Nancy Drew, Unplugged Sunday, Jul 3 2011 

great read and mystery to die for Auntie M Writes Crime 12:01 am

Today’s guest blogger is Canadian author Nancy Lauzon, whose exciting new novel debuts this fall.  Hannah is a character whose voice you will enjoy, and who gets herself into and out of trouble the way most of us change our clothes. The dialogue is snappy and you’ll gobble this one up!  Get a jump on the rest with this special contest Nancy is offering:

The Chick Dick Blog Contest!

Just visit Nancy’s blog at http://nancylauzon.blogspot.com and click “Follow” in the right hand column.

All new blog followers will be eligible to win a FREE copy of The Good, The Bad and The Hair-a Chick Dick Mystery. Deadline September 1st, 2011

   “Chicks make lousy detectives,” he said.  “Trust me, I’ve worked with a few. They can’t keep their mouths shut and they’re too emotional. You need a dick to be a good P.I., not to mention balls.”

   She smiled. “I guess that explains why you’re not a very good P.I. then, doesn’t it?”

Excerpt from:     A Few Dead Men – a Chick Dick Mystery by Nancy Lauzon            Release date: Fall 2011

Imagine an alternate universe, where a frizzy-haired Nancy Drew drives a beat up Delta, ekes out a living at a health food store, and worries about her father, on probation for tax evasion.

Or a disillusioned Nancy Drew with a bigamist father, who must save the family home from foreclosure.

Or a depressed Nancy Drew who runs away to escape her past traumas, and ends up in a haunted house.

Welcome to the world of Chick Dick Mysteries, a collection of novels inspired by my lifelong love of the Nancy Drew Mystery series, about women who share many of the qualities that Nancy Drew was noted for: brains, bravery, deduction, or a well placed karate kick.

“Nancy Drew, an attractive girl of eighteen, was driving home along a country road in her new, dark-blue convertible. She had just delivered some legal papers for her father … Carson Drew, a well known lawyer in their home of River Heights, (who) frequently discussed puzzling aspects of cases with his blond, blue-eyed daughter.”

(Excerpt from “The Secret of the Old Clock” by Carolyn Keene)

Problem is, how many eighteen-year-olds do you know who are allowed to drive around in a snappy roadster and solve mysteries for fun? Nancy’s father never nagged her about getting a job or studying harder at school. He was an unending source of emotional and financial support. His sternest warning? “Be careful.” Carson is the father every girl wants.

But not the one most of us have. Dad, I love you, but you never bought me a car for my birthday.

Growing up, I never had a Ned Nickerson in my life, either. Wouldn’t it be great to have a guy who was handsome, reliable and gallant, ready to fight off arsonists and kidnappers at a moment’s notice, but also willing to stay in the background if you needed your independence?

Nancy also enjoyed loyal and steadfast friends like Bess and George, who didn’t mind getting knocked down, poisoned, or nearly suffocated in an ice-cream freezer. Being friends with Nancy couldn’t have been easy, but it must have been irresistible.

On the flip side, a Chick Dick heroine’s personal life is usually a mess. They are noted for their disastrous love lives, dead beat–or dead–parents, mind-numbing jobs, and second-hand cars. A far cry from Nancy’s idyllic existence in River Heights, but perhaps a more relatable one for readers.

Nancy’s passion was solving mysteries and helping others. Chick Dicks are amateur sleuths too, but usually out of necessity rather than choice. A Chick Dick heroine gets thrown into the mystery by chance. While she might enjoy the challenge of following clues, the stakes are higher, and much more personal.

Nancy has been a wonderful role model for generations of fans, and has captured our hearts for more than eighty years. We love her, even though we might be just a tad jealous of her perfect life.

Following in Nancy’s slender, size 5 footsteps, Chick Dicks will beat their bad luck, bad hair and bad relationships. They’ll rise to their challenges and earn their happy ending.

But their path may be a little rockier.

 

Karin Fossum’s Inspector Sejer: Next three Sunday, Jun 26 2011 

Award winning novelist and great read and mystery to die for and Series not to be missed , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:30 am

As promised, here are the next three Konrad Sejer novels in Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s addicting series. The dates shown are the US translation publication dates. As of this date, there are two new Sejer’s in the wings:

2010’s Bad Intentions will be available in the US this August. 2011’s The Caller does not have its US publications date yet. I’m sure down the road this blog will have those reviews of this series that continues to delight, as Fossum has the patient and kind Sejer dissect crime in Norway’s tiny rural towns.

2007 The Indian Bride: In one of Fossum’s characteristic moves, she takes us inside the mind and life of bachelor Gunder Jomann, a man of simple means who never spends money on himself. So when he travels to India, he raises a few eyebrows; and when he comes back a married man, even more. Jomann returns alone to prepare for the arrival of his bride. As the buildup to this day looms for him, his sister’s car accident will bring forth a series of horrific events, as the villagers of his small town of Elvestad are stunned when a woman’s battered body is found in a field on his wife’s arrival day.

The town’s inhabitants all come under close scrutiny by Sejer and his colleague Skarre. Everyone has a secret to protect, from the young woman who is a key witness to the owner of a local shop. It is up to Sejer to decide whose secret led to a horrific murder. With her usual care for getting inside the heads and psyches of her characters, Fossum has written another one that will keep you turning pages at night.

Next up is Black Seconds, which also came to the US in 2007. The story opens with an ordinary day, when almost-ten year old Ida Joner setting off on her brand-new bicycle into town. Then the girl vanishes without a trace. Hundreds of volunteers comb the neighborhood, searching for the little girl, and the media is whipped into a frenzy. It takes the calm reassurance and clear thinking of Konrad Sejer to find the answer to this puzzling case.

Quietly unnerving, Black Seconds illustrates how the disappearance of a child can affect a small village as much as any terrorist or serial killer.

2009’s Water’s Edge is the last case for Sejer I can review at this date.

A young married couple, Kristine and Reinhardt Ris, set out for a Sunday walk in the woods. What could be more normal? Until they stumble on the body of a young boy, just as they see a man limping away. To make matters worse, as the couple await the arrival of the police, Reinhardt takes multiple pictures of the dead boy’s body.

While Sejer makes his inquiries, he delves into the stories of the people in the town and those who knew the dead boy. Then another boy disappears without explanation, and the Ris’s marriage begins to disintegrate.

Fossum’s novels are like M&M’s: you can’t read just one. In places the syntax is evocative of the Norwegian of their origin, and this adds to the flavor of this series. I will be anxiously awaiting the August arrival of the next installment.

 

Karin Fossum Sunday, Jun 12 2011 

great read and mystery to die for and writers , , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:31 am

First things first: I have to credit Florida writer Glynn Marsh Alam, creator of the Luanne Fogarty Mysteries, with turning me on to Norwegian writer Karin Fossum. I met Glynn at the Cape Fear Crime Festival and we shared our favorite authors. Once I started on Fossum’s Inspector Sejer series, I gobbled them up, and I promise, you will, too.

Fossum has written poetry and general fiction but her award-winning crime novels have now been translated into sixteen languages. Her inspector has been dubbed “the Morse of the fjords” as he uses his intellect, reasoning, and knowledge of human nature to solve the crimes that fall across his path. Fossum’s coastal Norwegian settings and small villages are brought to life, but the novels are character-driven, as she displays an understanding of the psychology of her characters, as does Sejer, and writes from the points of view of all the main participants. For some reason, two of the Sejer novels remain untranslated, but the publication dates I’ll give you are the US editions. Today’s blog will cover the first three. While you can read them and enjoy them in any order, you follow the trajectory of Sejer’s personal life if you read them in order. He is extremely likableand appealing, conflicted in veryhuman ways, and very fond of his huge Leonberger, Kollberg.

2002 Don’t Look Back:    This novel won both The Riverton Prize and the Glass Key for Best Nordic Detective Novel.

In a rural village such as the ones most of Fossum’s characters inhabit, a young child, Ragnhild, goes missing. The frantic search for her reveals the naked, dead body of a well-known and well-liked schoolgirl. Annie often babysat for most of the families on her road; she was strong and intelligent.  Investigating her untimely death are Inspector Konrad Sejer and his colleague Jacob Skorre, both likable, but distinctly different. As he investigates, Sejer uncovers layers of distrust that run through the village. From page one, Fossum has the reader hooked with a tension that never lets up. Annie is drawn for Sejer in the words of the people he interviews. He tried to reconstruct the murder by retracing Annie’s last moments and chillingly succeeds. The book is filled with the crisscrossed stories that maintain the tension, as the patient Sejer unravels the stories and red herrings of people’s secrets with the ones that lead to Annie’s murderer.

2003 Hear Who Fears the Wolf:           Errki is a schizophrenic who escapes from a mental institution and is seen in the area when the horrifically murdered body of elderly widow Halldis Horn is found on her doorstep.

A young obese boy who lives in a nearby group home find the body and alerts the police. The case swings into action just as Sejer is literally thrust into the middle of a bank robbery with a hostage taken that  same morning. Trying not to be sidetracked by the hostage situation, Sejer and Skarre begin to track down both criminals. As he searches for these strange criminals, Sejer comes up against small-town prejudices that twist every version of the information he seeks to collect. Fossum’s gives the reader extraordinary insight into the psychologically warped mind and the lives which have been marginalized because of it. She is every bit as good as getting inside the psyche of children or adults.

2004 When the Devil Holds the Candle: 

This novel won the Gumshoe Award for Best European Crime Novel.

Two teenaged punks steal a young mother’s purse with dramatic and unforeseen consequences. The events they set into action tie what at first appear to be loose threads and unrelated perspectives, but are skillfully woven in Fossum’s hands.

When one of the delinquent’s disappears, Sejer doesn’t immediately connect the two crimes. The chilling and awful truth unfolds inside an old woman’s home. Fossum has Sejer do his usual digging beneath the surface of the quiet life in the small towns she features in her novels. It is to her credit that she understands how chillingly violence destroys everyday life, and that she is able to bring these places and these characters to life.

In subsequent blog I’ll discuss the next 3 Sejer novels available in the US, but don’t wait! Get started now on a series you’ll find impossible to put down.

 

The Janus Stone Monday, May 30 2011 

great read and mystery to die for and new series , , , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:24 am

I mentioned earlier that I would review the second Ruth Galloway novel by Elly Griffiths, Janus Stone, and one of my readers said it was good as the first. She was not mistaken.

This time the forensic archaeologist  is called in to investigate when builders demolishing a large ancient house uncover what appears to be the skeleton of a child. Bad enough, but its skull is missing. Found under the doorway, Ruth feels this might be a ritual sacrifice. While gathering her samples, DCI Harry Nelson, he of the complicated relationship with Ruth, becomes involved after it is revealed the bones are not ancient, and that the house was once a children’s home. He sets out to interview the Catholic priest who ran the home, who tells him forty years ago two children went missing, a boy and a girl.

When carbon dating proves the child’s bones are from an earlier period, Ruth maintains her ties to the investigation. She’s drawn more deeply into the case when it becomes obvious someone is trying to frighten her off it. They’re doing a good job of it, for Ruth is pregnant herself, and although she’s thrilled and determined to raise the child alone, is still dealing with telling her parents and friends about the baby, who include the child’s father.

Ruth is a grand creation, someone most women can relate to: an earthy, overweight gal who’s happy her pregnancy gives her a reason to stop trying to lose weight. Some of Ruth’s colleagues from the first novel, The Crossing Places, reappear, and add to Ruth’s wry sense of humor, which make these books a treat to read.

Griffiths does a great job of intertwining the emotional with the plot points and keeps them coming as the tension rises. There was one point at first where I thought she’d taken a jog off into the impossible, but her explanation and Ruth’s reaction to these events make that twist believable, and in the end, reasonable. Of course, that just makes me now anxious to read the third installment, due sooner than Ruth’s baby.

A

 

Sacrifice by S J Bolton Monday, May 2 2011 

great read and mystery to die for and writers , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:58 am

SJ Bolton lives with her family near Oxford, one of my favorite places on Earth, lucky gal. But she grew up in Lancashire and has always been fascinated by British traditional folklore.

You’ll see the evidence of this as you read her debut novel, Sacrifice, where she skillfully weaves a centuries-0ld myth into the very fabric of her story, where deceit is the name of the day.

Obstetrician Tora Hamilton is an outsider to the Shetland Islands but to her husband, Duncan, it’s where he grew up and both of his parents still live there.  The rocky, wind-swept landscape takes getting used to, but Tora is trying to embrace this new life, along with her position at the local hospital. Her horses give her solace until the day Duncan is away on business, and a dig into the peat on their property reveals a human body. At first Tora is convinced this is a bog body, a hundreds-year-old cadaver that has been preserved in the peat, interesting but not uncommon in the area.

At least, that’s what Tora tells herself, until she uncovers more of the body, realizes it is much younger, and sees the woman’s heart has been cut out only a few days after bearing a child.

Tora becomes obsessed with finding out who murdered this new mother in such a horrible way, and what happened to her child. Her research takes her back to an ancient Shetland legend, but the evil she finds has a very modern basis, and the dark secrets she unearths lead her to a systemic destruction of everything she thought she believed in. Her faith in those around her destroyed, Tora doesn’t know who she can trust, if anyone.

Readers of Anne Cleeves Shetland Island novels will be familiar with the barren landscape and physical challenges of living in such an area, which adds to the terror as Tora’s journey takes off in a series of escalating twists.

This is a page-turning debut, a real chiller, that will have you rooting for Tora. Bolton has several other novels I’ve ordered and will report on later this summer, but this initial novel promises her to be a writer whose books you’ll be waiting for down the road.

 

Twofer: Mo Hayder Monday, Apr 25 2011 

great read and mystery to die for , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:40 am

Readers first met DI Jack Caffery in the unusual novel Birdman, about a series of ritualistic killings. He next appears in Hayder’s , a genuinely frightening thriller. With Ritual and its follow-up Skin, Hayder has introduced a new character to work alongside Caffery. Police diver Flea (Phoebe) Marley, 26 and skinny, with a head of wild hair and widely spaced blue eyes that make her look even younger.

In Ritual, Flea  finds a severed hand while diving in a dense, muddy area of Bristol’s wharf. When Caffery is called in on the case, it is soon established that the hand belongs to a recently disappeared young man.

As the two search for his abductor, they find themselves poking into Bristol’s dark underworld. A waitress near the dock claims to have seen a young, naked man on the dock the night before the murder. As they investigate the area, filled with drug addiction and street kids prostituting themselves for their next hit, they stumble across a disturbing African ritual which appears to be connected. The plot comes together in swift ripples and more dives for Flea, that are accompanied by hallucinations of her mother calling for her. Both of Flea’s parents died in a freakish diving accident,which adds to her background and to the plot.

Skin features the unlikely twosome once again. Still bothered by hallucinations, Flea is becoming aware that her feelings for Caffery are stretching beyond their professional boundaries.

A decomposed body of a young woman is found near railroad tracks. Initially thought to be a suicide, Caffery doesn’t agree. While he investigates, Flea’s diving in an abandoned quarry brings her close–too close–to a macabre sighting. Or was it narcosis?

And then there’s the matter of Flea’s brother, Thom, a young man under the spell of an older woman, Mandy, who orders him around. As the investigation increases, another young woman goes missing, and Thom’s trouble becomes Flea’s trouble. Where will Caffery stand in all this? Can Flea turn Mandy into a friend instead of a foe?

Hayder’s books are entertaining and haunting, and even with a touch of the macabre in these two, will keep you riveted.

 

Started Early, Took My Dog Monday, Apr 18 2011 

great read and mystery to die for , , , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:02 am

Jackson Brodie is a most reluctant private investigator. His personal life is as perplexing to him as is his recent case. He is one of my favorite characters in literature these days, a man who’s professional life is in direct contrast to his complicated personal life.

Tracy Waterhouse is supplementing her pension from the police force by working as the head of mall security when she makes an impulsive purchase, setting into motion one helluva ride for Tracy, one that will have you rooting for this most unlikely heroine.

Jackson Brodie is trying to find the biological parents of an adopted woman raised in Australia. Her text messages to Brodie alone are the work of great invention by Atkinson, as we come to know this character we never see. Women confuse and perplex Brodie, including his new client.

How these two disparate stories overlap shows Atkinson at her best, in this fourth offering featuring Brodie. Dogs figure here: pursuers by, accompanied, neglected and adopted. Then throw in an elderly actress, slowly sinking into dementia. And the children: there are children here, too, some at risk, others waiting to be loved. There is also a tragedy from the past the needs to be unraveled, involving a police cover-up.

In the hands of a less skilled writer, these threads might have become confusing, but Atkinson keeps you turning pages long after you should have put the light out. She gets the varied voices and mental streams just right, as the past haunts all three of these people.  Even the changes in voice are revealed to be a deliberate device, affecting the plot.

It all works out in the end, with the important questions answered. This is a highly original novel from a writer at the top of her game.

 

A Red Herring Without Mustard Monday, Apr 11 2011 

great read and mystery to die for , , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:52 am

All of the Flavia de Luce novels have the unusual aspect of being perfect mysteries for adults that would also intrigue young adult readers, and this third installment, A Red Herring Without Mustard, is in the same fine category.

Alan Bradley does his usual tip-top job of showing us Bishops Lacey, a quintessential English country town, bringing 1950 to life.

Flavia is the most unflappable and clever eleven-ear old to appear recently. With her two older sister still terrorizing her, Flavia often retreats to her chemistry lab and the concontions she makes there for revenge. But this is a small part of the action, as Flavia is determined to find out who bludgeoned an old Gypsy woman she stumbles across in the woman’s caravan, only hours after she has sent Flavia a message from her dead mother Harriet.

The addition of a missing baby, an unusual religious sect called The Hobblers, and a subterranean maze of tunnels underneath Flavia’s home at Buckshaw all make their appearance.  So does Inspector Hewitt, Dogger and Mrs. Mullet. There’s a young gypsy, too, as well as a possible ring of antique thieves. It all comes together, as it surely should, under Flavia’s investigative genius.

I was pleased to see Bradley gave Flavia a vision of her mother she hadn’t seen before, although the true nature of this seems at first to be lost to Flavia, although it is not to her Colonel (ret.) father, the quietly-suffering, pedantic stamp collector.For fans of this young sleuth, Bradley doesn’t disappoint. For new readers, start at the beginning with The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie to get the full flavor of the lovely Flavia de Luce, chemist and crime investigator extraordinaire.

 

 

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