A Cold-Blooded Business by Dana Stabenow

Reading these from the beginning has been informative. Many series mystery writers have a theme (or two) which runs through the entire series. Nevada Barr, of course, "does" national parks. Those goofy ghost mysteries by Jaffarian, not only has the ghosts, but a sort of "treasures of California tourism" thing going - of course, those are blatantly "cozy" and themes are on my list of basic elements defining cozy mysteries. The Julia Spencer-Fleming books, which I have pretty well decided are not cozy, have the gloom and doom hymns quoted at the front (in Kindle you have to back up from where they start you to get to them) from which the titles arise. So far in the Henning Mankell books that I have been reading there is some sort of international connection - as if these grusome crimes couldn't possibly be of Swedish origin. Stieg Larsson promoted no such illusion.

All of that just to say that, as far as I can determine, Stabenow is a native Alaskan, but not a Native Alaskan, but her running focus is Native Alaskan, in particular Aleut heritage, culture, and tradition. Perhaps related, we are also seeing quite a bit of Alaska itself. Enough to make me curious, but not quite enough to make me want to pack up and move there.

This book is set at the Prudhoe Bay site of oil drilling operations. The scale and scope of that operation is far beyond anything I ever imagined. Huge areas, hundreds of employees - from the expected roughnecks and computer operations specialists to maids and gourmet chefs, not to mention PR and Security. The story, as the last one, centers around drugs. This time the question is who is supplying the (imaginary) oil company staff with cocaine, so Kate goes undercover again, this time as a roustabout - which apparently in this context means "one who does whatever else needs doing." For the most part, Kate works as the driver of a tour bus for the PR person who does guided tours for all the visiting politicians and other VIPs, foreign and domestic.

This is two in a row where Kate has been out there without the assistance of Mutt. Mutt did have her puppies, between the previous book and the one before - they were boarded out while Kate was on the crab boat, this time apparently Mutt boarded with Jack in Anchorage. Stabenow does not portray Anchorage as the garden spot of Alaska, or anywhere else. Although Dutch Harbor is rougher and dirtier, I'm thinking she described it with more affection than the "big city." Anchorage is also the scene of one of Kate's encounters with the fate of Native Alaskans. She meets an old man, homeless and begging, and we learn some sad lessons about the disintegration of tribal life.

The bads in these books really think up some creative ways to try to kill Kate, in this book they could have just knocked her in the head a little harder and gotten it done. In the last one, pretty much the same. But, fortunately for the series (this is only number five of fifteen or thereabouts), the bad guys aren't all that bright.

Dead in the Water by Dana Stabenow

I'm slacking here - I finished this last night, but I had homework to do - so there. By the way, I have hit my stride in that course. I have decided to make my goal creating posts on the discussion boards that no one will respond to - and so far I am winning in the current chapter - in fact, fewer than half of the members of the class have even read my posts for this chapter.

This book was interesting on a couple of fronts and on several levels. Stabenow really gets into the history and social issues regarding the native Alaskans. Kate is an Aleut. The entire tribe was relocated during the war from their homes on islands in the Aleutian chain to make way for a military defense of the area. Not as crazy as it sounds when you consider that if the Japanese had established a base in the area, they would have been within easy bombing range of Seattle, home of Boeing, maker of the B-17. The other side of it is that the Aleuts who were captured by the Japanese were quite well treated - far better than those who were relocated by the US military. When the military was through with their islands and tried to send them home, their homes had been destroyed - both the structures and the wildlife which had provided their living. So the surviving Aleuts moved into the park or took up residence on the fringes of white society.

We also get to see more near mysticism involving a couple of minor but quite interesting characters as Kate is back in the home territory of her family. I was wondering if that thread would continue and I am pleased that it has.

Another totally fascinating thing about this book is that the primary setting is a crab fishing boat. One of the secondary settings is Dutch Harbor, Alaska. If you don't know what I am talking about, you obviously have neglected to watch "Deadliest Catch" on the Discovery Channel. In her introductory comments to the e-release of this book, which is actually one of her earliest, Stabenow reports that one of the responses to any of her books that has given her the most pleasure was the letters from crab fishermen telling her that she got it right. It seems pretty true to what I have seen in the television series.

The Man Who Smiled by Henning Mankell

I think these are getting better as he goes along. In this one the title "character" only appears on a very few pages, but colors the entire story. He is one of the extremely wealthy and powerful - with business interests all over the world. He lives in a castle near Ystad and has ordered a number of murders in the area.

Wallander is, after eighteen months, still recovering from the breakdown he suffered after killing one of the lesser bad guys in the last book. He has decided to resign from the police force, but when a friend of his is murdered, goes back on active duty.

The Big Bad rests securely behind the walls of his castle and the walls of the reputation as a philanthropist he has purchased, but there are the shadow men who are always present. This definitely plays out as a David and Goliath number, but Wallander/David is not playing a lone hand. This is the first book in which the entire team seems to gel and perform cohesively to solve the crime. Of course, Wallander gets the big scene at the end - and sees the smiling man with the smile wiped from his face, but the entire team was required to find the lines that solved the crime.

And the big event!! Baiba Liepa - the widow of the Latvian policeman in The Dogs of Riga - for whom Wallander has been pining and to whom he has been writing for the last two books - has arrived to spend Christmas with him.

A Fatal Thaw by Dana Stabenow

When I read the first one of these the first time, this was not available electronically. Now - the first two have each blurbed the e-version of the next one. So, when I finished #2 late last night/early this morning, I got the next one. They also had the first one of her SF novels - free! My kind of price, so I got it, too.

Mutt is in heat and escapes Kate's attempts to contain her, so I suspect we will see puppies in the next book.

This one opens with a horrifying massacre. A madman gets up, dresses in brand new clothing, loads a brand new gun, and goes out and shoots and kills everyone he meets until Kate, warned by Chopper Jim (police helicopter pilot and all-round sexy dude) and with the assistance of the valiant Mutt takes him down. From there on it gets complicated. Turns out that one of the innocent victims wasn't as innocent as all that and neither was her death.

Stabenow's intro to the rerelease of this book discusses the ceremonial/ritual thread that runs through it. Like most of her readers, I probably wouldn't have noticed it without her big red arrow pointing at it, but it was interesting. In the opening, the killer's almost ritual preparation for his killing spree is paralleled with Kate's preparations for the changing season - winter to spring.

Another striking event is Ekaterina's potlatch in memory of the dead of the massacre. Ekaterina is Kate's grandmother and the actual, if not the titular, head of the tribe. She is also controlling and manipulative and has selected Kate as her successor - a fate which Kate desperately resists. At this potlatch, she calls on all the tribes - not just her own, also including the white man, and the black man, to join in the ritual dance. Here Stabenow lapses into mysticism in a way that was a complete surprise to me. As Kate leads the dance, she sees the dead present and is aware of their appreciation of the event in their honor.

I haven't read many of these, but I will certainly be looking for this sort of thing in further reading.

Grievous Sin by Faye Kellerman

I hate to be repetitive, but I haven't read one of these in a long time. I'd forgotten how good she is. Basically, the running characters of the series are a cop, his wife, her kids, his kid, and his partner. However --- the cop, Decker, was adopted by nice Baptist couple as an infant, and as an adult discovered that his birth parents were Jewish. His wife was a member of an ultra-orthodox Jewish community. They meet as he investigates the murder of her husband in the first book in the series. She has two young sons, now teenagers; his daughter is now college-age, and has lived primarily with her mother. Marge, Decker's partner is pretty standard for the cop's partner in a police procedural.

In this book, the Deckers are having their first child. This puts them on the scene when a baby and a nurse disappear from the hospital nursery. The trail leads through obsession and insanity as well as mere murder and child abuse. The resolution is a bit unsatisfying, she leaves us knowing the killer, but there is insufficient evidence to convict - and another person in custody confessing. Ordinarily, I would think that was much to much of a spoiler, but for some reason all that seems almost anticlimatic.

Another series to add to my to-do list - at least to pick up all the ones I've missed.

Borderline by Nevada Barr

I haven't read a Nevada Barr in ages - and this one has been sitting on my shelf for -- probably a couple of years, so there may be a couple more by now. Based on the list in the front of the book, I think I must have missed about six of them and there is one at the very beginning of the list that I don't remember - I thought Track of the Cat was the first one but there is one before it.

Back to this book. It certainly made me remember why I liked her books. Lots of action, beautifully discribed scenery - I wonder if she is going to run out of National Parks and have to branch out. Maybe not, according to the font of all knowledge, there are fifty-eight National Parks in the United States and another forty-three in Canada. So, even if she doesn't repeat herself, she could probably run this series as long as she wants to. It would take a little more research to find out if she has repeated any of them - I rather think not. The one before this one is set in Isle Royale, and I just read an article in Smithsonian about it: wolves and moose on a protected island habitat, could be interesting.

Oh, yes, this book --- it is set in Big Bend, and in the summer. Good choices. I have been reading too many frozen northern wasteland books: Minnesota, Colorado, Sweden, upstate New York ... Apparently, one can get just as dead down in Texas. And in this one Anna is married to her Mississippi sheriff and priest - must have happened in or between books that I missed. And in this one we have the singular experience of Anna caring for an infant - no, not her own - one of her rescues, like her dogs and cat - and she does find a home for it instead of having to take it home.

We begin with a rafting trip down the Rio Grande through the Big Bend country; US on one side, Mexico on the other. Then there is the flash flood, and the body in the river, and the rifleman on the cliff - classic Nevada Barr. Did I mention the crazy politician and associated henchmen? The word play in this title refers to the sometimes indistinct line between sanity and madness, with the primary reference, naturally, the US/Mexican border and the situations that were created by the abrupt closing of that border to casual commerce. Good bit of bloodshed, some seemed gratuitous, but all in all a good read.

Sugar Cookie Murder by Joanne Fluke

This is the first one of these books that I ever bought. I read a few pages and decided that it was pretty cute and I would go back and read the series from the beginning. I'm glad I did. This one is only a little over fifty percent story, and all the rest recipes. It's main function seems to be to wrap up the story lines left open in the previous book, while making sure that one was still open to carry on to the next one.

So, in this one we have the final whoop-de-doo for the town cookbook, and Andrea (Hannah's sister) finally has her baby. The murder turns out to be not such a much - and - forget the twenty-four hour mysteries that I have been complaining about - this one takes place, murder to resolution, within the space of the community Christmas Potluck at which all the cookbook recipes are tried. Well, maybe she did stretch the time a bit by bringing in a frozen northern wasteland blizzard to make sure everyone stayed put until Hannah tracked down the woman in a black skirt wearing boots.

Short, simple, and 163 pages of recipes - the entire Lake Eden cookbook? I don't think so - it is published separately. I suppose I will go on and get the next one, but right now I am feeling a little ripped off.

A Cold Day for Murder by Dana Stabenow

I had read this one before. I don't remember whether or not I read it on the Kindle or ordered a paperback. Hah! I looked it up in this blog - I read it last February, on paper. At the time I thought that the rest of the series was available for Kindle - wrong - and still wrong. I do believe that more of them are out in electronic form though. This would make sense, since this one was free for Kindle - and that would be a good way to hook people into getting more of them. Book 2, at least, is available - and is now in my queue.

I still think the solution is a little pat, but the characters are interesting, as is the setting. Actually, I had just been looking a some photos on one of the POTD sites I follow and there were several of Alaska - and that's what sent me back to this series. I'm still not sure that I would want to actually go there, it is amazingly beautiful, but I am really addicted to running water and flush toilets. That month in Africa without them was plenty - and it wasn't even cold there! And then there is winter. I rather favor having winter hold off until December or January and departing in March. And if we can get through those months without significant quantities of that nasty white stuff - all the better.

The White Lioness by Henning Mankell

No, they have not discovered lions in Sweden. The white lioness, which appears about halfway through, becomes a metaphor for South Africa in another international mystery.

In the first, there was a touch of international intrigue through the refugee camps and Wallander's interactions with them. In the second, most of the action takes place in Latvia. This time Wallander doesn't actually leave the country, but the entire context of the story is based in South Africa. Also in this story, Mankell splits the point of view and we see the action through many eyes. He holds it together well, but it is a departure from the "straight and narrow" - at least he didn't try the twenty-four hour stunt.

He is also developing Wallander's daughter Linda as a significant factor in his life and as a character in her own right. At some point that was inevitable - since several books down the list - the bullet description changes to "a Kurt and Linda Wallander mystery." My guess is that she "finds herself" and becomes a cop like Daddy.

These remind me in some respects of the British Inspector Morse mysteries, which I only know through Mystery Theater - I have not actually read any of them - I suppose I should someday - especially if I am going to start using them for a basis of comparison. Anyway, Morse and Wallander are both opera afficianados, both rather morose and solitary, and both probably alcoholics, and both given to stubbornly defying authority and conventional wisdom in the pursuit of their hunches. They do seem to have rather different relationships with their respective juniors - but that could have to do with the organization of their respective police forces. As I recall, Morse does actually have some sort of life outside his police work, which Wallander does not. Still, the likeness is interesting.

I think I just talked myself into getting one of the Inspector Morse books.

Fudge Cupcake Murder by Joanne Fluke

Fluke quite cleverly ties the title of this one into the entire story. We have two mysteries running side by side. The first one actually introduced is the Fudge Cupcake mystery. It seems that the little town of Lake Eden is creating a community cookbook. Naturally, Hannah is in charge of collecting and testing the recipes submitted for inclusion. Although the deadline for submissions has passed, she accepts her mother's pot roast recipe - if you have met her mother through other books in this series, you will understand why. The other is brought to her by a woman whose husband is extremely anxious to have his recently deceased mother's signature fudge cupcake recipe included.

When Hannah reads over the recipe, she finds that one line reads: "Add 1/2 cup of secret ingredient." Unfortunately, neither the woman's son nor her daughter-in-law is able to enlighten her in the matter of the secret ingredient. Unwilling to disappoint them, Hannah accepts the recipe and begins a quest for the secret ingredient. Many experiments follow, and sure enough, the ingredient is discovered - by an external clue, fortunately - or Edison and his four hundred experimental filaments would have had nothing on the intrepid staff of The Cookie Jar.

The actual murder had nothing to do with cupcakes, except that the sheriff was apparently eating one when he was murdered and dumped in the dumpster at the high school. Hannah's brother-in-law is the first suspect, since he is running for sheriff against the present sheriff, now dead in the dumpster. There has been a certain amount of acrimony involved, including the sheriff shouting at him within the hearing of most of the station that Bill would only win "over his dead body." Which is, in fact, how he did win - still he only got 80% of the vote - and he was running against a dead guy.

Bill manages to get an alibi established and the next person of interest is the sheriff's not particularly grieving widow. Enough!! Read it yourself.

The mystery ingredient was raspberry syrup, but I'm not telling who bashed the sheriff in the head - doesn't have quite the same meter as "I shot the sheriff," does it?

Dark Tort by Diane Mott Davidson

It has been a while since I read one of these; I'm sure there are several that I have missed, but this one was on the shelf so it seemed like as good a place to start as any. I may go back to the beginning on this one someday and read them in closer proximity to each other.

In this one, Goldy's catering gig with a local law firm causes her to discover the body of the firm's paralegal-in-training - who also happens to live across the street from the Schultz home. Of course, the mother of the victim asks Goldy to investigate the murder herself because she has no confidence in the police.

As always there is a lot of food, all of which sounds really good, but the recipes are pages and pages long - and that's just the ingredients. Of course, Goldy is a professional caterer, not just running a cookie and coffee shop like Hannah Swenson in the Joanne Fluke books.

As long as I am considering mystery series cliches (that is a bit harsh, but I can't think of a better word at the moment), we have several here. There are the recipes - a marker of the "Cozy" mystery, but on the other hand, the victims were completely undeserving. I haven't established a pattern on that yet, but it does seem that frequently in "cozies" in particular, the murder victims are people who really ought to be murdered. The cliche I had in mind, however, is the episode of deadly peril.

In this case, Goldy has been seized by the murderer who intends to strangle her like one of the earlier victims and is rescued by a 79-year old champion pitcher who beans the bad with a rock, since she didn't have a baseball close at hand. I shouldn't have told, I suppose, but it is definitely my favorite "rescue of the heroine" ever.

All Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer-Fleming

These keep getting more and more tense. Thank goodness, Spencer-Fleming returns here to a more conventional narrative style. The feature this time is an even more gruesome madness, and I hardly know what I can say about the book that wouldn't be a complete spoiler!

For one thing, the diocese has sent Clare a watchdog - to watch her, of course, not to watch out for her. The tension between them is a constant distraction for Clare, as she tries to get things done without letting her watcher know while seeming to be completely open with her.

Russ's wife, Linda, has kicked him out and that is the precipitating incident for much of the action. Russ is trying to save his marriage, and he and Clare are trying to avoid each other. Then Linda disappears.

Another of Spencer-Fleming's (and many other mystery writers) previous standard devices returns in this book. Clare and Russ in mortal danger and jointly managing the resolution of the situation. This is more grim than in previous stories and the final episode of the story, although rather predictable, is even more devastating.

In the epilogue, Clare joins the Army National Guard - again as a helicopter pilot - which virtually guarantees her a tour in the middle east.

To Darkness and to Death by Julia Spencer-Fleming

This time she did one of those 24-hour numbers with practically minute by minute reporting. And within that twenty-four hours we had three deaths, one brutal beating, a kidnapping (actually, she was kidnapped at least three times), and a couple of fire-bombings. Clare was not seriously damaged this time, although she was present at one of the fire-bombings, and her Shelby Cobra was a casualty of one of the bombs. Old money, shifting economic base, big money closing down local businesses, jobs being lost, and a little long-standing insanity just to spice it up.

Featured an awful lot of death and general violence, murder and mayhem for a twenty-four hour period in a tiny little town. Kept it moving, though. She did a lot more switching between characters than in the previous three, not just from scene to scene, but point of view. It was never unclear whose thought process we were following at any given moment, but it did chop things up some. It was almost as if someone dared her to write a twenty-four hour mystery and she didn't have "time" in the narrative to let Clare and Russ discover everything. I hope she goes back to a more conventional narrative style in the next one.

As for the Clare-Russ situation, they have both acknowledged to themselves and to each other that they are in love - although in this book they barely even shake hands - well, there is that bathrobe scene in Clare's kitchen. Maybe Spencer-Fleming is trying to see how far she can take it without anything actually having to happen. Not much farther, I think, Clare may have found a confidante/confessor in the person of the Bishop's hatchet-man. And Russ has decided that he must tell Linda.

Makes me want to skip to the last book and see how far things have gotten. Almost. I always used to skip to the last few pages of a mystery - not so much to see whodunnit, but to see if the dog survived (metaphorically speaking). Kindle has about broken me of that habit, partly because if I go to the last page to check on the ending, I have to manually update the pages in my Kindle or on my computer desktop. The other part is that I can read so much more quickly in electronic format that I can stand to wait and read it out.

The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell

The first one of these was pretty brutal, and this one may have been even more so. Most of the action takes place in Riga, Latvia, and centers around the unsettled political situation there in the 90s. I can't say I understand much about it, but Mankell tells it like our worst nightmares of a soviet puppet country. It seems that the Balkans are "free and independent" officially, but that the bulk of the political power rests in the hands of soviet expats who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Latvian nationals who wish to change the face of the country are in hiding and pursued by those in the power structure.

The opening has a couple of smugglers finding a life raft with two bodies in it. They tow it in close enough to be reasonably certain that it would wash up on the Swedish coast and cut it loose. By the time everything is all wrapped up, those two dead men are barely a side issue in the story.

A connection is discovered and the case is shifted to Riga, Latvia. Riga sends a police major, to assist. The major returns home and is murdered almost immediately. Riga requests Wallander. He goes; he goes back home; he returns - but is smuggled into the Latvia via an overland route (see geography notes which follow). Everything gets wrapped up - the major's murderer is dealt with and Wallander returns home by a more conventional route, but alone (sigh).

Now, about the geography - I realized that I had no clue where the Balkans are - although I think that I could have named them: Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. They are on the Baltic Sea (surprise, surprise) which is located "behind" Sweden, with Norway on the North Sea side. On the shores of the Baltic one may find Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, and Denmark, bringing us back around to Scandinavia again. Is a good murder mystery a waste of time when I manage to learn some geography?

Lemon Meringue Pie Murder by Joanne Fluke

More fun and cookies. One of these days I am actually going to try baking some of these cookies. They aren't like Diane Mott Davidson's recipes in the Goldy Bear books - those sound absolutely wonderful, but they have pages of ingredients and stuff that I think I might be able to define, but probably not. These are like real cookies with normal ingredients and procedures that even I can identify. I could do without the cutesy cookie reviews by characters in the story, but basically they make me hungry.

This is the fourth one of these that I have read and Hannah is still going with the two guys that she started dating in book one. No torrid love scenes -- and the dentist and the detective are actually friends. Not to mention the fact that Hannah herself considers that she probably isn't willing to give up her independence for marriage - with either of them.

I guess all of that is what makes these cozies and the Spencer-Fleming books not (in my opinion). Recipes, I believe, are a dead give-away. One does not find recipes in non-cozies, nor does your female detective fall for a married cop.

Okay, back to this book. The murder victim in this one was actually introduced in a previous book in the series. She was the flirtatious sales clerk at the drug store. And Hannah's mother, who has been seriously annoyed with Hannah for three volumes for her unpleasant habit of discovering bodies, finally gets to discover the body for herself. I do find myself wondering why the handsome sheriff's department detective doesn't ask the questions that Hannah does, but it wouldn't be a cozy if the cops solved the mystery, now would it?

The Paris Wife by Paula Mclain

A book club recommendation - that means not a book club reading selection, but one of the books we talked about and was recommended by one of the members whose judgement I trust. It is the story of Hadley Richardson Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway's first wife (of four), told in first person. She was a girl from St. Louis who met a dashing young man while visiting in Chicago

She is the one that married him before he was published and became a star. She lived with him in cheap and uncomfortable quarters in Paris while he struggled to find his voice. They were part of the expatriate community of American writers and artists which included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, Gertrude Stein, and Sherwood Anderson. It was a mad life. Mclain leaves the impression that Hadley never felt that she quite fit in, although she drank and caroused with them.

The story leaves many questions unaddressed. Why did so many American writers decamp for Paris. For most of them, their lives there were not particularly comfortable. And why did they cluster together almost frantically. Stein, understandably took herself and her partner out of the country. But the implication seems to be that creativity and the United States at the time were incompatible.

Mclain does specifically make the point that the book is fiction, not biography, but she makes these people of legend seem quite real. It leaves me considering reading Hemingway's own book about that period of his life, A Moveable Feast. Partly because I am curious about how when he and a woman Hadley considered her best friend had an affair, a woman who became Hemingway's second wife, they could expect her to simply continue in a bizarre menage a trois.

Interesting book, easy read, and perhaps a small window into the fundamental insanity of the time, place, and personalities.

Out of the Deep I Cry by Julia Spencer-Fleming

Actually I finished this book days ago - and just forgot to write it up and post it. I have been busy procrastinating the writing of a paper for the class I am taking - and writing anything seemed to interfere with the process. The paper is due Friday, so I am now down to procrastinating by writing something else.

Things are getting deeper - quite literally, as well as emotionally. And, wonder of wonders, Clare has finally met Russ's wife - hard to believe it took three books. And it has also taken this long to get to the semi-torrid love scene. Semi-torrid because it takes place neck-deep in icy water from the still mostly frozen river which is flooding the basement in which the bad dude has imprisoned them. And they both come to the conclusion that this is not the place and the correct time is never. I still think we are going to someday learn that the wife has something more than buying going on in the City.

The "life in danger" scene has become pretty standard in mystery novels, even the "cozies." I saw something somewhere - perhaps at the end of this book - Spencer-Fleming discussing whether or not her stories were cozies. I didn't read it, but have rather decided that these come down on the "not so much" side of the line. Yes, she is a priest - but she doesn't have a cat, she doesn't knit or cook, and she has totally fallen for the married chief of police. I shall have to do a study of the subject - which will require rereading any number of murder mysteries!

In this one, the murder is generations in the past, and that telegraphs that the present day murder isn't a murder at all.

Once I get the paper done, it is my plan (well, hope) to get the other two papers for this class done over spring break and not have to worry about them any more (yeah, right). Last month I procrastinated so hard that I basically missed the 100 books under $4 list. Of course, you can imagine my annoyance when I opened this month's list and found this book on it. Oh, well.