Publisher: Soho Crime

Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
Grade A #AudioBookReview: The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ RozanThe Railway Conspiracy (Dee & Lao, #2) by John Shen Yen Nee, S.J. Rozan
Narrator: Daniel York Loh
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Dee & Lao #2
Pages: 304
Length: 8 hours and 25 minutes
Published by Recorded Books, Soho Crime on April 1, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Judge Dee and Lao She must use all their powers of deduction—and kung fu skills—to take down a sinister conspiracy between Imperial Russia, Japan, and China in a rollicking new mystery set in 1920s London.
The follow-up to The Murder of Mr. Ma, this historical adventure-mystery is perfect for fans of Laurie R. King and the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films.
London, 1924. Following several months abroad, Judge Dee Ren Jie has returned to the city to foil a transaction between a Russian diplomat and a Japanese mercenary. Aided by Lao She—the Watson to his Holmes—along with several other colorful characters, Dee stops the illicit sale of an extremely valuable “dragon-taming” mace.
The mace’s owner is a Chinese businesswoman who thanks Dee for its retrieval by throwing a lavish dinner party. In attendance is British banking official A. G. Stephen, who argues with the group about the tenuous state of Chinese nationalism—and is poisoned two days later. Dee knows this cannot be a coincidence, and suspects Stephen won’t be the only victim. Sure enough, a young Chinese communist of Lao’s acquaintance is killed not long after—and a note with a strange symbol is found by his body.
What could connect these murders? Could it be related to rumors of a conspiracy regarding the Chinese Eastern Railway? It is once again all on the unlikely crime-solving duo of Dee and Lao to solve the case before anyone else ends up tied to the rails.

My Review:

I was completely enthralled by the first book in the Dee & Lao series, The Murder of Mr. Ma, and have been hoping for a second since the minute I turned the very last page of that first. So I was more than pleased to see this second book appear – even if finishing it has returned me to my earlier state, now hoping for a third book to be published.

Because this second adventure was every bit as marvelous as the first – and in some ways better as we already know these characters but now have the opportunity to plumb their hidden – and sometimes not so hidden – depths.

This second of Dee and Lao’s adventures is set in 1924 London. Both characters are based on real historical figures. Lao’s background and current profession were historically as the series portrays him. From 1924 until 1929, he was a lecturer at the University of London on the subjects of Chinese language and literature. Whether his students were as frustrating, and whether Lao himself was as utterly bored out of his mind as he is portrayed in the story, is not certain, but they certainly leave the fictional Lao ripe to be carried along in Dee’s adventures.

Spring Heeled Jack as depicted in the English penny dreadful Spring-Heeled Jack #2, Aldine Publishing, 1904.

Dee Ren Jie is as much myth as he is historical, but the historical Dee was a magistrate in late 7th century China. How much the historical Dee resembles this fictional interpretation is unknown, but I think it’s safe to say that the original Dee never masqueraded as the English folk hero/demon Spring-heeled Jack – as Lao’s friend Dee often does.

The story combines these bits of history with a compelling, confounding mystery, as all the best historical mysteries do.

Dee has returned to London after a year’s absence as an agent of the then-current Nationalist government in China. But that government is shaky at best. There are movements within China, including but not limited to the Communist Party, to bring the Nationalist government down. And there are forces outside China, great and would-be great powers far from limited to Britain, Russia, Japan and the United States, observing and even influencing events hoping that to destabilize the Nationalist regime so that they can pick up the pieces.

Which is where Dee and Lao and their associates, the redoubtable Sergeant Hoong and young English pickpocket Jimmy Fingers come into this tale, which begins with the return of a precious stolen artifact, middles in a great deal of romantic misdirection practiced successfully upon the supposedly impervious Dee, and concludes with an explosive confrontation on the London Necropolis Railway. (The Necropolis Railway is another bit of history that seems like it must be fiction, but it did really exist!)

When the dust settles, and there’s LOTS of it to settle, the immediate crisis – at least the London branch of it – is over. Dee is left realizing that he’s been a fool. And that while this crisis has been ameliorated it has absolutely not been averted – but that the fight will take him to other shores in other guises. In addition to making a fool out of him, the conspiracy has also made him their scapegoat, and London has become much too hot for him – at least as long as he continues to present himself as, well, himself.

So poor Lao is stuck returning to the boredom of his academic existence, while the country he left behind and plans to return to, is in jeopardy from all sides – including the one that he himself espouses.

It all sounds ripe for another book, doesn’t it? I certainly hope so!

Escape Rating A: I loved this even more than I did the first book, The Murder of Mr. Ma, which means that I need to give another shoutout to First Clue Reviews for their featured review of that first book.

One of the reasons I liked this better leads around and back to the other reason I got into this series. Many of the reviews of Dee & Lao liken them to Sherlock Holmes, especially the more active Guy Ritchie movie interpretations. While I think that is debatable, one way in which Dee & Lao are certainly like Holmes and Watson (and also Barker & Llewelyn) is that Lao serves as Dee’s chronicler as Watson does Holmes, with the same amount of reluctance to participate in the process on the parts of both Dee and Holmes.

Which means that this story is told in Lao’s first person voice. This is his interpretation – with the occasional use of a bit of literary license – of the events. In that regard, the narrator Daniel York Loh does a terrific job of interpreting Lao’s voice, to the point that when I ended up reading the last part of the book because I needed to find out who the true leader of the conspiracy is and how all the issues and conundrums got resolved – I was still hearing Loh’s voice in my head speaking as Lao.

I couldn’t put this one down because of how effectively it combined the pure whodunnit of the theft and murder conspiracy in London with the depth of historical setting and situation that lay behind it and the increasing knowledge of and bond between the characters, this most unlikely band of ‘scoobies’ that includes a government official, a merchant, a scholar, a pickpocket and has increased by the addition of a knife thrower and a dog. Dee pretends they are a circus act and he’s not far wrong in some aspects, but if it is it’s a circus that manifests a well of competence and an ability to improvise on the spot and roll with the punches.

And not just the punches they are administering themselves.

This reader, at least, is already anticipating Dee and Lao’s next adventure. It’s sure to be another fantastic read. After all, thanks to the conspiracy it’s going to have to start with Dee coming back from the dead!

A- #BookReview: The Comfort of Ghosts by Jacqueline Winspear

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Comfort of Ghosts by Jacqueline WinspearThe Comfort of Ghosts (Maisie Dobbs, #18) by Jacqueline Winspear
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, World War II
Series: Maisie Dobbs #18
Pages: 361
Published by Soho Crime on June 4, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A milestone in historical mystery fiction as Maisie Dobbs takes her final bow!
Psychologist and investigator Maisie Dobbs unravels a profound mystery from her past in a war-torn nation grappling with its future.
London, 1945: Four adolescent orphans with a dark wartime history are squatting in a vacant Belgravia mansion—the owners having fled London under heavy Luftwaffe bombing. Soon after a demobilized British soldier, ill and reeling from his experiences overseas, takes shelter with the group, Maisie Dobbs visits the mansion on behalf of the owners.
Maisie is deeply puzzled by the children's reticence. Their stories are evasive and, more mysteriously, they appear to possess self-defense skills one might expect of trained adults in wartime. Her quest to bring comfort and the promise of a future to the youngsters and to the ailing soldier brings to light a decades-old mystery concerning Maisie’s first husband, James Compton, who was killed while piloting an experimental aircraft. As Maisie picks apart the threads of her dead husband’s life, she is forced to examine her own painful past and question beliefs she has always accepted as true.
The award-winning Maisie Dobbs series has garnered hundreds of thousands of followers around the world, readers who are drawn to a woman who is of her time, yet familiar in ours—and who inspires with her resilience and capacity for endurance at the worst of times. This final assignment of her own choosing not only opens a new future for Maisie Dobbs and her family, but serves as a fascinating portrayal of the challenges facing the people of Britain at the close of the Second World War.
Over seventeen previous books in the Maisie Dobbs series, hundreds of thousands of readers worldwide have fallen in love with this fearless, compassionate woman—this final adventure not only ties up all Maisie’s loose ends, but also serves as a fascinating portrayal of life in Great Britain after the close of the second World War.

My Review:

As seems fitting for this final book in the Maisie Dobbs series, A Comfort of Ghosts begins with an ending. One of the towering – literally as he was quite tall – secondary figures in this long-running series, Lord Julian Compton, originally Maisie’s employer, once-upon-a-time her father-in-law, later and last her friend, has died, Leaving Maisie to mourn, to comfort his widow, to be the executor of his estate and to clean up his last act in the late war.

Sending a group of young squatters to her empty house in London, to protect some of Britain’s most hidden and secretive wartime operatives from a false charge of murder. They are a loose end, and entirely too many ‘boffins’ in the war offices have become so accustomed to death being the only tool in their toolbox to take care of such loose ends that they are willing to send four adolescents to the hangman for a crime that wasn’t really a crime that they had the misfortune to witness.

This final story of Maisie’s adventures shows her doing what she has always done best – discovering a problem and getting to the bottom of a situation that someone doesn’t want to be found while protecting as many innocents – and even some of the guilty – along the way.

That, in the middle of this investigation she has the opportunity to finally lay to rest the ghosts of her own past as well as bring her dearest friend back from the brink of disaster and help not one but two dear and deeply scarred veterans out of their very own pits of despair while searching for yet one more complicated truth hidden behind a scrim of convenient lies makes The Comfort of Ghosts, and the solace that Maisie has finally learned to take from her own, a perfect ending to the series.

Escape Rating A-: This story closes all the circles that were opened back in the very first book in this series, the titular Maisie Dobbs, finds all the dangling threads that have been left hanging through the course of EIGHTEEN BOOKS, and ties each and every one of them off. So it’s a book about endings.

At the same time, because of its setting, it’s also a book about beginnings. The series began in the years just before the opening of the ‘Great War’, when young Maisie became an under-housemaid in the household of Lord Compton at the age of thirteen. Maisie’s midnight raids of the great house’s great library were discovered by the mistress of the house, Lady Rowan Compton, and Maisie’s life took a different direction than it otherwise might, leading to all of the marvelous if sometimes fraught adventures and heartbreaks of the series.

But this story takes place in 1945. The second World War has just ended, the recovery and reconstruction has barely begun. Britain is no longer the seat of empire, and the U.S. – and Russia – have taken center stage as a new thing – superpowers.

Maisie and her generation of friends and frenemies are middle aged or older, retiring, returning to home and hearth, or lying dead on a battlefield from one war or the other. This last story, this reckoning of all her accounts, is her swansong.

Which is a hint and a half not to start the series here. It’s not necessary to real all of the previous 17 books to get into this one – I have a few I never got around to but probably will eventually – but this story has so much more resonance if you’ve read at least some and have gotten to know Maisie’s circle of friends and colleagues and contacts and the myriad ways that their lives have become interconnected over the decades.

For those, like this reader, who have gotten to know Maisie over the years and books, this story is a bittersweet delight. It also feels right that Maisie leave the stage at this historical juncture, as the world she knew is not the world that is to come – as we know and as hints are shown in the story.

But, in that desire to get every thread tied off with a neat bow and foreshadow the changes in the world as it will be, it may have lingered just a bit too long and found a way to tie that last bow just a bit too coincidentally. Your reading mileage may vary.

Still and absolutely all, a marvelous and utterly fitting ending to a captivating series, leaving this reader with both that smile because it happened and a tear or two because it ended.

A- #AudioBookReview: The Murder of Mr. Ma by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> audio reviews> audiobooks> book reviews
A- #AudioBookReview: The Murder of Mr. Ma by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ RozanThe Murder of Mr. Ma (Dee & Lao, #1) by John Shen Yen Nee, S.J. Rozan
Narrator: Daniel York Loh
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Series: Dee & Lao #1
Pages: 312
Length: 8 hours and 24 minutes
Published by Recorded Books, Soho Crime on April 2, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

For fans of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films, this stunning, swashbuckling series opener by a powerhouse duo of authors is at once comfortingly familiar and tantalizingly new.
Two unlikely allies race through the cobbled streets of 1920s London in search of a killer targeting Chinese immigrants.
London, 1924. When shy academic Lao She meets larger-than-life Judge Dee Ren Jie, his life abruptly turns from books and lectures to daring chases and narrow escapes. Dee has come to London to investigate the murder of a man he’d known during World War I when serving with the Chinese Labour Corps. No sooner has Dee interviewed the grieving widow than another dead body turns up. Then another. All stabbed to death withg a butterfly sword. Will Dee and Lao be able to connect the threads of the murders—or are they next in line as victims?
John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan’s groundbreaking collaboration blends traditional gong'an crime fiction and the most iconic aspects of the Sherlock Holmes canon. Dee and Lao encounter the aristocracy and the street-child telegraph, churchmen and thieves in this clever, cinematic mystery that’s as thrilling and visual as an action film, as imaginative and transporting as a timeless classic.

My Review:

It can be considered both sad and ironic that Ma Ze Ren had left his native China in pursuit of fortune and adventure among the Chinese Labour Corps in the trenches of World War I, survived, immigrated to London and opened a successful shop dealing in Chinese antiquities – having seemingly attained all that he had originally sought – only to be killed in the midst of his shop by means of one of those self-same antiquities he intended to sell.

When they both served in the Labour Corps, Ma Ze Ren and several of his compatriots had come to an agreement with the man who served as the liaison between the Chinese Labour Corps members and the British officers who used them as cannon fodder, Judge Dee Ren Jie, that Dee would make arrangements to send their bodies back home if the chances of war required such service.

The war may be long over when this story opens in 1924, but that contract still holds Judge Dee, so he has come to London to take care of Ma’s final arrangements. But before he can even begin, Dee is taken up in the midst of a labor riot along with other Chinese men protesting for fair wages and treatment in a city that considers them something less than fully human.

Which is where the chronicler of this tale, scholar and author Lao She, comes into the tale. Dee needs to be out of jail before an enemy realizes that he has this nemesis in his clutches. Bertrand Russell wishes to help his friend Dee without getting his own name attached to this scandalous business.

And Lao She is bored out of his mind – even if he is unwilling to admit it to himself – spending his days teaching Chinese language and literature to students who have no love or care for the language or the people who speak it, merely a desire to get a leg up on their fellows in the commercial opportunities opening up in a modernized China.

Lao is supposed to be clandestinely exchanged for Dee – but Lao gives away the game with every move he makes and every word he’s not supposed to be uttering. So a prison break it is, with Lao, Dee and Russell scattering along with the rest of the prisoners.

But Dee still has a mission, Lao has acquitted himself well in the melee and has acquired a taste for danger and adventure he never realized blazed within him. Reluctant partners, resistant friends, together they will uncover not one but two murder plots in a fascinating tale that takes readers from the homes of the intelligentsia to the alleys of Limehouse – with a stop among the pioneers of the silver screen along the heights and depths of its way – only to arrive frantic and breathless at one of the first principles in any investigation:

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Escape Rating A-: The Murder of Mr. Ma was the highlighted review in the online mystery/crime review newsletter First Clue several months ago, and something about that review caught my attention and held it more than long enough for me to mark the title in Edelweiss as “Highly Anticipated” and immediately grab it when my anticipation was rewarded with the availability of an eARC and later an early audiobook.

(The above is a hint. If you love mysteries, subscribe to First Clue!)

The comparison in many reviews of this book are to Holmes and Watson, particularly the Holmes played by Robert Downey Jr. in the Guy Ritchie movies – because that particular version of Holmes is considerably more active than most.

As has been confessed before, I am a sucker for a Holmes pastiche, so I would have been interested in this book on that basis alone, but I think that quick comparison sells Dee and Lao and The Murder of Mr. Ma a bit short in this particular instance.

There is a surface resemblance in that Dee is the more active and experienced investigator – with or without resorting to the martial arts – while Lao, like Watson, is the newbie at this particular game and is tasked with creating a record of the adventure rather than necessarily figuring out the solution on his own. And if this combination appeals, Barker & Llewelyn are a bit closer analog than Holmes and Watson in more ways than the initially obvious.

What takes this story up another notch or ten is that both Dee and Lao were real historical figures – who never met due to having lived centuries apart. But Lao was a Chinese scholar in London during this period in real life, while Dee was a figure out of legend whose adventures were popularized by Robert van Gulik in the mid-20th century. (So if you think Dee’s name sounds familiar, that’s most likely the reason.)

Of course, what makes any mystery is the way the case itself is laid out and investigated, and that’s where this one draws the reader in its whirlwind every bit as much as Dee pulls Lao along in his wake. Because at first it seems as if the murder was a result of the prejudice and anti-Chinese sentiment that Dee, Lao and their countrymen face on every side in London in 1924, not helped at all by the popular “Yellow Peril” movies that play on and sensationalize the British fear of “the other”.

But the more Dee and Lao, with the able assistance and frequent succor of Dee’s friend Hoong, search for clues and motives, the less that simple but terrible conclusion feels like the entirety of the answer – not that it doesn’t underlay that answer but it’s just not the whole of the thing. Particularly as that answer is made even more elusive by Lao’s struggles with his pride and his naivete, and Dee’s ongoing attempts to extract himself from his opium addiction.

This is a mystery with layers surrounding layers, wheels within wheels, two investigators neither of whom are having their best day and criminals whose overweening pride finally gets in their way. And it’s marvelous.

The audiobook, narrated by Daniel York Loh,  was a delight, but as is so often the case, I switched to text near the end because I couldn’t figure it out either and I just HAD to know. I have two and only two quibbles with the whole thing. I REALLY wanted Lao to get over his mooning over his landlady’s daughter because it was obvious from the beginning that he was deluding himself about his prospects and almost willfully blind to the obvious. His vain hopes and how thoroughly they were going to be dashed took a lot of audio time. My other quibble – a much bigger one – is that the short story that introduced this fascinating pair “The Killing of Henry Davenport” in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine does not appear to be available online, and that there’s no second book firmly fixed on the horizon. Dee’s and Lao’s investigations NEED to be a series. So much. So very much.

Which means that I leave this review pleased that Lao finally let himself get hit with the clue-by-four regarding Miss Wendell, and that rumors of a second book leave me with hope on that front as well.

Review: A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: A Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima RaoA Disappearance in Fiji by Nilima Rao
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery
Pages: 288
Published by Soho Crime on June 6, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

A charming and atmospheric debut mystery featuring a 25-year-old Indian police sergeant investigating a missing persons case in colonial Fiji
1914, Fiji: Akal Singh would rather be anywhere but this tropical paradise—or, as he calls it, “this godforsaken island.” After a promising start to his police career in his native India and Hong Kong, Akal has been sent to Fiji as punishment for a humiliating professional mistake. Lonely and grumpy, Akal plods through his work and dreams of getting back to Hong Kong.
When an indentured Indian woman goes missing from a sugarcane plantation and Fiji’s newspapers scream “kidnapping,” the inspector-general reluctantly assigns Akal the case, giving him strict instructions to view this investigation as nothing more than cursory. Akal, eager to achieve redemption, agrees—but soon finds himself far more invested than he could have expected.
Now not only is he investigating a disappearance, but also confronting the brutal realities of the indentured workers’ existence and the racism of the British colonizers in Fiji—along with his own thorny notions of personhood and caste. Early interrogations of the white plantation owners, Indian indentured laborers, and native Fijians yield only one conclusion: there is far more to this case than meets the eye.
Nilima Rao’s sparkling debut mystery offers an unflinching look at the evils of colonialism, even as it brims with wit, vibrant characters, and fascinating historical detail.

My Review:

If, as Shakespeare put it, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” does it then follow that an injustice by any other name would smell every bit as foul?

From a certain perspective, that’s the dilemma before Sergeant Akal Singh, a Sikh police officer posted more or less in exile in Fiji after a humiliating professional mistake – a mistake made all that much more heinous by the racial and caste barriers imposed by the British Raj. Even though the Great War that will bring the Raj crashing down has already begun.

Everyone in the police service knows just how Akal screwed up his trusted and cushy posting in Hong Kong. He let himself be led astray by a white British woman who only befriended him in order to get inside information on the security arrangements of the rich and famous in the Crown Colony. While nothing more than conversation EVER happened, simply talking with a white woman was enough to get Akal censured if not fired. That the conversation resulted in several successful burglaries before he finally got wise nearly put paid to his entire career.

But exile in Fiji proved to be a bitter sentence for Akal. His new superior neither trusts him nor wants him, so Akal gets the worst cases, the ones that are both trivial and unsolvable. Which only makes the situation worse as then the officer can claim that he is ineffective as well. (Anyone who has not faced this type of downward spiral in a job is to be envied, but Akal, alone, far from home and already beating himself up over just how easily he was taken advantage of, is in a particularly bad place.)

Then it gets worse. As the only Indian officer in Fiji, Akal is pressed into appearing at a reception for a visiting group of officials who are looking into the working and living conditions of Indian indentured laborers on the sugarcane fields of Fiji. His supervisor orders him to pacify his fellow countrymen on a subject that no one should be pacified about.

Unsurprisingly, he fails, and gets himself ordered to travel to the sugarcane plantations to investigate a possible kidnapping on one of the most remote plantations. Again, he’s supposed to quite literally whitewash any accusations of kidnapping and put the kibosh on any further investigations of the terrible conditions at the plantations.

Conditions that everyone knows about but that no one wants to disrupt. The money the plantations bring to the island is everyone’s economic lifeblood. And no one cares about a few lazy, complaining workers, not when the alternative is cutting off the money spigot that flows into seemingly everyone’s pocket in one way or another.

Akal knows that if he carries out his orders, he’ll be well on his way to ending his exile in Fiji. But once he’s seen the conditions on the plantation – he can’t unsee. And he can’t unknow that the whitewashed report he’s been ordered to write is an injustice that will spread its stink all over him for the rest of his life.

Escape Rating A: This story has three threads to pull – or perhaps that should be three threads that absolutely do pull at the reader. Or at least this reader, because I was certainly hooked from the very beginning and only got further woven in as the story went along.

First, and the reason I picked this up in the first place, is that it is a historical mystery, set in a time period well before the internet or cell phones or, most particularly in this instance, even late 20th century forensics. Akal is on his own with this case, all he has to go by are his wits, his knowledge of human nature, and his willingness to stick his neck out because he can’t stand to see the guilty go unpunished.

Which is very much where that second thread comes in, as this mystery is deeply interwoven in historical fiction. Not just because A Disappearance in Fiji takes place in 1914, just after the opening salvos in World War I have been fired, but because it takes place in a time and place and from a perspective on that history that Western readers will not be familiar with. But which frequently sounds all too familiar in its details AND its depravity.

What brings that history to life is the point of view of Akal Singh himself, as he is both forced to see the terrible conditions under which people just like him – or at least just like him as far as the white plantation owners and overseers view him – live and work. It’s both a view that he has tried his best to ignore – as many people have and do – as well as a reckoning with the notion of what the words “my people” means to him far away from home and in the midst of a society to which he can never truly belong.

Which leads directly to the third thread of this tapestry, that Akal Singh must decide not merely between obedience to his superiors vs. a measure of justice for his people and against the people who have virtually enslaved them – a justice that he already knows no one will allow him to truly bring. But also the question of doing what is right vs. doing what is easy.

It would be easy to sweep the crimes that he has discovered under a very large and bloody rug. It’s an act that would even profit him in the long run, make his career path much smoother and possibly lead him back to cosmopolitan Hong Kong. His mother might even approve!

But the right thing to do will have costs that he already knows he will pay for the rest of his life. Even if it is the act that his father will approve of, although it will most certainly continue his exile.

Staying in Fiji is the least of the price he will have to pay. But if it leads to more mysteries featuring this thoughtful, conflicted and fascinating detective, this reader, at least, is all for it!

Review: Midnight Water City by Chris McKinney

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews
Review: Midnight Water City by Chris McKinneyMidnight, Water City (Water City, #1) by Chris McKinney
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, noir, post apocalyptic, science fiction, thriller
Series: Water City #1
Pages: 305
Published by Soho Crime on July 13, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Hawai‘i author Chris McKinney’s first entry in a brilliant new sci-fi noir trilogy explores the sordid past of a murdered scientist, deified in death, through the eyes of a man who once committed unspeakable crimes for her.
Year 2142: Earth is forty years past a near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-seki. Akira Kimura, the scientist responsible for eliminating the threat, has reached heights of celebrity approaching deification. But now, Akira feels her safety is under threat, so after years without contact, she reaches out to her former head of security, who has since become a police detective.
When he arrives at her deep-sea home and finds Akira methodically dismembered, this detective will risk everything—his career, his family, even his own life—and delve back into his shared past with Akira to find her killer. With a rich, cinematic voice and burning cynicism, Midnight, Water City is both a thrilling neo-noir procedural and a stunning exploration of research, class, climate change, the cult of personality, and the dark sacrifices we are willing to make in the name of progress.

My Review:

When Chicken Little claimed that the sky was falling, that chicken faced a LOT of skeptics – and rightfully so. When the irascible, charismatic, genius Akira Kimura claimed pretty much the same things at the end of the 21st century, the science behind her claim was just a bit more complicated.

Not that there still weren’t PLENTY of skeptics. That’s human nature – especially in the face of a world-ending catastrophe that is still years away.

But Kimura had a stellar scientific reputation to bolster her claim. More importantly, even as she proclaimed that the world was about to end, she also claimed to have the solution. So governments and corporations threw money and power at her so that she could save the world from an onrushing meteor.

She did save the world. Forty years later, Earth is a much better place than it was before its near-collision with the asteroid Sessho-Seki. As much fun and excitement as stories about preventing disasters and saving the world can be, this is not that kind of story.

Midnight, Water City is a story about reckoning with that event, and with the downright iconography and deification that has grown up around the mysterious and reclusive Akira Kimura. It’s about the fixing of the blame for the collateral damage, and the settling of the grievances that resulted from that damage.

Someone has murdered the scientist who beat back the asteroid, the “Savior” of humanity. It’s up to her last, best friend to solve the crime, or die trying.

He’s not sure that he cares either way.

Escape Rating A: In the beginning, Midnight, Water City reminded me a whole helluva lot of Titanium Noir. Both stories have similar, post-apocalyptic settings, half-ruined ecologies, and are wrapped around the axle of a gritty murder with higher emotional stakes than their noir-ish detectives want to admit.

And I should have listened to my assumptions a bit more carefully, because Midnight, Water City takes all of that and then peels back the past of its world, its victim and especially its protagonist to reveal that a heaping helping of what we thought we knew at the beginning – and what that protagonist thought he knew at that same beginning – was a toxic stew of lies and manipulations, shaken AND stirred with implements of self-deception and a very selective memory.

We never learn the name of that gritty detective, and that’s appropriate. He never did think he really mattered. And it’s entirely possible that he still doesn’t. He’s always been a tool, putty in the hands of anyone who feeds his need to be appreciated and needed. Even to the point of letting himself be used.

His self-destructive, slapdash investigation of Akira Kimura’s grisly death forces him to look back at their joined past to figure out who might have had a reason to kill her in the here and now. Which leads him to an examination of all the things he did back in the there and then to keep her alive and support her work to save their world.

He’s been able to live with himself and his actions because he always believed that he was serving a ‘Greater Good’, that she was making the omelets and his job was to break the necessary eggs.

What made this story and setting so damn fascinating was that the detective’s walk through very dark places in his past and Kimura’s leads both the protagonist and the reader to questions about what he was truly serving and why he was chosen to serve it. Questions about the difference between something being right and something being true – and which is the one that lets you sleep at night.

A question that will hopefully be answered in the subsequent books of the Water City Trilogy. Eventide, Water City is coming in July. I’m looking forward to some answers – along with even more fascinating questions!

Review: Death on a Winter Stroll by Francine Mathews

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A+ Reviews> blog tours> book reviews
Review: Death on a Winter Stroll by Francine MathewsDeath on a Winter Stroll (Merry Folger #7) by Francine Mathews
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: holiday fiction, mystery
Series: Merry Folger Nantucket Mystery #1
Pages: 288
Published by Soho Crime on November 1, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

No-nonsense Nantucket detective Merry Folger grapples with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and two murders as the island is overtaken by Hollywood stars and DC suits.

Nantucket Police Chief Meredith Folger is acutely conscious of the stress COVID-19 has placed on the community she loves. Although the island has proved a refuge for many during the pandemic, the cost to Nantucket has been high. Merry hopes that the Christmas Stroll, one of Nantucket’s favorite traditions, in which Main Street is transformed into a winter wonderland, will lift the island’s spirits. But the arrival of a large-scale TV production, and the Secretary of State and her family, complicates matters significantly.

The TV shoot is plagued with problems from within, as a shady, power-hungry producer clashes with strong-willed actors. Across Nantucket, the Secretary’s troubled stepson keeps shaking off his security detail to visit a dilapidated house near conservation land, where an intriguing recluse guards secrets of her own. With all parties overly conscious of spending too much time in the public eye and secrets swirling around both camps, it is difficult to parse what behavior is suspicious or not—until the bodies turn up.

Now, it’s up to Merry and Detective Howie Seitz to find a connection between two seemingly unconnected murders and catch the killer. But when everyone has a motive, and half of the suspects are politicians and actors, how can Merry and Howie tell fact from fiction?

This latest installment in critically acclaimed author Francine Mathews’ Merry Folger series is an immersive escape to festive Nantucket, a poignant exploration of grief as a result of parental absence, and a delicious new mystery to keep you guessing.

My Review:

The Nantucket Stroll sounds like a lovely holiday tradition. Setting this mystery at the time of the 2021 Stroll, just after the President’s own traditional visit with his family, the first visit and first ‘regular’ Stroll as everyone hopes the worst of COVID has passed grounds the mystery into the here and and the now.

(No, the President, whose identity is screamingly obvious – and also quite real as he and his family did visit Nantucket for the 2021 Stroll and do have a family tradition of attending – is not an actual part of this story. But the Secretary of State, who is very much and very obviously fictional – certainly does.)

After the President and his Secret Service detail leave the island, Police Chief Folger faces not one but two invasions. There’s the Secretary of State, her husband, his restless, shiftless adult child of a son, the Secretary’s security detail, her staff, her childhood on the island and her husband’s big ego and bad memories of the place.

Pretending that they are on the island for a happy family vacation is just a bit of a stretch.

Then there’s the even bigger incursion from Hollywood filming a direct-to-streaming TV series on the sprawling estate of THE local tech billionaire. Between the director, the co-stars, the producer and chief financial backer and all the other members of the cast and crew – not to mention their egos and outsized personalities, the horde at the property known as Ingrid’s Gift is even bigger than the gang that SecState brought home with her.

Not that all is exactly well in either of the invading “armies” but their problems are not Merry’s problem – at least not until the first dead body turns up, with links to more of the visitors in both parties than could possibly be explained by the long arm of coincidence.

Which Police Chief Folger, being a very good cop, does not believe in. At all.

Escape Rating A+: In spite of its small-town setting, Death on a Winter Stroll is not a cozy mystery, even though it’s a setup that could easily lend itself to one. But Merry Folger isn’t a cozy sort of person – and I like her a lot for that – and the murders she has to solve, at least in this outing – are far, far from cozy. Not so much the murders themselves – as cozies manage to cozy up all sorts of ways that people shuffle off this mortal buffalo. But the motives for these murders and the slime that is revealed in their investigation are simply not the stuff of which cozies are made.

But if you like your murder mysteries seasoned with the nitty-gritty of real life and real people – even really disgusting people – Death on a Winter Stroll is absolutely excellent. And Merry Folger is a terrific avatar for competence porn. She’s very human – not superhuman – but she’s extremely good at her job and not afraid to display it – especially to people who think she’s less-than because she’s relatively young, because she’s a woman, because she’s a small-town police chief and not a big city cop or federal agent – or just because they’re assholes used to throwing around their power and privilege.

Death on a Winter Stroll turned out to be a one-sitting read for me, I sunk right into it and didn’t emerge until I was done three hours later. I was completely absorbed in the mystery, the setting and the characters, and didn’t feel like I was missing anything at all, in spite of this book being book SEVEN in an ongoing series that began with Death in the Off-Season. Whether it’s because this is the first post-pandemic book in the series, or whether the author is just that good at keeping things self-contained, I got what I needed about Merry’s past – including the loss of her grandfather to the pandemic – without having read the previous books.

Howsomever, I enjoyed this so damn much that I am planning to get them all. This series has all the hallmarks of an excellent comfort read, and I need more of those. Doesn’t everyone these days?

In addition to liking Merry as a character, and being able to identify with her in all sorts of wonderful ways, I appreciated the way that the mystery in this story worked, and that it dealt with real, important and ugly issues without either sensationalizing them or trivializing them.

One of the things that also made this story work for me is that the red herrings were more than tasty. There was one character who started out in a hole – or at least a whole lot of suspicion – and couldn’t seem to stop digging himself deeper. It would have been an easy solution to make him the murderer – or to have the cops attempt to pin it on him. The actual solution was much more devious and it was great the way the investigation didn’t fall into the trap of zeroing in on the obvious suspect first.

There was both compassion and redemption for a lot of the people who got caught up in the mess. None of the solutions were easy, most of them included a lot of pain and either past or present trauma. But the characters felt real, Merry and her family, friends and colleagues most of all.

In short, I loved this mystery, am so, so glad that I joined this tour and was introduced to this author, and can’t wait until I have the chance to dive into the rest of the series. And I’m utterly gobsmacked that the author also writes the Jane Austen Mysteries as Stephanie Barron. I think I hear my virtually towering TBR pile piling up another turret!

About the Author:

Francine Mathews was born in Binghamton, New York, the last of six girls. She attended Princeton and Stanford Universities, where she studied history, before going on to work as an intelligence analyst at the CIA. She wrote her first book in 1992 and left the Agency a year later. Since then, she has written thirty books, including six previous novels in the Merry Folger series (Death in the Off-Season, Death in Rough Water, Death in a Mood Indigo, Death in a Cold Hard Light, Death on Nantucket, and Death on Tuckernuck) as well as the nationally bestselling Being a Jane Austen mystery series, which she writes under the pen name Stephanie Barron. She lives and works in Denver, Colorado.

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Review: One-Shot Harry by Gary Phillips

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: One-Shot Harry by Gary PhillipsOne-Shot Harry by Gary Phillips
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical mystery, mystery, suspense, thriller
Pages: 274
Published by Soho Crime on April 5, 2022
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Race and civil rights in 1963 Los Angeles provide a powerful backdrop in Gary Phillips’s riveting historical crime novel about an African American forensic photographer seeking justice for a friend—perfect for fans of Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, and George Pelecanos.
LOS ANGELES, 1963: African American Korean War veteran Harry Ingram earns a living as a news photographer and occasional process server: chasing police radio calls and dodging baseball bats. With racial tensions running high on the eve of Martin Luther King’s Freedom Rally, Ingram risks becoming a victim at every crime scene he photographs.
When Ingram hears about a deadly automobile accident on his police scanner, he recognizes the vehicle described as belonging to his good friend and old army buddy, a white jazz trumpeter. The LAPD declares the car crash an accident, but when Ingram develops his photos, he sees signs of foul play. Ingram feels compelled to play detective, even if it means putting his own life on the line. Armed with his wits, his camera, and occasionally his Colt .45, “One-Shot” Harry plunges headfirst into the seamy underbelly of LA society, tangling with racists, leftists, gangsters, zealots, and lovers, all in the hope of finding something resembling justice for a friend.
Master storyteller and crime fiction legend Gary Phillips has filled the pages of One-Shot Harry with fascinating historical cameos, wise-cracks, tenderness, and an edge-of-your-seat thrill ride of a plot with consequences far beyond one dead body.

My Review:

One-Shot Harry is a fast-paced, noir-flavored, tautly written historical mystery set amid the turmoil of the summer of 1963 as Los Angeles was gearing up for Martin Luther King Jr.’s impending visit to the city.

Harry Ingram, a black Korean War vet who manages to keep his PTSD at bay by viewing life distanced through the lens of a camera, makes his living covering the crime beat for whoever will pay for his pictures – and occasional reporting – in LA’s black community. Which means that he mostly sells to the local black daily newspapers and the various magazines that served the community – back in a day when people still mostly got their news in print.

Between the pictures, and his side hustles as a process server and occasional fill-in member of one or more local jazz bands, Harry manages to pay the rent and not wonder too hard about where his next meal is coming from – but it’s a precarious living.

A livelihood that Harry puts at risk – along with his life – when an old army buddy returns to town, returns to the local jazz scene – and gets himself killed in an accident that might have been anything but.

Harry just can’t let it go. He and Leo had each other’s backs in Korea – in spite of the color line – and Harry feels like he has to have his old friend’s back one last time even if Leo isn’t around to see it. Because Leo isn’t around to see it.

Which gets Harry in way over his head – nearly six feet over his head. If the men hunting him even leave enough of him to get either identified or buried. Unless he gets them first.

Escape Rating A-: The description of the book doesn’t do this one justice. But it gives me a starting point to use to talk about the book and why it worked so well for me – especially after yesterday!

This is the kind of story that would have fit in extremely well with the male-centered, noirish thrillers that were very much in vogue in the 1960s when this story takes place. Series like John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer and Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct, among many others. But Harry’s story would have gone unpublished in his own time just as crimes against the black community would have been shoved under the carpet – hard – as Harry himself nearly is.

But what makes this story so compellingly readable is the combination of Harry’s character and the way that his pursuit of just a sliver of justice for his friend drives him forward. He’s every doggedly determined lone wolf blundering through an investigation that he’s not trained for, faces repeated roadblocks but just can’t let go. At the same time, his constant – and sometimes painfully reinforced – acknowledgement that the forces of law and order are arrayed against him because of his color, and that even if he’s technically right he’ll be judged wrong, feels real and true and unfortunately not all that historical at all.

The historical part of this mystery reads like it sits on the splintered crossroads between “the past is another country” and “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The institutionalized racism that Harry faces and has to work around is just as entrenched today as it was then – and all too frequently just as overt as well.

So the historical setting feels real and presents a clear and present danger, but what drives the story is Harry’s dogged determination. What makes it so compelling to follow, is that it isn’t just a cracking good mystery, it’s also well told and tightly edited in all the best ways to make the pace unrelenting.

(Upon reflection, part of what made yesterday’s book such a slog is that it sincerely needed someone to perform exactly this service. The bones of a good thriller were hidden under a lot of verbal flabbiness. I digress.)

The one thing keeping One-Shot Harry from being a sure shot at a full A grade is the ending. For a mystery to end satisfactorily, good needs to triumph and evil needs to get its just desserts. The perpetrator(s) need to be punished. Harry doesn’t exactly triumph at the end of this book – although from his perspective it could be said that his survival is triumph enough under the circumstances.

The men who committed his friend’s murder get exactly what they deserved. But it feels like punishing the puppets for what the hands up their asses did. They were tools, literally as well as figuratively. The owner of those hands walks away unscathed, because he’s white and rich and powerful and he has all the friends in high places to make sure nothing ever sticks to him. Harry doesn’t have a chance to bring him down and they both know it.

But there’s no catharsis for the reader in that acknowledgement or that ending. Very much on the other hand, that ending may not be satisfying but it is a whole hell of a lot more historically plausible. Harry really doesn’t have a chance to bring this bigwig down – at least not yet.

Harry’s “one-shot” at Mr. Big in this story doesn’t have to be his last. The ending isn’t a cliffhanger, but it isn’t closure either. It feels like Harry will be back and that this is just the start of what will hopefully be a long and eventually successful vendetta.

I certainly hope so because I can’t wait to read it.

Review: An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed by Helene Tursten

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | book reviews
Review: An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed by Helene TurstenAn Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed by Helene Tursten, Marlaine Delargy
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: mystery, short stories, thriller
Pages: 272
Published by Soho Crime on October 5, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Everyone’s favorite octogenarian killer is back in this new collection of stories by Swedish crime writer Helene Tursten that is sure to have you in stitches.
Eighty-eight-year-old Maud is never looking for trouble, but it always seems to find her. First, a woman in her building met an untimely end: tragic. Then, just recently, a dead body mysteriously appeared in her very own apartment, prompting an investigation by the local Gothenburg authorities. Such a strange coincidence. When it seems suspicion has fallen on her, little old lady that she is, Maud decides to skip town and splurges on a trip to South Africa for herself.
In these six interlocking stories, memories of unfortunate incidents from Maud’s past keep bubbling to the surface, each triggered by something in the present: an image, a word, even a taste. When she lands in Johannesburg at last, eager to move on from the bloody ordeal last summer, she finds certain problems seem to be following her. Luckily, Maud is no stranger to taking matters into her own hands . . . even if it means she has to get a little blood on them in the process.
Don’t let her age fool you. Maud may be nearly ninety, but this elderly lady still has a few tricks before she’s ready to call it quits.
*Includes cookie recipes*

My Review:

While neither as smooth nor as famous as “Tinkers to Evers to Chance” there has been a progression in this week’s reviews. First there was a book about “real” ghosts. Then fake ghosts being investigated by elderly lady amateur detectives. Today we have a story about real detectives investigating an elderly lady who might just be a serial killer. With fatally delicious cookie recipes.

Just like the previous trip through Maud’s murderous memory, An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good, the detectives who visit Maud are more of a catalyst than they are an integral part of the story. Inspector Irene Huss and Detective Embla Nyström still can’t quite get their minds around the idea that 88-year-old Maud might have been the murderer of the man who was found dead in her apartment over the summer. But they also can’t dismiss their instincts that say that Maud did it, no matter how frail and dotty a persona she projects.

That the detectives are still sniffing around Maud’s apartment makes Maud a bit apprehensive. I’d say nervous but Maud doesn’t seem to get nervous. Maud just removes whatever problem has come her way. But when the problem is two police detectives, she’s better off removing herself from their jurisdiction rather than employing her usual methods.

So Maud takes herself off, at 88 going on 89, on a luxury trip to a place she’s always loved. It’s been five years since her last, somewhat more economical visit to South Africa, so this time she’s going to go first class all the way. After all, she can afford it and she has no one to leave her money to, so she might as well spend some of it while she’s still capable of the trip.

The story of this elderly lady who truly must not be crossed isn’t so much a single story as it is a collection of memories. As Maud naps on the very long series of flights from Sweden to Johannesburg, her mind drifts back into the past, to the very first time she took care of business in her own inimitable-if-not-yet-deadly style when she was only eleven.

By the time that Maud eliminates her rival for a full-time teaching position, we see that Maud’s course is firmly set. She sees a problem – and she gets rid of the problem. She plans, she executes, and well, she executes someone who is in her way. Sometimes by way of a well aimed icicle, and sometimes by way of a not-so-nice recipe for cookies.

Maud gets things done.

But her trip to South Africa, besides causing her in-flight trips down memory lane, also gives her a chance to think about what she wants from the rest of her life, however short or long that might be. And it puts her in the way of one last good deed, by carrying out one more bad one.

Escape Rating A-: As with the previous book, Maud’s adventures are short but not exactly sweet. How could they be when Maud’s tried-and-true method of solving problems is to eliminate the cause of the problem – permanently.

Which makes Maud a bit of a guilty pleasure. On the one hand, I hope to be that healthy, spry and self-possessed at 88. On the other hand, Maud is a successful serial killer, not exactly a hobby to aspire to. If that’s what it takes to keep oneself young there’s a serious problem with the collateral damage. Maud is kind of like a picture of Dorian Gray that inflicts its damage on other people instead of a portrait.

I’m waxing a bit hyperbolic because of my internal conflict – although Maud has none. And probably doesn’t have a conscience either. There’s so much about Maud that’s admirable, and enviable. Her head is a very entertaining place to be. But she kills people who get in her way. Regularly. Some of them deserve it. And some are just in Maud’s way – until they aren’t.

The Ducote sisters from yesterday’s book are probably better role models for what one would want to be in their 80s. But having a drink or a meal with Maud would be fascinating – at least after I’d checked everything over for poison.

Review: Clark and Division by Naomi Hirahara

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
Review: Clark and Division by Naomi HiraharaClark and Division by Naomi Hirahara
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, World War II
Series: Japantown Mystery #1
Pages: 312
Published by Soho Crime on August 3, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Set in 1944 Chicago, Edgar Award-winner Naomi Hirahara’s eye-opening and poignant new mystery, the story of a young woman searching for the truth about her revered older sister’s death, brings to focus the struggles of one Japanese American family released from mass incarceration at Manzanar during World War II.
Twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, where they have been detained by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life in California the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled two thousand miles away in Chicago, where Aki’s older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier and moved to the new Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But on the eve of the Ito family’s reunion, Rose is killed by a subway train.
Aki, who worshipped her sister, is stunned. Officials are ruling Rose’s death a suicide. Aki cannot believe her perfect, polished, and optimistic sister would end her life. Her instinct tells her there is much more to the story, and she knows she is the only person who could ever learn the truth.
Inspired by historical events, Clark and Division infuses an atmospheric and heartbreakingly real crime fiction plot with rich period details and delicately wrought personal stories Naomi Hirahara has gleaned from thirty years of research and archival work in Japanese American history.

My Review:

This story is a reminder that, for all its midwestern friendliness, Chicago is still as Carl Sandburg so famously put it, the “City of the Big Shoulders”, and it can turn a cold, cold heart towards anyone it deems an outsider. It’s why Chicago, to this day, is considered one of the most segregated cities in the U.S., along with the New York City/North Jersey/Long Island metroplex, Milwaukee (which is close to becoming part of greater Chicagoland every day) and Detroit.

The biggest part of this story is about the Japanese-American experience in Chicago during World War II, as seen through the eyes of Aki Ito, a young Nisei woman from California by way of the Manzanar Relocation Center (read as political double-speak for concentration camp) who arrives in Chicago in 1944 with her parents to discover that her older sister Rose died the day before, crushed under the wheels of one of Chicago’s famous “El” trains. Rose’s death is ruled as a suicide, but Aki is determined to prove that her idolized older sister was murdered.

But Clark and Division is not a murder mystery, although it is being promoted that way. And not that there isn’t something to investigate in Rose Ito’s death. But Aki doesn’t so much investigate as obsess and flail around. Rose’s death drives Aki, but the investigation of it does not drive the story.

What does drive this story is Aki’s exploration of and adaptation to a city that does not want either her or her people to become part of it. Except that they are and they have, and Aki’s journey is to discover herself and how she fits into both her own community and this strange and unwelcoming place as she learns to live her life out from under her sister’s long and rather brilliant shadow.

Escape Rating B: It’s hard to figure out where to start with this one, because there were so many interesting parts to this story, but none of them quite gelled into a whole. Or at least not into the whole that I was expecting. Which means I ended up with a ton of mixed feelings about this book, because I wanted to like it and get wrapped up in it way more than I did.

One of the reasons the whole is not greater than the sum of its interesting parts is that there is so much that happens before Aki gets to Chicago, and there’s not enough time or space to go into any of it in nearly enough detail. That the story begins with Aki’s childhood in Tropico, California, where her father is successful and respected is a necessary grounding because it makes the transition to Manzanar and the later move north to Chicago and down the socioeconomic scale all that much more traumatic. But we don’t get enough depth in either of those parts of the story so it compresses the time we have with Aki in Chicago where the mystery is.

Also, the story is told from Aki’s first person perspective and it all feels a bit shallow. Not that she’s shallow – or at least no more shallow than any other woman her age – but rather that we only skim the surface of her thoughts and feelings. Too much of what happens to her in Chicago reads like more of a recitation of what she did than an in-depth exploration of what she thought and felt. Although I certainly enjoyed Aki’s description of working for Chicago’s famous Newberry Library in the 1940s.

The portrait drawn of the Japanese-American community in Chicago during the war years, along with the crimes, both to her sister and to her community, that Aki looks into/flails around at are based on historical events, but the story isn’t enough about those crimes to fit this into the true crime genre, either. Although the parts of the story that wrapped around the history of Chicago were fascinating and I wish the story had gotten into more depth there.

And that may sum up my feelings about this book the best. I wish there had been more depth to the fascinating parts. There are clearly entire libraries of stories that could flesh out this piece of forgotten (willfully forgotten in the case of the “relocation centers”) history. I just wish this had one of them.

Review: Slough House by Mick Herron

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
Review: Slough House by Mick HerronSlough House (Slough House, #7) by Mick Herron
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: espionage, mystery, thriller
Series: Slough House #7
Pages: 312
Published by Soho Crime on February 9, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Brexit is in full swing. And due to mysterious accidents, the Slough Houses ranks continue to thin. The seventh entry to the Slough House series is as thrilling and bleeding-edge relevant as ever.
A year after a calamitous blunder by the Russian secret service left a British citizen dead from novichok poisoning, Diana Taverner is on the warpath. What seems a gutless response from the government has pushed the Service's First Desk into mounting her own counter-offensive—but she's had to make a deal with the devil first. And given that the devil in question is arch-manipulator Peter Judd, she could be about to lose control of everything she's fought for.
Meanwhile, still reeling from recent losses, the slow horses are worried they've been pushed further into the cold. Slough House has been wiped from Service records, and fatal accidents keep happening. No wonder Jackson Lamb's crew are feeling paranoid. But have they actually been targeted? With a new populist movement taking a grip on London's streets, and the old order ensuring that everything's for sale to the highest bidder, the world's an uncomfortable place for those deemed surplus to requirements. The wise move would be to find a safe place and wait for the troubles to pass.
But the slow horses aren't famed for making wise decisions. And with enemies on all sides, not even Jackson Lamb can keep his crew from harm.

My Review:

In case you’re wondering, “Slough” should be pronounced the same as “Slow” – even though it technically isn’t. Because the “slow horses” that used to race in the spy games at Regent’s Park – home of Britain’s security services – now plod along at Slough House, still on the payroll but just marking time. Until they retire, or die. Or just fade away.

As this story opens, they’re dying. Alone. One by one. In accidents. Or in circumstances made to look like accidents.

But, as an old master of the spy game, Ian Fleming, once said, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” Jackson Lamb, while he’s not nearly as suave as Fleming or the character he created, is definitely a master of the spy game and well aware of this dictum – even if he doesn’t always show it. Or show much of anything except contempt for the entire human race – himself included.

He’s also the manager, or the general factotum, or the head inmate, or all of the above, of Slough House. He knows, even if neither the reader nor the ranks of his slow horses do, that some enemy is taking out his agents.

He just needs to figure out who the enemy is who is authorizing these actions – and make them stop. Even if the enemy is someone who is supposed to be on the same side. Especially if that person is supposed to be on the same side, because that makes it treason.

Escape Rating A-: Slough House is an ironically slow-building thriller – but that situation is also utterly fitting for the title and especially for the characters and set up.

A set up which at first seems like a combination of the TV series New Tricks and the movie RED, but upon reading doesn’t quite fit into the mold of either, although there are elements of both.

The slow horses of Slough House aren’t so much retired as they are exiled. Slough House is kind of a “last chance saloon” for agents who have screwed up badly but who are too young to retire and perhaps know too much to be let go of, but are safe enough to keep corralled together and just might, occasionally uncover something real out of the busywork they usually end up doing. After all, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And as far as Regent’s Park is concerned, the slow horses are consigned to the same scrap heap as those relics would be.

From the perspective of the racers at Regent’s Park, the situation is designed to keep those slow horses docile and dreaming of a potential return to Regent’s Park and “real” spywork – a return that will never happen.

Jackson Lamb, on the other hand, is far from docile. Or, frankly, even domesticated. Instead, he reads like a variation of Daniel Hawthorne from The Word is Murder, only even more egotistical and enigmatic and considerably less savory or salubrious. It’s pretty clear that he’s been assigned to run Slough House not because he’s not good at the spy game but because he’s really, really bad at making nice or playing office politics.

I suspect that there is a lot more about Jackson Lamb, the denizens of Slough House, the relationship between Slough House and Regent’s Park and the entire setup in the previous books in the series. But I haven’t read them and didn’t feel the lack. I mean, I’m intensely curious about the whole thing but didn’t feel like I was missing anything I needed in order to get firmly stuck into this story.

As much as the setup intrigued me, and as ill assorted as Lamb and his band of misfits are, I picked this up because I was very interested in just how the whole concept of a 21st century spy thriller would even work without the 20th century staple of Cold War maneuvering to underpin the whole structure.

The answer turned out to be really, really well, but not in a direction that I was expecting – which made it even better.

Because this turned out to be a kind of “who watches the watchers” story that plays into 21st century realities when too many of the watchers are much too busy watching the people on their own side to pay attention to operatives and operations preying on them from without.

It’s also a story about just how greasy the skids are at the top of the slippery slope of corruption, and how easy it is for even people with the most honorable of intentions to find themselves halfway down that slide before they are even aware of the incline. Something that is clearly going to be the fodder for future books in the series.

Not that there weren’t plenty of “bad actors” (for plenty of definitions of “bad” and “actors” and absolutely for “bad actors”) in this book, but Bad Actors is also the title of the next book in the series. And I’m more than curious enough to see what happens to the “slow horses” next!