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Readingomnivore Reviews

Meagan J. Meehan’s DEATH AMID GEMS begins five days after Thanksgiving and follows Long Island Detective Angelo Zenoni through the massive decoration of his house and lawn for Christmas and through solving the murder of jewelry-tv presenter Tiffany Kehl. It was published in e-book format in 2011.

When Tiffany Kehl’s found with her head beat in at the Treasure Chest Jewelry Television, Zenoni and his partner Nolan Wildow soon discover she’d been an unpopular lady. She snooped and complained to their bosses about the security guards, the janitors, and the incompetent station manager. She quarreled with her professor in a marketing class and with a classmate who keyed her car as a result. She quarreled with a neighbor whose parking spot she took routinely and with another whom she drives crazy with noise from her high heels and her barking dog. She quarrels with her half-sister whose existence her parents choose to ignore. But which one of them kills her?

Except for Zenoni, characterization is minimal. Even for him, Meehan devotes at least as much attention to Christmas decorations, with a brief excursion into his feelings for his no-count nephew, as to the murder case. There’s no sense of urgency in any of his actions.

A major omission weakens the plot. When her body is found, Tiffany’s lying in a pool of blood sprinkled with gemstones from a tray she’d been carrying when attacked. One of the things she’s complained about had been the disappearance of gems over several years’ time; it’s repeated that robbery was not a motive in her murder, but the spilled gemstones are never mentioned again. It presents a neat title, but why include the imagery if it means nothing? When the identity of her killer is revealed, the detectives have only the statement of an unreliable witness; there is no physical evidence, and the arrest is possible only through an emotional confession from the least likely suspect.

The Christmas decorations definitely establish the time of the story, but details of place and atmosphere are lacking. DEATH AMID GEMS is okay but nothing special. (C)
 
Louise Penny’s HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN is one of her long-running, award-winning series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, head of the Homicide Division of the Surete du Quebec. It is set just before Christmas with much of the action in the extraordinary village of Three Pines. It was published in e-book format in 2013.

Under fire from Chief Superintendent Sylvain Francoeur since a botched raid based on faulty information given to Gamache led to death and injuries for many young agents, he’s seemed on his way out, forced into retirement. All of his dedicated officers except Inspector Isabelle Lacoste have requested or been transferred out of his division, replaced with ill-trained, disrespectful, lazy agents with no interest in solving crime or protecting the public. Jean-Guy Beauvoir, so long his second-in-command and designated successor, has been transferred to Francoeur’s section and actively hates Gamache; following near-fatal wounds in the raid, he’s become addicted again to OxyContin, costing him his love Annie Gamache. Gamache is clandestinely investigating some huge, powerful plot involving Francoeur and others, but what is it? The death of Audrey Villeneuve, a mid-level clerk in the Ministry of Transportation’s Road Works Department, passes as a clumsy suicide, not even in Gamache’s jurisdiction, but when friend Myrna from Three Pines calls him about the non-appearance of former patient Constance Pineault, he and Lacoste find her murdered. He’s handed the case and soon discovers that Constance is actually Constance Oullet, the last survivor of the Oullet Quintuplets, born in 1937 and world-famous as the only naturally conceived and delivered surviving identical quintuplets. Who wanted her dead, and why? Can there possibly be a connection between the deaths and the conspiracy?

There are two distinct levels of plot in HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN. One is the relatively straightforward murder of Constance Oullet, the second is the conspiracy Gamache has investigated through several books. Repeated shifts in point of view between characters, especially those involved in the conspiracy, preserve the sense of not knowing who’s involved at what level, who’s working for Francoeur and who, if anyone, is working with Gamache. The conspiracy element is particularly appropriate in the current world political concern with domestic terrorism. The identity of the killer comes as a surprise, well set up.

Gamache is one of the more interesting series protagonists in the current literature. “Something had happened in Constance’s life, or the life of her killer, that provoked the murder. It might have been big, clearly visible. But morelikely it was tiny. Easily dismissed. Which was why Gamache knew he had to look closely, carefully. Where other investigators bounded ahead, dramatically covering ground, Armand Gamache took his time. Indeed, he knew that to some it might even appear as inactivity. Walking slowly, his hands behind his back. Sitting on a park bench, staring into space. Sipping coffee in the bistro or brasserie, listening. Thinking. And while others, in glorious commotion, raced right by the killer, Chief Inspector Gamache slowly walked up to him. Found him hiding, in plain sight. Disguised as everyone else.” (118) Continuing characters are dynamic, evolving as individuals based on their experiences, just like real people.

Penny’s ability to evoke sense of place is outstanding. She excels at atmospheric description that illuminates character. “...this was the snow of her childhood. Joyful, playful, bright and clean. The more the merrier. It was a toy. It covered the fieldstone homes and clapboard homes and rose brick homes that ringed the village green.It covered the bistro and the bookstore, the boulangerie and the general store. It seemed to Constance that an alchemist was at work, and Three Pines was the result. Conjured from thin air and deposited in this valley. Or perhaps, like the snow, the tiny village had fallen from the sky, to provide a soft landing to those who’d also fallen.” (6)

HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN is one of the best. (A)
 
IF THE SHOE KILLS is the third book in Lynn Cahoon’s Tourist Trap Mystery series. It’s set in South Cove, California, and opens before Thanksgiving. It was published in e-book format in 2014.

First person narrator Jill Gardner owns Coffee, Books, and More in downtown South Cove, a town whose existence depends on tourism. She’s the liaison between local business owners and the town council, the businesses questioning the wisdom of an intern-program proposed by Ted Hendricks of the Work Today welfare-to-work program. Hendricks is abrasive, especially toward women, and rumored to be blackmailing the mayor. So when he turns up dead in his car in front of City Hall, everyone’s hoping his death is a suicide. But is it?

I’m giving up at 17%. So far the book has consisted of clunky introductions of characters, none of them much individualized, including Jill. Jill’s just discovered Hendricks’s body and concluded she can’t depend on boyfriend, city detective Greg King to properly investigate, so she’s begun on-line background check on Hendricks. Generic cozy mystery cliche. Foreshadowing, to this point, is clumsily obvious. South Cove is only a name, with no sense of being a genuine place. I’ve found nothing to make me want to finish IF THE SHOE KILLS.

No grade because not finished.
 
Bill Crider’s THE EMPTY MANGER is a novella published in the MURDER, MAYHEM, AND MISTLETOE anthology issued in 2001. It features long-time sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas, Dan Rhodes and his usual supporters: dispatcher Hack, jailor Lawton, Deputy Ruth Grady, and wife Ivy.

When Rhodes answers a call that someone’s stolen the doll representing the baby Jesus from the living nativity scene, he finds the body of city councillor Jerri Laxton. Laxton’s politically ambitious, basing her future on her plans for revitalizing downtown Clearview, but some of the owners of the empty buildings don’t go along with her. Rumors link her romantically with d. Reverend Harvey Stoneman, pastor of the First Baptist Church. Husband Ron Laxton denies believing her guilt at first but then shoots up the nativity while trying to kill Stoneman. Stoneman’s red-headed wife Mona Mae is well known in Blacklin County for her anger-management issues. Did she find out about the affair and remove Jerri?

Crider uses limited third person narration, showing people and events through Rhodes. His self-deprecating sense of humor and recognition of irony are attractive traits. “There were bales of hay stacked all around [the Nativity], and Rhodes wondered briefly how the Jews of two thousand years ago had managed to get their hands on hay-baling equipment.” (247) His crime-solving technique is old-fashioned. “Rhodes had hoped there might be some clue on Jerri Laxton’s body, but there was nothing he could see. He’d do a more thorough search of her clothing after she’d been taken to Ballinger’s Funeral Home, but Rhodes didn’t really expect to find anything helpful. In his experience, clues weren’t usually easy to come by. He solved more cases by talking to people and weighing their statements than he did with clues.” (307)

Crider uses Rhodes’s memories to establish the atmosphere of current Clearview and Blacklin County. “Rhodes could remember Christmases of the not-too-distant past when it had been impossible to find a parking place, when the streets were crowde with shoppers carrying their wrapped and ribboned packages, when merchants put together Toylands in their stores and when there was Christmas music playing everywhere you went. Or maybe it had been longer than he thought, probably about the time of the last snow if not before then. Things had changed a lot over the years. Now most of the buildings were empty, and some had cracked or broken windows. There were hardly ever any cars parked on the streets. All the activity was out on the highway, at Wal-Mart or one of the big new grocery stores.” (294)

As might be expected at this length, characterization is limited, confined largely to the Stonemans and the Laxtons. The plot is “least likely suspect,” but Crider foreshadows it appropriately. He even leaves the ever-complaining Hack and Lawton in a rare harmony of Christmas spirit.

THE EMPTY MANGER is a pleasant Christmas read. (B)
 
Aileen Schumacher’s CHRISTMAS CACHE is a novella published in the 2001 Christmas anthology MURDER, MAYHEM, AND MISTLETOE. It features Tory Travers, consulting engineer, and her sometime boyfriend David Alvarez, a homicide detective. It opens on Thanksgiving and concludes within a week or ten days.

Tory’s son Cody is recruited to house-sit for a month to help complete a research project on conventional versus solar energy efficiency. Hafiz Bamia, a Bosnian Muslim, lives next door in the solar house, feuding with biology graduate student Josef Kunz, a Croatian Catholic who leaves abruptly and goes missing. After Cody’s dog Tango digs up packets of hundred dollar bills from Bamia’s back yard, Cody finds Bamia on the floor in his kitchen, bleeding out from a gunshot wound to the abdomen. There are no signs of robbery, struggle, or forced entry. Bamia had been building a cache behind the wallboard; when Tory suggests they check for other caches, police find a Degas, Picasso drawings, and other important works of art. What is going on?

CHRISTMAS CACHE is pleasant enough, but its characters are not much developed. Tory is downright unpleasant. Police procedures are ignored. There’s no sense of place and little sense of the holiday season. (D)
 
THE HOUSE OF SILK is Anthony Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes novel published in 2011. It opens in late November with its action extending into the New Year, but the Christmas season is not emphasized.

Watson is back at 221B Baker Street while his wife Mary is away visiting a former studentl. Holmes is visited by Edmund Carstairs, partner in Carstairs and Finch, purveyors of fine art. Carstairs had sold wealthy Boston Brahmin Cornelius Stillman four Constable paintings that were destroyed in a train robbery in New England; Stillman hired the Pinkertons to find the gang responsible, and all except one of its two leaders, Keelan O’Donaghue, had been killed. Stillman is later murdered by O’Donaghue. Carstairs has recognized O’Donaghue following him in London and at his home in Wimbledon, and he appeals to Holmes for his services. Holmes enlists the Baker Street Irregulars to locate O’Donaghue, which Wiggins and Ross Dixon do. However, he’s been stabbed to death, and a white silk ribbon tied about his wrist. Ross Dixon disappears, only to have his beaten, tortured body found with a white silk ribbon tied around his wrist. What is the House of Silk, with its white silk ribbon badge, and how do these events connect?

Horowitz is prolific and skilled with many screenplays as well as novels to his credit. He captures the tone of the original Conan Doyle stories, maintaining Watson’s self-deprecation in comparison to Holmes. “The kitchen knife lying on the table, the soup bubbling on the hearth, the brace of pheasant hanging from a hook in the pantry, Kirby casting his eyes downwards, his wife standing with her hands on her apron, Patrick still smiling... would they have told him something more than they told me? Undoubtedly. Show Holmes a drop of water and he would deduce the existence of the Atlantic Ocean. Show it to me and I would look for a tap. That was the difference between us.” (180) Most of the new characters have counterparts in the original stories. One of the most interesting bits shines a slightly different light on Professor James Moriarty.

The two story lines seem completely separate, but Horowitz draws them together believably. An unusual feature is Holmes’s being framed and arrested for murder, with a major coincidence / improbability that allows his escape from Holloway Prison. The criminal activity involved with the House of Silk is enough foreshadowed that an experienced reader may pick up on it early.

As might be expected from a screen writer, Horowitz is adept with visual descriptions that create the atmosphere of London and its environs. “It was now the second week in December and, after the bad weather that had begun the month, the sun was out and although it was very cold, everything as ablaze with a sense of prosperity and good cheer. The pavements were almost invisible beneath the bustle of families arriving from the countryside and bringing with them wide-eyed children in numbers that might have populated a small city themselves. The ice-rakers and the crossing-sweepers were out.The sweetmeat and grocer shops were gloriously festooned. Every window carried advertisements for goose clubs, roast beef clubs, and pudding clubs and the very air was filled with the aroma of burned sugar and mincemeat.” (222)

THE HOUSE OF SILK is one of the best modern interpretations of the immortal Sherlock Holmes. (A-)
 
Kathleen Ernst’s HERITAGE OF DARKNESS is the fourth book in her series featuring museum curator Chloe Ellefson. It was published in 2013.

Chloe, her boyfriend and cop Roelke McKenna, and her mother Marit Kallerud are in Decorah, Iowa, at the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum shortly before Christmas, as a mother-daughter bonding experience. Marit is a Gold Medal winning rosemaler, taking an advanced class, while Chloe’s takes a beginner’s class in the Norwegian folk art painting, and Roelke learns chip carving. But when Chloe discovers the dying Petra Lekstrom concealed in a painted immigrants’ trunk at the opening reception, things change. Their hostess and Marit’s best friend Sigrid Sorensen moves to teach the advanced class, and Marit replaces her to instruct the beginners. Chloe is recruited by museum director Howard Hoff to help since the curator recently quit with projects incomplete, and Decorah Chief of Police Moyer, a new hire and an outsider, recruits Roelke to help with the investigation of Petra’s murder. She was considerabIy disliked, but who wanted Petra dead badly enough to kill her in such a public place?

I’m not sure I’d have finished HERITAGE OF DARKNESS if it had’t been set in Decorah, Iowa, the town destined to become famous in 2011 as the location of the famous Decorah bald eagles, the first of the on-line eagle cameras. HERITAGE OF DARKNESS is set in 1982, for no particular reason I’ve been able to determine. Its flashbacks to December 1947, June 1949, August 1967, and July 1972, each involving a different member of the Sixty-Sevens, members of the first rosemaling class offered by the Vesterheim, do little to further the plot. The sense of place is good, but it’s improbable that Roelke and Chloe, who are staying with Marit’s friends in houses some distance apart and at least two miles outside Decorah, walk back and forth to each other and to town, especially after dark in single-digit or colder temperatures when Marit’s car would be available.

Ernst keeps attention firmly fixed away from the killer and the motive to provide a surprise conclusion, though it is appropriately foreshadowed. Chloe and Roelke both pull major TSTLs in roaming around at night, staying in the museum alone, and not telling where they’re going, even after arson at the museum and an attack on Marit. The murder story line is definitely secondary to the Marit-Chloe relationship and to the Roelke-Chloe romance.

My biggest problem with HERITAGE OF DARKNESS is Chloe herself. She’s over thirty years old, a well-educated and well-travelled woman with a job she loves as curator at Old World Wisconsin, but she’s a whiner. She became involved with a poor excuse for man early on and lost a baby that he’d not wanted throwing her into a depression that lasted for years and still affects her daily life; she’s estranged from her mother for little discernible reason. Chloe says she wants to become closer to Marit but does little to bring it about. She kvetches over being asked to help but apparently can’t say “no” to those asking or volunteering her to work. Chloe’s determined to dictate the terms of her relationship with Roelke. She’s rigid in her thinking about both people and events.

HERITAGE OF DARKNESS spreads the plot too thin to be completely satisfying. (B-)
 
Allana Martin’s THE CHRISTMAS BONUS is a novella originally published in the 2002 anthology HOW STILL WE SEE THEE LIE. It’s set in Presidio County, Texas, on the Rio Grande River and features trading post owner Texana Jones.

On December 12, Texana receives a suitcse containing $100,000 along with the “request” that she make the trading post available for one day’s private use by the messenger’s boss, date to be specified later. She knows that the money is from a drug smuggler who wants to use the trading post as neutral ground for a major drug deal, but she’s between a rock and a hard place. If she goes to the DEA or other law enforcement agency, she has no assurance that she will not be informed on by someone in his pay and much evidence to assure she and husband Clay will be very dead. If she allows the post to be used, she faces prosecution for drug trafficking by American authorities with confiscation of the trading post as well as being permanently (as long as she lasts) in the power of the drug lord. What to do?

I’ve enjoyed the Texana Jones series for several reasons. One is Texana herself. As first person narrator, she’s strong, honest about herself and her decisions. “Better people than I have been bought by drug capos. I know some locals who’d been caught: two ranchers, one Border Patrol agent, a sheriff, each one doing time in federal prison. I would fight back. In 1888, my great-grandfather, Franco Ricciotti, had built the original wood-frame trading post on the same site as my present adobe building. i was a fourth-generation borderlander. I intended to stay.” (11) Martin surrounds her with a believable cast of continuing characters, creating a community that seems to continue between installments of the series.

The plot is satisfying because Texana manages to identify and bring down the drug smuggler without being involved in any way that would provide a lead back to herself and her friends.

Sense of place is outstanding, with the setting very much an integral part of the story. “We turned our backs on Huachito, one in a string of tiny villages that hug the riverbank along a sixty-mile stretch of the Rio Grande. The villages are connected to each other by rutted roads. They smell of dust and sewage, have Honda generators and contaminated wells. Normally, children appear in abundance. Huachito is different. It is a village of men, slight Mixtecs arrived only ten months ago from Oaxaca. They had thrown together shacks of scrap sheet tin and used wood and erected an open-air cantina.... The village appeared abandoned except for the smoke of wood fires that curled toward the sky. At the river’s edge the men had nailed a hand-painted sign to the thick trunk of a tree. It read NO MAS AQUI, crude Spanish that may be interpreted either as KEEP OUT or DON’T COME BACK. The men were equally unfriendly toward the locls on the Mexican side....” (13-4)

THE CHRISTMAS BONUS is a well-crafted gift. (A)
 
Tom Mitcheltree’s A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS is a novella published in 2002 in the Christmas anthology HOW STILL WE SEE THEE LIE. It features Paul Fischer, Associate Professor of English at Southern Oregon University.

When Adam Shipper, a man whom everyone liked in Jacksonville, Oregon, a good man active in civic concerns and education, is murdered, his widow Minnie asks that Paul, who’d been involved in previous cases, to find out who killed Adam. Because he’s on Christmas vacation and bored, Paul agrees. As he investigates, he discovers that Adam was not nearly as loved as reported, that Adam had definitely made enemies in every organization with which he’d been involved. But then attention is turned on Paul, himself.

I was disappointed in A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS. There’s little sense of place, either of Jacksonville where the murder happened or of Ashland where Paul lives. Christmas is mentioned as being past, but nothing is made of the season. The plot sets up a selection of suspects with reasonable motives, then throws in a killer who’s barely mentioned in the story. Making the killer mentally ill doesn’t make up for lack of appropriate foreshadowing. Information and conclusions remain secret until the final confrontation. Writing style is elementary.

I did not care for Paul Fischer as a protagonist. The story is told from his point of view, but he’s not perceptive about himself or others. He’s divorced from his wife who lives in New England with their sons. Torn between former lover, hot-shot lawyer Pam Livingston, and Terri Drexler, lost in grieving over deceased parents and husband, Paul winds up in bed with Liz Mendoza, Pam’s former legal secretary, even though he knows they aren’t in love with each other. He doesn’t stay focused on the case, spending time buying a car from one of the suspects.

A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS isn’t merry. (F)
 
Connie Shelton’s HOLIDAYS CAN BE MURDER is a novella published in 2002 in the Christmas anthology HOW STILL WE SEE THEE LIE. It’s set in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the week before Christmas and features Charlie Parker, partner in RIP Investigations.

Charlie’s unexpected week-long Christmas visit from mother-in-law Catherine Langston turns out better than expected, but that’s not the experience for next-door neighbor Judy Garfield. Her mother-in-law Paula Candelaria has divorced husband number five and descended to take comfort from son Wilbur, who can’t stand up to his mother in any way. Paula’s loud, obnoxious, dresses and behaves inappropriately, and abuses alcohol and drugs. She’s driving Judy to desperation so, when Judy and Wilbur discover her body on Christmas night, Judy’s quickly arrested for murder. Naturally, Charlie is convinced of her innocence and determines to find Paula’s killer.

The plot is definitely “least likely suspect” with no foreshadowing of the killer’s identity. Alternative suspects are logically unlikely. Charlie pulls a major TSTL when she goes haring off to Los Angeles to check out Paula’s background. She’s alone in a city she’s not familiar with, with no backup, without husband Drake knowing that she’s cruising clubs trying to find Paula’s drug connection Gus. She’s assaulted by Gus’s girlfriend. RIP Investigations has not been hired by Wilbur or Judy, so she’s acting pro bono. Not very likely. There’s little sense of place.

HOLIDAYS CAN BE MURDER is passable if you suspend disbelief, but Charlie’s investigation is inherently improbable. (C)
 
Christopher Fowler’s “Bryant & May and the Secret Santa” is a Peculiar Crimes Unit short story published in e-book format in 2015.

Arthur Bryant and John May, lead detectives for London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit, go to Selfridges to investigate the strange death of eleven-year-old Sebastian Carroll-Williams after a visit to Santa’s Wonderland. His gift from Santa upsets him so much that he runs into the street and under the wheels of a Number Three bus, dying instantly. When Bryant and May follow up on the label of a school tie found in the tunnel exiting Santa’s Wonderland, scandal at St Crispin’s School for Boys, founded 1623, emerges.

“Bryant & May and the Secret Santa” is brief, so there’s minimal characterization and little atmospheric description of London, but it’s still a satisfying story. Fowler excels at using setting to illuminate character. “The outfitters’ shop proved to be one of those odd anomalies London has a habit of producing from nowhere. Its windows were decorated with gilt shields and its interior was dark wood, but it was wedged between a mobile-phone store and a Pret A Manger. its manager, Miss Prentice, was a formidable presence, as stately as a galleon in full sail. Bryant imagined that she might have been a headmistress, reluctantly released by the board of governors for being too free with the cane.” Placement of the clue that identifies the person responsible for Carroll-Williams’s death is deft.

I highly recommend “Bryant & May and the Secret Santa.” (A-)
 
HOMICIDAL HOLIDAYS is an anthology of holiday-themed short stories edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley in Kindle format in 2014. It is part of the Chesapeake Crimes series. Four of the stories involve Christmas.

The first is Linda Lombardi’s “Hoppy Holidays.” Hannah is a zookeeper working with Small Mammals who accidentally witnesses a murder. She’s threatened by the killer with injury to a favorite animal, a tamandua (a small anteater), plus it’s her word against his. What to do?

The plot uses a neat method for murder, though it’s improbable in real life, dependent as it is on the victim’s never following professional procedures. However, none of the characters are particularized to the point of having family names given. Hannah goes from despair about not being able to turn the killer over to the police to enthusiasm after the tamandua disables the killer because now she can call them, when nothing has changed in the essential standoff--it’s still his word against hers. There is no sense of place whatsoever--neither the zoo nor the general location is given.

The second Christmas story is Debbi Mack’s “Jasmine.” There are only three characters, with the first-person narrator not named and the lead character referred to only as Jasmine. Jasmine faces prison for killing Charles Goodwin, the man who raped her and was acquitted. So why is the narrator so involved?

Again, no characterization of significance. No sense of place, almost none of Christmas, and it ends on a truly depressing note.

The third is Clyde Linsley’s “Sauce for the Goose.” It involves Arthur Gibbs’s plan to kill his obnoxious next-door neighbor William Lanier ruins the ambiance of his lovely high-rise apartment. The plot is very much “the engineer hoist with his own petard.”

Most of the characterization is that used to set up the complete contrast between the two men. All of it is directly reported by the narrator. Gibbs, despite his education, experience, and urbane life style, prefers murder to the inconvenience of finding a new apartment. No sense of place, with Christmas used only a plot device for Gibbs to deliver poison.

The final Christmas story is Donna Andrews’s “A Christmas Trifle.” When newlyweds Meg and Michael receive a call from her Aunt Rose that Stanley is being poisoned, they head off to help. Until they arrive, they are unaware that Stanley is the neighbor’s animal for whom Rose is cat-sitting through the holidays. Even though it’s only mid-October, Aunt Rose’s house is fully decorated for Christmas. The vet confirms that Stanley is being poisoned, but Rose cannot account for how it’s happening. Meg immediately sees and corrects the problem.

Christmas is important only to account for the elaborate decorations which are the most detailed part of the story. There’s no crime of any kind. The only characterization establishes Aunt Rose’s eccentricity. The only reference to setting is to Aunt Rose’s living in Richmond.

I am seriously disappointed in all four stories. (D)
 
“God Rob Ye Merry Gentlemen” is a short story in Andrea Frazer’s Belchester Chronicles series featuring Lady Amanda Golightly of Belchester Towers and her good friend Hugo Cholmondley-Crichton-Crump. It was published in e-book format in 2015.

Lady Amanda and her guests are charmed by a group of children carolers on December 1. One of the little boys asks to use the loo and gets lost for several minutes. It’s not until some time later that they discover small valuable items missing: Lady Amanda’s silver baton, her silver chain-link evening purse, silver pencils for keeping bridge scores, Hugo’s gold lighter. They soon discover that many of their friends are missing similar items, also after visits from the carolers. Lady Amanda, with the assistance of her long-time butler Beauchamp Major (his son Beauchamp Minor is the footman), leads police to both stolen goods and the thief.

I’m at a disadvantage in evaluating this story because I’m unfamiliar with the characters in their previous outings. There isn’t much characterization, especially of Lady Amanda and Hugo. Their relationship is not explained, though he seems to live at Belchester Towers. The setup for the robberies is obvious, though Frazer rings in a Fagin figure to take responsibility. There’s no sense of place. Intended humor falls flat.

I’ll probably read the first episode in the Belchester Chronicles to see if my impression improves, but I’m not impressed with “God Rob Ye Merry Gentlemen.” (F)
 
“Love Me to Death” is the first short story in Andrea Frazer’s THE FALCONER FILES: BRIEF CASES published in e-book format in 2012. She uses short stories to fill in intervals between books in her mystery series featuring DI Harry Falconer and his legman “Davey” Carmichael. It opens on Christmas Day in the morning.

Falconer and Carmichael are called in when her fiance Dominic Cutler finds the dead body of young Angela Cater in the bed they’d shared just a few hours before. There are no signs of a break-in, of robbery, or of violence; she’d been in perfect health except for a rigorously-managed allergy to peanuts, so her death must be treated as suspicious. When the autopsy reveals the cause of death as an allergic reaction to nuts, the mystery remains because there is no trace of nuts of any kind in her stomach contents. When the point of entry of the allergen is determined, Falconer is able to wrap the case up quickly.

I have seen this murder method used once before in fiction and, while it seems improbable, it is factual. Once the cause of death is established, however, there’s only one possible killer, one whose back story comes as a surprise revelation.

Characterization is strong. Falconer and Carmichael are very different in personality but form an effective team. Both are humanized by the description of their life styles and by their interactions, especially those involving Carmichael and his family. “Really, Carmichael was like a child--an exceedingly large child, notwithstanding--in his enthusiasm for this season of the year, and had been straining at the leash (more like a huge puppy now) since the first of December, eager for all the joys of Christmas shopping, Advent calendars, pine trees, paper streamers, cards, wrapping paper and carols. So intoxicated had the acting sergeant been, by his seasonal love affair, that he had made Falconer seem like a re-incarnation of Ebenezer Scrooge himself.” (6)

Frazer is adept at creating atmosphere. “Outside, the air was as sharp and biting as ice, a frost still underfoot. Overhead, thick banks of clouds were rolling in, to encase the day, as if under a Victorian glass dome--a December tableau to be picked up and shaken, to let loose the snowflakes for some giant child’s amusement.” (4)

“Love Me to Death” is a satisfying Christmas read. (A-)
 
Mignon F. Ballard’s DEADLY PROMISE, published in 1991, is set at Christmas time in Harmony, Georgia, in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains. Its protagonist is Molly Stonehouse, widowed some nine months before. She discovers a note from husband Ethan’s childhood friend Neil Fry that convinces her that both he and Neil have been murdered. She goes to Harmony to spend Christmas with Ethan’s family to find out what happened.

I may just be Christmas-ed out, but I’m giving up on DEADLY PROMISE at about 20% for several reasons. One is the lack of Christmas spirit. Except for the church Christmas pageant Molly and thirteen-year-old daughter Joy are conscripted into, the story could be any time of the year. Characters are not much developed, and Molly’s naive in the extreme in her approach to people she doesn’t know well, any one of whom may be a killer. She doesn’t show the note to the police. The plot is slow moving, with no sense of suspense or urgency.

What bothers me most is, again, the lack of sense of place. Why do authors set a story in a specific locale with distinctive cultural elements, speech patterns, thought habits, and physical characteristics, only to ignore them? Molly’s home is in Charlotte, North Carolina, she’s visiting in north Georgia. A couple of Southern expressions do not create the ambiance of the South.

No grade because not finished.
 
“The Bothersome Business of the Dutch Nativity” is Derek Wilson’s short story published in 1997 in THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF NEW SHERLOCK HOLMES ADVENTURES edited by Mike Ashley. It was published in e-book format in 2009.

“The Bothersome Business of the Dutch Nativity” is Sherlock Holmes’s first case, solved when he was briefly a student at Grenville College, Oxford, following his two years at Trinity College in Dublin. He becomes aware of the theft of Rembrandt’s Nativity of Our Lord from the chapel of New College, to which it had been donated by elderly Dr. Giddings as a gift upon his retirement. It’s going missing h.as been attributed to an undergraduate prank involving several colleges, but Holmes quickly uncovers the truth. He resigns from Grenville when he’s asked to participate in a coverup to protect aristocratic reputations.
His enjoyment in investigating “The Bothersome Business of the Dutch Nativity” helps to determine Holmes’s subsequent career as the world’s first consulting detective.

The plot, setting, characters, and language are consistent with a continuation of Conan Doyle’s creations, but the story as a whole is awkward. Watson, at some point after his friend’s death, is organizing materials on Holmes’s life and career. He relates his memory of a trip in 1893 to relatives in Oxford where Adrian Hungerford, a distant relative of Mary Watson and Fellow of Grenville College, tells him the story of Holmes’s meeting Dr. William Spooner, Senior Fellow of New College, in 1873. On the train journey from London to Oxford, Dr. Spooner tells Holmes the story of Dr. Giddings’s donation of the painting in 1861 and its going missing some twelve years later. So many narrators and so many accounts from the past negate any sense of immediacy or suspense.

“The Bothersome Business of the Dutch Nativity” is hardly an artistic masterpiece. (C)
 
“The Affray at the Kildare Street Club” is Peter Tremayne’s short story in Mike Ashley’s 1997 edition of THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF NEW SHERLOCK HOLMES ADVENTURES. The book was reissued in e-format in 2009.

“The Affray at the Kildare Street Club” sketches Sherlock Holmes’s background. The well-known Holmes family originated in Galway, Ireland. His uncle Robert Holmes served on the Duke of Leinster’s education commission that created the Irish National School system. Both Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes were graduates of Trinity College, Dublin. Watson concealed Holmes’s Irish roots because his closest friend at Trinity had been Oscar Fingal O’Flauhertie Wills Wilde, at the time incarcerated in Reading Gaol. In spring 1894 Holmes gave Watson a written account of his first meeting with his second most dangerous opponent, not to be published until the passage of 100 years.

In 1873 Mycroft Holmes, at age 27 already an important personage in the fiscal department of the Chief Secretary for Ireland at Dublin Castle, takes Sherlock to dine at the Kildare Street Club to celebrate Sherlock’s earning a demyship to an Oxford college. At the Club they observe two men at a nearby table, Colonel Sebastian Moran and Professor James Moriarty who holds the mathematics chair at Queen’s University, Belfast. Moriarty is already famous for his abstruse book, The Dynamics of an Asteroid. When a toilet case belonging to the immensely influential Duke of Cloncury and Straffen is stolen in the washroom, Sherlock establishes through his powers of observation and deduction Moran as the thief, thus creating the enmity that culminates in Moran’s attempt on Holmes’s life in “The Empty House.”

Language, attitudes, and characters are appropriate continuations of the original stories. Tremayne gives a masterful evocation of period in his creation of The Kildare Street Club: “The Club was the centre of masculine Ascendancy life in Ireland. ...these were the Anglo-Irish elite, descendants of those families which England had despatched to Ireland to rule the unruly natives. The Club was exclusive to members of the most important families in Ireland. No ‘Home Rulers’, Catholics nor Dissenters were allowed in membership. The rule against Catholics was, however, ‘bent’ in the case of The O’Conor Don, a direct descendant of the last High King of Ireland, and a few religious recalcitrants, such as the Earls of Westmeath, Granard and Kenmare, whose loyalty to England had been proved to be impeccable. No army officer below the rank of major, nor below a Naval lieutenant-commandeer was allowed within its portals. And the only people allowed free use of its facilities were visiting members of the Royal Family, their equerries, and the Viceroy himself.” (31-2)

“The Affray at the Kildare Street Club” nicely fills in a hole in Watson’s accounts of his friend Sherlock Holmes. (A-)
 
CHEF MAURICE AND THE BUNNY-BOILER BAKE OFF is the third book in J. A. Lang’s mystery series featuring Chef Maurice Manchot, proprietor of Le Cochon Rouge fine dining restaurant in Beakley, Oxfordshire. It was published in e-book format in 2015.

Chef Maurice has been dropped from the Beakley Spring Fayre cake-judging panel to be replaced celebrity TV chef Miranda Matthews, thus adding insult to injury. He has no respect for her as a cook or as a person, but when her body is found in the creek beside the Fayre grounds, he’s determined to discover who murdered Miranda. Investigation soon reveals Miranda as thoroughly unscrupulous with many enemies, some local and some reaching years into her past. Chef Maurice and his best friend Arthur Wordington-Smythe, food critic for the England Observer, uncover evidence that implicates Cowton mayor Rory Gifford, but then Chef Maurice is convinced of his innocence. Who did kill Miranda, and why?

The plot in CHEF MAURCE AND THE BUNNY-BOILER BAKE OFF involves two main story lines. One is the mystery of Miranda Matthews’s death, which is straightforward, its conclusion set up with appropriate foreshadowing and character development. An experienced reader may well identify the killer and motive ahead of Chef Maurice. The second involves sous chef Patrick Merland’s offer of head chef at a new country-house hotel in the Lake District, which would mean the end of his relationship with PC Lucy. Chef Maurice and commis chef Alf conspire to provide Patrick the last element essential for his decision.

Lang writes humor and uses it effectively to reveal character. “Le Cochon Rouge’s secret mustard sauce was famous throughout the county as an accompaniment to a good slab of chargrilled steak, used in the glaze for the restaurant’s honey-and-mustard roast chicken, and, of course, slathered thickly onto a warm hog roast roll. No one except Chef Maurice knew the recipe, but there was speculation that the ingredients included two bottles of the finest amontillado, a type of molasses only available in two American states, and, according to some sources, a variety of bay leaf only grown on the western slopes of the Greek island of Meganisi. When questioned, Chef Maurice would only stroke his large moustache and admit that, oui, the speaker might be correct. But then again, they might not.” Lang has created a community of characters that it’s a pleasure to know.

Sense of place is not so well drawn as in previous books in the series. There’s a persistent error in use of apostrophe for singular possessives of names ending in -s. Still, CHEF MAURICE AND THE BUNNY-BOILER BAKE OFF is good fun, well worth the read. (B+)
 
DEADLY INVESTMENT is the fifth book in Jill Paterson’s police procedural series featuring Detective Chief Inspector Alistair Fitzjohn of the New South Wales Police Force, working out of Day Street Station in Sydney. It was published in e-book format in 2015.

When Beatrice Maybrick dies of a broken neck after falling down the stairs at her business, the Maybrick Literary Agency, only her old friend Esme Timmons suspects anything. But Beatrice had sent a letter for Esme to forward if anything unexpected happened to her. The day of her death, Beatrice uncovered major discrepancies in the agency’s books and confronted Max Ziegler, the accountant. Fitzjohn, meanwhile, is investigating the murder of Preston Alexander in North Sydney. When he looks at Alexander’s business dealings, he discovers that Alexander had invested $1,000,000 in Beatrice’s business and that Alexander had been involved in the confrontation over the embezzlement. When Esme goes to Fitzjohn, whom she knows from a previous case, he begins looking for connections between the deaths and finds them.

The plot is fairly set up with appropriate clues to motive and murderer. The secondary story line, Chief Superintendent Grieg’s vendetta against Fitzjohn, ends satisfactorily, and next-door neighbor Rhonda Butler is forced to be grateful to Fitzjohn and Betts for saving her sister’s life.

The strongest component of DEADLY INVESTMENT is the relationship between DCI Fitzjohn and DS Martin Betts, men who work together well and respect each other’s abilities. Characters are developed indirectly but well.

Setting is established mainly through physical locations in the Sydney area though there are snippets of atmospheric detail: “Betts edged the car along the narrow, congested street before he pulled over to the curb in front of an old red brick building. In an obvious state of disrepair with its peeling paintwork and guttering hanging loose from above the front entrance, the only signs that it was not abandoned were the words painted above the guttering: ‘The Adelphi Theatre’, and a large coloured poster to the side of the entrance advertising the next day’s matinee performance.”

DEADLY INVESTMENT is a good read. (B+)
 
DEATH IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE is the first book in Sara Rosett’s Murder on Location mystery series featuring film location scout Kate Sharp. It was published in e-book format in 2014.

When Kate’s boss Kevin Dunn goes missing in England, where he’s been scouting locations for Mr. O’Leery’s new film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, Kate is sent to find him. Since he’s a recovering alcoholic, she thinks he’s fallen off the wagon and she’ll find him on or recovering from a binge. Instead, she and local location scout Alex Norcutt, who’d been working with Kevin, discover his car submerged in a river near the village of Nether Woodsmoor; the police recover his body from the river some distance away from the car. His body shows a major blow to the head and a broken leg. What on earth happened to him, and why?

I’m giving up on DEATH IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE at 62%. I can’t get invested in the story. Kate is a pleasant-enough first person narrator, but she’s totally bland with few distinguishing characteristics. There’s no reason for her involvement in the investigation of Kevin’s death, but she rationalizes that DI Quimby’s checking into her story and background are wasting too much time for her not to help out. Alex Norcutt, who seems destined to be her Mr. Darcy, is standard romantic hero / sidekick, exceedingly handsome and helpful. Most other characters are more plot devices than individuals. There is little sense of place.

Of its type, DEATH IN THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE isn’t a bad book. It just didn’t have any element that grabbed my attention. No grade because not finished.
 
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