Let Me Lie

Author Clare Mackintosh is new to me, although she has published two previous suspense novels (I Let You Go and I See You), which I will definitely check into. This one had me going from the beginning and totally dropped me on my head at the end. The story is told alternately from the viewpoint of Anna Johnson, a new mother, Murray Mackenzie, a retired detective now working as a civilian in-take person at the local precinct, and a third unnamed person, who I assumed was Anna's not-really-dead father. Anna was stunned by her father's apparent suicide, supposedly witnessed and reported by a woman who saw him load his backpack with rocks and jump from a cliff into the sea. Anna's distraught mother, Caroline, followed him in the exact same manner within months. The trauma compelled her to seek help from a therapist, Mark Hemmings, who eventually became her lover (after appropriately referring her to another therapist) and then the father of her baby. Though Anna has not yet accepted his marriage proposal, they live together in Anna's childhood home. Anna is shocked into action when a message is dropped through the mail slot suggesting the suicides were, in fact, murders; she takes her fears to the local police and Murray decides to do a little checking on his own before he refers this to the active detectives. When Anna's supposedly dead mother resurfaces, with a new name and altered appearance, she tells Anna her father had faked the suicide to escape debt and forced her to go along. She further convinces Anna that her father had been an abusive alcoholic and that is why she, the mom, faked her own suicide and went into hiding. Anna is angry and overwhelmed that her parents have done this to her, but agrees to let her mom stay with her small family, pretending she is a long-lost cousin of her mom's. More threatening messages are delivered to the house and Anna believes that her father is threatening her family. Well developed secondary characters are Mackenzie's bipolar wife, Sarah, Anna's lifelong friend, Laura, and Anna's paternal uncle, Billy.
Reviews from Publishers Weekly and The Guardian.

The Word is Murder

Another twisty plot and story within a story from Anthony Horowitz, creator of Foyle's War. As in the Magpie Murders, a literary figure--this time supposedly the author himself--becomes embroiled in a real-life murder mystery. Horowitz drops in so many asides to his own works (past, present and proposed) that it's a big self-promotion piece, just in case you didn't know about his accomplishments. Also he names lots of real-life people and events, leaving the reader at times wondering if this is indeed a "true crime" piece rather than a work of fiction.
Horowitz, the character in the book, used a consultant named Daniel Hawthorne on one of the TV shows he created; Hawthorne is a former investigator on the Met's murder squad--brilliant but not very personable. Hawthorne is now brought in by the Met as a special consultant when the case is a particularly difficult one. He has a Holmesian ability to notice the smallest details and interpret them accurately to help him solve crimes, or just to annoy those around him.
When a wealthy older woman, Diana Cowper, is strangled in her own home on the very afternoon of the day she went in to make funeral arrangements for herself, Horowitz decides he wants his prowess as a detective documented and he comes to Horowitz to write a book about the case. Howowitz reluctantly agrees, even though the case is far from being solved. We follow along in Hawthorne and Horwitz's footsteps as they interview those who knew the dead woman, including the funeral home staff, her movie star son and his live-in partner, the parents of twin boys who were struck by a car driven by Diana Cowper 10 years ago (one died, one needs a full-time caretaker), the judge who let Diana Cowper off with no jail sentence, and, of course, the cleaning lady. Horowitz chafes that he has to pry information out of Hawthorne, either about himself as a person, or about his thoughts on the case--how can Horowitz write a book when he can't control the material or the outcome. When Horowitz finally figures out who the killer is, it almost gets him killed. Tongue in cheek style of writing prevents the book from ever feeling very heavy, and the ending was certainly a surprise. An engaging and entertaining read. More details to be found in reviews from Kirkus, the Star Tribune, the Washington Times, and Publishers Weekly.
Scott Simon interviews Horowitz about the book on NPR.

Norwegian by Night

This book by Derek B. Miller precedes the one I previously read, American by Day, which I so enjoyed that I sought out this one. There is more info about the author in the previous post.
Rhea has recently married her Norwegian husband Lars, and invited her 82- year old widowed grandfather, Sheldon Horowitz, to come live with them in Oslo.  Rhea was raised by Sheldon and his wife and does not want Sheldon to live alone in Manhattan and she also fears he is getting senile. Sheldon always maintained to his family that he was a clerk in the Marines, but was in fact a decorated sniper in the Korean War. One day while Rhea and Lars are out, Sheldon can't help but hear a violent fight upstairs and when the Serbian immigrant woman and her young son come running down the stairs to escape her abuser, Sheldon opens the door and lets them come in. The child's father, Enver, we eventually learn, was a Kosavar war criminal who had raped her during the war and has now come looking for his child in Oslo. Enver quickly figures out where the pair are hiding, breaks down the door of Lars' and Rhea's apartment and strangles the woman. Sheldon and the boy manage to hide until Enver hears police sirens approaching. Sheldon fears Enver will come back for the boy and so they escape out a basement door and go on the run.
Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård of the Oslo police and her second in commend, Petter, are put in charge of the murder and of finding Sheldon and the young boy before Enver does. Sigrid is at first frustrated that an old man and a boy can disappear so effectively, but eventually she comes to have real admiration for Sheldon's abilities because, although Sheldon is old, he has a lot of skills learned as a Marine, and the two manage to elude both police and the killers for several days. Sheldon is haunted not just by memories of his time in the Marines, but also by the belief that it is his fault that his son signed up for a 2nd tour in Vietnam, where he was killed. He is determined to save this boy at any cost.
Once again I was intrigued by the author's observations on the cultures of both Norway and America. As Kirkus notes in their review, this book is " an unusual hybrid: part memory novel, part police procedural, part sociopolitical tract and part existential meditation." There is a thoughtful review of the book by the Washington Independent, and a brief one in The New York Times.

Twenty-One Days

I've only read one other book by Anne Perry, although she has written a lot of mysteries based in England, which I tend to like. I read one of her fluffy holiday books (The Christmas Return), which had links to the characters of her primary series featuring Charlotte and Thomas  Pitt (over 30 novels). This is the first of an intended series featuring their son, Daniel, who is working as a junior barrister in a prestigious law firm. Daniel gets assigned by the head of the firm to assist with a case where their client, Russell Graves, is charged with the murder of his wife, Ebony. Although there is certainly some doubt about the motive Graves might have had to murder his wife, he is an arrogant man and the jury returns a verdict of guilty. Daniel and the lead attorney, Kitteridge, have 21 days to find compelling evidence that would cause the court to reconsider the verdict--an appeal. As Daniel presses Graves for other reasons his wife might have been murdered, it emerges that Graves is a muck-racking biographer and may have threatened powerful people who would frame him for the murder in order to stop publication of an upcoming book. When Daniel finds the manuscript, it turns out that these people could very well include his father, who is currently the head of the Met's Special Office. The manuscript not only insinuates dirty dealings on the part of Thomas Pit but also of the previous holder of the office and his wife, both long-time friends of the Pitt family. Daniel is torn, but feels he must pursue the leads to save Graves from the gallows if he is innocent of the murder. What he finds to exonerate Graves is based on the early forensic use of x-rays (this is set in 1910) and on interviews with Graves' children and household staff. It's a surprising twist in the story and I was thoroughly engaged in learning how it would all turn out. Worth the read if you like historical mysteries. Additional reviews available from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.

Two by Ruth Ware

Ruth Ware's The Woman in Cabin 10 has been getting lots of press and I just finished another mystery by her, The Lying Game. Both offer pretty intricate plotting, detailed character development and competent setting descriptions. Kirkus describes The Woman in Cabin 10 as "a classic 'paranoid woman' story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery." Narrator Lo Blacklock scores a career-building chance to cover the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise ship, the Aurora. Days before departure, however, she is traumatized by a break-in at her apartment in the middle of the night. While aboard the luxury yacht Aurora, she hears a loud splash in the middle of the night from the vicinity of the adjacent cabin's veranda. When she tries to report her concerns about the disappearance of the cabin's occupant, from whom she had borrowed mascara the previous night, she is told that no one has occupied that cabin during the voyage. As Kirkus notes further, "The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts." I disagree with their assessment that the ending was unsatisfying, but do agree that the excerpts from newspaper stories scattered throughout the text are a bit distracting, although they are intended to build tension. Additional review from USA Today (with several excerpts from the book).

The Independent provides a great synopsis of The Lying Game: "the premise of which is simple but highly effective: four old schoolfriends bound together by a terrible secret.
Fifteen years ago, Isa Wilde arrived at Salten House, a boarding school on the south coast [of England]. She and three other girls, Fatima, Kate and Thea, form an inseparable clique impervious to the world around them. They spend their weekends at Kate’s home, the Old Mill, a ramshackle building overlooking the nearby estuary, under the libertarian eye of her father Ambrose (the school’s art teacher), and in the company of Kate’s sort-of half-brother Luc.
Most of the girls’ time, however, is spent playing the Lying Game, competing with each other to get away with increasingly outrageous untruths: to “outwit everyone else – ‘us’ against ‘them’”. Then one day something terrible happens, and henceforth they’re “lying not for fun, but to survive.”
Nearly two decades later, they are reunited by an urgent text message from Kate, "I need you." Over the next few weeks, it becomes apparent that the premise for their ultimate, elaborate lie was itself a lie. And now, they are not the only ones who know where the body is buried. Kirkus gives a laudatory review, claiming you won't want to do anything else until you finish the book.

Auntie Poldi and the Sicilian Lions

First of a proposed series by Mario Giordano, son of Italian immigrants and raised in Munich; this is the first of his novels to be translated into English--by John Brownjohn from German. The story features Auntie Poldi (Isolde Oberreiter) but is told in the voice of her nephew, a struggling writer. Poldi's father, a German detective inspector in Munich, has left her with a craving for "the hunt." When she retires to Sicily at age 60, to be near her deceased husband's sisters, she expects a quiet life of wine, nosy relatives, and good food. Instead she finds a mystery when her handsome young handyman, Valentino, is murdered. She cannot seem to sit still and wait for the police investigation, headed by the handsome Commisario Vito Montana, to find the culprit, so she does her own sleuthing and nearly gets killed in the process. This is a light and entertaining book, rather like an Italian cosy. You do get a loving description of Sicily along with several colorful characters. Kirkus offers a highly favorable review as does Publishers Weekly.

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton: A Novel

This is Jane Smiley's ninth book (1998); the premise and the character sounded intriguing so my book group selected this for our June read. Smiley has won numerous literary awards including a Pulitzer and The National Book Critics Circle Award (for A Thousand Acres) and this book won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. This is set in the mid-west in the years running up to the Civil War (1855) when tensions between free and slave holding states were ramping up.
I think the New York Times does an admirable job of setting up the book in their review:
"At 20, Lidie is tall, plain, bookish and argumentative, by her own reckoning ''what you might call an odd lot, not very salable and ready to be marked down.'' Her half sisters in Quincy, Ill., view her as a problem to be solved, and so one of them furthers the fateful match between Lidie and Thomas Newton, who is on his way to the Kansas Territory, known as K.T., with a dozen Sharps rifles and the support of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company, which hopes to see Kansas enter the Union as a Free State."
Book One (262 pages) is all about the very rough and tumble life that Lidie and Thomas embark upon trying to homestead in a place where the people from Missouri were determined to route out those "damned black abolitionists" at any cost in order to make the K.T. a slave state. I won't spoil it by telling you what happens, but suffice to say that. in Book Two. Lidie leaves the K.T. and, disguising herself as a young man, has quite a number of adventures and tries to help a slave escape before eventually ending up back in Quincy, IL. Lidie had been immersed in her husband's abolitionist views when they married and moved to Lawrence to be with other members of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company; prior to that she had been apolitical, knowing only what a distant half-sister who supported abolition had told her. Lidie doesn't really know what she believes. The LA Times writes that Lidie's conflicts are a means to explore such moral questions as "How far should one go in the name of beliefs? How tolerant should one be of others' values, particularly values you find abhorrent? Is territoriality justifiable? Is theft in the name of a cause justifiable? Is it OK to steal from people who have been good to you, even if you don't believe that what you're taking--a slave--can rightly be considered property at all? Is revenge justified? Are there circumstances in which killing is justifiable?"
What I liked about this book was what I often enjoy about historical novels. I learned about a period of time and a place with which I was unfamiliar. I was actually born in Kansas but moved to Oklahoma before I started school so never learned much about it's history. The day to day struggle of living in such a harsh environment--especially for those coming from the civilized East who were lured with promises of well developed towns, free fertile farmland, and mild winters--is rendered in detail. Although we have all read various accounts of the Civil War and heard about John Brown, the horrendous violence that occurred in newly opening territories between "free-staters" and those who wanted to preserve the right to own slaves was unfamiliar to me. But to me, the first half of the book was a slog. The pace picked up in the 2nd half of the book, although the NYT found that part of the novel incredible (as in, hard to believe). Overall, I found Lidie particularly frustrating because she never clearly comes to hold positions and opinions of her own. The ending was believable but highly unsatisfactory.  More favorable reviews are available from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly.

The Last Equation of Isaac Severy: A Novel in Clues

Nova Jacobs inaugural novel does indeed lead the protagonist and the reader on a merry chase trying to figure out where the elusive equation is. Nobody is quite who they seem to be, or at the very least, they are keeping significant secrets from those closest to them. The Severy family is initially brought together in this story when Isaac Severy, a brilliant mathematician and world expert in chaos theory, apparently kills himself. Although we know from the Prologue that this isn't true, the rest of the family is devastated because no one had any sense that he was despondent or at risk of suicide. Our protagonist, Hazel Severy, the owner of a financially failing bookstore in downtown Seattle, has come to Los Angeles where the rest of the Severy family --or at least those she knows about--have always lived. Hazel and her brother, Gregory, an LAPD detective, were actually the abused foster children of Isaac Severy's son, Tom. When Tom was arrested for the death of his wife, Isaac officially adopted the two children and they lived with him and his wife Lily as their grandchildren. All of the Severy children are brilliant but not equally successful. Tom, the abusive foster parent, succumbed to drug addiction and is ostensibly in prison for life; Philip, like his father, is a noted mathematician at Cal Tech but feels he has stagnated in recent years; and their sister, Paige, has been working forever on a book that will never be finished. They all suffer from migraines, although Tom is more severely affected than the others. As the story proceeds we learn about the horrendous abuse visited on Hazel and especially on Gregory.
A few days after Isaac's death, Hazel receives a letter telling her that she is to destroy all of his work in room 137, and to turn over his final equation to only one person, a mathematician named Respanti who likes herringbone. Isaac also tells Hazel that his death was not a suicide and that she must leave his house no later than Oct .31, for there will be two more deaths. She must tell no one of the contents of his letter. Finally, Isaac's letter to Hazel says that the equation has been left with the person that people will least suspect; Hazel assumes this means her since she is not a mathematician. The long and short of this intricate plot is that Isaac has created a formula that can predict death--not accidental death, but homicides and suicides. When Hazel eventually finds room 137, she discovers a map of greater Los Angeles marked with red dots bearing the exact dates and times of deaths that will occur. Some of these are now past, but some lie in the future, creating additional pressure to solve this puzzle. One of Hazel's cousins, Philip's married daughter Sybil, dies from a fall down steep canyon stairs within a few days of Isaac. A mysterious person named P. Booth Lyon is stalking both Hazel and Philip, trying to find Isaac's legacy in order to profit from it. When Hazel turns to her cousin Alex, Paige's estranged son, to help solve the mystery, he betrays her. Raspanti arrives from Italy, tracks down Hazel and learns of the theft of Isaac's computer and the map; he berates Hazel for allowing Isaac's work to fall into the wrong hands. Can Hazel repair the damage no only from this error in judgment but also from the decisions she has made in other parts of her life? I've really only scratched the surface of the plot and characters. Highly recommended. Reviews from The Washington Post, Kirkus, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly.

American by Day

Can't remember where I heard about this book but I am glad I read it. This is a sequel to Derek B. Miller's Norwegian by Night, a Dagger Award winner eventually published in a dozen languages, featuring the same protagonist, Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård of the Oslo police. Miller is American, but married to a Norwegian woman and they live in Oslo. He has a rather impressive academic and real world resume including a PhD in international relations from the University of Geneva.
Sigrid has recently been involved in shooting a man to death and, although the shooting was ruled as justified, it has left her questioning herself. She takes leave to visit her father and finds out from him that her brother, Marcus, who has lived in the United States for 20 years, has gone missing. Moreover, Sigrid's father, has already bought her a plane ticket to go to the U. S. to find him.  So she does. But in some ways that is the least of the story, for this is a look at America from a European point of view, in particular our culture around guns and individualism and race. The characters are fascinating,  provocative, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. It seems like an odd combination of philosophy, humor, mystery, and literary fiction...but it works.
It's 2008 in the run-up to the Obama-McCain presidential election. Set in sultry late summer upstate New York, which as Sigrid dryly observes is still south of Venice, Sigrid has her suitcase stolen within minutes of arriving at her brother's empty house, which is now occupied by a prostitute who claims Marcus gave her the keys when he left. Sigrid teams up with local sheriff Irv Wylie, and his deputies, especially Melinda, who comes to look at Sigrid as a sort of mentor. Wylie has a master's degree in divinity so takes a somewhat different perspective on law enforcement and the world than your run-of-the-mill small-town sheriff. Marcus' disappearance coincides with the death of the woman he was dating, Lydia, an African American professor at the same small university where Marcus was working as an adjunct. Marcus made the 9-1-1 call and was there when Lydia fell to her death from the 6th floor of an office building still under construction, so he is suspect #1.  Wylie is having to tread very carefully because the Black community is up in arms about the police shooting of a 12-year-old Black boy--Lydia's nephew-- and the powers that be want this case solved quickly and seem less concerned about whether they get the right culprit. Needless to say, Sigrid feels she needs to reach Marcus before the police do if he is to have any chance of staying alive.
Not only was I impressed with the craft, the perspective, and the characters, but I also admire how Miller seemed able to cross the gender gap and authentically present a woman's point of view. I will definitely go back and read Norwegian by Night and maybe The Girl in Green as well. Reviews for this book from The Guardian, the New York Journal of Books, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly.

Weeping Waters: Book I of the Inspector Beeslaar Series

This crime fiction/ mystery by Karin Brynard was originally published in 2009 (in Afrikaans) but only translated recently (by Maya Fowler & Isobel Dixon) for this English edition of 2018. Really a knockout book that kept me engaged from beginning to end. I love learning about other cultures and the ins and outs of race relations in post-Apartheid South Africa were all new to me. There were times when I struggled to work through some of the unfamiliar vocabulary, but it never detracted from understanding nor slowed the plot. Brynard was previously a political and investigative journalist, and she knows how to string her words together in this compelling story.
Our main characters are, of course, Inspector Albertus Markus Beeslaar, who, we gradually learn, has left Johannesburg for a supposedly quieter life in a small town on the edge of the Kalahari Desert--it's really hot there! His reasons for leaving are partially revealed through phone conversations with a former lover, who just happened to be the wife of his ex-partner at the police department. What is clear from the beginning is that his new supervisor, in the slightly larger town of Upington, feels Beeslaar has been forced upon him--and there is racially based animosity towards this white detective as well. Beeslaar, for his part, is dealing with two very inexperienced local juniors (both black), Pyl and Ghaap, in response to a series of stock thefts from local farmers, which have recently escalated with the murders of the farmers or their hired help.
The catalyzing event of the book, however, is the brutal murder of an up-and-coming woman artist and farm owner, Frederika Swarts, and her adopted daughter. Estranged sister, Sara Swarts, arrives with a load of guilt for having abandoned her sister to care for their dying father on the family farm. Sara eventually comes to believe that Freddie's death is not, as has been characterized in the press, another in a years' long string of "farm murders," but something unique and personal to her sister. I won't try to explain the significance of "farm murders," a phenomenon that was an eye-opener for me, or to introduce the several likely suspects in the murders. I would agree with one reviewer that, if you like Stieg Larsson, you will probably like this. It is dark in nature, but also rich in character and history and culture. I can't wait for the next translation in the series to come out--hopefully later this year. A bit more detail in this review from Publishers Weekly.