Magicians and Mystery, in NOW YOU SEE THEM from Elly Griffiths

When Elly Griffiths opened her "Magic Men Mystery Series," the threads and tension drew on the experience of a team of illusionists, some professional, helping Britain protect itself from World War II bombings. How the men perceived what they'd done in the war and the echoes remaining in their postwar lives deepened the suspense.

With her fifth in the series, NOW YOU SEE THEM Griffiths has already arrived in the 1960s in her seacoast once-was-resort town of Brighton, and those wartime connections have little meaning. The book opens, in fact, with a funeral for The Great Diablo, and Edgar Stephens, now the Detective Superintendent for the city's police force, sees the adventures of his youth being buried too.

But at least Edgar still has crime investigation to do! For his wife Emma, who loved her work on the police force and who's now parenting three small children, even attending the funeral and seeing Max Mephisto there is painful, as she resents the loss of her main identity:

"So, Mrs. Stephens," said Max, "how's married life?"

"We've been married for ten years now," said Emma, rather tartly. She wasn't sure that she liked Max's new habit of calling her Mrs. Stephens. As a child she'd hated her maiden name, Holmes (the source of much teasing when she entered the police force), but now she rather missed it.

Emma also has reason to feel envious of the new young WPC (woman police constable) on the force, Maggie -- who in turn is sick of the way her colleagues hold up Emma as an unattainably heroic beauty.

These frictions push Emma into her own investigations as schoolgirls in the region begin to disappear, and eventually they tip the balance on how much she'll risk to pursue the criminal and reach the girls in time to prevent more than one murder.

Count on revelations about "mods and rockers," Brighton's smuggling history, and the art of magic -- along with as strong traditional mystery framework that lets Griffiths move into the terrain she's already established so well in her other series featuring archaeological specialist Ruth Galloway: the hard choices women face daily in balancing what they want from life. (There are hints that Griffiths will also tag men's choices in her next book, as Max Mephisto and his daughter Ruby work out their own fates in more detail.)

Griffiths is a polished, tight writer, and like her other books, NOW YOU SEE THEM provides a good share of astonishing revelations. Enjoy it as a holiday treat to yourself, and shelve with women sleuths, England, postwar, and sleight of hand.

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

British Traditional Mystery with Magic, THE VANISHING BOX, Elly Griffiths

[Originally published in the New York Review of Books]

In the English seaside town of Brighton, there’s an active murderer again—one whose theatrical death scene creation immediately binds together the amazing (if aging) Max Mephisto, stage magician, and his former wartime colleague, Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens.

The Vanishing Box is the fourth in the “Magic Men Mystery” series from British authorElly Griffiths, and it’s set in 1953, when the deep echoes and wounds of The War still shiver in England. But it’s also a time when the future is coming brilliantly to life, as the landlady where the variety stage player lodge appreciates her wireless (radio) but the stage players themselves are eager for the huge audiences that television promises to give them. Max Mephisto’s daughter Ruby, also a magician, is ready to play to that enormous crowd. Max, maybe not so much.

The “Vanishing Box” is, of course, a famous trick of stage magic. Max and Ruby create a father-daughter performance where one after the other disappears, only to return to applause. Behind the scenes, each struggles with romance (an enduring thread in Griffiths’s mysteries): Ruby, in love and engaged to DI Stephens (but always second in line behind his investigations); Max, feeling over the hill (was 44 so old, back then?), and suddenly open to a new and younger lover. How cruel that murder could threaten these possible happy diversions!

At first, it seems the murderer might just have madly posed one beautiful young woman to resemble something from the local stage show, a historic scene from a painting. But when the murder rate escalates, even the police investigators suffer trauma:

 ’Holy Mary Mother of God.’ This was the porter becoming religious with shock.

‘Don’t come any closer,’ said Emma.

Bob was leaning over the body. ‘He’s dead all right.’ …

‘Have you got a telephone?’ [Emma] asked the porter. … She was very grateful to Bob for offering to stay with the effigy that had been [a man] but didn’t quite know how to say so. She followed the porter, whose name she learnt was Norman, to his basement apartment. There she rang the DI and refused Norman’s offer of a whisky ‘for the shock.’ 

Despite the foregrounding of Max and Ruby, the magicians at center stage of the murder scenes, it’s the police investigators that Griffiths places into best perspective. Murder still horrifies them; death wounds them; investigating a killing, whether it’s purely evil or somehow a necessary twist to a shattered mind nearby, shatters their everyday interactions and relationships. How many losses will the Brighton murderer create, as he or she continues to stage death with theatrical trappings and terrible effectiveness?

Griffiths is one of the few suspense authors who can successfully summon the reality of the awkward 1950s, with its uncertainty, its breathtaking possibilities, and its rapid changes that build up a heap of dead customs, vanished family structures, safety wiped away. Staging The Vanishing Box in the last of the old-time variety shows adds to the sense of regarding a vanished era, along with lives lost.

The plot is neatly pinned together, and if the red herrings are not as noticeable as the kisses and courting, well, that’s how Griffiths spins this series. (Her other one features forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway.  And Griffiths has been a winner of the prestigious CWA Dagger in the Library Award.) Pick this one up as a good traditional mystery that won’t keep you up at night, but will keep you pleasantly engaged, page to page, like the ones from G. M. Malliet, Ellery Adams, or Barb Ross.

Once everything’s sorted out at the end of The Vanishing Box, quite a few things have vanished, but not returned. Will the series continue? It’s not clear what will come next, but DI Edgar Stephens has new possibilities in front of him—and so does Max Mephisto.

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

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Top-Notch British Thriller from L V Hay, THE OTHER TWIN

THE OTHER TWIN is a true breakthrough book: a thriller so intricate and compelling that it leaps away from previous books by the same author, into new and dangerous terrain. Presented as a "debut thriller" by Orenda Books, it hit the shelves a week ago. The author was previously known as Lucy V Hay -- but it makes good sense to see her writing drastically shifted in this new book. And the androgynous "L V" name also fits, in an entirely different way.

The book opens with an ominous scene of emotional abuse, quickly flashing instead to Poppy, a young woman way over her head in drinking and casual sex, trying to pull herself together after an all-night binge and the "mother of all hangovers," so to speak. Hers in the voice that gives us most of the story in THE OTHER TWIN. She has a past crammed with love and loss at the seacoast city of Brighton that she walked away from a year earlier, and her party life (not really balanced by her other-city job) is this cover for confused regrets and pain. Chapter by chapter, she faces the complicated mess of her past, propelled by what takes her "home again" at the start of the action: the supposed suicide-by-jumping of her younger sister India.

But there's a second voice that whispers to us periodically -- perhaps a killer's words and contorted emotions, as he enacts the twisted reality of "She Who Must Be Obeyed." Hay's mastery of suspense is echoed in the eerie sense of evil and manipulation that oozes from these scenes. Can Poppy, searching for the truths behind her sister's death, escape the seeping and vicious mind that's calling the plays around her?

The book walks an interesting knife edge of noir and violence: Much of the cruelty exerted by the shadowy perpetrators is so indirect, so disguised, that it never quite crosses into being graphic -- but the horror is even more haunting in this form.

Expect twists all the way through, and a final one that's as painful as being knocked over on a cement surface -- everybody bleeds from the heart, and as the powerful resolution arrives, it's clear there will be no escape from hurt. But maybe, maybe, there can be some escape from being hopelessly lost in a net of deceit.

Well worth reading. Yes, the title points to some meaning in the story -- but not what you might expect. And it's a stand-alone, at least so far, so there's no need to dig into Hay's earlier work -- which you can scan if you like at her (somewhat difficult to navigate) website. This title comes via Orenda Books, where the list of really fine mysteries is becoming impressive.

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

Magic and Murder, in THE ZIG ZAG GIRL, Elly Griffiths

I've become a devoted reader of the Ruth Galloway series from British author Elly Griffiths. Just released in the US this month is the start of her newest Magic Men series, THE ZIG ZAG GIRL -- and while I missed the abrasive and oddly vulnerable Galloway at first, the premise of this new series is fiercely exciting, and I enjoyed the book very much.

Consider the British seaside town of Brighton in 1950, a mere five years or so after the end of World War II -- bombed-out buildings, struggling economy, and a bare-bones police force, in which Detective Inspector Edgar Stephens is trying to ignore his wartime losses and move forward. But when the body of a young woman is sent in three pieces, to his specific attention -- under the rank he had during the war -- he's got to take this one personally.

Edgar's war wasn't something he took pride in afterward. Recruited (after the Norway disaster) into a small corps of specialists in magic, sleight of hand, and psychology, swiftly labeled the Magic Men, he'd helped create false armaments along the English coast to trick the German pilots overhead. But things happened that cost lives, and he's ashamed and in an odd sort of mourning, as well.

Now it's all got to be exhumed, so to speak, along with his connection with the clever stage magician Max Mephisto. Yet Edgar and his friends appear to be reliably one or two steps behind the murderous person stalking them. What's it about? Who's to blame? How can he protect his friends (and incidentally not lose his job)? It's clear almost immediately that the mutilated body is meant to suggest a faulty magic trick called "the zig zag girl," and when the victim is identified, the links to the wartime crew are inescapable.

Soon Edgar's having to show a murdered Magic Men friend, Tony, to the man's aging parents:

"Anthony had a very important job in the war," said Mrs Mulholland. "He was with the Secret Service."

"I know," said Edgar, thinking, as he had thought at the time, that the Magic Men was the least secret secret mission that he had ever encountered. Everyone in Inverness knew all about them. Tony kept himself in free drinks -- and worse -- by telling the locals that he was part of a crack commando team.

The nimble way that Griffiths paints the war, the resulting friends-with-friction, and the challenges of chasing a killer without knowing the motive -- well, it adds up to a rattling good story and plenty of genial jests among the crimes.

I didn't bond quite as tightly here as I did with the earlier Griffiths series; there's so much going on, and there are so many red herrings and twists of plot, that I think the characters aren't shown as deeply in THE ZIG ZAG GIRL. But I trust Griffiths as an author, and I'll ride along with the series, hoping that this enjoyable but fairly light introductory title will lead me into emotionally more complex and compelling waters.

In fact, since Griffiths admits her own family connection to the characters, I'm positive this is going to be a very good direction for her, and I am eager for the next book. This is one of those moments when the book in hand isn't quite as powerful as the ones that have already flown ... but there's good reason to trust that it's an opening act for an upcoming winner.
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PS -- The author's website is not up to date, but still gives a good look at the earlier series: http://ellygriffiths.co.uk