The Cuckoo's Calling

I resisted Harry Potter at first because I'm not a fantasy reader. Once the series ended, I realized that they're really a multi-installment mystery wrapped in fantasy cosplay. Needless to say, I was not surprised to find out that JK Rowling moved to the mystery genre (under a pseudonym) when she started writing adult novels.

The Cuckoo's Calling does not start out on a promising note. Robin Ellacott is young, gorgeous, and mentally reliving last night's romantic proposal as she realizes on the way to her latest temp assignment that it's with Cormoran Strike's private investigation agency. Beautiful, in love, and on the way to an adventure with a war scarred (physically and mentally) "tough guy" - it's a cliche cyclone. And it gets worse when her boss's new client is the brother of one of Strike's childhood friends, asking him to investigate the death of his younger sister, a model who apparently committed suicide.

The novel is better than the set-up. Robin shows herself to be the right assistant for Cormoran, a smart and creative researcher as well as able to role-play when necessary to get information out of a witness. Cormoran may be damaged, but he's also a good investigator who through both groundwork and intuition solves a plot twist worthy of Agatha Christie. I doubt this series will become the cultural phenomenon that Harry Potter is (and perhaps they'll go out of print in 20 years), but I enjoyed The Cuckoo's Calling and plan to read the rest of the series.

Crooked House

Published in 1949, Crooked House is Agatha Christie's first fully post-war mystery. Charles Hayward met Sophia Leonides during the war and decided to marry her. Once home, he invites her to dinner and when she appears, she tells him that she, and her entire family, are under surveillance because someone killed her grandfather. Aristide Leonides was a wealthy man, the founder of a food supply and restaurant empire, and his crooked, three-sectioned house, overflowed with suspects. The son who took over the business and his scientist wife, the other son (Sophia's father) who writes books no one reads and his actress wife, Sophia, her younger brother and sister, the children's schoolmaster, Aristide's much younger second wife, and his first wife's sister all had the opportunity to put ersinine in his insulin vial, and all have motives. It's classic Christie, with a twist ending that is shocking in 2019 and must have been scandalous in 1949.

Walking Shadows

I read Faye Kellerman's most recent Decker/Lazarus mystery, Walking Shadows, with bittersweet frustration. I didn't quite get the sense that the series is winding down, as in Diane Mott Davidson's The Whole Enchilada or in Marcia Muller's most recent books (with Sue Grafton's death - I still haven't brought myself to read Y Is for Yesterday because I know there will be no Z Is for Zero - Sara Paretsky is the only founding mother of the female PI genre still writing). In Kellerman's case, it's less a fear that she's going to end a series I've read since the mid-90s but a feeling that she should.

Kellerman coped with Peter Decker's retirement from the LAPD by moving him to a small town in upstate New York, and it hasn't quite worked. She's now set four books on the East Coast and what strikes me is how much the native Californian doesn't have a feel for the place (or the geography - at least she only set a few chapters in her funhouse version of Philadelphia). That, and how she has to stretch to place such gory murders in a small college town.

Walking Shadows opens with the discovery of Brady Neil's body. He's a fairly nondescript guy, works in the warehouse at a Walmart type place, and has never been in trouble. It turns out that his father is serving a life sentence for robbing and murdering a couple who owned a jewelry store in the adjacent small city. Decker and his partner Tyler McAdams (who has completed law school but not yet gotten his bar results) eventually piece together how the father's crime led to the son's death, but it's not neat. Kellerman introduces characters and motives but none of them feel natural. It's a sloppily edited book (a salad changes from one type to another in a single paragraph), and maybe that's the problem. Whether it's a case of an author getting tired of her characters or a publisher cutting back too far on editing, even though I enjoyed Walking Shadows, I did so with an uncomfortable feeling that it should have been much better.