Dreams of Falling

First of all, I wanted to thank my sponsors - y'all gave over $125 dollars to the Nature Conservancy, which is three times what I raised last year. Thank you!

Second of all, ( ten last mystery reviews in short-short form, covering settings ranging from murder among the Quakers to murder at a strip club. )

Still little if any brain capacity, despite sleeping half the day. Am holding out from going back to bed until a slightly more reasonable hour, though, or I'll be waking up at 3 AM with my sleep schedule utterly wonked. Wheeeee.

THE MURDER ROOM, by P.D. James.

Cover copy: The Dupayne, a small private museum on the edge of London's Hampstead Heath devoted to the interwar years 1919-1939, is in turmoil. The trustees - the three children of the museum founder, old Max Dupayne - are bitterly at odds over whether it should be closed. Then one of them is brutally murdered, and what seemed to be no more than a family dispute erupts into horror. For even as Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team investigate the first killing, a second corpse is discovered. Clearly, someone at the Dupayne is prepared to kill, and kill again.

The case is fraught with danger and complexity from the outset, not least because of the range of possible suspects - and victims. And still more sinister, the murders appear to echo the notorious crimes of the past featured in one of the museum's most popular galleries, the Murder Room.

For Dalgliesh, P.D. James's formidable detective, the search for the murderer poses an unexpected complications. After years of bachelorhood, he has embarked on a promising new relationship with Emma Lavenham - first introduced in DEATH IN HOLY ORDERS - which is at a critical stage. yet his struggle to solve the Dupayne murders faces him with a frustrating dilemma: each new development distances him further from commitment to the woman he loves.

THE MURDER ROOM is a story dark with the passions that lie at the heart of crime, a masterful work of psychological intricacy. It proves yet again that P.D. James fully deserves her place among the best of modern novelists.

Gender of detectives: two male, one female

The cover copy only cites Dalgliesh, but he has two subordinates who do nearly as much of the detecting, thus my notation.

Honestly, this is a straight-up puzzle sort of mystery, despite the cover's attempts to make it something more. Dalgliesh's 'complications' get short shrift - there's very little concerning his relationship either way, and no particular disaster winds up happening. The most complicated part of the puzzle is actually the re-creation of the Murder Room crimes: the more you stop and think about it, after finishing the book, the less that part makes sense.

*

Mariposa isn't quite sure what I think I'm doing, but it can't possibly be as important as petting the cat. I'd defend myself, except I'm not sure what I think I'm doing either.

SHE SHOOTS TO CONQUER, by Dorothy Cannell.

Cover copy: On a dark and foggy night, charming amateur sleuth Ellie Haskell, her husband, Ben, and her plucky sidekick, Mrs. Malloy, are stranded at the grand yet terribly dilapidated Mucklesfeld Manor on the Yorkshire moors. Shortly before their precipitous arrival, Lord Belfry of the Manor had made the startling decision to save his crumbling establishment by offering himself as the prize on a TV reality show titled Here Comes The Bride. The candidates are to be average women, chosen not for their charm or looks but for their ability to withstand the rigors of a week spent floundering through veils of cobwebs and sleeping on ancient bed linens, all in hopes of becoming Lady Belfrey.

Upon hearing of the elaborate scheme, and thrilled at the prospect of marrying a lord, Mrs. Malloy eagerly joins the competition. But after one of the potential brides is pierced with an arrow during an archery contest, she begins to rethink her eagerness to leap into this particular gothic romance. Ellie begins to investigate, exploring the dark passageway and hidden nooks of the delightfully spooky estate, but she may not be prepared for the secrets lurking behind closed doors.

Gender of detective: female

One of the pull quotes on the back recommends this to fans of Aunt Dimity. I can see the resemblance, at least somewhat: the surface ditziness, the love of imagination.

For the rest, this is a more than usually idiotic cover summary. The first murder is via car crash, not arrow. The archery contest doesn't happen until nearly the end of the book. Likewise, the reality-TV scheme gets a lot more development, with lots of Gothic Romance riffs (from the producers, not anyone else). And most key of all, Ellie is indeed not a total ditz.

She does need a big dramatic rescue at the end, in the best Gothic tradition. Ah, well. Suppose you can't have everything.

*

I'm trying to go through and grab the better books I haven't reviewed yet from my list. Stef is watching True Blood over on the couch. Yay efficiency?

THE BIG STEAL, by Emyl Jenkins.

Cover copy: Hoyt and Mazie Wyndfield were the sort of couple that everyone admired. Charming and elegant, they'd furnished their Virginia manor house, Wynderly, with beautiful antiques and rare treasures from their exotic travels. So it was natural that after their death Wynderly would become a treasured museum. But a burglary exposed more than simple theft.

Hired to assess the value of the broken and missing antiques, intrepid appraiser and amateur sleuth Sterling Glass finds that her job is more complicated than she'd anticipated. Why would this well-heeled couple have so many fakes among the extremely valuable antiques? Working her way through uncovered diaries, old receipts, and one hidden room after another, Sterling finds the plot - and the players - ever-expanding in this mystery of provenance and deception.

Gender of detective: female

There are no deaths in this novel.

("Everybody lives! Just this one, Rose, everybody lives!")

(...er, right, sorry about that.)

The sad thing is, I was disappointed. No murder. No big theft, despite the title: there's a little theft, which is what brings Sterling to the museum in the first place, and something deeper and older, which is what she discovers, but even that's not a clear-cut single theft. There are a couple points where I thought someone might die, but no.

The point to this novel, insofar as there is one besides antiques, is secrets - women's secrets, kept from habit or from duty or just from the delight of having one to oneself. It's an interesting topic, but not what I was expecting from the book. You know where you are with a murder. Secrets are trickier.

*

The sun's risen again. Let's see if I can persuade my eyes to do the same.

LOCKED ROOMS, by Laurie R. King.

Cover copy: Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes are back in Laurie R. King's highly acclaimed New York Times bestselling mystery series. And this time the first couple of detection pair up to unlock the buried memory of a shocking crime with the power to kill again - lost somewhere in Russell's own past.

After departing Bombay by ship, Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes are en route to the bustling modern city of San Francisco. There, Mary will settle some legal affairs surrounding the inheritance of her family's old estate. But the closer they get to port, the more Mary finds herself prey to troubling dreams and irrational behavior - a point not lost on Holmes, much to Russell's annoyance.

In 1906, when Mary was six, San Francisco was devastated by an earthquake and a raging fire that reduced the city to rubble. For years, Mary has denied any memory of the catastrophe that for days turned the fabled streets into hell on earth. But Holmes suspects that some hidden trauma connected with the "unforgettable" catastrophe may be the real culprit for Mary's memory lapse. And no sooner do they begin to familiarize themselves with the particulars of the Russell estate than it becomes apparent that whatever unpleasantness Mary has forgotten, it hasn't forgotten her. Why does her father's will forbid access to the house except in the presence of immediate family? Why did someone break in, then take nothing of value? And why is Russell herself targeted for assassination?

The more questions they ask of Mary's past, the more people from that past turn out to have died violent, unexplained deaths. Now, with the aid of a hard-boiled young detective and crime writer named Hammett, Russell and Holmes find themselves embroiled in a mystery that leads them through the winding streets of Chinatown to the unspoken secrets of a parent's marriage and the tragic car "accident" that a fourteen-year-old Mary alone survived -- an accident that may not have been an accident at all. What Russell is about to discover is that even a forgotten past never dies...and it can kill again.

Gender of detectives: one male, one female

Continuing our Accused Mary Sue Power Hour, we have Mary Russell -- first Holmes' apprentice, then his wife. I'll admit to picking up this book in fear and trembling. Holmes was one of the icons of my childhood, and there is so very, very much bad Holmes fiction out there.

To my relief, Russell didn't read nearly as Mary Sue as feared. There are hints in that direction (for fuck's sake, she's Holmes' partner, which is startling enough, and also his wife, which is worse), but at least in this book, where Russell is repeatedly described as being self-handicapped by her own denial of her past, she isn't given any plot coupons and I came to her same conclusions at about the same time.

The biggest problem I had wasn't so much Russell as it was Holmes. I felt as though I could have swapped out Holmes for any number of possible pulp heros, without particularly affecting the plot, Part of this, I gather, is that King argues that Holmes is actually at least ten years younger than commonly accepted, and thus it is a man in his 60s I'm reading about, rather than a man in his 70s or older.* I have a harder time judging the use of Chinatown and the Chinese: despite King's best attempts, I can't think of any way to use them without running into questions of cultural appropriation and so on.

Over all: like Reiko, I'll score Russell on the good side of the Mary Sue meter...for now, and subject to further study. King can write: I picked up one of her Kate Martinelli books and was pleasantly surprised how they treated the characters. It comes down to whether a good writer can redeem certain subjects.

*My initial reaction was a shrug - it wouldn't be the first time, nor the second, that authors have manipulated ages for their own purposes. On the other hand, clicking a link in Wikipedia yielded the claim that she had merely restored Holmes to his proper years, and freed him up for a long and healthy middle age, and I admit to a native distrust of any such grandiose claims.