Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron

Warning - Mild spoilers

The last two Jane Austen mysteries have had a bit of melancholy air to them, with a pall cast by the loss of Jane's Gentleman Rogue.  Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron starts with the death of Jane's beloved cousin Eliza but it's a much more vibrant novel than its immediate predecessors.  

Jane and her brother Henry travel to Brighton to recover from Eliza's death.  Along the way, they rescue a young woman who has been kidnapped by the dissipated Lord Byron, a young woman who eventually turns up dead, sewn into a shroud made from the sails of Lord Byron's boat.  Jane is not exactly part of this social circle, but Lord Harold's niece Desdemona (whom Jane befriended in a prior novel) asks for her help on behalf of one of Lord Byron's acknowledged lovers, Lady Oxford.  (Can you imagine how much fun the supermarket tabloids would have with these convoluted relationships?)  

Jane, of course, uncovers the truth but the real joy in the novel is in seeing Jane enjoy her new-found fame.  Everyone is reading Pride and Prejudice, and we get a little bit of a thrill when Byron tells Jane that he wanted to meet her because one must know the competition.  A little bit of money and some undercover fame (according to Barron, if Jane were to admit authorship, she would no longer be able to eavesdrop at the local dinners and balls which serve as her source material) return Jane to the vivacious woman of the earlier novels.  She may ruefully acknowledge her out of fashion robes and her greying hair, but in a way this is her second debut into society.  Sadly, we know it will be a short-lived social career.  Jane has only four more years to live, and only three more years of health.

The Minotaur

Barbara Vine's mysteries aren't so much 'whodunnit' as 'whydunnit' - she usually frames her books as a present-day retelling of a past event, focusing more on how her characters interact than the actual events.  The Minotaur follows that pattern.  Cartoonist Kirsten Kvist is on vacation in Riva when she sees Ella Costway, a member of the family with which she lived when she first came to England from Sweden.  

As a university student in late 1960s Sweden, Kirsten fell in love with an English student and earned a nursing credential so she could follow him back to England.  He helped her find a job as a nurse/companion to John Cosway, a mathematical genius diagnosed with schizophrenia and living in the family home with his domineering mother and three downtrodden sisters.  It doesn't take long for us to realize that John is not schizophrenic but autistic, and that he's been drugged into a near trance, but the book isn't really about John.  It's about his sisters - resigned housewife-without-being-a-wife Ida, 40ish spinsters Winnifred and Ella, and wealthy widow Zorah who on her periodic visits is the only person who treats John as a sentient being.  During Kirsten's year with the Cosways, Winnifred becomes engaged to the local curate and Ella begins an affair with a loutish artist who's moved into the village.  It's a novel of small things which have major outcomes, and one in which the central events just couldn't happen in today's world of cell phones and internet research.  Miss Marple would enjoy The Minotaur - it's a book for students of human nature.

Burn Out

It's amazing how much younger characters become over the run of a series.  When Marcia Muller introduced Sharon McCone, her detective was 28 and I was 8 and more than a decade from discovering her.  24 years later, we're about the same age, and I suspect that I will be older than she by the time Muller retires the character.  Some convenient amnesia comes with the Dorian Gray syndrome - McCone's Berkley days and the 20-odd years it took for her brother-in-law to go from a struggling country musician to a superstar have faded over the past several books - but Muller hasn't totally ignored the passage of time.  Once the lone investigator for a legal co-operative, McCone is now the head of a thriving investigative agency with a dozen operatives and little reason to leave her office.

This development (and the particularly nasty case solved in The Ever Running Man), led to the titular Burn Out.  Theoretically pondering her next career move (but in reality nearly paralyzed by depression), McCone has a chance encounter with a young Paiute woman who is murdered a few days later.   McCone investigates, mainly because the victim's uncle is the caretaker for her husband's ranch, and soon finds herself enmeshed in a web of family secrets and small-town intrigue - which somehow connect to a reclusive billionaire.  

Maybe I've become too good at solving mysteries, or maybe it's only a middling detective novel, but I solved this a bit too early for my taste.  Where Burn Out succeeds is as a psychological novel.  Muller slowly (and I think realistically) draws McCone from her depressive state to 'the old Sharon' as she teases apart the puzzle.  I enjoyed watching McCone wake up and begin to solve the day-to-day problems in both her personal and professional life.  It's a mystery novel for people who want more than justice for the dead in their mysteries.

Jacquard's Web

Jacquard's Web reminded me of Connections.  Not just because James Burke covered several of the same topics, but because James Essinger seamlessly traveled from Prince Albert's inspection of a woven portrait of JM Jacquard, to the history of silk weaving, to the 1890 US Census with stops along the way for the French Revolution and Lord Byron.  The bulk of the book, however, discusses Charles Babbage and his two machines, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine.  Babbage never managed to build working models of either machine, but they're considered the precursor to the modern computer, and their description, written and annotated by Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace is considered the first computer program.  Essenger is an engaging writer, and Jacquard's Web strikes the right balance between a collection of trivia facts and deep thought.

Disordered Minds

Minette Walters doesn't write straight-forward novels.  She drops newspaper clippings, e-mails, and police reports into the narrative, but somehow makes sure they contradict what she's just written.  Disordered Minds is a particularly twisty puzzle of a novel, and in my mind her second best (behind Fox Evil).  

Disordered Minds opens in 1970 with the particularly brutal gang rape of a 13-year-old girl as her best friend watches.  A few weeks later, the girl disappears.  Walters then cuts to a chapter in "Disordered Minds," a scholarly book by anthropologist Dr. Jonathan Hughes which argues that Howard Stamp did not murder his grandmother a few weeks after the opening scene.   George Gardiner, a 60ish woman who now lives in the neighborhood where both crimes occurred 35 years earlier contacts Dr. Hughes and after a particularly rough first meeting, they begin to unravel the case which is not so much cold as forced into a freezer.  

It doesn't take a lot of deduction to realize that the two crimes are somehow connected - two violent crimes separated by a few weeks and a few blocks, involving people who knew each other just can't be coincidental.  Walters is a master, though, and she keeps us guessing as to how they are connected, and who committed which crime.  Nothing is as it appears, and several characters have so completely hidden their pasts that the revelation of their true natures comes as a shock.  Against this dark and violent backdrop, Walters places the present day subplot of a wary academic with few friends and a lot of emotional baggage becoming close to the schlubby, frumpy older woman with whom he tracks down the killer.   Like a particularly dark Agatha Christie, Minette Walters serves justice with a happy ending.

Queen Isabella

Never designate a serious book as bedtime reading if you've also got a Sudoku addiction.  I think I've put off reviewing Queen Isabella because I didn't give it the level of attention an Alison Weir biography deserves.  Isabella of France, like most medieval princesses, made a political marriage.  Unluckily, her husband Edward II was a weak man who had no desire to be king and rejected her for his male lovers.  Even worse, he had horrible taste in men, choosing corrupt, social-climbing lovers.  Piers Gaveston never really understood court life, and that led to his downfall but the more courtly and manipulative Hugh le Despenser brought England to the brink of civil war.  Isabella made a similar mistake, because Roger Mortimer was also manipulative and corrupt, but he was a better tactician than any of Edward's knights.  Isabella and Mortimer led the only successful invasion of England, deposed Edward II, and acted as regents to Edward III.  Mortimer's greed eventually brought him out of favor and Isabella into disgrace, and she retired from public life and eventually regained some of her reputation - a reputation later ripped apart by early historians.

The book is much better than my review.  I need to read Queen Isabella again and give it the attention it deserves.

The Death Ship of Dartmoor

I think I've figured out what Michael Jecks's problem is - he needs a new editor.  I still enjoy reading about Sir Baldwin and Simon Puttock, and Jecks still vibrantly draws 14th Century England.  I just wish he'd return to the tight plotting he used in his earlier novels.

The Death Ship of Dartmoor is at least an improvement over the last two installments in the series, and the main mystery is fairly engrossing.  Simon is now the Keeper of the Port of Dartmouth and when a ship comes into harbor, burned and with the crew missing but the cargo intact, it's his job to figure out what happened.  Baldwin appears not to help him but to try to find Bishop Walter Stapleton's nephew who has disappeared in Dartmoor and may be the man found murdered in a hole in Dartmoor's main road.  While Baldwin's mystery is yet another disposable subplot, the fate of the titular death ship was interesting enough to keep Jecks off 'probation' and Sir Andrew de Limpsfield (the coroner and this volume's comic character) was actually amusing and helped advance the plot.  Jecks's 20th novel may signal a return to form, and I really hope it is.  Mainly because I don't want to think I've wasted money (amazon.co.uk does not offer free trans-Atlantic shipping) and I've got six more volumes on my bookshelf.

A Fatal Waltz

I'm pretty methodical, and I like reading series in order.  And when I say "like" I mean "I go to lengths to avoid reading series out of order."  Somehow, I bought books 3 and 4 instead of 2 and 3 in the Lady Emily Ashton mysteries while I was Christmas shopping and didn't realize it until I was a few chapters into A Fatal Waltz.  

The novel opens at a shooting party hosted by the unbearable Basil, Lord Fortescue and attended by Emily's oldest friend Ivy Brandon, Ivy's husband Robert (Lord Fortescue's political protege), Emily's fiance Colin Hargraves, and Colin's former lover Kristiana von Lange.  Because this is a mystery, we need a dead body and Lord Fortescue complies, shortly after a public argument with Robert.  As Emily tries to clear her friend's name, Colin tries to stop an anarchist plot that would start WWI 15 years earlier.  Both plots lead to Vienna, where Emily (with the help of French grand dame Cecile du Lac and childhood friend Jeremy Sheffield) and Colin (with the help of Kirstiana) piece together the parallel mysteries.  

Colin's mystery wasn't as interesting or as tightly written as Emily's, and its main purpose was to provide a few key pieces of information Emily needed to clear Robert's name.  They mysteries, though, are really just a background for the fun.  Emily experiences Vienna cafe society, Cecile has an understated affair (one of many) with the artist who is painting her portrait, Jeremy plays the useless aristocrat while nursing a crush, and Emily's mother Catherine, Lady Bromley blows in at hurricane force, bragging about finding Prince Eddy a bride and arranging for Emily to marry in the Queen's presence.  A slightly better than average mystery folded into a meringue of a smart historical romance.

Girl in a Box

About 2/3 of the way through Girl in a Box, I realized that even though it was published in 2006, I haven't seen the next Rei Shimura mystery.  Have I reached the end of another series?  I checked amazon.com and it turns out I haven't - there's one more volume, but that's probably a good thing.  I've enjoyed the series, but Massey may have written herself into a box.

Rei Shimura started the series as an English teacher in Tokyo, became an antiques dealer, and as of The Typhoon Lover has become a spy of sorts, working for a shadow intelligence agency which apparently has only one other employee, ex-Navy officer Michael Hendricks.  Her mission (which she chooses to accept) is to infiltrate a Tokyo department store with questionable profits and possible links to US businesses.  It's an interesting premise, and Massey keeps the plot fairly tight for about 3/4 of the book.  Unfortunately, it feels a bit like she rushed the ending, leaving the conclusion somewhat confusing and the evolving relationship between Rei and Michael feeling like it was grafted onto a completed novel.   Perhaps Massey realized that she had to start winding up the series - and maybe that's why I got the feeling around page 200 that this might be the last Rei Shimura mystery.