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Readingomnivore Reviews

AN INVASIVE SPECIES is the first book in J. J. Salkeld’s new A Natural Detective series, published in e-book format in 2015. It features Owen Irvine, fired years before from the Cumbria Constabulary for use of excessive force against armed poachers. Since then he’s made his living as a fraudulent claims investigator for the local council. Not to worry, however, because he’s an old mate of DC Andy Hall, who’s back at Kendal Nick job-sharing with DI Jane Francis so that both may share in care for their young daughter Grace.

The story opens with Irvine informing Clare Cooper that she’s busted for making fraudulent claims for support. Though he routinely expects to be lied to, Irvine believes her story of having been conned out of every cent she had by a young lover she’d met through an on-line dating site. He reports the crime to Andy Hall because apparently the police had done nothing, because he doesn’t believe she’s the con-man’s first victim, and because she things she may have been drugged while he was conning her. Trusting his friend’s instincts, Hall looks at it and assigns DC Abla Khan to investigate. She turns up three other victims, none of whom have any concrete evidence. As they follow the leads, Hall involves Irvine in the investigation, and he’s instrumental in uncovering a much more dangerous predator.

Characterization is a strong point in Salkeld’s series featuring Andy Hall, and this remains true in AN INVASIVE SPECIES. In fact, the involvement of Andy Hall, DS Ian Mann, and other characters from that series is sufficient to make a new series unnecessary. The major new character is Owen Irvine, a man content in his own life, solitary by nature, dedicated to preserving the farm passed down from his great-grandfather, the product of his upbringing there. “[Irvine] closed his eyes and listened. To the river, running late summer low and easy, to the breeze through the tree above him, to the sheep on the hill behind him, and the distant sound of old Tom firing up his even more ancient tractor. He would know this place anywhere. Blindfold him and set him next to any river in the county, no, in the world, and he would know when he was home. Maybe it was the contouring of the hill rising behind him and ahead of him, perhaps it was the particular geological constituents of the river bed, the sound of that particular water on that precise mix of stone. He had no idea, not really. But he’d still know exactly where he was, beyond Staveley and three parts up the Kentmere valley.” He’ll be interesting to get to know.

A feature of the earlier series that Salkeld continues is the focus on one member of Hall’s team with significant portions of the story viewed through his/her eyes. In AN INVASIVE SPECIES, newest Detective Constable Abla Khan, native of Yorkshire, leads on the con-man case. She is hard-working, intelligent, and brave, coming quickly to respect Owen Irvine’s judgment and character as he works with her, per Andy Hall’s instructions, on the case. This use of point of view gives a sense of knowing the team members as real people.

Sense of place is strong but with less atmospheric description than in some of the Andy Hall series. AN INVASIVE SPECIES is the first of what I hope will be many books involving Owen Irvine. It’s well worth the time. (A-)
 
ANOTHER MAN’S POISON is the sixth book in Ann Cleeves’s mystery series featuring George and Molly Palmer-Brown. He’s a retired Home Office trouble-shooter and liaison with local police; Molly is a retired social worker. Together they operate an inquiry agency. It was published in 1993.

When Molly’s aunt Ursula Ottway finds a poisoned buzzard and her two cats dead on the grouse moor at the Cadver, estate of MP Marcus Grenville, she’s infuriated and determined that the illegal activity be made known. That night she bursts into a dinner party at the Cadver and announces her intentions. George and Molly are en route to the Cadver for George, distinguished independent ornithologist, to attend Grenville’s invitational conference on the environment, but when they arrive the next morning, Molly finds Ursula dead in Back Rigg cottage.
Cause of death isn’t readily apparent, but George concludes Ursula’s death is too timely and too convenient to be from natural causes. In a panic lest Ursula’s accusations and death destroy his chances for a Cabinet post in the next change of government, Marcus Grenville hires George and Molly to clear up the matter of the poisonings. Deep secrets from the Grenvilles’ past emerge as they investigate.

Cleeves establishes characters firmly and only slowly reveals their personality and behavior. They are believable, if somewhat stereotypical. George and Molly are particularly well drawn. George is self-doubting, inclined to depression, introspective; Molly is more confident about her abilities. “When Molly went downstairs, George was still on the hill. She felt childishly resentful of his absence. They were supposed to be partners, but still he took the lead in the investigation, only feeding her information when he thought she was ready for it. He’s not always right, she thought spitefully, remembering small victories, the times when he had made important mistakes. She knew he did not mean to exclude her--he had worked alone for so many years that it was habit--but still it rankled that he had to prove her worth.” (116)

The plot is fairly laid out, with appropriate clues to identify the malefactor(s). I like that George works closely with Detective Inspector Dave Benwell rather than going off on his own.

Sense of place is good in ANOTHER MAN’S POISON. Cleeves is skilled at small snippets of description and history that create a real physical landscape: “...[Ursula] left the house and set off up the hill. It had been clear all day, and now, out of the house, there was enough light to see the whole of the valley spread below her. There was no real village. That had disappeared in 1963 when Crowford was flooded to provide a reservoir to supply the cities of the industrial northeast and Carlisle. The church and chapel were under the lake, visible only as ruins in times of drought when the water was low. At the bottom of the valley, below the dam, was the Cadver, the big house. She could see it better from here on the hill than from the road, where its privacy was protected by high stone walls and acres of woodland.” (5-6)

ANOTHER MAN’S POISON is a satisfying read. (A-)
 
CUSTER’S TRIALS: A LIFE ON THE FRONTIER OF A NEW AMERICA is T. J. Stiles’s entry in the literature on George Armstrong Custer, the “Boy General” of the American Civil War best remembered for the worst defeat in the U. S. Army’s long-standing warfare against American indigenes. It was published in print and e-book formats in 2015.

Stiles states his purpose explicitly: “...I want to change the camera angle--to examine Custer’s life as it was lived, in order to better grasp the man, his times, and his larger meaning. If we can escape the overshadowing preoccupation with his death, a critical fact stands out: he captured the American imagination long before Little Bighorn, even before he went west. That means he had a significance independent of his demise. ... I want to explain why his celebrity, and notoriety. spanned both the Civil War and his years on the frontier, resting on neither exclusively but incorporating both.” To this end, Stiles covers the Battle of the Little Bighorn, aka Custer’s Last Stand, only in the Epilogue, where it is presented through testimony in June 1879 at the Court of Inquiry requested by Major Marcus A. Reno, 7th Cavalry, in an attempt to clear his name from allegations of deliberate failure to save Custer and his men.

Stiles uses mainly primary sources, including the abundant writings of Custer and his wife Libbie Bacon Custer, who lived and wrote until 1933 to help establish and maintain the Custer myth. Maps are more legible than in most Kindle publications, but illustrations must be accessed from the table of contents--they do not show up in the text. A cast of characters would benefit readers who may not be familiar with the personalities of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age mentioned in the text. Stiles cuts back and forth in time to show events happening simultaneously in Custer’s military career and his personal and political lives and in Libbie’s, especially during the periods during which they were separated. This becomes tedious because Custer followed the same pattern of behavior throughout his life, involving himself in politics and financial dealings he didn’t understand, relying on his celebrity and his patrons (Sheridan, Sherman, and Grant, before he alienated them all by testifying at the impeachment of Secretary of War William Belknap in spring 1876) to smooth over his poor decisions.

Stiles summarizes Custer’s life succinctly: “From the Civil War through his two battles on the Yellowstone, [Custer] proved decisive, not reckless; shrewd, not foolish. In every other regard, he danced along the emerging modern world, unable to adapt to it. He failed in the new sphere of finance, rejected new thinking about equality, and wrote antiquated prose. He offended his military superiors, mismanaged subordinates, alienated civilian authorities, meddled inappropriately in politics, endangered his marriage, and gambled away his estate. Again and again, he saved himself through his ability to fight. And yet, ironically, we now remember him as a bad commander [at Little Bighorn].”

Another revision to smooth transitions and to cut repetition would benefit CUSTER’S TRIALS. As it stands, it’s okay, but it offers little new insight into Custer’s character or career. (C)
 
PARTICULAR STUPIDITIES is the fifth book in Oliver Tidy’s mystery series featuring Detective Inspector Tom Romney and Detective Sergeant Joy Marsch of the Dover and District CID. Detective Constables Peter Grimes and Derek Spicer are its other permanent members. The book was published in e-book format in 2015.

As PARTICULAR STUPIDITIES opens, the Dover CID investigates a series of thefts of lead from church roofs throughout the district. Then Buddy and Elvis Holloway of Aylesham phone in a decomposed male body concealed in an old chest freezer, stored in one of their containers at their Dover and District Self-Storage. The body is too far gone to identify by fingerprints; there’s no identification, wallet, or jewelry. There’s no record of a missing person. Who is he, how and why was he killed, and why was his body left there? The only ones with access to the container are the Holloways, long-time petty criminals who also run a scrap metal company inherited from their father, and people associated with the St Bartholomew Catholic Primary School next door. Its PTA uses the container to store out-of-season decorations. The situation is complicated for Romney because the woman who walked out on him in a previous case, Julie Carpenter, is Deputy Head Teacher of the School, and she is eager to walk back into his life.

Some observations about the plot without doing a spoiler. Tidy keeps the killer(s) hidden in plain sight throughout the early section of the plot, presenting successive theories of the crime. Much of the plot deals with Romney’s relationship with Julie; Joy Marsh deliberates on buying a flat and her relationship with boy-friend Justin, who wants marriage. Romney’s guerilla war with new station chief Superintendent “Boudicca” Vine continues.

The most attractive part of the Romney and Marsh series is the interaction between the CID members, especially the contrast between Romney’s old school copper ways and March’s more modern and technological approach. “Knowing something of Romney’s prejudice against certain strands of society and his habit of gross exaggeration and sweeping generalizations, she had learned to be suspicious regarding much of what he held to be true when speaking of groups that he displayed antipathy towards. Marsh thought that if he really did harbour feelings of negativity for the community of Aylesham it was probably because of something in his personal history. Marsh knew Romney was not above tarring a whole nation with his own brand of disparaging contempt as a result of the most trivial of personal slights. It would only have taken an insult or a punch thrown by one drunken miner on a Saturday night in Dover for Romney to have taken against all miners everywhere. It was part of what made him the man he was.” All of the continuing characters are believably human. However, Grimes’s prolonged mispronunciation through a mouth full of ill-fitting dental crowns becomes tiresome.

Scene of place is not as strong as in previous books, though the Dover area is clearly indicated. PARTICULAR STUPIDITIES is a good continuation of the series. (B+)
 
The title BECOMING QUEEN VICTORIA: THE TRAGIC DEATH OF PRINCESS CHARLOTTE AND THE UNEXPECTED RISE OF BRITAIN’S GREATEST MONARCH sums up Kate Williams’s 2008 e-book well. It covers the period from the beginning of George III’s mental illness through the first years of Victoria’s reign and marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. Anyone scandalized by the antics of the twentieth- and twenty-first century Windsors will be horrified by their Hanoverian ancestors.

“George’s [III] tyrannical behavior toward [his children] shaped the future of the British monarchy for more than a hundred years, indeed perhaps coming close to prompting its end. His daughters became bitter spinsters and his sons hopeless rakes detested by the country for their irresponsible behavior and shocking debts. By 1817, the entire complement of thirteen children had produced only one legitimate heir among them: Charlotte, daughter of George, Prince of Wales. When she died, the position was even more untenable: so many offspring [56 grandchildren of George III] and not one heir among them.” (6)

With the death of Charlotte following the stillbirth of her son, the Royal Dukes (Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge; William, Duke of Clarence; Ernest, Duke of Cumberland; Augustus, Duke of Sussex; Frederick, Duke of York; and Edward, Duke of Kent) quickly threw off their common-law wives and hordes of illegitimate children to seek appropriate marriages and, by begetting an heir, to guarantee his own personal power and fortune. George, Prince of Wales, renewed his attempts to divorce his wife Caroline of Brunswick, Princess Charlotte’s mother, so that he could remarry. Even 49-year-old Princess Elizabeth married hastily though she was beyond childbearing. With the aid of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, Charlotte’s widower, Edward, Duke of Kent, won the marital stakes with Leopold’s sister Victoire, Dowager Princess of Leiningen. She soon became pregnant and on 24 May 1819 gave birth to the second heir presumptive to the throne, Victoria. Only William, Duke of Clarence, stood closer.

The Duke of Kent died 23 January 1820, leaving his Duchess isolated from the royal family, substantially broke. She took as her private secretary (and perhaps lover) Sir John Conroy, an Irish army officer who used his influence to manage her financial affairs and enrich himself. Their personal futures depended on complete control over the person and education of Victoria. If her uncles died before her eighteenth birthday, Victoria would require a regent, a de-facto ruler of England. The Duchess of Kent was determined that she would be that regent. So followed a childhood with Victoria made miserable by the machinations of her family. As she became a teenager and George IV inevitably approached death, pressure on Victoria to bow to her mother and Conroy’s plans increased; William IV succeeded his brother, determined to live past Victoria’s majority and to thus frustrate the Duchess. Victoria’s eighteenth birthday was 24 May 1832; he died 20 June 1832.

Never having been allowed to be alone, literally, Victoria’s first order as queen was for the delegation bearing the news to leave her alone for an hour; her second was to have her bed removed from the Duchess’s bedchamber and set up in her own room. She firmly put her mother out of any control over her actions. Victoria was polite to her face but otherwise paid her little attention. Her uncle Leopold, who set up her marriage to his nephew Prince Albert, and her first Prime Minister Lord Melbourne were the great influences on her early reign.


I was disappointed in BECOMING QUEEN VICTORIA for several reasons. I never did figure out how to access the illustrations shown in the table of contents. Writing style is simplistic. The content reads like a cut-and-paste from Wikipedia with a few observations thrown in for ballast. Notes to sources for specific bits of information are inadequate, with many conclusions not cited or adequately explained (i.e., Williams’s statement that Conroy was not the Duchess’s lover). The bibliography is sparse. The episode in which I was interested, the Lady Flora Hastings scandal, is summarized with less specific detail than Wikipedia’s article. Victoria, who hated Lady Flora as the Duchess’s spy and Conroy for his influence over her, encouraged gossip that Lady Flora was pregnant by Conroy; Lady Flora’s family came to her defense, the country and court were outraged at the slander when Lady Flora died of a massive tumor on her liver but virgo intacta.


BECOMING QUEEN VICTORIA is superficial. Wikipedia on the various Hanoverians provides the same basic information in a much quicker format. (D)
 
THE NECESSARY MURDER OF NONIE BLAKE is the fifth and latest-to-date book in Terry Shames’s mystery series featuring Chief of Police Samuel Craddock of Jarrett Creek, Texas. It was published in e-book and print formats in 2016.

Jarrett Creek is surprised when Winona ‘Nonie’ Blake returns to town after being confined in Rollingwood Mental Hospital for twenty years. When she’d been fourteen years old, Nonie tried to hang her eight-year-old sister Charlotte. After a cursory investigation and on her parents’ decision to institutionalize Nonie, the case was dropped, and the Blake family ceased contact with her. Now she’s been released without notification to her family, who nevertheless take her in. But she’s only been home a week when her younger brother Matthew aka “Skeeter” finds her in the pond, dead from massive blunt force trauma to the head before she went into the water. The Blakes have always isolated themselves from Jarrett Creek, and they’re not sharing any more information than necessary with Craddock as he investigates the murder. What are the Blakes concealing and why?

It’s hard to discuss the plot without doing a spoiler. Suffice it to say, old sins cast long shadows, and secrecy can stifle a family for generations. Shames does play fair with foreshadowing, so the plot twists may be anticipated by experienced readers. It’s well worth the reading.

Samuel Craddock as first person narrator is a believable small-town cop. He’s retired from the oil business, having served as police chief years before; he’s in office now because Jarrett Creek’s bankrupt and he, already retired with a pension from his oil career, is the only experienced person who doesn’t require a salary. He’s complex--he and his late wife Jeanne collected high-end modern art--and appealingly self-deprecating: “[Trevino] has followed basic procedures that she learned in the police academy, while I was too busy depending on the psychology of the people involved. And she’s made a success of it. I remember her remark that at the academy they made fun of old geezers like me for thinking they can solve things by knowing people in the town. I thought she could learn a thing or two from me, and now I’m finding I might be prodded to learn something myself.”

Part of the strength of this series is the relationship between members of Jarrett Creek’s police department. Craddock has two part-time officers Bill Odum and Zeke Dibble. When the state funds a full-time officer for small-town experience, Jarrett Creek gets its first woman, first HIspanic officer, Maria Trevino. Realistic adjustments ensue. As a rookie fresh from the Academy, she’s an effective foil for the elderly Craddock. I look forward to her continuing role in the series. My only complaint about characters is their number, many more than those essential to developing the plot.

I always enjoy books with a good sense of place, and Shames is most effective in using Craddock’s Southern story-telling voice to establish her setting. “The Blake place is on the north side of town, out past the cemetery and a few miles down a gravel road. I barrel down the road, kicking up a lot of dust. Not too many houses out this way. Every one of them is situated on a couple of acres of land. People got in the habit of calling these places ‘the ranches,’ but for me it does’t fit. When I think of a ranch, I think acres and acres of land stretching farther than the eye can see, not some scrubby couple of acres. I don’t know why anybody would want to live out here. There’s something desolate about it, even though there are plenty of trees. But there’s also scrub brush and big patches of land with nothing on them, not even weeds. It’s worse this time of year when we haven’t had enough rain and the sun is at its hottest. If you walk around in this area, you run across a lot of fire-ant beds. Makes my ankles sting to think about it.”

THE NECESSARY MURDER OF NONIE BLAKE is an engaging read. (A-)
 
THE SANDYCROFT MYSTERY was originally published in 1890 by T. W. Speight and reissued in e-book format in 2015. THE SANDYCROFT MYSTERY is fully within the high Victorian literary tradition.

THE SANDYCROFT MYSTERY is intensely sentimental: though morally innocent (except for the slight problem of an underage secret runaway--but unconsummated--marriage), Enna Penleath is “purified” by suffering. Roden Bosworth plans to remain in hiding for the rest of his life, wanted for the murder of Vivian Davrill, to protect Ivor Penleath, Enna’s brother. Women are either “good” or are capable of the most extreme actions. The one non-English woman, a native of Rio de Janeiro married to Davrill, is a stereotype of the passionate, jealous, uncontrolled Latin, hinted at possessing Indian or African blood. There’s a definite supernatural influence, with maids at Sandycroft seeing the Dark Lady in the woods on the night Davrill was murdered; Davrill’s ghost makes repeated appearances to the murderer in the months following his death. The conclusion provides the best of all worlds, with the killer dead by accidental or intentional overdose; Roden and Enna’s uncle Alwyn, who years before killed a man in a fit of mania, are both cleared of suspicion; and young love triumphs with Roden and Enna determined on marriage.

Even more dating is the lack of conversational dialogue. Characters emote in long formal speeches; they meditate endlessly about the crime without discussing it with each other or with the police; much information is conveyed by letter or, in the case of the killer’s confession, by a diary. There’s no sense of immediate action at any point, including Rode’s observation of part of the murder scene. Speight’s changes of viewpoint make clear which characters are innocent, leaving only one character to be the murderer. Though the story opens with Inspector Malleson of Scotland Yard returning to discuss the case, the police play no important role in solving the crime. Little is made of the setting. Characters are all static.

The story line is very basic. Enna Penleath was persuaded to marry Vivian Davrill secretly when she was only eighteen years old; they are married in Scotland, but his regiment is shipping out to India that very morning so that the marriage is not consummated. Over the following three years, both repent of their impulsive action. Before Davrill returns to England, he marries Inez Pendleton, widow of a wealthy Englishman living in Rio de Janeiro; he comes to Sandycroft to convince Enna to forget about their marriage and keep it a secret. She refuses. They must seek and receive legal assurance that their marriage is invalid, in which case she will keep the secret, or, if assured the marriage is legal, she will charge him publicly with bigamy. After their confrontation in the smoking room, her uncle Geoffrey (or maybe Godfrey--both are used) Bernage finds Davrill stabbed to death. Enna, her old governess Mrs. Bosworth, and her son Roden Bosworth are the only persons besides Davrill who know about the marriage. Was the marriage the motive for Davrill’s murder, or did someone have another reason for wanting him dead?

Taken within the conventions at the time it was written, THE SANDYCROFT MYSTERY is okay, but it’s not anything special. (C)
 
Freeman Wills Crofts’s INSPECTOR FRENCH’S GREATEST CASE is the first in his long-running Golden Age mystery series featuring Detective Inspector French of Scotland Yard. INSPECTOR FRENCH’S GREATEST CASE was originally published in 1925, then reprinted in 1965.

William Orchard, young clerk in the offices of Duke and Peabody’s Diamond Merchants discovers the dead body of Senior Clerk Charles Gething in front of the safe from which £33,000 in loose diamonds and £1,000 in notes are missing. Inspector French assumes it will be a straightforward case, but every clue fizzles out as the robbery/murder becomes complicated by fraud and impersonation and by the suicide of R. A. Duke, the active partner in the firm. Can French solve it?

I am disappointed in INSPECTOR FRENCH’S GREATEST CASE. I did not care for the protagonist. Inspector French (whose Christian name is not given, as I recall) comes across as pompous and self-satisfied. The only humanizing features are his discussion of his cases with his wife (otherwise a cipher, she occasionally makes suggestions that he finds helpful, but he quickly forgets who originated them) and the death of his oldest in World War I (only alluded to). There’s little interaction with colleagues. Dialogue is more long set speeches than conversational. The number of characters is much larger than necessary to advance the plot.

The plot itself is “one step forward, two steps back” and frustratingly slow to develop. French spends more than two months chasing all over Europe, working exclusively on this one case. He’s much inclined to theorize ahead of his data, thus is constantly frustrated. Crofts aims for a surprise ending, but he’s foreshadowed enough that the limited number of possible suspects leave few alternatives. An experienced reader may well discern the killer early.

The strongest element in INSPECTOR FRENCH’S GREATEST CASE is Crofts’s use of setting to explicate French’s character. “That night [French] left for Murren. In due time he reached Berne, and changing trains, travelled down past Spiez, under the great conical hill of Nieden, along the shores of the Lake of Thun and into Interlaken. There he slept the night, and next morning took the narrow gauge line that led south into the heart of the giants of the Bernese Oberland. He felt overpowered by the towering chain of mountains, the Matterhorn, the Eiger, the Monch, the Jungfrau, and as they wound their way up the narrow valley he felt as if the overwhelming masses were closing down on him from either side. Reaching Lauterbrunnen, he went up by the furnicular to the Murren plateau, and continued his way by the electric tramway to the famous resort. There, as he walked to the Bellegarde, he gazed fascinated across the valley at the mighty buttresses of the Jungfrau, one summit of dazzling white succeeding another, up and up and up into the clear, thin blue of the sky.” (136)

Conventions of the genre have changed since Crofts wrote INSPECTOR FRENCH’S GREATEST CASE. In terms of its own day, it’s a solid read. (B)
 
Michael Innes’s OLD HALL, NEW HALL is a non-series detective novel published in 1975. I don’t know why it’s referred to on the cover as a detective novel because it involves neither a detective nor the police.

Colin Clout returns to Old Hall, the University he’d graduated some four years before, seeking a teaching job. On the grounds, he meets and falls for an unknown young woman who claims to be a secretary. Head of the English Department, Professor Ginglass hires him as the Alderman Shufflebotham fellowship, £200 per annum for teaching one class as well as researching and writing a biography of Sir Joscelyn Jory. He meets Sadie Sackett who’d been his girl-friend when they were both poverty-stricken students, now a librarian at Old Hall, and Olivia Jory, the mysterious young woman. Olivia is the descendant of Sir Joscelyn’s womanizing younger brother Edward. She involves Clout in the search for a mysterious tomb treasure Sir Joscelyn liberated and brought back to Old Hall. Except she’s not the only one looking.

I am disappointed in OLD HALL, NEW HALL. To begin with, I do not enjoy the protagonist Colin Clout, from whose viewpoint the story is narrated. He’s 25 years old, has a B. Litt. from Oxford and four years in the Army, but he’s willfully naive about everything. He doesn’t question Olivia’s motives, understand Ginglass’s intentions, or question the bona fides of “American professor” Milton Milder. In searching for the treasure, he ignores the most obvious place for concealment, leaving it to be found by competitor George Lumb. Even worse, he seems at the conclusion to have learned nothing from the experience. The other characters are stereotypes, the only surprise being that Sadie is the intelligent and morally upright woman, while well-born Olivia is the manipulative gold-digger.

The plot is slow to develop and involves no crime beyond impersonation in the literary present--thefts and possible murder date to the first part of the nineteenth century. Most of that action is reported in long letters from Sophia Jory, sister of Sir Joscelyn and Edward, to her former governess. Finding the treasure is anticlimax since Colin doesn’t figure out its location until after Lumb, Olivia, and Jerry Jory (descendant of Sir Joscelyn, to whom Olivia is now engaged) have recovered it.

Atmosphere is the strongest element in the novel: “...the mausoleum was now in front of them. It had probably been modelled ... on the celebrated affair at West Wycombe, but it had very little of the crazy impressiveness that Sir Francis Dashwood had achieved. It was a circular building, with half-hearted Ionic pillars engaged in the stone all the way round, and dilapidated frieze of monotonously festooned urns on top. There was a single entrance closed by rusty iron gates, and here and there a few empty window-spaces, set very high up. These seemed to have no function at all, as the whole affair was without a roof, and one simply peered through them at the sky. Grasses and wild-flowers were sprouting everywhere between stone and stone, but this didn’t lend anything that could be called a pleasing picturesqueness to the scene.” (55)

OLD HALL, NEW HALL doesn’t measure up to the quality of the John Appleby series. (C)
 
Olive Etchells’s FOOTPRINTS OF THE DEVIL is the second book in her Cornish Seaside Villages mystery series featuring DCI Bill Channon and his legman DS Bowles. It was published in 2006.

Professional surfer Dave Tregenza follows an instinctual urge to return home to Porthmenna, Cornwall, to find his older brother Jonny has disappeared, leaving a successful business, community respect, and a very pregnant wife and twin daughters. Police aren’t much concerned until the body of a man corresponding to Jonny’s description is found in a creek near Trevant, the home of Alan and Nancy Dancer where Jonny had visited the evening he disappeared. It’s not Jonny but a non-UK native with a Koran in his pocket. Can he be connected with a terrorist attempt on nearby Goonhilly, the largest satellite earth station in the world? DCI Channon is OIC because he’s both head of the local CID and chief liaison for South Cornwall with the Anti-Terrorism Unit. Then Jonny’s body turns up nearby, killed at approximately the same time. Did Jonny somehow see the other murder? Is there a terrorist plot against Goonhilly? Who killed Nancy Dancer, and why?

The plot in FOOTPRINTS OF THE DEVIL can be evaluated in two ways. On a positive note, Etchells keeps attention focused on the terrorism threat so that other possible motives are swept aside. On a more critical note, the situation leading to the murders is not hinted at until extremely late in the story, and the killer(s) not much foreshadowed. The secondary story line dealing with Dave Tregenza’s decision to return to Cornwall and his changing feelings about Frances, the aunt who reared the Tregenza boys after their parents’ death, about Delphi, whom he’d loved with all the passion of an eighteen-year-old, and about his responsibilities to Jonny and his family adds a depth often missing in the genre.

Etchells has created a believable law enforcement community. DCI Channon is almost too good to be true, combining instinct, intuition, and imagination to solve his cases. DS Bowles is more realistic in his abrasive, unlikable tough-guy, carping ambition. Bowles is, however, a dynamic character, with moments of insight and behavior that reflect changes he may not yet be aware of on a conscious level: “...Bowles lost his hard-boiled edge and shivered. There was something pretty creepy about the birth of a baby and the finding of its father’s body so close to each other, both in place and in time. He’d been taken with Delphi Tregenza when he met her, seeing at once that she’d be some looker if she wasn’t nine months gone with a missing husband. He was glad it wouldn’t be him who would have to tell her he was missing no longer. He looked at the back of Channon’s grey-streaked head and heard himself say, ‘I’m really sorry about it, sir. Count on me to help in any way I can.’ “ (80)

Etchells is skilled in using atmosphere and place to illuminate character. “...Goonhilly had atmosphere in abundance--a strange compelling blend of the very old and the very new. A five-thousand-year-old standing stone was in full view of satellite dishes that linked one side of the world to the other. There were dozens of Bronze Age burial mounds on Goonhilly Downs, six of them actually inside the perimeter of the site, lying there undisturbed among the sixty massive dishes that tracked satellites orbiting the earth. One of the Bronze Age barrows was up against the security fence, the ranked white propellers of the adjacent wind farm seeming to stand guard over the ancient grave mound. Such contrasts fascinated Channon. He could almost imagine the spirits of the clever, prehistoric men who once walked the Downs observing the marvels of Goonhilly, maybe even seeing them as a logical progression from their own skills in reading the heavens and moving immense stones in answer to the sun. Nobody knew what the heathland had been like in that long-gone age, but right now it was desolate and uninviting: a vast tract of heather roots still black from winter, stunted gorse and outcrops of rock. Word had it that locals avoided certain roads at night.” (204-5)

FOOTPRINTS OF THE DEVIL makes me regret that there are only three books in the series. (A-)
 
Kathryn Casey’s SHE WANTED IT ALL: A TRUE STORY OF SEX, MURDER, AND A TEXAS MILLIONAIRE is the story of the particularly vicious murder of an elderly Texas millionaire by his much younger wife and her lesbian lover. The attack occurred in Austin 2 October 1999, though Steven Beard, Jr., did not die of the shotgun blast to his abdomen until January 2000, and it was a further two years before his killers came to trial. SHE WANTED IT ALL was published in 2005.

Celeste Johnson was born 13 February 1963 and adopted as a baby by Edwin and Nancy Johnson. She was precocious, gifted, charming, persuasive, and a born manipulator. By thirteen, she was acting out; by fourteen, she was totally out of control, often employing physical violence against her three adopted siblings (the Johnsons adopted four babies in less trehan four years) and her mother. Celeste later claimed horrific sexual abuse from the age of three or four years by Edwin, though her brothers Cole and Eddy say they never saw any evidence of it. She got pregnant and married Craig Bratcher, with whom she had twin daughters Jennifer and Kristina, and a third child whom she sold for $10,000. She left Bratcher after ruining his life and credit, wandered around living hand to mouth, frequently left the twins in foster care, abused them physically and emotionally. She was a skilled con artist who drew people into her fantastic lies, damaging everyone she enthralled. She married repeatedly: Craig Bratcher, Harald Wolf, Jimmy Martinez, Steven Beard, and Spencer Cole Johnson (no relation); when her first four husbands threatened her lifestyle or to leave her, she staged suicide attempts and was institutionalized several times. Steven was at the point of divorce, tired of Celeste’s spending and her partying. She’d expressed to all and sundry her disappointment at his living so long and detailed how she would act as a “grieving” widow. After her attempts to hasten Steven Beard to his death did not work (she drugged him with sleeping pills in his food so that she could go out after he went to sleep to party and replaced half of his vodka with 190-proof grain alcohol for his evening drinks), Celeste used Tracey Tarlton’s love to convince her to kill Steven. Then, after Tracey was arrested for shooting Steven, Celeste tried to have her killed by a professional hit man; ironically, the con artist was scammed by her “friend” Donna Goodson who pretended to fix it.

Several things, besides Celeste, bother me about SHE WANTED IT ALL. Despite much detail on where Celeste was and what she was doing in her pre-Steven years, Casey never specifically confirms or denies that Celeste had been sexually abused as a child. It isn’t clear whether any of her suicide attempts / mental breakdowns were genuine or staged. Certainly she received treatment at the most expensive level--she met Tracey Tarlton at St. David’s Pavilion, a premier acute care psychiatric facility where both were hospitalized. None of her therapists appear to take taken her comments about Steven seriously enough to report them, which implies that they either didn’t believe her histrionics meant anything (faking) or they were derelict in their duty to report danger to a third party.

There’s a major legal question about the status of the twins, whom Steven Beard had adopted and become their real, if not biological, father. la was much more independent of Celeste’s influence than the younger Kristina, but both were terrified of her. They knew she was stealing money, doing drugs, having affairs, talking about how much she hated Steven and sex with him, doctoring his food and drinks; they helped in procuring and administering drugs to Steven; after he was shot, they helped by removing and destroying evidence, helping steal from Steven’s estate (in less than four months between Steven’s being shot and his death, Celeste spent well over $500,000), refusing to talk to the police. While admittedly under Celeste’s almost total influence, the girls were legally adults, certainly guilty of obstruction of justice and potentially accessories before and after the fact.

Several smaller things also bother me. “Spec” and “speck” are not the same word. Steven was shot with a .20-gauge shotgun, though Casey refers to his “bullet wound.” Was Celeste even legally married to Steven? Casey says Celeste married Jimmy Martinez while still married to Harald Wolf. There’s no later mention of a divorce from Wolf, though Casey reports her divorced from Martinez to marry Steven. A list of characters, an index, and a timeline would have been helpful.

The scariest thing about SHE WANTED IT ALL is the apparent ease with which a sociopath managed to operate for many years, blatant in her acting out, greed, abuse to her children, and telling everyone her feelings about her various men. She manipulated almost everyone she came in contact with, and none of the ones who didn’t succumb to her tales made any attempt to stop her. SHE WANTED IT ALL is an unsettling book. (C)
 
Anthea Fraser’s THE TEN COMMANDMENTS is another in her mystery series featuring DCI David Webb of the Shillingham, Broadshire, CID. It was originally published in 1997 and then reissued in e-book format in 2014.

When Simon Judd is found dead on the parking lot of The Nutmeg, he appears to be the victim of a serial killer. Six years before Trevor Philpott had been found between parked cars at The Feathers. Both men had been stripped of identification, both were killed by blunt force trauma to the head; both had been called to meet a new client at another pub, then transported before or after death and their bodies dumped. Neither was known at the time to have enemies or behavior to account for their death; neither had been robbed. Frederick Mace, elderly criminologist whose projected book The Ten Commandments offers the idea that murder arises from the victim’s breaking one or more of the commandments and includes the unsolved Feathers case, feels that both murders fit his theory and that Judd’s death is a copycat killing. He speaks about his theory in a television interview and at a literary festival, so he’s attacked and his study ransacked. Who’s responsible, and with little evidence, how to make a case?

The plot in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS involves two cases. Webb solves the Judd murder first; its conclusion is well set up, the person and motive reasonable. The older murder is more difficult, and Fraser does not play fair with The Feathers case. There’s almost no foreshadowing to establish the motive or the identity of the killer. Both come out of left field. A minor subplot involves Webb’s longtime lover Hannah James and her response to the return of Ashbourne School for Girls head Gwen Rutherford from sabbatical in Canada; Hannah has been in charge, and she’s uncomfortable with Gwen’s proposed changes for the school.

Characterization is average. I particularly like the cooperation and mutual respect between various detectives and stations as they all work the murders. This takes much of the action away from DCI Webb and DS Jackson. There’s little direct characterization and few domestic details to give the impression of real people. Glimpses of physical setting and its atmosphere convey little sense of place.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS is not one of the better books in the series. (C)
 
Joyce Dennys’s HENRIETTA’S WAR: NEWS FROM THE HOME FRONT 1939-1942 was originally published as a series in Sketch during the early days of World War II. She rediscovered clippings in 1985, when they were published by the Bloomsbury Group.

Henrietta Brown is the middle-aged wife of Charles Brown, the medical practitioner in a Devon seaside village; they have two grown-up children. Their daughter Linnet has gone into nurses’ training, while son Bill waits for his commission, then is sent to France as part of the British Army evacuated at Dunkirk. Henrietta writes faithfully to her childhood friend Robert who is a British colonel in “a safe place” in France in October 1939 when the letters begin. Henrietta’s purpose is to cheer Robert up and keep him apprised of what’s happening with their mutual friends. Occasionally bits of doubt and complaint slip through, but the letters are full of their eccentric friends and great humor.

Dennys’s humor is much more implied than explicit. She tells just enough to set up readers to imagine the scene and dialogue for themselves, based on their own knowledge of human nature. Her use of irony is exquisite: “There’s not much glamour on the home-front. Ours is not the saucy peaked cap of our untrammelled sisters. Ours rather to see that the curtains are properly drawn, and do our little bit of digging in the garden. Ours to brave the Sewing Party and painstakingly make a many-tailed bandage, and ours to fetch the groceries home in a big basket. Soon we shall have the big thrill of ration cards to add to these excitements.” (7-8)

Her characters are somewhat over the top, but most of us have known their counterparts: “Mrs. Savernack, that woman of nature, took out a gun-licence. If she couldn’t get meat at the butcher’s, she will go out and shoot it. The rabbits which for years gambolled happily in the fields at the back of the Savernacks’ house have received a rude awakening, and Mrs. Savernack, flushed with success, has begun to turn her thoughts to bigger game. Farmer Barnes, wisely perhaps, has moved his cows to another field.” (36) “...the one who is really enjoying the meat rationing is Mrs. Whinebite. Not that it actually makes any difference to her, for she and the unhappy Julius have been vegetarians of the most violent kind for years, but it gives her the chance to show off in the way vegetarians are so fond of doing.” (36)

HENRIETTA’S WAR is a quick, engaging read. I would love to see it adapted for BBC and/or PBS. (A)
 
Andrea Frazer’s STRANGEWAYS TO OLDHAM (THE MOST EFFICIENT ROUTE TO ETERNITY) is the first in her Belchester Chronicles series featuring Lady Amanda Golightly and her long-lost childhood friend Hugo Cholmondley-Crichton-Crump. The series is set in Belchester, an ancient cathedral town some fifteen miles from the south coast of England; her family home Belchester Towers had been built in the early nineteenth century by her nouveau riche ancestor Godfrey Golightly. STRANGEWAYS TO OLDHAM was published in e-book format in 2014.

I didn’t discover the meaning/purpose of the subtitle, but “Strangeways to Oldham” is the name of a cocktail Amanda remembers her parents drinking. It consists of one measure of dark rum, one of gin, one-half measure of Rose’s Lime Cordial, two of mandarin orange juice, one of passion fruit juice, and two of lemonade.

When Lady Amanda goes to the Birdlings Serenade Nursing Home to visit him, she finds the body of her father’s old business partner Reggie Pagnell. He’d recently consumed a Strangeways to Oldham cocktail, which she recognizes by its smell left in the glass. She also smells what she identifies as poison. She’s surprised to discover that Reggie had been visited regularly by his nephew, since she knows Reggie had no family. While at Birdlings, she encounters her old friend Hugo Cholmondley-Crichton-Crump incarcerated there by severe arthritis, and promptly liberates him to Belchester Towers, where she starts rearranging his life. She goes to the police about Reggie’s death and is laughed at by Inspector Moody. Infuriated, she’s determined that she, Hugo, and her general factotum Beauchamp will discover the murderer.

The characters in STRANGEWAYS TO OLDHAM are pretty standard in the cozy mystery genre. Lady Amanda and Hugo are both elderly pensioners, with Hugo hard up financially. Lady Amanda is majorly wealthy, her father having been deeply involved in the black market and munitions sales during World War II while her mother ran a knocking shop for American soldiers. The most interesting is Beauchamp, who runs Belchester Towers. He and Lady Amanda disagree over the pronunciation of his name. He prefers the modern “Beecham” while she insists on the traditional French pronunciation “Bo-shum.” Beauchamp is an compound of Lord Peter Wimsey’s Bunter and Bertie Wooster’s Jeeves: “...[Lady Amanda] realized she could probably leave this [parking ticket] to Beauchamp to deal with, as he did with most things that arose in the household which required thought.” Frazer is admirably restrained in the number of characters included.

The mystery plot is secondary to the interaction between Hugo and Lady Amanda as they adjust to living in the same house after years alone. Their relationship is totally platonic. Their investigation is set up almost as a police procedural with most of the action seen through Lady Amanda’s eyes. She does get the satisfaction of showing up Inspector Moody.

Sense of place is the strongest element in the book. “...Belchester was really a very pretty little place, if one raised one’s eyes above shop frontage level. Above the sea of plate glass windows with their gaudy displays of wares, one became aware of the history of the place, and the time it had taken to grow to this wonderful mixture of styles and ages. The latest additions to the terraces of shops had been Victorian, as the city had luckily avoided any bomb damage during the war, and these facades were typical of their era, many of them Gothic revival in style. Other buildings had graceful Georgian frontages, unfussy and clean-lined. Moving back through time, one eventually encountered Tudor buildings with their exposed beams and mullioned windows with leaded lights, above ground-floor level. Although Lady Amanda’s family had caused Belchester Towers to be built nearly two centuries ago, true Belchester families still considered the Golightlys to be incomers--Johnny-come-latelys, mere upstarts--so deeply buried were the roots of these ancient families in the very old city, which still boasted substantial and respectable remains of its venerable Roman walls.”

STRANGEWAYS TO OLDHAM is a decent cozy if a reader is able to set aside disbelief and go with Frazer. I, however, am whimsy-impaired, so I don’t appreciate a conclusion that implies Lady Amanda’s mother has returned from the long-time dead. (B)
 
Candice Hern’s A PROPER COMPANION is subtitled “A Regency Romance,” which sums it up nicely. it reads as if by Georgette Heyer out of Jane Austen. Except Austen’s wit, irony, and characterization are missing, along with Heyer’s impeccable touch with manners, mores, and attitudes. A PROPER COMPANION was published in inexpensive e-book format in 2011.

Beautiful Emily Townshend works as paid companion to Lady Frances Cameron, Dowager Countess of Bradleigh, who’s incensed that her rakish eldest grandson Robert James Frederick Cameron, ninth Earl of Bradleigh, has announced his betrothal to Miss Augusta Windhurst. Lady Frances despises Augusta’s mother Lady Windhurst, who’s a ruthless social climber, and immediately plans to cause Augusta to break the engagement. Lady Frances thinks Emily, who’s well-born despite the mystery of her past, will be a much more appropriate wife for her grandson.

I’m giving up on A PROPER COMPANION at 20%, mainly because there’s not much individual about the story. To begin with, attitudes and behavior are more modern than Regency, especially in treatment of servants. Robert and Sir Percy Whittaker, aka Gothic novelist Penelope Manning, both admire Emily for her intellect and praise her as a bluestocking (which was not a compliment in 1812). She’s even helping Sir Percy with his new novel.

The characters are all familiar to anyone who’s read Heyer. Both Emily and Robert bear distinct traces of the protagonists in Fredericka, The Grand Sophy, and A Lady of Quality. The number of characters exceeds the demands of the plot; Hern seems to be planning an Upstairs, Downstairs element with her introduction of so many household servants. Robert, of course, is only a womanizer because his heart hasn’t been engaged by any of the silly chits on the Marriage Market. Point of view shifts between Emily and Robert with occasional glimpses of Lady Frances’s perceptions.

The story is set in Bath, with Lady Frances and Emily going to London with Robert ostensibly so that Lady Frances can host a grand ball to celebrate her grandson’s engagement. There’s no description of Bath, either of physical locale or atmosphere, so there’s no reason to assume London will be depicted.

A PROPER COMPANION is too derivative and generic to pursue further. No grade because not finished.
 
THE FOURTH STAGE OF GAINSBOROUGH BROWN is one of Clarissa Watson’s mystery series featuring artist Persis Willum, who is also personal assistant to Gregor Olitsky, gallery owner. It was published in 1977.

The victim is notorious artist Gainsborough Brown, whom Olitsky represents. Brown is determined to get his work into the highly respected collection of Persis’s aunt Lydie Wentworth, railroad heiress of New York City, Long Island, and the world. He uses Persis toward this end. When Gains winds up drowned in the pool at Lydie’s combination birthday-Independence Day party, Persis is convinced he was murdered. Gains had been up to something that has his dealer worried; he’d recently married Alida, daughter of a French baron through whom he expects to access Lydie’s money. He’s been seen in company with glamorous actress/artist model Susan Evans. His longtime secretary Hope Ives is behaving more strangely than usual. Gains has proposed that collector Sidney Muss steal Gregor’s idea for a worldwide chain of galleries in exchange for exclusive representation of his work, and he’s willing to blackmail Muss for his backing. Who didn’t want him dead?

I’m giving up half through with the book. Life’s too short to have to force myself to read something that I’m reading for pleasure. I don’t find any of the characters attractive. Gains, in the words of my people, needed killin’ bad. The wonder is that he lived so long. Persis is 36 years old, an accomplished artist in her own right, a woman of taste and refinement, so why on earth does she put up with a poseur like Gainsborough Brown? There are hints of Persis’s emotional baggage from a bad marriage, but little about her seems realistic. She pulls two major TSTLs, one when she doesn’t report to the police that her house has been ransacked and a box belonging to Gains stolen and another when she realizes she’s being followed, still without reporting it. She’s deeply suspicious about what Gregor is up to, but she at no point confronts him; instead she allows him to get her drunk and pump her of everything she knows about Gains’s death and her aunt Lydie.

The plot is marred by the complete absence of the police. It’s hard to believe, but apparently no autopsy was performed on Gains’s body, the police just assuming he’d drowned while drunk. Sense of place is lacking.

I just don’t care enough about THE FOURTH STAGE OF GAINSBOROUGH BROWN to slog on. No grade because not finished.
 
Paul French’s MIDNIGHT IN PEKING: HOW THE MURDER, OF A YOUNG ENGLISHWOMAN HAUNTED THE LAST DAYS OF OLD CHINA s a historical true crime account published in 2011.

When on 8 January 1937 the partially-clothed, horribly mutilated body of a blonde young woman was found near the Fox Tower, part of the Tartar Wall on the eastern side of Old Peking, there was no identification on her body. By accident, E. T. C. Werner happened upon the scene and identified the body as his daughter Pamela. He’d been out searching for her because she’d not returned home the previous evening. He recognized her from her clothing and an expensive platinum wrist watch; her purse, bicycle, winter garments, and ice skates were missing. So was her heart and other internal organs. Because the body was found outside the Legation Quarter, the Peking police, represented by Colonel Han Shih-ching, was in charge of the investigation; because she was a Westerner, British consul Nicholas Fitzmaurice called in Detective Chief Inspector Richard Dennis, chief of police for the British Concession in Tientsin, to liaise with Han on the case.

What followed was a compromised investigation, later found probably deliberately sabotaged by Han, who not only suppressed vital evidence and information but lied to Dennis about witnesses’ statements that could have produced vital clues to the killer’s identity. Dennis was nobbled from the beginning by direct orders from the Foreign Office that the investigation be confined to the Legation Quarter. With suspicion rampant between all concerned, the stress of an ancient city overcrowded with poverty-stricken refugees, the presence of the Japanese with in a few miles of the city (Peking was said to have already fallen, the Japanese just hadn’t taken it yet), highly active criminal classes specializing in drugs and prostitution, and the determination to save Western face, it’s not surprising that the Pamela Werner case was never officially solved, though her father used his Chinese contacts and money to continue the investigation until he was satisfied that he’d learned the truth.

One strong point of MIDNIGHT IN PEKING is the sense of time and place French evokes. “...mainly [Werner] worked from home, at his house at 1 Armour Factory Alley, in the shadow of the Fox Tower, from which it was separated only by an old canal and its population of noisy ducks. Once part of China’s Grand Canal, it was now too silted up to allow the grain barges to transit, and had become a fetid rubbish dump. Armour Factory Alley, known as Kuei Chia Chang by the Chinese, was close to the old imperial examination halls and a number of papermaking factories, small family businesses that had given the warren of lanes squeezed under the Tartar Wall the name of the Papemakers’ District. The alley was lined with plane trees, and during the day it witnessed a constant procession, beginning with bird fanciers strolling with their covered cages, then street hawkers calling out their services, house staff carrying food back from the markets, people coming and going by taxi and rickshaw; and, finally, late night sellers of snacks. It was a street that could have existed only in Peking, and one that could have dated back more than a thousand years.” (23-4)

The sad thing demonstrated by MIDNIGHT IN PEKING is how little things have changed since 1937. Women and children are still abused and murdered; cops still accidentally or deliberately mess up investigations; the old-boy network and bureaucracies still function to protect their own, regardless of the heinous nature of their activities.

French’s narrative is coherent and well-organized, but several problems weaken it as history. The only map is a hard-to-read illustrated one inside the front and back covers of the book. A list of characters with brief identifications would be most helpful since there is no index. MIDNIGHT IN PEKING is 243 pages in length with a total of 68 notes, none of which are complete citations to the work. There’s no bibliography. For these reasons, it’s average at best. (C)
 
Ann Rule’s EVERYTHING SHE EVER WANTED: A TRUE STORY OF OBSESSIVE LOVE, MURDER, AND BETRAYAL is the story of Pat Radcliffe Taylor Allanson whose manipulation and sense of entitlement ruined the lives of most people she touched. EVERYTHING SHE EVER WANTED was originally published in 1992 and reissued in 2002.

I’m giving up at approximately 100 pages, less than a fifth of the way through. In an effort apparently to explain everything in Pat and Tom Allanson’s lives, Rule stretches the story way beyond effective storytelling. A list of characters and a time line would facilitate reading. The degree to which Pat manipulated people, especially her husband and her children, is off-putting as is the naivety with which they responded to her. Ironically, Pat early on told TomAllanson the literal truth about herself: “‘I’m like a rose, Tom. And like a rose, I’m selfish. I want all the sun for myself, all the rain. Roses need everything so they can bloom and be beautiful.’” (8) He didn’t believe her. Rule does not address the “fragile health” that Pat used to control others--what was its exact nature, and to what degree was it genuine? It is disturbing that such a psychopathic personality escaped detection for so long.

Easily the strongest element in EVERYTHING SHE EVER WANTED is the sense of time and place Rule evokes, particularly of Zebulon, Georgia: “The businesses across from the courthouse hide behind contiguous--but totally different--stone facades with squared-off rooflines of varying heights: a clothing outlet store, some antique shops, a furniture store, a hardware store, the Reporter, Zebulon’s weekly newspaper, has its offices at the end of the block. There are Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper machines every seventy-five feet or so along the sidewalks. Vehicles--mostly pickup trucks--park diagonally along the street. A yellow dog, in no danger, ambles casually across the carless road.” (3-4)

The filmed version of EVERYTHING SHE EVER WANTED is a fixture on many of the true-crime television channels. I recommend it. No grade for the book because not finished.
 
Paul Halter’s THE FOURTH DOOR was originally published in French in 1987 and reissued in English translation by John Pugmire in 1999. It was published in e-book format in 2007.

THE FOURTH DOOR purports to be a classic locked room mystery set in autumn 1951.The first three-fourths of the book is straight forward, first-person narration by young James Stevens of impossible deaths in a reputed haunted house, with no one hidden in the house but with proof (snow) that no one left. There are a malevolent spirit from ten years before, a fake medium and her husband, unexplained attacks, and at least three men who’re slightly (or more) mental. Then, abruptly, the narrator changes to Ronald Bowers, who explains that he’s a successful mystery writer under the pseudonym John Carter, writing in 1979. He’s been challenged by old friend and celebrity criminologist Dr. Alan Twist to create the characters, setting, and action for a locked room mystery, without including the solution; Dr. Twist will then solve how the murder(s) were committed and who is the killer. Twist says he can explain whatever Carter/Bowers sets up. The original story then resumes as completed by Dr. Twist, explaining the murders. There are two surprise twists in the conclusion.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***

First off, Henry White, the central character in THE FOURTH DOOR distinctly resembles both in mental and physical attributes / skills the protagonist in John Dickson Carr’s THE CROOKED HINGE, published in 1938. Characters are based on those in the Golden Age mysteries, so none are believably human. The young narrator James Stevens appears unreliable from the beginning.

The switch in the story line seems more slick trick than meaningful literary device. The double twist in the conclusion serves no useful purpose except to surprise the reader. I feel cheated, as if Halter took an easy way out. THE FOURTH DOOR is another of the books where I wonder if I read the same book as many of the other reviewers. (D)
 
Robert D. Bass’s THE GREEN DRAGOON: THE LIVES OF BANASTRE TARLETON AND MARY ROBINSON is the standard biography of Lieutenant Banastre Tarleton of the British Legion, the most feared British unit in the Southern colonies during the American Revolution. Mrs. Mary Robinson was a former actress and mistress to the Prince of Wales, a published poet, with whom he lived for many years following the AR. THE GREEN DRAGOON was originally printed in 1957 and reissued in 1973. The title refers to the green jacket worn by the cavalry component of the British Legion.

I’m giving up at 275 of 454 pages of text. Bass goes into much more detail than I need on the officers and politics of the British Army and the almost day-to-day activities of Tarleton and Robinson. Bass publishes long lists of names of officers of various regiments, most of which are tangential at best to the main narrative. He greatly relies on Tarleton’s own A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Provinces of North America, though Tarleton was notorious enough that source material is abundant. THE GREEN DRAGOON is indexed, but a list of characters, a joint timeline of Tarleton and Robinson’s lives, and maps of the various American campaigns would add greatly to its readability. It’s history of the driest sort, presupposing extensive knowledge of the American Revolution and post-Revolution British society and politics.

Banastre Tarleton is a most unappealing person. He and the British Legion polarized the Carolina backcountry, bringing previously neutral or even Loyalist settlers into active rebellion. During and after the Battle of Waxhaws on 29 May 1780, on his orders Tarleton’s soldiers slaughtered American militiamen trying or already surrendered, establishing “Tarleton’s Quarter” as a policy often followed by both sides, including the Americans’ slaughter of British Loyalists at King’s Mountain.

Under Tarleton’s command, the Legion was guilty of rape and unprovoked brutality toward women, looting and burning plantations, summary execution of suspected insurgents, and driving off or destroying livestock. “[Tarleton] spent November 9 and 10 [1780] suppressing disloyalty with the torch. He burned Sumter’s mills on Jack’s Creek and rode on for vengeance upon Widow Richardson. His mood was blacker than the mourning band he woe for [Major John] Andre. In sheer ghoulishness, although many thought he was looking for the family silver, he dug up old General Richardson who had lain in the plantation’s graveyard for some six weeks. He ripped open the coffin in order that he might ‘look upon the face of such a brave man.’ And his final vandalism provoked Governor Rutledge to write the South Carolina delegates in Congress: ‘Tarleton, at the house of the widow of General Richardson, exceeded his usual barbarity; for having dined in her house, he not only burned it after plundering it of everything it contained, but having driven into the barns a number of cattle, hogs, and poultry, he consumed them, together with the barn and the corn in it, in one general blaze.” (111)

Tarleton returned to England in a cloud of glory, notwithstanding his utter defeat at the Battle of Cowpens by General Daniel Morgan. He immediately resumed the life of a man about town, gambling money he did not have, intimate with rakes and hell-raisers including the Prince of Wales and the Royal Dukes, running up debts that he called on his long-suffering family to pay so that he wouldn’t be imprisoned for debt. Tarleton felt that England owed him luxurious support for life and complained repeatedly and publicly of its abandoning him. He managed to alienate many of his Army friends, including Lord Cornwallis; ‘...the impression grew stronger and stronger that on the 17th day of January, 1781, Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton lost the battle that lost the campaign that lost the war that lost the American Colonies!’ (207) Tarleton wrote A History of the Campaigns of 1780 and 1781 in the Southern Provinces of North America both to refute the accusations and to make money. (Following Finley Peter Dunne’s criticism of Teddy Roosevelt’s The Rough Riders, Tarleton’s book is better titled ‘Alone in America.’) It didn’t make money.

I could go on, but THE GREEN DRAGOON probably won’t appeal to many readers. No grade because not finished.
 
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