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Review

Knife Skills for Beginners

by Brian Kenney

Cooking as entertainment, from reality shows to competitions to documentaries, couldn’t be more popular, and Murrin’s decision to set Knife Skills in the heart of a London cooking school is a smart one. Located in an old mansion in the super-posh Belgravia neighborhood, the school—which is residential—offers week-long classes for small groups of a dozen or so. The students, a bit of an odd crew, are super excited at meeting their instructor Christian Wager—he’s sort of a Gordon Ramsay type. When Christian shows up, one arm in a cast, and announces that he’s passing the class on to his good buddy Paul Delamare, the class groans in disappointment. Paul isn’t a celebrity like Christian, but he’s a darn good chef, and slowly the class warms up to him. Until there’s a murder as gruesome as you can imagine (hint: cleaver) and the class rather ghoulishly wants to continue the course—corpse be damned!—and with Paul the number-one suspect. From here, the book spirals out—there are red herrings galore, and nearly everyone seems to be a suspect at one point or another. Lots of fun to be had, especially with the characters Murrin creates.

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Review

Your Dark Secrets

by Brian Kenney

Marr’s thrillers have a knack for getting inside the minds and lives of modern women, and this one continues that run, here in the high-flying (and sometimes just high) world of celebrity PR. Addison Stern is a bitchy, ruthless PR star to the stars. She’ll do anything for her clients, including ruining junior media employees who might be naive enough to try to look beneath the surface of the stars’ fake tans and Botox. She’s vying for a partnership at her firm, and finding her pharma-bro client, Phinneas Redwood, dead is not what she needs, especially when that murder is followed by other crimes that all lead investigators to Addison. She never thought she’d see the day, but she partners with her private-detective ex, Connor Windell—he’s only too happy to leave a losing streak in Las Vegas—to get to the bottom of things and save herself. The two are off on a jet-setting investigation that takes them to Monaco and other more-money-than-sense places in search of the truth. The touch of Jackie Collins here–the ridiculous riches if not the steaminess—adds a deliciously over-the-top touch to a fast-moving, satisfying whodunit.

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Review

The Noh Mask Murder

by Willy Williams

First published in 1949 and now elegantly translated into English for the first time, this award-winning atmospheric puzzler by a celebrated author from Japan’s golden age of detective fiction is both an intricate locked-room mystery and a metafictional take on how to write such a crime novel. In the summer of 1946 at a bathing resort, Akimitsu Takagi, a devotee of mystery fiction and an aspiring amateur sleuth, runs into Koichi Yanagi, an old school friend who has just returned to Japan after serving in Burma. Koichi now works for the respected Chizui family, whose members appear to be as cursed as Edgar Allen Poe’s Usher siblings. Ten years earlier, the patriarch, Professor Chizui, died of an apparent heart attack, although Koichi suspects foul play; his wife was institutionalized in an asylum; and recently their daughter also lost her sanity. One night, an eerie figure wearing a demonic hannya Noh mask is spotted in the upstairs window of the Chizui mansion; Taijiro, the professor’s brother, asks Akimitsu to investigate. By the time the sleuth arrives on the scene, Taijiro has been found dead in an armchair in his locked bedroom, with the mask on the floor beside him and the scent of jasmine lingering in the air. When Akimitsu learns that someone has ordered three coffins, he fears that the worst is yet to come. The author cleverly structures his plot like a Russian nesting doll, with one puzzle embedded within another puzzle inside another puzzle, until it is resolved in a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Agatha Christie and S.S. Van Dine fans will enjoy this twisty tale.

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Review

The Grey Wolf

by Henrietta Thornton

Quebec Detective Inspector Armand Gamache, so beloved of readers after 18 outings that showcase his fierce love for his family and his quiet investigative smarts, here finds himself far from his village of Three Pines, both in his investigation and emotionally. After he accepts a mysterious invitation to meet someone at a Montreal Cafe and the rendezvous ends in a terrorist attack, Gamache must hit the road to find out who his coffee date was and why he was seemingly murdered. Clues are few and Armand can’t trust his department as there are signs of an informant, but the lives of millions of Canadians are on the line. There’s a rich religious element here, with Gamache traveling to monasteries and even having a Vatican nun grilled as to her past. This book contains a more frightening thriller element than in some of Penny’s previous tales. But as the author’s acknowledgment so poignantly states, “Home. That’s really what the books are about.” Readers will happily follow Gamache back there to his beloved Reine-Marie and their now overflowing brood. A tense, satisfying tale.

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Review

Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain

by Brian Kenney

In the first book in the series, Kalmann, we were introduced to our hero, a young man who’s neurodivergent—although he uses many terms to describe himself—and who works as the self-appointed sheriff of Raufarhöfn, a fishing village in northern Iceland. His world is contained—he lives with his mother, his best friend he sees only online—but his life is still fraught with dangers, from fishing on the Greenland Sea to encounters with polar bears. Kalmann remains well regarded in his village, and it is his sense of humor that often helps him survive. But in Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain, we are stunned to find Kalmann in West Virginia, visiting his Dad, whom he has never met before, and getting swept up, along with his Dad and his MAGA buddies, in the January 6, 2021 riots in the Capitol Building. Incredible! While he is soon put on a plane back to Iceland by a kindly FBI agent, Kalmann’s world is changing. His beloved grandfather has recently died, and, Kalmann learns, he may well have been a Russian spy. Could he have been murdered in his nursing home? Another possible murder in the village, and a risky trip to an abandoned U.S. radar station with an aunt, forces Kalmann to rethink his family and village and his role in both. Both heart-rendering and hilarious, “there is no need to worry” as Kalmann famously declares. “Kalmann is in charge.”

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Review

The Drowned

by Willy Williams

Spotting a sleek Mercedes SL sports car parked in a sloping field below a house, its engine still running and the driver’s door left open, Denton Wymes, on his way home from fishing, pauses to investigate. It’s a moment that the isolated loner will soon regret as he becomes caught up in a missing-person case that will turn his life upside down. Before Wymes can retreat, a man named Armitage approaches, claiming his wife has thrown herself into the sea. Together they walk up to the house to telephone for help. Armitage’s behavior is odd (“he seemed more excited than distressed’) and Wymes senses that the tenant answering the door, Charles Rudduck, recognizes Armitage. Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector St. John (pronounced “Sinjun”) Strafford, who is also juggling a complicated personal life (an estranged wife and a lover who is the daughter of his colleague, state pathologist Quirke). In late 1950s Ireland, divorce is illegal, and Anglo-Irish social tensions remain strong. Banville deftly captures the prejudices and suspicions between the groups. “You’re not a Paddy, then” says Armitage to Wymes, who stiffly corrects him that he is Irish, but not “bog Irish.” In a mostly Catholic police force, Strafford stands out as the rare Protestant. His investigation gradually uncovers secrets that go back years and into previous series installments, but enough back information easily guides new readers through the complex plot. Banville ends his fourth Strafford/Quirke crime novel (after The Lock-Up) on a haunting, ambiguous note. With its complicated, not always likable protagonists, this beautifully written book will appeal to fans of literary mysteries in the vein of Kate Atkinson’s and Tana French’s works.

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Review

Death of a Master Chef

by Willy Williams

In his ninth outing, Commissaire Georges Dupin is reluctantly attending a team-building police seminar with his officious boss in the Breton port city of Saint-Malo, in France’s northwest. The packed four-day schedule, however, offers the consolation of a restaurant visit every evening, and Dupin uses his lunch hour to explore “the culinary heart of Brittany.” As he samples cheeses and sausages in the market hall of Saint Servain, bloodcurdling screams capture his attention. A woman has been stabbed to death in one of the stalls. Dupin quickly gives chase to the fleeing culprit, even “borrowing” a car from a local resident before losing the object of his pursuit. When he returns to the police station, Dupin learns that both the victim and the murderer have been identified: Blanche Trouin, a well-known chef and owner of a Michelin-starred restaurant, was killed by her younger sister, Lucille, also a successful chef. The two had engaged in a sibling rivalry that could outshine the famous Joan Fontaine-Olivia de Havilland feud in its vicious bitterness. When Lucille is quickly arrested, she refuses to confess or discuss a motive. Although Dupin’s colleagues back in Concarneau advise him to stay out of the case, the murder of Blanche’s husband indicates a second killer is at work, and the seminar participants are quickly organized into investigative teams. As Dupin probes with his teammates, the caffeine-addicted sleuth makes time to enjoy petit cafés and savor the beauty of the Emerald Coast. Once again Bannalec (the pen name of German-born Jörg Bong) has written an intriguing and tasty mystery with surprising twists in a beautiful, charming setting that will appeal to Louise Penny fans. It is also a good starter for readers new to the series. Do not read the mouthwatering descriptions of Breton delicacies on an empty stomach!

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Review

The Murder of Mr. Ma

by Brian Kenney

A high-energy, rambunctious tale that shares much with Sherlock Holmes—the Guy Ritchie versions, that is—as well as traditional Chinese gong’an crime fiction, in which government magistrates solve criminal cases. It’s London, 1924 and Judge Dee Ren Jie, known as Judge Dee, has just arrived in the country to investigate the murder of a colleague whom he knew during World War I, when both served with the Chinese Labour Corps. No less a personage than Bertrand Russell introduces the Judge to Lao She, a retiring London academic who quickly becomes Dee’s sidekick—they are introduced in a prison breakout, it’s complicated—and the two set off to locate the victim’s family. One murder soon becomes two, then more, all performed with the distinctive butterfly sword, putting yet more pressure on Judge Dee to find the perpetrator before he or she tries to murder him. The authors do a wonderful job of depicting the bustling London of the ‘20s, the Chinese community and the relentless racism and stereotypes it is a victim of, and absolutely fabulous displays of martial arts. There’s word that Dr. Dee may be returning to solve another case; here’s hoping he does!

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Review

The Meiji Guillotine Murders

by Willy Williams

It’s 1869 in the newly renamed capital of Tokyo, a year after the political revolution known as the Meiji Restoration overthrew the ruling Tokugawa shogunate that kept Japan in feudal isolation for over 200 years. It’s a time of rapid social change and political turmoil; not everyone is happy with the new government’s policy of Western modernization. Law enforcement, such as it is, is represented by five corrupt rasotsu (police officers) who are more interested in lining their pockets than in protecting the public. But they are reluctantly enlisted into the services of two chief inspectors from the Imperial Prosecuting Office as they investigate government corruption and a string of impossible-seeming murders. One inspector is the elegant and handsome Keisherō Kazuki, who cuts an odd figure in his old-fashioned clothes that make him look like “a courtier who had stepped out of the Heian period.” He is also obsessed with making the new government a just one and has imported a French guillotine as a more humane means of execution. His older colleague,Toshiyoshi Kawaij, is more down to earth, but he too is an outsider. The two men share a friendly rivalry as they probe several gruesome, supernatural-like killings. They are aided by Esmeralda, a beautiful Frenchwoman who followed Kazuki back to Japan (much to the dismay of Kazuki’s fiancée and her father) and who now is studying to become a miko, a Shinto shrine maiden with shamanistic powers that enable her to speak for the dead. How these crimes connect to the book’s title is resolved surprisingly and cleverly in the final section. Although the plethora of Japanese names can at first be confusing (a glossary of Japanese terms would also have been helpful), Karetnyk’s stylish and witty translation (there’s a lot of humor in this dark, bloody tale) quickly draws readers into Yamada’s atmospheric world. And Kazuki and Kawaij (a historical figure considered the father of the modern Japanese police force) make for a memorable sleuthing duo. Noted for his ninja novels, Yamada has written an engrossing, twisty tale that will appeal to fans of well-designed puzzle mysteries and international crime fiction with a fascinating historical setting.

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Review

Past Lying: A Karen Pirie Novel

by Willy Williams

It’s April 2020, the third week of a pandemic lockdown in an eerily quiet and empty Edinburgh. Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie of Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit has hunkered down with Detective Sergeant Daisy Mortimer in a “quarantine bubble” in her boyfriend Hamish’s spacious New Town apartment while he isolates up in the Highlands. There are no active cold cases to occupy the two officers, and Karen is languishing while longing for something meaningful to investigate. She fights her restlessness with her daily one-hour walks, the maximum allowed under tight restrictions. But when DC Jason Murray receives a call from a contact at the National Library about an unfinished manuscript in the archives of a recently deceased crime novelist, the team may have stumbled upon a connection to the cold case of a young woman who disappeared a year earlier. But how do they investigate a crime while trying to stay within COVID protocols? A determined Karen finds herself “making mincemeat” of the regulations, but as she tells a colleague, “I have to be out on the streets doing what I do. Because I want the world to still be a decent place when we come out on the other side.” In her seventh atmospheric series thriller, McDermid skillfully combines a twisty plot of murder and vengeance with the personal dramas of her detectives, set against the dramatic backdrop of a global pandemic. By the novel’s end, no one has been left unscathed by this traumatic time. In her acknowledgments, McDermid notes that she penned this novel only in 2023, needing the distance of time to write about those frightening early days. I suspect her book is the first of many crime novels that will explore the impact of COVID on the human psyche.

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