mystery

Book Review: ‘The Ice Child’

May 21, 2016 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The Ice Child by Camilla Läckberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. This is a gripping Nordic noir in Camilla Lackberg’s series that, in part, charts the arc of married couple Erica Falck and Patrik Hedstrom — she’s a true-crime writer, he’s a detective — on another grisly adventure. This one begins with a traumatized young girl wandering blindly in the snow observed by a horsewoman: we won’t truly understand the significance of this scene or the depths of its evil until the very last page.

Sweden’s Lackberg works on a big canvas — there are many, many interconnected characters in these books. That can be a curse or a blessing — like a Russian novel you have to keep track of who’s who. The best way I find to do that is to take my smartphone and charge it on the opposite side of the house and just let myself go.

Lackberg’s plotting is on a plane with, is it too much to say, Agatha Christie? At the very least her plots have that level of complication and awareness that even old apparently harmless ladies have a knowledge of the world that should never be underestimated. Besides its insane page-turner quality that kept me up on succeeding nights well after a reasonable bedtime, there are so many fascinating domestic themes. Erica and Patrik and their extended families are constantly trying to achieve a work-life balance with the help-hindrances of parents and in-laws. As a married couple, they are also trying to keep a balance of passion, compassion and mutual respect in a world awash in evil (and, yes, that is no exaggeration).

One theme that fascinates me in this particular novel is reflections over and over again on the subject of mothering: what makes a good mother, what limits maternal feeling, the extent a mother will go to protect a dangerous and even deranged child. In one very quiet scene toward the book’s climax, a daughter finally asks her mother the question that the teen must have asked herself a thousand times a day: mama, why don’t you love me? It is a raw question and cuts deeply. Sitting there, in my nightgown, racing toward the end and the many final revelations that keep spinning the story in surprising directions, I paused and wondered what is that question I have for my mother — and would I ever be brave enough to ask it.

And all this while corpses pile up and cold cases thaw. Lackberg is top-shelf Nordic Noir, and if you’ve done the Steig Larsson, Jo Nesbo, Anne Holt, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir circuit, Camilla Läckberg is a must-read.

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Review: Donna Leon’s ‘Falling in Love’

June 12, 2015 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Falling in Love: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery by Donna Leon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

To read Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti Mysteries is to fall in love with Venice, a city to which we will never have access because we are only tourists distracted by the gondolas and the rich polenta and the beautiful men. Brunetti is a native married to an aristocrat. He is a thinking man’s detective who rarely carries a gun and uses his brains to solve cases. But the reader suspects it is his wife Paola, a Henry James scholar, who has the bigger IQ. This mystery is heady — about a bisexual opera singer and her violent stalker — and a little anticlimactic as mysteries go. By the time we know who the aggressor is, the story’s interest begins to wane. The on-stage climax after a penultimate performance of “Tosca” is, well, anticlimactic. But to walk the bridges in Brunetti’s shoes, to stop in the cafes and restaurants, and get inside his head as he contemplates his wife and children is as delicious as risotto. He is a man who loves women, written by a woman of empathy and intelligence (the exquisite Donna Leon). One of the things I love the most about her books is the sense of Venetian justice — or lack thereof. While this particular novel ends with a sense of completion, Leon is unafraid to portray a society where justice can be bought, and where the do-right man has to be an expert in bureaucratic subterfuge in order to achieve a sense of balance between right and wrong.

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TV Review: ‘Murder in the First’

June 13, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Detectives Kathleen Robertson and Taye Diggs discuss a blank sheet of paper (photo credit TNT)

TNT should change their old motto: with the new original ten-episode mystery series “Murder in the First,” the don’t knew drama, they knew it. Very past tense. It’s the latest police procedural from Steven Bochko (“NYPD Blue”) teamed with Yale-educated Eric Lodal — and it’s so meta that it actually seems like a TV Show that exists in a tangential slice within another movie, like the Kristen Bell’s TV vehicle in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.”

“Murder in the First,” first, is a police procedural with an initial moderately grisly murder in San Francisco (cue establishing shot of Golden Gate Bridge) that sets off an investigation by an unlikely Starsky & Hutch that will last out the entire season through investigation, arrest and trial. The unlikely partners that will ultimately grow closer than most married couples are Terry English (Taye Diggs of “Private Practice” and “Chicago”) and Hildy Mulligan (Kathleen Robertson, best known for “Beverly Hills, 90210”).

Who names someone Hildy Mulligan these days? It’s such a screenwriter’s grab. It sounds like a stenographer in “The Front Page.”

But the show has worse problems, despite having a Silicone Valley villain played by Draco Malfoy aka Tom Felton, an obvious devil with blue eyes (or blue contacts). So obvious, we have to guess he didn’t do it — although I’m not sticking around to find out.

They lost me at the set-up: Terry’s wife is dying of cancer — and he just cannot handle it. OK: we get it. This will be the spiritual bruise he shoulders throughout the series. Hey, there, lonely man, lonely man. So, her character is dying of cancer to define him — therefore she is an absolute saint.

The show starts with Terry at his wife’s bedside, then talking to her white bespectacled doctor who couldn’t be clearer that she’s stage four plus pancreatic. This is it, man, think of her not you and go hospice. But Terry, as he agonizes at his desk (having a hissy fit when he cannot open a drawer), in his car behind rain-splashed windows and by her bed, just won’t let her go gently into the night. Which makes him seem like a big git because this poor pale woman in a hospital bed has to comfort him and stroke his bald head and tell him the story of how she first fell in love with him on a roller coaster when he showed his fear. And she’s the one that’s effing dying!

I’m so enamored of the harder-boiled, more grounded Danish “The Bridge” and the French “Spiral,” shows where the initial murder leads to season-long investigation and police team bonding/fraying. In contrast, “Murder in the First” strikes me like the “Guiding Light” version of a police procedural. Every emotion is so telegraphed, every bit of dialog so overdrawn, so many scenes are used to make each point that it’s almost like watching American TV with English subtitles. When [spoiler alert] Terry’s wife finally passes, he gets the news at a crime scene which is meant to be edgy because there is a nude blonde posed face down on a flight of stairs, her insouciant bottom in plain sight. So, the news: he takes it with a classic stagger, hand feeling for a piece of furniture to steady himself, bowed head, one juicy tear.

We get it — and don’t even get me started on Hildy’s character and how the divorced single mum jumps out of bed, awoken by a call from her deadbeat ex, and goes through her rushed morning routine in a perky music-driven montage. She shakes her expensively tousled, streaked blond hair, grabs her cutie patootie school-aged daughter, shoves a gun in her own waistband, stops for a cheery-bye at the school bus, and then arrives at the station with two hours worth of professional make-up covering any flaw she might possibly have.

Truth is: the make-up is the flaw. By definition, the flaws make this kind of show interesting. Because isn’t the capacity to commit murder the ultimate flaw in human nature? The society’s will to rectify it our redemption?

How ‘Inspector Morse’ Lives Again, and now Again, in ‘Endeavour’ Series 2

June 5, 2014 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Shaun Evans as DC Endeavour Morse

Dogged is one of the ways that the hero of Inspector Morse could always be described. Like a terrier. Of course, that applies toHercule Poirot, too, and so many other ‘always get their man’ fictional detectives and lawmen.

Morse is a stipped-down Oxford detective — no waxed mustache, no spats, no allergy to bad hotels. No, “I’m Belgian [implied you fool], not French.” Although Morse does drive a Jaguar, listen to opera, and has a classical education but no Oxford degree.

Still, Morse, past and near-present, is normal normal but for for an unscratchable itch to peel back to the nub of truth at the bottom of a mystery.

There was an outcry, of course, when the original series starring John Thaw, and based on the Colin Dexter novels, passed on (and passed the baton to his deputy, Kevin Whately as Inspector Lewis). Mystery watchers become very attached to their detectives (and the actors that play them). In the German series set in Venice, Donna Leon: the Commissario Brunnetti Mysteries, when the lead actor switched between series it took a big hiccup to accept his replacement. (I hiccuped – then continued: it’s Venice!)

I was moderately attached to Morse — not quite Midsomer Murders territory – but, over twelve seasons from 1987 to 2000, you could always count on a puzzle box of a mystery as this Jaguar-driving, middle-classed, middle-aged sleuth poked and prodded into the often perverse secrets behind Oxford dons and the larger society that surrounded them.

For Morse fans, the title of this prequel resonates: it took a long time before Morse revealed his unusual first name. It was Endeavour, spelled the English way, which is why the title of the new series, already available in full on video from PBS, maintains that spelling. Evans, who resembles an earnest young Dennis Leary, is not yet as set in his ways as his future self (a bit of Dr. Who time travel there). But, like so many memorable detectives, he grows on you because of his actions. He just cannot let well enough alone, and continually walks into danger like a theoretical mathematician that walks out into the rain without an umbrella.

Morse does not come from the morally-compromised police of Spiral, but the upright gentleman detective of the Agatha Christie tradition. Even as Britain cuts loose in 1966, Morse stays buttoned up and on the job. In Episode One of Series 2, “Trove,” airing on PBS on June 29th as part of Masterpiece Mystery fate deals Endeavor three apparently unrelated crimes — a missing person, a museum break-in of priceless artifacts and a dodgy suicide.

No one else on the force, including Morse’s boss, DI Fred Thursday (Roger Allam, who plays a pol in Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It), is buying the suicide as murder, or that the three disparate crimes are somehow related. And, since Morse has recently come back from the ending of Series 1, shell-shocked and gun-shy, the skepticism appears justified.

Enter the terrier: over the course of the first episode, Morse doggedly tracks down every clue, refuses to take time out for a personal life (although there is a lovely nurse down the hall from his low-rent flat) and…..well, you’ll have to watch it to see how it unfolds. Just, trust me, I’m hooked.

Why David Tennant Slays ‘The Escape Artist’

June 2, 2014 By Thelma 3 Comments

No open-and-shut case for David Tennant in 'The Escape Artist'

No open-and-shut case for David Tenant in ‘The Escape Artist’

Not all Masterpiece Mystery! series are created equal even though I would watch them just to see Alan Cumming and his overripe Scottish brogue. On June 15th a three-parter arrives from the BBC with David Tennant (duh, Dr. Who) as Will Burton, a youngish London junior barrister who’s never lost a case. He’s not cocky exactly but he has the nickname of ‘The Escape Artist’ because he is an expert at getting criminals off, even if that means ferreting out a technicality that frees a monster. This really aggravates his ambitious courtroom rival, Maggie Gardner (Sophie Okonedo of Hotel Rwanda). And the passion with which Burton takes on cases (shades of Tennant’s OCD detective in Broadchurch) distracts from his attendance at his son’s soccer games, which his loving wife Kate (Ashley Jensen) tolerates reasonably well by taking long soaking baths.

But when Kate sees her husband’s latest defendant, the acquitted killer Liam Foyle (Toby Kebbell, soon to star in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), at her bathroom window the separation between court and home contracts replaced by fear and dread. You know where this is going — but not where it will land. Watch the first episode and you will cry out over the cliffhanger for it to continue right then, that very minute. (That’s why I love purchasing the DVD, now available via PBS, because instant gratification cannot come soon enough.)