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Readingomnivore Reviews

Dell Shannon’s “The Bronze Cat” is one of the Luis Mendoza short stories in her 1987 anthology MURDER BY THE TALE.

When wealthy philanthropist George Cumberland is found dead by his miserly older sister, she’s anxious to tell the LAPD and Lt. Mendoza about his quarrel the previous day with Martin Gregson. Cumberland had outbid Gregson for a painting by artist Arvidian, who’d committed suicide the year before; Gregson had been extremely upset at losing out on the painting. And Gregson’s hat, complete with his name on the inside band, is at the murder scene. But the motive doesn’t seem adequate to Mendoza, who goes looking for more evidence. Gregson tied on a serious drunk the night before and doesn’t remember anything for part of the time of Cumberland’s death. Then Alison, Mendoza’s current redhead who’s a painter herself and knows Arvidian’s work, tells him the painting’s a forgery. This opens other motives and possible suspects, but Mendoza’s knowledge of human nature helps him solve the case.

One of the neat things about this collection of Dell Shannon’s short stories is that they reveal aspects of Mendoza’s character: “That was one of the few experiences Mendoza had missed, being drunk. Early in his tender youth he had discovered that about three drinks turned him into a belligerent warrior hunting a series of somebodies--preferably somebodies a lot bigger--to fight, and he had consequently curtailed his drinking. His handsome classic profile was too valuable to him in pursuit of certain other interests, to risk.” (110)

“The Bronze Cat” is an outstanding story. (A)
 
SIMON SAID is the first book in Sarah R. Shaber’s Professor Simon Shaw mystery series. It was originally published in 1997 and is available in e-format. Simon Shaw is an A. B. Duke scholar, Pultitzer Prize winner, and the youngest full professor in the history of Kenan College in Raleigh, North Carolina.

When his friend Dr. David Morgan, an archaeologist for the state of North Carolina, digs up a woman’s corpse in the remains of the old separate kitchen at Bloodworth House on the Kenan campus, it’s natural that Dr. Simon Shaw would be consulted. He, after all, extensively researched Charles Bloodworth, one of the founders of the Chesapeake and Seaboard Railroad, for his prize-winning history of the South between the world wars, and he wrote the monograph on the history of Bloodworth House, deeded to the college when the male Bloodworth line died out. The woman had been carefully arranged for burial, and she’d been shot in the back of the head. From her portrait in the house, Simon immediately recognizes her as Anne Haworth Bloodworth, Charles’s daughter who’d disappeared 9 April 1926, never to be heard of again. He becomes involved in trying to prove the corpse’s identity legally and also in trying to find out how she came to be dead in a hole in the ground. Simon’s life’s complicated by his clinical depression following a devastating divorce, and he’s under attack from within the history department from Alex Andrus, whose protege Bobby Hinton earned and received a C in Simon’s Honors history seminar. Simon’s successful in finding evidence for the conclusive identification, but someone rigs his car so that he wrecks when overcome with carbon monoxide exhaust fumes; someone puts all his anti-depressant medication in a coke, so he gets another hospital stay while Sergeant Otis Gates of the Raleigh Major Crime Task Force tries to find out what’s going on. Before he finally identifies Anne’s killer, another attempt on his life nearly succeeds.

Shaber’s series feature Shaw’s involvement in some case out of the past that produces current repercussions. She plays fair in foreshadowing both killer and motive, but she’s skilled at misdirection, both of which make for satisfying reading.

Simon Shaw and the other characters in the series come across as believable human beings. Simon's empathy and curiosity make him realistic: “Had Anne hard of the Scopes trial? Did she care that women got the vote in 1920, although without the approval of North Carolina? What kind of young woman had been been? And who cared now, anyway? Finally, whatever had been eating at Simon had worked its way into his consciousness. He realized that he cared. A lovely and intelligent woman had died violently long before her time. In the natural order of things, she should have lived, married, had children, enjoyed the good times and endured the bad, and died in bed. Someone took all that away from her. Simon wanted to know who and why.” Shaber is good with using atmosphere to reveal character. “He negotiated the narrow steps and aisles and walked to the Dillard’s Bar-B-Q stand at the far end of the left-field bleachers. He waited in line with about two dozen other hungry fans. The smell of roast pig, barbecue sauce, and home-made french fries overwhelmed his other senses and his reason. By the time he reached the head of the line, he had lost all dietary restraint. He carried back cardboard platters heaped full of ribs, fries, cole slaw, and magnums of sweetened ice tea. Simon sometimes felt guilty eating pork [his mother was Jewish], but his conscience vanished when he took his first succulent bite, dripping with the eastern-style barbecue sauce that was mostly vinegar and hot sauce.”

Shaber is second to none in her ability to communicate the distinctiveness of the South. “Out in the country, almost every house had a tobacco allotment or a livestock barn next to it, and the whole town went to church on Sunday mornings. Double-wides sat on lots next to huge brick houses built by guys who made a fortune feeding chickens for Perdue or Holly Farms. No one cared because if God had wanted the county zoned, he’d have done it himself during that first week. Out in the country, men came home from their day jobs and picked tobacco or fed the pigs. The women drove school buses in between doing their regular chores and going to the church to set up and cook for the Wednesday-evening service and supper. They spent their vacations selling barbecue and fried dough at the state fair every year in a booth marked with the name of their town and the words FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH so they could raise the money for a new church roof or an organ. This was where you couldn’t get elected dog catcher unless you were a Democrat, your daddy was a Democrat, his daddy was a Democrat, and everyone bragged that they voted a straight Democratic ticket. Mysteriously, though, the Republicans had carried the state during national elections since 1960. No one seemed to be able to figure that out. The rural North Carolinians, with their immense capacity for work and their absolute confidence about right and wrong were different from their town cousins, who together with carpetbaggers of various stripes, lived in the cities and university towns.”

SIMON SAID is most highly recommended. (solid A)
 
A CALCULATED DEMISE is the second book in Robert Spiller’s Bonnie Pinkwater series set in East Plains, Colorado. It was published in 2007 in e-book format.

Bonnie Pinkwater teaches math at East Plains Junior/Senior HIgh School where two of her student aides, Matt Boone, who qualifies as a special needs student, and Greg Hansen, who is president of the student council, state-champion class wrestler, and probable valedictorian, are best friends. Science teacher and wrestling coach Luther Devereaux criticizes the special treatment he perceives Matt receiving, and he makes it hard for Matt on the wrestling team. When Matt is found kneeling over Devereaux’s stabbed body, bloody knife in hand, everyone except Bonnie is willing to believe that he’s guilty. But many things were going on in Devereaux’s life. His wife Angelica, who was at school that day, has been having an affair with local rancher Trent Henrickson, who’s up in arms about Devereaux’s treatment of his son Kip in wrestling and also at school. Devereaux suffers from glaucoma and had been buying marijuana from growers Barty and Kyle Hansen, Greg’s father and brother. Greg’s spent his life trying to stay out of their business and lifestyle. For some reason PE teacher Harvey Sylvester leaves his last class and spends some time in his office, arguing with a woman, at the time of the murder. As usual, students are out of class for various reasons. Determined to show Matt Boone is innocent, Bonnie gets herself in trouble with Superintendent Xavier Divine and is on the periphery of three more murders before identifying the killer.

The portions of the plot dealing with in-school and in-system politics ring true. The portions dealing with the final three murdeers--Barty and Kyle Hansen and Janice Flick--are less probable. Spiller does a good job of hiding Devereaux’s killer in plain sight. The resolution of Bonnie’s trouble with Divine and the School Board is satisfying.

Bonnie Pinkwater is still torn-up with the recent death of her husband Ben, so her close relationship with her students is believable. She’s presented as the stereotypical good teacher, concerned: “...Matthew stared at her with those big eyes. Helpless, innocent eyes. If she left now, she knew she’d find herself back on the Bluffs, giving herself hell for being a coward. I can nose around, ask a few questions, and satisfy my own curiosity if nothing else. She’d be talking with the investigator this afternoon. She’d tell him about Barty and Kyle Hansen, about Trent Hendrickson and Angelica Devereaux. The more Bonnie thought about it, the better she felt. ‘I’ll see what I can do, Matthew.’ Hell, what could it hurt? (48) Her “imp of perversity” that leads her to say too much to the wrong people, most notably Superintendent Divine, seems a bit immature for a 53-year-old woman who’s been teaching for over twenty years. Most of the other teachers, the students, and parents are realistic, but many more are included than are needed to move the plot forward and many are little developed.

Sense of place is good. “East Plains’s substation looked every centimeter the double-wide trailer it had been when trucked out to the plains two decade earlier. ... Originally, monochromatic gray-on-gray, it could use a coat of paint, yet the weather-worn building stood its ground with grace. Like most things larger than a coyote out on the plains, this building appeared to have ben planted and was now growing, along with the sage brush and yucca, out of the sandy red dirt. This same red soil lent a faint patina of orange to the gray station, giving it a vaguely pumpkin-like look. Tumbleweeds huddled like weary winter travelers against the trailer’s apron. Even the small rusted sign that announced to the world, albeit humbly, this was Substation 1118 of the El Paso County Sheriff had its refugee tumbleweeds clinging to its twin tubular supports.” (49)

A CALCULATED DEMISE is a good continuation of the series. (B)
 
“Nooses Give” is the Dana Stabenow short story that gives one of Kate Shugak’s first interventions after she returns to the Park after leaving her job as an investigator for the Anchorage District Attorney. It occurs some six months after her injury.

When three Niniltna teenagers die after drinking bootleg whiskey and playing Russian roulette, the local state trooper is unavailable, chasing after a bank robber elsewhere in his huge territory, so Bernie Koslowski calls on Kate Shugak to deal with the bootlegger. Pete Liverakos has been flying bootleg whiskey into the Park for thirty years; the village voting to go dry and the tribal council’s searching every incoming plane hasn’t slowed him down. Kate has history with Pete. She locates the abandoned airstrip where Pete flies the whiskey in and the old mine where he stores it. Kate stakes it out, and, when he brings in his next load, deals with it and him.

Kate Shugak emerges, like Athena from the head’ of Zeus, fully formed. “Nooses Give” provides enough of Kate’s history to explain her personality and actions. She and Mutt, her wolf-husky hybrid, are a formidable pair, one best not to cross. The conclusion is poetic justice.

Even in this length, Stabenow creates an outstanding sense of place. “[Kate’s log cabin] sat at the center of a half circle of small buildings, including a garage, a greenhouse, a cache, and an outhouse. Snow was piled high beneath the eaves of the cabin, and neat paths had been cut through it from door to door and to the woodpile between cabin and outhouse. Beyond the buildings were more trees and a creek. Beyond the creek the ground fell away into a long, broad valley that glittered hard and cold and white in what there was of the Arctic noon sun, a valley that rose again into the Teglliq foothills and the Quilak mountain range, a mighty upward thrust of earth’s crust that gouged with sky with 18,000-foot spurs until it bled ice-blue glaze down their sharp flanks.”

Outstanding introduction to Kate Shugak, the Park, and some of its people. (solid A)
 
“A Market Tale” is a short story in Martin Walker’s series of books and stories involving Benoit “Bruno” Courreges, Chief of Police in St Denis, in the Perigord region of France. It is available as an inexpensive Kindle download.

When half-English, half-Swiss tourist Kati visits St Denis to visit the caves at Lascaux, she meets Marcel, who has a market stall selling fruits and vegetables as well as supplying delicacies to restaurants. Marcel is widowed, widely admired for making another life for himself after the automobile accident that cost him his wife and his leg ruined his career as a physical education teacher. He and Kati are immediately attracted. Kati’s language skills land her a summer job that allows her to remain in the Perigord while she decides what she wants to do with the rest of her life; she meets a fellow Yorkshire-woman who sells English hot pies and similar foods from a food van and, using superb cooking skills, begins her business. The problem is Marcel’s much older sister Nadette, deserted by her own husband, unpleasant, given to gossip and anonymous letters denouncing people to the authorities, and extremely jealous of Marcel. She’d fought with his first wife, and she’s out to cause as much trouble as possible for Kati. Bruno, wise to her ways and happy to see his friend Marcel so content, neutralizes Nadette’s venom and even helps her gain acceptance in St Denis.

Anyone familiar with the Bruno series knows the importance of food and drink in Walker’s creation of the ambiance of the Perigord. “A Market Tale” describes exquisite food and its ability to create good will. “[Bruno] took a forkful of the quiche and suddenly felt a sense of contentment stealing over him, dispelling the quiet anger that had been building up against Nadette throughout the day. He could taste the heavy cream and the aged Cantal cheese she had used, and there was a hint of nutmeg teasing his taste buds, but thee was something different about the flavor. That couldn’t be the bacon he’d expected to find, but whatever she had used the result was wonderful. ... ‘It’s duck. ... Manchons de canard and some gesiers. I was wondering why they call it Lorraine, and then I thought why not try to make something local, a quiche perigourdine, so I used duck instead of ham.’ ... Bruno shook his head, his mouth was full with the final taste of the food, the pastry that seemed lighter than air but crisper than a cookie, its butter merging richly with the cream in the filling and the touch of salt on the slivers of duck.”

There’s really no mystery in “A Market Tale,” just another wonderful example of Bruno’s determination to care for the village and people of St Denis. (solid A)
 
SADDLED WITH TROUBLE is the first book in A. K. Alexander’s Horse Lover’s mystery series. It was published inexpensively as part of an e-book bundle in 2011. The protagonist is Michaela Bancroft, who breeds and trains quarter horses for cutting and reining events.

Michaela is less than a month away from signing divorce papers from her cheating husband Brad Warren who left her for buckle-bunny rodeo queen Kirsten Redmond; he’s left Michaela deeply in debt for the years of fertility treatments and in vitro procedures to try to have a baby. When Michaela find her Uncle Lou Bancroft dead, stabbed with a pitchfork, his body in the stable of his best stud horse Loco, there are plenty of suspects: the vet Ethan Slater, who’d quarreled violently with Lou a month before; Kevin Tanner, developer who hasn’t wanted to accept Lou’s refusal to sell the Diamond Bar Z ranch; Summer MacTavish, whose accounting duties Lou’d reduced to payroll and accounts receivable only; Lou’s wife Cynthia, unaccountably pregnant despite Lou’s having had a vasectomy years before; Michaela’s father Ben, a gambling addict who’s deeply in debt and Lou’s refused to bail out; Brad, proved unfaithful by Lou’s photographer and fired from a cushy job. Cynthia shows Michaela the legal papers where Lou was being sued by horse owners whose mares, supposedly artificially inseminated with Loco’s sperm at $3,500 per stand, were impregnated by some other stallion. Also at the Diamond Bar Z are Dwayne and Sam Yamaguchi, Hawaiian cowboy cousins who are respectively head and assistant trainer, and Sylvester “Bean” Chasen, an older general ranch hand who’d been brain damaged in a fall from a horse in his childhood. Who kills Lou and later fakes Bean’s suicide and confession? Is it connected with the artificial insemination fraud?

Michaela Bancroft is believable, carrying emotional baggage, determined to be the best. “There were no other horses in the ring at the same time as the reiner--only horse and rider. But it was as if the animal had a complete understanding of what he was bred for and what was at stake--for him--a bucket of grain and a lot of praise from his rider. For the rider, a wad of cash and some major recognition. For Michaela as a woman, that recognition meant more to her than most of the riders on the circuit, who were men. She wanted to be at the top of her game. She wanted to be the trainer that everyone looked up to: horseman--or in her case, horseworman--of the year.” (105) Michaela does pull a couple of potentially TSTL moments in her search for Lou’s killer. Supporting characters are individual, well delineated.

Setting is Indio, California, in the Coachella Valley, but in fact, there’s little sense of a specific location and few physical details. What Alexander does depict skillfully is the rhythm of life on a working horse ranch where routines of care and training are enacted daily and changed rarely.

What makes SADDLED WITH TROUBLE outstanding is the skill with which Alexander conceals the person responsible for both the fraud and the murders in plain sight. I’m seldom taken in by misdirection, but this one fooled me completely, even though, thinking back, appropriate clues to the identity and motives are in place.

My only complaint is the common misuse of implied and inferred. A writer or speaker implies something; his or her reader or listener infers its meaning.

SADDLED WITH TROUBLE is well worth the time. I’ll definitely be following up on the series. (A-)
 
“Novelties” is one of the Luis Mendoza mysteries in Dell Shannon’s collection MURDER BY THE TALE that she published in 1987.

First John Palliser, youngest of the sergeants, thinks something’s suspicious about Greta Schwartz’s death; he asks the senior Homicide sergeant Art Hackett to take a look, and Hackett shares his Mendoza-like feeling. Hackett passes their hunch on to the Lieutenant himself. Greta Schwartz had been an unpleasant miserly old woman who spent as little as possible despite leaving $100,000 in real estate and securities to her only relative, nephew Rudolf Klopfer. She had a bad heart, could have dropped dead at any time, and she was deathly afraid of burglars. The autopsy shows she did of a heart attack, and there were no signs of forced entry. She’d recently talked to friends from church about changing her will, leaving her money to the Lutheran church, because she disapproved of Klopfer’s dating a divorced woman Ruth Yorke. Both Klopfer and Yorke are solidly alibied for the time of death. Mendoza agrees that Greta Schwartz was murdered and that Rudolph Klopfer did it, but how, and how to prove? Mendoza puts together the contents of a novelty catalog Alison received in the mail with a poetic justice stunt to get a confession.

“Novelties” is fun because it reveals a bit of detail about Mendoza and Alison’s early days of marriage and because the stunt is unusual, one of the few departures from strict police procedure in the Mendoza series. (A)
 
Bruce Beckham’s MURDER IN ADLAND is the first in his Detective Inspector Skegill series. It was published in e-book format in 2012.

Tregilgis-Goldsmith and Associates advertising agency with offices in London and Edinburgh is celebrating seven years of success at a weekend party at Bewaldeth Hall, a hotel in the English Lake District. When Miriam Tregilgis discovers her husband Ivan’s body in their bed, Detective Inspector Dan Skelgill and Detective Sergeant Emma Jones are assigned the case. Someone had stabbed Ivan Tregilgis as he lay, severing his carotid artery and spinal cord. He was nude, and in the bedding at the foot of the bed is a g-string. As they investigate, Skelgill and Jones discover multiple motives and suspects: his wife in revenge for serial infidelities; his partner Dermott Lord Goldsmith (who uses his middle name as if a title) control of the company and a substantial fortune when the agency is bought out by an American company; London office manager Krista Morocco, who had a significant affair with Ivan some eight years before; Edinburgh office manager Julia Rubicon, with whom he’s having a current affair; Elspeth Goldsmith, who fancies herself as the power behind the throne at Tregilgis-Goldsmith; or Grendon Smith, who’d been fired the week of the party, whom Ivan had escorted off the premises in London. Elspeth Goldsmith and Krista Morocco receive blackmail letters, but it takes a forgotten flask of tea to stimulate Skelgill’s resolution to the case.

There’s a fine line between sufficient detail of personal life and activities to establish a character as a believable person, and too much. I expect characters in a well-written mystery to be fleshed out, but MURDER IN ADLAND takes it too far, what with long descriptions of hill walking, fishing (more than one trip), a cricket match (literally ball by ball while Skelgill is in play), extraneous chases of other malefactors, clubbing in London, and meditations during journeys to and from Cumbria to London and Edinburgh. Enough already. That being said, Dan Skelgill as a protagonist has potential: “...for serious problem-solving, Skelgill reckoned nothing could be a good session out on the fells--not running, mind, just a steady pull (albeit at a pace that would leave most casual walkers floundering in his wake); a state of autopilot in which the body basically takes care of itself, with the odd adjustment being sufficient to preoccupy the conscious mind, leaving the subconscious to its own devices.” Seeing the story through his eyes adds greatly to the sense of knowing Skelgill. Sergeant Emma Jones is an attractive assistant, though the developing social relationship with Skelgill implied in the last chapter doesn’t ring true. The number of characters much exceeds those strictly necessary to the plot, though most of them are individual.

Beckham does a good job of keeping attention focused away from the killer, but an experienced reader will probably discern the identity well before Skelgill. Both identity and motive are foreshadowed fairly.

Easily the strongest element in MURDER IN ADLAND is the sense of place. “They had taken off into a gentle westerly breeze and turned left just before Glasgow. The pilot was now tracking the M74 towards the English border, still climbing into the early evening sunshine. Skelgill started intently as the Solway crept nearer, a vast glistening by drawing the eye across the Irish sea, whee the distant Isle of Man seemed to float above the horizon. He began to pick out the Lakeland hills, first the blunt twin massifs of Blencotha and Skiddow guarding the northern reaches, and soon the jagged cluster that made up the Langdale and Scafall Pikes. The lakes themselves were harder to discern--blending into the dusky landscape until suddenly illuminated by the suns direct line of reflection.”

MURDER IN ADLAND is strong enough that I will follow up on the series. (B)
 
THE LADY WHO CRIED MURDER is one of Lauren Carr’s Mac Faraday mystery series. It was published as a free or inexpensive e-book in 2013. It’s set mostly on Spencer Mountain, in Deep Creek Lake in western Maryland.

When Khloe Everest disappears following the party for her twenty-first birthday, her mother and the local police believed that she’s been kidnapped. After four days of intense search by city, county, and state police, Khloe shows up at Spencer Chief of Police David O’Callaghan’s press conference, happy at the media attention. It had been a publicity stunt staged to win a spot in a reality TV show. Her furious mother Florence Everest disowns her. Three years later, when Florence dies in a car wreck, Khloe learns she’s been disinherited and also finds a tape that identifies her father. Sheriff Harry Palazzi had raped and impregnated Florence; after the disappearance of his wife and her best friend, Palazzi parlayed the sympathy vote into election to the US Senate. His son and political heir apparent Bevis Palazzi claims to be Khloe’s good friend. The morning Khloe is scheduled to make an announcement of national importance for E-Enterainment Live, her body is discovered in Florence’s house where she’s been illegally squatting. She’d been stabbed to death, eviscerated, dismembered, and her uterus removed. Two earlier murders exist with the same modus operandi and semen samples from the same man, but one died in Los Angeles some twenty months before and the other near Pittsburgh the month before Khloe’s publicity stunt. Mac acts as special homicide consultant to the Spencer Police Department, assisting his half-brother David O’Callaghan and Pennsylvania State Police detective Cameron Gates, the officer in charge of the Amber Houston case. They discover a common person in all three murders--Nick Fields, supposedly Khloe’s gay best friend from her reality show. But Nick’s not gay, and he’d helped her set up her publicity stunt. There’s no question of Senator Palazzi’s being a serial rapist, but is he also a murderer, either personally or by contract? If he’s not, who did kill Dee Blakeley (Senator Palazzi’s victim murdered before she was to testify to her rape to the grand jury), Tiffany Blanchard, Amber Houston, and Khloe Everest? Is Senator Palazzi as untouchable as he thinks?

I normally don’t read serial killer-themed mysteries, but this one isn’t graphic even though it involves rape and at least ten deaths. THE LADY WHO CRIED MURDER is essentially a police procedural focusing on how to bring Senator Palazzi, his henchmen, and the killer to justice. I have two slight reservations about the plot. One involves Cameron Gates planting a bug in the office of one of Palazzi’s employees. Isn’t a court order required to do so legally? The other involves the fate of the man Palazzi framed for the kidnapping and murder of his wife and her best friend. Twenty years before in Maryland, for kidnapping and murder, wouldn’t the criminal be sentenced to death? The killer’s identity and motive are set up to be a surprise, but an experienced reader will probably pick up enough foreshadowing to know ahead of Mac and the detectives. The epilogue provides poetic justice.

Most of the characters, especially the continuing ones--Mac, Archie, David, Bogie, Chelsea, Gnarly--are reasonably well developed. Most of the action is seen through Mac’s eyes, but occasional shifts to other viewpoints helps to personalize them. Location range from western Maryland into Pennsylvania into the Washinton, D.C., area, but there’s not much specific sense of place, and there’s little distinctive Southern ambiance.

One of the features I enjoy most about the Mac Faraday series is the presence of Gnarly, the big German shepherd Mac inherited from his mother. Gnarly and his activities provide much of the humor in the series. Gnarly’s interaction with the “retrieval expert” sent to recover the tape from Mac’s house is worth the price of THE LADY WHO CRIED MURDER. (B)
 
“Happy Release” is another Dell Shannon short story in her 1987 anthology MURDER BY THE TALE.

Dan Deasey is unhappy. Following a case of the flu, the 72-year-old man is completing the six weeks in a nursing home recommended by Dr. Katzman. Very much his own man, alert and suspicious, Mr. Deasey hates both Sunnyrest Home and its proprietor Mrs. Beauchamp. He’s particularly suspicious because three other patients--Mrs. Pope, Mr. Swann, and Mr. Jensen--have died during his five weeks there. All three received no visitors, had financial troubles, and were much less aware than Mr. Deasey. And he doesn’t like the way Mrs. Beauchamp has been talking to him. “ ‘A happy release,’ the Beauchamp woman had said. And for a second she had looked really happy. ‘To think of the dear soul entering into eternal bliss with Our Lord--Much the better way than continued loneliness and suffering here on earth.’ “ (140) But who can help Mr. Deasey? He has no evidence for the police, and Dr. Katzman and Dr. Sayers expect deaths among the elderly. But Mr. Deasey isn’t afraid to take responsibility. His solution is ironically appropriate.

Both Deasey and Mrs. Beauchamp are well-developed characters, especially for a story of this length. (A)
 
“Rannysore” is a Dell Shannon short story from her 1987 collection MURDER BY THE TALE.

Anthony Lewis Shipley’s neighbors dislike him. He’s bought the last house and the adjoining vacant lot at the end of the dead-end upper middle-class neighborhood. The vacant lot, long the playground for the neighborhood children, is his newly planted garden, and he goes off at the kids when they inadvertently damage it, playing in the street alongside. The dozen children are afraid of him; Jane Reade, mother of Brenda, a tom-boy who’s had a recent run-in with him, is wary of him also. But perhaps his ways are changing. After he’d exploded at three-year-old Brucie Brent, who’d pulled up seedlings from a garden bed along the road, Shipley apologized and gave him an expensive battery-operated truck. When his mother momentarily takes her eye off him, Brucie runs into traffic on Broadway, chasing his truck, and is struck by a bus. He later dies. Now Mr. Shipley comes to apologize to Brenda, bringing her a three-foot stuffed animal, a Tyrannosaurus rex that she names Rannysore. Rannysore becomes her favorite toy. She plays with him alone, does not want her family to touch him, and says that he talks to her. Jane is spooked by Rannysore, who seems to watch her and occasionally to move on its own.

***SPOILER***SPOILER***

The day Brenda takes Rannysore to school, she’s hit by a train at a crossing that’s not part of her normal route from school. Jane is convinced that she’d changed her route because Rannysore told her to. After all, Mr. Shipley is a lecturer for the Association of Modern Alchemists and says he’s mastered the art of sending a spirit to possess an inanimate object. (B)
 
Vicki Delany’s IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLACIER was published in 2007 as a free or inexpensive e-book. It’s set in the small inland town of Trafalgar, British Columbia, and features Constable Molly Smith and Detective Sergeant John Winters. Smith has only been on the force for six months, while Winters is nearing retirement.

When developer Reg Montgomery is murdered in an alley in Trafalgar, Molly Smith is excited. Because the other detective on the force is on holiday, she is to assist Winters to investigate Montgomery’s death. Montgomery had planned to develop a resort nearby, promising jobs and increased tourism that Trafalgar needs, but costing large areas of bear habitat. Naturally, the town is divided between developers and conservationists. Also polarizing Trafalgar is the question of the Commemorative Peace Garden, with land and funds for creation of a park left to the city. Opinion is divided because many feel a memorial to draft dodgers, deserters, and other assorted peaceniks of the Vietnam era will hurt American tourism. There’s also a stalker after a friend of Molly’s.

Despite potential in the plot, the characters are not attractive. Molly Smith is immature for her age and job, given to elaborate deductions that haven’t considered all the factors. Winters moved from Vancouver looking for a more stress-free life in the police, but there are apparent financial and possibly drinking problems, and he comes across as Oscar the Grouch. At 14%, Delany has introduced at least 22 characters, cutting back and forth between their points of view. Setting is the strongest element in IN THE SHADOW OF THE GLACIER, but it’s not enough. No grade because not finished.
 
“They Will Call It Insane” is one of Dell Shannon’s short stories in her 1987 anthology MURDER BY THE TALE.

As her husband and their guests enjoy after-dinner coffee and conversation, the hostess mediates on murdering her husband of thirty years, George. She thinks that murder should be for big reasons, like wills, deathless love, or blackmail. She’s considered that no one will understand her frustration with George’s insensitivity to her feelings--she’s asked him not to refer to her as “the old lady” or to call her “Mother.” They won’t understand her tiredness at the word for word repetition of jokes and stories that weren’t funny to begin with. They won’t understand her revulsion at his inevitable overture to sex--”Well, old lady, what about it?” She’s not distracted by the inane conversation of her female guests--questionable women’s club politics, the new fashions in clothes and hair styles, and the problems associated with them. When George gets ready to tell the story about the Russian private one more time, she warns him. She tells him....

Neat story. (B+)
 
“Conundrum” is a Dell Shannon short story found in her 1987 anthology MURDER BY THE TALE. It is in story-within-a-story format, narrated by an unnamed Irish Detective Superintendent.

Robert Patrick Doyle is a young, rapidly rising plain clothes detective; being half English, he’s handicapped by too much reason. When Tom Devesey burgles Bryant and Reed jewelers, he accidentally hits the elderly nightwatchman too hard and kills him. Doyle is put on the case, chasing him into the sparsely populated northern part of Ireland. In a pub, Doyle overhears that at dusk a local saw The O’Derrigan, a mythical high king who rests in sleep with his warriors in a nearby cave, ready to emerge in the time of Ireland’s greatest need. The O’Derrigan rides out alone on his great black warhorse at midnight on the night of the first full moon, to see if it’s time for him to awaken. Doyle, educated and half-English, takes this as a story; he and Brady, the local policeman, go out looking for Devesey; they find him, Doyle chases him down and tackles him, and they both fall into a crevice. As he awaits Brady to help him with Devesey, Doyle realizes there’s a fissure in the rock, through which he hears the rattling of harness and the stamping of an iron-shod horse.

Shannon includes a good sense of place, even in this short format. “Doyle swore some more and went on to Drumkeerin. Now, you understand--if you’ve never been up that way, I’ll tell you--every mile he was going backward, you could say. That’s the loneliest and emptiest part of the country, northwest. No big towns at all this side the border, once you pass Sligo. It’s barren, open country--little villages, and little farms, and hills, and that’s every last damn thing. Good fishing in the lakes, but not many decent hotels, and people living just about the way their great-great-grandkin did--and thinking the same thoughts, by damn. There are police, and telephone wires--in places--but they’re not frequent, nor much regarded.” (164-5)

Attractive story. (B)
 
John Enright’s PAGO PAGO TANGO was published in 2012 as a free or inexpensive e-book. It is set in American Samoa, featuring Detective Sergeant Apelu Soifua.

After Apelu brings in Tokeni “Junior” Tokeni on drug charges, his captain removes him from the case and turns it over to the drug unit; both the detective bureau and the drug unit ignore Junior’s story of having helped dispose of a body in the jungle. Apelu takes Junior and locates the body, only to have Junior shot to death on the cliff. In punishment, Apelu serves three weeks’ administrative leave and comes back to work only the lowest level of crimes. One of those crimes involves a burglary at the home of Gordon Trurich, a palangi executive at SeaKing Tuna plant, the main employer in Pago Pago. Oddly enough, there’s no sign of a forced entrance, and only the contents of a locked entertainment center are taken--a VHS machine, videotapes, a bit of money. But the burglary doesn’t fit a normal pattern. Then a brawl at a local night spot results in a killing with a gun traced back to the Trurich burglary. In digging around, Apelu turns up connections with local criminal Lenny Ulfson and discovers that TJ Sualepata, the killer at the club, is connected with the stolen videotapes. He even manages to recover one of the stolen tapes, with pages of ledger entries in code recorded over the middle of the tape. To what does it refer? Who’s involved?

There’s a fine line between the amount of personal and daily life needed to establish a believable character and so much detail that it bogs down the plot. PAGO PAGO TANGO goes over the line, but it’s forgivable because Apelu is caught between two cultures. Reared on the island, he went to school in San Francisco and worked for the SFPD for seven years before returning to Samoa. “The thing about his grandmother’s stories was that they had no classic Western beginning, middle, and end. They always started somewhere in the middle and ended somewhere in the middle. Characters from other stories would appear in them, then disappear. Motives were seldom explained. Characters made really stupid decisions. The known was not really known, and anyone was capable of the next evil--or, just as likely beneficent--action. .... As [Apelu] got older, he more often took refuge in the possibility that maybe nothing really made sense and that the best he could do was pretend that it made sense, pretend well enough so that things continued to work for another day or two and hope that no one--some ultimate rules-keeper or judge--would call him on it, catch him up in some bungled fabrication, out him as a charlatan, an agent bent on denying that reality was total chaos and best left that way. Maybe the real world was just something you danced with when you had to--nothing you took home, slept with, got serious about. Just all middle--no beginning, no end, no cause and no effect, no point in trying to make sense of it.” (40) Limited third person point of view helps build Apelu’s character. Enright is economical with the number of characters, most of whom are individual.

The plot is police procedural, and Enright plays fair with showing us Apelu’s discoveries as he makes them. The foreshadowing is enough that an experienced reader will probably pick up on what’s going on before it’s disclosed in the story.

Strongest is the sense of place. Lyrical descriptions of the island abound, but Enright emphasizes the contrast between the countryside and the town. “This was not a pretty part of the island. After Pago Pago was the village of Satala, with the oldest and loudest of the island’s two electrical generating plants on the mountainside of the road and a run-down ship repair yard on the bay side, then the totally swallowed-up village of Atu’u. Atu’u ws the center of the dark side and a civic disaster by anyone’s standards. The bay side of the potholed road was solid with cannery buildings, truck loading docks, industrial chaos. Forklifts, driving backward because their loads of pallets and cans blocked out all forward view; shared the main road with the buses and traffic. The smell of the cannery blocked out even the smell of the backseat vomit. On the mountainside of the road there was very little room before the sheer jungled walls of the exposed caldera rose up a thousand feet into semiperpetual mist. What flat space thee was--and above that, chopped into the talus slope and face of the cliff--was filled with a warren of chockablock buildings and alleyways that looked and teemed and smelled like any dockside slum in any impoverished Asian port. It wasn’t big, but it was intense.” (102)

PAGO PAGO TANGO is worth following up on. (B)
 
BRYANT & MAY AND THE BLEEDING HEART is the 2014 entry in Christopher Fowler’s Peculiar Crimes Unit series. It is available in both print and e-formats.

BRYANT & MAY AND THE BLEEDING HEART opens with the unit’s move into new headquarters under City of London jurisdiction. Late one night, London teenager Romain Curtis and his potential girlfriend Shirone Estanza are hanging out in St. George’s Gardens, where they see the recently-buried body of Thomas Edward Wallace rise from the grave. He’d hanged himself some three days before. The exhumation comes to the attention of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, as does the hit-and-run killing of Romain Curtis the next night. Bryant is called in by old friend Matthew Condright, Keeper of the Ravens at the Tower of London; the seven ravens have been stolen. How were they stolen, and why? Is this some symbolic warning of an attack on England? Wallace’s wife and son blame Krishna Jhadav, who’d removed an important account from Wallace’s firm, driving him deeper into the depression that resulted in his suicide. Then a second body buried in St. George’s Gardens is exhumed, this an elderly lady who’d died some ten days before, finally a Jack Russell terrier buried about the same time. Someone’s obviously looking for something, but what? Bryant is mixed up again with Peregrine Wosthold Perry, the necromancer from earlier books, who refers him to a group of medical students who call themselves the New Resurrectionists. Both Krishna Jhadav and Stephen Emes, one of the resurrectionists, are killed with crossbow arrows. And in the meantime, their new supervisor, Orion Banks, is doing her best to force standard operating procedures on the PCU and/or sabotage its effectiveness.

Peculiar Crime Unit mysteries are always over the top, involving esoteric objects and ideas, history-saturated areas of London, and a miscellany of outre characters. “ ‘It’s just the way they are,’ Land ventured. ‘The way they’ve always been, right from the start. They attract the unusual. You wouldn’t believe some of the people who’ve helped them.’ He ticked them off on his fingers. ‘A professor who finds missing people by analysing newspaper cuttings. A forensic expert who thinks he’s a werewolf. A biochemist who impersonates his dead wife. A gang of counterculture hippie types called the Southwark Supernaturals. Witches, conspiracy theorists, lefties, Fascists, criminals on the run. Sane, intelligent people who believe they’re reincarnated Vikings or characters from Gilbert and Sullivan operas. We’ve had things going on here I could never put in official reports. You know they always say there is a fine line between genius and madness? Well, here the line gets rubbed out.’ “ (375-6)

One of the things I enjoy most about the Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries is the sense of the layers of time embedded in present-day London. “[Bryant] had last walked these back streets in the purgatorial month of February. Dickens had pointed out that here even the snowflakes were covered in soot, ‘gone into mourning for the death of the sun.’ There was something about the low level of light that muted the shades of brick and concrete, turning homes into prisons. The geography of Farrington and Clerkenwell matched its weather, being perverse, grey, unsettled and confusing. The empty roads were never less than atmospheric, and made fertile ground for the creation of dark mythologies. Many stories of murders, hauntings and hangings were associated with the old Smithfield Market, where the bones of slaughtered animals washed down from the butcheries to the riverbank. Bryant found it it impossible to pass over the pavements and not be aware of what lay below. He could see the forgotten tributaries of the River Fleet through the drain covers, hear the rushing waters and follow the chain of underground wells from King’s Cross down through Farrington to the river. He caught himself thinking, There’s more death here than life.” (137)

BRYANT & MAY AND THE BLEEDING HEART is another solid entry in one of the stronger mystery series around. (B)
 
“Need-Fire” is one of the short stories in Dell Shannon’s collection MURDER BY THE TALE published in 1987,

Adam Marriott is an archaeologist supervising a relatively unimportant dig that he feels confident is a burial. He’s professionally frustrated by the limits placed on digging in England and Europe; he’s physically exhausted from three years’ digging in Turkey, following on a messy divorce; he’s involved with Sheila, who’s responsible for her problem herself, but planning to break up with her. As he pushes to complete the dig while the beautiful weather holds, is it any wonder that he’s not sleeping? The chemist fills a prescription for him but cautions him on not taking more than one at a time. After finding the bones of a priest and some bronze grave goods, and exceeding his dosage, Adam experiences a Beltane (May 1) that changes his mind about many things.

Well written, not a mystery, but good. (A-)
 
Dell Shannon’s short story “The Practical Joke” is included in her collection MURDER BY THE TALE that she published in 1987.

Alex, a mystery novelist, narrates the story of a practical joke played by a group of friends on Jevon Griffiths. Griffiths, a Welshman without a sense of humor, has written a successful book Nemesis of Nonsense in which he debunks all elements of the supernatural, including ghosts. His friends thinks he protests too much and would change his tune if he experienced a ghost firsthand. So they plan one for him. Griffiths is finishing a novel and so rents a cottage in Somerset where he can work. Alex enlists the estate agent Barlow, who primes Griffiths with a story about a young wife drowned the deep stream beside the cottage, her husband hanged for the crime. Actually, Barlow tells him, the cottage does have a strange history. Only ten years old, it had been built by a scientist who had a lab on the premises; when the scientist went insane, the community found hundreds of small animals who had been killed or tortured and mutilated, so badly tortured that all had to be destroyed. When Alex comes to visit Jevon and see how the joke is working, it is he who is shocked by the ghosts.

It’s nice to see a joke turned on its originator. (A)
 
“Flash Attachment” is the last short story in Dell Shannon’s MURDER BY THE TALE, her anthology published in 1987.

Young Mike Garvan is recovering from a bad case of measles, missing his father and wishing his mother were different. She’d been awarded custody of Mike in New York and received regular child support from her ex-husband John Garvan, a professional photographer. After Mike wrote his father, she moved them to California and changed their names. She often leaves Mike alone, doesn’t remember about buying food, or washing his clothes. Now, despite his having been sick, she’s been gone since Thursday, leaving him with a man she’d met named Sammy. Sammy is intent on getting Mike, who’d been told by the doctor to stay in while he was sick, out of the apartment. As Mike thinks more about his situation and his mother, he gets an idea. He tells Sammy he’ll go buy the flash attachment for his Kodak camera, if Sammy gives him the $15 it will cost. Sammy does, and Mike uses his camera to prove what’s wrong about his mother’s absence.

A particularly appropriate story for now, what with custody battles, women (and men) clubbing, and the anonymity of thecity. (A)

MURDER BY THE TALE as a whole (A-)
 
Dell Shannon’s MURDER WITH LOVE is one of her Luis Mendoza mysteries originally published in 1971.

Central Homicide of the Los Angeles Police Department is working under a handicap--most of the windows at police headquarters were broken in a major earthquake, so the squad is working sans windows and consequently sans air conditioning, in August. There’s the usual assortment of unattended deaths to be sorted out, but there are also a number of strange cases. One involves Patrick Henry Logan, young police officer of impeccable record, with no known enemies, who’s beaten, stabbed, and left for dead in his own home. Another is Christopher W. Hauk, found dead in the Sheridan Hotel, likely the victim of a hooker robbery gone wrong. Then there are the shooting deaths of Dr. John Harlow, his wife, and the receptionist in his office; the only survivor is the Harlow’s baby daughter, Celia Ann, who’d been hidden in the bathroom. A decent middle-aged lady Mrs. Rhoda Fleming is found dead in her bathtub, strangled. Two young siblings, a sixteen-month-old girl and a three-year-old boy, are abducted from their back yard; their bodies are found later, not far away, hidden behind a sign. They had not been molested. The major cases do get solved the old-fashioned way, with legwork, perseverance, and the occasional hunch from Mendoza.

I enjoy the glimpses of personalities and family life that Shannon intersperses in the investigations. In MURDER WITH LOVE, Detective Jason Grace discovers Celia Ann, now orphaned child of parents who had both been orphans themselves; he and wife Ginny have no children, so he begins a crusade to adopt Celia Ann. Tom Landers is after Officer Phillipa O’Reilly to marry him, but she’s cautious. His twins think Mendoza can causes earthquakes. It is Mendoza who remains the focus: “...of course Luis Mendoza had been brought up to believe that Something was in charge of affairs--and all of a sudden, now, dimly he wondered if Something was. When he came to think, the unexpected good luck (the guardian angels?) they’d been having lately--George getting away from those ugly thugs with a whole skin--and Landers getting taken off the hook by the belated discovery of the real X--It was the way the cards fell. Pares o nones....” (227)

Shannon excels in establishing the streets and neighborhoods of Los Angeles: “It was one of the many narrow old streets down here on Central’s beat, which was the oldest part of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles River meandered through part of that area, wandering into the city from the valley through a natural pass in the kfoothills. It was dry ten months of the year, but could be a menace in heavy rains, and the riverbed these days was encased in concrete walls forty feet high--an ugly trail through this part of town. Along th route of the riverbed ran the railroad tracks, converging on the great bare dirty expanse of the Southern Pacific yards, behind Union Station. Union Station was a handsome, modern building,very clean-looking, very Californian, but away from Union Station with its tiled floors and mosaic walls there was the old and tired and shabby tangle of streets, the oldest in the city, the poorest now.” (248)

MURDER WITH LOVE’s major cases are unified by the linkage of love in its various forms with death. It’s a good read. (A-)
 
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