This is a Bust, by Ed Lin

This is a Bust

Robert Chow is not a happy man. When he joined the New York Police Department and was assigned to Chinatown, he thought he would be making a real different for his community. After all, he spoke Cantonese. He grew up there. But as the only officer of Chinese descent in the NYPD, Chow is nothing more than a PR tool. He walks a beat most of the time, except when he is called in to be a Chinese face at some public event. This is a Bust, by Ed Lin, tells Chow’s story as he races for rock bottom in the summer of 1976.

Because Chow is not a detective (though he desperately wants to be), he is stuck walking a beat through Chinatown. Every morning, he fuels up with iced coffee and two or three hot-dog pastries and walks. Some of the inhabitants of Chinatown see him as an outsider because he is a cop. Others, usually older residents, see him as the only policeman they can trust. They tell him things, which annoys and saddens Chow because he’s technically not supposed to do anything with these tips apart from passing them on to the detectives.

The enforced uselessness of his position—and Chow know full well the NYPD is exploiting him for his face—is getting to Chow. He drinks more and more each day. He drinks in the morning. He drinks at night until he passes out watching news from Taiwan and mainland China. He drinks to forget his experiences in Vietnam. He drinks to forget his dreams of making a difference. In spite of all this drinking and Chow’s increasingly bad attitude, people love him and try to help him rescue himself from alcoholism.

The mystery in This is a Bust, involving a trio of older Chinese residents, is a footnote to Chow’s alcoholism. Chow responds when Yip bursts into the barbershop to announce that his wife is dead and he doesn’t know what to do. Chow leaves mid-haircut to take a look and call it in. For the rest of the book, Yip sidles up to Chow for help and to try and make friends with the officer. Evidence and clues about what really happens slowly trickle in. In any other novel about a hardbitten alcoholic cop, the protagonist would have been all over this case. Chow, however, is so angry and disaffected most of the time that he stays warned when his superiors tell him to let the detectives handle the case. It’s almost a surprise when Chow later cracks the case.

This is a Bust reads, to me, like a prologue to explain why Chow is the way he is. In other circumstances, we might have come to know Chow through other mysteries and liked him for his dedication to Chinatown or something similar. Instead, we watch him race towards rock bottom while a case is lackadaisically pursued by others. What I liked most about this book was the setting. Whatever his value as a cop might be, Chow is an excellent guide to the tangle of histories and relationships in New York’s Chinatown during the mid-1970s.

I received a free copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration. It will be released 25 July 2017. 

Arrowood, by Mick Finlay

Arrowood

William Arrowood hates Sherlock Holmes. The damned man is on everyone’s lips as the best detective of the age. Arrowood would argue (and does, repeatedly) that Holmes is sloppy and relies too much on physical evidence rather than witness statements and lies. In Arrowood, by Mick Finlay, we see a better argument for Arrowood’s superiority (or not) as the detective and his partner, Norman Barnett, track down a missing Frenchman and unravel a criminal conspiracy.

Arrowood begins in classic mystery fashion when a beautiful woman walks into the detective’s consulting room and pursues him to take her case. Miss Cousture’s brother has disappeared. The evidence suggests that he fled back to the sibling’s homeland, France. Arrowood is reluctant, even when she presses him with some much needed coin, but accepts the case only when he learns that the brother works for an old enemy. Mr. Cream was responsible for a death in Arrowood’s last big case. This new case offers the detective a way to take the villain down.

Arrowood is the kind of detective who can read lies in facial expressions and discover clues in omissions. His people skills can get witness and suspects to reveal much more than they meant. He hardly has to stir from his rooms above a bakery to gather information. His style of detecting is enabled by his partner, Barnett. Barnett does all the legwork and is frequently beaten by suspects—which is a useful, if painful way, of learning that they are on the right track. Barnett is also our narrator, so we solve the mystery along with him for the most part. Thankfully, Barnett is not an idiot the way Dr. Watson is portrayed in many of the Holmes’ stories; he just misses tiny clues that Arrowood can pick up on.

While we rarely see Holmes mess up, Arrowood and Barnett make mistake after mistake. Their history with the London Metropolitan Police means that the pair have almost no support as they barge into dangerous situation after dangerous situation. When Holmes does make a mistake, is usually because he’s been temporary outsmarted by a worthy adversary. When Arrowood screws up, its because of bad luck or because the villains are more vicious than anticipated.

I enjoyed the well-constructed mystery at the center of this novel and I particularly enjoyed Arrowood’s soliloquies about Holmes. I’m not sure I’ll follow the series, however. Apart from Arrowood’s potshots at Holmes, I didn’t love this novel. It’s a solid novel, but it didn’t thrill me.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration. It will be released 18 July 2017.

Murder on Black Swan Lane, by Andrea Penrose

Murder on Black Swan Lane

With Murder on Black Swan Lane, Andrea Penrose launches a new series featuring the satirical cartoonish Charlotte Sloane and the irascible Earl of Wrexford, set in Regency London. In this debut novel, Sloane and Wrexford team up to defeat a criminal mastermind before the villain succeeds in framing the earl for a series of ghastly murders.

Murder on Black Swan Lane kicks off with a prologue featuring two characters meeting in mysterious circumstances before one kills the other with acid and a knife to the throat. The prologue gives way to Wrexford being questioned by a Bow Street Runner about his whereabouts the night before. He and the victim had been trading increasingly angry words in the newspapers. Meanwhile, Charlotte Sloane, in her guise of cartoonist A.J. Quill, reveals in her newest work that she knows far more than anyone should about the details of the murder.

After Wrexford tracks Sloane down with a mix of bribery and curiously talented servants, the two strike a bargain to share information in order to track down the killer. The more I read, the more I was enthralled by the mystery and the characters. It was clear from the prologue that the central crime would involve some flimflammery about alchemy, but I very much enjoyed the way Penrose grounded the weird with the pragmatically criminal as the plot developed. I also appreciated the sparks between the highly independent investigators. I don’t mean romantic sparks (although Penrose laid some groundwork there for future stories). Rather, I mean sparks between clashing world views. Wrexford swears by logic and physical evidence. Sloane is more intuitive and relies on her wide learning and artist’s eye to figure out what’s missing in the gaps between the evidence.

The book has clear hints that there will be more to come (even setting up future plots here and here). The partnership between Sloane and Wrexford is wonderful reading, mostly because of their senses of humor and mutual inability to suffer fools. I definitely plan on reading future entries in this series.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration. It will be released 27 June 2017.

The Long Drop, by Denise Mina

The Long Drop

How do you write a biography for a liar? Denise Mina found one way with her novel, The Long Drop. The events in this book are based on the investigation and trial of Peter Manuel. Mina took what is known about Manuel and his crimes, the investigation, court records, and other documents and stitched together a tale of what might have happened in a series of murders in Glasgow between 1956 and 1958. It makes for chilling reading.

The Long Drop begins in the middle of the story (fitting enough, considering how much is unknown about Manuel). A solicitor and his client meet with an informer who claims to know what happened to the client’s wife, daughter, and sister-in-law. The three women were murdered in September of 1956. The husband and father, William Watts, was the Glasgow police’s first and only suspect. He began to investigate the murders himself, since the police wouldn’t look at any other suspects. As the night goes on, however, Watts and others slowly learn that Peter Manuel—the informer—knows a lot more than he should. The longer anyone knows him, the more they realize that there is something deeply wrong with the man.

The novel then starts moving back and forth in time, revolving around the night Watts and Manuel got profoundly drunk and shared secrets. We never see the murders reconstructed. Mina leaves them ambiguous, making us wonder if Manuel really did commit them. We do see a lot of Manuel’s trial in the second half of the book. We also get to see the last weeks of Manuel’s life before his execution.

Peter Manuel, both in life and in The Long Drop, is a compulsive liar. He has a desperate need to be the hero of his own life. He’s a terrible liar, constantly contradicting himself and spinning completely unbelievable yarns about “what really happened.” Between these lies and the lack of a proper investigation, we can only draw our own conclusions about Manuel’s guilt—which I think makes for a fascinating take on true crime nonfiction. I’ve never read anything quite like The Long Drop before, but I hope to read more from Mina in the future.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration. It will be released 23 May 2017.

Long Black Veil, by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Long Black Veil

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s Long Black Veil begins like many other “awful thing happens to a group of friends”stories, but it quickly becomes more complicated—and more affecting. We are told at the beginning that some of the friends will die. What we don’t know until much later is why everything happened the way it did. While we have the mystery to sort out, Finney Boylan also gives us a moving portrait of a trans woman who wrestles with the long shadow of her past.

Long Black Veil moves back and forth in time from 1980, when the awful thing happened, to the later 1980s to 2015. The awful thing is the death of one of the friends when they get locked inside the abandoned Eastern State Penitentiary. No body is found (not until 2015), so the friend is only missing officially. The night at the Penitentiary breaks up the friends, who drift through the next 35 years. The chapters change perspective from one friend to another, so we get to see how the death has arrested their development into adulthood. They can function, but it’s clear that none of them is living the life they wanted—with one exception.

The exception is Judith. Judith was born in a male body before transitioning in the late 1980s. She hasn’t told her husband or her adopted son anything about her past in the sixteen years they’ve been a family; the men have told her they don’t want to know. There are some small marital spats, but Judith is very much content with her life. To be honest, I was much more interested in her character than in some of the others because I wanted to see how Finney Boylan would depict someone who didn’t feel right in the body they were born in.

The mystery part of Long Black Veil gives some added tension to the whole, but I think I might have been happy with just Judith’s story on its own. That said, when the literary and mystery parts of the novel start to converge again at the end of the book, I liked how the narratives asked the same question in two different ways. The question, of course, is how do you make amends for the past? In Judith’s case, it was her initial disappearance and starting her life over without telling anyone. In the case of the rest of the characters, it’s owning up to what really happened to their friend that night at the Penitentiary.

On balance, I enjoyed reading Long Black Veil in spite of some clumsiness with the disparate genre elements. What made this book so engrossing was the psychological portrait of Judith as she becomes the person she always was on the inside.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration. It will be released 11 April 2017.

The Wages of Sin, by Kaite Welsh

The Wages of Sin

It seems like everything is against Sarah Gilchrist in The Wages of Sin, by Kaite Welsh. She’s enrolled in one of the first classes of women in the University of Edinburgh’s medical school, so she faces harassment by the male students and staff. Because of an incident in her past, she is shunned by several of the female students. Her aunt and uncle—the only members of her family currently speaking to her—are pious, traditional people who want to marry Sarah off as quickly as possible. As if this wasn’t enough to cope with, a patient Sarah sees at the clinic where she volunteers turns up dead in the University’s anatomy lab the next day. Sarah, being the determined young woman she is, dives right into the mystery.

I would have been hooked by The Wages of Sin even if it hadn’t been a mystery. I am a sucker for medical history and this book plunged me right into the thick of it by dropping me into Sarah Gilchrist’s head as she tries to overcome her trepidation in the anatomy lab. We spend a day with Sarah as she braves school and the free clinic—with its testy, unwashed patients—before the main action kicks off. At the clinic, we meet Lucy, a young prostitute who begs the doctor to give her an abortion (which was illegal at the time). The next day, Sarah gets a nasty shock when she recognizes Lucy on the anatomy lab table. Sarah begins to ask questions in places that are entirely unsuitable for a young lady of her status and reputation because she knows that no one else will. In Edinburgh of the 1890s, no one seems to miss one more prostitute.

While Sarah tries to manage school and her relatives, she digs deeper and deeper into Lucy’s life. Unfortunately for her, she often charges down blind alleys and makes enemies along the way. One of those enemies, her very own professor Merchiston, fascinates her in a way that readers of romance novels will recognize—though Sarah resists and the plot doesn’t make it easy for her to get past her first impressions of the man. Sarah’s blunders make the story that much more believable for me; I distrust amateur detectives who are too confident and capable on their first case.

The only thing I did have a problem with in this genuinely engrossing novel was the ending. I felt the solution to the mystery came too soon and didn’t make much sense considering where Sarah had spent her efforts. I can forgive this because I really enjoyed Sarah and Merchiston’s characters. (This is also a debut novel and I expect a few hiccups in a debut.) The ending of The Wages of Sin makes it clear that more adventures are in store for Sarah and the professor. I look forward to seeing them again in future novels.

I received a free copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration. It will be released 7 March 2017.

Snowblind, by Ragnar Jónasson

Snowblind

In addition to all the other factors that make a book enjoyable—effective pacing, interesting character development, solid plotting—mysteries demand that writers carefully dole out information as needed for the reader to either solve the puzzle at the right time or trick the reader in a series of plot twists. Neither of those things happen in Ragnar Jónasson’s Snowblind, unfortunately. I don’t fault the translator, Quentin Bates, for the flaws in this novel. All the problems are structural. In fact, this book has so many fundamental issues that I wonder it’s garnered praise from the people who supplied the blurbs.

Snowblind is set in a remote town in northern Iceland. Siglufjörður is so far off the beaten track that it often becomes inaccessible in winter. The town is tight knit, the kind of place where everyone knows about everyone’s history and business. It would have been a tough nut to crack for any incoming policeman, let alone a rookie like Ari Thór Arason. He only take the job because the head police officer in Siglufjörður made him an offer and Ari Thór is used to being picked last, if at all. His first few days in the town lull him into thinking that Siglufjörður really is as boring as advertised. Then a famous writer is found dead in the local theater and a woman is discovered nearly dead in her own snowy backyard.

Snowblind should have been a tense, short mystery/thriller. It would have been if an editor had sat down with Jónasson and talked him out of the out-of-place victim’s perspectives, extensive histories of characters who turned out not to be involved in the crime, and the detective’s mooning over his distant girlfriend and the nearby woman he’s attracted to. (The editor should also have fixed the continuity errors while they were at it.) Of course, if you’d cut all that out, there wouldn’t be much book left.

I picked up Snowblind for two reasons. First, Iceland fascinates me. I very much want to visit some day and I love the fact that there are still people in the world speaking a Viking language. Second, I really enjoyed the Inspecter Erlender series by Arnaldur Indriðason. I was hoping to find something that could help fill the void. Although I enjoyed the descriptions of Siglufjörður, this book was uniformly awful.

I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley for review consideration. It will be released 31 January 2017.

A Fierce and Subtle Poison, by Samantha Mabry

A Fierce and Subtle Poison

People have always told stories about the house at the end of Calle Sol. They say it belongs to a mad scientist whose wife cursed it. They say a green-skinned witch girl lives there. People throw wishes written on paper over the wall around the house, hoping that the witch will grant them. But no one ever goes there, so no one really knows what’s going on. In A Fierce and Subtle Poison, by Samantha Mabry, protagonist Lucas will get closer to figuring out the house’s mysteries than anyone.

Lucas lives a charmed life in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His father is a rich white developer and Lucas has never had to work. Every summer, he lives in his father’s hotel and lives it up with his three friends, drinking and trying to get into girls’ shorts. He’s spoiled, but at least he knows it. He tries not to be too much of a gringo. He’s always been curious about the house at the end of Calle Sol and, the summer he turns 17, he actually makes contact with someone who lives in the house. One night, Marisol, the girl Lucas is trying to hook up with, makes a wish and throws it over the wall. The next day, she disappears and a note appears in Lucas’s hotel room telling him that Marisol’s wish can’t be granted.

Over the next several weeks, Lucas will end up in the middle of a mystery involving missing girls, the aforementioned mad scientist, and a girl who poisons everything she comes in contact with. This is not a metaphor. The first time Lucas meets Isabel, she demonstrates her condition by blowing on a wasp and killing it in midair.

Isabel ends up being the most interesting character in A Fierce and Subtle Poison, followed closely by her father, Dr. Ford. Dr Ford fits it in nicely to the rich tradition of crazed scientists who are willing to do anything to achieve their goals. Isabel is something special, though. Her condition (for lack of a better word) has left her isolated, raised by her father’s strict rationality and his memories of her Taíno mother. She’s odd, conflicted, and longs to be independent.

I really wish that this novel had been narrated from Isabel’s perspective. Not only would her story have offered a fascinating insight into a juicy ethical dilemma, but I wouldn’t have had to put up with Lucas’s first world problems as much. There was a lot of build up about the house on Calle Sol and its mysterious inhabitants at the beginning of A Fierce and Subtle Poison and, despite Lucas’s very interesting hallucinations, the narrative didn’t do enough with the stranger elements of backstory for me. Instead, I was left with an easily solvable puzzle and a dose of disappointment.

The Infidel Stain, by M.J. Carter

The Infidel Stain

One of the lesser tropes of detective fiction is that the detective knows he or she is on the right track when some goon appears and tries to warn them off, sometimes violently. The problem with this method of mystery-solving in M.J. Carter’s The Infidel Stain (sequel to the very enjoyable The Strangler Vine) is that Jem Blake and William Avery uncover so much dirty laundry that they get attacked by a variety of goons under orders from several different characters. It’s a wonder that the pair of them survive the book in one piece.

The novel opens in 1841, three years after Blake and Avery parted in India. Blake, who has become an inquiry agent for the wealthy, has received a new commission that also asks for his former comrade Avery. They have been asked to look into the ghastly murders of two printers in the poorer parts of London by Viscount Allington, a philanthropist and up-and-comer in Parliament. Before long, Blake and Avery turn up links between the murder victims, blackmail, and possible sedition. It’s all very interesting but nothing adds up to point to a viable suspect. There’s just no proof of anything.

In The Strangler Vine, Avery was very naive about world beyond the imperialist propaganda he’s grown up with. In The Infidel Stain, he’s more savvy about the world but still has much to learn about the way most people really live. In both books, he functions as our entry point into the London of Chartists, pornographers, Peelers, journalists, and desperate poverty. Through Avery’s eyes, we see just how bad life was for poor Londoners, many of them skilled craftspeople who were turfed out after industrialization. Welfare (other than the workhouse) did not exist in 1841. The franchise had not yet been extended beyond property owners. The parts of the city Blake and Avery roam through seem utterly hopeless.

Though motives and suspects proliferate throughout The Infidel Stain, I loved how Carter brought the mystery full circle by the end of the book. The clues to the real villain can been found here and there through the book, so the solution didn’t come out of nowhere. I found it very satisfying. I also enjoyed my trip around London in 1841. There are passages that reminded me of Charles Dickens’s and Henry Mayhew‘s writing about the London rookeries of the time. (No doubt this is on purpose because Dickens makes a brief cameo in this book and Mayhew has an important supporting role.) Carter has a gift for bringing it all back to grimy, miserable life.

The Unquiet Dead, by Ausma Zehanat Khan

The Unquiet Dead

Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty are two Toronto police officers who have the unenviable job of working “sensitive” cases involving Canada’s immigrant community. Not only do they have to solve mysteries and see justice done, they have the added pressure of keeping a lid on things so that they don’t become a media nightmare for the government. The Unquiet Dead, by Ausma Zehanet Khan, is the first book in a planned series featuring the two characters. If the mystery at the center of this book is anything to judge by, Khattak and Getty deserve a raise. As The Unquiet Dead opens, it’s not clear that there is a crime to solve. A rich man appears to have died after an accidental fall. Khattak and Getty don’t know why they’ve been called in exactly, until evidence surfaces that the rich man might have been a Serbian war criminal.

Khattak is the senior officer and it’s clear he knows more about the case of Christopher Drayton than he lets on. When he brings in his partner, Getty, he deliberate keeps his suspicions to himself to avoid any hint of prejudice or rule-breaking. Eventually, Khattak reveals that a Canadian official who is an expert in war crimes has been sent letters informing him that Drayton is actually a former lieutenant colonel in the Serbian army and may have been one of the architects of the Srebrenica massacre and other atrocities. The more Khattak and Getty dig, the more problems they find: unexplained money, a repellant fiancée, threatening letters, and worse. In spite of a number of possible suspects who might have wanted to kill Drayton, the detectives can’t work out what happened the night he died. Nothing adds up.

As Khattak and Getty investigate, short interludes take us into the experiences of three different people who survived the Bosnian War. The brutal irony of the situation is that Drayton’s death is of more interest to law enforcement than the deaths of the survivors’ families and the crimes committed against the Bosnian people. Drayton should have been in The Hague facing war crimes long before this, not living as a rich man in the suburbs of Toronto. But then, that’s the the very issue The Unquiet Dead asks us to think about: how the international community should have responded to atrocities and war crimes during the war and how they actually responded. For the survivors—who resurface later in the novel as they must, like Chekhov’s gun—seeing Drayton’s dead investigated must have felt like the last straw.

I was much more interested in the ethics of the case than in the personal subplots in the book. While the subplots humanized the detectives, I like to wrestle with ethical complexity—especially when it deals with war crimes. When the main plot would take a break for a chapter about Getty and her troubled childhood or Khattak’s attraction to one of the suspects, all I wanted was more dialog about how the detectives would keep the news that Canada had harbored a wanted war criminal for years and done nothing about it.

The Unquiet Dead is a solid read, but I’m only a little curious what the rest of the series has in store for Khattak and Getty. (The next book will have to have a very interesting hook to get me to read it.) Also, by the end of the book, I liked Getty a lot more than Khattak. Perhaps its because we spend more time with Getty as she puzzles things out, but she had a lot of my sympathy while she worked and Khattak wandered around moodily. The Unquiet Dead was just not quite right for me as a reader, I think.