Review of Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs delivers an interesting and entertaining mystery in this 11th entry in the Temperance Brennan series.

During the course of this story, Tempe is residing in Charlotte, North Carolina, dividing her time between teaching at the university and doing forensics for the local authorities. Reichs as usual describes the geography and history of the city, but I could have used a few more sensory details to help ground me in Tempe's reality. Scenes unfolded at a variety of settings, including her lab, her home, a strip mall on the wrong side of town, a Wiccan bonfire, and a riverside body dump site, but all seem oddly remote.

Review of The Spellman Files and Revenge of the Spellmans by Lisa Lutz

Sometime early this year I read Lisa Lutz's Curse of the Spellmans, thinking that it was the first in the series. It's not, and because there are some references back to "previous documents" in the later books, I recommend that you read them in the correct order, which is:

1. The Spellman Files

2. The Curse of the Spellmans

3. Revenge of the Spellmans

The Spellmans are a San Francisco-based family who run their own Private Investigation business. They spend as much time investigating each others' secrets -- and trying to protect their own private lives from each others' prying -- as they do investigating outsiders.

Review of Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear

I read a number of mysteries in October, and Among the Mad was the standout. 

In this sixth Maisie Dobbs mystery, the psychologist and sleuth -- and the rest of London -- is still dealing with the aftermath of WWI. Although the tale is historical, set in London as 1931 draws to a close, its disabled soldiers, disgruntled workforce, and depressed populace resonate with today's world.

Maisie is drawn into working with the police on a high-profile case that could jeopardize tens or even hundreds of people if they can't catch the culprits in time. At the same time, she must help her assistant, Billy, deal with his wife's hospitalization and caring for his children. I really enjoyed seeing more of Billy's life, although the situation was heart-wrenching. I also loved Maisie's new sense of self-confidence as an accomplished career woman, and liked seeing her lighten up a little bit.

I've never been to London, and I can't say that Winspear's version of the city sets me on fire to visit it -- she paints a bleak cityscape inhabited by a downtrodden people, caught between the horrifying memories of WWI and the gathering clouds of WWII. But the setting is superbly crafted and had me shivering even on Indian Summer days.

I find the Maisie Dobbs series a bit uneven, but this is one of its stronger books, highly recommended.

Review of The Price of Silence by Kate Wilhelm

I was a teenage science fiction addict when I first encountered Kate Wilhelm’s work in the form of her classic “Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang.” A few years ago I was delighted to stumble across her mystery series featuring attorney Barbara Holloway. When I started packing for my current trip (I’m writing this in a motel in Coos Bay, OR), I hit the library to search out fiction set in Oregon, and was reminded that some of Wilhelm’s work fits the bill.

The Price of Silence is a mystery, but not part of the Barbara Holloway series. It’s the story of Todd Fielding, a young female journalist trying to support herself and her graduate student husband, Barney, who is trying to finish his studies in Corvallis, Oregon. Hard up for work in a down economy and with a dwindling array of newspapers, Todd takes a job in a small, remote town (““Where the hell is Brindle, Oregon?” she muttered, opening the envelope’ (which contains an invitation to a job interview).)

Wilhelm does a nice job of setting the scene. “On the left, a mammoth greenhouse seemed ridiculously out of place considering the temperature was 101. A motel, a gas station with a small convenience store attached, a Safeway...Another store, general merchandise, a tourist-type souvenir store, another motel with a cafe, a rock shop...It looked like a move set waiting for the actors.” Then after a few more turns of the car’s steering wheel, “Brindle had turned into a real village with houses and yards, green things growing, a restaurant, a few people going on about their business.”

Not all is well in this tiny hamlet, as Todd soon discovers when she goes to work for a feisty 80-year-old publisher named Ruth Ann Colonna. Ruth Ann has lived in Brindle all her life, and has memories of helping her father paste up The Brindle Times when she was just a child. Her son Johnny is the managing editor, and proves more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to collecting and printing real news.

A few weeks after Todd arrives in town, a young teenage girl vanishes on the walk to the school bus one morning. Todd is amazed and then incensed at how sanguine local law enforcement, the powers that be, and the community in general are about the girl’s disappearance. When a postcard arrives a week after she vanishes, everyone but the girl’s frantic mother writes her off as a runaway. Probing further, Todd discovers a pattern of girls gone missing over the last two decades, and begins publishing articles about her research in the weekly newspaper. Everyone except Ruth Ann views this as stirring up needless trouble, and Todd soon finds her life threatened.

I loved the characters in this book, and think Wilhelm captures the setting nicely -- I could smell the desert in the scenes where Todd and Barney are exploring the back country. I could have done without the supernatural aspect that came into play, I found the premise that an entire small town would shrug off the disappearances of five teenage girls a little hard to swallow, and I knew the identity of the villain about half-way through the book. But all those negatives didn’t detract from the unfolding of the story, which was logical and well-written and peopled by characters I genuinely cared about.

Review of The Ice House by Minette Walters

I’ve read and enjoyed a number of Minette Walters’ mysteries over the last fifteen years or so. I just finished The Ice House, her debut novel published in 1992, and I’m glad it wasn’t the first of her works that I encountered, because I might have skipped her later books, and that would have been a shame. 

Walters has a way of getting into the creepy psyche of her stories’ bad guys in a fashion that is almost too deep and intimate for my comfort. In this first novel, the twisted emotional and moral fabric of the cops investigating the crime was almost too difficult to stomach.

When a body is discovered in the ice house on the grounds of an English manor, it stirs up reinvestigation of a ten-year-old disappearance. The man who vanished was a scoundrel and a criminal, but his presumed murder turned the narrow-minded villagers against his wife, Phoebe Maybury. She has maintained her innocence and reinforced her isolation with the help of Anne Cattrell and Diana Goode, old friends who moved into the manor with her shortly after her husband vanished. All three of them have things to hide, even from each other and their now-grown children. 

The two primary investigators, an inspector and his sergeant, are more deceitful and vindictive than the criminals they are trying to catch. They have a bizarre relationship that swings without warning between gruff fondness and antagonism.

Walters uses shifting third-person viewpoint to good effect, telling parts of the story from the vantage points of each of the cops, each of the women, and a few key witnesses. She does a masterful job of revealing just enough information in each scene to keep the reader turning the page.

Eighty-five percent of the action takes place in the manor house and its grounds, a setting drawn with loving detail. The big house has been divided into three separate flats for the three women sharing it. The characters’ distinctive personalities and careers --horticulturalist, interior designer, and writer--are reflected nicely in their natural habitats, and the reader gets a real taste of the isolation in which they live from spending so much time on the manor grounds. The sights, scents, and sounds of the houses and the pub where the cops encounter various suspects and witnesses also come right off the page.

I found the corrupted cops disturbing and the unfounded animosity of the villagers shocking, but was most deeply unhinged by the way Maybury, Cattrell and Goode all rolled over and accepted their victimization without fighting back. The Ice House was a good mystery with a logical solution and a satisfying ending. It will please readers who are already fans of Minette Walters, but I wouldn’t recommend it as the first of her books to try.

Review of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley

Precocious 11-year-old narrator Flavia de Luce is the highlight of this crime novel, the first in a series intended for adults, although middle-grade readers might also enjoy it. Ignored by her family and the adults around her, she takes solace in chemistry, spending hours in her glassware-filled laboratory at the top of her family’s mansion in the English countryside. When she stumbles upon a corpse in the garden, she sets herself the task of finding the murderer -- or at least saving her father, even if he is guilty, from going to prison for the crime.

I finished this book largely because I found Flavia’s voice so enjoyable. The setting was a disappointment in that the descriptions lacked the telling details that make you feel like you’re right there. I often had a hard time remembering whether the story unfolded in 1950s England, or some decades earlier.  

Most scenes had a sketchy, dreamy quality that failed to transport me into our heroine’s reality; the only moments when I felt like I was with Flavia were when she was visiting her dead mother’s mothballed car in the estate’s carriage house, and when she was in the defunct garage that had been pressed into use by the village library for storing overflow materials. 

I had a hard time picturing a lake with an island you could wade to, and never had a good picture in my mind of what the rooms of Flavia’s house looked like, or even whether the manor was well-maintained or going to seed. 

I figured out early on who the murderer was, also a disappointment. Flavia’s unravelling of her father’s secrets during the course of the investigation was interesting but not terribly compelling. 

Unfortunately I found the depictions of all of the other characters, with the exception of the inspector Flavia butts heads with, mere caricatures. Although I never really did understand the inspector’s quote that gave the book its title, I liked the way their relationship grew, and hope that the inspector will become something of a mentor for Flavia in future adventures.

In spite of all my criticisms, I look forward to Flavia’s next adventure, because her voice is so unique and her perspective on life so enjoyable.

Book Review: Fox Evil by Minette Walters

Accomplished writer Minette Walters does her usual magic act in Fox Evil, bringing complex, three-dimensional characters to life in this psychological thriller’s pages.

At either end of the mystery is an isolated old man, retired Colonel James Lockyer-Fox, and his now-grown biological granddaughter, Captain Nancy Smith, who was long ago put up for adoption. Caught in the middle is the Colonel’s lawyer, Mark Ankerton, who is tasked with bringing Smith back into the family.

It turns out that Smith, whose character and features echo those of both her grandfather and his deceased wife, doesn’t really care about being a long-lost heiress. She’s more than happy with the family who adopted her, who are well-to-do themselves, as Ankerton realizes while he waits to meet her in the Smith sitting room. “A nineteenth century map on the wall above the fireplace showed Lower Croft and Coomb Croft as two distinct entities, while a more recent map next to it showed the two within a single boundary, renamed Coomb Farm.”

Farms, land owners, tenants, and property rights are recurring themes in the story, which deals with long-buried secrets, shame and blame, loyalty, and gossip. The Colonel hopes to leave his estate to Smith, largely cutting out her biological mother and uncle. The gossip mongers who have cruelly isolated the Colonel since his wife’s suspicious death live on parts of the farm that he’s already had to sell off to pay his wastrel children’s bad debts. The man and his property are both being neglected by his elderly servants, who live in a “tied cottage” on the property and cannot be evicted and replaced with younger workers. And now travelers are camped on adjoining land, intending to take over “waste property” and put down roots.

The action takes place in Devon, largely on the Colonel’s estate, which Walters describes deftly. “He opened the door on to a walled courtyard and ushered Nancy through...Weeds grew in profusion between the cobbles, and the terra-cotta tubs contained only the brittle skeletons of long-dead plants...They emerged onto an an expanse of parkland...Frost still lay in pockets under the shrubs and tress that formed an avenue facing south, but the bright winter sun had warmed it to a glistening dew on the sweep of grass that sloped away and gave an unrestricted view of Shenstead Valley and the sea beyond.”

The travelers are led by a man calling himself Fox Evil. His name hints at a connection to the Colonel, and he knows far more detail about the area and its inhabitants than a stranger should. He runs his band of travelers like a military group, even down to insisting they all wear black scarves and balaclavas when they face the locals. He alternately neglects and terrifies his own young son, Wolfie, and when some of his fellow travelers begin to balk at his treatment of both Wolfie and themselves, he ratchets up the fear with razor and hammer he carries in his pockets.

Walters does a great job of moving between points of view and raising tensions as she peels away layer after layer of the lies and deceptions from which her characters have woven their lives. 

While the story is compelling, and its setting is beautiful, I can't say it's set me on fire to go and explore Devon in reality, just in case its inhabitants are all as deceptive, angry and vindictive as most of this story's characters.

Book Review: The Shanghai Moon by S.J. Rozan

This ninth book in the Lydia Chin and Bill Smith mystery series is told from Private Investigator Lydia’s point of view, and is centered in her Chinatown community. The story has all the elements I’ve grown accustomed to from S.J. Rozan: wonderful characterization, interesting twists in a compelling plot, and evocative scene-setting.

A surprise element was a fascinating historical component to the mystery. Using letters and many interviews with “old Chinese men,” as a tea-bloated Lydia refers to them affectionately, Rozan deftly tells the history of tens of thousands of Jews who escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Shanghai at the outset of World War II. Letters written by 18-year-old refugee Rosalie Gilder bring to life her flight from Europe aboard a steamer bound for Shanghai, the ups and downs of life in a Shanghai ghetto, and the drama of forging new family bonds against a backdrop of war and oppression.

The letters and history are woven in among scenes and events in Lydia’s private and professional life, and the quaint mystery of a valuable long-lost jewel takes on urgency when it becomes the key to the murder of one of Lydia’s colleagues. Lydia’s unique voice is strengthened by her warring impatience with and appreciation for her own cultural background. 

With help from her on-again, off-again partner Bill Smith, Lydia unravels the mysteries within mysteries and brings several wrongdoers to justice. During the investigation, Lydia scorns herself for getting so involved and caring so much about these people whose lives were in the past. I sympathized with her reading Rosalie’s letters late into the night, eagerly reaching for the next one to find out what happened next, since I was doing the same, neglecting sleep and chores in favor of devouring chapter after chapter of The Shanghai Moon, wanting to know what happened with both Rosalie and Lydia.

Through Lydia, Rozan brings to life contemporary New York: Chinatown bustling with people and redolent of noodles and exotic tea, the Diamond District full of couples gazing at engagement rings, suburbs with their small houses set in neat yards. Through Rosalie and her descendants, she brings to life the Shanghai of decades past, from walled gardens and plush restaurants to stinking wharves and crowded ghettoes. And as their stories intertwine, Rozan, Lydia, and the reader explore themes of separation and togetherness, family and belonging, cross-cultural relationships, and deception.

This story’s only real shortcoming for me -- and it’s a minor one -- was a lack of imminent peril; even when one of the bad guys is shoving a gun into Lydia’s face, the conversation is so civilized that I couldn’t bring myself to fear for Lydia’s welfare. Nevertheless, this latest installment in the Lydia Chin and Bill Smith mystery series is a wonderfully complex novel that leaves the reader wanting more.

Book Review: The Last Kashmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly

One of the best things about “traveling by fiction” is that I can experience a different time as well as an unfamiliar place through a story’s setting. Barbara Cleverly’s first mystery in the Inspector Joe Sandilands series is an evocative introduction to the India of 1922. 

Sandilands, a dashing survivor of the trenches of World War I France,  is a Scotland Yard Inspector on loan to the government of Calcutta. He is just about to escape from what he considers a hellish country when he is dispatched to investigate the latest in a string of mysterious deaths on a British army outpost.

The victims have all been wives of British officers, all dying under strange circumstances in the month of March. The murders are strung out so much over time -- the serial murderer apparently interrupted by the advent of World War I, among other things -- that the first thing Sandilands must establish is that they were, indeed, murders. This he does with the able assistance of the woman who drew him into the mystery and Naurung, an extremely engaging and capable young native Indian police officer who becomes the Inspector’s sidekick.

The book held some disappointments and frustrations for me. I wanted a glossary to define unfamiliar terms that were used without explanation, such as “nabob.” The secondary and tertiary characters tended towards caricatures, to the extent that I had a hard time keeping the bereaved husbands straight. I was also disappointed at how easily Sandilands was manipulated by the young woman who drew him into the mystery. And I never completely bought his change of heart from a desperate desire to head home to England at the story’s opening to a growing emotional attachment to India by the end of it.

In spite of these flaws, the story kept me engaged, in large part because of the descriptions of the exotic location and the mores of a fascinating era.

About halfway through the story, Sandilands travels to Calcutta in search of the husband of one of the victims. “Initially, brass plates discreetly announced the presence of banks, insurance companies, the Calcutta office of internationally known trading houses, engineers, architects, and solicitors. But soon the brass plates got smaller as the number increased. Brass plates gave way to cards. The number of bell pushes multiplied. Names appeared on upper windows, front doors stood open. Kites circled the damp air and crows pecked crumbling cornices.”

Later he explores the countryside on horseback. “Topping a jungle-clad ridge, their road turned downwards towards a village presided over by a rhythmically creaking water wheel, turning and turning and lifting buckets to send a flush of water down the many irrigation channels. Thirty or so mud-walled houses with thatched roofs huddled companionably together, set out to no obvious plan and with no eye for drainage or ventilation as far as Joe could make out, but scattered, it seemed, haphazardly about a central square in which stood a venerable peepul tree. In the windless day spires of smoke rose from many households, bringing with them the sharp smell of dung fires and cooking.”

I’m glad I read the entire story, because the end was unexpected but logical and satisfying, hinging on the brilliant motivation of the seemingly unlikely killer.

Book Review: Lie Down with the Devil by Linda Barnes

I enjoyed Linda Barnes’ early Carlotta Carlyle mysteries, but haven’t followed the series in recent years. Having finished Lie Down with the Devil, the 12th mystery featuring the Boston-based Private Investigator, I can’t wait to go back and read the ones I missed.

Carlotta’s at her best in this book: smart, courageous, and persistent. Her actions are gutsy, but measured rather than incautious. The action moves from downtown Boston to a shooting range on the Harbor Islands to a pastoral mental health institute to Cape Cod. Barnes’ deft descriptions bring these settings to life in a way that makes you feel you are right beside Carlotta as she teases apart and clears away layers of mystery.

Early in the story, Carlotta tracks her long-time friend Mooney to the Boston Police Department’s firing range on Moon Island. “Pulling into a space in the level gravel lot, I opened the cab door and sniffed an unexpectedly salty breeze. Living in Cambridge, the way I do, you can almost forget the proximity of the Atlantic. I inhaled the sea air gratefully. There’s something cleansing about the ocean, all that green water licking the shore, endless and timeless, soothing and hypnotizing...” Her relationship with Mooney, who is her former boss, proves both a help and a distraction as her newest case unfolds.

Also distracting Carlotta is the mystery surrounding her runaway fiance, mobster Sam Gianelli. She misses him and wants to help him, but also resents being kept in the dark about his “situation.” At one point she considers “borrowing” his Jaguar, but “The Jag would have been a lousy tail car. Too conspicuous, I told myself, scrunched behind the wheel of another aged Ford cab. The bucket seat in Sam’s car would have put me instantly to sleep, and the heating unit that kept it toasty under your butt, who needed it? The musky smell would have made me nostalgic and I didn’t need that either. The Spartan chill of Gloria’s cabs would keep me alert...”

Even as she takes on the new case, Carlotta realizes her judgement is not entirely trustworthy, because she is angst-ridden over the still unfolding recovery of her “little sister” Paolina. Recently retrieved by Carlotta from a kidnapper, the teenager is in a mental health institution for her own safety, and refuses to speak to Carlotta. The private investigator’s distraction with Paolina and her daily check-in calls become a factor in the story when Carlotta takes a few missteps.

In pursuit of the true identity of a client who lied to her, Carlotta finds herself parked in a run-down part of Boston. “Two overturned plastic chairs decorated the weedy yard of a two-family with peeling beige paint. The adjoining house was green with unfortunate yellow trim. The high, narrow structures, too close to the street and too close to each other, had stingy lawns and forbidding chain-link fences.”

Later, on the run from both the good guys and the bad, she holes up in a shack on Cape Cod. “There were two main rooms, one up, one down, connected by a contraption that was more ladder than staircase. The room on the bottom level had a tiny bathroom in a curtained alcove. The top room had a galley kitchen against a narrow wall, a child-sized refrigerator, a two-burner stove.”

The pace starts out a bit slow due to the intertwining threads of the case at hand and Carlotta’s multiple distractions, but it soon picks up. The reader learns more about Carlotta’s past, and by the time the story ends and all the loose threads are tied up, has great hopes for Carlotta’s future.

Book Review: First the Dead by Tim Downs

The third book chronicling the adventures of forensic entomologist Dr. Nick Polchak, First the Dead is set in New Orleans during and just after Hurricane Katrina. Author Tim Downs draws a convincing portrait of the devastated city and the tireless rescue workers braving horrifying conditions to bring in the last the survivors of the storm.

Polchak and his friend Jerry Kibbee are part of a team that usually arrives in the wake of a disaster to process and identify the dead. Deployed to a small town outside New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina hits, the team is told in no uncertain terms that they must set aside their usual work and spend the first few days of Katrina’s aftermath in rescue work: “first the living” is to be their temporary new mantra.

Polchak, a brilliant and driven scientist, believes that someone is using the flooding of the Lower Ninth Ward to hide a series of murders. He is convinced that all forensic evidence of these murders will be lost before his team can recover it. With the help of his easy-going friend Jerry and J.T., a young African-American boy they rescue from roof on their first day in the Lower Ninth Ward, Polchak sets out to find and preserve the evidence. He soon finds himself the target of the killer.

Downs’ descriptions of the destruction wrought by Katrina are compelling. On the first day the Lower Ninth Ward is nearly deserted as Polchak steers his small boat down inundated streets and alleys. Families too large to fit into his craft choose to stay on their griddle-hot roofs rather than risk being separated. His boat gets hung up in tree branches.

At one point Polchak makes use of a flooded hospital lab. “In the doorway he stopped and looked back. The scene was utterly surreal: a medical laboratory half filled with water and a fishing boat floating in the center. Beyond the boat was a window with no glass; outside the window was an endless black lake.”

The search for J.T.’s father takes them to the Superdome, which is being used as an emergency shelter. “...the air reeked of sweat, and feces, and rotting food. The stench was nauseating...The noise was nearly deafening, and the buses only made it worse.”

At one point Polchak is trapped in a flooded house. “The lukewarm water was choked with particulate matter swirling around him like leaves on a windy day; he clutched at the largest pieces and felt nothing but clumps of soggy cardboard and waterlogged wood.”

Downs also does a great job of showcasing the chaos endured by the rescue workers in the first days after the storm. He immerses the reader in the military-issue “meals ready to eat” that the hungry J.T. devours. Polchak and his sidekicks sleep in an air-conditioned morgue truck to escape the oppressive heat and humidity. They scrounge rides in emergency supply trucks and hide their rescue boat to keep it safe from thieves and looters. Cell phones don’t work, patients die in the upper floors of hospitals because their life-support machines have no power, and nobody seems to be in charge.

It’s this lack of leadership that compels Polchak to reject the idea of “first the living,” and it’s this same vacuum that lets him get away with his renegade behavior. Like many brilliant scientist characters, Polchak comes off as a cold, distant wise-cracker. His few moments of warmth are short-lived, and he’s not a character who I want to spend a lot of time with.

Another character in the book, psychiatrist Dr. Elizabeth Woodbridge, was sometimes Polchak’s foe and sometimes his friend, sometimes his superior and sometimes his partner. Although there was the hint of a romantic relationship there, I found myself wondering why any woman as together as Woodbridge would bother with someone as maddening as Polchak.

What made this book a success for me were the challenges Polchak had to overcome to keep his investigation going and his genial entourage. I didn’t ultimately care very much about what happened to Polchak or his precious evidence; but I did want to follow the stories of easy-going Jerry and bright and courageous young J.T.

This is the third book in a series, and given my reluctance to spend time with the main character, I’m uncertain if I’ll go back to explore the first two.

Book Review: "Feint of Art" by Hailey Lind

The first in a series to follow the adventures of artist and amateur sleuth Annie Kincaid, Feint of Art turned out to be the fun and witty read that its title promised.

Annie Kincaid is a gifted artist who, although struggling financially, is rich in friends. Several years ago she was bounced out of her budding career as an art restorer at San Francisco’s fictional Brock Art Museum for being the granddaughter and one-time apprentice of a forger. Since then she has built a good business doing faux finishes in the bay area’s hot interior decorating market, painting the occasional portrait to soothe her artistic soul.

Because of her intimate knowledge of forgery -- she went to jail in Paris at the age of 16 for flooding the market with faked Old Masters -- an old boyfriend who still works at the Brock calls upon her to render a verdict on a recent high-profile acquisition. Within an hour of her declaring the painting a forgery, her old boyfriend disappears, and another museum worker is murdered.

Annie lives in Oakland: “My home was the top floor...of a once-stately Victorian...The plumbing and electrical systems were suspect, but the rent was cheap, moldings were ornate, and if you stood on the toilet you could glimpse the San Francisco Bay from the bathroom window. The place was a lot like me: a bit quirky, occasionally contrary, but with lots of character.”

Those quirks make Annie a fun character to spend time with, and while her contrariness sometimes had me shaking my head at the fixes she got herself into, it certainly enlivened the story.

Annie’s San Francisco art studio has a “wide wooden plank floor and exposed brick walls; the inviting sitting area with the faux fireplace I had painted on the wall; the skylights high overhead; the half-dead ficus tree; the jumble of easels, shelves of art supplies, and worktables piled with paintings and pictures and artifacts at various stages of completion; the smell of linseed oil and turpentine. I loved my studio, and most of my clients were thrilled to get a peek at a working artist’s space.” 

As Annie is drawn deeper into the mystery of the forged painting and her missing ex-boyfriend, she learns that several other acquaintances in the art world have vanished -- one with some extremely valuable Old Master sketches. Since the hunky but uptight new owner of her rented studio plans to double her rent, she decides to expand her sleuthing to track down the stolen sketches and claim a substantial finders fee. 

The investigation brings her into contact with a laundry-list of forgers, thieves, and other colorful characters intent on double-crossing each other. It brings her the unwanted professional attention of a couple of San Francisco Detective Inspectors. And it sets up something of a budding romantic triangle between Annie, her straightlaced landlord, and an equally attractive but morally reprehensible art thief. The triangle was pleasantly reminiscent of the one in Janet Evanovich’s early Stephanie Plum novels, and in fact Annie’s motley crew of sidekicks and the characters and situations she encounters all rang a welcome but toned-down Evanovich bell.

Annie’s trusty beater of a truck transports her all over the bay area, and Hailey Lind’s descriptions were so evocative I felt like I was riding along: from San Francisco, where she can never find parking; to Oakland, where she eats some great food; to a bungalow-turned-antique shop in Napa Valley; to the ritzy island of Belvedere, where she is marooned by the cute art thief. Whether you already know and love the bay area, or are planning a first trip to it, Feint of Art provides a quirky and enjoyable tour. 

The story reaches a satisfying climax during a gala event at the very museum from which she’s been banished, and Hailey Lind does a good job of tying up the dangling plot threads of this very entertaining debut book. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

Review of The Fault Tree

The Fault Tree: A Mystery
By Louise Ure
St. Martin’s Minotaur; 2007; 336 pages; $24.95 (hardback)

When I signed up to attend the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in 2007, one of the assignments I gave myself to prepare for the conference was to read the first book of at least six of the faculty members I’d be encountering there. This exercise exposed me to some wonderful writers I hadn’t read before, and one of those was Louise Ure.


Her first mystery, Forcing Amaryllis, was a real pleasure to read. Her descriptions brought the southwest setting alive and her protagonist was a strong, smart, outspoken woman I enjoyed getting to know. So I was more than a little disappointed when, while talking to Louise during one of the conference lunch breaks, I learned that she considered Forcing Amaryllis a “stand alone” book rather than the beginning of a series. Her second book, which was due out in late 2007, would feature a new protagonist.


Just before The Fault Tree came out, I received another unwelcome shock: the protagonist of the new mystery was BLIND, and much of the story was told through her sightless point of view! I cringed. I’m a very visual person, and when I read, a movie plays in my head. For that matter, when I write, I’m describing a movie I see in my head – it requires some discipline and a lot of revising on my part to incorporate senses other than sight.


With these two strikes against it, I couldn’t imagine how The Fault Tree could possibly meet the expectations that Forcing Amaryllis had set.


I am happy to report that my preconceived notions were wrong.


Cadence Moran is an antisocial young blind woman with an ear for trouble. She makes her living as a mechanic who uses her senses of hearing and touch to troubleshoot engine problems that cannot be solved by reading meters or thumbing through a shop manual. Socially isolated as much by choice as by her “handicap,” she taps her way through life with a hand-carved cane, choosing well-known physical and emotional paths that hold no surprises and no variations – paths she’s so familiar with they’ve truly become ruts.


Early in the book, Ure immerses us in Moran’s world through her character’s keen sense of hearing: “A lawn sprinkler ratcheted around several yards to my left…and a horn honked down by the Guardian Motel on the corner. Although the air was cooling, Apache cicadas still thrummed in concert from the cottonwood tree down the block. Farther away I heard the dentist’s drill whine of a Japanese motorcycle…”


While navigating the virtual rut between the shop where she works and her tidy little house, Moran is nearly hit by a speeding driver. She soon discovers that the car was likely barreling away from the scene of a murder, and goes to the cops with what little evidence she can offer: a distinctive engine noise and the smell of antifreeze. The cops give little credence to her story until she has another violent encounter with the same – at least by the sound and smell of it – vehicle. But by then the police interest seems to be too little, too late. For the killer doesn’t realize that Moran is blind, and wants her permanently silenced.


As the story unfolds, Ure skillfully rotates viewpoints from Moran’s first-person narration to the villain’s and cops’ third-person points of view. In these differing points of view, descriptions of place help reveal character even as they anchor the reader in the Tucson setting.


The bad guy’s hideout is described as “Thin walled and tin roofed, with acres of creosote-choked desert between him and the nearest neighbor, the house was the perfect hideaway. No tourists or fancy buildings out here. Just rusty old vehicles and worthless land. Everybody on the shitty side of town had something to hide.” This character has fallen backwards into a quagmire of crime, and throughout the story I found myself rooting for him to make the right choice and find redemption.


The appealing sense of humor of one of the detectives, August Dupree, comes to light when he goes to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum to interview a friend of the murder victim. “Dupree’s favorite part was still Prairie Dog Town, a patch of sandy soil surrounded by a waist-high wall and studded with a warren of small holes the prairie dogs dug for concealment. It looked like a life-size version of a Whack-A-Mole game…”


Ure does a good job of escalating the action and the stakes as the story moves along. The backstory of the accident that resulted in Moran’s blinding eight years before the story opens is woven nicely into the novel’s fabric. Moran is an appealing character with understandable flaws and believable fears. Once she is jolted out of the narrow rut of her self-circumscribed life, she stretches and grows in both the practical and emotional realms.


Coincidence is always a tough thing for me to swallow in a mystery, and I did find it a little hard to believe that the only friend Moran has works as a crime scene technician for the Tucson police. The pigheaded refusal of one of the detectives to give any credence to a blind woman’s testimony also seemed, if not melodramatic, at least to drag on through too much of the story – I found myself hoping that a real-life cop wouldn’t be such a jerk, or at least wouldn't be such a persistent jerk.


But these minor flaws did not mar my enjoyment of The Fault Tree. I found myself turning pages quickly, unwilling to set the book down, and staying up later than I should to read just one more chapter…always the mark of a good mystery.


The Fault Tree more than met the expectations set by Forcing Amaryllis. I look forward to Louise Ure’s next endeavor, even if it is another “stand alone.”

Review of Shell Games: A John Marquez Crime Novel

Shell Games: A John Marquez Crime Novel
By Kirk Russell
Chronicle Books; 2003; 347 pages; $12.95 (paperback)


[A truncated version of this review appears in the June 2008 issue of Between the Tides, the quarterly newsletter of Friends of Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. http://www.fitzgeraldreserve.org/]


I grew up on the east coast, spending most of my elementary school years in Connecticut. Every summer my parents took me to the coast of Maine for a week or two, and I fell resoundingly in love with the Atlantic Ocean and its inhabitants – especially marine mammals – as a result of those trips. After my parents divorced I spent a landlocked adolescence in Wisconsin. When I was twenty-one I lit out for the West Coast in the old Chevy Malibu I inherited from my mother before the ink was dry on my Beloit College degree.


I had completed my degree in 3.5 years, motivated by a strong dislike of being trapped in classrooms and hog-tied with institutional red tape, so it was late January when I first saw the Pacific Ocean. I no longer remember the route I used to cut across the state, but I was somewhere in southern California, twisting along on Highway One on cliffs high above the water, when I noticed a cluster of large boats very close to shore.



It was a spectacularly clear and sunny day, the kind implanted in my brain by hours of listening to the Beach Boys’ golden oldie “California Dreamin’” while I studied in snow-blanketed libraries and dorm rooms. Watching the almost motionless boats while I wondered what they were doing in a spot that was so obviously not an anchorage, I suddenly saw one, then three, then half-a-dozen puffs of spray.


Whales! I swerved into the nearest pullout, yanked my binoculars out of my backpack, and reveled in the sight, wishing my mother, who had been even more of a marine mammal enthusiast than I, was still alive to enjoy the scene with me. I learned from a roadside interpretive sign somewhere along the way that these were gray whales, and that they followed the coast of California on their migration north and south between Alaskan feeding waters and breeding lagoons in Baja, Mexico. It took me many hours, with many roadside stops along the way, to inch my way up the coast.


I arrived in Mendocino, California, late the next day, and by the time I had been ensconced in my Aunt Jane’s spare bedroom for a couple of weeks, some gray whales had worked their way that far north. I saw them daily on my walks on the trails of Mendocino Headlands State Park, and the three week California visit I had planned turned into a permanent relocation when I went to work at the historic Ford House Visitor and Interpretive Center. (http://www.mcn.org/1/mendoparks/mndhdld.htm)


For a year I worked there, exploring the myriad other state parks, wandering daily through Highlight Gallery and the Gallery Bookshop, and haunting the bakery and The (now-defunct) Chocolate Moose. (http://www.mendocino.org/html/shop.html)


After I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work as a technical writer, Aunt Jane relocated to Fort Bragg, the mill town twenty minutes north of Mendocino, and my visits included exploring the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, going to Glass Beach, walking the Ecological Staircase at Jug Handle State Reserve, and camping in Russian Gulch and McKerricher state parks. (http://www.fortbragg.com/fort-bragg-attractions.php)


In between visits to Aunt Jane I came to know and love other spots on the Northern California coast, including Sausalito, Bodega Bay, and Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay.


So imagine my delight when I discovered Kirk Russell’s Shell Games, a well-told mystery with numerous plot twists and turns, which begins with the discovery of a pile of hundreds of empty abalone shells and two abalone divers tortured to death in a fictional state park south of Fort Bragg. “They started up the creek trail, skirting waist-high greasewood and taller poison oak with dead leaves curled and drying. He smelled creek mud and the dry oaks…” Russell’s description of the scene transported me back to my old stomping grounds.


Protagonist John Marquez is a California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) warden, one of the unsung heroes in society’s struggle to save what’s left of our natural resources. Working undercover, he and his team of DFG agents are hot on the trail of large-scale abalone poachers who are threatening the survival of the species.


In the torture deaths of the two abalone divers, Marquez believes he recognizes the handiwork of a criminal mastermind he crossed swords with when he worked undercover in the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). As he carefully cultivates informants from abalone divers to seafood wholesalers, he learns – to his regret – that his own actions have sometimes tragic repercussions in other people’s lives.


Marquez and his agents stake out harbors, dive sites, and houses up and down the northern California coast, and Russell’s writing brings to life many of the spots that I’ve grown to love in my adopted home state. His descriptions of the various places where the action unfolds had me feeling the fog on my face and hearing the surf in the background.


Marquez lives in a house built by his grandparents on Mt. Tamalpais. “A wooded shoulder of Mt. Tam fell away to the right of the house and below there were stands of trees, open flanks of dry grass and folded ravines with oak and brush, then the ocean. In winter he watched the leading edge of storms approach…He had a partial view of the top of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge…and still, it was dark enough at night to see the stars.”


Early in the story Marquez meets an informant near Half Moon Bay, transporting the reader along with him: “Forty minutes south of San Francisco Marquez left Highway 1 and drove through fields of pumpkins out to a broad stand of eucalyptus trees along the bluffs. Fog shrouded the high branches of the trees and under the canopy the road was wet and dark. Droplets ticked onto the hood as he parked.”


The current undercover operation has Marquez’s team based in a house in Fort Bragg, where “They met on Elm Street and walked down the old road alongside the Georgia-Pacific property, between the blackberry bushes and down to Glass Beach where for decades earlier in the past century the citizenry of Fort Bragg used to dump its garbage into the ocean. Over the years the broken china, glass, and metal had been worn by the ocean, the glass rounded like small stones that glittered now in the moonlight.”


Glass Beach is a real place that you can explore the next time you’re in Fort Bragg, as are the Sausalito docks: “Sodium lights strung along the dock hummed and swung in the wind and the shapes of Bailey and Heinemann flickered through the pale light of their rear cabin window. Across the bay, the skyline of San Francisco glowed with a hazy brilliance and as the night deepened and quieted he listened to the water lapping at the dock and faint strains of music…”


Marquez puts a lot of mileage on his truck during the course of this investigation, and just reading about the long drives involved in a day’s work made me road-weary!


Time and again the team comes within striking distance of the bad guys, only to have their bust thwarted by a turncoat informant, an unexpected maneuver by the poachers, or – the most frustrating and frequently encountered hurdle – jurisdictional problems. The cops in the small towns where the action takes place are often more of a hindrance than a help. And Marquez and his team aren’t just up against the evildoers; in this post-9/11 world, they must also deal with their wardens and patrol boats being diverted to operations for Homeland Security. Finally, the FBI seems to be after the same perpetrators as Marquez is, and they don’t care how many abalone or game wardens get caught in the crossfire.


Marquez is a believable protagonist, physically and mentally strong and devoted to his work. He’s knowledgeable as well. “A century ago, abalone had been so plentiful along the California shoreline that all you had to do was wade in a foot or two and pick them up. Shellmounds attested to how plentiful they’d once been…Diving came after the easy stuff was gone and we’re down to the end game for a species that has survived for a million years.” And yet Russell’s deft characterization prevents Marquez from being a self-righteous know-it-all.


Although everyone around him thinks he’s gone off the deep end when he jumps to the conclusion that his quarry is a shadowy figure from his own dark days in the DEA, Marquez trusts his instincts. He is emotionally grounded in the world with strong feelings for his estranged wife and stepdaughter, affection for his agents, and concern even for the informants who may be betraying him – feelings that raise the stakes as the action unfolds.


The story isn’t flawless. There are so many minor characters that I had a hard time keeping track of some of the agents on Marquez’s team and his informants. And I thought the foreshadowing of the book’s ending was a little heavy-handed.


But Marquez and those characters close to him are people I enjoyed spending time with, and I loved the glimpses of how a DFG agent works. “Tell most people that white abalone was the first ocean species humankind could genuinely claim bragging rights to extinguishing and they’d shrug. Big deal, extinctions happened. Talk about managing resources and they’d agree with you, as long as it didn’t cut into their lifestyle too much…Not much glamour in an abalone and there never would be.”


Such a down-to-earth perspective is intriguing in a world where “going green” is fast becoming more of a fashion statement than a philosophy. This John Marquez character will be worth getting to know better.


I look forward to reading the rest of Kirk Russell’s series.

Review of Murder on Molokai: A Surfing Detective Novel

A slim volume from Island Heritage Publishing, Murder on Molokai has Hawaiian Private Investigator Kai Cooke looking into the suspicious death of an environmental activist. Kai is a surfer and has an emotional, almost spiritual connection to the sun-soaked, wave-washed Hawaiian Islands. The first-person narration appeals to all five senses:

• Describing his first glimpse of Molokai, the tiny island on which the environmental activist died: “Sloping plateaus painted the west in cocoa brown and rust red; sheer sea cliffs in the east soared in moss green.”
• Awakening on Molokai itself the next day: ‘“Errr-errr-errooooo! Err-errooooooooo!”A rooster strutting the grounds of the ‘Ukulele Inn jolted me awake the next morning before dawn.’
• Describing the lei-filled floral shop above which his office is located: “The ginger’s sweet, pungent odor raised the hair on the back of my neck.”
• Narrating the long hike to the spot where his client’s sister died: “We hiked through the first few canopied switchbacks, nearly every turn bringing breathtaking views of the wave-pounded peninsula. In the open stretches, the sweltering sun beat down, but to our great advantage: No rain-slick boulders or gooey red mud to challenge our footing today.”
• Describing the drinks over which he reports to his client: “They even tasted like milk shakes, with a coconut and pineapple sweetness that masked double shots of vodka.”

The plot could use a few more twists and turns, but the characters are interesting, and the glimpses of setting are well-done. This book is worth reading to get yourself in an island frame of mind. (It’s the first in a series, and the only one I’ve read thus far.)