Finger Lickin' Fifteen

Lula doesn't like cops, something Janet Evanovich refers to in most of her Plum books.  So what does Lula do when she sees a man decapitated in front of her?  Ask Steph to call her boyfriend, Trenton detective Joe Morelli.  There's a slight hitch - when they return to the scene the body is missing and Joe and Steph have broken up after an argument about peanut butter.  Further complicating matters, Steph is once again working part time for RangeMan Security, this time at Ranger's request.  And this is all before Lula and Grandma Mazur decide to enter a barbecue cook-off.

Finger Lickin' Fifteen is a bit of departure for Evanovich because the main crime seems to get less attention than the subplot.  The headless man is celebrity chef Stanley Chipolte and there's a million dollar reward for solving his murder so Lula and Grandma Mazur decide to enter the cook-off in an attempt to find the killer.  Even with the help of Lula's new man, a cross-dressing fireman who bears at least a passing resemblance to Julia Child, they are far from successful.  This thread focuses more on the home aspect of Steph's life - the killers are found but the murder takes a back seat to Lula's and Grandma's attempts to make non-burnt, non-toxic barbecue sauce.  It does allow Evanovich to channel her inner teenager, with a lot of bodily function humor, most of it from Lula.

The RangeMan plot is a little tighter, and gives Steph a chance to show that she's not merely lucky.  Several of RangeMan's security clients have been burgled, and it looks like an inside job.  Steph's job is to casually investigate the RangeMan employees while doing background searches for clients.  This turns out to be a dead end, but while visiting a recent break-in with Ranger, she figures out how the crime were committed.  Using that information, they lay a trap for the robbers and save the security business.

Finger Lickin' Fifteen is well plotted, but the plot is really just a framework against which the insanity of Steph's life is set.  So we get multiple Car Deaths,  a family dinner (with the cross-dressing fireman and a produce manager named Peter Pecker whom Steph's mom thinks could be her new son-in-law), a few appearances by Joyce Barnhardt, a fire in Steph's apartment which does not reach her indestructible 70s-painted bathroom, and a secondary FTA.   Junior Turley is a flasher with a regular route (and yes, Grandma Mazur is a regular) whose capture is up there with Punky Balog.  Not only is there the unsuccessful attempt to capture him during a funeral with Grandma's help, but there's also why he was arrested.  It's middle-of-the-pack Plum, but still funny enough that reading it in public is a risky endeavor.

Plum Spooky

Stephanie Plum has a problem.  No, it's not the scientist who broke his boss's nose with a coffee cup and then disappeared after Vinnie Plum wrote his bond, or Lula's romantic problems, or the fact that Joe Morelli's brother Anthony was kicked out by his wife and is currently living with Morelli - and has been shot in the butt with a nail gun.  Or even the fact that Diesel has reappeared in her living room.  Her problem is Carl, Susan Stitch's pet monkey.  Susan has gone on her honeymoon and left Carl with Steph.  So while dealing with her FTA, who is apparently in cahoots with the Unmentionable Diesel is trying to catch, Lula's problems with Tank, and Morelli's frustrations, she also has to deal with a monkey who gives people the finger, plays GameBoy, and gets into an argument with Grandma Mazur about how to eat mashed potatoes.

Steph and Diesel locate their respective quarries in the Pine Barrens, where they also encounter the Easter Bunny and Edgar the Fire Farter (whom, of course, Steph unknowingly invites to dinner).  Plus about twenty more monkeys.  There's a creative Car Death and  the unexpected and amusing capture of a minor FTA, just as we expect from a Stephanie Plum novel.  This is also one of the books where Stephanie is truly in danger - the Unmentionable uses Steph as a 'reward' for her FTA, and while we know she will save herself with panic and a well-placed knee, the scene is a bit creepier than we expect from Evanovich.  Still, she knows that we like our Steph books moderately fluffy so Steph escapes unscathed and even monkey-free, and in search of yet another car to destroy.

The Unruly Queen: the Life of Queen Caroline

I was never particularly interested in the media circus surrounding Charles and Diana.  She struck me as an initially naive girl who'd been roped into marriage and who eventually developed into a media-savvy woman.  He struck me as an immature jerk, but one who'd been created by his bizarre upbringing.  Strange as it may seem, I feel sorry for members of the Royal Family, or at least the ones close to succession and constantly in the public eye.  It may be nice to have the money and social cachet to be a second cousin once removed to the Queen, but you can marry when and whom you want and have your own career and interests.  The Queen's children and grandchildren are public property, their romantic lives must be seen through a dynastic lens.  Their job is to make public appearances and lend a famous face to charities, but they are rarely allowed to take an active role.

This, however, was not the most acrimonious marriage entered into by an heir to the British throne.  That dubious honor belongs to the Prince Regent and Caroline of Brunswick.   Flora Fraser wrote The Unruly Queen in 1995, at the height of the Charles and Diana conflict but managed to avoid highlighting the parallels between Charles and his great-great-great-granduncle.  

George, the Prince Regent may not have been quite as dim as portrayed by Hugh Laurie in Blackadder the Third but he was as spoiled, extravagant, and concerned with his own amusement.  George married for money - he'd been secretly married before to Maria Fitzherbert, a Catholic widow, and kept a succession of mistresses after he'd been persuaded (temporarily, at least) to end his relationship with her.  He married his first cousin Caroline solely to increase his allowance and ended all pretense of marriage as soon as she'd delivered a healthy heir.  Caroline is no more appealing of a character, although slightly more sympathetic.  She'd been raised in almost total isolation, not only kept apart from children her age (as many royals of the era were) but even after the age at which she would have made her debut was not allowed to attend formal dinners or musical performances.  It should be no surprise, then, that she was crude, childish, and willing to test the boundaries of her new-found freedom.  

Fraser paints a compelling picture of a lonely woman surrounded by people who depended on her husband for their livelihoods.  Once she'd given birth to Princess Charlotte, she was disposable and essentially excluded from royal life.  Like her husband, she had multiple affairs, but one can understand why a woman whose marriage had essentially ended on her wedding night would do so.  Unlike her husband, these affairs were crimes against the state and culminated in her trial in the House of Lords for treason and eventually her being barred from what should have been her coronation as Queen Consort.  She died soon afterwards from an intestinal obstruction and if not forgotten, left as more of a footnote to history than an important person, unlike her 20th Century successor whose media savvy will preserve her place in the collective memory.

Death on the Nile

I've been reading Agatha Christie for nearly 30 years - she was my gateway into adult fiction, and a few years ago, I realized that despite the many hours I'd spent with her books, I'd only read about 2/3 of them and re-read about a dozen multiple times.  I've since worked on reading more of the cannon, but that doesn't stop me from pulling one of the favorite few off the shelf every few months.

Death on the Nile is one of those favorites.  I remember the first time I read it, as a 15-year-old on my way back from vacation in Rio de Jenario.  25 years and at least a dozen revisits later, I still flash back to my mother retrieving me from the airport snack bar where I was pouring over the plan of the S.S. Karnak so intently I hadn't heard our flight announced.  

The plot of Death on the Nile follows the locked room template.  Someone murders Lynnette Doyle while she's on a honeymoon cruise in Egypt.  No one other than her fellow passengers could have committed the crime, most of them have both alibis and motives, and it is up to Hercule Poirot to deduce the identity of the murderer.   Of course, I know who murdered Lynnette Doyle, and why, and how.  That allows me to enjoy the setting and the characters, especially the Allertons (does Mrs. Allerton really not know what her son is up to?), Simon Doyle (is he really the sweet, stolid, doting husband he appears to be?) and Cornelia Robeson (is she dim, or has she been typecast by her family?).  Rereading Death on the Nile, or any Christie novel, is untaxing pleasure reading in its most basic form.

A Gladiator Dies Only Once

The advantage to writing historical mysteries is that the author can place his stories as far apart as he wishes.  Steven Saylor's Roman detective Gordianus aged 31 years over the course of 10 novels published between 1991 and 2005, with nearly a decade between the early novels and months between later ones.   Gordianus's timeline speeds up because Saylor places him as a bit player in major events, and those events become more frequent as the Roman Republic segues into Empire.

A Gladiator Dies Only Once is Saylor's second collection of Gordianus short stories, and like The House of the Vestals, it both fills in gaps in Gordianus's personal history and provides insight into Roman culture.  He provides a primer on gladiator games and funeral rites, the manufacture of garum, Roman sports, and the foibles of historical characters.  What strikes me is how modern Gordianus's life really is.  In one story, his pre-teen son has replaced toys with statues of mythological creatures, like a modern boy replacing Matchbox cars with action figures.  Gordianus endures rather than enjoys dinners with his frequent client Cicero, the embodiment of the pompous, long-winded politician.  He takes cases he doesn't like solely for money and deals with the cynical ends to which his work is applied.  Saylor, like Miss Marple, knows that human nature is the same, no matter what the setting.

Plum Lucky

How can I review Plum Lucky?  Stephanie is not a deep character, and Janet Evanovich's between-the-numbers novels are short and fluffy.  It's tightly plotted enough to get past the silliness, with the slightly scatty but ultimately sane Stephanie Plum holding everything together.

On St. Patrick's Day, Grandma Mazur 'finds' a duffel bag full of cash.  So, like the 72-year-old juvenile delinquent she is, Grandma decides to buy an RV and head to Atlantic City, bringing along angry little person Randal Briggs as a bodyguard and driver.  Unfortunately, the money actually belongs to a gangster named Lou Devina.  Also on the trail of the money is Snuggy, a jockey-turned-bank robber who talks to animals and is on a mission to save a race horse, the supernatural bounty hunter Diesel, and Stephanie whose mother has threatened to cut off her supply of pot roast and pineapple upside down cake if she doesn't bring her grandmother back Right Now.  Along for the ride are Lula, the hooker-turned-file-clerk who kept her wardrobe when she changed professions and Connie Rosolli, the Jersey-girl receptionist at Vincent Plum Bail Bonds who packs a lot of attitude and a semi-automatic pistol.  Of course they find Grandma and recover the money and even save the horse, but that's not really the point.  The plot exists only to tie together the set pieces, including Lula creating a diversion by throwing nickles on the ground...while wearing gold lame spandex that's shorter, lower cut, and tighter than usual, and a few jokes about the bodily functions of quadrupeds. It's fluffy fun, not to be read on public transit unless you're trying to get a three-seat for yourself.

Nine Men Dancing

I had an account with amazon.co.uk several years before I had one with amazon.com, and Kate Sedley is one reason why.  I picked up her first Roger the Chapman mystery, Death and the Chapman about 15 years ago, but after the first few installments, she must have been dropped by her American publisher.  I was hooked, though, so after a few years shopping with a now-defunct bookstore in London, I started buying her books (and those by Michael Jecks and Susanna Gregory) through amazon.co.uk.

Sedley makes Fifteenth Century England feel both familiar and alien.  Roger's travels wouldn't seem out of place on the Travel Channel, if they were to do a walking tour of southern England, but the bustling commercial city of Bristol only has a few thousand inhabitants, most of whom  have some connection to each other.  It's odd to think of a major city with fewer people than my Roxborough neighborhood, and even odder to think of a town so isolated that an outsider's marriage and relocation is gossip-worthy twenty years later and a decade after his death.

Nine Men Dancing begins, as do about half of Sedley's mysteries, with Roger leaving Bristol in January, 1478 to sell his ribbons and notions in the small settlements and villages of Southeastern England.  As he begins his return trip to Bristol, he stumbles across an abandoned manor.  A few hours later, he hears how the brothers who owned the manor died of plague shortly after digging a new well, and also about the disappearance of Eris Lilywhite.  The prior autumn, Eris had disappeared on a stormy night after Nathaniel Rawbone announced that he planned to marry her.  Eris had originally been attached to Nathaniel's son Tom, who had jilted Rosamund Bush, who first tells Roger the story.  He meets Eris's mother and grandmother and promises the older woman to try to discover if Eris is dead or alive.  Naturally, everyone in this small, isolated community has an idea of who may have murdered Eris, with most suspicion centering on the jilted Tom Rawbone and his older brother Ned whose inheritance would be decreased if his father started a new family with Eris.  

Sedley neatly ties the threads together, ending with Eris's sad but believable fate, the details of which involve a bit more technical knowledge of water tables than I expect in a medieval tale.  She also mixes in the politics of courtship in a small village where everyone knows (and is probably related) to each other.  With only a few eligible men and women of marriageable age, the competition for the son of a well-off farmer (like Tom Redbone) or the tavern-keeper's daughter (Rosamund Bush, who spends the novel playing hard-to-get with Lambert Miller) can be as fierce as any seen in Jane Austen's assemblies and balls.  It's one of the more enjoyable books in an entertaining series.   Sedley's books are hard to find in the US, but finding them is worth the effort.

Seneca Falls Inheritance

I like to re-read mystery series.  I'm sure that seems odd to some people, because what's the point of reading  a mystery if you know the solution?  For me, the point is to revisit the characters earlier in their history and see how they've grown over the years.  And, to be honest, with nearly eight years and 457 books between visits, some of the details of Seneca Falls Inheritance were a little fuzzy.

The book opens with a flatboat accident which kills Friedrich Steicher and his wife.  A few weeks later, his daughter by a brief, annulled first marriage appears in Seneca Falls, asking for directions to the Steicher farm.  Her body turns up in the canal the next day, and when the town learns of her parentage, Steicher's son becomes the main suspect.  Constable Cullen Stuart and town librarian Glynis Tyron piece together the solution, with a few unlikely but not totally unbelievable twists.

Miriam Grace Monfredo ties this mystery to the organization of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention, and she isn't totally successful in doing so.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton sets the main plot in motion by writing to Steicher's first wife, asking her to tell her daughter that she may be in line to inherit a prosperous farm and has enlisted the novel's fictional librarian/detective to help organize the Convention, but the convention itself feels unconnected to the main plot.  I've always been fond of that particular historical event (I memorized Stanton's keynote address in 6th grade forensics), but in retrospect, its appearance in Seneca Falls Inheritance feels a bit forced.  The book also contains a bit too much character exposition and explanation, probably because it's the first in the series,  and it's not particularly complex.  Like Sharon Kay Penman's Justin de Quincy mysteries, it may serve as a good bridge from YA to adult novels for pre-teens interested in mysteries or historical novels.

T is for Tresspass

Series authors have a problem.  Most novelists release books about a year apart, so how do you deal with aging your characters?  Many authors slow the clock, allowing their characters to age at half or less the normal speed and changing cultural touchstones as the series wears on.  Marcia Mueller did this with her Sharon McCone mysteries - the 60s radical who was 28 at her 1977 debut stopped talking about the 60s  as time wore on and eventually turned 40 in 1999.  Others, like Faye Kellerman, start with relatively young characters and stagger the spacing of their books so if there are only a few months between volumes, the next book will take place two or three years later.   Then there's Janet Evanovich, who has decided that Stephanie Plum will be 32 forever, and forever accompanied by her juvenile-delinquent grandmother, and the authors of historical mysteries who either by luck or design don't have to worry about how quickly their characters age.

I don't know when or why Sue Grafton decided to deal with aging Kinsey Milhone by setting her novels further and further in the past, but it's an ingenious device.  Kinsey has only aged 5 1/2 years in the 25 she's been on the scene, but the world has slowed down with her.  Kinsey's new car is a 1970 Mustang which is merely used and not classic, she has no cell phone, no one suggests that Rosie's Bar hook up cable, and she actually has to get government documents in person instead of clicking on a link and printing it herself.  I've felt rather nostalgic while reading the last few Milhone novels.  So far, they've spanned my teens and carried me from 8th grade to sophomore year of college and I enjoy seeing how much of daily life which we take for granted barely existed just 20 years ago.

While I normally notice the historical aspect of Grafton's books, they stood out in T is for Tresspass, perhaps because the topics are so current, identity theft and the problem of caring for the elderly and alone.  Grafton shifts the narration between Kinsey and a woman who has stolen the identity of a nurse named Solana Rojas and has been hired as a home health aid for Kinsey's neighbor.  

Solana looks good on paper, because the real Solana (referred to as the Other) is highly qualified and because the criminal is highly skilled at ingratiating herself, and because in some ways she's picked the perfect victim.  Gus Vronsky is the local crank, an elderly man whose hobby is yelling at teenagers for practicing skateboard tricks.  Kinesy's landlord Henry Pitts maintains a casual friendship with Gus but few others in the neighborhood care to talk to him and his only relative is a great-grand niece who lives across the country in Manhattan.   No one seems to notice that Solana is gradually cutting Gus off from society, first cancelling the Meals on Wheels delivery, then telling his few visitors that Gus 'just isn't up to company' or 'just started a nap.'  Once she has control over Gus, she moves in with her disturbed and mentally disabled son and begins to steal Gus's property while physically mistreating him and frightening him into believing that she is protecting him from being locked in a nursing home.  

Solana's plot fails through a series of coincidences - a chance encounter with the granddaughter of a woman she'd previously 'cared' for, seeing Kinsey's car where she doesn't expect it, and the actions of Henry's potential ladyfriend, a successful 70-something real estate agent.  It falls by coincidence, and yet it doesn't feel like Grafton cheated.  It may be a bit too coincidental that her prior charge's granddaughter sees her in a department store as she's planning her escape but not beyond belief, and Grafton plants the seeds of the other 'random' events while Kinsey goes about her professional life investigating insurance claims and acting as a process server. 

What doesn't quite work is the ending, or rather the last two of three endings.  Kinsey (with help) rescues Gus, but the fate of Solana and her son are a bit more gruesome than I expected and verge on cartoonish.  Still, it's one of the better entries in what has been an enjoyable series.  Grafton only has six letters left in the alphabet, so somewhere around 2015 we'll see the series end with Z as Kinsey faces the year - 1990 - in which I first met her.