The Murder at World’s End has everything one wants in a mystery: great characters, an interesting setting and a twisty mystery with a surprise at the end.
Stephen Pike, recently of Borstal prison, is desperate for a job when a letter offering him one arrives out of the blue. He arrives at a house on an island in Cornwall that is regularly cut off by the tides. He quickly sees that something is not right. The master of the house is terrified that Halley’s Comet, will fill the air with poison gasses, make the seas rise, and destroy the earth. Everyone is the house is under orders to lock themselves in their rooms, board up the windows, and seal every crack around doors and windows with wadding.
The following morning, the master is found dead in his locked and sealed study.
But his aunt Decima, a batty elderly lady with a scientific mind, is on the case with Stephen as her sidekick.
Decimal is a wonderful character and some of the scenes in which she interacts with her family are laugh out loud funny. Highly recommended. This is a series I will definitely follow.
When a young girl goes missing in the Colorado mountains, Mattie Cobb and her K-9 partner, Robo, go on the hunt for her, unfortunately discovering the girl’s body in a shallow grave and her dog with a bullet wound of her own.
The wounded dog is brought to the local vet, a single dad whose daughter was a good friend of the murdered girl. Mattie suspects she knows more than she is telling.
When Belle, the dog evacuates envelopes filled with cocaine, the case takes on a whole new dimension. Mattie stays the course, putting herself in danger, to solve the murder and Save others from being mrdered.
Recommended. Mattie and Robo are a great team and the setting is well delineated. I will be reading others.
When Annie Gore leaves the Army, in which she enlisted to escape her troubled childhood, she sets up as a private investigator. A young man approaches her to investigate a case ten years old. Three little girls disappeared and although one has been returned, the other two were never seen again. Annie does not want to take the case. It reminds her too much of her own background. But she is broke.
She goes to the holler and begins investigating, stirring up a lot of feelings in the town. She is asked to drop the case more than once. But she persists, although someone shoots at her. And then another little girl disappears.
Threaded through the mystery is a superstition about a witch and the two girls she takes as her own. The characters are clearly drawn and the mystery is so clever I never guessed who the kidnapper and murderer were.
The mystery really begins with a bang when a masked intruder bursts into Blubber B Gone ( a weight loss chain) and murders the owner.
Camerin Torres takes a new job with Trend magazine and although assigned to copyediting, begins to investigate the murder. She soon realizes that murders always follow visits by Terry Mangel, and his body positivity traveling group, and the murders are always of people associated with weight loss businesses. Since Camerin herself has unresolved issues surrounding weight and weight loss, she is drawn further and further in to the investigation, even traveling to Philadelphia to visit the most recent stop of Mangel’s show. Her impulsive action puts her in legal trouble and her life in danger.
An unexpected romance blossoms between Camarin and Trend’s owner, who has secrets of his own.The romance distracts a bit from the mystery, but the central theme of this society’s focus on weight was captivating. The list of research materials at the end was also very interesting. A mystery that makes one think.
Mornings on Horseback, by David McCullough, is a selective biography of Theodore Roosevelt. McCullough does not discuss in depth Roosevelt’s political career, although of course it is touched on in several places.
Instead, McCullough concentrates on Roosevelt’s childhood and youth, and the family which had so much influence on him. His father, Theodore Roosevelt Senior, was almost a god in his children’s eyes. As with many of the wealthy, Senior was a philanthropist, something that influenced his son.
The family was almost unbelievably wealthy and the children enjoyed every privilege. That did not, however, prevent serious health issues. Anna (Bamie), the eldest daughter, was born with a twisted spine. Elliott suffered from seizures (possibly epilepsy) and died young from alcoholism. (He is Eleanor’s father). Theodore himself suffered throughout his life from asthma and McCullough compellingly makes the case that Roosevelt’s interest in the outdoors, the open spaces, the hiking, hunting, birding and so on, stemmed at least in part from an early treatment for his asthma.
Hooker Avenue, by Jode Millman, takes place in Poughkeepsie, New York. Since I live close by, have lived in the Hudson Valley most of my life, and attended college in Poughkeepsie, this is familiar territory.
The mystery follows several characters. Jessie Martin, Det Ebony Jones and Lissie Sexton. Jess, a disgraced lawyer, sees a shiny flash in her headlights one rainy night. Lissie is trapped in a storm drain and in danger of drowning. This event begins a chain that links the three women together in the hunt for a serial killer.
Lissie in particular is a captivating, although not particularly likable, character. Severely beaten, she narrowly escapes the killer. But, as a prostitute with a rap sheet, she is dismissed until Ebony ties the beating to a string of missing women.
Exciting and enjoyable. My only criticism is that the wrap up could have been tightened up.
The Changeling Queen, by Kimberly Bea, begins with the English folk song, Tam Lin. For those unfamiliar with the song, Tam Lin, an earthly knight, is the lover of the Faerie Queen. He is destined for the teind, a fee Faerie pays to Hell. But Janet, a human woman who is carrying Tam Lin’s child, pulls him from his horse and holds on through the magical changes the Queen throws on him. (A snake, a burning brand etc.)
The Faerie Queen, determined to win, tells Tam Lin and Janet her story. She hopes to trick them into surrender.
The Queen was raised by a human midwife and given a human name, Bess. For a time, Bess chooses to remain in the human world, working as a healer, and falling in love with Thomas Shepherd, the bastard son of a noble. But he chooses to marry a human woman and Bess, hurting and vulnerable to the machinations of the Dark God Amman, returns to the faerie realm.
Recommended. I enjoyed this. A better book in my opinion that deals with the Faerie Realm and the teind is The Perilous Gard, by Elizabeth Marie Pope. The Elizabethan world is believably depicted and the Faerie Realm and Faerie Queen carry an aura of menace. I reread this book regularly; it is that good.
The Red Queen is the 26th entry in the Richard Jury series. And what a disappointment.
Tom Treadnor is shot through the window in a local pub, The Queen. When Jury investigates, he sees someone has edited the pub’s name to The Red Queen. When he begins investigating, he discovers everyone has a different opinion of the victim. Jury sends his friends Melrose Plant and Gerrard Gerrard to the Treadnor estate to do some undercover investigating. I was never sure why this section was included since it offered nothing to the mystery.
About halfway through, Jury’s sergeant suddenly leaves Scotland Yard to look for a sister that disappeared five years ago and has suddenly reappeared. (In past novels, the sister is believed dead.)
I’ve read almost all of the Grimes’ mysteries and yet I felt as though I’d gone to a party where I knew no one, but they knew each other. There was almost no back story to help put the reader in the know. There was, however, an awful lot of empty banter. And the murder mystery was not very good. But at least there was an ending, albeit not a very plausible one. Wiggins’ story feels half-finished with several unanswered questions.
This past week I read Dachshund Through the Snow by David Rosenfelt. I love these books. They are funny and with good mysteries as well.
In this one, Andy Carpenter is persuaded by his wife and by a Christmas wish from a young boy, to bring his father home. But he doesn’t want to be found. He knows he is suspected of a murder that happened long ago, a murder he assures Carpenter he didn’t commit.
As he investigates, Carpenter begins to believe the young man is telling the truth. Especially after several people assigned to watch Carpenter are murdered. Then another man who was asking questions.
Sure enough, the case is way more complicated than it first appears. But Andy pursues it to the end and justice is served.
I regularly read nonfiction. (A lot of research material, but I don’t blog about that.) This past week I read two nonfiction books just from interest.
When I started this book, I thought it would be about Woodrow Wilson but it turned out to be primarily about William Bullitt. An energetic politician, Bullitt was active right about to the Nixon years. Bullitt was active during World War II, was given a medal by DeGaulle, and also served as an ambassador to the Soviet Union.
The book was only slightly about Wilson. It began with a few chapters, focusing especially on a psychological workup of Wilson by Freud and ended with the release of that workup. So a break of almost forty years. Bullitt waited until Wilson and his wife were dead.
Bullitt was an interesting character. Super smart. His assessments of the Nazis and the Soviets was spot on. I was disappointed there was not more about Wilson, however. And I feel the psychological assessment reached in some cases. So, an interesting book, but not a total success.
Now for a complete change of pace. This book is a history of the video game industry from the early 2000s. I love video games and have played many, many, right up to the Burning Shores ( from the Horizon Forbidden West franchise), Mario smash brothers, Hollow Knight and Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. (Not a fan. The game felt clunky and old-fashioned to me.) I have not played all the games discussed. Shovel Knight, for example. I have played Assassin’s Creed, although not Unity. (I’m glad since apparently the game kept glitching and one of the NPC’s face would explode. Disturbing to say the least.) Huge fan of Dragon’s Age and Witcher 3. Even bigger fan of The Last of Us, one and two, but this game was not included in the book.
I may go back and look up some of the games I missed. Yes, I still have my PS4 as well as my PS5.
I am even more amazed, after reading about all the trouble these teams went through, that my friend Thomas Happ developed Axiom Verge BY HIMSELF. The first was released in 2015, after five years of development. The second installment came out in 2021. Both were considered among the best games of those years.
