Insightful Books Reviews
Our reviews section
examines the latest mystery offerings, covering books,
anthologies, audio books, and videos.
11/22/1963
By Stephen King
New York: Scribner, 2011. $35.00
Stephen King’s latest novel, 11/22/1963, takes
readers back in time to a turning point in American
history. There was huge anticipation and publicity
surrounding this magnum opus and the novel does not
disappoint.
Jake Epping, a high school teacher in
present-day Maine, is asked by local diner owner Al
Templeton to complete a task that Al is now too ill to
finish. The task is to use a secret “time tunnel” in the
diner’s basement to travel back in time and prevent the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in
1963. Yet the tunnel only leads to a specific day in
1958. In order for Jake to blend into late 1950s and
early 1960s culture, he adopts the identity of George T.
Amberson and brings a wad of 1950s cash provided by his
dying friend. Al also explains the rules of the time
tunnel, since he has used it many times for “vacations.”
No matter how much time one spends in the past, only two
minutes elapse in the present reality, and each journey
resets the portal to the same date and time in 1958.
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On his first trip to the past, Jake travels to
the fictional town of Derry, still reeling from events
that were outlined in King’s It. Jake aims to track down
a man who savagely murdered his wife and family with a
hammer, leaving one son seriously injured. That son
would grow up to become Harry Dunning, the janitor with
the limp at Jake’s school, a man who before retiring
finally gets his high school diploma—in part thanks to
Jake’s reaction to the essay he penned detailing that
tragic night. Jake hopes he can improve Harry’s future.
The period detail of the 1950s, coupled with Jake’s
commitment to be over ninety-nine percent certain that
it was Lee Harvey Oswald that killed President Kennedy,
make the journey as exciting as it is filled with
nervous anxiety. King pins his drama firmly on Oswald
being the lone gunman, as opposed to the Grassy Knoll
theory, and it’s obvious why he does this. As a literary
device, the lone gunman theme keeps the narrative
focused.
Despite the time travel element and President
Kennedy’s assassination being key drivers for the
narrative, it is the other themes King explores that are
at the center of this work. The novel explores the
relationship between love and loss, as well as the idea
that we live in an absurd reality—one that allows a lone
nut to kill the most important man in the western
world—and drives home the point that people must never
take anything for granted as it can be taken away in the
random sway of reality.
Stephen King’s 11/22/1963 is a mature work that
makes you feel the past is always alive and all our
actions and inactions ripple through time to create “the
present.” The book is a masterpiece in a career that,
thanks to the author’s extraordinary imagination, only
gets better and better.
—Ali Karim
THE FORGOTTEN AFFAIRS OF YOUTH
By Alexander McCall Smith
New York: Pantheon, 2011. $24.95
Former Scottish medical law professor and novelist
Alexander McCall Smith’s gentle, gracious outlook on the
human condition optimistically shines through every page
of this slim but significant mystery/meditation on the
frailties of human nature.
Philosopher Isabel Dalhousie, comfortably
situated professionally, financially, and most of all
emotionally with her devoted fiancé Jamie and quirky
toddler Charlie, finds herself drawn into fellow
philosopher Jane Cooper’s search for her biological
parents. Jane’s mother died very young in Scotland,
leaving her to be adopted and taken to Australia. Now at
age forty, Jane wants to find her father, who she
believes was a student in Edinburgh. So begins The
Forgotten Affairs of Youth.
As Isabel draws on her own connections and
experiences to help Jane, she also faces situations that
challenge her personal convictions: When should she and
Jamie marry? What should she do, if anything, about her
niece Cat’s consistent attraction to the wrong men, not
to mention the toxic mushrooms Cat sold to Jamie that he
and Isabel ate? How should she deal with her housekeeper
Grace’s money problems that Isabel, herself, may have
inadvertently caused?
Told with McCall Smith’s trademark wit and
wealth of insight into human motives and activities,
this small excursion into moral philosophy makes a big
contribution to understanding one’s world—and one’s
self. As always Alexander McCall Smith has the power to
make his readers believe in the best that lies within us
all.
——Mitzi M. Brunsdale
FROZEN ASSETS
By Quentin Bates
New York: Soho Press, 2011. $25.00
In Quentin Bates’ debut novel featuring
Sergeant Gunnhildur “Gunna” Gísladóttir, the body of a
man is found floating near the docks of a coastal
Iceland village. Hvalvik is a place where everyone knows
everyone and the most Gunna ever has to do is write a
speeding ticket or deal with an unruly drunk. When the
medical examiner states that the unidentified man
drowned, and was probably too intoxicated to be able to
walk very far from wherever he started out, Gunna is
puzzled by the fact that the man is neither from the
town nor known to anyone in it. And when she learns he
is from Reykjavik, more than an hour’s drive away, she
suspects foul play—despite pressure from her superiors
at the capital to think otherwise.
After identifying the dead man by a tattoo on
his arm, Gunna tracks his former occupation to a public
relations firm run by an extremely unpleasant woman
named Sigurjona Huldudottir, who also happens to be
married to Bjarni Jon Bjarnason, Iceland’s Minister of
Finance. The PR firm represents an aluminum
manufacturing company with questionable practices that
are potentially dangerous to the environment and further
investigation reveals that the dead man was a friend of
an environmental activist who died in an unsolved
hit-and-run a few weeks earlier. What at first appeared
to be a simple drowning in a quiet seacoast village has
quickly turned into a complicated scheme involving
corrupt politicians and an international contract
killer.
Often referred to as the “fat police officer,”
Gunna is a middle-aged widow with two teenaged children,
indifferent housekeeping practices, and a surreptitious
smoking habit. She is aided in her investigation by a
large cast of well-drawn characters. As Hvalvik is a
tiny village in a small island country, Gunna knows a
lot of people there—more than a few are her relatives.
In more than one instance, stopping for a quick bite in
a café provides her with useful information from one of
the patrons. Also particularly helpful is a young
reporter from a Reykjavik newspaper charged with writing
a story on nearby village police officers. And a blogger
with a business sense turns out to be on the same path
as Gunna. As the dirt behind the drowning takes on
global significance, this kind and friendly cop leads
the charge against a sophisticated group of criminals
who discover that the Hvalvik police force has been
highly underrated. A compelling read.
—Carol S. Chadwick
KISS ME QUICK
By Danny Miller
London: Constable & Robinson, 2011. $11.99
Danny Miller’s excellent debut crime novel,
Kiss Me Quick, is set in 1960s England and introduces
young Detective Inspector Vince Treadwell. After
Treadwell falls foul of a corrupt senior officer in
London’s Soho sex industry—sixties Soho was more known
for sleaze than for trendy eateries and clubs—he is sent
to Brighton on the south coast.
Treadwell is a native of Brighton and all too
familiar with the power of gangster Jack Regent, who
disappeared after apparently being involved in a knife
killing. His new job with the force is to track down
Regent in the chaos of organized crime, heroin, and the
riots involving gangs of Mods and Rockers that were in
fact a feature of south coast seaside resorts in the
early 1960s.
Treadwell must walk a fine line between the
criminals he is pursuing: Regent himself, Regent’s
psychopathic henchman Francis Pearce, his own brother
Vaughan—a heroin addict who has in the past worked for
Pearce—and Regent’s girlfriend, Bobby, with whom
Treadwell becomes romantically involved. Corruption
within the police force means that he is unable to trust
the people who should be backing him, from his superiors
in Brighton all the way back to London.
Miller captures the sleaze and the excitement
of sixties Brighton, and the moral ambiguities of a
police force that was far less accountable and far less
controlled than it is today. One flaw in the narrative
is that heroin addiction was comparatively rare in 1964,
as doctors were able to prescribe freely up to 1965 and
addicts were less dependent on dealers. Heroin
trafficking was not the big business it is now, yet the
heroin addicts Treadwell encounters are more akin to
current users than UK addicts of the period. Also
exaggerated in the story, the Mods and Rockers riots,
though they occurred, were relatively small scale and
blown up by a sensationalist press. Nonetheless, Miller
paints a believable and vivid picture of 1960s England.
The plot is as crowded as a Brighton beach on a sunny
summer Sunday, but the book is a highly enjoyable
page-turner. Danny Miller’s second Vince Treadwell book,
The Gilded Edge, is due out in May 2012.
—Danuta Reah
NORTHWEST ANGLE
By William Kent Krueger
New York: Atria Books, 2011. $24.99
Welcome back to northern Minnesota and the
quickest, most exciting read closest to the Canadian
border. The Northwest Angle is a place of majestic
vistas, pristine forests, and ocean-like waters in the
Lake of the Woods. And William Kent Krueger’s love for
this sparsely inhabited region generates all
possibilities concerning its independent populace of
peace seekers and rogues.
In Northwest Angle, Cork O’Connor and family
are vacationing on a houseboat when their lives are
threatened by a derecho—a monster storm with
hurricane-force winds. The storm sets the mood of
violence amid spectacular beauty in this twelfth
installment of the spirited series. While the family
seeks shelter on one of a myriad of islands, Cork’s
oldest daughter Jenny finds the tortured corpse of a
young Native American woman and her hidden and healthy
infant son, giving rise to another of the novel’s
themes: children and family.
With his children entering adulthood and his
wife deceased—due to an airplane crash two years
prior—Cork is dreading the loneliness of an empty home.
Yet his children’s choices are awakening new
possibilities: Jenny asserts her motherhood as she
defends the newfound child from kidnappers; and Stephen,
fifteen, wholeheartedly embraces his father’s Ojibwe
heritage, learning of the responsibilities and
consequences of becoming a Mide (a healer). As the story
progresses, we meet another family, the founders of the
Church of the Seven Trumpets, who seek seclusion and
security for their worshippers and carry rifles when
meeting with outsiders. Heavy lies the burden upon the
adults guiding their charges.
The novel’s setting in the Angle Islands
engenders a sense of the primitive beauty and natural
turmoil that have molded the region’s modest citizenry.
In this land of contrasts, all things are possible and
best expressed by Amos Powassin, a blind Ojibwe elder:
“In all good is the possibility of evil, and in all evil
the possibility of good.” Further, the Ojibwe culture
emanates from every thread of the story, endowing the
thriller with greater meaning. William Kent Krueger
allows readers to smell the campfire bacon of deception,
but doesn’t let us fully digest the meal until the
powerful conclusion.
—Patricia Cook
PERFECT PEOPLE
By Peter James
London: Macmillan UK. $30.00
Peter James is well known as the author of the
highly successful Brighton-based police procedurals
featuring Detective Roy Grace. However, James’ latest
novel, Perfect People, is not a crime novel per se, but
a topical international techno-thriller, and a
remarkable one to boot.
Filmmaker James started his writing career
penning thrillers and horror fiction before he hit his
stride as a best-selling crime writer, and he expands
his horizons even further with this cautionary tale of
genetics and madness. Perfect People opens with
Californians Dr. John Klaesson and wife Naomi dealing
with the loss of their four-year-old child to a rare
genetic condition, and in the midst of planning to have
another baby. But both parents carry the faulty gene
that caused the fatal condition that resulted in the
death of their child and both fear the odds of the rare
disease rearing its ugly head again. They turn to the
mysterious geneticist Dr. Leo Dettore, who offers a
gene-screening process to prevent the unthinkable from
happening again. Due to the complexity of laws and
ethics that make genetic manipulation a minefield,
Dettore performs his technique on a ship in
international waters.
Dettore’s method also offers the ability to add
“design” to their offspring; and we’re not talking just
about sex and hair color here. The debate on the rights
and wrongs of “designer babies” provides an interesting
dimension to this thriller, and one that attracts the
attention of a millennial religious cult. Soon the
doctor is killed when his helicopter turns the sky red
and, with Naomi pregnant, John realizes that their own
lives are at risk. The Klaesson’s flee America and head
to Great Britain.
With clipped chapters, the pace ratchets up
when the couple discovers that they are expecting twins,
a boy and a girl—but once the children arrive, the
Klaesson’s problems really begin. With unearthly
intelligence, the Klaesson children are “more than
human,” and soon the dangers that John and Naomi had
been dodging are far closer to home. Perfect People is
a surreal journey of ethics, science, and religion. It
is as far away from the dark alleyways of Roy Grace’s
Brighton as one could get, but a blindingly hot read set
at the edges of our reality and indicative that Peter
James can carve a thriller as twisty as the DNA
Double-Helix. In a word, remarkable.
—Ali Karim
A RED HERRING WITHOUT MUSTARD
By Alan Bradley
New York: Delacorte Press, 2011. $23.00
Canadian author Alan Bradley created this, his
first novel series, when he was seventy years old. His
decades of teaching and writing—especially his
co-authored work Ms. Holmes of Baker Street: The Truth
About Sherlock—creatively anticipated these adventures
featuring eleven-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce. The
first book of the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of
the Pie, was an international success and winner of the
2010 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery Novel. A Red
Herring Without the Mustard is the third installment,
and although this is not a book for young children, it
will be embraced by young adults (age 15+) and adults
who love language and humor.
Flavia lives with her two older sisters and
father, Colonel Haviland de Luce, in Buckshaw, a British
estate manor in the village of Bishop’s Lacey in the
early 1950s. But the family may soon lose their home for
lack of money. Harriet, mother and wife, disappeared ten
years ago while mountain climbing in Tibet, leaving the
family more or less emotionally paralyzed. The Colonel
refuses to speak about his beloved wife’s death and is
barely present in the lives of his daughters. Because of
her father’s stiff upper-lip attitude, Flavia cherishes
the least smile or brush of affection from him. Flavia’s
sisters are interesting characters in their own right:
Daphne (Daffy), thirteen, is a bookworm with a
Jeopardy-like mind and Ophelia (Feely), seventeen, is a
highly regarded pianist. Flavia, an amateur chemist with
her own lab in the southeast corner of Buckshaw, is a
loner, separated from her older sisters who “torture”
her because of some incomprehensible hurt, origins
unknown.
Flavia’s actions always have dramatic
consequences. In Red Herring, she accidentally burns a
gypsy fortune-teller’s tent and her subsequent act of
charity results in the gypsy later being bludgeoned. The
mystery of the attack on Gypsy Fanella and the
outrageous murder of Brookie Harewood—lout and poacher,
whose body is displayed upon Poseidon’s trident in the
Buckshaw’s gardens—have their origins in a shadowy
religion founded by Nicodemus Flitch in the sixteenth
century. Threaded within this tightly woven story is the
disappearance of a baby, blamed, of course, on the
gypsies.
Bradley writes with sophistication, defining
the unseen with unique metaphors and similes that allow
the reader to see, feel, and hear those ideas: “... the
mind loves nothing better than to spook itself with
outlandish stories, as if the various coils of the brain
were no more than a troop of roly-poly Girl Guides
huddled over a campfire in the darkness of the skull.”
And flavored with Dickensian spice, the author’s
characters—Flavia, the tolerant Inspector Hewitt, de
Luce family servant Dogger, and the rest of Bishop’s
Lacey—are the kind in which all readers can find a
little of themselves.
—Patricia Cook
THE REVISIONISTS
By Thomas Mullen
London: Mulholland Books, 2011. $19.95
The Revisionists is a disturbing mix of George
Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 with a
sprinkling of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and perhaps
hints of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island or Philip K.
Dick’s A Scanner Darkly … because nothing in this
political espionage thriller can be taken at face value.
We start with an agent from the future named
Zed (who uses the alias Leroy Jones), sent back to our
time to watch over world events and ensure that all the
known disasters occur as history has recorded them. The
purpose of Zed and his fellow agents is to protect the
“perfect world” of the future from the future’s opposing
forces, “the hags.” So Agent Zed finds himself playing
cat and mouse with fellow time travelers while trying
morally to justify the task with which he has been
entrusted—ensuring the death of many innocent people in
the upcoming “event,” something that will decimate the
population and leave only the small band of future
survivors who will craft the perfect world. Added to the
mix is Leo, a disgraced ex-CIA agent now working as a
private contractor, and the political dissidents that
Leo watches over: T. J., the young anarchist; Tasha, a
corporate lawyer grieving over her brother who was
killed in combat; and Sari, a Korean diplomat’s
housekeeper. How their paths cross with Zed is somewhat
surreal, as Zed tries to match his mission with what
happened to his father-in-law, wife, and young child in
his future. There are rumors that Zed/Leroy is not what
he seems, as perhaps the future is not as perfect as he
has been lead to believe.
In a world where reviewers bemoan books devoid
of originality, this is the exception to the rule. The
kicker is that the ambiguity of the ending forces the
reader to rethink what he was read, since the
narrator(s) of the tale appear a tad unreliable—unlike
Mullen who delivers a disturbing vision of reality and
madness, in a literary style that has you reaching for
Valium at the end of each chapter.
—Ali Karim
13 MILLION DOLLAR POP
By David Levien
New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011. $24.95
One reason the PI thrillers by screenwriter
David Levien have been gathering such strong
acclaim—including a recent Shamus Award nomination for
Where the Dead Lay—is the strength of his series
character Frank Behr, the troubled former cop now
scratching a living as a private eye.
In 13 Million Dollar Pop, Behr has been working
for the Caro Group, a private investigation and security
company that has been hired to protect Bernard “Bernie
Cool” Kolodnik, a successful businessman hoping to start
a career in politics. While on duty protecting Kolodnik,
Behr ends up in the crossfire of a shootout and quickly
realizes that the political motivations of his ward are
not shared by some on the darker side of the law. He
begins investigating what really happened that night,
but receives no help from the local officials, and as it
becomes more and more apparent that protecting Bernie
Cool was not the plum job that it first appeared, Behr
finds himself in the middle of a dangerous conspiracy.
Added to this are hit man Waddy Dwyer, escort girls, and
euro-trash blocking Behr’s path to the economic security
he is chasing. As if that weren’t enough, Behr’s
girlfriend is pregnant and he’s dealing with the reality
of health care costs, which is why he ended up taking
the job in the first place.
This third excursion into the seedier side of
Indiana is highly recommended, but bring a Kevlar
jacket, because when you crack the spine of this book,
you have to watch out for the ricochet of gunfire.
—Ali Karim
13 MILLION DOLLAR POP
By David Levien
New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011. $24.95
One reason the PI thrillers by screenwriter
David Levien have been gathering such strong
acclaim—including a recent Shamus Award nomination for
Where the Dead Lay—is the strength of his series
character Frank Behr, the troubled former cop now
scratching a living as a private eye.
In 13 Million Dollar Pop, Behr has been working
for the Caro Group, a private investigation and security
company that has been hired to protect Bernard “Bernie
Cool” Kolodnik, a successful businessman hoping to start
a career in politics. While on duty protecting Kolodnik,
Behr ends up in the crossfire of a shootout and quickly
realizes that the political motivations of his ward are
not shared by some on the darker side of the law. He
begins investigating what really happened that night,
but receives no help from the local officials, and as it
becomes more and more apparent that protecting Bernie
Cool was not the plum job that it first appeared, Behr
finds himself in the middle of a dangerous conspiracy.
Added to this are hit man Waddy Dwyer, escort girls, and
euro-trash blocking Behr’s path to the economic security
he is chasing. As if that weren’t enough, Behr’s
girlfriend is pregnant and he’s dealing with the reality
of health care costs, which is why he ended up taking
the job in the first place.
This third excursion into the seedier side of
Indiana is highly recommended, but bring a Kevlar
jacket, because when you crack the spine of this book,
you have to watch out for the ricochet of gunfire.
—Ali Karim
WICKED AUTUMN
By G. M. Malliet
New York: Minotaur, 2011. $23.99
Agatha Award-winner G. M. Malliet—the British author
of Death of a Cozy Writer and its two St.
Just mystery sequels—sets her new series in Nether
Monkslip, an idyllic fictional village seething with
barely submerged passions, jealousies, and feuds.
At the center of it all is the universally
feared and loathed Wanda Batton-Smythe, self-appointed
head of Nether Monkslip’s Women’s Institute. Gingerly
circling Wanda like reluctant satellites—drawn by the
irresistible force of a tacitly shared desire to murder
her—are Awena Owen, owner of the village’s new age shop;
Elka Garth, operator of the Cavalier Tea Room and
Garden; local knitting maven Lily Iverson; and Suzanna
Winship, the willowy and vampy sister of the village
physician. Among the basic ingredients for this
deliciously plotted homicide, Malliet has cleverly
inserted a darkly handsome sleuth with secrets of his
own—Max Tudor, a former MI5 agent turned Anglican
priest, who as vicar of St. Edwold’s Church is the
inevitable object of lascivious fantasies on the part of
Nether Monkslip’s womenfolk.
After Wanda is found dead during the Harvest Fayre,
Max has to tread a precarious tightrope between the
“pure, peaceable, and gentle” wisdom from above and the
deplorable but so much more fascinating “earthly,
unspiritual, and devilish” motives driving a ruthless
killer. Wicked Autumn is the opening of
what promises to be a thoroughly delightful cozy series.
—Mitzi M. Brunsdale
