Enter Pale Death

British award-winning author Barbara Cleverly is best known for her series of mystery novels based on protagonist Joe Sandilands, a WWWI hero and Scotland Yards detective, and set in the time between the wars. When Lady Lavinia Truelove is trampled by an out of control horse, the verdict is death by misadventure, but Joe--tipped off by an anonymous letter-- suspects foul play. He is somewhat biased in that the widower, Sir James Truelove, is slated to be the next Home Secretary, i.e., Joe's new uber-boss, and is also the patron of the woman Joe wants to marry, Dorcas Joliffe. Because of the high political stakes, Joe investigates off the books and encounters a web of upstairs-downstairs intrigues and a long-ago death that may have repercussions for the present. In the process, Joe gains a new understanding of his relationship with Dorcas. A brief review from Publishers Weekly is here.

The Secret, Book, and Scone Society

I have read and posted about two other books by Ellery Adams, both in her "Book Retreat" mystery series. She is the prolific author (over 30 novels) of several cozy mystery series. This book is also set in a retreat like location, the small town of Miracle Springs, North Caroline, renowned for its natural hot springs spa. But other cures are available, including my favorite, bibliotherapy, hence my excitement at finding a mystery with this plot device. Nora Pennington, owner of Miracle Books, has a special talent--prescribing the perfect novel to ease a person's deepest pain and lighten their heaviest burden. The action kicks off when a visiting businessman, for whom Nora prescribes a book, is found dead on the train tracks the next day. Nora is convinced, the man was not suicidal, although he was deeply distressed about something, and she decides to investigate. She is joined in her efforts by 3 other women in town: Hester, the owner of the Gingerbread House bakery; a hair dresser, and a waitress. In order to be a member of this group, each much reveal their darkest secret. Not only do they track down the bad guys/gals, but they form a lasting friendship that will help heal their own broken lives. I will have to read the sequel to this book, The Whispered Word.

Seveneves

Neal Stephenson is one of my favorite science fiction authors, but his books are very long so you have to be committed. This book spans 5,000 years as the earth is first destroyed and then rebuilt. In this version, humans are not actually responsible for the destruction. Rather, something--perhaps a black hole--strikes the moon breaking it into several large chunks. They continue to orbit the earth as a cluster of giant rocks, causing minimal disturbance on earth. When two of the chunks strike each other, scientists realize that it is only a matter of time--approximately 2 years by best estimates--before the rate of collision and breakup will cause untold numbers of rocks to fall to earth, setting off fires that will annihilate all life. The earth will not be habitable for several thousand years thereafter. Frantic efforts are made to expand the space station and bring genetic materials for safekeeping and future regeneration. A few people on earth make other plans, such as creating huge caves under mountains in Alaska or taking people in submarines under the ocean. Politics, led in large part by a ruthlessly ambitious U.S. president, cause several of the space pods to break away from the main constellation of habitats, initiating a chain of events that leaves only 7 fertile women alive, hiding in a deep valley of the largest remaining moon fragment--these are the 7 Eves.
Fast forward to 5,000 years later as the descendants of these women have repopulated the space above the earth, using new technologies and yet somehow lacking many of the old ones. The society is tribal, based on the original Eve's genetics. Scouting parties periodically go down to the surface in an effort to reintroduce various animal species, and occasionally some of these scouts choose not to return to their homes in the sky. But what is really a game changer is when two other species surface on the planet, independent of those introduced by the space survivors. As always, a compelling job of examining human relationships, creating new worlds, and stretching our thinking about "what-if" scenarios. Highly recommended. Read his Seveneves website page to learn how the idea for this novel evolved. Great review from The NYTimes, with more from The Guardian, the LATimes, and The Boston Globe.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes

So apparently Alexander McCall Smith has decided to start a new genre of literature that he refers to as ScandiBlanc--a tongue in cheek response to the growing popularity of ScandiNoir. In this book, no one dies a grisly death. Someone does get stabbed in the back of the knee, and an imaginary boyfriend goes missing, and then there is the man who suffers from lycanthropy. All of these somewhat unusual and sensitive crimes have been referred to the Department of Sensitive Affairs within the Malmö (Sweden) Criminal Investigation Authority (CIA). The office is staffed by 3 detectives: lead detective Ulf Varg, and his associates Anna Bengtsdotter and Carl Holgersson, supported by clerical assistant, Erik Nykvist, who lives and hopes to soon retire in order to fish. I would say the entire tenor of the book is slow, thoughtful, and gentle. Nobody rushes around. Nothing is terribly urgent...except when Ulf needs to intervene to keep a defendant assigned community service at the local military base from being put onto the bomb disposal squad. Ulf is somewhat in love with Anna but refuses to allow himself to even contemplate involvement because she is married with two daughters. Neverthless, they work very well together because they have the same sensibilities and notice the same details in the world. They can finish one another's sentences. The detectives are occasionally aided in their investigations by the local policeman, Blomquist, who has tried and failed numerous times to get assigned to Sensitive Crimes. He feels undervalued and he talks a lot about a lot of different things, which makes him a rather annoying companion. When the police commissioner calls Ulf in to undertake a very discreet investigation, he assigns Blomquist to accompany Ulf, much to Ulf's chagrin. But all's well that ends well. The knifing culprit is caught and is remorseful, the truth about the imaginary boyfriend comes out, and Ulf tries to find help for the man who thinks he's a wolf. Not sure what to say about this book. It's not sufficiently thought provoking nor sufficiently engaging to get rave reviews from me. I have been a big fan of McCall Smith's "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" series, which now extended to 20 installments, and is similar in many ways to the tone and pace of this book. But the characters are more interesting as is the locale. In fact, there is very little setting in this current book and I miss that. He has two additional series with multiple volunes: 44 Scotland Street and the Isabel Dalhousie series--also a detective focus. Reviews are available from the usual sources: Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and The NYTimes.

The Ice Beneath Her

This is the first solo outing of Swedish author Camilla Grebe. Grebe has previously collaborated with her sister, Åsa Träff, on the crime series featuring psychologist Siri Bergman.
The book opens with the grisly murder of a young woman found in the house of the wealthy CEO of a popular clothing store chain, Jesper Orre. We hear the story from three perspectives, much of it in flashbacks. I am going to offer the plot summation from Publishers' Weekly since they do it more justice than I could. "Peter Lindgren, the detective investigating the crime, is afraid of commitment and still hasn't accepted the teenage son he never wanted; shop assistant Emma Bohman, whose now-missing wealthy lover appears to be the prime suspect in the murder, dwells on her painful dysfunctional childhood; and profiler Hanne Lagerlind-Schön, who's trapped in a suffocating marriage, faces early-onset Alzheimer's while helping the police with the case. The present-day crime resembles a 10-year-old cold case during which Peter and Hanne shared a short, tragic relationship. In alternating chapters, the three central figures regret what could have been, grieve for what's been lost, and lament what seemingly can never be..." One might begin to suspect what is really going on about halfway through, but would be unlikely to untangle the whole knot until the very end. The frequent use of flashbacks dropped into contemporary narrative is sometimes a little confusing, but not enough to lose you entirely. It's a very tricky plot and you would probably have to read it twice to truly understand at least a couple of the characters...I won't say why. If you like Scandinavian noir, this will certainly fill the bill. In fact, Kirkus claims, "A tour de force that lifts its author to the front rank among the increasingly crowded field of Nordic noir."

Next Year in Havana

As a descendant of Cuban exiles, with advanced degrees in international relations and global politics, author Chanel Cleeton is more than qualified to write this historical novel. The title is taken from the forever wish of Cuban exiles to return home. The story is told in alternating chapters during two time periods. In 1958 Havana, the rebels continue to fight and eventually defeat Batista, bringing Fidel Castro to power. Present day Cuba has been tentatively reconnected to the U.S. by President Obama's new policies. One narrator is  Elisa Perez, 3rd daughter of a wealthy sugar baron close to Batista's regime. She is 19 and has led a sheltered, high society life that has been little inconvenienced by--and is probably not even aware of--the rising power of a hungry and oppressed populace, even though her brother, the only Perez son, has been cast out by their father for his revolutionary views. One night, she and her 2 older sisters sneak out to a party where she meets a compelling older man, Pablo, who turns out to be an idealistic Castro supporter. Her family would be shamed by her relationship to him, but she is hopelessly in love and eventually becomes pregnant. Before she can inform him about the pregnancy, he disappears into the mountains to join the fight against Batista, and Elisa is later told that he has been killed. When the body of Elisa's brother, fraternal twin to Elisa's sister Beatriz, is dumped at the gates of the family mansion, they knows they must flee with only their lives and none of their possessions. They make a new home in Palm Beach and Elisa is quickly married to avoid the shame of an unwed pregnancy. Our second narrator is Marisol, the granddaughter of Elisa. Elisa had stepped in to raise Marisol and her siblings after their mother abandoned the family. Elisa filled Marisol's head and heart with romantic stories of the life she left behind in Cuba, and upon her death asks only that Marisol return her ashes to Havana. This provides the jumping off point for the present day story line as freelance lifestyle writer Marisol brings Elisa's ashes home to Cuba and also seeks to learn more about her family's history. When Ana, Elisa's best friend who remained in Cuba, gives Marisol a box of letter from Pablo that Elisa buried before she escaped, Marisol is even more determined to find out about the man her grandmother loved. But even though Castro is dead, the government will still not tolerate anyone stirring up trouble and Marisol creates problems as well by falling in love with Ana's grandson, who is hiding potentially deadly secrets of his own.  I really enjoyed reading this book because I had recently visited Havana for a couple of days and felt it filled in a lot of the backstory to what I saw. Although Kirkus took the author to task for trying to weave together politics with romance, I was fascinated to learn more about paladars and the significance of the dual Cuban currency. Nothing is black or white. Castro was viewed as a redeemer, but turned out to be a tyrant. The Communist government promised to take care of everyone, yet people starved under his regime. The U.S. presence in Cuba was malign as was their support of the corrupt and cruel Batista. Author Chanel Cleeton draws on her family's own exodus history to write this and follows up with a sequel, When We Left Cuba, focused on Elisa's sister, Beatriz, who was fraternal twin to the murdered Perez son. I will definitely read it! You can read an excerpt from Next Year at NPR.

Paradox

Prolific author Catherine Coulter has written over 80 novels ( a complete list here), from historical romances to contemporary FBI thrillers. This book is the 23rd in the FBI series. Married FBI agents Lacey Sherlock and Dillon Savich are awakened by a monitor failure alarm and find a man in their 5-year-old son's room. They effectively thwart the kidnap attempt but fail to catch the would-be kidnapper. Two days later, the police chief of tiny Willicott, MD, Ty Christie, is standing on her deck overlooking the foggy lake when she sees a man in a rowboat strike the other passenger of the boat in the head and dump the body overboard. The killer disappears into the fog, but when the body is recovered, it turns out to be a federal prosecutor. The FBI, specifically Special Agents Sherlock and Savich, are quickly on the case and discover another FBI agent tied up and left for dead in an old derelict house on the lake shore. Forensic evidence strongly suggests the perpetrators of the two crimes are the same person, Victor Nesser, recently escaped from a mental institution. The woman dumped from the rowboat was the prosecutor who got Nesser put in the mental hospital, which saved his life as he was on trial for murder. Apparently he wasn't grateful. Meanwhile, Chief Christie is dealing with the fact that the initial search for a body in the lake has turned up dozens of skeletons, and the only conclusion is that a serial killer has been operating in the area and using the lake for a dumping ground.  Well plotted with decent characterization and setting. No doubt much of the character development for Sherlock and Savich has occurred in preceding installments of this series.  Here's a brief review from Publishers Weekly.

The Girl in the Spider's Web: A Lisbeth Salander Novel

David Lagercrantz has, amid great controversy, taken over the series from deceased Stieg Larsson (see my earlier posts on Larsson's trilogy). There are several stories running on parallel tracks here. Millennium Magazine is again struggling financially and people, as usual, are out to undermine Mikael Blomkvist to keep him from revealing dirty secrets. A huge media conglomerate provided a monetary infusion a few years ago but now are threatening to pull the plug if Millenium does not change focus and put Mikael on foreign assignment, effectively getting him out of the country. In the meantime, our favorite hacker, Lisbeth, has just managed to breach the firewalls of the NSA and given them a nasty little shock; their main IT security guy, Ed Needham, is incensed and swears he is going to find and gut whoever hacked into his system. A reclusive computer genius, Frans Balder, comes home from working in Silicon Valley to take up the care of his autistic son, August, because he fears August was being abused by Balder's ex-wife's partner, an alcoholic actor. When Balder is murdered, the mute child is the only witness. Mikael has learned through his network of the NSA breach and is pretty sure Salander is behind it but he can't fathom why she would bring so much heat down on her head. He contacts her to get information about Balder. It turns out that Lisbeth was already involved and figured out which of Balder's assistants had sold his secret AI research to the highest bidder. Lisbeth rescues August from an assassination attempt and goes into hiding, discovering that he has a savant's ability to draw and can, in fact, identify his father's killer. Balder's killers were hired by none other than Lisbeth's evil and devastatingly beautiful fraternal twin sister, Camilla. HUH?! Who knew she had a sister...I don't remember any reference to this in earlier books. Camilla wants to destroy Lisbeth for helping to get her beloved father killed. Of course Lisbeth wins this round, but Camilla is still out there somewhere. The reviews vary in their praise or lack thereof: Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times. Still, if you liked the earlier books, you'll probably be perfectly happy with this one. There is a further sequel, also by Lagercrantz, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye.

Blown Away

This is the 6th installment of G. M. Ford's "Frank Corso" series of thrillers. Nominated for numerous writing awards, Ford has also written the "Leo Waterman" series and several stand alone mystery/ thrillers. Corso is, in this book, a well-known and controversial journalist and book author. He has just signed a new deal with a publisher who has told him, in no uncertain terms, to investigate a year-old bank robbery in a small backwater town in the middle of Pennsylvania in the dead of winter. Corso is furious and resistant at being told what to do, but becomes intrigued when first the local police chief warns him to leave town and then he is attacked in his hotel room with the apparent intention of kidnapping. When those efforts fail, he is run off the road and nearly drowned in the town's icy lake. Now he's on board and asks his publisher to send a private investigator who can work with him. But no sooner does Chris Andriatti arrive than they are summarily confronted by the FBI and whisked off to Los Angeles, where a series of robberies have been committed with the same MO as the cold case--a person is kidnapped, wired with a bomb, and sent into a bank to get the money. If the police interfere in any way, the bomb goes off and the kidnap victim and anyone around them die. The FBI and ATF are vying for control of the investigation but it is Corso who is asking the right questions and finding the real behind the operation. Once the bad guys in LA are wrapped up--or blown up--Frank and Andriatti head back to Pennsylvania because Frank wants to know who set him up to be kidnapped and killed. However, Andriatti is not who she claims to be and Frank is taken completely unawares. This is a fast paced thriller with a good plot and interesting characters. The Pennsylvania winter is as much a character as the people. What I really did not like, however, was that one of the major characters is never explained--where they came from or why and how they are involved. And the ending was so wrong. Here's a brief review from Publishers Weekly.

The Uncommon Reader

This novella by Alan Bennett is a pleasant little fantasy about the Queen (you know, the one in England) discovering the wonders of reading. Of course she already reads, but it's all work. One day the corgis dash off and in going after them, she comes upon a mobile library parked by the kitchen door of Buckingham Palace, making its weekly rounds. Out of politeness, she inquires and then feels she should check out a book. A kitchen boy who is checking out books on his break offers some guidance for her first selection; she slogs through Ivy Compton Burnett and then devours Nancy Mitford. After that she she becomes a regular visitor... until her Secretary arranges for the mobile library to be assigned. So she sends Norman to the town library to borrow her books.  The staff, and even the Duke, get rather annoyed that the Queen seems always to have her nose stuck in a book. She still performs all her required duties, but now feels them to be more of a burden. She learns to surreptitiously read while riding in her carriage and waving at people they pass simultaneously. And instead of asking the people she meets at these various events such innocuous questions as "How far have you traveled to come here?" she starts asking what they have read recently--which intimidates people and slows down the timetable. Norman initially gets moved from the kitchen to a position as page, stationed in the hall immediately outside the queen's chambers so that he is available for consultation at any time. That is, until the Secretary disappears him to East Anglia University. The unsuspecting Queen just starts using the libraries at her various homes, expanding her repertoire to the classics. At one point she decides she wants to meet and talk with authors, but that's a bust and she concludes that meeting authors in their books is preferable to meeting them in person. Her Secretary enlists the Queen's trusted advisors to try and dissuade her from reading. When eventually she encounters Norman again at a university event, she figures out what happened and sends her Secretary back to New Zealand. At some point, because she has always been a "do-er," she decides reading is not enough and that it's time to move on to writing. But she can't do that while she's the Queen. It's a charming little fantasy that highlights many of the benefits and pitfalls of falling in love with reading. There is a lovely and glowing review of the book by the NYTimes, with more from The Guardian, Kirkus, and The Telegraph.

If Books Could Kill

This is the 2nd installment in Kate Carlisle's "Biblophile Mysteries;" see also my post on the first one, Homicide in Hard Cover,  in which we meet protagonist and rare book restorer, Brooklyn Wainwright. Brooklyn is excited to be attending the Edinburgh Book Fair and presenting a couple of seminars on recognizing fraudulent books and how to restore books. While at a local pub, one of her ex-boyfriends, Kyle McVee, shows up with a tantalizing tale about uncovering a manuscript that could change the world's view of Robert Burns and throw the orderly succession of the British monarchy into chaos. He wants Brooklyn to authenticate the manuscript for him and she agrees to at least have a look, storing it safely in her hotel's safe.  When she goes out with a friend/colleague, Helen, for a walking tour of the historic city, their first stop is an old basement tenement with a dead body in it--Kyle's!  Helen completely breaks down and Brooklyn learns she was secretly engaged to Kyle; Helen and Brooklyn are both shocked when a woman claiming to be Kyle's wife turns up at the funeral. The police at first suspect Brooklyn, but there are plenty of suspects and she is determined to clear her name, find the real killer and hopefully figure out the authenticity of the manuscript. Of course the handsome love interest, Derek, is still in the picture and Brooklyn's parents show up in the company of Brooklyn's best friend Robin from home, who is going to take them to some of the spiritual sites of Scotland. And never to be left out is Brooklyn's nemesis, Minka LaBoeuf, who is constantly trying to throw Brooklyn under the bus. All in all an entertaining read set in one of my favorite cities.

Murder Between the Covers

Of course I could not resist picking up a used copy of this title, a mystery with bookstore employee Helen Hawthorne as the protagonist. This is actually the 2nd installment (of 15 books to date) in the "Dead End Job" mystery series by prolific mystery writer Elaine Viets. Helen works a dead-end job in each book, many of which Viets claims to have worked in herself. Viets has written several other mystery series, which she says allows her to appeal to a wide variety of reader preferences. This series is her "funny and traditional" one.
In this book, Helen is working as a cashier at the Page Turners bookstore in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, getting paid off the books and keeping her head down to avoid an abusive ex-husband and the long arm of the law. We don't find out what she's done until midway through the book. She is living in a funky, run-down old apartment, infested with termites and run by a very colorful landlady. She has rather eccentric neighbors, but her philosophy is live and let live. No one is surprised when her misogynistic boss, book store owner Page Turner III, gets murdered. He had a lot of enemies--ex-wife, ex-employees, etc., but Helen is upset when her neighbor Peggy is accused of the murder. She decides to try and find out who did it to keep her friend out of jail.