Book Review: The Woman in Blue by Elly Griffiths

The Woman in Blue (Ruth Galloway #8)

By Elly Griffiths

Published and Sold by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 6, 2016

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Two and a Half Stars (out of five)

Note: This is the eighth book in a series.  I suppose some of what’s contained in this post could be construed as spoiler-ish if you haven’t read the first seven, though I do not discuss the actual mystery plots of any book besides The Woman in Blue (and do not spoil the resolution).

Hmmm.   So, I usually really like the Ruth Galloway mysteries.  Ruth is an archaeologist whose skills the police put to use on occasion, and since part of me is still a twelve-year-old girl who wants to be an archaeologist when she grows up, they’re right up my ally.  I do not and have never loved the primary “romance” (if that’s what it is) in these books, though I do like that Ruth is a single mother.  Maybe that’s why this book ultimately just didn’t work for me; there’s really no archaeology at all and the personal relationships have a central role to play—and a strange one at that.

The plot centers around two murders and one assault in the town of Walsingham, where there are Anglican and Catholic shrines.  Ruth gets a call from a grad school friend who’s now an Anglican priest right around the same time a young woman receiving treatment at a nearby hospital is murdered.  It turns out that Ruth’s friend, Hilary, has been receiving threatening letters from someone who doesn’t like women priests.  She’s in Walsingham on a conference for women who might want to become bishops, so she and Ruth meet up.  The second murder victim is another priest, a friend of Hilary’s who was also attending the conference.  DCI Nelson has to figure out what, if anything, a cult of the Virgin Mary has to do with the murders and/or the letters.  Also complicating the situation is that Nelson’s wife, Michelle, is assaulted by the murderer—leading to the revelation that she’s been having an affair with Tim, one of Nelson’s assistants.

Clearly, there’s a lot going on here.  Sadly, none of it has anything to do with archaeology, though Griffiths does gesture toward Ruth’s skills by having her dig around in a basement for some old artifacts.  While Ruth finds a clue that ends up being important to the case, she really doesn’t have much to do besides listen to Hilary’s worries and pass the information she learns along to Nelson.  Because of Michelle’s affair, Ruth and Nelson’s always awkward relationship gets even more awkward, and there’s some stuff here that I felt embarrassed to read.  It’s probably realistic, given that Nelson is married to Michelle and he and Ruth have a child together, but yikes!  The longer Griffiths drags that relationship on without some definite “we parent a shared child and nothing else” resolution, the less interested I get in reading these books.

The whole point of this series is supposed to be (I thought) that Ruth helps the police solve crimes by using her archaeology skills, and that didn’t happen here.  For me, this is the weakest entry in the series so far.  If there’s another new entry next year I’m sure I’ll read it, but if it’s not a stronger novel, I’ll no longer rush to read these right after they’re released.

Book Review: The Moonlit Garden by Corina Bomann

The Moonlit Garden

By Corina Bomann (translated by Alison Layland) 
Published by AmazonCrossing and Sold by Amazon Digital Services, February 2016
Free as part of Amazon’s Kindle First program for Prime members 
Link: Amazon 
Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

I enjoyed this book quite a bit.  In fact, it might be my favorite Kindle First selection (certainly my favorite in some time).  It’s the kind of book I tend to enjoy anyway, as it moves back and forth between a present day story and a historical story related to a mystery the present-day characters are trying to solve.  The story begins when Lily Kaiser, a young, widowed antique dealer in present-day Berlin, receives a violin from a mysterious man who tells her it belongs to her.  In the lining, she finds a piece of sheet music, which takes her on a quest to England and then to Sumatra in search of the music’s origins and the reasons why she was given the violin.

The historical plots concern the violin’s two most famous owners, Rose and Helen, both of whom are child prodigies born on Sumatra who go to England for training and later become famous violinists.  Both women’s careers end in tragedy (that’s not a spoiler; we find out very early on), so the story isn’t terribly happy, but it’s certainly engaging.  The Moonlit Garden was a page-turner, in fact, as I followed Lily’s quest to discover what happened to Rose and Helen.

There were, however, a few things that didn’t quite work.  The first concerns the piece of sheet music.  That mystery drives the rest of the plot, but its resolution was unsatisfying.  I also found some other aspects of the book’s ending to be either unbelievable or so predictable that I rolled my eyes.  The writing is, in general, fine.  Bomann keeps up the tension pretty well, and since this is a translation (from German), it’s hard to judge the prose.  However, I was always aware that it’s a translation, insofar as characters’ language choices often didn’t seem natural and a lot of the wording just doesn’t quite “fit.”

What made me enjoy the novel in spite of its weaknesses was the way I came to care for the characters.  I wanted Lily to find out why she got the violin and I wanted to know what exactly happened to Rose and Helen.  I even got mildly interested in the present-day romance plot, once Bomann gave up pushing the “Lily is widowed and needs to learn to love again” plot point.  The relationship happened pretty organically once it got started, and they didn’t rush into a happily ever after ending that may or may not be feasible.  I appreciated that the characters were adults with lives that included romance but didn’t exclude everything else.

  

On the whole The Moonlit Garden isn’t great literature, but it’s fun.

Book Review: Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear

Journey to Munich (Maisie Dobbs #12)

By Jacqueline Winspear

Published by Harper and Sold by HarperCollins, March 29, 2016

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

So, there I was, back to blogging at a faster pace… for awhile.  Then, well, things got busy.  First of all, we had event after event at The New Job.  Then, as I think I’ve mentioned, I’m a pretty active adult recreational musician.  I both sing and play an instrument, and there was a week in there when I had a rehearsal or a performance every night.  Then I got a sinus infection.  So, as you can see, blogging fell by the wayside.  The good news, though, is that I haven’t stopped reading.

One of the books I read in the midst of all the busyness was Jacqueline Winspear’s latest entry in the Maisie Dobbs series.  I really, really like this series.  It’s quite sophisticated and well-written and, on the whole, the characters are much more psychologically complex than those in your average historical mystery series (that’s not a ding at other writers—just a compliment to Winspear).  The early Maisie Dobbs books are set in the 1930s and they explore the ongoing effects of World War I on the British public.  In the first 10 books, Maisie is a private detective whose business takes her all over England and occasionally across the channel.  Book 11, A Dangerous Place is a reboot of sorts; after losing a husband and a pregnancy, Maisie finds herself on Gibralter, where she functions, essentially, as a British spy (as well as having a mission of her own).

Journey to Munich continues the espionage plotline, as Maisie is sent to Munich to recover a British inventor who has been imprisoned by the Nazis for distributing anti-Hitler propaganda.  While there, Maisie also looks for the daughter of her nemesis, John Otterburn.  She runs into trouble with Nazi high command, of course, but she does not give up on either of her missions.

I really enjoyed this book.  A Dangerous Place felt sort of gloomy and weird to me, and I was glad to see Maisie back in action here.  I’m still not sure how I feel about Maisie as a spy, and I miss her interactions with her assistant Billy and receptionist Sandra.  I think there’s potential for Maisie to return to more mundane detecting, though, and this book sets the stage for that to happen while also allowing for the possibility that she’ll still work for the Secret Service from time to time. 

I do think the series has changed fundamentally, and that given its historical setting it almost had to.  World War II was devastating in very different ways from World War I, and Maisie’s social conscience won’t allow her not to be involved in some way.  I hope that as the war progresses, Maisie will use her skills to benefit both her country writ large and individual clients, paying or not, to whom she always been so personally and professionally committed.

Book Review: Habits of the House by Fay Weldon

Habits of the House (Love and Inheritance #1)
By Fay Weldon

Published by St. Martin’s and Sold by Macmillan, 2013
Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle
Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's
Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

Habits of the House is the first of Weldon’s trilogy set at the turn of the twentieth century.  It concerns the plight of the Hedleigh family, including the Earl of Dilberne, his wife Isobel, and their two children, Rosina and Arthur.  In the opening chapter, we learn that family is deeply in debt and that their South African gold mine has been flooded in the Boer War.  Most of the plot concerns the family’s attempt to become financially solvent, and the primary method of recovering their wealth involves Arthur’s marriage to Minnie O’Brian, an American heiress of questionable reputation.  Points of view vary, but we see the Dilberne story primarily through the eyes of Arthur, Minnie, Isobel, and Isobel’s maid Grace, with occasional forays into the minds of the Earl, Rosina, and other servants.

Because it was published at the height of Downton Abbey’s popularity and tells the story of English aristocrats and their servants, comparisons to the TV show are inevitable, and some reviewers have described Weldon’s novel as a Downton knockoff.  I’ll not deny that Weldon capitalized on Downton’s popularity with the timing of this release, but given that she wrote the pilot of Downton’s predecessor Upstairs, Downstairs it’s hard to say she “copied” Downton.

Habits of the House is a quick, enjoyable read.  It’s not psychologically dense; while we get a sense of why they characters act the way they do, the narrative often skims the surface of characters’ feelings and motivations, and Weldon relies to an extent on familiar types.  That is, the Earl is a wastrel aristocrat, and his son is a wastrel aristocrat in the making.  Rosina is a spinster-reformer, too intent on her various causes for her family’s liking.  There’s even an upstart Jewish lawyer on whom the Earl is far too dependent, though Weldon fortunately does not indulge in much stereotyping of Jewish characters.

It probably goes without saying that Weldon is a good writer (she’s been wildly successful for quite some time).  Her prose never bugs, and the pacing of the story is good.  That said, for the first half or so, I found this book rather hard to get in to. The surface-skimming nature of the narrative, alongside Weldon’s use of types, made it difficult to care about the characters.  By the end, though, I wanted to know what happened to Arthur and Minnie, and I had come to care for Minnie—she and her mother might be the only characters in the story allowed psychological complexity.  I’m also curious about Rosina’s fate and Grace’s.  For these reasons, I added the second book in the trilogy to my Wish List, though reading it isn’t really a priority, I’ll admit.

Book Review: The Evening Spider by Emily Arsenault

The Evening Spider

By Emily Arsenault

Published by William Morrow and Sold by HarperCollins, January 2016

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

I enjoyed Arsenault’s latest more than any of her other books.  I haven’t read her first novel, The Broken Teaglass, but I have read the other three (What Strange Creatures, In Search of the Rose Notes, and Miss Me When I’m Gone).  Obviously, I liked each of the above three enough to read the next, but I can’t say I’ve found her books to be must-reads.  In fact, I probably wouldn’t have read Rose Notes or Miss Me had they not been marked way down, and wouldn’t have bought The Evening Spider when I did had it not been on sale for 99 cents.  On the whole, I’d describe Arsenault’s writing as Domestic Suspense.  Her young(ish), female, main characters are usually solving some mystery that directly effects them and their daily lives.  This is fine, but both Rose Notes and Miss Me suffered from flat plots that (too me) petered out, and the resolution to What Strange Creatures was melodramatic enough that it bothered me (also, I guessed the culprit very early on, which always cuts into my enjoyment of a mystery).  But, like I said above, I really enjoyed The Evening Spider.

The story alternates between the present and 1885.  In the present-day story, young mother Abby suspects that her house is haunted and that the ghost is trying to harm her young daughter.  In 1885, Frances, also a relatively new mother, becomes obsessed with a murder that took place near her Connecticut home.  Both stories are told in the first person; Abby’s is a standard first-person narrative, but Frances’s unfolds as she tells her twin brother the story of how she ended up in a mental hospital.  The latter narrative strategy is highly effective.  I really wanted to know what happened to Frances.  So does Abby, who finds Frances’s journal and becomes convinced that her fate is somehow tied to the earlier woman’s.

The story is told in short chapters alternating between Abby’s perspective and Frances’s narrative with, for a while, sections of Frances’s journal.  Short chapters keep it moving and kept me reading, sometimes to the detriment of my sleep schedule.  Since Abby’s story is all about finding out what happens to Frances, we accompany her on her journey—but we know more than she does, which is sometimes frustrating (in a good way—we’re frustrated for Abby, not with Arsenault).  The stakes for Frances are much higher than those for Abby.  While Abby is unsettled by what’s going on in her house, she’s not actually in personal danger from it, and most of the danger Frances is in comes from her historical circumstances.  That is, Frances can end up in a mental hospital because her husband finds her inconvenient, and we know very well that nothing like that is going to happen to Abby.

My one problem with this book is that it doesn’t always seem to recognize that the stakes for Abby just aren’t as high as the stakes for Frances.  Maybe my problem with that is that I have a hard time buying that supernatural forces are an actual danger to anyone, even in fiction, but it does mean that the conclusion of the present-day story is a little underwhelming.  There’s simply nothing to really resolve, while the nineteenth-century story has a satisfying and logical conclusion.  Overall, I enjoyed the book a lot and would recommend it for fans of historical fiction and mysteries.

Book Review: Gone West by Carola Dunn

Gone West (Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher #20)

By Carola Dunn

Published by Minotaur and Sold by Macmillan, 2012

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Three Stars (out of five)

This is one of my favorite series, and I’m glad there are so many of them.  I found them about a year ago and plowed through (I think) the first 17 in less than three months.  Then I realized that there were only a few more, so I’ve been reading one every few months or so since, to prolong the pleasure.  In other words, I learned my lesson from reading all 20 Phryne Fisher books in less than three months in 2014 (Dear Kerry Greenwood: When will Phryne be gracing the page again?  I miss her.  Sincerely, Lauren).

Like most long-running series, this one is a little uneven.  Some of the mysteries are convincingly high-stakes, with lots of tension.  Others are slower and even a little dull.  Most of them are fairly quiet country house murder mysteries, and Daisy finds herself involved in the murders because of her friendliness and compassion.  Gone West definitely falls into the country house category, and I suspect some readers will find it slow; the murder doesn’t happen until around halfway through.  I don’t think Gone West will ever be one of my favorites in the series, but I enjoyed it and was ultimately quite invested in learning who the murderer was. 

In this book, Daisy visits her friend Sybil, who is a secretary turned ghostwriter for an author of Westerns, at her employer’s remote home in Derbyshire.  Because the author, Humphrey Birtwhistle, can’t seem to recover from a bout of pneumonia, Sybil is afraid someone is slowly poisoning him and asks Daisy to investigate.  When Humphrey dies suddenly, the eccentric relatives and friends who make up his household are all suspects in his murder.  Of course, Daisy’s husband Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher is called in to investigate, and he brings along his trusty subordinates DS Tring and DC Piper.

Overall, the mystery was enjoyable.  I did care who killed Humphrey, and I particularly wanted Sybil and her paramour, a local doctor, to be innocent.  I had my suspicions about the murderer, but it wasn’t obvious, so Dunn gets points from me for a logical but suspenseful progression of events.  The book is a bit slow—it takes an awfully long time for the murder to happen—and a few of the obstacles to solving the crime are rather artificial (a suspect can’t be located, papers take a long time to go through, etc.).  These are not fatal flaws, though.

If this series has a problem, it’s that it’s getting harder and harder to explain why Daisy is always at crime scenes.  I think Dunn is aware of this, as Alec’s superiors have noticed her frequent involvement and complain about it, but metafictional self-awareness only goes so far (not an English major, you say?  Look it up, say I).  In isolation, Gone West does a good job of this—Sybil is an old friend of Daisy’s who has heard about her sleuthing ways—but how many friends of murder victims can one person know?  However, given how much pleasure I get out of these books I’m willing to continue suspending disbelief if it means I get more books. 

Book Review: Princess Elizabeth's Spy by Susan Elia MacNeal

Princess Elizabeth’s Spy (Maggie Hope Mysteries #2)

By Susan Elia MacNeal

Published by Bantam and Sold by Random House, 2012

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Two Stars (out of five)

So, it’s been over two months since I last posted.  They’ve been busy months, dear readers (if I have any).  For in these two months I have started a new job (yay!) and moved into a new house (yay!).  Now that things have settled down a little bit, I’m back to reading quite a bit and hopefully back to blogging regularly.  I won’t preface this with any more personal details and will instead jump right in to the book review.

Princess Elizabeth’s Spy is the second in MacNeal’s Maggie Hope series.  I read the first one a little over a year ago, and at the time I didn’t think I’d read any more of them (more on why below).  But when the second book was marked down a few months ago, I thought “why not?  Maybe it’s better than the first.”  You see, I really wanted to like these books.  They have a spunky heroine who was raised in the US but lives in England, are set during World War Two, and are mysteries.  From the jacket copy, I should like them.  But I have to say, I have found both books unconvincing and, to top it off, the prose ranges between flat and stilted.  This time, I probably won’t read any more in the series, Kindle sale or not.

In Princess Elizabeth’s Spy, Maggie, after failing the physical portions of MI-5 (or possibly SOE) training is sent to Windsor Castle to keep an eye on Princess Elizabeth (yes, the present Queen).  Her cover is that she’s the Princess’s math tutor.  The reason the princess needs a protector is that there are rumors of a plot to kidnap her and therefore to destabilize the English succession, making the German path to Occupation easier.

There are a number of problems with this plot, as you can probably tell even from my brief description.  The biggest one is, of course, the Princess Margaret, who would have been the rightful heir to the throne had anything happened to Elizabeth.  To really destabilize the succession, you’d have to do away with both Princesses, something the book never addresses.  For me, there was also a major verisimilitude issue.  I just didn’t believe that this was something that could have happened without it having out some time in the past seventy years.  I realize that fiction is, well, fiction, but good writing convinces readers that events in the story could have happened.  This is very difficult with fiction that involves major historical figures from the twentieth century or later—it’s hard to find and fictionally plug a hole in the historical record without readers going “huh?”.

My other problem has to do with Maggie herself.  In both the this book and the first one, Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, she turns out to be very wrong in her conclusions about who the culprit is in the murders and/or government plots she’s investigating.  Her wrongness leads to dramatic climaxes, but ultimately she solves the mysteries largely by chance (or someone else solves it and she goes along for the ride).  She’s supposed to be brilliant, but it’s hard to buy that she has extraordinary reasoning skills when her reasoning so often leads her astray.  She can also be really annoying, and readers are just supposed to buy that, for example, a low-level operative can successfully dictate to the head of MI-5 who her handler will be.  I didn’t, and at times I found her “spunk” to be, well, kind of silly, immature, and possibly dangerous.

I’ll leave it there.  I already mentioned the lack of panache in the prose, and I don’t feel a need to hammer the point home.  I’ll just say that a good mystery makes the reader believe that something real is at stake and that it’s the sleuth’s job to find it out and make things right, and this book did not do that for me, hence the two star rating.