REVIEW: Mystery

Island Of Tears by Troy Soos
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

ISLAND OF TEARS, Troy Soos, 2001, #1 Marshall Webb, reporter, Rebecca Davies, social worker, NYC 1892. At the Opening Day ceremonies at Ellis Island, a reporter makes the acquaintance of a nice young immigrant girl and decides to follow her story as she adapts to life in America. When a few days later he finds she's gone missing, he tries to track her down.

I very much enjoyed this author's earlier, baseball-centric historical mystery series: smoothly written, funny, AND baseball! Plots were good too. (and one of them was about my beloved Red Sox). His writing here is even better, richly plush, almost Victorian in its depth and complexity. But heavy, and dark. Excruciatingly dark.

I suspect the plot is a good one; there are likely lots of twists and many interesting characters. But I don't know for certain, and won't, since I will not be finishing this book. I read fifty pages and, sadly, must consider it as "Did Not Finish". This is far too dark and, yes, grubby for me, too much ugliness and dirty streets and truly foul people. This historical mystery may be true to its setting, it may be an accurate representation of the period as well. But I did not enjoy reading about it in those fifty pages; the book has over 200 pages total. But that's just me. YMMV.

View all my reviews

REVIEW: Mystery

Death in the Off-Season: A Merry Folger Mystery by Francine Mathews
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

1994, #1 Merry Folger, third-generation police officer, Nantucket Island, New England. Cosy police procedural with an interesting case and a good plot, wonderful characters, will gladly try another.

Merry Folger works for her Dad, in the family business: she's a police detective, and he's the Chief of Police. Male detectives hate and/or envy her, even her Dad seems to think she can't do the job. Locals accept the family, the rich look down their noses at the locals, and the tourists don't seem to much care about the social strata on this small island. Merry is gorgeous and falls a bit for the Lead Suspect, brooding hunk old-monied Peter.

Sounds like a cutsey disaster, right? Sweet romantic fluff? Nope. Think Again.

Yes, Merry is beautiful but she's also smart and tough, with a realistic strength that comes from being part of a long established, well-respected, genuinely loving family. And the characters here are very well drawn, with good shadings and nice touches despite much of the writing seeming to be superficial at first look: Peter, whose black sheep no-good, high-flying big brother comes calling one night and dies in a cranberry bog on Peter's farm, and is found by the fragile Will, a young employee who has simply suffered far too much in his short life. Peter is fixated on his Lost Love who ran away with the brother years ago, and a reclusive schoolteacher is in love with him. There's more in this vein, but it's surprisingly woven in nicely and doesn't actually distract from the mystery plot:

Rusty the black sheep was once their powerful, wealthy and avaricious father's pride'n'joy - until he attempted "something" the family won't mention and got caught by Dad who not only disowned him but also turned him in to the goverment, so Rusty's been on the run for a decade. Killed immediately in the story, the plot centers on who and why, and Peter and his relations are not talking. We follow along with Merry as she works her way through what turns out to be a nicely twisted plot until the final denouement, as red herrings slide by and bits and pieces of clues surface and fade.

Over all this was well done, tidy, and interesting - I enjoyed it. And for a first novel (not just first-in-series) the flaws were minimal. But present, and that's why the comparatively low rating - for me - for a book I quite enjoyed. The ending was rushed, the "reveals" close to the end much too abrupt and portentous, without any real feeling for or about the current state of plot or character, got the feeling she knew she was coming to the end but still had a few "good bits" she simply HAD to put in! So she tumbled things down. Not bad, but not smooth - first-book-itis. The final "take-down' scene with the murderer is sketchy and too quick, not prepared for enough as well. We needed a bit more rounding out of that character and didn't get it. The feeling the murderer was only a chess piece was pretty clear, and that was disappointing, but not really bad.

And that's how I felt, ultimately, about this book: entertaining, pretty good, "not bad" for a first book, and will gladly read another in the series - I love what are for me "local" mysteries.

[NOTE: my indicator "cosy police procedural" means the lead is a working cop, but the slam/bam!!! quotient is low, as is the general blood'n'guts level. "Cosy" for me does not mean a book is sweet and "cuuu-yoote!!" in any way, it mainly means traditional format(s) of story and/or settings]

View all my reviews

REVIEW: History, Philosophy

Our Oriental Heritage: A History of Civilization in Egypt and the Near East to the Death of Alexander, and in India, China, and Japan from the Beginning to Our Own Day, with by Will Durant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

First volume in Will (and later Ariel as well) Durant's enormous series STORY OF CIVILIZATION, this is nearly glacial in movement, very old-fashioned in its approach, and yet completely compelling and endearing, as well as enduring. Filled with a wide variety of "asides", footnotes (heck, even the footnotes have footnotes...), and sometime quite amusing little bits of story, hint, and twist, the overall writing is, while very (almost overwhelmingly) pedantic at times, enjoyable.

Best sampled in small sips, the overall narration here is very good, not too "precious", and made for a lovely way to end the day, as "this sort of thing" is the majority of books I read (listen to, usually) for a half- or an hour each night last thing before bed. It helps slow my brain, gives me something to concentrate upon that is interesting without becoming "too much!", kwim?

The hardcover or digital editions are, of course, a lot more fun, as they have pictures, albeit black and white, but many of the places visited by the Durants in the 1920s and 1930s and the pictures shown here are gone now. And far too many of the beautiful and/or interesting artifacts are destroyed as well. But the pictures as described via audio may still be found on the web, or via the Kindle edition of this (and possibly other formats or PDF-type documents). Yay, for technology!

BOTTOM LINE: Superb but slow beginning to a long, deservedly considered "classic" multi-volume work of history, sociology, anthropology, archeology, philosophic thought, and a bit of psychology too.

A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


BOTTOM LINE: Thoroughly old-fashioned "good read!", with an aristo-detective, all the suspects gathered in A Great House for a weekend house party, a peculiar murder method, wild Bolsheviks complicating everything, family intrigues galore, an affable-but-dim Watson - what's not to like? First mystery novel (1934) from a now-classic author isn't challenging, brilliant, or particularly special, but is still entertaining, giving a hint of her good books yet to come and, as is usual with Marsh, there are nicely pointed sly digs here'n'there.



Nigel Bathgate's cousin Charles is a bit of a dog - loving the pursuit of ladies rather too much, he enjoys playing with fire, and gets burned, in many ways. He loses a girlfriend/possible wife (who truly loves him) while in pursuit of an already-married woman, whose current husband isn't much pleased. And while remaining rather likable (at least in callow Nigel's eyes) his superscilliousness and air of "I know better/all!" gets on not a few raw nerves during an extended house party. And not many are surprised when, in the course of A Murder Game, he winds up truly dead - and in a spectacular (how like Charles!!) fashion.



Enter Inspector Alleyn - obviously refined, very well-educated, extremely likable, his smooth demeanor hides a mildly tormented psyche, as he finds he must expose Nice People to the machinations of the police force and its subsequent events, some not at all well-mannered. With these attributes Alleyn, in Marsh's first novel, is quite ordinary, an oft-used character in popular novels of the time, and although in future novels he becomes a rather interesting personality with a fascinating backstory, in this his first recorded case he is quite traditional, and rather stodgy. And while in subsequent novels Marsh builds up the cast of regulars around Alleyn (especially the wonderful Mr. Fox), here he's pretty much the entire show, except for a funny local policeman named Bunce - yet another character that often shows up in mysteries from the 1920s and early 1930s.



The plotting, while good, is also quite ordinary for the period - a stilted setting, a twisted murder mystery with overlapping elements of several crimes, a bit of spy-thriller nonsense, some slight omnipotence from the police, and a thoroughly ludicrous bit of play-acting-cum-reconstruction of the crime at the end. But it's all very smoothly written, and while now a curiosity, at the time "this sort of thing" was quite popular.



Now considered one of the Queens of Crime of the period (along with Christie and Allingham), Marsh's first mystery is still enjoyable, if not special or especially thrilling.



View all my reviews