Mystery Monday: "There are people who should die...."

I don't know why there aren't more mysteries set in Southeast Asia. That said, most of the ones I've sampled, I haven't been able to really get excited about. Which is why I've decided to devote an entire blog post to two mystery series that I think should be on every fan's shelf and that I strongly suspect still remain too obscure. My reasons for these suspicions? Well, one series is an old favorite, discovered several years ago -- the witty, delightful, suspenseful and utterly charming mysteries set in Laos of the mid to late 1970s and featuring the country's reluctant coroner, the septugenerian Dr. Siri Paiboun. Whenever I shove these books into the hands of a friend, there is a better than 75% chance that he or she has never heard of them or their creator, Colin Cotterill, and a 90% chance that the friend in question has never tried reading them. (I don't allow that state of affairs to last for long, and my success rate in getting people to share my fan-dom is fairly high.) Alas, I'm less enamored of Cotterill's newer series, set in Thailand, where he makes his home. But now -- cue drum roll and, yes, why not, some trumpets, too -- I can get very, very excited about another series of mysteries set in Thailand. This one is published by Soho Press (a fave publisher of mine) and is written by Timothy Hallinan, who not only spends a chunk of his time in Bangkok, but clearly been using that time very, very well.

Part of what appealed to me most about A Nail Through the Heart is that Hallinan doesn't even try to make his chief character Thai. Poke Rafferty, in many ways, is a quintessential North American, one of the many male expatriates who wash up in Bangkok and simply never leave, floating around the fringes of its bar culture. But Poke is different in many ways. First of all, he's half Filipino; as one of the Thai characters notes consolingly in the book, this makes him look almost normal, and not like one of those ugly farang with their big noses. And while he ended up in Thailand in order to write a guide book to the city for restless young guys looking for the hottest bars and clubs -- along with tips for how to identify a ladyboy -- his own life has long since moved on. He has fallen in love with Rose, a tall, thoughtful and drop-dead gorgeous former bar dancer trying to build a cleaning business that will help get some of her former co-workers out of the bar trade before they end up in the blowjob bars -- the lowest ranks of the sex trade. He has taken in an 8-year-old street girl named Miaow, whom he met while she was peddling pencils, and who now is at school herself. He wants to adopt Miaow, and to marry Rose: the former may, just, be feasible, but Rose isn't sure he understands Thai culture or what it means to earn merit or be reborn. She wants him to understand what it would mean to mesh not only their lives but their souls.

But before any of that can happen, Poke succumbs to Miaow's pleas to give her friend, a street urchin named "Superman", a place to stay. He agrees to do a favor for his closest Thai friend, a policeman named Arthit (and just as compelling a character as Poke, Rose and Miaow, the main players in the drama.) And that lands him in a whole mess of trouble, looking for a vanished Australian who, he rapidly discovers, was involved in a particularly nasty child pornography ring, even as he ends up entangled with Madame Wing, a reclusive, wheelchair bound woman who has one of the most evil auras that Poke has ever encountered -- but who will pay him enough to find someone who stole from her to finance Miaow's adoption. There are some truly nasty folks out there, and as Rose tries to make him understand, maybe some victims aren't innocent simply because they are victims, and perhaps not all killers, just because they commit murder, are guilty. Watching Poke wrestle with the competing claims on his conscience, as he discovers stuff about his clients -- who have one claim on his loyalty -- and as he understands the motivations of the perpetrators, is fascinating, especially as it's all interwoven with his ongoing struggle to understand Rose and Thai culture.

From corrupt cops to the legacy of the Khmer Rouge killing fields, this novel covers a tremendous amount of ground, but Hallinan has a command of his material and, more importantly, does an amazing job of capturing the ambiance of Bangkok, from the flower warehouses to the crowded sois, or alleyways off the main roads. At one point, Poke is on the back of one of Bangkok's motorbike taxis, dodging through the inevitable traffic jams, at risk to life and limb, and I was literally there. (Well, I've done that -- though not, thank heavens, at high speeds!) Hallinan doesn't exaggerate to give us a picture of Bangkok, but instead relies on a host of small details, from the humidity to the body language of people on the streets.

I think after one encounter with Poke Rafferty and his motley assortment of fellow characters, and my introduction to his attempts to build a family of some kind in unpromising circumstances, I'm hooked. I'm moving straight on to the second book in the series, and the third, and the fourth... Thankfully, I think there are enough to keep me going until at least Christmas...

For audiobook fans: I can wholeheartedly recommend the audio version of these novels, as narrated by Victor Bevine.

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Now, if only the same were true of Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri mysteries, and I had another unread book sitting here demanding my attention immediately!! The next in this much-loved series, Six and a Half Deadly Sins (is it a coincidence that both authors are published by Soho? It can't be...) won't be out until May. Grrrrr. By which point my nerves will be shredded. So I'll just have to spend time forcing the series onto more people. Including anyone reading this blog post.

Why? Because Dr. Siri is simply one of the most intriguing and unique sleuths ever to stalk the pages of a mystery novel -- and yes, I include Sherlock Holmes in that category. The Pathet Lao have taken over power in Laos -- it's 1976 -- and Dr. Siri, a French-educated doctor who spent many of the best years of his life in the struggle for some kind of just, humane regime, just wants some peace and quiet. (He's also coming to realize that the new regime is just as foolish as the old one, albeit in entirely different ways.) He's a classic humanist; a believer in people. But dead people? Siri isn't keen on serving as Laos's only official coroner but when the last doctor with any experience zooms across the Mekong to Thailand in an inner tube, he's lumbered with the job: there is no way to say "no" to the Politburo. Worse still, his first jobs have unpleasantly political aspects: why on earth do the bodies of dead Vietnamese soldiers keep popping to the surface of a Laotian lake? and what happened to the wife of a powerful Laotian leader?

Siri's morgue may be short of anything that a typical coroner might want or need. But it turns out that Siri isn't a typical coroner. As well as being a reluctant coroner, he's a reluctant link to spirits and ghosts. He also has unusual resources, in the shape of Dtui, the nurse who hopes to be sent to Russia for medical training, and Geung, who, in spite of his Down's Syndrome, is loyal and eerily wise. They do amazing things with very little, even when they have to take samples off to local school teacher on the back of a motorbike to be tested. And even when the Laotian version of justice may be just as eccentric as some of Siri's methods.

As the series progresses, the stories simply get richer and more intriguing, taking Siri to the ancient royal capital of Luang Prabang (one of my own favorite places in Laos) and even to Phnom Penh in the final days of Khmer Rouge rule. His sidekicks include a Politburo member, a transvestite fortuneteller, Vientiane's best noodle chef, and Yeh Ming, the shaman who inhabits him. And while the tone is far lighter and more whimsical, Cotterill, like Hallinan, knows the region, its people and its culture. That becomes part of the story, neither window dressing nor exaggerated for effect.

And I may just have talked myself into re-reading the entire series before the release of the newest book in May. But not until I have finished reading all of the Poke Rafferty novels. Now, when will I find time to read anything else??

Mystery Monday: When a literary novelist writes mysteries, the result proves magical

So, I promised that my return to blogging would be based on being critical; no cozy cheerleading here. Of course, I also pledged to be rigorously honest in my views and opinions. So if I now end up going all fangirl (horrible phrase, but the only one that possibly applies in the circumstances) in my first post, I'll take refuge by pointing to the second part of that pledge.

And just who, or what, is causing the excitement? It's the pending release of the fourth of what the author plans to be ten mysteries set in Egypt in the years leading to the events of the Arab Spring in 2011, The Burning Gates by Parker Bilal. But to understand the reason why I did a small dance of joy when I downloaded an advance review copy of this book (due in bookstores next February) from Bloomsbury via NetGalley), I have to rewind to early last year, when I picked up Bilal's first book in the series, The Golden Scales. 

From the first pages, I was hooked, as a desperate woman scours the streets of Cairo for her daughter. Flash forward, and the reader learns that Liza Markham, the woman, is still looking for the little girl, whom she hasn't seen since 1981, when she was four. And there is another missing person, too, this one of far more apparent importance to Cairo's powerbrokers, that of a young footballer and protegé of its shady, threatening owner, Saad Hanafi. Both of these mysteries land in the lap of Makana, a Sudanese political exile and former cop turned private investigator, living on the margins of Cairo society. But why would someone like Hanafi -- who has access to all the resources he could possibly want -- hire the likes of Makana to retrieve Adil, the  missing footballer? And what, beyond Makana's involvement, links the two cases?

This is set in Cairo of 1998, a city of which Mubarak has firm control but in which Makana's life is precarious. We learn slowly (at just the right time, in the right way) how it happened that he fled Khartoum and what happened to his wife and child during that traumatic flight; we also understand how that shapes his own view of the case and these other two missing children. Murder follows, and Makana's sense of justice is horrified. He pursues the case in the face of Egyptian oligarchs, Russian mafiosi and yes, Islamic militants.

What I loved about this series from the first book onward was the rich level of detail. An outsider, Makana will never be accepted in Cairo, and his life reflects that status. He even lives on a rickety, decaying houseboat moored to a bank of the Nile, making little effort to do more than exist in this exile's life until his cases engage him to the point where he becomes reckless in the pursuit of justice. Cairo, in lesser hands, would simply become a backdrop for this story, but instead emerges as another character in its own right. Makana's Cairo isn't just the souks where the tourists gawk at the merchandise for sale, but seedy little hotels, neighborhood cafes and tea shops, the ubiquitous traffic jams, the offices where underlings cater slavishly to powerful men. There's a pervasive sense of menace in the air.

You can read these as straightforward mysteries, but also as political novels. Parker Bilal doesn't just

write detective novels but also literary novels, under his "real" name, Jamal Mahjoub, several of which have examined broad political themes in Africa, so it's hardly surprising that if you scratch the surface of his "Makana" books -- excellent in their own right -- you'll find similar concerns lurking. A razor-sharp critique of political opportunism? Check. Politicians using and exploiting religious convictions in their own pursuit of power? Absolutely. If Makana's decaying houseboat home is always just about to vanish beneath the Nile's surface, Egyptian society as a whole -- however affluent it may look -- isn't in much better shape, as Bilal's novels point out.

The second novel, Dogstar Rising, once again sees Makana with two cases to solve. He has been hired to investigate apparent threats to the head of a dilapidated and dysfunctional travel agency, and, working undercover there, discovers that the thread leads to sectarian religious conflicts and some ugly past secrets. Sectarian conflicts are emerging elsewhere, however: the bodies of young boys -- mutilated -- are showing up in Cairo's alleyways, and it is all too easy for opportunists to point the finger of blame at the Coptic Christian community.

Early this year, I snapped up a copy of The Ghost Runner as soon as it was released in the UK -- I didn't want to wait to read it until it became available in the United States. It was a bit of a departure, literally: this time, Makana leaves the crowded, noisy streets of Cairo for the eerie quiet of Siwa, an oasis town. If you're thinking "oasis" as in "desert paradise", however, you may want to rethink... Makana is in pursuit of the truth behind the burning of a young woman, Karima, whose family roots lie in Siwa. Could her estranged father -- formerly a criminal, now a born-again jihadi -- have set fire to her to restore the family 'honor'? Siwa's citizens, however, don't want to give up their secrets and Mahjoub/Bilal himself confirms, in an interview with Publishers Weekly, that he saw Makana as riding into the remote community rather in the same way that the outsider in search of truth and justice shows up in a Western movie shot by Sergio Leone. Unsurprisingly, the outcome is a tremendously vivid literary equivalent of what you might have seen in one of those Westerns -- with a 'War on Terror' twist, since the novel is set in 2002.

Now I've got my hands on book #4, The Burning Gate, which may be my Thanksgiving reading treat for myself. Certainly, I can't imagine not eagerly snapping up each book in this series as soon as possible: there are some circumstances in which self control simply isn't a virtue, and this is one. I want to know how Makana fared after his misadventures in the desert. I want to know whether he'll ever find out what happened to his daughter, and how he'll fend off the next attempt by his Sudanese nemesis -- his former underling in the police department -- to coax him back into harm's way?

And another next step, of course, will have to be to seek out some of the works by Parker Bilal's alter ego, Jamal Mahjoub. Having read the first of John Banville's mysteries (written under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black) and having discovered Mahjoub/Bilal, I'm becoming convinced that this particular combination is a slam-dunk win -- especially for readers who prize great, atmospheric writing, impeccably suspenseful plots and compelling characters. And really, what more do you need in a great mystery?

Full disclosure: I received advance review copies of The Golden Scales and Dogstar Rising from the publishers via NetGalley, in exchange for my honest opinion. 

Mystery Monday: With roots in the Arctic, no wonder this is a chilling tale...

I can't even remember any more where I first heard about Giles Blunt's series of novels set in a fictional northern Ontario city named Algonquin Bay (a thinly-disguised North Bay), but I do know that I'm very glad that someone mentioned them to me! At their heart is John Cardinal, a middle-aged detective who once played in the big leagues in Toronto, and whose daughter is trying to make it in the art world's big leagues in New York. I'll try to avoid some spoilers -- this is one of those series in which major life events shake up the main protagonist from one book to the next -- but will say that Cardinal, while world-weary, still has an ability to empathize with those who suffer and a strong sense of justice driving him.

In the latest book in the series, both will be taxed by the events that unfold. It is winter in Algonquin Bay, and the freezing wind is blowing so fiercely that when Cardinal wakes up one morning, he sees it blow the ice fishing shacks clear across the lake. He is called out to the scene of a crime -- a man is dead and a woman is missing, feared dead. But when a woman's body is found, it isn't that of Laura Lacroix, but rather the wife of a Canadian businessman turned politician, who vanished hundreds of miles away in Ottawa. Oddest of all, when she is found, she has been chained up and left to die -- but dressed in warm clothes and abandoned with a thermos beside her, as if her murderer wanted to give her some kind of fighting chance -- or just prolong her agony.

At first, the excerpts from a 20-year-old diary kept by a member of an Arctic expedition are a puzzling contrast and an interruption to the main flow of the narrative. I was just as eager as Cardinal's colleague (and increasingly close friend) Lise Delorme to understand whether the former rock star and current sex club owner was responsible for the crime, given his track record. I wanted to know how the Algonquin Bay cops would cope with the arrival of a brash and arrogant Toronto hotshot, with an inability to work well with others but a tremendous reputation. But slowly, Blunt's portrayal of the Arctic world captured my attention, from the natural landscape and its perils to the struggle of a small group of scientists cooped up together to coexist in isolation, grabbed my interest just as much or even more -- especially when the ominous link between the contemporary crime(s) and the history slowly emerges.

This isn't a pitch-perfect mystery novel. There are a few implausible elements in the sub-plot featuring Lise Delorme and her attempt to hold someone responsible for a past crime, for instance, and Loach, the obnoxious newcomer, was a two-dimensional figure who didn't really add all that much to the central tale. But Cardinal himself is anything but two-dimensional, and the setting -- Northern Ontario in the depths of winter -- is a vivid and authentic backdrop to a compelling mystery. Read it -- but start off with Blunt's debut, Forty Words for Sorrow, which introduces both Cardinal and Delorme and also is set in a fierce winter. One reviewer in Toronto's Globe and Mail argued that Blunt does for Northern Ontario what James Lee Burke does for Louisiana's Cajun country, and having just read my first Burke novel, I'd have to agree.

For some unknown reason, while the first few books are easy enough to find in the United States, the later ones have yet to be published here, so you'll have to order them from an Amazon vendor or Amazon.ca. For my part, I haven't regretted doing so yet -- this has rapidly become a "must read in hardcover; can't wait until the paperback is released" series. A solid 4-star book; recommended.

Mystery Monday: Inger Ash Wolfe's Identity Revealed!

I've been wondering for a while who the author of the rather compelling series of mysteries featuring small town Ontario detective Hazel Micallef might be. The books themselves -- which I began reading with the debut of "Inger Ash Wolfe" a few years back -- are interesting. The setting appears to be the traditional kind of backdrop for a "cozy" (aka "cosy") mystery -- a small town, plenty of people who know each other well and have for decades, lots of domestic conflict that might escalate to the point where one person flings a cup of scalding Darjeeling over another, or someone keys the brand-new car purchased by their rival. Until a serial killer comes to call, that is. It's that odd mismatch of what appears to be a tranquil backwater and some really gritty, complex crimes that captured my attention -- and the character of Hazel herself. She is feisty and cantankerous; in her 60s, divorced and with a characteristically ambivalent relationship with her ex-husband. (Book #2, The Taken, opens as she is recuperating from back surgery in the basement of the home her ex shares with his new wife; they are stuck looking after her because her octogenerian mother -- just as feisty and cantankerous -- isn't physically able to do so. )

It is Hazel and her attitude that has kept me reading these books. She is a welcome antidote to the usual breed of supersleuths found in many mysteries, or the women who often feature in those books -- women who are in the book to provide a love interest, or who end up feeling torn between their personal lives and their police careers, etc. etc. With the exception of a handful (Val McDermid's Carol Jordan, for instance, or the character of Vera Stanhope, created by Ann Cleeves, with her tendency to call everyone "pet" while fixing them with a laser-like glare), there are relatively few women around whom a series has been built that remain interesting characters from book to book. Above all, she is human and fallible. As she admits to her sidekick, James Wingate, midway through The Taken, she has ""a man trapped in my computer, live animals and body parts appearing on my desk, a CO who thinks I've outlived my usefulness and expensive gifts coming from missing friends, I also happen to have a pill problem ... So I'm slightly less than OK."

So who, I wondered, was behind the fictional creation of Hazel Micallef? All that readers were told was that Inger Ash Wolfe was the nom de plume for a Canadian novelist, and I mentally ran through a list of candidates, trying to figure out who that might be. Turns out all my guesses and wildest speculations were off base -- and mostly because I committed the tremendous faux pas of assuming that because (a) the author's name was female and (b) Hazel was female, the author must be female. Whoops... As it turns out, the author is Michael Redhill, who confessed in a column for the Globe & Mail in Toronto that he had long been fascinated by here the idea of "being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself." At a younger age, he had tried acting; now, he decided to immerse himself inside the personality of another kind of writer, a crime novelist and a woman.

Readers' responses to the Ash Wolfe/Redhill novels have varied, but I have relished them, including the one that just landed in bookstores, A Door in the River. As before, the author blends the image of a small Ontario community with the reality of an ugly underbelly, the two meeting in what Micallef is one of the only people to suspect might even be a crime. When Henry Wiest is found dead, apparently of an allergic reaction to a bee sting after stopping off at a smoke shop on a local Indian reserve (a smoke shop being the place where the tribe is able to sell cigarettes free of taxes), Hazel can't help wondering. Henry didn't smoke -- so what was he doing there? And what bees are out and stinging at night? Hazel has never played well with others, so it's no surprise that when she starts investigating she ruffles feathers at the reserve, where a thriving new casino might explain Wiest's presence on the reserve -- if not his death. But what she uncovers turns out to be far uglier than a gambling addiction, and what starts off as a police procedural mystery ends up being a gripping suspense novel.

A bonus: the first two books are available very cheaply if you have a North American Kindle (less than $3 each) and the paperback editions aren't that much pricier if ordered from Amazon.com. Start with The Calling and read them in order so that you don't get irritated by the failure of Ash Wolfe/Redhill to provide a lot of background with each new book. The middle book in the series is slightly weaker, but only slightly, and the latest is gripping and compelling reading -- even if it does end with a new character arriving on the scene and the fate of an old one hanging in mid air. Oh well, let's just hope Mr. Redhill is writing very, very rapidly and that book #4 in this series will be making its debut soon...

Mystery Monday: Gamache Sans Three Pines??

When the boatman who transports Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of Quebec's Sûreté on the long journey through isolated bays in the Quebecois hinterland to the remote monastery of Saint-Gilbert-entre-les-Loups, he is convinced that within minutes he'll be ferrying them away once more. Outsiders are never admitted to this cloistered home of the Gilbertine monks, even though many now are trying to gain access to hear the community perform live the Gregorian chants they made famous through a recent recording. To the boat owner's surprise, the gate opens to Gamache and his assistant, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Not because the monks are any more eager for visitors, but because one of their number, the prior and choir master,  has been found dead in the abbot's private garden -- violently murdered. What kind of cacophany exists beneath the pure harmony of the chants to which these monks devote their lives, and how could it be so discordant as to lead to murder?

Saint-Gilbert-entre-les-Loups is a unique place, caught between two worlds. "A netherworld. Between the vibrant life of Quebec. The bistros and brasseries, the festivals. The hardworking farmers and brilliant academics. Between the mortal world, and Heaven. Or Hell. There was here. Where quiet was king. And calm reigned. And the only sounds were the birds in the trees and plainchant. And where, a day ago, a man was killed." (And yes, Louise Penny's writing is that choppy and staccato. If you want to read this book, you'll need to adjust. And yes, it's one reason her novels likely will never get more than four stars from me. Because it feels like sitting in a car. Whose driver keeps nervously tapping on the brakes. When there is no reason to do so.)

Fans of Louise Penny's will rejoice to see Gamache's return in this latest novel; it will be interesting to see how many will embrace a book that isn't set in Three Pines and doesn't feature that fictional town's assortment of eccentric and lovable characters. Frankly, that made this latest mystery from Penny more appealing rather than less so. Let's face it, there are only so many complex murder cases that can plausibly be expected to occur in the same small community in the space of a year or two, and I think Penny has been pushing that limit for a few books now. Perhaps this heralds a parting of the ways, with Penny writing mysteries featuring Gamache and non-mysteries (or else much more cozy "light" mysteries) involving the residents of Three Pines? Regardless, I have become a little exasperated with the way that Three Pines characters have become almost caricatures (I know, sacrilege...) and even predictable. 

Not that Gamache himself can't become irritating. The man is almost saintly -- always having the best intentions; morality above reproach, unstained in an organization in which corruption apparently runs rampant. As Gamache and Beauvoir pursue their investigations, this becomes even more apparent, as Gamache's boss, Francoeur, shows up to throw spanners into the works and generally to disrupt Gamache; his hatred of the pure investigator transcending his interest in solving a high-profile crime, it seems. Gamache, by contrast, soars above such petty politicking in the same way that the monks' chants soar into the rafters of their church. 

Thank heavens for Jean-Guy Beauvoir. When the book opens, the troubled detective seems to have found himself an oasis of peace and love -- as the reader learns within only a few pages, he and Annie Gamache, the inspector's daughter, are now a couple, and it's True Love. His demons are put aside; Beauvoir is content at last, with only one hurdle remaining: the couple still must confess to Gamache pere and mere the truth of their current relationship. As Gamache must leave Reine-Marie to venture off into the wilds and behind the walls of an enclosed monastic order, so must Beauvoir leave Annie and he finds himself clinging to a string of love e-letters written and read on his Blackberry. Will that be enough of a lifeline for him to ward off an atmosphere in the abbey that he finds oppressive -- and resist the games that Francoeur wants to play at Gamache's expense? And what will become of  Gamache's attempt to save Beauvoir from himself?

The psychological tension between the three policemen grows to rival that among the various factions in the abbey itself, as Gamache moves closer to identifying the villain. I've rated this 4 stars, largely for the distinctive setting, the plot that revolves around the chants within the abbey and details of abbey life, and Penny's deep understanding of Quebec today as well as its history. I'm never going to become a Louise Penny fangirl, however -- but that's just fine, as I think she has thousands of them already! I obtained an advance copy of this mystery from the publisher at BookExpo in June; the publication date is August 28. (In other words, only three weeks to wait...)

Scheduled Publication: August 28, 2012

Mystery Monday: Introducing Two Overlooked Mystery/Suspense Veterans

I'm always on the lookout for authors who are able to blend mystery and suspense in intelligent ways, creating a book that I just can't put down. And in recent months, I have finally succumbed to a friend's urging and picked up some novels by Michael Robotham, an Australian who is basing his mysteries in England, and have gone back to re-read others by Charles Cumming, an English author whose books are sold in the United States but remain relatively under the radar, it seems to me. The two are quite different in their style and in the subjects they highlight, but both are capable of crafting what I like to refer to as "thumping good reads."

The first book by Michael Robotham that I read was Shatter, one of his first to be released in the United States. It features Joe O'Loughlin, who, when we first meet him, is standing on the Clifton suspension bridge outside Bristol, charged with keeping a terrified, naked woman from jumping to her death. Oddly, she seems to be talking on a telephone, and pleading with someone -- and then she jumps, taking the mystery of her death with her, or so it seems. But when her teenage daughter shows up on O'Loughlin's doorstep to insist his mother's fear of heights made it unlikely she'd ever commit suicide that way, Joe investigates, and finds his own suspicions mounting that something drove Christine to her death -- or rather, someone, someone particularly evil.

Does this sound a bit formulaic? Well, sure. Let's face it, O'Loughlin is a flawed but appealing hero, wrestling with the onset of Parkinson's disease and his family relationships, even as he struggles to do his best to obtain justice for Christine. Will he catch the bad guy before he can destroy more lives? Will O'Loughlin figure out where he went wrong in time?  And yes, the bad guy is appallingly bad, the epitome of an evildoer, almost a caricature. But Robotham dials up the suspense so much that I ended up simply not caring all that much about the book's flaws -- I just wanted to find out what happened next. 

The next  book featuring Joe O'Loughlin is Bleed for Me, which I promptly sought out after finishing Shatter. O'Loughlin's world has changed since the previous novel, and he's trying to maintain a relationship with his two daughters, especially with teenaged Charlie. Then Sienna, Charlie's closest friend, shows up at his family's home, covered in blood and unable to speak -- and Sienna's father is found dead. Is she responsible for this crime, but driven to it? Or is she being set up? Once again, the twists and turns had me second- and third-guessing my original assumptions about what was going in Sienna's life, and making this another unputdownable novel.

Charles Cumming doesn't delve into the gritty psychological suspense terrain inhabited by Robotham, but that doesn't make his spy thrillers any the less compelling. I began to read them when they started to appear -- including the two novels featuring Alec Milius, a British spook. But Cumming's most recent books have taken his work a notch higher.

Take The Trinity Six, for example, in which Cumming plays with the theme of the Cambridge spies -- the group that included Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt, all of whom spied for the Soviet Union for decades within the heart of the British establishment. (Blunt was the curator of the queen's art collection...) Historian Sam Gaddis stumbles over what could be the coup of a lifetime when a journalist friend tells him that a possible "sixth man" by the name of Edward Crane is not only still alive (despite reports of his death 15 years previously) but ready to spill the beans. Cumming does a great job of generating tension without having to resort to 007 or Mission Impossible feats of derring-do; the suspense comes from the characters and situations, and the unravelling of the complex puzzle. That's just fine by me; I don't need action adventures to keep me reading, but I do need suspense, and Cumming delivers plenty of it in this nicely complex novel. Nope, he's not a new LeCarre -- but who is? (Incidentally, you can pick up the Kindle version of this book, released last year, for a mere $2.99 right now.)

At last week's ThrillerFest VII, Phillip Margolin argued that a suspense writer needs to “get rid of anything that will slow the action down.” I'm not sure I agree with that. I've read plenty of books with non-stop action (James Patterson? Steve Berry?) and while they can generate a lot of adrenaline, they ultimately are about as satisfying as being offered cotton candy or ju-jubes for dinner when you haven't eaten all day. The sugar rush may be fab, but it doesn't last. I need character, and uncertainty, and something ominous lurking in the background. (For more on ThrillerFest, see this report from Library Journal.)

All of these are present in Cumming's newest novel, which will be published in the United States early next month. When the newly-appointed head of MI-5 takes an unexpected holiday before taking up her new post, and then vanishes from the hotel where she is supposed to be staying, a recently-disgraced agent is yanked out of compulsory retirement and sent to figure out what is going on -- discreetly. The secret of Amelia's disappearance is quickly resolved, but only leads to a larger puzzle. The first half of the book does move a little too slowly for my taste, but it picks up dramatically in the second half, as agent Tom Kell uncovers an astonishing counterespionage plot on the part of one of Britain's ostensible allies. Again, compared to many books of this kind, there's little dramatic action, but what there is is just the right amount and in the right place in the book. While I didn't like it quite as much as The Trinity Six, it's definitely a thumping good read.

All of the books above I would rate at 4 stars to 4.3 stars. With the exception of Shatter, which was a LibraryThing Early Reviewer book, all are books that I have purchased and own.

Some Ideas for Great Summer Reading

I don't know what it's like where you are, but here in New York, the temperatures are heading back into the 90s this weekend after spending last weekend flirting with 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Thoroughly unpleasant, by any stretch of the imagination. Whether you're spending the summer poolside, beachside or stuck indoors cozying up to your air conditioner, here are some tips for some fun, reasonably unchallenging books, all of which meet my definition of being "thumping good reads" and that will take your mind off the heat!

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: This is a novel that has got lots of new fans, and it deserves every one of them. The epitome of a "can't-put-it-down" rollercoaster ride that starts when a young woman goes missing on her fifth wedding anniversary. Another Scott Peterson/Laci Peterson story? We are seeing the story through the eyes of her husband, who acknowledges he's great at the art of omitting material facts -- so how reliable is he in what he tells us? Alternatively, how reliable is Amy -- can we trust what she is telling us? Just when you think you know what is coming next, Flynn whisks you off in another direction. This has to be the best thriller I'll read this year.

 The Taliban Cricket Club by Timeri Murari: What if... the Taliban decided to reach out the world through cricket? And what if one of the only ordinary Afghans to know how to play the game is actually a young woman, educated at a college in India? And what if she and her male cousins form a team as a way of helping them all escape the horrors of Taliban rule? Unexpectedly, this is an entertaining, amusing and heartwarming tale, one with sharp undercurrents reminding us just what is at stake for Rukhsana, a frustrated journalist who has risked her life to tell the outside world what is happening to Afghanistan's women under Taliban rule, and now may be facing the prospect of sharing their fate. At heart, it's a conventional romantic suspense yarn, but with enough bite, edge and novelty to make it compelling reading.

Defending Jacob by William Landay: There are several novels out right now about children or young adults committing -- or being charged with -- unspeakable crimes, and the adults who defend them. There is The Good Father by Noah Hawley and The Child Who by Simon Lelic -- and then there is this novel, in my opinion the best of the bunch. A classmate of Jacob's is found murdered, and Andy Barber -- his father, and the local assistant district attorney -- overseas an investigation into the crime. Suddenly,  Jacob is charged with the crime... and a father's protective instincts go into overdrive. Is he seeing things clearly, or is he choosing to ignore uncomfortable truths? The ending has one of the best twists imaginable.

Taft 2012 by Jason Heller: This is the novel to pick up when you just can't take any more political attack ads on television; when you want to tell both presidential candidates their handlers to put a sock in it. It's a gleeful romp of a book, that imagines what might have happened had William Henry Taft drifted off into the gardens of the White House during the inauguration of his successful rival, Woodrow Wilson, and ... vanished! Flash forward a century, and Taft finds himself waking up in the muddy grounds of his former White House domain -- and into a different political reality altogether. Heller has tremendous fun with what Taft discovers -- pleasant and revolting -- about the 21st century. While some of the gotcha moments are very predictable -- Taft and TV! Taft and the Internet! -- that doesn't spoil the fun, as long as you're not wedded to the idea of thinking logically about it all. Just enjoy the ride.

Double Cross by Ben Macintyre: This author has done several other books focusing on spy intrigues during World War II, and this, the latest, is easily the best of the bunch. It's the story of a motley crew of double agents -- a Serbian playboy, a Peruvian heiress, a Polish nationalist, a Spanish chicken farmer -- worked with British intelligence to mislead the Germans about the timing and direction of the D-day invasion. Bits of this story -- especially about Agent Garbo, Juan Pujol -- have already come out, but this is a great story that covers the experiences of a host of other people, with all their foibles and eccentricities. Worth reading for the exploits of one man convinced that the secret to keeping secrets and deception involved pigeons. Yes, pigeons.

Trapeze by Simon Mawer: Yup, another tale of World War II spies -- this time of the fictional variety. I was delighted to learn from Mawer's publishers that he plans a sequel to this novel, as it ends with a tremendous cliffhanger. To some, it spoils the book; to me, it was the only thing he could do and not end up with a too-trite ending. In any event -- there have been lots and lots of novels around the adventures of the SOE, entrusted by Winston Churchill with the mission of setting Europe ablaze. One young woman goes off to France -- and finds her life becomes unexpectedly complicated. One of the most nailbiting and compulsively readable chase scenes ever, through the streets of Paris, features in this.

The Cranes Dance: by Meg Howrey: A paperback original from a novelist who I hope will go on to write more novels. Howrey takes us backstage at the ballet -- and it's not as glamorous as you might think. (Although neither is it quite as deranged and maniacal as the movie "Black Swan" would have you believe.) Kate Crane has damaged her neck but her pain can be quashed with Vicodin, which she pops steadily as she tells us the story of her life and that of her sister. Talented enough to be one of a tiny handful of soloists in a top ballet company in New York, Kate knows she'll never measure up to younger sister Gwen in sheer talent. But as the reader learns, it's not that that makes Kate uneasy and anxious in her relationship with Gwen, who, at the time the novel opens, may be physically absent from the company and the stage and the pages of the novel but who is vividly present as a part of Kate's life nonetheless. The ending doesn't do justice to what came before -- the last page or two is an odd anticlimax -- but for ballet fans or chick lit readers looking for something a bit different, this is just the ticket.

1222 by Anne Holt: Now, here's a novel that will chill you ... Anne Holt has set her mystery yarn in a snowbound resort hotel -- when a train is derailed by an avalanche, its passengers all must take refuge there, where they will be struck as the storm of the century swirls through. Hanne Wilhelmsen, a retired detective now confined to a wheelchair, is among their ranks, and when a murderer strikes, she has to step into the breach. It's the last thing Hanne wants -- she'd rather not interact with any of these strangers, most of whom seem to her to be keeping secrets, some large, some small. There's a mysterious passenger, a runaway teenager, a priest, a television personality... A kind of hommage to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, this Norwegian mystery made me reconsider my recent aversion to Scandicrime and eagerly await Anne Holt's next novel to be released here.

Any of the novels above should help you beat the heat, and if you haven't managed to read any of the following (among my top books of 2012 so far), the summer is an excellent chance to catch up. Published over the last year or so, each is an excellent "thumping good read".

1. Gillespie and I by Jane Harris: Shame on you if you've missed it!
2. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern: Fantastical, and imaginative. 
3. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller: It's not just about the Trojan War.

Mystery Monday: Cherchez le terroriste...

A woman walks into a bookstore...

Well, actually, I walked into Politics & Prose, the wonderful Washington DC book temple, last summer when I was promoting my own book (Chasing Goldman Sachs, which comes out in paperback tomorrow!) I was there to sign their stock, but happened to ask a staff member what he recommended in the way of new reading. This is something I rarely do, but I was curious to see what he'd suggest. And something remarkable happened: every single book that he selected or identified for me has been a big winner, in very disparate genres. He urged me to try The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, a book that I hadn't really heard about; he said that everyone he knew was enjoying The Passage by Justin Cronin. The former was one of my fave books of 2010; the latter was a thumping good read. And he recommended a new mystery series, a paperback entitled Bruno, Chief of Police, by Martin Walker. Walker, he said, is a Brit, living in France, and writing about a local cop. I kind of wrinkled my nose; it felt too much like Peter Mayles redux. Not so, the bookstore guru argued: it's a great mystery.

And it was. So good, in fact, that I promptly downloaded book #2 to my Kindle and ordered #3 from the UK. I've just received and read #4, The Crowded Grave, and it's easily the best of the bunch. Walker is akin to Mayles, in that he reveres the sense of community and the food. But he never tells stories about the quaint natives; he is writing about Bruno, who isn't a local in St. Denis but who, since leaving the army and becoming head of the national police in the town, has made himself part of the fabric. He goes hunting in the fall; helps with the grape harvest -- and finds creative solutions to local "crimes". Best of all, Walker doesn't over-romanticize the French countryside. The world of the fictional St. Denis, in the Perigord region, is very much of today. EU environmental regulations drive farmers crazy; there is illegal immigration, growing ethnic diversity and the gradual death of a way of life, and Walker builds those themes into his novels.

In The Crowded Grave, a local archaeological dig makes two stunning discoveries of corpses -- one, dating back millennia, may reshape the way the world thinks of early man, while the other is wearing a Swatch watch. But Bruno doesn't have time to spend too much time digging into the identity of the murdered man, dead for about twenty years. Some environmental activists are wreaking havoc on local farms by letting loose ducks and geese to protest the foie gras trade, and he is on call to help prepare the town to host a summit between French and Spanish ministers to debate how to curb an upsurge in Basque terrorism. Not to mention the fact that his English girlfriend is keeping him at a distance, his ex is back in town, and there's a new, green and Green magistrate who is making his life hell. Walker deftly manages all the disparate threads, and ably jumps between the scenes of life in St. Denis, including Bruno's birthday party and the description of Bruno cooking a navarin of lamb that made my mouth water and sent me scurrying to the web in search of a recipe of my own.

This is one of those novels that isn't quite a cozy -- the denouement, bringing Bruno face to face with a bunch of murderous figures, is violent and sad -- but one that doesn't revolve around violence or crime. It's a story of a man and his community; one that happens to involve solving mysteries large and small and sometimes creating them as well. (Who is responsible for the protest that ends with farmers dumping manure on the front steps of the gendarmerie??) Definitely recommended; 4.2 stars. Some fans of Louise Penny's want to move to the fictional Three Pines in Quebec; as for me, I'm definitely hoping to relocate to St. Denis.

Also noted: Just finished the most recent in another series, one with more ups and downs in it. But in The Blood Royal, the latest in her "Joe Sandilands" mystery series set in the 1920s, Barbara Cleverly takes some risks and switches her focus somewhat. The most recent books in this series were set in 1926 and told largely through the eyes of Sandilands himself; now the military policeman turned Scotland Yard top cop is back in 1922, and working with a feisty and intriguing woman police constable, Lily Wentworth, to solve a complex series of crimes that may be the acts of Irish terrorists, or something altogether more personal. We get more of the action from the point of view of Lily, which is fresh and interesting, although it is a bit odd after so many books focusing on Sandilands. Personally, I liked this new twist, and was glad to see an ending hinting that readers will see the duo in action again. True, the preface perhaps tips the author's hand too much -- what does it matter that a young Russian aristocrat has arrived safely in London after escaping the Bolsheviks? -- but I found I didn't mind. This feels like a particularly good Agatha Christie novel, but with more attention to character than poor Aggie ever managed (she seemed to be contented with quirks, like Hercule Poirot and his little grey cells and moustaches.) Recommended; 3.9 stars.

Mystery Monday: An old favorite, a series that has improved, and a new discovery

I'm constantly hunting for new mystery series to read, partly because (as I've discussed before in these cyber-pages) a number of old favorites start to disappoint after a certain number of books but mostly because it's always fun to discover a fresh voices. But my recent reading has reminded me that no matter how venerable a mystery series may be, it can still be great to read, while it can be a mistake to write off a series prematurely. But that hasn't stopped me from finding new books that I can heartily recommend, either...

These days, Ruth Rendell is probably better known for her novels of psychological suspense, written under both her own name and her nom de plume, Barbara Vine. But my favorites among her books remain the police procedurals featuring Reg Wexford, who made his debut waaay back in the early/mid 1960s. The Wexford books helped Rendell hone her craft and make her name, and along the way have benefited from her interest in psychological suspense, as her focus on characters and their motives makes these feel more like novels that happen to revolve around a crime rather than conventional police procedurals. Which is just fine by me, as I happen to relish character-driven mysteries.

 The Vault is Rendell's 23rd (gulp) mystery to feature Reg Wexford, who, if he aged as rapidly on the page as in "real" time, would be either a centenarian or dead by now. Happily for me, he has only just retired -- perhaps one Wexford year equates to five years of our time? -- but is having a hard time putting his investigative instincts to rest even as he is relishing being able to spend time with Dora, his wife, exploring London from a new home base in the carriage house on the grounds of his younger daughter's Hampstead home. So when four bodies are found buried in a former coal hole underneath a patio (which reminds Wexford of the vault of the title), he's on hand to serve as an unofficial investigator for the detectives in charge of the investigation in the way he once was. And that ambivalent role (Wexford mourns the day when the Poirots and Peter Wimseys of the world commanded respect from the authorities) makes this mystery feel fresh for readers who might have become weary following Wexford around his Kingsmarkham home.

The plot itself is nicely tangled, even if it takes a while for the suspense to mount. True, Rendell doesn't seem to be spending as much time as she once did on her Wexford novels -- the writing is less elegant and more slapdash than in prior books -- they still offer fans intriguing character studies and, in this case, a great view of today's London, from its history to its current problems, including illegal immigrants and sexual predators. Indeed, I ended up enjoying this as much for the insights into the way London and its inhabitants are changing and the people that Wexford encounters, such as the busybody arrogant former South African woman who looks down her nose at the hired help and the beleagured born-again detective whom he is assisting. This was a 4.1 star book for me, and definitely recommended for those who have been following the series; don't start reading about Wexford here, however, as you'll need some background to follow all the plot lines. (You'll also be missing out on 22 other very good mysteries!)

I was on the verge of giving up on another mystery series set in London, the Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James series that I first discovered on a supermarket shelf in Brooklyn (Key Food on Atlantic Avenue, to be precise...) back in the mid-1990s and have followed ever since. Unfortunately, some of Deborah Crombie's novels had become underwhelming, for want of a better phrase. Her two main characters had long since settled down in predictable domesticity, and some of the crimes they investigated failed to grab my attention for long. So it was only because of a whim, and an Amazon.co.uk gift certificate, that I decided to pick up a discount priced copy of No Mark Upon Her (already out on the other side of the Pond; due out in the US in February.)

The latest outing for Kincaid and James revolves around the mysterious death of a high-ranking police inspector and aspiring Olympic elite rower in Henley-on-Thames. It's nicely complex, and gives the reader insight an interesting range of characters, such as the damaged war veteran who is building a new life for himself by becoming involved in canine search and rescue and building rowing shells. Is the victim's death due to her professional work, including her research into sexual violence and possible police complicity? Is it a personal quarrel that got out of hand? Or are rowing world politics involved? Crombie navigates the myriad investigative threads with aplomb, and the result is what I think is the best book in this series to date. At heart, it's a fairly plain vanilla police procedural, but with extra attention to character, setting and all those things that help a book rise to the top of its genre, and with a decent dash of suspense thrown in; happily, however, Crombie never was tempted to take the plot past what seemed plausible. Definitely recommended; while you could read this as a standalone book, you're more likely to enjoy it if you've read some of Crombie's previous books.

And now for my new discovery... 

I had never heard of A.D. Scott until I was offered the chance to peruse an e-galley of her second book, A Double Death on the Black Isle. Once I started reading, I raced through it to reach the final page, unable to put it down until I figured out "whodunnit". The central character, Joanne Ross, is separated from her husband and working on a tiny weekly newspaper in a Highlands community in the mid/late 1950s, an era in which a woman could get a reputation for being "fast" simply by being in a hotel bar with work colleagues. When the novel opens, she and young reporter Rob are racing down to the harbor, where a trawler is on fire; after an altercation with the trawler's owner, Joanne ends up booting him into the water. Needless to say, when she travels to the Black Isle a few days later and discovers that a childhood friend has invited her to visit to witness her secret wedding to none other than the obnoxious fisherman (a mesalliance, as her friend is the daughter of the local laird...), Joanne is aghast. But then her knowledge of the Black Isle and its personalities becomes particularly relevant when two of its dislikeable residents are found dead on the same day, and Joanne must juggle her professional responsibilities, her natural curiosity, and her friendship and family relationships.

This isn't a flawless book. Scott is overly fond of throwing in Scots dialog (if ayes and forbyes and suchlike annoy you, best to steer clear...) into the story, and for those not familiar with the jargon, some kind of glossary would probably be helpful. The plot can become tangled at times, and it's a book to read more for its rich portrayal of the Highlands during the 1950s and the characters who inhabited it then than it is for the suspense. Still, I enjoyed it enough to dash out and order the first in the series, A Small Death in the Great Glen in hopes that I've struck another "must-read" series. (The new book, just out last week, is one that can easily be read on its own, once you are past the first few pages.) Time will tell, but the omens are good: 3.9 stars.

Mystery Monday: A Return to Three Pines

I should confess, immediately, that I'm not a member of the Three Pines cult. I wasn't one of the hundreds of fans who swarmed the publisher's booth at BEA (BookExpo) back in May in order to get their hands on an advance review copy of A Trick of the Light, the newest Louise Penny mystery featuring Quebec detective Armand Gamache and his team along with the quirky or downright eccentric residents of the fictional Three Pines, the township left off all the provincial maps. Nonetheless, I did request a copy of the ARC from Amazon's Vine program last month, mostly because I found Bury Your Dead, the last episode in Gamache's adventures, to be particularly appealing, perhaps because it was largely set in Quebec City and because it featured a mystery surrounding the province's founder, Samuel de Champlain, and the endless conflict between Anglophone and Francophone residents of Quebec.


The good news about the latest Three Pines mystery -- beyond the fact that fanatics now only have two weeks to wait until publication day -- is that rabid fans will find it contains all their favorite features. It is largely set in Three Pines itself; Ruth Zardo, the obnoxious and cynical poet, is as curmudgeonly as ever; Gabri, the plus-sized bistro owner, is as lovable as ever and back to his ebullient self after the resolution of a plot that stretched over the last two books. (I'm trying hard to avoid spoilers!) The big news is that Clara Morrow is finally about to have her day in the sun: when the novel opens, it's at her first solo art show, and everyone is raving about her portraits. But when the scene shifts from the Montreal museum's formal vernissage to the informal party back home in Three Pines, the joy quickly evaporates. Because early the next morning, as her husband returns from picking up papers that contain reviews of Clara's show, he stumbles over a body in their picture-perfect garden -- a body that turns out to belong to one of the few people in the world that Clara could describe as an enemy, or at least as being hostile to her.


It's actually amazing that anyone dares venture into Three Pines at all, really -- the mortality rate, on a per capita basis, must be off the charts by now. Happily, Louise Penny seems to have a sense of humor about setting so many crimes in a tiny village. Gamache and his chief assistant, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, have become so accustomed to the slow pace of life in Three Pines that they have stopped locking their car doors when they arrive to investigate a crime. After all, "people in Three Pines might occasionally take a life, but not a car." As with many of the victims in Louise Penny's mysteries, readers learn about Lillian, the alcoholic art critic who rejoiced not only in puncturing pomposity but in destroying the dreams of aspiring artists only after her death -- she's never really a character except in the eyes of others. The plot itself is a relatively straightforward one: was Lillian's mortal offense one that dates back to the days when she routinely skewered her targets in the press, or did her recent efforts to make amends for her misdeeds trigger an unexpected homicidal urge?

It took me about 100 pages to get into this novel to the extent that I really cared about the outcome, and even then, what ended up grabbing my attention and holding it wasn't the plot, per se, but rather the unfolding of the relationship of Clara and Peter Morrow, and of what is happening to Beauvoir, still trying to recover after the traumatic events chronicled in the previous book. That isn't too surprising, as what Penny is writing are less classical mystery novels, full of clues and red herrings, than novels about an assortment of individuals who are brought together by that murder and the events that lead up to it. In this case, the theme of the book seems to be envy, whether it's Peter's envy of Clara's newfound success, Lillian's envy of the artists she pillories in print, or Beauvoir's envy of the man who has what he has discovered he wants for himself. 

Three Pines afficionados will love this book; if you haven't read the series yet, this is not the place to start as appreciating it depends on your understanding of the Three Pines scenario and its inhabitants. I admit that I find Penny's depiction of the Three Pines gang to be, at best, two-dimensional and sometimes even one dimensional. Peter is envious; Clara is insecure, Ruth is bitter and angry but a softy at heart; Gabri is joyous and full of life, etc. etc. etc. Rarely do they act out of character or surprise me. And I admit to finding Penny's staccato prose style deeply annoying. A particularly egregious example comes when Beauvoir muses to himself about the nature of his job, in comparison to art criticism: "There was nothing subjective about it. No question of good and bad. It wasn’t an issue of perspective or nuance. No shading. Nothing to understand. It just was. Collect the facts. Put them in the right order. Find the killer." While that's an extreme example, at a few points in this book I found the writing -- and in particular incomplete sentences like these - so jarring that I had to put it down and start reading something else.

I admit that I can't understand why anyone would want to go and live in Three Pines (quite aside from its astonishing mortality rate) alongside people who almost always try to do the right thing, who almost without exception are charming or at least fascinating, who all seem wise, witty, interesting and perhaps just a bit too good to be true even as fictional characters. (Even the obnoxious ones are really kind at heart, or at least incredibly talented; the food is always wonderful; the landscape always beautiful, and the criminal elements and their families disappear from one book to the next with hardly a trace.) There's just too much wish fulfillment going on here! Still, while the charm of these books escapes me, the personality of Armand Gamache is more richly developed; that and his quiet insistence on being an ethical cop in an era where corruption and political agendas rule is something that I find very engaging indeed. It was Gamache and his struggle to see justice done that made the last novel in this series the best for me to date. But in this, the seventh book in the series, the focus has shifted back to the ensemble cast at Three Pines and business as usual.  While I found the author's focus on the conflicts in the art world that Clara is discovering for the first time at the age of 50 to be intriguing, they weren't compelling enough to make this more than a novel that is just OK; something that now that I have read, I will probably forget relatively rapidly. I imagine this will be a 5-start book for all Three Pines afficionados; for me, it was about 3.7 stars. True, I'm idly curious to see what happens next to Beavoir and Clara Morrow, but not enough to race out and next year's new book the day it appears. 

Still, wouldn't it be dull if we all loved the same stuff?  

Mystery Monday: Overlooked/Underrated Mystery Series To Check Out

I was griping to a friend recently that there are too many mystery writers who keep going and going -- just like little Energizer bunnies with word processing programs -- long past the time when they should have gracefully retired their characters and moved onto something new, different -- something fresh. Take Patricia Cornwell, whose tomes featuring Kay Scarpetta I stopped reading several volumes back; Anne Perry's William Monk and Thomas Pitt mystery series, that I invest in only irregularly; even Daniel Silva's novels (the catalyst for the gripe in question), which have begun to feel very "same-y" of late.

I began to ponder what makes a mystery series really long-lived, for readers beyond just the devoted coteries who would devour every novel written by an author in question even if it ended up winning the Bulwer-Lytton award for most overwrought opening sentence (and continued in the same vein for 850 pages.) My conclusion? It's all about the characters. I want more than just the same old characters, spouting familiar phrases and philosophies, dealing with different crimes and situations. That's what makes Elizabeth George's novels so readable to me still, even though she must have written nearly 20 of them by now. Her half-dozen or so main characters have changed dramatically over the decades; her secondary characters, those caught up in the mysteries she crafts, are equally convincing. True, not all of the books are as successful as her earlier ones and the task gets harder as she keeps going, but she's done a better job of keeping me an engaged and committed reader than, say, Deborah Crombie. True, Crombie's main characters are a major focus of the books, they have married and built a life together over the course of the series, but really, each book is about mixing together a bit of that story with a bit of a crime story, to a predictable formula. It's like realizing you're eating another chocolate cupcake when you're in the mood for something a tad more exciting.

Here's the most recent book in one of the series that I do think augurs to be sustainable over the longer haul -- and a list of some others to keep a keen eye on.

Two for Sorrow is the third in a series of mysteries by Nicola Upson featuring the imagined adventures of real-life crime novelist Josephine Tey (who wrote too few books, rather than too many...) It's been out in the UK for a few months, and hits bookstores here in the US tomorrow -- aka Tuesday, August 9th. And I'd suggest you make a foray to your nearest bookstore and pick up a copy, along with An Expert in Murder (Upson's debut) and Angel with Two Faces.

All three novels are set in the London of the mid-1930s and onward, and Upson explores the link between Josephine Tey's real life and imagines the kind of people she knew, convincingly weaving crime stories that deftly showcase links to her own crime novels. (In this one, for instance, there's a character called Miriam Sharpe, a clear reference to Marion Sharpe, the "heroine" of The Franchise Affair, as well as a plot twist related to identity, an amusing one to ponder in light of Tey's later novel, Brat Farrar, some of the plot elements bring to mind Miss Pym Disposes.)  Above all, however, these books -- in particular, her latest -- is a thumping good read, one that comments intelligently on the fate of the lost generation of women left husbandless by the killing fields of the World War I trenches, and how they crafted careers and alternative kinds of relationships for themselves.

Two for Sorrow begins with Upson imagining Tey's effort to imagine the hanging of two condemned baby farmers, found guilty of murdering infants. The 1903 case was a real one, and the fictional Tey has decided to build a story around the aftermath of the crime on those affected by it. But as she pursues her research, with the help of a former teacher, Celia Bannerman, who worked as a wardress at the prison and who guarded one of the women in the days leading up to the execution, she doesn't realize that another crime is brewing -- the brutal murder of a young woman who discovered more than she should have about an outwardly-respectable figure in society. And what is the connection between this most recent crime and the tragedy of the baby farmers, more than three decades earlier, besides the fact that the young woman had been in the same prison that had housed the condemned women many years later and for much more minor offenses?

Upson takes on the complicated plot and never drops a single strand of the narrative; nor does she do violence to either the historical narrative or the needs and wants of today's mystery reader. She reads between the lines of Josephine Tey's life and presents a plausible version of what she was like, of what she wanted, of how she might have approached the kind of mysteries that she wrote about in real life had she encountered them in reality. There's a tremendous amount of convincing detail here; the author not only writes well but has constructed an entire universe in which readers can immerse themselves. Here's one mystery series that I feel has been overlooked and deserves a lot more readers than it may be getting: the books are so good that I can't ever see them as being referred to as merely "the new Nicola Upson".

Some other suggestions of mystery series to peruse if you're bored with the "same old" writers and characters:

• Paul Johnston: Avoid his dreadful, gory thrillers (the most recent novels) and head off to find the four books featuring Quintilian Dalrymple in an eerie post-Apocalyptic and dystopic Edinburgh. Fascinating and imaginative; the books include Water of Death.
• Rennie Airth: The author of three widely-spaced books featuring John Madden, survivor of World War I and the trenches, set in 1919, the early 1930s, and the beginning of the end of World War II. Fabulous and complex stories; utterly chilling. Start with The Blood-Dimmed Tide.
• Check out two novels by a new Canadian author, Inger Ash Wolfe,  The Calling and The Taken. In both, Hazel Micallef finds that rural Ontario isn't such a peaceful place to work as a provincial police inspector...
• Jill Paton Walsh is best-known in mystery circles for her Lord Peter Wimsey sequels -- I enjoy these, but like her mysteries featuring Imogen Quy, a nurse at a Cambridge college, still more. These are midway between being cozy and being suspense, and combine the best of both worlds, along with offering some great writing. Try The Wyndham Case, A Piece of Justice, The Bad Quarto, etc.
• Hannah March is one nom de plume for an author who has also penned novels under the name of Jude Morgan. But the Hannah March novels are excellent, set in Georgian England, where the author's amateur sleuth deals with highwaymen and opera singers and meets a young Mozart. I'd rate most of these five stars, and really wish someone would bring them back into print!
• Ann Cleeves has penned a lot of mysteries, but she isn't that well known on this side of the Atlantic. I hope the Shetland Island quartet -- staring with Raven Black -- will change this. Read the four books in order; it's important! Really compelling.
• Kate Charles is now working on her second series of clerical mysteries (an English contrast to Julia Spencer-Fleming's novels featuring Rev. Claire Fergusson, for those who have discovered those v. good novels.) I'd recommend the first series, with books like A Drink of Deadly Wine, which will be back in print in mid-August. That said, the first two books in the Callie Anson series are well worth a look, as well. I'm putting my money where my mouth is; discovering the series is now on Kindle, I've just ordered 'em all.
• Elly Griffiths is a newer author whose first novel, The Crossing Places, was so good that I didn't want to wait for the newest one to be released here and paid an exorbitant amount to have it shipped from the UK. Ruth Galloway is independent, slightly curmudgeonly -- not a classical heroine at all. She loves archaelogy, and that's about it. But Griffiths has some fun with Ruth and her character when a more modern burial is discovered...
• David Downing has so far written four novels, all named after a different train station in Berlin, that take the reader through the rise and fall of the Third Reich through the eyes of an American journalist living there. In each of the novels, there's an element of a crime and a mystery, but they are as much historical and political novels as anything else. The series starts with Zoo Station; the newest, Lehrter Station, will be out in a few months' time. 
• A few other names to ponder: Jassy Mackenzie (previously mentioned here); Giles Blunt (a Canadian novelist with five books in his John Cardinal series); Joyce Holms (who wrote the Fizz & Buchanan novels, set in Edinburgh) and Colin Cotterill (whose Dr. Siri continues to bring a smile to my face.)

Something all of these authors have in common, looking back on this list, is that they keep their series manageable in length. Downing has an end planned to his, as does Cotterrill. Jill Paton Walsh has only authored a few Imogen Quy mysteries; there are four featuring Quintilian Dalrymple. In other cases, the series is too new for the author to have fallen in love with his/her own creation or to resort to desperate measures in terms of the plot.

So, tell us all: do you have a favorite "overlooked" mystery series or author you think we should all be reading? Please share!

Mystery Monday: "Gaza has a special relationship with the dead."

One of the newer mystery series that I have discovered and begun to read is that of British journalist Matt Beynon Rees, who draws on his experience covering the decades-long conflict in the Middle East to develop profoundly human stories about the toll this takes on the ordinary lives of ordinary citizens. His hero, Omar Yussef, is a schoolteacher in his mid-50s, shuns politics -- he is no hero; he simply wants to open the minds of the history students he teaches to possibilities beyond the black-and-white world of the West Bank. Above all, Omar Yussef deplores the cult of violence that has taken over his world -- in Rees's first book, The Collaborator of Bethlehem, Omar muses that "there was such violence even in his girls that it shocked him. No matter how he tried to liberate the minds of Dehaisha's children, there were always many others working still more diligently to enslave them."

I've just finished reading the second in this series of mystery novels, A Grave in Gaza, and I was delighted to find that it's just as rewarding as the first. The focus of both novels isn't the Israeli-Palestinian conflict itself, but rather the toll that conflict is taking on Palestinian society. In his debut, Omar Yussef struggles to rescue a former student and Palestinian Christian, from being lynched as an informer for the Israelis  -- even in the hope of unmasking a murderer and clearing the name of his friend, he can't approach the Israelis themselves. In the second novel, factionalism again rears its head from the very second that Omar Yussef and his UN colleagues enter Gaza on an inspection tour of UN-sponsored schools there. Immediately, they must embark on an effort to save a schoolteacher who has been arrested after he accused the local university of granting degrees in return for money to local policemen. As a sandstorm rages and one of his colleagues is kidnapped by one of the many guerilla factions in Gaza, Omar Yussef must find a way to understand the power struggles underway within Gaza, and their implications for his friends and colleagues. "There is no single, isolated crime in Gaza," a friend warns Omar Yussef. "Each one is linked to many others, you'll see. When you touch one of them, it sets off reverberations that will be heard by powerful people, ruthless people."

Rees does a superb job of delineating and distinguishing the tensions within the Palestinian community. Nor does he shy away from violence or even tragedy, all of which are too much part of the real backdrop in which his fictional characters live; still, even as the body counts climb in the novels, there's an almost bitter awareness that in the circumstances, any other outcome would be unrealistic. Omar Yussef may see himself as a coward -- once imprisoned for his political views in Jordan, he has shied away from any activism since then, fearing a return to jail or torture -- but however fallible he may be, he ends up taking personal risks in order to live up to his sense of himself as being a voice of reason and a human being.

This may not be a mystery series to read if you happen to have very strong views on the state of affairs in the Middle East, regardless of which side you're on: Rees makes clear in his non-fiction book, Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide and Fear in the Middle East (published in 2004) that he views the real culprits as those extremists willing and even eager to annihilate opposing points of view. That's the philosophy that serves as the basis for this series of mysteries and for Omar Yussef's rather quixotic efforts to bring a measure of justice, however small, to the unjust society in which he must live. He may fail in some of his efforts, but at least he tries. The result, for mystery fans, is another good series; I'm hoping to read the third and fourth books sometime before the end of the year.

Mystery Monday: Quirky Crime in Thailand

Colin Cotterill's series of mysteries featuring Dr. Siri, the only coroner left in Laos after the 1975 victory of the Communist Pathet Lao, have been ranked among my favorite crime sagas since I began reading them a few years ago. With seven books out in that series (starting with The Coroner's Lunch) and an eighth due out early in the new year, Cotterill has branched out with Killed at the Whim of a Hat (the title is drawn from one of George W. Bush's malapropisms), which feels as if it might be the beginning of a new series?

Cotterill isn't venturing too far, geographically -- moving from Laos to the southern coast of Thailand. But the characters and settings actually feel far more exotic than in the Dr. Siri books, as Cotterill has assembled possibly the quirkiest cast of characters imaginable, guaranteed to make the sober Thai tourist authorities recoil in dismay. At the heart of it all is Jimm, a former crime reporter in her 30s, who has relocated with her family to a tiny fishing coast after her mother spontaneously decides to buy the dilapidated beachfront establishment known as the "Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant." Jimm, on the verge of becoming the top crime reporter in the northern city of Chiang Mai and now trapped hundreds of miles away, learning how to gut fish from a YouTube video, while her bodybuilder brother Arny is stuck rolling treetrunks up and down the beach (there's no gym nearby) and her elder transgender sister, Sissi, is living the life of a recluse back in Chiang Mai, making money off Internet scams.

Then, a miracle happens. Or rather, back-to-back miracles, at least in Jimm's view: a local farmer unearths a buried Volkswagen van containing two skeletons, and a local Buddhist abbot is murdered - and found with a bizarre orange hat on his head. Great stories for Jimm -- and a puzzle for her to solve, with the help of a very camp gay Thai policeman who may prove to be sharper than he first appears.

This was a fun and entertaining romp of a mystery, although the solution the crime turns out to be rather improbable. So, too, are some of the adventures that Granddad Jah (confined to the traffic police until he retired because of his refusal to take bribes) gets up to when he encounters another incorruptible ex-cop, or Jimm's mother, who goes out prowling with rat poison after dark. But a good part of the fun is just to hop on board and enjoy the ride. Cotterill himself moved from Chiang Mai to southern Thailand a few years ago and knows the country that he's writing about; he has a great eye for the detail the makes it all "click" into place as a convincing tale. Recommended; despite the body discoveries, at heart, this is more of a "cozy" crime series than a police procedural, with most of the bad guys being corrupt or stupid rather than vicious and evil. A fun weekend read; 3.9 stars. The Dr. Siri books are better still; just as much of a sense of time and place, but with more intriguing and darker plots tied to then-current events in Indochina.