Cook the Books by Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant

The mother-daughter team of Conant-Park and Conant have an imaginative series going with the "Gourmet Girl Mystery" series set in Boston.  "Cook the Books" is the 5th in the series featuring not so aspiring social worker, Chloe Carter.

Carter is a somewhat typical 20-something.  She has over-spent her credit limit doting on her best friend's baby.  She hasn't really found her calling in life, but thinks she should at least give a try to finish a master's in social work (or at least that is what will qualify her to get access to a trust fund from a dead relative). She prides herself on being independent, and it is that stubborn independence that makes her stay in Boston when her boyfriend accepts a job as a personal cook in Hawaii and invites her to come along.  She is so hurt that he made this plan without her participation she cuts him off totally, and makes herself miserable in the process.

Now Chloe desperately needs a part time job, and she responds to an ad to assist a cook book editor with the editing of a new cook book. The son of a famous chef is supposed to be working on the book and is making a mess of it. Chloe saves him organizationally and in terms of the recipes he is planning for the book. She proposes that they meet up with a friend of her former boyfriend, Digger, a chef who is about to open a new high profile restaurant in Boston.  The night before the arranged meeting Digger is killed in a fire that sweeps through his apartment.  Chloe has to discover who killed Digger and why while she juggles her work schedule, her school and clinical internship schedule, and resolving her feelings for the former boyfriend, Josh, who has returned to Boston for the opening of Digger's new restaurant.

The authors manage to keep the reader's interest throughout the book.  Both authors are social workers, and Conant-Park is married to a Boston chef, so they write about things they know.  They are able to legitimately endow their character with the kinds of skills and perception that make for good storytelling and great powers of observation for solving crimes.

I'm surprised I've missed the earlier books in this series and will make up for that by reading some of the previous books in the series.

Conant also has a well know series of mysteries for dog lovers, and I am familiar with some of the books in that series.

Liz Nichols

Murder at Longbourn by Tracy Kiely

Tracy Kiely's "Murder at Longbourn" is an excellent first mystery novel.  It will be of particulary interest to the cozy-lovers among the mystery reading set.

The sleuth is newspaper reporter (fact-checker, actually) Elizabeth Parker, who goes to Cape Cod to assist her Aunt Winnie at the aunt's B and B for a mystery dinner.  Things heat up quickly when a guest is shot and it becomes apparent that the mystery play is being used as a cover for murder. Parker pits herself against a police detective who seems bent on fitting the evidence to point toward Aunt Winnie as the prime suspect.

While Kiely presents a fairly conventional cozy, she never lets it get too predictable nor the characters too stereotypical.  For these reasons, I found it hard to put the book down once I started it and I polished it off in a couple of holiday weekend sittings.

I look forward to more Elizabeth Parker mysteries, with or without the B and B setting.

Liz Nichols 

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

The world of Henry VIII comes alive through "Wolf Hall."  British author, Hilary Mantel seems to invade the mind of King Henry's Secretary and close confidant, Thomas Cromwell, to enlighten readers on the Renaissance times of King Henry's court.

The book follows the life of Cromwell from his teenage years when he fled his home in Putney to avoid further abuse from his father, Walter Cromwell, a blacksmith, to near the end of his life following the execution of Thomas More.  In between Cromwell held a number of posts as a soldier of fortune in France and Italy, a woolen merchant in Amsterdam, the advisor of Cardinal Wolsey, and then the go-to advisor to King Henry.  He was an educated, accomplished and astute man who managed to keep his head while everyone else seemed to be losing theirs.  While history shows Cromwell to be quite a ruthless inquisitor, as was his mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, it is easy to sympathize with him and to see him as simply a man of his time and circumstances.

The format of this extremely thick book is often hard to read because it covers so much of the stream of consciousness thought process of the great Cromwell with smatterings of dialogue to break the lengthy internal monologues.  Still, once I got the flow of it I found it an extremely interesting, enlightening and unique novel.  The author must have one foot in this period of British history to have pulled off a work that gets so deeply into the psyche of important figures and events from the 1500's.

I do wonder about the title.  It comes from the estate of the Seymour family, who reached ascendancy after the events of this book. It would have been better called Austin Friars, the long-time home and work place of Cromwell.  I guess "Wolf Hall" is a sexier, more dangerous-sounding name that befits the events of King Henry's break from the Church in Rome and his stormy marriage to Anne Boleyn.

I highly recommend this book to any lover of Tudor history or British historical fiction.

Bryant & May on the Loose by Christopher Fowler

This is my first "Peculiar Crimes Unit" mystery.  Fowler has four in this series so far and is working on another one.  "Bryant & May on the Loose" finds the two modern-day Holmes and Watson clones casting about to restart their disbanded police department special unit which has fallen to the budget ax.  The old partners are not doing well in retirement and when May is called out to the scene of a beheadded body in the Kings Cross district, he jumps at the chance to bring back his old unit.

As someone who has not read one of Fowler's May and Bryant series before I did get a bit confused about some of the characters and police protocol, but I found myself absorbed in the details of London ancient lore, the history of different districts and buildings and the like.

I will definitely pick up the next in this series and go back to see what I missed with the first few books in this series.

Fans of British police procedurals and those who enjoyed the antics of Sherlock Holmes and his associates will get a kick out of this mystery.  Same is true for those who enjoy reading about London, its history and lore.

Liz Nichols

Heat Wave by Richard Castle

Since "Castle" is one of my favorite shows on TV I was pleased to see the book we've been hearing about on the show all year, "Heat Wave."  Boy, was I disappointed.

Even when I don't like a book I can usually persevere through the first few chapters.  Not this time.  I could only get a few pages in before I put it down.

I have never seen a more poorly written book to get published.  It is obvious that some non-English speaking hack was hired to ghostwrite the book from some screenwriter's outline.  American idoms are absolutely killed. Sentences are awkward and without any nuance.  Some phrases are laughable. At one point a bruised rib injury is called an "intercoastal" injury.  What's that?

All I can say is ABC and the producers of "Castle" blew it big time.  They've damaged the reputation of the show by putting out an almost illiterate piece of drivel.

Liz Nichols

Sand Sharks by Margaret Maron

This is another series I have not read before, and I am very pleased to have found it.  It is the Deborah Knott Mystery series by Margaret Maron, the latest of which is "Sand Sharks."

Knott is a district court judge in Colleton, North Carolina, who experiences more excitement than she bargained for when she goes to a conference for state judges in Wrightsville, NC, near Wilmington.  She discovers the body of a judge colleague near the restaurant where she eats for dinner the night before the conference starts and is caught up in helping the detective assigned to the case to determine who killed the judge.  Of course, there is some collateral damage and more dead bodies along the way to the truth about Judge Jeffrey's murder.  Did another judge kill him off?  Was it the friend of Deborah's cousin, who's son was victimized by a criminal the judge let loose?  Was it someone completely unassociated with the judge or his cases?

This is a profession I know little about, so watching the politics that goes on to get judges elected and kept in office is interesting.  What I liked best about the book is that all of the characters are given very human feelings and reactions.  Reading the book is like taking a page out of the lives of ordinary people and weaving a tale around them.  There are personalities you like and others you hate, and some that are just interesting or different.  All are described, warts and all, including the main character, Judge Knott.

This was a fast read.  I didn't want to put the book down and spent a large part of two days finishing it.  That is one of the tests of a good book for me.  If I am so involved that I can't put it down, it rates highly with me.  It means that the characters speak to me, the plot is absorbing and paced right, and the transitions are skillfully written so that you want to keep going on from one chapter to the next.  That is a skill that is accomplished by only the best and most experienced authors, usually, and Maron is experienced.  She has about 15 books in the Knott series, 8 books in the Sigrid Harald series, and 4 other novels.

Maron grew up near Raleigh, NC, lived in Brooklyn for many years, and has returned to her native North Carolina.  She has won awards for many of her mysteries. You can learn more about her at her website, www.MargaretMaron.com.

Liz Nichols
lizdnichols at gmail.com

Evil for Evil by James R. Benn

Evil for Evil is a bit of a twist on the classic war novel set during World War II in Jerusalem and Northern Ireland.

Billy Boyle is a Second Lt. on Dwight D. Eisenhower's staff and followed the war across Africa and Italy with Ike.  He has a distant familial relationship with Ike and calls him, affectionately, Uncle Ike.  His girl friend, Diana, is about to go out on another SOE special op for Britain behind enemy lines and Billy in a fit of frustration decides to take an assignment requested by the British to solve the disappearance of 50 Browning Automatic Rifles in Northern Ireland, which the British think may be linked to German infiltration and an attempt in the making of a German effort to topple the neutrality of the Irish Republic.

This sets Boyle up for a very interesting set of conflicting relationships in Ulster, for Irish-American Catholic Boyle is expected to take orders from the British and their Northern Irish Protestant cronies against possible members of the IRA, an organization Boyle and his family support fervently and with lots of dollars at home in Boston. 

The book is remarkable in how deftly Benn explains the complexities of Irish Catholic and Protestant interaction and politics and weaves it into the personalities, speech and actions of his characters.  In the end it is clear that the good and reasonable on both sides cooperate in the best interests of the whole, and the extremists on both sides tend to be more alike than different.  The extremists are killers with little real motive other than selfish self-interest. The only way to tell apart one their killings is by the MO.

If there had been more Boyles and more of the Protestant persuasion like DI Carrick, perhaps the bloody troubles in Northern Ireland would not have gone on for most of two centuries.

I found myself really being compelled to read on and on in this book with little desire to stop until I found out what would happen to Boyle and to the others who were looking for the guns, the German infiltrators and the extremists on both sides.  I will remember Billy and look forward to following him through the rest of the war in future Benn books.

This is a cracking good war mystery with a little bit of a twist and lots of action and surprises.

Liz Nichols