another suspect? Sherri, her friend Marley, the three amigos from the Sunset, and divers friends must discover what Jimmy has been doing, to keep Sherri out of the hot seat literally.

The plot in MARGARITA NIGHTS is well set up but drawn out. The story could benefit from judicious editing of about fifty pages to tighten the action. Experienced readers may have little trouble in discerning the murderer before Sherri and Styles.

Characterization is strong, but Sherri isn’t a very attractive protagonist. As she explains, “Private? We were surrounded by hundreds of empty acres, just us and the wildlife. It didn’t get more private than this. Alarm bells started jangling but I clattered along behind him. That’s the amazing thing about dumb people like me--we go on making the same mistakes over and over, trusting too luck and divine intervention. Since everyone had left for the night and nobody would be coming out here after dark, if things went wrong, divine intervention was the only thing I could count on.” (93) Not knowing whom she can trust, Sherri tells her friends (but not Styles) everything she finds out about Jimmy and his nefarious activities. She goes out into the night repeatedly into the most dangerous areas of Jacaranda, looking for an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic friend in whom Jimmy may have confided. Despite her comment about her cracker accent, Sherri doesn’t have a Southern story-telling voice.

The strongest element in MARGARITA NIGHTS is its sense of place. “Jacaranda is mostly a small town where everyone knows everyone else, except for the tourists, and they don’t count. Like one big family acrimonious, battling and often nasty, but still family, so everyone had heard about the explosion on the Suncoaster and was feeling real sorry for me.” (32) Smallman is good with atmospheric description: “The Windimere owners hadn’t stinted on the landscaping. A full-grown jacaranda tree, with beautiful silver bark, had been planted in the center of the parking lot. In early April it would turn periwinkle blue with flowers. The flat-roofed pro shop set under bottle bush trees, heavy with their distinctive red flowers. I’d stayed away from Windimere because of Jimmy’s connection to it, so this was all new for me. In the soft light of early evening, it looked magical. But without people coming and going it had a lonely feeling and wild untamed nature crouched around the perimeter of its carefully tended area waiting for the owners to fail so the jungle could reclaim its own.” (91)

MARGARITA NIGHTS encourages me to follow up on the series. (B)

 

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ROPE ENOUGH is the first book in Oliver Tidy’s Romney and Marsh mystery series set in Dover, Kent. It was published in e-book format in 2012. Formatting and proofreading are excellent, especially for an entirely self-published book.

The first crimes in ROPE ENOUGH are robbery of a convenience store and rape of its female employee Claire Stamp, who’s the girl friend of smalltime but ambitious local crook Simon Avery. The only evidence is saliva on the edge of a condom packet, opened by the rapist with his teeth in his hurry. The case is quickly complicated by Claire’s going over the fourth-floor balcony of the apartment shared with Avery. Can he be responsible? Because the apartment is ransacked after the SOCO processing, DI Tom Romney is convinced Claire had something dangerous to Avery concealed and that her death is neither accident nor suicide. His opinion is supported by the hit-and-run death of Claire’s mother in less than a week, along with the ransacking of her house. A second rape, identical to the first MO, happens at the Dour Nursing Home. But DNA evidence from the condom wrapper doesn’t match samples taken from Jane Goddard, the second victim. How can the rapes be connected?

The plot device, which I can’t discuss without doing a spoiler, is simple but neat. Tidy keeps the rapist in plain view but unsuspected for a considerable portion of the story. The Dover CID uses modern forensics and IT effectively, but there’s a comfortable, almost Golden Age feel to the narrative.

Detective Inspector Tom Romney and his new Detective Sergeant Joy Marsh are the protagonists in ROPE ENOUGH. Tidy develops them through alternating their points of view. Romney’s middle-aged, twice divorced, slowly renovating an old house where he lives alone. “A high street of charity shops, one or all of which might contain a good book-find, evoked the same feelings of excitement and anticipation in Romney that he got from breakthroughs in his police detective work. For Romney there were certain similarities between the detecting of books and being a crime detective. Each required working knowledge and thorough understanding of the subject matter. With books it was condition, edition, author and title. With police work it was the law and the evidence. Each required the painstaking application of the knowledge and understanding. Several times in the history of his book collecting Romney had been rewarded for trawling conscientiously through boxes in back rooms, or the bottom untidy shelf of a rambling second hand book shop, giving his focussed attention to each volume that came into his hands. Likewise, often it was the same dogged style of pursuit to uncover the truth by ferreting out and minutely examining evidence and testimonies that would lead to the job’s rewards. Backing up all this expertise and application was that sixth-sense, that gut feeling he would get when confronted with a room full of books, or a crime scene, that there was something there to be found, something waiting to be discovered, understood and celebrated.”

Joy Marsh “...hadn’t made the best of starts n this her first posting as detective sergeant. By her own admission, she had a barbed tongue, especially when confronted with the stupidity, chauvinism and arrogance of her male colleagues. Like most aspiring female officers she had encountered, she felt it a necessary defense mechanism, if you didn’t want them to grind you down.” Seeing the developing professional relationship between Romney and Marsh is a pleasing element in ROPE ENOUGH. Supporting characters are also individual and believable.

Sense of place is well established, with occasional flashes of humor. “The ‘Pool’ of the Dover Pool Hall neon sign was missing its ‘L’. It occurred to Romney...that this revised version was no less accurate. The exterior promised little in the way of comfort and cleanliness and suggested strongly that the interior was not likely to contradict it. The long-ago whitewashed external walls were somewhere between brown and grey with neglect, streaked with the run-off from defective guttering and the splash of puddle water from passing vehicles. The window frames were peeling, revealing a rainbow of layers of previous paint jobs. Big chunks of putty in the Georgian frames were notable by their absence. From across the street it was depressing enough, Romney reflected, to make one take up snooker.”

ROPE ENOUGH makes this a series I will definitely follow. (A-)

 

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STYX & STONE is the first book in James W. Ziskin’s mystery series featuring young reporter Ellie Stone. It was published in 2013.

I’m giving up at page 58 for several reasons. It’s set in January 1960, for tie reason that I’ve seen. It does not feel like the early Sixties, when Cold War tension was strong and anti-Communism was still dominant.

Except for the attack on her father and the theft of his latest manuscript, Ellie is completely internally focused, preoccupied with survivor’s guilt over her older brother Elijah’s death, resentment toward her father’s rejection after that death, and angst over her life. She’s 23 years old, living away from her father and New York City for two years, but she’s still acting and reacting like a young teenager. She seems to be drifting along, hard drinking and sexually promiscuous. There’s a superfluidity of characters, mostly unattractive.

The plot moves very slowly to this point. The same day/night as the attack on Professor Stone, another professor in the Italian Department of Barnard College Ruggero Ercolano died in a bathtub into which a radio had fallen, electrocuting him. There’s been one token appearance of a New York Police detective, no suggestion of a connection between the attack and the death, and Ellie hasn’t reported the theft of the manuscript.

Despite specific geographical details of New York City, there’s little sense of place. STYX & STONE just doesn’t grab my interest. No grade because not finished.

 

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THE CASE IS CLOSED is one of Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Maud Silver mysteries. It was originally published in 1937 and reissued in e-book format in 2011.

Young Hilary Carew lives with her cousin Marion Grey, whose husband Geoffrey Grey is in prison for the rest of his life for the murder of his uncle James Everton. In confusion at seeing the fiance she’d cast off a few weeks before, Hilary gets on the wrong train where she encounters Mrs. Louisa Mercer, former cook to James Everton, who tries to tell her how sorry she is that she didn’t get to see Marion during the trial. It’s Mrs. Mercer’s evidence that’s largely responsible for Geoffrey’s conviction. This gets first Hilary, then not-so-ex-fiance Henry Cunningham, and finally Miss Maud Silver involved in the question of who killed James Everton, if not Geoffrey. The most immediate suspects are Bertram Everton, the implied homosexual nephew in whose interest James Everton changed his will the day before his death, followed by Frank Everton, Bertie’s ne’er-do-well brother who’s dependent on an allowance paid by his uncle. Frank, as well as Geoffrey and Marion, is completely cut out. But Frank and Bertie both have impeccable alibis, Frank in Glasgow and Bertie in Edinburgh the night James Everton was shot in Putney. Or do they? And why is Mercer going around telling everyone his wife has lost her mind?

The Miss Silver series lasted many years, from the early 1920s through 1961. Its quality varied widely. THE CASE IS CLOSED is one of the pot-boilers. The plot to kill James Everton depends on alibis so elaborate that discovery is inevitable if anyone looks with a critical eye. It also depends on coincidence--Hilary happens to run into Mrs. Mercer on a train she takes accidentally, she happens to find Mrs. Mercer in Ledlington, Hilary happens to see her in the fifth-floor window of a tenement in Glasgow in time to intervene and prevent her murder by Mercer. Police inexplicably fail to interview all the potential witnesses and at least one only superficially.

Miss Silver, whose sleuthing is usually at the heart of the story, appears as deus ex machina. Before the climax of the plot, she meets Henry Cunningham twice, and once with Hilary and him; she discloses only one piece of information and its implications. Point of view shifts between Hilary and Henry without either being very believable. It’s hard to imagine that such a dweeb as Mrs. Mercer could have convinced anyone that she was telling the truth in court.

There’s little sense of place. While in general I am a fan of the Miss Silver series, THE CASE IS CLOSED is not one that I recommend. (D)

 

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Marty Wingate’s THE GARDEN PLOT is a cozy mystery featuring Pru Parke, Texas gardener transplanted to London. It was published in e-book format in 2014.i

I’m giving up at 34% because I can’t stomach Pru’s naivete.

SPOILERS***SPOILERS***SPOILERS

After the death of her English mother who indoctrinated Pru thoroughly in the superiority of all things English and the breakup of a long-term relationship, with only her savings and no contacts or family in England, Pru moves to London. She does a one-month internship at the Royal Horticultural Society Garden Wisley, takes a year’s sub-let on a house, and begins looking for work as a head gardener at one of the established gardens in England. She’s down to a month left on her lease and making do financially with an assortment of small gardening jobs, so when Vernona Wilson calls for a rapid clearance on an overgrown garden and offers a generous price, Pru jumps at it. Despite red flags--the speed with which it must be done, the secrecy from Harry Wilson, the comments that the house’s owner Jeremy Pendergast doesn’t want the Wilsons to mess about with the garden, and overtly curious neighbor Malcolm Quick who seems to observes every detail and pumps Pru about the Wilsons and her project--she goes blithely on. She discovers what looks like a Roman mosaic under the floor and Jeremy Pendergast dead in a corner of the garden shed. She blindly accepts the innocence and good will of the Wilsons and tells Romilda, an unknown woman supposedly looking for a flat to let on a street near the Wilsons’, everything she knows or suspects about the murder. She’s been treated politely and fairly by the police and is not a suspect, but she fails to give them photographs she’s made of progress in the garden and people in nearby streets. If she were fresh out of college, her approach to life might be understandable, but Pru’s in her fifties.

The plot is centers on some money-making scheme involving Roman antiquities. Harry Wilson is a member of the Amateur Archaeological Society of London, as is Jeremy Pendergast, with suggestions of objects going missing from digs. Jeremy’s corpse had clutched a brass coin from the time of Hadrian. Just before I gave up, Pru finds another of the Hadrian coins on Wilson’s desk in the basement area through which she enters the garden. Normally archaeology is an attractive feature in a mystery, but this time it hasn’t enriched the story.

Despite the natural setting one would expect in a story featuring both archaeological digs and gardens, there’s little atmosphere or sense of place. Pru’s thought patterns and speech give no indication of her fifty-plus years of life in Texas, tht to be her realistic limited third person point of view, should be there. Writing style is pedestrian.


If I’d bought THE GARDEN PLOT in paper copy, I’d be tempted to compost it. No grade because not finished.

 

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PRIME TIME is the first book in Hank Phillippi Ryan’s mystery series featuring Boston Channel 3 investigative reporter Charlotte “Charlie” McNally. It was published in 2009.

When the story opens, Charlie feels besieged. Kevin O’Bannion is the recently-hired head of the News Department, intentions towards current staff unknown; his assistant Angela Nevins goes out of her way to disrespect Charlie and give her grief; she’s pressuring Charlie and her producer Franklin Parrish, who’s already working on resumes for his next step up the broadcasting ladder, for a list of stories for ratings week in November, including one that will win an Emmy; Charlie’s contract at Channel 3 is up for renewal (or not); and Charlie’s 46 years old in an industry dominated by youth. When she does a quick voice-over for a morning news break, it opens up a possible story involving the disappearance and subsequent discovery of the death of Bradley Foreman, an accountant at Aztratech Pharmaceuticals. Aztratech is rumored to be under investigation for defrauding the government after being turned in by a whistle-blower. Franklin and Charlie take this to be their major sweeps-week story but, as they investigate, they find a much more complex conspiracy that almost costs Charlie her life.

Using readers’ preconceptions about conspiracies and stock market operators, Ryan does a magnificent job of focusing attention so that the identity of the mastermind comes as a surprise. The conclusion is subtly foreshadowed so that the plot does hang together logically in retrospect. My only complaint about the plot is the inclusion of the cell phone cliche--Charlie’s cell phone has a dead battery in one crucial moment and is fastened in her purse in the back seat of her SUV at another.

Charlie is the first person narrator, so she’s especially believable. Despite some twenty Emmy awards, she’s still unsure about her life and her career: “...what if I just quit now, just called Kevin back and said you know, forget it. I just don’t think I’m coming back to Channel 3 any more. Then they’d be on their own for November and I could just, um... I realize I’m crying. I stink at my job. My producer is in the hospital. My cat’s still at the vet. My best friend is out of town. And the one man who I thought might be my Prince Charming turns out to be a toad. I can’t bring myself to get up to get the newspaper. The reality of that front page is going to be proof in black and white that I’ve lost it. And I can’t figure out how it happened. When ‘Charlie McNally, Action News’ becomes just ‘Charlie McNally’--who will she be?” (174)

The interaction between Franklin Parrish, her gay, African-American producer, and Charlie is engaging; they’re friends as well as coworkers. Franklin’s role in unraveling the conspiracy is as important as hers. “Master of multi-tasking, he’s already opening his e-mail, checking his phone messages and clicking on our office TV. He’s a computer wizard, so organized he arranges his books by the Dewey decimal system. Give Franklin the half-full/half-empty test--he’d find out who the glass belongs to, what’s in it and whether it’s contaminated, illegal or the product of some political corruption. He’s also as much a goal-oriented perfectionist as I am.” (18) No wonder they make such an effective team. Other characters are also individual.

Physical details firmly establish the story in Boston and its environs, with only occasional snippets of atmospheric description. This maintians focus on the almost claustrophobic world of television news and the extent to which it isolates its successful practitioners.

PRIME TIME is the first Hank Phillippi Ryan mystery I’ve read, but it certainly won’t be the last. (A)

 

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COME DEATH AND HIGH WATER is the second book in Ann Cleeves’s mystery series featuring George and Molly Palmer-Jones. He’s a retired civil servant who liaised between the Home Office and various police departments, and she a retired social worker. Both are avid bird and people-watchers. It was originally published in 1987, then reissued in e-book format in 2013.

When eccentric Charlie Todd announces he’s going to sell Gillibry Island, where the Gillibry Island Conservation Trust maintains a seabird observatory, he sets in motion his own murder. That night John Lansdown, warden of the island, and his lover Elizabeth Richards, discover and extinguish a fire at Wendy House, Charlie’s home on the island; had they not come along, he’d have been incinerated in his sleep. His reprieve is short, however, because early the next morning while the island was cut off from the mainland by the tide, someone strangled Charlie Todd with the guy rope from a mist net. George Palmer-Jones, arriving late for the Trust Committee meeting, can testify no one had left the island after the tide ebbed; a blowing gale means no one came onto Gillibry by boat, so the killer must be one of the people on the island. Superintendent Savage, who’d met George as a young constable in the Merseyside force, asks for his help. That night Pamela Marshall, Charlie’s niece and one of his heirs, dies of stab wounds; Savage arrests Nick Marder for both murders. But George is not convinced of his guilt.

Cleeves uses clever misdirection to keep attention focused away from the motive for Charlie’s murder. Once it’s discovered, there’s really only one suspect affected enough to kill. She withholds an important bit of information about Charlie’s plans that would have led an experienced reader to the killer.

Characters are well-developed, especially George and Molly Palmer-Jones. Cleeves shifts point of view from character to character, minimizing exposition and showing them as individuals. “[Dr. Paul Derbyshire, Chairman of the Trust Committee] had been considering the ethical problem of whether he should pass on to Savage the conversation between Pamela Marshall and Jerry Parkham which he had overheard from the library the night before. He enjoyed thinking about it. He enjoyed teasing out the possible implications of the argument between them. He enjoyed the sense of happiness and security which the awareness of other people’s problems can bring. He had come to the conclusion that it would be right to repeat it, but this decision had nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with the power of gossip.”

Sense of place is excellent, with Cleeves adept at using atmosphere to illuminate personality: “The late afternoon sun was warm. [George] sat, like a boy, on the edge of the quay with his legs dangling over the mud. Waders were feeding on the shore in huge numbers, and as he watched them through his binoculars, he emptied his mind of the island and of questions and suspicion and fear. It had always been the only way he could force himself to unwind. While he was counting the birds, there was a movement across the mud. The birds started to call, rose in a group in alarm. A peregrine dropped from the sun, took one of the foolish, flapping creatures and flew with it across the estuary to the hills. The incident was over in seconds, but for George it was a joy, a reward to sustain him.”

COME DEATH AND HIGH WATER is a solid traditional mystery. (B)

 

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WOULDN’T IT BE DEADLY is D. E. Ireland’s sequel to George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and to the great classic film My Fair Lady, owing more to the latter than to the former, down to the costume Eliza wears on one occasion. It was published in 2014.

When the story opens, Henry Higgins and Colonel Pickering have just returned to London after a two-months research tour of the Iberian Peninsula. Eliza Doolittle is living with Higgins’s mother and working for the Professor’s former pupil, now competing elocution teacher Emil Nepommuck, who’d announced at the Embassy Ball Eliza’s royal Hungarian bloodline. Higgins is infuriated, especially when Nepommuck advertises that he, not Higgins, had been responsible for the amazing transformation of a Cockney flower girl into a duchess. Higgins hires a private investigator to uncover Nepommuck’s background, and he publicizes that background of scandal, womanizing, blackmail, even a prison sentence. When Eliza discovers Nepommuck’s body, stabbed in the back and with one of her tuning forks in his mouth, Higgins is the prime suspect. Eliza is determined to prove him innocent.

SPOILERS***SPOILERS***SPOILERS

I occasionally wonder when reading a book that doesn’t seem to match the glowing published reviews, if I’m reading the same book. WOULDN’T IT BE DEADLY is one of those books. I have no argument with the premise; in fact, I think it has good possibilities for a mystery series. However, I have many reservations about this rendition.

One involves the characterization. There’s not much of it. It’s largely a reflection of the film characters, except for giving Henry Higgins a love affair lasting many years with Lady Helen, Duchess of Waterbury, by whom he has a son who’s the Duke’s heir. She can alibi him for the time of Nepommuck’s death, but he’d rather go to prison than disclose the relationship. Eliza’s not sure what she wants to do with her life, but the murder must take precedence. “Higgins and Redstone were merely her friends, while Colonel Pickering was like a father, far more generous and loving that Alfred Doolittle had ever been. And she owed the Colonel and Higgins her loyalty for all their help. Without them, she’d be sitting next to Nan at Covent Garden tying bunches of violets. No matter what, she’d find a way to keep both Higgins and the Colonel safe from harm. That meant Freddy and his romantic plans would have to wait until she finished solving a murder.” (140)

The plot, crowded with people who take elocution lessons to conceal their place or social class origins, naturally involves many secrets and motives for a blackmailer’s murder. Some of them are recent, some originated years in the past, and some appear to be common knowledge, even if not spoken of. Mrs. Higgins accounts for the excessive influence of Verena, Lady Gresham, Dowager Marchioness of Gresham, over the Commissioner of Police by explaining that they’d had a well-known affair some forty years before as members of the Marlborough House set.

The plot also depends on coincidence, the greatest of which is that Detective Inspector Jack Shaw, officer in charge of the investigation of Nepommuck’s death, is Eliza Doolittle’s first cousin; she’s thus excluded from suspicion and given access to inside information. Shaw fails to take in evidence the list of Nepommuck’s students, surely prime suspects in the murder. The climax of the plot is a farce enacted back- and on-stage during the last act of Hamlet at the Drury Lane Theatre. Ireland establishes a believable succession of alternative suspects but then uses what may be the ultimate cliche in the mystery genre.

Ireland includes a multitude of physical locations in establishing the London setting without much atmosphere. The whole tone of the story is anachronistic, much more modern than 1913. Eliza’s still active in Mrs. Higgins’s social set and is living with her, but she’s also employed as a salaried teacher of elocution, and everyone seems to know her background. She goes into pubs, gets tiddly on Guinness, and reverts to her Cockney mother tongue whenever upset. As rigid as social class structure was in 1913, she just doesn’t fit. Another solecism involves Mrs. Higgins’s name. She’s mostly referred to as Mrs. Higgins, but she’s identified at one point as the Lady Grace Honoria. Shouldn’t her proper address be as Lady Grace Higgins? Monetary values are inconsistent. Higgins and Eliza refer repeatedly to Higgins’s going to prison for Nepommuck’s murder when the penalty for murder was still hanging. I could go on.

As much as I wanted to like WOULDN’T IT BE DEADLY, it wasn’t worth the time. Not recommended. (D)

 

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BUYING MURDER is one of Nancy Lynn Jarvis’s Regan McHenry Real Estate mystery series. It was published in e-book format in 2010.

Regan McHenry falls in love with a cottage in Santa Cruz County, California, and convinces her husband and business partner Tom Kiley that they should buy it. It is ideally located between beach and lake, offering both for recreation, and it can serve if needed as a refuge from wild fires so prevalent in California. In the process of having the cottage inspected, she and Barry Bradford discover a man’s skeletal remains concealed inside an enclosed space next to the fireplace. The police quickly identify the body as that of Julien Rochette, who disappeared some sixteen years before. The body had been placed in the cottage between late summer and the holidays in 1994, when the house had been listed for sale by Bradley Realtors, with Charles Alfrey as the listing agent. The Santa Cruz Police Department will work the Rochette murder but, with limited manpower and financial resources, it will not be a high priority case. Regan refuses to accept this and determines to “help” the police. Regan’s also involved with an eviction case in which her testimony leads to threats by Seth Cooper, son of the evicted woman; when she’s run off the road once, then a second attempt is made, the police believe the Coopers responsible. Regan thinks it’s all tied to the Rochette murder. Who’s right?

The plot is set up almost like a police procedural in that it’s clear from the beginning that Regan’s suspicions are correct. The question becomes not so much who committed the crime as can Regan prove it. What bothers me about the plot are the TSTLs pulled by Regan, by her husband Tom, and by their friend, police department ombudsman Dave Everett. Several times Regan goes haring off alone at night in poor driving conditions to a meet caller at isolated locations. Knowing that she’s confronting the killer in the guise of a blackmailer, Dave is unsuccessful in arranging police protection and doesn’t let Regan know; Tom, after saying he would be with her continually for the 48 hours until the killer must meet her deadline for payment or remove her, leaves Regan alone at their office, to be set up again. When Regan goes to her meeting, she does try to call Dave (only at work, not on cell phone) and the detective in charge of the case, but when neither is available, she doesn’t leave a message for either of them. Duh! The degree to which Everett tells Regan the details of the case is unrealistic.

Jarvis makes it believable that Regan investigate the murder: “...she shouldn’t get involved. The body hidden in the triangle had nothing to do with them. She should let the police do their work and determine the who, when, and why of the remains. There was no need for her to poke around or ask questions. Leave everything to the authorities. That was what she should do, that was exactly what she planned to do. That, and to work hard to squelch the annoying little voices in her head that kept connecting two thoughts in such an irksome way: Your house, Regan. Your murder.” (19-20) Other characters are realistic.

Sense of place is outstanding. “The beach that stretched from New Brighton through Rio del Mar and to Seascape was her favorite feet-on-the-sand beach in Santa Cruz County. Tom had proposed to her as they strolled there and they came back often for long walks. Usually hey headed south toward Seascape to walk past the ship house, a curious structure built on a long narrow lot at the ocean’s edge. The house was high and narrow, built with a pointed end like the prow of a ship. The original owner may have intended only to guarantee a beachfront view from every room, but subsequent owners had nautically enhanced the structure with porthole windows, a high-hanging dingy, and a deck where a Marilyn Monroe statue perpetually fought to control her skirt, not from subway air vent blasts, but from sudden ocean gusts.” (192-3)

There are, however, a few problems. The formatting frequently leaves hyphenated words within lines of text. Use of apostrophes in possessives is not correct. The plural possessive to identify the house belonging to the Pauralt family is Pauralts’, not Pauralt’s; something belonging to Santa Cruz County is Santa Cruz’s, not Santa Cruz’. Regan talks to Jessie Bolten, then he’s Jessie Bolton. Which?

BUYING MURDER is a successful entry in a good series. (B)

 

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DECEPTIVE CLARITY is the first book in Aaron Elkins’s mystery series featuring Chris Norgren, curator at the San Francisco Museum of Art. It was originally published in 1987 and then reissued in e-book format in 2014.

Chris Norgren is seconded from the SFMA to Germany to assist his immediate boss Peter van Courtlandt in curating a U. S. military-sponsored exhibition of the collection of Italian art belonging to Claudio Bolzano. Much of his collection had been expropriated by the Nazis in 1944; some had been recovered previously, and the recent accidental discovery of another three of Bolzano’s Old Masters in a salt mine near Hallstatt provides an excellent opportunity to further US-European relations by mounting the Treasures of Four Centuries: The Plundered Past Recovered exhibition. Upon arrival, Peter van Courtlandt tells Chris that he’s uncovered a forgery in the collection, one that’s “right up Chris’s alley,” but he doesn’t tell Chris anything further. Two thugs attempt to steal paintings from the collection in Berlin, while Peter is murdered in Frankfurt. As preparations for the show to open in Berlin, Major Harry Gucci investigates the attempted robbery and the murder, while Chris obsesses over finding the forgery. He’s unwilling to believe the two events unrelated.

Much of the action of the plot in A DECEPTIVE CLARITY involves the process of authenticating paintings. Elkins keeps it from overpowering the mystery. Involved in the story are important questions. If a painting is so good that it moves its audience as if it were an original Vermeer, for example, does it matter if Vermeer himself did not paint it? How much cleaning, repainting, restoring is allowed before a genuine painting becomes more of a copy or a reproduction than an original? How do you conceal a forgery in an exhibition of original paintings? Elkins keeps attention focused away from the killer and manages a neat surprise twist when he’s eventually identified.

Chris Norgren is a believable first person narrator, a good storyteller with a self-deprecating sense of humor. “In museum circles I had often seen and quailed under that doubtful look when I was introduced as San Francisco’s curator of Renaissance and baroque. And even under Gadney’s inoffensive scrutiny, I confess to a small stab of insecurity. Way down deep, you see, I’m not so sure that I really am a bona-fide art curator, and not just a fraud who’s picked up the jargon. Art, after all, doesn’t have a lot you can hang your hat on, and there are times when I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about. (I’m still waiting for someone to explain neoplastic constructivism to me, for example, and I’ve lectured on the damn thing!) Never have I heard my self-assured colleagues confess such uncertainties, and in my dark hours I sometime wonder if they,,, were simply born to the field and I was not.” He’s also carrying emotional baggage from a messy divorce and uncertainy about a possible relationship with USAF Captain Anne Greene, a liaison officer working on the exhibit. Other characters are authentic.

Elkins’s use of atmospheric description creates an outstanding sense of place. “In Germany it is hard to be hungry for long without realizing it. The Germans are surely the munchingest people in the world. It is rare to pass three pedestrians in a row without noticing that at least one of them is chewing on something that looks, sounds, and smells delicious. If they have to walk more than 150 feet without sight of a bakery or a Schnell Inbiss--a hot-snack stand--they become perceptibly anxious, even panicky. As a result, railroad stations, airports, and other public places are lined with tiny stand-up bars selling sausages, beer, cakes, and other restoratives, generally of high quality. The Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof was no exception, and the first thing I did when I got there was to order a chunk of warm Leberkase and a roll, served with a dab of sweet German mustard on a paper plate, along with a half-liter of beer. I stood with two other men at a table made from a big barrel and downed the meal happily, wondering, not for the first time, how this pulpy, slippery, delicious sausage is made. (I’ve never dared to ask. There are some things...)"

A DECEPTIVE CLARITY is good reading. I will definitely follow up on the series. (A-)

 

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BLACK AND BLUE is the fourth book in Emma Jameson’s mystery series featuring Lord and Lady Hetherirdge. It was published in e-book format in 2015.

Recently married, Anthony Hetheridge, ninth baron of Wellegrave, Chief Superintendent, and Detective Sergeant Kate Wakefield Hetheridge of New Scotland Yard face both personal and professional problems in BLACK AND BLUE. Maura Wakefield, the mentally-ill sister whose son Henry Kate has raised for years, is out of psychiatric hospital in a halfway house, and she’s determined to get Henry back. She’s supported by their mother Mrs. Louisa Wakefield, aka Lolo Carter, Lolo Shumway, and Lolo Dupree, who handed over her son Ritchie, who’s autistic, to Kate’s care years earlier. They’re willing to go to court and to appeal to the media to get custody of Henry. Professionally, Hetheridge is handed the murder of a neighbor Granville Hardwick, an egomaniacal art dealer whose home at 24 Euston Place is as out of place as its owner. The case is apparently open and shut since Buck Wainwight, who called in and reported the murder, also confesses, though he says he was in an alcoholic blackout and doesn’t actually remember killing Hardwick. In his interview with Wainwright, Hetheridge concludes Wainwright is in fact not guilty. But Hetheridge is faced with a demand for his resignation from Scotland Yard, based on complaints about his professionalism and nepotism in marrying Kate Wakefield. What will become of Kate and Detective Sergeant Deepal Bhar, the other members of his team? What will Hetheridge do in retirement? What will happen with Henry?

The plot is fairly laid out, with appropriate clues and the introduction of another whole range of motives when Kate discovers Hardwick’s art shipments also carried large quantities of drugs. There’s an amusing side story of Paul Bahr having to babysit the Prosecution’s witness in an unrelated drug trial. Sir Duncan Godington, the series’s resident master criminal, puts in a few cameo appearances, to put the wind up the team.

Jameson has a good variety of believable characters that do not remain static. Detective Chief Inspector Vic Jackson has been well-established as a pain in the arse: “To have hurt feelings, one must first possess feelings, and DCI Jackson id not. He harbored no sentiment, no hopes, no dreams, no inner life whatsoever. Within his overtaxed veins, shriveled by nicotine and clogged with dietary fat, coursed no mortal blood, only sexist jokes ad racist remarks.” But Jackson changes, actually apologizes to Kate for the sexual harassment and professional disrespect he’d shown toward her. Bhar grows up some, and the Hetheridges gain in emotional openness in their marriage. I look forward to seeing them continue to evolve.

Sense of place is well developed. “Shoreditch was part of Hackney in London’s East End. In recent years it had become increasingly gentrified yet was still known for its street art (temporary) and its graffiti (permanent, at least until the Council tok action.) Sometimes Shoreditch’s street art was simple: chalk drawings on sidewalks or stickers all over a sign post. Other times, entire streets were transformed by spray paint; by giant sculptures erected on rooftops, even by fanciful decoupage, such as paper lilies blooming inside phone boxes. It was all left of center, unexpected, and mostly anonymous, although a genuine Barky graced Rivington. Once upon a time in the Victorian era, rich young men in top hats and tails had gone slumming in Shoreditch, sampling its music halls and prostitutes, safely scandalized by how the other half lived. Now doubledecker buses packed with tourists trundled through, showing off a district that had become a sort of open-air gallery.”l

BLACK AND BLUE offers an unusual detective pairing, one that’s not static. I look forward to more of the series. (A-)

 

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Renata McMann’s “Heiress to Longbourn” is a short story variant on Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. It was published in e-book format in 2014.

The morning that Darcy and Colonel Fitzwilliam leave Rosings Park, Elizabeth Bennet finds Mr. Collins dead in the garden, killed by an aneurysm. She’s glad that her low spirits after refusing Darcy’s proposal will be perceived as grief. She stays on for an additional week to assist Charlotte, who returns to Lucas Lodge to live with her parents. Mr. Collins’s death means, unless Charlotte bears a son within the next nine months, the entail on Longbourn is ended. Mr. Bennet arranges to leave Longbourn to Elizbeth because she’s the only child who can handle the estate (and her mother) so that it will support Mrs. Bennet and the sisters in the long term. He sets in place good advisers and begins to educate Elizabeth in the ways of farm management. Being the sole heir to Longbourn makes her the target of every man in the area who’s looking for a well-to-do wife. Neighbor John Lucas even tries to compromise her; now that she has money; Colonel Fitzwilliam visits Netherfield with Bingley and Darcy to pursue Elizabeth. Elizabeth is well aware that her new popularity comes from her potential inheritance, and she’s acutely conscious that she doesn’t understand people as well as she thought. Can Darcy overcome her reluctance?

One major change in “Heiress to Longbourn” is the addition of John Lucas as a character, one that’s not quite believable. Lydia is recovered in London after she’s run away with Wickham, but she’s not married. Instead, Mr. Bennet returns her to the schoolroom and institutes a program of study. Lydia’s solution to this regime is consistent with her character as created by Jane Austen, as are most of the remaining characters. Language and writing style are modern. “Hurst’s” is used incorrectly as a plural possessive.

“Heiress to Longbourn” is pretty standard Austen fan fiction, not bad but not especially memorable. (C)

 

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Leslie Meier’s BAKE SALE MURDER is one of her cozy mystery series featuring reporter Lucy Stone of the Timber Cove, Maine, Pennysaver. It is available in e-book format.

Fred Stanton has developed the old Pratt place, next to Lucy and Bill Stone’s home, into a haven for newcomers to Timber Cove; he, wife Mimi, and sons Preston and Tommy moved from Gilead to occupy the best house in the development. Mimi, who works in the County Assessor’s Office, is a busybody who seems to delight in reporting the most minor infractions to City Hall. She’s after Lucy about lilac bushes that obscure sight lines on their road; another neighbor’s reported for running a home business; a third has a pet pot-bellied pig that Mimi reports as an illegal agricultural animal. She’s a gossip and may just be having an affair. To raise money for a local charity, Lucy and her friends, aka the Gang of Four, plan a bake sale, a plan soon preempted by the younger women from the development, under the leadership of Chris Cashman. When Mimi fails to show up with her cookies for the sale, Chris dispatches Lucy to find her. She does--dead in her kitchen with a carving knife in her back. The immediate suspect is Mimi’s obnoxious, verbally abusive husband Fred. At the same time, Lucy is anxious over a series of anonymous letters to the newspaper alleging hazing of Junior Varsity football players by varsity players. She’s particularly concerned because her daughter Sara is a freshman cheerleader who will ride the team bus to away games. Can Lucy find out what’s going on in either case?

The plot in BAKE SALE MURDER isn’t impressive. There’s no reason to suspect the eventual killer or the motive for the murders. The conclusion seems rushed. Police investigation is invisible. Much of the information Lucy picks up is through coincidence--her dog happens to find and chew up the wallet of a homeless man found dead in the harbor, swallows the driver’s license in the wallet, has to have surgery to remove the obstruction it causes, and the license still has a legible photograph and identification number. Seems unlikely. Lucy Googles several people and topics but doesn’t search for information on the new football coach, who adamantly denies hazing.

Characterization is so-so. The number of characters, including Lucy’s husband Bill and three of their four children, is surplus to requirements of the plot. Most characters are thumb nail sketches more of types thanof individuals. Use of limited third person as Lucy sees things adds little to make her believable. There’s little sense of Timber Cove as a real place.

BAKE SALE MURDER comes off as half-baked. Not recommended. (D)