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British

Steps to the Gallows, by Edward Marston

November 18, 2018 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Published 2016

Characters
Leo
Peter and Paul Skillen, twin brothers who run a shooting, archery and boxing gallery in London.
Charlotte, Peter’s wife
Gully Ackford, owner of the gallery and former soldier
Micah Yeomans, a runner with the police
Diane

This is a detective story taking place in and around London, not really sure of the time frame, but they are still riding horses and have coaches and carriages. There is no mention of the ‘horseless carriage’ so before 1900 at least. Leo Paige has come to a shooting gallery to hire a body guard, as he knows his life is in danger. Someone has been following him for the last few days and because of his career of creating caricatures of the powerful in government, he has made many enemies among politicians and the wealthy. When he enters the gallery he sees his former comrade in arms, Gully Ackford, not realizing that Gully is the owner of the establishment. Gully quickly assigns a bodyguard to follow Leo but, alas, it is of no avail, and Leo dies later that day, strangled in his apartment which is then set on fire, hoping to destroy all of Leo’s work along with the body. The bodyguard that has been sent to trail Leo is himself attacked and left for dead so the brothers Skillen realize that two men are involved in the murder of Leo. The Skillen brothers, who work with Gully at the gallery vow to outdo the runners, headed by Micah Yeomans and find the murderer of their friend. Peter and Paul Skillen are twins so identical very few people can tell them apart, although their personalities are almost opposite. This leads to a lot mistaken identity and is double trouble for Micah Yeomans. Leo had been publishing a magazine disclosing some of the foibles and underhanded dealings of those in government, but the Penny Tax is enacted putting the price of his publication out of reach and so he closes down the venture. But he still works with an illustrator, known only as Virgo, creating caricatures of those in power, and Leo supplies the witticisms. His work is sold in a shop owned by a formidable woman, Diane, who now becomes the next target for whoever has killed Leo. Likely suspects include a member of parliament, a wealthy business man and a doctor. All have felt the brunt of Leo and Virgo’s scathing criticism.
This is a fairly simple plot with a lot of good natured competition between the two groups, the Skillens and the crew at the gallery, and the runners headed by Micah Yeomans working for the police. I won’t give away who wins but it’s an enjoyable read.

Quiet Neighbors, by Catriona McPherson

November 18, 2018 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Published 2016

Characters

Jude, the main character, a librarian who is on the run from what she believes is the accidental death of her ex-husband’s new girlfriend which she is certain will cause her to be put on trial for murder

Lowell Glen, the older man who owns a book store in Wigtown, Scotland, where Jude ends up after she flees the scene of the accident

Eddy Preston, Lowell’s daughter whom he had no knowledge of until she shows up unannounced on his doorstep the same week that Jude arrives, who is eight months pregnant

T. Jolly, deceased, who left clues to who committed several murders before he died

Lowland Glen bookstore, owned by Lowell Glen, but in sad shape until Jude’s arrival, She is on the high end of obsessive compulsive and cannot help herself from tidying.

“Who runs away to a bookshop?” But that is exactly what ‘Jude’ does when her world collapses after the death of both her parents. A horrible accident takes both their lives and after the funeral Jude flees to an old book store in Wigtown, Scotland she had visited with her husband during happier times. By now she’s divorced and her ex is married to a co-worker he had been seeing during her marriage. When she arrives at the book store, Lowell Glen immediately remembers her and has in fact saved a book she had been looking for in a drawer until her return. She shows up at the door of Lowland Glen bookshop exhausted and emotionally broken, having fled London with nothing but the clothes on her back, her passport and a small mount of cash. She is afraid of using her credit cards, for fear that the police are looking for her and will arrive to take her away if she so much as swipes the magnetic strip. We don’t know why the police are looking for her until much later in the story. But Lowell takes her in, his old-fashioned gentleman style encouraging her to rest at his house until she feels better. The small town seems perfectly safe and Jude takes him up on his offer. Soon, she is working at the bookshop, and being a librarian with obsessive compulsive disorder, she is almost in heaven creating order out of the towering stacks of books, cleaning each one as she goes. Within a few days, more drama comes to the quiet little shop in the form of a teenage daughter that Lowell never knew he had. Eddy Preston’s mother Miranda has just died after a long illness and Eddy is eight months pregnant. She tells Lowell and Jude that the baby is Lowell’s grandchild and the reader gets the impression that Eddy’s story is calculated to force Lowell into taking her in. Not knowing how kind and mannerly Lowell is she didn’t need any story at all, merely having her show up was enough for him to be smitten with her. He remembers a night eighteen years ago when she could possibly have been conceived and takes it on trust that she’s his own daughter. But Jude sees some cracks in the story and doubts that Eddy is even really pregnant, what with the false wombs available now days. When Eddy refuses to have the baby at the hospital and demands that it be born at Lowell’s family home, Jamaica House, where she herself was conceived, Jude’s suspicions grow. But soon Eddy has figured out who Jude really is and the two of them form a pact of secrecy.
Once Eddy arrives she takes over the upstairs bedrooms that Jude had tidied up for herself, but Lowell offers her an old cottage at the edge of a graveyard, where T. Jolly had lived out his final years. There she finds some notes written in the back of books he had ordered for his membership in a local book club. It turns out there had been some scandal involved with Lowell’s father, the local doctor and several of his patients before he died, but the clues are scattered now, buried in the back of the bookshop in books relegated to the dead room which contained dozens of bags of books donated by the community. As Eddy’s due date grows nearer strange happenings occur. Jude receives ominous messages and the cottage is set on fire. The clues almost add up but Jude still needs to search out the final notes in one of the book club entries which still lies hidden somewhere in the bookshop.
An enjoyable read with good characters will keep you guessing.

Drood, by Dan Simmons

November 18, 2018 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Published 2009

‘Drood’, caught my eye as it was intended to do. The author well knew that the single word, part of the title of Charles Dickens’ last, alas unfinished novel, would compel me to reach for it and open its cover. And while the book is about this mysterious character that so many of us will forever remain curious about, it is much more about the narrator, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. Collins is a fellow writer who was popular during the Victorian period about which he writes. Wilkie Collins’ brother Charley was married to one of Dickens’ daughters, Katey and the two men were very close for many years. The story starts with the Staplehurst train accident which Charles Dickens barely survived in 1865. According to the Collins, this is where Dickens first encountered Mr. Drood, a caped figure of hideous appearance, with lidless eyes and mere slits where the nose should be. Dickens goes among the injured, dispensing brandy and carrying water, but Drood is also there, possibly trying to hypnotize the injured. Drood disappears but Dickens seems to be fascinated by him and engages Wilkie to pursue him into the great underground sewers of London. He enlists the help of Inspector Fields, who considers Drood to be the sinister mastermind behind dozens, if not hundreds, of unsolved murders in London over the past few decades. Fields assigns a working detective, Hibbett, a huge bear of a man armed with loaded pistol, to accompany the two writers into the seedy parts of the city. They do find Drood, or he finds them, it’s difficult to say which. Collins is becoming more and more addicted to laudanum, an alcohol drink with ten percent opium mixed into it which he uses for pain from gout. This substance was widely prescribed during the Victorian era for all sorts of maladies. Dickens used it at times as well. Collins describes his increasing use of the drug and when the effects no longer dull his pain he turns to the opium dens first discovered on his jaunts through the Great Oven into the underground with Dickens, in pursuit of Drood.
I won’t tell more of the story in case you want to read it for yourself. Dickens’ love affair with actress Ellen Ternan, his estranged wife Catherine, his children, are all there. Collins himself had an unusual family life, living with Caroline and her daughter but having children with another woman at the same time, neither of whom he ever married. If you are a Dickens fan, then you will enjoy it, if not, I would think it might be tiresome. The book is long, over 700 pages, and it’s hard to tell if what Wilkie is saying is the truth, or if it is some wild opium-induced fantasy. Mesmerism, which Charles Dickens was a follower and practitioner of, plays into the story as well. With all of these variables it’s hard to tell sometimes if Collins’ narrative is dream, fantasy, or reality. But it’s very well done and worth the endeavor. I’m not sure how much of the Drood character as portrayed by Simmons is based on Dickens’ ideas or entirely made up. Either way the book is fascinating for those Dickens readers who have gone beyond the more popular works like Great Expectations and Oliver Twist to the later ones David Copperfield and Our Mutual Friend.

Desperate Measures, by Jo Bannister

November 18, 2018 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Published 2015

Characters Gabriel Ash, the father, intelligence officer
Cathy Ash, his wife, who’s been kidnapped and held captive with their two sons, Guy and Gilbert for four years in Somalia

Hazel Best, the constable on leave who befriends Gabriel after his wife and children’s abduction

At the beginning of this tale, Gabriel Ash is meeting with his psychiatrist, Laura Fry in the presence of Hazel Best, a friend and police officer, after just discovering that his wife, whom he believed to have been kidnapped and murdered by Somali pirates, is alive. He has just talked to her via computer and is convinced that she is alive and well. It turns out that his two sons are also alive, but what he has to do to get them back safely to England is ghastly. He has been instructed by the pirates that he must kill himself live on the internet before they can be sent home. The two women advise him to call the police but he refuses to do so, saying that leaving the police out of it is part of the deal. However, Hazel is still a member of the police force, although persona-non-grata at the moment, so some collaboration is done. There is another female present at the meeting in the form of Gabriel’s dog, a lurcher named Patience. Lurchers are apparently a cross-breed dog found in Britain between a sight hound, usually a greyhound, and some type of terrier or collie. Patience is taken in by Hazel after Gabriel carries out the demands of the kidnappers but she isn’t your average dog. As Hazel puts it, Patience can say more with the angle of her nose than can be expressed in an essay. But the plot in this story has lots of twists and turns as Hazel is determined to find the pirates responsible for her friend’s death even after his wife and boys are safely home in Norbold. Gabriel’s wife won’t have a dog in her house so Hazel keeps her even though it means she will have to move out of her rented flat and into a small house. Now that she has the extra room, Hazel also takes in a young homeless man called Saturday, a nickname given to him while in care by the other kids, because being Jewish, he was ‘excused on Saturdays’. As Saturday tries to clean up his act Hazel keeps puzzling out the threads of what actually happened to Cathy Ash and the two boys and why her story doesn’t quite add up.
An interesting and readable book and even thought the plot takes some fairly wild turns I found it completely believable due to the skill of the writer’s story telling.

After Byron, by Norman Beim

January 15, 2018 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Pubished 2015

So we’ll go no more aroving
So late into the night,
Thought the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears it sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Lord Byron

This poem is at the beginning of the book which introduces us to the bosom friend of Lord Byron’s after his death. The story is told with excerpts from diaries, letters and private journals. It begins with a young barrister, Gerald Marston, who has taken a temporary job as a private detective to spy on Lord Ingersoll, a poet and contemporary of the Byron’s and the Shelley’s, who seems to be surrounded on all sides by suspicious deaths. Most recently that of his wife who was drowned after falling overboard during the night from their yacht. The weather had been rainy and somewhat windy, but not enough to cause real danger. But the inquest ruled the death was accidental. Ingersoll’s mother died by falling down the stairs at her home, breaking her neck and causing a fatal heart attack. Ingersoll, though not at home at the time, found his mother at the foot of the stairs. At the top of the stairs the carpet had been worn or possibly cut, causing her to catch her heel and tumble down. Ingersoll inherited a large sum upon her death. Most uncomfortable for Marston however, is the fact that the private detective just recently engaged in the same position which he now holds, has turned up dead as well, either from an accidental drowning or something more deliberate. Marston is spying on Ingersoll in Genoa, where Ingersoll’s illegitimate daughter, Diane Shelton, and her mother reside. Diane is to be taken by her father back to England and introduced to society so that she can find a husband with rank and title. To complicate matters more, George Marston falls head over heels in love with Diane which is rather difficult since he is spying on her father. No one knows if Ingersoll will be arrested when he returns to England due to the controversy surrounding him, yet he is willing to risk it for the sake of his daughter’s future.
This story is a bit complicated but is well told. At first it seems a sure thing that Lord Ingersoll is a very nasty piece of work, and Mr. Marston is doomed to lose his love if not his life. But as the narration proceeds many points of view come to light, not all of which are detrimental to the main character. This is a short book, just over 200 pages and is well worth the read, especially if you are a fan of Byron’s or Shelley’s.

The Moth Catcher, by Ann Cleeves

November 28, 2017 by Site Author Leave a Comment

Published 2015
Characters: Vera Stanhope, detective
Holly and Joe, her asssistants
Lizzie Redhead, a young offender whose parents live in the converted farmhouse near where the murders take place
Percy, a local man is driving home from the pub when he stops to answer the call of nature. Off the side of the road he finds the body of a young man, a house-sitter for the big house, Gilswick Hall, whose owners are visiting Australia where they are about to become grand-parents. Vera Stanhope arrives on the scene and then takes Percy to the home he shares with his daughter Susan. She goes into the big house once a week to clean and has a key, which Vera takes, and with Joe they head to the house itself for clues to the identity of the deceased. They let themselves in through the kitchen and explore the area, only to find the body of another, older man in the apartment where the house sitter lived. Both of these men turn out to be avid students of moths and at first the team can find no other connection between the two. The nearest inhabitants to the crime scene are some retired couples who live in an old farm house that’s been converted to modern apartments. Lizzie Redhead’s parents live in one apartment and they are anxiously awaiting her return home from prison. Lizzie had served time for attacking a young woman with a knife and her parents are understandably uneasy about having her back home with them, although they love their daughter, they don’t know how to handle her. She was locked up when the murders took place, but she may have known the killer.

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