Review of Tony Parsons's The Hanging Club

The Hanging Club, by Tony Parsons (International Edition, Century, June 28, 2016.  To come from Minotaur on November 1, 2016))

As with the previous two books in this series, Parsons begins with a prologue describing a gut-churning scene of violence, setting off the police investigation that plays out over the pages. For those police procedural readers who are concerned about graphic descriptions of violence (and I’m one of them), I will say that these prologues are always short, don’t feel exploitative, and are more detailed and graphic than descriptions of violence in the rest of the book.


The Hanging Club is a group of four disguised killers who kidnap men and hang them, live-streaming the killings on the internet. These killings are not the neck-snapping hangings that professional hangmen used in the later years of the practice, though. These are slow, agonizing strangulations.

The Club members depict themselves as executioners in the style of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s last official hangman. Their execution targets are men who got off lightly after committing crimes against helpless victims. The internet broadcasts spark a media and online frenzy, with the majority supporting the Hanging Club, seeing them as doing the job that the police and courts are unable or unwilling to do.

Max Wolfe is a Detective Constable at West End Central station, and it’s his team that catches the Hanging Club cases. It’s West End Central’s usual good team of men and women, with a couple of new members joining this time around: a female sound expert whom Max finds himself attracted to, and a nebbishy historian.

As always, Parsons cranks up the tension with a gritty, straight-ahead police procedural story and then releases it by shifting to Max’s after-work life with his sweet 5-year-old daughter, Scout, and a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Stan. Max and his family are right on the edge of impossibly cute. But it’s a nice change of pace to have a police detective protagonist who isn’t an own-worst-enemy substance abuser and emotional cripple.

I loved the first book in this series (The Murder Man, published originally in the UK as The Murder Bag), but I found the second (The Slaughter Man) to be have several disappointing plotting problems. I was relieved that Parsons is back to form this time. The plotting is clean and propulsive, with just enough clues dropped along the way for a reader to solve the crime along with Max, and maybe even just ahead of him.

While I enjoyed this book very much, I can’t give Parsons full marks on it. He sets up a thought-provoking debate on vigilantism, but he gives short shrift to one side. He continues to have Max make stupid decisions that needlessly put him in danger––though at least as not as many as in The Slaughter Man. I was also disappointed that Parsons didn’t do as much with issues involving the media as he seemed to promise in the early stages of the book.

And now that I’ve read three books in the series, I can also see a character choice that Parsons makes with Max Wolfe that I’m not crazy about. When Max takes a physical or verbal beating, he is almost ostentatiously stalwart and uncomplaining. It’s clearly a play to gain sympathy for Max’s noble suffering character, but it's not an attractive trait.

I should also mention that I listened to the audiobook and recommend it. The narrator, Colin Mace, perfectly captures the Max Wolfe character.

Image sources: amazon.com, mirror.co.uk, dogsinpubs.com, buzzfeed.com.

Review of Judith Flanders's A Bed of Scorpions

A Bed of Scorpions, by Judith Flanders (Minotaur Books, March 1, 2016)

Samantha “Sam” Clair is an editor at a small London book publisher. The constants in Sam’s life are her colleagues, her powerful solicitor mother, Helen, her fatherly upstairs neighbor, Mr. Rudiger, and now her boyfriend, Jake, a homicide detective with London’s Metropolitan Police. If you want to know how Sam came to be in a romance with a police detective, read the first book in the series, A Murder of Magpies.

All seems well in Sam’s life this London summer. The weather is fine, her relationship with Jake has reached the almost-living-together stage, and the only fly in the ointment is the concern at the office that their company might be sold. That is, until Sam has lunch with an old friend, Aidan. Aidan, an art gallery owner, is distraught over his business partner’s having just been found shot.

Is it suicide, murder? No surprise, Jake is assigned to investigate and, of course, questions arise about whether this could have something to do with the gallery and Aidan. Since Aidan isn’t just an old friend of Sam's, he’s a former boyfriend, things quickly become awkward with Jake. Is it her desire to help Aidan that makes Sam start asking questions, or is it her crime fiction addiction that compels her? For whatever reason, she’s soon knee-deep in her own investigation.

Sam is an entertaining character. She’s the opposite of her super-confident, supremely groomed, socially connected powerhouse of a mother. Sam is a klutz, her wardrobe is marginal, she likes to lounge around at home, reading and going to bed early. She’s an amusingly snarky observer of her own foibles and everyone else’s.

Read the book

Though this is a cozy mystery, that doesn’t mean it’s just a bit of fluff. The plot is engrossing, with clever twists and turns, and details about the inside workings of art dealerships and publishers that are informative and add unique features to the story. And I can’t tell you anything about the climax except that it’s both inventive and hair-raising.

It’s not absolutely necessary to read the first book in the series before this one, but it’s a good idea if you can.

Image sources: Amazon.com, bbc.co.uk, Wikipedia.

Review of Judith Flanders's A Murder of Magpies

A Murder of Magpies by Judith Flanders (Minotaur, February 24, 2015)

Samantha "Sam" Clair is a book editor at a small but reputable London publishing firm. Sam has designed her wardrobe to function more as camouflage than style, so it's surprising that one of her best friends is Kit Lovell, a fashion journalist who also writes gossipy exposés about celebrity fashionistas.

When Kit disappears, and it looks like somebody is out to destroy all copies of his latest manuscript, which promises to be a tell-all about the death of designer Rodrigo Alemán and financial shenanigans in boutiques associated with him, Sam is worried and frustrated. The police aren't pulling out all the stops to find Kit, though they have assigned Detective Inspector Jake Field to ask questions about the death of a courier who may have been carrying a copy of the manuscript to Sam's office.

Much to Field's dismay, he's unable to get Sam to stop investigating on her own. But when he starts spending a lot more time with her, at least he can keep a little more of an eye on her . . .

Though this quick read has plenty of sleuthing, its main attraction is Sam's world. Sam appears to be a little gray mouse surrounded by much more colorful and fierce members of the animal kingdom. Sitting outside Sam's office is her sharp Goth secretary, Miranda. Ready to pounce across the meeting room table is Sam's chief rival editor, Ben, who thinks he's cornered the market for young and edgy novelists and that Sam is past it. But the alpha is Sam's mother, Helena, a supremely successful corporate attorney who has done a complete workout before Sam is out of bed in the morning, puts in a full day of work and then goes to every important play, gallery showing and party while Sam is curled up at home with a manuscript and a glass of wine.

Sam's office is in a drafty old building.
Not this one, though.

But underneath that unassuming exterior, Sam is clever and determined. She knows how to wage undercover office warfare, and how to make sense of the bits of information she is able to garner about the fashion world to try to find out what happened to Kit. She also knows when it's best to team up with Jake and Helena--and quite a team they make.

There are several other appealing side characters in the book, including Sam's reclusive upstairs neighbor, Mr. Rudiger. The inside look at the publishing world is also a pleasure, particularly Sam vs. Ben and a plot line about one of Sam's most successful authors, Breda––who sounds a lot like Maeve Binchy––and the resulting kerfuffle when Breda turns in what seems to be a disastrous wrong turn into chick-lit.

Sam Clair is likable new protagonist and her friends, family and workplace are entertaining. If this turns into a series, it's definitely one I will follow. I hope Jake becomes a more fleshed-out character in any future books.

I should note that if you're a cozy reader, there are several F-bombs dropped in the book, but it contains no graphic sex or violence.

It may also be worth noting that although this is a debut novel, author Judith Flanders has had a long career as an editor and is the author of the nonfiction book The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime (Thomas Dunne, 2013).


Note: Thanks to Minotaur and the Amazon Vine program for providing a complimentary review copy of the book. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other review sites under my usernames there.

The Wolfe of West End Central: Review of The Murder Man by Tony Parsons

The Murder Man by Tony Parsons (Minotaur, October 7, 2014. International Edition published by Century, August 2014, under the title The Murder Bag)

The Murder Man is the first crime novel by well-known British journalist and author Tony Parsons. If you're familiar with his work, you'll see that some patterns are repeated, among them that the protagonist is the single father of a young child.

Detective Constable Max Wolfe lives across from London's Smithfield Market with his five-year-old daughter, Scout, and their new Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy, Stan. (Conventional wisdom is that the ideal dog name is two syllables, with a vowel ending, but I love the idea of a cute little sad-eyed, long-eared spaniel named Stan.) Father and daughter are close, Stan is learning about his new home, and all is well, except for the absence and sadness that can sometimes be heard softly echoing around their loft apartment's large spaces.

On the job, Max is a bit of a maverick. But not maverick as in the alcoholic, self-destructive, villain-whispering genius we see so often in today's crime fiction. Max is just a very good cop who sometimes lets his humanity and his inborn sense of duty make him a little bit deaf to orders and the rule book. Just enough of a maverick to have made it seem like a good idea to him to transfer out of anti-terrorism to homicide, to London's West End Central station on the famed Savile Row.

It looks like Max has landed in a good place, with congenial colleagues and a good mentor-type guv'nor, Detective Chief Inspector Malory. His first day on the new job is a shocker, as the team is called to the scene of a homicide in the high-rise office of a posh banking executive, where they find him dead from a brutal, but expertly-applied throat cutting.

Once similar killings reach the magic number of three, we have a serial killer, which not only changes the priority of the investigation, but sends the news outlets and the social media into an orgy of 24-hour coverage. The victims are sons of privilege, which is a wonderful hook for the news stories, websites and tweets, who characterize this as kill-the-rich class warfare and whip the public into an almost celebratory frenzy over the killer the cynical media are calling Bob the Butcher.

Because author Parsons begins the book with a short prologue from 1988––a scene of appalling sexual violence––we know the "whydunnit" of this mystery before the detectives do. This is a daring choice by Parsons, because it could make the reader feel the sleuths are slow on the uptake. But that doesn't happen here. Max and his team are smart and capable, quick on the scent.

Both Tony Parsons and Max Wolfe
like to relax with a spot of sparring

Also, Parsons is writing much more than a whodunnit here. This is very much a character-driven and issues-driven story. Max is human; tough, but also vulnerable, likable and funny, and even a reader like me, who dislikes reading too much about a detective's domestic situation, found Max's family life a plus to the story. Parsons interweaves the plot with issues of privilege, power, inequality and media manipulation. The story is also imbued with a powerful sense of place. Locations include Scotland Yard's Black Museum, its private museum of murder history, complete with weapons and relics going back to Jack the Ripper; the boxing gym Max frequents; Smithfield Market; a posh boys' school in the country.

Tony Parsons, back in his rock-and-roll journalism days.
Yes, that's The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, on the right.

I don't know if anyone else will agree with this, but this book reminded me a little bit of J. K. Rowling's Cormoran Strike series. The connection first came to mind because these are two novelists who are new to crime fiction, but it's more than that.

Both writers have developed very human protagonists who are out of the usual run of hard-drinking own-worst-enemy types. Both authors' crime fiction is character-driven, with a great sense of place, and incorporate commentary about modern society. I think most people who enjoyed Rowling's The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm will be likely to enjoy the grittier The Murder Bag––assuming they can get through that prologue.

I'm thrilled to hear that Parsons plans two more books featuring Max Wolfe. I can guarantee they'll be on my pre-order list.

Notes: I listened to the audiobook of The Murder Bag, read by Colin Mace, who raised the level of the book even higher. After the short prologue, the book is told in first person by Max, and Colin Mace embodied that character perfectly.

Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Simon Brett's A Decent Interval

From the painting Ophelia by Millais

A Decent Interval by Simon Brett

Shakespeare's Hamlet—with its themes of revenge, mortality, and madness—is made for crime fiction. In Death in the Morning by Sheila Radley, Mary Gedge is found dead, floating in the water and surrounded by flowers, like Ophelia. Martha Grimes's title, The Dirty Duck, is taken from a Stratford-upon-Avon pub, and Inspector Richard Jury's sidekick, Melrose Plant, finds a clue to the murder in Hamlet. Scamnum Court is the setting for an aristocrats' amateur production of the play in the 1937 book Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes, and one of the actors is killed. Hamlet is staged again, with no better luck, in Simon Brett's A Decent Interval (August 2013, Severn House/Creme de la Crime).

This 18th book in the series marks a return for actor/sleuth Charles Paris, whom we haven't seen since 1998's Dead Room Farce. Nothing much has changed for Charles, now in his late 50s. He still gauges his mood by how quickly he finishes crossword puzzles in The Times; vows sobriety, but polishes off bottles of Bell's and wakes up hungover in a chair; and reminds himself to call Frances, his estranged wife, whom he hasn't seen for months. Their marriage foundered years ago due to his infidelities, booze, and time away from home, although Charles likes to think—without any encouragement—that they still love each other. Don't ask when he last called his daughter, Juliet, now married and the mother of twins.

Professionally, Charles has done a lot of "resting" (waiting for work). A call from his agent, Maurice Skellern, sets Charles up with a day of filming for a cash-strapped TV documentary about the English Civil War. He fights the Battle of Naseby—alone. And then Maurice has good news. Ned English, known for his "reimagining" of classic plays (he set King Lear inside an aquarium), is directing the new Tony Copeland touring production of Hamlet. Because Ned thinks the key line in the play is "There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so," the action of the stage will be set inside a replica of Hamlet's skull.

John Gielgud's Hamlet (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The setting isn't the only offbeat element of the production. The goal of the director and producer is theater seats full of "lovely young bums," so the lead roles of Hamlet and Ophelia go to two reality show winners: last year's Top Pop, singer Jared Root, who can't act or project his voice without a mike; and StarHunt's winner, Katrina Selsey, who can act, but wants songs from her upcoming album to replace Ophelia's mad gibbering. Surrounding these divas onstage are "solid, biddable" actors like Charles, cast as the Ghost of Hamlet's Father and the First Gravedigger.

Of course, tension begins to build at the first read-through and increases steadily thereafter. Charles looks for someone shaggable, but there's not the camaraderie of earlier times. While not on stage, younger actors text and tweet, drink bottled water, and head to the gym. Charles feels like an old fogey and worries he'll never have a big role or a woman again. Readers don't need to worry; an injury and a death that don't appear in the Hamlet script cast Charles in the familiar role of sleuth.

David Tennant's Hamlet (Ellie Kuurtz/RSC)

Charles's long-overdue reappearance is, as usual, a combination of amusing satire, theater history and lore, and traditional whodunit. His reminiscences of old roles are accompanied by snippets of reviews (e.g., "'With Charles Paris as Julius Caesar, I was surprised Brutus and his cronies didn't take action earlier.' --Beeston Express"). He recalls many road productions in Marlborough's Grand Theatre and its neighborhood pubs.

In assessing his past and predicting his future, Charles is more cynical and pessimistic than ever. He's losing Francis, perhaps for good. It would be a lovely novelty to awaken without the "shifting tectonic plates" of a hangover, but Charles can't stop buying Bell's. He surveys his fellow professionals, and few of them have happy family lives. The theater appears increasingly unfair. Genuine acting talent is often trumped by good looks, a relationship with someone famous, or membership in an acting dynasty. In A Decent Interval, the casting of theater leads is the result of a TV publicity circus rather than the normal auditioning process. A formerly successful director is unable to find work doing straight plays. One immensely talented actor spirals down after a life of fame; the career of another ends prematurely. It seems a miracle that Charles not only sticks it out, but that he'd never do anything else.

Jean Simmons as Ophelia

Running on Dali Time

Yesterday began a week of Dali Time at my house. That's what my husband and I call our kids' obsession with time since Daylight Saving Time ended and we set the clocks back an hour on Sunday morning. I cannot say, "Lunch is at 1:00," without their response, "You mean Now Time or Real Time?" as if we're time traveling, or any moment the hands on the clock will spring forward again. They heatedly debate what time it really is until my head spins. This is when I'd take refuge in a book, but if the book is anything like some I've read recently, time doesn't stay put there either.

The past collides with the present through memories and visions in The Fire Witness, a riveting and spooky thriller by Lars Kepler (translated from Swedish by Laura A. Wideburg), published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in July 2013.

The crime scene at a home for troubled girls in Sundsvall, Sweden, is disturbing. A ward nurse and teenage resident were bludgeoned to death. The bloody weapon is found under Vicky Bennett's pillow, but Vicky has vanished into the forest, only to reappear and steal a car with a young child asleep in the backseat. The case is closed when the empty car turns up in the river. But Stockholm Detective Inspector Joona Linna doesn't believe Vicky and little Dante are dead and he isn't convinced of Vicky's guilt. No one trusts Linna's instincts, because he's still off-kilter from an internal affairs investigation and worries about his family's safety. Then he receives a call from medium Flora Hansen, who insists this time her visions are real.

Time, logic and and identity shift  in César Aira's The Hare (translated by Nick Caistor), published in July 2013 by New Directions.

Nineteenth-century British naturalist/explorer Tom Clarke is in the Argentine pampas, searching for the mythical leaping and flying Legibrerian hare. Accompanying him are a gaucho with plans of his own and a 15-year-old boy. Their mission is interrupted when Cafulcura, leader of the Mapuche tribe, disappears and Clarke assumes the role of detective responsible for finding him. An all-out tribal war ensues.

That makes too much sense to convey the tangle of subplots, the sense of improvisation and strange conversations in which the meaning of words changes as they are spoken. Despite the wild and woolly disorder, it ties together in a meaningful way. You'll want to read this if you have an appetite for imaginative and absurd Victorian adventure.

After a decade of quietly observing the ravages of time, a guard at London's National Gallery becomes restless with her stalled life.

In Chloe Aridjis's hypnotic modern Gothic, Asunder (September 2013, Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Marie is the 33-year-old guard. Her great-grandfather was also a museum guard there and his inability to stop suffragette Mary Richardson's vandalism of Velàzquez’s Rokeby Venus haunted him and weighs on Marie. Almost as quiet as her work is her life outside the museum, hanging out with her roommate and creating tiny landscapes inside eggshells. A trip to Paris with her poet friend Daniel tears her life asunder.

The asides, such as the explanation of why varnish on painted canvas forms a network of cracks ("craquelure"), are fascinating. The beauty of the writing about the effects of time invites margin notes and underlining. This is a book I'll remember.

Let's leap four decades into the future with a U.S. President from our past, and then travel back in time to the '60s.

It's 2055 in Philip E. Baruth's satire/sci fi/thriller The X President. Several bills signed by then-President Bill Clinton in the 1990s have now resulted in decades of global Tobacco Wars. The war isn't going well for our country, and the National Security Council has the answer. Surprisingly, it isn't drones or spying on Americans, our enemies and our friends. They want to time travel to 1995 and undo those Clinton decisions. To this end, they kidnap Sal Hayden, the official biographer of now 109-year-old "BC" (it's due to bionics, not veganism) and send Sal back to 1963 to find the 16-year-old "yBC." Accompanying Sal are NSC operatives code-named "George" (Stephanopoulos), "James" (Carville) and "Virginia" (yes, she's beautiful). It's kinda silly but who doesn't like (a) time travel, (b) satire/thrillers and (c) BC? (Hey, if you can't say anything nice....)

I often correct my kids' manners with that reminder, and now that reminds me. It might be time for my kids to go to bed. That is, if it's really their bed time.

Mmmm, Bacon

In recent years, there has been a bit of a trend toward making famous figures protagonists in mysteries. Oscar Wilde in Gyles Brandreth's series, Jane Austen (Stephanie Barron), Daphne du Maurier (Joanna Challis), Josephine Tey (Nicola Upson), the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII (Peter Lovesey), Beatrix Potter (Susan Wittig Albert), Dorothy Parker (J. J. Murphy) and many more. Just check "Real People" under Stop, You're Killing Me!'s Job Index to see the others.

Janice Law has picked a not-so-famous figure: Francis Bacon (the 20th-century painter of famously gruesome art, not the 17th-century philosopher) for the protagonist of her mystery series, which she began in 2012 with Fires of London, and follows up with The Prisoner of the Riviera (Mysterious Press/Open Road Media, December 10, 2013).

A Bacon self-portrait. Yikes! And this is subdued and almost cheerful compared to most of his work.

Bacon is a surprising choice for a mystery protagonist. He was booted out of his home by his domineering father for being flamboyantly effeminate, and lived on his wits, mostly in London, seeking out wealthy older men to keep him. More often, he lived with his old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot, who had always been more of a mother to him. But don't be fooled by the seeming domesticity of a grown man living with his old nan. She didn't put any sort of a crimp in his style. The two of them used his studio as an illegal gambling den at night, and she passed judgment on any prospective lovers who answered his coyly-phrased advertisements for a "gentleman's gentleman."

Janice Law sets Fires of London in 1940, shortly after the wartime blackout made nighttime London a place of misty, impenetrable blackness. She has Bacon acting as an ARP (air raid precautions) warden, walking a beat at night. One night, he learns that one of his acquaintances in London's gay demimonde has been brutally murdered in a nearby park. Not long afterward, Bacon literally stumbles on another victim. Feeling under threat himself, Bacon uses his patrols and contacts to try to find the murderer.

Law skillfully mixes wry humor with heart-thumping suspense. Bacon's scenes with his nan are a little like a comedy double act; full of charm and chuckles. The mood changes completely when Bacon stumbles through nighttime streets and alleys with only falling bombs and incendiaries as illumination to help him avoid threats from a host of attackers. I've read a lot of World War II-era mysteries, and several novels that take place during the London Blitz. I don't remember another that did such a good job at conveying the chaos, fear and exhilaration of being on the streets during a raid.

For her second Francis Bacon novel, The Prisoner of the Riviera, Janice Law jumps ahead to 1946. At first, I was disappointed that Law had chosen to leave the London-during-the-Blitz setting after just one book, but I quickly got over it. Setting stories in the immediate postwar period seems to be all the rage these days, or maybe that's just a coincidence in my recent reading. It's a rewarding period because, as Law has one character put it, in France "power was lying on the ground during the war" and it was picked up by dubious characters who couldn't just return to the plow when the war was over. These characters abound in The Prisoner of the Riviera.

Let's back up and set the scene. Francis is out for dinner in London with his longtime lover, Arnold, when they come upon a man who has been shot and is bleeding to death in the street. Francis uses all his ARP training skills to keep the man alive until an ambulance arrives, but it doesn't look good. He is contacted shortly afterward by M. Joubert, proprietor of a London casino that holds a dauntingly large number of Francis's gambling chits. Joubert tells Francis that the man, a Monsieur Renard, did die after a few days in the hospital, but left a farewell letter for his wife, who lives in the south of France. If Francis will deliver the letter, Joubert will tear up Francis's chits.

There's something rotten about this setup, right? You and I know it, and so do Francis, Nan and Arnold. Aside from the imbalance between the value of the gambling chits and the going rate for in-person mail delivery, there's something fishy about that letter. Francis and Nan couldn't resist painstakingly removing and replacing the wax seal on the letter, and they suspect it's really a coded message––though one they can't crack without a cipher key. But it's cold, grey and rainy in London and the rationing means the food is even more depressing than the weather. Who can resist the siren call of the Riviera?

After enjoying a few days in the sun, Francis decides it's about time to deliver the letter to Mme. Renard. Afterward, he narrowly avoids attack from a couple of goons as he heads back to his hotel and, soon after that, he learns that Mme. Renard was found murdered later that same day––and he is the number one suspect.

Attempting to clear his name and avoid a long stretch in a French prison, Francis uses a couple of false identities to investigate the murder and figure out what this supposed farewell letter really is. He's not the only one interested, and soon it seems that the entire south of France is seething with characters who are after the letter, Francis and each other. They all seem to have had secret underground pasts during the war, but it's impossible to be sure which side they were on, if not both, and whether their current intentions are to help Francis, use him, abuse him or carve him up.

Here's an odd thing. When I read The Prisoner of the Riviera, I kept thinking about P.G. Wodehouse. In part it's because most of the story is set in the south of France, where Bertie Wooster often used to travel to get into trouble gambling and falling in love. And here's Francis, on his arrival in Nice: "Have I mentioned my fondness for sailors? I have a weakness, as Nan would say, for members of the maritime profession, for the toilers of the sea, for jolly jack-tars and also the not-so-jolly ones, who are really more to my taste." Can you see a Wodehouse-ish style in that? I can.

There's a lot more about Janice Law's writing style here that makes me think her Francis Bacon is a sort of Bertie Wooster-ish character–––if Bertie had a dozen or two more IQ points, considerably less of "the ready," liked risky sex (with men) and kept running into murders. The books are written in the first person, and even when fists are flying or guns are blazing, there is an air of Bertie describing one of his sticky wickets.

And, like Bertie Wooster, Francis is soon beset with troubles involving false identities, mistaken impressions, getting caught sneaking into other people's houses and bedrooms––and even being bedeviled by a pair of troublesome aunts. I found the book a dizzyingly improbable but delightful caper, just like a Wodehouse story. Unlike a Wodehouse story, this one does have a great deal of serious crime and danger in it, but for mystery lovers, that's all to the good.

Janice Law

During the Golden Age of mystery, a typical novel would clock in right around 200 pages. For a skilled writer, that was plenty of time to limn the characters, bump off the victim(s), and collect enough clues to solve the crime. Janice Law may not be a high-profile mystery writer, but she's a longtime author with an Edgar nomination under her belt (in 1977, for Best First Novel), and she knows how to write a good, tight story in that Golden Age manner. At a little under 200 pages each, these books are quick reads, but terrifically entertaining. I should note that the books include sexual content, but there are no detailed or graphic descriptions.

Note: I received free review texts of the ebook versions of these titles from the publisher, via Netgalley. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

A Rose By Any Other Name

Quietly, in the early spring, a novel by a new author Robert Galbraith called The Cuckoo's Calling was published. The author's note gave a short bio reporting that Robert Galbraith spent several years with the Royal Military Police before being attached to the SIB (Special Investigative Branch), the plainclothes branch of the RMP. He left the military in 2003, and was working in the civilian security industry. The idea for Cormoran Strike grew directly out of his own experiences and those of his military friends who returned to the civilian world. "Robert Galbraith" is a pseudonym.

As The Cuckoo's Calling begins, 25-year-old Robin Ellacott has just experienced some of the best times of her life. She had moved to London to be with her boyfriend, Michael, and last night she became romantically engaged to Michael at the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus. While Robin looks for a real job, she is working as a secretary, through a temp agency. On this morning, she is on her way to a new assignment. She is about to knock on an office door when she is literally bowled over by a very large, disheveled man, who bursts out of the door and nearly knocks her down a stairwell. This bulldozer turns out to be Cormoran Strike; an apt appellation, since he shares a forename with the first giant felled by Jack, in the fairy tale, Jack the Giant Killer.

Like Robin, Cormoran has also had an epoch-changing 12 hours. He has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend, Charlotte, who dented his head with a heavy glass ashtray as a goodbye present. He is on his last leg, both literally and financially, since he lost his lower leg not so long ago in war action in Afghanistan. Now he's lost his home, belongings and security, and is not sure what is coming around the corner––other than Robin.

Almost before Cormoran can pull himself together, Robin is introducing him to a new, wealthy client who wants him to investigate the death of his adopted sister, Lula Landry. She was a most beautiful supermodel, who appeared to have jumped out of a top story window in a suicidal depression. The client, John Bristow, is convinced that she was pushed. So, even with his life in disarray, Strike falls back into the familiar soldierly state of doing what must be done, without question or complaint.

A cuckoo is a small, brownish-gray bird that lays its eggs in another bird's nest. In this book, the cuckoo gives clues to the mystery. There are certainly birds growing up in others' nests in the plot, not only in the victim's family, but Strike's as well. He counted at least 17 schools that he had been hustled in and out of during his childhood. He was the illegitimate son of a famous rocker who cared little for him. The cuckoo is also known for its repetitive cry, and there are many repetitive cuckoo-like cries from all sorts of characters in this book, which give the reader pointers in the right direction.

The character Strike is fairly standard for a fictional PI. He comes from a policing background, he has a disastrously complex personal life and he has a great new young partner––I mean secretary––who is one of the only good things going for him. The case is not that unusual either; I have read a few "was he pushed or did he jump" scenarios. But what I really enjoyed was the ambience of London, the view through opera glasses at the lives of the rich and famous, and how the author took these ingredients and made an excellent reading experience from them. You would never guess that this was a debut novel. And of course it wasn't.

As it happens, Robert Galbraith is pure fiction as well. This is a nom de plume for the very well-known J. K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame. Rowling has been quoted in a British newspaper as saying, "I had hoped to keep this secret a little longer because being Robert Galbraith has been such a liberating experience. It has been wonderful to publish without hype or expectation and pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name."

Since the news broke, New Statesman reports that the book's sales from Amazon alone have gone up more than 150,000%. Rowling once said, "The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous." She has also been quoted as saying, "I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do––ever––was write novels."

In that case, it is not surprising that Rowling has continued to write novels. Her last published Harry Potter story, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was published six years ago, in July of 2007. She did publish an adult novel, The Casual Vacancy, that came out last year and sold like hotcakes. I must admit is on my wish list for when it comes out in paperback, which is any day now.

Someone seeking anonymity can change appearance, name and alter a biography, but experts will tell you that a voice will always reveal the real identity.

Of course, with the knowledge of hindsight, I can hear the Rowling voice in Galbraith's words. Robin, the character who opened the book, immediately charmed me, and I was firmly a Cormoran supporter before the first chapters were done, just as I was with young Harry P. The wonders of London were described so that I could visualize them, as I did the peripatetic stairway at Hogwarts.

Obviously, Rowling is not the first author to write under an assumed name. In 1870, Charlotte Brontë admitted that she and her sisters had been writing under masculine names. Well-known author Nora Roberts writes under at least three other names. Even Stephen King tried out a nom de plume or two; the best known of which is Richard Bachman.

Donald Westlake was an American writer with over a hundred novels and nonfiction books to his credit. He specialized in crime fiction, much of it comic capers, and he wanted to try to see if he would be as successful in a different guise. He began a series of books that he was writing simultaneously in order to keep his character consistent. He wrote the books under the pen name Sam Holt. His publisher, unknown to him, let the bookstores in on the secret in order to boost the sales of the book. In the introduction to One of Us Is Wrong, Westlake said he became aware of this and he lost heart and did not finish the series for years. On the other hand, he must not have completely lost heart, since he is known to have written under about a total 16 pseudonyms.

The question is: Did Rowling countenance the leak to the British newspapers? Bob Minzesheimer of USA TODAY speculates that she did, because she was not very angry at being outed. Either way, I hope there is another book in this series. I will get it ASAP. I am anxious to know what happens to Strike, and what the future holds for Robin. It will come as no surprise that Strike solves this very high-profile case and, of course, now he has a name. What will he do with it?

Bringing Up the Rear

I got a kick out of Maltese Condor's post on Wednesday, with its horse-racing theme. When I apply horse racing to my recent mystery reading, the books are far from front-runners. Actually, that's not quite right. The books are front-runners. But I'm reading from the back of the pack.

John Gardner and The Nostradamus Traitor

I don't think I'd ever heard of author John Gardner until a couple of weeks ago. My eye was caught by what I thought was a new book, called The Nostradamus Traitor. It turns out, though, that this is a republication, and a very nicely-produced one, of a 1979 original publication that was a finalist for the Gold Dagger that year. The Mysterious Press and Open Road Integrated Media are publishing the book this month in quality paperback and ebook formats.

Of course, I checked out Gardner on stopyourekillingme.com and I was flabbergasted to see how prolific Gardner was in his life (1926-2007). I was intrigued and had to do more research. Gardner began his writing career with a series featuring Boysie Oakes. The Oakes series is set in the swinging 1960s, but it's more of a spoof of James Bond, with Oakes being a professional assassin who doesn't like killing people.

The Liquidator, the first book in the eight-volume Oakes series, was a finalist for the 1964 Gold Dagger. Gardner went on to write several other series and a number of standalone crime fiction books. Probably the best fun fact about Gardner's career is that a few years after his last Boysie Oakes book, he was tapped by Ian Fleming's estate to write James Bond novels. He was so good at it (apparently) that he ended up writing 16 of them, including License to Kill and Goldeneye.

How in the world did I completely miss this guy? I know there are gaps in my crime fiction reading, but this is one the entire Kentucky Derby field could run through.

The Nostradamus Traitor begins in London in 1978, when what appears to be an old lady tourist from Germany approaches a Beefeater at the Tower of London. Instead of the usual touristy question, though, Frau Fenderman is looking for information about her long-dead husband, Claus Fenderman, who she says was a spy for Germany in World War II and was hanged at the Tower.

This hot potato (that's heiße Kartoffel for you German speakers) lands in the lap of British Intelligence veteran Herbie Kruger. It's only fair, really, since Herbie speaks German, having been born in Berlin. Herbie was a young boy during World War II, living in Berlin with the mother who lost her husband to a battle with an RAF pilot.  Herbie'd lost his father, but he also lost his friends, Jewish friends, and he knew what the Nazis had done to them, so when the Allies arrived, he immediately made himself useful to them. He's spent decades running agents for Britain in the Cold War, and now he's nearing the end of his career.

But shouldn't that say "hanged," not "hung"?

Frau Fenderman's story seems plausible to Herbie and he even wonders if she might be a possible contact for his espionage group when she returns to Germany. But then things start to smell funny. There is no record of a spy named Claus Fenderman having been hanged at the Tower––or anywhere else in Britain, for that matter. Frau Fenderman also seems to be more familiar with London's streets than she should be. The suspicious smell becomes overwhelming when somebody takes a shot at the lady outside her London hotel.

What little history Herbie can winkle out of the old files hints that Claus Fenderman had something to do with a British wartime intelligence con game called Operation Nostradamus. Herbie sits down with an old acquaintance in the Foreign Office, George Thomas, to find out about Operation Nostradamus, which attempted to distract and discombobulate some of the top Nazis with a mix of real and fake prophecies from Nostradamus's famed 16th-century mystical book. (If you've watched The History Channel––or even Raiders of the Lost Ark––you know that several of the top men in the Third Reich, including Josef Goebbels and Hitler himself, were a little looney on the subject of the occult and were always ready to believe any psychic, soothsayer or mythologist who said––or seemed to say––encouraging things about the Third Reich's glorious destiny.)

Operation Nostradamus was George Thomas's first mission for the Special Operations Executive. He was dropped into France and instructed to contact a deep undercover agent, Michel Downay, who had cozied up to a couple of SS officers and was advising them about Nostradamus. George's job was to impersonate an academic specializing in Nostradamus, an ostensible colleague of Downay, and then get in with those selfsame SS officers and feed them Nostradamian misinformation. George had the heebie-jeebies about going behind enemy lines, period, but having to spend so much time with the SS really didn't help. And could he really count on Downay's being on the side of the Allies? How about Angelle, the alluring refugee living in Downay's apartment? Was she just a trap waiting to be sprung?

In The Nostradamus Traitor, Gardner takes us back and forth between Herbie's 1978 investigation of Frau Fenderman and the attempt on her life, and George Thomas's account of his espionage work in 1941. As Herbie's dogged sleuthing and George Thomas's story progress, Herbie sees that Operation Nostradamus in 1941 and Frau Fenderman in 1978 are more connected than he'd thought––and the connection presents tremendous danger in the current day.

If you're not familiar with The Mysterious Press, founded by the famed Otto Penzler in 1975, check out its website here. In addition to new fiction releases, The Mysterious Press republishes crime fiction classics and hidden gems in high-quality paperbacks. These aren't sloppily OCR'd reprints, either. All are newly typeset, formatted and proofread, printed on quality paper and given attractive covers. For those of you who don't do paper anymore, The Mysterious Press has teamed with Open Road Integrated Media, and offers its books in digital formats.

I'm excited that there are still four more books in the Herbie Kruger series for me to read, all available from The Mysterious Press/Open Road. Then, I can't forget Gardner's 29 books in the other series and standalones, as well as the 16 James Bond books. What with my World War II obsession, I've got my eye on Gardner's Suzie Montford series, about a police constable in London during the war. It begins with Bottled Spider, which they just happen to have at my library. I may be very, very late to the John Gardner stakes, but I intend to earn a spot in the running among his readers.

The Return of John Rebus

Way back in February, Della Streetwise told us here about her two recent "redonkulus reads": Jonas Jonasson's The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared and Ian Rankin's Standing in Another Man's Grave. I rushed out and listened to the former and it really lightened a week of deep winter.

Somehow, though, despite Della's terrific review, I didn't get around to Standing in Another Man's Grave until this week. I always read all the John Rebus books right away in the past, but when Ian Rankin retired Rebus at the end of Exit Music in 2007, I eventually made the emotional adjustment to his leaving my reading life. (Though not well enough to read Rankin's Malcolm Fox books, The Complaints and The Impossible Dead.)

I think I was a little afraid to read Standing in Another Man's Grave. Would it be my old favorite Rebus? Now I'm wondering what I was worried about. He's the same guy, alright; the guy who drives everybody around him absolutely crazy because he breaks all the rules. The gravitational force of Planet Rebus is like a tractor beam that drags anybody who helps him into the disciplinary crapstorm that usually results from his misdeeds.

As night falls at the end of Standing in Another Man's Grave, Rebus must decide whether to fill out that application to be reinstated to CID. I wonder if he'll do it or if he'll decide that operating outside CID's rules is more to his liking. I'm looking forward to finding out. Next time, I'll be the first out of the gate.

Note: I received a publisher's review copy of The Nostradamus Traitor.