Book Review: A Midsummer’s Equation by Keigo Higashino

A Midsummer’s Equation
A Detective Galileo Mystery #3
Keigo Higashino
Minotaur Books, February 2016
ISBN 978-0-2500-2792-4
Hardcover

In The Devotion of Suspect X, the author created not only a first-class, original crime novel, but a singular character: a physicist, Manabu Yukawa, dubbed Dr. Galileo, who turned out to be an excellent amateur detective.  In this sequel, he applies the same scientific logic in helping to solve a murder, although the police believed the death to be an accident.

The new novel is a twisted tale full of unexpected turns in the plot.  It begins with the visit of a fifth-grade young man to a seaside resort on the Japanese coast, to a dilapidated inn run by his uncle and aunt, where he befriends Yukawa, who takes him under his wing, teaching the boy about various scientific principles and helping him with his homework. At the same inn a retired Tokyo homicide detective checks in and is soon discovered dead, presumably after a fall onto rocks lining the coast.

The story is far from a simple murder mystery and has its roots in the past.  The plot is full of surprises.  As was its predecessor, A Midsummer’s Equation is distinguished not only by the scientific content as applied to the case, but the moralistic conclusions as well.  Once again Higashino has written a clever tale that is deep and satisfying, and highly recommended.

Reviewed by Ted Feit, February 2017.

Book Review: Practical Sins for Cold Climates by Shelley Costa

Practical Sins for Cold Climates
A Val Cameron Mystery #1
Shelley Costa
Henery Press, January 2016
ISBN: 978-1-943390-41-0
Trade paperback

Val Cameron is a senior editor with a NY publisher in a bit of financial trouble. The story opens with Val on her way to Canada to persuade an author to sign a contract they hope will be lucrative. The Canadian island resort she lands in is nothing like she expects, or like her boss, who owns a house there, has indicated. Far from luxurious and barely accessible, she immediately runs into violence at a community meeting she attends, hoping to meeting her author. Everyone on the island has an agenda. Those who want to preserve the land as pristine wilderness. Those who want to exploit the island’s resources. Those who barely eke out a living and want jobs.

And worse, the first thing she discovers is an old, unsolved murder that overshadows everything and everyone to this day. Including the widower with whom Val immediately forms an attraction, and the author she’s been sent to find.

The book is well-written, well-plotted, and quite literary in texture, with plenty of twists and turns. These aren’t characters who immediately endeared themselves to me, but that’s not to say others will have the same reaction. I liked the setting and the ecological aspects of the story. I did wonder why, although the murdered woman was always on Val’s mind, after two years and the death going unsolved, nobody else seemed terribly concerned or anxious.

Reviewed by Carol Crigger, September 2016.
Author of Three Seconds to Thunder and Four Furlongs.

Book Review: Dig Too Deep by Amy Allgeyer

Dig Too Deep
Amy Allgeyer
AW Teen, April 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8075-1580-8
Hardcover

Whoever Dad was has never been in her reality and as things stand right now, Mom’s nearly as useless. She’s not only in jail, facing serious charges, but she used Liberty’s college funds to hire a lawyer. Now Liberty Briscoe is facing the loss of her best friend, the city she feels comfortable in and the promise of scholarships that being enrolled in a good private school offer.

Instead, she’s heading via a 14 hour bus trip back to Ebbotsville, Kentucky, the town where her mother grew up, to live with her grandmother. She has some memories of life there, but when she arrives and has to take a beat up taxi to Gram’s place, it’s her first inkling that life is about to change in ways she never imagined.

Gram’s frail and claims her persistent cough isn’t serious. The water has a creepy orange color and despite claims allegedly by the people responsible for testing it, nobody drinks it. In fact, bottled water eats up a lot of the limited cash and food stamps Liberty and Gram have to buy necessities.

Then, there’s the huge difference between her old school and the public one in town. Class choices are fewer and since she’s an outsider, other kids tend to shun her. Cole, however, is interested starting on day one. Liberty’s grateful for the attention and likes him at first, but his pushiness, coupled with his attempts to control her once she decides to investigate the water and why so many people have various kinds of cancer, lead to a quick break-up. Cole’s firmly in the camp of those willing to let the coal mining company wreak havoc on the nearby mountains and keep the town council in their pocket.

Dobber, Cole’s best friend intimidates Liberty at first, but the more she watches him and learns how his own family has been screwed by the coal company, the more willing she is to trust him, especially after scary things start happening around her and Gram’s farm.

This is an excellent ecological mystery/thriller that also involves a girl coming to grips with just how alike she and her estranged mother really are. Teens and adults liking an intelligent story that features a scared, but courageous protagonist will really like it.

Reviewed by John R. Clark, MLIS, May 2016.

Book Review: Dig Too Deep by Amy Allgeyer

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Title: Dig Too Deep
Author: Amy Allgeyer
Publisher: Albert Whitman
Release Date: April 1, 2016

Genre: General Fiction, Young Adult

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Dig Too Deep
Amy Allgeyer
Albert Whitman & Company, April 2016
ISBN 978-0-8075-1580-8
Hardcover

From the publisher—

With her mother facing prison time for a violent political protest, seventeen-year-old Liberty Briscoe has no choice but to leave her Washington, DC, apartment and take a bus to Ebbottsville, Kentucky, to live with her granny. There she can finish high school and put some distance between herself and her mother– her ‘former’ mother, as she calls her. But Ebbottsville isn’t the same as Liberty remembers, and it’s not just because the top of Tanner’s Peak has been blown away to mine for coal. Half the county is out of work, an awful lot of people in town seem to be sick, and the tap water is bright orange–the same water that officials claim is safe to drink. When Granny’s lingering cold turns out to be something much worse, Liberty is convinced the mine is to blame, and starts an investigation that quickly plunges her into a world of secrets, lies, threats, and danger. Liberty isn’t deterred by any of it, but as all her searches turn into dead ends, she comes to a difficult decision: turn to violence like her former mother or give up her quest for good.

I tend to shy away from any novel that seems as though the author might have an agenda of some sort and I admit to being a little leery of Dig Too Deep for that reason since it seemed clear that environmental issues would be front and center. There was something about it, though, that appealed to me, mostly the apparent dichotomy between mother and daughter, so I decided to take a chance and I’m glad I did.

Yes, the damage that can be done in coal mining is a very important element of this book but I actually found my connection to be more with the changes that take place in Liberty because of those environmental issues. From a girl who heartily resents her mother for placing her causes above her daughter, Liberty gradually becomes her mother in a fashion once she begins to understand the harm being done to her granny and the community.

The community is the other thing that particularly struck me and the author does a masterful job of bringing the locale to life. I’ve spent time in coal country and Ms. Allgeyer gets it right, evoking a strong sense of the deep poverty but also the haunting beauty. She also has a fine hand in making the reader feel the people’s devotion and loyalty to each other and the land and her characterization of Granny in particular is vivid and appealing.

As for the central story, the greed and moral corruption of the company’s management is obvious and certainly easy to paint as evil but I did think it was a bit overdone. There’s no doubt that Big Business can be very much on the dark side but I felt not enough attention was paid to what could happen to the community, to the people’s livelihoods, if the company were forced to make dramatic, expensive changes. I’m not saying the environmental problem should be ignored—far from it—just that all potential consequences need to be considered and planned for.

Whatever my concerns might be, Ms. Allgeyer is clearly a talented writer and has given readers a compelling story. I’m interested to see what she’ll offer next.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, April 2016.

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About the Author

The youngest of seven kids, Amy has been writing stories since she first learned to make her letters face the right way. Her work has appeared in Family Fun, A Fly in Amber and Stories for Children. As an architect, she spends her days restoring hundred-year-old homes in Boise where she lives with her son, a feral house cat, and a fake owl named Alan. She hates chocolate, but loves vegetables. She also loves traveling to foreign lands and the smell of honeysuckle on humid Southern nights.

Amy is represented by the lovely and amazing Danielle Chiotti of Upstart Crow Literary.

AUTHOR LINKS:

Website: http://www.amyallgeyer.com/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14368598.Amy_Allgeyer
Twitter: https://twitter.com/amy7a
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmyAllgeyerAuthor?ref=hl
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/appalachian_ya/?ref=badge

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Book Reviews: A Beeline to Murder by Meera Lester and Nunavut by Roger Herst

A Beeline to Murder
A Henny Penny Farmette Mystery #1
Meera Lester
Kensington, September 2015
IBSN 978-1-61773-909-5
Hardcover

Abigail Mackenzie was once a cop in Las Flores but an accident left her right hand too weak to hold a gun. She hasn’t lost her investigative nose, though. Now living on a small farm, raising bees and selling the honey, she keeps her hand in doing investigative work for the district attorney. When she finds the body of her best customer, the pastry chef Jean-Louis Bonheur, she asks that vital question, “Why?”

This is a cozy debut by Meera Lester with good bones, but a tad overweight for my tastes. A nicely intricate plot unfolds, red herrings and possible Persons of Interest, a debonair love interest—even a rescued dog—keep Abby on the go as she searches for the motive and the killer.

Closer editing—she makes $22 for 16 ounces of honey but sells it in 20 ounce jars—would have kept me better in the story-line.

This is a gentle cozy that should appeal to readers of the genre.

Reviewed by Michele Drier, October 2015.
Author of Delta for Death and SNAP: All That Jazz.

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Nunavut
An Arctic Thriller
Roger Herst
Dale and Hill Publications, February 2015
ISBN 978-1508423850
Trade Paperback

This novel begins right away with a conflict – a Russian icebreaker is trying to sneak through the Northwest Passage in Nunavut, but is warned off by two people on snow machines: Leetia Quilliq, daughter of the deputy-premier of Nunavut, and RCMP Inspector Nils Christendorp. Leetia and Nils advise the Russian captain that he’s in Canadian waters, and that he must leave immediately. However, without the power to stop the large icebreaker, the Russians move ahead anyway, while Leetia and Nils are left behind, determined to investigate further into what the Russians were doing.

Nunavut is subtitled “An Arctic Thriller”, which is a fair description. Its premise is based on real issues – global warming is having a big impact on the Canadian North, allowing access to areas that were previously inaccessible, and opening up the potential to tap into its vast reserves of oil and uranium. While such a remote area, so sparsely populated, has not previously been a place to battle over, it may become very desirable in the future, and Canada has already begun to increase its military presence in the Arctic. In addition to the possible fights over Nunavut’s untapped wealth, Nunavut is Canada’s newest territory, still establishing itself and finding ways to become economically viable, while sustaining an Inuit way of life.

Herst explores all of these issues in his thriller, as well as describing the negative impact of the changing environment on the area’s wildlife. Leetia Quilliq, the heroine of the novel, is a veterinarian who operates Seafarers, a clinic that exists to heal injured sea mammals. As the daughter of the deputy-premier, she is also under pressure to enter politics. But as a young woman, she is also trying to choose between having a professional life that takes up all of her time, or starting a family with her plastic surgeon boyfriend, Steven. She is torn between Steven, her RCMP ally Nils, and her father’s friend Siggy, a lawyer and an artist who has been inspired by Nunavut’s famous Cape Dorset sculptors.

Nunavut makes for a fascinating setting. I live in Canada, and I have travelled through a lot of it, but the far North seems like another country even though it is a large part of my country. The characters were interesting as well, with Leetia being the most complex, as she identifies strongly with the Inuit people and yet is herself half-Korean, half-French-Canadian. The mystery aspect of the book centres around the death of a politician, and whether or not it was an accident or an assassination.

For all its strengths, however, Nunavut never completely came alive for me. It seemed overwritten in places, with convoluted sentences that drew me out of the narrative. As well, there were numerous shifts from the past tense to the present tense that I found disconcerting. Herst seemed to be trying to combine not only a thriller scenario, but also a bit of a mystical story, with injured animals magically finding their own way to Seafarers to be treated, and then to mix all of that with romantic suspense, as Leetia tries to choose between the various men pursuing her.

Admittedly, though, Nunavut did make me curious and get me thinking, and I appreciated that. The issues this arctic thriller raises seem important, and I was inspired to do some research and become more aware of what is happening in Nunavut. Herst was successful in painting a strong picture of the challenges that Nunavut is facing, which are so intertwined with its potential for wealth and prominence.

Reviewed by Andrea Thompson, October 2015.

 

Book Review: The Rhyme of the Magpie by Marty Wingate

The Rhyme of the Magpie
A Birds of a Feather Mystery #1
Marty Wingate
Alibi, June 2015
ISBN 978-1101883389
Ebook

From the publisher—

With her personal life in disarray, Julia Lanchester feels she has no option but to quit her job on her father’s hit BBC Two nature show, A Bird in the Hand. Accepting a tourist management position in Smeaton-under-Lyme, a quaint village in the English countryside, Julia throws herself into her new life, delighting sightseers (and a local member of the gentry) with tales of ancient Romans and pillaging Vikings.

But the past is front and center when her father, Rupert, tracks her down in a moment of desperation. Julia refuses to hear him out; his quick remarriage after her mother’s death was one of the reasons Julia flew the coop. But later she gets a distressed call from her new stepmum: Rupert has gone missing. Julia decides to investigate—she owes him that much, at least—and her father’s new assistant, the infuriatingly dapper Michael Sedgwick, offers to help. Little does the unlikely pair realize that awaiting them is a tightly woven nest of lies and murder.

When I first picked up The Rhyme of the Magpie, I expected a typical English village mystery but this is a bit of an anomaly. Yes, it’s set in an English village and it’s a mystery but there the expectations go off the rails. The most obvious difference is that the sleuth is a newcomer to the village and, because of that, there are only a few villagers that we get to know. I miss that because the interweaving of villagers’ lives is so often a large part of the story, even the core of the solution to the mystery.

Not only is the sleuth new to the area but the criminal activity is, in some ways, a step away from the village, meaning it isn’t happening because of some element unique to the village. Also, there is hostility between two factions that could happen anywhere, the eternal fight between conservationists and those who value land development and other commercial enterprises over the preservation of habitats. In other words, there’s a feeling of watching at a distance rather than being totally immersed. This is not a bad thing, just a caution that Ms. Wingate’s story is not what you might normally anticipate.

Julia is a likeable woman and she’s in the midst of making some critical changes in her life. Other than the mystery itself, I found this aspect of the story to be most interesting as she tries to find a way to fit into an environment so different from what she’s used to. Although I didn’t move to a new town, I did uproot my career after many years and started over so I had a lot of empathy for Julia. The other thing I like about her is that she’s not inordinately reckless and, well, TSTL, another departure from so many mysteries of this kind.

Other characters, while not as well developed as Julia, are fleshed out enough so that I felt comfortable with them and I’m sure we’ll get to know them better in future books. Michael is intriguing, as any potential love interest should be, and Vesta and Linus are a good introduction to the denizens of the village. All have their parts to play in the murder investigation and, wonder of wonders, the local police are competent, another difference from some amateur sleuth novels. When Rupert, Julia’s TV celebrity dad, disappears and a body is found, the hunt is on for the missing man and a killer who has a gruesome touch. Are they one and the same?

All in all, this first in the series is a good effort and I’ll be back when the second book comes out.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, June 2015.

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About the Author

Marty Wingate is the author of The Garden Plot, The Red Book of Primrose House, and the upcoming Between a Rock and a Hard Place and a regular contributor to Country Gardens as well as other magazines. She also leads gardening tours throughout England, Scotland, Ireland, France, and North America. More Birds of a Feather mysteries are planned.

Author Links:

         

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Book Review: Carrier by Anne Tibbets

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Title: Carrier
Series: The Line #1
Author: Anne Tibbets
Published by: Carina Press
Publication date: June 16th 2014
Genres: Dystopia, New Adult

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Book Trailer

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Carrier
The Line #1
Anne Tibbets
Carina Press, June 2014
ISBN 9781426898495
Ebook

From the publisher—

Twenty-two -year-old Naya has spent nearly half her life as a sex slave in a government institution called The Line. When she’s kicked out after getting pregnant with twins, she’s got no way to earn a living and a horrifying choice to make: find someone to replace her, or have her babies taken in her stead.

A doctor with a history of aiding ex-Line girls, Ric Bennett, wants to help. He runs a team of rebels that can delete Naya’s records and free her forever. But when The Line sniffs out his plan, things get bloody, fast. Naya means more to them than just a chance at fresh faces—her twins are part of the government’s larger plan.

As they hide from government search parties, Ric comes to admire Naya’s quiet strength. And Naya realizes Ric might be a man she can trust. If they make it off the grid, they could build a new life. But first they’ll have to survive the long, vicious reach of The Line.

If I leave a potential reader with only one impression, it must be this: don’t let the synopsis of this book deter you from reading this book because you don’t care for sexual themes. Carrier is so much more than that and, in fact, the author takes the admonition to “show, not tell” to heart but stops short of making this important theme too graphic, in my opinion. Yes, Naya has been a sex slave for years but we first meet her at the end of her captivity. There are other uncomfortable elements, such as a tyrannical and evil government and an economy brought to its knees, but these are themes that we should not ignore in today’s uncertain times.

In this future society, Naya has had a life that would be considered horrendous in any day and age and is now faced with an impossible choice. Can she really betray another young girl by convincing her a life of constant prostitution is favorable to the abject poverty and oppression she now lives? Would it be possible for Naya to hand her babies over to  the government or is she destined to return to The Line?

My only real quibble with Ms. Tibbets’ story is that coincidence seems to come into play a little too often, putting Naya and other characters in the right place at the right time, so to speak. Beyond that, the premise is a good one on several levels, not least of which is the strong reminder that many, many women and girls around the world today are in dire situations much like Naya’s and it’s far too easy for us to look the other way or just to forget.

Naya is, of course, the central character of Carrier and is remarkably resilient considering her past and her present but there are others who also stand out. Ric, the young doctor who wants to help, has his own past but has found a way to make a difference and to fight back against the government which is, in reality, a huge corporation run amok. Evie is a young girl who could be Naya at a much younger age and she grips our hearts with fear for what her future might become while Shirel is a stark reminder of what economic ruin can mean to people with no way out.

One dream sequence is bound to make any reader uneasy at best but I believe it’s important and is at the heart of the story. Skip it if you must but don’t skip the entire book. Fiction makes harsh themes a little more palatable but, when all is said and done, it does no good to intellectually object to certain human behaviors unless we have emotional knowledge of what they really mean. Still, it’s the little touches that elevate Carrier above the usual dystopian pack, things like Naya’s fear of being touched and, yet, her strength and her hope in the face of nearly impossible odds.

Book Two is Walled, in progress now, and I will be be impatiently waiting for it so I can spend more time with characters I’ve come to know and admire.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, July 2014.

About the Author

 

Anne Tibbets is an SCBWI award-winning and Smashwords.com Best Selling author. After writing for Children’s television, Anne found her way to young/new adult fiction by following what she loves: books, strong female characters, twisted family dynamics, magic, sword fights, quick moving plots, and ferocious and cuddly animals.

Along with CARRIER, Anne is also the author of the young adult fantasy novella, THE BEAST CALL and the young adult contemporary, SHUT UP.

Anne divides her time between writing, her family, and three furry creatures that she secretly believes are plotting her assassination.

Find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/AnneTibbetsAuthor or on Twitter @WriteforCoffee. To contact Anne, visit www.annetibbets.com and click the ‘CONTACT’ tab.

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