The Yard – Alex Grecian

Click to buy from Amazon

London 1889. Jack the Ripper hasn’t murdered for a while but his identity is still a mystery and the city’s residents have lost faith in the police. Scotland Yard is trapped in old-fashioned police protocols but a new Commissioner just back from India, a new Inspector in Murder just promoted up from Devon and a newly-discovered dismembered body in a trunk at Euston Square Station are about to change that.

Alex Grecian’s Victorian police procedural introduces a terrific pair of sleuths—Inspector Walter Day and Constable Hammersmith are a little uncertain they will manage the overwhelming case loads and win the trust of their fellow officers. But both are unafraid to operate out of integrity and neither has the good sense to go home when a gruesome case remains tantalizingly unsolved. They have plenty of work.

The body is a fellow murder detective and what has been done to him is sickening and inexplicable. The story is larded with gory detail—a major character is the self-appointed medical examiner, a doctor with a jones for the newly emerging discipline of forensic science. He’s a keeper–very colorful and intrepid man with a strong backstory and an even stronger appeal in the middle of a homicide investigation. No dull characters in this novel—chimney sweeps to frenzied, bloodthirsty maniacs are feisty, lurid, eccentric, certifiably mad, unaccountably sane, courtly, deadly and every iteration of unexpected human being. Grecian’s characterization skills are cinematic.

The plots–and there are several that intersect, veer off and unspool into a bizarre tangle in the end–are logical and terrible. London is grubby, smelly, murderous, streaked in blood, gore and horse manure. Threats abound and none are idle. The cops are so inundated with crimes they can never catch up and big clues fall between the cracks as they land on the wrong desk—or in the trash can.

But the new team is good at seeing connections and unafraid to consider patterns of criminal behavior that haven’t been part of a detective’s arsenal before. There’s a great introduction to the questionable idea of finger printing and a willingness to examine psychological profiling as London seems in the grip of multiple serial killers. Kid victims, cop victims, lady victims and sadistic killers are tucked behind every door and most of the doors are closed–but not for long.

The Yard is gritty, sort of disgusting, convincing and gripping. I liked the characters at least as much as the plot. I would pick up a sequel to Grecian’s debut novel—and I suspect, from the way this one leaves off, Inspector Day and his tough, humane sidekick Hammersmith will be back in trouble and in print soon enough.

The Yard   Alex Grecian | Putnam 2012

Cain His Brother – Anne Perry

Click to buy from Amazon

William Monk has been busted out of the police force in Victorian London and, with no other skills but detective work, set himself up as a private eye. When Genevieve Stonefield comes to him with a desperate tale of a missing husband, he suspects a fiscal or romantic entanglement. But Angus, the missing man, seems to have been a model of rectitude and there is no mistaking his wife’s distress. She believes he went to the Limehouse section of town where his wastrel twin brother Caleb haunts the docks and alleys, a fearsome murderous criminal.

As Monk sets off to find Caleb and determine if and how Angus has met with foul play, typhoid fever sweeps through the slums and Hester Latterly and several wealthy patrons convert an old warehouse into a makeshift hospital. Hester and Monk have some history but it is as much antagonism as attraction and they spend this book sparring relentlessly. Monk has reasons to visit the typhoid shelter and Heather has emergency nursing duties for one of her helpers who succumbs to the fever. The woman is the wife of Lord Rathbone, Angus and Caleb Stonefield’s childhood guardian—the plot thickens.

So, we have Cain and Abel—er, Caleb and Angus—plenty of excuses for Monk’s and Hester’s paths to cross on a regular basis, a seedy waterfront setting and a hunt for a missing identical twin. Alas, I figured out a major, major plot point before the fever had even taken hold in the filthy back alleys of London. But Anne Perry pulls out her usual bag of tricks and surprises in Cain His Brother and suspecting what really happens does not dim the pleasure in tracking what is happening. Monk is framed by a beautiful woman who accuses him publicly of attacking her, a charge that will ruin him and make it impossible for him to work. Certain society matrons have rather colorful and extremely veiled pedigrees. Perry throws in her version of the movie car chase—a wild hunt for a vicious perp on and along the Thames, on foot and on barges.

The William Monk mysteries are reliably satisfying. The sights and sounds of Victorian London, especially its seedier environs, are vivid and convincing. Hester and Monk’s wary circling is acerbic and fun to watch. I ran out of hours trying to keep up with overscheduled life and a seriously long YA book that is also a very good read, so I jumped into the polluted Thames with Monk, who can always be counted on for a thrill ride and a complex, twisted plot. Even knowing the key to the riddle of the disappearance didn’t help me to unravel all of it. I did, however, slide into the last chapter well before midnight. Murder mysteries will probably get me through the year.

Cain His Brother: A William Monk Novel (Mortalis)   Anne Perry | Ballantine Books  2010

Blue Asylum – Kathy Hepinstall

Click to buy from Amazon

Blue Asylum has the clarity of perfectly clean water, pale blue and clear to the sandy bottom, so empty that you can see the markings on the shells there. The water off Florida’s Sanibel Island in the Gulf of Mexico, setting for the lunatic asylum that swallows Iris Dunleavy just after the Civil War, used to be that blue and translucent. The beaches were thick with prized shells and sea turtles covered the sand above the tideline with their nests each summer and their hatchlings in the height of hurricane season. I don’t know if there was ever a mental hospital on the island, back in the late 1800s, but Blue Asylum is a credible approximation of what one would have been.

Iris is delivered to the private human warehouse by cattle boat after her plantation owner husband has her declared insane and committed. Her crime is to have been too dreamy a girl, marrying a brute who considered his slaves to be disposable property, refusing to celebrate the bloody whippings for minor, or imagined, infractions, plotting a disastrous escape and insisting on her own autonomy, integrity and sanity in a sadistic patriarchal society.

The asylum is full of rich characters—the woman who believes her adored husband of forty years is still alive and dances with her on the beach, the seemingly sane woman who swallows things that are not meant to be swallowed, the Confederate soldier who slips into a screaming frenzy at any trigger for the nightmares that grip his memory and his mind. The psychiatrist is as obstinate and obtuse as the sentencing judge—Iris must be mad, else why would she be in his establishment? The matron is a malicious beast who sets Iris up for the horrifying water cure, a torture the doctor has developed to treat resistant cases.

Wendell, the shrink’s thirteen-year-old son, is going mad himself, isolated on the mosquito- and alligator-infested barrier island. He harbors terrible guilt and crushing grief for the suicide of a girl he befriended before Iris arrived. Wendell is a great character—the most empathetic and evolved person in the story. He worries about Iris as she falls in love with a dangerous patient.

What happens when truth is corrosive enough to eat through the lies wrecks the comfortable assumptions that order this mad world. The personal horrors that the main players harbor are revealed slowly but evidence of them is there from the first. Terrific book but hard to read because it made me so furious at the way human connection and the intrinsic worth of women, children, slaves and the spiritually wounded were casually and relentlessly discounted.

Confronting reality comes at a cost. People do change in the course of the novel and some are lost. That kid Wendell is a prize. Good read, if at times blood-pressure-raising. Blue Asylum is a story well-told.

Blue Asylum   Kathy Hepinstall | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt   2012

A River in the Sky – Elizabeth Peters

Click to buy from Amazon

The Emerson family, the brightest and bossiest collection of human beings to grace early 1900s archaeology, has been unleashed on another artifact-rich region. This time the delightful and troublesome Ramses is a young man—he’s an admirable young man but I love him as the hell-on-wheels six-year-old in older Egyptian adventures—and there is an adopted daughter, Nefret, whose acquisition must have been the fascinating topic of another book.

A River in the Sky tracks Amelia Peabody Emerson, her blustery, adoring and brilliant Egyptologist husband, Nefret and a motley crew of friends, servants and hangers-on to Jerusalem where a bumbling amateur intends to dig for the Ark of the Covenant at one of the holiest sites in Palestine. Ramses is already in Palestine on another dig, getting himself perilously involved in a murderous intrigue. The Germans are planning a railroad and an eventual occupation of the region. Turkish soldiers of the Ottoman Empire don’t bother with niceties when keeping order. Weird characters abound and many of them might be spies or other nefarious villains.

As ever, Amelia is brusque, intelligent, competent, attracted to the most dangerous sites and the possibilities of a dig to clear up some historical mysteries. But this time an added complication is the apparent disappearance of Ramses who has failed to show up as directed and join his parents’ dig. The Crown has set the Emersons loose in Palestine to uncover a plot to destabilize the precarious peace among conflicting religions in the tinderbox of Jerusalem. Much more than the discovery of new artifacts is at stake. Things get complicated before the expedition sets one foot out of England.

Elizabeth Peters delivers her razor-sharp, contentious, funny and historically-lavish typical Amelia Peabody mystery. The repartee between the Emersons is quick and clever. The plots and subplots twist into a satisfying tangle. You can’t entirely guess at the resolution but you are happy to be led to it, enjoying the adventure along the way. There are no false notes in these stories. The times, the trickery and the players all make sense in a believable world. My only regret was the absence of De Cat Bastet and that wicked little boy who bedevils everyone and saves the day hilariously in earlier books.

A River in the Sky: An Amelia Peabody Novel of Suspense   Elizabeth Peters | HarperCollins   2010

The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R. – Carole DeSanti

Click to buy from Amazon

Eugénie Rigault is a goose girl, grown up but not reconciled to life in the foie gras countryside. In France, in the late eighteenth century, a girl who follows her dreams and her lover to Paris, believing that she can remake herself merely by stepping on a train, is bound to be quickly disillusioned. The lover from a prominent family abandons her, alone and pregnant. The artist for whom she models leaves her at the mercy of merciless landlords and the streets. The whorehouse where she winds up hands her an herbal potion to abort the child—and she pours it in a potted palm.

Carole DeSanti’s The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R. is silk brocade, gleaming in the candlelight, and the silken luxury of real chocolate in a tart. And it’s the unspeakable isolation of giving birth alone in a shabby room, of a diseased customer breaking ribs and beating hope out of a young woman with milky breasts and a feverish infant. It is artistic notoriety, loyal women friends in the back streets of Paris, rampant duplicity and greed, callous lovers, corrupt bureaucracies and betrayals. Eugénie keeps trying to remake her world to match her dreams and that world is carved up and ripped away from her without warning time and time again.

The baby, Berthe, goes to a foundling home that is no better than a prison and from which Eugénie never stops trying to ransom her. The lovers, patrons, courts and house madams are a backdrop of misery that seduces, uses and controls. Through it all, the young women pour themselves into survival and schemes for self-determination and independence. One wealthy Confederate expat lover keeps Eugénie in style so her presence will conceal his homosexuality. The end of the Civil War abruptly ends his Paris exile and her comfortable life. Another lover paints a portrait of her that wins a salon prize and achieves a level of fame. “An Unknown Girl” is the name of the painting and it might be a stand-in for the model herself. Eugénie’s life is something unknown to her. She sees her motives only after she has paid the penalties for them. She spends a decade trying to reclaim her child and reconcile her sense of self with her reality.

The Siege of Paris is an unavoidable factor in the lives of women who live at the edge of society and ruin. Eugénie is forced to sort the lies and treacheries and find a price she can pay to survive. The Unruly Passions of Eugénie R. is the tempestuous story of a mesmerizing heroine who seems real and remarkably contemporary in our own conflicted and chauvinistic times. Really good read, lovely prose, compelling protagonist and great story. When an author gets fiction right it is such a gift to a reader. DeSanti has been generous with this one.

The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R.     Carole DeSanti | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt   2012

Tutankhamen – Joyce Tyldesley

Click to buy from Amazon

Tutankhamen’s grave, in the Valley of the Kings, nearly went undiscovered. The Egyptologist who held the sole concession to excavate there for twelve years declared he had found a dusty tomb that was Tut’s final resting place and that it had long ago been emptied of artifacts and mummy. But when Lord Carnarvon and his hired archaeologist, Howard Carter, succeeded in grabbing the concession, they sifted the clues of those who worked the site before them and homed in on a likely spot.

Joyce Tyldesley writes a detailed adventure story of the hunt for King Tut’s remains and the painstaking process of recovering them in Tutankhamen: The Search for an Egyptian King. Your brain will get a rigorous workout keeping track of all the permutations of Nefertiti, Amenhotep, Tutankhamen, Tutankhaten, Tutankhamun, Hatshepsut, Ankesenamen and the rest of the royal band but your sense of story will be satisfied.

It’s a good story—even if many of the specifics remain elusive and a general disregard for fastidious archaeology was widespread at the time. The time is the turn of the last century when Britannia ruled and the expeditionary hobbies of the wealthy led to digging up deserts and plundering the ancient heritage of less prosperous lands. Egypt, with its tourist-friendly pyramids and legends of pharoah gold, was fertile pickings but the Tutankhamen discovery was blessed with a patron and an archaeologist who went to extraordinary lengths to protect their finds.

And they were blessed with the richest trove and most intact royal burial chamber to be unearthed in the often-plundered valley. Tut’s chambers were buried by flash floods that dumped sand and debris over tomb entrances and filled the long passages to reach them. Even so, the tomb had been breached several times before it was buried under the sands. Yet, when Carter and Carnarvon cautiously poked a torch into a small opening and saw the gold glinting in the gloom, they knew they had hit the jackpot.

The discovery and the recovery of the artifacts and the human remains of a king who reigned for ten years and died at about age eighteen continues to fascinate historians, archaeologists and the public. There was so much in the chambers that the information about Egyptian civilization yielded up by textiles, paintings, carving, sculpture, jewelry, gold, funerary objects and every scintilla of matter taken from the tomb is still being revealed. How did Tut die? Was he murdered? Who were his parents? Did he have children? Why are objects with the names of other kings included in his grave swag? Why were some of the earlier names on gold bands and caskets obliterated and Tut’s cartouche substituted? Were the children’s clothes found in the tomb those of the eight-year-old boy king? What would the world of the pharaohs have been like had he lived longer? Are some of the items left among the ceremonial offerings sentimental? Who mourned Tut? Was there really a Mummy’s Curse–or just an excess of bat guano?

The sheer beauty of the golden death mask and the carved and etched caskets and ornaments in the grave capture the imagination. Tutankhamen has that necessary ingredient for any lasting celebrity—extraordinary good looks. The images we have, in museums and exhibitions, make us stop and look again. The book about how those images came to see the light is an absorbing tale that sorts the obvious fictions from the facts we know—and leaves interesting questions unanswered to be excavated by advances in science tomorrow.

Tutankhamen: The Search for an Egyptian King   Joyce Tyldesley | Basic Books   2012

Acceptable Loss – Anne Perry

Click to buy from Amazon

I’ve been reading a lot of Anne Perry novels and come to some conclusions about this best-selling author of historical crime fiction. She writes several series with dedicated characters situated in specific venues for their exploits. By far I prefer her William and Hester Monk books. Acceptable Loss is the latest of these and they are so good I will reserve as many as the New York Public Library has so I can read all of them.

Monk shares top billing with Hester who is a strong heroine, smart sleuth, fearless investigator and highly principled woman essential to the solving of morally repugnant crimes along the Thames in Victorian London. Acceptable Loss picks up where Execution Dock left off—the pornography ring and floating salons of sexual abuse that serve as prisons for young boys is still very much alive. Even the murder-suicide of the owner of one of the boats and the prominent judge who was his customer hasn’t slowed the traffic. Monk and Hester have taken in a mudlark, Scuff, a kid who lived by his wits on the lawless banks of the Thames and was nearly destroyed by the horrible business. As Acceptable Loss opens, they know that Scuff still doesn’t feel safe and won’t until they do something to uncover the money and power behind the sex salons and the extortion ring they fuel.

When the body of a boat owner farther upriver washes ashore, Monk and his deputy find another slave ship crammed with five- and six-year-old boys. The hunt is on for the real puppet-masters, complicated by the charge that the upper-class father-in-law of London’s most prominent barrister, a close friend of both Hester and Monk, has something to do with the revolting trade in children’s flesh. Monk’s investigation threatens a major patron of Hester’s clinic for prostitutes and poor women, and makes an enemy of the barrister’s wife, a clinic volunteer and friend of Hester’s who is also the daughter of the chief suspect.

The forensics are terrific; the suspects are plentiful; the stakes couldn’t be higher; the moral questions are fierce; the courage required to pursue faint and dangerous leads to the truth is exceptional. So is the novel. I think the Monk books are by far Perry’s best and my guess is that the characters and the issues are richer and more compelling than those in her other mysteries. London’s seedy waterfront spawns an inexhaustible number of colorful individuals. The crime is cinematic; the narrow alleyways are stifling; the poverty is grinding and grimy; the gap between rich and poor is stark; the self-doubt that plagues the protagonists at key points in the crime-solving isn’t based on poor self-image but on a refusal to settle for anything less than absolute integrity.

I wonder if Monk and his cohorts are Anne Perry’s favorite creations? In my estimation, they benefit from the lion’s share of her talent. I have yet to read any of her WWI books, although I am told those are among her best. So I’ll reserve final judgment until I’ve had the chance to sample all the dishes in this literary banquet. But Monk and Hester are the go-to team for times when I want a reliable, satisfying read—one that could compel you to stay up way too late so you can finish it. Which I did.

Acceptable Loss: A William Monk Novel   Anne Perry | Ballantine Books  2011

Buckingham Palace Gardens – Anne Perry

Click to buy from Amazon

I’m still not sure why this Victorian murder mystery is named Buckingham Palace Gardens—it takes place mostly inside Buckingham Palace and there doesn’t seem to be much to do with the gardens. But Anne Perry weaves a suitably wicked plot inside the palace walls and her sleuths, Thomas Pitt and his household servant Gracie, do range from the wine cellar to the kitchens to the guest wing and the Queen’s bedchamber in search of a vicious killer.

At a house party to hammer out details of a grand venture to build a railroad the length of Africa and expand the Empire, a collection of diplomats, bankers, visionaries, Africa hands and desperately unhappy upper class people are wined and dined by the Prince of Wales. But festivities come to an abrupt end when the horribly mutilated nude body of a prostitute is found stuffed in the royal linen closet. Pitt and his superior in Special Services are called in to solve the crime. Gracie is added, posing undercover as a new palace maid, to pick up whatever intelligence she can from the servants.

The crime is a tough puzzle. There are inexplicable details, no apparent motive, missing clues that will prove vital and no witnesses. Everyone but the houseguests has a solid alibi and palace security means the culprit must be one of them. Anne Perry uses the claustrophobic setting to explore the connections, frustrations and secret longings of several of the guests. No one seems to be in love with the one they’re with—in fact, most of them are covertly or openly lusting after someone else’s partner. That goes on a bit and gets revisited more than I thought was good for the pace of the story. I got really tired of the interior monologue of one character who was miserable but couldn’t be sure the son-in-law she always meant to marry herself was a worthy object of her affection.

Random clues stay random; Gracie discovers more than the cops; the nobility and the elite are less than admirable. The dead woman isn’t placed and her clothes are never found. Odd comings and goings, blood traces, broken pottery and other seemingly haphazard bits of information don’t add up to a motive or a suspect. And then another corpse is discovered and chunks of the puzzle start to snap into place.

Reasonably good book, hard to guess, although a reader is led astray pretty often with clues that dead end after a while. I’ve liked other Anne Perry books better than this one but it was cleverly done, even if the emo content verged on the obsessive or maudlin from time to time. Buckingham Palace Gardens is one of Perry’s Charlotte and Thomas Pitt mysteries but Charlotte doesn’t make an appearance. Gracie is good though. I wouldn’t mind another mystery with Gracie reprising her role as sleuth—she’s a great character.

Buckingham Palace Gardens: A Charlotte and Thomas Pitt Novel (Charlotte & Thomas Pitt Novels)   Anne Perry | Ballantine Books  2008

Execution Dock – Anne Perry

Click to buy from Amazon

A discriminating reader I know advised me not to miss Anne Perry’s William Monk Victorian murder mysteries. Good advice. Execution Dock was intricate, wildly descriptive and is set in a world it’s easy to get lost in. Monk has been appointed Commander of the River Police and he is up against old ghosts and present evil that reaches far beyond the dodgy and treacherous waterfront.

The River Police close in on a pornographer and flesh peddler of young boys who operates a brothel of degradation and torture on a pleasure boat on the Thames. One of the boys held captive on the boat has been found badly burned by cigars with his throat cut. Monk snags the killer, Jericho Phillips, but Monk’s testimony and his wife’s about the horrors of Phillips’ trade are picked apart in court and a vicious murderer goes free. As stunning and terrible to the Monks is the tactic of the defense attorney who gets the killer off by attacking the credibility of two of his closest friends—William and Hester Monk.

The sights and smells and dangers of the waterfront are vivid and evocative and the characters in this story are all colorful. There is some very clever work in the first part of the book to throw the reader off the trail and it is well done enough to be really effective. Monk is torn between loyalty to his former commander, who died saving Monk’s life and whom he admired unreservedly, and the urgent necessity to disprove ugly allegations about the man that might be true.

Hester struggles with the day-to-day management of her clinic and the tragic lives of the prostitutes and impoverished Londoners who show up for medical care. She burns at her treatment on the witness stand by a man who once wanted to marry her. She determines to shield Monk from the pain of the revelations his sleuthing threatens to uncover by finding out who is linked to the sex slave business first. And she is meticulously protective of the ‘mudlark’, the young boy who survived by his wits gathering and selling flotsam from the mudflats of the river and who now lives with Hester and William.

Perry takes a fine scalpel to the motives and emotions of the main characters and the glimpse inside their heads is as fascinating as the efforts to catch the killer. Socially prominent people do completely out-of-character things—some admirable, some despicable, some irrationally risky. Wary denizens of the darkest alleys know more than they are willing to tell. Scuff, the Monks’ young charge, becomes a pawn in the deadly game played out on the river. Scurrilous charges begin to make the rounds, attacking William’s and Hester’s reputations and endangering the existence of the rough and tumble River Police unit.

There’s plenty of violence, plenty of fine writing and plenty of juicy plot. I’m adding Monk to my great all-time gumshoe list—but he makes it on there as much for the pleasure of reading about the indomitable Hester.

Execution Dock: A William Monk Novel (William Monk Novels)   Anne Perry | Ballantine Books     2009

Ma Jiang and the Orange Ants – Barbara Ann Porte

Click to find through Amazon

Ma Jiang and the Orange Ants is a sophisticated picture book, written by Barbara Ann Porte and beautifully illustrated by Annie Cannon. It tells the story of a young girl in a traditional peasant family long ago in China and how political circumstances at the time conspire to challenge her cleverness and courage.

Ma Jiang’s family makes a living by selling orange ants—the voracious insect eaters that protect the tender fruit of orange trees from pests. The ants are a kind of natural pesticide and they are fierce enough to bite people who climb to the tops of trees to cut down their nests. Jiang’s older brothers and father collect the ants, her mother weaves the fine rush bags to hold the nests and Jiang helps with selling the orange ants in the market.

But one day all the available men in the community are conscripted by the Emperor’s soldiers and marched off to build the Great Wall. This means disaster for the Ma family—both older brothers and father are gone, leaving only baby Bao, Jiang and her mother. There is no one to catch the ants. The baby is too little and the risky climbing is men’s work. Then an old beekeeper buys some of the rush mats and bags and pays in the only currency he has, honey. And while she is minding Bao, Jiang gets an idea.

How Jiang solves the income dilemma and saves her family from starvation is brilliant and bold. As they begin to prosper, the only sorrow is the continual absence of the conscripted brothers and father. Throughout the story, which is resolved in a very dramatic and satisfying conclusion, the conditions of life in ancient China are presented in a lovely text that is mellifluous when read aloud and would be an interesting challenge for a young reader. The pictures are exquisite—every page is a full scene, edge-to-edge, with plenty of information about the society Jiang lives in.

Ma Jiang and the Orange Ants is a good story, a constructive example of resourcefulness and responsibility, an excellent cultural primer and pure pleasure to read and examine. Children’s books can be small wonders of information and entertainment and this one is a tale to relish.

Ma Jiang & The Orange Ants   Barbara Ann Porte | Orchard Books   2000