Cutting Edge

It was a happy day a few years ago that I began to read John Harvey. This is the favorite of my series.

Cutting Edge


John Harvey


After a long shift at the hospital Doctor Tim Fletcher is exhausted but is looking forward to spending time with his girl friend  Karen. He knows that he is late so he stops to make a call to her at a telephone near the exit door of the hospital. There is no answer but Fletcher quickly makes his way to the house that Karen shares. He puts on the earphones from his Walkman and strides across a pedestrian bridge singing along with the  opera music he is listening to not hearing the foot steps behind him that will change his life forever. He is struck from behind and mutilated by the very instrument of his own trade.




 Another music lover Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick who favors jazz and has named his four cats after jazz greats, Miles, Dizzy, Bud and Pepper is also finishing up a long day and rescuing rescuing people at a center from an axe wielding drunk who used to be a well known jazz player. He will be called in in on the Fletcher case which will be only the first in a series of brutal assaults on hospital  personnel which involve people from all levels of the staff. 

It's autumn in the midlands and Resnick's staff is busy with other assorted investigations as well as their personal troubles, but Resnick keeps his troops well in hand. This is the third book in this series and the reader is getting very familiar with the characters and it like dropping in for a welcome visit. Graham Millington and Diptak Patel were working on a robbery ring, Mark Divine had a personality that is a major stumbling block, Lynn Kellogg is a very promising young officer with a lot to offer, Kevin Naylor's wife is sufering from  post natal depression, and is making every one's life a misery because Kevin transmits his blues like the flu.

Resnick has personal problems of his own. He was once married but his wife left him for a prosperous real estate agent. He has made a life for himself staving off loneliness with his music and some rare nights out at the local polish club, and warding off hunger with the erection of of the most marvelous sandwiches which  rival those of Dagwood. But he had been receiving some mail from his wife that he has been destroying without reading it because he fears it's destructive powers and now she has taken to calling him and he has managed to miss these calls as well. he is not certain that he is doing the right thing by avoiding his past. From every thing that Resnick can ascertain the seeds of the motive behind the viscious attacks on the medical staff must arise from something that happened in the past as well. The connections between the victims are very obscure.

John Harvey is masterful in creating that atmosphere and sense of place that is so realistic yet humane that you can read one book after another and really get to appreciate all the characters with all their foibles, weak and strong that makes them individuals that you would find anywhere. The Bloody Brits Editions are of s high quality that the act of holding the book is part of the pleasure of reading this book. This is my second reading of this series, not my last I am sure.

The Rainaldi Quartet III

The Rainaldi Quartet

Paul Adam

It was on a lovely June night that four friends  met for their customary musical evening in Cremona, Italy. They had been gathering like his for about fifteen years for regular monthly sessions at the home of Gianni Castiglione a luthier, a violin maker who also repaired them, who lived out in the country. The first violin of the quartet was Tomaso Rainaldi who was also a luthier but not in Gianni's class, he had at one time had been a professional violinist at La Scala.    Father Arrighi was a priest who played the viola. The fourth member of the group was quite a bit younger than the rest; he was the cellist of the quartet and a policeman Antonio Guastafeste. The get togethers would start with a lively discussion about what they were going to play. Brahms, too melancholy, besides he had a reputation for harpooning stray cats, not in the mood for Haydn, OK for Beethoven and so it was.

Amati

 Later that evening Rainaldi's wife called Gianni and was worried that Tomaso had not come home. Castiglione and Guastafeste finally track him to his office and find him dead, murdered.

The Messiah

As Guastefeste begins to re track his late friend's steps he finds that Tomaso had been travelling recently. He had been to Milan, to Paris and even to London. It seemed that he had been on music related business so Guastafeste called in his friend Gianni as a consultant to help him with the case. From what Gianni can determine, Tomaso had been on the quest of a very rare violin. He had been researching the possibility of a sister violin to the very valuable violin made by Stradivarius now kept in a museum in Oxford, England known as the Messiah. It had this name because it was the kind that you might wait for it forever and it might never come. It is the most famous and the most valuable on earth. The French call it Le Messie. No man alive has ever heard it played.

There are a few great violin makers that have become historic. Their violins are all well documents and accounted for and they become more valuable with the passage of time. The best known of these are Stradivarius, Amati and Guarneri. These were all families in the trade of violin making in the area of Cremona, Italy. Part of their secret was that they worked at it for all of their lives. You can almost hear music in the words even as the names of the violins trip off your tongue, Amati Guarneri Stradivari Guadagnini Grancino Gagliano Maggini.

This duo of Castiglione and Guastafeste backtracked through some of the people Rainaldi dealt with only to find that the trust was hard to come by. Many of these people were dealers in antiques and Guastafeste felt that you could never trust some one that wanted to sell you something; greed always was a factor that hooked some one.

For Gianni the hunt for a violin was special because violins were special where your body is in direct contact with the instrument, where you can feel the vibration in your head as you play.

'The human body has a natural frequency. That’s why harmonic music pleases and discordant music jars. We like sounds that vibrate at a frequency sympathetic to our internal structure- hence Mozart will always be more popular than Schoenberg- and the violin, of all instruments, produces that sound most effectively. It is in perfect tune with the human soul.'

Before this story is over the edges between reality and history will be blurry and you won't care. You will be a believer. The Messiah's sister is out there and it will be found. Hook up your iPod and get your self a playlist of great violin works and listen while you read.

My playlist for this book

I. Quartet of Oboe, Violin,  Violoncello in F major          Mozart Oboe Quartet

2. Dance of the Comediens       Smetana

3. All of My Days     Alexi Murdoch

4. Esisti Dentro Me     Il Divo

5. String Quartet, No.3 in B Flat, Op 67 Andante       Johannes Brahms

6. Fire and Rain      James Taylor

7. Mal de Luna      Hayley Westenra

8. So Soft Your Goodbye      Mark Knopfler/Chet Atkins

9. String Quartet  Op.  59 Razomonovsky     Kodaly Quartets

10.  L’alba del Mondo      Il Divo

11.  Lifelong Passion     The Firemen

12. In Trutina      Hayley Westenra 

Whack A Mole

 Chris Grabenstein

As the warm weather approaches different waves of people make their way to the seaside’s resorts. Asides from the regular tourists there are the June Bugs, which come early in the year. These are the graduating High School Seniors who come for a week or so to let off steam. Then there are the small groups of conventioneers because large groups cannot be accommodated. Class reunions meet up and many other groups like the beach as a get together. The boardwalks are also a place for shelter for the young who are on the run from home and family and think they will blend in on the beach and will be safe at a family resort. Jobs are plentiful and they should be okay.  But will they be?

Sea Haven, New Jersey is just that sort of family resort on a barrier Island off the coast of New Jersey. One day Police Officers John Ceepak and Danny Boyle had just returned from a short trip to a neighboring town where they returned a high school ring to a man who had given it to his high school sweetheart Lisa. She had gone to Sea Haven the summer of '83 and had never come back. She fell into that category of people that nobody really cared enough about to follow up on. Ceepak belonged to one of those clubs that used metal detectors to finds objects left on the beach and had unearthed the ring and had wanted to return it. 

This is the first summer that Danny is a full time police officer. He has been to the police academy but when he is uncertain in some situations he wishes he had a hat with the initials W.W.C.D.  What Would Ceepak Do?  This seems to be a good guide most of the time.

Ceepak lives by a code. He does not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. If he ever chops down a cherry tree, he'll hand you the axe and arrest himself.

The partners were now on beach patrol securing the area of un upcoming sandcastle building contest which was a new project for Sea Haven and was expected to be a big money draw for the community, when they were called to a local seafaring museum because jars of body parts had been found. Oddly these body parts seemed to have been removed by a scalpel in an expert fashion. More oddly still they are hand dated to the early eighties.  The anatomical specimens continue to pop up in the next few days in different spots like the critters in the game Whack a Mole.

As Ceepak and Danny follow this trail you hardly catch your breath before something else is happening and the plot develops at a rapid pace. The clues were laid out like a treasure hunt because the perpetrator believed himself to be very clever. One of the difficulties in this case was that the list of suspects was too long. There were many people that were repeat visitors to the resort area. The classic question was why were the parts surfacing now? More than twenty-five years had passed in some cases. The sad thing is why these bodies have not been searches for prior to this

 It is because they fall in the category of what Ceepak refers to as the less dead. One who nobody back home seems to care about because he or she is one of civilized society's so-called loser's or trouble makers. Someone who doesn't toe the line or seems to be cast away with out a line.

This case gets very close to home for Ceepak. Danny also has to dig a little deep and find out what he is made of. They help each other out as partners do. Of course they both need the help of the Jersey shores poet laureate Bruce Springsteen's immortal words on more than one occasion.

  I wanna find one face that ain't looking through me,

  I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these badlands.

This is a perfect story of the darkness hidden beneath the happy smile. There are no paradises out there. But most of the people at beach have a good time and the Ceepaks and the Dannys are at work keeping the rest of the people at funland enjoying the rides. So instead of Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town we listen to The Promised Land.

All the same it is a wonderful ride if you hop on. There is nothing better than a trip down the shore. You can smell the salt air, you can almost taste all the food that could only be named at a seaside resort. If you have no time off coming grab a Chris Grabenstein vacation.

                    SHE FELT NO PAIN
                                                 LOU    ALLIN

RCMP Corporal Holly Martin is enjoying the summer in the area known as Canada's Caribbean.

This is the vacation mecca of Vancouver Island where the year round clement weather has people moving there by the score. Martin has been stationed at Fossil Bay not very far from where she grew up.Fossil bay gets its's name from, well you guessed it, fossils! She is in charge of the local three  person police force , the law enforcers for the expanding population. Her cohorts are Corporal Ann Troy who would have been the head of the unit except for physical problems and Constable Chirakumar Knox Singh a Sikh, who in Canada is allowed to wear a handsome light-blue turban designed for the force as a part of multi-culturalism. 


Aside from the hikers, campers, and the enlarging group of homeless drifters  there are visitors doing all kinds on neo  touristy things such as geocaching.  This is a game with an Internet site for which a GPS is needed. After visiting on online site users search for treasures using co-ordinates. The treasures are usually small things that kids like such as pins, balloons, toys and so forth. When the caches are found something is taken and something is left in it's place and logs are kept. It was one family pursuing such a cache that stumbled across a body. 


                                                                                                                                                                         At first it seemed to be a simple  death by overdose of a homeless person because all the paraphernalia required for that activity were at the scene, but there were several other puzzling facts, an unusual amount of money found at the scene, an ancient scrap of paper, a familiar photograph and more questions that needed answers. 








As this murder is investigated Corporal Martin's  concerns about the other drifters in the area were mostly about the fears of fire at this time.Things are so dry that the area is like a tinder box and this adds to the tension. This is the second book in the RCMP Holly Martin series following AND ON THE SURFACE DIE  in which Allin portrays Martin as naive and inexperienced . Clues have to circle her sometimes more than twice before they penetrate. She takes days to question the last people to see a murder victim and examine the victim's room for instance. 


In SHE FELT NO PAIN Martin is much more grounded although she still makes some pretty big errors in judgement, but she has not had very much experience as yet, in view of some of the scrapes she gets into she may not live long enough to get any.


Still the area that Allin writes about is unique enough to make the reader want to pack up and go there, but Canada's Caribbean, my eye! It is great in the winter but it does NOT get very warm there in June, July or August! The homeless leave for the summer apparently to seek nicer places to stay.

Over all while the mystery and the back story are interesting the location wins the prize.

Devil in a Blue Dress

Walter Mosley



 Easy Rawlins has one thing he loves more than anything else in his life and that is his house and home, his own patch of property that is his to call his own. It may not be large but he loves everything about it from the dahlias at the front gate to the shingles on the roof'.  But he was fired from his work at the factory because for once he just couldn't tolerate the lack of respect and the different standard that was set for men of color. His main problem is that it is nearing the end of June and come July 1st his mortgage payment is due. 

As he muses about his problems over a beer at his friend Joppy's bar he considers how he would not be where he was if not for his interactions with men  and women he called his friends but he  thinks 'So many people have walked into my life for just a few minutes, and kicked up some dust and they are gone away. My father was like that; my mother wasn't much better.


This night at Joppy's he is offered a job by a man in a white suit, white actually from head to foot. The job is to find a girl for this Mr. Albright.  Her name is Daphne Monet and a rich man is looking for her, she has left him for reasons of her own. Easy is hesitant because he senses danger but Joppy who acts frightened of Albright encourages him to find the girl. With the promise that no harm will come to Daphne Easy begins the search. He first goes to John's a run down music dive that gets  the big name artists because John gave them a leg up when they needed it. It was always jumping.


 As Mosley describes it 'California was like heaven for the Southern Negro. People told stories about how you could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn't like the dream. Life was still hard in LA and if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom. But being on the bottom wasn't so so bad if you could come to John's now and then and remember what it felt back home in Texas, dreaming about California.'


Before the night is over, the first of Easy's friends is dead, lovely Coretta who had no harm in her but she had a loose tongue and she might have told something she knew. Easy, although he had been in the war and has killed people is still innocent enough to be horrified and traumatized by the deaths, particularly the murders of people he knows. He still somehow expects to see them one more time again, as the song goes. Easy tries to get out of the job but there is no going back. Unlike his namesake the biblical prophet Ezekiel he cannot perform miracles or tell the future.

Amid double crosses and betrayals, the worst of which come from friends Easy
is in trouble. Suspected of murder by the police who never ask questions without softening a black suspect up with beatings and threats Easy finds himself in a different world. The reader finds herself in a different world as well, a world of racism unimagined by anyone not there in those days. The liberties I have always taken for granted I must appreciate. Easy is almost killed by a group of college thugs who most likely in other circumstances would have been considered gentlemen, just because a white girl spoke to him and he answered.


 The story is not about that kind of thing, it is about how Easy Rawlins becomes a detective, begins to listen to his inner voice that kept him alive in the war, and determines to have a life in which he can control how he is perceived.

Death Before Bedtime


by Edgar Box

Georgetown

Gore Vidal writing as Edgar Box did a short series of mysteries in the early 1950's featuring dashing P. R. man Peter Sargeant.   In Death Before Bedtime Peter has just been hired by Senator Leander Rhodes. In early December  Peter has been invited to the Senator's Washington home to meet with him. There was to  be several other guests there at the same times as his visit because the senator is a busy man. Peter suspects that the Senator is planning to announce a run for the presidency.


On the way down Peter shares a sleeper car with Ellen the Senator's daughter to whom Peter was engaged for about one month several years ago. She is a spirited girl in many ways. They arrive in Washington in the morning and Peter meets with the Senator's secretary, Rufus Hollister.

Senate Building

Before the night is over the Senator is dead, killed by a bomb laid cleverly in his fire place so that he would inadvertently set it off himself. The person who set the bomb had to be someone who knew the habits of the Senator well, and to be someone who had had access to the senators fire that day.


Peter finds himself out of a job, but with a scoop on his hands. 


'I was disagreeably struck, as I often am, with my elected role in life; official liar to our society. My lifework is making people who are one thing seem like something very different... manufacturers are jailed for adulterating products but press agents make a fortune doing the same thing to public characters.'


The best part of this story is some of the anachronisms. Peter and Ellen are concerned for a porter in the train to see them together in the sleeper car. My question of course is whether this was a stage coach sleeper since it took all night to get from New York to DC and I am confident it was just a few hours trip even in the fifties. It would been unlikely these days for a presidential hopeful to hire  small one man PR firm run by a 29 year old to get his name out, and he would definitely give himself more than the  seven or eight months that Rhodes had  on his agenda.  Boy, we could easily  approve of a much shorter TV blah blah time during election year.


Also quite nice is the sharp little rapier that Box(Gore) uses to skewer those political figures.  Gore himself grew up in the world of politics. His mother married Hugh Auchincloss, a wealthy man , and the lived in Potomac, Maryland for a while.Auchincloss latter Married Jackie Kennedy's mother He was the grandson of Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma.

 June is one of the seminal months of the year. Couples use it to start new lives together, seeds put out shoots and hope for rain, children tie up all the fragments of the of new ideas and facts that have been introduced to them for the past many months and head for the fresh air and freedom, at least where I live there is still summer vacation.  For many, summer has deeper spiritual meaning of renewal that in some cases always has a darker side because of the perversity of human nature.

 

ZIA SUMMER

Rudolfo Anaya

Sonny Baca awakens one morning from a very disturbing dream. The smell of strong coffee that his neighbor Don Eliseo brews every morning under an ancient cottonwood tree in the Old Town section of Albuquerque, New Mexico comes through his window. Before he gets an explanation of his dream from the wise old man he gets a call from his Aunt Delfina telling him that his cousin Gloria is dead and she wants him to take her to Gloria's house.

Zia Sun

Gloria has been murdered in a ritualistic manner. The sign on of the Zia sun has been carved into her body and her blood has been drained and taken away.  The Zia sign the powerful positive image of the sun, symbol of the state flag, giver of life, whose path in the sky was observed was daily observed was now perverted by those who scratched the Zia ring on Gloria Dominic's stomach, now a symbol of murderers.

Delfina has no faith in the police and she wants Sonny to solve this murder. The police want to pin the case on the gardener for a quick fix because Gloria's husband Frank Dominic is running for Governor. Sonny is a PI. After he left University, he taught High School for a few years but he found that teaching was not for him. He was quickly involved in a very high profile case that gave him a lot more fame than he deserved and life had been good. He was also the great grandson of a famous lawman of the territory and he did want to live up to his ideals. He knew that this case was going to be difficult; there were no clues just feelings.

Don Eliseo spoke about these feelings. 'In the old days we called them brujas, men and women who did black magic, fornicated with goats, prayed the Black Mass. Ah, that's what the people said. They are really people who have destruction in their hearts. Things don't change. Now maybe they drive or work in fancy cars, wear nice cloths. They work all over the city. The surface changes, underneath the evil intent remains'.

Cavern

What some people considered evil intent was the intent of the government to bury nuclear waste material in the deep caves and caverns of New Mexico and their aim was to stop this.

WIPP Trucks

What other people considered was the true evil intent so that the government would have to reconsider was that a cult dedicated to stopping the desecration of the South West planned to blow up trucks carrying nuclear waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant and to cause a terrific nuclear incident that would never be forgotten. 

Sonny Baca had a perilous path to tread, one that could only be survived with the help of loved ones.

Cottonwood tree

Rudolfo Anaya tells a very modern story that is full of characters that have deep connections to the past, to the place that they live, to history and to the spiritual world. Ancestors are important in this life and are more than our genetics. His respect for the family is strong and translates to a naturalistic approach. He uses the symbol of the cottonwood that although ancient and dying can if treated tenderly still put out one last green shoot at summer solstice and encourage all by living on and becoming just as much a story as a murder.

Rio Grande