8/15/2004
Suzy Longthorne, former London supermodel and still beautiful, needs to resuscitate her inn, The Hopwicke Country House Hotel. She lowers her gracious living standards and welcomes as guests a raucous group of local businessmen, grandly self-titled The Pillars of Sussex.
Who does Suzy hire to help her? None other than that aging pair who have been referred to as Holmes and Watson with a touch of Laurel and Hardy’. Simon Brett’s Odd Couple, Jude, an ex-model who now does some off-Picadilly acting and Carol Seddon, surfeited with a Civil Service pension, gardening and the like, who’s become Jude’s partner in crime. In “The Hanging in the Hotel” (Berkley Prime Crime; $23.95; 345 pages) Jude is recruited by Suzy to keep the spirits flowing, but the next morning Jude discovers that one spirit has flown for good when she finds the body of a young lawyer hanging from the poster of a canopied bed. The police are quick to call the body a suicide, in homage to the Pillars of the town ensconced therein. Suzy wants to keep the news out of the papers lest it drive away customers seeking a cozy weekend and the local police take a good deal of umbrage at the interference of the two dilettanting do-gooders. For awhile Jude and Carol seem to be exactly that, but persistence is rewarded. The killer is unmasked. Who is it? I’m not telling. Read the book and enjoy Brett’s mordant wit as you figure out whodunit.
Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, writes a regular column for the Miami Herald, and is the author of ten previous novels. He has a social conscience and a wry eye on the building going on allover Florida, especially South Florida, where the miles of sugar cane, houses, etc. threaten to sink the peninsula entirely. If you’re looking for a successor to John D. MacDonald and Travis McGee, Hiassen and “Skinny Dip”(Knopf;$24.95;355 pages) should do it for you.
Former cop and current loner Mick Stranahan is fishing in the current off his island in South Florida, when he plucks from the water a bale of what turns out to be Jamaican pot, to which clings blindly Joey Perrone. Joey has been upended from the deck of a cruise liner by her husband, Chaz Perrone, the only marine scientist in the world who doesn’t know which way the Gulf Stream flows. Instead of rushing to the police and reporting her husband’s crime Joey decides to stay dead.
And (with Mick’s help) screw with Chaz’s head.
As Joey haunts and taunts her homicidal husband, as Chaz’s cold-blooded cohorts in pollution grow uneasy about his increasingly paranoid behavior, as Mick Stranahan discovers that six failed marriages and years of island solitude haven’t killed the reckless romanticism in him, we’re along for the ride in what turns out to be a water slide of enjoyment.
“R is for Ricochet” (G. P Putnam’s Sons/A Marian Wood Book; $26.95), Sue Grafton’s eighteenth adventure with Kinsey Millhone. Kinsey is now thirty-seven; She’s learned that love and work are a questionable mix, that other people’s romances are much less hazardous than her own; and that a couple of McDonald’s Quarter Pounders with cheese is often just what she needs and forget the risks, love, life and sex .
“R is for Ricochet” (Kirkus Review insists this should be “R is for Romance”) opens when private eye Millhone is hired by a local millionaire, Nord Lafferty, to go pick up Lafferty’s daughter, Reba, his rich and spoiled 32-year-old whose upcoming parole from state prison Kinsey is to supervise. Her father indulged Reba as a child, wanted nothing to do with her when she became trouble. Here, too, we are
concerned with land developers who would disturb the peace of St. Theresa (read Santa Barbara) by overbuilding the precious landscape.
We meet Alan Beckwith, the big time land developer who convinced Reba to take the fall for him; her best friend, Onni, who replaced Reba at Reba’s old job in Beckwith’s company and took Reba’s place beneath Beckwith to keep him warm while Reba’s away. We meet Cheney Phillips, a classy guy with a red Mercedes who also happens to be a local cop and who is attractive enough to Kinsey to make her put on make-up and a skirt for a date with him.
Grafton always does a faultless job of research, so here we are treated to a thorough detailing of what goes on in a woman’s prison, from entry to exit. (Martha; take notes).
One of Grafton’s better efforts. I remember learning a lot of things from Kinsey’s adventures. In “R” we learn a lot about who we are and are we ever capable of change, a question that resonates with each of Grafton’s characters, praise be.
Janet Evanovich’s tenth novel about Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum is called “Ten Big Ones” ( St. Martin’s Press; $25.95;3llpages). Such is Evanovich’s fame that Stephanie and Lula and Grandma Mazur and Step’s two men, cop Joe Morelli and Ranger, the top bounty hunter at Steph’s shop started life this summer at the top of the New York Times best seller list. It wouldn’t be Stephanie if she doesn’t begin the book by destroying her Escape, and having to borrow Grandma Mazur’s Buick for a quick trip to the police station. This means Grandma and her big black patent leather purse go along as well, and Grandma has been known to pack a 45.
“You don’t have a gun in there, do you?” Steph asks.
“Who, me?”
“If they catch you carrying a concealed weapon they’ll lock you up and throw away the key.”
“How would they know I got a concealed weapon if it’s concealed? They better not search me. I’m an old lady. I got certain rights.” Grandma pulled the gun from her purse and shoved it under the car seat. “I don’t know what this country’s coming to when an old lady can’t keep a gun in her purse.” And we’re off! Enjoy!
“Little Scarlet” Walter Mosley’s newest Easy Rawlins from Little, Brown ($24.95) has Easy aged some twenty years since “Devil in a Blue Dress” first burst on the scene. Mosley’s ninth Rawlins novel takes place during black Los Angeles’ Watts uprising. The LAPD asks Easy’s help in discovering the murderer of a young black woman whose name gives the book its title. A white man is suspected, but Easy’s investigation leads in unexpected directions. Taut, well-written, a time capsule of a tumultuous time in America.
We’ve had a historical bouquet of surprising private eyes in the past year. Jane Austen has had her clever hand in sleuthing as has Will Shakespeare. Now comes the famed Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer.
It is 1370, in the heart of the Anglo-French conflict, the Hundred Years War. In danger of losing the valuable Aquitaine territory, England sends Geoffrey of Chaucer, the protégé of the king’s son, on a mission to France. As a poet on a diplomatic mission, Chaucer must persuade one of the most important noblemen of the region, Henri, Comte de Guyac to remain loyal to the English king. Chaucer’s problem is that he had fallen in love with the Comte’s wife, Ro samund, a decade earlier.
Enemies and suspects lurk around every corner. Chaucer’s mission is undermined when his host, Henri, is killed during a boar hunt. He must solve the murder (no accident, that) before he can return to England and his writing. Philllipa Morgan, a former schoolteacher who lives in the West Country in Britain, has produced this, her first novel, “Chaucer and the House of Fame” (Carroll&Graf; $25.00;341 pages.)
Lisa Scottoline has come up with a killer novel in “Killer Smile” (Harper,Collins;$25.95; 358 pages), and it has to do with a family secret she recently discovered. At the beginning of World War II Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the ‘enemy aliens’—Japanese-Americans, German-Americans, Italian-Americans to register, and some were relocated from coastlines, or given a curfew. Nothing to what the Japanese suffered on the West Coast when 100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans were uprooted and \imprisoned without due process—but an embarrassment, nevertheless. Lisa’s grandparents were served enemy alien papers even as their son, Lisa’s father, was serving in the U. S. Army Air Force in Italy. “This is my next book” observed Scottoline to a New York Times reporter some fifty years later.
As do most of her books, this one centers on an all-female, mostly Italian-American Philadelphia law firm. Lisa’[s heroine, Mary DiNunzio, a South Philadelphia native like Scottoline, solves a murder by unraveling the mystery of an Italian immigrant’s death in an internment camp. In an appendix, includes a copy of her grandparents’ 1942 enemy alien papers, a source of what she always perceived as a vague uneasiness in her family about their Italian roots.
Occasionally the exhilaration of a brief affair will end badly, think Fatal Attraction starring Glenn Close and Michael Douglas. For Miranda the residual affects haunt not only her, but also her family as Nicci French walks us through the trials and tragedies of love and family dynamics in her latest psychological suspense, “Secret Smile” (Warner Books; 308 pages;$24.00).
Miranda’s sister has never been the belle of the ball, that was always Miranda’s role, so when Miranda receives a call from Kerri bubbling with excitement about her new beau, Miranda can’t help be excited for her. The bubble quickly bursts at the always awkward first family dinner with the new beau, Miranda sees that her ex aka Kerri’s new beau, Brendan, will now infect the entire family with a virus of lies, deception and obsession. How can Miranda warn her sister without sounding obsessed herself as Brendan
rewrites the history of their brief affair?
French escalates the tension on each page as Miranda struggles to protect her family. Once the family destruction is complete and Brendan extends his toxicity to one of Miranda’s closest friends, Miranda vows to put an end to Brendan’s destructive path by reaching out to a virtual stranger and cements an alliance to stop Brendan in his tracks.
Special Collection
100 Years of Crime Stories by Women has been put together and edited by writer Elizabeth George in “A Moment on the Edge”(Harper Collins; $24.95;540 pages), 26 stories by distinguished members of the mystery and suspense field. From the Golden Age of Britain and the Commonwealth, including Ngaio Marsh and DorothyL. Sayers; and many thrills and surprises including Shirley Jackson’s “The Summer People”, Nadine Gordimer’s “Country Lovers” and Antonia Fraser’s “ Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grove.” Margery Allingham, Charlotte Armstrong, J. A. Jance, Sara Paretsky, Ruth Rendell are just a few of the top suspense writers included here.
