Month: April 2010

Take My Breath Away by Martin Edwards

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Take My Breath Away by Martin Edwards is a legal mystery, featuring Nic Gabriel, a lawyer turned writer, who is investigating the death of his friend Dylan Rees. Nic is transfixed by the sight of Ella, a woman who had apparently died five years earlier, walking up to Dylan at a party and stabbing him. Dylan had already intrigued him with stories about ‘strange and sudden deaths’ and had promised to tell him the details after the party:

This was all Dylan’s fault. Dylan who had seduced him with all that talk about dead lawyers. Dylan the yarn-spinner; the myth-maker, the Celtic bard in an Armani suit. Of course he’d known that Nic could never resist a story about strange and sudden deaths.

The rich man who burned in Paradise. The giant who chopped himself in half. (page 15)

 I kept turning back to this passage in the first chapter as Nic delved into the mystery, and also this one:

There was a connection, Dylan had insisted on the phone, and not just because the dead men were lawyers in the same firm. Forget about suicide or accident. Think murder for pleasure.

‘As for the boy who died of shock’, Dylan said dreamily, ‘the real culprit wasn’t the guilty creature who killed him. Trust me.’ (page 15)

At the same time Roxanne Wake begins her new job with Creed, a firm of lawyers specialising in human rights law. She’s nervous and it’s not just the new job, because she has something to hide, something she’s not told Creed, something terrible. However, someone knows her secret and it seems she’ll go to any lengths to prevent it becoming known. Eventually the two strands of the book coincide in a dramatic conclusion.  There are many twists and turns and it kept me guessing to the end.

Like all good murder mysteries this is a complex book about good and evil, about power and manipulation, about secrets, lies and deception. It’s a stand-alone book, but I hope that some time Martin will write another book about Nic as I’d love to know his back story and what really happened to his parents.

For more details about Martin’s books see his website. He also writes an entertaining blog – Do you Write Under Your Own Name?

More Crime Fiction

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

The current issue of newbooks magazine included a Crime Supplement, which I’ve just got round to looking at. This is a really useful source of information on crime fiction for someone like me who has only relatively recently ventured into this genre. In the past my knowledge of crime fiction has been rather limited, although it did expanded rapidly over the last 8 months through taking part in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet.

In this supplement a few books caught my eye, all by writers who are new to me, such as:

  • Instruments of Darkness by Imogen Robertson. This is her first novel, described as an eighteenth-century manor house murder mystery. The manor house in question is Thornleigh Hall, the seat of the Earl of Sussex and the murder mystery concerns a dead man found with his throat has cut and the death of Alexander Adams killed in a London music shop.
  • A Time of Mourning by Christobel Kent. This is set in a rainy Florence, a menacing and dark story of the death of  an elderly Jewish architect and the disappearance of a young English art student. As private detective Sandro Cellini investigates the cases the connections between them get increasingly complex.
  • Two more historical whodunnits by Shirley McKay –  Hue and Cry and Fate and Fortune, both set in Edinburgh in the sixteenth century. These are the Hew Cullen Mysteries. In Fate and Fortune Hew is reluctant to follow in his father’s footsteps as a lawyer and ends up in the middle of a long-hidden mystery, an abduction and a brutal murder.
  • No Sorrow to Die by Gillian Galbraith. Another book set in Edinburgh, this one featuring Dectective Sergeant Alice Rice investigating a murder in the course of a burglary that is complicated by the fact that the victim was terminally ill.

There are articles by and about authors such as barrister-turned-author M R Hall, and a “Biography of Agatha Raisin“, M C Beaton’s fictional sleuth. I’ve only read one Agatha Raisin book and wasn’t impressed. Maybe I should give them another chance as apparently they are very popular books – there are plenty of them!

Then there is the programme of  2010 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate 0n 22 – 25 July with a whole host of crime fiction writers, including Ian Rankin, Val McDermid and Joanne Harris. Full details are at www.harrogate-festival.org.uk/crime. I’m not going but I’d love to be there.

Challenges and the All Things Alcott Challenge

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

At the beginning of the year I decided not to do many challenges this year partly because I want to concentrate on reading books I already own and partly because I find I lose track of where I’m up to with the challenges. I have no problem with the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge as that is ongoing with no deadlines and also the To-Be-Read Challenge fits in well with my aims.

Recently, however, I’ve been attracted by the Cozy Mystery Challenge, the Daphne Du Maurier Challenge and now the All Things Alcott Challenge that Margot has set up. This is a challenge to explore Louisa May Alcott’s world  and her body of work. For all these challenges I intend to read from books I already own and I hope to keep a record of my progress on the Reading Challenges Tab (above).

These are the guidelines for the All Things Alcott Challenge:

  1. Between May 1st and the end of the year (2010), choose one or more Alcott related things to do (see #2). In the spirit of Louisa May Alcott, each participant will set his/her own course in this challenge. You choose one or as many Alcott related items as you wish.
  2. You will also determine the contents of your challenge. As long as it is Alcott related, you may choose books, audiobooks, DVDs, movies, TV shows, a play or live theater. Anything by or about Louisa May Alcott is the intention of the challenge.
  3. It’s not necessary to compile a list at the beginning of the challenge.
  4. It’s perfectly okay if this challenge overlaps with other challenges.

Margot is aiming to re-read some of Alcott’s books and I may do that as well, but my main aim is to read Eden’s Outcasts: the Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson, which has been on my bookshelves since last year.

Faithful Unto Death by Caroline Graham

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

 

Faithful Unto Death (Misomer Murders -€¦Faithful Unto Death by Caroline Graham is a Midsomer Murder Mystery. I’ve enjoyed watching the TV series over the years. Midsomer is obviously a dangerous place to live with all those murders happening so regularly, but they are not the gory kind – it’s murder of a sanitised nature. Inspector Barnaby is a genial character, although an astute detective, one who is not quite up to date with modern police methods but relies on intuition and thinking.

So I was a bit surprised reading this book that the characters are a bit different, especially Sergeant Troy who is nothing like the TV character. On TV Troy was a bit naive and usually didn’t have much of a clue about solving the murders, but a likeable chap who got on OK with Barnaby. Troy in the book is sharper, meaner, spiteful and inwardly critical of Barnaby. He’s insecure, resentful and sees any creative or intellectual prowess in others as a criticism of his own life.

Set in Fawcett Green, an unspoilt peaceful village the book begins with the disappearance of Simone Hollingsworth, soon followed by her distraught husband’s death, apparently suicide, then the disappearance of their neighbour’s daughter. Barnaby and Troy, with the doubtful assistance of the local policeman Constable Perrot work their way through interviewing the village’s inhabitants and gradually unravel the mystery.

It’s an entertaining and satisfying book, full of detail and clues as to the eventual outcome, which I did work out before the end. The characters stand out as real people, and are described with humour and empathy. I don’t remember seeing this on TV but reading about it online it seems it’s differed from the book, so that’s not too surprising. As in the TV version Barnaby is a patient, tolerant man,  also a bit grumpy and moody, who is trying and failing to lose weight, and who loves music. So many fictional detectives seem to like music and food!

This is the first Midsomer Murder mystery I’ve read and much as I like the TV series I prefer the book version – it has more bite and more substance. I’m taking part in the Cozy Mystery Challenge and although I’m still not too sure about the classification of “cozy” murder mysteries, I think this book can count as one.

Sunday Salon

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

I’ve now started reading 100 Days on Holy Island: a Writer’s Exile by Peter Mortimer, a diary of the time he spent living on Lindesfarne, off the coast of north-east England, in a close-knit community of a 150 people. This is not a book about the history of the island but it is about what it was like for Mortimer to live there on his own away from his  family from January to April 2001.

It began badly as his father died just before Mortimer had planned to leave, and his nephew was very ill after an emergency operation. As it was winter there were few, if any, visitors to the island and the pubs and village store were closed for most of the time:

 It was silent in the way cities are never silent, silence not as a brief interruption from traffic, the humans, the incessant noise of civilisation, but silent as a way of being. What lay beneath the surface of this small settlement I had no idea. But on a bitter cold January night in 2001, it offered up silence as a totally natural state. (page12)

In preparation for his stay he had asked ten northern writers to select  a book (not written by themselves) that they thought might amuse,divert or challenge him during his stay. Nine of them gave him a book and I’m looking forward to discovering what they were. 

I can see already that I’m going to enjoy this memoir and hope the rest of the book lives up to the beginning.

I’ve dipped into The Breaking Point by Daphne du Maurier (short stories) this week and will continue reading that later on. Qiu Xiaolong’s Death of a Red Heroine has had to take a back seat for a while whilst I read these two books and I’m also tempted to start reading Martin Edward’s Take My Breath Away. I just wish I had more than one set of eyes and one brain to cope with reading multiple books – that would be excellent.