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.