Dana Stabenow: Restless in the Grave

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Guest reviewer Patti O’Brien is a long time friend of both Aunt Agatha’s and of mine.  She is a librarian with a passion for reading and especially a passion for mysteries.  Her library in Arizona is very lucky to have her!

Restless in the Grave is another terrific book by Dana Stabenow, who is one of my favorite authors. This book features both of Ms. Stabenow’s Alaskan series characters, Kate Shugak and Liam Campbell.

It is State Trooper Liam who indirectly contacts Kate to go undercover to solve the murder of a wealthy aviation businessman, Finn Grant. Grant had alienated almost everyone in his town by buying them out to turn it into a destination for hunters and other explorers of the Alaskan wilderness. Kate goes to work at the main bar in town, and manages to ask a few questions and is working on answers when things start to get a little too interesting for her. The apartment she is renting is searched, and as Kate interrupts that search, she is shoved into deep freezer. She escapes from that, but other situations occur to let her know she is being too nosy. It takes a few more near-misses for Kate to get to the bottom of what is going on and why Finn Grant was killed. read more

Graham Moore: The Sherlockian

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This was a blast of a read, one that can be enjoyed by the non Sherlock Holmes fan as much as the devotee.  While Laurie King’s Mary Russell books focus on a young girl meeting Holmes as an old man, this novel focuses on a young Sherlockian in the present who is on the lookout for the Holy Grail of any Sherlockian: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s missing diary.

While Laurie King’s books are set firmly in the past, Moore instead alternates chapters.  One plot thread is set in the present, and focuses on Harold, the newest member of the Baker Street Irregulars.  The other thread is set in Victoria’s London, and features Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, sick to death of Holmes, is instead trying to write “realistic” fiction after killing Holmes off. read more

Peter Robinson: Before the Poison

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Peter Robinson is one of the most intellectual of all mystery writers – and I’m including P.D. James, Ruth Rendell and the late, lamented Reginald Hill in my assessment.  One of his recent books, All the Colors of Darkness, was a take on Othello and its theme of jealousy.  This novel, while not a part of his now classic Inspector Banks series, is still a thoughtful and compelling novel, based not on Shakespeare, but on the classic film Laura.

While Robinson has forsaken some of that film’s pop sensibility and sense of fun, he has retained its longing for the unattainable.  In the film, it’s a portrait of Laura that sets off the longing; in this novel, it’s both the central character’s dead wife, Laura, and the ghost of an executed woman who seems to inhabit the house this man has just bought in the depths of Yorkshire. read more

Gerald Elias: Devil’s Trill and Danse Macabre

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Jacobus…was dumbfounded by such a compelling, polished personal performance, unaware of anything else but the music – his own definition of a great performance. – from Devil’s Trill

Devil’s Trill is one of the more traditional mysteries I’ve read in a long while, and I’ve recently re-read books by Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Patricia Moyes. It’s also a breath of fresh air with a truly interesting main character and a fantastically interesting setting. Daniel Jacobus is an old, blind, crotchety (he gives new meaning to the word “codger”) violin teacher, and it’s also clear from the novel that he’s a teacher with a rare gift. Along with his deductive skills – honed from many years as a blind man – his gift to mystery fiction is an insight into the backstage goings-on of the classical music world. read more

Diane Mott Davidson: Double Shot

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The wait is over – Diane Mott Davidson is back, and she seems energized by her hiatus. The change in publishers has only brought one difference – the recipes are in the back instead of throughout the book – but really, that just makes them easier to find. Either you like Davidson’s heroine, Goldy Shultz, or you don’t. I love Goldy and her whole family – her dashing policeman husband, Tom; her sometimes sullen but always interesting teenage son, Arch; and her flamboyant best friend Marla, who shares the ultimate bond with Goldy: they have the same ex-husband. The aforementioned ex-husband, John Richard Korman (called by Goldy and Marla at all times the “Jerk”), is present at the kickoff luncheon of the book, which is full of the doctors and Aspen society Goldy knew in her old life as a doctor’s wife. Of course, Goldy is now a caterer, and her ex is freshly out of prison. He beat Goldy up when he was married to her, and finally beat one of his girlfriends so badly it sent him to jail. But he’s back, and as nasty as ever. read more

Diane Mott Davidson: Dark Tort

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I’ve long been admirer of Diane Mott Davidson’s Goldy Bear books (I’ve read all of them) and am delighted that she will be stopping by the store this month, and even more delighted that there’s a new book to read. If you are a “Goldy” fan you already know that along with authors like Sue Grafton and Janet Evanovich, Ms. Davidson delivers one of the most reliably entertaining series on the planet, and like the recipes laced throughout the books, one of the more comfortably familiar. Either you are a fan of Goldy, Tom, Arch, Julian and Marla, or you are not, but if you are you are seriously hooked, and have enjoyed the arc of Goldy’s life as she established her business in the first few books and broke away from the clutches of her abusive ex-husband; believably raises her very true to life teenager, Arch; and meets, falls in love with, and marries Tom Shultz, policeman, cook and husband extrodinaire. Like all good women’s detective fiction, these books work because while there’s an element of reality, there’s also a large dose of enjoyable – and perhaps attainable – fantasy. In these books the fantasies involve Goldy’s drinking espresso from morning till night and never having that awful caffeine sick feeling; having a husband who treats her like a goddess (down to running her shower and getting her a soft robe to climb into when she’s done); having a best friend, Marla, who besides being rich is also the ex-wife of Goldy’s ex and hates him just as much as she does; and best of all the fact that Goldy cooks like Julia Child and eats like Roseanne Barr but never seems to gain a pound. For some reason this is completely and totally captivating, and I haven’t regretted reading a word of this series. read more

Casey Daniels: Don of the Dead

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The set up of Don of the Dead is really quite clever – Pepper Martin, a tour guide at a Cleveland cemetery, falls and cracks her head on the corner of a mausoleum and is thereafter able to see the spirit of the resident of that mausoleum, one Gus Scarpetti, a one time crime boss who had been gunned down by an unknown assailant thirty years earlier. Seeing him isn’t the real problem, however, as Gus can also talk to Pepper, and demands that she solve his murder, threatening to haunt her until she does so. Even though men (and ghosts) can’t seem to stop staring at her generously endowed chest, there’s more to Pepper than meets the eye. The daughter of a rich doctor who was convicted and sent to prison for fraud, she’s still smarting from her vertiginous fall from grace, the desertion of her much loved fiancee, and the realization that her privileged upbringing hasn’t prepared her for much now that the privilege has been removed. read more

Gordon Cotler: Artist’s Proof

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If this book interests you at all, snap up one of the few used copies we have, as it’s out of print. I’m a sucker for “art” mysteries, and so I picked up this book by an apparent past Edgar winner who is now totally out of print. This novel features one of the more unusual characters I’ve encountered in a mystery – Sid Shale is a retired NYPD homicide lieutenant who has taken his twenty year pension to pursue life as a painter. His ex-wife handily owns an art gallery that handles his work, but still, sales are on the slow side for Sid. The Long Island Beach community he lives in is a small one, and when one of Sid’s friends runs in to tell him there’s been a murder “up the beach” – Sid goes up the beach himself to see if he can’t be of help to the green Chief of Police whose main function heretofore has been investigating bicycle thefts. read more

Thomas Cook: Into the Web

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Thomas Cook is one of the underappreciated treasures of American crime fiction. Although an Edgar winner in 1997 for The Chatham School Affair, he’s never achieved the popularity he deserves, maybe because his books are atmospheric, psychologically oriented stand-alones, with more in common with the works of Brits like Barbara Vine and Minette Walters than that of U.S. series writers like Sue Grafton or Michael Connelly.

Cook’s latest, Into the Web, is a wonderful example of his craft, a beautifully written tale of memory, murder and guilt which also features a clever, surprising, yet thoroughly plausible plot. In it Roy Slater returns from California to Kingdom County, the impoverished Appalachian community that he grew up in and couldn’t wait to get out of, to nurse his brutal father through his final illness. Although Roy, a bookish teacher, now leads a life completely different from his hardscrabble boyhood, he’s never really escaped Kingdom County or the bloody crime that suddenly erupted there. Once home his thoughts are inevitably drawn back to the double homicide his brother allegedly committed years ago, and as he fumblingly begins his own investigation, long hidden secrets are slowly and tantalizingly revealed, secrets that, although old, are far from dead, and which have deadly implications for the present. read more

Jeffrey Cohen: Some Like it Hot-Buttered

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You don’t have to be a movie lover to enjoy Jeffrey Cohen’s Some Like it Hot-Buttered, but it helps. It helps because as you read about Elliot Freed, whose dream (now reality) has always been to own an old style movie theater showing only comedies, you are mentally remembering the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, and Mel Brooks movies you’ve enjoyed yourself. Having your own movie memories to add to Cohen’s equation makes the entire reading experience a richer one – and the whole set up is a unique and clever one. Elliot himself is kind of a classic mystery character in that he’s almost a complete outsider – he’s divorced; he owns a business that’s, to put it charitably, struggling; and he doesn’t have a cat or even own a car. When someone is discovered dead in his movie theater after a showing of Young Frankenstein from eating poisoned popcorn, Elliot’s odyssey of detection and personal discovery begins. read more