Readingomnivore Reviews

Kashaya,

I'm honored that you would ask me for a review for your book, but I decided when I began posting critiques that I'd not do requests. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, and I'm too old not to be totally honest about my opinions. So rather than take that chance, I review only what I choose to read myself. I hope you will find a good reviewer who'll be able to help you. Best of luck on your writing career.

THE DEEP BLUE ALIBI is the second book in Paul Levine’s legal mystery series featuring Miami attorneys Stephen Solomon and Victoria Lord. It is currently available in e-book format, 2015 edition.

Both Steve and Victoriia are much involved with their families and their pasts in THE DEEP BLUE ALIBI. Without telling his father, retired judge Herbert Solomon who resigned from office and surrendered his license just a step ahead of indictment, Steve has applied for his father’s license to practice law to be reinstated. Victoria’s father’s partner Harold Griffin, after no contact in all the years since Nelson Lord’s suicide, has contacted her to handle some legal work for him. Both have tremendous baggage--Steve to know why his father’s friend Peter Luber had perjured himself and involved Herbert Solomon in a planning commission bribery scheme, and Victoria to know why her father committed suicide without leaving any note or message for her. Neither Herbert Solomon nor Irene Lord, aka The Queen, is best pleased by the actions. But Hal Griffin crashes his boat Force Majuere IV into the beach, with himself unconscious, hit in the head, and Ben Stubbs, a Washington bureaucrat from the Environmental Protection Agency, dying from a speargun shot to his chest. Plus $100,000 in hundred-dollar bills blowing about, out of the wreckage. Stubbs had been in the Keys to give final approval for Griffin’s multi-hundred-millions floating hotel / casino / resort to be constructed off Paradise Key, in the heart of a federally-protected marine sanctuary. The development is being fought by local environmentalists. Do they want the Oceania project stopped bad enough to commit murder? Solomon and Lord, then Victoria alone, defend Griffin on the charge of murdering Stubbs.

More of the 465 pages in THE DEEP BLUE ALIBI deal with Steve and Victoria’s individual baggage and the future of their personal and professional relationships than with the murder mystery. A minimum of fifty pages could have been cut without damaging the thrust of either story line. Levine is particularly devious in his concealment of the identity of the killer, setting the person up with appropriate background and personality but revealing few actions that arouse suspicion. The personal story lines resolve believably.

Part of the pleasure of this series is Levine’s use of two very different characters, Steve and Victoria, who nevertheless form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. “No way was [Victoria] going to miss the orange fireball dip into the sea. She loved the eternal rhythm of day into night, the sun rising up from the Atlantic, setting in the Gulf. Day after day, year after year. What dependability. She doubted Steve understood that. If he had his way, the sun would zigzag across the peninsula, stopping for a beer in Islamorada.” (2) Because so much is character driven, this is a series best read in order. It’s pleasant to see the growth and increasing confidence in Bobby Solomon, the high-functioning autistic nephew Steve is rearing.

Levine is good with humor. Steve’s carrying an anatomically-correct female doll into court in defending The Beav, a “gentleman’s club,” against an elderly client who sues for injuries sustained in a jello-wrestling match with a bikinied woman, along with the subsequent courtroom scene are worth the price of the book. He’s also good with creating a sense of place. “Answering Waddle’s questions, [Helene Hendricks] appeared comfortable, slouching a bit, almost relaxed. If she folded into a protective ball when Victoria stepped up, she’d be spraying mosquitos by the afternoon.... The first people who filed into the [jury] box were typical Key West. A retired naval officer, a time-share saleswoman, a cigar roller, a shrimper, a tattoo parlor owner, a pole dance instructor, and someone who called himself a ‘pharmaceutical tester.’ ...(‘I just test the stuff my buds make in their garage.’) ... Then there’d been a wingwoman, who earned commissions accompanying men to bars and introducing them to women. Or in Key West to other men. There was the city rooster wrangler, a man hired to keep the free-ranging chickens to a manageable level. Like Ms. Hendricks, he was a government employee. Then there were two failed businessmen, one who went bankrupt with a shoe shine parlor at the beach and another who lost everything with an ill-conceived fast-food restaurant called ‘Escargot-to-Go.” (335-6)

I recommend both the series and THE DEEP BLUE ALIBI. (A-)

VINTAGE MURDER is the fifth book in Ngaio Marsh’s long-running Roderick Alleyn mystery series. It was originally published in 1937 and became available as part of an inexpensive e-book bundle a few years ago. It’s set in Middleton, a fictional town somewhere south of Ohakuna on the North Island of New Zealand.

Chief Detective Inspector Roderick Alleyn, on holiday incognito as “Mr. Allen” from a helpful mistake on the passenger list, is traveling along with the Carolyn Dacres English Comedy Company, the most important touring company of Alfred Meyer and George Mason’s Incorporated Playhouses Company. Meyer and leading lady Carolyn Dacres are married. Just outside Ohakuna in the early hours of the morning, someone tries to kick Meyer off the train, literally. After opening night on Carolyn Dacres’s birthday, Meyer has planned a party, the climax of which will be the graceful descent of a jeroboam of champagne from the heights into a carefully-prepared artistic nest on the dinner table on stage. The rigging has been done and the delivery well practiced, but on the night, the huge bottle hits Meyer and kills him. Alleyn’s anonymity quickly goes by the board as he works with Inspector Wade of the local police and uncovers the murderer.

In some ways, VINTAGE MURDER is a very typical Golden Age mystery novel. It is plot driven, with the solution depending on an ingenious method of having an apparently solid alibi while still evading detection going to and from the murder scene. Characterization is nothing like as full as in most good modern mysteries, though Alleyn is analytical about himself: “He was reminded most vividly of his only other experience behind the scenes. ‘Is my mere presence in the stalls,’ he thought crossly, ‘a cue for homicide? May I not visit the antipodes without elderly theatre magnates having their heads bashed in by jeroboams of champagne before my very eyes? And the answer being ‘No’ to each of these questions, can I not get away quickly without nosing into the why and wherefore?’ He put on his gloves and began to climb the ladder. ‘Again the answer is ‘No.’ The truth of the matter is I’m an incurable nosy parker. Detect I must, if I can.’ “ Members of the acting company are standard types from Marsh’s other theatrical mystery novels.

Another characteristic of many of the Golden Age mystery novels is the casual racial prejudice expressed by white characters. Inspector Wade tells Alleyn about Dr. Rangi Te Pokiha (Oxford and St Thomas Hospital, London): “...there are Maoris and Maoris. Ta Pokiha’s high caste. His mother was a princess and his father a fine old chief. The doctor’s had an English college education--he’s ninety percent civilized. All the same, there’s the odd ten percent. It’s there, no matter how civilized they are. See him when he goes into one of the back-country pas and you’ll find a difference. See him when he goes crook! By gen, I did once, when he gave evidence in a case of--well, it was an unsavory case and the doctor felt strongly about it. His eyes fairly flashed. He looked as if he might go off the deep end and dance a haku [war dance] in court.”

Marsh’s atmospheric descriptions of the New Zealand bush create a stronger sense of place than in many novels contemporary with VINTAGE MURDER. It’s definitely worth the time. (B+)

For those who've followed my reviews, you know how seldom I consider a book a solid A--as old English teacher, a solid A means I don't see much way the book could have been improved. This one is an A+.

Frances Mayes’s UNDER MAGNOLIA: A SOUTHERN MEMOIR was originally published in 2014 and issued in e-book format in 2015. It consists of her reflections on the South and growing up in Fitzgerald, Georgia, determined to leave it at the first opportunity, anxious to be perceived as “normal.” UNDER MAGNOLIA would be an excellent companion read to The Help by Kathryn Stockett or to Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie.

It’s impossible to summarize UNDER MAGNOLIA, full as it is of meditation on her dysfunctional family. “Once, I ran away. I stayed in a culvert all night, just a block from home. When I returned, blank and tired the next morning, I felt grimly triumphant. I expected the state patrol, my mother properly distraught, my father taking vows new to act up again. No one had noticed that I was missing.” Frances Mayes was nine or ten years old.

Mayes evokes the South Georgia of her childhood in wonderfully atmospheric description. “The light on the islands is white, reflecting off the white sand dunes and oyster shell roads that can shred your feet. In late evening, after a long twilight, the sky darkens quickly, like a room someone walks out of while holding up a lantern. Even after the fringed tops of pines disappear into the dark, the bright sand holds down the light that suffuses the air with soft silver. Sky and ocean disappear into each other. Twisted coastal oaks draped with Spanish moss make the landscape doleful or romantic, depending on one’s frame of mind. In The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash maintained that the blue air, softening all edges, gave us our ambiguous ways of seeing things.”

Mayes attributes her love for Tuscany to her Southern heritage. “One reason I felt immediately at home in Tuscany was that certain strong currents of life reminded me of the South. The warmth of people and their astonishing generosity felt so familiar, and I knew well that identical y’all come hospitality. ‘It’s unhealthy to eat alone,’ our neighbor in Italy told us early on. ‘We’re cooking every night so come on over.’ I learned that the attitudes toward food were not an external custom, but, as in the South, a big cultural clue about how people weave together their lives.” “The complex interconnections of family and friends, the real caring for one another, the incessant talk, emphasis on ancestors, the raucous humor, the appreciation of the bizarre, the storytelling, the fatalism, the visiting, the grand occasions--in both Tuscany and the South these traits offer an elaborate continuity for solitary individuals. Deeply fatalistic, Southerners, again like Tuscans, can be the most private people on the globe.”

No account of growing up or living in the South can be considered complete without the centrality of food as a social bond, and Mayes does not disappoint. “Daily life in Hillsborough draws me close to my earliest, best connections to the South. My father invited his office workers and other friends on Friday to our backyard, where everyone ate smothered quail and grits souffle, Willie Bell’s crunchy biscuits, potato salad, peach pickles she and my mother put up, and platters of pound cake, Pecan Icebox Cookies, and Frankye’s Chocolate Icebox Cake made with ladyfingers and cloudlike mousse. On certain Sundays, our church offered dinner on the grounds and my mother would bake a stupendous Lane Cake or, what still makes me feel deep lust, her famous three-layer Caramel Cake. Daddy preferred her Lemon Cheesecake--not a cheesecake at all but cloud-soft layers of butter cake, with thick curd filling that must have reminded someone of cheese. Maybe it’s the food of the South that makes its children long so for home.”

UNDER MAGNOLIA: A SOUTHERN MEMOIR is beautifully written, a profound rumination on the influences that shape our lives and our region. Most highly recommended. (A+)

Amy Reade’s THE GHOSTS OF PEPPERNELL MANOR is available as a free or inexpensive e-book published in 2015. Carleigh Warner is an expert restorer of historic homes, called to Peppernell Manor, some fifteen miles out of Charleston on the Ashley River, to do repairs and reburbishing on her friend Evie Peppernell’s family home. She’s temporarily left her business in Chicago to live at Peppernell Manor with her toddler daughter Lucy while doing the work. She soon finds that the family is divided. The house belongs to Cora-Camille Chadwick-Peppernell, who wants it restored to its former antebellum glory. Son Graydon, grandson Heath, and granddaughter Evie want her to do as she pleases with her house; daughter-in-law Vivian and grandson Harlan want to bring in outside investors who will then take over management and run Peppernell Manor as a tourist attraction. Cora-Camilles daughter Ruby and the housekeeper Phyllis, whose five-great grandmother was a slave at Peppernell Manor, oppose both the restoration and Harlan’s plans. Carleigh receives an anonymous threatening call, then someone tries twice to run her down with a car, both of which the family downplays. Cora-Camille tells her family that she’s considering changing her will, leaving Peppernell Manor to the State of South Carolina, to be run as an educational center. Then Cora-Camille takes to bed with what’s diagnosed finally as influenza and pneumonia, but she insists on remaining at home.

I’m giving up at 24%. The characters, including Carleigh, are little more than names. Carleigh is standard romantic suspense heroine. She doesn’t even report the attempts to run her down to the police. There are rather generic descriptions of the Lowcountry area, but they don’t add up to a sense of place. The writing style is simple declarative sentences. Major problem is time line on projected renovation work, most of which Carleigh is doing alone. She begins in late August and commits to having the foyer, living room, dining room, withdrawing room, and ball room all completed in time for Christmas entertaining. This includes repairing plaster ceilings and moldings; stripping and repairing walls and woodwork; painting and/or wall-papering; and refinishing floors. It’s an impossible task for one person within that time and not the way restoration specialists usually work.

THE GHOSTS OF PEPPERNELL MANOR reads like one of the early romantic suspense novels of Mary Stewart or Dorothy Eden, only not so well written. No grade because not finished.

THE DANTE CONNECTION is the second book in Estelle Ryan’s mystery series involving Dr. Genevieve Lenard, autistic expert on nonverbal communication and recognition of patterns and connections between events. It was published in e-book format in 2015.

THE DANTE CONNECTION features the same cast of major characters as THE GAUGIN CONNECTION: Gevevieve; her boss Phillip Rousseau; Col. Manny Millard, who’s now with Interpol; Colin Frey, art thief and secret Interpol agent; his gigantic friend Vinnie; and computer hacker-conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Francine. Some six months after the events of the first case, after Vinnie and Colin have disappeared out of her life for over four months and Francine for several weeks, Genevieve is astonished when a badly beaten Francine shows up at her apartment, asking for help and saying she’s killed two men to escape. Francine insists on calling in Colin, who’s still recovering from an undercover Interpol assignment that resulted in his being tortured by Tomasz Kubanov (the criminal mastermind from THE GAUGIN COLLECTION). Rescued by Vinnie when he didn’t make appointed check-ins, Colin has bought the apartment next door to Genevieve but not contacted her in an effort to protect her. In the meantime, Rousseau asks her to look at a series of art robberies that should have been impossible, that turn out to be part of another master plan of Kubanov’s, this time directly involving Genevieve and her friends in his scheme for revenge.

***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***

These are interesting individuals, but the plot leaves me uncomfortable. I’ve always considered the criminal mastermind subset of mysteries as less than satisfactory. My least favorite of the Sherlock Holmes stories are those involving Professor Moriarty. To have Kubanov escape again, even though his revenge scheme is uncovered and thwarted, seems a crude device intended to be sure that the reader buys the next book in the series. Yes, I’m aware that there are indeed criminal masterminds who never get caught, but I still prefer some sense that justice has been done.

Ryan devotes more attention to Genevieve’s emotional transformation in THE DANTE CONNECTION as to the various layers of Kubanov’s plots. While I’m unfamiliar with the nuances of the spectrum of autistic behaviors, Genevieve’s reconnecting with the group and her growing affection for Colin seem too facile to be believable. I’ve already downloaded the next book in the series, so I’ll probably read it eventually, but I’m much less impressed with THE DANTE CONNECTION than with the first book. There’s even less sense of place. (B)

A HALF REMEMBERED LIFE is the ninth book in J. J. Salkeld’s Lakeland Murders series. It was published in e-book format in 2015.

Andy Hall has retired from the Cumbria Constabulary and is contentedly acting as house husband and caregiver to young daughter Grace; his domestic partner, Detective Inspector Jane Francis, is up for promotion, which Superintendent Sperry will not recommend because he thinks she devotes too much of her team’s resources to capturing violent criminals; Detective Sergeant Ian Mann, attacked by Paul Macrae in the course of a routine inquiry, is suspended because he defended himself and knocked Macrae literally through a door. Paul Spedding, another older father in the children’s play group, approaches Andy as a retired cop with the story of his house being watched. Spedding tells about his early days when he was an environmental activist involved in a long-term protest against a proposed open-pit coal mine in St. Bees in 1985; he and Cam Donald were both undercover cops who’d infiltrated the movement. Cam Donald was killed in what was ruled an accident; the driver of the digger that crushed him was specifically exonerated, but Stan Grieg committed suicide some months after the protest ended. Spedding had not been able to convince his superiors that Donald had been murdered, so he quit the force. Why now is someone watching his house? Are he and his family in danger? As Andy and the suspended Ian begin poking around, they become convinced that there has indeed been a cover-up, one that continues.

***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***

In A HALF REMEMBERED LIFE, events unfold slowly, and there’s no concrete evidence to bring anyone to justice, though it’s clear that Hall has indeed discovered what happened so long ago. The person responsible for the deaths of three men walks away free. While this is often a realistic ending, it’s not a very satisfying one. Jane Francis plays little role, except her career is hostage for Andy’s good behavior in the matter of Vinny Battersby. The series could be improved greatly if attention focused on Jane’s cases now, with Andy relegated to the sidelines, as is appropriate for his role in retirement.

Characters are not much developed, especially that of Vinny Battersby, the villain of the piece. Once again, officers in the police above the level of Detective Inspectors almost all appear more concerned with public relations and budgets than with arresting criminals. Not only are their policies and procedures generally counterproductive, they actively hamper those who’re trying to protect the public. Sense of place is missing.

I hate to see a series that I’ve enjoyed very much decline in quality. A HALF REMEMBERED LIFE is far off the previous standard. (C)

Henry Kertan Simpson’s title A SPLENDID LITTLE MURDER: DEATH ON LA TEMPESTAD is a reference to President Theodore Roosevelt who supposedly hunted on the island off Southern California in the early twentieth century. The island has continued as a hunting and vacation destination for Washington’s power politicians to the present day. The protagonists of the book are Inspector Edward Lane of the Federal Police and Special Agent Miranda Bell, an employee of the Fish and Game Service who’s completing a three-month training rotation with the police. It was published in e-book format in 2012.

Gina Raines, executive assistant to Representative Alonso B. Duncan, is found shot to death in the hunting lodge on La Tempestad. The FBI office in San Francisco is busy, so the Federal Police send in Lane and Bell. The island is accessible only by small plane or by a multi-hour boat ride, so it’s highly likely that the killer is still on the island. Most of it is occupied by a federal Marine Mammal Sanctuary run by biologist Fred Hale; much of the rest is federal land rented by the Stockton Cattle Company, represented by ranch director Tony Stockton. Besides his wife and the guests, the remaining inhabitants are Mexican vaqueros who work the ranch, some of whom are ex-cons. Duncan, obnoxious and inclined to throw his weight around, is the last person known to have seen Gina alive.

I’m giving up on La Tempestad at 29%. A SPLENDID LITTLE MURDER, despite the allusions to TR, is just too generic. Characterization is minimal, even less for the protagonists than for some of the island’s people. The plot has little to draw the reader in, with no sense of what the motive for Gina’s death may be. There’s no sense of place, including the exact location of the island. Initial references and allusions to its weather place it somewhere off San Francisco, then Lane tells his daughter to visualize Catalina Island. Except for the FBI, Simpson names no specific federal agencies. Verisimilitude is sadly lacking.

No grade because not finished. Not recommended unless you like groping around in the mist and wind like Bell and Lane.

I think I may be hitting another dry run on choosing mysteries.

Cricket McRae’s LYE IN WAIT is the first book in her Home Crafting mystery series. It was published in e-book format in 2009.

Sophie Mae Reynolds lives with her college roommate Meghan Bly and Megan’s ten-year-old daughter Erin and runs her small business Winding Road Bath Products out of its basement. When neighborhood handyman Walter Hanover dies in her workroom from drinking lye, Sophie Mae’s emotional baggage from the unexplained suicide of her brother Bobby Lee kicks in, and she is determined to try to find out what led to Walter’s death.

I’m giving up at 12%. Frankly, I find no attraction to characters, plot, or setting. To this point, setting is the strongest element in the story and that consists almost entirely of Pacific Northwest precipitation. Sophie Mae’s questioning of Walter’s elderly mother may be presented as concern, but it reads to me as sheer blatant nosiness. LYE IN WAIT seems to involve many of the more objectionable cliches of the cozy mystery genre, including the presence of a hunky detective for a potential romantic interest.

No grade because not finished.

THE GOSPEL MAKERS is one of Anthea Fraser’s mystery series featuring DCI David Webb of the Shillingham, Broadshire, Constabulary. Originally published in 1994, it was issued in e-book format in 2015.

Many seemingly unconnected things are happening as THE GOSPEL MAKERS opens. Hannah James, Webb’s significant other, is Acting Head of the Ashbourne School for Girls while the Head is on sabbatical in Canada; she’s dealing with Miss Mattie Hendrix, an outstanding English teacher who dresses like a bag lady, not upholding the prestige of the school. DI Nina Petrie has received an invitation to a meeting of a new religious group that’s gaining strength in Shillinham, the Church of the Final Revelation, which preaches the imminent destruction of mankind through a second Flood. Hannah’s friend Dilys Haywood is providing house room for her god-daughter’s son and his nanny, and she’s finding Sarah Baines a disconcerting guest. Two girls from Ashbourne largely neglected by their parents, Stephanie French and Marina Chase, attend the same meeting of the Revelationists as Nina Petrie. And David Webb answers a suspicious death call when an unidentified man, apparently from France, is found dead in the King’s Head Hotel. Who is he, and what’s going on?

The plot in THE GOSPEL MAKERS is slow to develop because so many characters know only a bit about one aspect of the problem. Experienced readers will probably put the events together much faster. It’s hard to say more without doing a spoiler, but the resolution resembles several real-world situations in the past twenty years.

The number of characters in THE GOSPEL MAKERS greatly exceeds the minimum required to move the plot, and characterization is minimal. Even the protagonists receive little attention. DI Nina Petrie as the newest addition to the Shillingham CID is the most described, but her susceptibility is not explained by her background or experience. Sense of place is lacking.

THE GOSPEL MAKERS is at best average, not up to the caliber of most of the other books in the series. (C)

Ngaio Marsh’s OVERTURE TO DEATH is one of her long-running series featuring Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard. Originally published in 1939, OVERTURE TO DEATH was issued in an inexpensive e-book bundle several years ago.

There’s much emotional upset in Pen Cuckoo, Dorset, when OVERTURE TO DEATH opens. The young squire Henry Jernigham is in love with the rector’s daughter Dinah Copeland. The match is opposed by Squire Jocelyn Jernigham, who needs his son to marry a wealthy woman in order to restore the estate; by the rector Walter Copeland who thinks Dinah too young and who doesn’t want to go against the Squire’s wishes; and by the Jernighams’ cousin Eleanor Prentice who lives at Pen Cuckoo and fancies herself the lady of the manor, not about to be displaced by another woman, especially one who’s an actress. Miss Prentice is locked in unacknowledged though mortal combat with Miss Idris Campanula for social leadership of the parish and for the hand of Reverend Copeland. Dr. William Templett, local physician and police surgeon, is embroiled with a femme fatale newcomer Mrs. Selia Ross, with gossip spreading. Yet this group agrees to produce a play Shop Windows to raise money for a new piano for the church hall. A village boy rigs a practical joke to discomfit the person, expected to be Miss Prentice, playing the overture to the play; however, Miss Campanula is the literal last-minute substitute pianist. She’s shot dead by an automatic used to replace Georgie Biggins’s water pistol. Who was the intended victim, and who used Georgie’s rigging to commit murder?

Marsh does an excellent line in neurotic, middle-aged spinsters suffering from sexual obsessions and/or religious fervor. OVERTURE TO DEATH gives the reader two, equally nasty. She also includes for good measure the “other woman,” the sexy, manipulating outsider who’s usually up to something with a married man. Most of the characterization is indirect and concentrates more on the people in Chipping and Pen Cuckoo than on the detectives. Nigel Bathgate is involved but not central to the investigation.

Marsh uses atmosphere both to establish a sense of place in OVERTURE TO DEATH and to establish character. “It’s a fine thing to be abroad on Dorset hills on a clear winter’s dawn. Henry went round the west wing of Pen Cuckoo. The gravel crunched under his shoes and the dim box-borders smelt in a garden that was oddly remote. Familiar things seemed mysterious as if the experience of the night had made strangers of them. The field was rimmed with silver, the spinney on the far side was a company of naked trees locked in a deep sleep from which the sound of footsteps among the dead leaves and twigs could not awaken them. The hillside smelt of cold earth and frosty stones. As Henry climbed steeply upwards, it was as if he left the night behind him down in Pen Cuckoo. On Cloudyfold, the dim shapes took on some resolute form and became rocks, bushes and posts, expectant of the day. The clamor of faraway cock-crows rose vaguely from the valley like the overlapping echoes of dreams, and with this sound came the human smell of wood-smoke. Henry reached the top of Cloudyfold and looked down at the vale of Pen Cuckoo. His breath a cold mist in front of his face, his fingers were cold and his eyes watered, but he felt like a god as he surveyed his own little world.”

As with most mysteries of its age, OVERTURE TO DEATH is plot driven. An experienced reader may discern the killer’s identity and motive ahead of the detectives. It’s debatable whether the Rube Goldberg arrangement by which the murder is committed would actually work. It’s doubtful whether a police surgeon present at the murder with enough motive to be a person of interest to the police would be allowed to conduct the autopsy on the victim. But Marsh makes it easy to suspend belief and go with the story. (B+)

Lorna Penfold’s FROM SEQUINS TO SUNSHINE: LORNA’S LIFE IN SPAIN, YEAR ONE was published in e-book format in 2013. It is the story of the move from Brighton to Montero, Andalucia, Spain, of Lorna Penfold, her partner Alan, and her daughter Frankie in 2007. Lorna goes from dance teacher to alpaca farmer.

I’m giving up at 21%. There’s little to evoke a sense of place. The events are pedestrian, revealing little about the expats and less about the locals. There’s no humor. There’s nothing so far about the alpacas except the females’ names and the males to which they have been bred. The photographs are not identified and are not viewable on a Kindle. Formatting is poorly done, with no paragraph indentations and no extra space between paragraphs. Most pages are a solid block of text.

Sorry, but life’s too short. No grade because not finished.

LAST OF THE SUMMER WINE, Vintage 2005, is the latest DVD issue to date of the long-running British sit-com. As before, the series since the death of Bill Owen, who for so many years anchored the show as William (Compo) Simmonite is not as strong, but to true fans, it’s still way better than most else. The Norman Clegg (Peter Sallis) and Herbert “Truly of the Yard” Truelove (Frank Thornton) characters take lesser part in the more physical aspects of the plots, while Alvin (Brian Murphy), Billy Hardcastle (Keith Clifford), and Entwhistle (Bert Kwouk) hand most of the stunts.

LAST OF THE SUMMER WINE, Vintage 2005, includes ten episodes plus the 2005 Christmas special which PBS doesn’t broadcast. The season opened with one of my favorite episodes, “The Swan Man of Ilkley,” in which Bobby Ball plays Lennie, from the pickle factory, who’s going to make a reputation for himself as the basis for an best-selling autobiography. To this end, he’s floating the canal in a large inflatable swan boat. (A-) “Watching the Clock” has Clegg proving to Old McDermott that from a certain vantage point in a local tree, the clock at Tollgate Church is visible; most of the action consists of Clegg getting up, then back down the tree. (A) “Has Anyone Seen a Peruvian Wart?” is another variant on Billy’s trying to get rid of his wife’ sister; notorious womanizer Crowcroft is lured into courting Nora Batty, based on her fruitcake (the reason the Vikings raided Yorkshire was fruitcake), to train for Billy’s sister. (A)

“Hermione (take the short course)” has Smiler mourning loud and long over the lost of girlfriend Hermione, who lasted less than one date; Clegg’s “Do Not Disturb” sign draws a large crowd, and the gang convincing Howard and Marina that they’re under observation by a detective. (B+) “Who is that Mouse in the Poetry Group?” introduces Marina’s poem “What is Love?” to discussion with newly intellectualized Smiler, while Clegg pulls tourists’ legs with discourse on “ancient fertility figures” (the gang playing at statues on the hillside.) (B+) “Available for Weddings” involves setting up Smiler’s great Cadillac gunboat of a car as wedding transport in Auntie Wainright’s new wedding planning scheme. She’s also cited as evidence that the original Dracula was a Yorkshireman, Josiah Draculathwaite, her relative. (B+)

“The McDonaghs of Jamison Street” involves the gang in episodes trying to find what became of Mavis McDonagh who, years before, might have been a possibility for Smiler’s true love. (A-) “The Afterthoughts of a Co-Op Manager” has Cleggy trying to remember the name of the 1937 manager of the Co-Op, whom he cordially disliked. Trying to find it out involves finding a tie with Marina, and the gang convinces her she should remain faithful to Ronald Pillsworth, who disappeared to Australia years before. Turns out the manager tricked Clegg by serving well and dying in World War II, earning a M.C. (A) “Lot No. 8” involves speculation about the contents of an auction lot bought unseen by Auntie Wainwright and the gang’s use of the wooden coffins it contains. (B+) “Little Orphan Howard” reveals Clegg’s mischief-making nature when he sends Howard into a depression, convinced that Howard’d been abandoned on a doorstep by his mother. (A)

The 2005 Christmas Special, “Merry Entwhistle and Jackson Day,” is another slice of life adventure as the gang putters about during the holidays. Much involves Smiler, dressed as Father Christmas, riding around town in the back of Enwhistle’s truck, advertising Auntie Wainwright’s new Santa’s Grotto. The policemen see him and jump to conclusions that he’s a body being transported. Howard comes up with empty pool-cue container as part of an elaborate plot to get out of the house. (A-)

Well worth the time. LAST OF THE SUMMER WINE, Vintage 2005, overall (A-)

Lawrence Durrell’s BITTER LEMONS OF CYPRESS is his memoir of life on Cyprus immediately before and during the movement toward the devastating civil war. Since Durrell served as press secretary to British government, he is well placed to comment on events. There’s a sad inevitability about the progression. No one--British, Cyrpriot, Greek, or Turkish--seems to want to interfere with way of life on Cyprus but, forces of nationalism, colonial inertia, and “ethnic identity” build uncontrollable tensions.

BITTER LEMONS OF CYPRESS contains some of the most beautiful descriptions of place that I’ve read. “The month or so of spring weather with its promise of summer to follow proved fraudulent. One day we woke to a sky covered in ugly festoons of black cloud and saw drift upon drift of silver needles like arrows falling upon the ramparts of Kyrenia castle. Thunder clamored and rolled, andhapi the grape-blue semi-darkness of the sea was bitten out in magnesium flares as the lightning clawed at us from Turkey like a family of dragons. The stone floors turned damp and cold, the gutters brimmed and mumbled all day as they poured a cascade of rain into the streets. Below us the sea dashed huge waves across the front where not a week ago we had been sitting in shorts and sandals, drinking coffee and ouzo, and making plans for the summer. It was a thrilling change, for one could feel the luxuriant grass fattening under the olives, and the spring flowers unwrapping their delicate petals on the anemone-starred slopes below Chiapini.”

I’m not going to finish BITTER LEMONS OF CYPRESS, so I will assign no grade. However, for evocative writing and an informed view on the Cyprus situation of the 1950s, it’s unsurpassed. Highly recommended.

DEAD WITH THE WIND is the second book in Miranda James’s Southern Ladies mystery series featuring elderly sisters Miss An’gel and Miss Dickce Ducote of Athens, Mississippi. It was published in e-book and print editions in 2015.

Miss An’gel and Miss Dickce are in St. Ignatiusville, Louisiana, to assist in and attend the wedding of Sondra Delevan, daughter of Miss An’gel’s god-daughter Jacqueline Champlain Delevan Mims. The Ducotes are cousins of Mireille Champlain, matriarch of Willowbanks. They’re accompanied by their ward Benjy, Labradoodle Peanut, and Abyssinian Endora. Willowbanks is not a happy house. Sondra is a massively spoiled brat who’s marrying to gain access to her inheritance from her father; Lance Perigord, her fiance, is gay, physically beautiful, and intellectually challenged. Trey Mims, Sondra’s step-brother and father of her four-year-old daughterTippy, is infuriated at the idea of the marriage; Horace Mims, Jacqueline’s husband, needs massive infusions of money to save his business; housekeeper Estelle Winfield is rude and inclined to blackmail; family attorney Richmond Thurman seems omnipresent. When Sondra refuses to wear the heirloom Champlain wedding gown and destroys it, Mireille suffers a heart attack from which she dies, and someone throws Sondra off her balcony into a fierce storm, an apparent repeat of a ante bellum tragedy.

***POSSIBLE SPOILERS***

So much bothers me about DEAD WITH THE WIND that it’s hard to know where to begin. There is little sense of place. Southern story-telling voice, speech patterns, attitudes and events associated with large society family weddings in the South are all missing. Besides the inhabitants of Willowbanks, no other relatives besides the Ducotes are mentioned. Lance Perigord had never been to the main house; Lance’s mother is alluded to but is not a character. St. Ignatiusville is not located except for being close to Baton Rouge, where Mireille is taken after her heart attack.

It’s unusual for me to complain about the lack of characters, but the cast in DEAD WITH THE WIND is too small to generate much suspense. The depiction of Lance Perigord is in poor taste considering his presentation as intellectually challenged and his eventual role in the plot. Sondra’s daughter Tippy presents a horrendously off-putting lisp. None of the characters, including the Ducotes, is much developed.

The role of the police in DEAD WITH THE WND is almost nonexistent, which is unlikely in one of the leading families in a small town, especially when the day before, someone had cut the brake lines on Sondra’s new car, causing a serious accident. The biggest disappointment is the positively Victorian plot twist of a fake death and a confrontation scene in which the victim arises from her casket to denounce her killer. It seems as if, “okay, I got my 275+ pages, how can I get out of this book a.s.a.p.?”

DEAD WITH THE WIND isn’t worth the time. (F)

FELLOWSHIP OF FEAR is one of Aaron Elkins’s Gideon Oliver mystery novels. It was originally published n 1982 and recently reissued in e-book format. Oliver is an associate professor of anthropology at Northern California State University.

Two years following the death of his wife Nora, Gideon Oliver takes a semester’s leave to teach in Europe as a visiting fellow for the United States Overseas College program, which provides college courses for American soldiers and civilian workers. He’s a bit concerned when he discovers that his two immediate predecessors had come to sticky ends--one had been killed in an auto accident in Sicily, and the other simply disappeared. He’s drawn into a shadowy world when he agrees to report to the NATO Security Office if anyone approaches him to ask for information or to carry materials as he travels from base to base. The Soviets have some major maneuver in the works, and no one seems to know what it is. Gideon is attacked, his rooms searched, personal items stolen, while he’s in the dark about who’s after him, what they want, and why.

The plot in FELLOWSHIP OF FEAR is one of the major themes of literature through the ages--the ordinary man (though Gideon is smarter than most) thrown into a dangerous situation about which he knows little, forced to fend for himself. Elkins does it well. There’s a bit of irony when Gideon finds out the method of moving the information and the identity of the courier.

None of the characters seem particularly realistic as human beings, but they’re mostly pleasant and reasonably described. Elkins’s Gideon makes readers’ identification with the protagonist easy. Much of his characterization is carried through atmosphere: “When they approached the Lorelei, the great rock that juts into the Rhine like the prow of a stupendous ship, the loudspeaker squawked twice, announced ‘Die Lorelei,’ and emtted a series of hollow, tinny noises that were barely recognizable as Silcher’s music to Heine’s famous poem. At first it distressed Gideon. He had loved the song since his high school German class and he found the scratchy rendering tasteless and commercial. The passengers paid no attention; they continued to shout, laugh, and pour huge glasses of wine and beer. Then, as they neared the great rock, the clamor died down. One by one, the Germans softly took up the song so that as they passed the towering cliff face, the mournful, surpassingly sweet melody enveloped the ship like a sad, silvery cloud. Gideon was too overcome by the beauty of it to sing. Others were weeping as they sang, and he felt the tears come to his own eyes.” (238-9)

There’s nothing wrong with FELLOWSHIP OF FEAR, but it seems dated. The world has moved on. (B)

Robert V. Remini’s THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS: ANDREW JACKSON AND AMERICA’S FIRST MILITARY VICTORY is a brief account of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 and its impact on the character and thought of the nineteenth-century United States. Remini is the premiere twentieth-century biographer of Andrew Jackson, so his use of source materials is outstanding and his four-page bibliography offers multiple choices for additional reading. His story-telling skills make the information accessible, THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS offers multiple detailed maps, a timeline, and illustrations of major figures and events.

The War of 1812 against Great Britain was largely fought because the United States got no respect from European powers France, England, and Spain, locked as they were in the first the wars of the French Revolution, then the Napoleonic Wars. None recognized American freedom of the seas, and Americans knew that the British and Spanish incited hostile natives against the Southern frontier. But prior to the Creek War fought in 1814, American force of arms meant little. The United States was badly divided on the issue of the war, the coast was blockaded by the Royal Navy, Washington had been captured and burned. But with the victory at Horseshoe Bend, General Andrew Jackson and the army he commanded were freed to move to Louisiana to defend against the British plan to drive up the Mississippi to capture New Orleans, then proceed up the Mississippi Valley to rendezvous with another force moving south from Canada, effectively cutting off the trans-Mississippi from the United States and controlling Western commerce through control of New Orleans.

No one thought New Orleans defensible. Part of the United States for only a decade, New Orleans was the most heterogenous population in the country in all ways: religions, races, language, morals, classes, ethnicity, political allegiances. The British confidently expected the citizens would rise to welcome them; the British command didn’t think the city physically defensible against their gunboats and the strong contingent of battle-hardened troops under one of the Duke of Wellington’s most successful proteges Major General Sir Edward Michael Pakenham, the Duke’s own brother-in-law.

Jackson’s charisma and iron will, the support of the people of New Orleans, supplies, men, and gunnery expertise from the pirates of Barataria led by Jean Laffite and his brother Dominic You, and the swampy terrain and the Mississippi River defended the city. On 8 January 1815 Jackson’s forces cut to ribbons the attacking British in possibly the most one-sided battle in American history. A rag-tag and bobtail army of frontiersmen, militia, free men of color, pirates, volunteers, sailors, marines, citizen soldiers, and a handful of U. S. Army regulars destroyed some of the best British regiments, killing two commanding generals and wounding the third so severely he had to had over command. Ironically, the Treaty of Ghent had been signed in December 1814, but word had not arrived in America. The Battle of New Orleans did not affect the peace terms--status quo antebellum--but it proved that Americans could fight the best and win. It also showed that a polyglot population could work together and put common good before personal preference, a great reassurance that the American experiment could work.

Well-written, flowing, full of fascinating characters--I highly recommend THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS. (A)

Susan Furlong’s PEACHES AND SCREAM is the first in her new Georgia Peach cozy mystery series featuring Nola Mae Harper, whose parents are peach farmers in Cays Mill, Georgia. It was published in e-book format in 2015.

Nola, who left Cays Mill immediately after high school graduation for an alluded-to dark reason, is back to look after the Harper orchard while her parents celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a three-week Caribbean cruise. Formerly a field worker for an international humanitarian organization, she’s been downsized to a desk job in Atlanta and must face the coming change. In addition, pregnant older sister Ida Jean Shackleford and her husband have marital problems, and he’s majorly stressed over a bank loan he’d authorized that may have been fraudulent. The orchard is in financial trouble about which Nola’d known nothing. When Nola finds the body of Ben Wakefield, the lumber man whose loan is Hollis’s problem, Hollis is the immediate suspect, even though plenty of people had issues with Wakefield.

I’m giving up at 31%. PEACHES AND SCREAM is another cozy set in the South but lacking both Southern sense of place and Southern voice. Even the old moonshiner doesn’t sound like a Southerner! To create an appropriate ambiance, Furlong uses “Georgia Belle Facts,” such as “#048: Down here, we can tell how classy a woman is by the height of her hair and the thinness of her brow.” (27) She does refer to sweet tea, the speed of gossip, and taking food to the bereaved, but Cays Mills is generic small town.

The plot seems standard thus far. Protagonist is facing personal as well as family troubles with the murder; she’s got some secret in her past that kept her away from home for fifteen years; there’s a handsome, single man who’s done well for himself who used to be her boon companion. The local sheriff hates the Harpers because she and Ida Jean were high school enemies, so she’s not looking beyond Hollis for a killer.

No grade because not finished, but PEACHES AND SCREAM is in no way distinguished.

Ngaio Marsh’s A MAN LAY DEAD is the first in her long-running mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Detective Roderick Alleyn of Scotland Yard. It was first published in 1934, then recently reissued in e-book format as part of an inexpensive bundle of her early works. In it begins Alleyn’s association with young journalist Nigel Bathgate, who in subsequent works becomes the recorder of Alleyn’s cases.

Bathgate attends a house party with his cousin Charles Rankin at Frantock, home of Sir Hubert Handesley, late of the Diplomatic Service and expert on ancient weaponry. Handesley is famous for his socially-impeccable house parties. This one includes his niece Angela North; Rosamund Grant, who’s in love with but doesn’t trust Rankin; Russian Dr. Foma Thaviokareff; archeologist Arthur Wilde and his young attractive wife Marjorie, who’s involved with Rankin. Rankin’s been sent an antique Mongolian dagger that Tokareff and Handesley’s butler Vassily Vasilyvitch recognize as an important symbol of a secret Russian brotherhood. When Rankin’s stabbed in the back with the dagger, Alleyn is sent to solve the murder.

In many ways A MAN LAY DEAD is stereotypical of its age.It features the motif of secret societies dedicated to evil purposes, and the plot doesn’t reveal all the evidence until the final “tell all” reenactment. Its explanation of how the murderer committed the crime while seeming to have a solid alibi is the most important element. None of the characters are particularly well drawn, though Bathgate is not so facetious as in some of the later novels. Alleyn is an enigma, presented as a gentleman doing a job in which his finer feelings must remain secondary to his duty; there’s some suggestion of back story in the comments about his having begun in the Diplomatic Service, later entering the police for personal reasons. He’s a further refinement on Lord Peter Wimsey and Albert Campion as aristocratic sleuths. Alleyn already has Bailey for fingerprints and Smith for photographs, but Inspector Fox has not yet made his appearance. Sense of place is lacking.

A MAN LAY DEAD is interesting mainly for its introduction of Alleyn. (B-)

Craig Briggs’s JOURNEY TO A DREAM: A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY FROM ENGLAND’S INDUSTRIAL NORTH TO SPAIN’S RURAL INTERIOR is an account of his move to Galacia, on the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula. It was published in inexpensive e-book format in 2012.

JOURNEY TO A DREAM appealed because it is about a part of Europe with which I’m unfamiliar. However, it falls short in creating a sense of Spanish life, dealing instead with Craig and Melanie Briggs’ multiple frustrations in moving to Galacia, finding a suitable house to buy for renovation, the vagaries of dealing with Spanish workmen and professionals, and the weather. Problems are complicated by their not doing their homework--neither speaks Spanish on more than the most rudimentary level; they are unfamiliar with banking and real estate practices, registering a car, and requirements for medical care. They seem to make little effort to accommodate themselves to Spanish culture other than drinking at local festivals.

Briggs’s writing style is simplistic. There’s little sense of atmosphere, with the same phrases used repeatedly. Neither Briggs nor Melanie emerges as a definite individual, and the Spanish are pretty much homogenized with little personality.

JOURNEY TO A DREAM just may put you to sleep. (D)