Mr. Churchill's Secretary

I love used books. Besides seeing how cover art and typefaces have changed over the years, they're a good way to find new authors and series. They're cheaper so I'm likely to take a chance, and sometimes I start a series that already has several installments. I took a chance on Susan Elia MacNeal and bought the first two books in her Maggie Hope series. The chance paid off - Mr. Churchill's Secretary was a fun, fast-paced read.

Mathematician Maggie Hope first traveled to London to sell her grandmother's house so she could pay her graduate tuition at MIT. Unfortunately, the house was a decaying Victorian pile so she stayed in London, fixing up the house and supporting herself through tutoring and renting rooms to friends. Once Britain entered WWII, she realized she wanted to stay. 

A few months into the war, Maggie's friend David calls her. David is an intelligence analyst (a job Maggie interviewed for but did not get because they hire men from the 'right' schools, not women with mathematical abilities). One of Churchill's typists has been murdered and they need a replacement. Maggie agrees to take the job and between taking dictation and typing speeches finds a hidden German code which links Maggie's story to the subplot involving a German sleeper agent who's in communication with a radical Irish separatist. These threads also connect to Maggie's search for information about her parents who died when she was a toddler. The last third of the book is a series of action scenes, revealed identities, and last minute rescues. While exciting, it did feel like the book could have ended multiple times. This, and the level of exposition needed to introduce a dozen characters (possibly necessary for a first book but still distracting) bring the book down a bit, but I enjoyed it and am looking forward to the next installment.

The Dark Heart of Venice

 Looking back over my reviews, I see that I've been reading Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily books since 2010, and that they've been enjoyable but a bit uneven throughout the series. The Dark Heart of Florence is one of the lesser series entries - entertaining, but the main mystery is a bit obvious. It opens with Emily overhearing one of her husband Colin's fellow operatives suggesting that he and Emily go to Florence both so he can investigate a crime and to get away from an unknown threat. Once ensconced in his daughter's villa (inherited from her mother, another spy and Colin's long-ago lover), they find a dead body. Emily and her friend Cecile (a French woman of a certain age and with an interest in attractive, intelligent men) investigate both this crime and an apparent cypher written on the walls of the villa. As she's done with most of her books, Alexander also tells a story set further in the past - here, a woman who lived in the villa in the late Fifteenth Century. All three threads come together in a somewhat obvious and slightly forced conclusion. Enjoyable but not particularly memorable, The Dark Heart of Venus is worth reading for the atmosphere and for Cecile, but otherwise mediocre.

Lady in the Lake

Laura Lippman is a master at creating compelling but not quite likable protagonists and using shifting timelines and POV. Lady in the Lake utilizes these methods, but isn't quite as satisfying as her other novels. One night in 1968, Madeline Schwartz's husband invites a new tennis buddy to dinner - a local TV anchor with whom Madeline had one date in high school. That night inspires Maddy to leave her comfortable life and follow her teenage dream of becoming a reporter. Well, a housewife in her late 30s with no experience or degree isn't going to get a reporting job but she does manage to get hired as a columnist's assistant. From there, she branches out into investigating the murders of a local tween and of a woman whose body was found in a lake a few months earlier. 

On the surface, it's a standard historical mystery but Lippman focuses more on the characters than the mystery which makes for a interesting but somewhat disjointed novel wrapped around an unsatisfying mystery. After every chapter narrated by Maddy we get a chapter narrated by someone with whom she interacted - the columnist, the only woman on the paper's reporting staff, the African American cop with whom she's begun an affair, the woman who would become Tess Monaghan's mother, the murdered woman's young son - and occasional chapters from the dead woman's ghost. While interesting, it never quite flowed. I enjoyed it, but it wasn't quite up to Lippman's standards.

The Chancellor's Secret

 The 25th and final installment in Susannah Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew mysteries is a decent mystery but more importantly gives the characters a happy ending. Matthew marries Matilde, he's given a source of income so he can continue to treat the poor while still supporting himself, his sister Edith has remarried to a wealthy and good man, Brother Michael has installed a figurehead into the Chancellor's position so he can run the university from behind the scenes, and the town will no longer have to worry about Sheriff Tuylet's disturbed and violent teenage son.

In the meantime, Matt and Michael have to solve the mysterious deaths of two Chancellor candidates and deal with a collapsed bridge while Matt handles an atypical outbreak of the flux and two about-to-graduate students who've already set up shop as physicians. Matt's also frustrated by the local woman who's helping Matilde and Edith plan the wedding, worried about whether his sister's new marriage of convenience (her late husband had left a financial mess and her new husband is wealthy), and contemplating life once he gives up his teaching position. Add in a drought which turns into a flood and Gregory provides a fitting sendoff for her characters. I'll miss them, but I've got 25 books to reread.

The Tomb that Ruth Built

 I met Troy Soos at a Mid-Atlantic Mystery Convention 30ish years ago. He'd just published the first Mickey Rawlings mystery and I couldn't resist. Mickey was a young baseball player in 1910, destined to be a team-hopping utility guy, and somehow he keeps stumbling across and solving murders. Mickey played for 6 teams through 1921 and then...well, I guess Soos's contract ended and he didn't get another one. In 2014, he wrote one more installment for a small publisher, The House That Ruth Built. It's 1923 and Mickey is playing (very occasionally) for the Yankees and tasked with keeping an eye on his road roommate, Babe Ruth. Well, that's not working out very well, but at least Mickey gets a few clutch hits and Miller Huggins sees him as a potential manager and uses him as an unofficial bench coach. 

He's living happily with Maggie who has a job as a stunt coordinator with a New York based film company (showing how women had more behind the scenes jobs in the days of silents than even in the 1990s) when Yankees management gives him an extra task - find out who put a corpse behind a wall next to one of the concession stands at the new Yankee Stadium. Mickey solves the crime, of course, before being cut from the team for some kid from Columbia named Gherig. I solved the crime as well - as soon as I met the murderer in fact. As a mystery, The House That Ruth Built is only so-so but it was an enjoyable book, one last visit with Mickey and Maggie where I saw them finally marry and him embark on his career as a manager.

Speaker of Mandarin

 Ruth Rendell was a product of her time. Still, by the early 80s I knew that the L-for-R switch to connote a native Chinese speaker using English was at best cringe and generally unacceptable - and I was a tween, not an established novelist. This may have colors my view of Speaker of Mandarin but beyond that, it's not Rendell's best.

Inspector Wexford is on a tour of China. He's supposedly there s part of his London detective nephew's retinue, discussing policing, but once established, Rendell drops this. He's dealing with a stereotypically devoted party member guide and attached to a tour group from the UK. He's also hallucinating a woman old enough to have bound feet following him. 

A few months later, Wexford is called to investigate the death of one of the tourists he met in China. adela Knighton was shot at point blank range in the back of her head, and her jewelry is missing. While Mike Burden investigates the tour group and potentially disgruntled patients of Alan Knighton, Wexford focuses on her family, gaining insight from her lifelong friend.

The Knighton "had" to get married, and for years it was an outwardly satisfactory arrangement - Adela raised their four children while Alan rose in his career. In her friend's words, though, Adela "only had a husband in the sense that he slept next to her." Then, something changed.

None of this seems to connect and it doesn't play into the solution. Both the "hallucination" (which, of course, has a much better explanation than too much green tea) and the murder are solved by coincidence and not ones that are particularly interesting. i try to read entire series, but if you're wandering around the Wexford novels, you can probably skip Speaker of Mandarin.

Death Notes

 In Murder by Death Lionel Twain accuses the characters (based on Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Charlie Chan, Nick and Nora Charles, and Sam Spade) of cheating. I'm not familiar with the last three, but I can't think of a book where Christie cheated. She may have made it look like she did, but trace back through the clues and she supported her conclusions.

Death Notes, however, shows that even the masters like Ruth Rendell can cheat. Sir Michael Camargue was murdered shortly before marrying a woman younger than his estranged daughter (and a casual friend of Reg Wexford's actress daughter Sheila, whose banns are read at the same service). Did his daughter kill him for the inheritance? Or was someone impersonating her? Wexford travels to California ostensibly on vacation to solve the mystery...and then it turns out everything he learned there was irrelevant. I enjoyed parts of the book (Mike Burden has remarried since the last book and he's more relaxed than in the early books as well as becoming more well-rounded through his wife's interests, and it was entertaining to watch Wexford deal with jealousy when he and his wife met up with her old flame and his wife in California), but the ending was unsatisfying enough to affect the entire book.

Where Memories Lie

 Deborah Crombie combines the personal with the professional in her Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James mysteries. Here, the two are throwing their first dinner party as a couple, inviting his boss and his wife and both partners new professional partners to round out the table. Towards the end Gemma gets a call from a distressed friend. Art expert Erika Rosenthal, who escaped Nazi Germany with her late husband, and one of her former students has seen the broach her father made and which was stolen during her escape in a local auction brochure. As she begins asking a few low-key questions for her friend, Gemma discovered that Erika's husband was murdered in the 1950s and the detective on that case mysteriously died a few days after being told to stop investigating. Will Gemma solve the cold case, and is it connects to the murder of a young auction house employee? Maybe it's a bit coincidental but Crombie ties the crimes together in an unexpected way.

Ice and Stone

 Grunge was just coming in when I discovered Sharon McCone in 1990, so it's a bit odd to think of Ted being into grunge when Sharon met him. Marcia Mueller's detective was 28 at her 1977 creation, 20 years older than I was. Now, her age is unstated but I estimate she's just shy of 60. Mueller's retcon skills exceed those of Sara Paretsky, though. She mentions old friends and alludes to early experiences, but since her world has changed regularly, both personally and professionally, the fuzzy timeline causes fewer problems than with Chicago's solo PI.

Sharon has also become more apolitically active, in part due to her discovery of her Native American heritage. Ice and Stone has Sharon investigating the murders of two Native women, tow of thousands who have disappeared or been murdered in the last several years. Here, the main suspects are the local landowners, a man and his two sons, or perhaps the two goons they employ. ice and Stone is tightly plotted and q quick read (only 256 pages, with several pages just giving the date), with an unexpected motive for the murders.  There's also slight pharmaceutical plot error (-zone is the nomenclature for antipsychotics, but she needed to explain how rare earth elements would factor in), but it's obscure enough and not quite vital to the plot (i.e. not five minutes of searching like the patent/trade secret confusion made me give up Jill Churchill) that I'll let it go

Water Like a Stone

Gemma James and Duncan Kincaid are police detectives so they shouldn't have to stumble across dead bodies. Deborah Crombie's mysteries border the cozy sub-genre so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when their Christmas, the first spent with Duncan's family in Cheshire, includes a murder investigation. As the couple arrive with enthusiastic 5-year-old Toby, moody teenage Kit, and two dogs, Duncan's sister Juliet calls - she's found an infant's body behind the plaster of the barn she's rehabbing. Duncan and Gemma are off duty, but the DI on the case is an old friend (of sorts) so he allows them to observe. When Kit finds the body of a longboat dwelling former social worker, a woman who'd let him and his father visit the boat, there's no way the London police can stay out of the case.

As for Juliet, finding the body isn't her only worry. She'd recently opened her building business after quitting her job as office manager to her husband's investment firm, akin to the tension created by his mistaken belief that she'd been having an affair with his business partner, Piers Dalton. Their teenage daughter Lally has secrets of her own, involving Piers's son Leo and a classmate who'd drowned a few months earlier. Kit finds himself between his magnetic new cousin and his basic nature as a good kid scarred by his mother's death. His attempt to protect her puts himself in danger and unmasks the murderer.

Crombie's books are the anti-Law & Order; the detectives personal lives play a central role. Christmas was the perfect time for Gemma, Toby, and Kit to meet Duncan's casually affectionate and welcoming parents. Cheerful, energetic Toby happily accepts them as grandparent, and Gemma almost immediately feels at home with her almost-in-laws, so different from her working class parents. Kit has a slightly harder time, as one would expect considering the fraught relationship with his maternal grandparents who are fighting Duncan, who has not legally been declared Kit's father, for custody. Despite the recurring nightmare of finding his mother's body and the turmoil caused by Lally, Kit warms to his new family. Even if the mystery wasn't a good one, Water Like a Stone would be worth reading as a straight novel. 

Death and the Chapman

When Kate Sedley completed her series with The Christmas Wassail, I decided it was time to return to the start of the series. Roger changed quite a bit over the 12 or 13 year timeline of his books. In December 1483, Roger Chapman is married with four children with Bristol as his home base and a reputation for aiding Richard III. That's a far cry from 19-year-old Roger Carverson who recently left Glastonbury Abbey knowing that monastic life wasn't for him. That Roger is bright and curious but somewhat naive. Naive, but tall and handsome and it's his attractiveness that brings him to the attention of Alderman Weaver's housekeeper/cousin and to Lady Mallory's servant Bess. Relatives of both Alderman Weaver and Lady Mallory disappeared from the same street in London and both want Roger to find out what happened, which he does. 28 years after my first reading, I'd forgotten this main mystery in favor of the subplot which brings Roger in contact with the Duke of Gloucester and his spymaster, Timothy Plummer. While chasing a false lead in the disappearances, Roger finds out where Anne Neville had been hidden in an attempt to prevent her marriage to Richard. I have hundreds of books (read and unread) on my shelves, but I'm going to make time to revisit Roger's travels.

In the Shadow of Vesuvius

 In the Shadow of Vesuvius brings Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily, along with her childhood friends Ivy Brandon and Jeremy, Duke of Bainbridge, to an archaeological dig in 1901 Pompeii. As so often happens, they come across a much more recently deceased body and find that most of the archeological expedition (including a brother and sister team - she's the archaeologist and he's an artist who draws the uncovered artifacts - the head archaeologist, and the man financing it) are hiding secrets. Another more personal secret turns up as well, in the form of Emily's husband Colin's previously unknown daughter. Fighting jealousy and the feelings of inadequacy Colin's late lover induced in her years ago, Emily eventually uncovers the truth, and saves herself with the aid of a knife carried by the young woman poet whose life in Pompeii shortly before Vesuvius destroyed the city.

In a Dark House

 Sometimes, a mystery novel has too much plot. That's my opinion of Deborah Crombie's In a Dark House but I still found it entertaining. The book starts with a young firefighter chatting with her colleague before they're called out on an arson fire. You can feel their friendship and romantic potential, so it's not a surprise when he dies during the fire. He's not the only casualty - there's a woman's body on the ground floor - and Duncan Kincaid leads the police investigation. Meanwhile, Duncan's cousin, a Cambridge based vicar who's covering for one of her colleagues, asks Gemma James to come along on a welfare check of one of her parishoners. Fanny Liu is a former nurse now disabled by Guillaume-Beret and her flatmate, who also helps her with daily activities has disappeared. There's also a missing child case and a murder connected to the battered women's shelter adjacent to the fire site, and all plots end up being at least loosely connected. It's not the best mystery I've read, but Crombie's characters are engaging and feel like real people and each individual solution is well supported. In a Dark House is a bit too convoluted to be a good mystery but it works as a novel.

The Case of the Reincarnated Client

 Hardboiled mysteries focus on the dark side. What non-mystery readers don't appreciate is that even lightweight mysteries and procedurals have dark threads. After all, they're focused on a crime, often murder. My favorite Christie, Sparkling Cyanide doesn't just include multiple murders but the whole plot would not exist if not for women barely out of their teens marrying rich men over 30. Tarquin Hall's Vish Puri novels are generally on the lighter side but the Delhi-based detective has dealt with serious issues before. The main plot The Case of the Reincarnated Client is by far his darkest.

Puri reluctantly gives in to Mummy-ji's nagging and takes on the case of a woman who claims to be the reincarnation of one of the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. This sends Puri back into that violent time and explores mattes of prejudice, police corruption, abandoned widows, and domestic abuse. It's a case where we see that solving the crime will have a minimal effect at best on those who were harmed.

The subplots, fortunately, lighten up the novel. There's Puri's other case - he'd done a background check on a prospective groom who turns out to be a prodigious snorer, so loud his new wife can't sleep with him - and the administrative chaos brought about by the November, 2016 demonetization. And there's the destruction of Puri's beloved Ambassador and the desire of everyone around him - his driver Handbrake, his wife Rumpi, and Mummy-Ji - for him to finally replace the not-as-reliable-as-he-claims, past-its-prime sedan with something that has power steering and heated seats. A thread which resolves on the last page, along with Puri's reluctance to accept that his younger daughter wants to make a love match.

Vanity Dies Hard

 I shouldn't be so surprised that the first half or so of Ruth Rendell's novels feel so old. Vanity Dies Hard was written 56 years ago, putting it only a year or two closer to today than The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was when I read it in high school. But by the time I discovered her, Agatha Christie was dead and Rendell was only halfway through her career when I picked up her first Barbara Vine novel 30 years ago.

Rendell was a psychological novelist, with motivations more important at times than the actual mystery. But science and society evolve, making Vanity Dies Hard hard to review today. The plot is simple - wealthy but drab Alice Whittaker married a younger man at 37, and after her friend disappears, she believes she's being poisoned by someone. Well, it doesn't take a detective to discover why a 37-year-old newlywed might suddenly feel "unwell" so despite Rendell's talent for creepiness, I never though Alice was truly in danger. I was intrigued by the fate of her glamorous friend Nesta, though, but less so than I was by questions about the framework. Why was Andrew Fleming essentially forced to quit his job and join the family firm when he married Alice? Why was Alice's first assumption poison and not pregnancy? How desperately dull life was for affluent women for whom there was no expectation of even becoming educated just for the sake of knowledge. And how accurate is this portrayal of mid-1960s small town England?

Dead Land

 Every time I read one of Sara Paretsky's I wonder if it will be the last. VI Warshawski has been around for 40 years and at least two age-retcons, but I still look forward to her appearances. In Dead Land, VI is once again dragged into the mystery by her goddaughter Bernie. On an ice hockey scholarship in Chicago, Bernie is supporting herself over the summer by coaching youth sports and VI is supporting her when she attends a local committee meeting where Bernie's charges are receiving an award. The main agenda item is redeveloping the beach along Lake Michigan and when a low-level staffer (and Bernie's sort-of boyfriend) gets flustered and drops some papers, it leads the two women into VI's speciality, corrupt politics. This ties in with a second plot involving a socially conscious musician who's been homeless and emotionally fragile since her husband's politically motivated murder. The two plots developed along parallel tracks and while they connected at the end, this is one of Paretsky's less satisfying books. Mediocre Warshawsky is still entertaining and thrilling, though, and I'm happy to see that there's a new book coming out next month.

A Sleeping Lie

There's a four year gap between the publication of Shake Hands Forever and A Sleeping Lie but the England of 1979 in which Inspector Wexford lives feels further in the past. Wexford's older daughter Sylvia has left her husband over her desire to start a career, and that (along with the fact that she'd married at 18) feels like it belongs to the early rather than late 70s. As does her return home after the purchase of a dishwasher.

Wexford's domestic life ends up providing him with the lightbulb moment that solves the murder of Rhoda Comfrey. Miss Comfrey was stabbed to death after visiting her hospitalized father, but there's no proof of her existence other than her corpse. Or of the novelist whose wallet she's inexplicably carrying. Moving between London and Kingsmarkham, Wexford and DI Mike Burden try to flesh out the life of a woman who all but disappeared after winning a football pool and to trace a man who was apparently born in his 20s. After an embarrassing (but amusing) mistake, Wexford's actress daughter Sheila unwittingly provides the final piece of information Wexford needs.

Appointment With Death

 You do see, don't you, that she has to be killed?

Those words drift though Hercule Poirot's window as he's traveling in the Middle East. We (and he) don't know this, but the words were part of a conversation between Raymond and Carol Boynton and aimed at their stepmother. Mrs. Boynton the second wife of a rich man, and has completely cowed her three stepchildren and made her daughter Genevra appear to be mentally unstable. The only person who appears able to stand up to her is daughter-in-law, Lennox's wife Nadine. We first see Mrs. Boynton through the eyes of two doctors, newly qualified Sarah King and prominent psychologist Dr. Gerard, and as they analyze the family we know Mrs. Boynton will not live past page 75 and that everyone around her will have a different motive for killing her. This is Agatha Christie, though, and she's got some surprises up her sleeve. The murderer is *not* one of the obvious subjects, but there are just enough clues scattered across the narrative so that the solution doesn't come across as a cheat. Christie even supplies us with a happy ending.

Dead Souls

 Dead Souls is dark, even for Ian Rankin, with several plots which connect in unexpected ways. It begins with a policeman's suicide and quickly moves on to Rebus's botched attempt to catch someone who's been poisoning animals at the zoo. Botched because Rebus sees a released sex offender and chases after him. His unauthorized investigation into the parolee leads him to an old case involving sexual abuse at a reformatory, which may or may not involve a murderer returned from Montana where he's been released on a technicality. And in his spare time, Rebus is investigating the disappearance of his high school girlfriend's 20-something son and worrying about his daughter, still unable to walk after the accident in The Hanging Garden. It's a lot, and as usual Rankin doesn't give anyone an unqualified happy ending, but it's also interesting, believable, and well written. Just not something to read in January when we need a bit of a lift.

The Christmas Wassail

 It's Christmas 1483 and people are beginning to wonder where Richard's nephews are. Roger the Chapman, occasional investigator for the King tries to ignore the rumors (and the implications that he's in the King's service). Sedley's last novel returns Roger to non political matters when he comes across the corpse of a thoroughly unpleasant man who happens to be both the head of a squabbling family and one of Bristol's leaders. When another prominent man dies violently, Roger takes up the task of solving they mystery, all while celebrating the holiday and taking his children to see the visiting troupe of mummers who have a secret past. The novel ends with Roger leaving on another trip to sell his wares, and with me ready to re-read his first adventure because I'm going to miss him.