You can generally tell when my budget situation is getting tight by the way I start reviewing “classic” books, downloaded for free to my Kindle. And so we come to one of the first English mystery novels, Wilkie Collins’s 1859 book, The Woman in White.

I enjoyed The Woman in White, but found it frustrating at the same time. The story’s compelling, the characters wonderful, but (although I think I’m better suited to handle old fiction than most readers today) I found the Victorian conventions aggravating. Also, like any pioneering work in a genre, the author isn’t entirely sure how to handle his material, and does things which later writers, working in an established tradition, would never waste time on.

The Woman in White centers on two women who physically resemble each other, leading to tragic consequences. The first is Anne Catherick, who, when the hero, artist Walter Hartright, first encounters her, has recently escaped from an insane asylum. Hartright, unaware of this, chivalrously helps her find her way in London. The second woman is Laura Fairlie, a prospective heiress for whom Walter is soon hired to be drawing tutor. He falls in love with her without delay. But Laura is betrothed to a man of “her own class,” who eventually turns out to be an utter scoundrel. And so the foundation is laid for a diabolical plot to deprive her of her fortune and (perhaps) her life. Continue reading The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins →

Lars has already reviewed Mark Bertrand’s detective novel, Back on Murder, so it may already be on your To-Read list. I finished it Friday and loved it. At the start of the novel, Roland March is “a suicide cop,” the officer in the homicide department who does the legwork no one wants to do after a fellow officer kills himself. Though March made a name for himself years ago and had the respect of whole department, his one famous case killed a part of him and has been dragging him down ever since. When a house full of gang members is found shot up, March notices a detail that sticks with him, irritating him into taking risks that only further distance him his teammates. But will those risks pay off?

Layer onto the murder case the disappearance of a beautiful blond teenager, one who looks like the other good-looking teenagers you’ve seen on national news, but this one is the daughter of godly widow, a pillar of her Houston mega-church. Is it possible the two are related, or is March just hoping for another high-profile case to put his career back on track?

The novel’s title sums up the detective’s ambition, that is, to be fully restored in the Homicide department, no longer a burn-out and convenient scapegoat for odd police jobs. He wants respect. He wants to be trusted as the lead on another murder case, not just suicide clean-up work.

As the story develops, we see the great pain March carries and shares with his wife, Charlotte. He’s continually dropping hints about it, and the narrative gradually reveals without telling too much. It’s impressive really. Bertrand has a strong novel here, and I look forward to the next two. March definitely has staying power.

I reviewed Tom Lowe’s first Sean O’Brien mystery, A False Dawn, a while back. I liked the writing (though a copy editor might have been profitably employed) as well as the characters, but felt the story was weakly constructed and fell apart toward the end. My report on the second book in the series, The 24th Letter, is that the storytelling has improved, but I still wonder that St. Martin’s Press would have purchased the manuscript. Author Lowe shows substantial progress in his craftsmanship, but he’s still writing at a high amateur level, in my opinion.

This time out, retired Miami police detective Sean O’Brien is contacted by an old friend, a Catholic priest. The priest tells him he has been told by a prisoner—who was recently wounded by a sniper while on the way to testify in a drug trial—that a man O’Brien himself put on death row for the murder of his girlfriend is in fact innocent. The prisoner will soon give the priest a written confession, detailing where vital evidence is hidden.

But soon both the prisoner and the priest have been murdered, and O’Brien, conscience-stricken that he might bear responsibility for the execution of an innocent man—works against the clock to unravel a convoluted mystery before the date of execution. Continue reading The 24th Letter, by Tom Lowe →

This wasn’t bad. Although I found things to dislike in Paul Levine’s second Jake Lassiter novel, Night Vision, I also found things that pleased me. So I may possibly read another.

In this outing, Miami lawyer Jake Lassiter, having (apparently) recovered from the tragic loss of the love of his life in the last book, so completely that he now never thinks of her at all, is called in by an ambitious district attorney to act as special prosecutor in the murder of a local female TV reporter, strangled while engaging in sex talk over the internet. Jake, along with Charlie Riggs, his retired pathologist friend, is soon embroiled in a serial killer investigation, and along the way Jake meets a beautiful English psychologist who becomes a romantic interest. But who can he trust? Somebody’s telling a lot of lies and laying a lot of false tracks. Continue reading Night Vision, by Paul Levine →

Where’s My Son? by John C. Dalglish is a police procedural with a terrific premise. It also has the virtue of being (judging from a few hints in the text) a Christian novel that doesn’t preach. Unfortunately, it also exhibits a number of first novel weaknesses. I think the author may be capable of much better stuff.

The story starts well (from one perspective), balancing three horrifying plot strands. An amoral operation in false adoptions retains a felon to find and steal a baby for them. A childless couple suffers the heartbreak of multiple miscarriages. And a pair of loving new parents do not know they are being watched, and their lives are about to be torn apart.

It’s only once the kidnapping has been committed that the book’s hero is actually introduced (this, by the way, is in most cases a mistake. Authors are usually well advised to bring the main character in as early as possible). Here the hero is Detective Jason Strong who, sadly, does not live up to his surname. He’s hard-working and compassionate, but he comes off pretty stiff. No back story, no private life. Some readers don’t care about such matters in a good puzzle mystery, but this isn’t a puzzle mystery. It’s a police procedural in which we know whodunit before the detective does. Another problem is that Detective Strong doesn’t actually do much detecting. He follows leads, but his big breaks come from luck. That may be true to life, but it weakens a novel. The fact that he prays for guidance at one point is what tipped me off that this is a book by a Christian.

There are also a number of stylistic problems. At one point, two characters meet and just waste time:

“Hi, Wade. How ya doing?”

“Good, you?”

They shook hands.

Tip for authors: Unless some major clue is going to be dropped in the course of two characters greeting each other, just say, “They said hello and shook hands,” or something like that. Or skip the greeting altogether. The reader will know they went through the pleasantries. It just slows your story down.

At another point, a character is thinking about his wife, and in the next paragraph we’re told the same character “let his mind wander” to her. It doesn’t need to wander that way if he’s already thinking of her.

Most disappointing is the ending. Sudden and spare, it reads more like a synopsis point than a fiction passage. This relates to the weakness of Det. Strong’s character. If he had a life and friends, he’d have someone to bounce his decision off, and the scene would have a lot more resonance.

All in all, a good try. I wish the author the best as he improves his craft. Caution for a few passages of strong language.

I found Ken Casper’s As the Crow Dies a competent mystery. I neither loved it nor disliked it. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t like it more than I did. The characters are well drawn, the prose professional (always a pleasure, that), and the mystery puzzling (though I did guess the murderer before the end).

Jason Crow, son of a successful local restaurant owner, comes home to his West Texas town in 1968, a double amputee from wounds received in the Vietnam War. Once an NFL hopeful, he’s self-conscious about his disability, and insecure about his future with his girlfriend, Michiko.

His reunion with his wise, supportive father, to which he’s looked forward greatly, is not to be. He comes home to find police cars in the driveway, and he’s told his father has shot himself in his office—with Jason’s own gun.

Jason cannot believe his father would ever do such an insensitive thing. So, relying on his army buddy Zach, who has become a sort of personal attendant, he sets about discovering who among their friends and relations hated his father—and him—enough to commit murder in this way.

There are lots of leads, pointing in various directions. There’s enough infidelity, old hate, and bigotry in the town to provide a snake’s nest of motives. The depiction of Jason’s growing maturity as he learns to live a new kind of life is one of the book’s strengths.

I think my main problem with As the Crow Dies was that something I usually like in a story—lots of well-drawn, well-rounded characters—in this case produces soap opera moments from time to time. I was worried about anti-Christianity, but although a cultish “church” does provide some suspects, that church is so unorthodox that it doesn’t really come close to home.

You may like it more than I did. I don’t disrecommend it. Cautions for language and adult situations. As is so common nowadays, premarital sex is generally taken for granted.