Category: Crime Fiction

Dog Will Have His Day by Fred Vargas

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Dog Will Have His Day (The Three Evangelists, #2)

I enjoyed the first book in Fred Vargas’ Three Evangelists series so much – see my review – that I decided to read the next one Dog Will Have His Day  and I’ve reserved the third book, The Accordionist at the library. I love Fred Vargas’s books. She writes such quirky crime fiction, with eccentric characters and intricate plots that I love and find so difficult to solve.

The three ‘Evangelists’ are thirty-something historians, Mathias, Marc and Lucien, all specialists in three different periods of history, who live in a rambling house in Paris. Actually there are only two of the three Evangelists in Dog Will Have His Day – Marc and Mathias – who help ex-special investigator Louis Kehlweiler, to uncover the mystery surrounding a tiny fragment of human bone Louis had found.

Louis is another one of Vargas’ eccentric characters, known variously as Ludwig/Louis, the son of a French woman and a German soldier, he carries Bufo, a toad, around in his pocket and even talks to it. Even though he is retired he still keeps newspaper cuttings and files on any criminal activity of any kind, which is where Marc helps him. And he also still keeps watch on all his observation posts, numbering the public benches and even trees in the Paris parks.  Sitting on bench 102 one evening he had seen a pile of dog excrement on a grid around a tree. This annoyed him – he didn’t like his lookout posts to be fouled – but the next morning the rain had washed the grid clean and all that remained from the dog poo was the tiny bone. The bone, which turned out to be the top joint of a big toe, probably that of an elderly woman, convinces Louis that a murder has taken place. And, of course, he has to find out who it had belonged to and what had happened.

His search takes him and Marc to a small fishing village in Finistére in Brittany, where they are later joined by Mathias, in the hope of identifying the victim and the murderer. There Louis not only comes across an ex-girlfriend, discovers the answer to a mystery in his own family history, but he also discovers that an old woman, Marie had been found dead on the beach. It had been recorded as an accidental death but Louis is convinced she was murdered – but who killed her and why?

This really is a strange murder mystery, full of bizarre events and characters – plus an extraordinary machine that prints out vague answers to questions. I found it compelling reading. I see from the synopsis of The Accordionist that Louis is also in the third book in the series with the three ‘Evangelists’ – I’m hoping my reserved copy will be available from the library soon.

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (9 April 2015)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0099589885
  • ISBN-13: 978-0099589884
  • Source: Library book
  • My rating 4.5*

WWW Wednesday: 15 August 2018

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

IMG_1384-0

WWW Wednesday is run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

I’m currently reading:

I’ve started my Classics Club Spin book, He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr. Set not long after the Second World War end this is a ‘locked room’ type of mystery, in which the body of Howard Brooks is found, stabbed to death, on the top of a tower, but the evidence shows that no one entered or left the tower during the time the murder took place.

And I’m still reading Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met His Match by Wendy Moore, non fiction about Mary Eleanor Bowes who was the richest heiress in 18th century Britain. She fell under the spell of a handsome Irish soldier, Andrew Robinson Stoney and found herself trapped in an appallingly brutal marriage. Fascinating reading that if it was fiction you’d say you couldn’t believe it.

I’ve recently finished:  

The Story Keeper by Anna Mazzola, which was published on 26th July 2018. See yesterday’s post for the opening paragraphs and synopsis. It’s beautifully written and as I like folklore and legends, with a mystery interwoven within it, I’ve been enjoying this very much.

I’ll post my review in the next few days.

 

My next book could be:

The Way of All Flesh by Ambrose Parry, co-written by best-selling crime writer Chris Brookmyre and consultant anaesthetist Dr Marisa Haetzman, to be published on 30 August 2018.

Synopsis

Edinburgh, 1847. City of Medicine, Money, Murder.

Young women are being discovered dead across the Old Town, all having suffered similarly gruesome ends. In the New Town, medical student Will Raven is about to start his apprenticeship with the brilliant and renowned Dr Simpson.

Simpson’s patients range from the richest to the poorest of this divided city. His house is like no other, full of visiting luminaries and daring experiments in the new medical frontier of anaesthesia. It is here that Raven meets housemaid Sarah, who recognises trouble when she sees it and takes an immediate dislike to him. She has all of his intelligence but none of his privileges, in particular his medical education.

With each having their own motive to look deeper into these deaths, Raven and Sarah find themselves propelled headlong into the darkest shadows of Edinburgh’s underworld, where they will have to overcome their differences if they are to make it out alive.

Have you read any of these books?  Do any of them tempt you? 

No Further Questions by Gillian McAllister

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I was hooked right from the start of No Further Questions by Gillian McAllister. It plunges straight into a trial as Martha sits in the courtroom listening to expert witnesses being questioned  and cross-examined about the death of her baby, Layla, just eight weeks old. Her sister Becky is accused of murdering her.  Becky was looking after Layla, a difficult baby who cries and screams endlessly, whilst Martha was away in Kos, organising a school for refugee children and her husband, Scott was away at a work conference. She found Layla dead in her cot and denies killing her. It looked like a cot death – until the postmortem showed otherwise – and the police are convinced it was murder.

This is a tense, tightly plotted book, narrated from several viewpoints, but mainly alternating between Martha and Becky, revealing their thoughts and emotions as they relate what had happened. Despite being very different characters with different lifestyles Martha and Becky love and trust each other – otherwise Martha would never have left Layla with Becky. Martha doesn’t want to believe Becky is guilty but as the trial proceeds, as medical and social worker witnesses as well as neighbours and a school teacher present their accounts it looks increasingly bad for Becky. And yet, and this shows how real this trial and these characters came over to me, I couldn’t believe she had done it either.

Despite being written in the present tense, I was gripped by this book. I didn’t want to stop reading it and when I wasn’t reading it I was thinking about it, about the characters and their relationships, about how they had got themselves into such a terrible situation. Gillian McAllister presents such a complex subject, with great insight into human nature, with characters that are not perfect (as none of us are) – they each have their flaws and make questionable decisions, so it is next to impossible to untangle the truth from supposition.

This  is simply an excellent book, and it is without doubt one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Thank you to Gillian McAllister, the publishers and NetGalley for my copy of this book for review.

  • Format: Kindle Edition ( also to be published in paperback on 18th October 2018)
  • File Size: 2892 KB
  • Print Length: 421 pages
  • Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1405934603
  • Publisher: Penguin (2 July 2018)-

Six Degrees of Separation from Atonement to Out of Bounds

Published on by Margaret27 Comments

I love doing Six Degrees of Separation, a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Each month a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the other books on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

Atonement

This month the chain begins with Atonement by Ian McEwan, a book I’ve read and loved! This is a love story and also a mystery. It revolves around the lives of  two sisters, Briony and her older sister, Cecelia. It has vividly-drawn characters and harrowing descriptions of war with reflections on the process of writing and the interpretation of novels.

Kew GardensThe Gardens of the DeadThe Black Friar (Damian Seeker, #2)He Who Whispers (Dr. Gideon Fell, #16)CauldstaneOut of Bounds (Inspector Karen Pirie, #4)

Briony is an admirer of Virginia Woolf and stream-of-consciousness writing and that brings me to the first link in the chain – Virginia Woolf’s short story Kew Gardens with its descriptions of people in the Gardens on a sunny day as they pass by a flowerbed.

My second link is to a book also with the word ‘gardens‘ in the title –  The Gardens of the Dead by William Brodrick, featuring Father Anselm, a barrister turned monk. Another book, also crime fiction, that features a monk is –

The Black Friar by S G MacLean, set in the 17th century, in which the body of a man dressed as a Dominican friar, is found bricked up in a wall in Blackfriars, once a monastery. He was actually an undercover agent going under the name of ‘Gideon Fell’.

In He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr, one of his series of locked room mysteries/impossible crimes, Dr Gideon Fell is an amateur sleuth.  A body is found lying on the parapet of a tower, once part of a chateau since burnt down.

My next link takes me to another book featuring a tower – Cauldstane by Linda Gillard, a ghost story, set in a Scottish tower house in the Highlands owned by Sholto MacNab, a retired adventurer. It’s also a story of loss and revenge, of good versus evil and the power of love. Meredith, Sholto’s second wife, was killed in a car crash.

There is also a car crash in my final link, another crime fiction novel, Out of Bounds by Val McDermid, the 4th Inspector Karen Pirie novel, in which a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car and ends up in a coma. A routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from twenty-two years before.

 ~~~

My chain is made up of a mixture of books that I’ve read or are on my TBR shelves and a mix of short stories, historical fiction and mostly crime fiction. Beginning with a book set in the 1930s and 40s the chain moves through the centuries from the 17th century to the present day linked by the titles, monks, names of the characters, towers and car crashes.

Next month (1 September, 2018), we’ll begin with Where Am I Now? by Mara Wilson.

The Classics Club Spin Result

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Classics Club

The spin number in The Classics Club Spin was announced yesterday. It’s number …

9

which for me is He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr. The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by August 31, 2018.

img_20180801_192319728

My copy is a Golden Age Mystery, one of the Green Penguin Crime and Mystery series paperbacks, published in 1953 (first published in 1946). It features Dr Gideon Fell.

Here’s the blurb from Goodreads:

At the edge of the woods by the river stands the tower. Once part of a chateau since burnt down, only the tower remains. The inside is but a shell with a stone staircase climbing spirally up the wall to a flat stone roof with a parapet.

One that parapet the body of Howard Brooke lay bleeding. The murderer, when Brooke’s back was turned, must have drawn the sword-cane from it sheath and run him through the body. And this must have occurred between ten minutes to four and five minutes past four, when the two children discovered him dying.

Yet the evidence showed conclusively that during this time not a living soul came near him.

I’m looking forward to reading He Who Whispers as I  haven’t read any of Carr’s books before and I’m really pleased one of the crime fiction novels I listed came up in the Spin.

Did you take part in the Classics Spin? What will you be reading?

Catching Up: Darkside by Belinda Bauer & The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Once more I’m behind with reviews of some of the books I’ve read in the past few weeks, so here are some brief notes on two of them that fall into the 10 Books of Summer Reading category.

Darkside by [Bauer, Belinda]

5*

Darkside  is Belinda Bauer’s second novel, set in Shipcott on Exmoor a few years after the events in her first novel, Blacklands. Some of the characters in Blacklands also appear in Darkside, but only in minor roles and I think that Darkside can easily be read as a standalone novel. Shipcott is an isolated village and young PC Jonas Holly is the only policeman in the area covering seven villages and a large part of Exmoor. When Margaret Priddy is killed his inexperience means that has to call in the Taunton Homicide team, led by DCI John Marvel.

Jonas and Marvel clash and Jonas, undermined by as number of anonymous notes accusing him of failing to do his job, tries to keep out of Marvel’s way. More murders follow as Jonas, whose wife Lucy has been diagnosed with MS, is struggling to hold everything together. I liked the characterisation, the description of the setting and the twisty, turning plot. Like Blacklands, Darkside is full of a dark, brooding atmosphere and suspense. I had my suspicions about the identity of the murderer but it was only as I was getting near to the end of the book that I began to think I could possibly be right.

The Woman in Cabin 10

3*

The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware didn’t satisfy me as much as Darkside. I liked the beginning of the book. The main character, journalist Lo Blacklock takes the opportunity to fill in for her boss on a luxury press launch on a boutique cruise ship and hopes it will help her recover from a traumatic break-in at her flat. But woken in the night by a scream from cabin 10 next to hers she believes a woman was thrown over board, only to discover that the ship’s records show that cabin 10 was unoccupied. Lo is exhausted from lack of sleep, overwrought with anxiety and dependent on pills and alcohol to see her through. She fails to convince anyone that she is telling the truth.

So far so good. I thought the setting on a luxury cruise ship worked well for this type of locked room mystery. But then as I read on I felt the book was too drawn out, I wasn’t convinced by the plot and in places I found it hard to believe. I wanted to know how it would end  and it is easy reading, so I kept turning the pages. But the final chapter left me cold – tying up the ends in a facile way.