Murder in the Marais

Cara Black starts off her series with lead character Aimee Leduc in the book Murder in the Marais. What starts out as a simple and overpaid job of hunting down a encripted website, ends up becoming a case of murder. Aimee finds the body and sets in motion an investigation that goes all the way up to the top level of French politics.


The Marais is the traditionally Jewish section of Paris. And this is where the French Jews were rounded up during the occupation. Memories are long for injustices, and Aimee finds she is sifting through the history of the occupation in order to find out who would want an elderly Jewish woman murdered and who wants her to stop investigating.


This is a fast paced story but Black gives the reader enough time to get to know Aimee and her unusal background. Black hints at the fact that Aimee has secrets of her own that will be revealed in later books. Aimee is a tough character who has been trained by her recently deceased father in the art of detection. And it does not take the reader long to admire her tenacity and skill at going undercover to figure out the case. I'm looking forward to reading the next one in the series. A good mystery and a very good read.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

A chance encounter with a book by Charles Lamb, leads to a inquiring letter written to an author, who just happens to be looking for her next project, and her curiosity leads her to the island of Guernsey in the The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows have written a book that is full of characters that we want to get to know - right away- and the format that the authors use - personal letters between characters - gives us the opportunity to be eager (and inquisitive) for the next missive.

Their letters give us the chance to examine the relationship between the characters, as it grows from being formal strangers, and moves to becoming beloved friends. They contain a lot of the minutia of life, and give the reader a bit of the background of the main writer - Juliet and what her life has been like during the war. All of the characters are experiencing the recovery of Great Britain from the war, but those on Guernsey have a special reason to be grateful after the sorrowful years of occupation.

The Literary society came about because of a special pig dinner. Special because it was being hidden from the Nazis. And as the islanders bonded over dinner and being in trouble, the society grew to be more than just a group of people talking about books. And one person, Elizabeth, seems to be the catalyst that brings them all together. When Juliet learns about their stories, she wants more than ever to bring their tale to light in a book because she is falling in love with the island too.

Filled with war stories, book references, British slang, and good humor, the authors have a definitely created a great story to tell. If you don't like the style of the book - personal letters - you might have trouble with it. But I think it is splendid! A very good read.

A Death in Vienna

A bomb goes off in Vienna. Art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon, is sent in to see what happened to his friend who happens to hunt down items stolen from the Jews in World War II. What he finds is a complicated web of lies and deceptions that will take him around the world in Daniel Silva's A Death in Vienna.

Silva writes an exciting book that takes readers on a whirl of four continents. Gabriel is a killer, but as he becomes more entangled in the plot, he finds himself providing revenge for those who were killed in the gas chambers. And Silva makes him a complicated Renaissance man. We want to discover more about the contradictions in this artist, who has been trained to kill. We learn more about his personal background and his personal ties to this case.

Silva also touches on the aftermath of the war. Which lower level Nazis escaped? And how did they do it? Via the Americans, via Rome, via Argentina? Who helped the murders along the way - to rebuild their life and not suffer retribution for their sins? Silva has done his research well and provides the reader with enough details to want to learn more about the post war period. This period of history was not black and white - there is a whole lot of gray.

A fine read and a good thriller. I'm looking forward to reading more books in the series.

Summer of the Big Bachi

Summer of the Big Bachi by Naomi Hirahara is not your typical mystery. This book does not start out with a bang or a murder. It starts very slowly by showing us Mas Arai, who is a 69 year old gardener. As we learn more about him and his place within the Japanese-American Community in the L.A. area, we discover that there are secrets. Secrets from the war. Secrets that people want left behind. Secrets and money that people would kill for.

Strangers are coming around asking questions. Mas who is an ornery character, doesn't want anyone knowing his business or background. Why do they want to know about Mas' old friends? Who sent them? What does this have to do with a piece of land in Hiroshima? He does not want any more trouble headed his way. To get himself and his friends out of this mess, Mas needs to ask some questions of his own.

Hirahara takes her time with her character study of Mas and his social environment. But by doing this, she also manages to create a ominous feeling that something bad is really going to happen. She allows the reader to experience the growing pressure surrounding Mas. Is he going to tell what he knows - can he tell it? Will they let him? In creating this amoral character she leaves the reader in suspense of what he is going to do.

A great study of a character who is a survivor. Survivors are not always the "heroic people" Hollywood makes them out to be. They are as real as the next person. I am interested in seeing where Hirahara's sequels take him. A little different, but a good read.

Defiant Gardens

Defiant Gardens : Making Gardens in Wartime by Kenneth I. Helphand, is a good book to read in the spring when the desire to garden and dig about in the dirt is very strong after a long winter. He studies very specific periods of history where gardening not only helped with physical survival, but helped people mentally survive.

He looks into the gardens that were created and documented in wartime. He starts with the trenches during World War I, proceeds to the horrors of the Jewish ghettos in WWII, and informs us about the gardens of prisoner of war camps in Europe as well as the civilian war camps in Asia. He ends with a chapter about the Japanese-American camps in the U.S. And in a final chapter mentions more recent wars in Serbia, Africa and in Iraq.

He explains the conditions of the war, the situations that these people found themselves in or were forced into. He goes into the documentation of the gardens - photographs and writings to show how these gardens sustained the people around them. And in some cases, he can tell us whether these gardeners survived their war.

This ended up being one of my favorite passages:

"In an extreme situation beyond an individual's control, such as is common during war, the manifestation of the human ability to wield power over something is a potent reminder of our ability to withstand emotional despair and the forces of chaos. Gardens domesticate and humanize dehumanized situations. They offer a way to reject suffering, an inherent affirmation and sign of human perseverance. In contrast to war, gardens assert the dignity of life, human and nonhuman, and celebrate it."

A very powerful book about a little known area of history. For serious gardeners and students of history.

Reading While Sick - Getting Through the Books

Reading while your are home being sick, is a great way to get through your book pile - if your cold medication will let you stay up for a few hours.

Bachelor on the Prowl by Kasey Michaels

When the financial side of the fashion house has to run the big fashion show, Holly Hollis is in a panic cause she is missing male model for her finale. She grabs a guy back stage - who she assumes is the model - surprise ! Colin Rafferty is a bit surprised when he visits his cousin's fashion designer wife's show backstage and some female orders him to drop his pants and get into a tux. And the romance of errors starts there. A fun short contemporary romance.

Bookmarked to Die by Jo Dereske

Miss Helma Zukas is turning 42. She is not having a good time. Her boss, the library director, wants her to attend group counseling sessions. She has a younger perky co-worker who is flirting with her longtime admirer Police Chief Wayne (who has not noticed her birthday). Her cat, Boy Cat Zukas is missing. Her idea to start a local author's collection, has brought every writer (bad and good) in her district - and 2 of them end up murdered after the first start up meeting. After her free spirited best friend arrives in town, they hunt for her cat, mess up counseling sessions galore, and start looking for the murderers. Lost of fun and she portrays library land very well! A series.


Too Darn Hot by Sandra Scoppettone - Faye Quick and her usual band of helpers - her scrappy secretary, her buddy at the precinct, and the losers at the tobacco shop; solve another mystery in the midst of World War II era New York City. But this time she's trying to find a beauty's missing army beau. When she goes to his hotel room - all she finds is a body who may or may not be the missing guy. Lots of atmosphere and a great character to watch.

The Great Escape

The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World, by Kati Marton, is a study of how by the nature of their exclusionary policies, Hungary and Germany lost the chance to utilize the talents of nine Hungarian - Jews (most were secular), who were photographic artists, writers and scientists.

The text focuses on the following:
Robert Capa & Andre Kertesz - photographers
Arthur Koestler - writer of Darkness at Noon

These 4 scientists all worked on the nuclear bomb at Los Almos:
Edward Teller - physicist and theorist of the "star wars" defense theory
John von Neumann - mathematician and "grandfather" of the computer
Leo Szilard - physicist and founder of Federation of Atomic Scientists
Eugene Wigner- winner of the Nobel prize for physics

Alexandar Korda - Film Director, Producer of The Third Man
Michael Curtiz - Film Director - most known for Casablanca

Marton gives the reader an excellent background of Hungarian society when these nine were growing up. She has us follow their stories, as they must leave their homeland for other European cities and evenually leave Europe for the United States. It is amazing who these men knew and what they accomplished. And she manages to explain and clarify some of the scientific technology for the average reader.

This is a great book and a good glimpse into these men and their times. The author is Hungarian herself which adds a special knowledge to the story of their lives. A surprisingly quick, well written read.

The Manor House Mysteries - Part Two

This mystery series by Kate Kingsbury is great fun, and she is pretty good about knowing her stuff from the World War II homefront. Lady Elizabeth is still trying to save the village, and gets help from her staff and from a certain Major in the American Forces. See the prior review.

These are the ones I have completed so far:

For Whom the Bell Tolls - murder in the bellfry and illegal goods.
Dig Deep for Murder - body in the victory garden.
Paint by Murder - spies in the village
Berried Alive - someone is poisoning red- headed service men.

The sad part is that there are only two more left. The author really did not have a chance to tie things up before they cancelled her book contract. Bummer. It is always disappointing when characters you like end up with unresolved endings...

The Alibi Club

The time is May 1940. There is a rather sordid murder. The victim is an American who works at a rather prestigious law firm. His girlfriend, Sally King, does not believe the police are interested in finding the truth. All of Paris is distracted by the fact that the French and Belgian forces may not be able to hold off the German advance. She believes that her boyfriend was killed because of something in his law firm. She goes to the American Embassy to find help and enlists the services of one of the ambassador's right hand men. And when he starts to look in to the situation - he finds more than he bargins for. Thus begins the web of deception, lies, and truths that took place before the German occupation in The Alibi Club by Francine Mathews.

This mixture of espionage, science, fact and fiction makes a good read. Who else could manage to mix a Josephine Baker homage character with Frederic Joliot-Curie and the race to figure out how to split the atom? She gives us a good sense of the time and place - the rush of refugees trying to escape on the roads south of Paris, the burning of the embassy's papers, the knowledge of what law firms and banks did business with the Nazis and the choices made, of who would stay in Paris and who would go. And meanwhile, Sally is convinced that in this chaos, the killer will go free.

Mathews has a good thriller on her hands here. She manages to weave in a large cast of characters - a mix of real people and made up ones - with the oncoming sense of panic and doom that the Nazi advance brings. Each chapter brings the Germans closer to the city. And the tension in Paris arises. Worth a look.

The Manor House Mystery Series

It's World War II in England. The men are off fighting, the Yanks are over here, and rationing is everywhere. Kate Kingsbury's A Bicycle Built for Murder introduces us to her reluctant sleuth Lady Elizabeth. She's a divorcee whose parents were killed in the Blitz and she is now in charge of maintaining Manor House. One of her tenants' daughter is found murdered, and she is asked to look into it -since the the remaining constables are not too eager to have had to have come out of retirement due to wartime. The murder is being blamed on the Yanks, but Lady Elizabeth - mindful of the fact that the Manor is about to have American officers stationed there - tries to remind the locals that the Yanks are not all bad.

The second book is equally as fun. Death is in the Air has a murder of a land girl, but the village is more nervous by the fact that there is a downed German airman on the loose. They would have caught him when he parachuted down, but some folks were a bit distracted by getting the silk of his parachute.

Kingsbury does a great job of giving her readers the flavor of wartime England in the countryside where the London bombings seem so far away. Lady Elizabeth is a great character. She is unsure of herself, but tries to carry on the family tradition anyway in this rapidly changing world. And everyone tries to adjust to wartime deprivations. A great series.

The London Blitz Murders

It is 1942 - the Blitz is raging. London is under duress - what else can go wrong? Max Allan Collins' book The London Blitz Murders gives us a fictional scoop of a real murder. The Blackout Ripper was real and Collins takes some of the real players and gives us a great historical mystery.

His lead detective is good ol' Mrs Mallowan who works in a pharmacy for the duration. Don't know her? Try her other name - Agatha Christie. Collins manages to work in Christie's war time work - both writing and otherwise, with the true crime tale.

This book gives the reader a slice of what it was like in the time period - with the characterizations of the real people involved with the case. And leaves us with a little insight into Agatha and her writings as well. Great read.