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BLOODY KIN by Margaret Maron

Currently fifth on my list of favorite authors, due to her marvelous character Sigrid Harald, Maron writes her first non-series book (1985).

The pregnant, city-bred widow of a North Carolina man moves back from New York to his NC farm to bear and raise their child. The problem is that, unknown to her, her husband's death by a gunshot wound when he was visiting the farm without her, was not an accident. There a lot of strange and suspicious situations and characters among his extended family living in and near the farm. But, the key to the murder(s) lies in relationships that were forged among four soldiers in Vietnam ten to fifteen years before.

Maron is an exceptionally gifted writer who never makes a stylistic error. Like most mystery writers, her plots can seem a touch contrived, but she carries you along so effortlessly, it's still an enjoyable reading experience. She has the special gift of really getting you to care about her characters so that the suspense intensifies.

8 of 10

THE NOCTURNE MURDER (1987) by Audrey Petersen

A young woman staying in London for a couple of years while working on her research paper on an obscure English composer forms an attachment to a noted middle-aged music critic. The latter is unhappily married and has two grown children, each of whom gives him problems.

The relationship between the two is actually pretty casual, but when the critic is found murdered in the young woman's apartment she is accused of the murder by the family and by her landlady and another apartment building resident.

After her arrest, the landlady's lawyer son and her American teacher, who is visiting England at the time, come to her aid.

The author is able to make her heroine an amazingly sympathetic character despite some personality flaws. The puzzle element of the story is handled very well, and though there isn't a great deal of suspense, there is some. And, the desperate situation of the heroine makes up for the relative lack of "action".

I was interested enough to order the next book in the series.

7 of 10

ENGRAVED IN EVIL (1965) by Paula Minton

This was a paperback Gothic from the heyday of paperback Gothics.

As plots go, it wasn't bad. The orphaned daughter of a notorious gangster and a society deb is raised by a normal couple and kept ignorant of her origins. Her stepparents die while she is finishing up her schooling in Europe. Her money runs out. She thinks she's going to marry a titled but impecunious Austrian, but he buckles under pressure from his parents to marry money instead. She returns to America where her stepparents' lawyer has "good news" for her. Her real father left her a fortune, but nobody knows what or where it is.

From this point on the book is more a mystery than a Gothic as someone is trying to get their hands on the fortune after she leads them to it. The plot is somewhat surprising, with a little romance in the beginning and end of the book, but none in the middle, and no reappearance of the Austrian cad (I was expecting it). The characters are well-drawn, too.


4 of 10


The problem is the writing. There is more than a touch of the amateur in the prose, which is a shame. It might have been recommendable otherwise.

(above question addressed in another forum - I'm not ignoring Pat)

DEADLY NIGHTSHADE (1940) by Elizabeth Daly

This book contains one of the most unusual crimes I've encountered in a mystery novel. Four children in a vacation-home settlement in New England are apparently poisoned by the berries of the nightshade plant, but all four seem to have been on their own and far apart from each other. Two are dead, one recovered and one is missing. A fifth child, belonging to a gypsy camp, may or may not have eaten the berries, too. What could be the motive?

The puzzle is intriguing, and the solution is clever. Unfortunately, I could not warm up the the main character, a Lord Peter knock-off with the personality of a fish.

Good plot, good writing, uninteresting characters.

3 of 10

THE RIGHT JACK (1987) by Margaret Maron

Marons fifth book, and the fourth starring DI Sigrid Harald of the NYPD was the best of her books to this point.

Haralds detective partner Tillie, devoted father and husband, is one of two people critically injured when a bomb goes off during a cribbage tournament held at a swanky New York hotel. The two players at the board that was booby-trapped were killed instantly. Harald herself was in the hospital recovering from a knife wound received elsewhere in the line of duty at the time of the bombing.

Upon her release from the hospital, her first order of business is to determine which of the four people killed or seriously injured was the intended victim. (The bomb was clearly intended to hurt someone specifically since it was placed in a corner table and not at a place where it would have achieved maximum damage.)

Haralds personal life gets some interesting development in this novel as well, as a dashing Navy Lieutenant, assigned to help with the investigation (one of the victims worked in Naval Intelligence) finally gets her to do something about her bland appearance, much to the envy of her devoted older boyfriend who had been trying to do the same for months.

Great characters, polished style and an ingenious plot make this one of the best mysteries Ive read in a while.

9 of 10

ENCHANTERS NIGHTSHADE (1937) by Ann Bridge

As excellent as ILLYRIAN SPRING (her previous novel) was, this rather slow-starting book eclipses it in reader involvement. I have seldom, if ever, been as engrossed in a book as I became in this one by about the mid-way point of its approximately 500 pages.

To set out the plot in detail would spoil the book's effect without giving a true picture of it. The mastery of the story-telling art is more than half the battle here. However, Ill attempt a brief description of the set-up for the story along with a description of one of the themes the book explores.

A somewhat less than responsible mother of non-Italian ancestry who married into a rather wealthy, upper-class Italian family in the early 1900s is looking for a governess for her fifteen-year-old daughter. (The family in question is a rather extended one, more or less presided over by a matriarch approaching her 100th birthday.)

Certain friends recommend to her the older daughter of an English peer who recently died, leaving his titled family almost destitute. This young woman has been brought up in typical Edwardian fashion, kept ignorant of much of the physical side of life, and constantly told to be prudent. As well educated and intelligent as she is, she is ill-prepared for the experiences which await her.

The author uses some obvious foreshadowing to indicate to the reader that a tragedy of some sort is to be expected, but she cleverly keeps the reader guessing as to how, what and when. The story is told through many different eyes, including that of the governess. And, by making her such a sympathetic character, to both the reader and a number of her characters, she ratchets up the tension to an unbelievable pitch.

There are many themes dealt with in this book, but the most interesting to me was the examination of physical versus spiritual love. Ms. Bridge put her finger on a paradox that has perplexed many of us throughout our lives and managed to tell us something very worthwhile about it.

Definitely 10 out of 10

MERLINS KEEP (1976)

And

THE CAPRICORN STONE (1978 by Madeleine Brent (Peter ODonnell)


ODonnells Edwardian romances just got better and better as he went along. The most fascinating thing about his work is that he was more feminist in his books than the women contemporaneously writing in this genre. In each of the books, he dreamt up something bizarre but empowering about his female lead characters. In STRANGER AT WILDINGS, the book that preceded these two, his heroine was a girl who ran away from home at age fourteen and trained to become a circus acrobat. In MERLINS KEEP, the lead character is a young half-Indian girl, rescued from her parents murderers and raised by an old soldier in Nepal to be a trail guide. And, in THE CAPRICORN STONE, the heroine and her sister are rich girls impoverished practically overnight. The older girl has certain physical peculiarities that make her a gifted prat-falling comedienne, and she joins up with a troop in Vaudeville as a clownish male impersonator to earn enough money for her sisters education.

Of course, in each book there is also a mystery connected to the heroines background that creates danger and suspense, and the heroines unique gifts and courage help her deal with the evil (and, I do mean evil) bad guys. The plotting is tight and the writing is smooth and professional.

Oddly enough, although the books just kept getting better and better, the more recent of these two disappointed a little in the ending a bit, only from the standpoint that the heroine, despite her courage and resource, needed just a little bit too much to be rescued by the hero. The earlier books gave me more of a sense of partnership at least.

8 and 9 of 10, respectively

PRAY FOR A BRAVE HEART (1955) by Helen MacInnes

MacInnes ninth novel seemed to be almost a return to the higher quality of her first five books, though I still have a couple of important reservations.

This is a straight intrigue book, as an American soldier, about to return to civilian life, agrees to assist an old friend in an intelligence matter in Switzerland. It has been rumored that a valuable collection of jewels that was stolen by the Nazis is about to be illegally sold in Switzerland by agents of Communist Russia, and the money received in return to be used to finance a major propaganda effort. It later appears that a large part of the propaganda will be in connection with the wealthy American buyer of the jewels, who has renounced his American citizenship.

The mission becomes greatly complicated when the old friend is murdered after a failed rendezvous with an informer, and when the hero is introduced to a woman who works on a committee successfully engaged in helping in safe emigration for Soviet dissidents.

The suspense elements in the book are handled well, and in a manner reminiscent of some of MacInnes better WWII novels.

My reservations are: 1) that certain plot elements seem needlessly complicated (trying to figure out the involvement in the transactions of a gang belonging to a notorious jewel thief is mind-boggling); and 2) the propaganda threat seems somewhat unbelievable and at the same time hearkens back to the McCarthyism sympathies of her previous three books.

I changed my rating system to a maximum of 12 points. Because of my reservations, I could only give this one a 6.