Crime fiction

Review: Boundary Waters

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Cover image of "Boundary Waters" by William Kent Krueger

Boundary Waters (Cork O’Connor #2), William Kent Krueger. Simon & Schuster (ISBN: 9780671016999), 2000 (link is to a different edition in print).

Summary: A young country-western singer hiding in seclusion in a Boundary Waters cabin is pursued by a man claiming to be her father, FBI agents, a father and son from an organized crime family–and a couple of cold-blooded killers for hire.

Cork O’Connor is living in Sam’s old house, running Sam’s burger concession. His girls help in the summer but he and Jo remain apart. Unbeknown to him, a country-western singer, Shilohm, whose mother and Cork had been friends has used an Anishinaabe guide to hide away in a remote cabin in the Boundary Waters to seek clarity about her life.

A man known as Arkansas Willie Ray, who raised her and helped her build Ozark Records, shows up and hires Cork to help find her. She had been communicating and all communication had stopped. Then the FBI shows up at Sheriff Schanno’s office, also searching for her. They use strong arm tactics to compel Cork to help them along with Stormy Two Knives and his ten-year old son Louis, whose uncle, Wendell Two Knives had taken him when he brought supplies to Shiloh. Louis is the only one with any idea where she is.

They set out on a journey into the Boundary Waters as the weather transitions from fall to winter. Meanwhile, back in town, another “father” arrives, an aging organized crime boss and his son, also wanting to find her. Meanwhile, the search party doesn’t realize two other ruthless hired killers are also hunting for Shiloh. Already, they have tortured and killed Wendell Two Knives, without extracting any information. They also don’t know that Shiloh, tired of waiting for Wendell, has started back, using a map Wendell gave her. Something else is following Shiloh–a mysterious wolf who doesn’t attack.

While Cork and his party hunt Shiloh and realize they are also being hunted, Jo and the Sheriff figure out that all is not as it seems with the party that went out. Danger may not only be stalking Cork and the others but traveling with them. All this makes for a page-turning account where we wonder whether anyone but the killers will come out alive.

Meanwhile Jo struggles to believe with the support of her sister Rose, that all will come right, even as bodies are found (but not Cork). One senses that though their relationship was badly damaged, there is love that remains, to be explored if Cork survives. All this, along with Krueger’s well-drawn descriptions of the wilderness, make for a novel rich in its character relationships, setting, and thrilling plot.

Review: The Delicate Storm

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The Delicate Storm (John Cardinal and Lise DeLorme #2), Giles Blunt. London: HarperCollins, 2004.

Summary: A gruesome murder in the woods is soon followed by another, leading to an international investigation, a terrorist plot from the ’70’s, and a shrewd murderer on the loose, climaxed by an epic ice storm.

The call comes for John Cardinal when a local living near the woods reports a gruesome discovery. His dog has retrieved a severed human arm. The investigators retrieve more parts traced back to a cabin where the body was hacked apart to be eaten by bears. It’s an American scouting out ice fishing possibilities. The Mounties, are called in, including a former nemesis of Cardinal’s.

Meanwhile, Cardinal’s father’s heart condition is worsening. The one bright spot is a young woman doctor, Winter Cates, recently arrived and quickly embraced for her ability to connect with patients, including Cardinal’s father. Then she goes missing. Soon her naked body is found in the woods. That case goes to DeLorme, but they soon begin to wonder if the murders are connected. They wonder more when they discover a fifteen year old case of a woman murdered under similar circumstances, strangled with signs that made it look like she had been raped.

The only evidence they have is that Cates’ murderer apparently sought her out to treat a gunshot wound, leaving signs of type AB blood in her office, but nothing else. Then Cardinal goes to New York where the first murder victim lived to learn that the supposed victim is very much alive and that the real victim is a former CIA agent using his identity. But what was he doing in Canada? And why are Canadian Security Intelligence Services making it hard to track down the story behind this man?

While this is all going on, Cardinal is getting veiled death threats from a criminal he put away, due to be released from prison soon. They are coming to his home. A buried secret connected to the case is putting his family in jeopardy.

Further clues from the case of the murdered CIA agent lead to Montreal and a terrorist plot that resulted in the death of a hostage in the 1970’s and a mysterious figure, Yves Grenelle, who disappeared after the death. Could Grenelle be the killer who has left three bodies in the forests of Algonquin Bay, perhaps under another identity? Who is he and why Algonquin Bay?

An artist skilled in taking images and “aging” them gives DeLorme and Cardinal a clue to the identity of the killer, but there is not enough evidence to make an arrest, let alone convict, leading Cardinal to make a risky move to confront the suspected murderer amid a hundred year ice storm.

DeLorme and Cardinal work well while respecting boundaries. But they clearly notice each other–she appreciating Cardinal’s maturity and integrity, he noticing her attractiveness. Then they are thrown together, sharing a hotel room but in separate beds, when DeLorme’s room is flooded and none are available. Nothing happens, except in Cardinal’s mind, as he struggled to sleep. It’s awkward, and we’re left wondering how the two will work it out. At least Cardinal doesn’t keep it secret from his wife.

The book is one you don’t want to put down. There are threads left dangling for future books in the series. And having lived through ice storms with power outages, and frigid weather, Blunt captures the creeping dread one has in these kind of storms and the deeper frustration and ominous foreboding when one knows who a killer is but cannot find the way to prove it.

Review: Forty Words for Sorrow

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Forty Words for Sorrow (John Cardinal and Lise DeLorme Mystery #1), Giles Blunt. New York: Berkley Books, 2000.

Summary: When a missing teenager’s body is found in a mineshaft, John Cardinal is re-assigned to a case he’d been pulled off of and is joined by Lise DeLorme, who is also investigating him for corruption. Meanwhile, facts point to a serial killer when another body turns up and another missing youth is traced to their community.

John Cardinal had been investigating the disappearance of a girl, Katie Pine, that he’d linked to another missing youth. When the search threatened to absorb most of the Algonquin Bay police department resources, he was taken off the case. No other leads developed until now. Then a body was found, frozen in ice in an abandoned mine shaft. and identified as Katie Pine. He is put back on the case. We learn the depths of how much Cardinal cares about his work, and about the victims of crime in this interior monologue after he tells Katie’s widowed mother that her body has been found:

“Eskimos, it is said, have forty different words for snow. Never mind about snow, Cardinal mused, what people really need is forty words for sorrow. Grief. Heartbreak. Desolation. There were not enough for this childless mother in her empty house.”

Blunt, p. 37

Cardinal has been assigned a partner from Special Investigations, Lise DeLorme. Sharp, observant, and strikingly attractive, it turns out she is investigating Cardinal on the quiet. After several frustrated attempts to bust a major credit card fraud operation, it becomes apparent someone is tipping off the suspect, a man by the name of Corbett. Cardinal suspects the investigation though DeLorme denies it. And there is something suspicious about this apparently diligent, caring cop. His wife is in an expensive psychiatric facility and he has a daughter in an art program at Yale. And all this on a cop’s salary. Yet as DeLorme comes to work with him, it seems out of character.

Their investigation leads them to see a link with one and possibly two other missing youth. They find another body. Then the girlfriend of another young man shows up. He had been headed to Algonquin Bay and had failed to stay in touch. It looks like they are hunting for a serial killer. Will they find the killer before there is another victim? They may have some time, but not a lot–it appears that the killer likes to play with the victims before administering slow, torturous deaths.

Unbeknownst to Cardinal and DeLorme, they are looking for two people, a twisted young man who already has a record as a child for killing animals and a needy, unattractive young woman who has been taken in thrall with both the man and his cult-like fascination with torture and murder. As DeLorme and Cardinal investigate, tension rachets up as we follow the killers in their plans to “party” with Keith London, the missing young man. The plot moves back and forth between the killers and the detectives, with the investigation DeLorme is pursuing on Cardinal in the background and Cardinal’s own troubled conscience raising further apprehensions.

Blunt plots this masterfully, developing the relationship between Cardinal and DeLorme from initial distrust to growing admiration that stays professional. Cardinal is faithful to his wife–even when she thinks herself worthless in her illness. We find ourselves rooting for them, not only to catch the killer(s), but for Cardinal to be cleared and for them to be able to trust each other. Blunt combines a fascinating police procedural with characters we care about and a psycho-thriller with truly evil killers and a young man with a girlfriend who loves him who we desperately want to survive.

[BTW, thanks BT for the gift of a great read!]

Review: A World of Curiosities

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A World of Curiosities, Louise Penny. New York: Minotaur Press, 2022.

Summary: The arrival in Three Pines of a sister and brother involved in a murder case that brought Armand and Jean Guy and the opening of a sealed room and the strange painting found within confront Gamache with two of his greatest fears.

Bricks. They are all over this story. The instrument of murder in a case that brought Armand and Jean Guy together. The means used 160 years ago to seal up a room filled with strange objects and a copy of a famous painting altered in sinister ways signifying to Gamache that an old nemesis is on the loose.

The murder case and the room summon two fears in the mind of Gamache. The murder was of a drug-addicted prostitute who prostituted her children. Jean Guy, languishing in the basement of the district detachment under a corrupt boss, is called on to assist Gamache. As the mother had deteriorated, the children took over, and then murdered the mother. With a brick. The older girl, Fiona Arsenault, confessed, but Gamache was never certain. There was a chilling something about her brother Sam, something deeply broken and disturbing. And while Sam bonded with Jean Guy, he hated Gamache for ending what he and his sister had.

Fiona, against Gamache’s wishes, went to prison. While there, he sponsored her when she discovered an aptitude for engineering. He and Reine Marie became mentors to her. Sam survived, first in a foster home, then in a variety of jobs, traveling about, becoming a strikingly handsome young man.

In the present, Myrna’s niece Harriet is graduating, as is Fiona and they are all present. Fiona, now out of prison is staying with the Gamaches. Only Sam shows up as well, staying at the B & B. The contempt for Gamache is still there, and all his fears and instincts are aroused, even as Sam wins Harriet’s heart. Myrna, in her previous life as a Montreal psychologist, had interviewed Sam. She shared Gamache’s concerns that he could be a sociopath, or worse. Jean Guy disagrees.

Converging with all this, a 160 year old letter to Billy Williams reveals the existence of a hidden room bricked up by Billy’s ancestor, a stone mason. It is connected to Myrna’s loft and could make a great extra room for Harriet. Yet the reasons for bricking up the room and why this came to Billy at this time raise suspicions. And indeed, what they find in the room is “a world of curiosities.” There is an old grimoire, a book of potions, of herbal remedies, and more, that could get a woman killed for witchcraft. There is a statue that had gone missing after a strange guest stayed at the B & B, covered with strange markings. And there is a painting, a copy of The Paston Treasure with menacing additions from the present. It is the additions that increasingly disturb Gamache, as he figures out they are meant for him.

They signal that a nemesis thought to be locked away is afoot. How did these contemporary objects get into a sealed room? Only a meticulous mind could do this, a master of disguise. But he is locked away in a high security prison. Or is he?

Two who hated Gamache. Two with access to Three Pines. Even the home of the Gamaches, endangering all he loved. They both seem to know everything about Gamache. Can he get into their heads as they have his? And can he go deeper, and walk into his fears? And will it be enough?

So much has turned on the kindness of Gamache, especially to Fiona. Early on, a mentor had cautioned him with the words of Matthew 10:36, “And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” Yet the Gamaches make themselves vulnerable in their care for Fiona, their tendency to take in the needy. They’ve also done this for Amelia Chocquet, even as years ago, they did so with Jean Guy, who has tried to show kindness to Sam. So much turns in this story on whether this is weakness, foolishness, or strength.

We also see two ways and their fruit: the way of a deep bitterness and how this consumes, and the way of facing one’s brokenness, the admission of wrongs and the power of forgiveness. Armand is forced by the evil that threatens to look in and wrestle with these two ways in his own life.

All I will say about the ending of this book is that if you have a heart condition, you may want to seek your physician’s advice before reading it. This is Louise Penny at the top of her game.

Review: Tied Up in Tinsel

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Tied Up in Tinsel (Roderick Alleyn #27), Ngaio Marsh. New York: Felony & Mayhem Press, 2015 (Originally published in 1972).

Summary: Hilary Bill-Talsman is the subject of a Troy portrait and host of a Christmas house party that includes a Druid Pageant, marred when the chief Druid disappears. Alleyn arrives from overseas just in time to solve the mystery.

Hilary Bill-Talsman, an entrepreneur and nouveaux riche is rehabilitating an old manor house, Halberds, to which Troy has been invited to paint his portrait, and if he can persuade her, his fiancée, Cressida Tottenham. The holidays are approaching, Alleyn is away on assignment, and Hilary has persuaded Troy to stay for the Christmas pageant on a Druid theme, along with his house guests, Colonel Fleaton Forrester, Hilary’s uncle and his wife, along with their “man” Moult, formerly under the Colonel’s command, Bert Smith, an expert on antiques, and the aforementioned Cressida.

It’s an interesting lot, to be sure, but even more interesting is the household staff, all former murderers who have done their time. Staffing a manor house in the 1970’s, when this is set, is difficult. Hilary covers this with his social experiment. Particularly disturbing is Nigel, whose mental state is questionable, seeing “sinners” behind every bush, as it were. Yet the house seems to run smoothly, they get along and the only conflicts are between them and Moult, who has a streak of unpleasantness mixed with being prone to excess, and Cressida, who is averse to Cooke the cook’s cats.

Colonel Forrester is set to play the chief Druid, the counterpart of Father Christmas, whose appearance with gifts is the climax of the pageant. But he has a propensity for spells, and worked up as he is, he succumbs to one. Unbeknownst to everyone except for Cressida who helps him with his costume, Moult takes his place and pulls it off. Only after helping him remove the beard in a cloakroom, does Cressida inform Mrs. Forrester of the Colonel’s indisposition. Only afterwards do they notice that Moult has disappeared. A search of the house and grounds is made but he is nowhere to be found.

It’s at this juncture that Alleyn, having finished up an overseas assignment early, turns up, advises contacting the authorities, and stays on to help with the investigation. It turns into a murder investigation, when he spots four of the house staff moving a large box in the middle of the night, a box that contains Moult’s body. Yet despite the protests of the guests, Alleyn is not inclined to suspect the former murderers.

Marsh is a master of the “murder at a house party” genre but I have to admit that this one wasn’t my favorite. It takes half the book to get to the murder, a lot of stage setting, a series of malicious messages and pranks intended to incriminate one or more of the staff. And the identity of the murderer did not come as a surprise, only the motive. At the same time, the setting of the mood during Troy’s walk in the country and the later search during the storm, the description of the pageant, and the fascinating character of Hilary were all masterfully done.

This was one of two Marsh novels to be nominated for an Edgar Award, the other being Killer Dolphin. I’m not sure I understand the nomination of this book, which I did not find nearly as well-written as Killer Dolphin or some of her other works. It may just have been the year.

Review: Death in a White Tie

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Death in a White Tie (Alleyn #7), Ngaio Marsh. New York: Felony & Mayhem Press, 2012.

Summary: At a premiere debutante ball, Lord Robert Gospell’s call to Alleyn about a blackmail conspiracy is interrupted. A few hours later, Gospell turns up at Scotland Yard in the back of a taxi–dead!

It is the season of the debutante ball in London. Chaperoned young women are introduced to eligible young men–a high fashion and high pressure time for daughters and their mothers. Lady Alleyn’s niece Sara is one of those coming out as is Bridget O’Brien, Lady Carrados daughter by her first marriage to Paddy O’Brien and Miss Rose Birnbaum, the retiring protégé of the abrasive and ambitious Mrs. Halcut-Hackett.

Mrs. Halcutt-Hackett comes to Roderick Alleyn to report a blackmailer threatening one of her society “friends” and possibly others. He asks Lord Robert Gospell (aka “Bunchy”), a lovable “Victorian relic” who moves easily among these fashionable circles because he is the epitome of grace and empathy, especially for the scared young girls and their mothers confronted by the intimidating experience of “coming out.” He quickly intuits that there are at least two objects of blackmail–Mrs. Halcutt-Hackett herself and Lady Carrados, whose weariness, attended by Sir Daniel Davidson, doctor to the London elite, seems to stem from more than just the arduous efforts of hosting a ball, which is being capably handled by her quiet and efficient secretary, Violet Harris, who turns out to have a connection to the family going back to the death of her first husband, Paddy O’Brien.

“Bunchy” is a keen observer, and he notes that the hands of the caterer to the rich, Colombo Dmitri, are the very ones that purloin a handbag of Mrs. Halcutt-Hackett, sitting beside him in a darkened concert hall. Later, he witnesses Dmitri return a much thinner handbag to Lady Carrados at the debutante ball. The question is, is he doing this alone or with an accomplice who has access to the material being used to perpetrate the blackmail?

“Bunchy” thinks he has figured it out and calls Alleyn from an upstairs sitting room, but is interrupted as he is about to reveal his hunch. He covers up, discussing a lost item, and arranges to stop by and see Alleyn later that night. A few hours later, Alleyn sees him at Scotland Yard–dead. A cabbie picked him up, but before they set off, he was joined by another passenger in male dress. They stop at Bunchy’s address, and someone feigning Bunchy’s voice gets out wearing Bunchy’s cape. When they get to the other address given, the cabby finds Bunchy dead, and drives on to Scotland Yard. He’d been knocked unconscious by a cigarette case and suffocated, most likely with his own cape.

The delight of this mystery is Alleyn’s concerted effort to find the murderer of his dear friend which involves connecting a number of different pieces and eliminating suspects. Was it Donald Potter, Bunchy’s nephew, who has just been cut off because he prefers his dangerous association with Captain Maurice Withers, who is running an illicit gambling house? Is it Withers? Or Dmitri? Why did Sir Herbert Carrados hide a letter brought him by Violet Harris as a young girl, that had been in the coat of Paddy O’Brien when he died? And what was General Halcutt-Hackett doing when he was out walking near the ball at 3:30 in the morning? There were several, including Donald, Captain Withers, and Sir Daniel Davidson, who knew Bunchy suffered from a heart condition that would have made it easier to suffocate him. And what happened to Bunchy’s voluminous cloak?

There was one odd aspect of the novel for me. It was the scenes of Alleyn and Troy together. I think some modern readers would object to Alleyn’s breaking through the awkwardness between them by forcing a kiss upon her, to which she softens. It’s a classic trope, the idea of the male who is a bit “rough,” asserting his attentions. It surprises me that a female writer would write it this way and I wonder whether this reflects a perception of what her readers would want.

This aside, I think this is one of the most artfully plotted and tightly written of the Alleyn books I’ve read with a great classic climax scene with all the suspects present at Scotland Yard. We also get a glimpse into the frenetic character of the London “season” of the day and what seems an implicit criticism of its often fatuous character.