Husbands and Wives and Lovers, Oh My!

The Diva Digs up the Dirt [by] Krista Davis

New York; Berkley Prime Crime [2012]

978-0-425-25134-8; $7.99

Sophie Winston and Natasha Smith have been rivals for years, especially in the Domestic Diva department.  Now they are writing feuding advice columns.  Natasha has always been a bit over the top, but, then she also took Mars, Sophie’s husband, although they haven’t gotten married yet.

This time, Natasha is angling for a big TV show by showing how well she can work with the cast of the makeover show “Dig It Up With Troy.”  The person who is having the makeover – of her backyard, with the introduction of a garage, is – Sophie!

But before this even gets underway, Sophie is set upon by an improbable lady in a festive, brightly-colored ensemble.  She says she knows who Sophie is, and she would like to hire her to find her daughter, getting out a wad of cash.  Sophie explained she was an event planner and didn’t know how to find people.  Soon she finds the woman sneaking around, talking to her neighbors and trying to get into her house. And Sophie’s best friend and neighbor is encouraging her!

But Sophie is busy – that afternoon Roscoe Greene, the wealthy owner of a catalog store catering to Southern gardeners and outdoorsmen, is having his big picnic-party, complete with famous ice cream bar.  Because just 10 days before, Roscoe had married one of his employees, Mindy, in a destination Ireland wedding (after having dumped his wife of 45 years, Olive), he had hired Sophie to plan the whole thing.  And, apparently, Olive had taken umbrage at not being invited, and had had a dumptruckload of steer manure delivered to their house in Mindy’s name! (Olive has heard that Mindy is threatening to concrete over the gardens she spent many loving years cultivating.) Sophie tries to deal with all of the mishaps and last-minute-issues, and then the guests are there and the party starts. 

Roscoe shows off his new – and costly – print of Four Mallards.  He also announces that he has bought a retirement place, about which he is really excited.  Mindy asks if it’s the Palm Beach place, and he says No –it’s a 500 acre bed-and-breakfast lodge in the mountains, where there’s the best hunting and fishing in the world!  Mindy can barely hide her disappointment.

Later, Sophie and her best friend Nina spot a trio of interlopers watching the party from the woods.  One looks to be Olive, Roscoe’s former wife, one is a sandy-haired man, and the third is the woman who’d accosted Sophie about her missing daughter – a woman they have since learned is named Mona – short for Desdemona. Later, Sophie gets an eyeful of Roscoe’s 40-something son Audie (who is engaged to another employee, Cricket) with his arms wrapped around his future stepmother.  Hmm – what’s that all about?

The next morning, Sophie gets to meet Troy and the show crew, who have come to dig up her backyard.  Included in the crew is a man that Sophie and Nina saw yesterday, prowling in the woods near Roscoe’s.  Sophie gets a visit from the man she has been dating for a while, a Homicide Detective named Wolf.  They start to make a date for dinner, but when Sophie mentions her meeting with Roscoe tomorrow, Wolf gets angry.  He tells her to cancel it.  She believes he wants to give her more work, and she can’t.  Wolf stalks off.  The last person Sophie wants to see while her backyard is being torn up is Mona, but she shows up next.  Sophie has to avoid her – she gets her dog Daisy and walks her around the side of her yard and gets away, making it to her car, parked four blocks away.  (She really does need a garage!)

Every time she and Wolf sit in her yard, he admires the climbing Blaze rose she has. He used to have one, but it died not long after his wife Anne went missing.  He mourns both of those losses.  Since Troy will most likely chop her rose into oblivion, Sophie decides to plant one in Wolf’s yard as a sort of truce.

The need for this seems to be underscored as, when she goes shopping, she meets Wolf coming out of a restaurant.  They apologize to each other, but then get into it again as Wolf says that Roscoe isn’t to be trusted.  Then, Cricket comes out of the same restaurant, and stops to greet Wolf – they haven’t seen each other in years. Sophie is amazed that they know each other.

She buys the rose and takes it over to Wolf’s yard and begins to dig a hole to plant it in.  Wolf’s neighbor wants to know what she’s doing.  His neighbor is Roscoe’s ex-wife Olive (Small world!)  Sophie explains, and Olive leaves her to continue her digging.  Deeper into the hole she finds a purse.  A very nice leather purse.  Inside it is a driver’s license for Anne Fleishman, Wolf’s missing wife!  Rumors had circulated all over the place that Wolf had killed his wife, and thoughts of that rush back into Sophie’s mind.  Nina comes over to console her and then Mona shows up.  The Mona who is looking for her daughter – her daughter Anne, who married Wolf!

Sophie calls Wolf, who comes home.  He looks at the hole and the handbag, and then calls the police.  He seems not to be surprised at Mona’s presence.  He looks very sad.  His partner, Det. Kenner, whom Sophie does not like, arrives with a uniform.  He asks questions and looks at the hole and the purse, and then gives it to the uniform to bag. Kenner gives Sophie his card and suggests that she be very careful.  She’s surprised – this is the nicest he’s ever been to her.  

Wolf then disappears, telling no one where he is going.  Roscoe's mallard print goes missing. Sophie goes to Roscoe's, against Wolf's admonishments, and talks to Cricket, who used to be his late wife's best friend.  Meanwhile, Roscoe's housekeeper, Violet, dubbed by Sophie and her friends as "Mrs. Danvers" for her behaviour towards them:  condescending, closemouthed, and unforthcoming, is practically crazy over a calico cat, which is bothering her birds. Nina promises Violet she will capture the cat, with Sophie's help.

Sophie also discovers Mona in her closet. A body is found under the mulch at Roscoe's.  Roscoe goes to the hospital, then comes home.  Audie and Cricket begin their wedding in Roscoe's backyard, and Audie keels over and has to go to the hospital, too.  Then Sophie has a flash of insight in a junk store, where she and Natasha have gone to repurpose items for her backyard.  She also finds Roscoe's missing mallard print.

The final upshot is that Sophie loves her backyard, as made over by Troy, and Natasha's little touches aren't too bad.  The perpetrators of Anne's disappearance, as well as attacks on Roscoe's family are unmasked and jailed, and Sophie's group of friends is brought back together.  Roscoe takes back his first wife, and Sophie gains a friend, but loses her boyfriend.  She's gotten very philosophical about it.  We'll see if it holds up in the next one, or if there are other prospects.  Now that Kenner has proven to be a real person, he may also have a bright future.  Lose ends get tied up -- not necessarily as you would expect them to, proving that Krista Davis still has the magic in one of the best constructed cozies in the business.  Excellent recipes and gardening tips, too.  Highly recommended. ~ lss-r
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My own book.





Sins of the Fathers

Night Rounds [by] Helene Tursten

[New York; Soho Press, 2012]

978-1-61695-006-4; $25.00

When the lights go back up at the Löwander Private Hospital, the ICU nurse, Marianne, is missing, the surgical patient Peterzén is dead, and the other nurse, Siv Persson, sees the ghost of Nurse Tekla mounting the stairs in the moonlight. Moments later, the security guard finds Nurse Marianne dead in the basement, lying across the back-up generator, which was also dead, its powerlines cut.  She has ligature marks around her neck, and is missing one shoe, which was found later in the elevator.

The Violent Crimes Division puts in an appearance early the next day in the persons of Superintendent Sven Andersson and Detective Inspector Irene Huss.  They begin to ask questions.  They are told about the love affair rumored to have happened between the formidable Dr. Hilding Löwander, the father of the current director of the hospital, Dr. Sverker Löwander, and Nurse Tekla.  It was broken off when Mrs. Löwander became pregnant with her son, and Tekla hanged herself in a garret room. Of course, the inspectors tell Nurse Siv that they do not believe that a ghost was responsible for the murders.

But there are still odd things at the hospital.  Nurses disappear, and aspects of the hospital’s history, and the history of its key family, take on greater and greater importance.  Then a newspaper article comes out saying that a witness had seen the ghost on the grounds.  Huss goes to see the journalist, Kurt Höök.  She begins to search for the witness Höök only knows as Mama Bird.

They find a garden shed on the grounds of the hospital, which looks to be one of Mama Bird’s hidey-holes.  But even when they stake it out, they do not find her.  Visiting with a street person at one of the downtown soup kitchens, they learn her name.  They also discover that she had a relationship to the hospital.  Then the shed is torched.  The river that goes near the shed begins to flood because of a blockage under a bridge.  The bicycle that belonged to a missing nurse named Linda is found there, holding back the dead and mangled body of Mama Bird.

The body of the missing Linda is then found hanging in the same garret room where Nurse Tekla was found.  More hospital people are interviewed, as are both of Sverker Löwander’s wives, past and present.  Even the wife of the dead patient Peterzén and her son are visited.  Old records are looked at. Old luggage is gone through.  Personnel from other hospitals, who know the players in this drama are also talked to by the inspectors. The books of the hospital, which show that it is bankrupt, are looked at.  At last, Inspector Huss puts together the whole story, which has a lot to do with the past, and also the future, as it turns out.  The final scene is pretty exciting, as Irene Huss is very nearly killed by the culprit.

There are some really nice touches to this book, beyond the really depressing scene set at the old hospital.  There are lovely insights into Irene Huss’ family life, as well as the very human dynamics of the Violent Crimes Division in Göteborg, Sweden.  A very satisfying police procedural. Recommended. ~ lss-r

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Library book.



Counterfeit and the Real Thing

Counterfeit Road [by] Kirk Russell

[Sutton, Eng.] Severn House [2012]

978-0-7278-8145-8; $28.95

22 years to the day, a videotape of an unsolved 1989 murder – the murder of former Secret Service agent Alan Krueger – arrives for the San Francisco Homicide detail, and falls into Homicide Inspector Ben Raveneau’s proverbial lap.  What’s more:  back then the 61 $100 bills in the victim’s pocket were considered legitimate; but now the Secret Service takes another look and calls them counterfeit. What is going on?

There also seems to be a link to the present, which no one wants to talk about.  Ben studies the video.  He pores over the old case files.  He hunts for the couple who found the body.  He enlists the help of a retired homicide inspector.  Then a young man shows up, saying that he’s the son of the man whose name was in Alan Krueger’s pants pocket.  He has photographs, which he brings along for Raveneau to see.  A photo tech he knows tells Raveneau that the pictures were taken in Hawaii, and names the places. There are pictures of the young man’s father, Alan Krueger, and two others with whom he saw service in Vietnam.

Then, there is a shooting in a warehouse.  A truck had just delivered plywood and driven off.  Then a shooter killed three of the workers and wounded another, who died on the way to the hospital.  The boss was out of the office at the time.  The saws were still running at the little cabinet shop when the cops got there.  Raveneau went after the trucker, but got no real answers.

When he went back to the shop, Raveneau inspected the palette of plywood and discovered it was faked. Inside hollowed-out parts of the plywood there were things which turned out to be bomb casings.  Unfortunately, they try to follow them when they are trucked away, but they lose track of the truck, so they still have no answers, but lots more questions.

Raveneau goes to Hawaii, to the house owned by Jim Franks, the father of the young man with the photos in San Francisco.  It looks like he will find answers there, but the house is no longer lived in.  He is shot at, and gets to meet another son of Jim Franks, and then his friend Tom Casey.  Casey was one of Krueger’s Vietnam buddies.

Eventually Raveneau gets to tie all of the loose ends together.  There is a very large conspiracy, which includes the money found on Krueger – so-called “supernotes” – extraordinarily good counterfeit U.S. currency, which predated the known supernotes, as well as the bomb casings, and this small circle of Vietnam vets.  Not to mention Feds of different kinds, and people who were not who they said they were, but turn out to be threatening, with pieces of the past hanging about them.  It is quite a relief for Raveneau to finally get back to his ordinary life, and the time to celebrate his girlfriend’s new bar to the utmost.  A great thriller – highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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Library book.                                                           





What are the Odds...



The Probability of Murder [by] Ada Madison

New York; Berkley Prime Crime [2012]

978-0-425-24667-2; $7.99

The Benjamin Franklin Hall, home of the Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics Departments, is famous for its Friday afternoon parties.  This one is in celebration of the mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius, and a sophomore named Chelsea Derbin is demonstrating one of the things that made him famous, the Möbius strip.  Onlookers include members of the various departments in the building, both faculty and students, including Math Department Chair Sophie Knowles. Chelsea’s presentation runs out of steam, and she looks to her professor, but, fortunately for Sophie, her main squeeze has just arrived – Bruce Granville, a medevac helicopter pilot.  He comes with questions – What’s going on at Henley College’s library?  There’s a whole fleet of city cop cars out in front.  Then cell phones all over the room start ringing, and rumors spread about someone being taken away in an ambulance.  The party breaks up as everyone leaves to find out what’s happening.

At the Library, Sophie and Bruce meet Bruce’s good buddy, Virgil Mitchell, one of Henley PD’s finest. Virgil tells them that the College’s reference librarian, Charlotte Crocker, one of Sophie’s dearest friends is dead.  Her body had been found by a student who worked as her assistant.  Virgil then begins to question Sophie about her knowledge of Ms. Crocker, definitely putting Sophie on the defensive.  And it’s only the first time.  Needless to say, Sophie’s and Bruce’s plans to have a romantic and educational weekend in Boston caves in, and Bruce leaves to join his buddies for a mountain climb in Vermont.

A few days before her death, Charlotte had given Sophie her duffle bag.  It had sat in the corner of her office for a few days, and then Bruce picked it up and brought it to Sophie’s house when her brought her home, in shock because of Charlotte’s death.  Now Sophie is being charmed by the duffle and its siren call provokes her open the bag.  It’s full of money.  Lots and lots of money. She hides it, wondering why her friend had so much cash in such a variety of bills.

Sophie feels it her duty to call the only relative of Charlotte’s she had ever met to tell him about Charlotte’s death.  A few weeks back, Charlotte had asked if she could bring her nephew Noah to see the medevac outfit at the airport, where Bruce works.  Bruce and his colleagues had really put on a good show for Charlotte and Noah. There’s a few sheets of paper in the duffle with phone numbers on them, and “Jeff/Noah” is written on one of them.  Sophie calls the number.  It’s early in the morning for the guy on the other end.  He doesn’t seem to know what’s going on or who she is, and she figures this is Jeff, Noah’s roommate.  The guy admits he’s Jeff, but that there is no Noah. He explains that he works at the snack bar at Boston College, and that Charlotte had come in one day and saw his ad to do odd jobs.  She had paid him to play her nephew Noah. Sophie remembers the outing.  Noah wasn’t very interested in the medevac business, and Charlotte seemed especially interested in the airfield. She realized that Charlotte had used her and Bruce.  The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. Her friend wasn’t a friend.  She didn’t know anything about her.  Who was this woman she thought she knew?

First, she calls her best friend Ariana, who comes over to cheer her up, with bags of goodies. They’ve been friends forever. Sophie tells her about the phone call and shows her the bag of money and they speculate on why the librarian might have had it.  Ariana tells her she has to get rid of it because it’s bad luck, and probably also dangerous.  Sophie takes it to Virgil after Ariana leaves. 

Sophie occupies her time while Bruce is gone sleuthing around Charlotte’s death, with many pizzas shared with Virgil, as she finds out from him about Charlotte’s history of aliases, her history of crimes going back many years, her incarcerations, and more.  Sophie follows the clues left in the duffle bag, finding out who some of her friends and associates were.  She continuously checks in with Virgil as her house is broken into and various people become ubiquitous in her life.

Then Bruce’s party is lost in a blizzard on their mountain in Vermont, and Virgil and Sophie spend time together hoping and praying for the threesome’s safe return.  They do come back, but injured.  One is still in the hospital, but Bruce and the other, who are on the mend, spend time getting TLC in Sophie’s little house, which is great, because Sophie’s investigation gets her almost killed by someone she hadn’t expected to be involved until literally minutes before it happens.

This is a cozy little mystery from the mistress of the genre, Camille Minichino, writing under the pseudonym of Ada Madison. She also writes the miniature mysteries under the pseudonym of Margaret Grace.  Her stuff is fun: neatly plotted with great characters. Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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Library book.



Hiding in the Shadows

Shadows at the Fair [by] Lea Wait

New York; Scribner [2002]

0-7432-2553-8; $24.00

Maggie Summer became a widow after Christmas last year, and is now trying to put her life back together.  She’s still teaching at Somerset County College in New Jersey, where she lives, but she’s actively building her antique print business, Shadows, by attending more antique fairs.  As the book opens, she is just pulling into the parking lot at the Rensslaer County Spring Antiques Fair.

As she unloads her wares and sets up her booth, she learns that there have been several deaths at the shows she’d missed, including the Westchester Show last weekend.  Although she is able to greet the Wyndhams and her friend Gussie and Gussie’s nephew Ben, things are different with some of the other people with booths nearby. Will Brewer’s booth is taking the space of the fellow who died at the last show. Always considered one of the most congenial, and even model, couples, Susan and Harry Findley were not setting up their booth together as usual.  In fact, Susan seemed to be spending a lot of time with Vince, who runs the shows.  Harry was helping Joe Cousins unpack his First Editions.  What is going on, Maggie and her friends wondered.

But the show got underway on time, with buyers walking around with drinks and snacks and sellers bustling to answer their questions, and, hopefully, get a sale.  Gussie’s 20-year-old nephew chose to get out of the way and practice running on the track out beyond the parking and restrooms.  He has Down’s Syndrome, and, although fairly high-functioning and quite charming to Maggie, he liked being by himself.

The buyers do come and buy, although some are buffaloed by their spouses into saying no, after they’ve said yes, so that all of the sales do not happen, Maggie is generally pleased with what’s going on.  She also gets a hefty seller’s discount on a mirror she saw in another booth, so she’s very happy as she buys it and takes it back to the cabins on the property where she and her friend Gussie are staying.  Gussie and Maggie visit and order pizza while waiting for Ben to return.

Ben interrupts them by rushing in, hysterical.  He believes he has killed a man he thought was going to hit a woman. He ran over to stop him, and he pushed him down.  The man didn’t get up.  There was blood, even on Ben’s hand.  The woman fled.  Since Gussie is in a wheelchair, Maggie volunteers to go back to the fairgrounds with Ben to see about the man.

On the way, they pick up Will Brewer, who is staying on scene in a van.  He’s new, but seems really nice, and is willing to help them look.  They do not find a dead man where he should have been, and they start to walk back to the entrance.  Ben describes the woman he saw with the man, and Maggie is pretty sure it’s Susan Findley, so they look for Susan’s van.

They are interrupted by a woman screaming and screaming.  It is Susan, and Harry is lying at her feet – very much dead.

Needless to say, nobody gets out of the immediate area, so Maggie and Ben take potluck with Will, and then sleep in his van.  A very upset Susan comes with them and Maggie tries to calm her down.  They all get questioned by the police, and Ben is taken as Suspect #1.  Maggie spends much of the next day trying to figure out where people were at the time, and the show goes on.

Maggie’s sleuthing also goes on, as she talks to others and puts things together, including who ate and drank what, who was sleeping with whom, what possible items could have been murder weapons, who owed whom money, etc.  What she puts together almost gets her killed, but does unmask the murderers, gets Ben out of the cops’ clutches, and promises a brighter future for the antique business and even Maggie’s life.  You learn quite a bit about the antique print business, as well as antiques in general, and you get to spend some time with wonderful characters.  An enjoyable mystery. Highly recommended. ~ lss-r 

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Library book.