Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: A Stillness in Bethlehem by Orania Papazoglou (Jane Haddam)

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In the spirit of the season, up for consideration today is A Stillness in Bethlehem by Orania Papazoglou writing as Jane Haddam (Bantam, 1992). This is the seventh book in the Gregor Demarkian contemporary mystery series. Demarkian is a retired FBI agent, one who established and led the agency’s profiling department. In his retirement he began consulting with police departments on a volunteer basis but has no official standing or credentials. He has however a significant reputation as an investigator; the references to him in the more sensational news outlets as “the Armenian Hercule Poirot” cause him much angst.

After a high-profile case Demarkian comes home to Cavanaugh Street in Philadelphia to find his friend Father Tibor Kasparian dangerously exhausted from his work on behalf of Armenian refugees. Their mutual friend Bennis Hannaford arranges for the three of them to travel to Bethlehem, Vermont, to see the town’s long-running Nativity play and to give Tibor a much-needed break. The tiny rural town has found a way to generate revenue and to lift itself out of genteel poverty, similar to the college students in Rest You Merry by Charlotte MacLeod, who created a profitable Yule celebration. The Christmas pageant is a tourist destination and produces most of the income in Bethlehem, so when Tisha Verek, a recent transplant to the area, decides to file a civil liberties lawsuit against the town to stop the play, nearly everyone is upset. Who was upset enough to shoot her in front of her house, however, is not clear, and the State police wrote the death off as a hunting accident. The fact that a second town resident was killed in much the same manner about the same time and not far away did not rouse the State police’s curiosity, who labelled it another hunting accident.

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The town police chief was not so confident and, when he discovers Gregor Demarkian in his village, he begs Demarkian to review the evidence. When a third victim is claimed during the first night of the pageant under Demarkian’s nose, he feels he has no choice but to find and stop the culprit.

In a lifetime of reading mysteries, the Demarkian series is among my greatest favorites. The plots are often downright devious (see Blood in the Water, for instance), and the people on the pages are powerfully developed and finely nuanced. Father Tibor Kasparian is quite possibly the fictional character I would most like to meet; his apartment stacked high with books of all kinds on every surface inspires equal parts hilarity and envy every time I read about it. The structure of the stories is intriguing: Characters are sketched in a prologue to set the stage for the murders, there’s always more than one, and then their back story unfolds as the book progresses. My only quibble with the series is Demarkian’s astonishing obtuseness in his dealings with Bennis Hannaford, a successful writer of fantasy sagas whom he meets on his first case. Nonetheless, these books are simply not to be missed by any mystery reader, and this title is a fine place to start reading them.

·         Hardcover: 289 pages

·         Publisher: Bantam (November 1, 1992)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0553090240

·         ISBN-13: 978-0553090246

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: Dead Letters by Jane Haddam

Dead Letters by Orania Papazoglou writing as Jane Haddam is her first mystery featuring Georgia Xenakis, a New York City investigative journalist who returned to her hometown of Canfield in Connecticut to care for her ailing mother. Georgia found work teaching English in a for-profit college and managed to write a freelance article here and there to maintain her foothold in the New York journalism scene.

The failure of a local investment fund several years earlier still has everyone talking, not least because Jeff Laramie, who ran the investment fund, was killed shortly afterwards. His wife Margaret stood trial for his murder but was acquitted. She is living as a recluse across the street from Georgia while everyone in town believes she should be in jail. In the meantime no one is trying to find the real murderer.

The book opens just before Christmas, about a week after the funeral of Georgia’s mother. Georgia is still coming to terms with the huge change in her personal circumstances while the college administrators are demanding that she reverse the failing grade she gave the son of the town’s First Selectman. Since the grade was based on a paper taken verbatim from a Smithsonian journal, Georgia thinks the student should be expelled. The college administrators are more interested in revenue than ethics, however, and a painful meeting with the student, his father, and the college administration ensues.

After the meeting Georgia walks away from the university distracted and upset and ends up in a deserted subdivision of empty houses, their previous owners victims to the economic downturn. She finds an abandoned dog and searching for the dog’s owners, she stumbles onto the strangled body of her neighbor Margaret Laramie, whom Georgia just saw a few hours earlier across town.

The labyrinthine plot with multiple threads is exactly what I expect from the author of the Gregor Demarkian series. The diverse cast of characters is vividly delineated with their human frailty on full display. They include the new police chief, former head of Homicide in the Charlottesville, NC, police department, whom the First Selectman hired because he assumed a Southerner could be pushed around; the pair of childhood friends who grew up on the same street with Georgia and became the town gossips; and the free spirit owner of a coffee shop who runs a dog and cat rescue. The focus of Georgia’s suspicion bounces around like a pinball machine, and the perpetrator turns out to be someone I didn’t consider for a minute.

There are a number of enjoyable scenes. I particularly liked the bit where Georgia decides to respond to the neighborhood critics who have complained about her lack of holiday decor over the years by putting up the most tasteless display she can quickly assemble, a la Peter Shandy. Then the gossipy friends decide that the crime scene tape and police seals on a house do not apply to them and they break in to check things out, after which the police chief arrests them and they spend the night in jail. And on and on.

I look forward to seeing Georgia’s next adventure.

The occasional typo was jarring. I hope the Kindle version is corrected and a new one released.

·         File Size: 1933 KB

·         Print Length: 426 pages

·         Publication Date: January 9, 2018

·         Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC

·         Language: English

·         ASIN: B078XJWW1C

Aubrey Hamilton © 2018

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