Spring Preview 2015: Part Two

As I sit here watching the icicles form on the holly bushes and birdhouses just outside my window, it seems my spring reading list is skewing just a little bit to novels that are taking place where ice cleats are not de rigueur. At least some of my favorite authors are brightening the reading landscape this spring.

Even though in Six and a Half Deadly Sins (Soho Crime, May 19), Colin Cotterill’s Dr. Siri Paiboun has already retired twice from his post as the National Coroner of Laos and left 70 far behind, he is intrigued by an unusual package that arrives in the mail. It is not exactly a present; it's more like an invitation to solve a puzzle. The first clue is the remnants of a human finger sewn into a garment worn in northern Laos.

This is, after all, the 1970s, and Vietnam is invading Cambodia. With more than that going on, Siri hastens north with his usual coterie: invaluable Nurse Dtui and her husband, Inspector Phosy; Mr. Geung, the lab assistant, who has Down's Syndrome; Ugly the Dog; and, most important of all, Mrs. Paiboun to keep them all straight.

This is an addictive series, both unusual and endearing, and best started from the beginning with The Coroner's Lunch (see review here).

Quite the opposite from Siri Paiboun is Estelle Reyes-Guzman, in a long-running series by Steven F. Havill, which takes place in the southwestern state of New Mexico. Estelle is a young woman who is the undersheriff in Posadas County. She has a busy job and a lively family. In Blood Sweep (Poison Pen, April 7), Estelle is torn between her duties as a mother and those of her job. Her eldest son, Francisco, is a gifted pianist, and he is touring parts of the country under the auspices of his music school. Estelle is concerned when she learns the tour has also taken Francisco to some crime-ridden areas of Mexico, but she is tied down with other responsibilities.

At the same time, the other main series characters have their own problems. Sheriff Bobby Torrez is in danger, and something has happened to old standby Bill Gastner. Talk about a rock and a hard place. Havill's characters always take the calm, reasoned approach to problems and never fly off half-cocked. Estelle will save the day. I have this book on order as we speak!

Now, if you need something more calming because your doctor doesn't like your erratic blood pressure or the way your eyes keep popping in and out, it's time for a little Alexander McCall Smith. You might know him from his Botswana mysteries featuring the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, his Sunday Philosophy Club mysteries with Isabel Dalhousie; or even his 44 Scotland Street series with six-year old Bertie Pollock, who has more fans than almost anyone else in Scotland––maybe more than Smith himself.

Have you heard of the Austen Project? Briefly, six current bestselling authors were paired with Jane Austen's six novels. The authors are to rewrite Austen's works with their own spin on the basic core of the plot. Sense and Sensibility was done by Joanna Trollope, and Val McDermid took on Northanger Abbey. I confess that I've read neither. But when I heard Alexander McCall Smith was tapped to do Emma: A Modern Retelling (Pantheon, April 7) in his inimitable way, I could hardly wait to see the results.

Emma is a young woman so self-possessed she is convinced her gift is to straighten out the messes others have made of their lives––but in the nicest way possible, of course. McCall Smith is a writer whose pen has the ability to draw the most accurate of portraits with gentle humor, penetrating insight and enough acumen to allow a reader to appreciate the trying aspects, as well as the strong points, of even the most difficult of characters.

I am not sure if "gastroporn" is on my Dictionary Word of the Day app, but I got an inkling about what it means when I read what Chief of Police Bruno Courrèges does to a chicken as he prepares one of his scratch meals in Martin Walker's The Devil's Cave. All of Walker's books are filled with the delectable culinary adventures of the man who would make a great husband and father, but who so far spends his time taking care of his town and a few women who wander in and out of his life. If he can't be with the one he loves, he'll love the one he's with, as the Stephen Stills song goes.

So I am eager to read the American release of Walker's upcoming book, The Children Return (Knopf, April 28). (Walker's website states that this title was published in the UK as Children of War (Quercus, 2014).) The theme of this mystery is very topical because it is about an autistic youth from St. Denis, Sami, who has been kidnapped by Islamic extremists. Or did he go willingly? The fear is that he is going to be exploited because he is a genius with technology, and he has gathered an invaluable store of al-Qaeda intel.

Walker does his usual brilliant job of translating international events to a local rural French jargon and makes it all plausible and understandable––hopefully, even resulting in a resolution.

P. L. Gaus has been writing a series based in Ohio Amish country for the past 15 years. One of his central themes has been how modern life intrudes on the quiet, ordered lives of the Plain people. While some of the crimes Gaus writes about are the usual murder, mayhem, grievous bodily harm, theft and the like, the way the crimes are handled––both by the sheriff and the victims––are not the usual. The sheriff is not Amish, but he works closely with the church elders and community leaders. In a place where the tenets of "turn the other cheek" and "forgive thy transgressor" abide, law enforcement takes on another meaning.

But when drug dealers and reluctant Amish drug mules enter the picture, creative measures are needed. Whiskers of the Lion (Plume, March 31) follows closely on his previous book, The Names of Our Tears, since both are related to protecting victims of a vengeful drug contact. Fannie, a young girl on the run, doesn't know whom to trust any more, and she will not be easy to help.

After all this, you need a cup of tea. Try some unusual blend and settle in with Laura Childs's Ming Tea Murder (Berkley, May 5). Theodosia Browning owns a shop that caters to the most exotics tastes in tea if you are lucky enough to live in Charleston, South Carolina. At a gala evening celebrating an exhibit of a genuine 18th-century Chinese teahouse, Theodosia's boyfriend, Max, asks her to check out a photo booth across the banquet hall while he speaks to a museum sponsor.

She meanders across the hall. When she gets to the booth, she finds it occupied by the self-same museum sponsor––definitely dead, the blood already pooling, already congealing. Although Theodosia is no stranger to corpses (this is Book 16 in the series!), she screams bloody murder. Time travel? Scotty's Star Trek transporter? Chinese mysticism? Is there something in the tea?

Special Delivery before Midnight, 12/31/2012

I feel like a woman about to give birth, and it's not a comfortable sensation. I finished The Child's Child by Barbara Vine (the pen name Ruth Rendell uses for dark and complex psychological suspense), but this tale about Grace Easton, who becomes pregnant by her brother Andrew's lover and discovers an unpublished manuscript from 1951 that mirrors this triangular situation, is too sad to review on the last day of the year. I haven't quite finished Karen Englemann's delectable The Stockholm Octavo, in which seer Sofia Sparrow reads the cards and promises young Office of Customs and Excise bureaucrat Emil Larsson a golden path to love and connection in 1791 Stockholm. Rather than prolong my labor in writing a review, let me share some books I plan to read soon.

Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus, translated by Steven T. Murray (Macmillan, January 2013). I want to revisit the Grimm's fairy tale refrain "White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony." In this multifaceted German police procedural, Altenhain cops Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein investigate the death of a woman whose son, Tobias Sartorius, was convicted 10 years earlier of murdering two teenage girls. The bodies were never found. Tobias has recently been released and moved back home. After more disappearances, townspeople are ready to take the law into their own hands. This is the fourth in a six-book series, and the only one published in English so far. What I've read about this police duo and the twisting plot of betrayal and revenge promises a great read.

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (Melville International Crime, 2001). Okay, you tell me how I can read the first sentence of a Kirkus review ("A writer is sucked gently into the evil new Ukrainian economy as his penguin flatmate watches.") and not scramble to read this book. Viktor Alekseyevich's life, in the dumps since his girlfriend left him, appears to be looking up. He's taken over the care of Misha, a "quiet and thoughtful" penguin de-accessioned from the Kiev zoo, and he's been hired by Capital News to write "pre-need" obituaries for underworld luminaries. Then Viktor realizes he's handing death sentences to these luminaries.

The Woman Who Wouldn't Die by Colin Cotterill (Random House, February 2013). It is now 1978, and Dr. Siri Paiboun is retired from his job as national coroner of Laos; however, a judge has asked Siri to look into a case involving the minister of agriculture's wife, who has hired the supposed-to-be-dead Madame Keui to lay rest the ghost of the minister's brother. Siri, who has a healthy regard for the supernatural, is the perfect man for the job. This is the ninth book in Cotterill's witty Dr. Siri Paiboun series. (Read Della Streetwise's review of the first book, The Coroner's Lunch, here.)

Three Graves Full by Jamie Mason (Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster, February 2013). “There is very little peace for a man with a body buried in his backyard.” Thus begins Mason's debut about an ordinary man named Jason Getty, who kills and buries a man behind his house. That is enough to disconcert Jason right there, but things become even more complicated when police dig up two bodies, and neither is the one that Jason buried. The publisher says this book is for fans of offbeat, black thrillers and the Coen brothers' movies––in other words, for me, and you, too?

Perfect Hatred by Leighton Gage (Soho Crime, February 2013). For a police procedural that combines terrific characterization, action, setting, and social issues, Della Streetwise, Maltese Condor (see her review here), and I read Leighton Gage's Chief Inspector Mario Silva series, set in modern Brazil. In the sixth book, Silva's team investigates a suicide bombing, the assassination of a gubernatorial candidate, and the revenge plot of a newly released felon who hates Silva. It's not necessary to read Gage's books in order, but these characters grow over time, and you'll want to follow them. The first book is 2007's Blood of the Wicked, in which Bishop Dom Felipe is assassinated when he visits the agricultural town of Cascatas do Pontal.

What about you? What's on your schedule for early 2013?

I'll be back later this week to tell you about Vine's The Child's Child and Engelmann's The Stockholm Octavo. I hope your festivities tonight will deliver a wonderful 2013 for you.

'Twas the Weekend before Christmas

'Twas the weekend before Christmas, and all through the land, it was easy to face, with a good book at hand. Whether for you or a gift, check out the titles below:

Celebrate finding the perfect gift for Great-Aunt Harriet by armchair travel to another country or time. You can look back at the Prague Spring of 1968 with Czech writer Josef Škvorecký's The Miracle Game, a detective story/satire/history lesson, in which the jazz-loving Danny Smiricky investigates the facts behind a 20-year-old miracle in a provincial church. Go farther back with Jack Finney's time-travel classic set in Manhattan, Time and Again. Or, visit the near future in 2015, when Russia is reeling after a civil war, in Donald James's vivid Monstrum. Police inspector and narrator Constantin Vadim investigates a series of killings of young women. Watch the world ending in Karen Thompson Walker's dystopian The Age of Miracles, in which 11-year-old Julia deals with the earth's gradual slowing to a close. Or stay in always-intriguing modern Russia. The author of 2012's The Silent Oligarch is Chris Morgan Jones, who used his experience working for Kroll, the world's largest corporate intelligence firm, to craft an intricate thriller about the mysterious Konstantin Malin, a bureaucrat in the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources.

Fed up with fruitless shopping or stubborn gift-wrapping paper? Ease your frustrations with noir or a tale about vengeance. Erin Hart's False Mermaid is about forensic archaeologist Nora Gavin's attempt to prove her brother-in-law killed her sister. James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet and Underworld USA trilogy are mesmerizing noir. Or how about reading classic noir and then watching a film of the same name? Holiday preparations are a breeze compared to the Depression-era dance marathons of Horace McCoy's 1935 novel, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. The 1969 movie stars Jane Fonda, Michael Sarrazin, and Gig Young. Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place (1947), set in post-WWII Los Angeles and narrated by misogynistic killer Dixon Steele, inspired the movie with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. Both are entertaining.

A friend glued to the bed by the plague (or maybe it's just a bad cold)? Cheer him or her up with a hospital bed, the long-dead, and a few skeletons; even nonmystery-reading folks would like these books. In Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, hospitalized Inspector Grant investigates Richard III's guilt in the disappearance of two little princes from the Tower of London. Recently, a skeleton believed to be Richard III was discovered, and we should hear results of DNA testing and radiocarbon dating in 2013. Colin Cotterill begins each chapter of Killed at the Whim of a Hat, first book in his new Thailand series, with an apt quotation from former U.S. President George W. Bush. (The title is from this one: "Free societies are hopeful societies. And free societies will be allies against these hateful few who have no conscience, who kill at the whim of a hat.") Cynical Jimm Juree, who lost her journalism job in Chiang Mai when her mother purchased the decrepit Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant and moved the family to Chumphon, is thrilled when a digging man unearths a Volkswagen van with a couple of skeletons inside.

Surely there are a few impossible-to-please names on your gift list. For your Uncle Fred, who sees a government conspiracy or coverup lurking behind every tree, The Cassandra Project, by Jack McDevitt and Mike Resnick. It's a thriller set in 2019 that involves NASA's moon-landing program in the late 1960s. Maybe Neil Armstrong wasn't the first man to set foot on the moon. For your picky sister Susie, who combines a love of history with an appreciation of black comedy, David Benioff's City of Thieves is sure to please. It follows a pair of young Russians on their quest for a dozen eggs during the siege of Leningrad. Need a gift for your sardonic brother Bill, who counts Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 among his favorite books? Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, features eight heroes from Bravo Company, who are treated to a Dallas Cowboys football game while on a two-week leave from the war in Iraq.

You or someone close to you in need of a laugh? Good choices are the first few Stephanie Plum books by Janet Evanovich; Thorne Smith's 1926 charmer Topper, about a banker whose stodgy life changes when he's haunted by a fun-loving couple killed in a car smash; John Mortimer's Rumpole of the Old Bailey books; or P. G. Wodehouse novels. Irish writer Paul Murray begins his wonderful dark comedy/coming-of-age novel, Skippy Dies, with the death of 14-year-old Skippy on the floor of a donut shop and then explains how this came to be. Or, turn to Florida, which often functions as the United States' least predictable state during presidential elections. Comedy writers get plenty of fertilizer there and include crime-fiction writers Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, Elmore Leonard, Paul Levine, and Laurence Shames. Pulitzer Award-winning Miami humorist Dave Barry's first satiric mystery, Big Trouble, involves a crazy ricocheting between a couple of high school kids playing the game Killer, their folks, enterprising Russians running an illegal-arms business out of a seedy bar, a homeless man living in a tree, a food-obsessed dog, a poisonous toad, and the poor cops chasing the action.

The holidays are based on traditions, and what is more traditional than the Golden Age of Mystery Fiction? Some great writers are Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Michael Innes, and Edmund Crispin. A fun book connected with gift giving is Anthony Berkeley's The Poisoned Chocolates Case. For terrific books specifically set at Christmas, there's Ngaio Marsh's Tied Up in Tinsel, Georgette Heyer's Envious Casca, Dorothy L. Sayers's The Nine Tailors, and Cyril Hare's An English Murder. Charming traditional mystery series include Delano Ames's Dagobert and Jane Brown (Corpse Diplomatique involves a murder on the French Riviera), Ngaio Marsh's Roderick Alleyn of London's CID (Overture to Death sets a murder at the performance of a play), and Patricia Moyes's Henry Tibbett (Murder Fantastical introduces the eccentric Manciple family). For the serious lover of old crime fiction, who would be interested in seeing comments about these books as they were published, a good gift is The Anthony Boucher Chronicles, by Francis M. Nevins. Boucher, whose name is honored by the yearly Bouchercon meetings of mystery writers and fans, wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1942-1947.

Is your name Sister Mary Murderous, or are you shopping for a WWII/espionage nut like her? Here are a couple of good ones. I'm currently riveted by Laurent Binet's 2012 novel HHhH (translated from the French by Sam Taylor). Binet tells the story of how two brave men recruited by the British secret service—Gabčik the Slovak and Kubiš the Czech—assassinated Nazi Reinhard Heydrich on a Prague street in 1942. John Banville's beautifully written, thoughtful, and funny The Untouchable features Victor Maskell, modeled after Sir Anthony Blunt, who is exposed as a traitor and reminisces about the Cambridge men who became double agents, working for both the British and Soviet intelligence agencies.

I need to stop now so I can bake Maida Heatter's pumpkin gingerbread. I wish you the best this holiday season.

Meteoric Local Legends

My good friend Georgette is not the only one who reads the satirical newspaper The Onion. I'm sincerely hoping that God does not read it or at least skips the horoscope section because a few weeks ago my horoscope said, "You've always wanted to become a local legend, so please enjoy your fame as The Guy Who Smoked at the Gas Station and Everyone in the Next Town Thought Was a Meteor." I wouldn't mind being well-known but not at the price of becoming a human Roman candle. The characters in the following books may not share my astrological sign but they still achieve local fame in rather meteoric ways.

"Tran, Tran, and Hok broke through the heavy end-of-wet season clouds. The warm night air rushed against their reluctant smiles and yanked their hair vertical. They fell in a neat formation, like sleet. There was no time for elegant floating or fancy aerobatics; they just followed the rusty bombshells that were tied to their feet with pink nylon string.

"Tran the elder led the charge. He was the heaviest of the three. By the time he reached the surface of the Nam Ngum reservoir, he was already ahead by two seconds. If this had been the Olympics, he would have scored a 9.98 or thereabouts. There was barely a splash. Tran the younger and Hok-the-twice-dead pierced the water without so much as a pulse-beat between them.

"A quarter of a ton of unarmed ordnance dragged all three men quickly to the smooth muddy bottom of the lake and anchored them there. For two weeks, Tran, Tran, and Hok swayed gently back and forth in the current and entertained the fish and algae that fed on them like diners at a slow-moving noodle stall."

So begins The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill. These poor tortured Vietnamese soldiers fall into the Laotian lake like meteors without the blaze. When their bodies are discovered, however, they will provide the new national coroner of Laos with a flaming headache. Tran, Tran and Hok have the potential to become an international incident.

It is 1976, a year after Communists came to power in Laos. Siri fought with the Communists out of love for his wife but when the fighting was over he expected to retire. Unfortunately, doctors are in very short supply and the reluctant Siri is drafted to become coroner. He has no formal training in performing autopsies and there are few supplies, textbooks or assistants to help him. Yet Siri goes about his business. Hacking through red tape and cover-ups, Siri tackles the suspicious death of a local Communist leader's wife, the surfacing of the Vietnamese soldiers in the lake and a series of deaths in northern Laos.

The Coroner's Lunch is the first of a seven-book series. It's an unusual series in many ways: the exotic Southeast-Asian locale, a look at life under a Communist regime in the 1970s, an irreverent coroner protagonist in his 70s and the combination of serious and farcical writing. Cotterill employs vivid imagery and unique characters. He is respectful of Laotian culture and traditions while skewering bureaucrats and finding humor in life's tragedies. If an outlandish plot element occasionally strains belief or one plot thread is weaker than others, it really doesn't matter.

This series is a great find and Cotterill's books only get better: Thirty-three Teeth (Siri must identify some badly charred corpses, investigate a creature killing people in the capital and explain why citizens are falling to their deaths from a ministry building) and Disco for the Departed (Siri investigates a corpse entombed in cement at the former home of the President in remote Vieng Xai) are wonderful. Next month, readers get a timely holiday present because Soho Press will publish Cotterill's Slash and Burn. I can't wait. One of these days I'll visit Southeast Asia but for now, I'll read about Dr. Siri Paiboun.

Our next local legend is Sovereign of the Deep Wood, who is "the approximate size and shape of a snow blower." He is a wild boar, the town mascot in Nancy Mauro's debut, New World Monkeys. The boar is owned by Skinner, a man you'd rather not cross, so it's not an auspicious beginning to life in the fictional town of Osterhagen, New York when Lily and Duncan's Saab collides with Sovereign of the Deep Wood as they arrive in town. Tellingly, Lily attempts to grab the Saab's steering wheel away from Duncan moments before impact and then mercifully kills the severely injured boar with the tire iron when Duncan can't.

Duncan and Lily are only in their early 30s but they fight with the zeal of a couple who's been incarcerated for a lifetime in a flamboyantly unhappy marriage. When Lily inherits an old Victorian in upstate New York, she and Duncan see this as an opportunity for change. Lily can get moving on her Ph.D. dissertation in pre-Renaissance architecture while Duncan commutes to his job at a Manhattan ad agency. Things are bound to look up personally and professionally. And pigs, like meteors, can fly.

This is an eccentric book containing eccentric characters (including a sexual deviant), an eccentric plot (including a backyard grave) and eccentric writing (I've never seen so many adjectives, similes and metaphors in one book in my life). The characters are for the most part unlikeable even though I empathized at times with all of them. Mauro's writing is imaginative but so stuffed with sentence modifiers it nearly bursts at the seams. This book isn't for everyone, certainly not for people searching for stripped-down prose and a speeding plot. I did have fun reading it and I suggest it to someone who likes black humor and satire and is looking for a book by a creative new writer. I'm glad to hear Mauro is working on her second novel now because I plan to look for it.

Meanwhile, I can take heart from avoiding a fiery (or other) demise. My most recent horoscope is more promising: "You may not be an expert on which snakes are poisonous and which aren't, but damn it, you know a cuddly one when you see it." You're darn tootin', I do.