Boundary Waters: William Kent Krueger

Boundary Waters is the 2nd book in the Cork O'Connor series. I bought this book as soon as I finished Iron Lake, the first book in the series. Not only did I want to know more about what happens with Cork O'Connor, but the writing was very good. And I was not disappointed. This book was different and just as good.

This is the description at the author's web site:

The Quetico-Superior Wilderness: more than two million acres of forest, white-water rapids, and uncharted islands on the Canadian/American border. Somewhere in the heart of this unforgiving territory, a young woman named Shiloh—a country-western singer at the height of her fame—has disappeared.

Her father arrives in Aurora, Minnesota, to hire Cork O’Connor to find his daughter. Cork joins a search party that includes an ex-con, two FBI agents, and a ten-year-old boy. Others are on Shiloh’s trail as well—men hired not just to find her, but to kill her.

This book is a thriller with excellent pacing, more like an adventure story than a mystery. Of course there is the mystery of who is trying to find Shiloh and kill her, and which of the people seeking her are truly trying to help. There are multiple groups interested in finding her.

I praised the first book for the characterizations, and that is true in this book also, although the most fully defined characters are Cork and his family members. While Cork is on the trail, his family is back at home in this one, but is still featured. Another great character is the young Anishinaabe boy, Louis Two-Knives, the only one who can lead them to the cabin Shiloh was staying in.

Cork's estranged wife plays a part in this story, once she is aware that the rescue mission and its members may not be all that it seems. She knows that at least one member of the team is a traitor but cannot communicate with the team. The chapters alternate between Shiloh's struggles as she tries to return to civilization, Cork's adventures, and Cork's wife's activities in Aurora.

The physical setting of northern Minnesota and the exploration of the Anishinaabe culture is a bonus. In this book, Krueger focuses on the Anishinaabe storytelling tradition.

One thing I noticed while reading Boundary Waters was a prevalence of violence (more than in Iron Lake, and that story was not tame). The opening scene was somewhat shocking (although no explicit violence there). Overall, it did not bother me and I felt like it fit the context of the story, but I did wonder if the rest of the series was like this. William Kent Krueger answers that question in a blog post from 2009. (Boundary Waters was published in 1999 and Krueger had published nine books in the series by that time.)  Per the author, only two other books in the series (to that point) were as violent as this one. So I take that to mean that there is good variation within the series, in that area and others.


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Publisher:  Atria Books, 2009, orig. pub. 1999.
Length:    402 pages
Format:    Trade Paperback
Series:     Cork O'Connor #2
Setting:    Minnesota
Genre:     Mystery
Source:    On my TBR since December 2019.

The Saint Valentine's Day Murders: Ruth Dudley Edwards

This is book 2 in the Robert Amiss series, following on Corridors of Death, which I read and reviewed earlier. The first two books in the series feature office settings, and focus on bureaucracy and office politics. We often complain about bureaucracy in the business world, but I have never experienced anything like these workplaces.

Robert Amiss is a British civil servant and has recently been transferred to the British Conservation Corporation. He had been expecting a secondment to a job in industry, and a position that would lead to a better position in the civil service in the future. What he gets is a job pushing papers and managing men who are more disgruntled than he is.

Based on the title of the book, the reader is expecting murders on Valentine's Day, but it takes quite a while to get to that point. And the characters and the interactions within the office setting are so innocuous that it is surprising when crimes do occur. There are some practical jokers in Robert's department, and the pranks initially seem harmless but gradually escalate. But, when the murders do take place, they are quite horrendous. Not so much in the way of violence, but because so many innocent victims are claimed.

And at that point the pace does pick up. Once Robert has been cleared of any connection to the murders, he again works closely with the police to try to uncover the villain. In the first book in the series, Amiss met Jim Milton, a Scotland Yard detective, and his wife, so they are already friends when this crime takes place. And Ellis Pooley, the young detective who is obsessed with fictional sleuths, makes his debut here.

My thoughts:

Initially I was disappointed with this book, because I had enjoyed the first book in the series tremendously. I rarely have any problem with the crime being delayed until later in the story yet in this case the initial part of the story dragged for me.

The author tells a humorous story with excellent dialog, and the recurring characters are well done, but in this second book I did not enjoy the secondary characters as much.  Nevertheless, I am still enthusiastic about the series, and I will continue reading these books.

Praise for this book:

"The Saint Valentine’s Day Murders is a witty, well-written mystery as well as a keenly observed and cynically funny view of modern bureaucracy and the people who work in it."
  --  Michael Foley, Irish Times

Kirkus Reviews was somewhat disappointed with the plot, as I was, but still said:
"a wry, smart, surprisingly warm-hearted diversion--with one choice vignette after another (even the subsidiary cops are amusingly sketched) and some of the best office-life comedy since Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise."

Also see reviews at Jillysheep and RogerBW's Blog.


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Publisher:  Poisoned Pen Press, 2007. (orig. publ. 1984)
Length:  225 pages
Format:  Trade Paperback
Series:   Robert Amiss #2
Setting:  London, UK
Genre:   Mystery
Source:  On my TBR pile for one year.

Death Lives Next Door: Gwendoline Butler

Death Lives Next Door is the sixth novel in the John Coffin series by Gwendoline Butler. The 34 books in the series were published from 1956 to 2002. In this book, published in 1960, Coffin is a Divisional Detective Inspector in South London. So, in a sense, this is a police procedural.

Dr. Marion Manning is a well-known and respected professor at Oxford University. She has a watcher who follows her around and watches her house, yet she is reluctant to complain to the police about it. (Now he would be called a stalker I am sure, although initially people in the neighborhood were afraid that they would all be watched, and the focus was not immediately on Marion.)

The story starts with Ezra Barton, on his way to see Marion, and thinking about whether he likes his life as a perpetual student. Marion has been his mentor since he came to Oxford and is not in any hurry for him to leave. On the other hand, his girlfriend is pushing him to move on and make something of himself. Since Ezra is 35, that seems reasonable, but he likes his life fine as it is. This is an important thread in the plot, but the story really centers around Marion, her neighborhood, her relationships, and her mysterious past.

In this book of about 250 pages, the crime does not take place until page 100 and Inspector Coffin does not show up until even later. He comes to Oxford for an unrelated missing person case. So you can see that not much of this novel is a standard police procedural.

My Thoughts:

Why did I read this book at this time? Partly because I acquired the book nearly 15 years ago. At that time, I had read about the author and I like police procedurals and I wanted to try the series. Then I just let the book sit. But another reason is that I have another book from the same series, set in Malta and published in 1964, and I want to read that one soon too.

This is a strange mystery, with an emphasis on personal relationships, but I enjoyed it and liked the writing style. Because it is unusual, I don't know if I will like later books in the series, but I will read the one I have and look for more.  I am sure the series changes over the years since it was published over four decades.

Readers who like the crime to happen early on in a book may not be pleased with the crime occurring later in the book. I liked the first portion of the book best, leading up to the death of one of the characters. Other reviewers did not like that section of the book and preferred the later portions of the book, as the crime is investigated and Coffin shows up.

In the first four books, Coffin is only a background character, and another detective, William Winter, is the protagonist. This novel was published in the U.S. as Dine and Be Dead. Actually neither title makes much sense to me in the context of the book, but that is not unusual.

Has anyone else had any experience reading this author? She also wrote under the pseudonym Jennie Melville.


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Publisher:  Worldwide, 1994 (orig. pub. 1960).
Length:    253 pages
Format:    Paperback
Series:     John Coffin #6
Setting:    Oxford, England
Genre:     Mystery / Police Procedural
Source:    On my TBR pile since 2005.

The Last Defector: Tony Cape

I read Tony Cape's first book featuring Derek Smailes, The Cambridge Theorum,  almost exactly eight years ago, right before I started blogging. I liked it a lot and I was grateful that Felony and Mayhem had published a new edition of that book.

In the first book, Derek Smailes is a detective sergeant in Cambridge. He investigates the suicide of a student at the university who was researching the possibility of a fifth Cambridge spy. That book begins as a police procedural and morphs into spy fiction. Set in the 1980s, it was first published in 1989.

In the follow-up to that first novel, Derek has been offered a position in MI-5, and has decided to accept it because he will be sent to New York for his first assignment. He has always had an interest in the US and its culture and he is delighted to be able to experience it directly. He has a junior position as a security officer at the British Mission to the UN. The story is set when the Cold War is coming to an end and disarmament talks are going on (late 1980s).

Based on a recording recovered from a listening device, Derek's superiors plan to try to convince a Soviet citizen also working at the UN to defect and provide information on disarmament plans in Russia. They decide to use Derek as the contact point for the mission, and allow him to plan the approach. The setup of the scheme to soften up the Russian for defection is complex and intriguing. A secondary plot in The Last Defector takes place in the Soviet Union, and follows a conspiracy to take over the government due to dissatisfaction with the current leader.

Initially the planned defection goes well, but as things start to fall apart, Derek ends up suspecting just about everyone he is working with of treachery, even the woman he wants to marry. He is a more realistic protagonist than some I have encountered in spy fiction. He is eager to take on a challenging assignment that could give his career a quick shot in the arm, but has doubts about his abilities and whether he and his group are doing the right thing.

I found this second book in the Derek Smailes series to be a worthy successor to the first. The plot was complex but not confusing. There were a lot of characters to keep track of, but that wasn't a problem either. The people he works with are well developed characters, with different personalities, but the officials back in Russia are more stereotypical. However, that seems to be true in many spy books I have read.

As with the first book, it was the development of the main character, Derek, and his new relationships in his job and with his ex-wife and daughter back in England, that made this book especially enjoyable to read. I like it when espionage stories explore the characters personal lives and motives, and I was happy that I made the effort to find a copy of the second book in this series.

This biographical information is available at Felony and Mayhem:

Tony Cape was born in Wales and grew up in Yorkshire before attending Cambridge University. After working as a journalist in Northern Ireland and England he moved to the United States in 1977 to join the Buddhist community of Tibetan meditation master Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche. In the 1990s, he published a series of spy novels featuring Derek Smailes, a former police detective turned counterintelligence officer. The first of these, The Cambridge Theorem, became a bestseller in Britain and Italy, and was re-released by Felony and Mayhem Press in 2006.

See my review of The Cambridge Theorem.


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Publisher:  Doubleday, 1991.
Length:      390 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Series:       Derek Smailes, #2
Setting:      New York City, US; UK
Genre:       Spy fiction
Source:      I purchased my copy in 2013.

A Kiss Before Dying: Ira Levin

I read this novel for the Classics Club Spin #22. Previously, I had avoided reading anything by Ira Levin because his books are mostly horror and very tense. But I am finding it easier to try new things in my reading. For me it was not a fun read, but it was rewarding.

The story starts with a young man and woman, both college students, discussing their future. She is pregnant, and she wants to get married immediately. He doesn't. That doesn't sound too unusual, but in this case the situation eventually leads to the young woman's death.

The young man in this story is a World War II veteran with dreams and ambitions, but he wants to take short cuts to get to his goal. He doesn't want to finish college and find a job and work his way up the ladder. He wants to marry a young woman who has lots of money. That becomes his goal in life and he will let nothing get in his way of getting what he wants.

That is all I want to say about the plot because it is best to come into this story knowing very little.

My thoughts:

I don't do well with psychological suspense. This book was very intense for me, and there was a point where I just wanted to stop reading it. But I persevered and shortly after that it got less tense and more interesting.

The story is divided into three sections and each has a different feel, or mood, even though the main character remains constant throughout. There is tension in each part of the story, but handled in a different way, and I admired the author's ability to do this. The story has a fantastic twist, and it happens midway through the book. It  took my breath away.

More about the book and the author:

In a New York Times review of A Kiss Before Dying, Anthony Boucher wrote that “Levin combines great talent for pure novel writing -- full-bodied characterization, subtle psychological exploration, vivid evocation of locale -- with strict technical whodunit tricks as dazzling as anything ever brought off by Carr, Rawson, Queen or Christie.”

The New Yorker said:
"A remarkably constructed story depicting an inconceivably vicious character in episodes of thrilling horror."

A Kiss Before Dying has been adapted for the screen twice. The 1956 adaptation starred Robert Wagner, Virginia Leith, Joanne Woodward, and Mary Astor. The second adaptation was produced in 1991 and starred Matt Dillon, Sean Young, Diane Ladd, and Max von Sydow. I haven't seen either of the films but I understand that the 1956 film adhered closer to the plot in the book.

Ira Levin wrote a total of seven novels. Among them were: Rosemary's Baby (1967), The Stepford Wives (1972), and The Boys from Brazil (1976)... all of those also had film adaptations. He also wrote plays, several of which had film adaptations.

These reviews have more details about the plot:

• At Mysteries Ahoy!
• At Existential Ennui

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Publisher:  Pegasus Books, 2011 (orig. publ. 1953)
Length:      265 pages
Format:      Trade Paperback
Setting:      USA
Genre:       Suspense / Inverted Mystery
Source:      I purchased my copy in June 2018.

More 2020 Reading Goals

I have decided to take part in a few more challenges and put them all in one post.

Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2020
Hosted by My Reader's Block
January 2020 kicks off the ninth year for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

I have participated before but it has been a few years and I need some motivation to focus on the TBR books I own, rather than getting books from other sources.

A few of the rules:
*Books must be owned by you prior to January 1, 2020. Items requested or ordered prior to January 1, may count even if they arrive in the new year. Audio books and E-books may count assuming you own them.
*A blog and reviews are not necessary to participate.

There are challenge levels. I am going for Mt. Ararat: Read 48 books from your TBR pile/s.




Japanese Literature Challenge 13
Hosted by Dolce Bellezza

The guidelines are simple:

The Challenge only lasts for thee months.
It runs from January 1, 2020 through March 31, 2020.
Read and review one or more books which have originally been written in Japanese.
There is a separate review site for the Japanese Literature Challenge 13 to add links to reviews.

I will read: The Thief by Fuminori Nakamura.
I also have books by Seichō Matsumoto  and Keigo Higashino.

2020 Victorian Reading Challenge
Host: Becky's Book Reviews
Duration: January - December 2020
Goal: Read between 4 to 6 Books (4 minimum)

There are two options:  the basic challenge (quarterly) or the advanced challenge (themed months). This is described in more detail here.
All books must fall into the "Victorian" category being either a) books originally published between 1837 and 1901 b) books originally written (but not published) between 1837 and 1901 c) general nonfiction about the Victorian era (the times, the culture, the people, the events) d) biographies of Victorians.

MY GOAL:  4 books

2020 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge
Hosted by Passages to the Past

Any sub-genre of historical fiction is accepted (Historical Romance, Historical Mystery, Historical Fantasy, Young Adult, History/Non-Fiction, etc.)

Each month, a new post dedicated to the HF Challenge will be created to share links to reviews. However, you don't have to have a blog to participate.

Duration: January - December 2020

You can pick different reading levels, from 2 books to 50+ books.
I choose the Victorian Reader level = 5 books. I will probably read more.

Mount TBR Challenge Check-in: 2nd Quarter

In the first quarter of 2015, I read 20 books from my TBR shelves, stacks, and boxes. I was pretty happy with that. In April, May, and June, I have only read 8 books that count toward the 2015 Mount TBR Reading Challenge.

My goal for the year is 48 books -- Mt. Ararat. So I am now at 58.33% of my goal. I will have to pay more attention to my reading choices in the next two quarters. The challenge is run by Bev at My Reader's Block. 

For this quarter's check-in, Bev asked us to write about one of three topics. This is the one I chose:

B. Tell us about a book on the list that was new to you in some way--new author, about a place you've never been, a genre you don't usually read...etc.

The most unusual book in my list of TBR books this quarter was White Heat by M. J. McGrath. The setting is what makes it unique. The story is set on Ellesmere Island, a location in Canada that I did not know existed. Ellesmere Island is considered part of the Queen Elizabeth Islands. The protagonist is Edie Kiglatuk, half-Inuit and a hunting guide and school teacher. In the first few chapters, I was put off a lot by the descriptions of the food (igunaq, fermented walrus gut; seal- blood soup; fried blubber). By the end of the book, I was getting used to that.

Mount TBR Challenge: First Quarter 2015

This quarter I have read 20 books that count toward the 2015 Mount TBR Reading Challenge. My goal for the year is 48 books -- Mt. Ararat. So I am at 41.66% of my goal. The challenge is run by Bev at My Reader's Block. Bev hosts several challenges, and she reads and reviews a lot of mysteries, my favorite genre.

I did so well in this area in the first three months of the year because I also was participating in  the Double Dog Dare TBR Challenge hosted at James Reads Books. The goal in that challenge was to read only from the TBR pile in January, February, and March. 

Bev requests that we complete ONE or more of the following:

 A. Post a picture of your favorite cover so far.

 B. Who has been your favorite character so far? And tell us why, if you like.

 C. Have any of the books you read surprised you--if so, in what way (not as good as anticipated? unexpected ending? Best thing you've read ever? Etc.)

 D. Which book (read so far) has been on your TBR mountain the longest? Was it worth the wait? Or is it possible you should have tackled it back when you first put it on the pile? Or tossed it off the edge without reading it all?

My favorite cover: Villain by Shuichi Yoshida.

The book that surprised me most was The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe. The novel is a serial killer thriller and that is not my favorite type of mystery. Yet I found the story compelling. The protagonist, Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef, is a wonderful character and I look forward to reading the next in this series, which is also on my TBR pile.

Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2015 (4th Year)

This is the fourth year I will be participating in the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted by Bev at My Reader's Block. I have been working on the challenge in spirit since January 1st  but today I join in officially.

My goal this year will be  Mt. Ararat: 48 books. As I look back at the last three years, my total of books read from my TBR piles, boxes, shelves is always around 50, so 48 is fairly safe. I usually read around 100 books a year, so I don't know why my count of TBR books is only about half of that. This year I plan to pay closer attention to that.

I am always complaining about my TBR piles but really the problem is that I keep buying books. How can I resist, when I see other bloggers' recommendations for books and authors that I had missed before of maybe just forgotten about?

You can check out the rules at this post. The goals start at 12 books and go up to 150+ books. Bev is allowing re-reads to count this year, but only under certain conditions.

I have already made a good start on the TBR piles, because I am reading only from my TBR piles in January - March 2015 for the TBR Double Dog Dare Challenge at James Reads Books. The only exceptions have been two ARCs from NetGalley and there will be one or two more of those.