Death Comes Silently by Carolyn Hart
In this installment in the Death on Demand Mystery series bookstore owner, Annie Darling, finds a substitute for her shift at the local thrift shop in order to host a book signing for the latest novel by the town’s local mystery writer, Emma Clyde. Her substitute is murdered during the shift, presumably by the young handyman, an ex-con. Annie and her friend, Henny, have reason to believe the young man had nothing to do with it.
This cozy mystery will appeal to fans of Carolyn Hart’s series. It’s easy to feel the clammy winter fog in Broward’s Rock, SC as Hart describes it and to experience some of the sense of terror that Henny and Annie feel as they are pursued in the thick island undergrowth by the killer. The setting and the characters are familiar, but the suspense and action are always riveting and new.
Hart should also win over new fans to the long-standing Death on Demand series with “Death Comes Silently” because it is not hard to get to know the cast of characters and the idyllic setting of Broward’s Rock just from reading one installment in the series.
Liz Nichols
Fatal Induction by Bernadette Pajer
Bernadette Pajer’s second installment in the Professor Bradshaw Mystery series was just published as of May 1. “Fatal Induction” is a worthy companion to the first title in the series “A Spark of Death” which was published some months ago. Again, I was lucky to have a review copy of this book.
Pajer sets her story during a most interesting time and area: Seattle in 1901 during the tense days during and immediately after the assassination of President McKinley. The first Professor Bradshaw book dealt with a fictional threat on McKinley’s life in Seattle by an anarchist. The second book starts off with the actual assassination a few months later. In “Fatal Induction” Professor Bradshaw is trying to win a contest to create a loud-talker device (a loud speaker system) that will pipe entertainment from a local theater into Seattle homes with good sound quality. At the same time, he is trying to solve the mystery of who killed an itinerant medicine peddler and where the peddler’s 10 year old daughter is hiding from the murderer she saw. The peddler’s wagon was found parked in the professor’s alley and he finds that his son has hidden the girl for a night or two before the professor discovers the girl and causes her to run away. The professor searches high and low among the underbelly of Seattle society in the Tenderloin district before he finally figures out where she is hidden. Has the killer also discovered her hiding place?
Pajer uses great care to retell history accurately and to explain complex scientific discoveries in a way that can be understood and appreciated by the average reader. She reveals for the reader in an Afterword what is fact and what is fiction in the story. It is fascinating how skillfully she blends fact and fiction.
I’m a big fan of Pajer’s work. Her characters are multidimensional with all the good, bad and ugly blended in so the reader can get to know these characters as if they were real people. Her characters think in ways that are appropriate to their era, age and station in life. Professor Bradshaw is the kind of character who’s home and inventor’s workshop can be visited time and again and not become boring. His relationship with his relative and boarder, Henry, who has just returned from the Alaska gold fields in this book, will certainly be developed further in future books in this series. I’m also looking forward to how Bradshaw’s other relationships with his son, Justin, his police contact, Detective O’Brien, Henry’s niece, Missouri, and others develop over the coming books.
Great series. Highly recommended.
Liz Nichols
Chocolate Covered Murder by Leslie Meier
I like food-themed mysteries. Not sure what that says about my tastes, but I usually find that they are fun, fast reads. Meier’s latest in her Lucy Stone Mystery series, “Chocolate Covered Murder” is no exception. The only disappointment is she did not include the recipe for Lucy’s prize-winning Maple Blueberry Cheesecake in the book. (I’ll have to check Meier’s website to see if she’s posted it there.)
I really like Meier’s protagonist, Lucy Stone. She’s a small town weekly newspaper reporter and someone who gets to know everyone who comes to town and knows everything that goes on in town. She’s the kind of character that the reader comes to hang out with every time a new book comes out to enjoy a not-so-taxing read. In this book Lucy is helped out of a snow-covered ditch by one of the town’s life-long residents and shortly after Lucy discovers that the same man drowned when he fell through the ice in a pond. He had a fish hook caught in his lip. Lucy suspects foul play, but the police rule it an accidental drowning. The former wife of the man is one of the owners of Fern’s Famous Fudge, a candy shop that has been a fixture in Tinker’s Cove for years.
There’s a new chocolate shop in town, Chanticleer Chocolates, that is billing its product as the “best candy on the coast.” The two shops go head-to-head for the Valentine’s Day business and the newspaper, “The Pennysaver” is stuck squarely in the middle. Most of the townsfolk square off with most of the women supporting Fern’s business and most of the men supporting Chanticleer, mostly because of its bombshell of a store manager, Tamzin Graves. The big boss of Chanticleer is Trey Meacham, a new businessman to the area, who manufacturers all of the chocolates in an old converted factory in a town nearby. His business acumen is undeniable, but some of the townspeople discover he may not share all the same interests and values as the regular folk.
There are two deaths that occur in the book that Lucy decides to solve with the help of an Army Major who comes into town late in the story with some information on Tamzin that helps to break open the case.
“Chocolate Covered Murder” is an enjoyable, fast read for anyone who loves a cosy mystery set in a quaint New England town.
Liz Nichols
Skeleton Picnic by Michael Norman
“Skeleton Picnic” is the second in the J.D. Books Mystery series. Norman is a resident of Utah and sets this particular series in the southwestern corner of that state in the area surrounding the rugged Grand Staircase Escalante Monument. I found this mystery to be extremely interesting because it explores the little-discussed topic of the illegal antiquities trade of the Four Corners area of the Southwest.
J.D. Books is a Bureau of Land Management law enforcement officer who transplanted to the Kanab, UT area not long before from the Denver Police Department. He grew up in the area and still has a father and sister nearby, but because he has been away he can view the politics and social connections in this tight-knit Mormon community somewhat dispassionately. Not every official and sworn officer is able to divorce family traditions and feelings about what is called a “skeleton picnic” from the legality of the practice.
A “skeleton picnic” is the local way of saying people are going out into the ancient Indian burial grounds and grave-robbing for valuable artifacts. People like Kanab High School history teacher, Roland Rogers and his wife, were widely known to have an extensive illegal antiquities collection. Others in the community have quite an under-the-table business in selling these illicit goods on the black market. When Rogers and his wife turn up missing and their house is ransacked in an apparent robbery, the town must confront the fact that going on “skeleton picnics” can be dangerous. It is up to J.D. Books, his counterpart with the county sheriff’s department, Elizabeth Tanner, and others in the BLM and local law enforcement, as well as the FBI, to figure out if the Rogers couple ran-afoul of over-zealous tribal law enforcement, other antiquities hunters, drug dealers, big-time antiquities dealers, petty burglars, or some combination.
This police procedural has plenty of action and lots of possibilities for suspects with means and motive to kill. The book poses an interesting question of whether generations of family tradition among the mostly Mormon pot hunters can be turned around by taking a fresh look at the consequences of these actions and how many people get hurt by the practice. Will real-life situations like the ones portrayed in the book ever cause the pot hunters to stop?
J.D. Books is a likeable character with sufficient complexity to become a regular subject for a mystery series. The situations that someone in his position can get in to is as limitless as the vast territory he patrols. I look forward to reading more books in the series.
Reviewed from a provided copy. The book is currently available for sale.
Liz Nichols
Lonesome Animals by Bruce Holbert
It’s rare that I read such a lyrical, almost poetic novel. Holbert vividly captures the essence of his characters and of the place that spawned them in “Lonesome Animals.”
Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a native of the Okanogan Mountains of northeastern Washington state that serve as the backdrop for this novel.
The author has fictionalized an account of his great-grandfather, Arthur Strahl, who was an early settler of Grand Coulee and an Indian Scout. I am sure that the tale contains some combination of facts turned into family lore and fiction to make it a really exciting story.
We meet Holbert’s main character, Russell Strawl, and his family in the 1930s. Strawl is a rancher and a retired lawman with a reputation for having a short fuse and a quick trigger. His step-son, Elijah, not only learned old-fashioned vigilante law from Strawl, his violent streak seems even more pronounced and unpredictable because of his hell-fire and brimstone Old Testament viewpoint. Elijah identifies with, and his actions are reminiscent of, God’s avenging prophet and namesake, Elijah.
It’s possible to understand and accept some of the violence that pervades this book when the protagonists are seen as instruments of God’s righteous retribution. Strawl and Elijah cast their vengeance on anyone who gets in their way or slows them down in the quest for a particularly gruesome serial killer. Still, not every instance of torture, maiming or killing has an apparent purpose except for shock value, and that is the one element of the book that bothers me. It makes it extremely difficult for the reader to feel any sympathy for Strawl or Elijah or to care what happens to them. The revelation about who has actually committed the series of extremely violent murders that are described in great detail by the author comes as no surprise.
So, in the end, this is a mixed review of Holbert’s “Lonesome Animals.” It is beautifully written in poetic prose. There is lots of action, suspense and drama. But ultimately, the protagonists are flawed and damaged making it difficult to feel any sense of empathy for the difficulties that beset them. Many readers will react negatively to the extreme violence of the book—others will find it adds the kind of vicarious thrill similar to that can be experienced in a graphic horror novel or movie. To each his own.
The book was reviewed from a supplied pre-pub copy and should now be available in libraries and bookstores.
[Name of the main character has been corrected.]
Liz Nichols
The Pirate King by Laurie R. King
Laurie King has delivered eleven Mary Russell mysteries and “The Pirate King” is the first one I’ve read that has disappointed me.
The thing that I find so jarring about “The Pirate King” is that it is set in the 1920s. Our heroine, Mary Russell, and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, are so thoroughly Victorian. There is a character-to-era mismatch. I also find that the plot plods along with little action until the very end. It was a chore to slog on through it.
In this installment of Mary Russell’s story she is recruited to find out whether a silent film director, Randolph Fflytte, is responsible for a rash of smuggling drugs and other illegal contraband into the U.K. and the death of a company employee. Russell takes a job as the assistant to the film company’s producer, Geoffrey Hale, and promptly gets roped into accompanying the film crew, a bevy of young starlets and other actors to Portugal and then on to Morocco to film a parody of “The Pirates of Penzance.” Needless to say, Russell’s Victorian values clash with those of the thoroughly modern Roaring Twenties era film crew.
It becomes apparent to Russell early on in the filming that Fflytte has hired a real pirate and a real pirate crew to be the title characters. Fflytte also falls in love with an old pirate ship and spends some extra time in Portugal outfitting the ship to be able to take the whole crew to Morocco. As Mary Russell predicts, the whole British cast and crew are held captive once they get to Morocco and the women are threatened with the possibility of being sold as harem wives deeper into Islamic territory while the men (including a disguised Sherlock Holmes) are threatened with being killed. Supposedly the westerners can be saved by arranging a large ransom, but Mary doubts that any of them will get out without putting up a fight. The escapes scene is quite entertaining and is the best part of the book. Mary so impresses Fflytte that he signs her to a contract to become “The Pirate Queen” in a sequel to the current movie. Again, readers who are used to Mary being this Victorian era sleuth will find the image of Mary as a pirate somewhat strange.
I’ll come back to this series when King decides to place Russell and Holmes back in their Victorian era.
Liz Nichols
Plunder by Mary Anna Evans
Other priorities have kept me from writing about my most recent mystery read for a couple weeks, Mary Anna Evans’ “Plunder.” “Plunder” is the 7th in Evans’ “Faye Longchamp Mystery” series. This book takes archaeologist, Faye Longchamp, her husband and co-worker, Joe, and their toddler, Michael, to the bayou off Grand Isle south of New Orleans to survey the archaeological sites that were about to be covered by the Deepwater Horizon oil slick catastrophe. At the same time, they worry about what impact the oil spill will have on their own home along the Florida Gulf coast.
Faye and family are housed in a cabin at a marina and become friends not only with the marina owner and barkeep, but also the 70 year old inhabitant of a houseboat, Miranda, and her granddaughter, Amande. Miranda tells tales of sunken treasure in the shallow Delta waters and on the islands that dot the area. Her no-good relatives and other visitors to the area give credence to the old woman’s tales, and that leads to some nasty results for some of the marina residents that also put Faye and her family in danger.
There’s some interesting differences between Louisiana’s Napoleonic law and the rights of inheritance that are strange compared to the rest of the states. Even though Miranda has life-time use of the houseboat through usufruct rights from her dead husband, it is her husband’s children and grandchild who actually inherit the houseboat, including Amande and her aunts and uncles. These no-good relatives are hardly a good influence for the 16 year old girl. Will the social worker put in charge of deciding who should be Amande’s guardian when her grandmother is killed recognize that the remaining relatives are bad news for the girl’s well-being?
Evans does a great job of placing the reader right there on the bayou with the exploratory team. She uses an interesting device to get to know the 16 year old better as well by interspersing bits from a text Amande planned to use as a series of podcasts about her grandmere’s stories about the runaway slave pirate Gola George and his right hand man, Henry the Mutineer and speculation about whether her family is descended from either of these pirates. She’s a very bright young woman. We want so much to see her thrive. The reader also experiences the foreboding of what the oil spill will do to the delicate eco-system right along with Faye and her crew.
I read an uncorrected pre-pub copy and there was still a little editing to do before the March release of this fascinating mystery. Hopefully, the typos were caught before the final version came out. Editorial issues not-withstanding, props to Mary Anna Evans for an exciting, atmospheric new Faye Longchamp mystery, “Plunder“!
Liz Nichols
P.S.: There’s a new subscription form on the site. Those wishing to know when I publish a review can fill in the form and get notified.
Three Day Town by Margaret Maron
“Three Day Town” is the 17th novel in Maron’s Deborah Knott Mystery series. Colleton (NC) County Judge Deborah Knott and her husband, Sheriff’s Deputy Dwight Bryant take a belated honeymoon in New York City where they have the opportunity to use Dwight’s sister-in-law’s Upper West Side apartment. They also have a package to deliver to NYPD Lt. Sigrid Harald from her grandmother who lives in Colleton County. Before they are able to meet up with Harald the package is stolen and the building superintendent is found murdered in the apartment Dwight and Deborah are borrowing. They team up with Harald to find the killer. Deborah winds up with her own harrowing experience at the hands of the killer when she wanders out one night to investigate a large plastic-covered object that is being thrown in the trash collector’s truck.
This is a pretty routine mystery with nothing particularly special about it. There is so much petty theft going on in the apartment building I would think that the tenants would have risen up long ago to change over the staff, hire security, etc. The plot just doesn’t add up for me.
I appreciated one comment that one of the characters makes: In real murder mysteries it is usually the most obvious party who is the killer. In made up mysteries it is usually the least obvious party who is the killer. In this case it is completely made up and the author is trying to pin this on the least obvious character. I simply wasn’t convinced about this particular killer and how he could have been around so long. He seems so unstable that he should have been out of the picture long before the sequence of events that led to two murders and the attempted murder of Knott.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read anything in this series. I think there are better ones. I’d prefer to read about Knott in her own setting in North Carolina.
There is a newer Sigrid Harald series as well and it is obvious the author is trying to gather readership for the Harald series through her long-time Knott readers. I don’t think the cross-pollination really worked and the two series should be kept separate from now on.
Liz Nichols
House at Sea’s End by Elly Griffiths
“House at Sea’s End” is the third novel in the Ruth Galloway Mystery Series. Griffiths’ protagonist is a forensic anthropologist on the faculty of North Norfolk University (a fictitious institution of higher learning) in Great Britain. She regularly consults with the local constabulary on cases that require her forensic skills to determine the age, cause of death and other characteristics of dead bodies and skeletons.
In this book Ruth has just returned from maternity leave. She is a single mom holding the secret that the father is a married man who happens to be the local DCI. He knows, but he has not shared the information with anyone else as he fully intends to stay with his original family. Ruth is called in with her university team to unearth and study the remains of six male bodies. They were determined to have been executed at close range by gunshot about seventy years ago, possibly during World War II, and they are probably of German origin. Could these have been Nazi commandos widely rumored to have been scouting for a possible invasion along the Norfolk coast during the early days of the war? If so, who killed them? Why were they not turned over to the British military.
The killers are determined to be zealous Home Guard members in 1940 who shot the intruders and asked questions later. It had a tremendous impact on the lives the the men who kept the secret of the killing for many years and members of their families. When some of the original Home Guard members die under suspect circumstances the police begin to question everyone who might have seen the killer or been involved in some way. Ruth puts herself in danger by remaining involved in the investigation.
Those who like atmospheric British mysteries and British Police procedurals will especially appreciate “House at Sea’s End.” It is very easy to picture the forlorn salt march cottage where Ruth and her baby live, and the quickly crumbling town of Sea’s End on the coast of Norfolk. Scenes and characters in the book also take the reader back to the horror of the War in Bosnia and the gruesome genocide discoveries made after the war by forensic anthropologists. A woman who stays with Ruth during her time investigating the Sea’s End murders lost her son and her whole family to genocide in Bosnia. Ruth was one of the team members who looked for the remains of genocide victims in Bosnia.
The chilling scenes are very well described, and they make one want to curl up in front of a fire with a warm cup of cocoa to ward off the chills.
“House at Sea’s End” is a modern story of a single mom coping with her work, home and social life juxtaposed against the brutal realities of war and its impact on civilian populations. Laid on top of those themes are a compelling forensic mystery and a modern day British police procedural. What more could a mystery lover want in one book?
Liz Nichols
So Damn Lucky by Deborah Coonts
“So Damn Lucky“ is the third in the Lucky O’Toole Vegas Adventure series. It should be out to the public in hardcover on February 28. This is another fast-moving, rip-roaring thrill ride through unusual parts of the city that never sleeps including the sewer system and parts of the desert just outside Area 51.
The adventures of Las Vegas Babylon casino’s Customer Relations manager, Lucky O’Toole continues with another crazy set of characters and situations. Only in Las Vegas…
This time the mystery revolves around a UFO convention and a magician’s attempt to succeed at one of Houdini’s tricks– escape from a water-filled tank. Like Houdini, the magician, Dimitri Fortunoff, fails to make it out of the tank and is extricated by breaking the tank. The badly injured– or dead?– Fortunoff, never makes it to the hospital. Evidence is revealed that the ambulance that picks Fortunoff up is not actually from a hospital but was stolen from the ambulance pool.
From investigating the disappearance of the magician Lucky finds out that a number of Fortunoff’s associates were involved in a failed Area 51 experiment years before. All of the participants are sworn to secrecy and at least one is a vagrant who lives in the city’s sewer system. Lucky knows the vagrant, Carl, from previous experiences and is one of the few people he trusts.
Meanwhile, Lucky’s personal life is in a shambles. She has let fiancee, Teddie go to live his fantasy life as a rock star and she is somewhat torn between remaining loyal to Teddie and accepting the attentions of the new French chef at the casino, Jean-Charles, or possibly the affections of Dane, the Gaming Commission’s representative. Lucky also finds that, as usual, her penchant for sticking her nose in police matters is bringing her unwanted attention from a killer. The story also progresses on the personal front between Lucky’s bordello-owning mother, Mona, and her casino-owning father, the Big Boss.
I will say that I was not left as satisfied with “So Damn Lucky” as with the two previous Lucky O’Toole mysteries. I found the story of how all the magicians and UFO specialists related to the mystery about Area 51 rather confusing, as well as to how the killer’s interest was involved in that part of the story. Perhaps I got distracted while reading parts of the book and should go back and reread portions.
Despite some confusion I am still a huge Lucky O’Toole fan. She is one of those rare mystery series heroine’s who’s life becomes almost real to the reader. We care about what happens to her and how she resolves the crises in her personal life. I can’t help but feel a little sad that she has shut off possibilities of a come-back with Teddie so soon and is about to embark on a relationship with the Frenchman– or so it seems. Perhaps the tension that defines Lucky’s love life will remain unsettled for now so the reader can go on rooting for their favorite love interest…
The beauty about this particular series is there are endless crazy plotlines available because of the variety of people who live in, work in and visit Las Vegas. Each book in the series leaves hints as to what is next. At the end of “So Damn Lucky” we can surmise Lucky will be busy running the revived and renovated Athena as its new CEO in the next book, and there will be some further exploration of this relationship with the French chef. I can’t help but think we haven’t seen the last of either Teddie or Dane, though.
Liz Nichols
Reviewed from a pre-publication copy supplied by the author.