The Mysteries of a Gourmet
Oline H. Cogdill

 

gourmetdetective hallmark
Back in the late 1990s, Peter King wrote a series of amusing, well-plotted novels about the Gourmet Detective, whose British business revolved around seeking rare ingredients and finding markets interested in unusual foods and wines.

This profession made The Gourmet Detective—we never found out his real name—a different kind of sleuth and also offered a different window to the culinary mystery. The books' plots were engrossing and included bits of lore and history about myriad ingredients and regions.

King, a Cordon Bleu–trained chef, and a retired metallurgist, wrote eight novels in The Gourmet Detective series, as well as three historical mysteries starring Jack London.

So I was greatly pleased when Hallmark Movies & Mysteries added The Gourmet Detective to its lineup of made-for-TV mystery movies.

Death Al Dente: A Gourmet Detective Mystery premieres Sunday, October 9, at 9 p.m. ET/PT, on Hallmark. Encores are to be expected.

The first two Gourmet Detective movies were quite well done and Death Al Dente continues those high standards.The plot is solid, the chemistry between the leads read and there is just a soupcon of humor to add to the mix. Death Al Dente briskly moves during its two-hour story.

And The Gourmet Detective finally has a name—Henry Ross. His occupation also is different in the films. Now Henry is a former world-class chef who helps the San Francisco Police Department on crimes that involve food.

And this being San Francisco—a world-class foodie city—there are a lot of crimes that involve food. Without giving anything away, I so wanted that last shot in San Francisco's Chinatown to be of a real Chinese restaurant.

Death Al Dente again pairs up Henry, winningly played by Dylan Neal (Debbie Macomber’s Cedar Cove, Dawson’s Creek, Arrow) and San Francisco homicide detective Maggie Price, nicely played by Brooke Burns (The Chase).

This time the pair investigates the murder of Henry’s old friend, Leo, another well-known chef who was shot in his home kitchen. This shooting follows a recent break-in at his home. While Leo (Ben Wilkinson) survives the shooting, he later dies in the hospital. A family secret, a man who may be stalking Maggie, and the burgeoning relationship between Henry and Maggie play into the plot.

And of course, there are a good number of salivating food scenes as well as those that involve food discussions. After all, it takes a gourmet detective to pause during an interrogation to ask about a recipe. 

Death Al Dente: A Gourmet Detective Mystery premieres Sunday, October 9, at 9 p.m. ET/PT, on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries. Running time: two hours.
 

Photo: Brooke Burns, Dylan Neal in Death al Dente: A Gourmet Detective Mystery Photo courtesy Crown Media United States LLC/Photographer: Marcel Williams

Oline Cogdill
2016-10-08 20:36:39
Triple Crown
Craig Sisterson

If thriller writing were thoroughbred racing, you would have to say Felix Francis comes from exquisite bloodlines: his father Dick Francis is the only author to ever win three Edgars for Best Novel. While creative talent does not always pass so clearly from sire to colt, Felix has proven a champion storyteller in his own right.

Felix’s latest racing mystery sees the welcome return of Jeff Hinkley, investigator for the British Horseracing Authority. But this time readers, and Hinkley, get to explore a different racing scene, as he is seconded to the United States to ferret out a mole in the US Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency. A bust goes bad, a man’s left dead, and three favorites for the Kentucky Derby are scratched on the morning of the race due to a rare sickness. With plenty of suspicion swirling, and not knowing whom he can trust among the federal agents, Hinkley returns to his undercover roots as a groom at Belmont Park.

Triple Crown is an engaging thriller that bursts out of the gate and maintains a good pace throughout. Francis pulls back the curtain on American horse racing, giving readers a peek into what goes into getting a thoroughbred ready for the starting gate, as well as the stark differences between racing, and law enforcement, on either side of the Atlantic. There are occasional info dumps, but the writing is so smooth and the early hook set well enough that they add flavor rather than reining in the story.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 16:31:45
Fractured (Catherine McKenzie)
Vanessa Orr

When Julie, a bestselling author, her husband, and six-year-old twins move to Cincinnati in order to avoid a stalker, they think that it will be the start of a new, safer life. Instead, they find themselves becoming the target of harassment that does not end until someone is dead.

This book is an absolutely mesmerizing unveiling of the dark underbelly of what appear to be perfectly normal suburban lives. The story is written in alternating chapters from the points of view of Julie and her new neighbor John, who strike up a friendship and become jogging partners, though John’s intentions are not as friendly as they seem. The reader gets to see not only what happens on the surface of the neighborly relationship, but also what lies beneath.

The chapters flip between present and past, following the events from the first day that Julie’s family arrives through the tragedy and its aftermath when the families have to meet each other in court. It is an ingenious method for building suspense, and it had me flying through the pages to find out what happened earlier in Julie and John’s relationship to lead to such a deadly climax. An added touch—and one that added a little levity as well as absurdity—were missives spaced throughout the story from Cindy Sutton, Pine Street Neighborhood Association chair and founder, surreptitiously airing all of her neighbors’ dirty laundry.

For anyone who has ever wondered about what their neighbors really think about them, this story provides an unsettling view of what goes on behind closed doors—and why it is sometimes better to leave them unopened.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 16:42:20
Only the Hunted Run
Katrina Niidas Holm

At the start of Neely Tucker’s third Sully Carter novel, the Washington, DC newspaper reporter is chasing down an interviewee inside the US Capitol when a gunman opens fire. Sully, a former war correspondent with a bum leg and PTSD, wants nothing more than to flee the building and get to safety, but the journalist in him cannot resist a good scoop. So instead, he runs toward the chaos. While hidden in a bathroom, Sully overhears the shooter call 911, identify himself as Terry Waters, and tell the operator that he is sorry for all the casualties, but Oklahoma congressman Barry Edmonds had to die. Sully later finds Representative Edmonds’ bound and gagged corpse in the hallway, an ice pick driven through each eye.

Upon evading capture, Waters reads Sully’s front-page article about the incident and quickly becomes obsessed. Waters learns all he can about the reporter, calling him repeatedly and shooting up a neighborhood restaurant at which Sully is dining before finally being taken into custody. After his indictment, Waters is admitted to a local mental hospital for evaluation, and Sully heads west to Waters’ hometown, hoping to learn more about the making of this particular murderer.

It is at this point that the book starts to shine. Tucker pushes in the camera, transitioning from large-scale thriller to small-town mystery, and forces Sully and the reader to focus their attention on the tragedy behind the tragedy: who Waters is, what shaped him as a person, and what motivated him to commit such an unspeakable act. As Sully becomes more invested in his research, so, too, does the reader, grounding the story and giving it a much-needed dose of heart and humanity.

The pace occasionally sags under the weight of our hero’s too-frequent introspection, but for the most part, Tucker manages to entertain while he educates, pulling back the curtain on a major metropolitan newsroom, exploring the role of the media during a tragedy, and examining the hard choice between justice and journalism.

Tucker’s prose is artful, painting a vivid picture of Waters’ carnage and effectively conveying the terror of being trapped inside a building with an active shooter. And while the cast is stocked with clichés (hard-bitten, Ducati-driving, bourbon-soaked Sully chief among them), Tucker’s setup is compelling, his mystery is solid, and some clever plot twists pave the way for a tense, action-packed conclusion.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 16:45:26
Jimmy and Fay
Joseph Scarpato, Jr.

I nearly went ape when I realized that the Fay in Jimmy and Fay was Fay Wray of King Kong fame. I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised, since these Michael Mayo novels take place in New York City in the early 1930s. In this case, the year is 1933, just before King Kong is to premiere. Jimmy Quinn, a small but tough speakeasy owner and friend of gangsters and lawmen alike, is approached by Miss Wray to help deal with a strange threat.

Apparently, some blackmailers have got hold of a blue movie that shows a Fay Wray lookalike doing the nasty with a man in a gorilla costume. Both the star and the studio want this to go away before the movie debuts and ask Jimmy to act as the middleman to make the payoff. Because FDR has just been elected and proposes to end Prohibition—and effectively put Jimmy out of business—Jimmy agrees to take on the assignment for a percentage of the payoff.

Thus begins a fast-talking, fast-moving mystery involving dolls, molls, and brawls, with Jimmy, his brass knuckles, and his trusty .38 following a trail of clues that take him far beyond Wray’s blackmail and into the realm of murder—and maybe even worse, all while trying to figure out why his girlfriend is suddenly giving him the cold shoulder.

Jimmy and Fay is a portrayal of the era, peopled with actual characters of the time—mostly criminals and politicians—who come to life in pages that harken back to old Jimmy Cagney movies. In the acknowledgements section of the book, author Mayo discusses an interview he had with Miss Wray as being the catalyst for this story, saying, “She was one of the most charming women I ever met and, like Jimmy, I fell a little bit in love with her.”

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 16:50:37
There Was a Crooked Man
Eileen Brady

Who wouldn’t get a kick out of Chicago PI Cat DeLuca, founder of the Pants on Fire Detective Agency? Her specialty: catching lying, cheating husbands. There Was a Crooked Man is the fifth book in this series from authors and sisters Kari, Julianne, and Kristen Larsen, who write under the pen name K.J. Larsen. Poor Cat not only has cases to solve, but she also has to deal with her meddling sister, cousins, mother, and uncles in a very extended and outspoken Italian-American family.

This time around, her father’s old partner in the police department, Captain Bob Maxfield, is the victim. The case is dognapping, a crime a little out of Cat’s expertise that soon morphs into something much more complicated that ultimately involves Cat’s father, Tony DeLuca, and a case from his past. Along the way, readers are treated to Larsen’s stockpile of characters, including Cat’s “Barbie Doll Baby Factory” sister Sophia, who is bored with her stay-at-home-mom job, their uncle Joey, a Chi-town cop who drives a red Ferrari, and her bossy Mama, who is determined to marry her daughter off if Cat’s FBI agent boyfriend Chance Savino doesn’t propose soon. All lead to an unsolved armed robbery, a hit-and-run accident, and a killer ultimately caught. Another fun read from the Larsen ladies.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 16:54:21
An Obvious Fact
Oline H. Cogdill

Craig Johnson’s novels about Absaroka County, Wyoming, featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire, deliver an unexpected view of the contemporary West, showing how diverse and vast the environs can be.

Motorcycle rallies and motorcycle gangs may not come to mind as being a part of the West for those of us who don’t live there, but the largest motorcycle rally in the US is held annually in Sturgis, South Dakota, with part of the festivities continuing in Hulett, Wyoming. The rallies attract more than a million bikers annually, and make an intriguing backdrop for the rip-roaring, action-packed An Obvious Fact.

Accompanied by his longtime friend, the Arthur Conan Doyle–quoting Henry Standing Bear, Walt comes to Hulett to look into what caused 22-year-old Bodaway Torres to crash his motorcycle. Walt believes that Bodaway, now in a coma in nearby Rapid City, South Dakota, was purposely run off the road. The young man was a member of the Tre Tre Nomads, a biker gang under investigation for drug and gun smuggling by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Soon enough Walt, Henry, and undersheriff Victoria Moretti find themselves maneuvering a labyrinthine event full of drunken bikers, rival gangs, and undercover ATF agents in search of answers. But what Henry finds first is Lola. The Lola. The woman after whom he named his 1959 Thunderbird. Lola has always been a mystery to Walt, and readers, because Henry has never talked about her through the years. Judging by the slap and the appearance of a gun that mark Henry and Lola’s reunion, the two did not part on good terms.

A Walt Longmire novel is like going on a ride-along with an old friend, watching him ferret out the bad guys with wit and humanity (and more than a few bullets), while we swap stories and catch up on old times. Johnson’s 12th novel brings new insights into his characters, especially Henry. As for the manipulative, spiteful Lola Wojciechowski, readers will wonder what possessed Henry to name his car after her. Henry probably does too.

As usual, Johnson imbues his novels with a strong sense of the Southwest. Hulett, Wyoming, is in the shadow of Devils Tower, the United States’ first national monument. Johnson gives its storied history, including its Native American lore.

Walt has become an iconic character in crime fiction not only because of Johnson’s well-plotted novels but also because of Longmire, the TV series based on the novels. Whether you are catching up with the sheriff on the page or on the screen, it’s An Obvious Fact—it’s good to have Walt back on the scene.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 17:24:57
The Little Parachute
Robin Agnew

Set in 1943, France, J. Robert Jane’s brutal novel The Little Parachute tells the story of a mother and son who travel from the countryside to Paris in search of a doctor to help the boy, who has lost his power of speech. In German-occupied France, no part of this journey is an easy one. As Angelique and ten-year-old Martin sit through questioning in the offices of the SS, they can hear the sounds of torture from somewhere else in the building. Will they be next or will they be spared?

It is a question that sets the tone of the novel, in which nothing and no one are what they seem. The desperation of war makes for very strange partnerships, as well as unexpected enemies at a time when anyone will do most anything not to be killed and tortured themselves. Every interaction is fraught with tension and mistrust.

The story is not really a mystery, but a search for a missing person. It emerges quickly that Martin is not actually Angelique’s son, but the son of a man with whom both shared a flat with before the war. While the two appear to have loved Martin’s missing father very much, it is not so clear how they feel about each other. What is clear is that something very traumatic has separated them from Martin’s father.

J. Robert Janes adeptly sets a mood, setting, and relationship between Martin and Angelique as they try and puzzle through what has happened to Martin’s father. Is he in Britain? Is he dead? Is he working for the resistance? All these options are explored as the two endure the casual brutality of the Germans, waterboarding, sexual assault, and more.

There is little hope and no sustenance for any of the characters beyond Angelique’s crazy love for Martin, who does not always return it. It seems unfair of the boy until you flip it around: he’s an orphaned, traumatized child. This is a depiction of France during wartime that makes you live it through the pages, down to the casual, fragmented relationships that exist during a crisis. It doesn’t give the reader a main character to love, but it does leave you, after finishing the last page, with a sense that you were there. As WWII moves further into the past, this is a worthwhile achievement.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 17:35:26
Curious Minds
Sharon Magee

Riley Moon has degrees from Harvard Business and Harvard Law. She’s two weeks into her dream job as a junior analyst at megabank Blane-Grunwald when she is picked to be the liaison between the bank and its uber-rich, eccentric client Emerson Knight, also known as Mr. Mysterioso. When she arrives at Mysterioso Mansion she finds it overrun with exotic animals and Emerson camped out in the library, literally, tent and all. All he wants, Emerson tells Riley, is to see his gold that is supposedly housed in Blane-Grunwald’s vault. The refusal to grant his request leads Emerson to come up with the conspiracy theory that his gold—in fact, the world’s gold—is systematically being stolen. In addition, Gunther Grunwald, the youngest of the four Grunwald brothers, is missing, and Emerson is determined to find him. He convinces a very reluctant Riley to help him investigate both the missing gold and the missing man, and so begins a road trip in a vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow (and later a rusted-out RV) that takes them from Washington, DC, to the Federal Reserve in New York, to Las Vegas, and finally to Area 51 in Nevada.

Janet Evanovich, author of the hugely popular Stephanie Plum series, has launched the Knight and Moon series along with Phoef Sutton, an Emmy Award-winning writer on such shows as Cheers, Newhart, and Boston Legal. While a fun read, the quirky characters are a bit over the top—Emerson, for instance, is supposed to be eccentrically charming, but comes across as creepy—and the humor feels a little forced. Stephanie Plum can rest easy; it is doubtful she will be upstaged by this newcomer.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 17:39:44
The Babe Ruth Deception
Ben Boulden

The Babe Ruth Deception is David O. Stewart’s third historical mystery featuring unlikely friends Jamie Fraser, a medical doctor working at the Rockefeller Institute in New York City, and Speed Cook, the black owner of the Negro League baseball team the Atlantic City Bacharach Giants.

It is the summer of 1920 and baseball has been tainted by the 1919 World Series scandal in which notorious gambler Arnold Rothstein paid eight Chicago White Sox players to fix the series. The new baseball commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, is on a mission to clean up the league’s reputation, and new Yankees player Babe Ruth is fearful that Landis’ investigation will uncover a large debt he owes Rothstein.

Speed Cook hires The Babe to play several off-season exhibition games, while, coincidentally Fraser’s wife Eliza, a producer, also hires Babe Ruth to star in her silent film. Soon Speed and Fraser are enlisted to help recover Babe’s note, but Babe is less than forthcoming about the debt—what he owes, why it is owed—which makes Speed’s and Fraser’s attempts at recovery difficult. Add to that a serious romantic affair between Speed’s bootlegging son and Fraser’s daughter, who was crippled in the bombing of Wall Street, and it makes for a terrific read.

The Babe Ruth Deception is an alluring low-wattage historical mystery, but the mystery is far from the story’s most appealing element. The New York City setting is nicely rendered and the social issues of the day are highlighted by the interracial affair between the protagonists’ children, the bombing of Wall Street by an anti-capitalist group, and the corrosive relationship between high-stakes gambling and baseball. Then there is The Babe, a larger-than-life character made vivid and real. This one is a baseball fan’s dream.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 17:43:49
Black Hills
Kevin Burton Smith

Is Whitehurst, South Dakota, the new Poisonville?

Certainly, the rough-and-tumble fracking boomtown that serves as the toxic center of this bracing debut by the siblings Franklin and Jennifer Schneider recalls the setting of Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett’s classic novel-length debut.

But the Schneiders have a few other tricks. Readers who have fallen all over themselves looking for the next Girl (after With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone, On the Train, etc.) will find much to love in Alice Riley, a jaded Brooklyn private investigator. She’s yet another flawed protagonist and questionable narrator, running on bad luck, bad lies, and bad choices, be they sexual, pharmaceutical, professional, or moral. Bitter, abrasive, and autonomous to the point of obnoxiousness (“I don’t kneel for anyone.”), she can’t quite shake her past as a disgraced journalist. She is guilted into journeying to Whitehurst on behalf of her former boss, to clear her geologist husband who’s been charged with beating up a young prostitute.

But Alice isn’t one to depend on the kindness of strangers. Which is probably just as well, since most of Whitehurst’s citizens (surly oil workers, drug dealers, whores, pimps, crooked cops, and the like) are rarely kind. Nor does it help that half the town seems to be running on dust, a local meth variant. Even Kim Holywhitemountain, the tiny, mouthy Native-American hooker she hires to assist in her investigation, or the local pig of a sheriff, to whom Alice is perversely attracted, can’t be trusted.

With drugs, greed, and corruption running rampant, the violent, polluted, and earthquake-prone boomtown is a great variant on The Great Wrong Place. Alice, however, is no Continental Op.

Nonetheless, her descent into hell is a bleak, harsh tale well worth investigating. Occasionally frank, if not sexually explicit, and rendered politically subversive simply by mentioning fracking and its high social and environmental costs, Black Hills is a rough-edged debut that may occasionally stumble, but its sheer bravado suggests we’ll be hearing plenty more from these two writers.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 20:11:02
Strange Things Done
Sharon Magee

It is freeze-up time in the Yukon when Jo Silver arrives at the last refuge of the desperate, also known as Dawson City. The town shrinks from 60,000 residents to around 1,000 in the winter. Leave by freeze-up, or you won’t leave until the spring thaw. Jo has accepted a job as editor of the Dawson Daily and is glad to escape Vancouver and her former job as a crime reporter, which she left under a mantle of shame for an editorial decision that resulted in a woman’s death.

One week into her new life as a Dawson City citizen, Jo finds herself being wakened by Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Johnny Cariboo after her raucous night at the local watering hole, Diamond Tooth Gerties. Cariboo wants to know about her activities of the night before. Jo realizes she remembers nothing after she climbed into the truck of Christopher Byrne (handsome, sexy Byrne, who spouts Thoreau, deals cards, and carves beautiful objects from wood). Seems Marla McAdams, an activist, councilwoman, and ex-girlfriend to Byrne, was found drowned in the Yukon River and Jo is a suspect. Jo decides to investigate and finds that not all is as it seems in Dawson City. As more people connected to McAdams disappear, Jo realizes her own life may be in danger, and as winter closes in, there’s no way out of town.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 20:19:35
Smoke and Mirrors
Ben Boulden

Two inseparable friends, Annie Francis and Mark Webster, 13 and 12 years old respectively, go missing just before a freak November storm covers the seaside English town of Brighton in a layer of deep snow. Some speculate the two ran away together, but Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens thinks otherwise. The children’s bodies are discovered a few days later in a ditch next to a popular walking area, a trail of candy leading to their resting place.

The year is 1951 and master magician Max Mephisto is performing in a pantomime of Aladdin in Brighton’s Palace Pier Theatre. The inspector enlists Max, who served in WWII with him, to help with the investigation. Max warns Edgar that though Annie wrote plays based on Grimm’s fairy tales and, with Mark’s help, staged them in the garage of a retired widower they called Uncle Brian, the candy trail is likely misdirection used by the killer to sidetrack the police’s inquiry. Then another of Aladdin’s cast members recalls an eerily similar murder of a child pantomime actress in the nearby town of Hastings in 1912.

Smoke and Mirrors is the second Magic Men Mystery written by Elly Griffiths. The series is named for a fictional MI5 group comprised of magicians, Max and a few others, and tasked with confusing the enemy with stagecraft during WWII. Smoke and Mirrors is a study in misdirection. The suspect list is long, and more than one of the suspects is convincing as the killer. The characters are nicely rendered, especially Max and Edgar, and the pacing is expertly achieved with an unhurried, but interesting plotline.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 20:30:21
A Most Novel Revenge
Robin Agnew

Ashley Weaver’s light and pleasant series is set in 1933 Britain, not all that carefree of a time, but at least one war was over and the next not yet begun, leaving some room for Ms. Weaver’s romps through the country houses and mansions of England.

Socialite Amory Ames and her dashing husband Milo (despite Milo’s vote for a villa in Italy) are off to a weekend in a country house in Lyonsgate, at the request of a friend and cousin, Laurel. Lyonsgate, abandoned for several years, has been re-populated by its owners, brother and sister Reggie and Beatrice, and their much younger sister Lucinda. All have come together to re-create a deadly weekend of a few years back when one of their hard-partying set was found dead in the snow. One of their number, a Miss Isobel Van Allen, has made hay out of the situation by writing a thinly veiled novel about the incident, implicating another guest who went on to commit suicide.

The gathering feels constrained and uncomfortable, and while the mood of the novel could be dour, it maintains a lighter tone and spirit in true Golden Age fashion, complete with a gathering of suspects at the denouement. It is pretty obvious the unpleasant and unpopular Isobel Van Allen is going to be murdered, and once she is, the fun really begins. What is not Golden Age is the fact that the characters in A Most Novel Revenge are emotionally affected by the crimes they encounter. Amory is undone by finding the body of Isobel, and there is a lingering sense of fragility that accompanies her throughout, despite Milo’s rapt attention and care.

I did not guess the ending, and while the first novel in this series, Murder at the Brightwell, was more than half a romance novel, this one is all mystery with a few romantic dalliances. I think this series could go far, considering the limitless number of country houses in England where Amory and Milo could spend a weekend—to say nothing of villas in Italy!

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 20:36:54
British Manor Murder
Eileen Brady

In British Manor Murder, by veteran writer Leslie Meier, popular series character Lucy Stone is catapulted from her cozy home in Tinker’s Cove, Maine, to Moreton Manor, the country mansion of the Earl of Wickham, near Oxford, England. Her clotheshorse friend, Sue French, has an invitation from Earl Perry to contribute her hats to an upcoming millinery show and thinks the trip is just the thing to cheer up Lucy, who has been down in the dumps since her adorable grandson and his parents departed for Alaska.

Most of Lucy’s ideas about Great Britain come from watching Downton Abbey, so the modern-day realities of Perry and his sister Poppy running the 120-room estate is an eye-opener. The earl has resorted to opening his home to hoards of tourists in order to maintain it, no throng of servants wait hand or foot on the residents, and meals are often...sandwiches. This cozy gets off to a slow start, but once a dead body or two appear in the castle, the fun begins. Lady Millicent, the earl’s eccentric aunt, cannot believe common folk are rude enough to die on her nephew’s property. And is Poppy’s liquor-swigging husband having an affair? And what are the mysterious items hidden under the jacket of Lady Millicent’s maidservant, the unpleasant Harrison? The lively, far-reaching plot in this 25th in the series will keep readers guessing right up to the end.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 20:43:27
Death of an Avid Reader
Ben Boulden

Death of an Avid Reader is Frances Brody’s sixth mystery featuring private detective Kate Shackleton. Kate inhabits England in the mid-1920s city of Leeds, where she and her partner Jim Sykes operate a detective agency. Kate’s new case beckons her to London with a letter and a check for a considerable amount to help Lady Jane Coulton find the illegitimate daughter Sophia she gave away 24 years ago.

The case takes Kate back to Leeds where she is also drawn into a murder investigation. There is a rumor of a haunting at the local lending library, and on the evening of a planned exorcism, Dr. Potter, a popular mathematician and member of the library’s board, is found dead in the library’s basement. Umberto, a sickly street performer found sheltering in the library’s basement with a small purse of gold coins in his possession, is the constabulary’s primary suspect for the murder. It is an assumption Kate disagrees with, and as clues begin to unravel, Kate discovers both the murder and her search for Sophia are connected, but in unexpected ways.

Death of an Avid Reader is a traditional British cozy. Its 1920s English setting is richly rendered, and its characterization perfectly matches both the era and the story. Imagine sleek convertibles, cloche hats, and chiffon dresses. The mystery is entertaining, if somewhat predictable, but the setting and Kate’s strong-willed and likable temperament more than compensate.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 20:47:27
Survivors Will Be Shot Again
Ben Boulden

Dan Rhodes, sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas, is enjoying a rare day off admiring the Dr Peppers—a drink he loves, but a drink he has been boycotting since the company quit using real sugar—in the cooler of the local Pak-a-Sak convenience store. His thoughts and temptations are interrupted by an armed robber at the front of the store, whom Sheriff Rhodes stops cold with a gambit involving a loaf of bread, a little muscle, and a bunch of grit.

His day “off” gets worse when a burglary is reported at the B-Bar-B ranch in an especially rural part of the county. There have been several burglaries in the area over the past few months and the ranch has been hit more than once. When Sheriff Rhodes arrives to investigate, the owner, Billy Bacon, seems nervous and is hesitant to enter the barn. Dan isn’t suspicious of Billy’s behavior until he finds a dead man, Melvin Hunt, inside.

Survivors Will Be Shot Again is the 23rd outing for the likable and charming lawman Dan Rhodes. It is a perfectly executed traditional mystery that includes a large list of suspects, well-placed clues, and a genuinely surprising and satisfying solution. And the mystery is only made better by its rural Texas setting, cast of eccentric but relatable characters, and Sheriff Dan Rhodes’ sly wit. If you have not discovered Bill Crider or his Sheriff Rhodes novels, this is great place to start, and for longtime fans, it is welcome chance to get their shot, again.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 20:51:07
Face Blind
Oline H. Cogdill

Imagine not being able to recognize people by their faces. The official term is prosopagnosia, a neurological disorder that prevents one from remembering a face—even your own. Gabe Traylin, the hero of Lance Hawvermale’s fifth novel, Face Blind, has been living with this syndrome for years, relying on voices, clothing, mannerisms, or other telltale signals to compensate for his disorder.

Because he is face blind, Gabe is quite happy working as an astronomer at a research outpost in the Chilean Atacama Desert, as far away from civilization as possible. It’s an area where no rain has fallen in more than 400 years and “the complete and bleak denial of life” in this “empty skull of earth” suits him just fine. But his life takes a turn when he witnesses a murder.

Although he saw the killer, he is near useless as a witness—unable to give the police a description of the murderer or convince them of the reason why he can’t. So it’s a natural progression when he becomes the main suspect, especially when similar murders occur. Gabe isn’t used to trusting anyone, but he finds himself drawn to Mira Westbrook, a woman who has traveled to Chile with her dyslexic twin brother, Luke, to find a reclusive science-fiction author.

Hawvermale delivers a gripping, well-plotted novel with Face Blind. He doesn’t use the disorder as a gimmick, but makes it a believable part of the mystery, allowing the reclusive Gabe to naturally become involved in the investigation. Hawvermale, whose previous novels have been standalones, could develop Face Blind into a formidable series.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 21:01:36
Presumption of Guilt
Matthew Fowler

When a Brattleboro, Vermont nuclear power plant is shut down and a skeleton is exhumed from the concrete on which it was built, the case is sent to Joe Gunther and his team at the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. What friends and family of the unearthed victim long ago assumed was a case of a man walking out on his family, quickly reveals itself to be a four-decades-old murder. Such is the set up for Presumption of Guilt, the latest in Archer Mayor’s Joe Gunther series.

Mayor, adept at the detective procedural, pushes through his early set up with gusto. Just as soon as Gunther’s interview with the wife of the deceased is finished, the reader is thrown into what it takes to find the person who committed the crime. Pages and pages of effective interrogations compensate for a lack of personality in Joe Gunther’s squad. The plotting remains exciting, even as the author introduces a major twist involving money laundering and the mafia. Line by line, there is nothing groundbreaking about Presumption of Guilt, but taken as a whole, readers will find the easy entertainment one expects when picking up a Gunther book.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-11 21:07:34
Death in Cold Water
Joseph Scarpato, Jr.

When one of the most well-known philanthropists in the Green Bay area is reported missing by his son, Sheriff Dave Cubiak is sent in to investigate. Before long, a ransom note is received, along with a disturbing video of the philanthropist bound and blindfolded with spiders walking across his face. The FBI joins the case to investigate a potential terrorist connection and Special Agent Quigley Moore and his assistant agent, Gwen Harrison, are typical, by-the-book FBI types—the opposite of the rough-hewn sheriff—and the relationship creates friction beyond who will lead the investigation.

Complicating the issue are several human bones found washed up on the Lake Michigan shore not far from a former boy’s camp that was one of the first philanthropic endeavors set up by the missing man. After autopsy, they are identified as the remains of a young boy, dead ten years or more. When additional bones are found, and a former director of the camp goes missing, Sheriff Cubiak senses a possible connection to the kidnapping.

One of the key scenes in the novel is a wonderfully realistic description of a dangerous and challenging scuba diving expedition search in the lake. While I am not a boating or diving enthusiast, I could picture myself in the scene as the dangers mounted. I also enjoyed the on-again, off-again relationship between the sheriff and his girlfriend, a photographer whose camerawork documents the findings during the dangerous bone collection expedition.

This is a fast-paced story highlighted by the differences in temperament and style between the local law enforcement officer and the federal agents, and the different approaches they take via the investigation and the handling of the media to come to a final, satisfying conclusion.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-12 16:05:44
Stripped Bare
Vanessa Orr

Cattle rancher Kate Fox loves living with her husband, Ted, and her orphaned niece, Carly, in the Nebraska Sandhills. But her world is upended when a neighboring rancher is killed and her husband is shot, possibly paralyzed, and accused of the rancher’s murder. And then her niece disappears.

Two factors elevate this murder mystery and add to its unique appeal: winning characters and a stunning setting. Shannon Baker populates Stripped Bare with a myriad of eclectic characters who add a good bit of humor to the story, such as Kate’s artistic and possibly manic mother, her stoic father, and her eight protective siblings, as well as a mother-in-law who hates her, and her husband’s lover, Roxy, who is his alibi for the time of the murder.

The austere setting of the Nebraska Sandhills is the perfect backdrop to the crime, as cattle ranchers and developers battle over who has a right to the murdered man’s land. Desolate and lonely, it echoes Kate’s isolation as she tries to not only find a murderer, but to find a reason why her life has been so callously torn apart.

Kate is a strong protagonist, and her no-nonsense attitude and sense of humor keep the story fairly light—some of the best passages in the book are those that team her with Roxy, who is also trying to prove Ted’s innocence, and who is largely clueless as to why Kate could possibly hate her when they both want the same thing—her man. At times, it is astonishing that another murder doesn’t occur.

The ending is gratifying, though it does not tie everything up as neatly as one might expect. It leaves room for Kate to take on another challenge, and I’m looking forward to watching her wrangle whatever comes next.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-12 16:12:04
Daisy in Chains
Lucie Smoker

Handsome convicted serial killer Dr. Hamish Wolf has a fetish for full-figured women, yet never responds to his fan mail from the hundreds who write him in prison. Instead, he pours out his soul to an unnamed lost love or to the famously slender defense attorney and author Maggie Rose. She has a track record of overturning convictions, but has steadfastly refused Hamish’s case. But when Hamish offers to give up some information if the famous attorney will visit him just one time, Detective Pete Weston implores Maggie Rose to consider the families of the victims—the new information Hamish promises could help them heal.

After the visit, Detective Pete catches Maggie researching Hamish’s case. It seems she is seriously entertaining taking the killer on as a client, and could even be falling for his charms. To dissuade her, Detective Pete tells her about the woman they suspect was his first victim, Hamish’s unknowing costar in a college sex tape called Daisy in Chains. The full-figured “Daisy” disappeared shortly after Hamish sold the video to a fetish tape distribution company.

Fat shaming plays an active role throughout this tale. In Hamish’s letters, Maggie Rose’s case notes, newspaper clippings, and a tight third-person narrative, author Sharon Bolton brings out the lonely desperation of a true killer called shame. All the while Detective Pete searches for victims in deep, meandering caves, and Maggie Rose clears one murder charge after another. To keep Hamish in prison, Detective Pete focuses on finding his first victim, Daisy—and nails this case with a highly satisfying end.

Teri Duerr
2016-10-12 16:16:08
Aurora Teagarden Back on TV
Oline H. Cogdill

 

aurorateagarden julius
Readers—and viewers—get a double dose of Aurora Teagarden this month.

After a 13-year hiatus, author Charlaine Harris brought back the Lawrenceton librarian in All the Little Liars, the ninth novel in that series. The novel was released earlier this month.

And now, Aurora makes a return to the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries Channel with The Julius House: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery. The made-for-TV movie airs at 9 p.m., October 16, on the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries Channel.

Fans of the Aurora series will again be pleased by the film version, judging from the advance screener I watched last week.

Candace Cameron Bure is the perfect Aurora Teagarden, capturing the librarian’s spirit and intelligence. Bure is energetic, but not annoyingly perky, and that works well in the film version of this beloved character.

The Julius House, based on Harris’ fourth Aurora Teagarden novel, released in 1995.

aurorateagarden julius2
In The Julius House, Aurora finally finds a house, which, of course, comes with a dark past. Years before, the family who lived there disappeared in the middle of the night without a trace.

Being the true crime buff—and the leader of the Real Murders Club that studies true crimes, Aurora is intrigued. The case has never been solved though the family’s nearest living relative remains hopeful they will return.

A teenage couple, a controlling father, a diary entry and hidden closets add to the intrigue. The discovery of bloody towels in a walled off room further Aurora’s determination to find out what happened to the family.

In addition to Bure, Marilu Henner stars as Aurora’s mother, Aida, and Yannick Bisson as Martin Bartell, Aurora’s love interest. Each is believable in their roles.

Aurora’s smooth transition to film is due to Harris’ skills as a writer.

Unlike too many amateur sleuth characters, Aurora’s involvement in solving crimes is organic and realistic. Aurora also doesn’t play the role of a cop but a believable character whose intelligence gives her a unique insight.

The film moves the setting from Georgia to the Pacific Northwest. The Washington State scenery works well, retaining the small-town feel.

Astute viewers will notice Charlaine Harris, and her “guest,” making a cameo early in The Julius House. The author’s performance is spot on!

It’s good to have Aurora back—both in print and on film. Here’s hoping each of the Aurora novels makes it to the screen.

The Julius House: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery airs at 9 p.m. Oct 16 on the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries Channel. Encores will follow.

Photos: Candace Cameron Bure, Yannick Bisson, top;  Candace Cameron Bure alone, bottom. Credit: Copyright 2016 Crown Media United States LLC/Photographer: David Dolsen

Oline Cogdill
2016-10-15 14:40:59
Riders on the Storm: Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain Novels

gorman ed 2010A small-town hero with a big heart, Sam McCain is living through tumultuous times in Ed Gormans distinguished series of novels set in America’s Midwest from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.

Sam McCain—the fictional private investigator/ lawyer in Black River Falls, Iowa (population 26,760, “four and a half hours away from Chicago”), whose realistic and engaging life and career are being chronicled by Iowa author Ed Gorman in an ongoing series of novels spanning (so far) from the late 1950s through the early 1970s—is not your father’s predictable, toughtalking, hard-living private eye.

Diminutive in stature (he’s 5’5”), still baby-faced at 23, Sam’s standard attire is a white button-down shirt, chinos, and desert boots. He drives a ’51 red Ford convertible with a woven-cloth ragtop, smokes Lucky cigarettes, drinks Falstaff beer, and jots down case info in Captain Video notebooks bought at a discount. His office is a single room on the side of the local dime-store. The “youngest and poorest” attorney in town (“My clients were mostly one step above public defender level”), Sam needs private eye work to pay the rent; and his main client is Judge Esme Anne Whitney, a Katharine Hepburn act-alike who yearns for the vanished days when her ancestors ruled the town; Her Honor has a running feud with the current civic powers that be (including the boorish, bullying chief of police), and also takes childish delight in shooting McCain with rubberbands from a dozen paces.

gorman wakeuplittlesusieSam is a college grad, literate (he drops authors’ names from Baudelaire to Sinclair Lewis without missing a comma), competent, and may have a brighter future. But in the meantime, he lingers in Black River Falls (“For all its flaws, I love the place,” he insists), trying to emulate the actor Robert Ryan (“I really like that crazed Irish intensity of his”), carrying a torch for his gradeschool sweetheart Pamela (who carries a torch for someone else), and daydreaming: “I wished I could paint. Or be a serious pianist. … Or be a great novelist. … Or figure out a way to get Pamela to marry me.”

Readers who like to consume series books in chronological order have the unusual option with the McCain novels of starting with the saga’s first-published book The Day the Music Died (1999), which takes place in 1959 at the time of the plane crash that took the life of Buddy Holly (McCain’s so shook up he gets the date wrong); or the next-published installment, Wake Up Little Susie (2000), which takes place five months earlier in historical time, when Ford Motor Company’s latest “innovative” automobile debuted in the fall of 1958.

Nothing’s lost by commencing with Wake Up Little Susie, in which the corpse that propels the action turns up early on page 19: It’s the ex-district attorney’s wife, stuffed into the trunk of a factory-fresh peach-and-kiwi colored Edsel. Was she killed by her husband, a political hopeful with a not-so-secret penchant for spouse abuse? Or might his jealous ex-wife be the guilty party? Or how about that tight-lipped ex-con living on the edge of town?

Sam makes his way through a case in intuitive fits and starts, sharing speculation and insights with his down-to-earth Midwestern neighbors (such as his chic landlady, who reminds him of Lauren Bacall), and fending off insults and beatings from foes (principally the aforementioned chief of police). It’s McCain’s sweet gift to feel empathy for almost everyone, yet he isn’t oblivious to the dark side of a place where everyone knows everyone else and their business.

“In a small town, you get punished for being different in any way, and sometimes when you sit in a small-town barbershop you get a sense of what Salem must have been like during the witch trials. Reputations get smeared, sometimes ruined permanently. Women get ripped up especially hard. … The modern version of the lynch mob: They hang you with innuendo and lies.”

gorman savethelastdanceformeSam’s acquaintance with works by such authors as Balzac and Ibsen gives him necessary perspective on human nature: “I guess that’s the understanding I get from reading. That all people are the same. No matter how far back in history you go.”

Sam and his people are of humble stock: They’re from the town’s poorest section, the Knolls. By dint of hard work and good luck, McCain and his folks (with whom he’s still close) made it out of that social ghetto, but “The Knolls and its despair and its violence had taught…too many of us, things we shouldn’t have known at such tender ages. Things that marked us forever.” McCain, forever aware of economic and political disparities, is always the underdog’s champion. He’s a Democrat, through and through. Yet, later in life, he’s forced to concede: “I’ve learned to my dismay that there are a lot of downright decent wealthy people. Not fair at all.”

The McCain series—ten books so far, each titled with a pop song from its particular time frame—has an obvious nostalgic appeal, but it’s also focused in a street-level way on tough issues of not so long ago.

Racial prejudice and illegal abortions are encountered in The Day the Music Died. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the threat of nuclear war weave through Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (2004), in which a corpse is discovered in a fallout shelter. By ’63, civil rights activists are working in the South; while in Sam’s town, a black college student rumored to have been having an affair with a white Senator’s daughter is killed.

In 1964, the Beatles and their colleagues have given young people a Ticket to Ride (2009), but an evangelical minister has joined forces with the police to crack down on longhairs—while Black River Falls suffers its first casualties of the war in Vietnam.

A hippie commune has come to town by the time of Bad Moon Rising (2001), testing the tolerance of many and bringing out the worst in a violent few, even as Nixon helms the Vietnam War after LBJ’s “abdication.”

gormanridersonthestormIn the latest McCain entry, the just-released Riders on the Storm (October 2014, Pegasus Books), it’s 1971. Not only is Black River Falls coming apart at its political seams, McCain himself—veteran of a near-fatal accident that put a premature end to his attempted Army service—is suffering psychological and physical stress. He’s in better shape though than a fellow returnee scorned and beaten for joining an antiwar veterans group—and then accused of murdering his principal hometown tormentor.

“The war was not only destroying people overseas,” Sam says, “it was destroying them back in my hometown.”

The population of Black River Falls has grown by now to 35,000 or so. Many folks still keep their doors unlocked—but that’s changing. McCain, back at work, still, as a lawyer and private investigator, now has his one-room office at the rear of a one-story laundromat building. He drinks Hamms beer, not Falstaff—and also hits the harder stuff: “I’d taken to getting sloppy drunk sometimes. …I was confused and…the meds weren’t tempering my anger or my depression. …I felt out of place just about everywhere since coming back home.”

The good news is that Sam’s old nemesis, the trigger-happy police chief, has at last retired. The bad news is that his replacement, a seemingly friendlier and more civilized type, is quick to pin the new murder rap on McCain’s lifelong friend. The more things seem to change, the more they apparently stay the same.

Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain series seems almost unique in its soft-spoken achievement: being at once a satisfying batch of mysteries, a history of social attitudes in a Midwestern town over a tumultuous period, and a running biography of its likable but increasingly put-upon narrator-protagonist. The series’ first several books are compulsively readable. By the time of Riders on the Storm, though, the tone and mood are bleak beyond melancholy: reflective of a narrator unsure of where he and his world are headed, but clinging nonetheless to the heartland values and behavior—friendship, decency, loyalty, courage, reason, redemptive love—that have made him appealing from the first and that have been reinforced in him by over a dozen years of mixed experience.

And then one realizes the melancholy has been there all along, a defining aspect of McCain’s personality, laced though with the semi-saving grace of humor (sometimes ironic, sometimes self-deprecating). “Jack Kerouac said that even at a very young age he’d had this great oppressive sense of loss,” McCain recalled back in The Day the Music Died, “of something good and true vanished, something he could never articulate, something he had carried around with him as young as age eight or nine.…I guess I had it too, this melancholy…. Maybe it’s just all the sadness I see in the people around me, just below the surface I mean, and the fact that there’s nothing I can do about it. Life is like that sometimes.”

Young or old, rich or not, male or female, single or married: Some of people’s larger mysteries, McCain has learned in each installment of this distinguished series, are never solved. Life is like that sometimes.

SAM MCCAIN MYSTERIES
The Day the Music Died (1999)
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow (2000)
Wake Up Little Susie (2001)
Save the Last Dance for Me (2002)
Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool (2004)
Breaking Up Is Hard To Do (2004)
Fools Rush In (2007)
Ticket to Ride (2009)
Bad Moon Rising (2011)
Riders on the Storm (2014)

First published in Mystery Scene Fall #136 2014.

www.edgorman.com

Tom Nolan reviews mystery fiction for The Wall Street Journal

 

Teri Duerr
2016-10-19 16:36:19

gorman ed 2010A small-town hero with a big heart, Sam McCain is living through tumultuous times in Ed Gorman's distinguished series of novels set in America's Midwest from the late 1950s to the early 1970s.

 

Remembering Ed Gorman: Author, Editor, Anthologist
Kate Stine


gorman ed 2010In sad news for the mystery community, author and editor Ed Gorman passed away on October 14, 2016.

In addition to his many literary accomplishments in the crime, western, and horror genres, Ed and Robert Randisi founded Mystery Scene Magazine in 1985. Ed remained publisher and editor until 2002 and stayed active in the magazine as a consulting editor and columnist up until the most recent issue, Fall #146 2016.

Ed is remembered not only as a talented writer (see the links below) but also as a man with a gift for friendship. Marked by his lively sense of humor and self-deprecating tone, a phone call from Ed brightened any day. In fact, many of his friendships took place solely over the telephone and email since Ed was not one to attend mystery conventions and events.

Ed was a mentor to a generation of crime writers, often giving them their start by publishing a short story in one of the numerous anthologies he edited over the years, many with his great friend Martin H. Greenberg. Ed was known for his encouraging phone calls and emails to new writers as well as more concrete aid in the form of agent and editor recommendations. His network of contacts in the publishing and writing worlds was as vast as it was affectionate.

Ed had a profound effect on my life. We had known each other for years, he as the editor and publisher of Mystery Scene Magazine and I as the editor of The Armchair Detective. In 2002, he called to ask whether I'd like to own a small magazine. Would I! It was a dream come true and Ed was an unfailing source of good advice and good cheer in the magazine's transition from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to New York City. In all the years since, he's been as much a joy to work with as he was a joy to know.

Edward Joseph Gorman was born on November 2, 1941, in Cedar Rapids. He worked in advertising and public relations for over 20 years, becoming a full-time writer in 1989. Gorman’s novels and stories are often set in small Midwestern towns, like the fictional Black River Falls, Iowa (the Sam McCain series), or Cedar Rapids (The Night Remembers). For his Dev Conrad series, Gorman drew upon his years as a political operative. In 1985, he co-founded Mystery Scene Magazine. In 2003, he received the Ellery Queen Award for distinguished contributions to mystery publishing for his numerous anthologies and Mystery Scene. He received a lifetime achievement award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 2011 and was twice an Edgar Award nominee. He is survived by his wife, Carol, a writer of young adult novels.

Here are some links that give some idea of Ed's importance in the field, both as a professional and a person.

First is "The History of Mystery Scene" by Jon L. Breen (Mystery Scene, Holiday Issue #77 2002), which includes the years Ed spent running the magazine.

HistoryofMysteryScene.pdf

Next is a ringing set of tributes, "Ed Gorman: A Great Man of Mystery," which ran in Mystery Scene Fall #76, 2002, the first issue after we took it over from Ed.

Tributes to Ed Gorman.pdf

Here is a specific tribute from Dean Koontz, a longtime friend of Ed's. This also ran in Mystery Scene Fall #76, 2002.

Ed Gorman Tribute Dean Koontz.pdf

And finally, here is an article on on Ed's Sam McCain novels which ran in Mystery Scene Fall #136, 2014.

Riders on the Storm: Ed Gorman's Sam McCain Novels by Tom Nolan

We'll have more in our upcoming Holiday Issue #147, 2016.

 

Kate Stine is the editor-in-chief and co-publisher of Mystery Scene Magazine.

 

 

 

Brian Skupin
2016-10-19 19:05:19