Tag: murder mystery

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Blood for Blood | Book Review

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Ziba MacKenzie is a criminal profiler who consults with Scotland Yard. On her way to dinner one night, the train she’s riding collides with a derailed tanker car, killing more than a dozen and wounding several hundred. Though injured herself, Ziba comforts a dying woman who with her last breath whispers an enigmatic confession: “He did it.” Who did it? What did he do? And why? are the questions Ziba asks herself. But these questions get pushed to the side as Scotland Yard requests her services to help them catch the London Lacerator, a serial killer who’s started murdering again … Continue reading Blood for Blood | Book Review

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Dark Sacred Night | Book Review

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Michael Connelly’s Dark Sacred Night picks up where his two previous novels, The Late Show and Two Kinds of Truth, left off. Renée Ballard continues to work the late shift for Los Angeles Police Department’s Hollywood Division. Harry Bosch continues to work cold cases for the San Fernando Police Department. They meet by happenstance when Ballard finds Bosch snooping through Hollywood’s case files in search of information about the murder of Daisy Clayton, whose mother, Elizabeth, Bosch rescued at the end of Two Kinds of Truth. They strike a bargain and investigate the case together. Along the way, Ballard and Bosch investigate … Continue reading Dark Sacred Night | Book Review

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A Debt of Death | Book Review

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A Debt of Death begins with Adam Lapid looking at his friend’s body in a Tel Aviv gutter. A friend who helped him survive Auschwitz. A friend whom he worries he might’ve gotten killed. This is the fourth installment in Jonathan Dunsky’s series featuring Israeli private investigator Adam Lapid. Almost no one escapes suspicion in this hardboiled tale mixing love, obligation, hope, despair, counterfeiting, the black market, and murder. And just when you think Lapid has collared the perpetrator, he reveals a new layer to the mystery. To my mind, this is the best of the Adam Lapid mysteries published so … Continue reading A Debt of Death | Book Review

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The Auschwitz Violinist | Book Review

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When a man greets Adam Lapid on the streets of Tel Aviv, Lapid recognizes him as a fellow prisoner at Auschwitz named Yosef Kaplon. A few days later, Kaplon slits his wrists and a friend asks Lapid to figure out why. His investigation opens a window on Holocaust survivors, collaboration, and vengeance. Before the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial, many Israelis poorly understood the experience of European Jews who had survived the Shoah, and the survivors rarely spoke about their experiences. Some Israelis—sabras, “natives”—felt that European Jews had been too weak and compliant in the face of oppression. The “new Zionist … Continue reading The Auschwitz Violinist | Book Review

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The Dead Sister | Book Review

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“I knew he was an Arab the moment I saw him.” With these words, Jonathan Dunsky opens The Dead Sister, the second in a series of mysteries featuring Adam Lapid. They are pregnant with meaning, given that the story takes place in Tel Aviv in October 1949. On May 14, 1948, Israel had declared independence. The next day, five Arab nations declared war on Israel, vowing to fight with and on behalf of Palestinian Arabs in order to erase the Jewish state. A U.N.-sponsored armistice ended the war on March 10, 1949. In the aftermath of the war, approximately 700,000 … Continue reading The Dead Sister | Book Review

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Ten Years Gone | Book Review

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Ten Years Gone brings together three things I love: Israel, mystery, and sequels. It is the first of four novels by Jonathan Dunsky featuring Adam Lapid, a private detective in post-Independence Tel Aviv. (By first, I mean that the events it narrates come first in the series. It was actually written third.) Having completed it, I’m already on to the next novel, The Dead Sister. Lapid was a Jewish police detective in Hungary before World War II. His wife and children didn’t survive Auschwitz, but he did. After the Allies liberated Buchenwald, he stayed in Europe for a time, hunting … Continue reading Ten Years Gone | Book Review

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Review of ‘Vertigo 42: A Richard Jury Mystery’ by Martha Grimes

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Martha Grimes, Vertigo 42: A Richard Jury Mystery (New York: Scribner, 2014). Hardcover | Paperback | Kindle Vertigo 42 is the twenty-third mystery novel Martha Grimes has written, and like the others, it is named after an English pub or bar, this one high atop a skyscraper in downtown London where the action begins. And like the others, Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury sleuths the mystery with help from his friend, Melrose Plant (the former Lord Ardry); his sergeant, Alfred Wiggins; and the cast of characters (in every sense of the term) from Long Piddleton. The mystery in this case … Continue reading Review of ‘Vertigo 42: A Richard Jury Mystery’ by Martha Grimes