Readingomnivore Reviews

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Ann Littlewood’s NIGHT KILL is one of her Zoo Mystery series available as a free or inexpensive Kindle download. It was originally published in 2008. Its first person narrator is Iris Oakley, Felines keeper at the Finley Memorial Zoo in Vancouver, USA.

Iris’s husband Rick Douglas, Reptile keeper at the zoo, is found mauled to death in the lion exhibit. What was he doing at the zoo in the middle of the night, drunk on Scotch when he only drank beer and had sworn off that? Iris realizes that she can’t move on with her life until she understands why Rick died. As she pokes around and there are attacks on her, Iris concludes Rick was murdered. But why?

This won’t be a formal review, just my thoughts as they occur. There’s little indication of any sustained investigation of Rick’s death. The autopsy shows high blood-alcohol levels but misses other important clues that should have been picked up. Neither the police nor the zoo tries to find how he arrived in the exhibit. Zoos have major debriefing and crisis management procedures following any breach of animal security. Think of the investigation of the teenaged boy in San Francisco in 2007, when a tiger he’d been harassing escaped its exhibit just after closing time and mauled him to death. This doesn’t happen in NIGHT KILL. To an experienced reader, the clues to the identity and motive of the killer are obvious and the misdirection weak. A diagram of the zoo grounds would help.

Iris is only 25 years old and she’s not a college graduate, yet NIGHT KILL opens with her as keeper in charge of the Felines. Zoo keeping is a highly competitive career that requires both years of experience and a college degree, How did she get this job, even in a small zoo? Iris has three near-death experiences--tiger loose in the enclosure when she’s cleaning it, a heat lamp in the aviary rigged to electrocute her, locked in freezer locker in the Commissary section--and her house is searched and set on fire before she realizes Rick’s death wasn’t an accident. When she finally puts together who killed Rick and why, she comes up with a cockeyed trap, one that nearly gets her killed. I didn’t find her an appealing or consistent character.

I don’t recommend NIGHT KILL. It wasn’t worth the time. (D)

 

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Willard Sterne Randall’s A LITTLE REVENGE; BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND HIS SON was a free or inexpensive Kindle download, originally published in the mid-1980s. In the Vietnam Era, the phrase “generation gap” came to be used as shorthand for the personal and ideological differences and conflicts between parents and their young adult children, but the concept had been around for a long time. Benjamin Franklin-- American inventor, philanthropist, scientist, writer, businessman, politician, lobbyist, Founding Father--and his illegitimate son William Franklin could have been poster children for the generation gap.

Benjamin Franklin brought his young son, mother unknown, home for his common-law wife Deborah Read Franklin to rear as her own; William’s relationship with her was close and loving. Like many self-made men, particularly those as financially and socially successful as Benjamin Franklin came to be, he was convinced that he knew best and that he could use his authority as father and the power of his money to control his son all his life. Despite his wealth, money for William’s education and living expenses, even when he was working for his father, were regarded as loans to William, for which he demanded repayment. The Franklins worked together closely and successfully during the French and Indian War and Franklin’s first sojourn in England; both men made many friends, Benjamin Franklin made friends with politicians around Lord Bute, confidential adviser to George III, scientists, and writers; William associated with the aristocratic sons, lawyers, and judges connected with the Inns of Court. In London, William made the contacts that resulted in his being named as Royal Governor of New Jersey.

The Franklins worked together successfully in America for several more years, but as the tensions arose that culminated in the American Revolution, they were pulled apart by their political philosophies and by William Franklin’s job. He was one of the most successful Royal governors ever in British America. A staunch defender of the King’s supremacy, he worked to keep New Jersey loyal while representing the legitimate problems of New Jersey colonials, as Benjamin Franklin’s ideas became more radicalized, especially after his humiliation in front of the Privy Council when in London as agent of six of the protesting colonies. The men were completely out of touch during most of the war, much of which William Franklin spent under house arrest, then imprisonment in solitary confinement under abominable conditions which his father made no attempt to alleviate. When Benjamin Franklin left for France to negotiate the treaty of alliance, he took with him his grandson William Temple Franklin, lured away with promises of adventure and inheriting everything Benjamin had intended for his son, leaving William in close confinement and miserable circumstances as a prisoner of war. William and Benjamin Franklin were never reconciled, nor were William and William Temple Franklin. William Temple Franklin had at least two illegitimate daughters but never married, so that Benjamin Franklin’s dream of a political dynasty like John Adams’s family or the Lees of Virginia failed.

A few general comments. Randall writes well and makes dealing with the large number of characters easy. He keeps tight focus on the Franklins, and his revelations of Benjamin Franklin’s personality and political machinations create a much different picture than that presented of him in standard college American history books. Much of his success in during the 1760s was based on the work of his son, who seldom received much credit. Likewise, William Franklin was also much more effective as governor of New Jersey during the troubled period of the rising revolution than he’s given credit for; had his advice been heeded in London, the Revolution might have been prevented or won by the British. Maps would have improved the book; I would appreciate a list of prominent American Loyalists; portraits of the individuals involved would help.

Still, A LITTLE REVENGE works well on both levels: that of troubled relationships between fathers and sons and that of the inside workings of the British empire leading up to and including the American Revolution.
(A-)

 

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CUT TO THE QUICK is the first in Kate Ross’s mystery series set in 1824 England and featuring man-about-town Julian Kestrel. It was originally printed in 1993 and issued in e-format in 2010.

Julian Kestrel, a gentleman of the Ton but with a mysterious past, assists a drunken Hugh Fontclair in a gambling den and finds himself called upon to serve as best man when Hugh marries Maud Craddock. Her father Mark Craddock, now a wealthy cit but formerly groom to the Fontclairs, is blackmailing the family into the marriage to protect its honor. Kestrel is invited to a small house party at Bellegarde, whose inhabitants include Mr. and Miss Craddock; Hugh’s father and mother, Sir Robert and Lady Cecily Fontclair; Sir Robert’s brother Colonel Geoffrey Fontclair, disabled veteran of the Peninsular War; his son, the sport Guy Fontclair; Sir Robert’s sister, ferociously family-obsessed Lady Catherine Tarleton; Sir Robert’s orphaned second cousin Isabelle Fontclair, who’s lived with the family since she’d been three years old. Everyone knows that Hugh and Maud’s marriage is being forced on the Fontclairs, but how? The party is already tense, but conditions deteriorate rapidly when Kestrel finds an unknown dead woman locked in his room at Bellegarde.

I’m not sure why CUT TO THE QUICK is set in 1824. Other than a few allusions to the war with France, social restrictions on women, and the use of some criminal slang, the action could have happened at any time. Language and writing style are modern. Descriptive passages about Bellgarde and the countryside help create an English village sense of place and also add to characterization: “...the [Elizabethan great chamber] was resplendent with carved and gilded wood, heraldic designs, and colourful tapestries. The plaster ceiling was a riot of birds and flowers, scrolls and acanthus leaves. Julian, whose tastes usually ran to space, light, and simplicity, was surprised to find himself captivated. It was all so artlessly exuberant. He thought how beautifully it expressed the spirit of an age when continents were being discovered, when Armadas were defeated, and great English poets and dramatists flourished. An age, he thought, when it must have seemed that anything was possible to humankind.” (26)

Characterization is strong. Julian Kestrel is an appealing protagonist, with most of the action shown through his eyes. “[Kestrel] found it hard to observe this ritual with the clam, alert detachment he needed. It was all very well to conclude, as a matter of logic, that one of these people must have killed her. It was quite another thing to see them filing slowly past her, and to picture each of them driving a knife into her living flesh. But he must not let his feelings cloud his judgement. Compassion was all very well, horror was only natural, but neither would do the girl any good now. The only thing of value left to give her was justice. And that was another reason...why he must do everything in his power to solve the murder.” (168) Other characters are well drawn, especially Hugh’s younger sister: “Philippa had a poor opinion of authority and did not submit to it very well. When she was forbidden to do something she had set her heart on, she thought the prohibition over carefully, and if she decided it was unfair or unnecessary, she disobeyed it.” (23) It is eleven-year-old Philippa who provides the information that lets Kestrel solve the murder.

The plot is fairly laid out with appropriate clues, but it’s at least fifty pages longer than necessary. An experienced reader will probably discover most of the secrets and the killer’s identity before the conclusion. Still, CUT TO THE QUICK is an enjoyable summertime read. (B+)

 

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RADICAL EQUATIONS is the fourth book in Robert Spiller’s mystery series featuring Bonnie Pinkwater, a mathematics teacher in eastern Colorado. It was published in 2011 as a Kindle download.

Hiking in the area of the Paint Mines with fellow teacher and Wiccan friend Rhiannon Griffiths, Bonnie Pinkwater finds the body of Vice-Principal Clarence Murphy; by the time they hike back out, notify the sheriff’s office, and return to the scene, the body is gone. Deputy Byron Hickman, Bonnie’s former student, advises them to keep the episode quiet. When Bonnie stops by East Plains High School to pick up materials for the next-day opening of school, she’s caught in a tornado that destroys the school complex and discovers Murphy’s body sitting at his desk in his office. What on earth is going on? Murphy had been leading the town’s battle against the Comanche Land Development Company’s draining the local aquifer to sell the water to Denver; he’d been a notorious womanizer, drinker, and gambler, not popular with the faculty. But who wanted him dead? And why was his body moved?

Bonnie Pinkwater is an appealing protagonist. She’s motivated by curiosity and logic in equal parts and seems incapable of leaving things alone. She has what she refers to as an Imp of Perversity that gets her into trouble, but she’s a gifted and caring teacher. Bonnie’s viewpoint offers insight into her character. “Doctor Xavier Divine, superintendent of the East Plains School District was smiling. It was [a] strained weak sort of thing, but the effort was being made and truth be told, Bonnie would have preferred The Divine Pain in the A** stick with his usual scowl. The smile looked as natural as a nun smoking a cigar.” She does, however, pull some TSTL moments, most notably chasing after a suspected killer in a van nearly out of gas and the cliched never having her cell phone with her or turned on. (52) Most characters are well-developed.

Spiller is good with misdirection that keeps the reader focused away from the killer, though he’s fair about clues to possible identity. There is one major loose end that bothered me, which was how the caller knew where to find Murphy at 2 AM following a water rights meeting, to set up Murphy’s murder.

Spiller’s also good with incorporating the story of the eighteenth-century mathematician Leonhard Euler and his Seven Bridges of Konigsberg problem into the narrative, making it a rallying point for a student in need.

Spiller gives a graphic view of the tornado as Bonnie experiences it, and he includes atmospheric descriptions of the desert: “The Mines had relinquished their private treasure. The bleached sandstone walls, in streaks five, ten feet wide, twenty feet high, flashed the painted namesakes of the trail. Like some rainbow god had splashed the rock, crimson mixed with golds mixed with shades of purple ranging from pale violet to deep royal. Burgundy stripes ran headlong into lemon swaths morphing into brilliant tangerines. The streaks blended into a watercolor effect, a wash no artist but God could have pulled off.” (6) He’s also spot on about the challenges of teaching high school students.

RADICAL EQUATIONS is sending me back to the first book in the series--this is one that I want to follow. (B+)

 

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Kay Tee’s MISS CATHERINE BENNET is a continuation of Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, beginning with the marriages of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet. It was released in e-format in 2013.

Tee introduces a pair of attractive brothers, Henry Shearlow who’s studying law at Oxford and much taken with Georgiana Darcy, and Lieutenant Edward Shearlow of the Royal Navy, who meets Kitty at Netherfield and is impressed enough to ask permission to correspond with her. Catherine spends Christmas with the Gardiners at Pemberly, where Lady Shearlow, oldest son Richard, and Henry will also be guests. This is the point at which I give up.

MISS CATHERINE BENNET cries out for a strong editor. There are many grammar and usage problems, including misuse and non-use of commas, run-on sentences, and poor world choice (“horse rider,” “put out” to mean upset, “himself” written as two words). A typical sentence reads: “In the afternoon shortly after tea had been served they were to dress for dining at the Goulding’s for they had a drive of something less than half of one hour to the house, though with the rain and wind as it was boding ill for the whole evening and into the next day, such a journey might be extended.” ‘Nuf said.

Worse are the violations of appropriate behavior between unmarried, unrelated young men and women, including repeated hands-on contact as Edward Shearlow buttons Kitty’s coat and when he sits with his thigh against hers as they look at a book.

It’s a shame that MISS CATHERINE BENNET was not properly edited, because Edward and Henry Shearlow are attractive characters. Kitty has grown in maturity and decorum, in the process of becoming an appropriate wife for a man of sense. However, as written, it doesn’t deserve any more of my time. No grade because only 21% read.

 

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THIS PRIVATE PLOT is Alan Beechey’s third book in his Oliver Swithin mystery series, published in 2014. Oliver Swithin, under the pseudonym O. C. Blthely, writes the Railway Mice series featuring the despicable Finsbury the Ferret, who’s the most popular character in the series. He’s in love with Effie Strongitharm, Detective Sergeant to his uncle, Detective Superintendent Tim Mallard of Scotland Yard’s Serious Crimes Directorate.

Oliver and Effie are spending a week with his parents in Synne, a small Cotswold village near Stratford-on-Avon, where Uncle Tim’s drama group, the Theydon Bois Thespians are to present a one-time performance of Hamlet on the main stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. A practical joke leads Oliver and Tim to the discovery of Dennis Breedlove hanging in the Synne Oak, reputed to have been the village gallows. Detective Sergeant Simon Culpepper, officer in charge of the case, finds what he takes to be a blackmailing letter in Breedlove’s desk; discovering that Breedlove had no money and would be unable to meet blackmail demands, he concludes Breedlove committed suicide. Oliver concludes otherwise.

The plot of THIS PRIVATE PLOT is definitely over the top, including murder; multiple blackmails; a writers’ group with curious critical technique; internet pornography involving one of the would-be County families (the Bennets, with five unmarried daughters); peeping Toms; the mysterious resident of Furbelow Hall known as the Vampire of Synne, because he only comes out at night, dressed in a monk’s cowl and robe; disappearing holes in the ground; a mysterious organization known as the Priory of Synne; a government covert operation and its cover-up; and an attempt to answer the Shakespearean authorship question.

Humor is a major component of the Oliver Swithin series, and THIS PRIVATE PLOT is no exception. One of its manifestations is in the names of characters: Dr. Hyacinthe McCaw, an academic blackmailer (who had to retire because there’s nothing now that people are ashamed of) and Mr. Underwood Tooth, one of the Grand Masters of the Priory of Synne, for example. Beechey also uses humor to leaven characterization: “There was little doubt that Toby would shortly be subjected to the notorious Strongitharm Look, Efie’s special way of sending her ice-blue gaze deep into an offender’s brain, swatting away the defending forces of bravado and self-justification, grabbing the cowering sense of shame by the throat, and plucking it out for all to see, like a still-beating heart. Two seconds of the Look, and Toby would be recalling every embarrassing, scrotum-shrinking moment of his life, including the time Oliver caught him doing bodybuilding poses in the bathroom mirror, dressed only in what he’d supposed was one of their sister’s thongs, although it turned out to be their mother’s.” (18) Breedlove’s funeral is worth the price of the book, as is the closing of Humfrey Fingerhood’s production of Hamlet.

Beechey’s also good at creating the sense of Synne as a genuine place, in part by including odd snippets of history: “Furbelow Hall, Synne’s manor house, was built in the early seventeenth century. At that time, the village was known officially as Lesser Synne, a name that stuck well into the twentieth century, when Warwickshire Family Council finally agreed to drop the ‘Lesser.’ The villagers’ complaint was not that there was no longer any corresponding Greater Synne to justify the demeaning qualifier, but that there never had been one the in the first place. Synne had narrowly escaped being the site of an early Civil War battle when the young ‘Mad Cavalier’ Prince Rupert of the Rhine stopped at the recently completed Furbelow Hall, eager to try out the confections from its state-of-the-art kitchen. He missed the Roundhead army because, hours later, he was still trying out his host’s state-of-the-art privy.” (184)

Though I tend to be whimsy-impaired, THIS PRIVATE PLOT is a charming light read, perfect for an afternoon in the shade with a tall glass of sweet tea. (A-)

 

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CHILDREN OF WAR is the seventh of Martin Walker’s outstanding mystery series featuring Benoit Courreges, aka Bruno, chief of police in St Denis in the Vezere River Valley in the Dordogne. It was published in the United Kingdom in 2014. I couldn’t wait for the US edition. While the books in the series do well as stand-alones, reading them in order adds to the sense o Bruno and the inhabitants of St Denis as actual people whose lives continue between the episodes that Walker chooses to record.

The title CHILDREN OF WAR operates on two levels. One of the children is Sami Belloumi, an autistic Muslim teenager from St Denis who shows up at a French army base in Afghanistan, wanting to come home. He’d been in a special school associated with the mosque in Toulouse, only to disappear four years before into the jihad. He’s malnourished, with serious medical conditions, severely traumatized both physically and psychologically. The Americans have his fingerprints on unexploded IEDs. But how did he get involved with the jihad, and is he legally competent? The Brigadier comes down to St Denis to handle his debriefing and security, while politicians of several nationalities and the French media create havoc.

The second children of war are siblings David and Maya Halevy, who were moved through the French Boy Scout operations that relocated thousands of Jewish children into homes of Protestant and Catholic families in southern France, where they were protected. David has died and, to honor St Denis, has left an unspecified sum to build a memorial honoring those who’d sheltered them. Bruno and the Mayor are involved with developing a plan that will solve current problems and also preserve the history of WWII St Denis.

I don’t pretend to be objective about this series. I enjoy Bruno as a humane, honorable man doing the best he can in the situations in which he finds himself. “He felt sickened by a personal sense of outrage that such an evil killing had taken place on his turf, almost within sight of the town he was sworn to protect. Even though the dead man was a stranger, Bruno felt the manner of the man’s death had been a kind of pollution of these woods that he knew so well. He’d never be able to bring his horse or his dog this way without thinking of it. And this atrocity had been carried out by people skilled in the blackest arts of death, professionals who were notoriously hard to bring to justice. But he’d find them.” (2) His desire for wife and children, his love of his horse Hector and his basset hound Balzac, and his relationships with the people of St Denis all make him intensely human.

Walker’s St Denis seems a real place, at least in part because he invests it with a sense of history. “They rounded the corner to see the golden stone of the inner courtyard turned into a rosy pink by the glow from the giant firepit on which the boars were roasting. When the twilight gave way to the dark of night, Bruno knew the whole scene would turn a rich red as the ashes smouldered. He felt the strong sensation stealing over him of time slipping, of the modern France of high-speed trains and computers giving way to a scene that was almost medieval or perhaps even older. The setting of stone and fire and meat roasting over an open fire could have taken place in this valley in days when men carried swords and wore chain mail and kept guard against English raiders, or millennia ago when they wore furs and painted prehistoric beasts on the walls of caves.” (118-9)
I would love to visit St Denis.

Adding to the French ambiance is Walker’s appreciation of the food and wines of the Dordogne, lovingly described as Bruno prepares and/or experiences them: “...he’d dine alone; something he rather enjoyed from time to time. He had some spinach in the garden which he could pick, wash and quickly simmer. He could slice some of the ham hanging from the beam in his kitchen and chop it into lardons, fry it, and mix them into the spinach, and then poach two fresh eggs from his garden and serve them on top with some freshly ground black pepper. With some of that morning’s baguette, lightly toasted and rubbed with garlic, and a glass of cool white wine, it would be delicious.” (62) Walker outdoes himself in the food details in CHILDREN OF MEN.

I recommend CHILDEN OF MEN and the whole Bruno series without reservation. (solid A)

 

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THE LAST SCHOLAR is the latest in Jill Paton Walsh’s continuation of the characters of Lord Peter Wimsey, now Duke of Denver, and his wife Harriet Vane Wimsey, Duchess of Denver. It was published in 2014. It is set three years after the events in THE ATTENBURY EMERALDS.

Peter Wimsey is surprised to learn that he, as Duke of Denver, is the Visitor for St Severin’s College in Oxford, whose duties include casting the deciding vote if the Senior Fellows are hopelessly deadlocked on a major decision affecting the college. St Severin’s is in deep financial trouble. Its one major asset is a copy of Boethius associated with Alfred the Great. Argument has been dragging on for several terms about selling it and using the money to purchase a tract of agricultural land that’s expected to become extremely valuable for development; the Senior Fellows are evenly split. Peter as Visitor is called in to decide. He soon discovers that the current Warden, Dr. Thomas Ludgvan has been missing for several months; one Senior Fellow Mr. Enistood has died in a fall down stairs, and there have been non-fatal attacks on two other Fellows. Sale of the Boethius is tied in with a scathing review some five years before of a book by a young Research Fellow David Outlander, a review so scathing and personal that he committed suicide. Disturbingly, the death and attacks seemed based on the plots in some of Harriet’s books. Two more deaths ensue before Peter and Harriet solve the killings.

First, let me state my prejudices. I treasure the Dorothy L. Sayers novels involving Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. I am a fan of the mysteries from the Golden Age that Sayers’s works helped to create. I enjoy Harriet Vane’s feminism. That being said, I am always uncomfortable when another author produces sequels to continue an established character like Lord Peter Wimsey.

The characters in THE LATE SCHOLAR are pale copies of the originals. I would expect them to evolve as they age--Peter, for instance, must be approaching 65 years old, and he’s succeeded as Duke of Denver with all its new obligations. Somehow the joie de vivre is missing. The “piffle” that is such an important feature of the Sayers originals is leaden. The habit of quotation seems artificial. One area which is unchanged is Peter’s sense of the importance of what he’s doing in discovering murderers: “It’s the enormity of it; of death, I mean. I’m not thinking only of Mother, but of those deaths in Oxford. To take a life for reasons such as we suspect is appallingly frivolous, it’s sacrilegious. To make light of death; to secure it as a move in a game, to treat it with less than fear and reverence as the common fate of all.” (245)

The plot is complex, stretching back five years and involving desires to evade responsibility, to protect a cultural treasure, to acquire money, to protect academic turf, and to obtain vengeance. Intermixed are the Wimseys concern about the Dowager Duchess, Lady Honoria, whose health is declining and who injures herself in a fall down stairs, and about Bredon, their 17-year-old son who wants to attend not Oxford, but Reading University where he can study estate management, his eventual responsibility. My major complaint about the plot is its length. Walsh seems determined to include every Fellow named in GAUDY NIGHT and every artist friend of Harriet’s from STRONG POISON whether or not they serve an essential function. Walsh telegraphs the identity of the killer.

Easily the strongest element of THE LAST SCHOLAR is the sense of place, with beautiful descriptions of Oxford: “The library had been built by someone who thought of it as a sacred space; it resembled a chapel, having a fine hammer-beam timber roof, beautifully carved seventeenth-century bookcases, and Gothic windows glazed in plain greenish bubble-filled panes of glass. The room was dark, and needed the reading lights with which every desk was provided. Along the back wall of the room a row of glass-fronted bookcases displayed the treasures of the house; those, that is, that were not in the locked display cases that occupied the centre aisle.” (167-8) Walsh emphasizes time with allusions to films--The Robe andFrom Here to Eternity--and place with the names of prominent Oxfordians--Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, A. L. Rowse, Edmund Crispin, and C. M. Bowra.

THE LAST SCHOLAR doesn’t compare with Sayers’s own works, but it’s a satisfying read taken on its own terms. (B)

 

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IN THE BALANCE is one of Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Maud Silver books. It was originally published in 1942 and made available in e-format in 2011. Miss Silver is a retired governess who is now a successful private investigator.

When Lisle Jerningham encounters Miss Silver on the train to London, she’s still in shock from overhearing speculation that her new husband Dale plans to kill her as he had killed his first wife Lydia. Shortly before, some two weeks after writing a will leaving her substantial fortune to Dale, Lisle had almost drowned while swimming with Dale and his cousins Alicia Steyne and Rafe Jerningham. They’d been reared together at the Jerningham estate Tanfield, which Dale needs Lisle’s money to maintain. Miss Silver is much concerned and offers her services to Lisle, who declines out of loyalty to Dale. Alicia does her best to make Lisle feel an unsatisfactory wife and unwelcome at Tansfield; Rafe seems to be a shallow womanizing troublemaker; Dale shows much more concern for her money than for Lisle. In short order,someone tampers with the steering in Lisle’s car, resulting in a crash that would have killed her had she not jumped from the car, and a local girl Cissie Cole, wearing a distinctive coat given her by Lisle, is pushed over a cliff near Tanfield to her death. Miss Silver comes to Ledlington to discover what’s going on.

***SPOILERS***SPOILERS***

This isn’t one of the better Miss Silver mysteries. The characters are not very sympathetic. Even by the standards of 1942, Lisle’s passivity in the face of her justified suspicions of Dale is extreme. She ignores her instincts, makes no effort to be mistress of her household, puts up with digs and insults from Alicia, and disregards Miss Silver’s advice about changing her will to remove Dale’s motive for killing her. “[Lisle] saw herself in her silver dress, with the emerald which had been her mother’s. Some people’s eyes would have taken a green shade from the green stone, but hers were never anything else but grey. They didn’t change. There was something in herself which didn’t change either. Even if it was all true, she wouldn’t change. Even if Dale wanted her dead, she couldn’t change.”

Dale is so obviously a dominating bully who’s only interested in Lisle’s fortune to save Tanfield that I thought it might be a plot device to conceal a surprise murderer. It isn’t. The plot is straight forwardly the series of incidents culminating in Dale’s pushing Lisle into the sea and leaving her to drown in the incoming tide. When he learns from Rafe that Lisle didn’t drown, Dale suicides. Miss Silver and Inspector Randal March, her pupil, play no part in preventing the last attempt on Lisle’s life or in proving who’d killed Cissie Cole.

Easily the strongest element in IN THE BALANCE is the atmosphere, especially the sense of human lives dominated by the long obsession with Tanfield. “[Lisle] had never felt that the room was really hers, but never before tonight had she experienced so completely the sense of being a passing guest in this place where so many others had lived, and ruled, and played their fleeting parts. The heavy curtains had been drawn across the windows. The atmosphere of the room seemed old and stale. The hangings, the carpet, the massive furniture, all sent out a faint something to taint the air.”

As much as I hate to say this about a book in a series that I’ve enjoyed very much over the years, IN THE BALANCE really isn’t worth the time it takes. (D)

 

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MADAME KOSKA AND THE IMPERIAL BROOCH by Ilil Arbel is one of her Madame Koska series set in London in 1921. It was a free or inexpensive Kindle download published in 2012.

Madame Vera Koska, well-known Parisian dress designer of highborn Russian descent, has moved to London to establish her atelier. Her friend Countess Anna Petrovna Golitsyn assists her with advice and the services of her niece Natalya Saltykno, a seamstress skilled in beadwork and embroidery; Annushka also finds Vera an outstanding model, Eurasian beauty Gretchen Van der Hoven. As Vera opens her atelier, London is abuzz with rumors about the theft from a provincial museum in Russia of a famous sapphire brooch once belonging to Catherine the Great; the theft seems associated with a Eurasian criminal gang who kidnapped or killed Gretchen’s father. When her atelier if burglarized twice, Vera determines that she must find out for herself what is going on.

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

MADAME KOSKA AND THE IMPERIAL BROOCH reads very much like some of the thrillers from the 1920-1930s, with the worldwide criminal conspiracy, a mysterious jewel thief, and mysterious young women who may or may not be innocent of wrongdoing. It’s not particularly believable either in characters or plot. Arbel doesn’t play fair since she conceals from the reader background information known to Vera. The criminal’s identity is also a cliche from the same thriller tradition.

I don’t think I’ll be following this series. (D)

 

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Eric Wright’s A BODY SURROUNDED BY WATER is the fifth in his Inspector Charlie Salter series. It was originally published in 1987.

The Great Silver Seal of the government of Prince Edward Island disappeared during a raid on Charlottetown by privateers out of Marblehead, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It resurfaces during the annual holiday of Charlie, Annie, Angus, and Seth Salter on the Island. Charlie’s father-in-law Robert Montagu and two others propose to purchase the seal and use its return to generate favorable publicity in the upcoming election. Then Clive Elton, the local historian representing the purchasers, dies in what looks like a burglary gone wrong, and the seal is nowhere to be found. Charlie and Angus are golfing buddies with RCMP Constable Fehely, who’s investigating the burglaries, and Charlie’s father-in-law asks him to liaise with RCMP Staff Sergeant Croll, who’s working the murder. Are the killer and the burglar the same person? Where is the seal? Matters only become more complex when the identified burglar’s body is found weighted down at sea.

Part of the reason I enjoy this series so much is the character of Charlie Salter. He’s managed to restart his career in the Toronto police after a stagnant period caused by office politics. He loves his wife, considerably above his station as one of an Establishment family on Prince Edward Island. “Salter got along with his father-in-law but he had no sort of relationship with him. From the beginning he had resisted being integrated into the Montagu clan; he felt his working-class background when he was among them, and without being prickly he maintained a distance from them to keep their assumption--that he was one of them--in check.The thousand miles that normally separated their worlds made this easy, but on the annual trip to the Island his fundamental wariness resurfaced.” (35) I appreciate the believability of Salter, his nuclear family, and his attitudes.

Wright plays fair with the plot, incorporating appropriate clues to the identity of the burglar and to the machinations involved in the the Great Silver Seal business. Salter’s casual participation in the local mysteries is reasonable.

Sense of place in the Charlie Salter series is outstanding. “Prince Edward Island is Canada’s smallest province and in summer its two-coloured landscape of green and red makes it the prettiest. The ironstone which colours the soil is so distinctive that gas station attendants in Montreal, six hundred miles away, can identify a car from the island by the red dust on its wheels. Angus drove carefully from the ferry docks onto the imposing piece of highway, complete with cloverleaf and multi-directional overhead signs, which turns almost immediately, like a false storefront, into a comfortable two-lane road through the fields and brightly painted villages of Green Gables’ country, as domesticated as the English countryside, but with the slightly toyland quality given it by the coloured wooden houses.” (28-9)

A BODY SURROUNDED BY WATER isn’t the strongest to date of the series, but it’s a satisfying read. (B+)

 

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THE MURDER AT SISSINGHAM HALL is the first in Clara Benson’s mystery series featuring Mrs. Angela Marchmont. It was released as a free or inexpensive Kindle download in 2012. Set in the early 1920s, it is a classic country house party mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie.

Charles Knox has returned to England after eight years in South Africa where he’s made a fortune in gold mining. He’s met at the docks by his oldest friend “Bobs” Buckley and his younger sister Sylvia; after spending time with their family at Bucklands, he accompanies them to Sissingham Hall, home of Sir Neville and Rosamund Stricklands. Sir Neville is a potential business partner, and Rosamund is Knox’s former fiancee, who broke off the engagement just before he left for South Africa because he lacked money and prospects. Unfortunately, Sir Neville, who’s been depressed and has called his solicitor to change his will, is found dead in his locked study. The doctor who examines the body and Mrs. Angela Marchmont, Rosamund’s cousin and guest at the house party, think Sir Neville’s been murdered.

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

I’m not sure whether to take Benson’s novel as a straight-forward mystery or as an homage to the genre of the house party murder mystery. Certainly it has the characters of an homage: a first person narrator who doesn’t understand much of what he sees and hears, a colonial returned home in much changed circumstances, an unhappy woman who married for money, a wastrel heir about to be cut out of his cousin’s will, the heir’s gold-digging wife, a lumpish female ward, a shell-shocked secretary who runs away, an amateur detective who anticipates the police’s discovery of the truth. None of the characters are particularly believable, and the identity of the killer is telegraphed in the first characterization.

Plot devices are also standard: the seemingly locked room, a faked time of death, all suspects alibied for the apparent time of death, a set up of the killer, who’s compelled to brag to the potential victim about committing the crime. There’s little suspense about the killer’s identity, the only question being if the murderer acted alone or had help. The police are helpful, but Mrs. Marchmont engineers the exposure of the criminal. There’s little sense of place.

However read, whether as a mystery set in 1921 or as an homage, THE MURDER AT SISSINGHAM HALL is average at best. (C)

 

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CRIME SCENE AT CARDWELL RANCH by B. J. Daniels was originally published as a Harlequin Intrigue. It was a free or inexpensive Kindle download.

Readying the family ranch for sale, Dana Cardwell and elderly ranch manager Warren Fitzpatrick find a skeleton in an abandoned well near the original homestead. This involves Dana with Acting Marshal Hud Savage, to whom she’d been engaged five years before, when she caught him in bed with her older sister Stacy. The skeleton is that of Ginger Adams, a good-time girl who’d disappeared from Gallatin Canyon, Montana, fifteen or more years before. She’d been involved with both Angus Cardwell, Dana’s father, and her older brother Jordan, and had a habit of going after older men of wealth and power. She had been thrown in the well alive, then shot in the head with a .38 that was used only five years before the discovery to kill Judge Raymond Randolph. Judge Randolph had been feuding with Brick Savage, and Hud had seen his father with Ginger. Who’s behind murders so different and so far apart?

Even when I take the genre into account, CRIME SCENE AT CARDWELL RANCH is weak. Characters are standard romance fare, with more angst than communication. Had Dana and Hud talked five years before, their separation might have been prevented. Dana’s three siblings are one-dimensional, forcing Dana to sell their mother’s ranch that she loves. Dana pulls repeated TSTLs when she goes running hither and thither after Hud warns her of her danger. At least one relationship between characters that’s key to identifying the killer isn’t exposed until the climax.

The plot is awkward. An emerald and diamond ring found in the well with Ginger is essential in tying her to her lover, but it isn’t clear how her lover took his wife’s ring for Ginger without his wife’s knowledge. It’s not clear how long Ginger’s been dead--first is given as fifteen years, next it’s seventeen years; yet when the Judge’s killer explains why he had to die, it’s narrated as if the deaths are almost contemporary, despite the gap of ten years or more. Attempts at misdirection don’t much work. The conclusion is rushed, not adequately set up. There’s little sense of place.

Don’t bother. (D)

 

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ARTISTIC LICENSE is the second book in Nageeba Davis’s series featuring art teacher and sculptor Maggie Kean. Originally published in 2002, it has been available free or inexpensively from Kindle since 2011.

Maggie’s having the first showing of her sculpture at The Outlook a year after the death of her friend Elizabeth Boyer, whose legacy has allowed Maggie to take a year off to work on her art. That evening she discovers the body of Jeff Riley, a special agent of the IRS, in the kiln in the studio behind The Outlook. Despite lover Sam Villari’s requests, she’s determined to involve herself in the murder.

ARTISTIC LICENSE involves many of the problems I have with the extreme cozy genre. Maggie has absolutely no need to become part of the investigation. She didn’t know the dead man, she’s not suspected of killing him, no one she cares for (except police detective Sam) is involved. Another is why anyone, especially the victim’s wife Joanne Riley would answer her questions. She’s an impertinent stranger with absolutely no authority for asking questions. Another is her disregard for small transgressions like invasion of privacy, breaking and entering, theft of papers, and suppression of evidence. In real life, she’d be arrested for obstruction of justice at least.

Even as first person nsrrator, Maggie as a character grows old quickly. If she were a child, she’d be under treatment for oppositional-defiant disorder (ODD). Her fall-back position in any situation not going her way is anger, defiance, and determination to do her own thing. She excuses this by her having lost her mother at a very young age and her father being emotionally distant, but she’s in her thirties. I want to smack her upside the head and say, “Get over it.” To be fair, after nearly losing Sam, she does begin to acknowledge her feelings and her behavior improves, as reported in the falling action. These changes come only after such TSTLs as her nearly being run off the side of a mountain and not telling the police about it and two separate burglaries.

The plot in ARTISTIC LICENSE is awkward. There’s no apparent connection between the victim and his killer, and the vital clue isn’t revealed until Maggie confronts the murderer. The sub-plot involving gallery manager Mark Gossett and his lover Jamie _____ adds little and is overly dramatic. The plot coasts along slowly, then the conclusion feels rushed and “let’s get it over with.”

Easily the strongest element in ARTISTIC LICENSE is its atmosphere. “As I waited for [coffee] to percolate, I gazed out the window. The sun had dyed the sky in broad swatches of orange and yellow, a perfect backdrop for the tall pine trees and blue spruce that provided the last remaining splashes of color to the horizon. Nature seemed oblivious to last night’s tragedy, and morning arrived bathed in its palette of fall colors.”

I was disappointed in ARTISTIC LICENSE. (C)

 

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Anne Elwood’s A PROVENCAL MYSTERY features American historian Dr. Pandora (“Dory”) Ryan, who’s working at the Archives de Voucluse in Avignon, France, in 1990. She’s researching an article that’s essential to her obtaining tenure at Carlsbad West University; the article isn’t as interesting as a portion of a nun’s diary from 1659 that turns up in her research materials, one that recounts events in the Our Lady of Mercy convent surrounding one of the “fallen women” incarcerated there. The diary appears and disappears, documents are requested and denied, and when Dory finds one of the other researchers, Sister Agatha, dead in the restroom, she’s convinced that the diary is involved. She’s determined to find the connection and the killer.

First, let me say that I’m trained as a historian and enjoy mysteries that involve a modern crime based on past events or artifacts. A PROVENCAL MYSTERY uses the 1659 events and the sheltering of a young Jewish girl from the Vichy Nazis in March 1944. There’s a fine line between historical background and too much information, that Elwood misses. It seems as if she’d been given a specific number of pages to fill, so she added layers to the 1659 story instead of focusing on the modern mystery. There’s no sense of the police investigating Sister Agatha’s murder, and the identity of the killer is telegraphed from the beginning. Information that leads Dory to the solution of all three mysteries turns up by coincidence when she talks with a street cheese seller in the village of New Chateaublanc. In terms of the plot structure, the turning point of the action (Dory’s decision to break and enter, looking for documents) and the climax of the plot (identifying the killer) do not coincide, leaving the resolution as anti-climax

Dory Ryan as first person narrator is an interesting character. A new Ph.D. in her first teaching position at 45 years old, pressured by her department to write a statistical analysis on the social origins of nuns in the Old Regime when she’d rather be telling their stories, she’s independent and complex. “Though my parents hadn’t thought of the curious girl in the myth when they called me Pandora (they just liked the sound), the name suited me more than they could have imagined. I was prone to take the lid off every box I found, sometimes with dramatic results--and often with disastrous ones.” (8) Other characters are well developed and believable.

Sense of place and time are both excellent. “The highest point of the village [Old Chateaublanc] was a ruin of rubble, of half-fallen grayish stone houses built so that the side of the mountain acted as one wall. Tree roots had felt their way between the stones and over the years had split them apart. Tiny plants thrived in the mixture of fine gravel and dirt that had sifted into the cracks. In the square of a ruin maybe a thousand years old, we sat on a stone, happy in silence. on the one wall, gray smoke stains were all that was left of an ancient fire. If i could read those stones, I thought, I might know the people who had lived here so long ago. They had been rebels for centuries--Protestant dissenters, bandits, renegades escaped from city justice. Their presence hung in the air like ghosts. In my mind, their voices spoke in guttural Old Provencal, planning insurrection, complaining bout the tax collector.” (193)

Formatting of A PROVENCAL MYSTERY does not indent paragraphs and does not leave lines between chapter breaks or paragraphs, making for large solid blocks of text that are unattractive and sometimes difficult to read.

I’ll be looking for other books by Anne Elwood. (B)

 

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Scott Mackay’s OLD SCORES is a mystery featuring Detective Sergeant Barry Gilbert of the Toronto Police Department Homicide Squad. It was published in 2003.

Barry Gilbert is called away from his fiftieth birthday trip to the theater to the murder scene of Glen Boyd, major 1970s concert promoter and manager of the rock band Mother Courage, now fallen on hard times. He’s got a recently broken arm, he’s been strangled with a woman’s silk scarf, and there’s evidence of significant drug use. He’s ripped off bands, band members, and Colombian drug dealers; he’s a sexual predator. But who wanted him dead?

The plot in OLD SCORES depends on a major improbability--that Gilbert would be made officer in charge of the investigation of Boyd’s death, when Gilbert’s wife Regina had run away with Boyd to France and lived with him there for nine months before returning to Canada and her marriage. It’s only because of the threat of major media publicity that he’s removed from the case, even after enough evidence surfaces against Regina, Gilbert’s wife, for a warrant to be issued for her arrest. A second major improbability is his bosses’ overlooking Gilbert’s flagrant disobedience to direct orders that he is off the case. Mackay is skilled at directing attention away from the killer and the motive for Boyd’s death.

Point of view is limited third person, with events as perceived by Barry Gilbert, but he doesn’t seem terribly believable. His absolute blind faith in Regina and his forgiveness for her is too sweet; his lack of blame for the young man who’s exposed his seventeen-year-old daughter to HIV is improbable. His fixing on a suspect and then looking for evidence against that person (anyone as long as it’ not Regina) is poor police work. Too many characters are extraneous to the requirements of the action, and most are mentioned without much development.

The physical details of the setting in and about Toronto are explicit, yet there’s little sense of the feel or spirit of the city. OLD SCORES is average. (C)

 

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Hailey Lind’s FEINT OF ART features Annie Kincaid, former art forger turned respectable, running True/Faux Studios, doing restorations, legitimate painting, and faux finishing. She had been trained by her grandfather Georges LeFleur , premier forger. The book was published in 2006.

FEINT OF ART involves the theft of Caravaggio’s The Magi from the Brock Museum in San Franciso, three forged copies of the painting substituted at various times and places for the original and for each other, missing Old Master drawings, arson at Annie’s studio, kidnapping Annie, various assaults, multiple murders, and a shoot-out climax. The reader literally needs a scorecard to keep up with who’s involved and who’s done what to whom. The novel reads as if meant to be turned into a caper movie, complete with Annie’s having choice of good guy and bad boy romantic leads. There’s a distinct Keystone Kops flavor to it all.

Easily the best developed character is Annie Kincaid as first person narrator, though she doesn’t seem particularly believable. For someone determined to go straight and establish herself as a legitimate business woman, she’s close to her questionable background. Dumped publicly by her lover curator Ernst Pettigrew of the Brock Museum when her forgery background was outed, it doesn’t make sense that she’d agree to meet him at midnight at the Brock as a favor, to authenticate The Magi. The biggest improbability for me was Annie and Michael (or whatever his real name is supposed to be) finding the body of Joanne Nash, murdered long enough before that major decomposition and stench have set in, after phoning in an anonymous tip to the police, playing an air hockey game that involves the whole bar and passing-out drunkenness. The jewel thief / art thief with heart of gold motif has been overdone.

The strong point of FEINT OF ART is the humor Lind uses to enliven both characterization and the outstanding sense of place. Physical details of San Francisco’s streets and neighborhoods are supported with atmospheric description. “Although it was February, and therefore normally sunny in the City, one never knew for sure. San Francisco’s climate, like most everything about the place, was unique. The City was at its foggy coldest in the summer, and the local joke was that one could always spot the summer tourists because they were the only ones dressed in shorts and T-shirts. The ubiquitous sidewalk vendors made a killing selling sweatshirts emblazoned I left my ♥ in SF and got goose bumps instead and The coldest winter I ever spent was the summer I spent in San Francisco--Mark Twain.” (66-7)

Maybe I wasn’t in the mood for its excess, but I find FEINT OF ART too busy--to many crooks, too many double-crosses, too much running about to be credible. If you can suspend disbelief, it’s a fun summer read. (C)

 

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James Street’s THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR: BEING A DE-MYTHED ACCOUNT OF HOW THE THIRTEEN COLONIES TURNED A WORLD UPSIDE DOWN was the first book of revisionist history I read. It was published in 1954, and I read it while in high school 1957-1961. I didn’t know it was revisionist history; I didn’t know the term. And it’s not so much revisionist in the facts and interpretation of events and people of the American Revolution as in the breezy, story-telling style of its writing. It was the first American history that I read that didn’t present the textbook pasteurized, homogenized, skim milk version of the Revolution but gave me the heavy cream of a down-to-earth, humorous approach. This book, literally, is one of the reasons that I am a historian by training.

I’m not going to try to do a formal review, just give a few examples of Street’s style and attitude. Let me state that his facts are accurate.

“...George Wasington was not a man of towering intellect or gaudy imagination, but he had too much sense as a farm boy to cut down a good cherry tree and much too much sense as a man to stand up n a small boat to cross a river.” (7)

“The Puritans didn’t trust the Anglicans. The Methodists didn’t trust the Puritans and Anglicans. The Anglicans were pretty smug. The Baptists didn’t trust anybody, and all of the American Protestant sects were dead-set against Roman Catholics.” (23)

“The American didn’t cotton to the idea of a Colonial army. He would fight hard for such border captains as John Stark, Francis Marion, Ethan Allen and John Sevier, but he just wouldn’t go for the discipline. He had a way of wandering off or sleeping on duty, or slapping officers on the back and bumming a snort of rum or a twist of tobacco.” (86)

“...working the swamps and the tall timber were three of the best guerillas in the business: Andrew Pickens, Thomas Sumpter, and the amazing Francis Marion, called ‘the Swamp Fox.’ Of the three, Marion is the best known and was one of those natural soldiers who comes along once in a coon’s age. When he had the men, he stood toe to toe with the British, but usually he didn’t have enough men for open engagements. His follower were Carolina Partisans and not Continentals. He’d recruit a bunch of farmers, a few hunters and trappers and maybe some Negroes and they’d go helling across the countryside, ripping and tearing the British flanks, burning out Tories, waylaying stragglers--just fighting anywhere, any way, any time.” (129)

“...out of the coves and gaps came riflemen, singly and in pairs and in bands. Some of them had fought the Tories before, down in the Piedmont and lowlands, but most of them hadn’t taken much part in the Revolution except to fight England’s Indian allies. Now, however, the British were coming their way and they didn’t aim to put up with it. Colonel Charles McDowell sounded the call and nine hundred men answered. They had their horses and Deckard rifles, and their rations were parched corn and sourwood honey. Isaac Shelby was there and William Campbell and Colonel Williams, and John Sevier and his young son, Captain Sevier. These were not Continental soldiers, mind you. There was not a uniform in the bunch. They were mountain men and thy didn’t know the difference between a bayonet and a poop deck. They had gone into the mountains to get away from the magistrates and lawyers and moneylenders of Tidewater, and to get a little land, even if they had to take it from the Indians. They didn’t have much, but what they had, they aimed to keep.” (135) These are my people.

And, “...in the language of the world, we [U.S. citizens] are all Yankees. To the Southerner, however, a Yankee broadly is any American who is not a Southerner, although vaguely the South does sometimes separate non-Southerners into Westerners, and Yankees. The line of demarcation is somewhere around Colorado. A Southerner thinks of a Montanan as in a Westerner, although a Nebraskan is a Yankee. To the Northerner, a Yankee lives in New England. To the New Englander, he lives in Vermont. In Vermont, he is a fellow who eats pie for breakfast.” (156)

I love Street’s story of the American Revolution. Highly recommended. (A)

 

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Christopher Fowler’s THE INVISIBLE CODE is one of his Peculiar Crime Unit novels featuring the oldest active detectives in London, Arthur Bryant and John May. As always, the Unit is besieged by the Home Ofice, faced with dissolution in case of failure. It is available in both print and e-book formats.

It’s impossible to summarize a Peculiar Crimes Unit novel adequately without doing a spoiler. As always, relatively simple-seeming crimes or events lead into strange and wondrous by-ways. The unexplained death of Amy O’Connor in St. Bride’s Church leads to the PCU’s care for Sabira Kasavian, wife of Home Office security expert Oskar Kasavian, who seems to be losing her mind; this leads to the murder of photojournalist Jeff Waters, which leads back to St. Bride’s Church, which leads to Amy O’Connor’s connection to Dr. Peter Jukes who’d died in mysterious circumstances some two years before when working on biological defenses in a privatized government program known as Theseus. Also as usual, arcane knowledge and practices are involved.

First off, Bryant and May are not believably human, but they go into the same category as Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe--the reader is ready and willing to suspend disbelief and just to enjoy them on Fowler’s terms. Other members of the PCU are more realistic, and the esoteric specialties of consultants to the PCU (such as Georgia Standing, archivist at the British Museum who’s expert in Roman lunar symbolism) are fun.

The plot in THE INVISIBLE CODE is particularly effective because Fowler hides the villains in plain sight while keeping the reader focused on conspiracies within and without the government and how the PCU can prove them. Allusions to previous cases are included, but THE INVISIBLE CODE reads well as a stand-alone. Fowler includes masses of information on the past English history and beliefs without becoming cloying. The conclusion is particularly effective, with implications leading, I hope, to a sequel.

One of the things I enjoy most about the PCU books is the sense of London, both modern and past. Fowler is skilled at succinct atmospheric bits that reveal place and character. Raymond Land, Acting Unit Chief, writes a departmental memo on their new headquarters at The Old Warehouse, 231 Caledonian Road, London N1 9RB: “While it appears to be true that a Mr. Aleister Crowley once held meetings here (and decorated the wall of my office with inappropriate images of young ladies and aroused livestock), the building is most emphatically no ‘haunted.’ It’s an old property with a colourful history, and has Victorian pipes and floorboards. The noises these make at night are quite normal and certainly don’t sound like the ‘death rattles of trapped souls.’ ... May I remind you that you are British officers of the law, and are not required to have any imagination.”

I enjoyed THE INVISIBLE CODE very much. (A-)

 

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Reginald L. Gray’s DEATH ON ROUTE THIRTY SEVEN was a free or inexpensive Kindle book published in 2012. It is a police procedural featuring Detective Inspector Ted Harty and Detective Sergeant Bob Tully of the West Town CID. I will not be assigning a grade because I’m not going to finish the book.

At 30%, Hardy and Tully are plodding step by step through the investigation of a robbery of a bus in which the driver was shot to death. Riding on the bus had been Peter Watkins, manager of a news agency carrying a week’s takings, some £6,000, to the bank. Obviously, someone from the bus company had been involved in planning the robbery. The case becomes more urgent when the get-away car is found burnt out with the body of one of the teenaged robbers inside.

The writing style is clunky. Dialogue is not realistic. Characters are introduced with what sounds like 3x5 card descriptions. All the action is told, not seen. There’s no sense of place.

Sorry, but life's too short to finish DEATH ON ROUTE THIRTY SEVEN. No grade.