Barbara Clark

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Characters collide in Maron’s latest

Review by Barbara Clark

Mystery fans will be delighted to learn that Margaret Maron has penned a new book in her long-running Deborah Knott series. Three-Day Town is unique because Knott meets up for the first time with Lt. Sigrid Harald, who has crossed over from another of Maron’s popular series for a double delight.

Judge Deborah Knott and hubby Dwight have been married a year, and they’re finally getting to leave North Carolina and take their honeymoon—a week in New York City, in an apartment loaned to them by an in-law. They arrive on the eve of a winter snowstorm and anticipate a week of walking, museums, theater and other honeymoon activities. Dwight soon discovers New York’s famous Fairway Market, and the pair settle in with grocery bags of delicious goodies for some overdue time together.

But soon a small glitch introduces big trouble. Deborah has brought a mysterious wrapped package to deliver at the request of a distant relative. The intended receiver, Anne Harald, is on a trip, so her daughter, Lt. Sigrid herself, phones to inquire about the item. She asks Deborah to open the package, which turns out to be an intricate bronze statuette depicting male bodies intertwined in Kama Sutra-like positions. This surprise brings Sigrid calling to retrieve the strange object, but she arrives on the heels of a murder in the couple’s loaner apartment: The building’s “super” is dead and the statuette has gone missing. An assortment of apartment residents with stories to tell; a gaggle of elevator men and building staff; and a second death add to the fast-thickening plot.

Three-Day Town is number 17 in the series, but Maron writes with such skill that new readers can open the book and fly, right from page one. Related characters slide in easily, with earlier occurrences woven throughout the story—so newcomers to the series won’t be lost. Maron’s loyal fans will love this new pairing of the outgoing, garrulous Deborah with the slim, grey-eyed and serious-minded Sigrid.

Author Maron’s strong suit, as always, is her impeccable sense of place. She beautifully evokes the scenes and sounds of the Big Apple, from the bustle of Times Square and glitter of Broadway to the mountains of trash bags piled high on the streets after a big storm. This enjoyable entry is a great walk in the park—make that Central, of course, with snowflakes.

Mystery fans will be delighted to learn that Margaret Maron has penned a new book in her long-running Deborah Knott series. Three-Day Town is unique because Knott meets up for the first time with Lt. Sigrid Harald, who has crossed over from another of Maron’s…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

A murder at sea

Review by Barbara Clark

“The body slid heavily from the table and for a brief moment seemed to hang in the air, then broke the water’s surface with a tremendous crash. For a moment, not longer, a white ghost seemed to linger just beneath the surface, but before anyone could be sure they had seen a final glimpse of the ensheeted body it was already speeding toward the depths.”

This salty description in A Burial at Sea is one of many atmospheric touches in the fifth book in author Charles Finch’s Victorian mystery series. For the newly initiated, the series features Charles Lenox, Member of Parliament and (possibly) retired amateur detective. Here, Charles is on a mission to Egypt and the newly built Suez Canal at the urgent request of his brother, Edmund, a staid civil servant—and member of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

This seaworthy mystery adventure starts out mildly enough, but after a snowy, lamplit meeting between Charles and Edmund, Charles boards the ship Lucy, bound from London to Egypt and Port Said. He travels on what the ship’s crew believes is a diplomatic journey, but is really a clandestine mission meant to counter France’s influence in the newly burgeoning port. There’s murder aboard ship, however, and Lenox finds his detective skills pressed into service by the ship’s captain. He is soon investigating the ship’s logs, decks and wardrooms— even climbing to the crow’s nest—for clues to a brutal killer.

In this descriptive tale, the mystery and mayhem are equalled by the fascinating lore and adventure of life at sea in the 1870s. Readers are treated to first-class descriptions of all things nautical and seaworthy, including spars and songs and storms at sea; which deck is which and who goes there; and even a breathtaking game of Follow the Leader, where crew members outdo each other with death-defying acrobatics from the mizzenmast and crow’s nest.

Sandwiched in between the grog and salt beef rations, there’s shipboard gossip that hints at mutiny, mermaids and more, but talk is valuable in this contained community and may contain clues to the identity of the murderer. Lenox must listen carefully and take caution for his own life.

Readers of this expertly written adventure will welcome the change of venue from the parlors of England’s genteel classes to excitement on a seagoing vessel. Reef the mainsails! Ship ahoy!

“The body slid heavily from the table and for a brief moment seemed to hang in the air, then broke the water’s surface with a tremendous crash. For a moment, not longer, a white ghost seemed to linger just beneath the surface, but before anyone…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

A wild and wacky ride

Review by Barbara Clark

In Ranchero, a wonderfully original debut novel by Rick Gavin, former cop-turned-repo man Nick Reid speeds across the back roads of the Mississippi Delta in pursuit of a stolen 1969 Ranchero, painted a glorious Calypso Coral.

Nick had been driving the Ranchero himself, but it actually belongs to his eccentric elderly landlady Pearl, a widow of open heart and stubborn temperament. Nick was out to repossess a flat screen TV from a fellow named Percy Dwayne Dubois. But Percy Dwayne attacked Nick with a shovel, then disappeared in a cloud of calypso coral dust.

Nick had promised to love, honor and maintain Pearl’s pristine Ranchero, and he takes his promise seriously. There’s nothing for it but to chase down the car and the thief, who turns out to be just the tip of the Dubois iceberg. Nick and his 350-pound buddy, Desmond, drive off in hot pursuit through a tangle of Delta back roads and unforgettable scenery, where “everything was slower and hotter, the local manners approached baroque, and racing down a Delta road with crop dusters on the horizon was like driving into 1952.”

The story is peopled by folks stuck a few rungs lower than, say, a Damon Runyon-meets-Ma Kettle of an earlier era—although they retain that basic outlandishness. Author Gavin keeps the momentum going with escalating accidents and incidents, as violence mixes with a whole lot of stupidity to gain our hero a chance to reclaim the vehicle. Nick also contends with his boss, a crazy Lebanese man named Kalil, whose prized stuffed mountain lion appears to have been stolen. But everybody knows everybody down in the Delta, and we just know that cat will turn up again.

As one mile leads to another, then another, more members of the lowlife Dubois clan come out of the woodwork, and soon Desmond’s Geo Metro is full of misfit Delta crackers, each with an ax to grind or a suggestion to make. (Whether they’re helping or squashing Reid’s chances of reclaiming the Ranchero is up for grabs.) One drug dealer leads to another, leading to scenes of grit and squalor touched by the humor of misfits who inhabit a crazy world of their own. Nick admits to “the passing conviction that a niggling sort like me would never make anything happen quite the way I wanted it to. That view of the world is as much of the Delta as the black loam and the mosquitoes.”

Ranchero is a marvelous, scruffy and hilarious read.

In Ranchero, a wonderfully original debut novel by Rick Gavin, former cop-turned-repo man Nick Reid speeds across the back roads of the Mississippi Delta in pursuit of a stolen 1969 Ranchero, painted a glorious Calypso Coral.

Nick had been driving the Ranchero himself, but it actually…

Mystery & SuspenseMysteryFilm

Getting the scoop in an atmospheric Scottish mystery

Review by Barbara Clark

A.D. Scott’s intriguing mystery, A Double Death on the Black Isle, is set in the 1950s in the Scottish Highlands. If townsfolk want to keep tongues from wagging and dodge the stares of neighbors, they better avoid pregnancy before marriage, working on the Sabbath and being caught in a public bar (only if they’re female). In this community, local customs and gossip play commanding roles, and though it’s a small enough town, there’s still room for a little enmity between the farmers and the fishermen, the year-rounders and the nomadic Traveling People.

The mystery kicks in when fisherman Sandy Skinner, newly married “above his station” to Patricia Ord Mackenzie—a member of the estate-owning Highland gentry—dramatically plunges over the Falls of Foyers to certain death. That same day, the volatile Fraser Munro, whose family manages the estate’s lands, is found dead in a ditch near Devil’s Den. Coincidence or connection? 

We join the cast and crew of the Highland Gazette, a newly re-launched newspaper, as they rush to cover the story of a fishing boat that’s been bombed and sunk, followed in quick succession by the two unexplained deaths on neighboring Black Isle. Scott, who is also the author of A Small Death in the Great Glen, book one in this Highland series, draws readers right into the sights, sounds and nostalgia of a small-town newspaper, where reporters still hit the streets in search of a story and deadline day is an adrenaline rush of untangling loose ends.

Joanne Ross, a typist and budding reporter at the Gazette, is the protagonist of this novel, although my favorite character may be reporter Rob McLean, who is ambitious, funny and quick at nosing out a story. He’s got his eye on the future, although readers will be very disappointed if he takes another job and exits this series. Memorable characters also include Hector Bain—he of the green cap and orange hair and a passion for photography—and the Black Isle residents themselves, who sneak one and all into your reading consciousness, like Janet Ord Mackenzie (mother of Patricia), whose gothic air and ring-bedecked pointy finger remind Joanne’s young daughter of the queen in Snow White.

A Double Death on the Black Isle is filled with alliteration and atmosphere. Just about every character seems to be related somehow, and it’s occasionally difficult to keep the Allies, Agneses and Alistairs all straight. However, the end result is worth sticking around for and readers will be left anticipating the next installment.

A.D. Scott’s intriguing mystery, A Double Death on the Black Isle, is set in the 1950s in the Scottish Highlands. If townsfolk want to keep tongues from wagging and dodge the stares of neighbors, they better avoid pregnancy before marriage, working on the Sabbath and…

Mystery & SuspenseCozy Mystery

Stitching together the evidence

Review by Barbara Clark

Clare O’Donohue has penned three previous mysteries in her Someday Quilts series, and like the others, her latest, The Devil’s Puzzle, is a haven for those who love a good mystery as well as the history and colorful ambiance involved in the craft of quilting. O’Donohue is also a television writer who has worked on shows for Food Network and the History Channel, and she was a producer for HGTV’s "Simply Quilts."

Twenty-something Nell Fitzgerald lives with her grandmother Eleanor in the small town of Archer’s Rest. There’s a hole being dug in their back garden, where rose bushes are planned as a gift to Eleanor, who, at 74, is about to receive a proposal. Instead, the landscapers dig up a skeleton. Reactions from the townsfolk follow on the heels (or bones) of that discovery, led by Jesse, Nell’s boyfriend and also the chief of police; various official (or officious?) town bigwigs who are planning the town’s 350th anniversary celebration; and the Someday Quilters, an eclectic group of women friends—including Nell—who work in Eleanor’s quilting store, Someday Quilts, a landmark in the town.

Whose bones are these? What stories from the past must be dug up to uncover the history that will explain the strange discovery? The sleuthing that follows nicely mirrors the quilters’ work, as they choose pieces of bright cloth to stitch into a meaningful pattern that expresses a style or era from the past. Both real and wannabe quilters will be delighted at the lore and explanations of this historical craft that are inserted neatly into the text, adding color and depth to the plot.

The Someday Quilters and their extended families form a comfortable core for the series, and the story fans out from their daily interactions, as they meet at the aptly named Jitters coffee shop to mull over quilts and clues. The curious Nell must contend with the knotty politics that seal the lips of the librarian, town historian, old-time movie theater owner, mayor, witchy reclusive lady and other sundry characters who alternately impede and enhance her search for the skeleton’s identity.

Even though I can’t help but think that any smart police officer would jettison a nosy girlfriend who sticks her “civilian nose” into every conundrum and crime that happens in town—still, that’s what makes for a good story with a dash of romance to boot, isn’t it?

Clare O’Donohue has penned three previous mysteries in her Someday Quilts series, and like the others, her latest, The Devil’s Puzzle, is a haven for those who love a good mystery as well as the history and colorful ambiance involved in the craft of quilting.…

Mystery & Suspense

An engrossing new voice in suspense

Review by Barbara Clark

Four women dead and a serial killer on the loose—we’ve read it all before. But wait! This familiar opening scenario is just a jumping-off point for London author Jane Casey’s U.S. debut novel, The Burning. After the discovery of a fifth victim, we’re off and running in a totally new direction. The work of the quadruple killer, though it hangs around throughout the book like a thorn in the side, turns out to be secondary to the main plot.

The M.O. of the fifth murder, that of the young and talented Rebecca Haworth, differs in crucial forensic ways from the other four, so Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan and her superiors treat it as a murder unto itself. Casey’s considerable talent lies in discovering a new trail that readers will follow eagerly as she draws each character closer into our circle of interest.

The action develops via the alternating thoughts of detective Kerrigan and those of Louise, Rebecca’s best friend. Instead of focusing on the drama and gory details surrounding a serial killer’s deeds, the book morphs into a page-turner as readers learn about Rebecca’s former life and seeming successes. The author is adept at creating a drama that is rich with details about the victim—her doting parents; a liberal assortment of doomed affairs with the opposite sex, including the handsome and cruel Gil; and her friends and fellow workers, effusive in their praise for the victim.

Rebecca’s early years as a student at Oxford were marred by a traumatic and unexplained death; her later relationships with men turned murky; and prior to her death she began an inexplicable slide into drug addiction. Detective Kerrigan, struggling with her own vulnerability and image within the department, undertakes the complicated process of merging these fragments into a whole cloth.

The Burning stands apart from others in the genre by virtue of its deft characterizations and engrossing backstory. What looks like a thriller and starts out as a gory crime scene morphs into a compulsively readable character study by a writer I hope will return for another spin with her witty and perceptive detective.

Four women dead and a serial killer on the loose—we’ve read it all before. But wait! This familiar opening scenario is just a jumping-off point for London author Jane Casey’s U.S. debut novel, The Burning. After the discovery of a fifth victim, we’re off and running…

Mystery & SuspenseFiction

Pirates, a parrot and plenty of fun

Review by Barbara Clark

Author Laurie King’s many readers will be delighted to learn that her character Mary Russell, known to mystery fans as the wife of famous sleuth Sherlock Holmes and a detective in her own right, is off on a new adventure.

The play’s the thing—or in this case a moving picture—and a film within a film forms the imaginative backdrop in Pirate King, a wild and woolly tale that plays artfully with the confusion between reality and make-believe.

Chief Inspector Lestrade of the Home Office asks Russell to go undercover and look into the disappearance of a young production assistant from the movie set of a film of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. She is to investigate a possible connection between the Fflytte Films Company and a lively trade in drugs and firearms that seems to follow on the heels of many of the company’s productions. Hired as a replacement for the missing assistant, Russell finds herself knee-deep in a world of cinematic sets and crackpot characters who are making believe they’re real. This witty and comic foray into the silent silver screen of a bygone era has the normally elegant Russell expending a lot of energy—and patience—in the midst of a cockeyed world: a film about a film about the operetta The Pirates of Penzance.

Russell, who’s neither a tunesmith nor a fan of operetta, finds herself more alarmed at being in the vicinity of a D’Oyly Carte production “than by the thought of climbing storm-tossed rigging in the company of cut-throats.”  Film director Randolph Fflytte, however, has a taste for “realism,” and cast and crew shuttle from stem to stern on a weary-looking brigantine in this high seas comic adventure. It’s one thing to have actors acting as pirates, but to enlist real pirates to play pirates in a play? It’s a recipe for misadventure in true Keystone Kops fashion, as Russell is soon to discover. 

She’s up to her neck in kidnapping, cutlasses, topmast stays’ls and port deadeyes, and way too far up in the rigging for her own taste. There’s also the Pirate King himself to contend with, decked out in ostrich plumes, with a parrot that spouts English lyric poetry. And Holmes himself appears, in a hilarious overboard (literally) scene. Undaunted, Ms. Russell—armed with weapons of her own—manages to scale the barricades and quell the uprising, to the satisfaction of all hands.

Author Laurie King’s many readers will be delighted to learn that her character Mary Russell, known to mystery fans as the wife of famous sleuth Sherlock Holmes and a detective in her own right, is off on a new adventure.

The play’s the thing—or in this…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

New series is a whimsical delight

Review by Barbara Clark

Author Colin Cotterill has penned a new offbeat mystery series, and the first installment kindles in the mind like fireworks that bloom in showers of light. Killed at the Whim of a Hat is one of the most aptly titled books I’ve seen in a long time, and by far the best book I’ve read in an age.

Crime reporter Jimm Juree, recently of Bangkok, is down in the dumps. Her dreams of being promoted to senior crime reporter at Bangkok’s Chiang Mai Mail are dashed after her mother purchases a crumbling tourist resort in the tiny village of Maprao, far afield in southern Thailand, and the family moves, lock, stock and barrel.

Jimm’s bad luck at being in the pit of no-news land seems to change when a visiting abbot at the nearby temple is violently murdered. There’s also an odd skeleton or two, discovered buried deep in mud in a 1970s VW bus. Jimm seems on her way to a breaking news story or three. She gets a lot of help from crafty Lieutenant Chompu of the local police force and from her wondrously odd family. Together they make sense of the bizarre events.

A solid plot runs neck and neck with the plain and simple joy of reading a crackerjack narrative filled with droll humor and small asides that are never throwaways. In the current world of detective novels—where quick comebacks and sarcasm pass for humor and where characters jockey for top position as most snide or most trendy—this stands out as a beautifully crafted look at life with a Thai twist. Thankfully, Cotterill’s characters are so easy to picture they jump right off the page, yet are straight out of the town of whimsy.

Cotterill’s language is musical, with an offbeat cadence. What’s not to like in a book where you can read, of the crime scene: “From the road it didn’t look like anything special but when you got to the top of the dirt track you could clearly see that it really was nothing special.” Or where you can taste beer that “arrived so cold it poured like sleet from the bottle.” This stuff, on nearly every page, boggles the mind.

And I mustn’t forget an unsung hero named Sticky Rice. But you’ll have to read the book yourself to really get the hang of it all.

Author Colin Cotterill has penned a new offbeat mystery series, and the first installment kindles in the mind like fireworks that bloom in showers of light. Killed at the Whim of a Hat is one of the most aptly titled books I’ve seen in a…

Mystery & SuspenseCozy Mystery

Murder by kelp

Review by Barbara Clark

In 2003, television comedy writer Laura Levine created a female sleuth in the person of freelance copywriter Jaine Austen. Jaine soon became a member in good standing of a select club of wisecracking female detectives, including famed fictional P.I.s Stephanie Plum and Kinsey Milhone, all of the quick comeback school of detecting.

After penning her first book, This Pen for Hire, Levine went on to please mystery fans with her clever plots and wry humor. Now she has penned her 10th installment in the series, aptly titled Pampered to Death, wherein Jaine heads off for a week of spa relaxation at The Haven, a dubiously named retreat that turns out to be a “fat farm,” or weight loss center, where weigh-ins are public torture and dessert consists of a wilted slice of mango.

The Haven becomes a perfect setting for Jaine’s hilarious brand of detecting, her one-liners as abundant as the book’s off-beat characters—including the sleuth’s cat, Prozac, a feline who’s dying for a bacon bit amidst all the lean cuisine. Equally comic are Jaine’s asides, when she shares what she imagines her compatriots are saying. In Jaine’s mind, the spa owner calls her “a tub of lard” when she’s really only calling out Jaine’s weight at the daily weigh-in, a number Jaine describes as a “carefully guarded national secret.”

The early pages are devoted to a spa-full of suspects—seems everyone at The Haven has a motive for wanting spa guest and B-list movie actress Mallory Francis out of the running . . . for good. The A-list of possibles includes Mallory’s disgruntled personal assistants; the pill-popping spa owner; former co-star Clint; and a jealous athletic instructor whose husband is dallying with the bodacious film star.

After the body is discovered—strangled with spa-healthy kelp—Jaine’s detecting begins in earnest. Her desire to escape the premises at the earliest possible moment is thwarted by the police, who want no one to leave town ‘til the murderer is apprehended. That’s plenty of incentive for Jaine to employ her detecting skills, even after she nearly becomes a victim herself, held under water by unknown hands in the spa’s Jacuzzi.

Unfortunately, there are distracting and un-funny e-mails scattered throughout the book. Minus those, this humorous send-up of health spas is sure to score high in reader caloric count—a tasty treat for Jaine Austen fans everywhere.

In 2003, television comedy writer Laura Levine created a female sleuth in the person of freelance copywriter Jaine Austen. Jaine soon became a member in good standing of a select club of wisecracking female detectives, including famed fictional P.I.s Stephanie Plum and Kinsey Milhone, all…

FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

A moving story of life after war

Review by Barbara Clark

In her fine debut mystery novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett, Elizabeth Speller has evoked the world of post-World War I Britain, its mood of hope and optimism contrasting with one of hopelessness and depression felt by many returning veterans who survived the horrific conflict. One young veteran, Laurence Bertram—a former officer—has come home feeling the senselessness of what he and thousands of others have gone through, wanting only to retreat from the nightmare of his experience.

However, a letter arrives from the sister of a former school chum, requesting help in discovering why her brother, John Emmett, also a recovering veteran, has apparently taken his own life. Laurence, aided by his friend Charles, begins to look for some answers. What seems at first an obvious case of suicide due to depression turns into something quite different.

The search begins with a small stash of Emmett’s belongings, including a melancholy photograph taken at the battlefront, a small book of poetry and a school scarf. There’s also Emmett’s will, naming a curious assortment of legatees. Laurence begins with these slim leads, and the quest turns into a many-layered mystery that’s true to each carefully drawn character who becomes part of the tapestry of events.

Laurence and Charles question several people who seem connected by a trench collapse during battle and a horrific execution by military firing squad. The sense of tragedy is deepened by battlefield reminiscences and witnesses’ stories. Confounding the search is a series of seemingly unconnected post-war deaths, but these begin to form a pattern, and the unfolding events lead Laurence and Charles inexorably to a final and devastating conclusion.

More than just a well-crafted story, however, this is a beautifully written narrative. Speller is attentive to the ways in which actions undertaken in fear and under stress can widen to encompass many others, like ripples that spread when a stone falls into water. She drops us into Britain’s rain-soaked autumn countryside and gray city streets, and into the lives of people who bear the scars of war. No character is superficial, and each fits in, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle coming whole before our eyes.

I opened this book with some small hesitation, as it is a first novel written by an unknown writer. However, I read every page with deepening pleasure and appreciation for this gifted author. 

In her fine debut mystery novel, The Return of Captain John Emmett, Elizabeth Speller has evoked the world of post-World War I Britain, its mood of hope and optimism contrasting with one of hopelessness and depression felt by many returning veterans who survived the horrific…

Mystery & SuspenseCozy Mystery

Mystery in the countryside

Review by Barbara Clark

Leslie Meier has penned more than 14 Lucy Stone mystery novels, and her latest, English Tea Murder, has arrived just in time for her many fans to stash it in their summer beach bags and take it to the seaside. This book has a perfect title, invoking the surprise and thrill of murder as well as a British atmosphere of tea shops, country hedgerows, shadowy cathedral carvings and crypts and cozy row homes with tiny gardens.

Leave it to Lucy to be sitting across the aisle from a dead guy on an airliner en route to London. College teacher George Templeton expires in front of her eyes, after his asthma inhaler falls into a glass of water as he gasps for air. Lucy and three friends are on a group tour to London, and the deceased is (or was) the tour leader. The group includes a mix of students, parents and a few townies like Lucy and her friends, one of whom teaches a class in the college’s night school. Templeton’s death arouses odd and violent emotions in the group, but what’s their rhyme or reason? It begins to seem as though many people had a reason to cheer his death—including the tour guide sent to take Templeton’s place.  

Lucy, in her listening way, hears various stories from her tour-mates, and a rather skewed, crooked pattern (involving a near-death plunge off a pier in Brighton and, much later, another murder) begins to take shape. How do these incidents connect, and is there something—or someone—at the center, turning this wheel of misfortune?

There’s plenty here to please Meier’s followers and fans of cozy mysteries: Lucy and her friends shop their way about the countryside, and Meier pays homage to all the tried and true British high points, from the Tower of London and its resident ravens to tea shops, strawberry jam and Devonshire cream, to the glories of Stonehenge at sunset. Though it’s hard to believe that Lucy could be quite as naïve as she sometimes seems (after delving into, what, 14-plus crimes?), she does knit up the ravell’d sleeve of another one—but not without leaving readers guessing as to what the future has in store for her characters.

Leslie Meier has penned more than 14 Lucy Stone mystery novels, and her latest, English Tea Murder, has arrived just in time for her many fans to stash it in their summer beach bags and take it to the seaside. This book has a perfect…

Mystery

A turn-of-the-century detective

Review by Barbara Clark

Readers of historical novels who discover Detective Simon Ziele will glom onto Stefanie Pintoff’s series of mysteries in a hurry. The first entry, In the Shadow of Gotham, garnered an Edgar Award in 2010.

Secret of the White Rose, the third in the series, is again set in turn-of-the-20th-century New York City, and filled with detailed historical settings and descriptions of the city’s helter-skelter atmosphere. This includes clopping horse-drawn cabs and early electrical cars, the Tombs prison, row houses, downtown opium dens, gaslit streets . . . and anarchist violence.

This time out, Ziele is investigating three murders of three prominent judges, linked by a Bible and a white rose left near each victim. Is this the work of an anarchist cell, or are there more personal motives for the murders? New York’s hard-boiled and judgmental police commissioner, Theodore Bingham, believes that the anarchists are responsible—one of the dead judges had been presiding over the trial of Al Drayson, a notorious anarchist leader who is in the dock for murder—and he is not interested in having his opinions overturned or thwarted.

Throughout this intricate and ingenious story, Pintoff shows how even the seemingly clearest clues or motives can be called into question. Ziele’s ongoing association with a wily criminologist, Alistair Sinclair, is fraught with such ambiguity, and the interchange between these two colleagues considerably ups the ante in this superior plot. True-to-life historical details form a major part of the story’s allure. It’s easy to read oneself right into the atmosphere of that time and place, maneuvering New York’s twilight streets with the detective as he puts to use the new forensic methods emerging in the field of criminology.

Even more engrossing is the thin line the author draws between the “good guys” and the “bad guys.” She sets us down in the midst of people’s obsessions and, ultimately, actions. While occasionally a little heavy-handed with its anti-anarchist spiel, Secret of the White Rose stays absorbing and surprising, as it dissects a series of mystifying crimes and inspects the reasons why many of our assumptions can be mistaken.

Readers of historical novels who discover Detective Simon Ziele will glom onto Stefanie Pintoff’s series of mysteries in a hurry. The first entry, In the Shadow of Gotham, garnered an Edgar Award in 2010.

Secret of the White Rose, the third in the series, is again…

YA Fiction

What lies beneath

Review by Barbara Clark

Take a lovely tree-shaded campus, add wealthy alums and a big-ticket endowment, and fill it with rich and entitled preppies headed for big-name colleges. Stir with selected townies from working-class Greenville at the bottom of the hill, and flavor with secret student societies (or “freaky cults” as one teacher calls them) and hidden passions at this institution of privilege, and you come up with The Twisted Thread, an addictive summer read written by Charlotte Bacon, a winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction.   

Claire, a beautiful but icy blond senior at Armitage Academy who, incidentally, has just given birth in secret, is found dead in her dorm room. Where is her newborn baby? And who is the father? Why did no one on the faculty know? These dark questions seem preposterous, set as they are in this upscale environment, but they loom large as police detective Matt Corelli (a former graduate of Armitage anda resident of Greenville) and his partner, Vernon Cates, begin to uncover a seamier side of campus life with its welter of cross-currents and relationships.

Central to the story is Madeline Christopher, an intern/teacher in English. With her ebullient, spilling-over personality, mussed-up hair and lack of perfect attire, Madeline becomes both confidante and foil to the girls in her dorm, who alternately confide in, threaten and use her for their own ends in covering up what they know. She must painfully discover for herself how this bastion of wealth conceals the same layers of passion, vulnerability, slyness and deceit that abound outside in the “common” domain.

All the characters in this surprising story are beautifully realized. Each must come to terms with the tension between a knowledge of what lies beneath the surface at Armitage and a desire to keep the superficial calm unruffled. Vernon is an endearing and imaginative addition to the long line of detective partners in mystery fiction. Claire’s former boyfriend, Scotty, snatches at our interest, even though at first glance he seems to inhabit the borders of the story. All the members of the cast, including townies, ancillary faculty wives, too-old faculty members, even the mother of a buildings and grounds worker, emerge as worth listening to in their own right.

Much more than a standard whodunit, this story goes to the heart as it seeks to unravel and lay bare the tensions and costs of living in the cocoon of privilege.

 

Take a lovely tree-shaded campus, add wealthy alums and a big-ticket endowment, and fill it with rich and entitled preppies headed for big-name colleges. Stir with selected townies from working-class Greenville at the bottom of the hill, and flavor with secret student societies (or “freaky…

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