Format: eARC

#BookReview: Follow the Stars Home by Diane C. McPhail

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Follow the Stars Home by Diane C. McPhailFollow the Stars Home by Diane C. McPhail
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, U.S. history
Pages: 304
Published by Kensington on August 20, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A captivating reimagining of the intrepid woman who – 8 months pregnant and with a toddler in tow – braved violent earthquakes and treacherous waters on the first steamboat voyage to conquer the Mississippi River and redefine America. 
The acclaimed author of The Seamstress of New Orleans brings to life Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt’s defiant journey of 1811 in this lush, evocative biographical novel for fans of Paula McLain, Gill Paul, Allison Pataki, and stories about extraordinary yet little-known female adventurers…
It’s a journey that most deem an insane impossibility. Yet on October 20th, 1811, Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt—daughter of one of the architects of the United States Capitol—fearlessly boards the steamship New Orleans in Pittsburgh. Eight months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, Lydia is fiercely independent despite her youth. She’s also accustomed to defying convention. Against her father’s wishes, she married his much older business colleague, inventor Nicholas Roosevelt—builder of the New Orleans—and spent her honeymoon on a primitive flatboat. But the stakes for this trip are infinitely higher.
If Nicholas’s untried steamboat reaches New Orleans, it will serve as a profitable packet ship between that city and Natchez, proving the power of steam as it travels up and down the Mississippi. Success in this venture would revolutionize travel and trade, open the west to expansion, and secure the Roosevelts’ future.
Lydia had used her own architectural training to design the flatboat’s interior, including a bedroom, sitting area, and fireplace. The steamship, however, dwarfs the canoes and flatboats on the river. And no amount of power or comfort could shield its passengers from risk. Lydia believes herself ready for all the dangers ahead—growing unrest among native people, disease or injury, and the turbulent Falls of the Ohio, a sixty-foot drop long believed impassable in such a large boat.
But there are other challenges in store, impossible to predict as Lydia boards that fall day. Challenges which—if survived—will haunt and transform her, as surely as the journey will alter the course of a nation . . .  

My Review:

Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt clearly did not believe that adventures were things that happened to other people. Because she absolutely had her own adventures for her very own self, in spite of her gender, the times she lived in, the overwhelming number of naysayers, and that she was pregnant. On her second trip, she was, in fact, very, very pregnant.

Follow the Stars Home is a reimagining of her story, fictionalized so that it can be told from her perspective, as she accompanied her husband Nicholas Roosevelt on not one but two history making journeys from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. On her first journey in 1809, she traveled by barge and by flatboat, finishing up in a rowboat after a series of mishaps and outright disasters.

That trip was merely a scouting mission for the trip yet to come, the one that we get to take with her in 1811. The first successful attempt to conquer the Mississippi River with steam power. If their journey was successful – and it was – steamboats plying the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers would change the face of the fledgling United States with the speed of passage both down and UP the rivers against the current, for both passengers and especially – and profitably – cargo.

But the Roosevelts have to succeed to make that future possible. This is the story of that fantastic journey through territory the U.S. had yet to claim, on the way to a Manifest Destiny – for good and ill – that the Founding Fathers could only imagine.

All they have to do is keep the boat, their finances and their marriage off the rocks.

Nicholas J. Roosevelt, wife Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt, and their grandson J. Montgomery Roosevelt Schuyler, ca. 1848

Escape Rating B+: Follow the Stars Home is a story about being in the rooms where it happened – even if those rooms are powering down the Mississippi at the then astonishing rate of 12 miles per hour – and then steaming back up again.

Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt is the kind of unsung heroine whose accomplishments should have been shouted to the skies, but who is instead reduced to merely ‘Nicholas Roosevelt’s wife’ in the accounts of their history making journeys.

Instead, at least according to this fictionalized account – and it’s the version I WANT to believe in – she was as much of a full partner in this venture as the times and social conditions allowed – if not just a bit more. She’s certainly a real-life historical figure that it would be fascinating to know more about. Because she didn’t just marry into history, she was born to it. Her father, Benjamin Latrobe, was the architect of the U.S. Capital and many other buildings in the new capital of the newly formed United States.

A father who did not approve of his daughter’s marriage to his own friend and fellow engineer, a man more than 20 years her senior. (It’s not so much the age gap that gives this reader pause, but rather that they became engaged when Lydia was only 13.Your mileage and your judgment on that subject may definitely vary.)

The story in Follow the Stars Home is one that should be wider known, and I was certainly thrilled to learn about Lydia and her place on both epic journeys and in history.

That being said, her perspective on the events as they happen – at least her fictional perspective on her current situation, past experiences and her misgivings about them both – was a bit more domestically focused than I would have preferred. I was there for the adventure, the journey itself, and for the changes that happened after.

I fully recognize that’s a ‘me thing’ and may not be a ‘you thing’. In fact, I believe that a LOT of readers will be all in on that domestic perspective, because it was clearly damn difficult to manage a household, keep her toddler Rosetta occupied and more importantly out of trouble, AND give birth to her second child – at a scheduled stop in Louisville and NOT actually ON the steamboat – as history was being made.

I came to Follow the Stars Home for the history, but I stayed for this terrific portrait of a female adventurer who just plain isn’t as widely known as she ought to be. I sincerely hope that this marvelous story helps bring Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt to the more prominent place in the historical record where she truly belongs.

#BookReview: Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan Ballingrud

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Crypt of the Moon Spider by Nathan BallingrudCrypt of the Moon Spider (Lunar Gothic Trilogy, #1) by Nathan Ballingrud
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook
Genres: Gothic, horror, science fiction
Series: Lunar Gothic Trilogy #1
Pages: 112
Published by Tor Nightfire on August 27, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Crypt of the Moon Spider is a dark and dreamy tale of horror, corruption, and identity spun into the stickiest of webs.
Years ago, in a cave beneath the dense forests and streams on the surface of the moon, a gargantuan spider once lived. Its silk granted its first worshippers immense faculties of power and awe.
It’s now 1923 and Veronica Brinkley is touching down on the moon for her intake at the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy. A renowned facility, Dr. Barrington Cull’s invasive and highly successful treatments have been lauded by many. And they’re so simple! All it takes is a little spider silk in the amygdala, maybe a strand or two in the prefrontal cortex, and perhaps an inch in the hippocampus for near evisceration of those troublesome thoughts and ideas.
But trouble lurks in many a mind at this facility and although the spider’s been dead for years, its denizens are not. Someone or something is up to no good, and Veronica just might be the cause.

My Review:

When we first meet Veronica Brinkley as she’s on her way to the Barrowfield Home for Treatment of the Melancholy, we already know that this is not going to be a pretty story because the sense of creeping dread is there from the very first page.

At first, in spite of the story’s setting, that creeping dread is of the mundane but still extremely chilling variety. It’s clear that it’s set at in a period where it was entirely too easy for a woman to be labeled “mad” or “melancholy” or “hysterical” by doctors in cooperation with their husbands and fathers as a way of getting rid of an inconvenient child or spouse by locking them up in an asylum and waiting to receive word of their inevitable demise.

Veronica is well aware that her husband doesn’t expect her “black spells” to ever be cured. She’s never expected to return to their Boston home. The most terrible part of the opening of the story is that she feels she’s earned her place at Barrowfield – that it’s what she deserves for being weak, useless and self-absorbed. For failing in her duties as a wife.

And her treatment is horrific enough – and would be even if it was confined to the historically available treatments of its 1920s setting. But this is a version of our world – and our solar system – that owes a lot to the science fiction of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.

Barrowfield is on the moon, a moon that once housed an indigenous species of giant spiders that would have the power to make even the mighty Shelob quake in her lair.

But those giant spiders left behind vast webs in the lunar forests, and a surprising number of more-or-less human priests and worshippers who seem to be passing the gifts of the moon spiders on to the staff at Barrowfield, where the patients are treated by scooping out parts of their brains and replacing their supposedly diseased brain matter with moon spider silk.

It sounds barbaric – only because it is. It’s clear that Barrowfield’s medical chief has an agenda for his experimentation that he never reveals to the wealthy clients who commit their wives and daughters to his care. He knows they don’t, wouldn’t and won’t care about any supposed ‘treatment’ he might possibly think to administer.

But the acolytes of the moon spiders have an agenda of their own. And in Veronica Brinkley, they’ve found the perfect receptacle for their hopes, dreams and plans. All they have to do is wait, and watch, and let the doctor do his work – up to the point where they can finally do their own.

Escape Rating B: I was absolutely fascinated and utterly creeped out by this story, all at the same time. If it had stayed with historical treatments it would have been creepy enough, because damn but they were.

Howsomever, the elements of Verne and Wells and the moon spiders absolutely kicked the whole thing onto another level entirely. Not in the way that the acolytes took control of Barrowfield, because that was both expected and honestly hoped for in a peculiar way.

But the implications that the reader is left with at the end definitely embody next-level chill.

Which is where the issue I had with this book absolutely kicked in with a vengeance. Not that the vengeance aspects of the story bothered me at all because all the men involved with this story were a despicable and deserving bunch of fellows.

The SFnal aspects of the story were enough to carry me over – or perhaps through – the horror aspects of the thing, except for the image of Veronica left in my mind at the end. For anyone who has ever played Dragon Age: Awakening, the expansion for Dragon Age: Origins, well, in my head Veronica ends up as a saner, more self-aware version of The Mother from that game, and the idea of a saner version is seriously both frightening and stomach-churning. (The picture at left is actually one of the less horrific images.)

Circling back around, the thing that is keeping this from an A-, because I was certainly riveted, chilled and downright appalled at points more than enough for that, is that the story feels incomplete – and not just in the sense that it’s labeled as book 1 in a trilogy.

I’m left on the horns of a reading dilemma that it feels like I didn’t get enough of this story – even though it contains plenty of things that I wouldn’t want in any more detail. It’s more that I turned the final page feeling like I didn’t know nearly enough of how this world got to this point and that I was piecing together bits in my mind much the same way that Veronica’s mind got pieced together and I feel the missing bits every bit as much.

Which means I’ll be waiting with the proverbial bated breath for book 2, Cathedral of the Drowned, in the creeped out hope that I’ll get more of that connective spider silk in the next part of the story this time next year!

#BookReview: Passions in Death by J.D. Robb

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B- Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Passions in Death by J.D. RobbPassions in Death (In Death, #59) by J.D. Robb
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, large print, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Series: In Death #59
Pages: 368
Published by St. Martin's Press on September 3, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Homicide Detective Eve Dallas hunts a killer who turns a wedding party into a murder scene in the latest novel by the #1 New York Times bestselling author, J.D. Robb.
On a hot August night, Lt. Eve Dallas and her husband, Roarke, speed through the streets of Manhattan to the Down and Dirty club, where a joyful, boisterous pre-wedding girls’ night out has turned into a murder scene. One of the brides lies in a pool of blood, garroted in a private room where she was preparing a surprise for her fiancée—two scrimped and saved-for tickets to Hawaii.
Despite the dozens of people present, useful witnesses are hard to come by. It all brings back some bad memories for Eve. In her uniform days, she’d suffered an assault in the very same room—but she’d been able to fight back and survive. She’d gotten justice. And now she needs to provide some for poor young Erin.
Eve knows that the level of violence and the apparent premeditation involved suggest a volatile mix of hidden, heated passion and ice-cold calculation. This is a crime that can be countered only by hard detective work and relentless dedication—and Eve will not stop until she finds the killer who destroyed this couple’s dreams before the honeymoon even began…

My Review:

The villain in Passions in Death was almost as much of a ‘dooser’ as the villain in the previous book, Random in Death. And that’s unfortunate for this particular entry in the long-running (59 books and counting!) In Death series.

The case in Passions in Death is just a case, just as it was in that previous book. Even if there is a touch of painful nostalgia in it, as the victim, Erin Albright, was murdered at the ‘hen party’ for her and her bride-to-be, in the same club, in fact the very same room, in which Dallas was nearly murdered at her own such party the night before her wedding to Roarke three years previously.

Now Erin is dead, her bride-to-be has a memorial to attend instead of a wedding, and Dallas has to figure out who killed the bright young artist just as her life was about to reach a new pinnacle of happiness.

The problem for Dallas is that, initially at least, all she has is the victim. There are no obvious motives, the usual suspects all have alibis because they were all dancing on stage with each other, drunk and just a bit high on happiness, as the murder took place. Or were they?

All of which means that Dallas will have to dig, and dig hard, into every single one of those supposedly happy partygoers to discover who in Erin and her fiancée Shauna’s tight-knit little tribe wasn’t nearly so happy as they pretended to be.

Someone who was cold and calculating enough to plan what initially appears to be a perfect murder, while still hot-headed and vicious enough to strangle a victim who trusted them up close and personal via a piano wire digging viciously into their neck.

It’s not an easy case, made more difficult by Dallas’ own memories of that room, and of its location at an old and dear friend’s club. But it’s Dallas’ job, and she’s damn good at it – even when the initial leads are as slim as they are in this case.

Escape Rating B-: While this story doesn’t represent a trip to the angst factory for either Dallas or Roarke, it represents a bit of a literal return to the past in the way that the story circles back to a few of the locations of the earliest days of Dallas’ life in New York City.

So the story manages to touch on a bit of nostalgia – without diving into the dark corners of either of their psyches. That they have places that feel nostalgic in the story is a reminder that, although the writing of this series has taken 30 years of the author’s and the reader’s time, it has also encompassed a bit over three years in Dallas’ and Roarke’s lives.

A lot has changed for both of them, and for the found family they have gathered around them, in those three years, more than enough for them to get a bit nostalgic at revisiting earlier scenes, but not nearly as much change as the world outside the series has experienced in three DECADES.

I’ve said in my reviews of many of the books in this series that the cases tend to fall into two categories. Sometimes a case is just a case – and this entry in the series is definitely one of those. Sometimes the case threatens a member of Dallas and Roarke’s extended family or does a deep dive into the dark parts of one or both of their pasts. Those stories get painful, and yet they are often the most compelling of the series.

As long as they don’t happen too close together, because no one does well dredging up that much trauma too often – not even the reader.

And not that the ones that are just cases can’t also be compelling. I’m thinking particularly of Origin in Death as well as the more recent Faithless in Death. But this one just wasn’t, and that’s because the killer was even more of a ‘dooser’ (that’s dick+loser) than the villain in Random in Death.

Come to think of it, their dooserness wasn’t the only thing the two villains had in common. Which doesn’t help the case for the story or the doosers.

There also wasn’t nearly as much news about the fam as I normally find both comforting and amusing in this particular entry in the series. This could also be my own disappointment carrying over to my feelings about the whole thing, as I was REALLY looking forward to reading this and it just wasn’t as compelling or comforting a read as I hoped.

Your reading mileage may certainly vary.

Howsomever, the next book in the series, Bonded in Death, looks fascinating as it looks like a trip to the angst factory, not for Dallas or Roarke, but for Roarke’s father-figure, his majordomo Summerset. Hopefully this new book, coming in February, 2025, will represent a return to form after Passions in Death and Random in Death, which were okay but just not up to the series’ usual high standards.

#BookReview: Saving Susy Sweetchild by Barbara Hambly

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Saving Susy Sweetchild by Barbara HamblySaving Susy Sweetchild (Silver Screen Historical Mystery #3) by Barbara Hambly
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Silver Screen Historical Mystery #3
Pages: 293
Published by Severn House on September 3, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Welcome to Hollywood of the 1920 a world filled with glamour, fake names . . . and the occasional felony!

July, 1924. After nine months of living in Hollywood and working as a companion to her beautiful silent-movie star sister-in-law, young British widow Emma Blackstone is settling into her new doctoring film scenarios whenever the regular scenarist is overwhelmed with work, which seems to be most of the time.

Shoots for the Western movie Our Tiny Miracle are in full swing, with little seven-year-old Susy Sweetchild playing the lead and acting most professionally. Maybe too professionally, Emma thinks, shocked to the core when the child star is nearly killed in a stunt scene and her mother - former screen siren Selina Sutton - seems only to care that Susy gets the job done.

But Emma's concerns only worsen when news reaches her that Susy and her mother have been kidnapped. The ransom note says to keep the cops out of it, so it's up to Emma and Kitty to find them before the unthinkable happens and Emma is forced to rewrite Our Tiny Miracle with a far more tragic ending . . .

New York Times bestselling author Barbara Hambly once again brings the glamour and intrigue of Hollywood to life! An unputdownable mystery for fans of female-fronted historical mysteries set in the roaring twenties.

My Review:

Emma Blackstone, after nearly a year in Hollywood as her sister-in-law’s friend, confidant, dog handler and general factotum, as well as serving as a script doctor for Foremost Studios for almost as long, has learned the way that things work in Hollywood – no matter how often she wishes she didn’t.

Because she sees entirely too much, and is all too aware that she can’t fix ANY of it. Although she certainly does what she can, as shown in the first two books in the Silver Screen Historical Mysteries, Scandal in Babylon and One Extra Corpse.

But Susy Sweetchild’s situation still pierces her straight to the heart. Because the child is clearly – and justifiably – frightened to death. And is just as clearly aware that no one can help her or save her no matter how much they want to.

It’s 1924, and Hollywood is still the ‘Wild West’ when it comes to rules and regulations. Prohibition is in full swing, but bootlegged booze is openly everywhere. OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, won’t exist for another 45 years and child actors like Susy have no rights whatsoever – not even to the money they make.

Especially not to the money they make.

Susy is only seven years old, she’s one of Foremost Pictures biggest moneymakers, and she’s supporting her stage mother, her alcoholic father, her mother’s business manager and her mother’s succession of lovers and THEIR failed businesses as well as her father’s drinking habit. And quite possibly the partridge in the pear tree.

The only person on Susy’s side is her cat Mr. Gray, and poor Mr. Gray is even more of a hostage than she is. If Susy ‘misbehaves’ in any way, Mr. Gray is done for. And Susy is all too aware of the threat.

Possibly so is Mr. Gray. The cat seems both smart and sober, which is more than can be said for a lot of the humans in this story.

Emma would like to rescue Susy, but she has entirely too many hostages to fortune of her own to step that far out of line. She also knows it won’t do any good, as the powers that be in Los Angeles are all too aware of the side on which their bread is buttered, and that the studios are the ones doing the buttering.

But the status quo of Susy’s dreadful situation and anyone’s ability to help her out of it goes from bad to worse when the child star and her mother are kidnapped, along with Mr. Gray – a ginormous clue that should have occurred to more people an awful lot sooner.

Someone is extorting $100,000 from the studio for Susy’s safe return. (That’s something like $18,000,000 in today’s dollars!) There are multiple ransom notes being delivered, quite possibly from multiple sources. The police are not involved in the case, but the gossip columnists and the bootleggers are.

Considering how frequently the adults – including Emma and her Scooby Gang – are misdirected, as reluctant as the studio is to pay all that money to rescue a child star who is rapidly growing out of her cute and winsome phase, it looks like the princess is going to have to rescue herself in this one.

Escape Rating B: There are two stories going on in Saving Susy Sweetchild, and I have to admit that one interested me considerably more than the other.

The first is, of course, the mystery of who kidnapped Susy Sweetchild and whether the poor child can be found before it’s too late. The investigation of Susy’s abduction and ransom is the stuff of which Keystone Cops movies were made. No one covers themselves in glory in this part of the story – either because they are in on it, they intend to exploit its outcome, because they’ve been paid to look the other way or merely because they are simply incompetent but photogenic at the job they’re supposed to do.

Emma at least has a damn good excuse for not catching on right away – she’s not a professional detective, either police or private. It isn’t her job – she just cares about the kid and wants to help her.

But underneath – although often in plain sight – is the glimpse under the glitter and tinsel of Hollywood in the mid-1920s, before the Hays Code crackdown on ‘immorality’, before the talkies, and before the Great Depression.

We still read horrific stories about the treatment of child actors in Hollywood, and a lot of those stories are terrible to children and other living creatures. Susy will probably remind a lot of people of Shirley Temple, but by Temple’s time 15 years later, the situation had actually gotten a bit better. For select versions of ‘better’. Maybe less awful.

One of Susy Sweetchild’s contemporaries would have been another child actor named Jackie Coogan – who might be more familiar to readers as Uncle Fester in the 1960s Addams Family TV series. His relevance to Susy Sweetchild is that It was his lawsuit against his own mother in 1938, after he turned 21 and discovered that his mother had squandered his entire fortune, that finally put laws in place about the treatment of child actors AND the provision to put a portion of their income in trust for their adulthood.

All of the above tells readers that as much as I was following Susy’s fictional case, it was the factual underpinnings that truly had my attention for much of the story. The split in my attention wasn’t great for my absorption in Susy’s actual story, but the research dive was a lot of fun.

Howsomever, I did love the ending of Susy’s story. She was pretty much the only person who deserved a happy ending, and I was very relieved to see that she – and Mr. Gray – got exactly what they deserved – as did a whole lot of others who deserved something considerably less…happy.

Grade A #BookReview: The Kill List by Nadine Matheson

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Grade A #BookReview: The Kill List by Nadine MathesonThe Kill List (Inspector Anjelica Henley, #3) by Nadine Matheson
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Series: Inspector Anjelica Henley #3
Pages: 448
Published by Hanover Square Press on August 6, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

While an innocent man sits behind bars, a serial killer with a gruesome signature has started killing again. And only Anjelica Henley can stop him.
After twenty-five years behind bars, Andrew Kenan has just been exonerated. Newly discovered DNA evidence proves that he was not the cold-blooded serial killer the world thought he was, the one who sewed his victims' eyes shut before burying them alive. Before Kenan can taste freedom, however, he is found dead in his prison cell. And Inspector Anjelica Henley, who worked the original investigation, is left in shock.
Henley never thought she'd have to revisit one of the most horrifying cases of her career. But now, after evading justice for twenty-five years, the true killer is back, and so is their gruesome signature. Can Henley stop them once and for all? Or has the Serial Crimes Unit finally met its match?
Drawing on her experiences as a criminal attorney, and exploring themes of race, class and justice, Nadine Matheson's newest entry in the Anjelica Henley series is her darkest, most adrenaline-fueled mystery yet.

My Review:

I picked this up because I was utterly riveted by the first two books in the Inspector Anjelica Henley series, The Jigsaw Man and The Binding Room. It’s taken me nearly a month after the publication date to brace myself to read the book, because this is a series where the word “enjoy” doesn’t actually apply to the reading of it.

Riveted, on the other hand, certainly does. Compelled, also. Certainly glued to the edge of my seat for nearly four hours, unable to put the thing down out of fascination and fear that something else even more terrible was about to happen.

Which, to be fair, it generally was.

Detective Inspector Anjelica Henley is a member of the (London) Metropolitan Police Serial Crimes Unit. It’s a unit that didn’t exist in 1995, when the serial killer the press dubbed “The Burier” began his spree of kidnapping young women, torturing them, raping them, burying them until they died of asphyxiation, then digging up their bodies and staging the discoveries of their corpses.

Then 15-year-old Anjelica Henley’s best friend Melissa was the first – but certainly not the last – of The Burier’s victims.

The Burier’s spree came to an end in 1996, when Andrew Streeter was convicted of all five monstrous killings. While Streeter protested his innocence repeatedly at his trial, at his conviction, and frequently and often over the twenty plus years since, the fact that the killings stopped convinced even the doubters that they had the right man – even if there might have been a few – or even more than a few – irregularities in the way the police handled the case.

But those irregularities have come back to haunt Anj, the entire SCU, and every single person who ever had anything to do with that old case. Because Andrew Streeter, the man everyone simply knew was guilty, had gotten the attention of a high-profile “Innocence Project” that successfully convinced a review board that those irregularities were the result of a police cover up and corruption that stitched him up for reasons that had nothing whatsoever to do with his actual guilt or innocence of the crime for which he was convicted.

He was merely convenient. Or in someone’s way. Or both. Almost certainly both.

And now that he’s about to be released from prison, the hunt for The Burier is starting all over again. Unless he starts hunting for them, first.

Escape Rating A: I’m not joking about the utterly mesmerizing four hours it took me to read this from beginning to end. I think the only times I moved were to adjust my legs to accommodate whichever cat had nestled into my lap and frankly I was glad of the comfort.

A comfort I desperately needed, because comfort is absolutely the last word I would use to describe this book OR the series from which it sprang. Compelling, yes. Fascinating, also yes. Riveting, absolutely. But comforting, no, not even in the ending which is not so much cathartic or relieving as merely a sigh and a pause between this story and the fresh hell that its unanswered questions inevitably lead to.

This is a hard book, and that’s made it difficult to get my thoughts into order and pour them out through my keyboard.

Why?

Because there are at least three elements to the taut suspense of this thriller, and each one is more of everything than the last. Surprisingly, the case of The Burier, with all of its chilling and even visceral horror, isn’t the worst of what the characters face.

Except for Henley, none of the current members of the SCU were involved in the original case. And Henley’s involvement was as a witness and victim-by-association. Whatever guilt she may feel – however much she might second guess her behavior then – she wasn’t actually responsible for any of the events – and neither are any of the other current members of the team.

It didn’t happen on their watch – although they are being held accountable for cleaning up the rather obvious black eye that has materialized on the face of the Met as a result of it.

Which is where the story veers into the worse, because it’s not just that Streeter was framed then. It’s that their deceased boss, their mentor, is being framed now, that his handling of the case then is responsible for this miscarriage of justice.

Unless, he wasn’t the bent copper who focused the case on Streeter, manipulated evidence and witnesses and knowingly put the wrong man in jail. A possibility that seems even more obvious as the way that the present case has been dumped in their collective laps has made it crystal clear that the Serial Crime Unit has an enemy within the Met who absolutely is out to get them all.

The question of who, what, when, where and why of that fact, while less terrible in the blood and guts sense, is a bigger and worser question for a unit that sees each other as family – whether that’s healthy or not – and sees that they are all falling over the edge in one way or another. Watching each other fall apart, knowing that someone has a figurative knife in their backs even as they investigate a killer who literally stabs his victims before he does the rest of his terrible work ratchets up the tension of this case even as it powers the story straight into the next book – which we’ll probably have to wait a nail-biting two years for.

A fact which makes this reader want to curse even more than the characters in the story do.

#BookReview: The Ghost Cat by Alex Howard

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
#BookReview: The Ghost Cat by Alex HowardThe Ghost Cat by Alex Howard
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cat stories, cozy fantasy, historical fantasy, historical fiction, magical realism
Pages: 272
Published by Hanover Square Press on August 27, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A charming novel for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold and How to Stop Time , following a cat through his nine lives in Edinburgh, moving through the ever-changing city and its inhabitants over centuries
Early morning, 1902. At 7/7 Marchmont Crescent, Eilidh the charlady tips coal into a fire grate and sets it alight. Overhearing, Grimalkin the cat ambles over to curl up against the welcome heat and lick his favorite human's hand. But this is to be his last day on earth…before he becomes the Ghost Cat.
Follow Grimalkin as he witnesses the changes of the next 120 years, prowling unseen among the inhabitants of an Edinburgh tenement while unearthing some startling revelations about the mystery of existence, the unstoppable march of time and the true meaning of feline companionship.

My Review:

Grimalkin is dead, to begin with. (The opening line to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is a gift that just keeps on giving.)

Grimalkin is a house cat, in fact THE house cat, at 7/7 Marchmont Crescent, born in 1887 and dead at the rather battered age of 15 in 1902. The thing about Grimalkin’s death that makes the story work is that the cat gods, in the person of Cat-Sìth who comes to visit Grimalkin upon the occasion of his death have to admit that they’ve fallen down on the job. As a cat, his spirit if not his body is entitled to nine lives, and he’s been shorted out of eight of them.

Something must be done in redress.

Grimalkin is given a choice even if the full measure of it isn’t clear to him at the time. He can go to his eternal sleep – or – he can have his eight remaining lives as a ghost cat. He’ll be able to experience the world, but generally not affect it – at least until his final three lives. He’ll be granted two more lives to ‘stay’ as he did in his first, corporeal life, three lives to ‘stray’ and three lives to ‘play’ as a poltergeist.

He’ll get to see how his human, Eilidh, is doing even if he won’t be able to actually be with her. He’ll get to see how the place he lived is getting on over the years. He’ll experience a bit of the world as it changes. But only for one day in each life.

His body will no longer feel pain, and he’ll be incapable of being harmed. But harm to the body isn’t half as painful as harm to the heart and the soul. There will be times when the world will have moved too fast for him to cope with. There will be occasions that will break his heart. There will be times when he’ll want to give up and go to his final, eternal catnap right meow.

But he’ll also have a few opportunities to change the world – not in a big way – but in small and important ways to make sure that a person or two gets EXACTLY what they deserve. Whether what they deserve is salvation – or damnation.

In Grimalkin’s case, the old saying proves to be absolutely true. “Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.”

Escape Rating B: First, let me admit the obvious. I’ve been picking a lot of books with cats recently because I miss Lucifer something fierce. Each person deals with their emotions in different ways – for me it’s books.

(The above comment does not apply to Junkyard Roadhouse. I’ve been following that series for four years now and would have grabbed that audiobook the minute it arrived no matter when it came. The series is totally awesome. Review coming later this week.)

Pivoting from my digression, I also have to say that I’m glad I read this AFTER the trip to Glasgow and not before – even though this is set in Edinburgh. There are a few things – like the ubiquitous presence of IRN BRU – that just had a bit more immediacy and resonance after such a recent trip to Scotland – and Britain more generally – than they would have before.

As a story, The Ghost Cat feels like a timeslip story mixed with quite a bit of magical realism as well as a touch of the musical Cats and just a hint of the cat wizards in Diane Duane’s The Book of Night with Moon.

I loved Grimalkin as a character, even though his particular existence conflicted with the laws of the universe in ways that are detailed in the rather long Reviewer’s Note at the end. Grimalkin the cat displays the feelings that we all hope that our companion animals have for us, specifically that he has chosen his person and loves her unconditionally. His primary motivation for accepting the option of ghost lives is to follow her through the years – not understanding the heartbreak that will inevitably follow.

What makes him interesting to follow is the way that he dips into time – rather like Brigadoon – but at much shorter intervals. He gets to see just a bit of the changes in the world, and it’s particularly poignant that he is present for both Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation AND the announcement of her passing. Also a tad ironic, as at her coronation he assures himself that she’ll be just a ‘flash in the pan’ compared to the eternal Victoria who was Queen for his entire life – and of course he’s so very wrong about that.

But right about many other things – not so much about eras and the increasing pace of life and what appears to be its equally increasing lack of civility and manners – but rather about his insights into the hearts of people. Human nature, for good or ill, doesn’t change all that much over a mere century or so.

In the end, Grimalkin’s story is a lovely little collection of observations and snippets, grounded in a bit of the author’s life, however fictionalized – and with additional magic. It’s a charming slip through the high points of a century, as seen through the often floor-level eyes of one very intelligent – but ultimately soul-weary – cat.

If, like this reader, you’re looking for a story that will reassure your heart and soul that the cats who leave us behind love us even from the Rainbow Bridge or wherever it is they go next, Grimalkin’s story may also serve as a bit of a balm to a wounded heart.

Reviewer’s (REALLY LONG) Note on feline genetics as applied to Grimalkin, the tl;dr version of which is that Grimalkin is genetically impossible and the story didn’t cover that over with even a bit of handwavium.

The ‘ghost cat’ of the title, Grimalkin, is very explicitly described as a rather prolifically reproductive tortoiseshell tomcat – and that is an actual, honest-to-goodness contradiction in terms. Due to the peculiarities of feline genetics as they apply to coat color and gender, tortoiseshell and calico cats are nearly always female. It is possible, but very rare for a male tortie or calico to be born – only a 1 in 3,000 or .033% chance. (That’s not 33% or 3%, that’s 3 one hundredths of one percent. In other words, the chance exists but it’s TINY.) And due to the genetic anomalies that allow this to happen, male tortoiseshell and calico cats are always sterile.

Now and very much on the other hand, the book of The Ghost Cat definitely falls into the category of magical realism – meaning that magic could make Grimalkin exactly what he is in the story. In the Victorian Era, when Grimalkin was born, science and the ‘Cat Fancy’ hadn’t yet figured much if any of this out, although detailed observation would have led to a conclusion that male torties were rare indeed. Howsomever, the cat gods or deities or powers-that-be or whatever that magic black cat with the white heart marking was could easily have known just how special Grimalkin was and commented upon it – as that cat spirit did so many other things. A mention would have taken care of the incongruity and kept it from tripping me – and probably other readers who are even slightly familiar with cat genetics – out of the story every time Grimalkin’s appearance was detailed.

I understand completely the desire for Grimalkin to possess both a tomcat’s machismo AND a heaping helping of tortitude, I just needed a bit of handwavium (or plot armor) to get there that wasn’t present in the story.

Your reading mileage, or percentage in this case, as always, may vary.

#BookReview: The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: The Full Moon Coffee Shop by Mai Mochizuki, translated by Jesse KirkwoodThe Full Moon Coffee Shop (The Full Moon Coffee Shop, #1) by Mai Mochizuki, Jesse Kirkwood
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: literary fiction, magical realism, world literature
Pages: 228
Published by Ballantine Books on August 20, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Translated from the Japanese bestseller, this charming and magical novel, inspired by the myth of cats returning favors to those who care for them, reminds us that it’s never too late to follow our stars.
In Japan cats are a symbol of good luck. As the myth goes, if you are kind to them, they’ll one day return the favor. And if you are kind to the right cat, you might just find yourself invited to a mysterious coffee shop under a glittering Kyoto moon. This particular coffee shop is like no other. It has no fixed location, no fixed hours, and seemingly appears at random to adrift young people at crucial junctions in their lives.
It’s also run by talking cats.
While customers at the Full Moon Coffee Shop partake in cakes, coffees, and teas, the cats also consult them on their star charts, offer cryptic wisdom, and let them know where their lives have veered off course—because every person who visits the shop has been feeling more than a little lost. And for a down-on-her-luck screenwriter, a romantically stuck movie director, a hopeful hairstylist, and a technologically challenged website designer, the feline guides will set them back on their fated paths. After all, there is a reason the shop appeared to each of them…

My Review:

It will not surprise any reader of my reviews that this book had me at cats. And it was expecting something a but cutesy, but also heartwarming and charming because a) cats and b) this book is part of the recent trend of interconnected vignette novels that kicked off – or at least into high gear – with Before the Coffee Gets Cold – a trend which I’ve been enjoying very much.

So I was expecting a similar combination of magical realism with a touch of cozy fantasy and/or cozy mystery, just with a whole lot of cats.

I fully admit I was NOT expecting the astrology bits, but we all get our paradigm shifts where we find them and the logic of what causes them doesn’t have to be the same for everyone. So even though the astrology explanations didn’t work for me except as a metaphor, as a metaphor they worked just fine.

What got me in the heart was the way that the story managed to come full circle and tie itself up with a truly beautiful bow. If, as this book posits albeit a bit sideways, if the Rainbow Bridge touches down on Earth  when the moon is full so that the cats we have loved and cared for have a chance to give us a bit of a push when we need it – I’m there for it.

Escape Rating B: At first, the stories seem a bit random, as they often do in this kind of book. I’m thinking of Before the Coffee Gets Cold, The Dallergut Dream Department Store, What You are Looking For Is In the Library, and my personal favorite, The Kamogawa Food Detectives.

When the two cats deliver some rather tough love to the down-on-her-luck, has-been writer, it’s not just her life that needs to change. The following stories connect back to her, and to a time in her life when her dreams were still in front of her.

And they could be again if she just takes the more practical aspects of the cats’ advice. As she does.

What I wasn’t expecting – but should have because these books often work similarly – was that all the people involved remember her, remember her fondly, were inspired by her in their own ways, and were part of an event in their brief time together that affected them all deeply even if they didn’t specifically remember it.

It’s that event that leads back to the cats, and to a truth about animal companions regardless of species. That it’s not just that we rescue them, as this teacher turned scriptwriter and her students once did. It’s that they rescue us as well.

And it’s that truth that makes the whole story not just work, but work with a smile and just a touch of a tear at its just so delicious bittersweet ending.

#BookReview: Memories of the Lost by Barbara O’Neal

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
#BookReview: Memories of the Lost by Barbara O’NealMemories of the Lost by Barbara O'Neal
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: magical realism, relationship fiction, women's fiction
Pages: 285
Published by Lake Union Publishing on July 30, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

An unsuspecting artist uncovers her late mother’s secrets and unravels her own hidden past in a beguiling novel by the USA Today bestselling author of When We Believed in Mermaids.
Months after her mother passes away, artist Tillie Morrisey sees a painting in a gallery that leaves her inexplicably lightheaded and unsteady. When a handsome stranger comes to her aid, their connection is so immediate it seems fated, though Liam is only visiting for a few days.
Working on her own art has always been a refuge, but after discovering a document among her mother’s belongings that suggests Tillie’s life has been a lie, she begins to suffer from a series of fugue states, with memories surfacing that she isn’t even sure are her own. As her confusion and grief mount, and prompted by a lead on the painting that started it all, Tillie heads to a seaside village in England. There, she hopes to discover the source of her uncanny inspirations, sort out her feelings about Liam, and unravel truths that her mother kept hidden for decades.
The fluidity of memory, empowering strength of character, beauty of nature, and love of family braid together in this artful tapestry of a novel.

My Review:

Who is Tillie Morrisey?

That question is at the heart of this story, as Tillie discovers that the only true things that she can be sure of are the ones that she has accomplished for herself. She is a successful artist, living in New York City, preparing for her next show.

Those things are real and true, no matter what else happens – or has already.

Because discovering that the rest of the things she believed were true – about her mother, their lack of family, the isolation of Tillie’s childhood, even Tille’s name and family history, are hidden behind a tissue of lies that Tillie had no idea lurked inside her memories.

Which she can’t trust at all.

Inside Tillie’s fractured mental landscape is something a lot like ‘Pandora’s Box’ – with all the implications that name invokes about what is released and what lurks within. The key to Tillie’s version of that box turns out to be an old newspaper clipping hidden away in her recently deceased mother’s house. The clipping holds the story of a long ago tragedy. That her mother didn’t reveal all the details of something that happened before Tillie was born isn’t really a surprise – but the other document that she finds certainly is.

Because Tillie’s birth certificate is right there in the same set of boxes. But it’s not exactly Tillie’s, because that Tillie – that other Tillie – would have been three years older than artist Tillie. And the other Tillie died in that long ago tragedy.

Present-day Tillie, adult Tillie, doesn’t know if the girl that died was her sister, if her mother named the both the same for ‘reasons’ or if there is more to unravel than Tillie ever knew.

That this revelation comes at a point in Tillie’s life where she herself is unraveling, as she realizes that she’s painting wild cats while is in so deep a fugue state that she loses time and doesn’t remember the work – and a point when she’s fallen deeply into a long-distance relationship – may be enough to finally release the memories she’s blocked – and lost.

Or she may just lose herself.

Escape Rating B+: I picked this up because I’ve enjoyed several of the author’s previous works, particularly Write My Name Across the Sky and This Place of Wonder. I was hoping for more of the same and almost, but not quite, got it.

It seems like all of the author’s work circles around a group of people whose past suddenly crashes headlong into the present – and how they deal with that crash.

In this particular case, it’s Tillie’s past, the past her mother withheld from her – a withholding that started early enough (Tillie was FOUR) and was pervasive enough that Tillie repressed any memories that she might have had.

What’s happening in this story is that those repressed memories are now breaking through and manifesting as migraines (YUCK and UGH), painting in fugue and generally knocking on the door in Tillie’s memory any way they can.

That this all started happening just a few months after her mother Arletta’s death can’t possibly be a coincidence – and it isn’t.

Although Tillie’s brand new romance possibly is one. Or it may be karma or fate trying to put things back on course in ways that initially seem like tangents or distractions but finally do reach the heart of the matter.

From whence comes to the reasons that I liked this book but didn’t love it quite as much as I hoped I would.

Because this story operates on three tracks. Of course, there’s Tillie’s perspective, and then there’s her new love, Liam’s point of view. I liked them, I liked their story, I understood their doubts and fears even as they kept moving forwards into a future they couldn’t quite see yet.

But there was a third track to the story that felt like an interruption to the thing as a whole. It does eventually connect up – and that connection is SO important and part of the resolution of Tillie’s quest. Howsomever, as it was happening, as the focus switched from Tillie and Liam to this other thread it dropped me out of the story to the point where I was wondering if there was going to be a portal fantasy element along with the touch of magical realism throughout the story. (There’s no portal, but I seriously wondered for quite a while.)

So, if that third angle drives you a bit up the wall, stick with it, because the story as a whole turned out to be lovely, even as it walks Tillie – and Liam – through some surprisingly dark places along the way to their well-deserved happy ever after.

TLC

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A- #BookReview: The Naturalist’s Daughter by Tea Cooper

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Naturalist’s Daughter by Tea CooperThe Naturalist's Daughter by Tea Cooper
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Pages: 368
Published by Harper Muse on August 20, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

1808 Agnes Banks, NSW
Rose Winton wants nothing more than to work with her father, eminent naturalist Charles Winton, on his groundbreaking study of the platypus. Not only does she love him with all her heart, but the discoveries they have made could turn the scientific world on its head. When Charles is unable to make the long sea journey to present his findings to the prestigious Royal Society in England, Rosie must venture forth in his stead. What she discovers there will change the lives of future generations.
1908 Sydney, NSW
Tamsin Alleyn has been given a mission: travel to the Hunter Valley and retrieve an old sketchbook of debatable value, gifted to the Public Library by a recluse. But when she gets there, she finds there is more to the book than meets the eye, and more than one interested party. Shaw Everdene, a young antiquarian bookseller and lawyer seems to have his own agenda when it comes to the book – and Tamsin. In an attempt to discover the book's true provenance Tamsin decides to work with him.
The deeper they delve, the more intricate the mystery becomes. As the lives of two women a century apart converge, discoveries rise up from the past and reach into the future, with irrevocable consequences...

My Review:

There have been plenty of hoax animals and artifacts in the histories of archaeological and biological discoveries. But the platypus was not one of them – no matter how skeptical scientists initially were about the creature found – and only found – on the wet eastern riverlands of Australia.

But it’s easy to understand why scientists in Britain, presented with a preserved specimen of an animal that had fur like a mammal, a bill like a duck, a poison spur like a reptile, that laid eggs like a bird but nursed its young as mammals do treated the specimen with a HUGE dose of skepticism.

Even the platypus’ early scientific name, ornithorhynchus paradoxus – paradoxical bird-snout – makes the confusion of all who observed the animal exceedingly clear.

This illustration by Frederick Polydore Nodder is the first published illustration of a platypus. It accompanied George Shaw’s 1799 description of the animal in the Naturalist’s Miscellany, or Coloured figures of natural objects”. London:Nodder & Co.

The story in The Naturalist’s Daughter is wrapped tightly around the paradox of the platypus, both its discovery across two centuries – about the history of its first introduction to the preeminent 19th century naturalist Sir Joseph Banks and then the early 20th century discovery that perhaps the attribution for that first discovery had been misplaced in the midst of a series of tragic family secrets and devastating lies.

It’s a story that goes full circle, from young Rose Winton, a budding naturalist in her own right – or at least she would have been if she had been born either male or in a later century – and the origin story that had been hidden from her – to Tamsin Alleyn a century later, an independent young woman determined to chart her own course – a course that leads her back to a family and a history she never knew was hers.

Along the way, the story of the platypus spurs its poison and lays its eggs, from the manipulations of a wealthy family that abused, transported, lied and cheated Rose’ mother to descendants that hid her heritage and did their damndest to do it all again.

Only for the truth, at last, to make so many injustices finally come ‘round right and correct the mistakes of history in a story that combines the thrill of scientific discovery with the sins of avarice, the desperation to escape not one but two legacies that are too difficult to bear and a romance weighed down with secrets on all sides.

Escape Rating A-: Before I get to the story, I have to say that to this reader, at least, the original Australian cover (pictured at left) does a much better job of conveying the heart of this story – which lies in the land that gave birth to the platypus – than the US cover. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, etc., etc., etc., but the well-dressed somewhat generic figure on the US cover doesn’t ring true for either Rose or Tamsin – but the land and its creatures are definitely the heart of the thing.

The Naturalist’s Daughter, like several of the author’s other works, is a dual timeline story. In the 1808 timeline, we have Rose Winton, the titular naturalist’s daughter, as her father teaches her his craft even though she has no chance of being a professional or respected scientist. When he is struck down, she finds herself taking up as much of his mantle as the society of the time will allow.

In the 1908 portion of the story, we have Tamsin Alleyn, a young librarian and archivist who has come into contact with a sketchbook that once belonged to Charles Winton. A sketchbook of somewhat mysterious provenance – and an even more uncertain fate – that contains some sketches that the reader is already aware were drawn by Rose and not her father.

For much of the story, it seems that the sketchbook is the connecting link, but as Tamsin continues to investigate the path that the sketchbook has taken through the intervening century, it becomes clear that there is more to connect the two women than it first seemed.

Readers may find one or the other character easier to empathize with. Rose faces more danger, but Tamsin has more freedom of action. Rose is closer to the beginning of the mystery, but Tamsin is the agent who uncovers the whole of it.

Personally I found Tamsin’s story the more satisfying approach, but Rose’s story certainly has its own appeal.

The way that the two stories turn out to be the same story after all turned into a fascinating web built out of secrets and lies, told by multiple less than reliable narrators, which made it that much more fascinating and difficult to suss out the truth before the final – and imminently satisfying – conclusion.

A+ #BookReview: Anatomy of Evil by Will Thomas

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> book reviews
A+ #BookReview: Anatomy of Evil by Will ThomasAnatomy of Evil (Barker & Llewelyn, #7) by Will Thomas
Format: eARC
Source: purchased from Amazon, supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Barker & Llewelyn #7
Pages: 327
Published by Minotaur Books on May 12, 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

In London of 1888, Private Enquiry Agent Cyrus Barker takes on his biggest case ever—the attempt to find and stop the killer terrorizing Whitechapel: Jack the Ripper
Cyrus Barker is undoubtedly England’s premiere private enquiry agent. With the help of his assistant Thomas Llewelyn, he’s developed an enviable reputation for discreetly solving some of the toughest, most consequential cases in recent history. But one evening in 1888, Robert Anderson, the head of Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID), appears at Barker’s office with an offer. A series of murders in the Whitechapel area of London are turning the city upside down, with tremendous pressure being brought to bear on Scotland Yard and the government itself.
Barker is to be named temporary envoy to the Royal Family with regard to the case while surreptitiously bringing his investigative skill to the case. With various elements of society, high and low, bringing their own agenda to increasingly shocking murders, Barker and Llewellyn must find and hunt down the century’s most notorious killer. The Whitechapel Killer has managed to elude the finest minds of Scotland Yard—and beyond—he’s never faced a mind as nimble and a man as skilled as Cyrus Barker. But even Barker’s prodigious skills may not be enough to track down a killer in time.

My Review:

Private Inquiry Agents Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn have been on a collision course with this particular date with destiny since the very first book in this series, Some Danger Involved, opened in 1884 with Barker taking Llewellyn on as his apprentice.

This seventh book in the utterly riveting series of their adventures has reached the ominous year of 1888, the year that “Jack the Ripper” terrorized the streets of London’s most desperate and notorious neighborhood, Whitechapel.

Every single police agency – and there were plenty of competing jurisdictions and agencies in London in the autumn of 1888 – wanted the glory that would come from catching the killer – and zealously guarded their patch and every single scrap of evidence they managed to acquire.

In this compelling take on the investigation into the Whitechapel Murders, Scotland Yard, reluctantly and with a ridiculous number of caveats and restrictions, deputized Cyrus Barker and his apprentice-turned-assistant Thomas Llewellyn into the Metropolitan Police Department in order to avail themselves of Barker’s much vaunted expertise in investigation and manhunting.

And, in all probability, if all else failed, to have him on hand to use as a scapegoat if they couldn’t manage to close the case.

Which, or so history tells us, they didn’t. Unless one of the many conspiracy theories had it right after all, and the truth would have lit a powder keg that Scotland Yard was incapable of putting out.

Escape Rating A+: I picked this book when I did because I was on a long flight and needed something that was guaranteed to take me away from my current circumstances. I was one hundred percent certain that Barker & Llewelyn were the men for the job.

Which they absolutely were.

The fascinating thing about this particular entry in this long-running series is that its focus isn’t on the lurid details of the crimes, but rather on the intricate details of the investigation – including the interdepartmental rivalries, the political shenanigans, the conflicting social mores of the time and the various factions that needed protection – or demanded it – as well as the potential consequences of any of the various possible resolutions.

Barker and Llewelyn find themselves in the one place neither of them ever expected to be. They’re not just in the thick of the investigation, but they are embedded firmly into the Metropolitan Police. Barker prefers to be his own boss and run his own show, and Llewelyn is an ex-con. While neither of them expected to be welcomed in the Met with open arms, they’re continually astonished that they are there at all.

At the same time, the experience fosters respect on both sides that honestly neither side believed was possible. It will be interesting to see how and even whether that continues in future stories.

But the Ripper killings took place at the dawn of forensic science – and many of the techniques were still being hotly debated – even as “Jack” cut a bloody swath through Whitechapel and left damned few clues behind him – while the gutter press did their damndest to gin up readership with sensationalism.

The story runs at a compelling, page-turning pace as Barker and Llewelyn gather and discard clues and theories even as they walk the streets of Whitechapel night after night in an attempt to learn the territory so they can spot anything out of place – while they observe the day-to-day and night-to-night life of this district that most well-heeled Londoners would just as soon forget with understanding and empathy instead of the judgment and derision exhibited by their current colleagues and their usual clientele.

In the end, Barker gets his man – with Llewelyn’s able assistance – just as he always does. That the solution seems plausible even though justice can’t truly be served feels right, true to the circumstances, and even surprisingly satisfactory – in spite of the lack of historical closure.

Saying that I had a “good” reading time with Barker & Llewelyn this time around feels wrong – because the whole Ripper case is awful. I appreciated the way that the story dealt with the evidence of the actual killings without sensationalizing them more than has already been done elsewhere and plenty. The in-depth details, very much on the other hand, of the investigative processes of the police and the sheer amount of manpower they devoted to the case were fascinating.

And of course, I love these characters, so taking them out of their familiar haunts and watching them still get the job done added new layers to them, their association and their story. Which means that I will definitely continue my journey with Barker & Llewelyn with the next book in the series, Hell Bay, the next time I need to be swept away to Victorian London.