Tag:

Historical

Review

The Bloodless Boy

by Henrietta Thornton

“Life owns a way of disappointing most,” notes a character in Lloyd’s meticulously written and researched debut, in which murder is hot on the heels of the disappointments. One of the killings is the goriest I’ve ever read: brace yourself for a man having his Adam’s apple bitten out, with the gruesome fruit spat out to roll across the floor. And that’s only a minor character, one of those enmeshed in the politics swirling through London’s grimy, cold winter of 1678, when paranoia about Catholic plots to kill the King and turn the populace toward popery abounds. A light in the gloom is real-life polymath Robert Hooke, who leaves his elaboratory experiments to investigate the murder of the book’s titular boy. The child is found with his blood entirely removed, dates written beside various wounds on his body, and a coded message left on his chest. Once Hooke’s newly invented means of creating a vacuum in a jar is employed to preserve the body, the sleuthing is afoot. London of the day is almost its own character here, with Lloyd shoving readers into the chill, stink, and fear for a wonderfully atmospheric time. Try this if you enjoyed Cathedral of the Sea by Ildefonso Falcones, which illuminates the same era, but in Barcelona

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Review

Front Page Murder

by Brian Kenney

Yes, another cover featuring a woman in a period outfit with her back turned towards us—except this time the book is a rollicking good mystery. It’s World War II, the U.S. has just entered the war, and Irene Ingram’s fiancé and father have both enlisted, leaving Irene to step into her father’s shoes as editor-in-chief of the Progress Herald, the local paper. Young—she’s in her early twenties—and female, Irene has to continually prove herself, whether it’s to her mother who doesn’t believe women belong in the workforce or to the newspaper staff who bridle under a woman’s leadership. When her star reporter, Moe Bauer, is discovered dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs, Irene has more pressing matters to attend to than the grousing among her staff, all the more so when she figures out that Moe was likely murdered. Then Sam Markowicz, owner of the local hardware store, becomes the victim of anti-Semitic harassment, and another man, also Jewish, is attacked in a local factory. Irene puts aside features about victory gardens and the like and dives into a criminal investigation. The setting—small time life during World War II—is a brilliant choice, and the language and references are pitch perfect. Fans of Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs, Rhys Bowen’s Molly Murphy, and Mariah Frederick’s Jane Prescott will enjoy meeting Irene Ingram.

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Review

The Houseboat

by Brian Kenney

A lyrical, moody crime novel—there’s no mystery and just a smidgen of suspense—set in small-town Oscar, Iowa in 1960, a town “as plain as a white wall.” When a young couple, spending the night on the banks of the Mississippi River, are attacked—and the young man is murdered—local sheriff Amos Fielding knows he needs help, so he calls for regional backup. He’s rewarded with Edward Ness from Minnesota, a stylish detective who hasn’t put down the bottle since his wife and young son were murdered seven years earlier. We follow Ness as he discovers and flirts his way through Oscar. But soon enough the narrative turns to Rigby Sellers, a terrifying, angry recluse—with coke-bottle glasses and a “jutting brow and a bent nose, a patchy beard and an incomplete set of long jaundiced teeth”—who lives on a decrepit houseboat moored on the river. Still not convinced of Sellers’s creepiness? His lovers are mannequins that he dresses and paints for their date nights. Days go by without a confirmed suspect but with plenty of rain, and a long-standing drought gives way to a swollen Mississippi that rips through the town, upending it. When more bodies are found, the townspeople are, literally, up in arms, and Sellers is directly in their cross-hairs. Hard to put down and even harder to forget, The Houseboat is a poignant rendering of a place and time.

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Review

A Thousand Steps

by Henrietta Thornton

Matt Anthony, a high-schooler in 1960s San Francisco, has the weight of the world on his skinny shoulders. His conservative father abandoned the family and writes only to rail about the “queers and communists” who have taken over the city. Matt supports his family with a punishing paper route while living off fish he catches and foraging restaurant leftovers, all because his mother claims to have a curiously long-lasting flu but is actually using their grocery and rent money on drugs. Worst of all, right after Matt sees a teen girl’s body washed up on the beach, his sister Jasmine goes missing. Matt’s mother doesn’t take Jasmine’s disappearance seriously for days and the police are little help, leaving Matt to investigate the seedy human infrastructure of the city’s drug scene, which wears a veneer of peace and love but underneath is cut-throat capitalist. Matt’s story is akin to an ancient epic that sees the hero tested and battered (his lengthy skirmish with a giant fish—two week’s worth of food for a hungry boy—is terrifying). But ultimately he triumphs as he fights for what’s right. The prolific Parker has 27 other novels to back this up, most recently Then She Vanished (2020); readers who like a modern epic should turn to Michael Hughes’s Country, a version of The Iliad set in present-day Northern Ireland.

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Review

A Valiant Deceit

by Henrietta Thornton

There’s no shortage of WWII novels, but this second in a duology is happily in the less-crowded subgenre of the women behind the scenes. It stars Olive Bright, a kind, loyal, and sometimes-brash young woman who keeps even family in the dark about her work. Pre-war, she inherited her father’s loft of racing pigeons, and now lends them to the war effort as carriers. They’re brought from England to mainland Europe by government agents, then fly home bearing maps and letters that Olive and her gruff supervisor, the dashingly named Jameson Aldridge, hope will help beat the Nazis. Olive’s avian work isn’t the only deceit here; as cover for her job at the Bletchley Park-like Brickendonbury Manor, she and Jamie pretend to be in a relationship, but she hopes for more between them (as will readers). The mystery here concerns a body found in nearby woods, but the worldbuilding, characters, and details of espionage-assisting pigeons make the tale. Graves’s afterword discusses the real Operation Columba, which saw the allies drop thousands of pigeons from Denmark to France from 1941 to ‘44. Readers can go back to the first book in the series, Olive Bright, Pigeoneer; also try Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code, which features women codebreakers at Bletchley Park

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Review

The Secret in the Wall

by Henrietta Thornton

Many of us grew up on a strict diet of Nancy Drew. For nostalgia in the same vein but grittier, try 12-year-old sleuth Antonia Grizzi, who’s been raised on Gilded Age San Francisco’s streets, and it shows. She’s now the “ward” of Inez Stannart, a single woman who wants to remain so. The two are perfectly matched as companions, but Antonia can’t bring herself to trust Inez, or anyone, completely. When demolition in a building Inez has bought reveals a dead man and a cache of gold coins, she and Antonia each determine to solve the mystery of who he is and what happened—solo. By playing in the house, the little girl gets deep into its secrets, while her guardian looks further afield, including in the investigation a handsome local who just might make her abandon the going-it-alone plan. Exciting switches in perspective quickly advance the plot while accessible but atmospheric dialog and cultural touchpoints impart a vivid sense of the time. Readers will want more from Parker; also try Erin Lindsey’s Rose Gallagher Mystery series.

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Review

April in Spain

by Henrietta Thornton

John Banville invites us into the inner lives of Irish people and, through their loves and struggles, creates a composite view of modern Ireland. This eighth in the series named for retired medical examiner Quirke sees him reluctantly vacationing in Spain with his wife, Evelyn, a psychiatrist whose quiet love for Quirke is a highlight of the book. When an injured Quirke visits an ER, the Irish doctor who treats him is strangely familiar and later, at a thank-you meal she obviously loathes attending, behaves bizarrely. Back in Ireland, Quirke’s daughter, Phoebe, will frustrate readers through her relationship with superior-acting, controlling Paul. When Phoebe joins Quirke to tackle the mystery surrounding the Irish doctor, she sidesteps Paul and his aloofness only to face something much more sinister (warning: sexual abuse is involved though not graphically described). Love and fear are wonderfully juxtaposed here, and those who enjoy reading the former should try Irish author Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart. Fans of the more dangerous elements should be steered toward the Sean Duffy novels by Northern Ireland’s Adrian McKinty.

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Review

Where There’s a Will

by Henrietta Thornton

Rowland “Rowly” Sinclair and his wealthy Australian artist friends live a life of leisure except for solving crime; in this 11th outing (after A Testament of Character, 2020), they’re taking a languid trip through Asia, stopping at British Colonial outposts that allow them to remain of the empire even on the road. Their frivolities are ended when Rowly’s friend Danny Cartwright is murdered in Boston and Rowly announced as the surprise executor of Danny’s will. What they find stateside is a greedy family waiting for the will to be read and long-simmering anger that Danny, who was gay, had any say in their family’s fortune. The will doesn’t go the Cartwrights’ way, causing danger for Rowly and friends as well as some of the best writing of the book as Gentill portrays the loyalty and love—some of it less unrequited than previously—among this gang of affable eccentrics. Be aware that a past attempt at gay conversion therapy is described “off stage.” Gentill’s fans will be delighted with this latest installment; it’s also a great readalike for Amanda Allen’s Santa Fe Revival Mystery series, which too features an artist sleuth

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Review

Deadly Summer Nights

by Brian Kenney

A midsize Catskill resort in the 1950s provides a rich setting for Delany’s latest series. Elizabeth Grady manages the resort, while her mother, Olivia—a retired theater and film star who inherited the venue—loafs about, deigning to occasionally show up at cocktail hour to dazzle the guests. Keeping the Haggerman’s Resort profitable is serious work, and Grady doesn’t think things can get any busier, when the body of one of the guests—loner Harold Westenham, a former college professor—is found floating in the lake. If that doesn’t cause enough of a ruckus, the police find a copy of The Communist Manifesto in Westenham’s cabin, bringing in the FBI and fueling a red scare among the guests. Faced with a hostile police force, Grady ends up taking on the investigation herself. While the detective work is low-key, and the resolution falls pretty much in Elizabeth’s lap, the real pleasures of this book lie in its setting, period, and characters, all of which are wonderfully realized. Cozy readers will be happy to return to Haggerman’s Catskill Resort any time.

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Review

Inheritance of Secrets

by Henrietta Thornton

Bates, Sonya. Inheritance of Secrets. November 2021. 432p. HarperCollins.
After her mother left when Juliet was nine, she grew up with her German grandparents, Karl and Grete. The three are close, and she’s devastated when they’re murdered. Even more upsetting, investigators claim that Karl was a long-pursued Nazi war criminal. That present-day story, set in Australia, alternates with the wartime romance tale of Karl and Grete, who love their country but are kind to Jewish neighbors, and who promise to reunite after Karl returns from the front. Most of this earlier tale takes place before and after the war, leaving what Karl did during the conflict a mystery that Juliet is desperate to unravel. This is not a story of Nazi redemption; rather, it’s a thoughtful, immersive look at pre-and postwar life in a destroyed Europe and an examination of the scars left for succeeding generations. Canadian author Bates drops readers right into this family’s heartache and struggle for togetherness. This is Bates’s first novel for adults, and readers will want more; in the meantime, steer them toward Anna Lee Huber’s Verity Kent series, which also features WWII melancholy-tinged romance.

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