Whisper Down the Lane

 Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman is the ultimate horror novel, a genre that I generally avoid. However, this story was inspired by the real and most ugly McMartin Preschool drama of the 1980’s. Two issues led to me fighting my way through a story that is so difficult to read as the result of very real human trauma involved. One of those issues is that I knew a family that sent all three of their sons to the true McMartin Preschool (which had first opened in 1956 and closed in 1984 after allegations of horrific child abuse) in Manhattan Beach, California, so those three  boys were never part of the trauma that was to follow. The second issue was the belief at the time that recovered childhood memories of sexual trauma were always true. I am a part of the mental health personnel that struggled with the reality of such claims of abuse and the fallout that occurred in families as the result of the wide publicity that came as the result of such claims.

At the end of the story which occurred after extensive investigation and legal action, all charges were dropped against most of the accused employees of the preschool, and no one was convicted of any wrongdoing. The mental health practitioners that pried stories from the preschool children were known to have used manipulative methods to pull out false information they thought were true.

I thought the author captured the essence of some of the trauma. He touched on Satanic rituals, the issue of multiple personalities, and without labeling it as such, he described dissociative identity disorders. I continue to feel embarrassed by those professionals who fell victim to the mass hysteria that underlied the McMartin Prescrhool trials.

I really can’t recommend this book to anyone because of it’s content. It’s just too terrible.

Magpie Murders

 

I raved about the Hawthorne & Horowitz Series by Anthony Horowitz. He is a prolific writer in multiple genres. Magpie Murders is apparently his best-selling thriller, and I got it in the audiobook format. Once again, he writes about a successful fictional author of crime novels, Alan Conway. His editor, Susan Ryeland has been working with Conway for many years and has already edited many of his novels. However, she becomes suspicious that Conway’s new book actually contains a true-life hidden story of greed and murder. Conway wrote about a detective he named Atticus Pund who is reputed to be the best in the world at what he does. Given the story-within-a-story format, there are many characters to learn about, so the reader has multiple options to choose who the real suspect is. Horowitz is clever and fun. I plan to scan his long list of novels and choose another one in the near future. You won’t be disappointed.

Blunt Instrument

 Blunt Instrument by Amy Bloom made the list by Oprah for Daily Best Book for the Summer. I didn’t think it was that good. I stumbled across this novel in the NY Times Book Review. Ms. Bloom has not previously been reviewed in this blog.

Elderly Professor Bullfinch was bludgeoned to death with a bust of Daniel Hawthorne. It was possible that his death was linked to the struggles in his department at Cromwell University. Bullfinch was not a very popular guy. The university president hired a private detective in an attempt to solve the murder before the police did, therefore being able to keep the matter quiet. 

Although Ms. Bloom is a prolific author, this is her first crime novel. I think I’ll wait for her to develop better crime chops before I read this author again.

Storm Warning

 Storm Warning is the first novel new series which introduces Sonny Marshall as the protagonist. I had already read the second novel, Storm Damage. The story line is pretty good when his beautiful girlfriend ended their relationship because she could not tolerate Sonny’s fixation with helping people who desperately need help. Please read my rave review of the second novel. Sonny is not a cop, not a PI, not a detective. Rather, he’s a successful musician who places the saxophone in a blues and jazz band known as the Storm Lake Blues Band. It was when he was unable to protect his sister from a brutal assault that he began study marshal arts, skills that he would often make use of in his “white knight complex” efforts.

There was one aspect to the story line in the second novel which I did not like. The plot had to do with the kidnapping of exceptionally bright and beautiful children. When one five year old girl was taken and Sonny began learning as much as he could about it, he ran into a police detective in Sacramento, Detective Katrina Hastings, who had been pursuing the kidnapping of a girl for the last seven years. They teamed up and then fell in love. That was a good part of the book. They discovered a ranch in New Mexico where the kidnapped children were taken and being trained. The powers behind the abduction scene wanted to create a master race. It was there intent to make these highly intelligent children run the world because they believed without them, the world would come to a catastrophic end. It’s an old story line of which I’m quite tired.

However, Terry R. Bacon has created a great cast of characters who are quite different than most of the murder mysteries that I read. I really want more of this – hint – so when am I going to see book three?

Ransom

 

Ransom by Daniel Silva is his 26^th novel about Gabriel Allon, an Israeli spy and assassin who rose to being the director of an undercover department, but he has finally, allegedly, retired from such clandestine work. Allon spends his winters in his flat on the Grand Canal in Venice with his Venecian wife, Chiara, and his two children. In retirement, during the summer months, he retires to a remote cabin in Cornwall, England. He works as a restorer of old art masterpieces, the same skill he often used during his years as a spy to disguise his true identity.

This story starts out with four women, now in their 30s, who have been friends since their college days. One of them, Alice Winnter, married to Edward Knight, a man worth billions, and she typically pays for all expenses for their annual week-long reunions in only the most extravagant places. The current gathering is on the island of Ibiza. Alice is a dazzling socialite who has millions of followers on social medial. However, before the week is over, Alice gets in a major argument with one of her girlfriends, Phoebe. Alice then disappears, and her husband is desperate to find her. The story become one of kidnapping and an outrageous ransom demand, leading to Knight’s plea to Allon to find Alice.

The plot involves the discovery that Knight is only so wealthy because of his financial support by a Russian oligarch. However, there’s an important twist regarding the kidnapping, and Alice reveals she must divorce night because of his connection to the Russians who are currently at war with the Ukraine. When the ransom demand went unpaid, at first, it is assumed that Alice has been killed. The unwinding of the mystery of Alice’s disappearance is the meat of the story, including the undoing of her husband’s source of wealth.

I’ve often thought of myself as Silva’s best fan. He produces one new book a year which I usually read in a day or two, and then impatiently wait for another year before I get to enjoy the continuing saga of his protagonist. The life and adventures of Gabriel Allon have captivated me. However, this book was not up to Silva’s usual engaging stories. It’s not a simple task to follow any  hero through 26 books as he ages out of the very work that made him so interesting. The wonderful and rich descriptions of his travels was present, just as in all of his previous novels. However, as Allon gets into the tedious details of money laundering on behalf of Putin (never named in the body of the book), we’re taken through lengthy and boring details. The plot stalled until the very end of the novel. So, this particular novel was not one that I can recommend.

Storm Damage

 Storm Damage is the second book in the Sonny Marshall Thriller series written by Terry Bacon. This is an excellent and well-written story, and I’ve already downloaded the first novel in the series, Storm Warning. Sonny Marshall is a blues musician whose band has brought him considerable success. Most of his time is spent in the Bay Area of California, and he owns a music studio in San Francisco. His back story is important because it includes his family suffering a home invasion in which his older sister was brutally raped. He was only a boy at the time and came away with intense guilt, that he had failed to save her from the trauma. He promised himself he would not allow another innocent person to suffer. Sonny began an intense study of Marshall arts. A couple years later when his younger sister was being bullied by a group of boys, he followed her home from school and when they began their harassment of her, he took them on all by himself. Sonny brought the group down and they left his sister alone after that. Author Bacon called this a “white knight complex.”

There are many references in this second book, Storm Damage, to Sonny having repeated similar events in his adult life, but I’ll have to read the first book to learn about that. In this book, The Storm Lake Blues Band has just returned to the Bay Area from a tour. They were working on a new album which was due to be released the following month. Eric, the lead guitarist, had been hitting cocaine quite heavily. He went to a drug party only to try an unknown designer drug which led to his death. At the same time, there were several similar drug-related events around the Bay Area in which people were suddenly become homicidal – behavior which was totally foreign to their day-to-day personalities. The deaths were piling up and Sonny began to use his own contacts, including law enforcement, to track down the mysterious creator of this new substance.

Meanwhile, the author let us know more about Sonny’s personal life. His girlfriend, Katrina Hastings or Kat was a detective in Sacramento, and she had a daughter, Sara, of middle school age. Kat shared some of Sonny’s savior feelings, so she was able to tolerate his rescue behaviors. Even though Sonny and Kat seemed averse to talking about their future together, the book ends with the two of them moving together in Sonny’s apartment where the very talented Sara will be able to attend a special high school.

I found myself attracted to the author’s writing, and I’ll give you a one paragraph example:

When my former girlfriend, Marily Anne Crittenden, caught COVID in 2020, I spent a       week sleeping on the couch while she recovered in our bedroom. Nobody in the world knew what to do back then. Advice from the CDC changed every other week, and the president advised people to drink bleach and shine ultraviolet light up their ass. Mac wasn’t sick enough for a hospital, but my taking care of her was like a grease monkey arranging flowers

Bacon treats the reader to a rich cast of characters including Kat, Sara, his band members, members of law enforcement, and the drug-affected victims. One subplot had to do with replacing Eric with a new guitarist, and Bacon introduced the remarkable artist Le’Andre Kimani to fill Eric’s shoes. He wrote beautifully about the emotional process of producing new music. Now, I must impatiently wait for the third book in this promised series.

Close to Death

 Close to Death is the fifth of six books in the Hawthorne & Horowitz series written by Anthony Horowitz. I’ve already reviewed the first four books, so I need not report here what has drawn me to this series which has gotten my rave comments. This book is different from the others since the two protagonists do not appear in the book until about the 30-40% mark. Rather, the author Horowitz, distinct from his semi-fictionalized writer in the novels, provides us with a lot of background about the small and elite housing area near London, Riverview Close. Close is an English term for a small and relatively insular area of homes, the word coming from the word “enclosure.”

I’ll be brief. Once again there is a murder. While there has been very little turnover of the houses in the close, one of the houses went up for sale. It was purchased by Giles Kenworthy who very quickly becomes an irritant to all of the other neighbors, and it is Giles who is murdered with a crossbow shot into his throat. Detective Hawthorne comes to the scene to solve the murder, and Horowitz is there to gather material for his next novel. The reader is provided with a great cast, any of whom had a motive to kill Kenworthy. There are artful misdirections, and there was the usual tension between the two main players.

The sixth book is entitled A Deadly Episode, and I’m in line to get it, estimated at another seven weeks although there are 47 copies in use. I’ll impatiently wait for it to become available.