How Mysterious!

Dorothy Gilman, Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief

Jun 192013

My friend Alison recommended Barbara Rosenblat’s narration of the Mrs. Pollifax mysteries, and so I listened to Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief purely out of interest in the audio.

I’ve read a couple books in this series before, so I already knew that Emily Pollifax is the unlikely elderly U.S. spy working for the CIA. She’s always getting sent off to distant places (but it’s not a travel series so don’t expect to learn much about China or the Middle East, even if that’s where she lands) and ending up in dangerous situations which she survives by her own wits, helpful friends, and good luck. That and the fact that people keep underestimating her because she’s old and kindly.

The situation in Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief is no different. The CIA receives an S.O.S. from a former agent, Emily’s friend Farrell, in Italy, specifically requesting her. It turns out he’s seen a villain that he knows she can identify by sight, perhaps the only American who can say that. She heads off to Palermo, where she’s met by Kate, another U.S. agent sent to recuperate with family following PTSD- inducing service in another location. Kate and Farrell take an instant dislike to each other, but the three of them must work together to survive whatever trouble Farrell’s landed in. As usual, Mrs. Pollifax’s karate chop will come in handy.

My friend was absolutely right about the narration. Barbara Rosenblat brings Emily Pollifax to life with a voice that kept reminding me of one of my grandmothers, older yet feisty, while also creating other characters like Kate and Farrell — their voices were less distinctive, but that only served to put the focus on Mrs. Pollifax, where it belongs.

The story was only 5 or 6 CDs long, so it would be perfect for a short- to medium-length car trip, or in my case for running around town escorting an 8-year-old to her multiple activities and playdates. (Unlike some of the mysteries I listen to, Mrs. Pollifax is definitely safe for children.)

Amazon won’t let me link directly to the audiobook, so here’s a link to the book:

Susan Elia MacNeal, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary

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Jun 172013

Do you ever stumble upon a series you’d swear you’d never heard of, and then suddenly find references to it all over the place? That’s what happened to me with Susan Elia MacNeal’s Maggie Hope mystery series.

I saw Mr. Churchill’s Secretary at the bookstore and was immediately attracted to the cover and the title. I love reading about World War II anyway, and when I realized that Maggie works in the London war bunker (now museum) that I visited in 2010, I immediately blew off that promise to myself that I was just going to look and not buy this time. I swear that if I’d ever seen or heard about this book before I would’ve bought it. But then I kept seeing reviews of other books in the series, including the recently released third book, His Majesty’s Hope. Everywhere.

Well, I guess the important thing is that I did stumble onto the series eventually, because I’m going to read them all.

Mr. Churchill’s Secretary introduces Maggie Hope, a British citizen who was raised by her aunt in the United States, but who was in London trying to sell her grandmother’s house as World War II loomed. Of course, the advent of the battle of London pretty much sank the real estate market, so Maggie invited other women to rent rooms with her, and she decided to stay and help with the war effort. As the book begins, she’s just been given a job as one of the secretaries in Churchill’s underground bunker.

Being a secretary is not Maggie’s first choice. Her aunt, a professor at Wellesley, made sure she was highly educated, and she’s particularly gifted — like her dead father — in mathematics and code-breaking. Yet we learn early on that there’s some bad secret about that father that has prevented Maggie from getting a job where she can use her real abilities.

Of course, having access to Churchill, working with him through drafts of his speeches and correspondence regarding important secrets like the development of radar, means that Maggie does find herself in a position to help in a number of different ways, escalating into more and more dangerous work.

Although it’s fiction, it’s fun to see Churchill at work, to watch as Maggie and her friends and housemates adapt to the nightly bombings, and to try to figure out what’s going on not only with her father but an apparently sneaky friend and a possible love interest. On top of the war with the Germans, there’s also an Irish angle, with a bad guy named Michael Murphy who at the beginning of the book detonates a bomb in the tube and tips his cap to one of the victims.

If you enjoy reading about World War II, London, and women in the war effort, or if you just like a good spy story, try the Maggie Hope series. I’m looking forward to reading #2, Princess Elizabeth’s Spy. Soon.

Nancy Atherton, Aunt Dimity and the Lost Prince

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Jun 132013

I love mysteries, but sometimes all the murder and mayhem just get to be too much, and that’s when I turn to a cozy like Nancy Atherton’s Aunt Dimity and the Lost Prince.

The Aunt Dimity in question is a ghost who helps solve mysteries. Just accept that and move on, which is exactly what our heroine Lori Shepard has done. Aunt Dimity was her mother’s best friend, and although Lori never met her, when Dimity died she left her honey-colored stone cottage in Finch, a quaint English village, to Lori. She and her husband, both Americans by birth, are raising twins who, in this book, have been trapped inside by February weather for days on end.

Lori’s teenage friend from a previous book, Bree Pym, decides they should take the boys to Skeaping Manor, a stately home now turned into a museum chock full of weird things that little boys like — shrunken heads and the like. While Bree and the boys take in the bizarre, Lori heads upstairs, where she meets a little girl, Daisy Pickering, who tells a wild story about an elderly lost Russian prince being held against his will. Lori thinks Daisy’s a little odd, but there’s something particularly stirring about her story that makes Lori want to learn more.

Only a few days later, Lori finds one of the museum’s treasures, a small silver Russian sleigh, hidden in the pocket of Daisy’s coat, which has been donated to the local thrift store, and she learns that Daisy and her mother have disappeared. Could there be something to Daisy’s story?

As always, Lori takes her questions straight to Aunt Dimity. Their method of communication is a blue journal: Lori talks, and Aunt Dimity’s old-fashioned script appears in the journal, only to slowly fade again. In this instance Aunt Dimity encourages Lori to investigate: if by some chance Daisy’s story is true, someone out there needs help. As Lori and Bree begin to ask questions, they learn that the receipt books at many of the places where Daisy’s mother worked polishing silver share the same recipe for Russian tea cakes, and this suggests to Lori that there might be a kernel of truth to Daisy’s far-fetched tale.

The Aunt Dimity series provides a delightful break from the dark and serious. In this book, no one dies and the clues are things like recipes and neighborhood stories. Although it doesn’t turn out as they expected, Bree and Lori do solve the mystery, the bad weather breaks, and Lori learns to appreciate Finch just a little more.

David Mark, Original Skin

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Jun 112013

It’s hard to think of a more appealing detective than David Mark’s Aector McAvoy. He’s big and bumbling, in love with his wife and children, cares about getting to the truth, sometimes feels sorry for the criminals. He even blushes a lot.

But don’t underestimate our Aector. He’s also strong, determined, unafraid, and smart. In Original Skin, in fact, he’s smarter than the other cops, figuring out that what appears to be suicide was actually murder.

The book begins with the arrival of a band of travelers and a loose horse whose behavior is so wild the police are contemplating shooting it. Aector, however, who has a way with animals, arrives and manages to soothe the animal, saving its life and causing his fellow officers to look at him half-admiring, half-suspicious — who is this guy?

However, the officers in Aector’s group, the Serious and Organized Crimes Unit, have bigger fish to fry, namely, an upheaval in the drugs trade in the area. The Vietnamese gangs who’ve controlled the trade for a while are suddenly turning up tortured and dead: someone else, someone more ruthless, has moved in. Although this is clearly the biggest problem Serious & Organized faces, Aector can’t help thinking about young Simon Appleyard.

Simon’s naked body was found hung in his apartment, but no one took it very seriously because he was part of Hull’s sex scene, known among local swingers for the beautiful peacock feathers tattooed on his back. He and a female friend frequently attended sex parties and posted on erotic Internet forums in search of partners — male, female, or both. The police conclude he must’ve been depressed and purposely or accidentally killed himself, and no one makes any effort to investigate.

But Aector has found Simon’s phone, discarded on the banks of the Humber River, and he decides to look into his life and death a little closer, despite at first lacking an official assignment. Soon he begins to find connections to other cases, and it’s clear that something bigger than a suicide is going on. In fact, local political leaders might be involved, and simply by investigating Aector is putting his job in danger.

As in the first Detective Sergeant McAvoy book, The Dark Winter, there is as much about Aector’s private life and his interactions with fellow officers, particularly his guv, Trish Pharaoh, as there is about the investigation. And that’s a good thing, because if there’s anyone you’d want to get to know, it’s Aector McAvoy.

Many thanks to Eliza Rosenberry of Blue Rider Press for sending a review copy of David Mark’s Original Skin.

Wallander, Season 3 (TV series)

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Jun 072013

I still have never read any of Henning Mankell’s books, but the BBC series based on it is always worth watching.

Well, with one exception.

Season 3 includes three episodes, beginning with “An Event in Autumn,” a story about hopes dashed — both the victim’s and Wallander’s. First a young pregnant woman commits suicide by jumping off a ferry. But is it really suicide? Then, Wallander uncovers a body in the garden of the home where he’s just moved in with his significant other, Vanja. She’s a wonderful person so you know it can’t possibly go well for poor Kurt. He feels that somehow the body was left for him to find, although it’s not clear whether he thinks he’s expected to solve the mystery or if it’s just a plot to ruin his life. Either way, death and unhappiness seem to stalk him. As is typical of “Wallander” episodes, this one is melancholy when it’s not downright sad, but it’s well-acted, meaningful, and thought-provoking.

I can’t say that for the second episode, “The Dogs of Riga.” Two bodies are found floating in a boat in Ystad, and it turns out they’re involved in the Latvian drug trade. Wallander briefly works with a Latvian detective, Karlis Liepa, but when the detective is killed in the same spectacularly painful way as the drug dealers, Wallander rushes to Latvia where he manages to uncover a conspiracy and police corruption, despite the fact that he doesn’t speak the language, is completely unfamiliar with the culture and history, and has no connections to speak of. Oh, and his hotel room is bugged and he’s being shadowed. My friends, Wallander is a fine detective but no one could overcome those odds. Perhaps I was just annoyed and not paying enough attention, but I kept getting confused about who people were and which side they were supposed to be on, and in sum this is my least favorite episode, ever.

The final program, “Before the Frost,” concerns religious fanaticism, a topic I don’t remember from any of the previous episodes and not something I’d typically associate with Sweden. The episode begins with a crazy man setting fire to geese and killing a woman who witnessed too much. Her body is discovered buried in the woods with a Bible. Things get even more strange when Wallander realizes that the murderer was connected to a childhood friend of his daughter, a woman who has struggled with mental illness and is now a member of a fundamentalist Christian group. I particularly liked seeing Wallander interact with his daughter, Linda, as they struggle to reach an accommodation in their troubled relationship, paralleled by the problems her own troubled friend has with her mother.

I recommend the series in general and the last episode in particular, especially if you don’t mind a dark story and endings that are never really happy.

Kwei Quartey, Children of the Street

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Jun 052013

If you love a child, or children generally, Kwei Quartey’s Children of the Street can be difficult to read: in the second book in the series, Darko Dawson seems to be the only person in Accra (capital of Ghana) who notices or cares that street children are being killed and mutilated, left in a succession of degrading locations that indicate someone truly despises them.

The first victim is a teenage boy, who though living on the streets has a girlfriend he loves and other kids who care what happens to him. Inspector Dawson isn’t afraid to go into the worst slums, and he cares enough to try to help the kids in what little ways he can, despite the fact that everyone else seems to find street kids a nuisance at best.

While he continues to investigate the case, despite the complaints of his superior officer who thinks he should be working on an investigation that actually matters, Darko also has a number of personal problems, first and foremost his ailing son, whose medical care he cannot afford, but also a marijuana problem that could be a career problem as well. There’s a mother-in-law whom he can’t trust with his son, and a fellow officer who’s trying to use a family connection to leapfrog Darko on the career ladder.

As in his first book, Wife of the Gods, Quartey brings many aspects of Ghana to life, in a much darker and grittier series than Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ series set in Botswana, comparable instead to Adimchinma Ibe‘s Nigeria. Although reading about the street children is heartbreaking, there are also people like Darko Dawson who are trying to help them, and the children themselves, who build friendships and create support networks, are not to be pitied but helped.

Rhys Bowen, The Family Way

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Jun 032013

Appropriately enough, I read Rhys Bowen’s new Molly Murphy mystery over Mother’s Day weekend: Molly’s expecting her first child, and the mysteries are all about babies.

Actually Molly is now Sullivan, married to her policeman Daniel, and it looks like pregnancy has finally put her detective career to an end. But then she receives a letter from Ireland, from a family dearly worried about their niece, who came to America and seemingly disappeared into the teeming masses of turn-of-the-century (20th) New York. Surely it wouldn’t hurt for her to ask around a bit.

But that leads Molly to witness the aftermath of a kidnapping in the bustling streets of lower Manhattan, which is sure to provoke Daniel, but the mother’s face is something Molly can’t forget. She finally agrees to go stay with her mother-in-law in the countryside of Westchester County, but she just can’t stop investigating, especially when she thinks she’s found the family that employed the missing Irish woman.

I’ve purposely kept saying “but,” because that’s what Molly does through the whole book. I know I shouldn’t, but…, I’ll stop investigating, but…, I know this will make Daniel mad, but…. In the end all of Molly’s excuses don’t keep her (and her unborn child) out of danger, and the denouement should discourage further investigation, but… I’m not counting Molly out of the detective business yet.

Benjamin Black, Vengeance

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May 302013

There’s vengeance and then there’s Benjamin Black’s Vengeance, whose characters put any revenge fantasy I’ve ever had to complete shame: these people are professionals.

Vengeance is the fifth book in a series following Dublin pathologist Quirke, who is equal parts investigator, alcholic, and lover, with the occasional turn as awkward father to Phoebe, his adult daughter who was raised by Quirke’s adoptive brother and his wife, the love of Quirke’s life. And that’s just the back story.

The book opens with a startling and, as it turns out, brilliantly vengeful suicide. A man takes his boat out to sea, disables it, tells a peculiar story about an incident involving his father, and suddenly shoots himself in the chest, leaving his business partner’s son, shocked and unable to sail, floating alone with the dead body. His suicide was unexpected, and no one can figure out why on earth he brought the young man along with him. Although it’s clearly a suicide, Dr. Quirke can’t help but wonder what happened. It only gets more complicated when Jack Clancy, the business partner, also turns up dead.

As always, Quirke flirts with danger; in this book it’s mostly women. As the New York Times so aptly put it, “And when a wicked new woman appears at the heart of any of these books, she is apt to be ravishing, bored and cruel, all of which guarantee her a Quirke tryst.” It’s not so much a matter of wanting to warn Quirke to stay away from such women as it is a sinking awareness that he already knows he should but doesn’t care.

I know some people don’t like the term “literary mystery,” but in fact most of the allure of the Quirke series is in the writing. Benjamin Black (pseudonym for award-winning author John Banville) writes beautifully, and occasionally I found myself stopping to read a passage again for the sheer delight in the way he puts words together. This is one series you can definitely share with a reader who looks down on genre fiction generally or mysteries in particular. Although it’s definitely on the noir end of the crime fiction spectrum, the series will appeal to anyone who likes to read.

Joshua Alan Parry, Virus Thirteen

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May 282013

I’d been reading some sad or serious books and watched an episode of Season 3 of “Wallander,” the epitome of sad and serious, and I needed a change of pace. Joshua Alan Parry’s Virus Thirteen provided just that.

Parry is a medical resident at the Mayo Clinic, and this a medical thriller, but it’s also scifi because it’s set in the future when medicine has conquered cancer… and in so doing has opened a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences. Everyone’s living longer, and the population explosion has decimated the environment. The Department of Homeland Heath Care has turned into big brother, sending people on retreats (read: merciless boot camps) for smoking or gaining too much weight. GeneFirm, the company that employs our hero James, has retractable steel walls that envelop the entire complex when tornado-laden warm storms brew.

Although that all sounds pretty grim, there are enough sympathetic characters to lighten up the story and give it some life. First is James Logan, who stumbles onto the fact that something has gone wrong when he turns up with brain cancer — thought to be impossible — though it’s quickly cleared up thanks once again to advanced medicine. His wife, their children, and their genetically enhanced fluorescent dog provide a happy counterpoint to the impersonal powers of government and corporation.

Pat Henderson is another regular guy, but he’s sent on a retreat for being overweight, where he meets Modest, a genetically enhanced human with pink hair and cat eyes; neither of them buys into the whole HHC big brother act, and it’s fun to watch them metaphorically flip off the system.

The problem is, of course, a virus — a not surprisingly genetically enhanced virus — which has been purposely released into the population, with a horrible mortality rate. James’ wife, Linda, is called into GeneFirm to create a vaccine, while the virus spreads inexorably around the world. James, with stitches still crossing his scalp from brain surgery, becomes the unlikely hero who unravels what’s happening and the mad scientist who’s behind it.

Virus Thirteen ends with a flurry of action, medical shots and gunshots, accusations and recriminations, and a murder committed by a genetically engineered chameleon man, but in the end, James and humanity will prevail. If you’re looking for a beach book this summer with some action, a mystery, and insights on a world dominated by genes, try Joshua Alan Parry’s Virus Thirteen.

My thanks to Alexis Nixon, publicist for Tor/Forge, for sending me a review copy.

“Hitchcock” (movie)

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May 242013

“Hitchcock” isn’t a mystery, but it’s about the making of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most memorable movies, “Psycho,” and the backstory about the “Father of Suspense” was fascinating.

The best part about the movie, to me, was learning about Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, who didn’t often receive credit for her contributions but who was Hitchcock’s partner in more than just marriage. I’ve watched and reviewed a bunch of Hitchcock’s movies, but I’d never even heard of her, and couldn’t have even told you if he’d been married.

Directed by Sacha Gervasi, the movie picks up after the release of “North by Northwest,” with Hitchcock (played by Anthony Hopkins) riding a high while simultaneously searching for his next subject, something that will make people stop asking him about retirement. He almost irrationally decides that a movie based on the story of American serial killer Ed Gein is something he simply MUST do, never mind qualms about censors and poor taste, or that it’s perhaps more horror than suspense, or that the studio doesn’t want to finance it for all of those reasons.

In the meantime, Alma (played by Helen Mirren) is tired of being taken for granted and of watching Hitch’s grand obsessions with his beautifully blonde leading ladies, and when a friend asks her to help with his film and showers her with attention, she begins to spend more time with him. I won’t give anything away by saying how this problem is resolved.

But maybe I shouldn’t have said “showers.” If you’re a “Psycho” fan, you’ll also enjoy the backstory about the film — how Hitch motivated Anthony Perkins’ performance, his relationship with Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) and his method for getting her to scream realistically in that dreaded shower scene. Oh, and if you’re worried about that, this film doesn’t show anything scary or gory. For instance, when the scene plays in the theater, all we see is Hitchcock working through it in the lobby.

Needless to say, “Psycho” was a tremendous success, and “Hitchcock”‘s closing moments we get a hint as to the director’s next film. It’s the movie that I’ll never review, because my Mom saw it in the theater, before I was born, an experience that left her so afraid of a certain member of the animal kingdom that she made me afraid of them, too.

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