Delia Barry

Careless in Red
by Elizabeth George

Thomas Lynley is doing the coastal walk through Cornwall as a way to avoid thinking about the murders of his wife and their unborn son. In a small village by the sea, he finds the dead body of a teenaged boy at the foot of a cliff. This ends up plunging him into the ensuing murder investigation, and when New Scotland Yard sends DS Barbara Havers to aid the local constabulary, he's reunited with his former partner.

This book is the sequel to With No One as Witness that I'd been waiting for, and I was very pleased with it. Despite himself, Lynley can't help but be pulled into a murder investigation, and it's always fun to watch how he puts together the pieces to come up with the correct answer to the problem at hand; in this case the contrast between his style and that of the officer who is actually in charge is most interesting. But since this is the first we've seen of him since Helen's death, there is more here than just the mystery. George does an excellent job of charting his healing process and path back to life among the living. One particularly moving moment is when Tommy is unpleasantly surprised to find himself singing in the shower and realizes that life does go on after a tragedy whether we want it to or not. He's not a hundred percent by the end of the book, but he's on his way, and that's what really matters to fans of the series.

I have only one complaint. Twice in the course of this book, characters question the nature of the relationship between Lynley and Havers; one of them goes so far as to ask Barbara point-blank if she's in love with him. Havers is appropriately surprised and gives a definite no answer, but this makes me nervous. I certainly hope that George isn't planning to take the characters in that direction, because that would be an entire universe of wrong.

The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey

Detective Alan Grant is in the hospital with multiple injuries. To while away the time, he looks at some pictures of faces that a friend brought for him. When he discovers that the portrait of thoughtful-looking individual he pegged as a judge was actually of the notorious Richard III, he begins to investigate Richard's life and reign. What he learns changes forever his ideas about Richard in particular and history in general.

This is a wonderful book, one which routinely makes mystery readers' Top Ten lists. I first read it when I was in high school, but that copy has long since disappeared, so when I saw it in B&N last week I picked up a copy. I'm very glad to report that it's just as wonderful as I remembered. Tey (the pseudonym of Elizabeth Mac Knight) makes her case point by point. She had convinced the teen-aged me of her thesis the first time I read it, and she also convinced the older, much more cynical me as well. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone who likes history, mystery novels, or both.

On another note, I was astounded this time by the description of Grant's convalescence. Weeks in the hospital for a broken leg, indeed! Things sure have changed since the 1950s.

Twice in a Blue Moon
by Patricia Moyes

I've never read anything by Patricia Moyes, but she's a Big Name Author in mystery circles, so I figured I'd give her a try. Perhaps this book, the nineteenth in Moyes' Henry and Emmy Tibbit series, was the wrong book to start with. I must now admit that I read this in about twenty minutes this morning. No, not the whole thing. I read the first chapter, decided I knew whodunit and read the last two chapters to see if I was right. I was. End of story.

It's entirely possible that the chapters in between were funny, charming, and an excellent reading experience. But this is a mystery, and I've always thought the first responsibility of a mystery novel is to be mysterious. One of the reasons I like mysteries so much is that the good ones are like puzzles I get to solve while I'm reading. If I know who the murderer is after one chapter, there's no puzzle. Add to this the fact that this particular plot was a cliche as far back as the thirties, and I'm just glad I didn't lay out the money for the book.

I can't get her popularity out of my mind, though, so perhaps I should try the first book in the series. That's usually the best one anyway.

Miss Melville Regrets
by Evelyn E. Smith

One of the good things about my current living arrangement is that I'm sleeping in a room lined with bookshelves filled to overflowing with books, predominately mysteries.

Susan Melville is a middle-aged artist whose trust fund is kaput, whose teaching job has ended and whose apartment is going co-op. When she impulsively shoots a less than altruistic banker, she is recruited by an organization of assassins. The pay is good, and they promise that she will only have to kill those who really deserve it, so she accepts.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The author, who I suspect is writing under a pseudonym, clearly knows the ins and outs of NYC and the attitudes of the monied classes who live there. My favorite passage perfectly captures one of the city's most amusing attitudes:

Once there would have been little danger of running into anyone she knew on the West Side, but these days all sorts of people not only went there to visit museums and other cultural institutions (this would be too early in the day for that, at least), some went so far as to live there.

The book is clever, witty, and entertaining; I thoroughly enjoyed it. There are several sequels, and I'm looking forward to reading them.

Murder and the First Lady
By Elliott Roosevelt

Yes, that First Lady. Elliott Roosevelt has had the guts to write a series of murder mysteries with his mother Eleanor as the detective. This first novel in the series takes place in 1939, when Europe was on the brink of war. Mrs. Roosevelt's English secretary is accused of murdering her lover, who just happens to be the son of a congressman from New Jersey. Convinced of the girl's innocence, Mrs. Roosevelt begins to investigate, despite disapproval from J. Edgar Hoover and warnings from the President to keep a low profile.

Eleanor Roosevelt is one of my personal heroes, so I approached this book with some trepidation, fearing another expose by an angry child. I need not have worried. The author treats both his parents gently, and leaves the reader with the impression that she has had a peek behind the scenes of that long-ago White House. My favorite moment was when the Dutch Ambassador teaches Eleanor how to crack a safe after a formal dinner party. This is a series, and I look forward to picking up his other books down the road.

With No One as Witness
By Elizabeth George

I started reading Elizabeth George's mystery novels back in the 1990s, but drifted away from them several years ago due to series fatigue. Over the past couple of months, however, I caught a couple episodes of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries on PBS' Mystery! and became curious again, so when I saw this latest (in paperback anyway), I picked it up.

There have been changes in the lives of the characters since Missing Joseph, but there have been more changes in the type of case Lynley and Havers are investigating. This book deals with a serial killer.

George is an American who writes about a Scotland Yard detective solving murders in England, and to this American, her books are indistinguishable from those written by British authors. Some critics have called her the successor to Agatha Christie, but George's books are not traditional British cosies. Her work has always been full of psychological content; everyone in her universe has multiple sources of angst; I find myself comparing her to P. D. James. In this one, however, she amps up the stresses big time with our heroes tracking a brutal serial killer. As if that weren't enough, there's a devastating event near the end that throws the reader as well as the characters for a real loop.

As I said, I've read many of the previous books in this series and enjoyed all of them. This one was written to the same high standard as the earlier books, but it wasn't the same pleasurable experience I've always associated with her books. I'm suspect that was a result of the case our heroes were investigating; even though I couldn't put the book down, I was quite relieved when I finally finished it.

I'm anxious to see her next Lynley installment, if there is one. It had better answer the nagging questions left by this one.