Friday, September 25, 2020

Newest Caribbean Mystery from Teresa Dovalpage, DEATH OF A TELENOVELA STAR


Cuban-born Teresa Dovalpage's third mystery with Soho Crime/Soho Press was published over the summer; a copy reached me a few weeks ago and turned out to be the perfect light dessert for the season!

DEATH OF A TELENOVELA STAR opens with Marlene Martínez—a former Havana detective with a role in one of Dovalpage's earlier mysteries—finally taking some time off. Her brush with crime in Cuba helped motivate her to move to Miami, Florida, where she owns her own bakery. She loves it! But still, it's time to give her niece Sarita a significant quinceañera gift, and what she's opted for is an aunt-and-niece cruise to Mexico and the Caribbean. When a Cuban telenovela (soap opera) star turns out to be a fellow passenger, hunky and appealing, family bonding takes second place to social media posting for Sarita.

This is a compact, quick-paced novella with some fortune telling, a murder, and small revelations about Marlene along the way. "Men cause more trouble than they are worth," the retired detective tells herself, an easy enough position to take about the overly adored TV star -- but not as realistic when the cruise chef starts to pay some serious attention to Marlene's baking background and tastes in food.

All in all, a light-hearted, cleverly put together mystery, enjoyable and gently revelatory—treat yourself to a copy, and share it with a "bestie" so you can smile about it together.

 PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here

Cajun Country Mystery from Ellen Byron, MURDER IN THE BAYOU BONEYARD

 


[Originally at New York Journal of Books]

“If you enjoy timing your books to the seasons, Byron’s Halloween-themed Cajun mystery is a must-read for this time of year, and an enjoyable spin through the kind of sensible, clue-laden plotting that makes a good mystery—along with some end-of-book surprises for a bold finale.”

The new “Cajun Country Mystery” from Ellen Byron demonstrates that Maggie Crozat, owner of a historic bed-and-breakfast inn, can think clearly under pressure, make smart choices, and survive life-threatening guests—as well as a family that threatens to make her property and family business worthless.

Murder in the Bayou Boneyard comes with all the trappings of a classic “cozy” yet the well-plotted underpinnings of a traditional “amateur sleuth” mystery. Byron’s plotting is smooth, with well-turned dialogue and exploration. Maggie is not a fan of Halloween, but when her Cajun Country region feels pinched by an expanding online B&B app, she pulls the neighboring inns together for a month of spooky pleasures, including a theater performance in a graveyard. Who could blame her when a costumed “rougarou” (the local werewolf/vampire figure) runs onto the stage and falls dead?

Yet the investigators from the next town over manage to horn in on the action, focusing on Maggie as their prime suspect. It’s because the victim is a woman who’s already taken away Maggie’s art studio, in a property dispute gone awry. And the next death in the group intensifies the pressure on Maggie.

Her fiancé is a local police officer, and while that gives Maggie some clout and some avenues for information, it only feeds the competition from the neighboring police force. Between trying to keep guests from being scared away, and trying to keep them alive and entertained, Maggie’s got more than her hands full. And the local newspaper makes things worse:

A headline screamed, ‘Masseuse Death Ruled a Homicide.’ But it was the subtitle that made Maggie feel ill.

‘Suspects Include Local Family.’

‘If I ever do murder someone, it’s going to be Little Earlie [the reporter],’ Maggie fumed to Bo through her Bluetooth as she drove home. ‘Can’t I sue him for libel or something?’

‘I wish you could, except …’

‘It’s not libelous because it’s true.’ Bo’s silence confirmed this. ‘I guess it does look bad, with us firing Susannah and the whole property line thing.’

As Maggie turns sleuth to save her family’s inn, her mother and grandmother keep the good food rolling, and seasoned “cozy” readers will expect and be tickled by the recipes at the back of the book. Most satisfying in Ellen Byron’s tasty Cajun Country mystery, though, are Maggie’s investigative courage and her quick assessments of motive, means, and opportunity, including an easy local source of strychnine (who knew?).

If you enjoy timing your books to the seasons, Byron’s Halloween-themed Cajun mystery is a must-read for this time of year, and an enjoyable spin through the kind of sensible, clue-laden plotting that makes a good mystery—along with some end-of-book surprises for a bold finale.

 PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.  

Saturday, September 19, 2020

New Denise Mina Lifts Scottish (Glasgow) Noir to New Power: THE LESS DEAD

 [Originally published in New York Journal of Books]


“Mina’s touch with the dark, gritty, and disturbing is expert, and this book is a persuasive and frightening page-turner.”

Denise Mina has written two crime fiction series set in Glasgow, Scotland, establishing memorable investigators. The Less Dead is a stand-alone, also set in Glasgow, and circles around one bizarre situation: Dr. Margo Dunlop is pregnant, so she finally wants to know something about her own unknown mother. To her astonishment, as she tackles hoeing out the house where she’d grown up, raised by a loving adoptive mother, she finds a stash of letters addressed to her and never delivered. Letters from her birth mother’s sister, that is, Margo’s aunt, Nikki.

The first meeting with Nikki takes place at an agency that facilitates such reconnection. It’s an ordinary place, with an ordinary enough counselor, a bit over the top in her staged sympathy for Margo, but otherwise tame enough. Once Nikki walks in the door, though, all ordinary moments vanish from Margo’s life in a terrifying sweep of “the past isn’t even past.”

It turns out Margo’s mother was a murder victim, probably caught up in swapping sex for drugs at the time. And all these years, her aunt Nikki—sister of the murder victim, Susan—has been pleading (those undelivered letters, remember?) for Margo to help track down the murderer and avenge the murder at last.

Not so fast. An educated professional, Margo has no intention of being dragged into some crackpot scheme by the obviously eccentric and low-class Nikki. Still, now that she knows a little, she can’t resist looking up more, and even finds a crime photo online:

Margo has dissected corpses. She has removed and weighed livers and lungs. She isn’t shocked by the sight of death or injury but she isn’t ready for Susan’s vulnerability and how young she is. She’s small for nineteen, childlike, and dead and dumped … No one was punished for this. They did this to a young woman and they’re still out there, walking around, eating biscuits, drinking tea. having Christmases. She feels the injustice of it deep in her gut, the way Nikki must have for decades, a cross between fear and nausea. It’s wrong.

It’s not surprising that Margo, despite her revulsion, begins to think she ought to do something. But in a terrifying turn of the tables, she finds that opening the door to look into her past has made her the object of someone else’s threats and hatred. Is it an unrelated creep of some sort? Or does it have something directly to do with the pervert who killed her mother?

Mina’s touch with the dark, gritty, and disturbing is expert, and this book is a persuasive and frightening page-turner. Take the tender parts when they come, as Margo must: realizations of friendships, alliances across class lines despite not wanting them, friendships among women strong enough to fight off the men on hand, whether they are uselessly well-meaning or frighteningly violent.

There’s nothing pretty about reading The Less Dead. And it’s the slowly growing desperation that Margo finally embraces, for some kind of justice for her mother and for her own safety, that pulls the book forward. Still, Mina continues to offer the distaff side of the looking-glass world that began with the classic Glasgow noir of the late William McIlvanney: Crime always involves women, whether as victims, partners, or even perpetrators. In Mina’s capable hands, they raise their voices and speak out. At last.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.