Erskine, Margaret

It's been years since I read any of the Margaret Erskine books I have; I had forgotten how interesting they are.  

Detective Inspector Septimus Finch is summoned from New Scotland Yard to investigate the brutal murder of rich, spoiled, narcissistic Lisa Harcourt, The Woman At Belguardo.   Although it looks as if her rejected boy toy did it, other suspects in the form of former lovers, an ex-husband and other people who had reason to hate her are plentiful, too.  Grade:  A.  

Something fishy is going on at No. 9 Belmont Square:  a famous opera tenor has arrived at the run down boarding house filled with elderly ladies in search of his long-lost love and the fabulous diamond she owned.  What he finds instead is at least one murder and possibly more.  It's up to Inspector Finch to sort it out before there are even more murders.  I found the plot of this one complicated and unlikely.  And note to authors:  please, please, PLEASE don't send young women out on dodgy errands to empty buildings on foggy evenings.  Grade:  C.  

I found the Case With Three Husbands convoluted and confusing.  I never did figure out all the complicated family relationships, and frankly didn't care.  Grade:  C.  

Inspector Finch has been temporarily seconded to a London suburb where crime tends to be of the white-collar, financial type rather than murder in Harriet Farewell, when a local resident is shot under the cover of a Guy Fawkes Night fireworks display.  The leading suspect if poor, mad Harriet Buckler, just out of a mental hospital where she has been since her son died in a car accident two years earlier.  Now she wanders the grounds of the family estate, gun in hand, and may have shot her blackmailing mother-in-law.  Grade:  A.  

Elkins, Charlotte and Aaron--Alix London books

 I had to give this series of books their own page just because I've enjoyed them so much.  

Alix London, daughter of disgraced art conservator and master forger Geoffrey London, is trying to pick of the pieces of her fledgling career in the Seattle art world after her father's trial and imprisonment for fraud in A Dangerous Talent.  She's been hired by nouveau riche art collector Chris LeMay to evaluate a painting alleged to be by Georgia O'Keefe that Chris is thinking of buying.  Alix and Chris fly to Santa Fe, but before they even get a good look at the painting someone has attempted to kill Alix and has succeeded in murdering the gallery owner.  If that's not enough, Alix has to deal with a snooty art dealer (or is he really?) and try to sort out her feelings about her father, who is out of prison and has now resurfaced in her life.   Caution:  this book moves along at a cracking pace, don't start reading it just before bedtime, you'll be up all night finishing it.  Ask me how I know this.  Grade:  A+

Now working as a consultant for the FBI's Art Fraud team, Alix is sent on A Cruise To Die For aboard the super-yacht of Greek multimillionaire Panos Papadakis to gather information about a Ponzi scheme he's running involving fractional investments in art works.  Alix's job is to give informal talks to a group of wealthy investors before an on-board art auction as the yacht cruises around the Greek isles, but she's barely on board before she's cracked over the head and a famous Manet is slashed before she can even get a good look at it.  Grade:  A.  

A nasty campaign of negative reviews of Alix's modest little book on painting conservation threatens to undermine her budding career as she sets off to work on three paintings destined for auction by a Palm Springs museum in The Art Whisperer.  When she is murderously attacked after expressing doubts about the authenticity of the museum's recently acquired Jackson Pollack painting, and the well-hated senior curator of the museum is killed, it's apparent that something is very wrong at the museum.  Grade:  A.  I had to give this series of books their own page just because I've enjoyed them so much.  

The Trouble With Mirrors, as Alix London discovers, is that sometimes they're not what they seem to be.  A mirror given to her years ago by her beloved Zio Beni, AKA her father's art forger friend Tiny, has been stolen from her apartment just days after it's shown in a photograph on the cover of Art World Insider magazine.  Not only that, but Tiny himself has disappeared and may even have Genoese Mafia hoodlums after him.  What else can Alix do but try to find him herself and discover the secret of the mirror?  This is another one you shouldn't start reading just before bedtime.  Grade A+.  

Elkins, Charlotte and Aaron--Lee Ofsted books

 Golfer Lee Ofsted, a "rabbit" or newbie professional on the Women's Professional Golf League tour, finds the body of a friend dumped in a water hazard in A Wicked Slice.  When it appears that someone is going out of their way to make it look like Lee was the one who put it there, she decides to poke into things for herself.  I've always enjoyed the behind-the-scenes look into the world of professional golf.  Grade:  A 

Rookie golfer Lee Ofsted is in the unaccustomed position of leading the WPGL tournament in New Mexico, when she discovers the body of an apparent victim of a lightening strike in Rotten Lies.  Unfortunately, Lee's efforts to revive the man aggravates an injury to her arm, putting her out of the tournament.  When medical examination shows that the death was a homicide, Lee is once again drawn into a murder investigation.  Grade:  B.  

Elkins, Aaron

Gideon Oliver, Skeleton Detective books

Honeymooning in England in Murder In The Queen's Armes, anthropologist Gideon Oliver, known as the Skeleton Detective, visits a small museum in Dorset, only to discover that the 30 thousand year old skull fragment of Poundbury Man, known among anthropologists as "Pummy", has been stolen from the museum.  When Pummy turns up again on the site of a dig being conducted a few miles away by a friend of Gideon's, murder ensues.  I like the fact that Elkins uses knowledge from his own career as a physical anthropologist in his mysteries, but manages to keep it reasonably accessible for the reader.  Grade:  B.  

Gideon Oliver thought accompanying his wife Julie to Alaska for a training class for park rangers at a remote lodge would be a nice vacation, but finds himself bored out of his mind, at least until human bones are released from the Icy Clutches of a nearby glacier.  When Gideon is asked to determine whether the bones are those of a team of botanists killed in an avalanche thirty years before, he finds that they are, but that at least one of the team was murdered.  Complicating this is the presence of the sole survivor of the avalanche, prominent television scientist M. Audley Tremaine, two other scientists who were on the expedition, and a group of the relatives of the three people killed in the avalanche.  When Tremaine is killed and the manuscript of his "tell all" book stolen, it appears that the killer is among those present at the lodge. Grade:  B.  

Gideon and his friend FBI agent John Lau travel to Tahiti to the plantation where members of John's extended family grow Paradise's Blue Devil, the world's most expensive coffee, at the invitation John's uncle to investigate the suspicious death of a family member in Twenty Blue Devils.  Except that when they get there, they're told they're not needed, nothing to investigate, nothing to see here, thank you.  Naturally, this does not sit well with either Gideon or John.  Grade:  B.  

On vacation in Hawaii, Gideon is invited by John Lau to meet members of the Torkelson family, old friends of his who own one of the largest cattle ranches on the Big Island of Hawaii in Where There's A Will.  The gathering is interrupted by the news that an airplane, missing for ten years, has been discovered in a lagoon on a remote Pacific atoll, and is believe to contain the remains of Magnus Torkelson, missing since anonymous hit men killed his brother Torkel and burned down the ranch hay barn to conceal the crime.  At least that's the story the family is telling, until it isn't.  Grade:  B. 

 Gideon makes a joking comment to a reporter that his upcoming speech to promote his new book about archeological scams, hoaxes and frauds will reveal an even bigger fraud than that of Piltdown Man; the reporter takes the comment seriously and spreads the news worldwide so that all the attendees at a conference celebrating the discovery of Gibraltar Woman and Gibraltar Boy are expecting great revelations from him in Uneasy Relations.  Gideon himself tries to downplay it, until someone tries to push him off the Rock of Gibraltar.  Grade: B.  

Susan Dunlap

In Susan Dunlap's Karma, published in 1981, Officer Jill Smith is a recently divorced member of the Berkeley, California, police force attending a ceremony conducted by the new guru in town, when he is stabbed to death in full view of the audience.  Since the area is part of her beat, Smith goes to work on the case immediately, trying to sort out the motives of the various characters around the dead monk.  As the case progresses, she begins to wonder if anyone is really what they seem to be.  Having lived in the Bay Area in the 1980's myself, I enjoyed the portrait of that diverse area.  Grade:  B.  

Officer Jill Smith's ex-husband Nat calls and asks As A Favor that Jill check on one of his co-workers, Anne Spaulding, who has not come to work at the Berkeley Welfare Office.  When Jill goes to Anne's apartment, she finds signs of a struggle, overturned furniture, blood on the walls and floor, and the missing woman's purse and drivers license.  Blood stained clothing has been turned in at the police station, suggesting that a body has been dumped into San Francisco Bay.  As Jill investigates, however, an unflattering portrait of Anne Spaulding begins to emerge, as does a very fresh corpse, and Jill begins to wonder exactly how Nat may be involved.  These books tend to be police procedurals, although I have a lot of trouble believing that proper procedure was followed toward the end of the book when Jill goes to arrest the suspect without waiting for backup.  Still, I'd give it a solid Grade:  B.  

In Not Exactly a Brahmin, newly minted Homicide Division detective Jill Smith is driving down the street when she comes on the site of a recent automobile accident that turns out not to be so accidental--the car's brake lines have been tampered with, making this a murder scene.  The victim, a wealthy Berkeley philanthropist, was involved in many charitable organizations and seemed to have no enemies.  The only clues are a piece of paper found in the car that says "Shareholders Five", and the suspicious behavior of the widow.  Grade:  B.  

 Homicide detective Jill Smith helps paralyzed disability activist Liz Goldenstern get home in her wheelchair; hours later Liz is found drowned in a puddle of water miles away in Rainbow Village, a homeless encampment near the site of an apartment building Liz is involved in building in Too Close To The Edge.  A cut seatbelt on Liz's wheelchair shows this was no accident, but murder.  Once again Smith has to sort out the motives and emotions of a wide variety of characters.  Grade:  B.  

Jill Smith finds that the Berkeley "Gourmet Ghetto" can be a dangerous place when a celebrity restaurateur is poisoned in his own restaurant in A Dinner To Die For.  Was it a potential business competitor, an employee, or a well known local street person known as Earth Man?  As usual, Jill has a variety of motives and relationships to sort through.  Grade:  B.  

When Jill Smith is called to the scene of an alleged felonious assault in Diamond In The Buff, she finds that the victim is dentist Hasbrouck Diamond, known to the Berkeley PD as "Has-bitched" for his frequent complaints.  The alleged assailant is a ten-foot long Eucalyptus branch from a tree belonging to his next door neighbor, who he alleges has weakened the branch so that it would fall on him while he was indulging in nude sunbathing on his deck.  When the neighbor disappears and a corpse appears, the situation ceases to be comical.  Grade:  B.  

When an aggressive IRS agent is murdered in Death And Taxes, few Berkeley residents struggling to finish their Form 1040s in time are able to express much sorrow at his demise, and the scene is crowded with potential suspects, including participants in a macabre game called the Death Game.  Grade:  B.

As a trained hostage negotiator, Detective Jill Smith is called to the scene in Time Expired where witnesses have reported a woman being dragged into a canyon.  At the scene, the team finds evidence that the perpetrator may have been involved in an escalating series of pranks directed at the Berkeley Police Department's parking enforcement agents.  Interviewing potential witnesses leads her to dying attorney Madeline Riordan, who has a long history of challenging the police, and who clearly has something on her mind, but before she can tell Jill, she is murdered.  Grade:  B.  

These are all the Susan Dunlap books I have; I'm not sure I will ever read these again, but I found them entertaining enough to give them a grade of B.  

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 What is there left to say about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories?  A Study In Scarlet, published in 1887, introduced both Holmes and his chronicler, Dr. John Watson to the reading public and also introduced the public to the idea of the application of scientific methods to the study of crime.   For those reasons, I would give A Study In Scarlet a B, although this time around I found Doyle's American narrative and language more irritating than entertaining.  Grade:  B.   

The Hound of the Baskervilles still gets an A, though.  I first read it when I was about twelve years old; my mother caught me reading it late at night and made me turn out my light before I found out that the hound was a real dog and not a demonic apparition, and I couldn't sleep for envisioning a spectral hound slathering at my bedroom door.  Well plotted, well written, it still gets Grade:  A.  

I also re-read the short stories collected by Sir Arthur's son Adrian Conan Doyle in A Treasury of Sherlock Holmes, which were published over the years in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, His Last Bow, and The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes.   After the first several books of Holmes stories, Doyle apparently tired of writing them and decided to kill Holmes off.  To accomplish this, he introduced the criminal mastermind, Professor Moriarty in the story "The Final Problem", in which he has Holmes, pursued across Europe by Moriarty, grapple with Moriarty on the edge of the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, with the result that both men apparently fell to their death.  Later, bowing to public pressure and financial needs, Doyle resurrected Holmes in "The Problem of the Empty House", in which Holmes reveals that Watson had misinterpreted the confused footprints on the edge of the Reichenbach Falls and that Holmes had climbed up to fake his own death.  This never made much sense to me because it's apparent during the course of the story that Moriarty's chief lieutenant, Colonel Sebastian Moran knew from the start that Holmes was still alive as he dislodged boulders above him in an attempt to kill Holmes then and there, so why the need to pretend to the rest of the world that he was dead?  

At any rate, it was a very satisfying exercise to revisit the Sherlock Holmes stories.  Grade:  A overall.  

R. B. Dominic

The writing team of Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart, who usually wrote under the pen name Emma Lathen, also wrote a series of mysteries under the pen name R. B. Dominic between 1968 and 1983.  This series is set in Washington, D. C. and stars Congressman Ben Safford (D., Ohio) and his Congressional colleagues.  Although they wrote seven novels as Dominic, I only have three of them.  

As they did when writing as Lathen, the authors incorporate contemporary events and themes into their plots.  Murder In High Place gets Congressman Safford involved in the affairs of an unstable Latin American country as he tries to untangle the relationship between one of his hot-headed constituents and U.S. government departments that provide aid to that country.  This book involves the meticulous plotting and background research characteristic of Emma Lathen's work, but this book seemed to plod along with no trace of the wicked humor of the John Putnam Thatcher books, and I missed that.  Grade:  C.  

Safford gets involved with the Atomic Energy Commission in Murder Out Of Commission when a powerful utility company wants to build a nuclear power plant in a small town in his Congressional district.  Most of the residents are in favor of it, hoping the construction and other jobs it will bring in will revitalize the town, but activist residents of a wealthy neighboring town fear the potential consequences of a reactor safety failure.  Grade:  C.

The subcommittee Ben Safford is on is holding hearings around the country on Medicade fraud in The Attending Physician and Ben is chagrined to find that his Ohio district is next on the list to investigate fraudulent billings by seven local doctors.   This book reminded me of Emma Lathen's A Stitch In Time, written in 1968, where doctors were again the chief suspects in a variety of criminal activities.  Grade:  C.