Mr Campion's Christmas
Mike Ripley
Severn House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$2.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: The Campions are snowed in at Christmas, but j ust when they think it can't get any colder, their holidays take an even chillier turn.
1962, Norfolk. Boxing Day looks set to be a quiet affair for the Campions when they are snowed in at their remote farmhouse, Carterers - until a charabanc full of 'pilgrims' travelling from London to the Shrine of Our Lady in nearby Walsingham crashes into their imposing granite gateposts and the family unexpectedly find themselves playing host to the eccentric passengers.
But any lingering festive cheer is in short supply when a shocking discovery is made the following day, while a terrifying twist reveals that some of the guests are not who they seem. Which—if any—can they trust? Suddenly hostage to events, the Campions are drawn into a fiendish web of espionage as the Cold War comes chillingly close to home.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Set today, this final installment of Ripley's continuation of the Albert Campion Golden Age mysteries has Lady Amanda, Rupert, and Lugg doing their festive celebrating in the countryside...and Lugg piloting "Santa's Sleigh" aka Lady Amanda's works Land Rover in Yule drag.
Isn't that an image?
The passengers troop into Carterers, the family's Norfolk-countryside escape from the city, much to every Campion's distress; of course, as it's a literal blizzard outside, they make the stranded pilgrims to a Walsingham shrine welcome. They are signally lacking a driver among them,and thus kicks off the several stages of the murder investigation.
As always, the events in the story hew closely to known and checkable facts, like the blizzard that happened in Norfolk that Boxing Day. Lady Amanda's works (factory in US terms) is targeted for Cold War espionage, which I daresay is something all of us can remember taking place (the war, not the fictional spying), and so we're grounded in trustworthy reality for Ripley to base his fiction atop.
The murder, the weird assortment of religious pilgrims and US war personnel, Lady Amanda's capitalist war machine supplying works, Campion and Lugg doing their sleuthing double act...it's all good fun and results in a resolution that plays fair, still without spilling the beans too soon.
Author Ripley has continued the Allingham series creditably for a number of books. It seems a shame he's decided to make this one his final outing as the pilot of the Campion bus by crashing one into Carterers' gatepost, but permaybehaps it felt fitting to him. I will watch for the next thing he decides to do.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THE CONSPIRACIES OF THE EMPIRE (Judge Dee Investigation #2)
QIU XIAOLONG
Severn House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: The legendary Judge Dee Renjie returns, in this lyrical combination of mystery, history and ancient Chinese politics from the author of the renowned Inspector Chen mysteries
In Tang dynasty China, Empress Wu—seductive, ambitious and vindictive—rules with an iron fist. Her premier minister, Judge Dee Renjie, is honored to be trusted by her. But when she orders him to carry out an urgent investigation into the disappearance of disgraced poet Luo Binwang, he can't see why the matter is of such vital importance.
Luo Binwang joined a doomed uprising against Her Majesty, and vanished after the final, bloody battle. Is he missing—or dead? Either way, now that the rebellion has been mercilessly quashed, what harm could a poor, elderly poet do?
Traveling out of the great capital of Chang'an, accompanied by his loyal manservant Yang, Judge Dee launches a painstaking investigation, in the hopes of achieving what the empress' secret police could not. But the journey is marred by ill omens, and with death and disaster following his every step, Judge Dee soon begins to wonder if the empress trusts him as much as he thought . . .
This powerful mystery, set in ancient China, will appeal to fans of Robert Van Gulik's novels featuring the semi-fictional historical character Judge Dee, and includes an appendix of poems from some of China's finest Tang dynasty poets, newly translated by the author, who is an award-wining poet and critic in his own right.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: I ate up the van Gulik series in the 1970s. I have never been so ready to get into a new take on the character from classic mystery days...Robert van Gulik started publishing his take on the Chinese character in fiction in 1951...as in this instance. I was not disappointed. Author Qiu's Inspector Chen mysteries have entertained me for twenty-five years now, so I knew I was in for a good reading experience. I liked his choice to set the story in the more appropriate seventh-century Tang dynasty, unlike van Gulik's more Western-reader friendly sixteenth-century Ming setting that we're all more familiar with.
I think my feelings about poetry are well known to most who read my reviews (I'm agin it) and here I am pushing a story centered around a poet, written by a poet and scholar, at you. I reserve the right to be inconsistent. Judge Dee, to give him the Western-accepted name, is an old man who should not be traveling over rough roads and sleeping wherever he finds himself to re-investigate a death the secret police have thoroughly raked over for plots and treason...Poet Luo died rebelling against Empress Wu. The Empress wants him to do it so off the Judge goes. You don't say "no, I'm too old and ill to do that" to someone who has ordered the horrific deaths she has lest you be next.
It's now I must tell you that this is not as much a mystery as an historical fiction literary novel with a puzzle of sorts to push its plot down the action hill. It's super vibes heavy, with an appalling tyrant creating a paranoid culture of personality, an atmosphere of unrest and resistance, and an old man who thinks he's probably going to die doing this job for the tyrant he privately disrespects. (Spoiler alert: he doesn't.)
I did object to the poetry that clogged the story's channels adding nothing but dragging like heavy, caked on clay to my readerly need for action. I was ready not to be whirled into motion like a 1950s 87th Precinct procedural, but wow is there a lot of verse. There's also some excellent food description, and good ol' Yang's as dolefully fun as ever in any version of the Dee stories.
As Author Qiu makes clear in the historical notes of the Afterword, Di Goong An is an amalgam of real crime-solver and the platonic ideal of one. Think Eliot Ness in The Untouchables. I enjoyed the history lesson and the assurance we were reading real events from this period's annals.
Not for the plot-driven reader, but catnip for the vibes-led lover of atmosphere.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THE CONDOR'S RIDDLE
MARCELO ANTINORI
Secant Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 paperback, available now
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: Who is the dead man lying in front of the convent in Santa Clara by the Sea? Was he already dead before he died in Santa Clara?
Bebéi, a simpleminded French archivist with a photographic memory, must solve an ever-deepening mystery to calm the streets. But it will also take a village of friends and a Caribbean ex-president who lives among cats; a Chinese stripper with a doll face; a Rastafarian workaholic; a Greek sea captain; even a remorseful German terrorist, who shares a vagabond life on the church stairs with a runaway Wall Street investor and a stoned Canadian hippie.
With these and other characters, The Condor's Riddle adds to the exotic literature of Latin America, where timeworn splendors provide a haunting backdrop for the tragicomedy of modern times.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Clever, fourth-wall-breaking narration is the main motivating force in the story, similar to the old rom-com Don Juan de Marco. The cast is *huge* as the narrator warns you at the beginning of the story. I was often just riding the wave of narrative energy,wondering if this or that character was someone I'd met before.
The book is more about the characters, all skatey-eight bajillion of 'em, than the mystery of who killed the guy who dies. Bebéi has a photographic memory, and is characterized uncomfortably often as "simple" in what regard I didn't ever get. He's like Chance the gardener in Being There. He observes fully and completely; he absorbs relatively little. So what he is in relation to the story being told is more or less a camera, so we're really in a cinematic story.
Why that was fun for me, I suppose, is that the author committed to it, was fully in that intention, throughout the read. No excursions into interiority interrupted the characters' full and complete presence on the page. I read a movie, I suppose gets at the effect on me as I rolled along being narrated to. I might not have enjoyed that experience had the story itself not been so fully visual. The sensory world of the Caribbean is, to my northern experience, intensely visual, secondarily auditory and olfactory. That's the way the Brazilian author presents it to us. It was a very immersive experience for me.
It's also a pretty tendentiously political book. I say that to allow the head-in-the-sanders to decide on it for themselves if they care to risk the reality of the life of others being laid out to them. I did feel some of the more intense physiological politics were more protracted than was strictly necessary. I was edified by the excursion into indigenous beliefs occasioned by a discovery around the identity of the dead guy that you'll need to experience for yourself.
If you're in the mood for a brightly colored exploration of Caribbean life, with dark ugly secrets making deeply contrasting shadows, in its total affect feeling like you're reading a spy thriller set in hot, bright lands, this is the way to spend that gift card.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
RED TIDE
IRMA VENTER (tr. Karin Schimke)
Catalyst Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$10.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Deep in the South African Karoo, a small desert town runs red with old grudges and deadly secrets.
Three years after his niece is found dead the week of her wedding, Jaap Reyneke, a retired detective, is still doggedly looking for answers. Why was her body displayed so carefully, like a macabre art installation? Who erased all correspondence from her devices? But the townspeople of Carnarvon seem content to let dead bodies lie.
Desperate for help, Jaap turns to Sarah Fourie, a convicted hacker seeking reprieve from her own demons. Together, they sniff out the truth of Janien's death, setting in motion a chain of events that will tear the town apart from within.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: South Africa fascinates me because it has so many of the same disfiguring flaws as US culture has, and an ugly side it likes to pretend it doesn't have like the US does. I've watched its soap operas in an effort to get to grips with what it thinks of itself; I read its mysteries and thrillers to find out what scares it from within.
Jaap's retired from the police force, but Janien's unresolved death, a murder without closure, refuses to let him rest. He needs more skilled help to get information from the internet age that, frankly, does not interest him nor does he want to get into its guts. Enter Sarah, convicted of hacking for profit, and now seeking redemption. How better than to get the data Jaap needs to finally close Janien's murder?
It's a good mystery, keeps a solid pace, plays fair...but wow, does the author need some computer tech lessons. This being fiction, I get the need to compress time scales but hacking is not as straightforward nor as quick to produce results as this story suggests. I felt I needed to withhold a star for that; but the reason Janien was murdered, the ugliness the solution uncovered, and Jaap's dogged quest to fix this rent in Ma'at's fabric all compelled me to keep the pages turning.
As the motive for multiple crimes came to light the story had a fascinating tonal shift. A matter-of-factness entered the narrative that, the more I thought about it, was so much more pointedly a comment on the sickness of the world that hides, empowers, allows suchlike than a more condemnatory tone would've been that I got a chill. That's the half-star returned.
I hope we'll see more of Irma Venter's work in English soon.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SHUDDER PULP (Charley Scott Mystery #2)
VANESSA WESTERMANN
Cormorant Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.95 paperback, available now
Rating: 4.25* of five
The Publisher Says: Leaves are turning red in cottage country, and Charley Scott is putting on an immersive Halloween pulp art installation based on a local lake monster legend. But life imitates art when Laura, a mercenary newcomer with a controversial agenda for the dam, claims she was attacked by a lake monster she accuses Charley of raising.
Hours later, Laura is found dead by dry drowning.
Accident, murder, or a lethal encounter with a mythical beast? Tension mounts as snaking tracks, an animal carcass, and a witch’s ladder are found near the lake, but could there truly be supernatural forces at work?
Charley teams up with chocolatier Matt Thorn to investigate, but it’ll take more than seafoam toffee to bait this trap. To find the truth, Charley will have to risk it all to look the monster in the eye.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Dry drowning had never crossed my attention before now; there's a reason for that. I didn't start this read all that confident in the author's basis for the story even before that, as cryptid stories make my eyes roll so far I can see my brain.
Sounds like I'm about to light into Author Westermann, doesn't it. Consider the countervailing forces, though: cozy autumnal lakeside setting; Canada, that put-upon northern neighbor of the US; and a woman declining to leave the investigation of a death the deceased had accused her of causing before kicking the bucket to the police. Even though "the police" come in the form of her sister's boyfriend.
Soldiering on was not painful, even though I was not starting out that well, because I resonated as described and because I was drawn quietly along by the unshowy, unadorned narrative voice. Charley being our PoV character, we hear her more than any other in the third-person narrative. It makes her initial confrontation with the victim much more engrossing, immediate, than if we'd been in the omniscient or even the first-person narrative voice (I always wonder how first-person narrators see such fine-grained detail in action moments.)
Laura's secrets, her private plans, all come to light with appropriate speed and timing. Meghan, Charley's sister, is a journalist so a lot is due to her efforts; Meghan's boyfriend being The Law around their town makes her access believable. Matt, Charley's boyfriend, is of some help to her in the effort to resolve this threat, but he is (believably) involved in events happening in his own business. It doesn't beggar belief how supportive he is, because he's got limits and she respects them.
A cozy story indeed with that kind of scoobygroup. Each character adds their piece to the puzzle; each piece fits in a place that looks one way before it was added, another way after that. People in their town have just had the big October Thanksgiving rush of tourists so have free energy to spend on the murder investigation...some helping, others hiding evidence or knowledge.
This is the second mystery in the series featuring Charley and the townsfolk. I haven't read the first. It was not difficult to find my way through the characters and plot; I expect it will get harder if one were to start after this story because we are in a very dense web of relationships that will only get harder to untangle, to get inside and see from its best angle.
So start here, pick the series up with your gift cards and settle in to cozy Canadian killings.
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