John Keyse-Walker: Sun, Sand, Murder
Mr. Keyse-Walker is the winner of the Mystery Writers of America/Minotaur Books First Crime Novel award (the award being publication), so I turned to it with some interest. Past winners of Minotaur/St. Martin’s contests include Steve Hamilton, Michael Koryta and Julia Spencer-Fleming, so the bar is somewhat high. I was at first jarred as I opened a novel set on tiny Anegada, a remote member of the British Virgin Islands. The main character is special constable Teddy Creque, who is a native islander. The author, a lawyer from Ohio, couldn’t seem more removed from his character, but then I decided the guy who wrote Memoirs of a Geisha wasn’t very much like his character either, so I settled in.
At this point in Tasha Alexander’s career, now eleven novels in to her Lady Emily series, you’re either all in or all out. I am all in as Lady Emily makes her way around Victorian Europe solving crimes with the help of her dashing husband, Colin Hargreaves. As most loyal readers will know, Lady Emily was widowed in the first novel, And Only to Deceive, falling in love with her husband only after the fact. She ends up mirroring and following his passion for the classical world.
Maureen Jennings is known far and wide—and deservedly so—for her Inspector Murdoch mysteries, set in Victorian Toronto, But she’s also now written four installments in the equally excellent Detective Inspector Tom Tyler mysteries, set in a tiny Shrosphire village during the heart of the war. One of the books was about Land Girls; one about a munitions factory explosion; one about a hospital for the war wounded. In this novel she has settled deeply into Tom Tyler’s life and his assignment in Ludlow, as he gets used to being divorced and missing the love of his life, who is abroad doing secret war work.
Laura Lippman’s thoughtful new standalone novel, Wilde Lake, assumes the structure of Harper Lee’s beloved To Kill a Mockingbird but brings the story into the present day. The book is very much Lippman’s own, but the shadow of Mockingbird hovers. It enables the reader to consider both more deeply. In Lippman’s incarnation, which opens with an act of violence involving the narrator’s older brother (even ending in a broken arm, as Jem’s act does) all the moving pieces are there. Lippman centers her story on young Lu, who lives with her widowed father and her older brother in the newly created suburb of Columbia, Maryland, an attempt at a Utopian suburb, down to the outdoor structures designed by Frank Gehry.
Ovid tells the story of a beautiful sea nymph who caught Jove’s ever roving eye. However, wise old Proteus had predicted that her son would outstrip her father’s glory, and Jove, wanting none of that, sent his grandson, Peleus, to marry her instead, contenting himself with vicarious conquest. A son was indeed born, and hereafter Peleus, despite his own achievements, was known chiefly as the father of Achilles. With all the (deserved) attention being paid to her daughter Megan, I can only hope that a similar fate doesn’t befall Patricia Abbott, who has written a very fine crime novel called Shot in Detroit.
I’ve read other books by Sarah Zettel, a.k.a. Darcie Wilde, but this one is by far my favorite. I loved the setting – (mostly) 1817 London, with a brief prologue in 1812 – and the milieu, to any lover of Jane Austen novels, is a somewhat familiar one, as are the straightened circumstances of the heroine, Rosalind Thorne. Back in 1812, Rosalind comes home dreamily from a dance where she’s almost declared her love for young Devon, only to wake up and find her sister fleeing the house in the middle of the night with their father.
This is a long awaited return for Krueger’s beloved Cork O’Connor. Two years between books is really too long for the rabid fan, of which there are many (I live with two of them). One of the things Krueger has done really beautifully with this series is to paint a long portrait of a family – when we first meet Cork, in Iron Lake (1998), he and his wife Jo are separated. They get back together and then Jo is killed in Heaven’s Keep (2009), literally about half way through this long, now 15 novel series.
I haven’t picked up a Megan Abbott book since her fine books set back in the 30’s and 40’s – she’s since turned her gaze toward contemporary teen culture and I haven’t been as captivated. This one, however, I picked up just to take a look – it has incredible advance buzz – and was instantly grabbed by the theme: gymnastics. With the Olympics around the corner, what could be more perfect? Of course, being a Megan Abbott novel, this isn’t a happy little story of triumph over tragedy but a study of a family in deep crisis.
Thriller writer Andrew Gross has turned his sights to a topic closer to him personally, the Holocaust. While I almost feel I have read, seen and learned everything about the Holocaust, this book provides a fresh look at this hellish time in human history and reminds us that as humans we are capable of devastating cruelty. The balance Gross brings to his novel – a balance between storytelling and what is obviously deeply felt history – is really very well handled. I could not put this book down nor could I stop thinking about it.
I haven’t picked up a Barbara Cleverly novel in a couple years, despite being a huge fan of the earlier books in this series, which are set in India during the British Raj. Her central character, Joe Sandilands, has since made his way back through Europe and is now back home in London working for Scotland Yard. But enough time had elapsed for me not to compare the books set in India to this one, which is set in Oxford in 1933.