Night Rounds: Helene Tursten

This is the second book in Helene Tursten's series featuring Inspector Irene Huss, and is set in Sweden. The story starts when the power goes out in a hospital and the backup generator has been disabled. Only a skeleton staff is working at the time, and one of the nurses can't be found. The police are called in; after the dead body of the missing nurse is found, the homicide detectives arrive. The author's background is in nursing and dentistry; thus she has insights into the daily (and nightly) events at a hospital.

Irene's husband is a chef, and they have twin daughters and a dog. They feel like a real family; the parents both have demanding jobs, and have a hard time finding time to spend with each other. The two girls are teenagers and at that stage where parents worry about them a lot. Irene takes the dog, Sammie, to doggie day care if no one's going to be at home.

The story is told primarily from Irene's point of view. She is a female policewoman working in a predominantly male department. The other female in the department is experiencing sexual harassment at work, and it doesn't get handled very well by the bosses. Other social issues are covered as well (homelessness, mental patients released too early), but they never take over the story.

You can probably tell that I enjoyed this book. The reader follows the details and repetitive work involved in a murder investigation; there are not a lot of sensational events but the story is complex and there are plenty of surprises. I sometimes get irritated when the police in mysteries seem to forget facts or not realize their importance or put off following up on them, but that is probably like real life. The police make mistakes too and they have too much work and can't get to everything.

I read this book as a part of the European Reading Challenge. I had previously read and enjoyed the first book in the series, Detective Inspector Huss. One of the advantages of taking a long time to get going on a foreign language series is that you are more likely to have the books available to read in order. In this case, Night Rounds was the fourth of Tursten's novels that were translated, but the second in the series. I have had this one for five years but I am finally getting around to it. And there now seem to be ten books in the series that have been translated in English.

See more  reviews of Night Rounds at:
the crime segments (review of the first book here also)
Petrona
crimepieces
Mysteries in Paradise
Ms. Wordopolis


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Publisher:   Soho Press, 2012 (orig. pub. 1999)
Length:       326 pages
Format:      Trade paperback
Series:       Inspector Irene Huss #2
Setting:      Sweden
Genre:        Police procedural
Translation:   Laura A. Wideburg
Source:      I purchased this book.

Death of a Nationalist: Rebecca Pawel

Carlos Tejada Alonso y León is a Sergeant in the Guardia Civil, stationed in Madrid in 1939.  He is the son of a conservative Southern family of landowners, a supporter of the Catholic Franquista cause, and a Nationalist. The bitter civil war between the Nationalists and the Republicans has ended and the Guardia Civil is attempting to impose order in Madrid.

This story begins with the death of a corporal in the Guardia Civil. A young woman, sympathetic to the Republicans, goes to recover a child's school notebook left by the body, and is casually killed by Sergeant Tejada, just due to her presence at the scene of crime. From that point, I found it hard to have any sympathy with the protagonist. Not impossible, but very hard.

Tejada soon discovers that the dead corporal is an old friend and thus is doubly determined to find the murderer. His inquiries take him to the schoolgirl who owned the notebook and her family and school.

This is another book I should have read a long time ago. It has been on my shelves for twelve years. However, the time was right, and it was a great choice for the European Reading Challenge. Reading about the Spanish Civil War was new for me. The story does not go into a lot of historical background, but uses the circumstances of the characters lives to provide the background needed. The book was  extremely well-written and the characters had plenty of depth.

Quote from the author's web page:

Death of a Nationalist was originally conceived as a single novel with two protagonists, one on each side of the Spanish Civil War.  But at the end of the book, I realized there was more story to tell about at least one of the protagonists.  Carlos Tejada Alonso y León, the right-wing guardia who suffers a crisis of conscience in the first book, needed to develop further.  So the book became a series, currently with four novels, detailing the life of Carlos Tejada, who is often unsympathetic, but ultimately, like Marcus Brutus, an honorable man.

I hope to continue reading the series. I have the fourth book but this is definitely a series that needs to be read in order, so I will look out for the next book.

Also see reviews at:
The View from the Blue House, Brothers Judd, and MostlyFiction Book Reviews
Also added in November 2018: A review at Maphead's Book Blog

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Publisher:   Soho Press, 2004 (orig. pub. 2003)
Length:       262 pages
Format:      Trade paperback
Series:       Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon #1
Setting:      Spain, 1939
Genre:       Historical mystery
Source:      I purchased this book.

The Private Practice of Michael Shayne: Brett Halliday

This second book in the Michael Shayne series features a private investigator in Miami, Florida. His best friend, Larry Kincaid, gets involved with shady characters because he wants to make quick money. One of them, Harry Grange, is a blackmailer who ends up dead. In trying to protect his friend from suspicion, Shayne implicates himself in the murder and spends the rest of the story trying to undo that. Peter Painter, chief of the Miami Beach detective bureau, has a grudge against Shayne and would love to prove him guilty.

This is only the second Michael Shayne novel I have read, but both books have been fun and entertaining, the stories full of twists and turns. The first thirty novels in the series were written by Davis Dresser, using the pseudonym Brett Halliday. The remaining novels (there were over 70) were written by other authors, all using the same pseudonym. I don't know how the quality of the novels holds up throughout the long series, but I will be trying more of them.

Lloyd Nolan starred in seven films based on this series, starting in 1940, and the first one, Michael Shayne, Private Detective, was based on this book. Thus I sought out this paperback edition of the book so I could read it first.

Michael Shayne in the books is a tall tough red-headed Irishman. Lloyd Nolan does not exactly fit that description, but he still makes a fine Michael Shayne, charming and appealing but still tough. He is willing to bend the rules to save himself or a friend or client from arrest, and he has a humorous come-back for everything. The story in the film is switched around quite a bit, with additional characters, but basically it shares the same mystery plot as in the book. Other actors I enjoyed in this film were Marjorie Weaver as Phyllis Brighton (Shayne's love interest), Douglass Dumbrille as a crooked casino owner, Walter Abel as a crooked race horse owner, Elizabeth Patterson as Aunt Olivia, and Charles Coleman as Ponsy the butler. The film was very entertaining, much better overall than I expected it to be.

Included on the DVD was a very informative featurette titled The Detective Who Never Dies, including interviews with Otto Penzler, Barry T. Zeman, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, James Ursini, Alain Silver, Stuart Kaminsky, and Halliday's widow, Mary Dresser.

Both the cover of my paperback edition and the DVD cover shown here feature illustrations by Robert McGinnis.

My earlier posts related to this series are an overview of the series and a  review of Bodies Are Where You Find Them.

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Publisher:  Dell, 1958. Orig. pub. 1940.
Length:     190 pages
Format:     Paperback
Series:      Michael Shayne, #2
Setting:     Miami, Florida
Genre:      Mystery, private detective
Source:     I purchased my copy.

Murder is Academic: Christine Poulson

After reading Christine Poulson's most recent mysteries (Deep Water and Cold, Cold Heart) I wanted to go back and read her first series. Murder is Academic is the first book in the Cambridge Mystery series, starring Cassandra James.

In this debut novel, Poulson has set her story at St. Etheldreda's College at Cambridge. Cassandra is a professor of English, and she finds the head of her department drowned in a pool, surrounded by exam papers.

From the prologue...

It’s hard now to remember what first struck me as not being quite right, but I think it was the garden sprinkler. 

... As I walked down the path I heard the gentle swishing without being able quite to identify what the sound was. Then I turned the corner of the house and saw the water falling in slow rhythmic veils. The ground underneath the sprinkler was sodden, the grass almost submerged. It must have been on for hours, all night probably. You’d have to know Margaret as well as I did to understand why that was odd. She ran a tight ship in college and it was the same at home. I’d often thought it was just as well that Malcolm was fanatically tidy, too. They would have driven each other mad otherwise

Margaret Joplin's death appears to be accidental, but later more and more strange and unsettling developments point to the possibility of murder.

Soon Cassandra's boss asks her to take over the position as the Head of the English department. And with that new position, she has the stress of pushing not only herself but all  members of the small department to complete some research to satisfy a Research Assessment Exercise that is coming up.

One of the things that Christine Poulson does really well is setting and atmosphere. That is true in her two most recent books, one set in Ely in Cambridgeshire, in the world of pharmaceutical research; one set partially at a research station in the Antarctic. In Murder is Academic, in addition to the college setting, we have plagiarism, séances, the pressures to publish research. And you will notice that research is a prominent theme in all of these.

And on top of that, she creates characters that I care about. Cassandra is shaken up by the death of her friend and colleague. She is in a tentative romantic relationship with Stephen, an attorney, and she doesn't know how  far she  wants that to progress. Stephen; the department's office assistant, Cathy; the various quirky academics in the department -- all of those characters felt real and believable to me.

The plot is intricate, but with the setting in academia, among scholars and book lovers, I enjoyed the twists and turns that it takes.  I had no complaints. And I loved the ending.

The UK title of this book is Dead Letters.  I have the 2nd book in the series, Stage Fright, on order.

See also these posts at Confessions of a Mystery Novelist..., Clothes in Books, and I Prefer Reading.


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Publisher:   Minotaur Books, 2004 (orig. pub. 2002)
Length:       240 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Series:       Cassandra James, #1
Setting:      Cambridge
Genre:       Mystery
Source:      I purchased this book.

They Do It with Mirrors: Agatha Christie

I have been reading the Miss Marple books in order. In the first four that I read, Miss Marple was introduced later in the book. At first this confused me, I felt like she was an afterthought. Later I decided I liked that approach, so that we get to know the characters well before the sleuthing begins.

In They Do It with Mirrors, Miss Marple is on the scene from the beginning. The story opens with Ruth Van Rydock, an old friend of Jane Marple, requesting that Jane visit her sister, Carrie Louise Serrocold. Ruth has a feeling that something is wrong at Carrie Louise's home, Stonygates, and she wants Jane to visit there and check out the situation.

This is our introduction to Ruth.  She has been trying on an exquisite gown, while talking to Jane:

The elderly maid with the grey hair and the small pinched mouth eased the gown carefully up over Mrs. Van Rydock's upstretched arms.

Mrs. Van Rydock stood in front of the glass in her peach satin slip. She was exquisitely corseted. Her still shapely legs were encased in fine nylon stockings. Her face, beneath a layer of cosmetics and constantly toned up by massage, appeared almost girlish at a slight distance. Her hair was less grey than tending to hydrangea blue and was perfectly set. It was practically impossible when looking at Mrs. Van Rydock to imagine what she would be like in a natural state. Everything that money could do had been done for her - reinforced by diet, massage, and constant exercises. 

Ruth Van Rydock looked humorously at her friend. 

'Do you think most people would guess, Jane, that you and I are practically the same age?' 

Miss Marple responded loyally. 

'Not for a moment, I'm sure,' she said reassuringly. 'I'm afraid, you know, that I look every minute of my age!' 

Miss Marple was white-haired, with a soft pink and white wrinkled face and innocent china blue eyes. She looked a very sweet old lady. Nobody would have called Mrs. Van Rydock a sweet old lady.

After the first two chapters setting the story up, we leave Ruth behind, and move on to Stonygates. Carrie Louise is living there with her third husband, Lewis Serrocold, who runs a home for delinquent boys on the estate. Other relatives from her two previous marriages are living there or visiting. There are also people staying there who are employed at the school that Carrie Louise's husband runs. So, we have a large and confusing cast of characters. And eventually there is a murder, under very strange circumstances.

This was an interesting look at postwar England, when owners of large estates had difficulties keeping them running. Carrie's granddaughter Gina was sent to America during the war and met her husband, Wally, over there. They have only recently returned to England to live with Carrie Louise. Wally is not pleased with that situation at all. (Gina also seems to have every young male around madly in love with her.)

I should have known who did it. I even suspected, but as usual, Christie fooled me and kept me interested in other possibilities. All in all, this was an entertaining story and a different look at Miss Marple. Her connection with Ruth and her sister Carrie Louise was that they were at a European boarding school together, thus remained fast friends over the years even with little contact. I can picture that, although I never thought of Jane Marple as the product of a finishing school.

I read this book in a UK edition, with a lovely cover by Tom Adams. The title for the US edition was Murder with Mirrors.


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Publisher:  Fontana, 1975. Orig. pub. 1952.
Length:     188 pages
Format:     Paperback
Series:      Miss Marple, #5
Setting:     UK.
Genre:      Mystery
Source:     I purchased this book.

Six Degrees of Separation from Tales of the City to Gasa-Gasa Girl

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six other books, forming a chain. Every month she provides the title of a book as the starting point.

The starting point this month is Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City. I decided to read this book this month, it was even better than I expected and now I want to read other books in the series. It amazes me that I missed it when it came out in 1978, since I was living in California at the time. That was a transitional time in my life so I guess other things were on my mind. The book is set in San Francisco, California, and it was originally published in newspaper columns.

Another book set in San Francisco is The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan,  published in 1989, a story about four immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters. It is many years since I read that book, and what I remember about it was the exploration of the mother / daughter relationships. But the present day portions of each story are set in San Francisco, including Chinatown, and now I want to reread the book.

From there I move to a book set in another California city, Santa Barbara. Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg was a fantastic read but it was very, very bleak. The depiction of Santa Barbara is perfect and fits in well with the telling of the story of a Vietnam vet and his gigolo friend.

I don't read that many books that are dark and bleak, but even before I read Double Indemnity by James M. Cain, I knew it would be about greed and depravity and unhappy people. Even so, I enjoyed it; it is a  very short novel, almost closer to novella length. That book was also set in California, in Los Angeles.

Next I link to another book by James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce, set in Glendale, California, during the Great Depression. This one is about a single mother and her relationship with her selfish and narcissistic daughter.

Another mother / daughter relationship is the focus of Concrete Angel by Patricia Abbott. In this case it is the mother who is selfish and narcissistic and the daughter is victimized. The story is told from the daughter's point of view and is a mesmerizing read. A chilling story, dark but not depressing.

My last link is to a book whose theme is a difficult father / daughter relationship.  Gasa-Gasa Girl by Naomi Hirahara is the 2nd book in a series featuring Mas Arai, a Japanese-American gardener in Los Angeles. Mas is seventy years old and the book starts as he arrives in New York City on his first visit with his daughter and her family. They have not gotten along for many years, but now she is asking for his help.

This month I have read every book in my chain. I noticed that each one of the books, even Tales of the City, has elements of the effects of family relationships, although it isn't obvious in all of the descriptions. Next month the chain begins with Atonement by Ian Ewan. Another book I have not read, although I do have a copy in the TBR piles.

Strangers on a Train: Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith is known for her dark, suspense-filled novels and Strangers on a Train was my introduction to her writing. (It was also her debut novel.) I had been wanting to read it for years and Peggy at Peggy's Porch very kindly sent me her copy. The basic story is that two men meet on a train, and one of them suggests a murder pact. If they each murder a person that the other wants to get rid of, then they can get away with the perfect crime.

Charles Anthony Bruno is the one who proposes the pact; he is a rich young man, dependent on his father for funds, and indulged by his mother. The other young man is Guy Haines; he is embarrassed by the encounter, determined not to take Bruno seriously. Guy is an architect, just starting out, with a wife he wants to divorce and a girlfriend he wants to marry. Most of the story is told from Guy's point of view, although we get to know Bruno's thoughts very well also.

My assessment:

A very good novel, but a disturbing read. I read the first 100 pages enjoying Highsmith's wonderful way with telling a story. I liked the buildup of tension, the introduction of the characters, and the laying out of the story. But beyond that point I had to slow down and only read a bit of it a day. It was too intense and very unpleasant. The ending was a complete surprise to me and I did not find it convincing.

For readers who have not already experienced this novel, I would only recommend it to those who enjoy highly suspenseful noir novels. This novel proves to be more of a character study than the exploration of a crime, and that is usually an approach I like. This time it did not prove to be enjoyable.

The film:

There is well-known film adaptation of this novel, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Farley Granger as Guy and Robert Walker as Bruno both handle their roles very well. Robert Walker's acting is especially chilling. I had seen the movie before reading the book, but enough years had passed that I wasn't sure how much was changed in the film. The basic story and the ending of the film are quite different. I liked the film a lot, but it does not have the emotional impact or the depth of the book. In the book it is hard to have sympathy with anyone, in the film the characters are more likable.

Other thoughts on the novel:

• Marie's review at Goodreads
• At Peggy's Porch
• Moira's review at Past Offences
• Rich's  review at Past Offences
• At Col's Criminal Library

I still plan to read at least one other novel by Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, the first in a series. I will probably try some of her other stand alone novels. Suggestions are welcome.


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Publisher:   W. W. Norton & Company, 2001 (orig. publ. 1950)
Length:       280 pages
Format:      Trade paperback
Setting:      USA
Genre:        Mystery
Source:      A gift.

Reading Summary for June 2018

In 2018, I have been reading more each month (than in previous years) and it still amazes me. This month I read 10 books and they were all good reads. And some of them were spectacular. As usual, most of the books were crime fiction, but I did read two books that were not mystery or crime related. Eight of these books were books on my 20 Books of Summer list.

My two non-mystery reads in June were ...

Auntie Mame (1955) by Patrick Dennis

A story about a young boy raised by his aunt after his father dies. The book reads like connected short stories, each highlighting a different stage in the boy's growing-up years.  It is wacky and entertaining, definitely not my usual fare, and I enjoyed almost every story. The story has been adapted for film and as a play.

Tales of the City (1978) by Armistead Maupin

I really have no idea how I missed this series over the years. Set in San Francisco, California, and very close to the year I visited the city the first time. Not mystery related, so that probably has something to do with it. I did learn about the books in 2014 at Clothes in Books, yet still wasn't tempted to try one. This month the time was right. It took me a while to get into the story, but I ending up loving the book and planning to read more in the series.

And now on to the eight crime fiction reads:

The Bone Garden (2003) by Kate Ellis

This is the fifth book in a series that has an archaeological theme and has two mysteries in each novel, one past, one in the present. This one had interesting characters and a decent story, but I did have some problems with it. Many readers are very happy with the series though, so if you haven't tried it, I do recommend it.

An Expert in Murder (2008) by Nicola Upson

Mystery novelist Josephine Tey is the sleuth in this one. I am not sure how much the sleuth in this book resembles the real Josephine Tey (whose real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh), but I did find the story compelling and enjoyed the setting, so I will read more of this series.

Death in the Garden (1995)
by Elizabeth Ironside

A historical novel, with story lines in two different time periods. In 1925, Diana Pollexfen was accused of killing her husband, but found innocent. Sixty years later, her grandniece decides to find out what really happened. Both stories and the way they tie together are excellent, and the writing is very, very good.

Murder is Academic (2002) by Christine Poulson

This is the first book in Poulson's Cambridge Mystery series, starring Cassandra James. After reading Poulson's most recent mysteries (Deep Water and Cold, Cold Heart) I wanted to go back and read her first series. That was a good decision; this was a lovely book, with interesting, believable characters and a great ending. The UK title is Dead Letters.

The Terra-Cotta Dog (1996) by Andrea Camilleri

The second Inspector Montalbano mystery, set in Italy, part of a long-running series. Montalbano finds a cave filled with artifacts and the bodies of two young lovers who have been dead for 50 years. I had read the previous book in the series but had forgotten how much of an independent loner the inspector is. The story is very complex.

White Sky, Black Ice (1999) by Stan Jones

This series stars Nathan Active, an Alaska state trooper, half Inupiat and half white, assigned to the remote village of Chukchi. The story has an interesting and unusual setting and the plotting is fine, but it is the character that I want to know more about. And it is that element that will bring me back to read more books in the series. 

Thunderball (1961) by Ian Fleming

This is the second James Bond book I read this year. It is the first of three novels featuring Ernst Stavro Blofeld, head of the criminal organization SPECTRE. As always, a good read.

Faithful Place (2010) by Tana French

I read this for the European Challenge for Ireland. Set in Dublin, featuring Frank Mackey, a Dublin detective working in the Undercover department. Frank returns to his old neighborhood and the family he left 22 years earlier to investigate a possible crime. Another great story by this author, my favorite of her books ... so far.