Mysteries: Cosy, Cats, Capers, Historical, Medical, Procedural and everything in between

[Zorral]

Hillary Clinton writing a political thriller featuring a novice Sec of State with Louise Penny (whose latest Inspector Gamache title is waiting for me – still! – at the library, due to miserable weather).

https://www.louisepenny.com/

 Wonder if there will be a section in which this sec of state imposes a corrupt and brutal regime upon Haiti -- which the people are struggling still to oust.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/23/hillary-clinton-to-publish-thriller-set-in-aftermath-of-us-political-turmoil

 

[lady narcissa]

Clinton with Penny is an interesting combination.  I am 100% positive my mom will purchase and read it (because of Penny and the topic) so I might check it out if she enjoys it.

[Zorral]

The only interesting thing really, reading the latest Penny, All The Devils Are Here, is how very different this book's milieu and concerns are from what brought us to Penny's Gamache novels in the first place, essentially interesting and variegated individuals, in long-time relationships and community with each other, in a 'normal' sort of place, particularly Three Pines. 

Here, in Paris, it's all very high-powered, very wealthy, multi-national, legal, enforcement and financial figures and milieu.  This background on Gamache, his entitled and privileged family and guardians -- has not previously penetrated into the Gamache universe. 

I'm not hearing Gamache, I hear Clinton's voice, as in her What Happened, published post the 2016 election, constantly referencing her many internationally wealthy friends, their palatial estates in the DR, etc. -- with not a bit of sensibility about anyone outside of those circles, starting with the title.  What Happened is exactly that -- no touch with what is really going on with people who aren't comfortably within her circles of involvement.  It looks like Penny got star-struck by her new bestie.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/books/hillary-clinton-louise-penny-state-of-terror.html

I don't like it, truthfully.  It's off-putting, possessing nothing of what brought me back, book after book, to Gamache's world.

That Penny had gone as far with that world that was possible shows so strongly in the previous two – three titles, which were tired and over-stretched, rather implausible and certainly lacking in the sort of engagement with the characters and milieu we loved in the long string of books that preceded them.  So she wanting to do something different is understandable.  But her choice to shoe horn her new interests – and her new, insider access, to a much wider and powerful mise en scene – into the world of Gamache, is a mistake, an error of sensibility that is the same as Clinton's, the failure which lost her an election.
 

 

 

Edited February 25, 2021 by Zorral

[Xray the Enforcer]

So I've finished the Vera Stanhope series and started in on the Shetland series and AGAIN WITH THE BIRDS, ANN.  

I tried to read the first Shardlake book and it was very well written but I could not handle the religious bigotry because it reminds me way too much of the transphobic bigotry I have to deal with on the daily. So I will revisit that one maybe, oh, halfway through the Biden Administration or something like that. It's just too raw right now. 

[A wilding]

Personally I think the Shetland series is not as good as the Vera series. The first 3 books are okay, but then it goes downhill (and in a book that once more features ornithology). And if you don't want to read about religious bigotry, the Shardlake series is definitely not for you!

I have been on a reread of the classic golden age story (and also slight send up of the genre) Trent's Last Case by E.C.Bentley. It has aged extremely well considering it was published in 1913, possibly partly because, like The Moonstone, it is almost the only mystery story he ever wrote. (He co-wrote a sequel 25 years later, which is also good - a strong theme of failure and futility - but suffers a little from the co-writer's interest in food and drink.) I recommend it to any golden age fan who has not already come across it.

Edited February 27, 2021 by A wilding

[lady narcissa]

On 2/26/2021 at 10:38 PM, Xray the Enforcer said:

So I've finished the Vera Stanhope series and started in on the Shetland series and AGAIN WITH THE BIRDS, ANN.  

I think extra birds fly into your copies of the books!!! I mean I remember some birds in some of her books but not them being a dominant feature like this. I suppose we all just notice certain things more than others depending on our interests and experiences.

As for Shardlake, obviously with them taking place during Henry VIII's reign there is going to be religion in the background with Anne and the Reformation and his dissolution of the monasteries but the first one with the monastery setting perhaps amplifies it a bit more.

[Zorral]

New Donna Leone Commissario Brunetti title out -- Transient Desires.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/books/review/donna-leon-transient-desires.html

 

 

Edited March 24, 2021 by Zorral

[lady narcissa]

Well I finally read Robert Galbraith's Troubled Blood.  I wasn't sure if I would.  I really really really disliked the previous book in the series, Lethal White.  And all the things with the author and everything from that really did not sit right with me and I wasn't sure I had any interest in reading this based on that.  Plus the fact that a serial killer is part of the storyline also led to my reluctance as I tend to avoid such stories.  But I got a free copy and I like closure so I decided to read it.  I ended up reading it twice in a row - finished it and just started it right again.  And its been a few weeks and I still just find myself thinking back on it.  I hate to say I really enjoy a book such as this with its subject matter, but the book really took me in.

It's very long.  This is literally a year plus several months in Strike and Robin's lives with lots of stuff besides the main investigation.  There is Strike's personal life with family and his former girlfriend.  There is Robin with her personal life and her divorce.  There is the Agency with its employees and multiple investigations for multiple clients.  We get a lot of story about all these other things.  But then there is the mystery itself at the heart of the story - an investigation into a woman who disappeared many decades ago and now her daughter is all grown up and wants to see if she can get any closure and find out what happened to her mother.

Without being spoilerish I will say you find out what happens.  That whole story of what happened comes after the very long investigation with multiple interviews with anyone still alive who remembers the woman plus all sorts of personal issues amongst everyone.  There is lots of walking around locations and driving to other locations.  It was pretty satisfactory how it all comes together.  This is why I went back and read it a second time to see if the clues were all there, and they were.  It is a work of fiction, I don't think a cold case like this could really be solved without the coincidences an author is allowed to create.  But it was well created for the purposes of a story.

I do not like where the characters are heading with their personal lives.  I pretty much loathe Strike as a person, although I enjoy him as a character.  I would like to see Robin in a different situation.  But there we are.  Like the daughter, I got the closure I needed with this series with this book.

Edited March 28, 2021 by lady narcissa
Wrong word

[Zorral]

4 hours ago, lady narcissa said:

his former girlfriend. 

Thanks for the review -- I just watched the Strike stuff on HBO this winter.  Haven't read either Lethal White or this one.

Gosh, one hates that ex.  Or maybe only I hate her?  But then, I don't find any of these characters interesting or likeable.  Strike could have been, one thinks ... if the author hadn't screwed the pooch from the gitgo by dragging in Robin and the will they / won't they etc. exhausted beyond resuscitation trope.  And that horrible ex-girlfriend who truly hasn't been xed enough!

[TheLastWolf]

On 2/27/2021 at 10:08 AM, Xray the Enforcer said:

So I've finished the Vera Stanhope series and started in on the Shetland series and AGAIN WITH THE BIRDS, ANN.  

Hi Xray, i just can't seem to find the BIRDS thread in General Chatter anywhere? 

Is it only me or... 

PS

Greater Coucals nesting in my terrace 

[Ormond]

I'm just informing readers of this thread that I have posted information about the latest nominees for the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, and Thriller Awards in the Lit Prizes thread.

[Iskaral Pust]

On 3/28/2021 at 2:37 PM, lady narcissa said:

Well I finally read Robert Galbraith's Troubled Blood.  I wasn't sure if I would.  I really really really disliked the previous book in the series, Lethal White.  And all the things with the author and everything from that really did not sit right with me and I wasn't sure I had any interest in reading this based on that.  Plus the fact that a serial killer is part of the storyline also led to my reluctance as I tend to avoid such stories.  But I got a free copy and I like closure so I decided to read it.  I ended up reading it twice in a row - finished it and just started it right again.  And its been a few weeks and I still just find myself thinking back on it.  I hate to say I really enjoy a book such as this with its subject matter, but the book really took me in.

It's very long.  This is literally a year plus several months in Strike and Robin's lives with lots of stuff besides the main investigation.  There is Strike's personal life with family and his former girlfriend.  There is Robin with her personal life and her divorce.  There is the Agency with its employees and multiple investigations for multiple clients.  We get a lot of story about all these other things.  But then there is the mystery itself at the heart of the story - an investigation into a woman who disappeared many decades ago and now her daughter is all grown up and wants to see if she can get any closure and find out what happened to her mother.

Without being spoilerish I will say you find out what happens.  That whole story of what happened comes after the very long investigation with multiple interviews with anyone still alive who remembers the woman plus all sorts of personal issues amongst everyone.  There is lots of walking around locations and driving to other locations.  It was pretty satisfactory how it all comes together.  This is why I went back and read it a second time to see if the clues were all there, and they were.  It is a work of fiction, I don't think a cold case like this could really be solved without the coincidences an author is allowed to create.  But it was well created for the purposes of a story.

I do not like where the characters are heading with their personal lives.  I pretty much loathe Strike as a person, although I enjoy him as a character.  I would like to see Robin in a different situation.  But there we are.  Like the daughter, I got the closure I needed with this series with this book.

I posted a review of this in one of the quarterly reading threads.   I think it was Q1, but could have been Q4.

I don’t recall the details of what I wrote but I agree that it was much better than Lethal White (and really, really needed to be).  The procedural unfolding of the cold case was a better plot, and Galbraith’s strength (at least in this series) has always been the way she can portray in such detail the minute to minute behavior and thoughts of the characters.  They may be unlikable most of the time but you’re definitely immersed in them.  And the emo romance arc is thankfully cooled down a bit compared to the last book, but still omnipresent, despite Strike being a slobbish pig with no redeeming romantic qualities and (Mary Sue) Robin being so entitled and whiny and entirely shaped by her PTSD.  And once again Galbraith’s personal politics, especially on class, suffuses all of the characters.  The working class are the salt of the earth but deeply patronized (reading their dialogue makes me cringe), while the upper class are useless but always in a benignly fey way, while the middle class are reviled for their bourgeois aspirations and pretensions.  Strike and Robin are both heroes for rejecting middle class expectations and embracing a working class life instead.

I didn’t feel at all like re-reading it, especially when it is so drawn out, but I did enjoy it and was glad to see the series rediscover its quality as it concludes(?).

[Zorral]

Glancing through the pages of a library copy of Troubled Blood I wondered if there was an obvious point revealed somewhere in the story as to making Spenser's The Faerie Queen a sort of, what, chorus? commentator?  to the book.  You all who have read it, do you know?

[Zorral]

Transient Desires, Donna Leon's latest Commissario Brunetti Mystery, is a puzzling read, but not in the maner readers want crime fiction to be. It’s almost as if there were two books Leon mashed together, w/o either a throughline or destination for either of them, much less both of them.  Nor do we get a sense as to why this novel carries the title that it does. Which desires are transient?  Who has these transient desires? 

This may be due to covid, as the official publication date for Transient Desires is March 2021, so she was still writing this book presumably in the massively confusing first months of 2020, which were so for all of us.  She does deserve credit for managing to carry on, and produce on schedule.

Brunetti's personal, interior commentary include occasional observations as to the lack of tourists. This constant population which vastly outnumbers the people who live in Venice and who work there, allows him to travel in the canals rapidly, get tables and service w/o planning or waiting, yet this novel condition is accompanied by a lamentable drop in profit. There are a couple of other observations as to 'masks', and a passing mention of ‘plague’. Was Brunette referring to the Carnival masks?  To past historical pandemics and epidemics to which Venice was always subject? There is no context to think so, but there’s no context for anything else either, particularly as the action is caused by the serious injuries to two young American tourists, girls who were left without attendance on the dock of a hospital, the father of one of them flying in from the US. Brunetti goes searching for whom or what is responsible.  But the young women and their injuries not part of the plot, such as it is.  The novel also just ... stops, rather than having an actual conclusion.

~~~~~

Currently I am in the midst of reading New Orleans' author, C.SA. Harris's latest Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery, What the Devil Knows, published this month.  This series is not as long-running as the Brunettis, but has a most respectable number of titles by now.  Some of the later novels have flagged, but about two - three titles previously, they came back to form.  This one is there from the very first sentence.  The location is London, the time is 1814. The wars with Napoleon are (nearly) over.  The Congress of Vienna is in progress, as the victors debate dividing the spoils now that Boney's been exiled to Elba. (The 100 Days will likely be the background of the next St. Cyr, as the Congress is to this one.)

There's substantial continuity between these two novels, as New Orleans still reveres Napoleon. As well, New Orleans was one of the worst of the earliest hotspots of Covid last winter, thanks to Carnival-Mardi Gras.  This Catholic world's ritual on the Day before Lent begins has always been as important in New Orleans as it is in Venice.  Indeed, post Napoleon, Venice's only real economic raison d'être was Carnivale, so they celebrated it year 'round to keep the visitors and their cash coming.  Such thoughts chase each other while reading the two novels back-to-back, just about the only fiction I've read so far this year.  

~~~~~~~

I also am nearly half through Galbraith's Troubled Blood, thanks to Lady Narcissa's write-up of her own experience reading this latest (last?) Cormoran Strike detective series. As it's a download to my work computer from the library, with short chapters, this makes the vastly long book easy to read as  a serial, a few chapters here in-between the steps for cooking something, sitting on hold for a phone conversation, etc.  I think I've figured out why quotes from Spenser's Faerie Queen are at the front of every section of the novel and the top of every chapter.

Edited April 20, 2021 by Zorral

[lady narcissa]

Zorral, I've seen a couple of articles analyzing the Faerie Queen quotes in Troubled Blood - Elizabethan poetry experts jumped on the opportunity to talk about something 'new' - but I have to admit I just skipped over them.  Similarly I could not muster interest in all the Rosmersholm quotes in Lethal White.  Anyway, glad you are giving Troubled Blood a look.

I am also currently reading C.S. Harris' What the Devil Knows.  I have been less satisfied with the most recent books in the series.  We have really entered into a formula with these later ones with the greatest emphasis on the murders being solved and less advancement with the personal lives.  I think what I liked best about the stories was Devlin's personal life and his personal growth.  Now that he is in a content point in his life - despite there being countless attempts on his life in every book, of course - I am less interested.  There has been such a long drawn out few back plots on hold these past few books that could spice things up if brought to the forefront but we still wait for those.  I enjoyed the first half of this newest book and learning about the real life events that inspired the story as well as the history bits - but there are so many characters and so much talking to them and Devlin just investigating in the later half, I am sort of just skimming.

[Zorral]

@lady narcissa -- What I enjoyed most about What the Devil Knows was -- wait, I can't say now because you're only at the half way point.  And even under spoiler tag, it might get through when you don't want it to, so I took it down.  But I can say this -- it's good!  And real, but I hadn't known it before.

I think the family stuff is going to heat up in the next book, at least on Hero's side, but again I won't say why now. 

Finished Troubled Blood last night (gads, the titles for the books are dreadful!).  Again, thank you for bringing your thoughts on the book here.  It's hard to find something immersive in These Times, and with so much cold rain, one does want such a thing.  I shouldn't have enjoyed this book because it isn't what I like in so many ways, and didn't like the  previous ones, but this one worked for me.  Partly it was the role of the weather playing out within the novel, just as it did for people in the UK in 2014, and the other national backdrop, the referendum in Scotland for independence, watched so closely by people in Wales and Cornwall.

I felt the center set piece of getting to Cornwall in that endless storm and flood of February, 2014 was really fine.  Maybe it reminded me of what it was like here and everywhere in winter 2020 of getting anywhere when the necessity of birth and death demanded, and how difficult it was.  It still is, but not like 2020.

As far as Spenser goes, at least one part of its purpose, I think, is to highlight Strike's white knight syndrome, never able to resist coming to the rescue of damsels in distress.  Through the course of this one, he fights against that constant temptation with Charlotte.  His endless conflict to expend his force, to husband it, so to speak, for the worthy wronged, such as Margot Bamborough, and align himself with the right damsel, Mary Sue Perfect Robin.  That Robin perfection just gets worse and worse with every book. 

And as you say, "...Strike being a slobbish pig with no redeeming romantic qualities..." -- I literally can smell the nicotine reek of him.  Ugh!

 

 

Edited April 26, 2021 by Zorral

[Castellan]

I have been cosily listening to the agatha christie audiobooks which have appeared on youtube. So far I have only listened to those narrated by Hugh Fraser or those that combine David Suchet and Hugh. Hugh's wonderful! I think this reading brings out all that Christie has to offer. I also like Joan Hickson reading as Miss Marple. After you have listened to someone really good reading them (like Hugh) other versions become unlistenable.

 

[TheLastWolf]

All cinephiles try Satyajit Ray's Feluda series 

[Iskaral Pust]

On 4/10/2021 at 11:07 PM, Zorral said:

Glancing through the pages of a library copy of Troubled Blood I wondered if there was an obvious point revealed somewhere in the story as to making Spenser's The Faerie Queen a sort of, what, chorus? commentator?  to the book.  You all who have read it, do you know?

I found those Faerie Queen epigraphs to be very annoying.  The Early Modern English forced into Spenser’s stanzas, and randomly excerpted from the flow of an epic poem, makes for a jarring interruption to the flow of reading.

But, yes, if you’re familiar with the Faerie Queen, then this novel has some parallels with some of the characters, although it’s not attempting to match the overall theme of the virtues.

[Iskaral Pust]

Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series is very well written.  I just posted a review of the fifth installment in the current quarterly reading thread.