Death in a Bygone Hue Book Review

 

Death in a Bygone Hue review

 

Susan Van Kirk’s second art center mystery, Death in a Bygone Hue” is an engrossing and pleasant cozy mystery. My caveat here is simply a mention that I have known Sue as a neighbor and friend for many years and she is aware that my personal preference in detective procedurals calls for a bit more guts than the “cozy” genre generally supplies.  

 With that said, I still love her single, delightful, and unabashedly inquisitive heroine Jill Madison. Jill is a budding artist, and Executive Director of an art center in a small midwestern town. Just as she is readying the center’s first national juried exhibition, Judge Spivey, her good friend and the treasurer of her Board of Directors, dies suspiciously. This suddenly puts her as a sleuth in search of a killer as well as a suspect in the crime.  The judge’s will, unknown to her, has disinherited his adult children and left all of his valuable paintings and his money to Jill and the Art Center. A local newspaper woman adds fuel to the fire by writing articles accusing Jill of the crime and a final fan to the flames exposes concerns about the judge’s hidden past during the Viet Nam War.     

 Van Kirk’s tightly plotted narrative comes nicely equipped with a jolly sidekick and a handsome emergency room doctor from the local hospital who adds just a touch of steam to her life. Witness this quote, “I found myself falling for him as he hugged me, kissed my forehead, and headed for the door. He actually thought my work was important. He could be a keeper.”   

 Another plus is the unique setting of the book in an arts center. I cheerfully admit that I know this art center since Van Kirk has fictionalized the real one that operates in our town. When Judge Spivey’s painting collection is discovered to be valuable, it opens up the plot to potential art theft and forgery, which extends the plot well beyond the locality where the crime was committed. This allows a reader to pick up just enough discussion of how art shows are run, how exhibits are hung, and how provenance operates in the art world itself to add depth to the setting without slipping into the aesthetic weeds.

Van Kirk’s book is not going to knock Agatha Christie or Louise Penny off the top rung of the ladder quite yet, but she had me guessing the wrong villain right up to the final suspenseful confrontation. That, for my money, is what a good solid enjoyable read is all about. I give it a 4 out of 5.  Get a copy!

 

 

A PRIZED POSSESION

 

“A most prized possession”

This writing prompt asks that you select something you have or have had that means something to you. It should be a treasure, but not necessarily a monetary one. It should be something that has been special to you for a long time and you have kept in your heart if not in reality.  

Although my wife comes to mind immediately, this is not really a reasonable choice. Not a good idea to go there in this day and age.   Just in case you need to be reminded, women are no longer owned objects to be controlled by men.     

This leads me into a more physical domain. In spite of heart stutters, a bum shoulder, and all-round old age, I do treasure the blessing of my continued mobility. It is one of those things we don’t think about until it is disappearing. The ability to go about your daily regimen, albeit more slowly than before, is a treasured possession for any senior citizen.    

Tied to the physical world would be to choose the treasured memories of a lifetime of travel.  For many, those recollections are contained in the now fading photos or slides of far-flung places and past family gatherings.

Just as easily I could select a group of memories of the college students I have encountered over the years and the experiences bound up in the plays directed and sets constructed. More than a few of these students have kept a place in their lives for attending or making live theatre. Several met their mate while participating in one of my productions. Though now long gone from their alma maters and working and raising families of their own, I continue to enjoy their lives vicariously via some of the positive features of the modern social media.  

But finally, I have focused on books.  I offer no apology for choosing them as a valuable personal treasure.  Teaching has been my life and books have been as constant a companion as my loving spouse. They lined the walls of my office and of my study at home. The difficulty remains that this option is plural and keeps me from focusing on a singular personal antecedent.

With that in mind, I have boiled the choice down to a single representative book. It is my treasured copy of Richard Haliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels.  It is, as of now, my most prized possession.  I am looking at it on the shelf as I write this and am quite sure it can be used as a seminal first cause. The copy I own comes from the 1960’s. I am not quite sure when or where I bought it, but it has traveled with me for years.  It is a hardback and unquestionably shopworn. The paper jacket is still on although pretty torn and tattered. The jacket blurb proclaims proudly that it is “the most popular adventure book of our times.” The times are the 1930’s prior to its copywrite date of 1937.  What I do know is that it was a library discard and the evidence of my attempts, without much success, to pry off the old card pocket are still there to see.

You now have a right to ask why this volume has kept its place on my bookshelf over several moves and many years? This is where in old movies you see calendar pages sliding slowly backward in time to a younger and simpler age.

My mother was a high school graduate and an avid reader. She even belonged to the Book of the Month club.  Dad, not so much, partly because reduced circumstances took him into the work force and out of school after his sophomore year in high school.  They both did, however, share one commonality. That was that they would see to it that I and my sister would get a good education. My mother quit her secretarial job when I was born and one of the things I remember from my early life was she took me religiously to the branch library on Burleigh Street in Milwaukee every week from an early age.  It was first just for picture books and then on to real reading books as I entered the early grades. I was hooked and was devouring anything in print before I was eight.  Significantly fairy tales and travel to faraway places were tops on my list.

Adventure drew me like a bee to nectar and somewhere between my 8^th and 10^th birthday Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels came my way.  Halliburton often wrote for a younger audience and excelled in describing his travels around the Occident and the Orient. He wrote in the first person and in simple descriptive prose.  Facts were interspersed with questions and he had a penchant for throwing himself dramatically into his role as both narrator and participant in the scene he was describing. Take for instance his introduction to his first wonder—the San Francisco Bay Bridge.  He said, “Have you ever walked eight miles?  Were you tired?  How long did it take? . . . Now imagine walking and walking and walking for three hours all on the same enormous bridge.”  Yes, it’s a bit corny now. Time has not always been kind to Halliburton’s efforts, but I know for a fact that it got my travel juices flowing. I still would not trade his tale of swimming the Panama Canal (he is still today the smallest vessel ever to be locked through) or jumping into the “Well if Death” at the Mayan city of Chichen Itza for anything in the world. I must admit that I did not swim the canal or jump into the Well of Death like Richard did, but I have since passed through that canal and visited the “great well”  and other monuments at  Chichen Itza.

What now still makes this volume an important and valuable keepsake?  I guess because my copy of the book carries twenty-five checkmarks noting which ones of Halliburton’s fifty-five wonders of the world I have visited thus far. Now in my eighties, that bucket list still has some places and “miles to go” before I sleep, but with a little bit of luck  this scrappy kid from a working class family in Milwaukee might be able to add another checkmark or two to that book’s Table of Contents.

*A footnote:  Richard Halliburton disappeared in 1939 while trying to sail a specially constructed Chinese Junk named “The Sea Dragon” across the Pacific Ocean from Hong Kong to the San Francisco World Fair. No sign of his ship or its crew has ever been found. 

 

Jim De Young  7/24/2023

Book Notice: The Case of the Cantankerous Carcass

 

The Case of the Cantankerous Carcass by Howard of Warwick

When all you want is quick and silly,  there is nothing like the series devoted to the adventures of a hapless monk named Brother Hermitage written by Howard of Warwick.  He has fallen into the position of King’s Investigator and can’t manage to think of a way out. He is joined by a savvy weaver named Wat who has made a pile of money making and selling lewd tapestries to any and all. A third member of this triad is a young smart-mouthed female weaver who has a snippy answer for all questions and challenges.

 In this adventure an Abbot finds he has been proclaimed dead although he is quite alive.  Hermitage is asked to find out who started the rumor of his demise. Before that question is answered a newly appointed Abbot is really found dead and we are off to the races with constant jokes that are so corny you won’t need to plant another crop for years.   

There are a whole group of these throwaway adventures on offer at Amazon and most are offered free to Prime readers. Not sure you will want to keep them on your book shelf, but they are a gas if you need a break from the hard stuff.

 

A solid 3 out of 5  

Book Review Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

 

Ordinary Grace

 

Something struck my fancy on p. 245 of William Kent Krueger’s 2013 novel titled Ordinary Grace. The main character says: “I lay in bed that night more confused than ever. Too many things had happened in the day.” Now Krueger is a fine storyteller and an evocative descriptor of the weather, the colors, and the very smells of mid-western river towns, but he just seems to give his thirteen year old hero too many burdens too fast to convince me that all this could happen or should to one kid in such a short time span.   

Thirteen year old Frank and his brother Jake, a stutterer, live in a Minnesota river town in 1961. His father is the local preacher and his mother is a not so happy woman who thought she was marrying a bright young lawyer before he returned from “the war” a changed man and went off to divinity school instead.

 The tragedies mount fast and furious in that summer and Frank, when he is not included in the adult’s lives, is an inveterate eavesdropper on their conversations—most of which he can barely understand. The story ultimately hinges on who is the murderer of Frank and Jake’s older sister--Ariel. There are twists and turns aplenty before the real villain is found, but I just don’t think, even though the narrator is the adult Frank looking back on his childhood, he would have been quite so involved and philosophical about the events as he seems to be. Frank often seems to be more a nosey little brat constantly egging his brother into more trouble and as such doesn't make me like him a lot of the time. 

Publicity for Krueger often seems to mention his series of crime novels. I have not tried one of those and may pick one up in the future. Right now I give this one a 2.5 out of 5.  

 

 

The Way of the Bear by Anne Hillerman

 

I will admit up front to being a devoted fan of Tony Hillerman’s Navaho detective mysteries for a long time. His daughter, Anne Hillerman, has carried on his series and I remain a fan. The Way of the Bear is her eighth book in the continuation and she now concentrates more on the adventures of Bernadette Manuelito and her husband Jim Chee. Joe Leaphorn, the original chief detective, is now retired but nearby for consultation if needed. He may even come back into more prominence again if a bit of a hint at the end of this book is a truthful tease.

 

Ms. Hillerman brings a significant departure from her father’s work in the sense that she brings the concerns of women, both personally and professionally into the spotlight. In The Way of the Bear,  Bernie Manuelito and her husband are on a little break in Page, UT.  Jim Chee, her policeman husband, has been asked to visit a reclusive paleontologist to confirm his financial interest in donating money to the Navaho police. Bernie has tagged along, but is nursing a present disappointment in her failure to achieve promotion to detective and a deeper grief that is only hinted at early in the book.

 

While Chee prepares to meet the paleontologist, Bernie travels to the newly created Bears Ear National Monument and the Valley of the Gods to think about her future. Both Navaho detectives quickly run into violence. Bernie is shot at in the desert and Chee learns of one death on a local highway and finds another on the doorstep of the man he was to visit.

 

All of the usual twists and turn enliven this book, including the required final revealing of the main villains. You may find Ms. Hillerman’s plot reliance on cell phone calls in the quirky service area of the desert a bit too flagrant and the foreshadowing of nasty weather as a tension raising device a bit too obvious, but her delightful characters keep you turning the pages.

 

Finally, Hillerman’s veneration of the land itself as combined with the history and culture of the Navaho nation is fascinating and emotionally compelling. She manages to integrate the sciences of archaeology, geology, and paleontology into the plot without making it seem too wonky. She then manages to merge the science beautifully into a personal story of family and marriage that is always an undercurrent even while the detectives are facing danger in the world of stolen artifacts, environmental greed, and graverobbing. There is even a little skull named Mary that might be as important as the Leaky family’s Lucy in promoting a true concern for our planet and the well-being of all of the many species that populate it.  

 

I give it a 4.5 out of 5

 

P.S. The story of the creation of Bears Ears National Monument is intriguing all on its own. A google search will give you lots of material including insight into the political fight that has surrounded it. Check this URL out for a brief pictorial review.  http://bearsears.patagonia.com/

 

The Light Over London --Book review

 

The Light Over London  by Julia Kelly  

Are you into a bit of romance combined with a bit of history? If you are, Julia Kelly’s 2019 entry titled The Light Over London might be up your alley. It is a part of an entertaining and instructive genre that has recently produced a number of novels about women’s roles in the second world war. Jacqueline Winspear has dealt with female pilots, for instance and others have dealt with women code breakers at Bletchley Park and women’s service in intelligence. Some of the most courageous even parachuted into France to work with the resistance. 

Kelly has hitched her star to this  market by writing about the “ack ack” women who became part of anti-aircraft gun crews in London and other English cities. If you have not heard of these young volunteer patriots, you will get a full measure of enjoyment from the history alone.  And if you like some romance you can settle comfortably into the love affairs of two women from two different times and backgrounds.

Louise Keene, a sheltered young village girl, is swept off her feet by Paul, a dashing young spitfire pilot in the WW II Brit Air Force. To do her part in the war effort, she joins the women’s auxiliary of the British Army and her training reveals an expertise in maths that earns her an assignment to an anti-aircraft gun crew. At the same time she also begins a diary that records her feelings, her letters, and her beloved Paul’s responses.

Sixty years later, Cara Hargraves, a recently divorced woman working for an antique business, finds a tin box that contains old memorabilia and Louise Keene’s unfinished WW II diary. Cara is fascinated by the find and embarks on a search to learn more about the diarist and the described love affair. Conveniently, Cara also has a single male neighbor who offers to help in the search. 

From here on the book alternates chapters between Cara’s investigation in the present and Louise’s experiences from the past. The fairly traditional gimmick to integrate  the two stories seemed a bit arbitrary to me and the sexual sizzle remained resolutely  within the “cosy” genre guidelines.  But, overall, the material on the training and lives of the "gunner" girls was engaging and historically informative. I had never heard of these women. They were prohibited from engaging in combat, but they could do everything to aim and prepare the guns to fire except pull the actual trigger. It is not at all surprising to learn that a fair number of them were killed or injured while serving their country.      

 This is not a great book by any stretch of the imagination, but it retains enough bang for your proverbial buck to give it a try.  I give it a 3.5 out of 5 

 

 

 

 

 

A LINE TO KILL by Anthony Horowitz

 

A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz is a 2021 continuation of the Horowitz-Hawthorne series of mysteries. I  had recently enjoyed the London theatre setting in his The Twist of A Knife and had seen of his televised contributions such as The Magpie Murders. Once again Horowitz is the real author and also appears in the book as the writer who is following ex-detective Daniel Horowitz around while he solves more cases.

 

In this outing the pair is invited to attend a literary festival to promote their next to be published novel. The event is to take place on the quaint little English channel island of Alderney. It is an interesting and exotic location that still bears the scars of being taken over by the Germans during WWII and I was a bit disappointed that more about this history might was not incorporated.    

 

Shortly after the pair arrive, the rich resident who has bankrolled the festival is murdered. He has also been at the center of an ongoing fight to put a new electrical line from France that will result in environmental and historical destruction in exchange for lower rates. This leaves motives a-plenty for island residents to consider murder and it is complicated by previously unknown connections to the victim from among the invited literary guests.

 

Alderney is such a peaceful place that there is no upper-level constabulary on the island to handle murder, so a pair of investigators must be dispatched from Guernsey to handle the case. Even though Hawthorne is no longer with Scotland Yard, the DI sent over gives semi-official carte blanche to him to work the case and work it he does.

 

With befuddled writer and hanger-on Horowitz doing little other than wondering how he might write a book about the case, I kept bogging down in the narrative. It takes a lot of pages to set up the opening scenes and even the second murder of the first victim’s wife isn't much help. The narrative begins to pick up a bit as w head for the conclusion, but the final twists are so complex that it takes a whole series of chapters to tie things up. Coincidences are a part of fiction as well as real life, but there are just too many in this one for me to swallow. I give it a 2 out of 5 and in a publishing world inundated with crime fiction, Horowitz’s output won't be on my "have-to-read pile" any longer.