Readingomnivore Reviews

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Erik Larson’s DEAD WAKE: THE LAST CROSSING OF THE LUSITANIA is an example of his doing popular history right. It was published in 2015. Its style is accessible, the research is impeccable, and notes and a eight-page bibliography provide ample material for readers who want more information. Much of the material is from primary sources. Larson is skilled in evoking character, including passengers on the Lusitania; his depiction of the vessels and Room 40 make them almost characters in the narrative.

The sinking of the Lusitania, one of the Cunard Line’s “greyhounds of the sea,” by a German submarine, the U-20, is well-known as one of the causes of American entry into World War I. On Friday, 7 May 1915, she was hit by one torpedo and sank in eighteen minutes; of 1,959 passengers and crew, there were 764 survivors. Of the dead, 123 were American citizens. The United States was officially a neutral in the war, and Great Britain needed American involvement. Earlier in 1915, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, wrote Walter Runciman, head of England’s Board of Trade, that it was “ ‘most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.’ After noting that Germany’s submarine campaign had sharply reduced traffic from America, Churchill told Runciman: ‘For our part, we want the traffic--the more the better; and if some of it gets into trouble, better still.’ “ (189-90) So was the Lusitania set up by the British Navy as a target for a German submarine, to provoke American entry into WWI?

Larson cuts between four locales in covering the story of the last crossing: the Lusitania, under experienced and capable Captain William Thomas Turner; the German submarine U-20, commanded by Kplt. Walther Schieger, dashing and ruthless; Washington, D.C., where President Woodrow Wilson is suffering first through the death of his wife, then his emerging courtship of Edith Galt, while dealing with the complications of neutrality in time of war; and Room 40, nerve center for the Admiralty, under Churchill and First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher. The existence of Room 40 was a closely guarded secret even within the Admiralty, to conceal that the Royal Navy had the German naval code and was routinely monitoring wireless communications to ship and submarines, tracking movements and orders. The key question is, what did Room 40 know, and was there a conscious decision to sacrifice the Lusitania?

There’s no question that the Admiralty tried to cover up its role in the disaster. Larson concludes: “At no time during the secret portion of the proceedings [inquiry headed by Lord Mersey] did the Admiralty ever reveal what it knew about the travels of U-20. Nor did it disclose the measures taken to protect the HMS Orion and other military vessels. Moreover, the Admiralty made no effort to correct Lord Mersey’s finding that the Lusitania had been struck by two torpedos--this despite the fact that Room 40 knew full well that Schwieger had fired only one. Nor did the inquiry ever delineate why the Lusitania wasn’t diverted to the safer North Channel route, and why no naval escort was provided. Indeed, these are the great lingering questions of the Lusitania affair: Why, given all the information possessed by the Admiralty about U-20; given the Admiralty’s past willingness to provide escorts to inbound ships or divert them away from trouble; given that the ship carried a vital cargo of rifle ammunition and shrapnel shell; given that Room 40’s intelligence prompted the obsessive tracking and protection of the HMS Orion; given that U-20 had sank three vessels in the Lusitania’s path; given Cunard chairman Booth’s panicked Friday morning visit to the navy’s Queenstown office; given that the new and safer North Channel route was available; and given that passengers and crew alike had expected to be convoyed o Liverpool by the Royal Navy--the question remains, why was the ship left on its own, with a proven killer of men and ships dead ahead in its path? There is silence on the subject in the records of Room 40 held by the National Archives of the United Kingdom and Churchill College, Cambridge. Nowhere is there even a hint of dismay at missing so clear an opportunity to use the fruits of Room 40’ intelligence to save a thousand lives.” (323)

Room 40’s actions appear a forecast of the World War II decision to allow the unopposed bombing of Coventry, to conceal that the British had broken and was reading German Enigma codes. That decision was made by Winston Churchill.

I recommend DEAD WAKE highly. (solid A)

edited to change date--1915 for the sinking is a bit more accurate than this year. DUH!

 

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Amy M. Reade’s SECRETS OF HALLSTEAD HOUSE was published in e-book format in 2014. It reads, however, like the gothic novels from the 1950-60s by Victoria Holt, Dorothy Eden, and Mary Stewart. It has all the hallmarks: young, naive heroine; spooky house with shut-up rooms; isolated island accessible only by boat; sinister servants (Valentina Byrd is surely related to Mrs. Danvers); rapacious relatives; concealed secrets; and nefarious plans. Reade uses much “had I but known” foreshadowing typical of the genre.

I’m giving up at 29% of SECRETS OF HALLSTEAD HOUSE. I just don’t care enough about Macy Stoddard to continue reading. For one thing, her age and experience do not match. As first person narrator, she’s telling a story that happened to her some twenty years before. No exact date has been given. She explicitly says she’s a nurse who’s worked in Empire Hospital in New York City for over a year; she’s twenty years old with her next birthday coming in three months. Yet she says she met her ex-boyfriend Alan Jamison two years before at a fundraiser at the hospital where she worked. Twenty years ago, eighteen- or nineteen-year-old women were not qualified nurses.

So far in the plot, everyone except her employer Alexandria Hallstead has warned Macy off. Dirty tricks have been played. Someone’s searched her room and stolen her photograph album. Instead of confronting people or telling Alex what’s going on, she keeps everything to herself and indulges herself in paranoia.

Some atmospheric description of Hallstead Island is the best feature of SECRETS OF HALLSTEAD HOUSE, but it’s insufficient to carry the novel. Not recommended. No grade because unfinished.

 

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LOWCOUNTRY BONEYARD is the third book in Susan M. Boyer’s Liz Talbot mystery series set on Stella Maris Island, off Charleston, South Carolina. It was published in e-book format in 2015.

When police put the disappearance of Kent* Heyward on the back burner because it appears after a month she’d left home of her own volition, without evidence to suggest foul play, her father Colton Heyward hires Talbot and Andrews Investigations to find her. The early work of the case falls to Liz Talbot, since she operates the Charleston office; her good friend Ansley Johnson, who’s Kent’s best friend, had recommended her to the Heywards and provides Liz with much needed information. Kent’s parents and her maternal grandparents, the ultra-wealthy Bounetheaus, think her boyfriend, chef Matthew Thomas, is responsible for her disappearance. As Liz investigates, she uncovers conflict between parents and Kent over her ambition to paint; she finds Kent’s circle of artist friends, including Evan Ingle, artist and gallery owner who’s offering emotional and practical support; and she discovers both current and past secrets within the Bountheau family. She’s threatened, and she and Nate involved in an-intended fatal “accident” before the story concludes.

Liz as first-person narrator is honest and believable. She carries baggage, as does any divorced woman in her thirties. One of the pleasures of Boyer’s writing is Liz’s personal development as she deals with her on-going relationship with Nate Andrews, her partner and lover. He lives in Greenville and runs its office of Talbot and Andrews, while she feels inextricably tied to Stella Maris Island. She’s also a skilled private investigator: “A companion to my list of questions was my list of possibilities for each case. I try to imagine all the scenarios, no matter how improbable. If he’d hurt his daughter, Colton Heyward wouldn’t be the first person to hire an investigator to make himself look innocent.” “To me, each case was a puzzle. I needed to find all the pieces, orient them the right way, and fit them together until the picture became clear and complete. The first piece of the puzzle was Kent. I started an electronic profile for her, pulling together information from several public and private subscription databases and adding to what I’d learned.” Other characters are individual, if quirky.

Liz’s story-telling voice is authentically Southern, depending on expression and attitude rather than dialect: “I resisted the urge to share with [Ansley] the Ted Bundy lecture my mother had drilled into me regarding how serial killers often seemed like nice guys. Apparently Nell Johnson hadn’t been so vigilant as my mamma in her serial killer training.” Sense of place is second to none. “Daddy had a peculiar fascination with reality TV. Swamp People was his favorite. Apparently he’d been watching South Carolina’s contribution to the genre. Our former state treasurer, Thomas Ravenel, had resigned a few years back after being arrested and later incarcerated on cocaine charges. He now had a so-called reality TV show, which I had never seen, and a love child with a young woman reportedly thirty years his junior who was a descendant of John Calhoun. Oh, and Thomas was running for the U.S. senate.” Food preparation and consumption as a bonding agent of family are authentic.

The plot is based on Faulkner’s truism that the past isn’t dead, it’s not even past. It may seem extreme, but it’s hard to exaggerate the extent to which some families will go to preserve face. Boyer does a good job of providing alternatives for what happened to Kent, so that the eventual disclosure of her killer and the motive is a surprise. Colleen, the guardian spirit of Stella Maris who protects the island and those necessary to its preservation, plays a much more prominent role in LOWCOUNTRY BONEYARD than in the previous books.

I thoroughly enjoyed LOWCOUNTRY BONEYARD. (A)

*Kent is not a typo; it is a Bounetheau family name. Kent is definitely a woman.

 

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A REUNION TO DIE FOR is one of Lauren Carr’s Joshua Thornton mystery series. it was published in e-book format in 2007.

Thornton left the U. S. Navy Judge Adjutant General’s Office and been elected Hancock, West Virginia, county prosecuting attorney. He’s a widower with five children. Much of the story involves his readiness to move on from his wife’s death some fourteen months before, as well as his relationship with his cousin Dr. Tad MacMillan, County Medical Examiner and an alcoholic in recovery.

The mystery involves the 2005 return of Gail Reynolds to Chester, West Virginia, she says to write a book about the death of their mutual friend Tricia Wheeler during their senior year in high school, 1985. Pretty, popular, and head cheerleader, Tricia had publicly broken up with her cheating steady boy friend Randy Nice at school and then, according to the sheriff, gone home and shot herself to death. Gail doesn’t think so, and her questions precipitate a series of murders that leaves Joshua Thornton both a suspect in Gail’s death and responsible for finding the killer.

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

I have complained before of the overabundance of criminal activity in Carr’s books. A REUNION TO DIE FOR is no exception. In 333 pages, there are ten murders, one suicide by cop, and one accidental death while the victim is trying to kill Tad MacMillan. There are four separate killers, three of them hired and operating at the behest of the same person. And I thought Midsomer had to be the murder capital of the world! Carr hangs the cases together to make a unified whole, but the complexity is not believable. The identity of the person behind the killings is obvious, the only question being whether Thornton can prove it.

Many characters are superfluous. Most are not developed in any detail. Point of view shifts rapidly between characters, which helps to minimize exposition, but it leaves the action choppy without adding much to the characterization. Thornton is just a bit too perfect to be believable, as is his cousin Dr. MacMillan. The children are all super-achievers who behave beautifully.

Despite the naming of locales within West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, sense of place is lacking. No one in the group of West Virginia characters sounds or acts like it. A REUNION TO DIE FOR is the last of the Carr books for me. (D)

 

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Robert Goldborough’s MURDER IN E MINOR is the first in his continuation of Rex Stout’s great Nero Wolfe mystery series. It was originally published in1987 and reissued in e-book format in 2012. MURDER IN E MINOR marks Wolfe’s return to work after a two-year hiatus following the murders by and the suicide of Orrie Cather in Stout’s final volume.

Maria Radovich calls the office of Nero Wolfe for help because he and her great-uncle Milos Stefanovic had fought together in a partisan group in Montenegro during World War I. Now known as Milan Stevens, her great-uncle is music director of the New York Symphony Orchestra. He’s received three anonymous notes threatening his life but refuses to go to the police. Because Stefanovic had saved his life, Wolfe agrees to investigate. When Archie goes with Maria to the apartment she occupies with her uncle, they find him dead, stabbed in the back repeatedly. The only visitor to the apartment had been Gerald Milner, a violinist with the orchestra whose desire to marry Maria had roused Stevens’s ire. But others have cause to dislike Stevens. He’s not affected the rise in morale and professionalism expected by symphony board chairman Jason Remmers; he has ignored the recommendations for musical selections and morale building by managing director Charles Meyerhoff; he’s refused to premiere the symphony composed by the associate director of the orchestra David Hirsch, who’d expected to get the director’s job; he’s publicly humiliated principal flutist Donald Sommers. But who wanted him dead?

Let me make my prejudices clear. The Rex Stout Nero Wolfe series is one of my all-time favorites. It’s the first mystery series that I read in total, in order. That being said, Goldsborough’s Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin are not Stout’s. He maintains their outward appearances, but their personalities fall flat. In particular, Archie’s voice as first person narrator is off. About the best bit of characterization involves Wolfe and Archie’s relationship: “I don’t think Nero Wolfe has ever properly appreciated my role as the fulfiller of his wishes. During the one hundred and twenty minutes he was puttering with his playthings up on the roof that afternoon, I was making hurried telephone calls, jumping into and out of taxis, and signing a cashier’s check for twenty-five thousand dollars. All so that when he rode the elevator down and walked into his office, I could turn in my chair and casually say, ‘Everything’s set; Milner’s out and will be here at nine.’ It’s not that my efforts were totally overlooked. After all, he did say ‘Very satisfactory,’ when he sat down, which is roughly equivalent to a lesser mortal clicking his heels, doing a cartwheel, and singing the first two verses of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ “ The usual supporting cast--Cramer, Stebbins, Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, Fritz Brenner, Theodore Horstmann, Nathaniel Parker--is present and accounted for.

The plot leaves too much unreported before the standard “reveal all” scene in Wolfe’s office. There’s only one slight clue to the identity of the killer, and there’s no prior indication of the mechanics of the murder. Despite mention of Rustermann’s and West 35th Street, there’s little sense of place. No more. I’d rather re-read the originals. (C)

 

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THIS THING OF DARKNESS is the seventh book in Barbara Fradkin’s Inspector Green series set in Ottawa, Canada. It was published in 2007.

An elderly Jewish man is found brutally beaten to death, the only clue to his identity an antique Star of David pendant torn from his neck and ground into the pavement next to his body. Inspector Michael Green of the Ottawa Major Case Unit, himself Jewish, uses his contacts to identify the victim as mostly-retired psychiatrist Sam Rosenthal, a controversial figure in his heyday, challenging as he had the overuse of psychotropic drugs in treatment of the mentally ill. CCTV from a nearby camera shows a group of Somali males and a female sex worker in the area around the time of the attack. What part, if any, did they play? Was Rosenthal a deliberate kill, or was he simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?

The plot operates on several levels. In the mystery story line, Fradkin keeps attention focused in the wrong direction right up to the surprise ending, and the conclusion is, as so often in reality, ambiguous. On a higher level, THIS THING OF DARKNESS is a meditation on fathers and children, what fathers do to and for their children. It addresses attitudes about mental illness, the rights of patients, and the impact of mental illness on families.

Fradkin grounds Green and other continuing characters in reality with details of personal life. It is his relationship with Staff Sergeant Brian Sullivan that most reveals Green’s character: “A black, moonless night had fallen by the time Green could stand the waiting no longer. He’d never been good at hospitals, with their grim portent of death. Medical updates kept drifting in, but the essentials remained the same. His best friend hung between life and death, his recovery far from assured. He might never again be the man Green had known, the man who listened to his wild flights into zebra land with a bemused smile, only to gently, patiently remind him of the facts. The man who understood his passion for justice and his determination to beat the bad guys. The man who’d been content to let him lead but who had always watched his back. The man who’d forgiven him a hundred times in their years together. This time, for his worst transgression of all, there might never be that chance.” (157) Green’s compulsion to solve the Rosenthal murder led him to ignore signs of Sullivan’s physical condition, keep him on the job, and result in his heart attack.

THIS THING OF DARKNESS introduces a new member of the Major Crimes Unit, Sergeant Marie Claire Levesque, a product of diversity hiring, bilingual, possibly a bit too much like Green in ambition, determination, and single-mindedness to get along well with him. Supporting characters continue to evolve. Green’s daughter Hannah is in regular high school for her senior year, backing off her punk/Goth dress and makeup, and interacting with Green more positively. Sharon Green is thinking seriously about another baby. Sue Peters, so badly injured a couple of books back, is able to walk without a cane and back on desk duty three half-days a week; Bob Gibbs gains in confidence. Superintendent Barbara Devine has her eye on the Deputy Chief job.

Sense of place is outstanding. “The eclectic jumble of shops that brought Rideau Street to life--the tattoo parlours and African restaurants next to dance clubs, bakeries, and body piercing salons--were all wide open, their displays spilling onto the sidewalk before them. Some were new, catering to the tougher elements that had taken over the neighbourhood in recent decades, but others, like Nate’s Deli, clung stubbornly to their immigrant, working class glory days. When Green was a little boy growing up in one of the dilapidated Victorian redbrick townhouses just to the north, his mother had sent him to the Rideau Bakery for challah and to Nate’s for varenikes and white fish. Many of the tenements had been bulldozed to make room for the subsidized slums that masqueraded as urban renewal, but the shops were still there, familiar landmarks on the evolving street.” (8)

THIS THING OF DARKNESS is excellent. (solid A)

 

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TWIXT TWO EQUAL ARMIES by Gail & Tina (don’t you love the cutesy name from the title page?) is a variant-sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It was published in e-book format in 2009. The copyright information gives the authors’ names as Gail McEwan and Tina Moncton.

TWIXT TWO EQUAL ARMIES agrees with the events of Pride and Prejudice through the marriage of Wickham and Lydia and Lady Catherine’s visit to Longbourn. Thereafter Elizabeth Bennet travels north to the Southern Uplands of Scotland, to Rosefarm Cottage, near the village of Clanough, to visit her aunt Mrs. Arabella Fournier, the widow of a French Revolutionary leader who’d been exiled when the extremists assumed power, and her daughter Holly. Mrs. Fournier is Mr. Bennet’s older sister, left in poverty by her husband’s premature death and forced to earn her living in the publishing industry. Holly has worked at the prestigious Hockdown School in Edinburgh, but she’s been sacked for insisting that the girls should be taught academics as well as music, art, and social skills, and for teaching at a charity school for poor boys in the evening. Elizabeth and Holly are the best of friends. In nearby Clyne Cottage lives Lord David Baugham, the seventh Earl of Cumbermere, friend of Fitzwilliam Darcy since school days. Darcy soon “drops in” on Baugham for a prolonged visit. Naturally, he must call on Miss Bennet, which throws Holly and Baugham together. Elizabeth’s doubts about Darcy’s intentions are soon laid to rest. Sparks fly between Holly and Baugham.

TWIXT TWO EQUAL ARMIES takes its title from a John Donne poem and reflects the central struggle of Pride and Prejudice; Holly doesn’t understand Baugham any better than Elizabeth at first perceived Darcy, and Baugham must realize the importance of love and respect in choosing a marriage partner. The social gap between the pair are at least as great as that between Darcy and Elizabeth. Though an earl, Baugham’s father had wasted his fortune. It’s not clear how wealthy Baugham is, but the Fourniers must work for wages, albeit in “genteel” occupations; after her teaching job ends, Mrs. Fournier secures for Holly the job of illustrating science books.

The language of TWIXT TWO EQUAL ARMIES is Austenesque in style, but her humor and wit are sadly lacking. It reads long and dry. No one expects the course of true love to run smooth, but the willful misunderstandings become too much. Shifts between view points bring in the reactions of all the characters, including the housekeepers at Rosefarm Cottage and Clyne Cottage, Baugham’s valet, the village boy Hamish who helps Holly sort out Baugham’s library, even Mr. Grant, Holly’s rejected suitor so reminiscent of Mr. Collins. Much of this could have been cut to the story’s advantage. Use of intrusive narrator makes for a preachy tone. Setting moves from London to Longbourn to Clanough and back again, but there’s not much sense of place other than weather.

Without the leavening of Austen’s irony, TWIXT TWO EQUAL ARMIES lies flat and heavy. (C)

 

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LAST OF THE SUMMER WINE, Vintage 2004, is the last to date in the DVD release of the long-lived British comedy series. It continues with Peter Sallis as Norman Clegg and Frank Thornton as Herbert Truelove, Truly of the Yard. Sidekicks include Keith Clifford as Billy Hardcastle, Brian Murphy as Alvin Smedley, and Bert Kwouk as Entwhistle. The other major characters continue, including Dora Bryan as Auntie Roz and Josephine Tewson as the librarian Miss Davenport. As always, it’s was written by Roy Clarke and directed by Alan J. W. Bell.


The 2004 season includes ten regular episodes plus the Christmas special. “Jurassic - No Parking” has a running gag of the men transporting a huge inflatable dinosaur through the streets, delivering it as Howard’s surprise birthday gift, first for Marina, then for Pearl when he realizes he’s mixed up the dates. (A) Alvin has a prominent role in “The General’s Greatest Battle,” having to replace the dummy of General Monkcaster, the hero of the Battle of Mazurka, and to ride on a parade float with Nora Batty in costume as his wife. (A-) “Spores” involves the group with Mavis, wailing in a car beside the road because her husband Lionel has left her; he’s depressed, obsessed with nature red in tooth and claw and with the danger represented by invisible clouds of spores. (B+) Billy Hardcastle and Barry are outstanding in suits of Lincoln green in celebration of Robin Hood’s birthday, while Howard tries to improve his image with Marina, complete with WWI German uniform and helmet. (B+)

“Who’s That with Barry and Glenda? It’s Not Barry and Glenda” brings mutual suspicion into the younger couple’s lives. He’s acting guilty about a briefcase, leading Glenda to conclude he’s seeing another woman. She sets out disguised as a man to follow him; Barry sees her leave the house and concludes Glenda is seeing another man. Truly of the Yard must sort them out. (B+) Nora Batty’s determined to give an isolated farm couple a day out, enlisting the men to take Mr. Scrooby for drinks, while the women entertain his wife in “An Apple a Day.” “The lad” gets out and leads them a merry chase. (A-) In “Barry Becomes a Psychopathic Killer but Only Part-Time,” Smiler has to be rescued from Bessie, a behemoth who’s convinced he’s rich; she then decides Clegg, in disguise as Smiler’s financial planner, is a better catch. Barry’s twitching and tough act scare her off. (A)

Barry’s also prominent in “Things to Do When Your Wife Runs Off with a Turkish Waiter.” He’s stuck with entertaining the lonely Wendell The group help entertain him in the running gag about Wendell’s wanting to use music to charm the birds out of the trees. (A-) The group ends the feud between Nora Batty and Audrey Craig in “Beware of Laughing at Nora’s Hats.” Formerly best friends, they parted over insults about Nora’s hats. Barry’s passion for golf leads Glenda to secure the services of Tom as coach and Smiler as his caddy, all of whom fail to impress the club captain (played by Trevor Bannister). (A-) Truly is usually the instigator of the group’s practical jokes, but he’s caught when the group play on his aversion for the former Mrs. Truelove. Entwhistle in drag is a sight to behold. (A)

The Christmas special, “Variations on a Theme of the Widow Winstanley,” features Sir Norman Wisdom in his familiar role as Billy Engleton. Cleggy is writing on his memoirs and gets stuck on the name of a girl in his class--Audrey Brooke who married a Winstanley. The group sets it up to send her after Clegg, who escapes in disguise as Father Christmas at the library’s poetry group. (A-)

I don’t pretend to be objective about LAST OF THE SUMMER WINE, and Vintage 2004 continues strong. No one ever could replace the great Bill Owen as Compo Simmonite, but even without him, the series is far better than most anything on American network television. (overall rating for set--A-)

 

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HAIL AND FAREWELL is the sixth book in J. J. Salkeld’s strong Lakeland Murders series featuring DCI Andy Hall of the Cumbria Constabulary. It was published in e-format in 2014.

Warfare is brewing between rival criminal gangs in Workington. George Hayton has worked for years to replace Jack Moffett as the local crime lord, and the annual Uppies-Downies game is to be the venue of Hayton’s power play. Knowing this DI Jimmy Smith and DS Ken Hodgson participate in the game (which appears to be no rules rugby played throughout the town by men of doubtful sobriety), a man dies, and DCI Andy Hall and his team of DS Jane Francis, who’s coincidentally his lover, and DS Ian Mann, former marine and present hard man, are sent in. Hall’s on medical leave, having banged up a knee in a bicycle accident; DS Francis is OIC, though Mann is technically senior to her. Investigation of the victim Chris Brown turns up absolutely nothing connecting him to the gangs, so they speculate that he may have been killed in mistake for someone else. When a photographer filming the game is mugged and his cameras taken, his hotel room broken into and his computer stolen, Hall concludes that someone is scared of what his material must show, then CCTV puts George Hayton’s men solidly in the picture. Can they make a conspiracy case involving Hayton, one that also involves police corruption?

The plot format is police procedural, with a gradual disclosure of evidence drawing closer and closer to George Hayton. Salkeld does manage a clever surprise ending, not emotionally satisfying but realistic.

One of the pleasures of this series is the relationship that exists between the team members. Hall and Jane Francis live together and decide to try for a baby. Hall’s professional stance is absolute: “Of course I’m loyal to colleagues, and especially my team, because if they make an error then I expect to be given, and accept, at least part of the blame. And if they were acting on my instructions then I expect to carry the can, not them. That’s never going to change. And I hate the sloping shoulders of some of our senior colleagues, you know that. But if someone on my team was on the take then I’d grass them up. Of course I would.” Salkeld introduces DC Keith Iredale, newly promoted to the CID, an attractive character whose innate talent for detection Hall recognizes; he asks Iredale ito transfer to his team in Kendal. It’ll be pleasant to see Iredale develop. Characterization is strong throughout the series.

Plenty of geographical names indicate the setting of HAIL AND FAREWELL, but there’s little sense of place. I’m looking forward to the next in the series. (B+)

 

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FACE TIME is the second book in Hank Phillippi Ryan’s Charlotte McNally mystery series. It was published in 2009. Charlotte “Charlie” McNally is the lead investigative reporter for Channel 3 in Boston.

It’s June, Charlie and her producer Franklin Parrish are under pressure from Susannah Smith-Bagley, hired gun ratings guru, to come up with a blockbuster story for the upcoming July ratings week. Oscar Ortega, “the Great and Wonderful Oz,” first Hispanic Attorney General of Massachusetts, has announced his run for governor. Oliver Rankin, executive director of Constitutional Justice Project, contacts Charlie with the offer of an inside story on the CJP effort to free Dorinda Keeler Sweeney, imprisoned three years before for the murder of her husband Raymond Jack Sweeney. If CJP is successful, Ortega receives a major political setback. Charlie is suspicious of the timing--is the main objective to free Dorie, who did confess to the murder, or to embarrass Ortega? As she and Franklin investigate, they discover a shoddy investigation carried out by Tek Mattheissen, former Swampscott cop who’s now Ortega’s chief of staff, and potential sources of information die. Who killed Ray Sweeney?

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


I’m much disappointed in FACE TIME. To begin, the sense of place so strong in PRIME TIME doesn’t come through. Places are named, there are moments of atmospheric description, but overall, Charlie and Franklin are moving against a generic background.

Most of the characterization involves Charlie’s relationship with her mother Lorraine Carpenter McNally, to wed Ethan Margolis when she recovers from her extensive plastic surgery. Charlie’s relationship with Josh Gelston continues, and she gradually befriends his eight-year-old daughter Penny. Charlie is the first person narrator, so she’s the only one whose thoughts and motivations we know. None of the new characters are much developed, especially not Dorinda Keller Sweeney or her daughter Gaylen Sweeney. Both remain referred to rather than “alive.” Many characters are superfluous to need.

The plot doesn’t jell for me. Why Charlie’s so sure that the CJP’s story is a political maneuver against Ortega isn’t explained. Neither is the reasoning behind the laxity of the original investigation, including failure to question witnesses, use an impartial photo lineup, or check for Dorinda Sweeney’s alibi. “She confessed” becomes the mantra for all the omissions. After Watergate, any politician as savvy as Ortega is supposed to be should know that attempting a cover-up is more dangerous than the material to be covered. Ryan provides no reason to suspect the existence of Ray Sweeney’s killer, and the back story on his activities is improbable.

FACE TIME just doesn’t match the quality of the first of the series. (C-)

 

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NIGHT ROUNDS is the second book in Helene Tursten’s Inspector Irene Huss Investigation series. It was printed in 1999, and its translation into English by Laura A. Wideburg in 2012. Inspector Huss works in the Goteborg, Sweden, Violent Crimes Division.

About midnight, electricity goes off in the small private Lowander Hospital, the emergency generator fails to come on, and an elderly surgery patient Nils Peterzen dies. Marianne Svard, the ICU nurse, is found in the main electrical room, dead of ligature strangulation. Siv Perssons, elderly ward nurse, swears that she saw in the moonlight in the hallway the ghost of Nurse Tekla, who hanged herself in the attic of the hospital in 1947. When Kurt Hook, crime reporter for the Goteborg Times, runs the ghost story on the front page and reports a mentally-ill homeless woman had seen the ghost leave the hospital, Mama Bird immediately goes missing, as does Linda Svensson, the day-shift ICU nurse. The garden hut where Mama Bird had been sleeping on the hospital grounds is torched, and fiber evidence ties the arson to Marianne Svard’s murder. What is going on at Lowander Hospital, and why?

The plot is logically set up with appropriate foreshadowing and motivation. It operates on several levels, with relationships between different sets of parents and children, sexual attraction and sexual harassment within professional groups, and murder. The story moves slowly for so long that the resolution seems overly hasty and forced.

Tursten creates a believable body of cops in the Violent Crimes Division under Superintendent Sven Andersson, Irene’s boss, at least in part because they are different personalities, not all of whom are admirable. “Irene saw Hans lower his head to charge Birgitta, and instantly she stepped between them. She blocked Borg’s hand with her forearm, pushed away his hip with her left arm, and dropped him backward with an osoto otoshi. This was not hard to do, since he had the training and quickness of a sloth. She used a firm grip to keep him down. He whimpered that she was hurting him, but she didn’t care. As long as she had a jujitsu black belt, third dan, no one would hurt a colleague. Borg now was painfully aware of that.” (114) Irene’s family life goes a long way to personalize her. The number of characters is excess to those needed to carry the plot.

Sense of place is good. “...Irene and Tommy headed out to interview Marianne Svard’s ex-husband. Finding the address was not easy. Many of the stone buildings near Linnegatan had been torn down in the 1980s when a changing water table had rotted their support pilings. Architects attempting to re-create a turn-of-the-century atmosphere had not always been successful, but now pleasant pubs, small boutiques, and proximity to the large forest of Slottsskogan had made this area extremely popular. House prices and rents were sky-high.” (82)

NIGHT ROUNDS is a solid read in what appears to be shaping up as a strong series. (B)

 

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THE CAT SITTER’S PAJAMAS is the seventh book in Blaize Clement’s strong mystery series featuring former deputy, now professional pet sitter Dixie Hemingway. It was published in e-book format in 2011.

When Dixie goes to check on Elvis and Lucy, cats belonging to her friend Cupcake Trillin, inside linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, she discovers a nearly naked woman in his house, making herself at home. The woman identifies herself as Briana and claims friendship with Cupcake since their childhood in Thibodaux, Louisiana. When Dixie phones Cupcake, he denies any knowledge of her, but by the time the police respond to Dixie’s call, Briana is gone and an unknown dead woman with her throat cut is lying in the floor. What on earth is going on? The only clue is a pair of fake Nikes in Cupcake’s size in the middle of the bed in the master bedroom. Briana, an international supermodel with some less-than-savory friends, seems fixated on Dixie, who goes about her daily routines not terribly concerned with what’s going on. Then she’s attacked and her apartment ransacked. Why? Why are the police not releasing the name of the victim? Who killed the woman?

Clement uses misdirection to focus attention away from the killer, though there is at least one major episode of foreshadowing the conclusion to the mystery plot. There’s a second major surprise that also seems logically consistent, explaining why Briana involves Cupcake. Much of the story involves Dixie’s uncertainty about her relationship with Guidry, the homicide cop who returned to his home in New Orleans some six months before. It is best to read the series in order because events and people carry over.

Dixie as first person narrator is honest. “...it was time to either completely sever the relationship with Guidry or change my mind and follow him to New Orleans. And as I had told Ethan, moving to New Orleans wasn’t right for me. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to face what had to be faced. People say that denial doesn’t work, but it worked just fine for me. I could deny all over the place.” (130) She’s also self-deprecatingly funny: “...I’m like that overeager dog in the commercial who loses his cool because he knows he’s getting bacon-flavored kibble. Given a choice between sex with George Clooney or crisp bacon on toasted sourdough bread smeared with real mayo, a slice of ripe tomato, and a frill of lettuce, I’d take the BLT every time. Well, maybe not every time, but definitely some of the times. Once, maybe. Okay, never, but I’d imagine the bacon sandwich all the time I was making love to Clooney.” (163) Other characters are well-developed. I like Dixie and her friends.

Sense of place is outstanding. “It was my favorite time of day--that tentative period while the moon and stars negotiate with the sun, and the universe waits to see if the night’s rulers will gracefully exit and let a new day begin. A dull corrugated sea stretched toward a blurred horizon. On its surface, the reflection of retreating stars made winking lights like dying fireflies. Above it, a few desultory seabirds floated on high air currents. On the shore, a sleepy surf pretended to have every intention of getting its act together and making a bigger splash, but not just yet.” (102-3)

Much of THE CAT SITTER’S PAJAMAS involves fakes of various sorts, asking serious questions much deeper than usually found in a cozy mystery. “...I thought about how phoniness is so pervasive that we’ve come to take it for granted. Not just phony political rhetoric but phony smiles and phony conversation by ordinary people in which nobody says what they really think. With digital technology, photographs may have settings or people added or removed, and recordings of speeches or conversations may actually be random words spliced together to create a seamless whole. Most of us wear shoes and watches and jeans and T-shirts with fake labels in them, society matrons carry expensive handbags with fake labels, cigar aficionados puff pricey stogies with Cuban labels that are really from somewhere else, and heroic athletic feats may be due to muscles or stamina falsely created by steroids. I wondered if living in a phony world changed the way our brains and cellular structures operate. If we accept phoniness, will be do away with honesty and integrity altogether? Will we make up new selves from day to day, with no obligation to mop up the messes the old selves have made? Most important of all, is it possible to be real in a phony world?” (218-9) Good questions.

THE CAT SITTER’S PAJAMAS is the last book in the series actually written by Blaize Clement; her son John continues the series. Certainly, this final installment from her is a worthy one. (A)

 

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Brigid George’s MURDER AT MURLOO is the first in the Dusty Kent mystery series. It was published in e-format in 2015. The series features best-selling Australian true-crime writer Dusty Kent, who investigates, solves, and publishes cold cases.

Sean O’Kelly, an Irishman on a working holiday in Australia, meets Dusty Kent at Murloo Mansion, an exclusive hotel in Murloo, near Claigan on the coast of Victoria, Australia. She’s in Murloo at the request of the family of Gabrielle Peters, a young woman who’d been murdered the previous year, to investigate the murder and to discover the killer. Sean is an IT expert with a degree from Dublin University; Dusty needs an assistant with IT skills, so she hires him. Sean is the first person narrator of MURDER AT MURLOO. Two surfers, Jamie and Mark, are the prime suspects, especially since they disappeared the day of Gabby’s murder. Police are unable to trace them, and the people of Murloo are eager to believe them guilty, since that would mean no local was involved. However, Sean soon finds Jamie and confirms that the men were nowhere near Murloo at the time of Gabby’s death. But who wanted her dead? Her friends Bec and Sarah are concealing information; her fiance Heath Johnson seems devoted, or maybe obsessed with her; her sister Lisa is jealous of her; elderly Edna Graham resents Gabby’s friendship with 84-year-old Guiseppe Di Stefano; and who’s the source of cash deposits Gabby’s putting into a special account?

The plot is set up with appropriate clues to how the killer establishes a seemingly solid alibi. As Sean does background checks on the people surrounding Gabby, only one has what seems a sufficient motive for murder. Perhaps because the murder happened a year before the story takes place, there’s little sense of immediacy or emotional impact. The tradition of the “great reveal” ending is maintained, but without the confession of the killer, it’s questionable whether a jury would convict on the evidence Dusty presents.

Sean O’Kelly as narrator remains a cipher. He’d been invited to leave his IT position for hacking into the institute’s systems; he has an aunt with second sight; he’s worked in the hospitality industry; he has a crush on Dusty. That’s about all we learn about him. Dusty Kent is a bit more fleshed out. She’s driven to provide closure for families of murder victims because her own mother disappeared when Dusty was five years old; she was never found dead or alive. Dusty is a karate black belt, supremely self-confident, certain that her books help. She tells Sean, “It gets to you at first... It’s sickening to have to think of people as potential murderers; people you get to know and like. ... You have to try to remember who we are doing this for. Think of Gabby. She has no-one else to fight for her. The police have virtually closed her case. We have to be her warriors... To do that we have to go to dark places. But it will be all right in the end. Remember that.” Other characters are more talked about than shown in action.

Sense of place is lacking. One editing problem involves the nature of Dusty’s writing. She’s at first referred to as a true-crime writer, but later Gabby’s story is to become a novel. Which does she write, fiction or nonfiction? Apostrophes in singular possessive nouns are not used correctly. Despite the clever alibi, MURDER IN MURLOO is sadly generic. (C)

 

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Shanna Hogan’s THE STRANGER SHE LOVED: A MORMON DOCTOR, HIS BEAUTIFUL WIFE, AND AN ALMOST PERFECT MURDER is the story of Dr. Martin Joseph MacNeill’s career, marriage, and murder of his wife Michele Somers MacNeill. It was published in e-book in 2015.

Hogan’s writing is accessible. She handles a multitude of characters, making it easy for the reader to keep them straight. Her research is good; she confines her opinions to the afterword. Photographs are well selected (though they do not show up well on my early-generation Kindle). One curious feature is the appearance of the table of contents at the end of the book.

The trial of Dr. Martin MacNeill has been covered extensively in the media. Following extensive elective cosmetic surgery on her face, Michele MacNeill was discovered in her bathtub by youngest daughter Ada on 11 April 2007; Martin MacNeill said he’d performed CPR on her body, along with a neighbor Ada went to for assistance, until police and EMTs arrived. Autopsy ruled the cause of death as a cardiac arrhythmia. Extensive amounts of pharmaceuticals (including Ambien, supposedly ingested at 10 AM) were discounted, as was drowning as a cause of death. Within days of the funeral, Martin MacNeill had moved his mistress of two years, Gypsy Jyll Willis, into the family home as “nanny” to his three adopted younger daughters. Both Michele’s sister Linda Cluff, who had information about MacNeill’s early career, and Alexis MacNeill, youngest of their biological daughters, believed MacNeill had killed his wife, and both worked to get the case reopened. It was not until 17 October 2013 that MacNeill’s trial for first degree murder and obstruction of justice began. He was found guilty on both charges on Saturday, 9 November 2013, and on 19 September 2014 was sentence to what would effectively be a life sentence.

There are several aspects to this story that are downright scary. One is the ease with which Martin MacNeill manipulated the system throughout his life. He was found guilty of a major felony in the mid-1970s, following his discharge from the Army as medically unfit--he was diagnosed as bi-polar with latent schizophrenic ideation; he used his mental condition as a defense to minimize his punishment. He later went on to claim and receive for thirty years full disability benefits from both the military and from Social Security. As a convicted felon, he attended at least three post-graduate programs, two in medicine and one in law, on forged or stolen documentation that none of the schools detected.

MacNeill changed jobs often. In every position he held, he misdiagnosed and sexually exploited patients; he bullied and browbeat fellow doctors, nurses, other staff, and patients. His behavior was erratic and demanding. He bragged to a mistress Anna Osborne Walthall that he’d attempted to kill his mother with pills in her beer when he was eight years old, had killed his brother Rufus Roy MacNeill, and had killed patients with injections of potassium. Yet he remained a respected doctor whose activities were never scrutinized.

Equally frightening is the ease with which MacNeill at first got away with murder. His accounts at the scene with police and EMTs were contradictory. His behavior was bizarre. He interfered with the Emergency Room procedures at the American Fork, Utah, Hospital where Michele’s body was taken. Yet the first responder Ray Ormond of the Pleasant Grove, Utah, Police Department, took only eight photographs, did not interview everyone, took no physical evidence, and never treated the bathroom as a crime scene. Based on incomplete information, the State Medical Examiners Office ruled the death from natural causes and, though the finding was later amended to add that the pharmaceuticals may have been a contributing cause, never changed its verdict.

MacNeill’s behavior after Michele’s death was highly erratic and suspicious, moving his mistress into the house as his daughters’ “nanny.” He used his adopted daughter Giselle’s birth certificate to arrange a new identity for Gypsy Jyll Willis as “Jillian MacNeill,” his wife. His documentation gave their wedding day as of Michele’s funeral; by the day he returned to work following Michele’s death, only five days, he was wearing a new wedding band. He and Gypsy used her fake identity to claim military benefits as the wife of a veteran. He even sexually assaulted Alexis twice in the months following Michele’s death. MacNeill seemed to have no sense that he could ever be caught. It took years for Linda and Alexis to convince the Utah County Attorney’s Office to re-open the case. Hogan says that, without their persistence, MacNeill would have escaped punishment. The two women simply generated so much media attention that the prosecutors had to act.

The most egregious show of hubris, however, did not involve Martin MacNeill, but his mistress Gypsy Jyll Willis. At a hearing on the charges of identity theft and fraud held before the murder trial, she testified while wearing a distinctive blazer that had belonged to Michele MacNeill.

I recommend THE STRANGER SHE LOVED highly. (A)

 

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THE CANTOR WORE CRINOLINES is the latest to date in Mark Schweizer’s Liturgical Mystery series set in St. Germaine, North Carolina, featuring Hayden Konig. Konig is the full-time chief of police and the part-time organist and choir director of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church, though he’s on sabbatical during this story. It was published in e-book format in 2013.

Something unusual is going on in St. Germaine. Three houses are up for auction for unpaid taxes. Konig’s young protege Bud McCullough, now 22 years old and the youngest Master Sommelier in the United States, buys one of them in partnership with Konig; Bud’s opening a wine shop to be called The Wine Press. When checking out his house, he discovers the body of hairdresser Darla Kildair in a closet. Cause and time of death are not obvious since, in mid-January in an unheated house, the body is frozen. The next day Rachel Walt, who bought another of the houses, finds the body of Amy Ventura in the closet; Konig and policewoman Nancy Parsky find Crystal Latimore’s body in the third house. All the women were dressed as for church, the bodies were positioned alike, each had an earring missing, but no one knows of any connection between them. Then Konig and Nancy discover that the bodies have been staged like those in a cozy mystery the exclusive book club, the Blue Hill Bookworms, are reading. Are they involved? How?

A pleasure of Schweizer’s St. Germaine series is the goings-on at St. Barnabas. In this installment, St. Barnabas has an interim priest, Father Gallus Dressler, who is so High Church he’s Anglo-Catholic; since Konig is on sabbatical, he brings in a young crony, the Chevalier Lance Fleagle, as supply organist and choir director. Both are members of the Order of St. Clementine, the Canadian Priory, pledged to uphold the chivalric virtues. They’re determined to restore the true ceremonials of the church. The blended celebration of Candlemas Evensong and the St. Germaine Garden Club’s Winter Festival, held on February 2 and involving the blessing of the local ground hog Pig Whistle, is one of the better comic scenes Schweizer has written.

Humor is rampant, especially in Konig’s first person descriptions. Of Bud, he says, “Ask Bud about any wine you could think of and you’d be likely to get a quick review in winespeak: a saucy Cabernet that tastes like being slapped up side of the face with a wet trout that morphs into a mermaid; a young Merlot that has all the commercial appeal of gonorrhea with notes of dung, spare ribs, horse blanket, boiled cabbage, and cardboard; a Malbec almost Episcopalian in its predictability, cream cheese and mothballs, but as haunting as a cello solo by Yo-Yo Ma; hot dog water. And he was always right.” It’s good to revisit old friends in St. Germaine. My only complaint is that it’s not necessary to put every single one into every book in the series.

Sense of place is outstanding, evoking small Southern town and its folkways impeccably. One aspect Schweitzer nails is the importance of food in fellowship with friends. “Bratwurst Night was something special. Hot German potato salad was a necessity. Fresh rolls from Bun in the Oven, the new bakery in town. Caramelized onions, baked apples, and sauerkraut. The sauerkraut was an old family recipe, consisting of a jar of good kraut with a couple spoonsful of red currant jam mixed in to sweeten it, bacon crumbles, caraway seeds, and a dollop of goose fat. The bratwursts had to be the best--hand stuffed into natural casings by Bavarian virgins, salted with their tears, and steamed in beer before grilling.”

As always, Konig produces installments of a hard-boiled noir story ala Raymond Chandler, remarkable for its awful writing. It’s easy to skip over if you prefer. Schweizer has another good one in THE CANTOR WORE CRINOLINES. (B+)

 

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Oliver Tidy’s MAKING A KILLING is the second in his Romney and Marsh File series set in Dover, England. It was a free or inexpensive e-book published in 2012. It features Detective Inspector Tom Romney and Detective Sergeant Joy Marsh.

Duncan Smart is perturbed; he’s received several anonymous telephone calls promising great violence against him. Going for an early round at the White Cliffs Golf Club, he discovers the body of Phillip Emerson, his head so badly smashed that he must be identified by scars and other identifying marks on his body. He’s captain of the club, but no one offers Romney and his team much information toward finding his killer. Marsh finds a highly compromising CD of eight men from the club on holiday in Spain, which club professional Elliot Masters confirms Emerson was using to pressure the directors to sell a parcel of land and four tied cottages to them for development. Emerson’s also involved with a mistress, Lillian West, who’s grieving no more than his wife and son. But Masters then hangs himself in the pro shop. Someone stabs Duncan Smart and leaves him in his home to bleed to death. Is there a connection between the men? What is it? In a related subplot, Detective Sergeant Brian Wilkes sees his rapid advance-ment through the ranks threatened by DS Marsh and acts to sabotage her by stealing from her desk and destroying Phillip Emerson’s cell phone; he cuts corners to try to make a case against the person vandalizing cars improperly parked on the streets at night. Can Romney and Marsh get it all solved before others are hurt?

Tidy’s characters are well-developed. Shifting viewpoint between Romney and Marsh adds to their realism. Romney is more old-school than the younger Joy Marsh. He’s twice divorced, in his forties, inclined to make up his mind quickly and not always correctly in identifying suspects and formulating theories of crime. Fortunately, he has Marsh to prod him into keeping an open mind: “That [Romney] seemed prepared to continue to discuss things gave encouragement to her belief he was a good enough police officer to see that if something appeared too neat and convenient to be true it probably wasn’t. She hoped he was still a detective who wanted the truth at the end of an investigation and not the swift and opportune tying of loose ends, not simply the closing of cases to satisfy area’s thirst for positive and speedy statistics and definitely not just because he wanted to make his holiday. That wasn’t policing.” Romney, Marsh, and Detective Constable Grimes, overseen and supported by Superintendent Falkner, make up a believable investigative unit.

Sense of place is good. Tidy uses atmosphere to show character as well as to establish place. “Marsh entered the dark and gloomy hallway and Mrs. Michaels closed the door behind her, replacing the chain. The all too familiar smells of an old person’s home wafted up to greet her reminding her of her grandmother’s house, a place where the recesses were left to stagnate and windows were never opened. Musty fabrics, old furniture and the odours of an old person’s traditional diet combined to create a sad and slightly nauseating scent. Mrs. Michaels led Marsh through to the sitting room where she surprised the policewoman by offering her tea and biscuits. Marsh realised then why she had been kept waiting so long: the old woman had been preparing to receive her. A small antique gate-leg table stood between two uncomfortable looking armchairs. On top of this sat a tray with a a matching teapot, cups and saucers and a plate of plain biscuits. Marsh was touched by the gesture.”

Two things bothered me about MAKING A KILLING. One involves the introduction of a totally new character in the denouement, one suspected of killing Emerson. I can’t say more without doing a spoiler. The other less important objection is to problems in use of commas in series and between clauses in compound and complex sentences and in use of apostrophes in making names possessive.

Still, MAKING A KILLING is as well written as many much more expensive books, and I’m looking forward to the next installment. (B+)

 

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LUCKY STIFF is the fourth book in Annelise Ryan’s Mattie Winston mystery series. It is important that this series be read in order since references to previous cases/books are frequent. Mattie is a former ER and OR nurse who’s now working as a medicolegal death investigator for Dr. Izzy Rybarceski, the County Medical Examiner. LUCKY STIFF was published in 2013.

Starting on Christmas Day, Mattie and Detective Steve Hurley of the Sorenson, Wisconsin, Police Department are involved in two cases, one the death of paraplegic Jack Allen, his body found in his burned out house, clearly an arson. Some few months before, Jack had won a $500,000+ jackpot at the North Woods Casino, and he didn’t trust banks. His safe is empty; his blood alcohol level is sky high; he was dead before the fire started. Then the body of David Strommen, who’d gone fishing on Thanksgiving Friday and never returned, is found in the river. There’s a major skull fracture, done postmortem, but he didn’t drown. What’s going on in Sorenson?

****SPOILERS****SPOILERS****

Mattie’s relationship with Hurley gets much more attention than the two deaths. Because the police and the medical examiner’s office monitor each other’s work, fraternization between personnel is forbidden. To pursue their relationship, Mattie must give up her job, which she loves, and return to nursing at the hospital where her ex-husband is the only general surgeon. She agonizes, debates her finances, and decides she can “grow” her divorce settlement nest egg through gambling winnings at the North Woods Casino. She loses some $75,000 in three visits. Deciding to pursue the attraction between herself and Hurley, Mattie quits her job with Izzy, who immediately hires someone else; her ex-husband David threatens to leave the hospital if she’s re-hired, so she’s not. She and Hurley finally consummate their passion, to have Hurley’s supposedly ex-wife show up on his doorstep. It seems she never filed the signed divorce papers, and she’d not told Hurley he’d fathered a daughter, Emily, now a teenager. Kate has lost her job, their home is in foreclosure, and they have no place else to go. Hurley, of course, takes them in. LUCKY STIFF ends with Mattie alone, crying herself to sleep.

The solution to David Strommen’s death is pure happenstance. Mattie uses a piece of paper from a pad at Strommen’s house to note a phone number, and she later just happens to see the paper under black light which shows up the message that had been written on the sheet above. The explanation for Jack Allen’s death is logical, but the murderer’s identity isn’t foreshadowed.

The sharp characterization so strong in the earlier books in the series is largely missing from LUCKY STIFF. It isn’t required that every local mentioned in the series be included in each installment. Mattie is weaker, more impulsive, more ambivalent in attitude, while her immediate gambling addiction just doesn’t ring true.

Most of the humor is confined to establishing the small-town atmosphere of Sorenson: “For some reason, snowstorms turn otherwise normal people into hoarders. Larders everywhere within the strike zone get filled to the brim with bread, milk, eggs, and the like ... except in Wisconsin, where people are more likely stocking up on beer, brats, and snowmobile gas. Wisconsinites don’t surrender easily to winer, and we are well used to the cold. I know people here in town who think any temperature above zero is warm enough to cook brats outside on the grill. When people south of the 42nd parallel are bundling up in wool hats, long johns, parkas, and mittens, Wisconsinites might throw on a flannel shirt. And when hell freezes over, Wisconsin schools might open two hours late.” (122)

LUCKY STIFF just doesn’t measure up as a mystery. It’s more an installment of a romance novel with some mystery overtones. (C)

 

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SEX IN A SIDE CAR is the second book in Phyllis Smallman’s mystery series featuring Sherri Travis, a bartender in Jacaranda, Florida, on Cypress Island, a Gulf barrier island. It was published in e-format in 2011. Titles in the series come from names of drinks.

As Hurricane Myrna bears down on the Gulf and wobbles, changing her point of impact, most people batten down the hatches and leave the island. Sherri Travis plans to go when her shift at the Sunset restaurant and bar is over, but instead she’s kidnapped by Gina Ross. Ross is convinced that her sister had been murdered in North Carolina by a serial killer who’s now on Cypress Island, who’s in fact just murdered Bunny Lehre, a tourist enjoying the sun and some discreet plastic surgery. Ross takes her to the house she’d rented and disappears as Myrna hits the island as a full force Category 4 hurricane. Sherri later finds her car, blocked by a palm tree fallen in the road, with Gina dead from blows to the head. With the Sunset badly damaged, Sherri takes a bartender job at the Jacaranda Bath and Tennis Club, where Bunny Lehre had been a temporary member, hoping to uncover information about the killer. She discovers sex-for-hire pool boys, a scam involving stealing liquor, an informal pharmacy for recreational drugs, a spooky groundsman, a lecherous general manager, and more unpleasant rich people than she prefers to deal with, before she gets herself kidnapped by the killer.

Smallman’s plot twist on the identity of the killer uses the readers’ preconceptions against them. Sherri’s relationship with Clay Adams continues; she’s living with him and wants a deeper commitment but also fears it, not wanting to be perceived as a kept woman. It’s going to be important to read this series in order.

Sherri is still defensive about her Florida “cracker” background, very aware of attitudes about herself: “Low class, no class, trailer scum was how Jimmy’s mom described me. Clay’s social calendar emptied when he took up with me. The good people of Jacaranda were waiting for him to come to his senses. Actually, I was expecting him to come to his senses too. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t making any plans, just hanging in to see what came next. But then again that’s pretty much what I always do, planning ahead being one of many life skills I don’t have. Inertia always had worked for me in the past so I was pretty loyal to it.” (12) Sherri’s surrounded by a believable supporting cast.

Sense of place is outstanding. Smallman accurately catches the resentment felt in many Southern tourist areas: “She’d hit my reactor button, another Northerner saying the South just doesn’t measure up, saying everything is better up North. Well maybe everything except the weather. Even the snowbirds had to admit we excel at weather or we wouldn’t get so many of them down here where the only windchill they have to worry about is the one they get off their ice cubes. But they’re quick to point out that nothing else lives up to their expectations, so on pick-up trucks all over Florida you an see bumper stickers saying ‘We don’t care how you do it up North.’ “ (37)

Smallman is also good with physical details of setting. “I drove slowly down the beach, window rolled down, enjoying the sunshine and just glad to be alive. Where the road left the beach and curved inland, flowering vines, with a few new blooms, waved in the green canopy above me. How the hell could anything so delicate have survived Myrna’s vicious winds and already be blooming again? Already hibiscus flowers crowded up against the narrow road nearly brushing the sides of the Miata when we met other cars on tight corners. Repair crews were still on parts of Beach Road, dragging broken limbs out of the underbrush and running them through a shredder. If large numbers of downed branches are left to dry out after a wind brings them down, they can become a fire hazard, forest fires being the third plague of Florida after hurricanes and tourists.” (180)

SEX IN A SIDE CAR is worth the read. (A-)

 

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Ellery Adams’s MURDER IN THE MYSTERY SUITE was a free or inexpensive e-book download published in 2014. It features Jane Steward, great-niece of the owners and general manager of Storyton Hall, a resort dedicated to those who love reading. The Hall was disassembled in England and moved to western Virginia in the 1830s by one of her ancestors, but it’s now in need of repairs. Jane devises a Mystery and Mayhem week-long entertainment designed to pack the hotel at premium prices. Guests attend in the persona of their favorite fictional detectives.

I’m giving up at 21%. An unexplained death of an unidentified woman occurs in Storyton Village while Jane plans the Murder and Mayhem event. It’s apparently completely unconnected with Storyton Hall. There’s mention but no sign of Sheriff Evans or an investigation. Adams appears to be setting up the murder of Felix Hampden, aka Umberto Ferrari (think Poirot as an Italian), who’s won a prized first edition in the treasure hunt on the opening night.

Events and characters are seen through Jane Steward’s eyes, but this offers little information about her personality and character. We know only she’s got a good figure for clothes, has been a widow for six years, has twin six-year-old sons Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and loves Storyton Hall. She’s met Edwin Alcott, a Heathcliff-ish food writer who’s taking over the sandwich shop Loafing Around in the village. Both are generic romance novel protagonists. Adams has introduced a multitude of villagers, most of whom are little individualized, as well as the managerial staff of Storyton Hall, also only sketched.

MURDER IN THE MYSTERY SUITE lacks sense of place. The writing style is pedestrian. No grade because not finished.

 

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Bruce Beckham’s MURDER BY MAGIC is the fifth and latest book in his Inspector Skelgill Investigations series set in the Lake District of England. It was published in e-book format in 2015.

While running the fells around Barrowdale, DI Daniel Skelgill notices dead sheep, many of them decapitated and savagely slaughtered, in more than normal numbers. Then CID receives a missing person report on a Mr. Leonard; he checked into Mrs. Robinson’s Grisedale View bed and breakfast in Keswick, only to vanish without paying her. In searching his room, DS Leyton discovers a Ukrainian passport for Leonid Pavlenko. Tucked into the cover of the passport is a portfolio photograph of a beautiful blonde woman with “black beck” written on the back in Cyrillic script. Where is Pavlenko, and who is the woman? A Professor Wolfstein recently bought Blackbeck Castle near the abandoned Blackbeck copper and slate mines and sealed it off with major walls and security systems. Does he have anything to do with Pavlenko’s disappearance? What’s happening to the sheep, and why?

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

The plot hangs together though it focuses more than usual on Skelgill’s lone-wolf tactics. The conclusion is satisfying. However, there is a major disconnect between Skelgill’s realizing what’s going and its presentation to the reader. After the death of the old tramp William Thymer, Skelgill suddenly consults Rhian Roberts, Magistra of a coven of white witches, and the next thing we know he and DS Emma Jones are in Kiev, working with a local policeman on a human trafficking case.

The investigative trio of DI Skelgill and DS Emma Jones and George Leyton is a believable one. Very different from each other, all smart, observant, and professional, they are united by friendship, mutual respect, and distaste for DI Alec Smart. “...[Leyton] shares Skelgill’s agony. Skelgill has literally limped back into his office following a review with the Chief. She did of course show understanding (compassion would be too much to hope for), but in such circumstances there no need to point an accusing finger--no matter that it was DI Smart’s team that allowed DS Jones to disappear from under their noses-it is plain where the responsibility lies, and Skelgill is not shirking it. (DI Smart, on the other hand, is attending an unspecified ‘emergency’ in Carlisle, along with others who can be spared.)” Supporting characters are well-drawn.

Beckham is skilled at evoking place and history. “The incline has steepened, and the character of the surrounding landscape has made a swift transition from wooded dale to barren fell. Here the route snakes between Harter Fell and Hard Knott, where the col reached in due course takes its name from the latter. About a quarter of the way up this ascent is what must have been one of the Roman Empire’s least celebrated commissions, Hardknott Castle, a well-preserved garrison that once guarded the ‘Tenth Highway’, the route from the Roman naval base of Glannoventa (today’s Ravenglass) to the fort of Galava at Ambleside and on to Kendal. It is difficult to imagine what its detachment of five hundred Croatians would have made of such an assignment, the rainstorms of summer, the snowstorms of winter, and Skelgill’s unruly Brittonic ancestors snapping at their heels.”

MURDER BY MAGIC is a good read. (B)