Book Note--THE LAST REMAINS by Elly Griffiths

 

Griffiths, Elly THE LAST REMAINS

 The author’s name was unfamiliar to me, but discovered she has written a Ruth Galloway series that is now up to 14 books. This is 15 and is right up to date with a Covid sub-plot. I also was informed that this was the final book in series and was tieing up a lot of loose ends from the earlier books. It might be pleasant to take a peek at some of them.

 

The book is set in Norfolk. Her heroine is Dr. Ruth Galloway, an archaeologist and teacher, at a state “Redbrick” university.  Her department is being closed down and her favorite squeeze is a homicide detective named Nelson.

 

A skeleton is discovered in a bricked-up space during the renovation of an old building and she is called in to help identify the remains. It turns out that the bones are fairly modern and there is evidence of fowl play. This brings the police into the picture. The remains are identified as a young archaeological student who disappeared some twenty years ago and the remainder of the book chronicles the complicated relationships that tie all the characters together.

 

There is a lot of talk of ancient idols, old Norfolk legends, and trips to an ancient mine. A pleasant read.  I give it a 3.5

 

 

Book Review Louise Penny A World of Curiosities

From one critic “Her eeriest novel yet.” 

 

Someone at our Grand Living reading group knew a person who claimed to read the last couple chapters of a book before deciding to read it. I don’t recommend that method, but there is no arguing that classic books and plays are re-experienced even when we know how they come out.  In the case of Louise Penny’s 18^th Inspector Gamache book, I know of no harm that can come from looking at the author’s acknowledgements at the end. They say simply that she can’t put a finger on exactly where or when the ‘the major theme of ‘forgiveness’ emerged” in the book, but it did.  

The narrative begins with celebration and a party for two young female graduates of a Montreal engineering school. One of them was an abused child in one of Gamache’s early cases. The horrible sin that haunts both Gamache and his son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, is that the mother had abused her children by selling their bodies as well as hers. How this early sin persists into the present and to a violent conclusion is the journey Penny takes you on.

The central nemesis in the story is thought to be locked in a prison, but has escaped to plan his revenge. Chief Inspector Gamache has his own dark doubts that he keeps in a locked basement storeroom containing his personal files of old cases. Penny extrapolates from this that everyone has secrets and they are kept in locked rooms. “Either in their home, or their head, or their heart.”  These secrets are deep, often dark, and not easily revealed to others. The irony is they fester as much in a psychotic killer as they do in a heroic detective and for each, some kind of forgiveness or at least understanding is seemingly out of reach.

All of the secrets are exposed to light, though in code, when a bricked-up room is found in the former psychologist and now bookstore owner’s old Three Pines house. Inside that room is a huge painting that contains “A World of Curiosities” or a set of clues to the mystery. Each little element or brick contains a piece of the whole. Penny, through Gamache, continues to remind the reader of the “folly of expectations” When there are multiple trails, it is easy to go down a wrong path or follow the deceptive hint put out by an enemy.

Most of the familiar Three Pines denizens who have appeared in the previous books return for brief stints, including Ruth and her duck Rosa, Gabri, the owner of the B and B, and Myrna the former psychologist and book store owner. Food, as always, is an important part of the book. It contains joy, comfort, and togetherness as it unifies all humanity.

This isn’t an easy read; it is just a good one. It is beautifully constructed and thematically complex. It digs into deeply held doubts and obsessions that in turn have fostered  unspeakable evils and dark arts. As Gamache comments toward the end of the book, he has met both good and evil and “had the scars to prove it.”

 

 

 

 

 

Book Review

 

Paul Newman: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man is a memoir based on some long recorded interviews by Stuart Stern and then compiled and further edited by David Rosenthal.

And thereby hangs the tale. Aside from some amusing comments about his education at Kenyon College and a few tidbits about his films, there is little to recommend here. Newman’s extended comments are interrupted constantly by little paragraph length blurbs by people who knew him or worked with him or married him. All of this results in a kind of choppy garbled narrative that does no service to Newman or his biographers. Give this one a pass. Barely one star.

 

One of my favorite photos from the past. A native American Woman in AZ doing a basket dance in 2014

Book Review of Showstopper by Peter Lovesey

SHOWSTOPPER by Peter Lovesey is what I call a quicker picker upper mystery. I happened on it on the new book shelf at the library and because it was short, about show business, and set in my favorite locale (Britain), I took a gamble.

Peter Diamond is a detective in the historic town of Bath. He is having his own age-related emotional problems and when his superior orders him to stop mucking about in a popular TV show’s remarkable run of bad luck and instead order his team to start taking courses in more modern detection methods, he interprets this an attempt to force his own retirement.

Then, in a stroke of luck, the media find legs in a story about the TV shows string of accidents, disappearances, and deaths.  Diamond’s boss is now convinced that if this is a big story, her department has to solve the mystery in order keep the public happy with the police department. In a flash Diamond has encouragement from the top and a big budget to either prove that all the problems were accidental or to find and arrest a serial executioner who is running amuck.    

The bad luck angle is quickly discarded and it begins to appear more likely that someone has a dangerous grudge against the show or the personnel involved in making it. While his team researches backgrounds, Diamond carries out suspect interviews with the current star, her stunt double, the producer, the director, and an assortment of gaffers, grips, and production assistants. While the entertainment industry characters are pretty common stereotypes, there is also a strange itinerant tramp who has managed to be in Bath every time nasty incidents have occurred. He is by far the most interesting character when placed against the uppity star, the super organized director with a strange home life, the talented writer who can’t refuse a drink, and an assortment of disgruntled former employees and current worker bees. The prose is competent, but rather sparse on color and atmosphere in my estimation. The setting in the historic town of Bath seems to get a shorter shrift than it deserves.

On the positive side there is some humor. One of the nicest bits is the desperate search by divers at a river marina for evidence of human remains that finds everything but.  And you can safely recommend the book to your grandmother. It is well within the “cozy" mystery” genre. The twists and turns at the end show why Mr. Lovesey is a pretty fair plot creator, but I balk at a book jacket flack calling him one of the “finest exponents of golden age fiction.”   Give it 2.5 stars and choose only if Louise Penny or Elizabeth George are not available.     

 

 

The King's Anatomist by Ron Blumenfeld

 

Blumenfeld's book is described as a “historical mystery novel” and is a one-off in the sense that it is not structured to allow room for a series to develop.

The Anatomist referred to in the title is a real historical figure, though no doubt the name is familiar only to medical students today. Andreas Vesalius lived from 1514-1564 and is often referred to as the “father of modern anatomy.”   Blumenfeld’s narrator is a fictional “good friend” named Jan van den Bossche of Brussels.  Jan worships Vesalius from childhood and then meets up with many of his former students and followers as he plots a course from Brussels to the remote Greek island where Vesalius has met an untimely and mysterious end.  Van den Bossche is so devoted that he even continues to be a friend to Vesalius after the man has married the woman he loves. Years later, his quest is an attempt to discover the cause of his friend’s death and to deliver some closure to the widow and his daughter.  

It is the journey through 16^th century Europe that provides most of the interest for me. The book explores the two men’s strange friendship while the political and social history of the era unfolds in the background. We visit several cities where Vesalius lived or taught. As the journey proceeds, we encounter political intrigue, war, the black plague, the Protestant Reformation, and even the physical difficulties of traversing the Alps on horseback. Just outside of Milan, Mr. van den Bossche visits a man who has a collection of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, which may have inspired the medical precision of his friend’s illustrations. Ultimately, van den Bossche arrives in Venice where he boards a ship for a long and stormy trip to the island when Andreas Vesalius had died. And, like any good mystery, the final pages bring some unexpected twists and turns.

This is not a great book, but it develops the sights, sounds, and smells of the 16^th century nicely. One warning might be that some of the details of finding bodies and the dissections are not for the squeamish. 

 Mr. Blumenfeld was born in New York and was a physician, pediatrician, and hospital administrator in the past. This is his first novel.  I give it 3 stars.

Jdy 2/17/23

 

The Twist Of A Knife by Anthony Horowitz

A copy of The Twist Of A Knife was sent to me by a good friend, who is also a published author of mysteries. It garnered my immediate attention because the corpse in this whodunnit is a critic who pans the opening night performance of a thriller titled Mindgame at London’s Vaudeville Theatre.  The first “twist” is that Anthony Horowitz, the author of the book actually wrote a play called Mindgame that was premiered at London’s Vaudeville Theatre in 2000. The second “twist” is that the book deals with a play written by Anthony Horowitz that is opening at the Vaudeville Theatre. The third “twist” is that Horowitz (the author of both the real play and the one featured in the book) makes himself in the play in the book the primary suspect for the murder. Do you have that straight or is the mind game working on you overtime?

As someone who has had a previous life as a theatre director, teacher, and unrepentant anglophile, I can happily vouch for the accuracy of the theatre material right down to the grotty and cramped backstage at the Vaudeville Theatre.  I caught Mr. Horowitz in only one little boo-boo, which was attributing Peter Schaffer’s Black Comedy to his brother Anthony, who did write the classic Sleuth. Horowitz’s depiction of travel around London’s streets and into tube stations is also right on the money.

I am not quite as keen on Horowitz’s police procedures, however. The critic, Ms. Harriet, Throsby’s, is found dead at her home at 10:00 AM the morning following the opening. She has been stabbed to death by one of the several daggers given as opening night presents to the key company members by the producer.

With a speed unknown to most police departments, much less by London’s constabulary, the Peelers are able to process the crime scene, interview people at the first night party, track down the location of all the gifted daggers, and still arrive at the author’s home by 4:00 PM that afternoon armed with a murder warrant. In short order, the author manages to get his former literary partner, who is a cashiered former police detective (Daniel Hawthorne) to help him prove his innocence. 

Hawthorne, posing as a policeman, takes author Horowitz on a series of interviews of the other suspects. None of the interviewees challenge his status, ask to see his warrant card or ask for a solicitor. And no one seems to find it odd that a policeman, fake or not, who was investigating a murder would bring his main suspect along with him as he works the case.

Detective Hawthorne plays an inscrutable Poirot through all the interviews and ultimately schedules an Agatha Christie showdown with all the suspects right on the Vaudeville Theatre’s stage. The coppers sit in the auditorium while Hawthorne takes us through a far too long denouement.   

In spite of my reservations, the book kept me turning the pages. I loved the London theatre ambiance, and missed the other twisty clues that cemented the guilt of the villain. I give the effort 3.5 stars and am only mildly excited by the last pages, which promise at least three more adventures with Horowitz and Hawthorne in the future.

Jim De Young   2/4/23