MarysLibrary

The Bone Garden

My sister has a friend who buys all the latest mysteries. Every couple of months she hands over to Sandy a grocery bag full of mass market paperbacks. Since Sandy feels no need to read a mystery series in order she chooses her reading by closing her eyes and reaching into the bag. She recently came up with The Bone Garden, which she recommended strongly.

Why I had never heard of Tess Gerritsen before my sister told me about her last week I can't imagine. The woman can really write and her plot in The Bone Garden was brilliant. The two plots in the book take place more than 100 years apart but the author slowly angles them to converge at the end of the book.

In about 2006 Julia has bought herself a house in the suburbs of Boston. As she works in the overgrown yard in hopes of creating a garden she digs up the bones of a woman who was buried in the first half of the 19th century. Who can she be? Julia's search for information about the bones in her garden leads her to a relative of the last owner of her house who has an enormous collection of family letters, newspaper clippings, and other papers.

The second plot begins in the 1830s at the Massachusetts General Hospital where a country boy, Marshall Norris, has made his way into medical school against great odds. He forms a tentative friendship with three Harvard men in his class, and especially with Oliver Wendell Holmes (senior, the poet and physician.) When three horrendous murders occur near the hospital and suspicion falls on Norris, he and Holmes, with the help of a young Irish girl, must figure out who the murderer is.

All this is described carefully and gracefully by Gerritsen. The book is a stand-alone - not part of a series.

The Bone Garden by Tess Gerritsen (2007) 370 pages. 4.5 / 5 stars

I Shall Not Want

One of the finest US mystery series these days is Julia Spencer-Fleming's Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne saga. The mysteries in these novels are always clever and often different from the age old plots of most mystery novels. Spencer-Ferguson has been nominated for an Agatha, an Anthony, an Edgar, and a Macavity and why she hasn't won them I know not.

Like the other five in this series, the title of this sixth book is taken from an Episcopal hymn or the liturgy. I Shall Not Want is the story of two people who love one another, who have loved one another from the time they first met, but who have found too many problems to prevent their being together.

The murders in this book have happened before the book begins. The bodies of dairy workers, illegal aliens, have been found one by one, months after these people have been killed. The reason for the murders is elusive and the Hispanic workers are reluctant to help the police for fear of being turned over to the immigration authorities.

The beginning of the book, which is really a glimpse into the ending, is suspenseful and introduces a new character, a female police officer who has recently moved to Millers Kill, and who is going to be worth watching in future books.

Julia Spencer-Fleming, I Shall Not Want (2008) 322 pages. 5 / 5 stars.

A Death in Vienna

I read about A Death in Vienna back in early August at Ex Libris and thought it had promise. Just having finished it I can report it's a fine mystery and a convincing historical novel. If you love Vienna and if you love schlagsahne you will find this book very satisfying.

It's about a doctor, Max Lieberman, who is practicing the new science of psychoanalysis in 1900 Vienna. His friend Oskar Rheinhardt, a police detective, asks for his help with a puzzling locked room case. A beautiful young woman has been murdered but there is no bullet found in her body. She is a medium and there are those who believe that her death is supernatural. Herr Doctor Lieberman is not among them.

This is the first in what promises to be an superb series of mysteries. The author is a psychiatrist who practices in England and his expertise informs every scene in the book. I've borrowed the second book, Vienna Blood, from the library, and I'm looking forward to the third.

Frank Tallis, A Death in Vienna (2005) 458 pages. 5 / 5 stars.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Wilhelm and I have been watching a lot of British made-for-tv mystery series lately -- Frost, Lynley, Morse, Campion, and Poirot.

It had been many years -- decades -- since I'd read an Agatha Christie mystery so I decided to find out if they were as good as the tv programs make them seem with David Suchet as the inimitable Poirot.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the first of the Hercule Poirot mysteries, is even better than I remembered. There is nothing extraneous in this book -- the plot is all. It has everything, from a locked room and an estranged family to red herrings.

Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) 203 pages. 4 / 5

Murder on Marble Row

My sister Sandy read one of Victoria Thompson's "Gaslight Mysteries" recently and recommended the series to me. Of course I like to start with the first book in a series like this and read them in order, but my library doesn't have the first book, Murder on Astor Place (1999) nor does BookMooch, so I got the first Gaslight Mystery that the Spokane Library does have, which is Murder on Marble Row.

Marble Row is that stretch of Fifth Avenue in the 70s and 80s where the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers built their large marble facaded houses in the late 19th century and it is wealthy industrialist Gregory Van Dyke, the owner of one of these ostentatious residences, who is killed at the beginning of this book. He is the victim of a bomb blast in his office.

Who could have done or would want to do this terrible thing? His elder son who has left home to live with anarchists on the Lower East Side? Anarchists are known for using bombs and for assassinating people. His younger son, who is an alcoholic and who is rather more fond of his young stepmother than is fitting?

Could his daughter or his wife be responsible? Maybe it was anarchists after all.

The New York police commissioner in this year of 1896 is Theodore Roosevelt and he assigns one of his best men, Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy to the case. Malloy has been helped in past cases by Sarah Brandt, a midwife whose parents are part of the New York upper crust. I don't think I'll be spoiling anybody's fun if I reveal that he has fallen in love with Mrs Brandt who he knows is so far above him in class as to be totally unreachable.

This mystery is a little unusual. For one thing the plot is clever and the solution to the murder is not easily discerned even by those of us who read too many mysteries and have become adept at figuring out what the author is up to. For another the characters of Malloy and Sarah Brandt are well developed and more readily believable than those of the characters in many mysteries. And there is running beneath the mystery a story of the struggles of the poor in the areas of New York where immigrants congregated and the attempts of Sarah Brandt and others like her to help them during this era of the settlement house.

I enjoyed this mystery very much. As Virgil said to Gertrude, "It's not the finest detective story ever written." But it was just the thing for me the other day when I wanted something entertaining and well written but not too challenging.

Victoria Thompson, Murder on Marble Row (2004) 310 pages. 3.5 / 5 stars

Blood on the Dining-Room Floor

It was the summer of 1933 and Gertrude Stein had just achieved real success with the publication of her famed autobiography, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. But when she returned to her desk to begin writing her next work she found herself suffering from dreaded Writer's Block.

What to do? Why, write a mystery of course. The inspiration was a telephone line cut, two cars tampered with (spark plugs removed and water in the gas tank), a piano that wouldn't play (the keys were cemented together), and real blood on Gertrude Stein's real dining-room floor in her country house. Stein was also remembering the Lizzie Borden murders fifty years earlier and throughout the book she writes, "Lizzie do you understand." "Lizzie do you mind." "Of course Lizzie you do understand of course you do."

The result of this memorable summer was Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, of which Virgil Thomson said, "It's not the finest detective story in the world, but it is very good, Gertrude." I would echo Thomson and I would add that the ending . . . well, the ending is . . . um, . . . this is by Gertrude Stein, you understand of course you do.

Gertrude Stein, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1933) 73 pages. ? / 5 stars

The Calling

There seems to be a trend lately for "serious" authors to write murder mysteries, sometimes under a pseudonym. John Banville, whose novel, The Sea, won the booker in 2005, took on the name Benjamin Black and wrote Christine Falls, a mystery that takes place in Dublin, a mystery with which I was most unimpressed. Why Banville bothered with a nom de plume is a mystery in itself since everybody knew it was he who had written the book from the very beginning.

Susan Hill has been writing her superb Simon Serralier series under her own name. And Diana Abu Jaber has now written a mystery, Origins, which I read in one big swallow one night between 8 PM and about 3 AM. Both of these authors eschew pseudonyms.

Now comes Inger Ash Wolfe, "a North American literary novelist" with The Calling a thriller than which not many books can possibly be more thrilling. I read it until about 11 last night and I had to find a stopping point at which the characters were arguing briefly about cell phones so I would be able to get to sleep and so that I wouldn't have nightmares when I did.

The book is very Canadian, requiring a detailed map of Ontario and a bigger map of the entire country to follow the action. There's some friendly (and not so friendly) joshing about the big city (Toronto) and the back country where the action takes place. And there's a francophone character from Quebec who lapses into "Arrete" and French sentence structure in moments of stress (of which there are many.)

The story is about a serial killer with a religious fantasy who is working his way across the country from the far tip of Vancouver Island to the Maritimes killing people every couple of days along the way, people with whom he has made appointments in advance. Hazel Micallef, a 61-year-old divorced chief-of-police equivalent in a small city 50 miles north of Toronto has spotted the pattern and takes on the case, which should rightly be left to the RCMP.

No one seems to know who Inger Ash Wolfe is but we can make some guesses. It's probably a Canadian author, given the richness of the setting. It's probably someone fairly well known or using a pseudonym would be silly. Also a lot of speculation has been devoted to figuring out who this is, suggesting that it's somebody worth bothering to unveil. After reading the book I think it's a man. Not to get into too much trouble with the feminists here, but this is vigorous prose, with few and always apt adjectives and adverbs, and clean, strong verbs.

If you figure out who it is, please let me know.

Inger Ash Wolfe, The Calling (2008) 371 pages. 5 / 5 stars.

The Penguin Who Knew Too Much

Donna Andrews has been writing the Meg Langslow mystery series for some time now and she has yet to hit a false note. Not only is the main character, Meg, as crisp and amusing as she was in the first of these books, Murder With Peacocks, the always new plots and the familiar and sometimes hilarious family members and neighbors in the rural Virginia setting are as fresh as ever.

In this particularly funny novel, The Penguin Who Knew Too Much, the local zoo in Caerphilly is having money problems and the zoo keeper has asked locals to care for various zoo residents until he can get his fiscal affairs in order. But when he is found dead in a hole Meg's dad was digging to create a wading pool for the penguins he has volunteered to babysit, people begin to wonder if they will ever be able to get rid of the animals they have accepted temporarily.

And so these neighbors begin dropping off their charges at Meg's farm. There are camels, hyenas, lemurs, and sloths (the last particularly like hanging from the dining room chandelier.) Then a particularly dislikeable animal rights activist decides to release the animals, beginning with the wolves (who make tracks for the sheep pasture where they find the sheep being guarded by the llamas in a heart-warming scene of inter-species cooperation.)

Meg goes about systematically solving this murder, finding people with a grudge against the dead man and people who are familiar with the crossbow, the weapon used to kill him. She finds herself in some precarious spots, including a lion's den at the not-quite-deserted zoo.

Andrews uses bird names in her titles and she has begun making puns on movie titles. (My favorite is We'll Always Have Parrots.) These are very clever, very witty, very readable mysteries.

Donna Andrews, The Penguin Who Knew Too Much (2007) 262 pages. 4 / 5

Say It With Poison

Ann Granger's books are well written and amusing and her plots are finely made. Say It With Poison meets and exceeds all these expectations for a lively and complicated mystery. It's the first in the Mitchell/Markby series.

Meredith Mitchell, who is the British consul in some outpost of the former Austro-Hungarian empire, is invited to England by her cousin, a famous actress, to help with the arrangements for a family wedding. When she arrives she discovers a cast of characters who all want something from her cousin. Some of them are decidedly out of place in a Cotswold village.

The aging American television producer wants the actress for his soap opera. The bride-to-be confesses her misgivings, which are many considering her shady past. The crotchety old gardener who lives next door to the dead man has observed some interesting goings-on. The housekeeper knows what everybody in the village is doing and the police inspector, who is to give the bride away, is in a most ambivalent position when he has to investigate a murder while trying to stay loyal to his relations, however remote. The consul isn't helping. Well, she is, but she shouldn't be. She always has her nose in police business but she can't order people around in England the way she can in Ruritania.

When a second body is found the identity of the murderer becomes obvious - at least to Meredith (and me). What should she do about this touchy situation?

Amy Granger, Say It With Poison (1991) 224 pages  4 stars / 5 stars.

October Mysteries

October this year brings three mysteries by favorite authors Barbara Cleverly, M C Beaton, and Susan Wittig Albert.

Bright Hair About the Bone is the second Laetitia Talbott mystery by Barbara Cleverly, the author of the Sandilands mysteries. (The first was The Tomb of Zeus, published last year.) These books take place in the 1920s, the first being set in Crete. Bright Hair is set in Burgundy. Laetitia's godfather is stabbed to death, but before he dies he sends a coded postcard to Laetitia who heads to France where she finds at an archaeological dig the clues she needs to find the murderer.

The Tale of Briar Bank is the fifth of Susan Wittig Albert's Beatrix Potter books. (The first was The Tale of Hill Top Farm, published in 2004.) This series of cozies is just the ticket for those of us who adored Beatrix Potter's animals when we were younger and have longed for more adventures where the animals are just as smart as the humans, and in some cases much more savvy. The events in this story inspire Potter to write her 1909 book, The Tale of Ginger and Pickles.

M C Beaton is the pseudonym under which Marion Chesney writes the Hamish MacBeth and Agatha Raisin mysteries. A Spoonful of Poison is the 19th in the charming Agatha Raisin series. During a church fete in the town of Comfrey Magna an elderly lady jumps off the tower of Saint Odo the Severe. (I love the almost-believable place names.) An unexpected suicide and a murder connected with the theft of the event's proceeds complicate the situation. The solution to the mystery lies in the identity of the person who spiked the jam with LSD.

Says the St Petersburg Times, Agatha Raisin "is a glorious cross between Auntie Mame, Miss Marple, and Lucille Ball with a tad of pit bull tossed in." You should probably start reading this series with the first book, Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death (1992) and read them in order so that you can follow the amorous adventures of Agatha and her younger sidekick, Toni.