V is for Vampire

It’s September 1901, and the small village of Cleverley is gripped with panic. It started with children telling wildly improbable stories – a sinister face pressed against a window, a man appearing out of nowhere from a mysterious greenish fog, a sinister figure seen near a cemetery undoing the knots on a piece of string… But when a young girl narrowly escapes a vicious assault, the villagers gather at the cemetery and make a shocking discovery. One of the family crypts has been left wide open, and two of the coffins inside have been vandalized. The corpses inside have been impaled through the heart with a wooden stake… and although both have been dead for many years, one of the bodies looks like it has been dead for only a few weeks.

The two vandalized corpses are the two deceased wives of a Russian count, the subject of many a malicious rumour in the village. It is said that his wives, before their deaths, developed a taste for human blood, and one of them even was implicated in the death of a child. And wife number 3 is looking alarmingly pale lately… and has taken to wearing a scarf around her neck.

Never fear, for Owen Burns is nearby. He is investigating the death of a Catholic priest, whose last act was to hear a dying man’s Mysterious Last Confession. He makes a connection to an unsolved murder case which took place in a locked-room. Before long, a similar locked-room murder takes place, sending Owen Burns and his partner-in-crime, Achilles Stock, to Cleverley. There, they discover that the main suspect in the locked-room mystery is our friend the Russian count… an alleged vampire!

Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen...

It’s been a while since my last review, and I’m starting to get out of practice. I can’t quite figure out how to start today’s review of Chef Maurice and a Spot of Truffle (2015) by J. A. Lang. How to describe today’s book? Imagine, if you will, a culinary mystery. Make that a culinary mystery solved by an eccentric French chef named Maurice, a chef who is extremely fond of eating. Also, make this a mystery which revolves around the world of truffles and truffle-hunting. Finally, add a couple of chapters written from the perspective of a pet pig. “Oh, boy,” you might think, “Patrick’s finally gone insane. He’s seen one too many episodes of the BBC’s Father Brown, and he’s snapped and started to read cozy mysteries. Well, maybe we can at least finally get his recipe for coffee cake.” But you’d be wrong – the recipe is my mother’s, and it is not mine to give away. You’ll just have to settle for my opinion of the book.

I first heard of this book because of an enthusiastic review on In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel. The plot involves the disappearance of Chef Maurice’s mushroom supplier, Ollie Meadows. This is a major inconvenience for the temperamental chef. So he breaks into Ollie’s home to partake of his mushrooms, fully intending to pay of course. But he discovers that he hasn’t been the only one to break into Ollie’s home, and then he finds them: exquisite white Alba truffles… yet they have a distinct aroma of English woods to them! Could they possibly be local truffles? Chef Maurice decides that if Ollie was able to find the truffles, he can too, and thus he adopts a pig named Hamilton. They go truffle-hunting, but they turn up a corpse instead. And thus, the game is afoot, and Chef Maurice’s inaugural mystery is underway!

The Geometry of Murder

A group of people is stuck on an island, with no way off. Stuck on the island with them is a mad, cunning killer, determined to pick off the group members one by one. It’s a race against time, a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. No, I’m not talking about Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Rather, I’m talking about a recently-published translation of a Japanese detective story: The Decagon House Murders.

The titular Decagon House is, of course, shaped like a decagon, and the island upon which it sits was recently the site of a gruesome series of murders. Naturally, a university’s mystery club (modelled on such a club at Kyoto University) decides the island is a great place for a club excursion. Thus the members meet up, each of them known by a pseudonym taken from one of the great Western Golden Age writers: Agatha, Orczy, Van Dine, Leroux, Ellery, Carr, and Poe. It doesn’t take long for murder to occur, and as the body count rises, the list of suspects gets shorter and shorter…

Gone Baby Gone

Nick and Amy Dunne have been married for five years. On the day of their anniversary, Amy suddenly goes missing. Nick returns home to find evidence of a struggle, and immediately calls the police. Foul play is suspected, and before long, the media decides to publicly crucify Nick on the charge of murder, lack of a corpse notwithstanding. Is Nick truly a sociopath as the media declares, or is he simply handling the situation awkwardly, as best as he can?

This is the plot of the movie Gone Girl, based on the smash-hit novel by Gillian Flynn. Though the plot may seem rather conventional, the story is very cleverly structured, combining the main plot with excerpts from Amy’s diary. The picture the diary paints is one of a marriage which starts as a fairy-tale romance, but with financial troubles come hard times, and before long the relationship is strained almost to a breaking-point. Yet the story that Nick tells is a very different one. This forms something of a he-said-she-said plot which is easily one of the most interesting things about Gone Girl.

Strangers in the Night

The town of Mineral Springs, Nevada, is a 450-mile drive for the Nameless Detective. But when he got the call, he just couldn’t ignore it. An old flame of his, Cheryl Rosmond, is in trouble… or rather, her son Cody is in trouble. He’s been accused of a series of rapes, and the townspeople have decided he is guilty until proven innocent. As a result, the entire community has banded together against Cheryl, determined to make her life as miserable as possible, whether it be via nasty anonymous phone calls or through acts of vandalism. Desperate, Cheryl turned to Nameless, whom she hasn’t seen in a very, very long time. After consulting with his wife Kerry, he makes the drive to help an old friend…

Unfortunately, it seems the entire community is determined to make his investigation as difficult as possible. Although the local sheriff allows him to carry out an unofficial investigation, so long as he doesn’t push it too far, Nameless has no official standing in Nevada, a California’s PI license being completely useless here. With barely any internet access, all Nameless has are his wits, and he must put those to good use if he is to prove Cody’s innocence.

Visions

William Rigg has a problem and he doesn’t know exactly what to do about it. It has been nine years since his young cousins, Sylvain and Lisette, disappeared. Then he is advised to go to the Red Dragon, a bar in Soho, where he can consult Miss Ylang Li. Apparently, the young lady is a clairvoyant, and when William sits down, she goes through the usual motions of establishing contact… But her vision becomes very dark all of a sudden, and she describes the scene of a gruesome murder, with the corpses of the two young children being bricked up in a cellar!!!

William is shocked, naturally, and enlists the aid of his girlfriend Shirley to find the house described by the clairvoyant, and to find out whether there really are two corpses hidden there. They even manage to gain the approval of Inspector Briggs, a man who’s seen his fair share of the impossible. After all, he used to work with Inspector Archibald Hurst, a man who attracted locked-room murders and impossible crimes of all shapes and sizes. But will he be able to solve the mystery, or will Dr. Alan Twist have to step in to save the day?

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED???

It vexes me. I'm terribly vexed.

- Commodus, Gladiator (2000)

I really like the work of Steve Steinbock in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Having taken over “The Jury Box” column from Jon L. Breen, Steinbock writes very good columns in which he shrewdly judges mysteries by their merits and gives you a good idea of just what you can expect from them. One review in particular caught my eye in the March issue of EQMM – it was a three-star review of Mary Anna Evans’ Rituals.

The plot sounded like one I couldn’t miss: consulting archaeologist Faye Longchamp and her adopted daughter are working in the picturesque town of Rosebower, New York, a town known for its long and storied connection to the spiritualist movement. Rare is the citizen who does not claim some sort of psychic power, and two of them, a pair of elderly sisters, invite the Longchamps for a séance. It’s a bit of an unnerving session, and an hour or so after it wraps up, the medium (a lifelong agoraphobic) crashes her car by Faye’s hotel. Here’s the intriguing bit: the medium somehow managed to escape a locked room in her home when it caught on fire (an “accident” of course) and drive all the way to Faye’s hotel despite her agoraphobia, where she finally dies of smoke inhalation.

Murder Comes Up To Bat

Sometimes, you just want to sit back, relax, and take in the game. For Archie Goodwin and Saul Panzer, the sport of their choice is baseball. And so they venture out to the Polo Grounds to catch the Giants and the Dodgers battling it out. Of course, there’s a friendly bet on this game as with any other, and the winner will find himself being treated to an exquisite dinner at Rusterman’s Restaurant.

But this game isn’t quite like any other. There’s a notable guest in the stands, state senator Orson Milbank, who is at the Polo Grounds for Flag Day, enthusiastically supporting the American flag and getting some good publicity out of it. He needs all the publicity he can get, after losing many voters over some of his not-so-popular decisions. But apparently, he made one particularly bad enemy, because in the game’s fourth inning, the senator slumps over dead from a gunshot wound.

The Case of the Constant Suicides

It’s 1964. Beatlemania is sweeping the nation, and Chicago private eye Nate Heller is taking his son to see the group live onstage. Heller is working security for the group, and as a result, he even manages to give his son one kick-ass birthday present when he brings him to meet the group and they sign a napkin for him. All in all, it was a terrific evening, even if the Beatles’ screaming fans threatened to permanently damage Heller’s hearing.

But I suppose something worse could happen. For instance, a car might try to run Heller and his son down, and damn near succeed at ridding the world of the feisty P.I. once and for all. But Heller’s son is too quick for the driver, and succeeds at getting his dad out of harm’s way. But Nate Heller got a look at the driver, and he’s pretty sure he recognizes him. It’s somebody that he dealt with almost a year ago, a Cuban who was connected with the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy… in Chicago. The plot, described in detail in 2012’s Target Lancer, was ultimately foiled, but didn’t do much good: Kennedy met his death in Dallas a few weeks later, and the supposed assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed two days later by Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

Shanghai Noon

Brendan Lavin is an ex-con trying to make an honest living in New York City. It’s not an easy thing to do. His bakery is floundering, business is bad, and the bills are getting bigger and harder to pay. When his girl’s second cousin Tommy walks in with news of a job, Brendan initially wants nothing to do with it. But the rent is about to go up again, his supplier – of baking ingredients, that is – has cut him off, and he won’t be able to pay all his bills. Finally, he picks up the phone and gives Tommy a call and learns about the job.

It’s an armoured car heist, and it’s supposed to be as easy as taking candy from a baby. But it goes wrong; terribly, terribly wrong. Four people end up dead, and Brendan is torn up with guilt. When Maureen finds out about what he’s done, she leaves him. And so, Brendan takes his money and decides to start over again in Shanghai. But twelve years later, the past comes back with a vengeance when Brendan’s former colleagues find him, and they demand his help in another job…

No Man's Land

Inspector Celcius Daly was introduced to readers a year ago in Anthony Quinn’s debut novel Disappeared. I enjoyed the book tremendously, and in particular liked the character of Celcius Daly: a hard-working, honest Catholic cop in a Protestant land, trying his hardest to ensure that justice prevails in a world that seems dead-set against him. And so I have been eagerly looking forward to Celcius Daly’s return in Anthony Quinn’s Border Angels, in which Daly’s doggedness and honesty get him into serious trouble...

You see, it all revolves around Lena Novak, a Croatian woman who was forced into a prostitution ring by the ruthless Jozef Mikolajek. While on the job, she met a man named Jack Fowler who took pity on her. He decided to become her knight in shining armour and to rescue her from Mikolajek’s brothel. But a few weeks later, the fairy tale has taken a dark turn. Jack, responsible for some dirty tricks with money that doesn’t belong to him, is found floating in his swimming pool, quite dead. Suicide is possible, but Daly isn’t quite convinced. And Lena’s photograph is found by the body, but the girl herself is nowhere to be found…

Rough Justice

Living in 2013, when we think about World War II we can often forget about the smaller things. Of course the widespread Nazi atrocities are well-known, but it seems that many people assume that once Germany surrendered, the European war was over in one night. It’s not true, as J. Sydney Jones reminds us in his new book Ruin Value. Many Germans resented the Allied conquerors, and there were even some bands of Nazi holdouts. Jones sets his story in Nuremburg, shortly before the infamous Nuremburg trials began. The city itself lies in ruins, and it is about to become the stage for arguably the most important trial in the history of mankind.

That is, unless a mysterious serial killer gets his way… Because someone has been targeting Allied troops, slitting their throats and leaving cryptic coded messages behind. And if this killer gets his way, the murders will upstage the events at Nuremburg. Luckily the Allies have an ace in the hole: Captain Nathan Morgan, an ex-cop who went into intelligence during the war. Now he has to return to police work, and he’s paired with an unlikely partner: a German cop accused of collaborating with Nazi war criminals.

Nameless here for evermore

The latest Nameless Detective novel by Bill Pronzini picks up a few months after the events of Hellbox, last year’s instalment in the series. If you’ve read Hellbox, you’ll know that Nameless’ wife Kerry went through a traumatic ordeal that mirrored Nameless’ predicament in Shackles. The event has left Kerry traumatised, and Nameless is just as affected, waking up in the middle of the night from nightmares that bring his own ordeal back most vividly. As a result, Nameless has gone on a more permanent retirement from his detective agency, being involved as more of a consultant now.

This gives control of the agency to Tamara Corbin and Jake Runyon, Nameless’ partners. As the new novel, Nemesis, opens, Jake goes to the home of Verity Daniels. She’s a relatively young woman who recently inherited a fortune, but apparently someone has it in for her. This mysterious person has been calling her and making threating extortion demands. Jake agrees to take the case, but right off the bat something about Verity seems odd. She seems to be in some sort of trouble, and yet she’s oddly uncooperative and jeopardizes the whole operation. Jake begins to investigate Verity Daniels more thoroughly, and that’s about all I dare reveal about the book.

Year in Review: A Review of the New Books of 2012

A few weeks ago, I surprised myself with the thought that I had read quite a bit of new books this year. At the time, I quickly looked over the English ones and found that there were 15 of them, certainly a step up from last year, when I probably read less than five. Now that the time of lists is upon us, what better way to recap 2012 than by looking back at the new books I read in 2012? After all, you never know what might happen in retrospect. Some books get more and more memorable over time; others fade away from memory. You get to like some more than others once you’ve had some time to think it all over. Generally speaking, I found that most of my opinions were still along the same lines, but there were one or two surprises along the way.

So, what exactly constitutes a “new” book? For the purposes of this blog post, a new book is one that was published in 2012 and which I read in 2012. In addition, I decided to include translations, even if the original book was written years ago, as long as the English translation was published and read by me in 2012. I decided not to include novels that were brought back into print. And finally, I decided to include novels in other languages – which in this case boiled down to the two Paul Halter novels published in 2012. Well, there’s no time like the present, so let’s get started on a review of BOOKS PUBLISHED IN 2012 THAT I READ IN 2012.

A Fatal Winter by G M Malliet

Not a terrible book by any stretch, but Malliet has some atrocious luck when it comes to being read by me. I had just finished reading a novel by Belgian author S. A. Steeman, which used Malliet’s solution as just half of its solution. I was able to recognize this quite quickly and thus won the author-reader game very early on in the story. Although the mystery is decently constructed, it was almost ruined for me by a cheesy romantic element. I’m afraid I’m as immature as the child in The Princess Bride who suspiciously asks if grandfather Peter Falk is about to read him “a kissing book”. I don’t like romance. Well, I like it just fine in small doses, but I don’t like a romance to intermittently interrupt the mystery I’m reading, and then to spend an additional 40 minutes after the book’s story is over wrapping up that angle. But it’s okay, I suppose. I give it a grade of B-.