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Book Tour: Naughty in Nice

Sep 022011

I’ve always liked Rhys Bowen’s Lady Georgiana Rannoch series, so when I saw a chance to participate in the book launch for her newest Royal Spyness mystery, Naughty in Nice, I was worried that I couldn’t type fast enough to get my name on the list. Fortunately the fingers came through, so I’m one of the lucky ones who got to read it before its release on Sept. 6 (next Tuesday).

If you aren’t familiar with the series, Lady Georgiana is number 30-something in line for the British crown, but after her father blew through the family fortune and then killed himself, she’s more than a bit down at the heel. Her brother, Binky, and his wife, Fig (those names should tell you something about the gently satiric touch to the series), still have Castle Rannoch, but seeing as it’s 1933, not much else. So Georgie’s going to be left behind when everyone who’s anyone goes to Nice for the winter.

But then her royal relative sends Lady Georgiana on a mission: to retrieve the queen’s stolen snuffbox, which she has reason to believe is at the Mediterranean home of a wealthy subject, Sir Toby Groper. Georgie and her completely hopeless maid, Queenie, head to the French Riviera.

This book reveals a bit more of Lady Georgiana’s royal side than in earlier books, when among other things she worked as a maid opening and closing houses for other wealthy families who didn’t realize exactly whom they were hiring. Georgie gets mad when the French police refuse to call her “milady,” for example, and when she gets in trouble with the law deep down she knows the family won’t leave her to rot in a Riviera jail.

Naughty in Nice also portrays Georgie’s lighter side, when she’s thrilled at the chance to wear Chanel (designed for her by Coco herself) and be courted by a marquis, as well as allowing Georgie to resolve her relationship with her mother, the glamorous and wealthy former actress who left her with the Rannochs years before. And then there’s Darcy. Yes, even he manages to turn up in the French Riviera, despite the fact that he’s a Irish nobleman with even less money than the Rannochs. There’s no telling what he’ll think about the marquis.

But don’t be fooled into thinking this book is all charm and fashion. There are hints of the clouds gathering over Europe: Georgie’s mother Claire has money because her latest conquest is a German arms manufacturer, and the depression is so bad that Europe’s wealthy come from far and wide to enjoy the free food and drink at her party. The beautiful gowns and jewels and people stand doomed, as we but not they know what lies ahead.

Death of a Chimney Sweep

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Jul 212011

For the first time I listened to one of M. C. Beaton’s Hamish Macbeth series on audio. Death of a Chimney Sweep (2011) does feature a dead chimney sweep, but the mystery revolves around the murder of Captain Henry Davenport, a most unpleasant character who bullies his wife and commits fraud on his closest friends. It’s difficult to rue his death, but nonetheless Lochdubh’s finest is determined to solve the mystery.

As always, there are a number of other twists to the story. Hamish sees both Priscilla and Elspeth, both of whom he’s always thinking about marrying — but not really, and his good friend Angela Brodie has written a book about a doctor’s wife who has a torrid fling with the village bobby, which everyone, even the national press, assumes is autobiographical. Sonsie and Lugs, his wild cat and dog, play an important role as well.

Although there are quite a few murders before the book ends, and some other unpleasantness, this story is about as cozy as a mystery can get. It’s much less about the various obnoxious characters who populate the mystery, in this case in the nearby town of Drim, and much more about the eccentric ones who populate Lochdubh (if you’re a longtime fan, you’ll be surprised by what the Currie sisters do in this one). It seems that Hamish is always straightening out other people’s lives while avoiding both promotion and his nemesis, DI Blair, who’s always sabotaging Hamish rather than solving crimes.

So, the book is much what you’d expect if you’re a fan. What of the audio? It’s read by Graeme Malcolm, whose voice I enjoyed, particularly when he played up what Chesney often calls Hamish’s “sibilant” accent that comes out most when he’s upset. I was glad that Malcolm played it straight; I had kind of avoided the audiobooks because I was afraid they might sound silly, as opposed to quirky and funny. Do you like Malcolm’s voice? Listen to this brief clip (after the intro):

Counts toward the Audio Book Challenge.

Dandy Gilver & the Proper Treatment of Blood Stains

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Jun 192011

Here’s another book from my glorious trip to Foyle’s in London: Catriona McPherson’s Dandy Gilver & the Proper Treatment of Blood Stains (2009). I chose it, of all the many choices, because it was set in Edinburgh (which I love) and because I’d never heard of the series (although after I got home I found that my library has a couple of the books, but not this one).

In this mystery, Dandy receives a letter from a young wife who believes her husband is going to kill her. The only way the aristocratic Dandy can investigate is to sneak into the house by pretending to be Lollie Balfour’s new ladies’ maid. The premise is a good one; Dandy has to take a few lessons from her own maid and is proud when she knows “the proper treatment of blood stains” well enough to teach another maid what to do. The backdrop of Edinburgh’s participation in the 1926 General Strike, and the other servants’ discussion about labor relations, grounded the mystery with a sense of time and place while letting Dandy see the issue from an entirely new point of view.

This is the fifth book in the series, and I did feel that I was missing a bit by not being familiar with the earlier books — I had to spend a little time sorting out who some of the characters were, including some never met but mentioned — but the mystery stands alone. Dandy’s mission quickly changes when the accused man is killed in his own bed. She tries to identify the killer by process of elimination, figuring who was where when, but she’s frequently led off track by servants who don’t regret their master’s demise.

I don’t know about the rest of the series, but this book was a cut above the typical cozy because of the social commentary provided by the discussion of the strike. I not only enjoyed the resolution of the mystery, I also learned something.

Counts toward the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge

A Red Herring Without Mustard

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Jun 172011

A Red Herring Without Mustard (2011) is Alan Bradley’s third Flavia de Luce book, but that first one I’ve listened to on audio. Although I continue to enjoy the series, it’s my least favorite of the three so far.

Flavia’s third story begins in a gypsy’s tent; she’s having her fortune told when the gypsy’s startling statements lead Flavia to (accidentally) start the tent on fire, plunging her into a new investigation. The gypsy, as it happens, blames Flavia’s father for her husband’s death, but Flavia allows her to park her caravan on de Luce land — where the gypsy woman is attacked and almost killed. Flavia, of course, manages to save her, while also stumbling upon a theft ring, a fishy smell, and another dead body, battling with her older sisters, and hiding the gypsy’s granddaughter in her bedroom.

This book, like the rest of the series, requires more than a little suspension of disbelief. How on earth Flavia could know who and what to investigate — and why people answer her questions, for that matter — isn’t really clear (in one scene, for instance, she conducts a chemistry experiment, which somehow leads her to her next step in the investigation, though I couldn’t see why). If that’s the price to pay for being allowed to enter Flavia’s world, on balance that’s okay with me.

There’s just one thing that starting to bother me about this series. Despite her track record in having solved other mysteries, people still treat Flavia as a nuisance (“run along”) or fail to take her seriously as an investigator. I suppose this is what makes it possible for people to keep answering her questions — she’s just a kid, so why not talk to her? — but at some point I think the good people of Bishop’s Lacey are going to have to acknowledge her as a sleuth, rather than treating her in exactly the same way as they did in the first book. There are some hints at the end of the story that this could be happening, particularly in an invitation for tea, so I hope the next book will take that turn.

As for the audiobook, narrator Jayne Entwhistle has a good sound, versatile enough to voice an 11-year-old and the adults around her, but she played Flavia too humorously for my taste. She seemed to be speaking with a smile in her voice a great deal of the time, even when Flavia wasn’t trying to be funny (for example, once when she fears being in trouble with her father) — and it struck me that she, too, was treating Flavia too much like a kid, when in fact Flavia’s confronting a host of adult-sized problems with virtually no family or adult support.

Counts toward the Seventh Continent in the 2011 Global Reading Challenge

The Janus Stone

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May 202011

Although my review of Elly Griffiths’ first book, The Crossing Places, was pretty grumpy, when I saw her second Ruth Galloway mystery, The Janus Stone (2010), I picked it up and read it immediately (never mind the other stacks of books sitting around my bedroom). There’s obviously something appealing in this series even for a grumpy reviewer.

And, I’m pleased to say, I liked this one more — perhaps partly because Ruth is much less passive, but also, I think, because the mystery is more believable and because Ruth has winnowed out some of her less deserving friends.

The book begins with yet another discovery of a dead girl’s bones (is there a square foot in Ruth’s part of England that doesn’t contain a dead girl’s remains?), buried under a doorway. Ruth is called in to use her forensic anthropology skills to help the police understand more about the bones. Like the first book, this story blends ancient — in this case, Janus, who symbolizes not only doorways but beginnings and endings — with current — accusations against or at least questions about priests regarding children — to create tension and an almost mystical atmosphere.

Ruth’s personal situation also adds interest: she’s pregnant and hasn’t told the father yet, and doesn’t seem to really want to tell him given that he’s married to someone else. The one thing I didn’t like about this story line is that Ruth seems to be befriending the father’s wife, which just strikes me as out of character. Is it fair of me to say something is out of character when I’m not the writer of the character? Well, it’s how I feel regardless!

Diamonds for the Dead

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May 172011

I’ve been reading Alan Orloff’s blog for about a year now, so when I saw that Bernadette had selected his book, Diamonds for the Dead (2010), to fulfill the “Books with Jewelry or a Gem in the Title” category for the What’s In a Name challenge, I decided to steal her idea and do the same.

The book tells the story of Josh Handleman, who returns to Virginia from California because his father has died. While sorting out his father’s affairs, Josh is also deciding to divorce his cheating wife, renewing old acquaintances, dating someone new, and trying to find the lost diamonds that his father’s sister and his best friend insist that his dad had been saving for his son. The diamonds are important not only for the money they involve — upon his death, Josh’s father had donated millions to charity and apparently nothing to his own son — but as a symbol of his relationship with his father.

“Honest Abe,” as people called Josh’s father, died when he fell down the stairs, but his best friend, Lev, insists that he was murdered by the old man who lives in Abe’s guest room. Josh resists, but after a time he starts to wonder if this could be true. He goes to the police, who don’t believe a word of it, particularly when he brings up the missing diamonds — with no proof that they even exist. So he begins his own investigation. Along the way he learns more and more about his father and begins to wish he’d known all of it while his dad was still alive.

As a detective Josh is a bit of a bumbler, but that fits with the scenario — you wouldn’t expect a grieving son to be a master detective — and it allows for us to get to know Josh, and his father, in a deeper way than if he’d just quickly figured it all out.

It’s not surprising that Alan Orloff’s Diamonds for the Dead was a finalist for a 2010 Agatha award. It’s got good characters as well as a credible mystery and solution, and some moments of levity for good measure. Have you read Alan’s book or his blog? If not, check them out!

Photo, Snap, Shot

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May 102011

During December I had a scrapbooking marathon in order to finish the vacation album I was making for my parents’ Christmas gift. I hadn’t so much as picked up my scissors since. Not only that, but last summer I won an autographed copy of Joanna Campbell Slan’s new scrapbooking mystery, Photo, Snap, Shot (2010) and it was languishing untouched on a shelf in my closet.

Oddly enough, it took the mad scrapbooking murderer in Marshall Karp’s Cut, Paste, Kill to snap me out of the scrapbooking doldrums. It was so funny that it inspired me to pull Photo, Snap, Shot off the shelf, and I read it over a weekend, which in turn inspired to get back to work on my daughter’s 4-year-old scrapbook. If I ever finish it, I’ll owe it entirely to Lomax & Briggs and Kiki Lowenstein. (By the way, she’s 6 and a half now.)

Photo, Snap, Shot picks up with Kiki, still reeling from her discovery that her favorite cop is married, racing to her daughter’s private school because Anya and her friend just found the dead body of a teacher. Kiki gets involved in the investigation because Detweiler, the married cop, has begged her to use her insider knowledge of the school to help him clear his friend, a coach at the school who is suspected of the murder.

As in Slan’s previous books, Kiki has to manage her finances, her daughter, her job and coworkers, her mother-in-law, her weight, and the investigation. The way she races from one thing to the next sometimes reminds me of myself, although I wish I could count scrapbooking as work. She seems like a real person, if nosier than most, and for that reason she’s fun to read about even if the mystery isn’t all that compelling (I didn’t really care who killed the teacher; she sounded like a pain in the whatever). The scrapbooking tips are professional quality and made me want to get back in it myself.

Book #3 in the Strong Heroine Reading Challenge

Moonlighting for Murder: Agatha Raisin’s other job

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Apr 072011

As Jen Forbus pointed out, amateur sleuths must have something else to do all day, whether they’re journalists, or caterers, or stay-at-home moms. She therefore suggested that those of us who are blogging as part of Moonlighting week should write a post about our amateur’s “other job.”

Agatha Raisin is, of course, a retired public relations agent, who sells her London agency and moves to the Cotswolds in the first book in the series, Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death (1992). But Agatha has a hard time leaving PR behind, and in several of the books she puts her experience back to work.

In Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death (1998), author M.C. Beaton explains that “Agatha Raisin was bored and unhappy,” so it’s no surprise that when Agatha’s former employee Roy Silver phones to ask if she wants to take the Ancombe Water Company account on a freelance basis, she threatens to take the job — in part because it will irritate Mrs. Darry, a newcomer whom Agatha finds ugly (not on account of her appearance, “but because of the atmosphere of judgmental bad temper and discontent” she carries with her, a description others might apply to Agatha). Then Agatha finds a dead man at the well where the company is buying its water, and she’s drawn into the mystery — in fact, she takes the job primarily so she can investigate the murder.

In A Spoonful of Poison (2008), although by this time Agatha has started up her own detective agency (yes, she’s renounced her amateur status but I decided to include this book for its PR aspects), she’s asked to help publicize a church fête, but when she goes to turn the job down, she spots highly attractive widower George Selby and instantly agrees to help.

So, what is Aggie’s version of public relations? In the first book, Beaton explains that

“It helps in public relations to have a certain amount of charm and Agatha had none. She got results by being a sort of one-woman soft-cop/hard-cop combination; alternately bullying and wheedling on behalf of her clients. Journalists often gave space to her clients just to get rid of her. She was also an expert at emotional blackmail and anyone unwise enough to accept a present of a free lunch from Agatha was pursued shamelessly until they paid back in kind.

We see this in Spoonful, when Agatha engages a famous pop singer to come to the fête, which in turn gets the promise of national press — and all because Agatha helped get “her going again” after a drugs bust. The fête is a huge success, at least until someone drugs the jam in the tasting booth. Nonetheless, the church clears thousands, and all because of Agatha.

In Wellspring, Agatha takes a more strategic role. During her job interview, for example, she questions the logo the company has selected for the bottles of water and discredits some of the ideas the company directors suggest to launch the new product, including an event at a stately home and a boat trip down the Thames (“old hat”). Instead, she proposes a village fête, which will buy the goodwill of the village while appealing to the British “rural dream of croquet and skittles and my lord dishing out the prizes.” When the press come to interview her about the dead man, Agatha invites them in for drinks and plugs the water company. And, Agatha turns a village protest meeting against the water company into a “roar of applause” when she announces the company’s plan for a village fête with film stars and the like, and she spends a week in London “cajoling journalists” to attend.

Those of you who know me know that I’m a professor of public relations, and I can assure you that Agatha’s brand of PR is not what I teach. She’s primarily a publicist and event planner, rather than a counselor, and only rarely (as at the village protest) does she make an effort to build relationships with key constituents. As a publicist, though, Agatha is a real pro: she’s usually effective, and she makes it looks easy. Fellow PR prof Philip Young has written about Agatha’s approach to media relations in The Quiche of Death — well worth a read!

Thanks again to Jen Forbus for hosting Moonlighting for Murder week (links to today’s posts). I know that you all can now identify at least one of the amateur sleuths in Jen’s Positions Wanted contest.

Moonlighting for Murder: Agatha Raisin

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Apr 052011

People either love her or hate her.

Agatha Raisin: a successful public relations executive who retires at 53 and moves to the Cotswolds, because she’d had “one brief magical holiday” there as a child. Agatha, who’s nosy and bossy and usually grumpy, who’s rather plain but for her shapely legs, who’s always on the hunt for a man but usually ends up alone, who’s an unrepentant smoker and says all the wrong things.

Agatha first appears in M.C. Beaton’s Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death (1992), leaving her going-away party and elbowing aside a thin, nervous business man so she can take his cab. She wonders what on earth she’s going to do with all of her free time now, but that’s quickly resolved when a (store-bought) quiche she entered in a competition turns out to have contained poison. Her career as a sleuth is begun.

I’ll grant you that she’s not your typical cozy heroine, but don’t be too hard on Aggie: there are good reasons for her to have turned out as she did. According to her website, Agatha’s parents were unemployed drunks, she grew up in a tower block slum, and her parents took her out of school and put her to work in a biscuit factory at the ripe old age of 15. She escaped via London and a bad marriage, and then clawed and scraped her way up in the world through hard work and an aggressive personality.

Moreover, Agatha’s weaknesses are exactly what make her a good sleuth. She’s not afraid to ask impertinent questions, order witnesses and suspects around, or bluster around blurting things out until she says the wrong thing to the right person and provokes them into doing or saying something that reveals a bit more of the truth.

If you can’t look past the outward appearances, Agatha will drive you nuts. Instead, pay attention to Agatha’s wide variety of friends — Bill Wong, a young police officer she meets when he’s investigating her quiche in the first book; Mrs. Bloxby, the vicar’s wife; Roy Silver, who keeps her in touch with the PR world (more on that on Thursday); the stingy Sir Charles Fraith; and even Doris Simpson, Agatha’s cleaner. She’s the one they turn to when they’re in trouble, or when they need a little excitement, the one who won’t let anything get in the way of their happiness (if she can help it), and the one they keep coming back to, no matter what she’s done this time.

What’s not to love?

Links to other Moonlighting for Murder posts today.

Aunt Dimity and the Family Tree

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Mar 312011

Following Lori Shepherd’s whirlwind tour of New Zealand in the last Aunt Dimity book, Nancy Atherton brings her back to Finch to solve a local mystery in Aunt Dimity and the Family Tree (2011).

Lori’s father-in-law, Willis, Sr. (not to be confused with her husband, Bill), has completed renovations on an old dump, now showplace, near her Cotswolds cottage, and the book begins with his fabulous housewarming party, which goes off without a hitch only because the women of the village save the day.

Late that night, Deirdre and Declan Donovan arrive for their interviews, and Willis, Sr. hires them to be his servants. The Donovans seem just a little too good to be true, though, and Lori is suspicious of their motives when old family items disappear, furniture is moved around, and strange sounds go bump in the night. Are they out to rob Willis, Sr.?

To complicate matters, Aunt Dimity’s ghost has come up with a plan for Sally Pyne, she of the village tearoom, to save face with the townspeople while meeting up with her Mexican love, which involves Willis, Sr. masquerading as “Lady Sarah”‘s American cousin while entertaining the good senor.

The Aunt Dimity series is quirky, lovable, and sometimes predictable, but it’s in a good way that you always know what you’ll get: a charming cozy in which everything turns out well in the end.

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