Book Buzz

DANIEL JUDSON

Remer was a Private Investigator in New York until an angry recipient of his surveillance had him kidnapped, tortured and branded with the word VOYEUR. Five years later was living in Southampton operation a small liquor store and staying in the shadows. Until one of his former staff went missing with $80,000 of his money. This mystery has enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. A good read.

SUSIE MOLONIE

Witches can have anything they want. Anything. But witches need thirteen to work their will. How better to achieve this than to lure back a banished daughter and her child. By making the mother sick they get the young mother to return and bring her daughter as a sacrifice. Black humour at its best.

P D JAMES

When Venetia Aldridge, QC, defended Garry Ashe of murdering his prostitute aunt, she never thought that her daughter would later fall in love Ashe once she got him acquitted. Four weeks later  Aldridge is found dead in her office; she was wearing a court wig and her head was covered in blood. Ashe is immediately considered to be a suspect as is anyone who had keys to the law offices. As often happens in murder mysteries one murder leads to several others. And of course Adam Dalgliesh and his team are called in to solve them.

I liked the ending to this book. Not everything is wrapped up neat and clean as in most mysteries. A good read.

RENE GUTTERIDGE

YOUR PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS JUST WENT PUBLIC

Someone, somehow is listening to people’s private conversations and putting them verboten on a web page. How are they listening to conversations in people’s homes. Don’t people have the right to vent their anger and frustration? Marlo is a tight close knit community until careless comments and hurtful accusations are posted on a web page that nobody can seem to ignore. Damien is a lover of words, he creates the crossword puzzle for the local paper and a believer in the power of words. He works with the police to try and find the creator of the web page to stop what is happening until he becomes the main suspect. Listen is a series of mysteries within a mystery. Well worth the read.

SARA GRUEN

Isabel Duncan is a researcher at the Great Ape Language Lab. Isabel is the teacher, caregiver and friend to a troop of talking bonobos, who live with her in the “lab,” expanding their vocabularies while ordering in lattes through the lab assistant, the tattooed and punky Celia. Bonobos are often mistaken for chimpanzees. Isabel’s fiance Peter is head of the department. There are always a few animal rights protesters outside the lab waving signs and protesting. All very peaceful until the day the lab was blown up and the bonobos were released into the wild of the university campus. Unfortunately Isabel was still in the building. She was covered by a door or her injuries would have been compounded by sever burns.

I don’t want to tell too much more than this other than this is a must read. As was Gruen’s last book Water for Elephants.

ANTHONY BIDULKA

Bidulka’s mysteries alway take place in exotic locals as well as at Saskatoon the private dick’s home. Sheesha is no exception; it is set in the Middle East, speifically Dubai. When Saskatoon man is searching for antique carpets, turns up dead in a Dubai souk (market), Quant is hired to discover what happened. The title Sheesha refers to smoking with a houka (water pipe).

I get a kick out of this series, a gay private eye from Saskatoon, my home town. But Sheesha is not his best work. Fun but disappointing.

CHRISTOPHER BRAM

AKA: A Gay Republican is an Oxymoron

Ralph is an assistant manager of a bookstore. He met Bill on-line in a gay chat room. They decide to meet F2F (face to face) and start a relationship. They couldn’t be more opposite of each other. Bill is a right wing, closeted Republican and author of a book slamming Hillary Clinton and women in general. Ralph is a open and out gay man; his best friend is a speech writer for an out spoken Democratic senator. After Bill comes out on national TV defending his controversial book, he is killed. Police  think that a hustler robbed and murdered him. When Ralph goes to police thinking that he had information that could help them find the killer, he is arrested for the murder.

The story has two surprise endings. An OK read.

P D JAMES

When journalist Rhoda Gradwyn checks into Cheverell Manor to have a large disfiguring facial scar removed she hadn’t realized she would not return alive. The manor is a private surgery owned and operated by Dr Chandler-Power.  The ancient manor and the circle of standing stones, the Cheverell Stones, near by is an important part of the story. Adam Dalgliesh is dispatched to solve the murder and everyone at the clinic  becomes a suspect.

Though not as dense as most of James novels Patient is still enjoyable. A good mystery.

GREG HERRON

Set in New Orleans before Katrina, Rue Dauphine is a trashy gay murder mystery. But why are all the characters totally gorgeous? Life isn’t like that. It gets boring reading descriptions of the same looking men. But sometimes trashy is what I want to read. Chanse McLeod, Private Eye and ex-cop, discovers his latest client dead. “Faggots Die” was written in blood staining the wall. The client claims his closeted boy friend is being blackmailed. But how does the organization GRN, Gay Rights Now, fund raise so much money?

KATE WILHEM

Wilhelm’s sixth Barbara Holloway legal thriller has a compelling plos and characters. Holloway’s latest client is a brilliant young man named Alex Feldman, who has been left hideously deformed by a birth defect. He is accused of killing his next-door neighbor, Gus Marchand, a bully and a religious zealot who saw Alex’s deformity as the mark of the devil. There is no real evidence against him, but Marchand has created such hostility and fear toward Alex that it seems likely he will be convicted on the basis of his appearance alone. What makes his situation even more desperate is that he was born with part of his brain exposed: since any blow to the head might kill him, a prison term probably would be a death sentence. But did Alex do it? There is a real possibility (which Alex himself admits) that he is psychopathic, but he wasn’t the only one with a motive: the high school principal was also at odds with Marchand, and she is a close friend of Frank Holloway, Barbara’s father and mentor. This is a great mystery in which the smallest clues are important. Wilhelm does a good job of conveying Alex’s anguish and isolation.

A good mystery

JEFFREY ROUND

Time for a trashy, light mystery.  P-town is the story of Brad Bradford an undercover detective. When Brad receives an anonymous tip that his former lover has been killed in Province Town, Brad goes to deal with the body. He leaves his assignment of stopping a possible assassination of the Dali Lama in New York.  P-Town is portrait as heaven on earth. Especially for gay people. But more people are dieing in P-Town on a daily basis. Brad stays to solve the crime. The book is a campy look as the under world of gay life and death. Fun read.

ANTHONY E. ZUIKER

Brilliant concept. Cybernovel. (They have copywrited the term Digi-Novel.) Every twenty pages or so the book refers you to the web page level26.com with a code to see a video of what is happening. The videos are generally well produced. Zuiker was the creater of CSI series so he has access to top quality production. But not all of the videos add to the story and the story is not gentle. Level 26 refers to the fact that law enforcement personnel have a code that categorizes evil on a scale of twenty five levels. Level 25 refers to the sickest murderer-torturers. For this new serial killer they had to create a new level : 26. It is definately adult reading and not for people with queasy stomachs.

Not particulary well written but it is a bit of a page turner. If you can stand the gore. Again set up for the sequel.

Daniel Browning Smith is creepy as all hell as evil incarnate in the video. He is also know as rubber boy the contortionist. Google his name.

DEBORAH GRABEIN

I have been doing some rather heavy reading of late so I wanted something trashy. I found it in this mystery in my latest library stash. The fun part is backstage and behind scenes of a popular rock and roll band. Blacklight is a successful band, now aging and doing comeback tours for its many die hard fans. A tabloid sleaze journalist, Dillan, is planning a no holds barred, unauthorized biography. All the dirt and of course there is dirt. But on opening night of the North American tour, his body is found in lead guitarist, JP Kinkaid’s dressing room. Kinkaid’s long term girlfriend (he never got around to divorcing his wife), found the body.

Trashy but fun and light. Just what I needed.

LOUISE PENNY

A dysfunctional but rich family has a reunion at a lodge in Quebec. One of the siblings, the black sheep, meets an untimely demise. Which one of the other family members executed her is such a symbolic way?  It just happens that Chief Inspector Gamache is vacationing at the lodge with his wife so the investigation starts immediately.

Lousise Penny is a good writer. The insult “slid off his back landed on the floor and disintegrated.” However it took Penny 89 pages to get to the murder. I found this title from CBC’s Canada Reads Blog. August was the month to discuss mysteries and their authors. Worth the read but not great.

ANTHONY BIDULKA

On his way home from his engagement and trip to Hawaii, Saskatoon PI Russell Quant stumbles upon a treasure map and a murder. Intrigued by both he can’t let them go until he solves them. Beach book for the summer by gay Saskatoon author.

STIEG LAWSON

Mystery within mystery. Journalist Blomkvist, recently discredited in a libel suit, is hired by a industrialist to solve the forty year old disappearance of his niece. Fascinating to see the different levels of research and studying he does as he proceeds. Blomkvist is given permission to write a history of the family. But then questions whether the shadows he uncovers should be revealed to the public. The second mystery is ferreting out the truth about the executive who won the initial law suit and how to reveal the truth. As for the tattoo? And Swedish attitudes about sex? You’ll have to read the book. It is a bit of a page turner.

(Having thought the cover totally stupid I borrowed this image from: http://hubpages.com/hub/DragonTattoos&usg=__SMPDEBmXXsuRJ8DPniEGiNwe1Tw=&h=291&w=260&sz=15&hl=en&start=19&tbnid=kQkcZXNFRBq7MM:&tbnh=115&tbnw=103&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dgirl%2Bwith%2Bthe%2Bdragon%2Btattoo%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG)

ERIC STONE

Not a great book by any means, almost trashy but an interesting theme. Great for an asiaphile. IMPORTS centers around the illegal trade of Cambodian antiquities. How these jewels of cambodian culture are stolen and sold by Khemer Rouge, the same people who so decimated the population and the country years ago. How much of the Khemer Rouge leadership was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris. All this is told through the story of Ray Sharp, an American expat living in the East. He stumbles on this illicit business while perusing a Chinese Art supply store in Hong Kong.

BENJAMIN BLACK

Black writes interesting and unusual mysteries. His Christina Falls has been reviewed previously in this blog. In Lemur, journalist John Glass is contracted to write the biography of his powerful and wealthy father-in-law. But when he hires a researcher, the researcher is swiftly found dead, a bullet in his eye. What is being covered up?

Again this mystery has little police involvement. Not great but worth reading.

GAIL BOWEN

Light and fluffy as all Bowen’s mysteries are. This one mixes politics, prostitution and lawyers caught where they should not be at. It is actually one of her better books.

NEIL GAIMAN

“The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor.” Intriguing first line. That knife and the hand that holds it switfly kills all the people in the house except the baby who is nowhere to be found. The baby has miraculously vanished into the graveyard. Knowing that the child is being hunted the ghosts of the graveyard resolve to raise the child with one particular couple to be his parents. For many years Nobody Owens has little contact outside of the graveyard.

The book is quite a page turner. Definitely not for young readers but for teens. For a scary book set in a graveyard it actually quite life affirming. “I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands.” “There was life and Bod walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.”

Newbery Award Winner