8/1/2004
How do you choose anew mystery to read? Many people read the first paragraph.
Many more read the first few pages. Being an aficionado of the EnglishCosySchool, I am beguiled into buying a book by the presence of a map between the covers. Here’s a beaut! It’s called “Dissolution” by English lawyer C. J.Sansom and it’s a novel of Tudor England at the time of1537, when England is divided into those who continued to be faithful to the Catholic Church., and those loyal to Henry V111 and the newly established Church of England and his despised vicar general, Thomas Cromwell who crusade against the old church with vicious new laws and rigged trials and a closing of the monasteries, the better to pillage lands for the Crown. First-time writer Sansom, before sending the book to publishers first sent it to P. D. James, Baroness James of HollandPark, .
Since it’s the sort of book she adores and writes, she wasted no time in finding a publisher for it.(Viking Penguin;$24.95).The time and place is beautifully researched, as is the hero-lawyer one Matthew Shardlake, hunch-back, and his young clerk, Mark Poer.. Henry V111 has just had his wife beheaded and Royalty and those who would keep their heads are bent on closing the Catholic keeps, who have always handled their own moneys and fiefdoms (some pretty crooked). Cromwell, sends Shardlake and Mark to solve the murder of a king’s counselor at the monastery of St. Donatus .You won’t be able to resist those maps between the book’s covers, like an earlier day Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick. You’ll understand what The Vegetable Garden is, but the Reredorter? The Dovecotes?…The Buttery? Enjoy!
…Filled with unusual themes and paradoxes. “Nighttime is My Time”(Simon & Schuster; $29.95;) arrives on booksellers’ shelves from the indomitable Mary Higgins Clark, along with the time change and the daffodils and a salute to upcoming Mothers Day. ‘Mary’s Little Lambs’, I usually refer to her spring offering, since Clark’s s stories often have a child in peril as a theme. Here, Jean Sheridan, a prominent historian and author, is driving to the twenty-year class reunion at the exclusive StonecraftAcademy in Cornwall on Hudson, New York, where she is one of six honorees. She has decided to go to the reunion, in honor of one of her friends from the class, Alison Kendall, a high-powered talent agent recently drowned in her Hollywood pool, the fifth of seven women graduates in this class who have met a sudden and tragic end. ”I am the Owl”, the killer would whisper as he ended the lives of his victims, and leave with the bodies a small pewter owl.
On arriving at the Stonecraft Inn, Jean receives a fax about her receipt recently of a small hairbrush containing strands of hair, from a mysterious source claiming this belonged to Lily, the daughter she had at 18 and given up at birth for adoption. Jean had conceived Lily in a romance with a West Point cadet killed by a hit-and-run driver a week before his graduation. Lily, Jean discovers, is now named Meredith, and is a West Point cadet. Meredith now receives a phone call from someone saying he had a personal note to deliver to her from her birth mother, attempting to lure her to the Storm King Lookout—and to come along. Add to all the Clark fans, those who might have ‘dragged’ at West Point and looked forward to weekends at the Thayer Hotel plus those who are intrigued by the adoption laws of the states, know that the original printing of 700,000books will go fast. And to the widening fans of Book Audio, “Nighttime is My Time” is also available on both cassettes and CD’s. Looking at all Clark’s titles named for songs (“Remember Me”; “The Second Time Around” “Deck the Halls”) I am wondering about “Nighttime is My Time”. Is it a line from “Love Me or Leave Me”, that ancient Ruth Etting number from “Whoopee?”
“Black Dog” lives in the deep pit of the human soul. (Isn’t that the way Winston Churchill described his own bouts of depression?) In this new novel featuring Jimmy Parisi, the Chicago detective is fighting desolation and depression and his latest case isn’t contributing to his mental health at all. The killer is draining the blood from young women. Satanic ritual? Vampire cult? Two killers to catch, a f amily tragedy to get through. Will Parisi be standing at the end of it all? English writer Thomas Lairdis responsible for Parisi, his friends and his nightmares (Carroll&Graf; $25.00)
The third cleverly plotted Bailey Wiggins mystery provides a juicy insight into the well-to-do matrons of tony Greenwich, Connecticut in “Til Death Do Us Part” (Warner Books; $24.00) Bailey, creation of Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine, is the true crime reporter of Gloss Magazine and was described by Entertainment Magazine as ‘fun and frivolous as a champagne facial’. This smart, sexy heroine has been optioned by Touchstone and Mark Platt Productions for an hour-long ABC-TV pilot called “Bailey Weggins” and can replace all those tiresome reality shows as quickly as possible, for my money.
TRADE PAPERBACKEDITIONS
You might wish to investigate two new trade paperbacks, both of which are bargains. The first is Number One of a series selected by bookshop owner Otto Penzler as a book from the Mystery Writers of America as a book worth rereading. This “God Save The Mark” from Ancram’s Donald Westlake, a novel of ‘crime and confusion’-- is actually the third book of Westlake’s anti-heroes who are cataclysmically challenged, won his first Edgar for Westlake.. Fred Fitch is the man with the most extensive collection of fake receipts, phony bills of sale and counterfeit sweepstakes tickets in the Western Hemisphere. What happens to Fred when his long-lost Uncle Matt dies and leaves him three hundred thousand dollars shouldn’t happen to a bird who flies into a badminton game. Seems Uncle Matt was murdered. And now someone is after Fred.(ForgePaperback; $14.95).
Also, welcome back Rumpole, John Mortimer’s beloved barrister, worthy hand servant of She Who Must Be Obeyed, whose generous nose is sensitive to the whiff of the bouquet of a Chateau Thames Embankment and who is now old enoughto overcome dunces of all stripes with sly panache. “Rumpole Rests His Case” is from former barrister John Mortimer of the Old Bailey, who was knighted in 1998and lives in Oxfordshire, England.
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