Review 2178: Triptych

I have to admit, I looked for this first Will Trent novel after getting hooked on the TV series. Just a little warning: if you have already watched the series, the TV folks have made one major change from the book that may surprise you.

In Atlanta, young teenage girls have been found after being raped, beaten, and having their tongues either partially or completely bitten off. Detective Michael Ormewood is called out to a similar case, only this time the woman is dead, and she’s not a teenage girl but a middle-aged prostitute.

The next day, Ormewood meets Will Trent, a Special Agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He will be working the case with Ormewood. Will is unusual because he is dyslexic, although he tries to keep this problem a secret.

In the meantime, John Shelley has been recently released from prison, where he served 25 years for a similar crime, committed when he was 16. John has always maintained his innocence, right up to his last parole hearing when he wanted to get out before his mother died of cancer. John has been out for only a short time when he learns that someone has stolen his identity, but curiously, used it to apply for credit cards and buy things while keeping a good credit score.

Angie Polaski, a detective on the vice squad, has gotten peripherally involved in the investigation. She has ties to both Ormewood and Trent that she’s keeping secret.

This is a well-written, fast-paced novel that is part mystery, part thriller. It has interesting characters, and I enjoyed it very much.

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Review 2123: The Murder Rule

Hannah has left her alcoholic, dependent mother in Maine for the University of Virginia. There she uses deceit and some dirty tricks to get onto the Innocence Project. In particular, she gets herself onto the case of Michael Dandridge.

Dandridge has been in jail for 11 years, found guilty of rape and murder. However, his sentence has recently been vacated. The original prosecutor is determined to retry him.

Hannah’s goal is to interfere with the project’s defense of Dandridge. We learn why slowly as passages from her mother’s diary are revealed, dated 25 years before.

I wasn’t sure what I thought about McTiernan’s change of locale, her other novels being set in Ireland, but her storytelling took over, and I found myself reading another page-turner. Although I was not sure that things could turn out the way they did, I found the novel thrilling.

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Review 1825: A Gingerbread House

Catriona McPherson, in her standalone novels anyway, is a master at creating creepy situations that eventually resolve into the making of warm communities. I guess that makes her the queen of gothic cozies. In A Gingerbread House, she’s hit it with another one.

Tash Dodd has discovered that her family’s transport business is involved in trafficking. She wants to take over the business and put things right, so instead of informing the police, she lodges her proof and presents her father with an ultimatum—retire or else. Then she goes into hiding to give him a week to think it over.

While she’s been away training to turn her business to greater good, she’s caught glimpses of some women just before their lives completely change. Someone is creating elaborate hoaxes to lure one lonely woman after another into a Victorian gingerbread-style house. The first is Ivy, an older woman who would like a friend but would settle for a cat. Instead, she meets Kate, who claims her twin sister looks just like Ivy. Please come to the house to meet her. Kate has a surprise in store for Ivy.

As usual, McPherson creates likable heroines—this time four of them—and there are friendly neighbors and a hint of a love interest. I enjoyed myself very much.

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Review 1820: The Drowning Kind

Jax’s sister Lex has been calling a lot lately. Jax knows that means Lex is off her meds and in one of her manic phases. So, Jax, who has been estranged from her sister, doesn’t answer the phone. Lex’s messages are cryptic and incomprehensible, something about measurements. Later, Jax’s aunt calls to tell her that Lex is dead, drowned in the spring-fed pool behind her house. Since Lex has spent much of her life in the pool, suicide is assumed.

Back in Vermont for the funeral, Jax finds the family home a wreck, filled with notes and other documents Lex collected about the history of the house. The house had been their grandmother’s, the place where the two sisters spent every summer. One reason Jax was angry was because the house was left to Lex, whom she believes everyone liked best. Jax decides to try to find out what happened to Lex, what Lex discovered. It all seems to center around the pool, which has a local reputation of being cursed. Several people have drowned in it.

In 1929, Ethel and Will Monroe take a romantic trip to a new hotel next to a spring-fed pool. The spring has a reputation for granting wishes and healing. Ethel has been trying to conceive, so she goes to the pool and says she will give anything to have a child.

Back in 2019, Jax finds wet footprints in the house and catches glimpses of something in the pool. She also figures out that Lex has been measuring its depth, although the girls have always been told it was bottomless.

In general, this is a nice, creepy story, although I felt that maybe it signaled the truth of the pool a little too early. Of course, that adds to the suspense, as the reader knows more than Jax does. Another good one for McMahon.

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Review 1809: The Survivors

I haven’t read much by Australian writers, so when I noticed that Jane Harper seemed popular, I thought I’d give her a try. The Survivors is set in Tasmania, and I am attracted to books set on islands.

Kieran Elliott hasn’t returned to his small home town for 12 years, not since the storm. But his father has Alzheimer’s and his mother is trying to move them, so he has brought his partner Mia and their baby daughter back to the beach town in Tasmania to help with the move.

It is late in the season, and most of the summer people have gone home. One of Kieran’s high school friends, Olivia, has had a house mate for the summer, Bronte, and Olivia is glad that Bronte will soon be leaving, because there has been friction. Bronte has been working late at the local bar and restaurant, and after Kieran was there late with his friends, Bronte is found dead on the beach.

The storm years ago has been an elephant in the room, but it’s not until about page 75 that we find out Kieran had been in some sea caves that day and came out too late for the storm rise. His older brother Finn and Finn’s partner lost their lives in the storm trying to rescue Kieran. Some townspeople blame him for their deaths, including his own father.

Although this incident would appear to have nothing to do with Bronte’s death, we don’t learn until about page 120, as if it’s not important, that a girl disappeared on the day of the storm, Gabby, Olivia’s 14-year-old sister. When her backpack appeared in the surf, the police assumed she had drowned in the unprecedented storm surge.

Of course, Bronte’s death is related to Gabby’s disappearance.

I found a few things about the novel a little irritating. One is slight—that Harper remarks on the physical fitness of practically every male character. Maybe this is an Australian thing or maybe it’s supposed to reflect Kieran’s profession as a physiotherapist, but it seemed silly and unnecessary. Then there is a continuity problem—if Kieran’s rescuers died, how did he get rescued? There is no explanation of that. It also bothered me that Harper took so long to tell us what happened during the storm, as that delay didn’t seem to serve a purpose, and even more so that Gabby’s disappearance was treated like an afterthought.

Things get going slowly, but they seemed to be building to a satisfying and exciting conclusion, but no. Without giving away the ending, let me just say that the promised thriller ending sort of fizzles out. That being said, there are some interesting developments at the end of the novel, causing it to improve considerably.

I don’t mean to give this novel a bad review. It was interesting enough to keep me engaged; there are just ways in which it doesn’t quite deliver.

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Review 1802: White Dog

In this last of the Jack Irish novels, Linda has just left Jack for a position in London when he accepts a job from his ex-law-partner Drew. Sarah Longmore, an artist, has been accused of murdering her ex-lover Mickey Franklin. Sarah says she didn’t do it, but the prosecution has a witness placing her near the scene, and the murder weapon was a gun Mickey loaned her. Drew wants Jack to look for evidence that she is innocent.

Jack begins poking around but is unable to find out much except that three of Mickey’s former associates are missing. Against his own instincts, Jack and Sarah become lovers, but later when Jack goes to her studio to meet a witness, the building explodes, killing Sarah and badly injuring Jack.

Now that Jack’s client is dead, Jack is more determined than ever to find out who killed Mickey. The novel does not neglect Jack’s sidelines of learning cabinet making, hanging out with the old men Jack calls the Fitzroy Youth Club, and helping Harry Strang and Cam with horse-racing projects.

Again, Temple has produced a suspenseful and exciting novel in his Jack Irish series.

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Review 1797: The Historians

Like her previous two novels, Cecilia Ekbäck has set The Historians partially on the fictional Blackåsen Mountain, a stand-in for the Kirina Mine in far northern Sweden. This novel is set during World War II.

In Lapland, a Sami girl goes missing. She is not the only one. Near Blackåsen, a miner decides to find out what is going on in the secret mine, the one that is supposedly out of bounds. He hopes to find members of the Norwegian resistance there, so that he can help them against the Germans, Sweden being neutral. Later, he is found dead.

In Stockholm, Laura Dahlgren is approached by her best friend Britta’s Sami friend Andreas. He tells her Britta has disappeared, and he is worried. Britta and Laura were part of a group of special history students studying with Professor Lindahl at Uppsala University. After the others took up careers, Britta remained, working on her thesis. Laura thought Britta wanted to tell her something the last time she saw her, but she did not. Now not only is Britta missing, but so is her thesis.

Jens Regnell, the secretary of a government minister, is perplexed when the ministry archivist, Daniel Jonsson, asks about some phone calls to the Danish and Norwegian foreign ministers that were not logged. In fact, he doesn’t know how one could circumvent the logging. When he tries to find out about the calls, he is shut down and then Daniel is replaced, reported to be ill. Next thing he knows, Daniel is dead, a supposed suicide. Oh, and Jens receives in the mail a thesis by a student named Britta Hallberg.

This novel is genuinely thrilling, as Laura reconvenes the friends in her study group to find out what happened to Britta and what was in her thesis. I started out reading this novel when I had to take a break from reading another novel on my iPad because it needed a charge, but I ended up putting that one aside completely, even after my iPad charged, until I finished this one.

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Review 1786: The Unforeseen

Although I haven’t yet read Dorothy Macardle’s The Uninvited, the movie based on it remains one of my favorites for Halloween. I didn’t realize that The Unforeseen is not a sequel to it but a follow-up and that a few of the characters make a reappearance. So, I’m reading and reviewing out of order.

Virgilia Wilde cannot afford to live in the city while she is sending her daughter Nan to art school in London, so she buys a cottage in the wilds of Wicklow. There she enjoys herself rambling the countryside and working on a children’s book about birds. However, she begins having strange experiences. First, she thinks she is seeing ghosts—a shadow in the doorway when no one is there, a telegram being delivered when one isn’t. She fears she is losing her mind so consults Dr. Franks, a psychiatrist. But he thinks there is nothing wrong with her. He consults his son Perry, who is a doctor with an interest in parapsychology, and eventually they realize that Virgilia is having visions of the future.

In the meantime, Nan has a frightening encounter with a sculptor and decides to come home for the summer while she works on illustrations for a book. Virgilia doesn’t want Nan to know about her visions, but soon she has some frightening ones.

This is a good little thriller with a supernatural angle to it. It has convincing characters and beautiful descriptions of the Irish countryside, reflecting the relative peace of Ireland during World War II.

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Review 1784: Death in Oslo

I began reading this Norwegian series after watching the Swedish TV show Modus that is based on it. I mentioned that connection before, but while reading this novel, I thought about it a lot.

Helen Bentley, the American president, disappears from her hotel room during a state visit to Norway. Adam Stubo isn’t involved in the case at first, but then FBI agent Warren Seifford requests Adam as a liaison. When Adam’s wife, Johanne Vik, hears this, she demands that he refuse to work with Warren even though she won’t explain why. Then she leaves home with her baby when Adam reports to work.

Perhaps it’s because I watched the Modus version of this book first, which made significant changes, but I found it much less plausible than I have Holt’s other books in the series. I have already noticed, though, that her character Johanne Vik tends to be a little hysterical at times, unlike the calm counterpart in the TV series.

First, I felt that Holt had little grasp of the way politics between the Norwegians and the Americans would play out. Most of the time, she just shows them spinning their wheels in power plays. She, or perhaps the translator, also gets things wrong about American speech. The mistake I can think of offhand has an American on the news call gas “petrol.” Americans don’t use that word. I would think the book was simply translated for a British audience except the word was used in a supposedly verbatim news report from the States. I also noticed a similar error when Warren’s thoughts are revealed.

The TV program has the President stashed in the closet of an abandoned building, but in the novel she is in an apartment basement and just happens to be found by the servant of the woman Johanne Vik goes to stay with. That coincidence is bad enough, but that they don’t immediately call the police is wholly unbelievable.

Finally, there’s the big climax. I don’t want to give too much away, but I have to say that since the person the president thinks is guilty isn’t, what happened to the danger that she was supposedly in? They handled this much better in Modus by having there be actual danger.

So, a bit disappointed here. I’m ahead of the series on the next book, so we’ll see if that makes a difference.

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Review 1780: Dead Point

Things haven’t been going well at the track for Jack Irish, Harry, and Cam. They just had to shoot a horse, which broke his leg just as he was winning a race. But that’s not the worst. The men’s friend Cynthia was returning from the track with the winnings for a syndicate they put together when she was robbed and brutally beaten. There are no leads, but they soon hear of another similar incident.

Jack’s involvement in these activities has been leading him to neglect a job for Cyril. One of Cyril’s clients wants him to find a man named Robbie Colbourne, who works as a bartender. Jack has barely started looking for him when he reads that the man was found dead of a drug overdose. However, the client asks to see Jack. He turns out to be an eminent judge who had an affair with Robbie, during which Robbie stole a compromising photo album. He hires Jack to find the album.

Peter Temple has written another great thriller, but he has also invented a rich life for his character, who surrounds himself with interesting people. He’s taking the “youth club,” a bunch of octogenarians, to the football, he’s installing a library, he’s advising his ex-partner on his love life, he might be getting back together with Linda. Temple likes his characters and makes working-class Melbourne come to life.

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