Gigi Pandian's THE RAVEN THIEF

The Raven Thief

A Secret Staircase Mystery (Book 2)

Written by Gigi Pandian

Narrated by Soneela Nankani

What a fascinating concept for a crime novel: an author whose first book (about possibly shape-shifting into a raven to murder his wife) is accused of breaking into his ex-wife's basement to steal the typewriter he wrote it on. You might wonder whether he's superstitious or just wreaking petty vengeance on his newly ex wife for gutting his Poe-inspired old writing office and remodeling it into a much more fun space. Eventually you'll find out more about the typewriter, the author, the novel, and the book's title. But first....

There's a LOT of description of the remodeled space, and a great many complex setting details from both this remodel and the one where our protagonist lives: secret bookcase doors and rocking-horse door unlocking mechanisms, false-bottomed trunks etc. In print it would be easy enough to flip back over the descriptors to get them clear in your mind, but with audio it's harder to keep track of which knickknack hides or opens or unlocks or lights up what structural element. A sketch map would help. Maybe there will be one in the print version (this review is based on an audiobook ARC via #NetGalley).

There's also a fair bit of discussion in early chapters about past events and the overarching series mystery, which means a lot of references to characters who might have featured earlier in the series. Readers have a lot of names to remember and no way to tell how many of them will be important to the current story. So a cast list would help, especially if it was divided into 'current book' and 'series characters'. Or start with the first in the series, Under Lock & Skeleton Key (although, to be honest, that one spends the first 45 minutes or so of the audiobook largely in setup for Tempest's family home and her recent past that, frankly, sounds a lot more exciting than the early events of that book).

Once you get past all that, there is gradual progress on one of the crimes, and a lot of meandering about Tempest's past that may or may not impact her future. It all robs the story of momentum and although the author set up many Easter Eggs referencing classic crime fiction, they weren't enough to keep me caring who had been done wrong by whom, much less why.

The narrator's voice is pleasant to listen to, with enough emotional infection to enhance the text without overwhelming it. There's not a lot of difference between the protagonist's dialogue and the other characters' words, but enough to tell you it's a different character speaking. The text doesn't give the narrator a lot of emotional subtext to amply, sadly, but if what you enjoy about audiobooks is a human voice murmuring in the background while you're doing other things, this one will work as well as any other.

#Netgalley #RavenThief #SecretStaircase #trapdoor #cosymystery

WW2's Scanty Yule in The Mitford Secret

 The Mitford Secret

written by Jessica Fellowes

Narrated by Rachel Atkins

If you enjoyed previous books in this series, you'll likely welcome the 6th & final installment of this mystery series that takes place during WW2, when former nurserymaid Louisa attends a family Christmas at Chatsworth, acclaimed country seat of the Dukes of Devonshire. 

Many of the eternally fascinating Mitford family are in attendance: the parents and several of the daughters that The Times journalist Ben Macintyre famously described as "Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover; Nancy the Novelist; Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur".^[2]  Unity's already brain-damaged but still an ardent Hitler supporter. Diana's in prison for her Fascist activities (probably also, in the minds of Britain's War Service, to serve as a potential check on her husband Oswald Mosley's more seditious speeches and writings). Nancy's at odds with her husband, who hasn't bothered to communicate with her in quite some time, and Debo's philandering husband, Andrew Cavendish, is off on war duty somewhere, as is his older brother, the current heir to the dukedom. The Mitford parents are emotionally withdrawn from the family and each other. It's hardly the recipe for a successful house party even before the arrival of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire adds a formal chill to every meal.

And then there's the wild woman who turns up on a stormy night claiming to be a psychic medium, leading them through the unheated ancestral pile to a cupboard containing a bloodstained maid's cap.

There are house party games, rationing-constrained festive meals, shopping for small gifts in the village, and the handsome Air Force officer from the nearby base, ingratiating himself with the Chatsworth party. He's inordinately nice to disabled Unity even while unhappily married Nancy eyes his obvious sex appeal and vies for his attention. Soon Louisa figures out the medium is a former employee of the great house, determined to discover the truth behind the long-ago disappearance of her best friend on staff: the maid who once wore that cap. 

Oh yes, and then there's a murder that some of the family seem determined to believe was natural causes.

 "Debo" may be the putative hostess for this decidedly non-festive house party, but she's not yet the duchess nor even in line for the title (her husband's older brother isn't killed until quite late in the war). Indeed, one of the more fascinating parts of the book to me was watching her nascent steps toward becoming the woman now widely counted as saving Chatsworth by turning it into a productive, thriving estate and tourist attraction with a dedicated, largely local staff. The duke, it must be said, seems to have followed in the footsteps of his ancestors in the matters of horse-racing, spending lavishly, and continuous infidelities, all proclivities that play into the mystery of the missing maid.

Here, for those interested, are links about Debo

Basic biographical details   https://www.historyonthenet.com/deborah-mitford-the-duchess

The books she wrote  https://www.librarything.com/author/devonshireduchessof

The tiaras she wore  https://royalwatcherblog.com/2016/09/24/the-tiaras-of-debo-duchess-of-devonshire/

I enjoy this era of history both in fiction and in non-fiction. And aristocrats behaving badly is a rich vein of misdeeds that many biographers and almost as many crime writers successfully mine.

Sadly, I didn't find this one particularly convincing, in part because SPOILER! RUN YOUR CURSOR OVER TO SEE nobody would have made much fuss of a duke siring a bastard child, much less cover it up for decades. There are endless anecdotes in circulation still about the infidelities of pre-birth control aristocrats, and well understood protocols for how the children ought to be provided for. WW

When the central reason for a historical crime doesn't hold up to scrutiny, none of the subsequent coverup holds up either.

Also, other characters are inconsistent, in one scene being very helpful to Louisa beyond the scope of any relationship or job requirement (even the police inspector) and then, for no apparent reason, suddenly getting angry and refusing further cooperation with her. Also too many of these noble and individually famous people simply spilled their innermost thoughts and secrets to the former nursemaid with the weakest of motives other than allowing the author to provide the reader with context and clues in the most expeditious manner possible. As a lifelong reader of British mystery I found it lazy plotting. The writing doesn't enchant me either. We're told too often what Louisa (or another character) is feeling, rather than seeing her react to situations, so it all comes off as quite emotionally flat no matter how exciting the situation should be. The plot is driving the characters like so many bumper cars rather than events arising more organically from the characters' interactions and discoveries.

The audiobook narrator added nothing to the tale's enjoyment either. Louisa's accent meandered quite a bit from chapter to chapter, and every scene involving Lousia's wide-eyed daughter, regardless of which characters were speaking, was steeped in sentimental cooing tones that brought to mind movie-house Victorian spinsters in chintz-covered parlours. That said, the text didn't give her much help, as many chapters simply meandered to a stop without providing any compelling emotional subtext to pull us forward. (see 'quite emotionally flat' above')

The Mitford Secret is out in audiobook as of January 17, 2023

I'm giving it 3 stars out of 5 for Debo, and for the convincing backdrop of an impoverished great house brought even lower by wartime rationing.

Thanks #NetGalley for the audiobook ARC

#MitfordMystery #MitfordSecret #WW2 #HistoricalCrime #OswaldMosley #DianaMitfordMosley #NancyMitford #Chatsworth #DuchessOfDevonshire #audiobook #WorldWar2

Like jewels and adventure in high society? Check out The Maddie Hatter Adventures:

Deadly Diamond

Gilded Gauge

Timely Taffeta

Wreck Bay by Barbara Fradkin

 

While exploring the rugged landscape of Vancouver Island’s Pacific Rim, Amanda Doucette is drawn to a reclusive old artist known only as Luke, who lives off the grid on a remote island. His vivid paintings hint at a traumatic secret from his past that brings to mind her own struggles with PTSD, and she begins to bond with him. 

More at Dundurn Press

Great atmosphere and investment in the ragged natural world of Northwestern Vancouver Island. As many eccentric characters as live in three Pines, but Fradkin’s Amanda Doucette novels take us all across Canada.

The mystery is as complex as I have come to expect from a Fradkin novel. Just when you think you know what’s going on, a new twist arises that you realize has been foreshadowed all along, tucked almost invisibly between the  local scenery and First Nations lore.

There’s a moment where Amanda blurts out something that she would be better keeping quiet about, and it’s unmotivated, or at least unexplained, what changed her tactic of keeping quiet to suddenly blowing her cover. At one point there's a scene that might be seen as white savior-ism, but otherwise the book is respectful of the area’s First Nations people and the natural environment they protect against the double onslaught of tourism and industry.

Themes include PTSD, art as therapy, police handling of mental illness, tourism in wilderness areas, Vietnam era draft dodgers and deserters who set up communes on Vancouver Island and smaller area islands during and after the Summer of Love.

Side note: there's often confusion about what constitutes a trained service dog versus an emotional support dog, so you may be a bit confused by how Amanda's dog acts and interacts. For greater clarity, check out this link from the American Kennel Association or this one pertaining to Canada

 

A bit of local knowledge if you're planning to visit: anybody flying from Vancouver to reach the West shore of Vancouver Island would not book Vancouver to Victoria and then drive. Booking Vancouver to Nanaimo cuts 3+ hours off the drive and uncounted time hanging around waiting rooms in airports. Better still, for not much more money & a LOT faster trip, check for a regional float plane service straight over to Tofino. There are frequent options for much of the year, and private charter flights available as well. 

#VancouverIsland #Tofino #LongBeach #hippies #draftdodger #CrimeFiction #BarbaraFradkin #DundurnPress #mystery #murder #art #artist #survivalist #VietnamWar #emotionalsupportdog #kayaking #hiking #Ahousaht #Nuuchahnulth 

 

See this reviewer's other writings via http://jaynebarnard.ca/

 

Asian Space Opera on a galactic scale

The Red Scholar's Wake 

by Aliette de Bodard

The writing is lyrical. The character in a terrible fix. That much the opening makes clear but if you are not already familiar with this space based, Asian history-based, complex cultural hierarchy on a pirate ship in alliance with other pirate fleets (to use an English-language approximate synonym for ‘banner’) you may feel lost for a page or two.

Fortunately, this author quickly brings the wider, stranger universe down to a more easily contextualized contest of wills. If one  will belongs to a human tinkerer and the other to a mostly projected ship’s avatar, well, that’s just the way things work here.

The ship’s technology is fascinating, shifts of shade and image and motion, yet for all that it is grand and complicated, there are still human scale people and issues for our heroine Xich Si to deal with. She has to make a fast and terrible choice, with lifelong consequences for her only child, and for herself.

What makes this interesting particularly is that the ship is also making a fast and terrible choice, with lifelong consequences for itself.

I was immediately hooked by the complexity of the world and the language, although the shifting forms of address - respect and familiarity and affection  - require some adjustment for readers like me, raised in western cultures where family hierarchies and relationships are immutably defined by the blood, marriage, or adoptive tie.

The fusing of Asian and North American speculative fiction styles and directions/influences/objectives is not always an easy one but here it works. This is space opera in the truest sense of both space and opera: a 3D backdrop encompassing galaxies, on which is staged a libretto roiling with human passion and pain. In the hands of this adept novelist the vast blend includes deep insight into the core of a very human (albeit technologically enhanced) protagonist.

I was entranced from the earliest pages but given my lack of familiarity with Vietnamese culture and history, there are undoubtedly layers and subtleties that I missed. This is a book I would like to come back to with more cultural knowledge to enhance my experience.

Highly recommended. 

 

#Netgalley #Asian #SFF #SpeculativeFiction #SpecFic #SpaceOpera #Pirates #hostage #LGBTQ #RedScholarsWake #AlietteDeBodard

Egypt’s golden couple

Egypt’s golden couple: 

How Akhenaten and Nefertiti Became Gods on Earth

by John and Colleen Darnell

To anyone who watches modern politics in Canada, the prologue of this book is very familiar. Recent prime ministers’ marriages are constantly either upheld as models of solid political and personal commitment or rumoured to be extremely dysfunctional. Either on the verge of falling apart or secretly already separated. Their every public glance or gesture is picked apart by bloggers, newspaper opinion pieces and the Twitterverse. So when you read that Akhenaten is either the perfect father or an incestuous pedophile, either a prophet of monotheism or a totalitarian ruler who cast off all checks to his power, the public parallels are obvious. Akhenaten and his Chief Wife Nefertiti were a celebrity power couple.

 

Nowadays we have many written records from people close to our leaders and their spouses, and some sort of truth will eventually get into the history books. But for Akhenaten and Nefertiti, truth is elusive. After 3500 years, all that’s left is rumor... and whatever can be reasonably inferred from the public monuments and occasional private artifacts that are left behind. Akhenaton has been called “heretic, false profit, and incestuous tyrant by some, a loving, compassionate, peaceful precursor to Moses and Jesus by others.” Nefertiti is hardly ever seen as anything but the beautiful iconic image that lives in the popular imagination, a voiceless adjunct to her powerful husband.

Seemingly everyone from Freud to modern philosophers has had a crack at the royal relationship and its impact on the society, economics, and development of Egypt. What is known for sure is that they were so hated by the powers that came after - revivals of the priestly cults they had deposed - that their new Royal city was flattened, and his name defaced on monuments across Egypt. It was a deliberate attempt to erase his reign from the official record. 

 

Did he succeed in changing Egypt forever? Does it matter? The fact that we're still talking about him, and her, 3500 years later means their detractors ultimately failed to, in current parlance, cancel them.

Diving into the meat of the book, we're introduced to their milieu via a host of begats and easy-to-imbibe anecdotes about life in ancient Egypt, such as that Egyptian youngsters sucked on their index finger rather than their thumb; the image became a defining aspect of the hieroglyph for child. Amid the speedy recounting of who fathered whom, the book brings to resonant life some Egyptian ceremonials and festivals. There are also vignettes of imagined conversations between early Egyptians, allowing us insight into technical issues such as how to decipher hieroglyphics. If you've ever wondered, they can go left to right or right to left, in vertical columns or horizontal lines. So figuring out where to start is essential. That alone makes the successes of early Egyptologists in translating carved and painted texts even more astonishing.

 

Readers of the Amelia Peabody series, will recognize the names YUYA and TUYA, the husband-and-wife mummies. Their tomb was actually found in 1905, and thus we know more about the parents of the great queen TIYE than we do about her. How did the daughter of a prominent but not royal family marry into the royal household, and become the king’s great wife, and eventually a goddess? 

 

Clearly upward marital mobility is not solely a social media phenomenon.

The book presents some evidence about the background of Nefertiti too. Unlike Tiye, her parents get no prominent tombs or other recording on surviving temple walls. It’s hypothesized that her father was the court official AY and his wife Tiy, identified as “chief nurse of the great king’s wife“ may have been her stepmother. There is some DNA evidence showing that Nefertiti was Akhenaten’s first cousin on both sides of her parentage. It's probable the two knew each other. But their journey from childhood cohabitation in sprawling palace complexes to a revered and reviled power couple remains lost to the desert sands. 

 

The book is eminently readable for anyone interested in armchair archaeology, making the topic accessible without much scholarly detail.

Authors John and Colleen Darnell, credited jointly and separately with several other titles relating to Egyptian history, have an entertaining social media presence that charms some and offends others. 

Follow these Vintage Egyptologists on Instagram 

For more on the book and the authors, see https://us.macmillan.com/tours/john-and-colleen-darnell-egypts-golden-couple/

#Netgalley #Egyptology #VintageEgyptology #Nefertiti #Akhenaten #Egypt #history #marriage #PowerCouple #celebs

 

 

THE WHITE HARE: Cornish mysticism meets post-war pragmatism

THE WHITE HARE is a moving, powerful tale of love, loss, betrayal, treasure, and ultimately joy.

The novel opens on a textured, vivid, atmospheric beach scene. The rich language draws the mind's eye from the macro--literally the birdseye view--down to the micro: sand flies buzzing over the seaweed and the small gray green crab that skittles out of a rock pool. This opening is beautiful and terrible and immersive, and would almost certainly be so even without the body marking time by the withdrawal of the tide, baring its' frail limbs to the rising sun.

The language is often lyrical, never stalling the story’s forward motion, with secrets small and large advancing and receding in a dance worthy of the Grand Dame of 1950s women's suspense. That Mila is reading--or trying to, when the book doesn’t wander off between night and dawn--the famous Cornish novel ‘Jamaica Inn,’ is an overt homage to Dame Daphne DuMaurier as well as to the tangible and mystical mists that seep around Cornish moors and tors.

 

 Rooted in postwar Britain’s social and familial turmoil, The White Hare follows Mila, her daughter, and her mother as they reckon with rebuilding their shattered lives in a near-derelict seaside home at White Cove, whose long-habituated ghosts embrace the torments carried in each woman’s inner baggage. Items wander room to room, the child sees deeper than she should, and soon the very roof that shelters them seems almost as menacing as the wild winds and shadowy, ancient hollow ways that course and cut their isolated valley.

The valley's neighbours mutter of curses and avert their eyes, all but a pair of women in a vine-laden cottage who would surely be labeled witches in any other era. And then there is the mysterious handyman, appearing and vanishing like an unquiet spirit.

As matters long buried surge to the surface during a torrential New Years' Eve, will they all live to see the dawn? And will sunlight disinfect the old sins or release yet greater evil upon the women of White Cove?

If Daphne DuMaurier set out to write an early Mary Stewart romantic suspense novel with guidance from Celtic goddesses and saints, the result would be this spellbinding and suspenseful tale whose textured language flows like foam on the tide and illuminates great truths like moonlight through gossamer mists.

Highly Recommended

#Netgalley #TheWhiteHare JaneJohnson #Cornwall #Penzance #Mousehole #novel #family #secrets #seashore #well #legend #spirituality #Ostara #PreChristian #Celtic #murder #relationships #confrontation #truth #power

 

HER DEADLY MISCHIEF by Beverle Graves Myers

In this historical mystery series' 5th novel, set in 1742, the celebrated castrato Tito Amato is back home in Venice, on stage, in full-throated triumph over his rival Emilio, when a much-feted courtesan is stabbed in an opera box and flung down to the floor of the Teatro San Marco. Despite a whole theatre filled with possible witnesses including the city's new chief investigator, the killer eludes suspicion and capture while Tito untangles the threads of the dead Zulietta's conquests, her other relationships, and her childhood in Venice's ancient and rigidly controlled Jewish Ghetto. 

I laughed, I wept, I held my breath.

Tito Amato is musically gifted, sharp-witted, and engagingly human, always well-meaning but sometimes jealous or self-doubting or angrily impulsive. The supporting characters who have been with him since the first book are like my own family by now, and the new ones introduced for this novel are well-drawn, easily distinguishable and memorable long after the book ends. There's a fascinating scene or two in a glass-blowing factory and a solid look at the complex layered society in Baroque Venice.

This is my second time through this book, first time by audiobook, and while the series has always enchanted me, it's an even better experience now that I've learned so much about historical Venice myself for writing 'Timely Taffeta' (in which Maddie Hatter goes undercover in a fashion house famous for its jeweled Carnevale costumes) and can more fully envision every step Tito takes, every mood of the weather or the passersby or the frenetic gaiety of the great Piazza at the height of Carnevale. If I could, I'd commission a video game in which I follow Tito on his investigations through those fabled streets and canals, to the soundtrack of all the incredible music he sings through the series. 

These books are short but exquisite, so it's no hardship for any historical fiction fan to start from the first (Interrupted Aria, set in 1731) and continue on to get the full shape of not only the theatrical era in one of Europe's most fascinating cities but Tito's amazing and sometimes very sad life, his fortune at finding love when he had thought it out of reach, and his compassion for the frailty of humanity including his own.

The Tito Amato Mysteries

by Beverle Graves Myers

https://www.goodreads.com/series/41383-tito-amato

#mystery #histfic #Venice #histmyst #TitoAmato #BeverleGravesMyers #amreading #amlistening #bookreview #Italy #1700s #Baroque #music #opera #aria #castrato #Murano #glassblowers