In this particular mystery, A Prisoner of Birth, Archer takes readers on a labyrinthine journey through courts, prisons, probation offices, homes grand and humble, wealthy and impoverished parts of London, people good and bad. And in this well-plotted mystery, very little is what it seems, what it was intended to be, or what it was when it all began. Continue reading »
Henning Mankell’s Pyramid and Four Other Kurt Wallander Mysteries . . . Henning Mankell is Swedish and has—who would have guessed it—created a Swedish detective in Kurt Wallander. Sweden is a very different country culturally and politically from the U.S. and its policing is different in some respects, similar in others. That gives these short stories and their central character, a police detective, extra dimensions that add interest to each of the different plots.
Putting these mysteries together as they are is, to me, almost a stroke of editing genius. These mysteries were written at different times, some have run in newspapers, two have not seen the light of day until this book was published. (Mankell, in his foreword, sets the tone for the stories in the book. Please don’t miss it.) Mankell wrote Wallander’s First Case long after the others, in response to readers who expressed interest in knowing some back story of Kurt Wallander and how he got to be who he is. Continue reading »
The Jefferson Key by Steve Berry . . . The story Berry tells moves up and down much of the eastern seaboard of the United States—New York City, Washington, DC, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Richmond, Virginia, and the tiny town of Bath, North Carolina, once a hotbed of pirate activity.
It has as diverse a cast of characters as anyone could want, almost too many to easily keep straight. It offers history, mystery, presidents and lesser politicians, assassinations real and faked, double-dealing, a secret code apparently beyond deciphering, privateers and pirates both “old-school” and modern. The action ranges through hotels, Jefferson’s Monticello, Grand Central station in New York, pirate coves, wealthy estates, and an alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, some you know are real, some maybe not. Continue reading »
Laurie R. King is well known among mystery fans for her popular series of Sherlock Holmes pastiches, featuring Mary Russell, who becomes Holmes’s partner in mind and heart. She also writes the Kate Martinelli mystery/detective series. King’s own background is unusual in that it includes, as she tells us, “such diverse interests as Old Testament theology and construction work . . . .” And the mind-set that can encompass such breadth is brought to bear in “A Darker Place.” It’s a novel that is as fascinating as it is challenging.
The story follows its own unique path, building a sense that there are things here that we don’t want to know, yet there they are, just below the surface of the action. King, a skilled writer, weaves fact with fiction and uses this growing sense of discomfort to keep us hanging on, looking forward to the next revelation. Continue reading »
Against All Enemies: Tom Clancy . . . Back in the mid-80s, what kept me running regularly was a tape of The Hunt for Red October, Tom Clancy’s first thriller. As it flowed to my ears through my Walkman, I ran longer and farther than I ever had before—or since.
Now fast forward to today. Just a few minutes ago, I finished Against All Enemies, Clancy’s latest mystery/thriller. And, let me start out by saying that it’s vintage Clancy. It’s a cross between an engineering course, a military and/or spy-craft training manual, and a race across the world in a chase-’em-down-shoot-’em-up spy style. The body count keeps growing throughout, good people and bad people, and some deaths almost brought me to tears, others I cheered when they met their inglorious ends. Continue reading »
Tabloid City: A novel by Pete Hamill . . . Hamill knows the newspaper business. He knows New York City, and the kinds of people who live, work and die there. In this short novel (214 pages in my Nook), he pulls together a dying NYC newspaper, its staff and its “murderers;”, a cop and his son, a homegrown Muslim with terrorist dreams; an angry wheelchair-bound veteran; an aging artist; a wealthy woman with charitable instincts; a seemingly senseless murder, and a diverse cast of supporting characters so compelling and intriguing that I can’t begin to describe them. But Hamill can. Continue reading »
Healey’s Cave: A novel by Aaron Paul Lazar
When I was a youngster, I had a couple of favorite games, jump rope was one, marbles another. I played many a game of marbles and held many a marble of different sizes and colors in my hand. But I never experienced what Sam—the central character in Healey’s Cave—experiences when, working in his garden, he unearths a small marble. Continue reading »
My husband and I recently read two Mary Higgins Clark books at the same time. We both used modern technology, but of different modes and for different reasons. The two books were by the same author but of distinctly different time frames and cultural issues.
My husband, Jim, “reads” digitally recorded books from the NC Library for the blind, since he has lost most of his vision to end stage macular degeneration. I order his books online and they are mailed to him. This service is a blessing that can’t truly be appreciated until you have lost your sight as he has. In my case, I do much of my novel reading on an e-reader, a Barnes and Noble Nook with both WiFi and 3G technology. I order books from the Nook section of B&N, and they’re downloaded directly to my reader, usually within minutes. Continue reading »
