ReView of Another Dead Author by Katarina Bivald

 

Another Dead Author by Katarina Bivald

 Location, location, location, the old real estate truism is certainly true for this second or third book by Katarina Bivald.  You collect a group of young English authors, editors, and agents and tell them that they will spend three weeks in a lovely French chateau doing nothing but talking about or doing writing and you clearly have a nest of vipers. This is particularly true when the keynote speaker is a famous author who is poisoned by a glass of wine laced with hemlock just after he has delivered his speech.

Two French detectives are assigned to the case, but one of the other guest contributors is a published author who has recently helped solve a murder case back In England. This Miss Marple clone does what generally is done by an amateur sleuth—make things harder for the professionals, but in the end solves the mystery ahead of the constabulary.   

Since pretty much all of the participants seem to have some kind of motive for eliminating the famous author, the winnowing process is full of twists and turns. This is a good but not great mystery. Someone who has been involved with the writing process and its cutthroat commerciality might find it more interesting than the average reader. The French country background is handled nicely and is a slight change from the more usual English country house setting.

I give it a 3 out of 5.

Book Review of Bad Lands by Preston and Child

 

I had never read any of Preston and Child’s books, but when the blurb noted that it took place in the southwest around Chaco Canyon and had to do with the ancient inhabitants, my long-standing interests in archeology were piqued.  

The story begins with Nora Kelly, a young FBI agent, who finds herself out in the desert trying to figure out why a healthy woman threw off all her clothes and died of heatstroke in a remote area of New Mexico. Another death occurs, and further investigation reveals another death in the past and the potential of a cult being built by a professor at the state university.

Professor Oskarbi had been an acolyte of a Mexican mystic and then wrote a financially lucrative book about him. It also allowed him to build a coterie of young female grad students who had plenty of time in between studies to play house with their idol. Over the years, the coterie intensified into a cult that carried out summer research into the ancient residents of mysterious and remote Galina Canyon. The scientific digs apparently also featured the practice of ancient rituals, drug taking, and lots of overnight tent hopping.  

To prepare you for the tilt into fantasy, the authors tell you that FBI research has found that bizarre cults can be formed by intelligent people, like PhD grad students in anthropology, as well as by religious nuts. The professorial cult demands suicide, blood sacrifices, and violent torture. It is fueled by a real evil order behind reality that rises out of ritual fire and smoke. Detection disappears and the bloody climax, can’t even be mentioned in the final FBI report because nobody will believe it. I think I’ll stick with Tony or Anne Hillerman for my Navajo-oriented fiction.

I give it a 2 out of 5

Review of The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson

 

Constance Haverhill is a wonderful main character—intelligent, loving, giving, perceptive, ambitious, gracious, and funny in turn. She has spent the First World War running her family’s farm in the absence of her brother. Out of a job when he comes home safely, she has taken a temporary position as a companion to an elderly family friend who is convalescing at an English seaside hotel after a bout with the Spanish flu. Her future seems to be as a governess or a bookkeeper—both bleak and not prime avenues to marriage. 

 Then she meets Poppy, a woman from the monied class, who had carried dispatches on a motorcycle during the war. She has marshalled a group of local single women who were also riders and formed a taxi service to carry people around the town in the sidecars of their cycles. Poppy’s brother, a fighter pilot, has returned from the front without a leg and is having major PTSD issues.

There you have it. A historical event populated by young marriageable women of all classes who have done work in formerly male occupations during a war and are now seeing their hard-won freedoms being ripped away.  Poppy launches another plan for her incapacitated brother to teach women to fly, and there you have the full and catchy title.  

Various characters are there to display the disparity between the British upper and lower classes. The contrast is eloquently covered. The women, whether spunky or pompous, are hard to see as motorcycle demons and potential pilots but they carry the story through multiple twists, and romances. Everything builds to an exciting climax in the air and on the matrimony field. The whole ambiance seems spot on. The richness and endearing qualities of her characters and the luscious beauty of her descriptions of the seaside and the countryside will capture you, I’m sure. 

I will close with a few of the sentences I marked to illustrate Simonson’s prose chops.  

An image--“Percival turned an alarming shade of purple, strangled somewhere between his scorn and his public politeness.”

A smell-- “Ah, next to fresh-baked bread, there’s nothing better than the smell of petrol in the morning.”

A view on marriage before and after the war--“One had to dance with a lot of frogs to find the rare prince. But now the tide has really gone out.”

A view on life in general as noted by our heroine--“To live for today, one must be reasonably financially assured of tomorrow.”

I give this book a fine 4.5 out of 5. Truly enjoyable read.