Mystery in the Minster

A few weeks after the events of The Killer of Pilgrims, Ralph de Langelee may have a solution to Michaelhouse College's financial problems.  Now the Master of Michaelhouse, Langelee was a soldier in service to the late William Zouche, Archbishop of York.  A codicil to Zouche's will left a church to Michaelhouse, and now that the incumbent priest has died, Michaelhouse can claim the parish's income.    There's a problem, though.  No one can find the codicil and the minster's vicars have taken possession of the church.  To enforce Michaelhouse's claim, Langelee travels to York with law lecturer John Radford, devious courtier-turned-theologian Brother Michael, and exhausted physician Matthew Bartholomew (ostensibly for "relaxation").

Once in York, they discover that the codicil may never have existed and that several Zouche's executors have died mysteriously.  Then Radford dies, shortly after claiming to have found the codicil.  Matt sets out to learn who killed his friend, and succeeds.  I, unfortunately, didn't care.  Matt belongs to Cambridge, and I feel a bit lost when he roams too far from home.  Gregory needed too much exposition to introduce all the new characters and settings, and yet many the characters remained indistinguishable and the situations confusing.  Mystery in the Minster entertained me, particularly the final action scenes, but didn't stick in my mind.  It's worth reading if, like me, you're a bit obsessive about reading whole series in order.  The casual Susannah Gregory fan can probably give it a miss.

American Connections: The Founding Fathers Networked

Why write  book like this?  Well, writing beats real work.  And I hope you'll find it diverting.  History is where we come from, so it's worth a look.  And as navigators say: you don't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been.

That paragraph from the preface of James Burke's American Connections sums up the entire book.  He's written a good commute book; entertaining enough to distract you but neatly parceled into 5-7 page chapters so you won't miss your stop.  Burke uses his Connection walk through history to connect the signers of the Declaration of Independence to someone or something that's part of recent memory (and yes, he connects Josiah Bartlett to his fictional descendant, President Bartlett of The West Wing).  Some connections feel forced, others are more natural, and most chapters either share information or recycle facts from Burke's prior books (hence the "beats real work" comment).  Burke also retains his breezy, slightly irreverent style, so I'll forgive the recycling.

W is for Wasted

I've never believed that genre fiction sits on a lower rung of the quality ladder than straight fiction.  Good writing with complex, believable characters make a good novel, whether the plot involves simmering family resentment or a dead body.  W is for Wasted includes both, as well as medical fraud, a shady investigator, and return appearances by two of Kinsey's ex-boyfriends.

The dead body belongs to a homeless man who had Kinsey's name and office phone number in his pocket.  She's never seen him before, but business is slow so she decides to investigate her dead potential client.  Terrence - R.T. Dace - turns out to be an exonerated ex-con who wanted to clean up and reconnect with his now-grown children.  Dace's son and daughters didn't care about their father, alive or dead, but they are interested in the half-million dollar settlement he received from California for his false imprisonment.

It's all very straightforward (Dace must have found Kinsey's address in the phone book and planned to hire her as a go-between with his family) until Robert Deitz shows up.  He and Kinsey haven't spoken since the end of their affair, but there wasn't any bad blood until a sleazy investigator named Pete Wolinsky used Kinsey's name to subcontract a job out to Dietz, inflate his bill to his client, and then stiff Dietz because, well, by then Wolinsky is a stiff himself - shot at a bird refuge a few weeks before Dace died on the beach.

Grafton neatly connects the two crimes, with clean logic and few coincidences.  It's so cleverly constructed that it's difficult to review without spoiling.  It's enough to say that W is for Wasted, like the three preceding installments is a highlight of this long-running series.  As Kinsey approaches 40 (and Grafton approaches retirement), she's exploring issues with wider impact than simply uncovering insurance fraud, and wrapping serious discussions in novels which, although they're hard to put down, cannot be dismissed as merely "page-turners."

The Plantangenets: The Kings That Made Britain

Derek Wilson's The Plantagenets is the literary equivalent of a survey course.  Wilson provides quick biographical sketches of the kings and the highlights (or lowlights of their reigns in clear, concise language.  There's nothing special, but he does include the modern opinions of Richard I (brutal and negligent towards his kingdom), John (an able administrator if a poor king), and Richard III (the victim of a Tudor smear campaign), and by stripping the Wars of the Roses down to the basic facts, makes the inter-family civil war comprehensible.

The Weaker Vessel

I'm not sure how I feel about The Weaker Vessel.  The topic (women in 17th Century England) interests me, and I enjoy Antonia Fraser's writing style.  I should have loved the book, but for some reason it didn't make much of an impression on me.  Perhaps it's because I read it over the course of six very stressful weeks and couldn't devote enough mental energy to the lives of the dozens of (mostly) noble women Fraser profiled.   A few weeks later, only shadows of the political maneuverers, writers, holy women, merchants, and actresses remain in my mind, along with the nagging suspicion that the understandably missing lives of poorer women (who would have been illiterate and therefore would not have left letters and diaries) would have made The Weaker Vessel much more interesting.

Jane and the Canterbury Tale

I miss Lord Harold, and Jane does as well.  Stephanie Barron's Jane Austen mysteries became a bit more somber with his death, and I miss the lightness of the earlier books.  Jane is also aging - she's now nearly 39 and the flirting now falls to her niece, Fanny Knight.  She still enjoys a lively party, though, and Jane and the Canterbury Tale opens at a society wedding.  Adelaide Fiske, after a scandalous first marriage and widowhood, has married an army officer and all seems well until Fanny stumbles across the freshly dead body of Adelaide's first husband.  Naturally, Adelaide's brother and new husband are suspects, as is her cousin who expected to marry her, and the mysterious man who delivered a bag of tamarind seeds to the wedding.  Jane, of course, teases out the truth in the tales told by all the suspects, and while the book was entertaining, the solution wasn't totally satisfying.  I enjoyed Jane and her interactions with her niece and her brother, Edward Knight, but the mystery didn't live up to Barron's prior installments.

Star Island

Take Britney Spears's career profile and Lindsey Lohan's stage mother, remove all talent, and add an unwise mix of vodka, Red Bull, hydrocodone, birdseed, and stool softener.  That's how Carl Hiaasen introduces Cherry Pye, and her stunt double, Ann DeLusia.  As Cherry's mother sneaks the drug-addled starlet out through a service entrance, a particularly disreputable paparazzo snaps a photo of Ann being loaded into an ambulance - and discovers that the thrashing girl has brown, not green eyes.  Bang Abbot isn't your everyday sleazy photographer-for-hire, though - he's the recipient of a tainted Pulitzer Prize - so he's not going to settle for a photo of Cherry's double.  No, he's going to kidnap her and take enough pictures for a coffee table book to be published after Cherry's inevitable early death.

Except he kidnaps Ann, who a few days earlier was rescued from the wreck of her rental car by Skink (the former governor of Florida) so she can help him quash a shady real estate deal.  Oh, and Cherry's new bodyguard is a 6'10 ex-con with a weed-whacker where his left hand should be and who want to return to his previous job, shady real estate deals.  Star Island is classic Hiaasen - con men, an ineptly executed crime, improbable events (trust me, do not read how Bang Abbot won his Pulitzer in public unless you want to scare those around you), and weirdness that goes so far beyond the suspension of disbelief it's saved only by Hiaasen's whacked-out creativity.  Only Carl Hiaasen can surround a tight plot with the insanity of Cherry's mixers or Skink's idea of appropriate punishment and somehow make them fit.

Murder at Hazelmoor

I bought most of my Agatha Christies in the early 80s, some of them new and some used.  Murder at Hazelmoor fooled me - the spine is uncracked and it has early-80s cover art, but there's a stamp from The Book Swap on the inside cover.  It's also spent over 30 years on my shelf, unread - maybe I was more likely to file away the books I bought used.  In this case, I didn't miss much.  Murder at Hazelmoor is a middling locked-room Christie - a seance proclaims Captain Trevelyan's death and a few hours later, when Major Burnaby checks on is friend, Captain Trevelyan is dead.  The police settle on Trevelyan's nephew as the most likely culprit, and the young man's fiancée sets out to prove them wrong.  Cleverly plotted and diverting, but not particularly engrossing, it's a casual Christie - worth reading, but maybe not worth hunting for.

The Child's Child

I'm afraid that The Child's Child will be the last book Ruth Rendell writes under her Barbara Vine pseudonym.  It's not quite as good as The Birthday Present, but Rendell was in peak form for about two-thirds of the novel.  Perhaps it would have joined The Birthday Present and A Dark Adapted Eye among her best if it had been published as a novella.

I say that because The Child's Child feels like a novella with 85 pages of coincidence-laden framework extending the work to novel length.  Ph.D. candidate Grace Easton and her brother Andrew inherited a sprawling house on the outskirts of London from their grandmother.  Instead of selling it and  sharing the proceeds, they decide to divide the house and live together-but-not-together, and it works well until Andrew's partner James Derain moves in.  James's stability, never a sure thing, degerates when the two men witness the gay-bashing death of an acquaintance of theirs, and then a somewhat unbelievable series of events leads to Andrew and James moving out, leaving Grace, pregnant and working on a Ph.D dissertation analyzing the treatment of unwed mothers in 19th Century literature, alone in the suburban mansion.  One night, she reads the manuscript a family friend gave her.

The Child's Child couldn't be published when it was written in the 1950s.  Martin Greenwell based Maud Goodwin on a neighbor, a woman who'd gotten pregnant at 15 and who also happened to be James Derwin's great-grandmother.  Maude's brother John, who was gay at a time when it was illegal, "saved" Maude by moving away with her and pretending to be her husband.  One evening, John explained to Maude why he so willingly moved away with her, but she was a puritan-leaning as the family they'd left.  Long before John disappeared, Maude retreated into a icy shell, proud and protective of her daughter. There's not much of a mystery - we know John's fate, even if the police take several months to figure it out - but Rendell wrote a compelling story about a woman who trapped herself in a facade of respectability.  While I found the modern-day section of The Child's Child enjoyable, it really didn't add anything to the book.