Teeny Book Reviews: Pharma Con by Peg Herring and Epiphany by Susan Slater @authorpherring @susansslater @ColumbineGroup

Pharma Con
Kidnap Caper #2
Peg Herring
Gwendolyn Books, May 2019
ISBN 978-1944502263
Trade Paperback

How could a group of people make life just a little bit better for those who have had wrong done to them, something like the old TV show, “Leverage”? The motley crew of Robin Hooders led by Robin and Em that we first met in KIDNAP.org returns, still on the quest to bring justice or, at least, a kind of retribution, to those who prey on the vulnerable. While they go after their latest target, both Robin and Em are questioning their own futures with the outfit but that doesn’t stop them from going after Neil Preston, head of a pharmaceuticals company. Anyone in the US who is faced with exorbitant drug prices can sympathize with this crusade, especially since this man is reaping all the benefits of his unbridled greed. It’s an adventure full of clever tactics and a lot of sassy humor and any reader will enjoy this caper.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, January 2020.

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Epiphany
Dan Mahoney Mysteries, Book 4
Susan Slater
Secret Staircase Books, April 2019
ISBN 978-1-945422-67-6
Trade Paperback

Insurance investigator San Mahoney is already in St. Augustine, FL, with his wife, Elaine, when his company assigns him to look into a very large theft from the local Basilica but, tangentially, one of the nuns has been murdered. Sister Leah was involved in a very nasty side business but is that why she was killed? Dan needs to work with and around the police and, meanwhile, he and Elaine are concerned that his mom, Maggie, may have gotten herself involved in a sketchy situation in her new town, Dragon’s Bend, especially when a dead body pops up there, too. Elaine’s twenty-year-old son comes to visit and a family Christmas is in the making but Dan really has his work cut out for him this time what with the missing relics, bodies and hints of a really distressing criminal activity.

As a resident of St. Augustine, I was captivated by the author’s careful and quite accurate use of this beautiful, historic city as the setting for Dan’s latest investigation and enjoyed recognizing different locations. Ms. Slater has also crafted an intriguing tangle of crimes and puzzling it out kept me swiping pages on my Nook to see what would happen next.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, January 2020.

Book Review: Return to Dust by Andrew Lanh

Return To Dust
A Rick Van Lam Mystery #2
Andrew Lanh
Poisoned Pen Press, October 2015
ISBN 978-1-4642-0426-5
Hardcover

Billed as a Rick Van Lam Mystery, the novel has more atmosphere and character than one usually expects from a good crime novel. As a consequence, the characters and their backgrounds take up far more space and time than does the careful, sometimes plodding, efforts of the novel’s detective, Rick Van Lam, to answer a rather simple question. Was Marta Kowalski murdered or did she simply slip and fall of a bridge while under the influence?

Rick Van Lam is an Amerasian, a sad by-product of that disastrous war in Viet Nam. Van Lam makes a dangerous trek to America as a young boy. Now he’s a relatively calm and accomplished investigator for a large insurance company. He’s stationed in a bedroom community outside Hartford, Connecticut, where lives a sizeable group of Hmong and other refugees from SE Asia. His relationship to the community is fraught because Lam is not pure blood and many in the small community resent his very existence. That attitude interferes with his investigation. It also offers the author many opportunities to expound on the unique troubles of this group of Asian transfers as they continue to struggle to adapt to their new country.

The woman who died seemed to be an inoffensive sort, semi-retired, she cleaned houses and apartments for a wide assortment of people in the small bedroom community and despite resistance at almost every turn, Investigator Lam persists, wading through thickets of prejudice, suspicion and occasional assistance. Ultimately, of course, he solves the mystery of Marta’s death and in the process, delivers a long and occasionally tortuous dissertation on the outflow of the disaster that was that war in Vietnam.

Reviewed by Carl Brookins, June 2018.
http://www.carlbrookins.com http://agora2.blogspot.com
The Case of the Purloined Painting, The Case of the Great Train Robbery, Reunion, Red Sky.

Book Review: The Other Widow by Susan Crawford—and a Giveaway!

The Other Widow
Susan Crawford
William Morrow Paperbacks, December 2016
ISBN 978-0-06-236289-6
Trade Paperback

From the publisher—

Everybody’s luck runs out. This time it could be theirs . . .

It isn’t safe. That’s what Joe tells her when he ends their affair—moments before their car skids off an icy road in a blinding snowstorm and hits a tree. Desperate to keep her life intact—her job, her husband, and her precious daughter, Lily—Dorrie will do everything she can to protect herself, even if it means walking away from the wreckage. Dorrie has always been a good actress, pretending to be someone else: the dutiful daughter, the satisfied wife, the woman who can handle anything. Now she’s going to put on the most challenging performance of her life. But details about the accident leave her feeling uneasy and afraid. Why didn’t Joe’s airbag work? Why was his car door open before the EMTs arrived? And now suddenly someone is calling her from her dead lover’s burner phone. . . .

Joe’s death has left his wife in free fall as well. Karen knew Joe was cheating—she found some suspicious e-mails. Trying to cope with grief is devastating enough without the constant fear that has overtaken her—this feeling she can’t shake that someone is watching her. And with Joe gone and the kids grown, she’s vulnerable . . . and on her own.

Insurance investigator Maggie Brennan is suspicious of the latest claim that’s landed on her desk—a man dying on an icy road shortly after buying a lucrative life insurance policy. Maggie doesn’t believe in coincidences. The former cop knows that things—and people—are never what they seem to be.

As the fates of these three women become more tightly entwined, layers of lies and deception begin to peel away, pushing them dangerously to the edge . . . closer to each other . . . to a terrifying truth . . . to a shocking end.

I think one of the pitfalls of focusing a story on infidelities and their consequences is that it’s difficult to feel much empathy for the adulterers and I did, indeed, have a distinct lack of connection with Dorrie and the dead Joe. Besides the issue of what they’re doing to their families, you have to wonder why people in such a situation would rather follow such an unproductive path than either end their unhappy marriages or try to repair whatever is wrong. Certainly having an affair solves nothing.

Dorrie puzzled me, too, because of her immediate response to the accident. Blind panic sets in, largely because she’s so afraid of being found out and that’s understandable if weak, but she seems to be so unaware of the evidence she left behind. Still, I did sympathize with her to a point, kind of even more than Karen, Joe’s wife who studiously ignored all the signs and has her own secrets. Not knowing about a spouse’s affair is one thing; pretending it doesn’t exist is something else.

The character that really meant something to me is Maggie, the insurance investigator who becomes involved because of the large policy on Joe. This is a woman with a lot of baggage but she’s also intriguing with her background in the military and law enforcement. Her intelligence and sense of something being wrong are what made me want to keep reading, to go along with her as she searched for the truth behind Joe’s death.

Generally speaking, the plot was a bit clunky and had a few too many threads but, on the whole, I wanted to stick with it because I did want to know what really happened and how things would be resolved, plus there were a number of leads to follow to get there. While the ending left a few things hanging and some of the characters were unlikeable, The Other Widow is an interesting read.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, December 2016.

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Purchase Links:

HarperCollins // Barnes & Noble // Kobo

Amazon // Indiebound

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About the Author

Susan Crawford grew up in Miami, Florida, and graduated from the University of Miami with a BA in English and a minor in psychology. She later moved to New York City and then Boston before settling in Atlanta to raise three daughters and work in the field of adult education. A member of the Atlanta Writers Club and the Village Writers, Susan teaches at Georgia Piedmont Technical College and dabbles in local politics. She lives with her husband and a trio of rescue cats in Atlanta, where she enjoys reading books, writing books, rainy days, and spending time with the people she loves.

Find out more about Susan at her website, and connect with her on Facebook and Twitter.

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Follow the tour:

Tuesday, December 6th: No More Grumpy Bookseller

Wednesday, December 7th: Buried Under Books

Thursday, December 8th: Books and Bindings

Friday, December 9th: A Literary Vacation

Monday, December 12th: A Bookworm’s World

Tuesday, December 13th: Kahakai Kitchen

Wednesday, December 14th: Ms. Nose in a Book

Friday, December 16th: Peeking Between the Pages

Monday, December 19th: Tina Says…

Wednesday, December 21st: 5 Minutes For Books

Thursday, December 22nd: FictionZeal

Wednesday, December 28th: Laura’s Reviews

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To enter the drawing for one of two print
copies of The Other Widow, leave a
comment below. The winning names will
be drawn Friday evening, December 9th.
Open to residents of the US and Canada.

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Book Review: Hair of the Dog by Susan Slater

Hair of the Dog
A Dan Mahoney Mystery #3
Susan Slater
Poisoned Pen Press, July 2015
ISBN 978-1-4642-0418-0
Hardcover

From the publisher—

It sounds like some work and mostly play when United Life and Casualty sends its investigator Dan Mahoney to Florida. Five greyhounds—all heavily insured—were lost in a fire at the Daytona dog track.

So simple. Five dogs dead by smoke inhalation, bagged, tagged, and cremated. Papers all in order. Ashes in specialty urns on the desk of Dixie Halifax, track and casino co-owner. In jail, a young employee charged with arson to cover a murder he’s blamed for committing.

Then the body of kennel owner Jackson Sanchez is found face down in a pool of blood, a knife stuck in his back. But Sanchez didn’t die from a knife wound. Someone has carved “thief” on his forehead. The blood pooled underneath his body isn’t his. Should Dan be looking for a second corpse? And the one man who can answer questions, the track vet, dies in a motorcycle accident.

Working this case is not as complicated for Dan as having his mother Maggie move into the FBI’s favorite mob slob haven in nearby Palm Coast, while his fiancée Elaine Linden, on sabbatical, works on a PI license. Perfect—the FBI can set Maggie up to spy on her boyfriend who may be laundering cash in some geriatric mafia scheme in this follow-up to Flash Flood and Rollover.

Sometimes, the best part of reading is in re-discovering an old “friend” and that was certainly the case for me with Hair of the Dog. I first encountered author Susan Slater and her protagonist, Dan Mahoney, almost 13 years ago with Flash Flood and liked it very much but then it seemed Ms. Slater sort of vanished (and, in fact, she sort of did for a long time). I had found her other series featuring Ben Pecos but it was Dan Mahoney I really wanted to see again.

In 2014, his second adventure showed up in Rollover but I just plain missed it so when I heard about Hair of the Dog I was immensely excited and still am, even though I now need to go find Rollover so I can catch up on all Dan’s doings. This third book was a nice re-entry for me because I found the whole concept of murder and mayhem in the dog racing world to be not only very interesting but also a good way for people to learn a little about these wonderful dogs. Yes, it’s sad to read about the deaths that bring Dan to Florida but readers can be assured that Ms. Slater and, by extension, Dan, treat the subject with compassion and sensitivity. It doesn’t hurt that a delightful greyhound named Sadie captured my heart.

This is a mystery so, of course, there are crimes against humans and both humans and greyhounds keep Dan busy and on the alert. Meanwhile, Dan’s fiancee, Elaine, falls for sweet Sadie—who wouldn’t?—and uses her private-investigator-in-training skills to help Dan get to the bottom of things.

Now that Susan Slater is back in my book world, I’ll be looking for much more but, while I wait, I’ll be looking into A Ticket Home, a suggestion from the author for supporting retired greyhounds. I can’t think of a better way to conclude this particular adventure.

Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, August 2015.

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Purchase Links:

             

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About the Author

Susan is the author of the Ben Pecos series (Pumpkin Seed Massacre, A Way to the Manger, Yellow Lies and Thunderbird), a stand-alone (Five O’clock Shadow), a women’s fiction novel (0 to 60), a para-normal short story in Rod Serling’s commemorative Twilight Zone Anthology (Eye for an Eye), and the Dan Mahoney series. Susan lives on the Atlantic coast and writes full-time.

Catch Up:

             

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