Day for cats
A friend’s post on Facebook reminded me that today is International Cat Day, which I dare not let go by unremarked, lest Gidget do some big-time scolding (at which she is quite proficient!). So here are some titles guaranteed to appeal to readers of various types who are also cat lovers.
MISCELLANEOUS STUFF YOU WON’T WANT TO MISS
The Dalai Lama’s Cat, by David Michie, in which the Tibetan Buddhist leader’s cat offers insights on happiness and meaning.
The Rabbi’s Cat, by Joann Sfar, a graphic novel about a cat who eats the family parrot, gains the ability to speak, and demands a Bar Mitzvah, by a celebrated French comic artist.
James Herriot’s Cat Stories, by, you guessed it, James Herriot! Celebrating his feline friends…
On Cats, by Charles Bukowski, the irreverent and profane poet whose primary subjects of women and booze also apparently expand to include his take on cats.
The Travelling Cat Chronicles, by Hiro Arikawa, in which Nana the cat and her person, Satoru, go on a road trip, for what purpose Nana isn’t quite sure. Be prepared to cry.
The Cat Who Went to Paris, by Peter Gethers, the story of how a Scottish Fold kitten named Norton turned a curmudgeonly cat hater into a compassionate human.
A Street Cat Named Bob: How One Man and His Cat Found Hope on the Streets, by James Bowen. It’s all there in the very long title.
I Could Pee On This, and Other Poems by Cats, by Francesco Marciuliano. From the singular minds of housecats.
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by T. S. Eliot, in which the author describes cats each by their distinct personality.
The Tribe of Tiger: Cats and Their Culture, by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, a naturalist and anthropologist who explores the worlds of lions, tigers, pumas, and housecats.
MYSTERIES
The Cat Who… mysteries, by Lilian Jackson Braun, in which a reporter and his cat solve mysteries. First book: The Cat Who Could Read Backwards.
The Mrs. Murphy mysteries, by Rita Mae Brown & Sneaky Pie Brown, in which Mrs. Murphy and her human companion solve mysteries. First book: Wish You Were Here.
The Joe Grey mysteries, by Shirley Rousseau Murphy, in which there are talking cats and also a human who discovers an ability to morph into a cat. First book: Cat on the Edge.
SCIENCE FICTION/HORROR
Catfantastic: Nine Lives and Fifteen Tales, by Andre Norton, editor, in which sci fi and fantasy writers tell tall tales about furry felines. (Short stories.)
The Chanur novels, by C. J. Cherryh, in which a leonine species—the Chanur—take in a human refugee and by so doing threaten the interspecies Compact. First book: The Pride of Chanur.
The Cinder Spires books, by Jim Butcher, in which there are also cat clans and some naval airship action. First book: The Aeronaut’s Windlass.
The Cult of the Cat books, by Zoe Kalo, in which Trinity is left with a dead grandmother and a thousand grieving cats. A sort of Egyptian urban fantasy. First book: Daughter of the Sun.
Pet Sematary, by Stephen King. I always have trouble with the spelling of this one, seeing as how it’s spelled “cemetery.” Hm. But if you like to be scared by revenants, this one’s for you.
FOR SMALL, MEDIUM, AND LARGE CHILDREN:
Millions of Cats, by Wanda Gág, in which a lonely old couple acquires companions. This is known as the original picture book for children.
The Owl and the Pussycat, by Edward Lear. A classic.
Time Cat, by Lloyd Alexander. He can talk, he can time travel…what’s not to like? By the wonderful author of The Prydain Chronicles.
The Fur Person, by May Sarton. Yes, that May Sarton. A charming tale about a Cat About Town who decides to become a Fur Person instead. It could be read as either a children’s book or a novelty book for adults.
The Warriors books, by Erin Hunter, in which a house cat discovers clans of cats living in the wild in the forest…. First book: Into the Wild.
The Wildings books, by Nilanjana Roy, in which a small band of cats lives in the alleys and ruins of Nizamuddin, an old neighborhood in Delhi, India.
The Feline Wizards series, by Diane Duane, in which feline wizards time travel to avert disasters. First book: The Book of Night with Moon.
Tales of the Barque Cats, by Anne McCaffrey, in which cats are essential members of the crews of space vessels…until an epidemic threatens their extinction.
For many, many more books with or about cats, hit up this gargantuan list on Goodreads of Great Cat Books (1,511).
Invested
How to weigh the investment
I have made in the ongoing relationship that is still not a “relationship” between Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott against the increasingly lengthy tomes that, while well written and intriguing, still need the hand of a ruthless editor to bring them in under a thousand pages? It’s a toughie. I refer to the latest by “Robert Galbraith,” aka J. K. Rowling, The Ink Black Heart, #6 in this series, each book anticipated with both excitement and dread.
On the positive side, I love the effortless way she paints a picture of the inner workings of each character, lets us in on what each is thinking, and then shows us how they choose to respond on the outside regardless of their inner conclusions. The understanding of the misunderstandings inherent in human relations is masterful, and never on better display than in the interplay between Cormoran and Robin. This skill carries over to the rest of the characters that inhabit this somewhat sordid world observed by London’s private detectives, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the drama Rowling, er, Galbraith provides.
This particular book assays some formidable subjects. The seamy side of social media is on full display as people in chat rooms and on Twitter grab rumor and turn it into accusations and abuse. Some sincerely believe what they have read and are addressing it, while others are just meanly happy for the drama or are using it to manipulate situations for their own purposes. It’s also a political book, showcasing as it does the use extremists make of naive folk online, and the determined denigration of women by incels and just about everyone else.
The negative side is, well, the page count. The book is more than a thousand pages and, while I am not opposed to a lengthy story, there is something to be said for not turning over every single rock on the beach. This book could have been about 25-30 percent shorter and still been just as (or perhaps more) effective. I also simultaneously applaud the ingenuity of including the chatroom interchanges to thoroughly explore the largely anonymous characters in the game, any one of whom could be a murderer, while also bemoaning how repetitive and lengthy is that back-and-forth documentation. Sheesh!
The basic plot: Two people, Edie and Josh, have created a popular online cartoon, The Ink Black Heart. Two other anonymous parties came along afterwards and made a game (Drek’s Game) to accompany that cartoon, which features all the characters from the cartoon and also hosts chat rooms. There has been hostility between one of the creators of the game (and from his minions who play and enjoy it) and the people who made the original cartoon ever since the female creator, Edie Ledwell, expressed dislike for the game. The trolls have been out in full force, and the level of abuse is toxic. Edie is desperate to find out the identity of the creator, Anomie, who is out to get her, especially because now that the cartoon has gained interest from Netflix and will be made into a film, new rumors and abuse are flying. Edie approaches Robin to try to hire the agency to discover her nemesis, but Cormoran, Robin, and their subcontractors are already overwhelmed with work and Robin turns her away. A few days later, Edie turns up stabbed to death in Highgate Cemetery, the setting where the cartoon takes place. Through another client, Robin and Cormoran are drawn into the investigation to uncover Anomie’s identity, but considering the number of suspects with both motive and affiliation to the dead creators, it will be a long, tedious, and ultimately dangerous search.
Both the suspense and the level of frustration are doubled in this book because not only are they trying to unmask a villain, but—before they are able to do so—they must also unmask all the anonymous online personae.
And speaking of levels of frustration, the growing consciousness between Robin and Cormoran that there is something more to their partnership than friendship and work is definitely still present and ongoing, but I felt like it stalled out significantly in this book. I am beginning to fear that Rowling will drag this out for as long as Elly Griffiths has milked the connection between Ruth Galloway and DCI Harry Nelson in her series, and if Rowling and Griffiths don’t get on with it, their fans are going to start dropping off.
This book won’t cause me to do so, but I would love to say to Rowling, empower both your editor and your romance next time!
Catching up
I have read so very many series that I can’t keep track any more when a new book from one of them comes out, particularly if it’s a writer who is irregular in their production. With Louise Penny, you can always plan on a new Gamache hitting the bookstores somewhere between August and November each and every year, but others (such as Deborah Crombie) produce one so seldom that it’s depressing to go check up on what’s (not) happening.
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles is a fairly prolific writer, especially when one considers she has at least three different series going, and in different genres to boot. I discovered her first as a writer of police procedurals in the Bill Slider mystery series, but she’s more well known for her Morland Dynasty saga, and is now writing a new historical fiction series as well. I found out via my Kindle membership that there was a new Bill Slider, so this week I embarked on a read of #24, Before I Sleep.
The past few Sliders of late have been somewhat uneven, so I was pleased to discover that this was a particularly good one. Slider is tasked by the bumbling but good-natured Detective Superintendent Porson with a missing persons case, even though it’s not in his district and that’s not what he does (he generally solves murders), because word has come down from “on high” that this is a case that needs solving pronto. A woman has disappeared, and her husband is old school chums with the big boss, so Slider, who has an impressive solve rate and is also sometimes tiresome enough for the politicos to want to be rid of him, gets stuck with it. If he solves it, the glory redounds, and if he doesn’t, maybe he loses his job, so there’s a lot on the line.
Felicity Holland is a settled middle-aged woman married to a successful author, with an active social schedule and lots of hobbies and charities. One Tuesday after breakfast, when the husband has gone upstairs to begin his day of writing, she heads out for her weekly pottery class, but according to her husband she didn’t come home that night and hasn’t been heard from since. Being a vague, self-centered guy, he doesn’t remember the name of where she takes the class, has no idea who her after-class lunching friends are, and is basically unable to provide any useful information to the police, but expects immediate results nonetheless. His rather hysterical theory that she has been snatched up by a serial killer is causing him to make himself a nuisance, while Slider and his team have to buckle down to do the plodding police work that will ultimately trace her movements—check the CCTV cameras, the bus passes, the taxi services, talk to her relatives, find her friends, maybe delve a little into her past.
I liked how this evolved from a nuisance case into a legitimate “misspers” and from there to a probable murder mystery. The usual team is on duty, with a few new people added; Porson continues with his malapropisms, now enabled by Slider, who somewhat ironically inserts his own into the conversation to enjoy watching Porson struggle with the thought that what he said just isn’t right. Atherton is quick with the puns, and also has a new, possibly more permanent love interest at last. There’s not a whole lot about Joanna and the family in this one, but enough to keep things going. I figured out a key plot point quite a while before it was revealed, but it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of its revelation at the end. All in all, a satisfying read. Keep them coming, Ms. Harrod-Eagles!
Miscellaneous reads
In general, I try to blog about every book I read, but sometimes either there’s not much to say, or there’s something to be said that isn’t positive, either of which can stop me. But in the interest of an even flow of content…
I read the next book in Dana Stabenow’s Kate Shugak mysteries set in Alaska, and liked it quite as well as the first two, if not more. In Dead in the Water, Kate has to join up as a crew member of a fishing boat in search of expensive and difficult to harvest crabs in the Bering Sea in order to get a handle on a missing persons case she inherited from her former employer, the Anchorage District Attorney. The author’s own youthful experiences on an Alaskan fishing boat inform this volume with a real feel for what the life is like, and taking Kate out of her normal setting and putting her at a disadvantage among strangers ups both the tension and the quality of the storytelling. I will continue with this series anon.
I then picked up a young adult novel, in an attempt to get some new titles onto my “read” list; I will be teaching Young Adult Literature again at UCLA’s library school next spring, and since I retired from my job as a teen librarian I have fallen woefully behind with my reading. Unfortunately, I won’t be recommending The Upside of Falling Down, by Rebekah Crane to anyone. It had an interesting premise—Clementine Haas is the sole survivor of a plane crash, and wakes in a hospital in Ireland with trauma-induced amnesia that stubbornly hangs on for weeks. Her father’s imminent arrival from Chicago to take her home provokes a panicked response as she worries that she won’t recognize him or any part of her life in America, and she runs away, falling in with a kind young man who takes her back to his small Irish village and gives her license to stay there for as long as she needs. And then, of course, stuff happens…
I thought the book was only okay. The characters were all suspect—untrustworthy, and not particularly likeable. The best character in the book was, ironically, neither of the main protagonists; the “mean girl” sister stole every scene in which she appeared. And the events of the last third of the book were just too pat to be either believable or entertaining. Give it a miss. There’s a multitude of better YA novels out there, some of which I will hopefully be reading and reviewing soon.
Cozy
I felt the need to read something simple and comforting after my unexpected discovery that Miss Benson’s Beetle was anything but (see previous post), so when someone on the Facebook reading page asked for cozy mystery recommendations, I decided to do likewise and find a new author in a gentler genre.
I ended up with the Julia Bird mysteries by Katie Gayle, beginning with An English Garden Murder. I’m a sucker for anything with small quaint British villages, cottage gardens, and hey, a chocolate labrador puppy named Jake as one of the main characters.
Julia Bird has fled London after a somewhat unexpected retirement from a career as a social worker and an extremely surprising divorce in which her husband Peter leaves her for a garden designer named Christopher. She ends up in a picturesque and cozy cottage in the Cotswolds, and settles into a life she expects to contain no bigger excitement than adding a chicken coop and some laying hens to her backyard potagère. But when the local handyman and his son tear down a garden shed in order to replace it with the coop, they find a dead body buried underneath, apparently for decades. No one in the village (including the police) has a clue who it could be, so Julia decides to do her own investigation, which leads, dismayingly, to another dead body! Oops. Someone in the village has apparently killed twice—is Julia in peril as she moves closer to the truth?
I enjoyed the delineation of the characters in this series quite a bit. They are all individuals, with enough detail given about appearance, mannerisms, and possible agendas that you don’t have to keep reminding yourself who is whom, sometimes a problem when there is a fairly large cast. The scene-setting details likewise gave a complete picture of the surroundings, which is always pleasing. There is, every once in a while, a passage filled with so much detail that it seems over the top—a description, say, of the person’s entire morning routine with all the minutiae included, that has no bearing on the story—but this was a fairly minor flaw in what proved an enjoyable read. So, I went on to the next two books: Murder in the Library, and A Village Fete Murder.
This is when I started to think that I would have done better to seek out a more well known cozy series instead of this trio of quickly turned out (all three within nine months!) books by what turns out to be two authors (Katie and Gayle) working together. Say, the Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich or, hey, Agatha Christie! That’s because each of the next two had almost the identical formula to the first. Julia finds the bodies; Julia can’t resist being a busybody by soliciting local gossip and visiting possible suspects on her own without benefit of police oversight; and her poking around then results in another body because someone has caught on to something as a result of the extra attention, and doesn’t want to be found out. No blame to poor Julia, of course (although some of the villagers have nicknamed her the Grim Reaper).
In the second book, the minute one character confided, in front of three other people, that she needed to talk to Julia about something, I knew she was body #2. In the third, Julia carries on a conversation with the local police officer on her cell phone in a public place, and I knew that someone was listening (wasn’t sure who, but someone) who would benefit from the indiscreet conveyance of important information.
So…while I continued to enjoy both the character creation and the descriptions of both the surroundings and the small-town events, the fact that I had solved the crime a while before Julia in each book was a bit off-putting. If you are a person who enjoys having the advantage in this way, you may really like these books, but as for me, even in a cozy genre I prefer my stories to be more challenging. (There will be a fourth book, but I think I’m done with Julia. But if you are intrigued, it’s called Murder at the Inn, due out in August.)
Misspers
Quite by chance, I ended up reading two books in a row about missing persons. The first was Force of Nature, by Jane Harper, one of her Aaron Falk series, and the second was Liane Moriarty’s latest, Apples Never Fall. I didn’t plan it that way (maybe the library did?), but it made for some fun comparing the two as regards suspense, the form of the narrative, and so on. I enjoy the works of both authors, so it wasn’t really a quality comparison, although they brought different things to the table despite their common theme. They are also both set in Australia, another coincidence? Synchronicity strikes again.
In the first, a company that is secretly being examined by Aaron Falk and his partner for financial crimes sends 10 of its personnel—five men, five women—on a retreat into the wilderness of the Australian bush that is intended as a character-building and bonding exercise. The groups are divided by gender, the men taking one route, the women another. They pack in enough supplies for the first day, and the rest of their food and fuel is stashed for them at two way-stations, each of which they are supposed to reach within a day’s hike. The men successfully complete their retreat and emerge at the expected time, but the women are significantly delayed and, when they do turn up, are exhausted, starving, slightly hysterical, and missing one of their number, Alice Russell. Vague and conflicting accounts are given by the four remaining women and, as the rangers and regular police set up for a comprehensive search of the Giralang range, Federal Police investigator Falk tries to puzzle out whether the missing woman could possibly have met with foul play due to her clandestine connection with his investigation.
I enjoyed the personalities that Harper created—they were both original and yet clichéd in the best manner, in that you could see reflected in them all the characteristics, positive and negative, of the people you yourself might have worked with in a corporate setting—the bully, the ambitious but obsequious assistant, the entitled boss, the low-level couldn’t-care-less data entry clerk, and so on. I also really liked the chemistry and interplay between Aaron Falk and his partner, Carmen. And, as in her novel The Dry, the scene-setting is excellent; you soon feel overwhelmed by the claustrophobic closeness of the trees and the sense that perhaps something is watching from beyond the light of your fire. The book did take a long time to get where it was going, but the jumps from present to past and between multiple narrators/points of view keep it interesting and vibrant. I will continue with this series.
Moriarty’s book is a much more conventional misspers narrative, in that she’s a retired businesswoman and mom from the suburbs. The story opens with a cinematic shot of a deserted bicycle by the side of the road, with a flat front tire and a bunch of apples spilling out of its basket. Then someone comes along and steals the bike, and we realize that a key piece of evidence has just gone missing in a way that guarantees misdirection.
Stan and Joy Delaney, married for 50 years and also partners in a tennis coaching enterprise, have just sold their business and retired, and it’s not going so well. Their four grown children are largely oblivious to this, although certain incidents let them know the marriage is no longer as amicable as they would hope. Then Joy sends the kids a garbled text saying she’s going “off-grid” for a while, and disappears, but Stan doesn’t know anything about where she’s gone or for how long, and has scratches on his face that look like they were inflicted in a struggle. As Joy remains missing day after day with no word and the police seem ever more inclined to look at Stan as their prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance, their children try to come to terms with what they will do if their mother remains missing and if, indeed, their father is the one responsible.
The story is told from a “now” viewpoint and also via a series of flashbacks that cover the past six months or so. Complicating the narrative is the appearance, six months previous, of a stranger—the elfin and bedraggled Savannah—on Stan and Joy’s doorstep, asking for temporary shelter from her abusive boyfriend. The couple welcome her in, but soon her extended stay coupled with her lack of a substantial back story has the Delaney children worried that their kind and gullible parents are being taken in by a grifter.
Moriarty is, as always, a master at creating and developing her characters, and by the end of this you feel like you know each of the Delaneys well enough to predict their actions in any situation. Less predictable is the enigmatic Savannah, and Stan is likewise tough because he holds everything inside and presents a gruff and seemingly uninterested façade to everyone. Although the book probably could have been a bit shorter and still succeeded, I did like the jumping around, as in Harper’s book, from time period to time period and to all the variety of narrators. The one weird thing about the book was its ending, which I should characterize as endings, plural. I read a chapter and the final sentence seemed to put a period on both the scene and the book; then I turned the page to find another chapter, which also seemed conclusive; and this went on for about five more chapters! When the end finally came, it was almost surprising, because Moriarty had dragged it in so many different directions. I found it kind of irritating, but since it also imparted a bunch of information we wouldn’t otherwise have had, I ultimately couldn’t find fault with it, though I feel like it might have been more effective to reveal it all as more a part of the story instead of as a series of addendums, which is how it read. Still, I liked the book a lot, and don’t understand why so many of her readers found it disappointing compared to some of her others. No, it’s not Big Little Lies—but it’s not Nine Perfect Strangers (which I found both weird and unsuccessful) either!
Murder in Alaska
I just finished the first two Kate Shugak mysteries by Dana Stabenow—A Cold Day for Murder, and A Fatal Thaw. Stabenaw started publishing this series in 1992, so I don’t know how I have completely overlooked it until now, but the first book popped up in my Kindle freebies and I gave it a try. I wasn’t really looking for a new mystery series, but I will most likely dip back into it from time to time, now that I have found it.
It’s one of those in which the locale plays as big a part as any protagonist, so you have to be at least marginally interested in the scene-setting because there’s a lot of it. This one takes place in a remote area of Alaska, inside a national park that is largely inaccessible (no roads) for more than half the year and so beloved of its few residents that they want to keep it that way. Niniltna, the closest “town,” consists of about 800 people, but that swells to thousands (flown in) from (very) late spring through summer as the thaw sets in and the various hunting and fishing seasons begin.
Kate Shugak is a member of the Aleut people and, although she has many relatives in the area (including her grandmother, Ekaterina Moonin Shugak, head of the local tribal council), lives alone on a 160-acre homestead, except for her half-wolf, half husky, Mutt. She is in emotional recovery, as the series opens, from a traumatic incident during her tenure as a police officer in Anchorage that left her with a lot of anger, a growly voice, and a ropy white scar that stretches from ear to ear. She mostly keeps to herself, engaged in doing all the things a homesteader in Alaska has to do to get by, but occasionally, when the local police and the FBI can’t seem to solve a case for themselves, they appeal to Kate to get involved, since for all her solitude she has a better handle than they on her neighbors—the miners, hunters, trappers, fishermen, bush pilots, and pipeline workers who populate the area.
The first book was a bit slow, because the author focused almost exclusively on drawing a picture of the Alaskan scenery and outlining the main players, with all their quirks. It picks up in the second half as Kate gets closer to figuring out what happened to two missing men and turns into more of a mystery, but in general it was pretty low-key. The second book made up for that by opening with a literal bang as a man goes about shooting everyone in sight, and although it bottomed out a little in the middle while Kate ponders her course of action (which she keeps close to the chest and doesn’t share), it had a dramatic ending as well.
I wouldn’t call these books page-turners, but there’s something about them that is appealing, enough so to keep me reading beyond these (although not right now, I have two books about to be due back to the library that I have to finish first). Although there are certain passages involving scenery description that seem a little stiff and extraneous, there are equally beautiful paragraphs that let you know both the author and the protagonist are people who love and are focused on the natural world. There is an element of humor that gives the stories a kick in the pants when needed, and the complex relationships between a lot of people with unmeeting wishes when it comes to their surroundings makes for both interest and fireworks. The book I just started (Jane Harper’s second book, Force of Nature, starring Aaron Falk) beckoned to me, but I admit there was a little reluctance to leave Kate Shugak behind; I had gotten used to hanging out with her.
A World of Curiosities
I was late to the party reading Louise Penny’s most recent in her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series—they reliably drop in the fall of each year (although this one, coming out in November, was later than the usual August or September denouement), and I have just gotten to it in April, five months later. But I am happy to say it was worth the wait, and harks back, in more ways than one, to the best books of the series.
I always enjoy the books in which Penny explores origin stories for her characters, and A World of Curiosities went back to the original meeting and co-opting of Inspector Jean-Guy de Beauvoir into Gamache’s work circle and later, inevitably, into the family. And the case over which they met plays a central role in the current mystery, so that we are simultaneously intrigued by the past case and put into a major state of anticipation over the current one. This is a great ploy for keeping readers enthralled with the story line. It becomes even more engaging with the inclusion of Amelia Choquet, one of my favorite characters.
The creation of the siblings, Sam and Fiona, children of a murdered woman who managed to tragically damage them before she died, gives an entrée into the eternal question of nature vs. nurture, and also messes with the reader’s faith in the instincts of the detectives. Gamache cannot help but feel a frisson of fear and dread each time he encounters Sam, while Beauvoir believes he is completely off base and is being naive by trusting Fiona. When the two become a part of a bigger case, something Gamache believed to be shelved for good along with its perpetrator, John Fleming, lodged in the Special Handling Unit (SHU) of Montreal’s most notorious prison, the tension just keeps ratcheting higher. I loved this quote from one Goodreads reviewer:
“Despite the ravioli and eclairs,
this is no cozy mystery.”
I was also pleased that something lacking in the last book seemed much more present in this one: the Three Pines community. In the last story, interactions amongst the villagers seemed both subdued and incidental, while in this one the presence and significance of the residents came roaring back, with new connections being made and new characters introduced.
I like to scan the star ratings of books on Goodreads to see what other readers thought; I am somewhat puzzled by those for this book, since it was either the absolute favorite with five stars or the most disappointing with one or two! My vote is for the upper end of the spectrum, and I hope Penny will continue to tap into the richness of her characters’ back stories for future tales.
Manufactured mystery
I tried out a new mystery writer, D. D. Black, on the recommendation of someone on “What Should I Read Next?” and I’m feeling a little conflicted about whether to continue after the first two books. On the one hand, I liked the setting a lot (a small town on one of the many islands and peninsulas off Puget Sound, near Seattle), and I also liked the main character, Thomas Austin. He’s a former NYPD detective who, after a personal tragedy, retired on his pension to the Pacific Northwest and bought a combination mini-mart, café, and bait shop to keep him marginally occupied (not a lot of traffic). He’s smart and interesting and intuitive, and a little dark. I also liked the secondary characters, including Anna, a reporter/blogger destined to become a love interest in a future novel if Thomas can get out of his own way, and the three officers from the local police force—Ridley, Lucy, and Jimmy. I also like Austin’s corgi, Run.
What I didn’t particularly care for was the mysteries themselves. I know I have maintained in previous blog posts that mystery lovers read as much for the characters as they do for the mysteries, and that although the plots fade into one another, interest in the character’s ongoing storyline is what keeps the readers coming back. But the caveat to that is, the mysteries have to be at least marginally believable and present some sort of cohesive story arc to provide the background for a favorite detective, and…these didn’t, in my opinion.
The debut volume, The Bones at Point No Point, did a nice job of introducing all the characters, and then harked back to a case in which Thomas Austin was the lead detective when he was in New York City. It seems there is now a copycat killer on the loose, but the details are so eerily similar that it has him (and everyone else) wondering if he locked up the wrong woman or, at least, missed that she had a partner. This sounds plausible as a bare-bones description, but the likelihood of any of it was highly suspect. Also, for his first novel D. D. Black chose to portray a particularly gruesome murder scenario, in shocking detail, and I didn’t want to read about it, especially because he described it several times in scenes from the past and circumstances in the present.
I thought about stopping with the first, but then read the description for the second, The Shadows of Pike Place, and was intrigued. This was more of a “locked-room” mystery, in that the protagonist was murdered during an evening when she was in the company of a limited number of people, and therefore the killer had to be one of those present. Again, I enjoyed the dynamic between Austin and Anna, the introduction of the Seattle police chief, and the colorful characters Black writes as members of the murdered woman’s family; but again, the mystery took off in various weird directions and the result was dependent on so many doubtful events that I found it somewhat absurd and also anticlimactic.
These are what I call “manufactured” mysteries, in that the scenario is so out of the box that it strains credulity. In both cases, I would have much preferred a tamer mystery less dependent on extraordinary events, one that showcased its detective’s abilities rather than dropping him in the midst of chaos and expecting sense to be made of it when it wasn’t plausible in the first place.
I may come back to this series someday, just for the characters and locales, but I think I’m done with the Thomas Austin Crime Thrillers for now—they’re just too frustrating.
Zig-zag
I recently discovered that Elly Griffiths, who writes the Ruth Galloway mysteries and has three volumes in a fairly recent story line starring Harbinder Kaur, has yet another series, called either The Brighton Mysteries or Stephens & Mephisto, new to me although not new. She wrote the first, The Zig Zag Girl, in 2014, and the sixth one came out in 2021, so presumably it is an ongoing effort. I was excited by the prospect of another series by this author, especially because this one is billed as more of a “cozy,” so I picked up the first when it was offered at a discount by Book Bub. I am disappointed to say that it will not be a new favorite.
The first book begins in the 1930s, moves through World War II, and ends up in a “present-day” 1950s mystery in England. The pre-war and war years are told in flashback as background for what is happening “now.” During the war there was a group of recruits called the Magic Men (mostly made up of magicians by trade) who were deployed undercover to Norway to deceive and distract the Germans by building decoy camps, tanks, and aircraft carriers to make the enemy think there was a base of operations about which they should worry. In the present day, one of those people—Edgar Stephens—has gone on to become a police detective; a person associated with the war group has been brutally murdered, and Stephens is assigned to the case. It’s an odd one, employing a magical trick called the Zig Zag Girl, in which the magician’s assistant is apparently sliced into three parts, only to emerge whole at the end of the trick. (In the case of the murder, she has actually been dismembered.)
After a second person, also associated with the undercover war effort, turns up dead, Stephens and his friend Max Mephisto, a magician who still headlines in variety shows around Brighton where the murders have taken place, conclude that not only are the murders related, but that the other members of the group (including themselves) may be in danger. An effort is made to track them down and warn them, simultaneously checking to see if it could be one of them committing the murders.
The premise and the historical time period appealed to me, but there were so many flaws in this initial book that I doubt I will continue on to read another. The historical aspect is sketchy, and the timeline of the war itself doesn’t correspond to reality; the Norway campaign was in 1940, and in the book the group’s efforts there last only two years and a few months before the war ends, leaving out three years of World War II!
The police procedural elements of the book were likewise hard to believe: These are gruesome and high-profile murders (each based on a magic trick, so they were bound to have the media all over them, not to mention capturing the public’s imagination), yet the only people investigating them are one policeman, his assistant at the station, and his magician friend? It’s just too casual—even in the 1950s, there would have been some sort of investigative team. Most of the activities that, in a regular police procedural, would be featured and discussed (for instance, forensics) were merely dropped into narrative between the sole policeman and his civilian buddy, so that they seemed incidental rather than central to the case. Despite its being a murder mystery, there was more attention paid to the lifestyle of the traveling magician than there was to the murders!
Other than the two protagonists, the characters were thinly developed; perhaps the intent was to have you figure them out for yourself, but they just weren’t that interestingly presented, and some members of the Magic Men (even central ones) remained cardboard cutouts to the end. There wasn’t much scene-setting in terms of details about the era. The witness observations were repetitive and clumsy, and although the descriptions frustrated both the detective and the supposedly canny magician, I figured out “whodunnit” from them pretty early on in the book, and from there I was just reading to get to the big reveal.
If this book were a debut novel by a novice writer I might have been a bit more forgiving; but this is a skilled storyteller who has published 29 books and counting. My advice: Stick with Ruth Galloway, or try one of her Harbinder Kaur books. Perhaps the rest of the Brighton Mysteries are better than the initial one, but I don’t intend to investigate. There wasn’t enough zig-zag in this one to draw me further in.
The Book Adept 