How to Kill a Museum

Fire Engine Dead [by] Sheila Connolly

New York; Berkley Prime Crime [2012]

978-0-425-24670-2; $7.99

It’s a luncheon of the Greater Philadelphia Grantmaking Coalition, and Nell Pratt, President of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society, and an assistant have just sat down to eat with a tableful of colleagues, when a staffer from the Philadelphia Fireman’s Museum receives a phone call on her cell.  The color drains from her face as she receives the news.  From another place in the room, a rather colorless man is hurrying towards an exit.  “He must be her boss,” thinks Nell, wondering what happened. 

That afternoon she finds out:  the warehouse where the collection from the Fireman’s Museum, currently being renovated, has been stored, has, ironically, burned.  No one knows the extent of the damage yet – only that it is substantial. The Museum’s director, Peter Ingersoll, comes to the Society, hoping that its records will give some idea of the scope of the Museum’s loss.  Nell puts her staff to work on it. 

One of her Board members, Marty Terwilliger, is very anxious to know anything about the fire because it was her grandfather who willed to the Fireman’s Museum the crown of its collection, an 1825 horse-drawn fire engine, painted and gilded, in excellent condition.  Then Marty’s cousin, FBI agent James Morrison invites her to become part of the investigation by picking her brain about museums and how they run, what she knows about the players involved, etc.

The staff does their thing, providing Nell with lots of documents about the Fireman’s Museum, including some photos – even one of the fire engine.  When the newspaper reports on the fire, it describes the devastating extent of the loss, including the charred remains of the fire engine.  Nell is the first to notice that the shape of the fire engine in the Philadelphia Inquirer is not the same as that of the Terwilliger fire engine in the Society’s picture.  She is back on the phone to James, who agrees, as does Marty, who tears into Nell’s office soon after Nell’s discovery.  Oddly, when Nell turns the materials over to Peter, he makes no comment about what seems to the others to be as obvious as the proverbial nose on the face!  What is going on here?

But Nell has a Society to run, and gets caught up in hiring two new employees, who are slated to work on the Terwilliger Collection, which is moved out of the fireproof vault so that it can be worked on.  Then James throws a spike into the plans – the FBI has held as evidence a large collection of papers, including documents from Nell’s Society, as well as other museums and institutions, and some materials with no provenance. The Bureau is now done with them, and 167 boxes are sent to the Society.  Suddenly the trio which was working on the Terwilliger Collection is now trying to figure out what all of the 167 boxes contain, and where it belongs.  It is possible that the Society may even get some of the unclaimed papers.  The Bureau will also pay for the work, which is really a boon for a strapped nonprofit.

Meanwhile, James and the police are trying to find out what they can about the string of warehouse fires, which includes the one that took down the Fireman’s Museum collection, and about the people who work at that Museum.  Nell keeps seeing Peter, who has grown more pale and sickly-looking.  She is concerned about him, and when the young woman she’d sat with at the luncheon suggests that she talk with Peter, she jumps at the chance.

Peter comes over after hours, when it is just the two of them at the Society. He is so distraught by the events concerning his museum, he explains to Nell.  Then they hear a crash, indicating a basement window breaking, and an armed and dangerous museum employee makes his presence known.  His plan:  to shoot Nell, to position the gun, as if fired by Peter, who will be overcome by his asthma in the fire that will be set in the Society’s Reference Room.  The criminals will go free, and they will sell the fire engine for a pretty penny.

Feisty Nell turns the tables on him, testing the Society’s fire-suppression system for the first time ever.  One criminal dies, the other is captured, and Nell and James, who have been doing a “we don’t really want to talk about how we’re attracted to each other, but isn’t it grand” waltz, actually do talk about it and it is wonderful.  Life goes on, with a little more honesty and awareness, and a positive working togetherness.  All is well in this great cozy.  Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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This is a Library book.



Mysterious Writing





Skeleton Letters [by] Laura Childs

New York; Berkley Prime Crime [2011]

978-0-425-24389-3; $25.95

Skeleton Letters refers to a kind of basic lettering that Carmela Bertrand teaches to her customers and friends in her New Orleans Scrapbooking Store, Memory Mine.  It is this store that a group of the Crescent City’s women go to for community.  In the first scene, several of these friends are at nearby St. Tristan’s Church when a cloaked figure rushes in, knocking over one of the ladies with a statue of St. Sebastian, which kills her, and makes off with the displayed crucifix, which may have belonged to the church’s founder, Père Etienne, and which was found during an archaeological dig under the church.

Carmela’s main squeeze, Detective Edgar Babcock catches the case, and warns Carmela not to get involved – he knows that she has snooped in the past, and does not want her to continue to do so.  Bu then, she caves in to the pleas of the dead woman’s dear friend Baby, who is also one of her regulars, and the die is cast.

You’d think Carmela wouldn’t have time, what with running her shop and all of the other things she has to do.  The dead woman was going to have her house decorated for the annual Holiday Tour of homes, but that can’t happen now, and Baby asks Carmela to spiffy up the home she used to have with her ex-husband in the Garden District, and which she won in the settlement, for the Tour.  She has also been working on a wine-tasting for a friend, which goes off without a hitch, except that the nemesis of her friend Ava, a haughty socialite named Rain Monroe, keeps turning up to drip venom – she’d already blackballed Ava at church, where she volunteers, because Ava runs a Voodoo-based gift shop. Carmela also starts advising a friend of one of the scrapbookers, who trying to erite a mystery novel based on the death of their friend.

Ava and Carmela visit a new restaurant, and Ava suddenly becomes the owner’s “muse” for the Voodoo Couture line of clothing he has a stake in.  And Carmela ends up offering to redo his menu design.  They also volunteer at a soup kitchen they’ve gone to to gather clues – they met the man who runs it when exploring the church after the murder.  He sends them to a cult that meets outside of town, where they are summarily booted out.  When they return to the soup kitchen, they find out that the man has also been murdered. And Carmela is listed by a nosy reporter as having been an eyewitness at both of the murders.  Soon Carmela and Ava are running from a car driven by a maniac who seems out to kill them.

It seems wise to get out of town, so Carmela borrows her ex-husband’s keys to his hunting cabin on one of the bayous.  There, during a horrible lightening storm, they are stalked by the killer.  The cavalry comes over the hill to save the day, but not until after their lives are put at risk and exciting feats of derring-do are performed.

This is a fun cozy with an intrepid heroine and fun sidekicks.  Also some tips on scrapbooking and delicious-sounding recipes. Recommended. ~ lss-r

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This is a library book.

Trials and Tribulations

The Suspect [by] John Lescroart

[New York] Dutton [2007]

978-0-525-94998-5 $26.95

Stuart Gorman is a 50-year-old writer of outdoor books about fishing and rambling in the wilderness.  When we first see him, he is floating on a lake in the Sierra with a fly rod across his lap.  But he is not finding the peace he seeks.  He has just flown up the highway from San Francisco, where he has had a terrible fight with his headstrong, brilliant, difficult, still-pretty orthopedic surgeon wife, Dr. Caryn Dryden.  She wants a divorce.

Their marriage had definitely cooled a long time ago.  They started out as real soul-mates, and their lives complemented one another.  He was supportive as she went to med school, running the household and supporting them with two jobs.  But the birth of Kymberly, their high-maintenance daughter, changed the dynamics of their life together.  They grew apart as Caryn got more and more involved in her high-powered career.  Now she was involved in creating a new office with two business partners, she was borrowing money and making investments, and she had invented a new product for total hip replacement:  the Dryden Socket, which had passed the FDA tests and studies, but now, on the brink of it becoming FDA-approved, there were glitches she had to deal with.  She had no time for a husband or a daughter, and, now that Kym was off at college, there was no reason to stay together.

Stuart had slammed out of the house, gotten a speeding ticket, and consumed most of a quart bottle of vodka he’d found in the cabin’s freezer.  When he woke up this morning, he found he’d trashed the cabin.  He tried to work his anger out in exercise, but it just kept building.  Finally he decided he would go home and have it out with her.  Meanwhile, at the same lake, a 47-year-old attorney from San Francsco, Gina Roake, notices the solitary fisherman, who looked so peaceful, as she catches and cooks a rainbow trout, and makes camp for the night.  Little does she know that she will be meeting the fisherman soon, when Stuart’s State Assemblyman friend Jedd Conley recommends her to defend him.

But I’m getting ahead of the story – why does Stuart need defending.  He drives back to San Francisco to have it out with his wife, and he can’t find her at first. She’s not in bed, or the bathroom.  She’s not working or in any other part of the house.  He finally finds her in the hot tub.  He calls the police, then pulls her out of the tub and tries CPR, until the cops arrive and call him off – even from where they’re standing, they can see that rigor has already set in.  Then Inspector Sergeant Devin Juhle questions him.  Without an attorney present, he freewheels his story, and says some things he maybe should not have, but he is still thinking of himself as innocent, and has no idea that, to Juhle, he sounds guilty, guilty, guilty.

And that’s what he tells the group of lawyers at lunch at the Chinese-Greek restaurant across from the Hall of Justice.  This group includes Gina Roake.  That’s when she hears about the case for the first time. 

Later that day, she is introduced to Stuart by their mutual friend Jedd and she becomes his attorney.  He tells her he is innocent, and she tries to tell him that the cops and DA are gunning for him as if he were guilty, so he has think more defensively than he has been – this includes not spouting off whatever comes into his head, but to be more circumspect about what he says and does.  Appearances, in this case, may speak louder than reality.

The police continue to do their job, interviewing neighbors of the Gorman/Dryden household, including a girlfriend of Kym’s, who saw Stuart’s car enter the garage at the appropriate time to be guilty. She said she knew the car and had ridden in it many times.  Other neighbors talk about the fights the parents had.  Stuart confides to Gina that the fights were actually between Kym and him.  Kym has bipolar disorder, and in her manic phase tends to pick fights with her parents.  The parents decided long ago that they would band together to keep their daughter’s illness from the public.

Kym, who has come back from Oregon, is very distraught about the fact that her father is accused of her mother’s killing.  She knows he didn’t do it, and leans on the eyewitness to change her story.  She is now staying with her mother’s sister, who appears to the public to be an item with Stuart, which gets tongues wagging around town.

Stuart, trying to find other people who might have had it in for his wife, tells the cops and Gina about someone who calls himself “Thou Shalt Not Kill” or “TSNK,” who has sent him threatening e-mails.  The police blow it off.

Stuart, still not getting the seriousness of the situation he’s in, goes down the peninsula in his truck, with stolen plates (not a cool move), armed with a handgun (also not cool), to interview people involved with his wife’s businesses – the man financing her new ventures, the two men she’s partnered with to start a new practice, and the people involved with the production of her Dryden Socket.  He collects some good information, but during the time he’s been gone, the detective and the DA make their case.  The fact that he has fled has zoomed Stuart to the top of the suspects list (even though there is really no list – just him) and a warrant for his arrest has been issued.

Stuart, who doesn’t know this yet, has registered in a motel in San Mateo and calls Gina.  She goes down to see him, and makes the mistake of calling Juhle on her cell phone to tell him that she will be bringing him in at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow.  Juhle follows the cell call and takes him into custody, betraying both Gina and Stuart.  Stuart ends up in jail, where he didn’t want to be.

The trial goes speedily on, with some good jabs early on by Gina, and then some miserable failures as it becomes clear to all who can see it that the DA, the cops, and even the judge are pretty well convinced of Stuart’s guilt. When Kym’s friend from across the street takes the stand, her mother, knowing that Kym had threatened her daughter, and believing that the threat came from Stuart, attacks him with her cane.  This causes there to be a hiatus in the case, which allows Gina to attempt something that will, hopefully, unmask the killer.

Realizing that some of the power players in the background were banking on her inexperience – this was her first murder trial, Gina is galvanized to do the best she can, to dedicate herself to her profession as she has not done since her fiancé, one of the principals in her own firm, died.  The “Thou Shalt Not Kill” suspect makes himself known, and major changes happen in the lives of the major players.  A ripping good yarn from a master storyteller.  Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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This is a book from my local library.





A Twisted Vine of Secrets

Deadly Offer [by] Vicki Doudera

Midnight Ink; Woodbury, MN [2012]

978-0-7387-1980-1; $14.95

Darby Farr, a real estate broker in a small community near San Diego, is helping her neighbor Doug pack.  He has met a wonderful woman online – she lives in Hawaii, close to the beach, and is a surfer, with a small shop to keep her solvent.  Doug is smitten, even though he has not yet met her, and he is storing everything and getting ready to put his house on the market.  He figures this is his one big chance at a great love.

Meanwhile, in the northern part of the state, Selena Thompson, a lovely mid-fortyish woman, who owns a small vineyard in the Wine Country, has just expired mysteriously in her hot tub.  The next morning, her principal employee, her winemaker, Dan, discovers her dead body and reports her demise.  Her brothers are called.

Darby’s very capable assistant, whom she calls E.T., receives a phone call.  His little sister has died.  His younger brother Carlos is a basket case in San Francisco, and is waiting for his arrival to go to the winery where their sister died.  E.T. is completely overcome, in no condition to drive, and he has a complete a total fear of flying.  Obviously he needs help, and Darby finds herself driving him to San Francisco to pick up his brother, and then driving the two of them to the vineyard.

They are welcomed, with neighbors and other vineyard owners coming to pay their respects.  They learn that Selena had 3 viable bidders for the sale of her little winery.  One is the extremely large and important vineyard next, which can expand its land and use the little orchard of olive trees to great advantage.  Another is a yoga instructor, who wishes to make a yoga retreat out of the place – he also has had past dealings with Selena, which have a rather bad taste to them.  The third is a woman who has a very deep pocket backing her.  All claim that Selena had promised them the sale.  All claim that everything is aboveboard, but there are intense undercurrents in all of the dealings the brothers have with the valley’s inhabitants, which Darby, as an outsider, is able to observe. There are bribes and other chicanery. Dan, Selena’s winemaker, is also interested in the winery, but he cannot afford the price tag.

Everyone has only the best to say about Selena, yet someone sabotages the antifrost spraying system.  They rush out in the middle of the night to put it back together to save the crop, and they learn that there have been other acts of sabotage against the winery.  None has been too serious, and all were averted, but, obviously there are things going on that the newcomers do not understand.

Dan’s teenage daughter, in a ploy to get attention, and to get a souvenir of her friend Selena, takes the bottle of wine that was the last that Selena was drinking when she died, and Darby tastes the wine.  It tastes off.  Dan agrees.  They take the bottle to the police, who find out that one of the medicines that Selena was taking for her illness (which she had really kept under wraps) – a medication that many people in the valley take, was in the bottle, and that she was probably murdered. A final episode of sabotage unveils one of the enemies – the winemaker at the big family vineyard next door – he dies in the fire that he sets in one of the buildings.

Both Darby and the teenager do some sleuthing, unbeknownst to each other.  Several others also slink around, spying, dropping clues, and behaving badly.  Secrets abound in the valley, and it seems like many are being uncovered, distorted, and recalled.  And to pull Darby, and her drop-in boyfriend Miles, from the issues at the winery, are the issues around Doug’s trip to Hawaii.  They have listed his house, and there is some interest, but they cannot find him – he has disappeared.

When the patriarch of the family next door dies, things suddenly escalate.  Some players seem to tip their hands, but some family members are playing the parts of other family members.  A few red herrings crawl across the road and are nabbed, but it takes an extremely dangerous scene underground for all of the twisted vines to come together, almost cutting the lives of Darby and another player on her side short.

This is a very effective mystery, with lots of action in all directions and lots of suspense.  You really care about most of the characters, and it’s not always easy to see what the best course is to take for the good of the vineyard and the honoring of Selena’s life and her wishes, but it all works out in the end, order is restored, and the brothers and Darby, as well as her neighbor, all get back to what they are meant to do.  Highly recommended. ~ lss-r



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This is my own book.



Trials of a Cat Sitter



The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas [by] Blaize Clement

New York; Thomas Dunne Books [2011]

978-0-312-64313-3 ; $24.99

Dixie Hemingway [no relation to the more famous Floridian] used to be a sheriff’s deputy, until her husband, also a deputy, and little girl were killed in a pointless accident.  Then she retreated to a simpler line of work: pet sitting.  She has a schedule of dogs, cats, and birds she visits, feeds, plays with, exercises, and picks up after.  There are a number of regulars, plus some who are added from time to time, when the occasion warrants it.  Thus it was with Cupcake and Jancey Trillin, who were vacationing in Italy.  Cupcake is one of those famous faces you see around the barrier islands of Florida – he was an immovable inside linebacker for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

So the day in question, Dixie punches in the code to the gated community of Hidden Shores, where the Trillins live, and drives to their home to take care of Elvis and Lucy, their cats.  As she opens the door, a practically naked woman spears in the doorway, saying she is Cupcake’s wife.  Knowing that she is not, Dixie closes the door and calls Cupcake in Italy.  He tells her to call the cops and get rid of the woman, who calls herself Briana.  He says he doesn’t know her, but he has been stalked, and this sounds like another one.  Get her out of the house, but not arrested – committed, maybe – she sounds crazy. Dixie calls 911, and waits for the patrol car to arrive.

Briana is gone, but another woman is lying in the living room, bleeding out.  No one knows who she is.  Backup and techs are called, plus an ambulance for the body.  Dixie is allowed to take the cats out, which she does, including the piece of paper that Elvis was carrying – it’s what he does – Elvis has a paper fetish.  She takes them to a boarding house for cats, and then goes back to her routine.  Then she detects a convertible Jaguar behind her.  At a stop light, the occupant of the car jumps out and into Dixie’s Bronco.  It’s Briana, asking for help.

Questioning herself, she agrees to meet Briana later, which she does.  She manages to get Briana a lawyer and he gets her to turn herself in.  She, of course, knows nothing of the dead woman.  Briana tells Dixie about her childhood, back in the bayou country of southern Louisiana, when she and Cupcake used to burgle houses for stuff to sell.  Cupcake, she said, did it to get a pair of Nikes.  She did it to live, before she went to New Orleans, turned tricks, and was discovered and made into a supermodel with only one name.

Dixie returns to her pet sitting chores, but gets off course, when she sees a man driving Briana’s car.  She sees where he goes – to a very rich private street.  The next day the detective in charge of the case meets her at the diner, where she has breakfast after her early morning pet chores.  He listens to her story, and then demands to know the rest of the story.  She tells him she has told him all she knows, except that she found out where Briana lives, because she’d followed the Jag.

Dixie finds out that the CSI’s are done with the Trillins’ house, so she hires someone to clean up and books them a hotel room until they can get back into their home.  She calls The Trillins, who are in Charlotte, waiting for a flight to Sarasota.  She tells them she will pick them up.  She opens her door to go to the airport, and is clobbered.  The pain is exquisite, and, just before she passes out, she realizes that there are several men, speaking some language she doesn’t recognize, and they are very accomplished at torture.  She knows she won’t look too bad, but boy, does she hurt!  She wakes up when her phone rings – Cupcake and Jancey are in the Sarasota airport, wondering where she is.

The next day the Trillins get to go home, where they discover a pair of Nikes in Cupcake’s size, sitting on the bed in the master bedroom.  None of them have ever seen them before, and they assume that Briana left them.  The detective comes to visit them.  He discovers the Nikes are fakes.

Upset that the detective has investigated all of them, Dixie stops by the house where Briana’s car got parked.  The Oriental couple there is husband and wife, Peter and Lena.  They say that the men who beat Dixie are their enemies, who want to take over their business, which is making knockoff designer clothing and accessories and selling them to upscale shops in the area, who sell them to tourists, who will pay big bucks for them because they don’t know the difference.  When Dixie goes back to her pet sitting, Briana pays her a visit, and she learns that the bad guys were looking for a list of shops that take the knockoff clothing.  She also tells her that the dead woman was an F.B.I. agent.

The final scenes help to discover where the list of shops that everyone wants is, who killed the F.B.I. agent, who Briana really was, and brings Dixie close to death yet another time.  Finally, the death-knell seems to sound on Dixie’s now more off-than on love affair with Detective Guidry, who received an offer he couldn’t refuse in New Orleans.  She decides, for the second time, not to follow him.  There are some possibilities opening up for her closer to home.

Author Blaize Clement died July 20 of last year.  This will not be the end of Dixie Hemingway, though, for her son John will continue to the write her stories – there are at least 2 planned, and maybe more.  She is such a good character, and the people who are her friends, family, and clients are all such great folks.  I hope this cozy series continues.

Recommended.  ~ lss-r

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The book belongs to my public library.



Way Down Yonder in the Indian Nation

The American Café [by] Sara Sue Hoklotubbe

Tucson; The University of Arizona Press [2011]

978-0-8165-2922-3; $16.00

When Sadie Walela decides to give up her banking job in order to fulfill her
childhood dream of owning a restaurant, she has no idea that murder will be on the menu.  She goes down to the restaurant she has just purchased from Goldie Ray, to wait for a painter to put the new name on the window – “The American Café” – just like on her great-aunt Vera’s restaurant in the 40’s. She is threatened with a shotgun by the town’s crazy lady, and saved only because a group of sawmill workers are there on break (They all have keys!)  

Then she finds out that Goldie, who was to help her get started, is dead. And she was really looking forward to getting to know Goldie, too! Rather depressed, she goes home.  Meanwhile, the crazy lady finds herself a good rock, the police check the crime scene, finding the busted window, and the newest cop on the two-man force meets the crazy lady’s son, visiting from Arkansas.

The crazy lady is taken into custody after she confesses at church to shooting Goldie, and there in jail she commits suicide. Sadie gets help at the diner because Goldie’s sister Emma comes calling, looking for Goldie. She is angry that an Indian woman has bought Goldie out, because she’d hoped to run the diner, but she makes the best of it, and starts to cook for Sadie.  She is excellent.  Then the half-Indian girl Emma had adopted, Rosalee, starts work as a waitress/cashier.  Rosalee is on a mission to find her birth parents, much to Emma’s disgust.

Meanwhile, the manager of the local bank asks Sadie to take his place for 2 days.  She is reluctant to do so, but feels she owes him.  She discovers that the bank’s one teller, Polly, is skimming money from her cash drawer.  That night, Sadie is locked in the vault, and it is only because the new deputy, Lance, is expecting her to join him elsewhere, that he traces her to the bank and gets her out.  The next night, she is knocked out, after Polly quits in a snit.

Lance is shot helping a friend of his at a drug bust, and the shell matches the one that killed Goldie. Things move very fast, then, with Sadie almost killed by Goldie’s murderer, Rosalee finding her birth parents, and a surviving relative, and the Café changing hands.  While striving to untangle relationships and old family secrets, Sadie ends up unraveling far more than a murder.

This is an absorbing mystery that draws the reader into the rich history, culture and landscape of Cherokee Country. The American Café has all of the twists and turns expected in a first-rate mystery, but that’s only part of its charm. A gifted story teller, Sara Hoklotubbe writes of family, the fragile ties that bind people together, and the links to the past that are always just below the surface of things. Compassionate and wonderful! Highly recommended! ~ lss-r

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This is my own book.

Just Your Average Corpse

The Girl Next Door [by] Brad Parks

New York; Minotaur Books [2012]

978-0-312-66768-9; $24.99

Veteran reporter Carter Ross is reading the obituaries from the Newark Eagle-Examiner, his own paper, which is almost due for its own obituary, when he discovers the name of Nancy Marino.  Nancy was a 42-year-old waitress, who also had one of the biggest paper routes in the area for the same paper. She was a shop steward for the Union.  Carter sees her as a perfect subject for a personal-interest story. 

He attends the wake.  Other attendees include the publisher of the newspaper, Gary Jackman, known to his employees as “Jackass,” a very properly-dressed man, who seems to be having a confrontation with a short chunky man with a hideous comb-over, and the Union’s  executive director, Jim McNabb, with whom Carter talks about Nancy. He also talks to Nancy’s sisters, one of whom shows him an article from the paper, which says Nancy was the victim of a hit-and-run, a fact not in her obituary.  One of the sisters claims it was not an accident.

Later his editor, and sometime girlfriend, Tina, orders him to the symphony with her.  There they see Jackman again, and he is being a real jackass – he is totally smashed, and knocks people around and culminates his bad behavior by vomiting on the people around him.  Carter gets a small spark of an idea:  perhaps it was Jackman who ran down Nancy…

Carter goes to check out the scene of the crime, having learned from the police that they couldn’t find anything.  He suspects that they didn’t interview one family, which a neighbor tells him are Mexican illegals.  He calls a Spanish-speaking reporter to translate for him, and learns that the wife and mother saw the whole thing – Nancy was intentionally run over by a black SUV.

In one of the funniest scenes in the book – Carter has a great sense of wise-cracking humor – Tina sends him and their intern Kevin Lunkford, nicknamed “Lunky,” to do a story about a bear running loose in the city.  They find the bear, and Carter is chased by it.  Worn out, he leaves Lunky to interview people and then write up the story.  The bear is up a tree when Carter leaves – it should be a piece of cake!

Carter does more detecting, finding out that one of the diners where Nancy had worked has a lovely young hostess, who is the daughter of the owner, whom Carter had seen at the wake with Jackman – the bad comb-over.  When he tries to ask questions of this man, he gets thrown out of the diner.  But he does have some information from the daughter and Nancy’s best friend, a waitress named Jen.  He learns something – but not enough, from the National Labor Relations Board representative who visited both McNabb and the diner owner.  And McNabb clues him into some of his thoughts that Jackman maybe really was the culprit, considering what they discussed at a bar together the night before Nancy died.

When Carter gets back to the Eagle-Examiner offices, he discovers he’s in hot water for leaving Lunky behind.  Sure, Lunky was writing the story.  The angry photographer shows Carter the only photograph he could get, which is of the bear, but Lunky is carrying it – Carter is amazed.  It’s a two hundred-pound bear, but then Lunky was a linebacker once.  The story is even worse – Lunky is writing a treatise on bears in literature, not a news report, and he named the bear Ben after his favorite childhood book, Gentle Ben.

Carter saves Lunky’s story, but he goes off the rails trying to find out where Jackman was the night before Nancy’s death, making himself seem questionable to Jackman’s fleet of secretaries, which gets him suspended from the paper.  To celebrate, he goes to Jackman’s house to see if there’s a black SUV in the garage.  He looks through a cat door, and gets his head stuck, which gets him discovered by the Jackmans, who have him arrested.

After he gets out of jail, he nearly gets himself and the daughter of the diner owner killed by the same hit-and-run SUV.  Things go very fast after that, and he learns that his whole idea of the murder is wrong, very wrong.  The motive is wrong.  The culprit is wrong.  And he’s going to die because he was wrong.  But, with the help of his friends – the Spanish-speaking reporter, Editor Tina, members of his baseball team, and, especially Lunky, he is rescued and the mystery is solved.

Carter is a fresh new voice in the annals of amateur sleuths, with a fine sense of both the funny and the ethical, with a really good dollop of iconoclasm.  This is the third book in the series, and, hopefully there will be many more.  Go get ‘em, Carter!  You, too, Brad! Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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This is a library book.

Conspiracy!



A Conspiracy of Paper [by] David Liss
New York; Ballantine Books [2000] 
0804119120 ; $14.00

Benjamin Weaver, a Jew of Portuguese extraction living in London, has made his name as celebrated Prizefighter, “The Lion of Judah,” until he is brought down by a rival, with a bone-shattering injury that ends his career.  He spends a brief time as a criminal:  burglar, highway robber, and cutpurse, until he finds a slightly more savory living as an independent “protector, guardian, bailiff, constable-for-hire, and thief-taker.”  The London of 1719, when Ben starts out on his new career, is a stew of criminal life, with good men easily robbed on the streets, or by prostitutes and their ruffian cohorts, and businessmen pay protection to their regulators in order to avoid trumped-up charges.  The stench of the sewers is ripe and the skullduggery is riper in the 18^th Century London portrayed here by author David Liss, in the half-century before the first police force, the Bow Street Runners, is founded by Magistrate Sir John Fielding (who isn’t yet born until 2 years after this book begins.)  However, it also means that outsider Ben can pretty much go wherever he wants.

When an arrogant client engages Weaver to investigate his father’s murder, but seems to have withheld vital information, Ben finds himself embroiled in a multitude of confusing and dangerous intrigues, with furtive meetings and narrow escapes aplenty.  This starts with Ben’s suspicions about his own father’s “accidental” death, and his discovery of the complex secret life of his own cousin, the beautiful and dangerous Miriam.  The plot expands to embrace the underworld ruled by the legendary first crime lord, Jonathan Wild (a real person, whose life is somewhat manipulated by the author to fit the plot), and the machinations of “stock-jobbing” as they relate to the (subsequently infamous) South Sea Company, suspected of masterminding a scheme in which “money in England is replaced with the promise of money.”

Ben is a fearless man of action, a resentful ethnic alien in a world that despises him.  But his criminal past gives him the street smarts to maintain his own in the tricky world around him, and to cater to the well-to-do, who depend on his services to maintain their own well-being.  In his journey to the center of the mystery, Ben revisits his own roots, reconnecting with a culture that is singularly isolated from Christian London, as he simultaneously enters the strange, deceitful orbit of the South Sea Company, which is built on phony stock certificates and the interest of all that this house of cards is not publically acknowledged.  In the light of recent corporate shenanigans, we are reminded that, although the “South Sea Bubble” was the first stock market crash, it was not to be the last.  And in the light of recent scandals, thievery, murder, and the destruction of both rich and poor are still alive and well in the English-speaking world.

The book is based on Liss’ doctoral thesis work at Columbia University, but he manages to make it a lively story, rather than a series of boring articles on financial failures at the dawn of the stock market.  Ben and the people he meets and works with help to make it lively, as does the chaotic and dangerous life of 18^th Century London.  Recommended. ~ lss-r

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This book is mine.

Tracking a Murder

Scent of Murder [by] Cynthia G. Alwyn

New York; Thomas Dunne Books [2001]

0-312-26559-X; $23.95

Brenna learned to use dogs to track the victims of kidnappings from her mentor, Aaron, who gave her her first tracking dog, Sabrina, called Brie.  When she and her new boss, Jett, who runs a tracking service out of a Victorian in Sacramento, go to Seattle to track a kidnap victim, 4-year-old Zoe Hendricks, for a friend in law enforcement, Brenna inadvertently runs into the kidnapper carrying the little girl. He throws the little girl into a river and runs away.  Brenna runs after the girl, jumping in the river right after Brie.  She manages to save the little girl, but at the expense of the dog she loves and called “Funny Face.” 

When the friend, Garrett, comes to Sacramento with the cremains of Brie – he thought it might be best that Brenna not have to travel back with the body of her dead friend and partner – he has news for them: 

they had found a note at the house taunting the family, which they hadn’t found.  They also found that the box which was to be her death chamber was booby-trapped.  It looks like the kidnapper is not done yet.  Certainly Zoe’s family didn’t think so – they’ve vanished.

When Brenna got back to Sacramento, she plunged back into her work, leading new dog training, and joining in a child safety fair at a local mall with the dog team.  The fair activity is broken off as the team is sent out on another kidnapping case, this time in their area. Brenna is with her other dog, a Bouvier des Flandres named Feather.  The case seems curiously like the one in Seattle.  The outcome isn’t so cheery, though.  When they find the little girl, Leanne, she is dead.

When Jett calls her in the middle of the night, Brenna isn’t happy.  She has an e-mail from Gideon – the man who kidnapped Zoe and Leanne.  It’s all a game to him, and Leanne didn’t really count, which makes Brenna livid.  There is some banter referring to the game, which, it turned out, their computer person had been playing with Gideon for a couple of weeks, since Brenna had off-handedly told him to answer her e-mail.  He had no idea it was related to their case. 

Because of this computer conversation, Jett’s company gets its own fulltime FBI agent.  As they have more conversations, they begin to narrow down who this person might be.  Gideon gives them clues, most of which he doesn’t expect them to understand, but they do, as they add their surmises to the facts uncovered by the FBI. Their group grows by one when Rob Garrett of Seattle joins them.  He has been fired from his agency because he believes that Zoe’s kidnapper is not finished yet, even though his sheriff does.

Gideon disappears for a while, and their lives can go on, but when the sheriff of McEntyre County, Texas calls, just after a taunting – and angry – call from Gideon, they know they will be off and running to find another little girl, this time named Denise. They are transported to Texas via a USAF C-141, where they are met by McEntyre County deputies and they drive to the locale where Gideon left his taunting notes, and they set off to find Denise.

This is an exciting novel, in which you learn a great deal about dog search-and-rescue, and meet a great set of characters, both human and canine, whom you come to care about very much.  This could have been the beginning of a great series, but it seems to have not gone anywhere, for which I am very sorry.  It was a great read. Recommended. ~ lss-r

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This is a library book.

A Journey of Discernment

A Darkly Hidden Truth [by] Donna Fletcher Crow
Oxford, Monarch Books [2011] 
978-0-85721-050-0

In her second outing in the Monastery Murders, Donna Fletcher Crow continues the story of the intrepid Felicity Howard and the lovable Father Antony Sherwood.

As we first come upon Felicity, she is telling one of the Fathers of her Anglo-Catholic College that she wishes to become a nun.  His advice is to test her Spirit by going on retreats with several of the communities of nuns in the United Kingdom to discern whether she is really suited to the cloistered life, and which House she would find most compatible.  She receives a letter from home, which she assumes is from her father – he was always the one who wrote – her mother was much too involved with her law practice, but, as the call for evening prayers has sounded, she must delay opening her letter until afterwards.

It is while she is at church that she notices that one of the icons is missing.  She points this out to one of her colleagues, a former artist, now studying for Holy Orders, Neville Mortara.

After the service, she reads her letter, curious when she realizes that it is her mother who has written, and stopping dead when she realizes that her mother says her father wants a divorce.  She shares the letter with Antony, and he is the one to point out that her mother will be arriving tomorrow – just when Felicity has decided to begin her pilgrimage to various convents.  Antony is stunned that she wants to do this, especially since he has been asked to look for the missing icon, and he’d looked forward to working with her again after they had solved the last bit of monastic trouble.  Felicity suggests that Antony work with Neville.

She goes off on her pilgrimage to the first convent, when, who should come calling but Antony, Neville, and – can it be?  Yes, it could – her mother, Cynthia Howard!  She’d wanted to avoid her, but they’d brought her mother right to her.  Making the best of it, they all stay at the convent that night.  The next morning, Felicity’s breakfast quietude is shattered by a loud noise.  She joins others running to the chapel, where they find one of the sisters on the floor in a pool of red.  The red turns out to be wine, rather than blood, but the nun was indeed knocked out.  The icon at the chapel has been stolen, and Neville is nowhere to be found.  The rest take a detour to visit the church where Julian of Norwich spent her last days giving advice through the window of her locked room attached to the side of the chapel.

Antony gets a brief but excited phone call from Neville, who wants him to come meet him at a ruined monastery in an isolated boggy part of Norfolk called the Broads. They borrow a car and then a boat to get there.  But their quarry isn’t there.  They call his phone again and again, but it just rings and rings.  The last try sounds a bell right below them, and they discover that Neville is dead.  They call the police, who interrogate them thoroughly.

When that is done, Antony calls the head of Neville’s family, but only gets a secretary.  Cynthia has gone on to London to meet with the law firm that might hire her, so Felicity decides to go on to the next convent.  There she sees a furtive figure escaping through the garden.  The next day, Felicity joins her mother in London, where she gets a phone call from Sir Cecil, head of Neville’s family.  Later, Cecil meets with Felicity and her mother, but he only has eyes for the mother, although he gives some pointers to Felicity about the Knights Hospitillar, which she later shares with Antony.  She also shares her fears with him about her mother’s date with Cecil.  What is going on with her mother, she wonders.

Felicity talks with an expert on icons, and, later, so does Antony, who sees his gallery.  The expert is found dead the next day, with no leads as to the culprit.  Antony and Felicity visit Knights’ locations in London, where odd people appear and odd things happen. Felicity ends up at the bottom of the escalator in an Underground station.  Fortunately, Antony comes along in time and saves her and takes her back to the current convent, where she recovers.

They run into Cecil Mortara and Cynthia, and Cecil tells them his brother has found a book by holy pilgrim Margery Kempe.  They visit Rupert Mortara’s crumbling house, where they stay the night, and Felicity translates the book from Latin, while Antony, the Church Historian, brings them up to speed on who Margery was.  It seems that Margery might have had something to do with the missing icons. They also meet some other Mortaras.  They think this book was what made the late Neville Mortara so excited.

The next stop is Walsingham, an important place for Margery.  They see the reproduction of Nazareth and the many icons in the church. There they leave Cecil and Cynthia, who go on to his estate, while Antony escorts Felicity back to the convent.  She goes inside, and he goes unconscious from a blow on the head outside.  The information she gets is that he has gone back to school to recover.  But he has not gone back to school, she finds out.  Pictures on a cell phone send her back to Norfolk, where she believes Antony is in a church.  But that proves not to be the case, as she and her mother, who drove in her rental car, are captured. 

The denouement is quite intense, as violent things happen behind the scenes at a Good Friday service and at Neville’s memorial service at school.  Antony gets to have the ecumenical service he’d hoped for with the Russian Patriarch and his party, who will take the newly-recovered icon back to Russia for a visit, while Felicity discovers who the real thieves and scoundrels are, and almost gets to be dead.

This is a dense book, full of good plotting, strong characters, interesting history, fascinating holy lore, several red herrings, and some nice romance.  It’s a great entry in, what this reader hopes anyway, will be a long and enjoyable series.  Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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This is a Library book.

The Luck of the Irish

Murphy’s Law [by] Rhys Bowen

[New York] St. Martin’s Paperbacks [2001]

0-312-98497-9; $7.99

Molly Murphy’s mother told her her mouth would get her into trouble, but no one had any idea how much Molly could get herself into trouble until Justin Hartley lay dead on her kitchen floor, and Molly was running for her life.  Of course, she was only defending her honor, but who would see it that way, when it was an English landowner’s son she had killed, and her living in one of the peasant’s cottages on his father’s land?

Molly had taken herself to Belfast, with hopes for a passage to England, where she could lose herself in a big city.  She narrowly escapes being caught by the police, when a woman snatches her away from them, under the pretense that Molly is her sister.  The woman is Kathleen O’Connor, a woman who plans to meet her husband in New York, leaving tomorrow on the big ship in the harbor, the Majestic, with her two children, Seamus and Bridie.

Only Kathleen will not be able to go – her required physical sealed her fate:  she has T.B., and will be turned back.  But, if Molly sails in her stead, she can take the children to their father, barred from returning to Ireland because of his union activities.  Molly sets out with the two children for America.

The first hurdle to be overcome is that they are steerage passengers, deep in the bowels of the ship; unable to go on deck even to wave to the woman they are leaving behind.  They endure the crowding, the seasickness, and the rest of the lot of steerage passengers.  Molly is accosted by a man named O’Malley, who proves to be trouble, especially when it looks like he might be able to unmask her as a fraud, and another young man from the childhood hometown of Kathleen O’Connor, Michael Larkin.

Arriving at Ellis Island, they have to wait, listening to speeches from the Mayor of New York and others dedicating the new immigration building, while non-English-speakers, look around, not understanding.

This makes them too late to be processed through and they have to stay on Ellis Island, in the new dorms, for the night. Two things mark that night as memorable.  Bridie sleepwalks away from Molly, who runs to find her, and gets yelled at by a man in a guard’s uniform.  Later, all are rousted out of bed because someone has been murdered:  the man called O’Malley.  Molly can only feel relief that he can’t betray her.  She answers the policeman’s questions, and is allowed to go back to bed, but the next day she is questioned by Captain Daniel Sullivan, who is in charge of the investigation.  She tells him about the guard, and the police begin to look for him.  But Molly doesn’t see him in the lineup.

Finally, she is let go, and she and the children meet with Kathleen’s husband, who is shocked to find that Kathleen couldn’t come.  Then they all walk home to the East Side.  The children get an eyeful of the marvels of New York:  skyscrapers, electric streetcars and bright lights.  But the welcome at the crowded place where Seamus O’Connor lives with his brother and sister-in-law and their family is not a particularly warm one, and Molly realizes that it’s time she should be moving on.

The next day she walks back down to the waterfront park where she’d hoped to meet her friend from the boot, Michael, but he doesn’t come.  Discouraged, she goes back to the East Side, where policemen wait to take her down to the station.  There she discovers that Kathleen’s brother was involved with Michael’s father in the death of an English agent – the story Kathleen had told her while they waited the long night before the ship sailed, and that O’Malley may have bee the person who betrayed them to the authorities.  Michael has been taken by the N.Y.P.D. as a suspect in O’Malley’s death.  Molly promises to get him freed.

She both needs to find leads to absolve Michael and to find a job for herself, so she sets off the next day to do just that.  She finds a lead on the guard she saw at Ellis Island, but very nearly gets herself a position in a brothel.  Returning to the place she’s learned to call home, where the children and their father are living, she ends up having to fight Kathleen’s husband’s brother off, and getting blamed by his wife for leading him on.  She runs away. Spending the night in the police shelter, and then continuing her sleuthing the next day, she finds Seamus, and promises him to help with the children, and explains why she’s no longer there.  He gives her some money, so she can find lodging at a women’s hostel.  Then she finds the photographer who took pictures at Ellis Island, hoping that she might find a clue.  But the old Jew is dead, and Captain Sullivan is, again, investigating.

A visit to a job agency gets her a temporary position at the house of a man she’d found on one of the photographs taken by the dead Jewish photographer.  At the house, she finds the murderer, almost loses her life, and finds a great love.  A very satisfying ending to a lovely tale of a brave and resilient young woman, who became a pretty good sleuth by using her head at the beginning of the 20^th Century.  This is the first book in the Molly Murphy series, and I expect many more exciting adventures in Molly’s life.  Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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The book is mine.