Review: THE PRIVATE FACE OF MURDER, John Bonett

• 
  this edition read as an e-book on Kindle (Amazon)
  
• ASIN : B01N6V53R1
• Publisher : Lume Books (January 24, 2017)
• first published 1966
• Language : English
• File size : 1294 KB
• Print length : 172 pages
• #1 in the Inspector Borges series

Synopsis  (Amazon)

People have many faces…

In the Spanish town of Caltrava, a group of ex-pats have created their own close-knit community. In moving to a hotter country, the Brits are hoping to find a more relaxing way of living. But then – disaster strikes when the beautiful Linda Huntingdon is killed in a fatal car crash.

Nothing appears too suspicious until retired actor Aubrey de Lamplugh meets the same fate, being crushed by a falling cliff. Two complete accidents, or a double homicide?

That’s what Inspector Borges intends to discover. At first, the two appear unrelated – how is the death of a young, bored housewife connected with that of an alcoholic egotist? Slowly, a picture starts to unfurl before the Inspector’s eyes..

My Take

This novel took off fairly slowly, acquainting the reader with details about the residents of the British ex-pat community in the Spanish town of  Caltrava. There are a number of small side plots which tease out the links between the various residents.

After the two deaths Inspector Borges arrives to stay at the hotel, almost unobtrusively, not telling anyone at first that he is a police inspector looking for connection the two events.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. There are some lovely descriptive parts, as well as explanation of the Spanish criminal justice system. I'm certainly going to be looking for the second in the series.

My rating: 4.6

About the author

John Bonett was the pen name of John Hubert Arthur Coulson (10 August 1906 – 21 January 1989), an English author, best known for numerous mystery and detective novels written in collaboration with his wife, Emery Bonett.

He was born in Longbenton, Tynemouth and educated at Durham School. In addition to his writing work, after serving in the Admiralty between 1940–45, he worked as a banker from 1924–37, a company secretary from 1937–39, and finally as a sales promotion executive, from 1945-63.

He lived in Spain with his wife during his later years.

Review: A DAY IN THE DEATH OF DOROTHEA CASSIDY, Ann Cleeves

• 
   this edition published by Pan books 2018
  
• originally published 1992
• #3 in Inspector Ramsay series
• ISBN 978-1509-856244
• 193 pages

Synopsis (Fantastic Fiction)

The third title in the Inspector Ramsay crime series. Dorothea Cassidy, the Vicar's wife is found dead in the park's flower bed. The list of suspects include old Mrs Bowman, Clive Stringer, a disturbed adolescent, and Theresa Stringer, a single mother with a violent boyfriend and even members of her own family.

My Take

Dorothea Cassidy is not everybody's idea of a vicar's wife. She is much younger than her husband and an unlikely candidate for murder. Thursdays are the day when she "does her own thing" and thursday night is when she was last seen.

Stephen Ramsay is first alerted to Dorothea's disappearance by his aunt who lives in a retirement village where Dorothea was supposed to have given a talk in the evening. It is another 12 hours before her body is discovered in a local park. The circumstances are complicated by a music fair running over a number of days.

Stephen tries to put together a timeline relating to when Dorothea was last seen. She had last been involved with a child protection case being managed by a local social worker.

These are very readable, and credible stories. Recommended.

My rating: 4.4 

I've also read (from this series)

• 4.5, A LESSON DYING - Inspector Ramsay #1
• 4.5, MURDER IN MY BACKYARD -Inspector Ramsay #2

Review: THE BONE CODE, Kathy Reichs

• 
  this edition published by Simon & Schuster Australia 2021
  
• ISBN 9-781760-858582
• 351 pages
• #20 in the Temperance Brennan series

Synopsis (Publisher)

NUMBER ONE NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author KATHY REICHS returns with her next edge-of-your seat thriller featuring forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A storm has hit South Carolina, dredging up crimes of the past.

On the way to Isle of Palms, a barrier island off the South Carolina coast, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan receives a call from the Charleston coroner. During the storm, a medical waste container has washed up on the beach. Inside are two decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting and bound with electrical wire. Chillingly, Tempe recognizes many details as identical to those of an unsolved case she handled in Quebec fifteen years earlier. With a growing sense of foreboding, she flies to Montreal to gather evidence and convince her boss Pierre LaManch to reopen the cold case. She also seeks the advice—and comfort—of her longtime beau Andrew Ryan.

Meanwhile, a storm of a different type gathers force in South Carolina. The citizens of Charleston are struck by a bacterium that, at its worst, can eat human flesh. Thousands panic and test themselves for a rare genetic mutation that may have rendered them vulnerable.

Shockingly, Tempe eventually discovers that not only are the victims in both grisly murder cases related, but that the murders and the disease outbreak also have a common cause…​​

My Take

It is some time since I have read one of this series. THE BONE CODE is set in 2020, acknowledging the presence of the Covid-19 pandemic. However it is not the pandemic that plays a role in this novel but a virus that is killing dogs. Is it possible it can also infect their human owners?

In South Carolina the two bodies washed up in a shipping container remind Tempe of an unsolved cold case in Quebec fifteen years earlier. In a secondary mystery she is trying to track down why the photo of a death mask many decades old looks so familiar.

Tempe calls in a number of favours to help her solve her problems, and eventually tracks down the reason for the similarity between the two sets of bodies separated, in discovery, by 15 years.

I did feel at a distinct disadvantage from having read so few of this series. For me, the book worked relatively well as a stand-alone.

My rating: 4.4

I've also read

CROSS BONES - #8
4.1, MORTAL REMAINS  -#13 AKA SPIDER BONES

Review: GREENWICH PARK, Katherine Faulkner

• 
  this edition published 2021 by Raven Books, Bloomsbury Publishing
• ISBN 978-1-5226-2633-2
  
• 442 pages

Synopsis (publisher) 

Daniel is the perfect husband.
Rory is the perfect brother.
Serena is the perfect sister-in-law.

And Rachel? Rachel is the perfect nightmare.

When Helen, finally pregnant after years of tragedy, attends her first antenatal class, she is expecting her loving architect husband to arrive soon after, along with her confident, charming brother Rory and his pregnant wife, the effortlessly beautiful Serena. What she is not expecting is Rachel.

Extroverted, brash, unsettling single mother-to-be Rachel, who just wants to be Helen's friend. Who just wants to get know Helen and her friends and her family. Who just wants to know everything about them. Every little secret…

Masterfully plotted and utterly addictive, Greenwich Park is a dark, compelling look at motherhood, friendships, privilege and the secrets we keep to protect ourselves.

My Take

This is one of those books that just keeps the reader guessing. There are dark secrets to be unearthed, and just when I thought I had them all sussed out, then something else popped up.

As seems to be the fashion with the recent crime fiction novel, there are several narrators and their names head the various chapters. The "hook" is a letter written after the action is complete by an inmate of HMP Bowood to Helen saying that she needs to hear the truth, and here it is. There is no indication who the writer might be. The next chapters regress to when the pregnancy is at 24 weeks, and with Helen who is waiting at the antenatal class for her husband, brother, and sister in law to join her. Her sister in law Serena is also pregnant, more or less due at the same time. They don't arrive and Helen is joined by Rachel who is similarly pregnant and also on her own.

The novel then counts down each week, and new narrators pop up. Helen and Rachel become closer, until eventually Rachel moves in with Helen and Daniel. There are also scenes from Greenwich Park involving characters who remain unnamed.

So there is plenty of mystery for the reader to unravel, there are references to things that have happened in the past, as well as strange events occurring now. We are never quite sure about the relationship between various characters, but we tend to see things mainly from Helen's point of view.

Enjoy!

My rating: 4.6

About the author

An award-winning journalist, Katherine Faulkner studied History at Cambridge. She has worked as an investigative reporter and an editor and was formerly the joint Head of News at The Times (London). She lives in London, where she grew up, with her husband and two daughters. Greenwich Park is her first novel.

Review: KILL A STRANGER, Simon Kernick

• 
  this edition published by Headline Publishing 2020
• ISBN 978-1-4722-7096-2
  
• 376 pages

Synopsis (publisher)

They took your fiancée.
They framed you for murder.

You’re given one chance to save her. To clear your name.
You must kill someone for them.

They give you the time and place.
The weapon. The target.

You have less than 24 hours.
You only know that no-one can be trusted…and nothing is what it seems.

My Take

Matt Walters comes home late one night to find his pregnant fiance gone, and a strange woman in his bed .. dead in a pool of blood, with a phone in her hand. The phone rings and Matt's nightmare begins. Webcam footage shows Kate with a noose around her neck, and a voice on the phone tells Matt he must follow instructions or Kate will die.

There are are four main narrative voices in this story: Matt, Kate, a British policeman, and Kate's father.  The trouble is that we, the readers, don't know which has the true story, and which is the unreliable narrator. One of them, at least, is a killer.

To be honest, I was 10 pages from the end before I had the plot worked out.

I know I have read a Simon Kernick novel sometime in the past, but apparently not in the history of this blog (13 years) so I am claiming him as a "new to me" author. A much neglected one.

My rating: 4.5

Review: DYING ON THE VINE, Aaron Elkins

• 
  this edition published by Berkley Prime Crime 2012
  
• ISBN 978-0-425-24788-4
• 294 pages
• #17 in Gideon Oliver series

Synopsis (Fantastic Fiction)

Now, the celebrated Skeleton Detective is visiting friends at a vineyard in Tuscany when murder leaves a bitter aftertaste...

It was the unwavering custom of Pietro Cubbiddu, patriarch of Tuscany's Villa Antica wine empire, to take a solitary month-long sabbatical at the end of the early grape harvest, leaving the winery in the trusted hands of his three sons. His wife, Nola, would drive him to an isolated mountain cabin in the Apennines and return for him a month later, bringing him back to his family and business.

So it went for almost a decade - until the year came when neither of them returned. Months later, a hiker in the Apennines stumbles on their skeletal remains. The carabinieri investigate and release their findings: they are dealing with a murder-suicide. The evidence makes it clear that Pietro Cubbiddu shot and killed his wife and then himself. The likely motive: his discovery that Nola had been having an affair.

Not long afterwards, Gideon Oliver and his wife, Julie, are in Tuscany visiting their friends, the Cubbiddu offspring. The renowned Skeleton Detective is asked to reexamine the bones. When he does, he reluctantly concludes that the carabinieri, competent though they may be, have gotten almost everything wrong. Whatever it was that happened in the mountains, a murder-suicide it was not.

Soon Gideon finds himself in a morass of family antipathies, conflicts, and mistrust, to say nothing of the local carabinieri's resentment. And when yet another Cubbiddu relation meets an unlikely end, it becomes bone-chillingly clear that the killer is far from finished...

My take

The plot of this novel is very similar to the only other book I have read in this series (OLD BONES), in that the setting is linked to a conference on forensic anthropology that the Skeleton Detective is attending and giving several sessions at. The aim of the seminars is to teach detectives to "read skeletons". One of the attendees suggests that he is able to access some skeletons recently found. Gideon Oliver finds that he disagrees with almost everything the pathologists have come up with. The have concluded a murder/suicide. His interpretation is that they have the order of the deaths wrong, and that both people have been murdered. The other similar plot line is that Gideon Oliver has some connection with the dead person.

Some parts of the investigation held very interesting information, but in other parts the plot got just a little  bit too cute, and I thought the final chapter was not very satisfactory at all, and had the feeling of being written far too hastily. 

My rating: 4.4

I've also read 4.6, OLD BONES

Review: THE BIG FOUR, Agatha Christie

• 
  this edition published on Kindle
  
• ASIN : B0046H95TA
• Publisher : HarperCollins (October 14, 2010)
• Publication date : October 14, 2010
• Originally published 1927
• Language : English
• File size : 633 KB
• Print length : 242 pages

Synopsis (Amazon)

A ruthless international cartel seeks world domination…

Framed in the doorway of Poirot’s bedroom stood an uninvited guest, coated from head to foot in dust. The man’s gaunt face stared for a moment, then he swayed and fell.

Who was he? Was he suffering from shock or just exhaustion? Above all, what was the significance of the figure 4, scribbled over and over again on a sheet of paper? Poirot finds himself plunged into a world of international intrigue, risking his life to uncover the truth about ‘Number Four’.

My take

I had forgotten the unusual structure of this novel. 

Hastings returns from Argentina without warning Poirot that he is coming. He arrives to find Poirot about to leave to sail to South America. He had decided to surprise Hastings with his arrival.

Plans are thrown into disarray by the uninvited guest who comes into Poirot's bedroom, collapses, and then dies. Poirot realises that he is being warned not to embark for South America.

This 18 chapter novel focusses on 4 people who threaten world security with catastrophe and destruction. At first the identity of just two people are known, then the third is revealed, but Number 4 is like a chameleon, able to take on many disguises and then leave no lasting impression of his face. All 4 are self-centred, and have world domination as their individual goal.

The novel was written originally as 11 or 12  short stories with the central theme of Poirot's search for these arch villains. The stories are presented sequentially and take place over a period of 10 or so months. The stories were published separately in Sketch magazine from 1924 under the sub-heading of The Man who was No. 4, then amalgamated into one narrative. The stories test Hercule Poirot's abilities as a detective. In fact he wishes to establish himself as the pre-eminent brain in the world.

The idea of evil powers trying to control world politics and economies is not confined to Agatha Christie, nor to this one "novel". We see it for example in the James Bond stories, in Christie's Tommy and Tuppence stories, in Superman, Batman and so on. It seems particularly to crop up in the 1920s and 1930s when the Western Powers felt threatened by the rise of China, of Russia, and when the old order had been brought down during World War One.

Once you realise the structure of the novel you begin to see other things. Some of the stories in  THE BIG FOUR appear at first to have nothing to do with the central theme, but Poirot plucks 4s out of nothing.

My rating: 4.2

See Agatha Christie books I have read as part of the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge.