No Happy Ending by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
My rating: 4 of 5 stars




Héctor Belascoarán Shayne tells us that he decided to become a detective because he didn’t like the color his wife picked for the new carpet. He had been an engineer. He got his license by mail. He had never read a British mystery novel. He didn’t know a fingerprint from a finger sandwich. He could only shoot something if it didn’t move very much.

Héctor is a usually a taciturn, enigmatic man who is an unrepentant teetotaler with a penchant for Pepsi's. He shares an office with three characters, a plumber, an upholsterer and a sewer engineer.

One day a murdered man dressed as a Roman soldier is found at his office and then he gets a mysterious message to ignore was he saw and along with the message there was a plane ticket to New York City. All Héctor really knew at this point was that he loved his home, Mexico City with a passion and if he waited the killer would show his face.

In this case the detective is correct and it appears that there is more than one killer and that they are from the police. Since this is Mexico, the question is whether they were from the secret police, the auxiliary police, the judicial police, the special, the bank, the preventative, the traffic, the federal?

Héctor uncovers links from these men to a very unsavory incident in Mexico City’s recent past. What it has to do with him appears to be serendipity but he is caught in a web he cannot escape. His life is on the line and he is very like a gunslinger of the old West shooting first and asking questions later.

This is a very intriguing character and the people in his life are also worth knowing. The prose is somewhat Hemingwayesque and I look forward to reading more of this writer.

This story refers back to a real life incident that took place June 10, 1971 in which student demonstrators were massacred in  a square by a paramilitary unit that was secretly  trained  and funded by the government. Initially nine student died but the final death count was closer to thirty. Taibo postulates that this unit was possibly disbanded and re assimilated into the Mexico City Subway Police. The deadly June day was just one year later than the May Massacre of the four Ohio State Students by the Ohio National National Guard which resounded all across the US. It was also on a beautiful June day in 1989 that hundreds of students again were the targets of the military in China on Beijing's Tienanmen Square. There  were no happy endings on any of these occasions.

Murder Casts a Shadow: A Hawaiæi Mystery by Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars


It is 1935 in Hawai’i and even though the depression has hit these tropical islands as well the sugar industry has cushioned the effects  of unemployment somewhat.  Honolulu may have not have all the sophistication of a mainland city especially when it comes to the arts but it tries to make up for it with an excellent community theater. London playwright Ned Manusia has come to put his latest play on here and he feels quite at home here because he is of Polynesian extraction himself. He was born in Samoa.

Ned has a second reason for finding himself in Honolulu; he has escorted three important portraits of the Hawaiian Royal Family from the British Museum back to their home. He has done secret commissions for the British Government before. While in Hawai’i he is staying with his old friend Troy Forrest who is the Chief of Detectives for the Honolulu Police and his wife Nyla, who is an interesting blend of Hawaiian, Irish and English.

Shortly after the portraits are delivered the main one of the King Kalåkaua is stolen and a main functionary of the museum   Abe Halpern is murdered. Nyla’s sister Mina Beckwith is a reporter for the local paper who fights against the restrictions that are constantly keeping her from getting good stories. As a woman it seems it is felt she can only do justice to art and social events, but she is onsite for this case and knows she can run with it. She pairs up with Ned to dig into the background of the murder victim.

Abel Halpern was a grandson of one of the original outsider movers and shakers on the island.  There are many rumors about his dirty dealings within the museum, his family, and the city of Honolulu it self as well so his murder comes as no surprise to many. What must be determined was whether this killing was related to the theft of the portrait or incidental to it.

The Hawaiian Islands are the crossroads of the Pacific and people from all over had settled here over the centuries; Japanese, mainland Americans, Chinese, Polynesians and Europeans from many countries.  Kings have ruled Hawai’i  for a few hundred years. The last, King Kalakaua traveled to San Francisco. It while he was there that the portraits were painted then he mysteriously sickened and died.  One of his associates left a mysterious message of the back of the portrait.  Ned and Mina  feel sure the past and the present are coming together and they are risking their lives to prove it..


This book is the first in a series and it was very appealing . The characters and the story made the reader want to know much more about the history of the Hawaiian Islands and the people that are fortunate enough to live there.

The Flower Drum Song

The Flower Drum Song by C.Y. Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I saw The movie made from this book also called The Flower Drum Song when I was young I enjoyed it very much. The book as is usually the case bears somewhat of a resemblance but has it's very own charms.The story is told through the eyes of Old Master Wang who is an immigrant from China now living in Chinatown, San Francisco.  He and his wife left in  the forties or fifties when China was becoming communistic.

Old Master Wang has two sons, one in his twenties Wang Ta and one just fourteen Wand San. His wife has died some years past and he despairs of raising two sons with the Chinese characteristics of filial piety and following the teachings of Confucius. His sons of spouse have become Americanized and want to do things a different ways.

The story is told in a light humorous fashion that show the collision of cultural values that brings out the best in both worlds.

Dying In the Wool by Frances Brody
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Kate Shackleton  is a woman in her thirties who persists  in believing that her husband Gerald is still alive but MIA from WWI. Everybody else considers her a widow. She has spent quite a bit of time searching for him in vain but she did acquire the skills necessary to find people. Many others have been rewarded when she found relatives of theirs also MIA.

Kate takes on a case of a missing father for a friend who was also in the VAD, (Volunteer Aid). In other words yet another plucky ambulance driver alá Maisie Dobbs, Jade DeCameron and Phryne Fisher from the pages of other mystery writers who have plucky heroine ex-ambulance drivers as protagonists.

In this case the missing man was not in the armed services, rather he took a tumble, hit his head  and everyone stupidly decided he was suicidal so he ran away. The story is more interesting than it sounds but it takes until the last sixth of the book to spark your interest. There are a few gimmeabreak moments in the exposition of this mystery and you can't quite feel any sympathy for the girl who is missing her father, or for the father for that matter.

The depiction of the times was good and the description of the area was nice but it suffers in comparison just a bit with similar protagonists.

I may read the next in the series to see if it gets any stronger.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Among the other spring celebrations is the Jewish holiday Passover or Pesach. This year the celebration began at sundown on April 6, last Friday, and it ends the evening of Saturday, April 14.

The celebration begins with the traditionalSeder or dinner. A staple of this meal and other meals of Passover is unleavened bread or Matzoh, which symbolized the exodus from homes in such a rush that there was no time for bread to rise. During this meal, the Haggadah is read. This is a document of the account of the Jewish liberation and, as it is read, it fulfills the directive of telling one's son about the exodus from Egypt.

 For a long time, Haggadot  (books telling the story of the Jewish exodus from egypt after years of slavery and ten plagues)were hand-written, but eventually some were printed. These volumes of Haggadot were rare and cherished. Possibly the first printed texts were produced in 1482 in Guadalajara, Spain.

 One famous example is the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illustrated manuscript that is the oldest known in the world, originally coming from Barcelona around 1350.

In People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks has written a fictional account of the mystery of this manuscript. An expert book conservator, Hannah Heath lives in Australia. Awakened from a deep sleep, Hannah receives a phone call requesting that she come to Bosnia to use her skills to conserve and restore the precious Sarajevo Haggadah. The war between the Serbs and Croats is, one hopes, ending soon and the United Nations wants this book to be a unifying factor.




Through the years, this Jewish book survived many wars and travelled to many places as its owners moved or were moved from place to place. At least twice in its history it was rescued from certain destruction by people of the Muslim faith. Perhaps, on one occasion, it was saved from the fire by a Roman Catholic.

In the course of Hannah's repair of the book she came across small artifacts that can help in the investigation of where this book has been. One of these is a small insect wing that turns out to belong to an alpine moth. Another of these is a wine stain, perhaps mixed with blood, and finally there is a small thread or hair as well as some salt crystals. One last mystery that Hannah wants to unveil is why this book was published with illustrations in an era when the Jewish faith did not approve of images in their books, since they were considered sacrilegious.

The chief librarian in the museum where the Haggadah is located has a feeling about this special book: "The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox."

Hannah tracks the passage of the book through the centuries by scientifically identifying how the artifacts in the book came to be there. At the same time, she is taking a trip into her own history, which has also been fraught with pain. One of her colleagues points out:

"… the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again….you have a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, the need to demonize the 'other'––just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists… same old, same old."



Similarly, Hannah's personal mysteries and sorrows also keep repeating themselves because she has yet to come to a mature understanding about them. The United Nations wants the restored book to be part of a shrine to Sarajevo's multiethnic heritage. It will be displayed amidst Islamic manuscripts and Orthodox icons. Hannah still has a way to go before she can put her past in true perspective.

Bangkok Tattoo by John Burdett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep of the Royal Thai Police is quite a character. He is called to investigate the death of an American CIA agent in a seedy hotel room. It was murder and a brutal violent one at that.


The murder comes at a time not that long after 9/11 and thus the death of any American is automatically assumed to be a terrorist killing with Al Qaeda at the bottom of it. Sonchai and his boss the Machiavellian Col. Vikorn are willing to the let the investigation to lead in that direction while they find the real killer.


On one occasion Sonchai wants to keep two additional CIA men off the scent and he calls out to them playing the role of a man in the street. at first he can decide on an accent because he can do British and American 'generally one uses Brit when talking to an American and vice versa: the two cultures seem to intimidate each other quite well. On instinct,though, I use American with Enthusiastic Immigrant coloring and in a flash they decide I have Green Card written all over me: obviously I'm the best they can hope for down here.'


Burdett pokes fun at the West as well as the East  and he explains quite bit about the areas including  how all religions interact in Thailand.


It had been quite a while since I read the first in this series, but I am looking forward to the next.

The Last Enemy by Grace Brophy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Grace Brophy’s novel The Last Enemy  takes place at this time of year, but in the location of beautiful Assisi in northern Italy.


The evening of Good Friday is traditionally spent observing the procession of many local men and some women carrying a cross through the winding ancient streets of the city as they do penance to shorten their way to heaven after death and as a reminder of a momentous Friday 2000 ago.

1 Corinthians 15:26
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

While Count Casati and his family watch the procession in a piazza near their home, they wait for a traditional fish dinner and for a little beloved niece, Rita, who has been residing with them since she brought her mother’s body to be buried in Assisi. They wait in vain, because Rita has met her death in the family mausoleum. She is found the following morning resting on a stone altar step and posed in a fashion that suggests she was raped.



Because of the prominence of the family involved, Commissario Alessandro Cenni, the head of the special task force that deals with terrorism and politically sensitive domestic crimes, is assigned to bring about a fast resolution to the case. While he finds that the local police and the powers that be want the blame to settle on either a foreigner or a vagrant, Alex is confident that the killer had to have known the victim well––and that puts the powerful Casati family in the spotlight.

But this is Italy, where connections are more powerful than the facts. The story moves at a lively pace and ends with an Italian twist.


Brophy transports the reader to a lovely part of Italy that I hope to be able to see one day. Alex Cenni is an intriguing, complex character who is believable, likeable and a bit of a romantic. I am happy to report that there is more to this series, the latest of which is being released this year.

Prey on Patmos by Jeffery Siger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On a dark night early in the Easter Week of the Greek Orthodox Church, part of the body of the larger Eastern Orthodox Church, a saintly monk is cruelly murdered on the winding streets of Patmos, an island in Greece.
The crime was heinous not only because of the nature of the victim but because it happened during a holy time and in a holy place.

Patmos

Patmos is in the eastern Aegean and it is here in a cave almost 2000 years ago that Saint John wrote the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. It has a small police force of it’s own but in an unusual case like this one which many would like to attribute to muggers, Chief Inspector Andreas Caldis of the Special Crimes Division is called to take over the investigation.

Mount Athos

In the Greek Orthodox Church Easter is the most important day of the year.  Easter week is the week preceding Easter day. Tourists flock to places such as Patmos and Mount Athos another religious site that contains 20 monasteries, which have been there fifteen centuries.
Mount Athos is a self-governing monastic state that is vaguely a parallel to Rome. The monasteries all have one representative to a central Holy Community. And the leader of this group is known as the Protos. Ultimately the heard of the Eastern Orthodox Church resides in Istanbul once known as Constantinople, Turkey.  At this time the Turks have passed new laws who ultimate effect will be to push the central leader and his organization out of Turkey from whence it will be moved to Either Russia or Greece.  Naturally the Greeks prefer this latter scenario and the politics surrounding this move are at once complicated and devious.

 Solving this murder is going to be difficult because initial findings mean that Kaldis must be privy to the inside workings of the monasteries and most abbots believe in keeping their own council. Andreas and his associate have an uphill battle as they use every source in their power to find a killer hidden deep in monastic life surrounded by many people who think he is just an ordinary or maybe an extraordinary monk.



I enjoyed this book tremendously. Reading about the history of an area greatly enhances my reading experience. I took a lot away from this book.

Clerical Errors

This is the first in D.M. Greenwoods canonical series. It is intended to introduce Theodora Braithwaite, but it does more than that.  An entire cast of characters with nice depth and interesting backgrounds come to life and I would like to think the readers will run into them again.

The story begins with the discovery of a 'dead' head in a font by the cleaning lady. It is revealed that the head belongs to a young local priest. The whys and wherefores are developed slowly but well. I have read other books written about murders in the Anglican community which naturally includes the clergy but I still have a lot to learn about the roles of the members of the Church of England clergy, from Canon's, Deacons, Deans, vergers and vicars to other members of the laity involved in the day to day routine. It is quite complex compared to a simple pastor or priest  or Rabbi of my local places of worship.

I do love the words used to describe the services be they Evensong or matins. For all this there is still evil aplenty in and around the church.  I am really looking forward to reading the second in this series.