Review by New York Times Review
After dispatching Chief Inspector Armand Gamache to Quebec City in her last novel, "Bury Your Dead," Louise Penny finds good cause to draw the discerning head of the homicide division of the Sûreté du Québec back to Three Pines, a village so tiny and secretive it doesn't appear on any maps. "It could not be found unless you were lost," she explains, with the exactitude of language that's crucial to the psychological subtlety of her characters - and the delight she takes in them. Gamache returns to this enchanted ground in A TRICK OF THE LIGHT (Minotaur, $25.99) when a dead woman in a red dress turns up in Clara Morrow's flower garden, ruining this local artist's moment of glory after her solo show at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal. When the victim is identified as an art critic and frenemy from Clara's past, she becomes an obvious "person of interest" to the police. But with so many members of the cutthroat art community on hand to make what they will of Clara's success, there are plenty of suspects to go around. Clara's many friends are in such a rush to defend her that they resemble the bumblebees in her garden. "It-looked comical, ridiculous," Penny observes of these insects' frantic flight through the peonies. "But then so much did, unless you knew." That's the way it goes in this deceptively charming whodunit, which observes the cozy plot conventions of a village mystery while delivering acute insights into the complicated motives of complex characters. If there's a secret to Penny's technique, it's to be found in Clara's realistic portraits of local residents, which reveal their true meaning only after close study. To the casual observer, "Still Life" appears to be a study of the town's resident poet, her bitter gaze reflecting hatred for "the world that had left her behind." But closer analysis yields another image of this aged woman and another aspect of her rage - the radiance at "the moment despair became hope." Unless, of course, it's all "a trick of the light." In her sly fashion, Penny has given us fair warning not to trust the antics of Three Pines' eccentric residents and colorful visitors. Behind each volatile outburst of marital discord and professional envy lies some deeper truth involving the betrayal of trust and the need for atonement and forgiveness. With his sensitivity to the dark side of human nature, Gamache is not one to be distracted by the comical antics of bumblebees. Compared with that criminal mastermind Artemis Fowl, Dan McEvoy is a bungling idiot. But that's essentially the appeal of Eoin Colfer's first adult protagonist, an expat Irish Army veteran who appears in PLUGGED (Overlook, $24.95) in the mortifying job of club bouncer at a sleazy New Jersey club called Slotz. How sleazy is Slotz, you ask? Well, the way Dan tells it, "you always carry a pack of antiseptic wipes" if you know what's good for you. When first met, Dan seems to have no ambition beyond flirting with a hostess named Connie and growing some hair. "If you got hair," he reasons, "then maybe you ain't so old and your life ain't so over." It's no wonder, then, that Dan goes ballistic when Connie is murdered in the parking lot and someone kidnaps the disreputable quack who's been implanting his hair plugs. Although Dan tries to maintain his stance of "aggressive passivity," his training as a professional killer intersects with his protective impulses. Dan's chivalric mission of mayhem makes no logical sense, but it does attract the attention of numerous unsavory characters and results in lots of bloody fun. It's 1917, and Bess Crawford is in London on Christmas leave in A BITTER TRUTH (Morrow/HarperColllns, $24.99), Charles Todd's third novel about this kindhearted World War I battlefield nurse. Soon, though, a young woman prevails upon Bess to accompany her to Vixen Hill, the family estate in Sussex from which she has fled after a violent argument with her officer husband. Uncomfortable as Bess is in this dour household, where everyone seems in perpetual mourning, she's drawn into both their domestic disputes and a murder investigation. Todd (the nom de plume of a mother-and-son writing team) makes fine work of the brooding atmosphere at Vixen Hill, and a sequence set in France is a powerful illustration of the ordeals of orphaned children caught in the crossfire of battle. But despite their enlightened views on returning veterans, the authors have wasted the exceptional talents of their combat-trained sleuth on this housebound mystery. Wayne Ogden is a prince of a fellow, as long as you judge this bad-boy protagonist of Scott Phillips's caustic crime novel, THE ADJUSTMENT (Counterpoint, $25), according to his own perverse code of ethics. As a quartermaster for the United States Army stationed in Rome during World War II, Ogden had a rewarding career as a pimp and a trader on the black market. But life in postwar Wichita proves a letdown (even the funnies aren't as "funny and mean as they used to be"), and Ogden feels his skills are wasted in his job, which involves enabling the owner of an aviation company to indulge his various degenerate and illegal hobbies. Going by his own rule book, Ogden is just "playing Good Samaritan" when he escorts pregnant girls to a "reliable angel maker," distributes drugs to needy addicts and takes lonely women to bed. And provided he doesn't kill too many people or run out on his nice wife, who's to say otherwise? In Louise Penny's latest village mystery, a dead woman in a red dress turns up in a local artist's garden.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 11, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
WWI nurse Bess Crawford seems to encounter misfortune every time she leaves the battlefield. In the first two novels in this new series from the mother-and-son writing team behind the Ian Rutledge mysteries, Bess got mixed up in criminal goings-on when she returned home to England, and her bad-luck streak continues here. Coming home for a Christmas break, Bess encounters a seemingly homeless woman who, it turns out, has left her husband after a violent episode. Intending to intervene on the woman's behalf, Bess walks right into a case of murder. And this time she has a very personal reason for solving the mystery: she's the prime suspect. The Crawford mysteries are gentler and less psychological than the Rutledge novels, but they are no less satisfying. Bess is a very strong series lead, the historical setting is as well developed here as it is in the Rutledge books, and the mysteries are just as elegantly constructed. Readers who have yet to sample the Crawford series should be strongly encouraged to do so.--Pitt, David Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
At the outset of Todd's outstanding third Bess Crawford mystery (after 2010's An Impartial Witness), Bess returns to London in December 1917 on leave from her nursing work in France to find an attractive, well-bred woman of about 25 huddled in the doorway of her lodging house. The tearful woman, who reluctantly gives her name as Lydia, accepts Bess's invitation to come inside. Lydia later reveals that she's fled to London from Sussex after her husband struck her in the face. The tenderhearted Bess agrees to accompany Lydia back home so she can provide moral support. On arrival in Sussex, Bess finds herself in the midst of a family devastated by untimely death and hiding poisonous secrets. When a murder occurs, the local police suspect Bess is involved. The Todds (a mother-son writing team) plausibly insert their heroine yet again into a criminal investigation, besides providing their usual depth of characterization. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Truth can be a bitter pill to swallow. In Todd's third Bess Crawford mystery (after An Impartial Witness), Bess finds herself back in London, on leave from her nursing duties on the World War I battlefields of France. Upon arriving at her London lodging, she finds a battered woman named Lydia in her doorway taking shelter from the cold. Bess befriends Lydia, who begs to be accompanied back to her home in Sussex. During a memorial for Lydia's brother-in-law, Bess becomes embroiled in the family's disagreements and secrets. When one of the houseguests, a wounded soldier, is found murdered, the police cast their suspicion on everyone-including Bess herself. She must search from Sussex all the way to war-torn France to discover the bitter truth about a soldier's death not on the battlefield but on the home front. -VERDICT Todd brings World War I England and France to life with an intriguing plot and an intrepid sleuth. Recommended for all British wartime mystery aficionados who like plucky investigators similar to Maisie Dobbs.-Susan O. Moritz, Montgomery Cty. P.L.s, MD (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Sister Crawford spends an eventful Christmas 1917 on leave from the battlefield.Just back from France and planning to stay overnight in a London boarding house before traveling to her family in Somerset, Bess Crawford finds a young woman huddled on her doorstep, wet, shivering and bruised. She brings her inside, and the next day Lydia Ellis admits that she's leaving her husband Roger, who struck her. If Bess will accompany her, she'll return to Vixen Hill in Sussex and face him again. Off they go, their arrival heralded by a thunderclap announcement by family friend George Hughes: While in France he saw a young child identical to Roger's sister Juliana, who died as a tot. Surely Roger fathered her while serving in France. Roger's sister, mother and gran are distraught. The next day, George is dead, his murder followed by the disappearance, then death, of blind Davis Merrit, who may have killed him. But why? While family tension mounts, Bess, summoned back to France, promises Lydia to look for that child. With the assistance of an Aussie soldier, she finds young Sophie but leaves her in the care of nuns in Rouen. Bess returns to England, followed by the Aussie with Sophie in tow. There's another murder and much investigating by the constabulary before a plethora of confessions are presented, some admitting to current missteps, others to past mercy killings in the Ellis family, and a deserter is unmasked.The least believable tale from the Todd partnership (An Impartial Witness,2010, etc.) finds Bess, Roger and the Aussie traipsing all over France and England and bumping into each other. Still, few writers surpass Todd in depicting the insanity of war.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
