Bookshelf Traveling For Insane Times No. 20

I am participating in the Bookshelf Traveling For Insane Times meme. It was originated by Judith at Reader in the Wilderness, but Katrina at Pining for the West is now gathering the blogposts.

So now I have some new photos of bookshelves to share, and I will start with this one...

If you right click on the image of the shelf, and open the link in a new tab, you will be able to read more of the titles.

On the left side are six hardcover books. Except for Field Gray by Philip Kerr, those are all newly acquired books that I want to read soonish. 

Escape Velocity is the second book by Susan Wolfe. Her first book was The Last Billable Hour, published in 1989. Howard Rickover is an inexperienced lawyer who works for a Silicon Valley law firm filled with sleazy and / or very ambitious lawyers, Tweedmore and Slyde. He has only been there for a few months when one of the founders, Leo Slyde, is killed.  I enjoyed that book a lot and wished there were more by the same author. However, it wasn't until 2016 that the author published her second novel, Escape Velocity.

Two reviews for Escape Velocity are at Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan and at Clothes in Books.

To the right of those books is a stack of more of my Soho Crime books. The top book on that stack is Murder in the Off Season by Francine Mathews. It is set on the island of Nantucket. That book was originally published in 1994, but substantially revised before republication in 2016. I had not heard of an author taking that approach before. Read about that book at Reader in the Wilderness and at Caroline Bookbinder.

Further on the right are three books by J. Robert Janes, a Canadian author. The books are Mannequin, Sandman, and Stonekiller. The series is set in Occupied France, in 1942 and 1943. It is the story of two men who are on opposite sides but must work together. Gestapo Haupsturmführer Hermann Kohler and  his partner, Sûreté Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr have been thrown together by circumstances to investigate crimes.  They have developed a trusting relationship, but know that due to the realities of war, it will probably not end well. One side or the other will be the victor, and then where will their loyalties lie?

I have read the first four books in the series. See my reviews for Kaleidoscope and Salamander. And at Kirkus, see J. Kingston Pierce's interview with J. Robert Janes from 2012.

On the shelf above those books, you can see Tourist Season by Carl Hiaasen and The Dive from Claussen's Pier by Ann Packer. I have had both of those books for years and years. So long that I don't have a record of when I got them or where. And also two books about tap dancing. I love tap dancing in films and have at least a couple of other books related to that subject.

Have you read any of these books? What is your opinion?

Reading summary, December 2018

I had another very good reading month in December. I enjoyed all the books I read, although some were more challenging than others. I finished up the year with 112 books, many more than I expected to read.

Classic Fiction in December

A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens

This was a wonderful read. Not only is the book a pleasant and humorous read, while giving us a beautiful story of redemption and finding new happiness, it also shows us today what life was like in the 1800's. See more on the book here.

Crime Fiction in December

Saturday the Rabbi Went Hungry (1966) by Harry Kemelman

This is #2 in the Rabbi Small series and a re-read for me. I read the early books in the series back in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember liking them a lot. Today, the attitudes and behaviors in the book are surprising to me, but this is a good picture of those times. And a great way to learn more about the Jewish religion and laws. I will be reading more of them.

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (1992) by Peter Høeg

A very young boy that Smilla has befriended is dead as the result of a fall off a building. The death is almost immediately declared to be accidental, but Smilla disagrees and pushes for an investigation. This was also a re-read and I appreciated it even more the second time. For my summary and thoughts, check here.

At Ease with the Dead (1990) by Walter Satterthwait

Joshua Croft is a Santa Fe private investigator working for the Mondragón Agency, owned by Rita Mondragón. He is hired by a Navajo man to find and return the remains of a Navajo leader who died 100 years earlier. He heads to El Paso, Texas, where the investigation stirs up a lot of trouble. This is the second in a series of five books. I love the books for the combination of a serious mystery with humor and local history.

Salamander (1994) by J. Robert Janes

This is #4 in the St-Cyr & Kohler series. Set in the days leading up to Christmas 1942, in Occupied France. For more on this book, see this post.

Corridors of Death (1981) by Ruth Dudley Edwards

This is the first book in a series of 12 books about Robert Amiss, a low level member of the British civil service. In this book, his boss, a devious and despicable man, is killed during a meeting of many government officials and businessmen.  Amiss offers to help the police inspector in charge of the murder case with some background on how the civil service works and provide his insider knowledge. The mystery is secondary to the humor and the picture of the civil service and government at the time. Another very good read.

A Time to Kill (1989) by John Grisham

I have watched the film based on this book several times, but I resisted reading the book for many years due to the length and the subject matter. This is a story of revenge, about a black man who kills two white men to avenge the rape of his ten-year-old daughter, and is tried for that crime in a small town in Mississippi. It is not an easy read, but I was very impressed with the book, especially since it was Grisham's first novel.

Six Degrees of Separation from Memoirs of a Geisha to Blue Lightning

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six other books, forming a chain. Every month she provides the title of a book as the starting point.

It is not a requirement that the books be ones I have read, but this month I have read all of the books in my chain.

The starting point this month is Arthur Golden’s bestseller, Memoirs of a Geisha. I have not read the book, and I will be interested to read what others have to say about this book, as there was controversy surrounding its publication.

Moving on to my first link, I chose to go with another book set in Japan. The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino is a crime fiction novel first published in 2006 in Japan, then translated to English and published by Minotaur Books in 2011.

Yasuko Hanaoka is surprised when her abusive ex-husband Togashi shows up at her apartment. He wants money from her and threatens both her and her teenaged daughter Misato.Togashi ends up dead, strangled. Yasuko’s next door neighbor, Mr. Ishigami, offers to help them dispose of the body. Of course, once the body is discovered, the police consider Yasuko one of the suspects and life becomes very tense for Yasuko, her daughter, and her neighbor.
https://bitterteaandmystery.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-devotion-of-suspect-x-keigo.html

This book is an inverted mystery; the reader knows from the beginning who committed the murder. Thus the story focuses on how the murderer is discovered.

My next book in the chain is The Suspect by L. R. Wright, another inverted mystery. In this book the murder takes place at the beginning of the novel and we know who did it. At eighty, George Wilcox murders a man, and this story is as much about why the murder was committed as how.

This was the author's first mystery novel, and we are introduced to Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The novel is set in Sechelt, which is on the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia, Canada. It is character-driven, slowly develops the relationships of the main characters, and has a cozy feel. The Suspect won the 1986 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel of the year. It was the first Canadian novel to do so.

For my next choice, I link to another book by a Canadian author, but in this case the action occurs in France during World War II. Kaleidoscope by J. Robert Janes is set in Occupied France, in December of 1942. It is the story of two men who are on opposite sides but must work together. Gestapo Haupsturmführer Hermann Kohler and  his partner, Sûreté Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr have been thrown together by circumstances to investigate crimes.  They have developed a trusting relationship, but know that due to the realities of war, it will probably not end well. One side or the other will be the victor, and then where will their loyalties lie? This is the third book in a series of 16 books.

Another series that centers around World War II is the Bernie Gunther series by Philip Kerr. The series begins in 1936 in Berlin, and features plots that show Bernie's experiences before and after World War II. In The One from the Other, the fourth book, he is a private detective in post-war Germany who takes on some missing person cases with connections to ex-Nazis. Before the war he was a policeman. He had served in the military in both World War I and World War II.

Philip Kerr was a Scottish author who died in March 2018.

My next book is also by a Scottish author, Peter May.

The Blackhouse (and the other books in the trilogy featuring Fin Macleod) are set in the Outer Hebrides, an island chain off the west coast of mainland Scotland. The book is worth reading just for the setting.

Description from the dust jacket of my edition:

When a grisly murder occurs on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland's Outer Hebrides that bears the hallmarks of the work of a similar killer on the Scottish mainland, Edinburgh detective and native  islander  Fin Macleod is dispatched to investigate, embarking at the same time on a voyage into his own troubled past.

Next I move to the Shetland Islands, a subarctic archipelago of Scotland that lies northeast of Great Britain.

My favorite book in the Shetland series by Anne Cleeves so far is Blue Lightning, the fourth book in the series. DI Jimmy Perez has gone to Fair Isle with his fiancée to see his parents. A reception honoring the couple is held at the bird observatory on the island. The next day, Perez is called in because the leader of the institute has been murdered. Perez is on vacation, of course, but the island is socked in due to weather conditions and there is no one else to handle the situation. I liked the depiction of the birding community and the claustrophobic feel of not being able to get off the island or get help in.

So my journey in Six Degrees of Separation has taken me from Japan to Scotland, via Canada, France and Germany.

J is for J. Robert Janes

Kaleidoscope by J. Robert Janes is my submission for the Crime Fiction Alphabet at Mysteries in Paradise this week. Please visit the post at Mysteries in Paradise to check out other entries for the letter J.

Janes is a Canadian writer of crime fiction and children's books. Per MysteriousPress.com, publisher of his latest books:

J. Robert Janes (b. 1935) is a mystery author best known for writing historical thrillers. Born in Toronto, he holds degrees in mining and geology, and worked as an engineer, university professor, and textbook author before he began writing fiction. ... In 1992, Janes published Mayhem, the first in the long-running St-Cyr and Kohler series for which he is best known. These police procedurals set in Nazi-occupied France have been praised for the author’s attention to historical detail, as well as their swift-moving plots. Bellringer is the thirteenth in the series.

The Story

The  book is set in Occupied France, in December of 1942. It is the story of two men who are on opposite sides but must work together. Gestapo Haupsturmführer Hermann Kohler and  his partner, Sûreté Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr have been thrown together by circumstances to investigate crimes.  They have developed a trusting relationship, but know that due to the realities of war, it will probably not end well. One side or the other will be the victor, and then where will their loyalties lie?

The two detectives are sent from Paris to a small village in Provence to investigate the death of a woman who is still lying on the hillside when they arrive. She has been shot with an arrow from a crossbow, thus limiting the suspects to those who can shoot with that weapon accurately. The victim turns out to be Anne-Marie Buemondi, who lives in Cannes but has come to the area to visit her daughter, who has health problems. The plot gets complicated very quickly, with suspicions that the death is related in some way to the activities of the maquis, the French Resistance.

My Take

I enjoyed the book, but I was confused by the narrative and the jerkiness of the plot as I read at least the first half of the book. There were references to past events and other characters that I did not understand. It turns out that Jean-Louis is having trouble remembering the details of a traumatic event that occurred several years earlier, which explains the choppiness of the segments, but reading it was still confusing.

Having read the first two books in the series (several years ago), I had some knowledge of the background of the story, yet this did not help too much. The relationships the detectives have with others (family, superiors) are covered pretty sketchily in this book, compared to the previous two, to give more time to the story, which was fine with me but might seem strange if you haven't read any earlier books. This is not spy fiction, but in some ways it reads like spy fiction. With the French authorities working with the occupiers, there is always distrust and no one ever knows who is on what side.

I have read reviews by others who had similar concerns re the complexity of the plot and narrative, yet most seem to find the series rewarding. It has a lot to offer. If you read this series, I suggest starting with the first book, which does explain the setup. Hopping around to different books in the series after that may not make that much difference.

In summary, this is an interesting and informative book about a time in history that I keep coming back to in my mystery (and non-fiction) reading. I have four more in the series in my TBR stacks, and plan to keep reading through the series. I hope to read the next one soon in order to be able to make comparisons.

What Others Say:

Mayhem, the first book in the series, was featured at The Rap Sheet as a "Book You Have to Read." Here is is what Cara Black, author of the Aimée Leduc series set in modern-day Paris, France, says in that post:

It’s impossible to praise too highly the subtle ways in which author Janes shows the twisted times of World War II in Europe through the stories of his two policemen, both of whom are suffering in their private lives.

J. Kingston Pierce comments at The Rap Sheet on Salamander, the fourth book in the series:

Amazingly, those onetime enemies had not only been getting along since their first adventure in Mayhem (aka Mirage), published in 1992, but had become a rather crack team of crime solvers--often to the disgruntlement of their Gestapo superiors in Paris, who see them as far too independent. While war storms across the face of Europe, it’s up to St-Cyr and Kohler to solve the more everyday but nonetheless disturbing crimes--the assaults, the thefts, the occasional cross-bow killings. Misdeeds outside the scope of state-sanctioned battle.

Additional Tidbits:

Carousel, the second book in the series, is another complex story of three connected murders that St-Cyr and Kohler are charged with solving. I am including an image of the cover for the Soho edition. I like this style of Soho covers in general, and this one is particularly nice.

A fourteenth St-Cyr and Kohler Investigation, Tapestry, has just been published on June 4th, 2013. It and Bellringer are available as eBooks or in paperback.

Janes also recently published a non-series novel, The Hunting Ground, set in Europe in the years immediately after World War II.

This is my thirteenth and final book for the Canadian Book Challenge 6.