A Detective Story about a Detective Story

Detective | Magpie Murders | Anthony Horowitz

⭐⭐⭐ aka I liked it

An editor finds the last chapter of the detective novel by the boutique publisher's bestselling author missing. Shortly after, she learns that the author is dead, presumably a suicide. Her search for the missing chapter hints darkly at murder, and she ends up risking her life chasing the chapter and the truth.

You get to read the whole of the detective story by the fictional author as well... heh heh. Two mysteries for the price of one.

Anthony Horowitz tends to place himself and his family in some of his detective books. This time, he leaves the poor folk in reality. It makes the story a bit better this way, I think. That stuff is clever-clever, not necessarily more entertaining.

Bastards do not beguile

Detective/Thriller | The Hollow Man | Oliver Harris

⭐⭐

The mystery is well done, the detectiving is fine. The writing is pacy and atmospheric, the editing is taut. That should easily get a book 3 stars.

The reason it does not, is the ‘bastard of a hero’ as the blurb too charitably puts it. I found the detective (Nick Belsey) to be an appalling human, greedy, addicted, manipulative, conniving, misusing his position for personal gain, dishonest in every possible way (and yet he manages to con the investigative journalist into falling in love with him, despite lying to her at almost every step).

Deal breaker. It’s only curiosity about the mystery that saw me through the whole book. Next time, I’ll watch a train wreck instead.

So, the rating is the average of 1 star (I hated it, that’s Nick Belsey), and 3 stars (I liked it, that’s the mystery). It’s a shoddy compromise, leaving me feeling vaguely unclean. Like the book itself. More accurately:

   2 stars and a pile of poop.

Detecting in the crimefree far future

Science Fiction | Grey Enigmas | Gareth Lewis

An excellent mystery, with proper clues, a sci fi world in which a detective is resurrected (from death? incarceration? virtuality?) and tasked with solving a murder which should not have been possible. Alex takes up the task with a cheerful and endearing lack of penitence which not only disarms us but the stubbornly pro-law-and-order Theresa Patel, the closest the crimeless future has to a detective. The introduction of mind-bending tech is done so deftly, you don't even mind when 'ghosts' come in. The tech is far-out but the motivations for murder are everyday and human.

The pace is excellent, the suspects plausible, the backstories clear enough, and the climax and ending sufficiently unpredictable to keep our interest.

Recommended for people who liked Altered Carbon more for its concepts than the violence and sex. You can get it here. Unbelievably, this excellent story comes for free!

A Golden Goose of a Girl

Science Fiction | Girl of Great Price | Milo James Fowler

Milo James Fowler writes sci fi, noir and detective, and this story is a mix of all three. Charlie Madison, the hard-boiled detective who is on the verge of bankruptcy, gets clients who want their kidnapped daughter back. Except that the city is run by the Russian mobster Ivan, whom nobody has ever seen, and Ivan is interested, too. Why is murder a real possibility in this mad search for a little girl? An old war with bioweapons results in strange and creepy outcomes. Is there a happy ending? Read this short story, and enjoy finding out.

Shenanigans in the Arctic

Detective | Breakup | Dana Stabenow

I picked this up because it is a book about detecting in the Far North, in Alaska to be precise. Kate Shugak has featured in six previous books, and fans probably know all the characters and react to them entirely differently from someone who dips into the series at such a late point.

Kate has inherited her grandmother's position in the tribe, something she is reluctant to own, as she feels she cannot fill her grandmother's shoes.

In the meantime, the weather is warming, and the ice is breaking up, hence the title. Breakup is also the word, used as a curse, by most of the characters in the book.

It starts with Kate getting excited about the warm weather (warm? When the ice is just starting to melt? But it seems it truly is warm for the denizens, and they will probably shift to t-shirts at 4 degrees. Well, I did pick a book about Alaska), and forgetting her rifle, whereupon she is attacked by a mother bear.

Safe at home (oh, come on, the book would have been really thin if she was killed by the bear), her meat store is attacked by another bear. After driving it off, she is almost hit by, of all things, a jet engine, which has fallen off a plane. It totals her truck, so she has no transport. She also has no money, and taxes are due. So, at least, there is plenty of mad action throughout.

The investigators descend on her house, and the bear comes by again. Followed by three off-roaders driven by drunk tourists. Then, an old dead body is discovered near her land. Her friend, who has abandoned a rich background to live off the land, comes up in a tizzy. Her parents have descended on her (again) and don't approve of her boyfriend, so she wants Kate to tour-guide them to any distance. In return, she gives Kate her truck, forever.

Whereupon, the three of them (Kate and the parents) are attacked by yet another bear. This bear, though, has killed and eaten a woman. The woman's husband is a woman-magnet, but also an object of suspicion by the cops. So, was it a murder? And how was it done? What about that original dead body? Was it an accident, or murder?

In the meantime, there are planes doing groundloops, old family feuds resulting in bars being shot up, an angry wife chasing her husband with a gun (and finally tying him up and threatening to kill him), and other assorted incidents which the tribe wants Kate to fix.

It's an old-fashioned detective story, in the sense that you get all the clues, and should be able to work it out for yourself.

It's also more about the shenanigans of Kate and her friends, so if all you want is a detective story, go elsewhere.

There's humour, but of the Patricia Cornwell variety, not of the PG Wodehouse variety.

A fair read, but one of this series is enough for me.

The 'national bird' of Punjab claims a victim

Detective | The Case of the Deadly Butter Chicken | Tarquin Hall

Once in a while, one gets an Indian detective set in India, written by a non-Indian. Since getting Indian citizenship is one of the most difficult things to do, I suspect that Tarquin Hall, though married to an Indian and living in the NCR, is probably not an Indian yet, so I'm putting his book in this category.

The first Vish Puri book I read was The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing. In that, a debunker of mystics was stricken dead on India Gate lawns by a 20-foot effigy of the Goddess Kali that appeared and then disappeared. All the other members of his Laughter Club (there are plenty all over India, it's not as much fiction as you'd think) were unable to move from their places till the apparition had disappeared. Vish Puri of Most Private Investigators takes over the case and tries to sort out myth and reality. What I liked particularly about that book was the solution, down to earth and not the least bit Eastern-Oriental Mystic. Although it wandered into places I've never even heard of, let alone experienced. But it's a big country.

So, coming to this Vish Puri book, which is the third in the series. Vish (short for Vishwas) Puri attends a pre-cricket match party, at which the father of a rising star Pakistani cricketer falls dead after eating his butter chicken. He's been poisoned with aconite. I really didn't know it was that easy to get hold of aconite in India, but I'm prepared to suspend disbelief. After all, it is astoundingly easy to get acid.

Vish Puri has a whole team of helpers with quirky nicknames (we never get to know their real names) like Handbrake the driver, Tubelight the operative (tubelight is slang for a slow-witted person in India, so why Puri calls his top operative Tubelight is a mystery), Facecream the slick woman operative, Flush the computer whiz with the James Bond gadgets, and the like.

Vish Puri's English is quirky, but his mother's is downright weird. Oh, okay, there may well be Punjabis who talk like that; I'm sure T Hall didn't invent these people out of whole cloth. Yet, the language is not so much familiar as dissonant. I guess I should stick around some Punjabi friends more, but most of them who speak English don't mangle the language as much.

Vish Puri is also a member of a group of moustache aficionados, some of whose moustaches are being stolen by a midnight thief. I facepalm and think, Only in India. At any rate, Puri is unaware that his mother is stealing a march on him, as she's not only worked out the motive for the murder, but the most likely suspects. He, in the meantime, goes off on all kinds of chases into the murky depths of illegal betting on cricket matches. He goes to Pakistan, all a-tremble at stepping into enemy territory, and comes back with a different view of the country.

 

Tarquin Hall's view of Delhi, India, Gurgaon and Pakistan is very different from the average Indian's. More observant, more disinterested about the politics, full of authentic detail and yet described in words strange to an Indian. The books are published in the UK, and reprinted here. The delighted reviews are probably from Angrez reviewers who recognise a wittily turned out Indian caricature.

I watch the books about India by non-Indians like a hawk, hyper-sensitive to incongruence. Because it always exists. Pickles are not aachar, they are achaar. A Punjabi, creating a diminutive for a name, will not convert Vishwas into Vish. Vishu, Vishi, yes, but not Vish. That's what a Brit would do, like Kipling saying a mother would call her son Ashok, “Ash”. But even Indian authors, proofread by Indians, get it wrong often enough (see Ashok Banker's Ramayana series for an example of how he mangles amavasya), so that's fair enough. My main crib about Vish Puri is that he is a caricature. Quite what of, I'm not sure. Probably as much of a caricature of a Gurgaon-based Punjabi as Hercule Poirot was of a Belgian.

Let's leave it at that. Hall has just put too much turmeric in the curry. But it's nice and tasty despite that. Go easy on the cloves, too, sahib ji.

Sorry about the tininess of the image.

Finders keepers, losers weepers

Detective | Belinda Bauer | Finders Keepers

Someone is kidnapping kids and leaving behind yellow sticky notes that read “You don't love him” or “You don't love her”. Most of the kids are kidnapped when they are left unattended for trivial lengths of time. Like dropped off by their school bus or told to go to the car in the parking lot while the parents amble up. Certainly a nightmare scenario for any parent. And the town is full of anxious parents. The clues are few (the reader gets more of them than the detective).

On the other hand, there is Jason Holly, a policeman who has lost his family and seems to have become somewhat unhinged, and who is therefore off duty, and off the case. Except that he cannot, or will not, keep himself away. The guilty consciences of kids and adults cause more confusion. You know how it is: relatively minor stuff gets told lies about, which ends up complicating the main investigation.

All the spoiler I will give you is that there is a happy ending. Mostly.

This is a story in which the psychology of the detective is complicated enough, and the villain's is gruesome. Which means that your hair will stand on end. At least, mine did.

Othello, Othello, wherefore art thou, Othello?

Detective | Peter Robinson | All the Colours of Darkness

Inspector Banks (now, of course, promoted), is recalled from his holiday when some kids find a man hanging from a tree, quite dead. He is a set and costume designer in a local theatre, and as the theatre is about to get a large windfall and he is about to be propelled into name, fame and money, why on earth should he kill himself? I'm not going to do any spoilers, so all I'll say is, if the real police can unearth such hidden motives and find the right proofs, the world will be a safer place. Or at least a more just one. One of the best books in this series, imho.

Living in olden times

Historical detective | Michael Jecks | The Sticklepath Strangler 

Many books that purport to be placed in the past get the past all wrong. If you were a king, you would be relatively well off, albeit without a decent doctor or dentist, but for the majority of people, life was nasty, brutish and short. Ordinary people had little or no rights. As Lois McMaster Bujold's Capt Cordelia Naismith once drily remarked, democrats have no problem with an aristocracy as long as they get to be the aristocrats. Aren't most of us fantasy readers expected to identify with benevolent kings rather than the downtrodden serfs? Yeah, you read my previous review, right? It would indeed be difficult in the extreme for us to identify with the serfs of bygone ages, so Michael Jecks wisely gives us the viewpoint of Baldwin Furnshill (Sir, no less) so that we aren't faced with the viewpoints of the ordinary villagers of Sticklepath (steep path) -- which would drive us quickly insane.

Did you know that villages were fined if a murder occurred in them? Heavily? Now that's a motive for not reporting it, if there ever was one. However, a blabbermouth traveller happens to be around when some young girls discover an old body in a wall, and the King's men, Sir Baldwin and his friend the bailiff Simon, turn up to investigate.

The mystery is an old-fashioned detective story (ha! In more ways than one) in which you get clues, and you have to deduce the facts logically from what people state. No forensics, no photographs, not even written records. More than one murder is unearthed (cough, cough, no pun intended, I'm sure), and more than one murderer is unmasked, with more than one motive for murder. To Jecks' credit, he manages to explain the surreal motives of people in ye olde times understandable, with good doses of prior exposition neatly woven into the story so that you get your aha moment from the mystery's solution(s).

It's easy to understand the jaquerie after reading a book like this and finding out what a horrible life most people had before the industrial revolution and modern medicine. I'm grateful to live now, and not a few centuries ago, and especially not in rural England.

Recommended for a good mystery as well as insight into ye olde times.