Cozy up with a good mystery –

New outings from favorite authors

I was pretty excited when Goodreads announced that three of my favorite mystery writers had new books coming out in March.  I immediately ordered the latest works of Donna Leon, Elizabeth George and Martha Grimes.  Looking for a good audio book, I also stumbled upon the work of B.A. Paris, who published her first book in 2016 and has a brand new one out now.  I haven’t yet gotten to the Martha Grimes (The Knowledge) in which she continues the investigations of her protagonist Scotland Yard Detective Richard Jury, but that’s next up.

I was disheartened to see on the book jacket of The Temptation of Forgiveness that author Donna Leon is 75.  How many more Brunetti books will there be?  This was a very satisfying read, completed in 24 hours during a snow storm.  As usual, things are never quite as they appear.  A colleague of college professor Paola, the Venetian detective’s wife, comes to see Guido Brunetti, concerned that her teenage son is involved with drugs.  Soon after, the woman’s husband is pushed down some stairs and experiences a significant head injury from which he may not recover.  Guido proceeds to investigate on the premise that the two things might be related but, while drugs at the school are a problem, it is a very different illegal issue with drugs that leads to the man’s injury.  As always, Leon presents her characters with moral questions.  Senorina Elettra, the administrative assistant at the Questore, breaks the law by accessing data bases that help Brunetti solve crimes.  A doctor with a special needs son doesn’t have the legal means to support him.  At night, Guido reads the classics, this time Antigone, which of course also deals with the question of whether morality or law is more important.

Behind Closed Doors by B. A. Paris tells the story of Grace, a 31 year-old fruit buyer for Harrod’s who thinks she has found the man of her dreams when she meets Jack Angel, a handsome lawyer who has made a career of defending abused women.  She is at the park with her mentally disabled teenage sister, Millie, when Jack approaches them.  He seems like the perfect man because in addition to his looks and professional success, he does not see Millie as a stumbling block to the relationship.  After a whirlwind three-month courtship, Grace marries Jack – and the nightmare begins.  Jack is a psychopath who gets off on fear.  Grace becomes a prisoner, locked in a room of their new house all day; the windows barred, the driveway gated, the house is a fortress.  Grace has no access to a computer or a phone and eventually Jack, angered at her repeated attempts at escape, takes away books and newspapers and eventually starts withholding food.  As if this isn’t bad enough, Grace soon realizes that Jack’s true goal is Millie who, when she turns 18, will come to live with them.  Grace’s only hope of escape is the occasional dinner parties that they host and ones to which friends invite them.  Jack never leaves her side in either situation; even when several of the wives invite Grace out for lunch, Jack crashes the party so that she cannot tell them about her situation.  The few times that she has tried – in Thailand on their honeymoon and at a doctor’s office when Grace feigns illness, she is thwarted by Jack and made to look mentally ill. 

Told entirely from Grace’s point of view, the reader comes to feel as hopeless and desperate as she is.  It seems like, though, she could have taken more advantage of opportunities to get away.  For example, when they are at a dinner party, why doesn’t she try to escape with the help of the others there? It hardly seems like Jack could force her to leave with him when she is surrounded by these other people.   Still, it was a page-turner and I raced to finish it once the end was in sight.

The second book by this author, The Breakdown, follows a similar pattern to her first outing but does so more successfully.  Told entirely through the point of view of Cass, a 30-something woman who begins to doubt her own sanity when a bizarre series of events occur, it is the story of a woman whose happy life suddenly becomes a nightmare.  Driving home in a storm from a night out at the pub with her teaching colleagues, Cass doesn’t heed her husband’s advice to stick to the main roads and impulsively turns down the dark and winding woods road that is a shortcut.  Her nerves are on edge as it is difficult to see and she nearly runs off the road before spotting a woman pulled over in a layby.  Cass pulls over too, thinking the driver in trouble, and waits to see if the woman will wave to her or get out of the car.  When this doesn’t happen, Cass pulls off and heads home, only to discover the next day that the woman has been murdered and that Cass knows her.  Cass becomes unhinged by the experience, wondering if she could have prevented it; when she starts to get phone calls in which the caller stays silent and begins to think she is being watched, she concludes that the murderer thinks she saw him.  At the same time, she begins to forget things – money she collected for a joint gift for a friend, dinner parties that she initiated, the alarm code to the house, where she parked her car – and her paranoia is heightened by the fear that she, like her mother before her, has early onset Alzheimer’s.  Paris throws in a few significant clues at the beginning that suggest where this might be going, but they seem incidental and the reader, for much of the time, embraces Cass’s theories about her situation and feels her sense of despair.  As with the protagonist of the author’s first novel, one wishes she would be more assertive in figuring out what is going on – maybe trace the phone calls, for example?  Eventually, however, the reader and Cass figure it out.  The book is a cleverly plotted page-turner.

I can’t remember if I read one of Elizabeth George’s novels before or after I saw the PBS dramatization of her Chief Inspector Lynley stories starring the very handsome Nathaniel Parker.  No matter, as I very much enjoy both as well-crafted mysteries solved by persistent, clever detectives.  The novels, however, which always clock in at well over 600 pages, are more than police procedurals.  George deftly weaves themes that go beyond the crime to be solved.  In this outing, The Punishment She Deserves, her central motif is that of mothers trying to do their best for their offspring but not quite getting it right despite their best intentions. 

The book shifts point of view between a wide cast of characters that inhabit Ludlow, a small British town near the border with Wales and the London detectives who are sent to investigate the death of a clergyman while in custody in the local police station.    George takes her time building the stories of these various characters, and their relationships to each other, to the crime and to the central theme emerge gradually.  There is a group of students who attend the local college, who drink heavily and among whom there are friends with benefits.  Readers meet the families of several of these students and chapters are told through their mothers’ points of view as the parents struggle to protect (their word) and control (the young people’s word) their offspring.  The policeman responsible for bringing in the clergyman for questioning begins the novel.

It helps to have read previous books in the series as the main characters’ own stories continually develop but it’s probably not a prerequisite for enjoying the novel.  Detective Sargeant Barbara Havers, Lynley’s long-time partner and friend, is a true diamond in the rough, a woman who eats badly, dresses badly and frequently speaks before thinking, but who is also a sharp investigator whose obstinate persistence in the face of protocol has gotten her into trouble in two previous books; her guv (boss) at New Scotland Yard, Isabelle Ardery, is planning to give Barbara just enough rope to hang herself with the Ludlow investigation so that she can be reassigned away from London. Lynley, largely recovered from the death of his wife a few years back, is in a relationship with a zoologist who, like Havers, is from the proverbial other side of the tracks and doesn’t seem convinced that the gap between her upbringing and Lynley’s aristocratic heritage (He’s a lord.) can be bridged.  Isabelle, briefly in a relationship with Lynley in a previous book, is only just now starting to come to terms with the alcoholism that destroyed both her relationship with Lynley and her earlier marriage.  She’s lost custody of her twin boys and has only supervised visitation with them under the watchful eyes of her ex and his second wife whom Isabelle resents for supplanting her as the mother.  They are now planning to move to New Zealand creating even more distance between the boys and Isabelle, and this crisis in her personal life interferes both with her dealings with Havers as well as her investigation in Ludlow.

I was halfway through this book when it was time to board a flight for Denver and, while it seemed silly to drag such a huge book on a trip, given limited space in my backpack, I could not put it down.  George’s writing is compelling, her language well-crafted and her characters sound like real people.  Oh, and also there’s a tangled mystery to be solved.