New Mysteries for 2011

Before the year closes out, I wanted to share some short thoughts on four recent mystery novels.

The Drop by Michael Connelly is part of the Harry Bosch series.  This is a must read for mystery fans.  Bosch is an LAPD detective, with three years left until retirement.  He takes up a twenty year old murder case in which a DNA match was just found to a convicted rapist.  The problem is that when the murder was committed the killer was only eight years old.  Meanwhile, Bosch is called on to investigate the suspicious death of the son of a powerful city councilman, who, not coincidentally, is a nemesis of Bosch.  In this fast-paced, page turner, Bosch hunts down two mysteries, is enmeshed in the dark depths of political conspiracy and even finds time for a romantic relationship.  I simply could not put this book down. The book was one of Connelly's better ones and was one of my favorites of the year.  Highly recommended.


A Drop of the Hard Stuff is Lawrence Block's most recent mystery involving his detective Matthew Scudder.  Scudder tells this tale from his younger years after he was forced out of the NYPD.  Like so many fictional detectives, Scudder faces his problems of alcoholism.    Scudder enrolls in Alcoholics Anonymous.  As he approaches is one year anniversary of staying on the wagon, Scudder reconnects with a childhood friend who followed a route into a life of crime.  Based on the AA 12-step program, the friend has tried to "make amends" for the harms he caused to others.  Along the way, he is murdered.  Without the resources of the police department, Scudder hunts down a killer.  This was a very well crafted mystery set in a grittier New York City than we live in today.  The use of AA as a backdrop worked very well.  This is a worthwhile read.

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows: A Flavia de Luce Novel is the fourth Flavia de Luce mystery by Alan Bradley.  As Christmas arrives at Buckshaw, the de Luce family estate, the cash strapped Colonial (Flavia's father) has rented out the mansion to a movie company to generate cash.  In the middle of a charity performance for the local church by the movie stars, a blizzard hits, and the characters are trapped in the mansion.  Suddenly, there is a murder.  Classic British cozy murder set up.  Flavia sets out to solve the murder.  While I have enjoyed this series immensely and love Flavia, this one came up short.  After the murder, the plot stalled out.  The characters were not particularly well developed.  I am afraid that Bradley is responding to the success of his series by pushing out product.  Also, while I love the setting, there have been a lot of murders in the house in a very short period of time.  Bradley needs to move his detective out of the mansion to other locations if this series is going to hold together.  Pass on this mystery but read any of the previous ones for a unique and wonderful character and mystery.  Sorry, Flavia.

The Leopard by Jo Nesbo is the second Nesbo mystery I read and reviewed this year (Snowman was the first; review here).  While intricate, well written and well plotted, I found this novel less compelling than Snowman, even more gruesome (seemingly for shock value only, and a bit too long.  Two women are brutally murdered by an apple like device which is jammed in their mouths and shoots out 24 knives.  Gruesome.  From there, Nesbo's broken detective, Harry Hole, is running across the globe to solve a murder.  The ending was overly dramatic (a long confession explaining everything).  Everyone is looking to be the next Stieg Larsson.  This novel even employs a mildly crazed hacker.  This isn't it.  I'd give Nesbo another chance but I would recommend passing on this one.

Happy reading!

Now You See Me by S.J. Bolton

Now You See Me by S.J. Bolton is a fantastic police procedural mystery.  I could not put it down and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The novel opens in present day London when a young detective, Lacey Flint, finds a woman, who has just been stabbed, leaning on her car in a parking lot.  Within hours, a Jack the Ripper styled letter appears and names Lacey.  The murderer is not merely rehashing the Ripper's killings; the murderer picks and chooses key elements of Ripper's rampages to "update" Ripper's murderous spree.  Lacey, who has a keen interest in Jack the Ripper and serial murderers, becomes central to the investigation.  She must work with the team, which is made more difficult because she is forced to work with a male colleague in the special operations branch of the force who is both attracted to and mistrustful of her.  As bodies and Ripper parallels pile up, the pressure on the police to solve the mystery becomes extreme.

Bolton beautifully develops her characters, making them multidimensional.  The writing is crisp and thoughtful.  The plot is interesting and carefully calibrated.  The modern ties to the history of Jack the Ripper turned a very good book into a great one.

This was the first book by Bolton that I have read.  If you like mysteries and can tolerate the violence (if you are fine with Stieg Larsson, you'll be fine with this), you'll love this one.

The Map of Time by Felix Palma

As a kid, I loved time travel. One of my favorite shows was Voyagers! (see clip below), and, of course, there was blockbuster movie, Back to the Future.  Add to time travel Victorian London, Jack the Ripper, H.G. Wells, a few other literary luminaries and a good old fashion murder mystery and you have Felix Palma's The Map of Time.  Originally written in Spanish, this is a fun, well-plotted mystery with many twists and turns.

The book opens with Andrew Harrington preparing to commit suicide because his lover was the latest victim of Jack the Ripper.  Separately, a new business, Murray's Time Travel, has recently opened and provides  customers with the opportunity (for a large fee) to travel to the year 2000 to witness man's climatic battle against the automatons.   In a third plot line, H.G. Wells (a central character in the novel) is England's most famous author, having recently published The Time Machine.  In another strand of the story, there is also Claire Haggerty, a young, independent woman constricted by the norms of Victorian society.  There are several other plot lines to the story and supporting characters (the Elephant Man, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, Henry James, to name a few).  To avoid any spoilers, I'll won't reveal any more.  I enjoyed this book.

The book is 600+ pages.  It reads very quickly.  I could not put it down.  The prose is good although wordy at times; I assume Palma is mimicking the Victorian writing style.  Palma has fun with the issues presented by time travel (alternative worlds, altering the course of history, meeting a former iteration of yourself, creating time travel loops etc.).  Palma laces the novel with several surprises.  When I thought I had figured out where Palma was taking me, he surprised me again.


The Map of Time is a fun and exciting book.  If you are like me and find time travel and Victorian London interesting, you'll enjoy this book.

When I looked back at the Voyagers!, I found the closing tag line to each episode to be particularly apt to this blog (especially with the demise of the large bookstores):

"Take a Voyage down to your public library, it's all in books!"

Voyagers! clip

Back to the Future clip:

Conflict of Interest by Adam Mitzner

A Conflict of Interest is a first novel by Adam Mitzner.  It is a well-written legal thriller.  Reviewers have compared Mitzner to Scott Turow and John Grisham.  My friends at the Mysterious Bookshop got behind this one, and as is often the case, they got this one right.

The novel's protagonist, Alex Miller, works in a prestigious criminal defense firm.  Shortly after Alex's father passes away, a close friend of his father asks Alex to defend him in a securities fraud criminal case.  Alex accepts the representation.  In the course of that representation, Alex learns about his father, his client and himself through personal and professional tests.  From there, the action takes off.

This well-paced novel has plenty of twists and turns and well developed  characters.  The dialogue is real, the plot is believable and even the lawyering is credible.   (Mitzner is an attorney, which comes across.)  Even though this is a legal thriller (and the legal procedures appear generally right), Mitzner does not bog down the plot with too much lawyering.  This first novel is page-turner and a perfect summer read.

A video of the author discussing the book:

Heresy by S.J. Parris

Heresy, An Historical Thriller, by S.J. Parris, is the first novel in a new mystery series set in 1583 in Oxford, England.  At the center of the novel is Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk excommunicated by the Roman Catholic church.  Bruno, a street smart philosopher, finds his way to England and seeks refuge there to spread his more tolerant religious thinking.  Bruno is invited to speak at Oxford.  En route, he is recruited as a spy by Protestant Queen Elizabeth's secretary of state to report on underground Catholic activities in Oxford.  As an excommunicated Catholic, the Queen can trust him; but as a Catholic, he has access to people and meetings that Protestants will never manage.  At Oxford, several people die and Bruno, the outsider, is thrust into the role of detective. Parris loosely bases her protagonist on the real monk and philosopher, Giordano Bruno. 

The historical novelist faces two challenges: creating a believable setting and telling a good story in that setting.  Parris succeeded at creating a realistic and detailed back drop with characters that have real flaws.  Although the story shows terrific promise and generates intrigue and tension, it ends a too melodramatically and fizzes out by the end.

Recommendation:  If you want the very best in historical thrillers, I'd first recommend CJ Sansom and David Liss.  Parris is an up-and-comer with good potential.  Her newest novel, Prophecy, is due out in the U.S. in early May.


Other reviews: From the TBR Pile and S Krishna's Books.  Both are lukewarm.  
 

Author interview:

A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel by Alan Bradley

A Red Herring Without Mustard, by Alan Bradley, is the third installment of Bradley's award winning Flavia de Luce series.   In 2007, Bradley won the Debut Dagger Award for the first novel in the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and thereafter won more than a dozen awards for the book.  The second installment was The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag.

The series is set in 1950 in an ancient manor house on the English countryside.  The stories are told by an eleven year old narrator, Flavia de Luce, a precocious, chatty child, who is an accomplished chemist and a fantastic story teller.  Flavia lives with her emotionally vacant father, her two teenage sisters (Feely and Daffy), the cook, Mrs. Mullet, Dogger, a war veteran/gardener/handyman, and Gladys, her bicycle.  Flavia also lives with the memory of her ancestors, particularly her deceased mother.  The cast is further supported by the local librarian, the inspector, the vicar and others.

In A Red Herring Without Mustard, a gypsy fortune-teller is savagely attacked, a local thief is murdered, a baby is missing and there is a fishy smell in the air.  Flavia sets out to solve it all, matching her skills against the local constabulary.

What makes this series enjoyable is Flavia.  Bradley, a 70 year old Sherlock Holmes scholar (in his book Ms. Holmes of Baker Street, he argued that Sherlock Holmes was really a woman), creates a fun and intelligent character. She is a mix of the sharp brilliance of Sherlock Holmes, the tenacity of Colombo and the cuteness of Punky Brewster.

Some have categorized this series as one for young adults.  The violence aside, Harry Potter was supposed to be for young adults too and millions of adults read and enjoyed him.

Recommendation: The Flavia series is fun and entertaining and will be enjoyed by Agatha Christie lovers. Of the three books, Sweetness is the best. It is hard to beat a great first encounter with such a memorable character.


The book trailer for Sweetness:

An interview with Bradley:

Box 21 by Roslund and Hellstrom

For those that could not get enough of Stieg Larsson's trilogy (see my note below), Roslund and Hellstrom are billed as the next Swedish phenomenon.  Their newest book, 3 Seconds, is being heavily promoted as the next of kin to Larsson.  The critics, readers and collectors have received the book well.  It is atop my nightstand stack.

Larsson is the best known of the Scandinavian crime novelists but there are other prominent ones, such as Henning Mankell, the creator of Wallander. Wallander is featured in several novels and is also the name of a PBS Mystery series, which is a must for any mystery fan.  The Scandinavian genre is characterized by sex crimes, human trafficking, violence against women, corruption and social critiques. The genre leaders write fast paced and exciting thrillers.

I started with their first novel, Box 21, to meet the characters and see what the series is about.  Roslund and Hellstrom fit the genre well and the acclaim for their work is fitting. What makes this particular novel work is the authors' backgrounds: Roslund is a journalist and Hellstrom is an ex-criminal.


Box 21 is the story of a veteran detective, Ewert Grens, who is haunted by an accident that occurred 25 years ago that left his wife an invalid.  When Grens arrives at a crime scene, he finds a teenage prostitute (sex slave) nearly beaten to death and another woman who is mentally shattered.  The girls were lured to Sweden and forced into the work as under false pretense and sold as sex slaves.  The novel moves rapidly in action packed bursts between the investigation related to the teenage girls, the reappearance of the criminal responsible for injuring Grens' wife and a new crime scene.

For US readers, the references to Swedish pop culture likely will be missed or not understood.  There are few of them and they will not detract from the story.

Recommendation: Anyone who enjoyed Stieg Larsson will enjoy the works these authors are turning out.  They are exciting, intelligent reads.  The energy they generate will keep you flipping pages.

The Serialist by David Gordon

The Serialist is a fun and witty first novel by David Gordon.  The book has been nominated for an Edgar Award for best first novel of the year.  It is a great read.

Harry Bloch is a struggling author of mysteries, vampire stories and pornographic tales, all under pen names.  A serial killer on death row approached Harry to ghost write the killer's memoirs.  After several meetings, people Harry interviewed for the memior turn up dead, killed in the same signature style of the serial killer.  Harry is immediatly the prime suspect.  To protect himself, Harry is forced to become an unwilling detective.

For anyone who likes mysteries, especially noir mysteries, this is a terrific new voice.  The novel is loaded with references to great mystery authors and characters such as Edgar Allan Poe, Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, PBS mysteries and several others.  The voice is strong and distinct.  The plotting and pace will keep you reading.  Although this is written in the tradition of hardboiled private investigators, Gordon modernizes the characters and the issues.

Recommendation: This page turner is worth a read.  You'll read it quickly on a long cold afternoon or on the beach.  For hardboiled mystery enthusiaists, it is a must.

Author interview here.