mystery

The Dogs of Riga, by Henning Mankell

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I came to the corporate world from teaching where even the most cynical and disillusioned co-worker started from a place of caring about the children. When I started working in the corporate world, however, I quickly realised that there were two sorts of people there: those who cared only about getting ahead and those who cared about the work itself. Inspector Kurt Wallander is one of the latter.

Here, Wallander investigates the case of two dead men washed ashore in a life raft. Apparently in their mid-30s, dressed in expensive clothes with their arms wrapped around each other, both men have been shot through the heart. The previous day, one of Wallander’s younger colleagues had taken an anonymous call that a raft with two dead bodies would be washing ashore. At the time, Wallander decided to alert the coast guards and then wait and see what happened.

Wallander is not averse to waiting. He can act and does, but he takes a measured and intelligent approach to his job. Unfortunately for him, the ramifications of the case take him out of his comfort zone, out of his city and even out of his country. He must take action in an atmosphere of uncertainty, guesswork, and peril for both himself and others.

Once it is determined that the two men probably came from Latvia, Wallander is relieved to turn over the investigation to his Latvian counterpart, Major Liepa, whom he recognises as a policeman after his own heart. When the two talk late into the night over a bottle of whiskey, Liepa explains that he is a man of faith, though he does not belong to a religion. He cares about “the fight for survival”, which to him includes “the fight for freedom and independence.”

Another murder drags Wallander back into the case and sends him to Latvia, where he has to negotiate places, people and power structures that are foreign to him.

This is the third book in the Wallander series, first published in Sweden in 1992. The date is significant because, as Mankell describes in his Afterword, “Just a few months after this book was finished, in the spring of 1991, the coup took place in the Soviet Union—the key incident that accelerated declarations of independence in the Baltic countries.”

While the story is intricately plotted, with many unexpected twists and turns, the real joy of the book for me is Wallander as a character. We see much of his life outside of work: oppressed by the intense cold, navigating a difficult relationship with his elderly father, thinking of his daughter Linda who is away at college, and often missing his friend and mentor Rydberg who has died of cancer only a month previously.

Such scenes, which seem irrelevant to the puzzle of the two men in the life raft, help us with the puzzle that is Wallander himself. And each scene echoes through the story, adding context and color to Wallander’s thoughts and choices and actions.

I love the realism of this portrayal. Wallander gets discouraged; he needs to stop and rest sometimes or eat or use the washroom. He questions himself, at one point describing himself as “a Swedish police officer in early middle age, one who has completely lost his sense of judgment and gone out of his mind.”

But he goes on. Offered opportunities to leave and return to his safe desk in Ystad, Wallander is tempted but plows ahead, driven by the core of integrity that I most appreciate in those around me and in the protagonists with whom I choose to spend my time. These are my heroes, whether sitting at a desk near me or in the pages of a book: however flawed, they labor for something larger than themselves.

Who are some memorable characters from novels you’ve read?

And When She Was Good, by Laura Lippman

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While in line at Starbucks, small businesswoman and single parent Heloise Lewis learns of the apparent suicide of the so-called “suburban madam”. She hears the woman behind her patronisingly mocking the dead woman’s mental health and—in an action that might seem odd to anyone not from Baltimore—turns to confront her. Heloise defends the dead woman, arguing that prostitution is a victimless crime and, further, that as a person the woman deserves more respect than to have her entire life summed up in two words. She was “‘Someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s mother.’” Like Heloise herself.

This 2012 stand-alone from the popular author draws us irresistibly into Heloise’s life, a life she’s fabricated out of her damaged past to protect herself, her son, and her employees. Chapters alternate between Heloise’s history and the present where her carefully constructed life is under siege from an increasing number of threats.

Lippman deals out these threats with care. She follows up the surprise of Heloise’s profession with an account of the moment when as a child, then called Helen, her father first turns on her the anger and fists previously reserved for Helen’s mother. Then in the present, Heloise suffers the small betrayal of one of her oldest and favorite clients asking for someone new on his next visit.

By this time it was hard for me not to identify with Heloise and feel so firmly on her side that I could not abandon her when a worse threat is revealed: the possibility that her son’s father, a gangster and murderer, might be released from prison. I could not distance myself, thinking that such a thing would never happen to me. I could understand only too well how I might have gone down that path.

As K.M. Wieland describes in her blog for writers, it is a character’s backstory (or history) that makes a reader identify with her. As Lisa Cron says, backstory is “what gives meaning to everything that is happening up there on the surface” of the story. The trick, of course, is to weave it in carefully so it doesn’t overwhelm the story. With the parallel stories of Heloise’s past and present, Lippman doubles the difficulty. The difference in names–Helen and Heloise–helps keep the reader oriented between the two stories.

There are more betrayals, large and small, as Heloise struggles to save her life and the lives of her sons and colleagues. For me, the great joy of this book, aside from its powerful momentum, is the way Lippman details the inner workings of Heloise’s business. She’s thought through even minor details such as Heloise providing bracelets with GPS chips for her employees. When they leave her employ, they can have the chip removed and keep the bangle as a souvenir.

Even better is the way Lippman presents Heloise’s approach to running her business. It reminded me of Stringer Bell taking economics classes to better manage drug kingpin Avon Barksdale’s business in The Wire. It only makes sense, of course. A business is a business. Yet it keeps the reader identifying with Heloise even as we venture into less familiar territory.

As always with a Lippman novel, even as I’m racing to the end to find out what happens, I’m aware as a writer of bits of information falling into place, even those that seemed random or extraneous. I resisted this book for a long time because I so loathed the misogyny of the Philip Roth novel that the title pays tribute to that I not only threw it out but also tore it up first so no one else would suffer from its poison. However, I’m happy to recommend Lippman’s book as a supremely satisfying read.

Have you read any of Laura Lippman’s books? Which one is your favorite?

Salem’s Cipher, by Jess Lourey

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While the town of Salem, Massachusetts does make an appearance in this mystery/suspense novel, the title refers to Salem Wiley, a young woman whose deliberately uneventful existence in Minneapolis is torn apart by a phone call. She is a genius at cryptography and produced ground-breaking research for her PhD thesis, but her life is severely limited by a form of agoraphobia. The call from her best friend, Bel Odegaard, changes everything.

Police have informed Bel that her mother’s apartment has been broken into, a neighbor and her dog left in a pool of blood, and Grace–Bel’s mother–gone missing. When the two young women arrive, they discover that Salem’s mother was at the apartment as well, something we know from the prologue, and both Grace and Vida are missing, one of them probably dead.

Despite FBI Agent Stone’s warning that they too may be targets, Salem and Bel set out to follow the clue left for them by Vida, hoping to rescue their mothers. Or revenge them. As this tense, suspenseful novel tears along, the two women uncover a conspiracy going back hundreds of years. Each clue involves some kind of code, which Salem must decipher–and fast if they are to help their mothers. Factor in unforgettable characters they encounter, Emily Dickenson’s home and poetry, and an election about to produce the first female president of the U.S. and you have a story that works on several levels.

Lourey also works in references to scientific contributions by women, without slowing the breakneck speed of the story. She does an amazing job of capturing and conveying the emotions of the characters, especially the fraught mother-daughter relationships.

There are a few continuity problems that another editorial pass might have caught. There are also a couple of what Ray Rhamey calls “information questions” where information well known to the point-of-view character is teased yet deliberately withheld from the reader, presumably to create suspense. Mystery readers usually want to solve the puzzle along with the protagonist, so such tricks feel as though the author isn’t playing fair.

And it’s unnecessary, because Lourey is brilliant at ratcheting up the suspense. Every page has multiple instances of what Donald Maass calls “micro-tension” . A new and stunning bit of information or insight, a panicked physical reaction (“frantic movements”), even the use of especially active adjectives and verbs (“The . . . plane pitched and dropped, yanking Salem out of her light sleep.”) all keep the characters’ emotions in conflict and the reader turning the pages.

If you like to unravel a conspiracy or a good puzzle, if you long for a novel with engaging characters and a little history and literature thrown in, then hop on this rocket of a story.

Have you read a good mystery/suspense novel lately?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

The Lake House, by Kate Morton

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Summer is here, and no vacation is complete without plenty of books to read. Ebooks made packing easy: just bring my Nook. This year, though, I’ve gone even lighter, reading books on my phone through the Nook and Kindle apps. Which books, though?

For long car trips (I seem to do a lot of these) I love audio books, but must select them carefully. Thrillers make me drive too fast; long-winded sentences or complicated concepts make me tune out because I can’t follow them while driving. And the actor matters as well. If the delivery is too monotone, my eyelids get heavy. I thought I’d chosen a great book for my last trip: one of my favorite authors. However, this particular novel was more of a psychological study; it would have been excellent reading (and I may come back to it) but too slow for a car trip.

If I’m flying I want a book that is absorbing but not too thought-provoking, since its purpose is to distract me from my surroundings and make the time go by quickly. For a recent flight I picked up this novel by Kate Morton, an author new to me, though this is her fifth novel.

It was perfect! I fell into the story and barely came up for air during the long day’s travel.

Sadie Swallow, a disgraced detective keeping her head down at her grandfather’s cottage in Cornwall, goes running and stumbles on a beautiful abandoned house. Fascinated by the house, she becomes riveted by the 70-year-old mystery of the disappearance of the small much-loved boy whose loss so broke his family that they could not bear to return.

The story goes back and forth in time to fill in her past and that of the elderly crime novelist who is the last remaining member of the family who lived there. This kind of time-shifting rarely works, but here Morton handles it brilliantly. Each chapter is a single time period and labeled up front, so there’s no confusion. What really makes it flow are the transitions within the text, the scene at the end of one chapter flowing seamlessly into the first scene of the next chapter; even if there is a huge time gap, the story feels continuous.

The crime novelist, Alice Edevane, older sister of the lost toddler, is easily the most intriguing character in the book. While very successful as a writer, Alice loathes publicity and is impatient with people who don’t meet her standards. Those standards emerge through her interactions with Peter, the man she hires as a personal assistant, and later with Sadie: on time for appointments, clever (in the British sense of intelligent and practical), and a quality I used to call clear through: open and honest, without social artifice—someone you can trust.

I loved spending time with Alice. And also with Sadie. As a very junior female detective she’s smart but a little too willing to go her own way, ignoring orders from above, thus getting on the wrong side of her superiors. She has a bit of a troubled background, hence being brought up by her grandparents, and is too driven by work to care for a houseplant much less a relationship.

In addition to enjoying the characters, I too fell for the house and for the life the family led there before their tragedy. Set in Cornwall and the London I’d just left how could I resist? The atmosphere reminded me a little of the first part of Atonement. I loved Sadie’s grandfather and his life as a widower, making pies for the fête, walking his two dogs. He’s at peace with himself and able to advise Sadie without seeming too good to be true.

Some cross-genre novels shortchange one or another of their genres. For example, The Girl on the Train was a good thriller, but disappointing as a mystery. Here, Morton manages to present a satisfying mystery in a historical novel that also tackles important issues in women’s lives.

There were a couple of things I thought too improbable and if editing the book would have advised Morton to change. But overall a most satisfying read. I’ll certainly take along one of her other novels on my next flight.

Can you recommend a good audio book for a car trip or one for a flight?

Jar City: A Reykjavik Thriller, by Arnaldur Indriðason

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I have long had a soft spot for Iceland, partly from Halldór Laxness’s novels, so I was excited to find this mystery set in Reykjavik. The first of Indriðason’s books to be translated into English, Jar City starts with Detective Inspector Erlendur at the scene of a murder. In the sitting room of the basement flat he finds the body of a 70-year-old man who has been hit in the head with a heavy glass ashtray. Although Icelandic murders are not complicated, Erlendur knows this case will be different. In fact, everyone at the crime scene realises that this murder is something quite special, because they have seen the cryptic note left on the body, only three stunning words.

You want to know what they are, don’t you? So did I. When a mystery opens with this sentence “The words were written in pencil on a piece of paper placed on top of the body” you don’t expect to have to get through half the book before you find out what those words are.

This trick is what Ray Rhamey of Flogging the Quill calls an information question. He explains that the first page of any novel should raise a story question—a plot question about what will happen next—but not a simple question about information that the characters in the scene obviously have but the author has chosen not to reveal. Information questions break the contract between writer and reader, a contract especially binding in a murder mystery where the reader is challenged to identify clues and put them together to reach the answer before the detective does.

The note is only the first of several information questions in the book. Another egregious one is the identity of Erlendur’s mentor Marion Briem, whom we are told in a foreword has a gender-neutral name and whose gender is never identified by a pronoun. I’m all in favor of appreciating the spectrum of gender, but here it’s done so coyly that it just feels phoney. Information questions are a cheap way to try to create suspense instead of actually working to create suspense through the story. And they are irritating.

Aside from the information questions and some inconsistent word choices that are probably the fault of the translator (i.e., slang from different countries and different parts of the U.S. inexplicably mixed together), the book is quite good. Indriðason’s prose is appropriately spare, giving the reader a feel for life in Iceland’s capital city.

Erlendur is the usual sloppily dressed, lonely detective. He has two grown children: Eva Lind, a drug addict who provides a subplot for the book, and a son of whom we’re only told that he’s in “rehab”. Presumably that’s for recovery from alcohol or drugs rather than a knee replacement, but once again we are not given that information.

The story behind the murder is laid out well, with deceptive blind alleys and red herrings. Best of all, there is a larger story, a story about an aspect of society specific to Iceland but relevant to all of us.

You want to know what that larger story is, don’t you? Irritating, isn’t it? But in this case, I’m sparing you from a spoiler. If you can get past your irritation, the book is actually a good read.

Have you read any books set in Iceland?

A Traitor to Memory, by Elizabeth George

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I’ve been rereading this series of mysteries featuring Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley of Scotland Yard. It’s been over ten years since I’ve read any of them, so there are new additions to the series, and even back then I don’t think I’d read all of them. I do remember being astounded when I read her first book, A Great Deliverance. What a story! So many layers. And an unusually textured theme. I couldn’t think about anything else until I finished it.

The series only gets better from there. In this, the 11th book, Lynley is asked by his superior, Superintendent Webberly, to help investigate the hit and run death of Eugenie Davies. Webberly takes a personal interest because his first murder investigation as a DI was the death of Eugenie’s baby.

Interspersed with the investigation are journal entries by Eugenie’s estranged son. Gideon is a child prodigy, now a twenty-eight-year-old virtuoso who suddenly and mysteriously at the start of a long-anticipated concert at Wigmore Hall, lost the ability to play the violin. Along with it, he seems to have lost great chunks of his memory, so the psychiatrist he’s started seeing encourages him to write down what he does remember.

Among the many things George excels at is choosing titles. I am still thinking about this one. Gideon argues about the effect of his loss with his new American friend. Privately tutored as a child, until he met Libby he had no friends beyond his father and his music teacher. She keeps trying to persuade him that he is still a person even if he’s not able to play the violin. Gideon, though, whose life has been devoted to the instrument, thinks otherwise. In his journal, he asks, “How do I exist when the sum and substance of who I am and who I have been for the last twenty-five years is contained in and defined by my music?”

Interestingly, this idea calls up themes from the last book, though George doesn’t actually point that out. In that book, Lynley’s former Detective Sergeant, now demoted to Detective Constable, Barbara Havers, asks herself who she would be without her identity as a detective. This is another thing George excels at: she introduces backstory from earlier books in the series only rarely and only when it is necessary to the current story. Havers’s identity questions are left unspoken here, but add an extra dimension for a reader who recalls them.

Aside from basing identity on our vocation, there remains the consideration of memory. Does Gideon’s memory loss contribute to his feeling that he has ceased to exist? Who are we if we don’t have our memories? And since we rework our memories over the years, who are we if what we remember turns out not to be true? This last question actually get carried forward into the next book in the series.

This question of what constitutes our identity is a tangled one, fascinating in its permutations as it is carried out in various lives. It is especially interesting in the context of murder mysteries, where there are many secrets and where detectives must ferret out the hidden sides of the various characters, which in turns reveal previously unexpected aspects of their own. Everyone is changed. The end of each story leaves everyone—murderer, detectives, suspects, families and friends—in a new place.

Have you read any of Elizabeth George’s novels? Which is your favorite?

The Likeness, by Tana French

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In this second mystery from Tana French, the murder of a young woman drops like a stone into the world of her four friends, and of the detectives investigating it. Ripples spread, unsettling all of their lives and certainties and waking deeper currents.

I read this book and French’s earlier one, In the Woods, a few years ago, long enough ago that the details have faded but my memory of liking them hadn’t. That made them a good choice for listening to in the car on a couple of long trips: the story would come back to me enough that I wouldn’t have to concentrate hard to follow it but I could enjoy again the writing I loved.

The first person point of view makes these two books especially vivid. In the Woods is narrated by Rob Ryan, a detective in the Dublin murder squad. With The Likeness, his former partner Cassie Maddox, who has moved to the Domestic Violence unit, is pulled back and plunged almost against her will into investigating the death of Lexie Maddox, found stabbed in a remote cottage.

Frank Mackey, her boss from when she worked underground, back before the murder squad, persuades Cassie to impersonate the dead woman. The two young women look almost exactly alike, rare enough, but even more astonishing is that the dead woman had assumed the identity of Lexie Maddox, one of Cassie’s undercover identities. Mackie tells Lexie’s four friends that she survived and then sends Cassie in to live among them, to see if she can identify a suspect.

This is the part I loved. The five of them, PhD students at Trinity, live in a dilapidated country mansion which Daniel has inherited. He and Abby, Rafe, Justin, and Lexie are completely self-sufficient socially, a tight unit: innocently playful and sweet together, they become an armored phalanx among strangers.

Even just driving up to the house and seeing them on the steps Cassie is thoroughly charmed, in the deeper sense of being almost under a spell. It all seems so familiar. And the golden weeks that follow—working on the house together, dancing to Abby’s singing, reading and talking in the evenings—tempt Cassie with their promise of a different life. I was reminded of the beginning of Brideshead Revisited when Charles Ryder falls in love with Sebastian’s life. French captures so well the fun of being part of a tight group of friends, when you’re young and it’s all happening for the first time and everything seems unbearably sweet.

Even as Cassie slips more deeply into their easy camaraderie, though, she is looking for anything that might point to a suspect. She explores the local folks’ hatred for the house’s inhabitants and Daniel’s cousin’s frustration over not inheriting the house himself. She begins to see cracks in the family. She hears secrets whispered at night, notices Justin’s mounting fears and Rafe’s increased drinking.

There are plenty of questions to keep my mind buzzing, not just the big ones of who killed Lexie and why, but questions about each of the four friends, about why Lexie needed a new identity, about Mackey’s intentions and what Cassie herself will choose to do at each turn.

And the story is hauntingly beautiful at times, such as when we are drawn into the world these friends have created, their hour of splendour in the grass. There is much here about innocence and responsibility and the desire for freedom that can sometimes drown out everything else. And Cassie, with her strong moral code, her chameleon-like abilities, and her doubts and temptations makes an excellent traveling companion.

What books do you like to listen to in the car?

At the Center, by Dorothy Van Soest

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In this electrifying mystery, Anthony Little Eagle is placed in a foster home. Two days later he is dead. The police think it’s a tragic accident, but Sylvia Jensen isn’t convinced. As the foster care supervisor, Sylvia ignores pressure from her manager to accept the accident ruling; she thinks they are placing the reputation of the child welfare office above concern for Anthony.

The only other person investigating the death is J.B. Harrell, a reporter. He has little faith in Sylvia’s motives or determination. A sixty-year-old white woman with a grey ponytail, a beaded necklace, and a problem with alcohol, Sylvia knows she is on dangerous ground. She is deeply engaged with the tribal communities, through her work but also her sympathies. Yet, at the same time, she fears being seen as a wanna-be Indian, a New Ager cherry-picking another culture. Harrell picks up on her ambivalence and guilt.

Woven in with the story of Anthony’s death and Sylvia’s pursuit of the truth is another story, of a Native American child fostered by a white couple for seven years. Mary struggles with discrimination against her son and lives in terror that he will be taken away from her.

As a former welfare mother, I’ve seen social workers from the other side of the desk. Most are compassionate, but some treat their clients as mentally or morally deficient. All are burnt-out by huge caseloads and funding cuts. Sylvia Jensen’s compassion is tempered by her knowledge of the system, its strengths and its faults. The author captures the realities and sometimes contradictory agendas of a child welfare office.

As she should. In addition to being a writer, Dorothy van Soest is a social worker, political and community activist, as well as a retired professor and university dean who holds an undergraduate degree in English literature and a Masters and Ph.D. in Social Work. She brings a comprehensive knowledge of the foster care system, adoption, and tribal culture to give depth and detail to this fascinating story. Full disclosure: I am acquainted with Dorothy.

I read a lot of mysteries and thoroughly enjoyed this one. While Sylvia and Harrell’s investigation into Anthony’s death captured my attention, and Mary and her son my concern, what I most liked was the glimpse into a world unfamiliar to me: the liminal space where Native Americans interact with white people. I’ve read Tony Hillerman’s mysteries, but this novel gives a different perspective.

I also appreciated the multi-faceted depiction of the different forces competing over the fate of a vulnerable child. Even when all involved have the best intentions, a solution may not be easy to find. We are but human, and every system has flaws. To me, the hope comes in seeing characters such as Sylvia and Harrell rise above their own weaknesses to try to do good in the world.

What book have you read recently that gave you hope?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.