Scribner’s (first), 1995 Operatic in the dramatic colors and shadows of their relationships, Julia Swann’s family takes its style from its matriarch, bel canto soprano Dame Caroline Stowe, rather than from Sir Gerald Asherton, Dame Caroline’s husband and Julia’s father, or from Julia herself, a reclusive artist living with her parents rather than with her flamboyant, unfaithful, erratic husband Con. When Connor Swann’s body is pulled from the stream near his parents-in-law’s home, Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and Sergeant Gemma James are sent by Scotland Yard to investigate his death, their presence justified by the marks of violence on Swann’s body, and the illustriousness of his connections. Ironically, this death echoes […]
Continue readingBuzz Monkey by Sam Hill
Carroll & Graf (first), 2003 “Top” Kiernan does Clark Kent one better. He’s no “mild-mannered reporter,” instead he’s a research librarian. Who would suspect a librarian? Mind you, Kiernan isn’t your everyday librarian. He founded and heads a firm called Polymath (“someone who knows everything”), a high-tech, internet savvy team of 35 researchers who field 200 questions each day from publishers, authors and consulting firms. Polymath is based in Athens, Georgia, in an old elementary school building that Kiernan’s gradually renovating into both work space and living quarters — his bedroom is the school’s former basketball court. It’s great cover — but for what? Is Kiernan caped crusader or evil […]
Continue readingCops for our times: K.C. Constantine and Barbara D’Amato
Brushback by K.C. Constantine Mysterious (first), 1998 Good Cop, Bad Cop by Barbara D’Amato Forge (first), 1998 The present febrile atmosphere may have long-term effects, such as limiting the appetite for public life to all but the most ego-enthralled office-seekers. In the end, this could be one of those periods in history remembered more for the ferocity of their prosecutions than for the severity of their crimes. Few such eras are remembered fondly. Joe Klein, The New Yorker, February 2, 1998 The protagonists of these compelling new mysteries are office-holders, rather than office-seekers, but the impulse to hold a position — or at least not to leave it unwillingly or […]
Continue readingDeath’s Autograph by Marianne Macdonald
St. Martin’s (first), 1997 A satisfying but flawed first novel. Dido Hoare is nearly run off the road one night, then her antiquarian bookshop is robbed and searched, then her apartment is surreptitiously rifled. Meanwhile, Dido’s ne’er-do-well ex-husband Davey turns up, ostensibly looking for work. The object of the searches and of Davey’s attentions is a book in which a familiar poem was scribbled centuries ago, possibly by the author himself: Shakespeare. Despite all this, Death’s Autograph is slow to engage the reader. Dido is a merely competent narrator blessed with a good story to tell; the more interesting character is her father Barnabas, a clever retired professor who is […]
Continue readingJane and the Wandering Eye by Stephanie Barron
Bantam (first), 1998 “The actress’s magnificent form limned itself on the paving stones at my feet, like an enchantress materialising out of the common snow and dirt, and I knew her immediately for a woman any man might die to possess.” Surely Jane Austen would not have described a glimpse of a shadow in these grandiloquent terms. But though Stephanie Barron cannot approach the style and talent of her protagonist, in presenting her readers with Austen-as-sleuth she is on to a very good thing. In the third mystery in this series, a guest at a masquerade ball is stabbed just as a Shakespearean actor is declaiming lines from Macbeth – […]
Continue readingThe Running Woman by Patricia Carlon
Soho (first), 1998 An alluring eeriness characterizes Carlon’s books — heightened, or exacerbated, for her newer readers because her books come to us not only across the hemispheres but, in tumbled fashion, across decades. Their taut suspense, intensified by calm prose and apparently commonplace settings and events, created a coterie of eager readers; her American publishers have responded with The Running Woman, billed as “a new mystery set in a small town in Australia.” A mystery set in Australia, surely, but new only in the sense of being unfamiliar: rather than a book written in response to readers’ eagerness, we have a book written before those the current publisher chose […]
Continue readingSuspense by Parnell Hall
Mysterious (first), 1998 Hall’s satiric plot centers around bestselling author Kenneth P Winnington. Winnington and his trophy wife hire Stanley for protection following threatening phone calls. And everywhere that Stanley goes, the lam is sure to follow because every suspect our hero interviews dies shortly thereafter. One succumbs with Stanley’s name clutched in his hand minutes after he leaves his office, putting Stanley on the run from both the bad guy and the police. Clues are sparse but they all point to Stanley. Worse, several characters refer to our hero’s version of what’s going on with the same refrain, “What a weak plot.” If there is a flaw in this […]
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