Uneasy Lies the Crown

I love Lady Emily Hargraves, and I enjoy the secondary plots Tasha Alexander weaves into the noble sleuth's mysteries. Here, the flashback tale of a recently married noblewoman mistreated by the family caring for her while her husband is on Crusade doesn't influence the main mystery, but the two plot lines meet in the final chapter.

The main plot starts with Queen Victoria's death. During the funeral, Lady Emily's husband, an aide to the late Queen and new King, slips away to investigate the murder of a man dressed as Henry IV. Emily, of course, joins him, and they learn that this is the beginning of a killing spree. Will it include the current King? Alexander is too clever for something so obvious, and she supports the solution well.

Lady Byron and her Daughters

I wanted to enjoy Lady Byron and her Daughters, and the first third of the book was compelling. Annabella Milbank was a mathematician and a poet in her own right when she met Lord Byron through Caroline Lamb, her cousin by marriage. Their bizarre courtship, and his obviously close relationship with his half sister, set against the backdrop of the Regency aristocracy played like an uncensored Jane Austen novel. Once the couple married, though, the act of watching a psychologically abusive marriage dissolve became more horrible than interesting. Julia Markus's biography wandered a bit through its last half, touching here on Ada Lovelace's life and mathematical work, there on Annabella's involvement in progressive social movements (including the abolition of slavery), and lightly on Melora Leigh's tragic life.

A Deadly Brew

I've compared Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew mysteries to a workplace comedy, and the humor stars coming through in the fourth installment, A Deadly Brew, in part through the introduction of Ralph de Langelee. The future college head makes his first appearance as a suspiciously unlearned lecturer and Matt and Brother Michael are not surprised when he turns out to be a spy. Neither are they surprised to find out that the wine which is poisoning members of both town and gown was smuggled in. Starting with two deaths connected to the surprise election of the new University Chancellor and including an escape (accompanied by an elderly nun and a merchant's niece) through the fens from a convent, A Deadly Brew is a satisfying mystery.

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.

Hallowe'en Party

Never kill a child or a pet

That's standard advice from the plotting panels at mystery conventions, but if you're Agatha Christie, you can violate that twice in a single novel.  The first victim, Joyce Reynolds, is an unpleasant tween, the sort of girl who borrows adventures she hears and embellishes then when they become her own. Naturally, when she's drowned in the apple-bobbing basin during a community Halloween party, the investigation centers on Joyce's earlier claim of having seen a murder once.  

The problem is, no one can remember a murder. Well, there was that au pair who disappeared a year or so earlier, but she wasn't murdered, was she? Luckily, Ariadne Oliver happened to be at the party (she was visiting a friend, the mother of one of the other tweens at the party), and she calls Hercule Poirot who solves the mystery just in time to save a third child from death. Written in the mid-60s, Hallowe'en Party feels a little more comfortable with the era than Third Girl, largely because "mod" influences are made in passing rather than being a central part of the story. It's a good late Christie, but because it's missing the broad near-misses that evoke the years shortly before I was born, it's not one of my frequent re-reads.

A Case of Spirits

It's been three years since I read one of Peter Lovesy's Sergeant Cribb books. The policeman's adventures are light and diverting, and more interesting as a glimpse into certain aspects of late Victorian life than as straight mysteries. Here, Cribb finds himself immersed in the spiritualism fad because several seance-goers have been burgled while communing with the dead. When an up-and-coming medium dies while in an electrified chair (an instrument to contact the world of the beyond), Cribb and his plodding assistant Constable Thackery change their investigatory focus from burglary to murder. A Case of Spirits is a passable mystery with several amusing character sketches, particularly that of a well-born spinster who turns out to be more important to the plot than one would guess upon first meeting her.

One Nation Under God: How Corporate American Invented Christian America

My first grade school was part of the (now almost forgotten) religious left. When it closed, I ended up on the other end of the spectrum, and I didn't understand it. How could people who wear their Catholicism on their sleeves be so enthusiastic for Reagan and for shredding the social safety net? How did "freedom of religion" come to mean "you must practice some form of monotheistic religion, preferably Christianity but Judaism might be OK?"

Kevin Kruse traces our public and somewhat skewed view of religion to the corporate reaction to FDR's Depression and WWII programs. FDR used some liberal theology to support his creation of the New Deal, and the businessmen who felt he went too far used theology to claim the programs were not only unnecessary but harmful. This occurred during a time of increasing religious affiliation and attendance to record levels which we now think of as a historical norm.

The new religiosity may have started in the 1930s, but it didn't take hold until the 1950s. Promoted by a handful of ministers (including Billy Graham), an outwardly religious (but unaffiliated in early 1953) President Eisenhower, and the best minds of Madison Avenue, we became a "Christian nation" with public prayers and the insertion of "under god" into the Pledge of Allegiance. As one would expect from a religious movement led by millionaires and advertising executives, it focused on power over mercy, and the separation of church and state became almost blasphemous to both. Kruse devotes the third section of his book to the fallout, the lawsuits and eventual culture war that was inevitable when people began to question authoritarian public piety.