Here it is, a lovely Good Friday. We're watching old episodes of Call the Midwife and waiting for the groomer to call to let us know that the puppies are ready. Bonnie knew she was going someplace she didn't like and I had to really encourage her to go in the car. They'll feel so much better though with their new Easter / Spring haircuts.
This past week I received 4 books and today I finished my first book of April. I'll provide my review of that and of the last one of March and also my synopses of the 4 new books. Then I'll continue with my look at Women Authors I've been enjoying.
Just Finished
"Since early 2000, I've enjoyed about 15 books in this excellent series by Ngaio Marsh. Of course some are better than others but I've never been disappointed so far. I think this was one of my favorites.
I think this was one of the more unique mystery stories I've ever read. It's an Inspector Roderick Alleyn mystery and for the first half of the story he only appears at the beginning of each chapter. Alleyn is giving a lecture to a number of English police officers / inspectors and his presentation deals with a case that he and international police forces have been working on. It involves an international super crook known as the Jampot. He is a mystery thief, no pictures of him, except a blurry photo from Bolivia. This case will involve Alleyn's wife, famed artist Troy Alleyn. At the beginning of each chapter, Alleyn outlines where the case is going and then it switches to Troy's journey. While Alleyn has been away in America, working with American police and also attending conferences, Troy remains in England, attending showings of her paintings. In Norminster, she sees a sign in a shop window advertising a vacancy on a five day river cruise. At loose purposes, she decides to take the voyage down the River.
That is the basic premise. Troy will meet an interesting, at times suspicious group of characters on the boat and as Alleyn's presentation to his group of cops progresses, we discover that the Jampot may be on board. Troy finds herself in an uncomfortable situation. There is some friction between passengers, one is a black Ethiopian / English doctor from Liverpool and he is made uncomfortable by two American passengers and another. A middle-aged woman, very flamboyant, irritates everybody, especially with her snoring at night. One of the passengers disappears in unusual circumstances. A pair of suspicious motorcyclists follows the boat on its tour. Troy contacts Alleyn's faithful teammate, Inspector Fox, the fabled Brer Fox, with her suspicions and he directs her maintain contact with local police forces along the route of the boat trip.
The story moves along at a nice pace and is a fascinating read. Along the way, Alleyn finally makes an appearance and takes over the increasingly complex, tense investigation. I loved the mystery itself and the wonderful suspects. It was so good to see a Troy - centric story. She is an independent, intelligent, talented woman. In the TV series based on the books she is portrayed by Belinda Laing. The characters on the boat trip are all interesting. I particularly liked the Ethiopian doctor, Dr. Natouche, and I prayed he wasn't the killer. (You'll have to read to see if he is). The rest all have their unique qualities and present as possible suspects. I had my main suspect.. I was wrong. Oh and I do like Brer Fox. He makes me think of Basil Rathbone's (Sherlock Holmes) capable assistant, Nigel Bruce as Watson.. Mind you, in the TV series of the Alleyn Mysteries, William Simons is also excellent.
All in all I enjoyed this story very much. It was most enjoyable, as I said, probably my favorite of the series so far. (4.5 stars)"
"I have read a few of Howard Engel's Benny Cooperman's mysteries. It's such an enjoyable crime series. This may have been a reread (if so it was many years ago) but I finally got to the 1st book, The Suicide Murders. It's an excellent intro to the series. We meet Benny Cooperman, a struggling PI in the fictional town of Grantham Ontario, on the Niagara Escarpment, near Niagara Falls.
Benny works out of a small office, living off divorce cases and sometimes help researching estate issues for his cousin, Melvyn. His office is the floor above a somewhat drunken podiatrist, Frank Bushmill. Benny lives in a local motel, above the bar. He still goes to dinner at his parent's home on Fridays. His favorite meal is chopped egg on toast at the local diner. (Benny in a bit of a nutshell)
Myrna Yates arrives at Benny's office as Benny worries about the future. She suspects her husband Chester, a successful real estate developer, is having an affair. She wants Benny to follow her husband as he seems to leave his office every Thursday, lying about his whereabouts. Benny follows him and discovers he is going to see a psychiatrist. Before he has time to advise Myrna, the news reports that Chester is found dead in his office, presumably having committed suicide.
Benny is suspicious and continues to investigate, with Myrna's approval. Benny has run ins with one cop, who believes in the suicide presumption and lays on Benny. As well, a friend of Chester, William Allen Ward, a city adviser, also pressures Benny, even to the point of having his heavies take Benny for a bit of a ride. Benny, while maybe not the best of detectives, perseveres and continues his investigation.
There are various threads in this mystery; blackmail, a past history of crime by some suspects, shady real estate deals..... Benny plugs away. He may not be in the league of Lew Archer or Sam Spade, real hard-boiled gumshoes, (Benny is more soft - boiled) but he's not easily intimidated and can run fairly quickly when he's threatened.
I never expect anything really deep in a Benny Cooperman mystery and he does seem to pull threads together fairly easily, but it doesn't really matter. I like his relationship with various police detectives, specifically Pete Staziak and Chris Savas, a sort of mutual respect. There are other deaths and a quite touching ending (I thought) and overall it was an entertaining, involving mystery with interesting characters and a satisfying story. An excellent intro to a good series. (4 stars)"
New Books
"The daughter of a
Burmese mother and a white American father, Alex Wagner grew up thinking
of herself as a "futureface"--an avatar of a mixed-race future when all
races would merge into a brown singularity. But when one family mystery
leads to another, Wagner's post-racial ideals fray as she becomes
obsessed with the specifics of her own family's racial and ethnic
history.
Drawn into the wild world of ancestry, she embarks upon a
quest around the world--and into her own DNA--to answer the ultimate
questions of who she really is and where she belongs. The journey takes
her from Burma to Luxembourg, from ruined colonial capitals with records
written on banana leaves to Mormon databases, genetic labs, and the
rest of the twenty-first-century genealogy complex. But soon she begins
to grapple with a deeper question: Does it matter? Is our enduring
obsession with blood and land, race and identity, worth all the trouble
it's caused us?
Wagner weaves together fascinating history,
genetic science, and sociology but is really after deeper stuff than her
own ancestry: in a time of conflict over who we are as a country, she
tries to find the story where we all belong."
"The Earth was holding a fantastic contest...
An
international prize of over a million dollars was being offered to the
first man to complete an interplanetary journey. Target -- Mars.
It was a race against time. The U.S., Russia, and England were again competitors, fighting for fame an fortune.
Dale
Curtance of England didn't need the fortune. He was a millionaire. He
was an eccentric. But most of all he was an adventurer and he was
determined to win.
But winning was not going to be that easy.
There were going to be many surprises. And they all began with the
stowaway aboard Curtance's ship.
A stowaway to Mars.
A woman."
"Rising in the mountains of the Tibetan border, the Yangtze River, the symbolic heart of China pierces 3,900 miles of rugged country before debouching into the oily swells of the East China Sea. Connecting China's heartland cities with the volatile coastal giant, Shanghai, it has also historically connected China to the outside world through its nearly one thousand miles of navigable waters. To travel those waters is to travel back in history, to sense the soul of China, and Simon Winchester takes us along with him as he encounters the essence of China--its history and politics, its geography and climate as well as engage in its culture, and its people in remote and almost inaccessible places. This is travel writing at its best: lively, informative, and thoroughly enchanting."
"On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London.
Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image--as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation--as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature. Dodgson's love of photography framed his view of the world, and was partly responsible for transforming a shy and half-deaf mathematician into one of the world's best-loved observers of childhood. Little wonder that there is more to "Alice Liddell as the Beggar Maid" than meets the eye. Using Dodgson's published writings, private diaries, and of course his photographic portraits, Winchester gently exposes the development of Lewis Carroll and the making of his Alice."
Women Authors I Enjoy - Rosemary Aubert
I discovered Canadian mystery writer Rosemary Aubert as I began to enjoy mysteries again back in the early 2000's. She was born in Niagara Falls, New York in 1946 but has resided in Canada for over 40 years. Although she has written poetry and standalone novels, I've focused on her Ellis Portal mystery series. Ellis Portal is an ex - Ontario Supreme Court judge who has suffered a nervous breakdown. As he slowly recovers he becomes involved in local crimes and investigations. I've read the first 4 books in this six book series. I have yet to purchase the last two books but I will do so. I'll highlight the last book I enjoyed and provide synopses of the last two books.
Rosemary Aubert
"I've enjoyed reading Rosemary Aubert's Ellis Portal mysteries. Leave Me By Dying is the 4th book in the series. It's a prequel to the initial books. We find Portal at Law School, trying to find a project so he can impress a judge and get summer employment as an intern.
The year is 1965 and many things are going on in the country down south; Martin Luther King Jr is organizing a freedom march Selma and things are not going well in the Viet Nam war. These events are distant from what is happening in Toronto, but Portal's brother, Michele, is involved protesting the war and the draft, He wants Ellis to help a Native Canadian boy, who was born in Buffalo, avoid the draft. This presents itself as possible project #1 for Portal, an opportunity to research international law and US law and native laws.
As well, Ellis's 'friend' or rather law school associate Gleason Adams wants Ellis to help him sort out the circumstances of a dead body they see at the city morgue; a body that disappears during their visit.
All in all it's an interesting story. We get to spend time with Ellis's family and they are all interesting. The mystery itself is different and there is a nice twist at the end. The other story involving the draft issue also is an interesting concept. I also liked visiting Toronto in this story. It takes place 9 years before I went to university there. We also get an opportunity to see the events that affected Portal's later life. All in all an entertaining mystery and story. (3 story)"
"The fifth episode in Aubert's prize-winning series finds once-disgraced Toronto attorney Ellis Portal readmitted to the practice of law. Within moments, a superior court justice is charged with murder, and Ellis is tricked into defending him. Then Ellis faces his own daughter who's prosecuting the case."
"Ellis Portal has resigned from solving mysteries. Or so he thinks. When a profound personal tragedy propels him into a puzzling case with no suspects and no clues, he’s forced back into the world of crime. Against the drama of a Toronto conference that brings world leaders to the city, Ellis finds himself surrounded with new enemies and old allies, one of whom threatens to make demands on him he’s in no position to meet…"
I've enjoyed the first four books very much. It's a unique premise. The complete listing of Aubert's books can be found at this link. Enjoy your Easter weekend. Stay safe. 😷
No comments:
Post a Comment