Mystery and Suspense Challenge: Where’s the body?

Book Review: One Virgin Too Many
by Lindsey Davis

A keeper? Yes

If you’re a private detective (newly rich because it turns out you’re also a natural born tax auditor), what do you do when a poor little rich girl, about six years old, turns up – escorted by some of the family slaves – to announce that one of her relatives wants to kill her?

If you’re Marcus Didius Falco, and you already have enough problems making sure your own nieces – whose father, your no-good brother-in-law Famia, was recently and shamefully executed by a lion – are being taken care of, you just might pat her on the head and send her home. And then worry about it for days afterwards.

Not that little Gaia Laelia is Falco’s only worry. There’s his brother-in-law, Aelianus the twit, who has decided to become respectable by joining the priesthood of the Arval Brethren – and promptly stumbles over a body. Except when Aelianus takes Falco to investigate, there’s no body anywhere to be found. On the other hand, there seems to be an awful lot of blood-soaked grass…

And then there are the geese. Now that Falco has money, Emperor Vespasian has finally promoted him to the equestrian class, and given him an official job: Procurator of the Poultry, responsible for the sacred geese and the augurs’ chickens. There are probably more embarrassing responsibilities for a Roman citizen to be saddled with – but not many, and none noisier.

But what about Gaia? Could she really be in danger? Falco’s eight-year-old niece Cloelia has met her; they’re both among the candidates to be chosen as the newest Vestal Virgin. And Cloelia seems to think there was something wrong about Gaia’s family. It’s almost impossible to investigate, though. Gaia’s grandfather is the retired Flamen Dialis, former high priest of Jupiter, who doesn’t quite seem to realize that he’s retired; he expects total deference from everyone.

And getting back to Aelianus, it’s pretty hard to investigate a missing corpse, but Falco manages to dig up evidence that there really was a murder. More than a murder: it almost sounds as if a woman invaded the grounds of the Arval Brethren and killed the victim as if he was a bull intended for sacrifice. And, oh yes: Gaia seems to be missing.

Falco being Falco, he eventually proves that there’s one killer at fault in all the strangeness. He even locates little Gaia, still alive. Of course, Falco being Falco, his heroic rescue leaves him head down in the depths of a well with his tunic over his face, clutching the terrified child while being hauled up bare-bottomed to the snickers of his best friends…

Book reviews and Regency mayhem

Annnd – it’s a twofer! Just because I recently finished reading two books involving catching criminals that are more or less based on the Regency Romance.

I enjoyed both of them, mostly, but I think one approach worked a lot better than the other. So let’s see what we can figure out about what works and what doesn’t in telling a story, while we’re at it.

Review: Maggie Without a Clue

A keeper? Fer sure.

Speaking of Regency romances, somebody has to write them. That’s how Maggie Kelly makes her living. She’s a modern girl in modern New York, but her workdays are spent inventing mysteries for Alexandre Blake, Viscount St. Just, and his sidekick Sterling, to solve in London in the days of the Napoleonic Wars. She’s good at creating lifelike characters, so good that St. Just has decided to take charge of his own destiny. Three books ago, he and Sterling poofed into three-dimensional, solid, independent life in Maggie’s living room.

A period of adjustment followed.

By this story, the situation has kind of stabilized. St. Just has recognized that, in this world, he’s not independently wealthy, and he’s correcting that little problem by organizing street theater and starting a modeling career (since, like any good romantic hero, he’s dramatically handsome). Sterling has accepted twenty-first century technology and fads with great enthusiasm. Maggie has gritted her teeth about sharing her small apartment with both of them. Oh, and St. Just (who has accepted the alias of Alex Blake, Maggie’s English cousin) keeps solving crimes, annoying Maggie’s semi-boyfriend police detective Steve Wendell immensely.

Ah, but at least one part of the situation is about to improve! Poor old Mrs. Goldblum, who lives across the hall from Maggie, has offered her apartment to Alex and Sterling, since she has to hurry off and take care of her sick sister. Or is that an improvement? Never mind that Maggie’s friend Bernice has just found her husband – the one she thought drowned almost seven years ago – dead in her bed, and the police consider her the obvious suspect; what about the thugs who keep roughing up Sterling and searching Mrs. Goldblum’s apartment for something or other?

Alex intends to assert his independence from being only what Maggie wrote him to be. Also, he isn’t about to let Bernie get railroaded, and he’s definitely not going to put up with his new home and his old friend being attacked. He is, after all, the hero.

But what will his new independence do to his budding romance with Maggie?

I enjoyed this one. The mystery was pretty well worked out – including unexpected discoveries about Mrs. Goldblum, who isn’t all that poor and helpless. Maggie’s romantic tug of war between Steve and Alex continues; her friends and enemies are a colorful crowd who keep the story moving; Sterling’s and Alex’s adjustment to life in the real world and the current day is well handled.

Review: The Masque of the Black Tulip
by Lauren Willig

A keeper? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.

Once upon a time, back around the beginning of the twentieth century, the Scarlet Pimpernel helped to protect England from the French under Napoleon. Turns out he had help; a whole team of helpers with various color-coded code names. Lauren Willig is out to tell us all about their adventures undercover.

But so much for what’s happening around about 1800; what’s happening today? Well, there’s this American graduate student who’s researching the Pimpernel’s assistants, and she’s just found some new information.

But meanwhile, Miles Dorrington is hot on the trail of that notorious French spy, the Black Tulip, while keeping a protective (not romantic! absolutely not!) eye on Lady Henrietta Selwick. After all, he promised Hen’s brother, his best friend, that he’d take care of her, even if it means spending the evening at Almack’s. And at Almack’s, Miles stumbles across suspicious behavior that sends him into the slums of London after – maybe – the Tulip.

Oh, by the way, in our time that graduate student is having an awkward time dealing with Colin Selwick, who controls access to the long-lost correspondence that should clarify what the Pimpernel’s assistants were up to.

Meanwhile, Hen corresponds with her friend Amy in code – for both of them are involved in the Pimpernel’s circle too. She also goes into childish snits that might be appropriate for a sixteen-year-old high school student, but seem odd for a twenty year old brought up in a time when, we’re told, polite, formal behavior was important. And she gets caught – by Miles – hiding behind a bush in Hyde Park to spy on him when he takes the seductive Marquise for a drive.

Eager to find out what happens next? Sorry, time to check up on the modern characters again. They may be dull beyond words, but we can’t expect you to keep reading about all these old-timey folks that you can’t identify with, right? (Turns out that I really, really hate stories that try to split your attention between two completely different casts in two different centuries. Ahem.)

Well, eventually we find out, kind of abruptly, who is and who isn’t a spy. And the obvious couple admits they’re in love, after finding themselves compromised and having to elope, but okay, we’ve spent enough time in each of their heads to know they really want to get married anyhow. Oddly, I actually did enjoy the Regency parts of the book – maybe because they were so over-the-top. I hated being dragged back to the present day for no discernible reason, though. And I don’t know that the Regency story would hold up to re-reading; the characters had a tendency to lurch from situation to situation without much thought about what they were doing.

* * *

So – what works? First off, throwing yourself wholeheartedly into your story without worrying whether or not it’s silly. Both books feature overdone characters and situations; that’s a large part of their charm, and the weakest parts of the Black Tulip seemed to be included to assure us that the Regency story had some evidence to back it up. Second, give some thought to who these characters really are, and make them behave as if they have some idea of who they are, too. And if you can squeeze it in, let their personalities develop a bit without changing into somebody unrecognizable. Okay?

Mystery and Suspense Challenge – Where’s the money?

Review: Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich

A keeper? Sure

Ten years ago (book time), four guys robbed a bank in Trenton, New Jersey. Only one of them was arrested, and the money never turned up. Now Dom Rizzi is out of jail, mad at the world, and determined to get his share of the loot. He thinks it’s in his Aunt Rose’s house, or at least that a clue to finding the money is there. But Aunt Rose is dead, and who inherited her house? His rotten cousin Joe Morelli the cop, that’s who.

Worse yet, his nephew Zook (well, technically, his name’s Mario Rizzi, but what kind of name is that for a serious online gamer?) is living with Morelli because Zook’s mother Loretta is in jail and Morelli’s sometime girlfriend Stephanie Plum the bounty hunter promised Loretta that she’d make sure Zook had someplace to stay.

Are you confused yet? Just relax and enjoy the ride. Summarizing the plot of a Stephanie Plum story is worse than a waste of time; it’s a short route to head-spinning befuddlement. What we have here is fast-moving farce with cops and robbers and miscellaneous other offenders who didn’t get out of jail free. Instead they had to post bond, with a little help from Stephanie’s boss who advanced the money. And when they don’t show up for their court date, it’s Steph’s job to locate them and bring them back to the police. She’s not very good at it. But somehow, she gets by.

A word of warning for those who object to raunchy language: these are not the books for you. You won’t find really explicit scenes, but there are incidents like the elderly man Stephanie has to track down who doesn’t like to wear pants. So she ends up spreading newspaper on the back seat of her car and taking him to the cop shop bottomless. And Steph can’t make up her mind between Morelli (totally hot, probably husband-and-father material, but as bullheaded as she is) and Ranger (even hotter, dangerous, mysterious, absolutely not husband material, and inexplicably fond of her).

There’s a large cast of characters who have accumulated over the course of the series – each book has a numbered title – and many of the regulars show up in Fearless Fourteen. (Including Stephanie’s friend Lula the retired ho’, who has decided to get engaged to her boyfriend Tank, whether he knows it or not.) This one actually has a more coherent story than some of the Plum books, since there’s an ongoing theme of trying to find the other three bank robbers and the money, and rescue Zook’s mother Loretta (who gets kidnapped by the robbers), and keep Zook from spraypainting Morelli’s entire neighborhood…. But there are more than enough detours, one-shot self-contained scenes, plots that start out separate and get entangled in the robbery story, and general chaos to keep you from focusing on anything too hard.

Mystery and Suspense Challenge: An honest man in an evil world

Review: Graveyard Dust by Barbara Hambly

A keeper? Yes.

New Orleans, 1834. A fine city, if you’re rich, white, and ruthless. Otherwise, not so much.

Benjamin January is almost broke (being a musician doesn’t pay very well, especially in summer when all the rich people leave the city), very black, and compassionate. He has only a few things going for him: Freedom, as long as he can prove it (he carries several carefully hidden sets of papers documenting his status as a free man with him wherever he goes). A good education that qualified him as both a classical musician and a doctor, thanks to the man who bought January’s mother to be his mistress and freed her and her children. Several good friends (though how much can January trust the white ones, his colleague the consumptive violinist Hannibal Sefton or the “Kaintuck” (Kentuckian) policeman Shaw?). His family, especially his married sister Olympe and her husband.

Now Olympe has been arrested and charged with selling poison to kill young Isaak Jumon. There’s no body, but Isaak’s brother Antoine swears that he was taken on a long midnight carriage ride to a mysterious house where he was left with his dying brother for several hours, then taken home just as strangely. (But Antoine takes opium; how much of his story was a drugged dream?) Meanwhile, Isaak’s mother Genevieve – who, like January’s mother, was a “placee”, an ex-slave mistress of a rich white man – is trying to get control of the money Isaak inherited from his father by claiming that Isaak is her slave!

But January lives in a world full of greedy, unscrupulous people – Genevieve Jumon is far from the worst. There are rivalries between the old French upper class of the city and the newly arrived Americans. There are many humiliating laws and customs that “people of color”, slave and free, ignore at their peril. There’s a city government determined to insist that, no matter how many people die in the prison, no yellow fever and certainly no cholera has reached New Orleans. There are prostitutes of all ages. There are hired assassins – one is after January. There’s an uncounted number of voodoo practioners (including Olympe), headed by the notorious Marie Laveau, who winds up as one of January’s allies in finding out what happened to Isaak Jumon.

And there’s Isaak’s grandmother Cordelia, once a beauty of the French court before the Revolution, a truly evil woman noted for unusual cruelty to her slaves and her sons alike. But Cordelia is very old now; does she have enough strength left to be the killer in this case? Maybe not. Even so, if you read this story prepare to be genuinely shocked at the crimes of one of the characters; they go far beyond the usual greed and revenge motives of mystery stories.

And Benjamin January? An honest man doing his best to keep his head above water in a harsh world, an intelligent man trying to understand the people around him, a strong, brave, and determined man struggling to protect the people he loves, a man who can coax information out of people at almost every level of his society and keep his own thoughts to himself. If he can’t save Olympe from the hangman and the yellow fever that’s killing one prisoner after another, nobody can.

Bella Swan in the Heian Imperial Court?

Review: Of Death and Black Rivers by Ann Woodward

A keeper? No doubt!

I’m a sucker for all things Heian. And besides, this is a well-written little mystery.

But Bella Swan? Well, we start out with poor self-conscious Lady Saisho getting in trouble with the Empress yet again, because she’s too embarrassed to walk across the verandah and get into the waiting oxcart. Lady Saisho has a habit of inconveniencing all the other ladies in waiting while she spends long periods being exquisitely shy.

Her parents sent her to court so she could learn enough social skills to marry. But she’ll never find a husband behaving like this, now will she? Not in a court where ladies are expected to exchange flirtatious letters with gentlemen and even sometimes speak to them – even let their faces be seen, on occasion!

And yet, somehow she manages to run away with a dangerous, handsome, famous general who’s just back from winning a war in the north. Did she really leave the court of her own free will, or did he force her? How much danger is she in? Will he – metaphorically, of course – suck the life out of her?

Lady Aoi (our over-educated, not terribly ladylike detective) is concerned about silly Lady Saisho, even though she doesn’t much like her. But there are other things going wrong at court. The Empress has been persistently ill. Important officials are suddenly dropping dead for no clear reason – usually while out hunting with Lady Saisho’s general. And the poor but brilliant Teacher who once worked for Lady Aoi’s father (and worked for the General’s father before that, back when the General was a boy) has been found, murdered, in the burnt-out ruins of his home. All his books, ancient treasures and his own memoirs, are lost.

How could all these dramatic and dreadful things happen in a place like Heian-Kyo, the imperial city dedicated to arts, poetry, and flirtation? The answers will shake the entire court. (Though the people in this story don’t know it, they foreshadow what will happen in the whole country over the next few centuries.) It takes all the cleverness and courage Lady Aoi and her friends can find to restore matters to their normal calm.

And Lady Saisho? Well…does Bella Swan finally get what she wants, no matter who she has to hurt to reach her goals?

Weekly photo challenge: Through

This week’s Weekly Photo Challenge is Through. Here are two versions of “through”, taken in two very different places.

“Bridge of Sighs”, Venice

Chaco Canyon Ruins, New Mexico

Thousands of miles apart – but both are looking through darkness at light.

Spirits and mummies and fire, oh my

Review: The Summoning God, by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear

A keeper? No, even though it held my horrified attention

I’m starting to think I hate books that tell related stories in two different times. It’s one thing to have two sets of characters in different places; there’s room for them to cross paths or be affected by the same events or something. But stories with two groups in different centuries? Annoying.

In this one, the real story is set in the war-torn southwest U.S. – to be anachronistic – about 800 years ago. The extra story concerns a group of archaeologists who are excavating what turns out to be the town where the main characters live. And die. But why bother with the archaeologists?

A couple of guesses; that’s the best I can do. First, the Gears are archaeologists themselves – but they’ve written a lot of books about the last few thousand years in North America, and normally they settle for a short present-day prologue and then focus on the good stuff. Second, there is some argument about how to interpret Anasazi remains – Anasazi is the current term for the people this book is mostly about – and the Gears use the modern characters to tell us about the argument. And finally, the secondary group of people allows them to squeeze in a partial happy ending.

Because there isn’t much of a happy ending in the main story. The overall tone is oddly like noir detective fiction from the 1940’s: all the world is corrupt, no one can be trusted, the noblest plans may be thwarted, death waits around every corner. Unavoidable, I guess, when you’re writing about a time and place marked by a dramatic population crash. But the Gears bring it vividly to life with a town full of struggling, squabbling people and a series of increasingly gruesome questions.

Who left the mummified woman near Aspen Village – and who left a trail of copper bells to entice investigators into a trap? Who killed – and skinned – beloved Matron Flame Carrier? And who, who could or would have set fire to the kiva and burned so many young children? War Chief Browser is determined to find out. Meanwhile, shadowy threats menace the people of Longtail Village. Are they human enemies…or once-human witches…or murderous spirits?

I cared. I got involved in the story, worried for the characters, hoped that Browser would solve the mysteries in time to protect them. And by the end he does have answers to some of the strange things that have been happening. Unfortunately, he also has lots and lots of new questions that crop up in the last few chapters.

Normally, I try to avoid spoilers, at least unless I’m writing about a classic that most people probably know about already. And I’m not going to tell you who else dies, or who turns out to be a traitor. But the ending reminded me much too much of the X Files, or Lost – shows that spent years teasing viewers with the hope that they would finally clear up mysteries, all the while tossing out new puzzles.

After five hundred pages, I’ll put up with some loose ends. I won’t keep scrambling after an unraveled rope thick enough to moor a ship. The end of The Summoning God treats readers too much like the way the villains treated Browser early in the story, when they laid that trail of sparkling copper bells to lure him close enough to try to knock his head in. I won’t follow the shinies down the trail to the next book, and the next, and the next.

The elf did it?

Review: Sister to the Rain by Melisa Michaels

A keeper? Definitely.

Private investigator Rosie Lavine doesn’t trust elves. She’s spent too much time with them. So when the elf lord Finandiel tries to hire her to find out who or what is committing minor vandalism and making music in the midnight forests at the artist’s colony of Fey Valley, she figures he’s up to something underhanded. Rosie is ready to turn him down. And then Finandiel tells her his chief reason for concern, the reason that would make any elf take action (thanks to their own vanishingly low fertility): Whatever the Trouble may be, it’s scaring the children. Now, Rosie believes him.

Before Rosie knows it, she’s in the California hills, trying to find her way around the unworldly beauty of Fey Valley (kept that way by the tireless work of half-elf, half-human landscapers); trying to sort out the eccentric residents and work out who’s feuding with whom (and trying to interview residents whose homes are protected by keep-away spells); trying to decide whether anything in Fey Valley is really worth anybody’s concern at all.

Then an unlovable teenage boy runs his motorcycle off the road and is killed. Accident, say the local cops. Those motorcycles are dangerous. But then why was a wire – now broken – strung across the road just where the boy lost control?

There’s more. There’s an elven Romeo and Juliet who have deeply offended their queen – it’s not that they want to get married, it’s that they’ve had the repulsive bad taste to fall in love. There’s the real estate developer who wants to turn Fey Valley into a golf course. There’s an almost beautiful status of a nymph watering a heap of skulls. There’s the elf-hating woman who cooks all the meals for the entire colony. There’s the unknown who shoves Rosie down a steep slope over a creek and nearly beats Rosie’s partner to death.

On the whole, a very satisfying book. I wouldn’t have minded another fifty pages; I’ll see if Melisa Michaels has written any more stories in the same setting; I enjoyed Sister to the Rain thoroughly.