Mysteries Galore.com

Archive for July, 2010

Reviewed by Patricia Reid

Although Kera Kollmorgan loves to take care of her grandson, three month old, Micah, she is disturbed when his mother Danette does not return when promised. Kera is even more disturbed when Danette’s cell phone goes unanswered. Kera’s son Nathan was killed in Iraq and never knew his son Micah. Kera is always glad to pitch in and help but when Danette’s absence caused her to miss her shift at Planned Parenthood she couldn’t help but feel that something was very, very wrong.

Kera first attempted to contact Detective Wade Jackson. Detective Jackson and Kera had been in a relationship for sometime and Kera was sure he could help her find Danette. Detective Jackson was unable to answer her call because he was at a doctor’s appointment checking out a medical condition he had tried to ignore for sometime. When Jackson finally received Kera’s message he made a trip to the office of the psychiatrist that Danette had planned to visit. The doctor verified that Danette had been there but made no mention of where she might be going. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by Allen Hott

Excellent book as a Christmas gift for mystery lovers!

Otto Penzler is an editor of mysteries as well as the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop located in Manhattan. Each year for seventeen years Penzler had some of his favorite mystery authors write a short mystery involving both Christmas and his bookshop. Each year he gave the new story out to his customers. And now he has published all seventeen short mysteries in one book. It is a great book. It includes stories by Mary Higgins Clark, Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, and others.

Give Till it Hurts by Donald Westlake is a typical Dortmunder story involving the ne’er do well petty criminal who always ends up having his plans disrupted. Though he never seems to pull off the job completely he usually ends up with something and never ends up in the hands of the law. In this adventure he heists some very rare coins but as per usual he really doesn’t get to keep them. How he loses them is the climax and a good one!

Some of the stories employ hyperbole and very well. One even tells about a supposed missing Dashiell Hammett story titled The Thin Woman. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by Cy Hilterman

Troubled children that are taken to and treated in a pediatric psych ward of a medical facility have reached that location after much anguish and mental and physical abuse of their parents and anyone that has attempted to work with them. The path is long, troubled, and many times caused by former abuse to those children by another person, usually a family member or close friend. It can be various kinds of abuse, not just sexual, but regardless they end up needing long professional treatment. Sometimes that treatment is successful and sometimes not. In some few situations the professional furthers the abuse creating a worse monster out of the child, but in most cases the child is helped with improvement, slight as it may be, occurring over time. Lisa Gardner had to have done much research to take the reader into this world to the point that you can feel the tension, the personal games played, the many ways attempted to help these children even though the professionals themselves are sometimes hurt physically by a child.

Sergeant Detective D. D. Warren is a tough cop who has seen all types of crime but even she was awoken when she entered this world of children’s mental problems. She was a 12-year member of the Boston Police Department who was a workaholic who seemed to prefer work to a meaningful date, or so it seemed lately. When several families were murdered seemingly by one of their own family members, D. D. got dragged into this world of child psychotic behavior. Many characters were a part of “Live to Tell” from the children themselves to the parents, to the nurses and workers in the psych wards, and of course the police. You will be Victoria, the mother of a broken family that has a problem son; Danielle, a pediatric psych ward nurse who doesn’t remember exactly what occurred when her family was killed; Andrew Lightfoot, a believer in spiritual powers and “other” planes of being; and of course the children who could behave one minute and be hollering or attempting to hurt someone the next. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by Cheryl Masciarelli

Matriarch, Kate Blackwell owner of Kruger-Brent, LTD an international multibillion dollar company, has died. Family members gather and attend the funeral but most of them are not in mourning, they are happy that she is no longer alive. And those members of this family have only one thought and that is who will be taking over as CEO of the company. In her will she named Alexandra, her granddaughter, to be her successor but Eve, Alexandra’s twin will fight to take over even though Kate was adamant that she have nothing to do with Kruger-Brent. Eve plans to change that.

Fortunately for Eve, her twin dies during childbirth, and thus starts the fight for control. She feels that “her” company was stolen from her, since Alexandra’s children are next in line according to the will. Eve, once a beautiful woman, lives as a recluse because her plastic surgeon husband, Keith Webster, has taken her beauty away, during a procedure knowing this is the only way he can be sure she won’t leave him. Eve, a very bitter and vengeful person, grooms her son for the takeover even if it means murder. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by Patricia Reid

A coffee cup is probably the last place anyone would expect to find a corpse but then Maggy Thorsen is no stranger to the unexpected. The cup of coffee is not an ordinary cup of coffee but a cup fifteen feet in diameter by five feet high and capable of holding nearly 5,000 cups of coffee.

The coffee cup is a part of Brookhills celebration of a regular train connecting downtown Milwaukee to the Brookhills Junction depot fifteen miles west. Maggy’s coffee shop Uncommon Grounds has just relocated to the depot. Maggy and her partner Sarah Kingston are hoping for a steady business from the commuters who come and go on the train as well as their former customers from the previous location. A mime is strolling through the crowd at the celebration and seems to be getting in the way of everyone and trips over the air hose, which brings the giant cup tumbling down. Maggy has no clue as to who hired the mime unless it was JoLynne Penn-Williams, the person in charge of the Brookhills end of the celebration. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by Teri Davis

Most adults live fairly predictable lives. As a medical examiner, Maura Isles, is cautious. She is not a risk-taker. So while at a pathologists’ convention in Wyoming, she is offered the opportunity for an adventure from a former college classmate and fellow pathologist. Since her love life is not doubtful now, maybe this chance will change her life into something more meaningful. She agrees to a ski trip for the weekend.

When GPS gives directions, we tend to believe it is correct. As snow is falling and getting increasingly deeper, you definitely are hoping it is correct. However, when you are stuck in the snow, then you could care less about the GPS and just look for some place safe and out of the weather.

Maura, the other pathologist and his thirteen-year-old daughter, and another couple decide to leave the vehicle and hike to safety, trudging through the snow. They are relieved to come upon a small village of twelve identical houses. They enter one whose door was unlocked and are surprised to find the house is not equipped with the usual comforts of everyday life, such as electricity and central heat. Also, puzzling is the dinner that was left on the table, not eaten. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by Allen Hott

Charlie Hood, a LA deputy sheriff, really doesn’t know what kind of can of worms he has kicked over when on patrol one late night he stops a lady speeding in a Corvette. After checking her license and with headquarters he decides to leave her go with a warning. While he is talking to her they both notice an older Black Lincoln Continental slow down and look them over. Charlie goes back to his patrol and both of the other cars leave.

However Charlie’s patrol takes him back down the road to Miracle Auto Body. Seeing lights on causes him to go up and look inside to see who would be working this late at night. Looking through the window he sees dead bodies strewn throughout the shop with weapons by their sides.

And that is when the worms really crawl of the can that Charlie kicked over. Both of the drivers that he had seen earlier were very definitely tied into this crime scene but he is not aware of it at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by Allen Hott

Eve Duncan is back in Blood Game and still has not reconciled her mind to the disappearance and probable murder years ago of Bonnie, her young daughter. In this book Johansen not only weaves Bonnie into the overall texture of the story but also actually makes her into a fairly large character.

Duncan’s friend, Megan Blair, fears that some of her facilitator “skills” may have been passed on to Eve. They and Joe Quinn, Eve’s husband, were working on a case of missing, murdered children. During the excavating Megan had been injured and knocked unconscious. She feared that during that time she may have touched Eve or Joe and inadvertently made them also able to see spirits. It is not the thing that any of them would have wanted. Eve tells her not to worry but she doesn’t realize that Joe has in fact had some strange happenings occur to him recently.

Joe is a former FBI agent and present police officer in Atlanta so he is not too easily perturbed. He continues his work and puts the occurrences aside as a product of overwork. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by Caryn St. Clair

Kiki Lowenstein rushes to her daughter Anya’s school after being told Anya and a friend happened onto the dead body of one of the school’s teachers. Besides being concerned with how the discovery will affect her daughter emotionally, Kiki is also worried that the girls might have seen the killer-or at least that the killer might think so, putting them in danger. So it doesn’t take much urging from Detective Chad Detweiler for Kiki to start investigating.

While this series is built around Kiki Lowenstein’s scrapbooking business, this is far from a “craft” mystery. There are scrapbooking hints scattered throughout, but non-scrapbookers can just skip those pages and keep reading. Kiki does use her job as a way to snoop into people’s lives, but the mystery itself has very little to do with the craft. Instead, Slan uses her mystery series to take a hard look at tough issues. In the series, Anya attends a very exclusive private school. While that school has recently made an effort to diversify its student body, Slan’s books are an interesting study in class structure in America. Read the rest of this entry »

Reviewed by Douglas R. Cobb

What would you do, what would run through your head if you were charged with the crime of rape and didn’t do it? America has one of the world’s best justice systems, but even in America, the justice system can, and sometimes does, fail, and the innocent sometimes get sent to prison for years, decades, or longer. We all hear the stories on the radio or the news, or watch similar dramas play out on television programs or movies, or read about the wrongfully imprisoned in potboilers by authors like John Grisham. The Nobel Prizener by Herman Franck, Esq., is a similar novel, about a man who gets falsely accused of rape, and receives a lengthy sentence when certain evidence that should have exonerated him is given little weight by the jury in comparison with the alleged victim’s testimony. The man, John Carver, is a brilliant economist who is honored with the Noble Prize in Economics while in prison for his valuable and important theories and how they lead to the world’s countries coming out of a global recession.

But, how did he get to prison in the first place? What series of horrendous and inexplicable events could have led one of the most promising and insightful economists in America to being imprisoned for a rape he didn’t commit? Why would a woman (Gloria Fithe) lie in open court about being raped, knowing it could potentially ruin someone’s life? There should have been no way that John Carver’s life should have taken the unforeseen twist and turns that it did, and as I was reading it, I couldn’t help but to think: “There but for the grace of God go I,” because, sadly, given the wrong chain of unlucky circumstances, anyone could be railroaded much like Carver was, if not for rape then for some other crime. Read the rest of this entry »