The Gods of Gotham

When a young boy's body is found in a waste bin with the front of his body crudely cut in a cross and several organs missing, the nascent NYPD, called "The Copper Stars" in 1845, are all hands on deck trying to find out why. This is a period of time when daily shiploads of starving Irish immigrants pour into a city that already has insufficient work and housing for them and the anti-Catholic sentiment is at burning point. Tim Wilde, younger brother of political wheeler dealer and now police captain Val Wilde, has reluctantly become one of the first crop of Copper Stars after an explosive fire burned his home, his decade-long savings, and part of his face. And it turns out he has a special talent--for observing things others miss--and that may make him especially useful at solving crimes rather than just preventing them, or so his new boss believes. On his way home from a particularly bad day, a small blood-soaked girl literally runs into Tim and instead of turning her in, he shelters her and finds that none of the blood is her own. Eventually he learns that she comes from a house that sells the services of children as well as women, and that several children have disappeared from there whenever a man in a black hooded cloak visits. With the help of unlikely allies, a mass grave of 19 children, probably all Irish, is found and it appears a serial killer is at work. A letter claiming responsibility for the murders is sent to the paper and threatens to stir the anti-immigration sentiment into a fiery riot, but the truth is much more complicated, as is the human heart. Great historical detail, vividly described and compelling characters all serve to make this an engrossing read. Several aspects of the ending definitely caught me by surprise.

Voodoo River

With a title like Voodoo River, it's little wonder that this "Elvis Cole" installment by Robert Crais is set in the bayous of Louisiana. Normally I like to read a series in order, but I picked up a few paper backs to take to New Zealand and got hooked again on Robert Crais, so am kind of reading whatever I have on hand (see earlier reviews of Free Fall and The Last Detective). This one goes back to the time when Elvis met Lucy, then an attorney in Baton Rouge. Elvis is supposed to be tracking down the birth parents of a TV star, who it turns out, is being blackmailed about her parentage. Said star doesn't tell Elvis that and he finds out the hard way by running head on into the blackmailer and some even worse bad guys who eventually kill the blackmailer; they are also running illegal immigrants into the country. There are some pretty colorful characters here, including a centenarian snapping turtle named Luther who can bite a 2 X 4 (that's a board) into splinters and you just know he's going to be bad news. Pike comes out from LA to make sure Elvis comes out the other end of a high risk double cross designed to round up the  coyotes at the top of the food chain and get the blackmail victims off the hook. Lucy crowns Elvis with the moniker "Studly DoRight" in this book, and we meet her son Ben, so a lot of the material for subsequent books gets its genesis here...good one to read if you want to dive into these--and they are well worth reading. As I said in earlier reviews, there is a lot of actual detecting that goes on in this series.

Borderline

The title of this Nevada Barr installment in the Anna Pigeon series speaks both to the book's location in Big Bend National Park on the border of Texas and Mexico, and to the state of mind of Anna Pigeon.  After she killed someone--in self-defense--in Isle Royale, he sense of man's inhumanity to man has taken on haunting dimensions and she feels she is perched on the edge of a bottomless void in her soul. Even the love of husband Paula doesn't seem to be enough right now. She is on administrative leave from the Park Service and, because being in nature is what usually grounds Anna, she and Paul have decided to go rafting down the Rio Grande to facilitate her recovery. But a flash flood, the harrowing rescue of a nearly drowned pregnant woman, and the political ambitions of a big city Texas mayor on the verge of losing her husband all combine in this fast moving story to challenge Anna in ways that will either push her over or bring her back from the brink of that abyss. As always, you get a wonderful sense of place; it's like getting to virtually visit the national parks by reading this series of books.  And of course Anna is a strong resourceful woman, maybe most of all when she's having a tough time. You can read Maureen Corrigan's more detailed plot summary and evaluations of Anna's character here.

The Map of Lost Memories

This book by Kim Fay has gotten quite a bit of very positive chatter and I was certainly curious to read it, since the protagonist was (a) a strong, independent woman,  (b) started out in Seattle, and (c) was about a part of the world I know nothing about (southeast Asia). Starting out in 1925, at the art and cultural museum on the campus of the University of Washington--renamed in this book as the Brooke (instead of the Burke)--Irene Blum has operated in the background for years helping to build the collections to levels of national and international recognition with special emphasis on southeast Asian work. Her special passion is Cambodia and the history of the Khmer empire, which rose to prominence and then essentially faded away to nothing. Irene's parents had spent time in southeast Asia, although she doesn't realize how much until late into the story, but she does find out upon her father's death that he possessed the diary of a missionary with information that may lead to critical records documenting the last great king of the Khmer empire. When Irene is passed over for the curator's position of the Brooke museum because she does not have a PhD, she decides to see out these mysterious copper scrolls and sets off on a dangerous adventure, financed by a lifelong friend of the family, who is also a serious collector of artifacts. Everyone who comes into this story has ulterior motives as Irene soon discovers, even those whom she thought she could trust most, and the relationships between the players turn out to be much more complex than she could ever have imagined. In spite of the author's ability to capture a sense of place with colorful description, her characters left me unengaged and I never really felt very deeply for any of them. I was fascinated with the idea of learning more about the Khmer empire, knowing virtually nothing about this culture, and yet over I was disappointed by this book. She does raise all the pertinent questions about the damage done to history and culture and memory by colonization of one people by another (or many others) but still this story felt flat to me. Clearly this is a minority opinion so I encourage you to form your own.