1921 in Gilda Carr’s Manhattan involves a thirteen mile fence that runs down Broadway. East of the fence, things continue basically as they were. West of the fence is an overgrown wasteland that is at odds with and disallows modern technology. Thousands of people have disappeared in the Westside, and now the people who remain are thieves, bootleggers, murderers, artists, writers, drunks and the people who are too poor to leave. Gilda lives on the Westside.
In W.M. Akers’ Westside, Gilda is a detective, who solves ‘tiny mysteries’ as she calls them. What starts out as a usual tiny mystery for the wealthy Mrs. Copeland tracking down a white leather glove becomes the mystery of why Mr. Copeland is on the wrong side of town, murdered on a Westside pier. Which she wants no part of. That’s way too big for her. Her father, murdered years ago, was a cop, then a private eye, who solved big crimes. And who was eventually killed for what he stumbled upon. Gilda is not a solver of big crimes, she is a solver of small mysteries. The tiny questions that nag us to death and keep us up at night, not murders.
Still, she finds herself tracking down the details of Mr. Copeland’s death in the swampy Westside world of corruption, bootlegging, smuggling. Now Gilda finds herself on the verge of solving his murder and saving the city, even if she doesn’t want to be the person who does any of that.
I liked Westside. It had a very Neil Gaiman Neverwhere feel setting wise, and I very much enjoyed the whiskey, jazz, and the wild west feel of a wild New York City. Gilda herself is a compelling protagonist who distracts herself from her grief with the small mysteries she solves to make a living. The mystery is interesting but the pace was a little off in some places. I have already read the second Westside novel and have the third to dig into as well. I’m looking forward to it.
Category Archives: mystery
Westside: A Gilda Carr Tiny Mystery
2020: Victoria Abbott
I read a series of books by author Victoria Abbott in 2020 that I really liked – The Book Collector Mysteries. They were:
The Christie Curse
The Sayers Swindle
The Wolfe Widow
The Marsh Madness
The Hammett Hex
The series revolves around Jordan Kelly, who is back in her hometown, living with her not-quite-on-the-straight-and-narrow uncles after a treacherous ex-boyfriend put her crippling debt by running up massive credit card bills. She finds a job with local recluse Vera Van Alst (the most hated person in town), who likes her collection of rare books, and not much else, but the position includes room and board, and Jordan gets to work for Vera. Her job entails researching and tracking down rare books for her employer, and her first assignment (in The Christie Curse) is the rumored play that Christie wrote while she “disappeared” briefly in 1926 (reappearing eleven days later at a health spa under an assumed name).
The task seems simple, if challenging, until Jordan discovers her predecessor in the position died while looking for the play. That complicates things a bit.
I enjoyed this series a lot. A lot, a lot. I really like what Otto Penzler calls ‘bibliomysteries.’ (BRB, buying books). I googled the author to see when the next book was coming out, and discovered a couple of things.
1 – Victoria Abbott is the pen name for a mother-daughter writing duo. 2 – their website hasn’t been updated in years (and 3 years later still has not been updated). There’s no indication when another book will be out, or IF another book will be out. The mother is half of the duo seems to be the main writer and has started multiple series…and then seems to drop them. She hasn’t published anything since 2016, by the looks of it. If it weren’t for the fact the official Facebook page was updated, I would have guessed she was dead. (Really. Most of her pages don’t look to have been updated in years.)
The fact that there doesn’t seem to be a lot going on with the series isn’t encouraging. Again, I found those books in 2020 and there hadn’t been a mention of a new one in four years, and now it’s three years later and it’s seven years without any indication from an official source regarding a new book.
But I enjoyed the series a lot. I love the mysteries, Jordan is a decent protagonist and I really like Vera. I know a couple of Veras in my own life. She’s grumpy but pretty great. She lives in a big, old Victorian house (which I would love to live in) and which Jordan recognizes is *definitely* one of the perks of her job. I definitely do not live in a big, old Victorian house, but it sounds like a dream, especially the big clawfoot soaking tub in Jordan’s bathroom!
I’m going to keep any eye out for more of this series, but I don’t have high hopes. Fingers crossed, though!
Black Coffee
Agatha Christie’s Black Coffee was her first play and launched her another part of her writing career as a playwright. The premise of the story is that a scientist discovers a secret formula he was working on for explosives has been stolen. He calls in Hercule Poirot, but as Poirot, his friend and sidekick Captain Hastings, and Inspector Japp arrive, the scientist is murdered.
The play was, with the consent of the Christie estate, turned into a novel in 1998 by Charles Osborne (a writer and a classical music composer and critic). This is the version I listened to in 2020 (and the first of several Christie mysteries I read in 2020). I enjoyed this story very much, in spite of the fact that Christie didn’t actually write it in its novel form. It was more or less a locked room mystery and those are some of my favorites, plus, I enjoy Hercule Poirot a lot. I learned another fun poison, and of course read all about it.
When I saw this was the adaptation of a play I wasn’t sure what to expect. I would assume that it would be easier to go from a play to a novel under the premise that adding is easier than subtracting, but I don’t rightly know. That said, Christie always created an atmosphere that I enjoyed and wasn’t sure Osborne would be able to duplicate it, but he did a good job. I enjoyed the story tremendously and I even thought I’d solved it! But I got it wrong, haha.
It wasn’t my favorite Christie mystery but it was very enjoyable and I hope to see the stage play some day.
The Outsider
I was always going to read/listen to The Outsider. It was released in 2018, and I listened to it in 2020 during Covid, of course, but I had been on the waiting list at the library for much longer – I think three or four months. Anyway, I was always going to read The Outsider because Stephen King wrote the novel around Holly Gibney, probably my favorite of his female characters to date, and maybe favorite overall.
Holly is hired when what seems to be an open and shut case begins to get out of control. The raped and mutilated body of Frankie Peterson is found, and all signs point to Terry Maitland, a teacher and local Little League coach. Maitland claims innocence, as he was at a conference with other teachers at the time of the murder, but they find his fingerprints and DNA at the crime scene – however, they also find video of him and his fingerprints at the site of the conference, with the other teachers confirming his nearly constant presence.
Maitland is eventually murdered by Ollie Peterson, Frankie’s brother, who blames Maitland for his brother’s death and his mother’s resulting fatal heart attack. Ollie is shot and killed by police. Ralph Anderson, who ordered the public arrest of Maitland and blamed for the ensuing publicity circus, is put on leave. With his dying breaths, Maitland continues to insist he’s innocent.
Holly, who has become a private investigator since we last saw her in End of Watch, takes the case when she’s approached by the investigator hired by Maitland’s attorney. Things proceed from there, with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes quote driving the story: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. The premise of the story is that a guy was in two places at once, and Holly knows that cannot be the case.
I enjoyed this book a lot although I saw some mixed reviews of it when I googled it briefly to refresh myself of some of the character names (I couldn’t remember Terry’s last name to save my life three years later). Once again, Stephen King sucked me into a story *so* fast. It took one chapter or less. His gift for this, at least in my case, is something I can only dream of.
I love that Holly has opened a detective agency. I love Holly. She is just as adorably quirky in this book and I found her just as endearing.
Of note: HBO made this novel into a show and I hated it because they ruined Holly. I remember seeing a lot of criticism at the time that people who disliked the TV version of Holly was because she was black and eyeroll. It wasn’t that she was black. It was that they took away all her charming quirks and just left her as someone who was socially awkward. I love that she’s a movie buff and that she bites her nails obsessively and that she’s very sweet and loyal once you get to know her. None of what made her wonderful came through in the adaptation. I was super glad when HBO decided not to pick up season 02.
Better Holly news! Stephen King is publishing another novel focused around Holly later this year, and I’m so excited that I’m tempted to preorder it.
Maisie Dobbs
So, if you take a look through my lists of books during my more recent reading challenge years, you may notice I like a lot of series – particularly mysteries, particularly cozy mysteries. I listen to a lot of audiobooks at work while I’m fighting for my life in Excel and I love when I can go from one to the next.
Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear was an exception. We meet Maisie, who is pressed into service at thirteen when her mother dies and she needs to work to help support her family. She becomes a maid for the wealthy Compton family and the lady of the house catches Maisie indulging her love of reading in the family’s private library. *clutches pearls* But instead of kicking her to the curb, the lady sends Maisie to be tutored by a friend of the family named Maurice Blanche. Blanche, a gifted but discreet investigator, takes Maisie into his tutelage and he teachers her about science, psychology, and pretty much anything else Maisie will try learning. She tries everything.
Maisie is accepted into Cambridge University but her plans are put on hold when World War I breaks out. Maise becomes a nurse and falls in love with a young man, another service member. What happens to him is part of what Maise must deal with throughout the rest of the novel.
After the war, Maisie resumes her studies with Blanche, now more in an investigative capacity and she eventually opens her own investigation service when he retires. When the Comptons’ son signs his family’s fortune over to The Retreat – a home for war veterans – Maisie must get to the bottom of what’s happening at the veterans home while confronting her own traumas from the war.
The story didn’t hook me, but I don’t mean to disparage it. Winspear’s historical mystery was extremely well researched – some of the most delightful details came from Winspear’s knowledge of the time period, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. It was good, but for whatever reason it didn’t suck me in enough to want to continue with the series. It doesn’t make sense to me really, because it had so many elements I enjoy. An interesting female protagonist, a setting I’m not entirely familiar with (England circa World War I), and intriguing mystery. I still might try another one to see if it the series gets more interesting after we got past setting up Maisie as a character.
The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
Evelyn Hardcastle will be murdered at 11 PM. Over the course of eight days, the protagonist wakes up in the body of a new inhabitant of Blackheath House with a new chance to prevent the murder. If he fails to discover the murderer by 11 PM, the cycle repeats again. He puts information together over the course of the eight days, and if he doesn’t solve the crime in eight days, he will wake up where he was at the start (of the novel) with his memory wiped. Our protagonist cannot leave the Blackheath House until he solves the murder.
Stuart Turton’s The 71/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle was probably my favorite novel of 2020. It was a compelling mystery and I really liked the format of repeating the same day over and over from different points of view. I’m a big Agatha Christie fan, and this felt very much like an Agatha Christie mystery, with clues scattered through many of the chapters. I did originally consume this book as an audiobook so I only remember some of the clues but after I gifted the book to my uncle as a birthday gift, he assured me that there were a lot of clues about.
Other things I liked were the setting – I love a good Locked Room mystery and that’s essentially what this was – and I loved loved LOVED that there was a Plague Doctor running around. I always liked the whole Plague Doctor mask/concept/backstory of what a plague doctor was in general, and then I picked up this book during the Covid lockdown.
I won’t spoil the ending, but it was pretty unsettling in the sense that it pointed to something extremely dystopian or sort of like a supernatural explanation (a no-no in mysteries). Aside from the sort of bizarre explanation for what was going on though, I loved this story. I found the ending so-so and I still loved it so much it was still probably my favorite book of 2020. 10/10 would recommend.
The Man From the Train
The Man From the Train is a true crime book by Bill James and his daughter Rachel McCarthy James, in which the James’ lay out the case for discovery of a previously unrealized/overlooked serial killer in North America from the 1890s until about 1912.
Bill James, a baseball historian and statistician by trade, originally started his research in an attempt to solve the Villisca axe murders, which were the rather famous unsolved murders of an entire family in Villisca, Iowa in June 1912.
In the course of investigating the Villisca murders, James expanded his search to similar cases in the United States during that time frame – and found a lot. Like, I thought it was a surprisingly large number of family murders. From 1890 to 1912, there were approximately 8 entire families murdered per year in the United States. James gave this number as average. Most of these murders were not related to the murders the James’ connected in this book – the murders linked in this book involved several pieces of evidence present/reported on at all the scenes but not linked as a pattern by law enforcement at the time. Sharing information was hard to begin with due to distance, plus law enforcement can be territorial, and most law enforcement believed there was a local connection between the dead families and whoever killed them. You can understand their reasoning. Why would you wipe out an entire family for what appeared to be no reason?
The James’ found family murders that occurred in Nova Scotia, Arkansas, Oregon, Kansas, Florida and other locations that all fit certain patterns: all of the families lived only a few hundred feet from railroad junctions in small towns with little to no police force, none of the families had a dog to warn of an intruder, the families had barns where the killer probably spent a few days watching them first, the murder weapon was always the blunt edge of an axe, the victims were usually covered with a sheet before being killed (probably to prevent spatter), the axe was left in plain sight, the bodies were moved/stacked after death, the parents almost never showed signs of a struggle but the young girls usually did, there was no apparent robbery, and some other details that consistently showed up throughout the linked crimes. James believed the motive for/major factor in the murders was a sadistic attraction to prepubescent girls – hence the girls frequently showed signed of a struggle and signs that they’d been molested after death, and that the killer had ejaculated at the scene. (Gross).
They eventually reveal a suspect in the case – an immigrant named Paul Mueller. Mueller is only ever linked to the case of a murdered family in West Brookfield, Massachusetts by contemporary sources at the time, but a physical description of a short but well built German immigrant who spoke little English and who was a German veteran of WWI appears in a local paper. He had unusually small and wide spaced teeth, and worked as an itinerant lumberjack with good wood working and carpentry skills. Considering most of the family murders investigated by James took place in or near logging communities and with an axe, the possibility of Mueller jumping on and off trains for jobs in different parts of the country and murdering an entire family as a hobby isn’t implausible.
The only year the James’ didn’t find any family murders who fit the pattern was 1908, leading them to speculate the man from the train was imprisoned for a minor crime during that time. The murders stop not long after the Villsca murders, and the James’ believe Mueller may have left the States when private investigators and the media begin to call attention to the fact that a single person may have been traveling on the nation’s railway system and killing people at an alarming rate. They’re fairly confident the same person committed at least 14 family murders for a total of 59 victims, and are less certain of his involvement in another 25 for a total of 93 victims. They also ruled out the man from the train from being the Axeman of New Orleans. Same fun axe but different patterns at the crime scenes.
James also goes into the consequences of some of these murders – one particularly haunting story was in the deep South (Georgia? Florida?) where a couple of black men (including a mentally challenged man) were lynched for a family murder the man from the train probably committed. Police targeted them and harassed them into confessing, telling the man with the IQ of a seven year old if he just tells them he did it, he can go home – you know , all the usual heartbreaking fun you find in these recurrent nightmare stories of criminal “justice” in the United States.
As one last thing to think about, James calls attention to the 1922 Hinterkaifeck murders in Germany, noting the similarities between that family murder and the murders committed by the man from the train. Again, James theorizes Mueller left the United States when the family murders began being linked by journalists and private investigators in 1911. Since we know serial killers don’t stop unless they’re caught or die, it’s not impossible Mueller committed these murders too, although there’s no proof. Even James admitted it was a toss up.
I found this book really compelling, and for whatever reason, very scary. Just the idea of someone jumping off a train, hiding in your barn/house for days/weeks/months, watching your every move, then murdering whole families was so creepy and upsetting to me. Scholars of this sort of thing find James’ & McCarthy James’ theory plausible and even the best possibility for solving the Villisca murders. It’s safe to say that after 110+ years, we’ll never know what happened for sure, but the case for a serial killer who went undetected for two decades is quite compelling here. And as we know, the term “serial killer” wasn’t used until decades later and are weren’t understood (better understood, anyway) until much later.
The writing could be a bit informal at times, but for the most part I found the writing engaging and interesting. I highly recommend The Man From the Train. Is some of it speculating? Yes. But while the named suspect (Paul Mueller) might not be correct, I think the case that the same person committed multiple family murders over a vast swath of North America has more than been made here. Fascinating book, wonderful job by Bill James and his daughter.
2020: The Year of Agatha Raisin
I originally read an Agatha Raisin book in the first half of 2019, not realizing it was part of a much larger series. I listened to the entire Agatha Raisin series on audiobook in 2020. It was the early stages of the pandemic, I was working from home for the first time, and I decided to go back to this, as I enjoyed the book I’d listened to the previous year, and in 2020, I listened to all 30 books available at the time on audiobook.
I loved them.
Agatha Raisin is a successful, middle aged PR executive who sells her PR company to retire to the Cotswolds and tries to fit into village life. She joins the ladies’ society and helps her friend, Margaret Bloxby, the Vicar’s wife, run charities and ends up solving a murder in every book. She eventually opens her own detective agency.
I love Agatha. She’s sarcastic and dark and frustrated with the stupidity of the world and its double standards, and I love her for it. She’s tough but she is occasionally vulnerable and she has a softer side that makes her human and not just obnoxious. I also love when she sticks her foot in her mouth! It happens fairly often.
In the first book she’s 53, but this is one of those series where the characters don’t age much. She’s still in her 50s thirty plus books later. As with many series, Agatha’s rely on a rich supporting cast, including James Lacey and Charles Fraith, her romantic interests, who never fail to crack me up. She also hires a teenager, named Toni, who is quite beautiful and young and very capable at her job. Agatha sees a bit of herself in Toni and they have a very mother-daughter relationship, which is also very relatable and funny.
I was sad to learn that the author of the series, MC Beaton, passed away in 2019, but thrilled to learn that she had found someone else to continue the series after she passed. She was in her 80s and I believe she was ill, so she worked ahead of time to find someone. It’s only been a couple of books, but the transition has been smooth (in my opinion, anyway). The thirty-third installment of the series is due out next month.
The Cotswolds are also a feature of the story. I’ve never been, but I always wanted to visit, and they sound quite charming. Village life is a feature, as many of Agatha’s friends are people in the village and most of her cases take place in the Cotswolds.
Overall, I found the series funny and enjoyable and I am very glad it’s being continued by another author.
Titles currently available are:
- Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death (1992)
- Agatha Raisin and the Vicious Vet (1993)
- Agatha Raisin and the Potted Gardener (1994)
- Agatha Raisin and the Walkers of Dembley (1995)
- Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage (1996)
- Agatha Raisin and the Terrible Tourist (1997)
- Agatha Raisin and the Wellspring of Death (1998)
- Agatha Raisin and the Wizard of Evesham (1999)
- Agatha Raisin and the Witch of Wyckhadden (1999)
- Agatha Raisin and the Fairies of Fryfam (2000)
- Agatha Raisin and the Love from Hell (2001)
- Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came (2002)
- Agatha Raisin and the Case of the Curious Curate (2003)
- Agatha Raisin and the Haunted House (2003)
- Agatha Raisin and the Deadly Dance (2004)
- The Perfect Paragon: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2005)
- Love, Lies and Liquor: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2006)
- Kissing Christmas Goodbye: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2007)
- A Spoonful of Poison: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2008)
- There Goes the Bride: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2009)
- The Busy Body: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2010)
- As the Pig Turns: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2011)
- Hiss and Hers: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2012)
- Something Borrowed, Someone Dead: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2013)
- The Blood of an Englishman: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2014)
- Dishing the Dirt: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2015)
- Pushing Up Daisies: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2016)
- The Witches’ Tree: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2017)
- The Dead Ringer: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2018)
- Beating About the Bush: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2019)
- Hot to Trot: An Agatha Raisin mystery (2020)
- Down the Hatch: An Agatha Raisin mystery (October 2021)
The Art Forger
My last book of 2019 was The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro.
I won’t say it was bad, exactly, but there were parts of it I didn’t care for at all.
The plot is set against the backdrop of the still unsolved theft of thirteen priceless paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, the most valuable of which were taken from ‘The Dutch Room.’ The most valuable piece of art itself was a painting called ‘The Concert‘ by Johannes Vermeer (a work you are probably more familiar with is ‘Girl With a Pearl Earring‘). There are only 34 paintings that are attributed to him in the world. In spite of a ten million dollar reward, the stolen artwork has never been recovered. Considering the value of the artwork is now considered upwards of $600 million, maybe no takers for the rather generous reward isn’t surprising. You can read more about the art theft here and here.
Claire Rothe makes her living forging famous artworks for an online retailer. She enters into a Faustian bargain with a gallery owner who will show her own original artwork if she’ll forge one of the Degas works stolen in the heist. Claire doesn’t ask questions about how the supposedly original Degas work from the theft was acquired but she begins to suspect it’s also a forgery. Claire is made out to be particularly hard up; even though she is a talented artist with an excellent talent and skillset, she is persona non-grata in the art world.
And this is the part of the story that I really, really didn’t like. Claire is persona non-grata in the art because while she was sleeping with one of her professors who is the great artist Isaac somebody or other (who I think is also cheating on his wife), he’s having some kind of artistic block and she paints a painting for him that he takes credit for. It becomes absurdly famous and when she says, “Hey, I painted that, give me credit,” he turns on her. There’s an investigation where she reproduces the work and he can’t, but the investigation concludes that she forged the work basically so everyone can save face. Isaac eventually kills himself without clearing her name (still, yay though) and Claire is blamed for this and is further unwelcome in any meaningful art circles.
There was also the inevitable romance with the gallery owner that left me sighing in ‘Can we please get past this part?’ as well. He’s young and rich and handsome and charming and in over his head and Claire saves him. It was so predictable.
Anyway. What I really liked about The Art Forger was the art stuff. The art history, the oddly specific information about paint, the mystery of the Gardner Museum theft and the mystery of Gardner herself. The mystery about the shady dealings of the gallery owner was also actually pretty good in terms of plot. The only stuff I really disliked was Claire’s ‘Backstory of Sad and Dumb’ which was a lot of the book. I dunno. Maybe I am unusual or dysfunctional or programmed incorrectly or whatever, but I never fell for manipulative guys like Isaac. I never believed them when they said only I could help them. I love my husband very much but I don’t for one second think that I am the only one who can save him from his own artistically void state of blah blah blah BS. Most romance bores me at the best of times and this tragic romance of young woman manipulated by her professor into painting a masterpiece she never gets credit for and he kills himself over thereby doubling her burden had me rolling my eyes so hard I pulled a muscle.
I guess this book is for somebody. It wasn’t for me. The art stuff was awesome. The rest? Meh.
words in scarlet ink 