Lesa's Book Critiques: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

 Lesa's Book Critiques: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa

The Rap Sheet: Abell’s Sophomore Stumbles by Peter Handel

 The Rap Sheet: Abell’s Sophomore Stumbles by Peter Handel

Lesa's Book Critiques: Such a Perfect Wife by Kate White

Lesa's Book Critiques: Such a Perfect Wife by Kate White

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Ex by Alafair Burke

After a successful legal career, Alafair Burke started writing mysteries. She has two series to her credit, one that features a Portland, Oregon, district attorney and the other with a New York police detective. More recently she’s been writing stand-alone crime fiction, the latest of which was released in April. I went back in time a bit and read the third of her nonseries novels, The Ex (Harper, 2016).

This strong legal thriller opens when Olivia Randall, a successful defense attorney in New York, is called by the teenage daughter of her college fiancé whom she dumped shortly after graduation. The daughter demands that Randall defend her father, who has been taken to police headquarters on suspicion of murder. Along with two other victims, the father of a young man who committed a random shooting in a New York train station three years earlier has himself been killed. Jack Harris lost his wife in that train station mass murder and has been pursuing legal action against the father for supplying guns to his troubled son. That Harris was in the vicinity at the time the father was killed clinches the case in the mind of the police.

Randall is convinced, despite the intervening 20 years, that she still knows Harris well enough to know he could not be guilty, and she jumps headlong into his defense. All the while she relives their earlier relationship and the circumstances that finally led to its end. This is a compelling legal procedural on one level and on another a study of how people who are close still manage to misread and misinterpret each other. A great double plot twist at the end.

Finalist for MWA’s 2017 Best Mystery award. Library Journal starred review.

·         Hardcover: 304 pages

·         Publisher: Harper; First Edition (January 26, 2016)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0062390481

·         ISBN-13: 978-0062390486

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Sleight of Hand by Phillip Margolin

Sleight of Hand by Phillip Margolin (Harper, 2013) is the fourth legal thriller with Dana Cutler, a Washington, DC, private investigator as the lead character. That she was the primary character wasn’t immediately apparent, as soon after the book opens she is sent off on a trip to the Pacific Northwest on an odd but well-paying quest for a relic of the Ottoman Empire. She leaves the stage to Charles Benedict, a smooth attorney who represents drug dealers and crime bosses if they have the money. For the very well-heeled among his clients he privately offers additional services, such as making witnesses disappear. He is known for his high success rate in winning the cases he takes on.

Benedict is doing just fine until he decides to perpetrate a little blackmail on another high-powered attorney. During the struggle over a DVD with incriminating video the lawyer does not want her husband to see, Benedict accidentally kills her. He then has the brilliant idea of framing her husband for the murder and then convincing him that Benedict is his best option for legal representation. His plans are unfolding nicely until Dana returns from her trip to Washington State and realizes one of her investigations is linked to the murder case in the news headlines.

Benedict is one of the most repellent characters I have encountered in years. I actually put the book down about a quarter way in. I picked it up again to check the ending before I returned it to the library and found enough in the plot to keep me reading. Margolin is a practicing attorney with years of experience, and it shows clearly in the detailed trial preparations and courtroom scenes. He has written seven other books in two additional legal series and about a dozen stand-alone thrillers and mysteries. Reviews suggest this one is not among his best but I eventually found it to be an entertaining read and will keep his name on my list to re-visit as time allows.

·         Hardcover: 320 pages

·         Publisher: Harper; 1st Printing edition (April 9, 2013)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 9780062069917

·         ISBN-13: 978-0062069917

·         ASIN: 0062069918

Aubrey Hamilton ©2019

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: The Worm of Death by Nicholas Blake

I have taken a break from all of the Bouchercon thrillers that constituted my reading for a few weeks to go back to the Golden Age mysteries waiting for me on my TBR stack. This week’s read was The Worm of Death by Nicholas Blake (Harper, 1961), the 14^th title in the Nigel Strangeways series. Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis (27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972), the UK Poet Laureate from 1951 until his death. His protagonist in 16 of his books is Nigel Strangeways, an upper-class Oxford-educated amateur investigator in the style of Lord Peter Wimsey or Albert Campion. He is the nephew of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, giving him status with and access to official crime investigation and law enforcement groups. This series first began in 1935 and ended in 1966, with a hiatus during World War II.

In this story, Strangeways and his partner, sculptor Clare Massinger, have moved into a house in Greenwich. They are invited to dinner to meet some of their new neighbors, Dr. Piers Loudron and his family. Rebecca, the only daughter, has become engaged to a man her father dislikes. The oldest son James followed his father into the practice of medicine but is overshadowed by his brilliant father. Harold runs a business of some sort and has married a beautiful woman with roving eyes. Graham, the youngest, was adopted by Dr. Loudron as a teenager and is openly the doctor’s favorite, to the resentment of the others.

Nigel and Clare are startled to learn a few days after their dinner at the Loudron household that Dr. Loudron has disappeared, leaving his house in the middle of the night during a classic London days-long dense fog. The diary that the doctor mentioned during their visit is also missing. The police are called in but no clue to the doctor’s whereabouts is found until about 10 days later when his body surfaces in the nearby river.

Even though this book was released in 1961, it is classic Golden Age in every way: The unconventional family with its secrets and open resentments, the detective who relies on talking to suspects and witnesses and identifying discrepancies and conflicts in their statements rather than physical evidence, the law enforcement colleague who provides forensic details, the atmospheric setting. The river and the people who live on and near it as well as the ships that frequent it are referenced often throughout and described in exquisite detail. The writing is beautiful and literate, an absolute pleasure to read, although the use of dashes in place of curses and epithets definitely dates it. Highly recommended for anyone interested in classic detective fiction.

·         Mass Market Paperback: 243 pages

·         Publisher: HarperCollins (paper) (January 1986)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0060804009

·         ISBN-13: 978-0060804008

Aubrey Hamilton ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: A Death in Live Oak by James Grippando

A Death in Live Oak by James Grippando (Harper, 2018) is the 14^th legal thriller featuring Miami criminal defense lawyer Jack Swyteck. Grippando has also published 11 stand-alone thrillers; he won the 2017 Harper Lee award for excellence in legal fiction.

Grippando tends to use current events as the basis of his stories and this one is no different. When the body of Jamal Cousin, president of a major black fraternity at the University of Florida, is discovered in the swamps of the Suwanee River, the local police lose no time in accusing Mark Towson, the president of a white fraternity, and his friends of the heinous crime of lynching based on a text sent to the dead student from Towson’s cell phone.

The media and the general public rush to judgment while the university hastens to expel Towson and cancel the fraternity’s campus charter in order not to seem biased in favor of the accused.

Towson’s father and Swyteck’s father are old friends, and paternal persuasion is exerted to get Jack to defend Mark. Jack’s investigation is hampered by venomous rhetoric and blatant unreasoning partisanship that quickly escalates. Race riots threaten the entire area and the fraternity house is set afire.

Nothing Swyteck does keeps Towson out of jail while awaiting trial, where he faces physical danger from the prison populace. Anxiety and alarm kick in when a second black student disappears and is feared dead in the same manner as the first.

In the meantime Swyteck’s FBI agent wife goes undercover to gather evidence on a group of white supremacists that are fomenting discord in northeastern Florida. They are believed to have incited the rioting around the fraternity house and the university. She faces down some of their aggressive members in a memorable action scene.

I was not sure I would be able to finish this book after I read the prologue, the true story of the lynching of a teenager in Live Oak in the 1940s, and then realized the rest of the story could have come from almost any newspaper in the past few years. Grippando describes the horror of the Jim Crow era and then deftly diverts the reader’s attention to something else while keeping the vicious actions of the past and present always on the periphery of the reader’s awareness.

The surprise outcome is in some ways not a surprise and is a profoundly depressing observation on the state of race relations in this country. That I found the story riveting and finished it one afternoon despite my dislike of the subject is a credit to the skill of the author. I have put the rest of his books on my TBR list.

·                     Hardcover: 384 pages

·                     Publisher: Harper (February 6, 2018)

·                     Language: English

·                     ISBN-10: 0062657801

·                     ISBN-13: 978-0062657800

Aubrey Hamilton ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.