Readingomnivore Reviews

MURDER IN PARADISE is the third in Ann Cleeves’s mystery series featuring George Palmer-Jones, a retired civil servant and ardent bird-watcher. It was originally published in 1988 and was reissued in e-book format in 2013.

Sarah and Jim Stennet are newlyweds, she English, he an islander from Kinness; she has romantic ideas about life on the island and pushes to move there. Arriving on the same boat, the Ruth Isabella operated by Jim’s father Sandy and brothers Alec and Will, George Palmer-Jones comes to pay his annual visit to fellow-birder and island schoolmaster Jonathan Drysdale and his discontented wife Sylvia. George’s missing the structure of his former work in the Home Office, where he served as a liaison between officialdom and the police, and he’s considering setting up as a private investigator/consultant. That night at a party to which all the islanders are invited, Jim’s young deaf sister Mary reveals that she knows a secret; she disappears from the party, and her body is discovered at the foot of island cliffs the next morning. Police from nearby Baltasay Island accept Mary’s death as an accident, but George, more familiar with her and with the islanders in general, thinks she was murdered. When the elderly island busybody Robert dies from a shotgun blast, police believe him murdered but do little to investigate, leaving it up to George to find out what’s going on.

Cleeves does an excellent job of keeping attention diverted from the killer’s identity, though the motive, Mary’s secret, is well-foreshadowed. I like that Mary’s family asks George to investigate her death--he’s not just some nosy interloper as in so many cozy mysteries. The conclusion is logical. I appreciate the final chapter, an epilogue that follows up on the lives of the island characters and George.

Characters are believable and individual. George’s uncertainties about retirement and the changes it brings are realistic. “How pagan they still are, [George] thought, as Alec swung his partner about him, exposing a layer of underskirt and a stockinged leg. They pretend to be Christian, but when they’ve had a few drinks, they still behave like loutish Norsemen. He wondered how much of his disenchantment was caused by his lack of decision over his future. He had retired. Why should he again put himself in a position when his time was not his own? How could [he indulge in -- sic] his passion for ornithology if someone was paying him to work for them? He was determined that he would come to a decision by the end of the holiday, and seemed unable to put the problem from his mind.”

Perhaps the most interesting of the characters is young Sarah Stennet, so naive and unrealistic in her expectations. “She had hoped that the islanders would do something special to mark her arrival, but it was all much more spectacular than she had imagined. She did not know that most of the islanders came to the harbour every boat day, and she thought that the whole of Kinness had turned out to welcome her. There was a crowd and they all seemed to be waving and smiling. A banner reading JIM AND SARAH WELCOME HOME had been strung along the wall by the jetty. She felt like visiting royalty. ... Sarah stood, savouring the attention, the magic of being there, and waited for Jim to join her. He jumped onto the quay first. Instead of giving her his hand to help her ashore as she had expected, he took her into his arms and swung her onto the quay. The crowd cheered.” Because she’s another outsider, George involves Sarah in his investigation of Mary and Robert’s murders, and we see her mature into a woman strong enough to become a valued member of the Kinness community.

Cleeves is adept at using elements of setting and atmosphere to reveal character. “The track ended in front of the lighthouse. Not many years before, three families had lived there. The light-keepers’ cottages were still there, the windows boarded up. Everything had been left--washing lines, a children’s swing in one of the gardens, a rusting wheelbarrow. It was as if the people had all left quite suddenly and mysteriously. George was reminded of other islands where the whole population had been evacuated because so few people remained. In his torchlight the lighthouse compound evoked the same sad and empty feeling. The beam of the light swung above them, regular, remote, and impersonal. It was switched on automatically now as the daylight faded. Each time it swung above their heads it illuminated the cliffs of a nearby headland. George remembered Mary and thought it had been right to send the men and their families away. It was not a safe place for children.”

MURDER IN PARADISE suffers only from some formatting problems. It is the strongest in the series to date. (A)

MURDER IN PARADISE is the third in Ann Cleeves’s mystery series featuring George Palmer-Jones, a retired civil servant and ardent bird-watcher. It was originally published in 1988 and was reissued in e-book format in 2013.

Sarah and Jim Stennet are newlyweds, she English, he an islander from Kinness; she has romantic ideas about life on the island and pushes to move there. Arriving on the same boat, the Ruth Isabella operated by Jim’s father Sandy and brothers Alec and Will, George Palmer-Jones comes to pay his annual visit to fellow-birder and island schoolmaster Jonathan Drysdale and his discontented wife Sylvia. George’s missing the structure of his former work in the Home Office, where he served as a liaison between officialdom and the police, and he’s considering setting up as a private investigator/consultant. That night at a party to which all the islanders are invited, Jim’s young deaf sister Mary reveals that she knows a secret; she disappears from the party, and her body is discovered at the foot of island cliffs the next morning. Police from nearby Baltasay Island accept Mary’s death as an accident, but George, more familiar with her and with the islanders in general, thinks she was murdered. When the elderly island busybody Robert dies from a shotgun blast, police believe him murdered but do little to investigate, leaving it up to George to find out what’s going on.

Cleeves does an excellent job of keeping attention diverted from the killer’s identity, though the motive, Mary’s secret, is well-foreshadowed. I like that Mary’s family asks George to investigate her death--he’s not just some nosy interloper as in so many cozy mysteries. The conclusion is logical. I appreciate the final chapter, an epilogue that follows up on the lives of the island characters and George.

Characters are believable and individual. George’s uncertainties about retirement and the changes it brings are realistic. “How pagan they still are, [George] thought, as Alec swung his partner about him, exposing a layer of underskirt and a stockinged leg. They pretend to be Christian, but when they’ve had a few drinks, they still behave like loutish Norsemen. He wondered how much of his disenchantment was caused by his lack of decision over his future. He had retired. Why should he again put himself in a position when his time was not his own? How could [he indulge in -- sic] his passion for ornithology if someone was paying him to work for them? He was determined that he would come to a decision by the end of the holiday, and seemed unable to put the problem from his mind.”

Perhaps the most interesting of the characters is young Sarah Stennet, so naive and unrealistic in her expectations. “She had hoped that the islanders would do something special to mark her arrival, but it was all much more spectacular than she had imagined. She did not know that most of the islanders came to the harbour every boat day, and she thought that the whole of Kinness had turned out to welcome her. There was a crowd and they all seemed to be waving and smiling. A banner reading JIM AND SARAH WELCOME HOME had been strung along the wall by the jetty. She felt like visiting royalty. ... Sarah stood, savouring the attention, the magic of being there, and waited for Jim to join her. He jumped onto the quay first. Instead of giving her his hand to help her ashore as she had expected, he took her into his arms and swung her onto the quay. The crowd cheered.” Because she’s another outsider, George involves Sarah in his investigation of Mary and Robert’s murders, and we see her mature into a woman strong enough to become a valued member of the Kinness community.

Cleeves is adept at using elements of setting and atmosphere to reveal character. “The track ended in front of the lighthouse. Not many years before, three families had lived there. The light-keepers’ cottages were still there, the windows boarded up. Everything had been left--washing lines, a children’s swing in one of the gardens, a rusting wheelbarrow. It was as if the people had all left quite suddenly and mysteriously. George was reminded of other islands where the whole population had been evacuated because so few people remained. In his torchlight the lighthouse compound evoked the same sad and empty feeling. The beam of the light swung above them, regular, remote, and impersonal. It was switched on automatically now as the daylight faded. Each time it swung above their heads it illuminated the cliffs of a nearby headland. George remembered Mary and thought it had been right to send the men and their families away. It was not a safe place for children.”

MURDER IN PARADISE suffers only from some formatting problems. It is the strongest in the series to date. (A)

Marjorie Swift Doering’s SHADOW TAG is the second book in her mystery series featuring Ray Schiller. It was published in e-book format in 2013.

Ray Schiller is now a homicide detective in the Minneapolis, Minnesota, police department, his first day on the new job. He’s partnered with Detective Dick Waverly, who’s bringing him up to speed on the apparent suicide of Paul Davis, newly chosen president of Alliance Computer Corporation. Schiller had suspected Davis of the murder of his wife Valerie Stockton Davis in DEAR CROSSING. Both he and Waverly think there are discrepancies that point to murder rather than suicide. The reader knows that ACC board members thoroughly contaminated the crime scene, delayed some twenty minutes between the discovery of Davis’s body and the call to 911, lied to the police about Davis’s election, and continue to conceal information about Davis that would help the police investigation.

I’m giving up at 41%. Frankly, I don’t care enough to keep reading. SHADOW TAG is hard to identify as a separate book from DEAR CROSSING. Constant references to events and characters from the cases in Widmer make it a simple continuation of the same story. Davis is such a sleaze that any number of people might want him dead, and the others associated with ACC are little better. Focus shifts from character to character, making the flow of the story choppy and adding little to the almost non-existent characterization. There’s no sense of place.

Perhaps my largest objection to SHADOW TAG comes from the idea of a twelve-person (at least) Board of Directors maintaining a united front, when all except one favors telling the police the truth. It seems that Board decisions must be unanimous, and one member Mitchell Gaynor, who’s normally a go-along guy, unexpectedly refuses to agree or to explain his objections. I agree with Poor Richard that three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. Somebody on the Board in the space of several weeks between Davis’s death and Schiller’s entering the case would have talked.

SHADOW TAG isn’t engaging. No grade because not finished.

A GLANCING LIGHT is the second book in Aaron Elkins’s mystery series featuring Chris Norgren, curator of Renaissance and Baroque art for the Seattle Art Museum. It was originally published in 1991 and reissued in e-book format in 2014.

Museum Director Tony Whitehead puts Chris Norgren to double duty when Norgren goes to Bologna, Italy, to tend details associated with an upcoming traveling exhibition, Northerners in Italy. Some 22 months before, well-executed raids stole major art works from the Pinacoteca Museum, from the collection of Clara Gozzi, and from the workroom of Max Cabot, who was restoring Gozzi’s Rubens. The art theft unit of the Bologna carabinieri has asked the FBI for assistance in picking up information about a possible ransoming of the paintings, conservatively worth $100,000,000. Before he leaves for Bologna, two paintings turn up unexpectedly in Seattle in a shipment of fake paintings and objet d’art to Mike Blusher. One of them is Gozzi’s Rubens. Norgren reluctantly agrees to help, but when he arrives, Colonel Antuono doesn’t want his help; his friend Max Cabot, whose night watchman was killed by the thieves, is attacked and crippled for life, apparently because Max had announced his intention of talking to the police; Norgren is attacked but not so damaged in the same incident, and someone plants a bomb in his luggage, set to go off when he’s en route to the airport to go to Sicily about his exhibition. To what extent is the Mafia involved? Can Norgren trust anyone in Bologna?

Elkins keeps attention focused on the carabinieri, their operations, Norgren’s sense of wheels within wheels involving the thefts, and the role of the Mafia, hiding the killer’s identity in plain sight. The plot does hang together logically. There’s a bit of romantic subplot as Norgren reconnects with Anne Greene, the USAF captain he’d met in A DECEPTIVE CLARITY. Elkins provides ample information on art forgery without its burying the plot.

Chris Norgren is an attractive self-deprecating first person narrator: “...how did I know after a fifteen-second examination that this [Jan van Eyck portrait] was spurious? All I can say is, I knew. I have a friend in Italy, an art professor, who was overpressed as to how he could be sure a certain Titian was genuine. His memorable answer: ‘I know because when I see a Titian I swoon.’ I wouldn’t go as far as that on this van Eyck, but I knew. After you’ve lovingly submerged yourself in a field long enough, the judgments that at first had to be carefully reasoned become intuitive. It’s no different than an experienced breeder’s ability to size up a horse instantaneously, or a master cabinetmaker’s way of telling at a glance how good a piece of furniture is.” Other characters are also believable.

Sense of place is outstanding. “Bologna la Grassa--Bologna the Fat--they called it in the fourteenth century, and Bologna la Grasse they call it still. The words refer to the richness of the fare, but they might just as well apply to the richness of life in general, or to the people, who are so much more robust and hearty than their dark, lean cousins in the south that they seem to be from a different country. (Talk to the Bolognese and you get the impression that they are. Africa begins just below Rome, the northerners like to say.) In the surrounding countryside are some of the aristocrats of Italian capitalism: Ferrari, Masserati, Lamborghini. Riunite, too. And in Bologna itself the boutiques tucked away among the arcaded, medieval streets displaying fashions that rival Rome’s, and the cuisine in the grand old restaurants is the finest (and among the most expensive) in Italy, which is saying something.”

A GLANCING LIGHT is a solid addition to a strong series. (A-)

THE APRIL RAINERS is one of Anthea Fraser’s mystery series featuring Detective Chief Inspector David Webb, set in Shillingham in Broadshire. It was originally published in 1989 and re-issued in e-book format in 2015.

Ted Baxter, a brutal man whose violence drove his wife Linda to suicide, receives an anonymous warning note, written in distinctive green ink in copperplate script, condemning his behavior and saying that he will die in eight days. It’s signed “The April Rainers.” James Jessel, ruthless businessman who’s purchased the Broadshire Life magazine and made redundant, among others, editor Gaby Fenshawe and columnist Terence Denbigh who’d collapsed and died when sacked, also receives the “April Rainers” letter. Both men die on the eighth day, both asphyxiated with a ligature, probably a nylon stocking, that had been removed. Webb and his team have little physical evidence but turn up similar letters in other cases in London, Chichester, Leeds, Liverpool, and Cardiff. In the meantime, Shillingham is abuzz with the return home of world-famous composer and violinist Felicity Harwood, to premiere her latest concerto with the Shillingham Orchestra, conducted by her brother Sir Julian Harwood. She agrees to perform with the orchestra of the Ashborne School for Girls, her alma mater, in a fund-raiser for the school music program. Felicity Harwood asks Mark Templeton, who writes music reviews, teaches at Ashbourne, and knows Felicity Harwood’s music intimately, to write her authorized biography; he agrees to assess the project while she’s in Shillingham before giving her a final decision. Then following the school concert, Felicity receives a bouquet of flowers that precipitates a collapse on stage. What’s going on? Have the April Rainers targeted her?

Discussing the plot structure much would involve a spoiler, and I don’t want to do that. Fraser gives Jessel and Baxter both a selection of people with reason to want them dead, keeping attention focused on them while hiding the killers in plain sight. Their identities are foreshadowed.

Both characterization and sense of place are largely absent from THE APRIL RAINERS. Fraser refers to Webb’s habit of using his drawings, caricatures of people involved in the crimes, to access information from his subconscious, but he doesn’t use it in this story. Many characters are not essential to the plot. Shillingham locations are named but nothing makes the town seem real.

THE APRIL RAINERS isn’t as strong as other books in the series. (C+)

FINAL SENTENCE is the first in Daryl Wood Gerber’s Cookbook Nook mystery series set in Crystal Cove, California. Its first person narrator is Jenna Starrett Hart, widowed two years before when her husband David Harris disappeared at sea; she’s left her high-powered advertising job in San Francisco to return home to partner with her aunt Vera Hart in the Cookbook Nook, a bookstore and cafe. FINAL SENTENCE was published in e-book format in 2013.

I always check reviews before I download a book, even if it’s free or inexpensive. Sometimes when I read it, I wonder if I indeed have the same publication, so different is my evaluation. FINAL SENTENCE is one of these. I only finished it because my stubborn button was pushed, to see if there was some great redeeming feature I had missed. There isn’t.

Characters are standard, the usual combination of mentoring older relative, hunky young romantic interest for the heroine, who’s smart and spunky and carrying emotional baggage, and various quirky, nasty, and nice supporting characters. Jenna Hart’s motivation simply doesn’t ring true. Admittedly, she’s being accused of the murder of Desiree Divine, college roommate and Food Network star, but when Crystal Cove Chief of Police Cinnamon Pritchett tells her specifically to stay out of the investigation, that she’s no evidence except remotest circumstantial against her, Jenna doesn’t listen. Jenna’s father Cary Hart, retired FBI analyst and current FBI consultant, counsels her to stop poking around in the murder case. Does she listen? Of course not, and consequently Jenna puts her own life, as well as Sabrina Divine, in danger. There are way more characters than necessary to carry the plot, with most of them not developed to more than stereotypes. Gerber doesn’t develop a story-telling voice for Jenna as narrator. Judicious editing of at least fifty pages would improve the plot.

Admittedly, I have no legal training. What I know about investigative techniques comes from reading mysteries, legal thrillers, and true crime, and from watching Columbo, Perry Mason, and Law and Order. But the process as developed in FINAL SENTENCE seems highly improbable. Pepper Pritchett, who has a long-standing grudge against Cary Hart and all his family, names Jenna as the criminal repeatedly, interviews witnesses to find evidence against her, and uses her influence as the mother of the police chief to try to have Jenna arrested. There’s as much reason to suspect Pepper as Jenna, so shouldn’t Cinnamon Pritchett recuse herself and turn the investigation over to the Sheriff’s Department or to the California Highway Patrol? Pepper’s interference in the investigation would guarantee reasonable doubt, if enough evidence turned up to charge Jenna. One of the supporting characters is a kleptomaniac. Cinnamon mandates her going into an addiction program and sentences her to community service. No charges filed, no trial, no verdict. Does it really work that way?

The petty detail that bothers me most is Tigger. Tigger is the tiny abandoned kitten who shows up at the Cookbook Nook on the day Jenna and Vera begin renovations (which take an incredibly short time--something like three days to redo a commercial space that had been vacant for years). Jenna decides to adopt him and makes him the store’s mascot. However, he’s allowed to roam free within the bookstore AND the adjoining cafe. Does the Department of Public Health allow animals other than service dogs in eating establishments? The problem about Tigger is that, spite all the love and affection Jenna shows for him, Gerber never tells us what color or hair length he is. Tigger is a totally generic kitten.

FINAL SENTENCE needs at least one more draft and the services of a skilled editor to be ready for publication. (F)

MURDER ON THE ICW is the fifth book in Ellen Elizabeth Hunter’s Magnolia Murders mystery series. The first person narrator is Ashley Wilkes, historic preservationist from Wilmington, North Carolina; her older sister Melanie Wilkes, is a star real estate agent and former Miss North Carolina. It is available in e-format.

Melanie Wilkes had a torrid summer affair with Joey Fielding, former star of the Dolphin’s Cove TV series. He dropped her, and she, still infatuated with him, stalks him. When she finds his body, shot in the head, in the Bittermans’ house she has listed for sale, the police arrest her for murder. Ashley is preoccupied with the break-up of her marriage to former Wilmington homicide detective Nick Yost, who’s moved to Homeland Security, then to the CIA, and now to Blackwater Security. She and partner Jon Campbell are renovating a hunting lodge for retired tobacco lobbyist David Boleyn; in one of the sheds on the property, Ashley uncovers a body that’s been buried for about eighty years. There’s evidence that the property had been the scene of a major moonshining operation during Prohibition. Then Melanie’s attacked in her home, and her former boyfriend Mickey Ballantine, former club owner with ties to the Mob, is stabbed to death in her bedroom. The bloody murder weapon is in Melanie’s hand. Someone attacks Ashley as she’s walking in Airlie Gardens near the Boleyn lodge. What’s going on?

The plot in MURDER ON THE ICW is simplistic; it’s obvious from the first introduction who’s likely the murderer. The main mystery is what he’s doing and how the victims tie into his activities. For once, Ashley’s not terribly involved in chasing after the killer; she stumbles over things and only later realizes what she’s seen and its significance. There’s too much telling in the denouement with minimal foreshadowing beforehand. There are also major coincidences essential to Melanie and Ashley’s survival when they’re grabbed by the killer. They are locked in where the door hinges are on the inside, and Melanie had just bought a girly decorated toolbelt and tools that the killer doesn’t find in their Christmas shopping bags, so Ashley can engineer their escape. The yacht on which they’re held is part of the ICW holiday regatta and just happens to anchor next to Melanie’s boyfriend Cam Jordan’s boat, guaranteeing rescue at hand. It’s important to read the series in order, since there are constant allusions to previous books.

Characterization is sketchy for all the characters, especially the ones continued from earlier books in the series. The killer’s the best developed character in MURDER ON THE ICW. We’re told that Melanie is a dynamic character, that she’s become more self-aware, especially in her attitude about bad boy boyfriends, but it’s not shown convincingly. Ashley, on the other hand, in the first week of November finds Nick Yost leaving her house with all his possessions, going to another woman. She’s hurt and upset but, within a week, she’s decided that she’s really been in love with Jon Campbell all along. No more angst over Nick or divorce. Before Thanksgiving, she and Jon are lovers, though the divorce that Nick filed for will take a year to be final. By Christmas they are officially engaged with a wedding planned for Christmas next year. The speed with which Ashley moves on from the split with Nick isn’t realistic or believable.

Sense of place is the strongest element in MURDER ON THE ICW. “Greenville Sound was lovely in the fall; the blatant colors of summer had faded and mellowed into a gentle seascape. South of us, Bradley Creek flowed into Greenville Sound. With our semi-tropical climate, summer-like weather could prevail until Christmas, a boon for recreational sailors and yachting enthusiasts. Glistening white watercraft bobbed in the slips at the Bradley Creek Marina. Money Island, an acre of high ground where according to local legend Captain Kidd had buried two treasure chests, humped up out of the water a short distance from the shore. Beyond it and the marshes, Wrightsville Beach with its colorful beach cottages formed a barrier island between the mainland and the Atlantic.”

MURDER ON THE ICW is a pleasant enough read, but nothing makes it memorable. (C)

MARRIAGE CAN BE MURDER is the first book in Emma Jameson’s new mystery series featuring Dr. Benjamin Bones, set in the opening days of World War II. It was published in e-book format in 2015.

On 1 September 1939, young Dr. Ben Bones is en route to the village of Birdswing in Cornwall; he’d expected to become an Army doctor, but instead he’s to serve as primary care physician to a 20-mile radius of patients as well as triage service when nearby Plymouth is attacked by German bombers. He’s accompanied by his estranged wife Penny, who’s been unfaithful to him after marrying him some years before under false pretenses. Arriving after dark, walking on the road in blackout conditions, a lorry runs them down. Penny is killed, and Ben is severely injured, his right leg broken and his left leg smashed. Recuperating in a small room in the Sheared Sheep pub normally used by Edith, Birdswing’s part-time prostitute, Ben finds a note on his pillow, apologizing for injuring him, saying that the driver had only been after Penny. Air Raid Precautions warden and acting police constable Clarence Gaston doesn’t take the note seriously or have the first idea how to investigate. The owners of Belsham Manor, Lady Victoria Linton and her daughter, Lady Juliet Linton Bolivar, move Ben into Fenton House and arrange for his opening his practice, complete with an excellent housekeeper and source of village information, Mrs. Agnes Cobblepot. As he becomes more mobile and wins the trust of the villagers, Ben and Lady Juliet quietly investigate the incident that killed Penny.

I don’t enjoy historical novels, especially mysteries, because I generally find them full of anachronisms. However, MARRIAGE CAN BE MURDER is well-done in creating the sense of time and place for the first months of World War II in England, the time of the “phony war.” “Ben had heard that segments of the country took the notion of invasion very much to heart. Convinced that enemy agents might parachute into England, many citizens proposed eliminating the sort of information that might assist invaders in making their way to towns and cities, such as church and cemetery names, iconic pub signs, and all road markers. He had no idea what a freshly dropped German spy, perhaps still in harness with a collapsed parachute in tow, might make of their position, but as a natural-born Englishman in possession of a decent map, Ben was well and truly confused.” (8-9) ARP/Constable Gaston is comic in his ultra-rigid interpretation of blackout and other regulations, but he’s authentic for the period.

MARRIAGE CAN BE MURDER reminds me a bit of Patrick Taylor’s AN IRISH COUNTRY DOCTOR series, dealing as it does with a just-qualified young doctor dealing with his own inexperience as well as the culture shock produced by village life. Ben Bones is an appealing protagonist, much of the action seen through his eyes. He’s naive, marrying in his second year of medical school a woman that the most imperceptive reader can tell is a wrong ‘un. They’d have been divorced before the move to Birdswing if Ben hadn’t dreaded the scandal and his parents’ reaction to the first divorce ever in the Bones family. He comes to some home truths about himself as he recovers from his injuries: “Pain during recovery was inevitable; as a physician, he knew that. Yet he’d tried to avoid it by staying put in his chair, just as he’d tried to evade a different sort of pain by staying put in his room. It hurt to know Penny had died violently, skull crushed beneath the lorry’s wheels. It hurt worse to know he was relieved to be free of her, instantly, easily, without scandal. How could he go on thinking of himself as a good man when his grief was overshadowed by such powerful relief?” (46) Other characters, especially Gaston, Mrs. Cobblepot, and Lady Juliet, are realistic and intriguing. I look forward to getting to know them.

The plot is rather simplistic. Ben and Lady Juliet’s investigation eventually reveals the motive behind Penny’s death and, once motive is known, it’s clear whom she most threatened. For the reader familiar with the names and events of British history in the immediate pre-war and opening days of WWII, the motive is adequately foreshadowed.

MARRIAGE CAN BE MURDER is definitely a series I plan to follow. (A)

TRUST NO ONE is Jayne Ann Krentz’s latest stand-alone romantic suspense novel, published in 2015.

Grace Elland finds the body of her boss, positive thinking guru Sprague Witherspoon, shot to death in his apartment bedroom after he fails to show up at the Witherspoon Way offices. In her eighteen months working for him, she’d largely been responsible for the marketing strategies that had taken him from mid-level to the premier motivational speaker in the Pacific Northwest. But there’s something unexpected in his bedroom--a bottle of vodka, when Sprague didn’t drink vodka. Vodka had figured largely in a murder case when Grace was sixteen years old; she’d used a broken vodka bottle to save herself and a small boy from an abuser who’d just killed his wife. Then Grace begins receiving e-mails from Sprague Witherspoon after his death, her nightmare and anxiety attacks return full force. When she’s set up on a blind date with venture capitalist Julius Arkwright by her friends Irene and Devlin Nakamura, Julius is the only one who realizes that the murderer is also a threat to Grace. Naturally, they fall in love, investigate the crime, and both face danger before everything is explained. And they lived happily ever after.

The reviews of TRUST NO ONE praised it as a return to Krentz’s previous high standards of romantic suspense, but I can’t agree. Both protagonists are recycled from a dozen previous novels. Nothing about Grace or Julius is distinctive except their names. Despite many place names in the Seattle area, there’s little sense of place. Even the teenaged Grace’s escape from death in the basement of a deserted asylum lacks atmospherics. The plot involves embezzlement, blackmail, and a con-game in addition to Sprague’s murder and three attempted or planned murders. The killer’s identity comes out of left field with no foreshadowing. Krentz has used the same motivation and bits of the plot many times before. Most of the action is seen through Grace and Julius’s eyes; occasional shifts to the viewpoint of the criminals interrupt what little suspense has been generated.

I’m giving credit for Grace’s gnomic affirmations that went a long way toward making the Witherspoon Way a success. TRUST NO ONE is one of the books that make me wonder if I read the same material as the other reviewers. (D-)

SOLOMON VS. LORD is the first book in the series of the same name by Paul Levine. It is available in e-book as well as print format.

Steve Solomon is a lower-echelon lawyer in Miami, Florida; Victoria Lord is an assistant in the State Attorney’s Office for Miami-Dade County. When they meet in court they are total opposites and wind up with both jailed for contempt. Solomon is impressed with Lord’s potential as an attorney, so he offers to mentor her. When she’s fired from her job, she takes up his offer on a temporary basis. Solomon and Lord’s first case is the trial for murder of Kristina Barksdale, a trophy wife who’s accused of strangling her older, wealthy husband during kinky sex that included, among other accessories, a dog collar. Publicity mad State Attorney Ray Pincher, Victoria’s old boss, rushes to try Katrina for murder, hoping to ride a successful trial into the governorship. But Solomon’s instinct tells him Katrina isn’t guilty of murder. Solomon also faces a custody hearing over his autistic savant twelve-year-old nephew whom he’d rescued. Bobby’s mother has a long criminal and drug-related record, and she’d been both violently abusive and neglectful. Complicating the custody is the determination of a state expert witness to institutionalize Bobby so he can be a study subject for new therapies. Complicating the personal situation for both Solomon and Lord is their developing attraction when Victoria is engaged to millionaire avocado grower Bruce Bigby.

First, SOLOMON VS. LORD is good fun. “On the window ledge, the buzzard hopped a step, spread its wings, tucked hem in again. Smart birds, the scavengers winter in Miami, feasting on discarded burgers, media noches, and the occasional drug dealer stuffed into a garbage bag. They fly endless circles over the downtown courthouse, roosting on the ledges of the high-rise law firms, providing the source of endless lawyer jokes.” (348) Solomon’s laws of lawyering are also neat.

The plot twist in the murder trial of Katrina Barksdale is unforeshadowed but believable. The custody hearing ends as it should.

Both Solomon and Lord are attractive characters, easy to like. Solomon is realistic: “Steve preferred to defend the truly innocent, but where would h find hem? If people didn’t lie, cheat, and steal, he figured he’d be starving instead of clearing about the same as a longshoreman at the Port of Miami who worked overtime and stole an occasional crate of whiskey. Steve usually settled for what he called ‘honest criminals,’ felons who ran afoul of technicalities that would not be illegal in a live-and-let-live society. Bookies, hookers, or entrepreneurs like today’s client, Amancio Pedrosa, who imported exotic animals with a blithe disregard of the law.” (8) Lord’s uncertain about working with him: “Sure, Solomon had all that experience. But he was so aggressive, so reckless, he would lead hem into untold disasters. She was still furious at him for stealing her client, but she had vowed to put up with him. She needed his case to get on her feet, start building her practice. As far as learning trial tactics from Solomon, she’d study his every move, then do the exact opposite.” (150)

Levine’s also good at blending humor in with sense of place and characterization. “Pincer billed himself as a crime fighter, and his campaign billboards pictured him bare-chested, wearing boxing gloves, a reminder of his days as a teenage middleweight in the Liberty City Police Athletic League. He’d won the championship two years running, once with a head butt, and once with a bolo punch to the groin, both overlooked by the referee, who by serendipitous coincidence was his uncle. Boxing had been excellent preparation for Florida politics, where both nepotism and hitting below the belt were prized assets.” (16-7)

SOLOMON VS. LORD is a lively summertime read. (A-)

Donnie Eicharr wrote DEAD MOUNTAIN: THE UNTOLD TRUE STORY OF THE DYATLOV PASS INCIDENT with J. C. Gabel and Nora Jacobs. It was published in 2013. It is available in both print and e-book formats. I read it in print format for superior reproduction of maps and photographs.

To summarize the incident, the book jacket says: “In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains die mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain. Eerie aspects of the incident--unexplained injuries, signs the hikers cut open and fled their tent without proper clothing or shoes, a strange final photograph taken by one of them, and radiation readings on some of their clothes--have led to decades of speculation over what really happened.”

Eichar recounts his growing fascination with th Dyatlov Pass Incident after discovering it on the Internet and sets out to study and perhaps solve the mystery. DEAD MOUNTAIN shifts between his research and trips to Russia, including a winter trip following the party’s path as closely as possible; the organization and history of the group of hikers, plus the reconstructed events of their trip; the organization and efforts of the search teams who eventually found all nine bodies; and the investigation of the cause of their deaths. He details and shows why, to his mind, previous explanations for what drove the hikers out of their tent are not likely. Theories include an attack by Mansi, indigenous people of the Urals; an avalanche; high winds; armed men, either Russian military or prisoners escaped from the Gulag; weapons testing, either a rocket launch or radiation-related tests; “it’s classified”--some cause known but not yet released by the Soviet bureaucracy; and various less conventional ideas--space aliens, mountain dwarves, or, in a recent television “documentary,” an attack by Yeti or Bigfoot-type creatures. Eichar posits the disturbing and disorienting effect of infrasound generated by the Karman vortex street effect of winds around Holatchahl Mountain (“Dead Mountain”).

Eichar’s is an interesting theory but one incapable of proof, based as it is on a phenomenon that is rare, transient, and leaves no physical evidence. I’d feel more confidence in the theory if I had more confidence in Eichar as a researcher. He neither reads nor speaks Russian, and most of the material he consulted is published in Russian. The copy of the Dyatlov case file he studied is a clandestine publication assembled by students who secreted copied pages and smuggled them out of the archives, available only since 2009. There’s no guarantee that it’s accurate or complete. He gives no notes to specific information and no bibliography.

DEAD MOUNTAIN does contain a map of the route of the Dyatlov party’s route, many photographs, a list of major characters, a timeline of the Dyatlov hikers’ journey, and a timeline of the investigation of the mystery. However, there’s no map that shows the positions of the recovered bodies in relation to each other. The photographs, many taken from film from the group’s cameras, are printed on the same paper as the printed text, so the subjects are not very clear.

DEAD MOUNTAIN’s subtitle might more properly be “a possible explanation of the Dyatlov Pass incident.” (C)

DEATH IN BRITTANY is the first book in Jean-Luc Bannalec’s Commissaire Georges Dupin mystery series, published in 2012. It was translated by Sorcha McDonagh in 2014. It apparently has been published in e-book format as MURDER IN PONT-AVEN.

Commissaire Georges Dupin has been in Concarneau, Brittany, for almost three years, exiled for his outspoken ways from Paris. When Pierre-Louise Pennec, owner of the Central Hotel in nearby Port-Aven is murdered, Dupin is put in charge of the case. Pennec’s grandmother as owner of the hotel had welcomed the influx of artists led by Gauguin beginning in the 1870s, and her son and grandson had continued to support the arts. Pennec had been 91 years old; that week his doctor had recommended immediate bypass surgery because of severe blockages, so bad that death could occur at any time. Instead Pennec refuses treatment, contacts his notary about his changing his will, confers with his son, his estranged half-brother, and friends, and argues on Wednesday afternoon with a stranger. Thursday morning, he’s dead, stabbed to death in the restaurant of the hotel. Why is the murder of a dying man necessary?

Georges Dupin is an attractive protagonist revealed by Bannalec’s use of limited third person point of view. He’s a successful detective who wants justice for anyone involved in crime, especially murder. “[Dupin] really resented having to keep his anger in check in these kinds of situations. And that’s also why he found it a bit sad, because he lacked some of the ‘hidden depths’, which now seemed a quasi-requirement for his profession: drug addiction, or at least alcoholism, neurosis or depression to a clinical degree, a colorful criminal past, corruption on an interesting scale or several dramatically failed marriages. He didn’t have any of those things to show off about.” (68-9) He carries believable personal baggage. A bit of a lone wolf, Dupin functions as leader of a team of professionals I look forward to getting to know.

I especially like Dupin’s secretary Nolwenn, who served his predecessor and the Commissaire before him. “Dupin admired Nolween. She was unshakably pragmatic and determined. Nothing was too much for her; it always just seemed to be a question of the--correct or incorrect--approach to something. ... Nolwenn was indispensable to him in general, but particularly because of her practically limitless local and regional knowledge.... She was a Breton woman through and through, still fundamentally suspicious of France. After all, Brittany had only been a part of France since 1532, ‘for a piddling five hundred years’--an annexation!” (73-4) Characterization is excellent.

Bannalec excels in using atmosphere to reveal character. “As evening came on, the light became more and more bewitching. The colours of witchcraft: everything shone brightly, warm, soft, and golden. It always seemed to Dupin as though the sun mysteriously made everything glow for a few hours before it set. Things weren’t simply lit up: they radiated light from within themselves. Dupin had never seen this kind of light anywhere else in the world, only in Brittany. He was sure this must have been one of the main reasons the painters came here. He still found it a bit embarrassing when he caught himself--the city slicker par excellence--in sentimental raptures over nature like this. And he had to admit tht it was happening more and more.” (76)

I can’t say much about the plot without doing a spoiler, but the motive is reasonable with appropriate foreshadowing of the identity of the killer.

At least one Amazon reviewer disliked the translation, but I found it flowing. Not being Francophone, I cannot speak to its accuracy. I did find DEATH IN BRITTANY an engaging opening book in what I hope will be a long series. ( solid A)

NORDIC NIGHTS is the third book in Lise McClendon’s Alix Thorsson mystery series set in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Alix is the owner of the Second Sun Gallery. It was originally published in 1999, then reissued in e-book format in 2010.

Alix is much involved with the annual winter festival, this year entitled Nordic Nights. She’s invited Norwegian artist and national treasure Glasius Dokken to exhibit his painted murals depicting scenes from Norse mythology in the gallery and to help judge the ice carving contest. Instead, Glasius winds up stabbed to death in a hotel room, with Alix’s stepfather Hank Helgeson arrested for his murder. The room had been rented to Madame Isa Mardoll, a psychic who uses antique set of runestones, which she now says is missing, to tell fortunes,. Why was Glasius in her room, and who wanted the runestones enough to kill him for them? Complicating the situation is a small slab of stone, now also missing, that Alix’s mother Una Helgeson found at an archaeological dig in Minnesota the previous summer; carved with runes similar to those on the Kensington Rune Stone, it also purports to be a report of a Viking exploration of Minnesota. Who stole it from Hank’s truck? Why?

***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***

The plot in NORDIC NIGHTS is in two distinct pieces. One layer is Glasius’s murder and the appearances and disappearances of the case of runestones and of the stone Una found. Much more could have been made of this story line. The potential for obsessive belief and behavior is not much developed. While Chief of Police Charlie Frye dislikes Alix intensely, her disregard of any kind of cooperation makes it reasonable. When her gallery is shot into, she doesn’t report it to the police; her assistant Artie Wanker calls them the next day. When someone sets Hank’s hand-built model of a Viking longboat afire in the Nordic Nights parade, no one reports it to the police. When her mother is sideswiped by a van, her friend Maggie Barlow is the one who reports it the next day. A practical consideration bothers me. When three shots come through the front window of the gallery in the middle of the night, wouldn’t the alarm system go off? Alix has custody of Glasius’s gigantic paintings, left with her by the Norwegian consul who’s handling the repatriation because, with her professional system at the gallery, it’s the best place to protect them. There’s not much suspense in the murderer’s identity; the major issue is who else is involved, and how.

The second layer of plot involves convoluted relationships within the Thorsson family, much of which Alix as first person narrator attributes to their Norwegian heritage. Of her mother, she says: “[Una] swept all the bad stuff out of her mind, out of her life. She had never seen her only grandson, and that must hurt. She just kept on keeping on, in true Norse fashion. I admired her for that. She had suffered a great deal when my father died, both emotionally and financially, and struggled o finish raising me, the only child left at home, working in the school cafeteria and then cooking for a caterer. When I looked at Una, I saw a survivor. But is the only way to survive with your good humor intact to pretend everything that doesn’t agree with your worldview doesn’t exist?” (14) She later admits that she’s just like her mother. McClendon gives at least as much attention to family dynamics as to the mystery, leaving an imbalance in the storytelling.

Alix doesn’t come off well in NORDIC NIGHTS. She’s still hurting from the death of Paolo Segundo, her former lover and partner in Second Sun, the previous summer. She seems unconcerned by the absence of her sometime boyfriend Carl Mendez of the Missoula Police Department; he’s on assignment for several months in California, learning to fly helicopters. Alix pulls a massive TSTL when she decides to steal back Una’s runestone from the person who stole it from Hank’s truck, apparently not anticipating that someone who’s involved already in one death would hesitate to kidnap her mother and herself. The plan by which Alix elicits a confession by the killer may work in a cozy mystery, but it’s unlikely to work in real life. More likely, she’d wind up dead.

Sense of place is good with atmospheric descriptions that add to characterization, but it’s not enough to redeem the deficiencies in plot and realistic characters in NORDIC NIGHTS. (C)

Estelle Ryan’s THE GAUGUIN CONNECTION is an e-book published in 2012 featuring Dr. Genevieve Lenard. The first person narrator of the story, she has a Ph.D. and specializes in reading body language and in recognizing patterns and connections within masses of data. Genevieve has a genius-level IQ and is autistic; she can’t cope with people, dislikes being touched, and uses the writing of Mozart compositions on paper or in her mind to control being overwhelmed. She works for Phillip Rousseau of the multinational insurance company Rousseau and Rousseau of Strasbourg, France. Phillip is the man who first accepted and trusted her ability; she wishes he’d been her father. She carries major baggage from her childhood and her parents. An interesting different protagonist.

Genevieve becomes involved in a weapons theft case when Colonel Manfred Millard, Phillip’s old friend, comes to him for help in trying to track down who’s behind a massive loss of handguns from Eurocorps. Manny works for the European Defense Agency, and he’s highly suspicious that someone high up in the agency is behind the thefts since they had been covered up for over seven years. Who delayed inventories that would have shown the guns missing? Tied in the case is the murder some month before of a young woman who had a strip of a Gauguin painting sewn into her coat; analysis of residue on her hands shows her to have been a painter. How can this be connected? Coming into the case in pursuit of the artist’s killer is Colin Frey, a self-confessed art thief, and his giant friend Vinnie, who join the group trying to uncover a decades old international conspiracy.

The plot in some ways resembles the international criminal conspiracy themes from the 1920s-1930s, with a Mr. Big who’s apparently too clever to be taken down. It functions more as a police procedural than a straight mystery. There’s only one person who has the requisite position to be the master criminal. Colin Frey is almost a riff on Raffles or some of the other gentleman art/jewelry thieves. The conclusion indicates that THE GAUGUIN CONNECTION is probably the first of a series.

Ryan has a pleasing economy of characters. Genevieve is unflinching in her self-appraisal: “Episodes like I had experienced the last few days reminded me that regardless of all my knowledge and training, I was essentially still vulnerable to losing control. It humbled me. ... I accepted the fact that the only part in my rebelling against the whole case and all its elements was my intense and instant dislike of change. The psychologist, pattern-finder, scientist and information-seeker in me pulled at me to find the connections that I knew were out there. My fear of change was constantly at war with the cerebral parts of me. This was no exception. The excitement of finding new connections and patterns barely overrode that fear.” (66) She is a dynamic character whose work on the case lets her expand her circle of friends. She pulls a major TSTL when she follows the man she recognizes as head of the conspiracy into a wine cellar. Other characters are both complex and realistic.

My only complaint is the lack of sense of place. The setting of Strasbourg, France, is named, but there’s little physical detail and no description. THE GAUGUIN CONNECTION is a good read. (A-)

Sharon K. Owen’s THICKER THAN WATER was published in free or inexpensive e-book format in 2013. It features as its protagonist Kathleen “Kate” O’Donnell, a 25-year-old songwriter and musician with two degrees from Vanderbilt who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Her family is originally from Brands Crossing, Texas, founded by an ancestor who served in the Texas Revoution. Her grandfather Will Kincaid is involved in some controversy and ships family documents to Kate to keep safe. When he’s run off the road and mortally injured in the wreck, he lives long enough to charge her with protecting the Crossing and to make cryptic references to the game. Kate has been the inspiration for Phillip Norwood’s on-line game Aidennne’s* Revenge. Can this be what the dying man is referring to?

I’m giving up at 13%. So far, point of view has shifted from Kate to Phillip to an unnamed male who’s involved with whatever’s going down in Brands Crossing and who also means to claim Kate. Kate has major baggage with her mother, whose expectations she’s never felt able to meet. So far the story consists mostly of characters with minimal development and little action. It seems to be shaping up as standard romantic suspense--Kate’s attracted to Phillip, and Phillip is hot for Kate, and neither knows the other’s feelings. He’s major league protective, she’s overly independent. It’s obvious that she and Phillip will pair up.

The thing that bothers me most is the lack of Southern ambiance. There’s no story-telling voice that pulls the reader in; despite its setting, THICKER THAN WATER’s characters don’t use Southern speech patterns. The author isn’t familiar with local usage in Nashville. She names 21st Avenue, but a Nashville resident would refer to either 21st Avenue North or 21st Avenue South, a major distinction.

THICKER THAN WATER is pretty thin, even for a summer quick read. No grade because not finished.

*not a typo--three "n"s in a row.

JIGSAW is the second book in Anthea Fraser’s mystery series featuring writer Rona Parish. It was published in 2004.

Rona is carrying baggage from the murders uncovered in BROUGHT TO BOOK, but she’s ready to undertake a series of human interest articles for Chiltern Life magazine about the eight-hundred-year anniversary of the founding of the town of Buckford. Buckford is a long drive from her home in Marsborough, so she arranges to stay in Nuala Banks’s bed and breakfast on Monday and Tuesday nights for a month while she researches the material. She’s soon caught up in the death some years before of young Charlotte Spencer, a four-year-old killed in an auto accident by Hugh Pollard, who was DUI; he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison and released after nine. Two weeks after his release, Pollard is found outside a pub, stabbed to death, with Lottie’s father Alan Spencer standing over him, blood on his clothes. The murder weapon came from the Spencers’ kitchen, and the police find the bloody knife hidden in the Spencers’ garage. They ignore Spencer’s story of receiving a letter from Pollard asking for a meeting at the pub. The more time she spends in Buckford and observes, the more convinced Rona becomes that Alan Spencer is innocent. So who did kill Hugh Pollard?

The plot in JIGSAW is almost more police procedural than straight mystery. It unfolds slowly from Rona’s initial suspicions aroused by the ramblings of one of her sources for the articles, through requests for help for Beth Spencer. The only clue to the identity of Pollard’s killer comes shortly before the climax of the plot.

Characters are not so well developed in JIGSAW as in BROUGHT TO BOOK. Fraser develops Rona’s family more than the people in Buckford. Rona’s twin Lindsey is devastated when ex-husband Hugh Cavendish, with whom she’d resumed a sexual relationship, takes her at her word that she doesn’t want to remarry and moves on to another woman. Her parents’ marriage has been unsatisfactory for years, and her father Tom Parish meets and is much attracted to Catherine Palmer, one of Rona’s interviewees for the Buckford series.

Setting and atmosphere are the strongest element in JIGSAW. “Marborough, developed during the eighteenth century, had the spacious elegance of Bath or Cheltenham. Buckford, several hundred years older, was quite different. According to the tourist brochure, there was an Old Town and a New Town, though...they merged into one another and it was hard to tell where each started and ended.... Beyond the square there was less ambiguity, and they found a maze of narrow streets and alleyway, hidden courtyards, and worn stone step leading from one level to another. In many cases, the owners of the bildings had renovated their properties and, though careful to preserve their old-world charm, had turned them into boutiques, galleries and coffee shops.” (26-7)

JIGSAW is an okay read but not a memorable one. (C)

THE CAT SITTER’S CRADLE is the first Dixie Hemingway book (eighth in the series) published after the death of Blaize Clement’s death in 2011; it was completed by her son John, who has continued the series. Dixie is a former sheriff’s deputy who’s now a pet sitter on Siesta Key, a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico off Sarasota, Florida.

When Dixie is walking one of her client’s dog early in the morning, she and friend Joyce Metzger discover a resplendent quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala and on the endangered species list, apparently dead on a path in the park. Then they discover a young woman and her newborn baby girl. The woman speaks little English but does not want either the police or an ambulance called. Believing her an illegal alien, Dixie and Joyce take her to Joyce’s home until they can get more information and decide what to do. Dixie’s beginning a new pet-sitting assignment with Tina and Roy Harwick, to tend Roy’s Siamese Charlotte, aka Queen B, and Tina’s huge aquarium of rare tropical fish worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. On her first pet tending visit to the house, Dixie finds Mrs. Harwick’s daughter Becca distraught because her boyfriend split when she told him she was pregnant. On her second visit, Dixie finds Roy Harwick’s body in the pool. Corina and baby Dixie Joyce disappear. Dixie’s part-time dog sitter Kenny Newman has been the Harwicks’ pool boy and Becca’s lover. Now he is a suspect in Harwick’s murder. What on earth is going on?

***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***

There are interesting elements in the plot of THE CAT SITTER’S CRADLE--the appearance and disappearance of Corina, who’s apparently homeless but has $10,000 in her purse; Harwick’s high executive position in Sonnebrook, sufficient to explain his having many enemies (think Enron); Kenny’s story of a disappearing father; how Harwick’s stepson August, cut off from family funds, affords a new $100,000 sports car; the depth of the quarrels within the family; and the resplendent quetzal, not a wild bird blown off course by a storm, but a tame bird with clipped wings. The elements are brought together, but the mystery plot remains a hodgepodge, not an integrated narrative.

At least as much attention goes to Dixie’s continuing on again-off again relationship with Ethan Crane as to the mystery. With the emotional baggage from the death of her husband and daughter, Dixie’s caution at involvement is understandable albeit tedious. Dixie does not come into clear focus as a person. Too many of the series’s continuing characters are included without their having a definite function in the plot.

Sense of place remains outstanding. “Some afternoons on the Key are hot as blue blazes, especially in the summer when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky. The crickets and birds and frogs all take a break, finding cover in the shade and giving their voices a well-deserved rest. Afternoon clouds sneak in off the shore all demure and innocent, but before you know it they let loose with a torrent of rain and lightning bolts, sending golfers and beachcombers dashing for cover. Then, just as quickly as they rolled in, the clouds roll out. The sun shins through again, the laves all sparkle, and the crickets, birds, and frogs start warming up for their evening performance, which usually begins about the same time the sun starts her slow descent into the Gulf.” (132)

THE CAT SITTER’S CRADLE isn’t up to the standard of the earlier books in the series. (C)

Staci McLaughlin’s GOING ORGANIC CAN KILL YOU was a free or inexpensive e-book. It is one of her Blossom Valley mystery series.

Dana Lewis is the first-person narrator of GOING ORGANIC CAN KILL YOU. She’s the marketing director for O’Connell Organic Farm and Spa, owned by Esther McConnell. After nine months’ unemployment and her father’s recent death, Dana must keep the job so that she can remain in Blossom Valley while her mother needs her. During the spa’s opening weekend, while providing clean towels for the guest cabins, she discovers the body of Hollywood producer Maxwell Mendelsohn. He’d been stabbed to death.

I’m giving up at 15%. There’s no story-telling voice. There’s no particular setting. Blossom Valley is neither localized nor described, the only two real locations mentioned being San Jose and Hollywood. If the episode of Wilbur the escaping pig is meant to be humorous, it fails.

None of the characters, including Dana, appeal. They are stereotypes at best, including the zany cook, overbearing manager, low-class maid, and various Hollywood types: publicity-hungry starlet, surgically-enhanced older woman, put-upon assistant, megalomaniac producer. Dana allows everyone to put upon her, chasing the pig, waitressing at lunch, running errands, doing the towel service instead of the maid. She’s also not very smart, spreading the story of Mendelsohn’s murder to the guests before the police can question them.

There’s absolutely nothing in GOING ORGANIC CAN KILL YOU to make me want to know how it turns out. No grade because not finished.

MORTAL MEN is the seventh book in J. J. Salkeld’s Lakeland Murders series featuring the Cumbria Constabulary in Kendal. It was published in e-book format in 2014. Andy Hall has accepted promotion to Detective Superintendent, while Jane Francis is now a Detective Inspector. Detective Constable Keith Iredale, who impressed Hall in the previous case, is now part of Francis’s team, along with Detective Sergeant Ian Mann. They form a believably human, effective investigative unit.

The story opens in January 2000 when Frankie Foster grasses on Matt Somes, John Winder, and John Tyson for the attempted armed robbery and shooting up of a bank. The others refuse to name the shooter, and all three receive longer sentences for using a deadly weapon. Somes commit suicide in prison; Tyson and Winder serve their sentences and return to Troutbeck. In July 2014, someone shoots Frankie Foster twice with a shotgun. Both Tyson and Winder are suspects; both admit no sorrow at his death; both deny killing Foster; neither has an alibi. Jane Francis is SIO on her first murder case. There’s no forensic evidence. Which of the men killed him? Or is there someone else who wanted Foster dead? Also in Kendal, a young woman supposedly sent by the Council is gaining admission to the home of senior citizens on a pretext, then robbing them of jewelry and other small items of value. Iredale is determined to catch her.

The plot is well done, with viewpoint shifting between the continuing characters and the mind of Frankie Foster’s killer. The conclusion is satisfying. The major issue left unresolved is the enquiry into the behavior of ACC Peter Thompson, whom Hall witnessed bullying Will Armstrong, a civilian employee who later committed suicide. Thompson takes early retirement to preserve his pension, but there’s the question of whether Hall’s response to the situation was adequate. There’s also the subplot of Jane Francis’s pregnancy and its effect on their lives and her career.

Characterization is definitely the strong point of this series, and MORTAL MEN is no exception. I admire Salkeld’s ability to create a diverse set of characters who are independent individuals who understand and respect each other and work together well. In Kendal nick, Francis’s team is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. Hall is more in the background than usual: “The old man was feeling his age and superfluous in equal measure. Hall had been in his office all morning, and not a single person had knocked at his door. He’d had e-mail to deal with, plenty of that, but Hall knew that he’d been promoted beyond the point at which what he did made any kind of difference to anything that mattered. He thought about Ray Dixon, his old DC and a man who had spent a fair chunk of each of his working days thinking about retirement, and for the first time Hall began to understand why he did that. It wasn’t that retirement held any particular appeal to Hall, quite the opposite in fact, but this job was beginning to feel like limbo, or like being a ghost, aware of everything that was happening, but unable to influence it in any meaningful way.” Focus is more on Jane Francis and on DC Iredale, who proves his detective ability.

MORTAL MEN is a worthy continuation of a strong series. (B+)

Paul Gitsham’s THE LAST STRAW is the first book in his mystery series featuring newly promoted DCI Warren Jones, taking up n a new posting at Middlesbury, Hertfordshire. It was published in e-book format in 2014.

Jones comes into a touchy situation in Middlesbury CID, his predecessor having been charged with corruption and DI Terry Sutton hostile since he’d expected to get the DCI post. Jones hasn’t settled in when Tom Spencer, a doctoral student at the University of Middle England Department of Biological Sciences, discovers the body of Professor Alan Tunbridge. Tunbridge had been stunned with a blow to the head and his throat slit; he’d bled to death. Only Tunbridge and Spencer had been in the building, and Spencer had been in the PCR room on the opposite end of the building at the relevant time. Plenty of people had reasons to want Tunbridge dead--he made a habit of seducing undergraduate students, including Clara Hemmingway whom he impregnated, then forced to have an abortion; he’s ruined the career prospects of both graduate student Spencer and postdoctoral fellow Antonio Severino by holding up or appropriating their research; he’s planning on using his university research to open his own biotech company, his method for the treatment of antibiotic-resistant diseases literally almost priceless; he’s planning to divorce his wife; he’s sociopathic in his arrogance, the star scientist at the University whose international reputation has protected him from the consequences of his failure as a decent human being. But who killed him, and how?

Often times, the first book in a series runs long as the author establishes the setting and the characters. THE LAST STRAW is no exception. The e-book edition does not have page numbers, but the story read longer than necessary. Some characters are extraneous. That being said, the plot hinges on breaking an alibi, and Gitsham’s method of doing so is cool. Foreshadowing is adequate; the conclusion / epilogue is satisfactory.

Gitsham creates a believable community of professionals in the Middlebury CID: DCI Jones, DI Tony Sutton, DC Karen Hardwick, and DC Gary Hastings. Much of the action is seen from Jones’s perspective with occasional views through Hardwick and Hastings. Jones is realistic in his appraisal of the importance of Tunbridge’s murder: “He could see how it was going to be. This case was a big deal and a lot was resting on his shoulders. It was his first case as a DCI and it looked as though it was going to be sink or swim. He had the deeply uncomfortable feeling that the outcome of this case would set the tone for the rest of his time in Middlesbury.... As if a major incident such as this weren’t enough for him to deal with, now he had to negotiate local politics as well. For the first time since his move, Warren allowed the ever-present whisper of doubt that lurked in the back of his mind speak louder.” Sutton, Hardwick, and Hastings are the three working closest to Jones, but there’s a believable cast of IT analysts, forensics experts, and uniformed officers supporting them. I look forward to getting to know them all.

Gitsham does not greatly develop Middlesbury as a setting, though some sites are memorable: “Situated at the north end of the town centre, the pub [the White Bear] had a large plastic polar bear sitting above the porch-style entrance. Surrounded by neon lights, it might look enticing and exciting in the dark, after a few beers and if small market towns in north Hertfordshire were your sole experience of big city night-life. At one forty-five on a Tuesday afternoon it just seemed seedy to Warren, who was used to somewhat more glamorous drinking establishments on offer in Birmingham or London. The fact that the once-white polar bear was largely covered by the green mould that covered white plastic garden furniture if it was left outside too long further dispelled the illusion.”

THE LAST STRAW is a good introduction to what I hope will be a strong series. (B)