Wife of The Gods

By
Kwei Quartey

In Ghana on the western part of the African arm there is a custom that goes back for generations. Accepted in the past it has become controversial in the present. The custom relates to the Trokosi which is translated to wife of the gods or slave of the gods. These are young women who are given in their early puberty to the holy man of the village to serve him in all ways and to make reparations for possible wrong doings.  Traditionalists  are in favor of the custom and deny that slavery is involved. The Ghanaian government as well as other organizations oppose the practice.

Detective Inspector Darko Dawson is a city boy who lives in Accra. He is quite pleased with his life as a policeman, husband and father. He has had tragedies in his past having lost his mother when she disappeared after a visit  to her sister in Ketanu, and when his brother was severely  and permanently injured in an accident.

Accra

Aside from having an anger management problem Darko is ordinary except for a special sense called a synesthesia with which he can hear special qualities in people's voices. He describes one voice as the sensation of soft, wet grass on bare feet or the texture of rich warm velvet, and even the sense of a sharp wet river reed scraped across the palm. These descriptions help the reader get a better sense of the character so described.

A young medical student, Gladys Mensah was helping out in the village of Ketanu bringing education about sanitation and AIDS. She was also  trying to help the young girls and women  known as the Trokosi. One day she is found murdered near the area where the village priest/holy man lived.  One of the trokosi Efia is the person who finds the body. Many years ago Efia’s uncle murdered a man and was imprisoned,but the family  feels they have been cursed and are suffering from the gods displeasure. The elders of her family go to the high priest, Togbe  who communes with the gods and tells them that all will be well if they bring him a female child to serve at the shrine. She will belong to the gods and she will give birth to the children they give her through Togbe. Thus at the age of twelve, Efia becomes a wife of the gods. 

Witchcraft and traditionalist healing and spirituality are essential elements of the story. DI Dawson has more modern beliefs and he decries old fashioned notions This is  what makes this story especially satisfying, the juxtaposition between a modern city like Accra and life in a rural area such as Ketanu.

Dawson is sent to the location to clear up this case. He has relatives in the area and he speaks the local language Ewe. He has mixed feeling because he feels more at home with concrete under his feet and memories of the disappearance of his mother in this part of Ghana have kept him from visiting his family, his mother's sister for decades. But on the other hand he may re investigate this mystery as well. He too, has a foot in both worlds even though he has tried to put the past behind him.

This is a story of contrasts. The reader gets a better sense of Ghana because of the inclusion of both the city and the country life. The elements of the story that give a picture of the past make the present stand out as the culture of the Ghanaians evolves as do all ways of life. Solving a mystery with modern techniques at hand make the witchcraft stand out in stark relief. Finally, Gladys and Efia  are women who belong to two different worlds but in a small town in Ghana, their stories come together  in a nice contrast.

This book has been compared to Alexander McCall Smith's Botwana mysteries, but aside from the African setting most things are quite different. The pace, the characters and the subject matter make this a unique mystery of Africa. I am really looking forward to the next in the series Children of the Street.

Death along the Spirit Road

By C.M. Wendleboe

FBI agent Manny Tanno goes back to the area where he grew up, back to very poor Pine Ridge Reservation reservation which is a fraction of the area where the Sioux and Lakota  once roamed free.

When Manny  was growing up in the seventies, Pine Ridge was the poorest county in the nation and the most violent. His uncle tried to shield him from these realities. But as he drives on Highway 41 toward Oglala he has frightening memories of bodies dead in the roadway and scattered in all corners of the reservation.  There were many militants in the AIM movement and in 1975 two FBI agents were gunned down on this highway.

Agent's Car

This ambush is still used to teach baby FBIs about traffic stops.  Manny now knows the two different versions of the event, both the one that went around the rez at the time and the version he learned about while in training. Both  have a different take on these violent deaths.

 Manny's eldest brother was a leader in the AIM movement, he was an enforcer who eventually went to jail. He now lives in the reservation apparently having found religion while in stir and now is studying to be a holy man. Aside from the modern memories Pine Ridge is close to the sacred Wounded Knee territory where so many helpless innocents were slaughtered.  The entire area is filled with history.

Tanno's present mission is to find the murderer of local land developer Jason Red Cloud. On the one hand Red Cloud is well thought of as a local boy who succeeded but he did develop enemies along the way as Red Cloud made himself a national success story. Manny has lost his country roots and longs for concrete sideways and the environment of DC but as he reacclimatizes to South Dakota he finds his way toward the resolution of the case.  On more than one occasion his life is threatened he gets attacked several times.

What I liked about this book was the character development, the history, the locality and the story.

What I didn't like, because it made no sense was the fact that although Manny had a reputation for solving cases his boss was harassing him and threatening him on a daily basis to get the job done or else. The 'or else' involves getting fired from his teaching position at the FBI Academy and possibly stationed at some forlorn location. In addition to this after several attempts on Manny's life no backup was provided by the FBI, just further harangues. This detracted from my from my enjoyment of the book.

Pine Ridge

Martin Edwards

Martin Edwards has written a series that takes place in the lake district of England. This series has developed some critical acclaim in some blogs are British mystery discussions. I began the series at the beginning which is a smart thing to do because  the subsequent book frequently talked about people, places and things that appear in book one THE COFFIN TRAIL.

The main characters are Daniel Kind an ex-Oxford historian who is seeking the quiet life in a new location and DCI Hannah Scarlett a police detective who had a case fall apart on her so she had been shunted to a newly formed cold case unit, of which she has been put in charge.

A coffin trail was a pathway from small towns to the nearest consecrated ground. It was used for transporting the caskets of dead people for burial. In the area in which where Daniel now lives  the trail is also associated with a large flat=topped stone that the ancients used for sacrifices of different kinds for different purposes, but mostly to appease the pagan gods in one way or another.


Daniel has moved into a lovely house that has unusual history. It is where an acquaintance of his once lived. He is now dead but was accused of murdering a lovely woman and leaving her on the altar stone before he tumbles to his death in a hideous accident. Daniel believes his friend was innocent but the incident was decades ago and is settled for most people.

Hannah is called to reopen this case.  The two dance around the case poking it to see if it stirs. This occupies the first 2/3 of the book. Finally the investigation begins and proceeds nicely to an interesting conclusion.

In THE CIPHER GARDENS Daniel and Scarlett dance the same dance around another case of the murder of as local lothario who was also a mean, disliked man who was part owner of a landscaping business. Both Daniel and Scarlett  worry at the edges of the mystery until finally the case opens up. There is a new murder and it is this one that helps the historian and the detective find the killer.

Mean while back at the ranch or the lakeside cottage Daniel is trying to figure out the mystery of his unusual garden which is called a cipher garden because it is a puzzle set up by early owners of the home to explain either their lives or their deaths.




A subplot running through the story is the relationship between Daniel and his live-in girlfriend who always appears to me to be straining at the leash which is just as well because Daniel has eyes for Hannah who is already in a long term relationship in which there are several cracks in the foundation.These little characterizations don't paint Daniel in the strongest light because the reader really questions his judgement.

In The Woods

In The Woods by Tana French
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is no way to talk about this book without revealing what it is about. I began this book at least three times before I got past the horrific event in the beginning. Three children who often play in the woods go there one sunny afternoon and all that remains  by the evening is one traumatized child clinging to a tree in a catatonic state with blood in his shoes which had been placed on his feet after they had been filled with the stuff.




Adam Ryan never recuperated from this event even though he moved,  developed complete amnesia about the first twelve years of his life, changed his name and became a homicide detective workong out of Dublin Castle.

He was successful at this endeavor until he and his partner Cassie are called to investigate the death of another child in the same area.






This is more the story of how Rob Ryan slowly decompensates and falls apart. His motives for most things are self preservation in any endeavor which may be understood but his behavior changes from an integrated human to a self pitying, morose heavy drinker who treats people like dirt. He becomes involved with a suspect and turns a deaf ear to any remonstrations.  Everything is related in a way to the trauma he underwent as a child, This event is mentioned on most pages of the book but the author French elects never to let the poor reader in on the secret. We are left stuck in the woods grasping a tree. I think I shall develop amnesia about the book.

This character is apparently not present in the next in the series but I still want the answer of the woods mystery. French leaves the reader with the impression that  a mythic animal making great flapping noises ate two of the children, but left Ryan after spitting  blood into the shoe that fell off while he was running. I guess that could happen.

Death Makes The Cut

by Janice Hamrick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On the last day of summer vacation history teacher Jocelyn Shore is busy getting her classroom in order awaiting the onslaught of the more than 2000 Austin, Texas teenagers who will be saying goodbye to a hot steamy summer and beginning a new school year.  Jocelyn hears the loud voices of what appears to be an abusive confrontation between Fred Argus, fellow teacher as well as the tennis coach and a typical unrealistic parent who thinks his freshman son should be team captain (Really?) and she rushes in where others fear to tread confronting this angry blustering man as if he were an errant school boy himself.


 This approach is effective and the situation is resolved but aptly named Fred Argus is not behaving in his usual manner and he leaves for home.




The next time Jocelyn saw Fred was on the floor of the tennis shed, lying with his milky white eyes blankly open surrounded by some tennis balls. Fred was on older man in his sixties who was a teacher as a second career.

 Despite being a coach he was known for his spindly white legs and his two pack a day smoking habit. Jocelyn knew him to be an excellent teacher and she credited him with teaching her more than she learned in all her formal years of education with regard to how to impart knowledge to the teenage mind.


Despite the fact that the police are called it is natural to assume that this death was a natural one and although Jocelyn is deeply saddened the pressing issues of the first day of school is upon then them. Aside from here own classes she is expected to help her look alike cousin Kyla teach a course to girls about technology as part of a community service program.


It doesn’t take long for it to become clear that this death is really a murder. Before the day is out she finds that she is also the new interim tennis coach.

But Jocelyn is not too busy to realize that that Fred had been on the trail of some wrong doings and as she begins to investigate she puts herself in danger. The clues are there for the reader to join in the hunt for the murderer. He will murder again before he is through.


This is a lively fast paced story with an excellent cast of characters. The setting is a bit unlike high school as I knew it, but hey, the times they do change. It may help that I read it at this time of year but I felt the sweltering Texas ambience like I was there.  The characters have developing nice backgrounds which were introduced in the first of the series DEATH ON TOUR.

No Second Wind

A.B. Guthrie Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Jason Beard has left college to come back home to Midbury after his father died.He is working as a deputy once again for Sheriff Chick Charleston. The story begins in what people in that neck of the woods call a cold snap, the temperature is about 45 degrees below zero. This is unimaginable cold to me, but it did mitigate my sense of unimaginable heat that the east coast has been experiencing with days of 100+ degrees. I was fascinated by one description of the trouble people have to go through to keep their cars running.

 The people in the town are up in arms about the new hard hats and their families that are coming to town preparing for the passage of a law that will give permission for widespread coal strip mining.

If this happens the land will be destroyed for years and will never be good for ranching or farming again, The incomers are just hoping for jobs which will support their families and resent the way that are being treated like lepers from the town folk. It is only the bitter cold that takes the edge off the hostilities. But not for long, soon there is the death of a newcomer who owns a bar and the sounds of wolves are heard coming ever closer to town and the people on both sides of the mining question fear for the safety of their children.

Sundogs

 Sheriff Charleston is always a man of reason but people in a panic won't listen to reason and are not ready to test the idea that wolves don't go after humans. He also is always on the side of law and order regardless of who he is protecting. Jase Beard is maturing nicely and the weather doesn't seem to bother him, as he walks out in all weather even when the sundogs are showing. This is a cold weather phenomenon seen when the sun is just above the horizon  and there is a cold frost in the air.

Death follows death and soon a resident of the town is found dead. It is likely that both deaths are accidental but when people are up in arms that explanation is never satisfying.

Montana strip coal mine

This is an intriguing story written in the eighties and it is interesting to compare the background of the story with the situation of coal mining in Montana today.  I recommend googling this subject for some interesting information.The sense of time and place is wonderful and I shivered in my boots until the very satisfying conclusion. This rates as one of my favorite series. There are two more in this very short series and I am keeping them for special times.

Clouds Without Rain

One  hot August day college professor  Michael Braden is  driving an Amish single horse vintage buggy up and down the rural lanes  in a central valley of Ohio. He is playing decoy  and is wearing the shiny blue  denim pants and solid sky blue shirt covered by a black vest. He is already white haired and bearded  as nature has already made him. He moonlights as a sheriff's deputy when he can help out. He is trying to catch the two teenagers who are  local highway man in masks out to scare as well as steal and plunder from local Amish buggy riders.

After his short sojourns along the far from busy byways he returns the simple vehicle and gets into his own car just in time to be sent to the site of a multiple fatality accident. Among the dead are another member of the sheriffs department, a young man in a car, the driver of the semi which fishtailed and jackknifed  and was the immediate cause of the  accident , a man driving  a buggy and the horse.

The title of this book comes from the Bible. It is from Jude who refers to people who are self-involved.                "These shepherd to feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn tree's, without food and uprooted – twice dead."

Specifically it refers to JR Weaver who has been killed in this buggy accident. He had become a very liberal   member of the Amish faith and wasa real estate developer. He used electricity, telephones and fax machines but still drove a simple horse and buggy.







There has been a new more conservative Bishop elected in the district who wanted to change back to the old ways and there was some dissention about who of the group would chose to stay. There were also rumblings about shady land deals which were costing many families their farms and Weaver was behind this. Was there more to the fatal accident?

Professor Michael Braden, Pastor Cal Troyer and Sheriff Robinson work together to find the answers. It is a difficult path that the Amish must follow as farms become too expensive to own and keeping the faith becomes increasingly difficult when these folk must pursue jobs in towns or in doing work that is tourist oriented.

This is an excellent series and I learn a bit from each book. In one scene a woman scrubs her floor with a strip of 2x2 wood covered with cloth wrapped around it so that a new area of cloth is available when an area becomes soiled. I might just try that.    

Snake

When you are handling wild things it is wise to never forget the inherent danger of messing with Mother Nature. A young woman known as Eve had a nightclub act in which she fondles and uses in her act as an erotic prop. One morning she is found dead with her pet python wrapped around her neck.

The case is given to Trompie Kramer, an Africaaner  and his partner Sergeant Zondi. They have been very busy with a case of multiple cases in which shopkeepers of small stores have been gunned down at point blank range for no apparent reason. The witnesses are few, and those who did see something would prefer to keep mum. The inhabitants of this part of town have no love for the police. The police are serious in their intent to stop these massacres even though they are occurring in the wrong part of town as it were.



South Africa during the apartheid era is beautifully portrayed in this novel. The mystery genre is one in which all aspects of society can be examined and included in an interesting story. In SNAKE, one of the crimes being investigated by the team of Afrikaaner Kramer and Bantu Zondi  involves the white population with clues leading to members of the higher social classes. The second set of crimes being investigated by these two men in falls in the poorer sections of town and what they often referred to as the nonwhites which includes people from Greece and Portugal and India.

James McClure does a good job of highlighting many of the injustices and iniquities of the time and in his subtle way suggests how many of the prejudiced notions were hogwash, while at the same time shows examples of the strengths of the different cultures. Nonetheless there's definitely an excellent sense of time and place in the 1960s in South Africa.

A Rather Curious Engagement

A Rather Curious Engagement by C.A. Belmond
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Antibes

What would your life be like if you just unexpectedly inherited beaucoup dinero? Well, for one thing you would be dealing always with people who have a need or use for your money and have tons of ways to help you spend it. This includes ex-wives, shady family members and hordes of the deserving poor.

Penny Nichols and Jeremy her boy friend have thrown their lot and fortunes together and before settling down to new business ventures decide to take a gap summer. The first thing they do to get their place in Antibes into shape, recondition the vintage 1930's Dragonetta auto that was part of the legacy and of course buy a yacht. How else do you get away from it all.

But even on this getaway they have a commission to try and find  a special aguamanilia which was made for Beethoven.  These were were of a sort very ingeniously designed and beautifully crafted ewers.

The one that Penny and Jeremy is looking for has a history of being cursed as well as being very difficult to locate. But this is what this couple does so well. They have one exciting adventure after another which take them from the French Riviera, to Lake Como in Italy and even to Corsica, Napoleon's birthplace.

There are many challenges in starting a new way of life and Belmond makes the reader part of the sojourn.

Lake Como, Italy

If your summer plans include a staycation on veranda beach this is one way to get away.

Agatha Christie

If there is one author that I have reread on more than one occasion it is Agatha Christie. Somehow I seem to have to keep reacquiring here books as well. I know I have to thin the collection every so often before I end up on TV as a hoarder, but I invariably find my self regretting certain book donations.


This time I am restricting my rereading to Miss Jane Marple who I am really appreciating this time around. There are twelve stories in her series and they are available in  three separate omnibuses.


 I just finished the second omnibus which contained A Caribbean Mystery, A Pocket Full of Rye, The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side and They Do It Withh Mirrors.


Jane is at her best in these stories as is Agatha of course. By now Jane's nephew Raymond has been a successful writer and likes to help out Auntie Jane by sending her on a winter trip to Barbados to help her recuperate from a severe bout of bronchitis, or by providing her with a home help which slowly drives her crazy. Well, Jane never gets crazy, just irked in a gentle way.


But where ever Jane is she is forward thinking at the same time as she looks to the past for behavior patterns that are part and parcel of human nature.  Jane is fully aware of how she comes across and a fragile, elderly gentle lady and she plays this role to the hilt using it to great advantage while she is honing her edges on unsuspecting people.

Christie 1926

After reading the story I can watch a version to it on Netflix and compare them. I have watched at least two TV or movie versions of The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side. The book continues to surpass the adaptations. It is a version of murders in a country house but even though it is a classic mystery the clues are not all clearly set before the reader at one time, rather like the unveiling of Salome and her seven veils, the picture slowly comes into focus as Miss Marple peers though all the distractions and red herrings to see the solid core of the mystery.

I liked the Joan Hickson version of the story but I always wish they would give the poor woman more than one hat. I really don't believe she would wear the same hat to garden in that she wears to church and other social events. It is a subtle way to dumb her down and give the viewer a distorted vision of Miss Marple a person who bumbles into the answers rather than using her very acute mind.


The term Geezer lit is popping up these days and some times Jane Marple is included in the genre. Geezer of course really refers off eccentric elderly old men usually. If it is broadened to include women Jane  still doesn't qualify because she is not odd or eccentric but very normal.  Hercule Poirot on the other hand is geezer personified.


I have recently come across another series of Christies that I am going to try. It is that of Superintendant Battle of Scotland Yard. The first of the series The Secret of Chimneys was written in 1925. This was written about five years before the Marple books and five years after the Poirot books.