X

The Twenty-fourth Alphabet

In 1982, Sue Grafton started her Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series, with A is for Alibi. She has gone through almost every alphabet in the English language, with W is for Wasted coming out in 2013. The latest in the series is X, just X, no ‘is for’ attached. As the bestselling author said in an interview she is entitled to break her own rules.

Kinsey Millhone is one of the most loveable characters in detective fiction, a single (with occasional, very brief romantic entanglements), independent, courageous, witty and totally kickass female, who through A to X has solved crimes and fought felons up and down her stomping ground of Santa Teresa, California. She lives in a studio apartment, owned by the octogenarian Henry Pitts, who is also an expert chef, and her best buddy. His fun family of long-living Pitts is like Kinsey’s surrogate clan, and their watering hole of choice is Rosie’s bar and restaurant owned by a ferocious Hungarian woman, who often feeds them foul-sounding delicacies from her homeland, with Kinsey’s preferred drink of chilled chardonnay.

The series has remained in the 1980s, so no cell phones, computers just about making an appearance, phones are rotary, and notes typed on manual typewriters or handwritten on index cards. The most advanced gizmo of the age is the copier.  Even if this makes the books seem old-fashioned, it also lends them an unhurried charm.

In W, the down-at-heel detective Pete Wolinsky had been killed. In this book, his wife Ruthie, mysteriously threatened with a tax raid, requests Kinsey to check a box of his papers for any useful financial documents. What she find among other things, is a coded papers with six women’s names on it—all connected to a serial offender Ned Lowe-- and a package meant to have been delivered to his daughter April, fifteen years ago. While she is puzzling over this mystery, she has a problem of her own.

She was invited to a swanky mansion by a stylish, rich woman called Hallie Bettancourt, who wants her to track down her son, she gave up for adoption. The son, Christian Satterfield, happens to be a safe cracker and bank robber, just out of prison. Hallie pays Kinsey with marked currency notes that brings the cops down on her trail. Worse, when she goes back to check, the mansion shows no sign of habitation and her client cannot be traced. This gets Kinsey’s hackles up—how dare anybody cheat her?

As her work proceeds, in the backdrop is a severe water shortage turning to drought in California, that gets Henry into water-saving schemes, even if it means digging up his garden. Meanwhile, the new neighbours, an old couple Edna and Joseph, take full advantage of Henry’s kindness and pull their own little cons on him, much to Kinsey’s annoyance.

There are X’s sprinkled all over—a bank of X. Phillips, a wealthy transport baron Ari Xanakis and his divorced wife Teddy, the cause of a lot of Kinsey’s problems, a Father Xavier, and so on.

The culprit on whose trail Kinsey sets out, is just a small part of the book, but has left his vicious mark on several women. Even the usually equanimous Kinsey spooked out when she finds that he has trespassed into her office and left it off kilter. 

Although there is murder, burglary, cheating and corruption in Sue Grafton books, the times are still relatively peaceful and most people inherently decent. The world is protected from terrorism, computer hacking and religious fundamentalism. Fans wonder what will happen to Kinsey Millhone when Grafton completes the ‘Z’ book. There are still a quite a few months to go, but the suspense is killing.

X

By Sue Grafton

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Pages: 416

Love You Dead

Slithery, Slippery, Snaky

In Love You Dead,  the twelfth book of the Roy Grace series, popular crime writer Peter James, creates a heroine/vamp for whom you can’t help having a grudging admiration, even though she is a ruthless killer.

As a child, Jodie Danforth was the ugly duckling of her family, constantly being compared to her pretty sister, Cassie.  The sister dies in a mysterious fall off a cliff. And with this sly murder, Jodie embarks on a life in the pursuit of wealth.  Plastic surgery takes care of her looks, and her already devious brain does the rest. 

When the book begins, she cleverly kills her elderly husband on a ski slope, making it look like an accident. Her modus operandi is to look for rich lonely old men on the net, ensnare them with her beauty and then kill them.  At her secluded home, she has a hidden room full of deadly reptiles and insects; these creatures that would frighten the bravest, are her hobby.

Detective Inspector Roy Grace, is at a relatively peaceful stage of his life with loving wife Cleo and infant son, Noah, when his nemesis, a serial killer, Ed Crisp escapes from prison. To add to his woes, his ex-wife Sandy, who had walked out on him years ago, surfaces in a hospital in Berlin, in battered condition.

Meanwhile as Jodie kills husband number three with snake venom and plans the next hit, a British assassin called Tooth, working for a brutal Russian gang is on her trail, because she stole money and a memory drive from a gangster. The drive contains secrets that cannot fall into the wrong hands, and Jodie does not know that her life is in danger.

When a petty burglar and car thief dies with symptoms that look like snake poison, Roy Grace is called in to investigate and the various strands of the story start coming together. Grace makes a plan to trap Jodie, which involves the kind of subterfuge that would beat even her Machiavellian plots.

The subplots are not too interesting, and tie up rather too neatly, but the book is readable because of the smart and fearless Jodie; this femme fatale makes Roy Grace look like a rather tepid hero, as he plods away at his investigation and copes with the emotional turbulence in his life.  

Love You Dead

By Peter James

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Pages: 560

The Secrets of Happiness

Sassy Sisters

Never having read a book by Lucy Diamond before, one didn’t know what to expect, but it’s not hard to see why she is popular. The Secrets of Happiness is a grown-up kind of chick lit, meaning, the women have more to them than just perfect looks, and more to do that just mooning over guys.

Rachel and Rebecca (called Becca by all) are stepsisters-- Rachel’s father fell in love and married Becca’s mother, Wendy. There is an age gap between the two, but that is not the only reason for the relationship between them to be frosty.

The pretty Rachel grows up to be a successful careerwoman with a seemingly perfect marriage and three wonderful children. The frumpy Becca flits from job to job, ending up as a menial in a pub kitchen. Then, Rachel on a mysterious trip to another city, about which she tells nobody, hoping to be back before her kids return from school, is mugged and seriously injured.

The neighbour minding the children calls Becca to come look after them. In the process of reluctantly doing her duty towards family, Becca loses her job. On reaching Rachel’s home, she finds that her sister divorced her husband Lawrence, and lost her job too.  She was trying to set up her own fitness training enterprise when life dealt her a nastier blow. Since the muggers stole her bag with her phone and id, and a head injury gives her temporary amnesia, Rachel is unable to provide the cops with her name, number or address.

Rachel’s children, Mabel, Scarlet and Luke, are distraught, when their aunt comes by to bring some order into their lives. By the time Rachel is able to contact her family, Becca has learnt to manage a home and kids and also dealt with her sister’s clients, but her own freewheeling manner.

When Rachel returns home, she requests Becca to stay a few more days, even though she hates to be dependent on anyone. There is also a misunderstanding caused by Lawrence that prevents her from truly accepting her stepsister.

Over the weeks, however, the two grow close and learn the meaning of sisterhood. It is an easy read, bright and optimistic, with simple, relatable people populating its pages, not too much angst or ugliness and everything turning out all right.  Even the kids are not horrid, precocious brats, which is such a relief.

There are other characters and their stories woven into the novel.  It is no surprise that almost everyone from a teenager to a septuagenarian find their perfect mate by the end—it is that kind of happy-making book.

The Secrets of Happiness

By Lucy Diamond

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 480

The Paris Secret

Ghosts In A Canvas

This is something you can’t imagine in Mumbai—an apartment lying vacant for decades, without anyone trying to break in or squat.  Just such a place is at the centre of Karen Swan’s new bestseller, The Paris Secret.

Flora Sykes is a fine arts agent, working with large firm or art dealers; she enjoys her work, travelling all over the world, attending auctions, picking up paintings for clients. Suddenly her boss Angus and she are summoned to Paris by their wealthy clients, Lillian and Jacques Vermeil.

They received a mysterious communication informing them that the family owns an apartment in Paris, that they did not know of, and, according to a will, were not to enter the flat till the death of Jacques’s mother—the matriarch who lives in Antibes and ferociously guards the family’s past. But the apartment was broken into, and they need someone to check what is in there, without contravening the condition of the codicil.

Flora and Angus go to the apartment and find a treasure trove of classic art works by the great masters, believed to be lost during World War II.  Exciting as the discovery is, it has to be kept a secret, till the canvases and artifacts can be catalogued and their provenance established.

This is where Flora hits a block, because several paintings are traces back to an art dealer who worked for the Nazis during the War, which means they were probably stolen or extorted from Jewish families in distress. As Flora painstakingly solves the mystery, that involves the Vermeil family, she is also facing a family crisis involving her beloved brother Freddie.

To add to her stress she has to deal with the two obnoxious Vermeil brats, Xavier and Natascha. They are spoiled and cause scandals in their circle on a regular basis. Since it is a given that the workaholic heroine will fall for the bad boy, there is a romance thrown in half-heartedly, and a short-lived triangle as Flora dates a Vienna-based businessman, Noah Haas, who might have some details of a Renoir in the hidden collection. But for the reader, the story of the abandoned apartment and the paintings is of more interest.

Swan keeps the tone light, even though the story gets dark and intense at a point, when it brings in questions of ethics, honesty and loyalty. It is an easy, mostly appealing read, and Flora makes for a likeable heroine—scrupulous but not goody-two-shoes; strong, but not inflexible. The men in the book are not half as interesting.

The Paris Secret

By: Karen Swan

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 352

Black Water Lilies

Cocktail of Art and Murder

French writer Michel Bussi’s Black Water Lilies (translated by Shaun Whiteside) has an unusual setting—Giverny.  This is the village where the great Impressionist Claude Monet settled down to paint water lilies. It became a kind of pilgrim spot for students and art lovers who flock to see Monet’s house and the legendary lily pond.

In this peaceful community, a murder causes some turbulence. The story begins with the murder of art lover and womanizer, Jerome Morval. In his pocket is a postcard of Monet’s Water Lilies with the words: “Eleven years old. Happy Birthday.” The killer could be someone from the art underworld that trades in stolen masterpieces, or the jealous husband of one of his many lady friends, or perhaps one of the ladies.

The narrator is an old woman who watches over the village from her high perch in an abandoned mill, ignored by all but her dog Neptune. When Inspector Laurenc Serenac and his overeager deputy Sylvio Benavides start investigating the crime, they get a lot of tangled leads that don’t make sense.

Serenec falls madly in love with a schoolteacher Stephanie Dupain, whose husband Jacques is a suspect, a man known to be insanely possessive of his beautiful wife. Involved somehow in the jigsaw is eleven-year-old Fanette, an art prodigy, seeking a way out of her squalid existence with her single mother, by winning an international art exhibition.

Fanette has befriended a vagabond American painter James, who is also killed in the same way as Morval was, but it looks like the child imagined the artist, since no trace of him can be found. Benavides unearths a very old case in which a little boy also died in an identical manner.

Bussi constructs a maze of memories, time, motive and passion, that boggle the mind and lead to a stunning and quite unexpected climax. After the bestselling After The Crash, this is the second novel by Bussi to be translated into English and it is a fascinating read, in spite of the somewhat disjointed structure and a sagging middle.

Black Water Lilies

by Michel Bussi

Translated by Shaun Whiteside

Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Hachette

Pages: 350