Reviews

Rick Blechta: The Fallen One

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Mysteries set in the world of music are few and far between, but those that are musically inclined tend to be excellent.  Perhaps it’s because a gifted musician also has some of the skills of a mathematician and so is skilled at assembling a good puzzle, but whatever the reason, the addition of music as a “setting” always adds quite a bit to a good read.

My favorites are Cynthia Harrod-Eagles series where the main character’s partner/wife plays for an orchestra, and Gerald Elias’ wonderful series that reflect his own skills as a classical violinist.  Rick Blechta’s novel, The Fallen One, features a female opera singer.  This was new territory for me, as I’ve seen an opera once or twice – but decades ago – so my knowledge of opera (other than knowing titles of famous operas) is limited.  I enjoyed what Blechta had to share about this art form. read more

P.M. Carlson: Audition for Murder

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Jim Huang’s publishing imprint is re-issuing P.M. Carlson’s enjoyable series featuring Maggie Ryan, which begins with Maggie as a student at a small, upstate New York college.  The college is staging Hamlet and has decided to bring in some “real” New York actors to play the main parts, with the students filling out the rest of the cast and supplying the crew.

Carlson is an “old school” cozy writer – at times, the situations she is writing about aren’t so cozy, and the world she is writing about, while it has a hook (in this case both academia and the theater), what she’s really interested in are  the characters and their relationships to one another.  This series fits nicely next to Sharyn McCrumb’s Elizabeth McPhearson books or Nancy Pickard’s long lived Jenny Cain series.  There are eight books in this series, with Maggie growing from a young student into a woman, but this first one almost embraces her naiveté. read more

Laura Lippman: And When She Was Good

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Laura Lippman keeps growing as a writer.  For a reader, this is a true delight, and each novel is something of a surprise.  She’s hewing more, lately, to the standalone model than to the Tess Monaghan novels that started her career, and she has plenty to say.  This novel is both a good story and a nuanced look at ethical behavior and choices.

Her central character is Heloise Lewis, who, it quickly becomes apparent, is a high class madam in the Heidi Fleiss mode.  Making the novel a look at the politics of prostitution from the opening scene, Heloise overhears a conversation in line at the Starbucks about the recent suicide of a “suburban madam”.  As she challenges the easy assumptions of the couple behind her in line, she’s really challenging her own assumptions.  The articulation of her thoughts to a strange couple merely starts her own thought process. read more

Tim O’Mara: Sacrifice Fly

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It’s not too hard to deduce that old Mr. Private Eye is getting a little long in the tooth. Modern day masters such as Loren D. Estleman are able to cook up a delicious P.I. novel every year, but many of the older crowd, like Robert B. Parker, are no longer with us, while the newer contenders, such as Dennis Lehane and Michael Koryta, seem to have hit the wall. The game’s been going on since Hammett after all, and it seems like most of the gumshoe combinations have been played out. Women writers gave the genre a burst of vitality not long ago when they made Sam Spade into Samantha, but even that sex change has lost its novelty. read more

Maureen Jennings: Beware this Boy

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Jennings has a note at the end of this novel about the source of her title – it’s from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: “…most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom unless the writing be erased.”  Jennings skills as a novelist are somewhat similar to Charles Dickens skills, so this is an appropriate quote in many ways.  Her Dickensian talents lie in her ability to create an entire universe within her pages, bulging with characters, none of them – from the central character of Tom Tyler down to a briefly met matron in a bomb shelter – forgettable. read more

Elaine Viets: Shop Till You Drop

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I’m not generally a cozy reader, but for some reason I picked this book up and was hooked by the end of the first chapter. Viets’ sense of humor is never cloying, her central character, Helen, is smart, and the premise is wonderful. Helen is a clerk in an ultra fancy boutique in Ft. Lauderdale – a boutique so fancy that customers are buzzed in only at the whim of the manager – she rejects women whom she thinks are too heavy, who have ugly shoes, hair or purses, etc. (I know which side of the door I’d be on). It’s so fancy there are no price tags on the clothes – if you have to ask, you can’t afford the $500 halter top – and the clerks aren’t allowed to sit down. Viets’ description of a typical customer is classic: read more

Elaine Viets: Murder Unleashed

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The fifth book in Viets’ lively Helen Hawthorne series doesn’t disappoint, despite Viets’ taking on another potentially boring job (pet store clerk) and somehow milking it for satire and interest despite the odds. This time around, Helen isn’t working in a boring chain pet store but in one of those fancy pet boutiques that sell cute little coats, booties and fancy treats for super spoiled dogs. Catering to the ultra rich of Ft. Lauderdale, Helen finds herself schlepping bags of dog food out to waiting BMWs and driving to client’s homes to pick up their pooches for a session with the fabulous groomer at the Pampered Pet Boutique, Jonathan. Helen, for the uninitiated, works off the books for cash so her ex-husband, whom she caught with her best friend, can’t track her down and take half her assets away (he wants alimony from her). So Helen lives in a picturesque apartment building populated with all kinds of interesting eccentrics, including her boyfriend, undercover agent Phil, who handily lives next door but who is frequently out of town on assignment. This is a rich background for all the stories, as the characters at the apartment building stay the same (except for the rotating bunch of criminals in a certain apartment), while Helen’s different jobs provide a whole new slew of characters in every novel. It’s a neat and useful premise. read more

Elaine Viets: Murder with Reservations

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I’ve said this about every Elaine Viets book, I think – with each installment, I am always sure (I don’t know why) that it will actually be impossible for Ms. Viets to maintain the funny yet intelligent and somehow compulsively readable book she’s supplied with each outing. As usual, and happily, I was again wrong. Reading about the intrepid Helen Hawthorne’s job as a hotel maid was just as compelling as her telemarketer, bridal salesperson, retail clerk and fancy pet store jobs, and what’s more, Viets finally resolves a huge issue in this book – she deals with Helen’s ex-husband who is on the prowl and who seems to have at last tracked her down. read more

Elaine Viets: Just Murdered

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The hapless Helen Hawthorne is at it again – she’s working another dead end job, after telemarketing didn’t work out for her. This time she’s in a fancy bridal boutique working as an underpaid salesperson serving an assortment of dysfunctional brides and their mothers, as well as an all too street smart boss, Millicent. The bridezilla to take the cake is actually a mother of the bride – the glamorous, snaky Kiki, who drags her plain Jane daughter into Millicent’s to buy her the wedding dress of Kiki’s dreams, that will also – if all goes well – cost her ex-husband an arm and a leg. Kiki gets everything she wants; her daughter, Desiree, gets to wear the dress of her choice at the reception only. The dress her mother chooses for her to wear at the ceremony is hopelessly unflattering – as Desiree puts it, she looks like “a homely Hapsburg Princess.” Of course, as any astute mystery reader will guess, Kiki isn’t long for this world, but as with every other novel in this delightful series, that’s almost beside the point. read more

Tana French: In the Woods

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“What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with the truth is fundamental but cracked…”

Tana French has obviously learned a few lessons from more established writers like Val McDermid and Denise Mina, and her first novel is a richly textured and complex character study as well as a precise explication of a particular crime. There are two main plot threads. One of them involves the disappearance of three 12 year olds twenty years in the past. Two of them were never found; the third is discovered with blood in his shoes clinging to the side of a tree. French infuses the memories of the boy—who is now a police detective—with fairy tale lore and language, giving the past an almost dreamy, otherwordly quality. In an early version of Cinderella, for example, the stepsister cuts off bits of her feet to fit into Cinderella’s slipper, so the slippers are filled with blood. Even the title, In the Woods, references the location of most fairy tales. French comes back again and again to the theme that children think differently—on the slim chance of seeing some kind of “marvel”, they’ll take a bigger risk, unheeded, because of their very youth. This gives her narrative a good deal of power and resonance. read more