La Belle Dame Sans Murder Monday

[evelyn_b]

Archived from Livejournal, with images I don't know how to post on DW yet.

What I've Finished Reading

The Crooknose Mystery doesn't make much use of its setting (the author doesn't seem interested in or capable of the kind of self-indulgent writer-culture satire I was hoping for) and is a pretty boilerplate mystery with forgettable characters. Gin functioned perfectly well as corpse magnet and amateur sleuth, but I didn't care about her -- except for one line:

“.. .Remember Bess, Gin. You thought you knew her.”

I remembered Bess. As though I could forget the woman I had loved, who had killed and would have allowed me, or anyone else, to hang for it.

. . . oh, no, what do we have here? Presumably this is a callback to a previous Gin Crane adventure, but WHAT HAPPENED? For once, I regret that there's no helpful publisher's footnote instructing me to read about the doomed love of Gin for Bess in The Deceitful Heart, Scribner's. Unfortunately, Laura W. Douglas is too obscure for a page on orderofbooks.com, and Amazon is almost as unhelpful. But it looks like there's a decent chance it might be in The Mystery of Arrowhead Hill.

(There's probably no point in trying to nominate a single line from an obscure mystery novel for Yuletide, is there?)

Tancredi by Lou Cameron, another in the Mystery Bundle. The front-cover blurb says it all: "The gripping bestseller of a cop in a corrupt city, caught in a deadly crossfire." Robert "Tank" Tancredi is the cop in question. It's basically Jake Peralta's 1970s TV-daydream life, only with a lot more ethnic slurs. Not really my flavor of garbage, but it was interesting to read and kept moving until it stopped.

What I'm Reading Now

There had never been any question of Ricky following in his father’s footsteps. From the time when his son went to his first school, Allyn had been at pains to keep his job at a remove as far as the boy was concerned. Ricky’s academic career had been more than satisfactory and about as far removed from the squalor, boredom, horror, and cynicism of a policeman’s lot as it would be possible to imagine.


And now? Here they were, both of them, converging on a case that might well turn out to be all compact of such elements. And over and above everything else, here was Ricky escaped from what, almost certainly, had been a murderous attack, the thought of which sent an icy spasm through his father’s stomach. Get him out of it, smartly, now, before there was any further involvement, he thought – and then had to recognize that already Ricky’s involvement was far too advanced for this to be possible. He must be treated as someone who might, himself in the clear, provide the police with “helpful information.”


And at the back of his extreme distaste for this development why was there an indefinable warmth, a latent pleasure? He wondered if perhaps an old loneliness had been, or looked to become, a little assuaged.

Last Ditch is adorable, even if it is unfortunately turning into a heroin story. Drugs are boring! There's been a gruesome horse-jumping accident that looks less and less like an accident the more attention gets paid to it. Lots of annoying nudge-nudge stuff about the sex life of the victim. Young Ricky Alleyn is, as you might expect, a man very slightly out of time -- just enough that it's startling when he puts on a t-shirt and jeans. I laughed when he gave his name to the police and they thought he was taking the piss.



Tancredi didn't have a very interesting cover (photo of a gun and some bullets), but the next book in the mystery bundle has a great cover AND a beautiful title:

[A Forest of Eyes]

This is neither a murder mystery nor a Tough Cop Punches the Mob story, but a spy story set in Yugoslavia. I'm having a hard time getting into it, but it does have a nice title.

What I Plan to Read Next

Guess what finally arrived? The Monkey's Mask by Dorothy Porter! I had a look inside and it looks good. Plus whatever comes after A Forest of Eyes in the Mystery Bundle.