Review by New York Times Review
HONOR-BASED VIOLENCE - which covers everything from beatings and kidnapping to mutilation and murder - is a scourge in Britain, where the Crown Prosecution Service estimates that the 12 or so honor killings reported each year are only a fraction of the true number committed in Muslim, Sikh and Hindu communities. In LOVE LIKE BLOOD (Atlantic Monthly, $26), Mark Billingham puts human faces on one such case, telling the story of Amaya and Kamai, two Bangladeshi teenagers who run away together to avoid arranged marriages. They make it as far as the London Underground, and the rest is pure savagery. "There isn't an ounce of anything like nobility in what these people do," Detective Inspector Nicola Tanner hotly informs her colleague Tom Thorne. "It's murder, pure and simple, pretending to be something else." Although "dishonored" male relatives are prime suspects in most cases of punitive violence, squeamish families often prefer to shop the job to a middleman with access to professional hit men - thugs like Muldoon and Riaz, who collaborate efficiently but whose cultural clashes can be morbidly funny. (Riaz enjoys Bollywood movies, while Muldoon is amused by these musical fantasies about forlorn lovers. "In a film or whatever, you get to sing about it," he observes, "but in real life you get the likes of us turning up.") Billingham allows his plot to wander down some pretty dark alleys. A friend of Amaya's is gang-raped, considered appropriate retribution for talking to the police. And it's disconcerting to learn that in Pakistan some honor killings can be forgiven by the victim's family, with no punishment for the murderers. But Billingham saves his real animus for the Metropolitan Police's Honor Crimes Unit, which receives 3,000 incident reports a year but doesn't have a website - or even a sign on the door. "There's a Royal Protection Unit and a Marine Unit and a big, hairy Dog Support Unit," Thorne notes, but nothing about an Honor Crimes Unit. "It's as if it doesn't officially exist." Which is what the victims assumed all along. DETECTIVE MANON BRADSHAW was endearingly klutzy in last year's "Missing, Presumed," by Susie Steiner. Since she's five months pregnant in persons unknown (Random House, $27), she's even more ungainly, but still endearing, in a novel that's nominally a mystery but is actually a smart and funny rumination on motherhood. Manon has returned to Cambridgeshire with her adopted 12-year-old son, Fly, to protect him from the indignities of growing up black in London. The irony is that the boy becomes a major suspect in the murder of a London banker who turns out to be the ex-husband of Manon's sister, Ellie, and the father of her 3-year-old son. Although the plot - involving the sleaze merchants of an international prostitution ring - is a mess, the racial theme cuts deep enough to hurt, and the characters are distinctive. Secondary players like Detective Sergeant Davy Walker, who lives to help others, and Birdie Fielding, a prize specimen of the Beatles' lonely people, are sweethearts. But since Steiner seems to judge all her characters on the strength of their mothering instincts, the Latvian gangsters don't get any love. MARGARET maron is one of those authors whose devoted fans would follow them anywhere. Now that she has retired her wonderful Deborah Knott series set in North Carolina, readers must head for New York City, the setting of TAKE OUT (Grand Central, $27), the final mystery in another series, which features Sigrid Harald. Lieutenant Harald's policing may seem old-fashioned, but that's because the novel's action takes place in the 1990s. When two homeless men are found dead on a bench, the detective learns they were poisoned by some takeout food. But this part of Greenwich Village is very neighborly and the locals, who include the widow of a mafia don and a former opera star, were always bringing them home-cooked meals. Which one was meant to die? And who delivered the lethal lasagna? Sigrid has a coolly analytic mind; it's sad to think we're watching her puzzle out her last case. aside from mounting surveillance with a nanny cam, will having an 8-month-old bébe cramp Aimée Leduc's ineffable style? The modish heroine of MURDER IN SAINT-GERMAIN (Soho Crime, $27.95) and other delicious Parisian mysteries by Cara Black must juggle motherhood with finding a nasty blackmailer, overseeing computer security at the École des Beaux-Arts and hunting down a Serbian warlord. This is Black's 17th Leduc novel, each set in a different neighborhood, and the formula still charms. Although the business of the warlord is a lot more interesting than Aimée's bread-and-butter cyber security jobs, finding a babysitter in July and August, when "toute Paris had disappeared," is even more challenging. The criminal elements of the story aren't taxing, but the abiding pleasure of this series is the chance to ride with a cabdriver who wants to discuss Sartre or just tearing around Paris on Aimée's pink Vespa, making stops at the Jardín du Luxembourg and the île Saint-Louis, where Aimée has an apartment. Lucky girl. ? Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Maron wraps up her Sigrid Harald series with this sequel to Fugitive Colors (1995), set in New York in the 1990s. NYPD Lieutenant Harald is still mourning the accidental death of her lover, renowned artist Oscar Nauman, when two homeless men are found dead on a park bench with takeout boxes from a nearby Italian restaurant next to the bodies. When autopsies show the men were poisoned with Coumadin, the investigation centers on the two neighborhood dowagers who provided the food: Sofia DelVecchio, widow of a Mafia boss and godmother of one of the dead men, and Charlotte Randolph, former opera star with a memoir in the works, who identifies the other dead man as a onetime lover who came to her for money. As detectives piece together the complicated relationship between the two women, Harald also is dealing with the pending retrospective of Nauman's work and the appearance of his possible heir. Tying up loose ends, the acclaimed Maron provides an entertaining and intriguing finish to a remarkable body of work.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In 2016, MWA Grand Master Maron ended her popular Deborah Knott series with Long upon the Land, which resolved several outstanding questions about the characters. She also settles some unresolved issues in this, the excellent 10th and final entry in her series featuring New York City detective Sigrid Harald, which began in 1981 with One Coffee With and seemed to end with 1995's Fugitive Colors. An unexpected personal problem arises for Harald with the appearance of Vincent Haas, who claims to be the son of her deceased lover, Oscar Nauman. If Vincent is indeed Nauman's son, he may have a claim on the fortune that his late father left to Harald. Meanwhile, she investigates the mysterious simultaneous poisoning deaths of two homeless people, Matty Mutone and an unidentified older man. Mutone's sad story, as Harald pieces it together, connects him with one of Harald's neighbors, the widow of mobster Benny DelVecchio. Another neighbor, former opera star Charlotte Randolph, is able to identify the second victim as Jack Bloss, a backstage worker. A tangle of relationships tests Harald's abilities to ferret out which of the two men was the killer's intended victim-and why. If this is indeed Maron's final book, as she has announced, she is quitting while still in top form. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
In her final novel, Mystery Writer of America Grand Master Maron returns to late 1990s New York City and series protagonist Lt. Sigrid Harald, last seen in 1996's Fugitive Colors. Having come to terms with her lover Oscar Nauman's death, Sigrid is squaring away his estate and helping to coordinate an exhibit of his paintings. Her team lands a double homicide involving two homeless men that turns to be more complicated than they expect. Both men had been poisoned with a common heart medication found in the takeout food at the scene. The first victim is identified as Matty Mutone, who is connected to a mob family who has long lived in the neighborhood. The second man is harder to track down, but once his identity is known, the case breaks open. Meanwhile, Sigrid is finding closure in her own grief and dealing with the potential for an unexpected heir to Oscar's estate. Verdict Maron's series finale and last book ends her distinguished writing career on a high note. Her many fans will enjoy this while wiping away tears of farewell. [See Prepub Alert, 1/4/17.]-Kristen Stewart, Pearland Lib., Brazoria Cty. Lib. Syst., TX © Copyright 2017. 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.
