Blog Posts by David

"The Violet Hour" by Daniel Judson
Minotaur, 293 pp., $25.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James


Let's cut to the chase and say that thrill-spiller (and Shamus Award-winning author) Daniel Judson's fifth novel sports many a wild ride and plenty of wind-in-the-face chases.

"The Violet Hour" will snag your interest with the story of a young auto mechanic and the fistful of friends toward whom he manifests an intense loyalty, given the violent losses of his father and his older brother, Aaron. His mother predeceased them all.

Understandably, then, Cal Rakowski has sought stability and calm through a routine consisting mostly of work. He's coasting along, restoring expensive foreign and classic cars and living above a three-bay garage in Spartan rooms.

Cal (an allusion to "East of Eden" and its character of the same name is apparent) has been on cruise control for four years, when all hell breaks loose on Halloween. Not that there are any trick-or-treaters making the rounds at the

"Loot the Moon" by Mark Arsenault
Minotaur, 276 pp., $24.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James


Take some Harlan Coben and throw in some John Grisham, and you have a taste of Mark Arsenault's "Loot the Moon," a sequel to his "Gravewriter."

The novel features deadbeat (literally-- he's got the "dead" [obits composing] beat at the Providence, Rhode Island, newspaper) reporter Billy Povich, who has inherited full-time custody of his young son from his ex-[pired] wife.

Billy has also received custody of his ailing, deadbeat (as in, he split from his family when Billy was a kid) dad-- from no one in particular.

Call it "One and a Half Men Plus a Half-Dead Man." Underscoring all these "dead" references is the trio's residence over a funeral home.

In order to pick up some much-needed extra moolah-- he has a tendency to make bad bets-- Billy hires on as a part-time investigator for an unconventional lawyer who would fit in better at an ashram than in Providence, although the ([Grateful]

"Sheer Folly" by Carola Dunn
Minotaur, 296 pp., $24.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James

For those who savor British mysteries, heavily flavored with charm, drollery, and exquisite period details (in this case, 1926), then Carola Dunn's Daisy Dalrymple (she's now plain old Mrs. Fletcher) fills the bill.

Daisy would take umbrage at the word "old" anywhere preceding her name, so let's call her an "aging ingenue." No-- that's a backhanded compliment-- let's settle on "young matron."

Ah, nothing like a "young" to modify one's moniker. The mother of toddling twins, Daisy is still delighting in her marriage to Alec Fletcher, chief detective inspector with Scotland Yard. Seems to add to the wedded bliss that he's often got an interesting case in the offing.

Nevertheless, Alec arrives rather late on the scene of this adventure, in which Daisy and old (hard to avoid that bit of bosh here) school chum Lucy, wed to Lord Gerald Bincombe, have wound up at a Wiltshire estate to garner photos

"Dark Mirror" by Barry Maitland
Minotaur, 329 pp., $24.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James


Detective novels don't get much better than "Dark Mirror," the latest police-procedural drawn from the ranks of New Scotland Yard, by Australian author Barry Maitland (originally from Scotland and longtime resident of London, where the action transpires).

This is the tenth in his Brock & Kolla (an older and wiser, father-figure inspector [David Brock] and his fast up-and-coming subordinate [Kathy Kolla] at The Yard) series. However, it matters not if this is where one chooses to dive into the Maitland oeuvre, as the novels stand alone nicely. (See review of Maitland's third Brock & Kolla, "All My Enemies," on this blog.)

"Dark Mirror" is completely taken up with, sans subplots, Kathy Kolla's first case following her promotion to Detective Inspector, and it's almost dismissed as a bizarre, attention-grabbing suicide.

Marion Summers, a come-hither redhead, convulses and dies when she is

"There Goes the Bride" by M.C. Beaton
Minotaur, 277 pages, $24.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James


When Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum reaches her mid 50s, she'll probably be a lot like M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin, veteran of twenty mystery novels.

As Aggie could inform Steph, she'll no longer be turning the head of a good-looking, eligible bachelor, much less two of them. Instead of throwing on jeans and a T shirt, she'll be vainly tottering on too-high heels, packing on face creams and powders, and forking out for frequent touch-ups on her hair tinting.

However, the diet will still be grab-on-the-go: With Agatha, it's pub lunches, Chinese, and frozen curries. Speaking of pubs-- the Red Lion is the local one in Agatha's home village of Carsely, in the English Cotswolds-- this novel features an hysterical subplot in which Agatha saves the Red Lion.

Seems what Agatha protests as "the nanny state"-- she's never short of a pungent criticism or

"The Disappearance at Pere-Lachaise" by Claude Izner
Minotaur, 306 pp., $24.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James


The Gay Nineties are dawning upon Paris, which has recently celebrated its Exposition, including the opening of the Eiffel Tower.

Nevertheless, in a blast of deja vu from the then-present, now past, there's an influenza outbreak, and some 800,000 investors have lost their shirts in the first attempt to dig an interoceanic canal through the then-Colombian province of Panama.

However, if a body's able to pull a cart through the streets of Paris, mongering a few apples here, a clutch of violets there, then one may gather enough centimes to purchase a heel of bread and a steaming bowl of soup, then flop on a dry mattress.

At 18 Rue des Saints-Peres, bookseller Victor Legris is faring much better, having earned his money the old-fashioned way: through inheritance. HIs shop is a crossroads of academia, the haute monde, and belles lettres. Even Anatole France pops by, along

"Scary Stuff" by Sharon Fiffer
Minotaur, 292 pp., $24.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James


Someone who picks through yard sales and estate sales, through the evidence of other people's flotsam and jestam, would naturally stumble upon more than a few secrets in the bargain.

On that premise, author Sharon Fiffer has constructed a naturalistic, if you will, mystery series around protagonist Jane Wheel, a former Chicago advertising executive who has succumbed to her true passion: picking.

And crime solving: via those secrets she unearths, along with the "personal treasures" she seeks for clients and her best pal, Tim Lowry, who owns a resale business.

This sixth Jane Wheel mystery serves up a real familly affair. Jane-- whose professor husband and teenage son are off in South America on an archeological dig-- returns to her hometown of Kankakee, Illinois, where her father, Don, and mother, Nellie, have been running a roadhouse business since Jane's youth, although the food service

"All My Enemies" by Barry Maitland
Minotaur, 298 pp., $13.99
Reviewed by David Marshall James

This third entry in Australian author (born in Scotland) Barry Maitland's Brock & Kolla series of detective thrillers fares rather nicely as a "stand-alone" novel.

There have been seven more Brock & Kolla books since, but this volume is the first American edition of this early installment in the group.

After completing special training, Kathy Kolla has joined her mentor, David Brock, as a detective in Scotland Yard's Serious Crime Division. She has scarcely run a scrub brush over her sublet-in-her-absence London flat when Brock (something of a father figure to the parent-less Kolla) summons her to a gruesome crime scene in one of the city's upper-middle-class suburbs.

A young woman, Angela Hannaford, who was still living with her parents while commuting to the city center for a secretarial job, has been repeatedly stabbed and methodically disfigured during her parents' brief vacation on