I really wanted to love this book.

I definitely loved Heads You Lose, the wonderfully fun and zany novel that Lisa Lutz wrote with her ex-boyfriend. (Read my review here.) And I have to say that Trail of the Spellmans is pretty entertaining, for the most part. It’s a continuation of The Spellman Files, a series of novels about a rather dysfunctional family detective agency. Isabel Spellman, a 30-something year old detective, working for the family agency, is in the middle of several cases. Her father has a secret. Her mother is behaving bizarrely and no one seems to comment on it. Her brother and sister are feuding and neither will tell Isabel what the problem is. Her boyfriend’s mother is coming to visit and her tiny niece, Sydney, calls everything a banana. It’s enough to push anyone to a breakdown.

In this book, the cases they’re working seem chosen to play up the family drama. Her mother is taking classes — suddenly, indiscriminately studying everything from pottery to Russian literature, every day of the week, and no seems to find that remarkable except Isabel. She and her sister, Rae, are shadowing clients who may or may not be involved in illegal dealings — possibly with each other — and her parents seem very reluctant to talk seriously about the conflicts of interest they are facing. And perhaps most importantly, Isabel and her boyfriend, Henry, are facing serious problems. (I would think that the biggest problem is that she refers to him as Ex-Boyfriend #13, even though they’re still together, but that seems par for the course.) Everything seems gearing up for a giant collision.

Some of this book is laugh-out-loud funny. There is some very clever writing and I would probably try another Lutz novel, perhaps an earlier Spellman “document” (this book is Document #5). Some of it plods along, particularly in the middle. I found the family a little too precious, a little too forcibly funny, and that, of course, takes all the fun out of it. When Isabel is hiding from her boyfriend, she goes to her brother, David. But she doesn’t ring the doorbell and ask for asylum; she sneaks in a window. It just seems forced. There is quite a big deal about the secret that has caused a falling-out between David and Rae, and while the secret is definitely sufficient to cause a family feud, it just seemed so totally implausible that it sort of spoiled the fun.

All in all, it wasn’t a total loss, but I’m not convinced this was the best of the Spellman books. I am still open to trying an earlier book, but not as eager as I was right after Heads You Lose.

My copy of Trail of the Spellmans was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

In Burnedby Thomas Enger, Henning Juul is a veteran investigative reporter, returning to work after a series of personal tragedies left him changed and fragile. An apartment fire killed his son, ended his marriage and left him physically disfigured. He is struggling to deal with his fears and a case of PTSD that has left him unable to work for more than two years. A lot has changed in the world of internet news, he feels shaky, his sources and contacts may have moved on, but  he needs to prove himself, prove that he can still do the work — even if his new partner is dating his ex-wife. He’ll have the perfect opportunity: a gruesome murder committed in one of the city’s public parks. As Juul is drawn deeper and deeper into the case, both the danger — and the potential payoff — increase.

I have to admit that about 50 pages in, I almost set this aside. Early on, Juul is almost too fragile and too pathetic. It was painful to read. Here is a man who lost everything — his wife, his son, his career — and he feels responsible. He’s having a hard time adjusting to the regular rhythms of life. But I wanted to see what would happen to him and in the end, I’m glad I stuck with it.

The story is set in Oslo, Norway, which meant that the geographic references, and a lot of the cultural ones, were tough for me. There was some unfamiliar slang, but for the most part, it was easy reading. It was certainly an interesting look at the changes in the news business that have happened in just a few short years! Juul has to relearn his job while he is rushing to cover a major news story. His methods are very different from his showier colleague, but in the end, you know he’s going to be more successful.

Juul’s story is heartbreaking and you can’t help but root for him. Once I got past my frustration with Juul, it was easy to get sucked into the mystery. A young college student has been murdered — buried up to her neck and stoned to death in a tent set up in the park. The most obvious suspect, her Pakistani boyfriend, has some shady acquaintances. Her college friends, her colleagues in the film school and even her instructor all look a little suspicious. There are rumors that the murder was an honor killing, which has the potential to stir up a great deal of racial unrest. Juul is not going to have much time to get his sea legs back on this case, because he may be the next target.

I have been reading a lot of Scandinavian authors recently. Burned is Enger’s first novel, but I definitely look forward to reading the follow-up. With the cliffhanger that dangles at the end of Burned, how could I miss it!

My copy of Burned is an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

Joe O’Loughlin is an unlikely hero. He’s a psychologist with a failing marriage, serious health problems a troubled relationship with his daughter. He’s in a holding pattern, not sure if he’s looking for a safe place to land or just circling until he runs out of fuel and crashes. He makes some bad choices in Bleed for Me, but it’s hard not to root for him.

Joe gets a late-night call from his estranged wife, Julianne. Sienna, his daughter’s best friend, showed up at the door, covered in blood, and then ran away. Joe finds her — wet and shivering, silent, eyes flat and staring. By the time she comes around at the hospital, Joe will have the news: her father, decorated police officer Ray Hagerty, is dead. And it looks like Sienna killed him.

Maybe I’m a little burnt out on family drama right now. This is a pretty good mystery — there’s a lot of suspense, a good lead-up to discovering the killer, some misdirection and at the center, a troubled man, struggling against some pretty long odds. I just didn’t find it as moving as I had hoped.

Sienna is a difficult character for me, although that probably means Robotham has done an excellent job of writing a teenager. Most of the time, I want to whack her on the back of the head with something. She is that special teenage blend of stubborn and pathetic; she desperately wants help but she is dead-set against doing anything to help herself. Even when it becomes clear that she is in real danger — danger of being railroaded for her father’s murder and possibly a target of the real killer, if she’s not the real killer — she is unwilling to tell the truth, unwilling to give Joe anything to work with. He’s a psychologist, he understands what he’s dealing with, but getting through to her is a long, slow process.

Mr. Parkinsons is a main character in this novel, without having a single line. Joe O’Loughlin suffers from Parkinson’s Disease; it is largely at fault for the changes that lead to his marital problems. It makes it difficult for him to continue his work, it makes it difficult for him to get through the day, in one case it gets him arrested, when an officer sees his jerky, disjointed movements and draws the wrong conclusion. It has clearly changed Joe’s outlook on life and as much as his wife loves him, I can see how it would be difficult for her.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, even if I wasn’t swept away by it. It’s a good mystery, interesting characters and a main character you can root for. Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t have teenage kids, because I found the teenagers in the book the most difficult to deal with, even as a reader.

One small note of warning: as I mentioned in an earlier post, there is one small instance of rather extreme animal cruelty in this book. I struggled over mentioning it, but I think many readers will find it disturbing. It is moderately graphic, and if that bothers you, I suggest skipping it. It has a definite place in the storyline, but you will see it coming, I think. Simply turn a couple of pages and go on; the disturbing details do not come up again after that point.

My copy of Bleed for Me was a review copy, provided free of charge.

There is something I find really intriguing, at least in novels, about a female criminal. Their motivations seem so different from most male criminals — it never seems to be just about greed or power. It’s something more subtle. In The Face Thief by Eli Gottlieb, Margot is a promising young journalist. It doesn’t take long for her to realize that the lavish lifestyle she can glimpse from her assignments is just out of her grasp…but there are ways to extend her reach.

Margot meets Lawrence Billings, a man who is an expert at non-verbal communication. He teaches seminars on body language and reading a person’s face and what their physical attributes can tell you about their personality. Margot is eager to learn, maybe a little desperate, and she is able to use the things she learns from Lawrence to turn more men into her victims. She’s not a killer, but she still destroys their lives. She is beautiful and cunning and ruthless and she takes them for everything they’ve got. Even Lawrence is swept under, in his own way, as she turns his techniques against him.

This is an interesting read, told in a sort of disjointed way, with bits and pieces of the stories of the main characters told moving backwards and forwards in time. There is Margot — her troubled childhood, her ruthless nature and the destruction she leaves behind. There is Lawrence, who is interested in teaching Margot because he senses she is someone special. He eventually pays the price for getting involved with her, even though he tries to do the right thing. There is John Potash, lured into Margot’s web and faced with the destruction of his life and family. And there is Dan France, the mystery man at the hospital, who may decide to throw it all away…

I enjoyed the mystery and the way the reader had to piece the story together. I enjoyed the characters, for the most part. I have to say that I found the subject matter a little harder to swallow. I absolutely believe that you can tell a lot about a person from their body language and their non-verbal cues, but face reading goes well beyond that. Do I really believe that you can tell that someone is an obsessive-compulsive by the indentations at their temples? That people with few friends have short eyebrows or that people who seek attention have deeply cleft chins? Or that you can tell the details of my childhood from my hairline?

“The hairline is like a graph of life during adolescence.” He traced the laser dot along the ridges of her hairline. “And this jagged edge right here, well, that probably means our friend Margot’s adolescence was less than smooth sailing, am I right?”

“You’re right,” she said, speaking intentionally loud enough to be picked up by the overhead mike. “Like many people I had a difficult, um, transition to adulthood.”

No, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that you can tell anything about my personality from the shape of my ears, because I do not believe that everyone with similarly-shaped ears has certain traits in common. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying the book while I was reading it.

However, I have to admit that, writing this review only a few days after finishing the book, I find that it didn’t really stick with me. I enjoyed it, recommended it to a friend of mine who I think will also enjoy it very much, but I didn’t remember the names of the characters and I had to double check several details as I was thinking this through. Some books are just like that — a pleasure while you read them, but one that fades quickly once you’re done.

My copy of The Face Thief was a review copy provided free of charge.

Every now and then, the hype surrounding a book does not lie. That is certainly the case with Defending Jacob by William Landay. I had been hearing a lot of buzz about this one, but I was a little late on the Request button and didn’t get my copy right away. Once I picked it up, I could hardly stand to put it down.

Defending Jacob begins in with a grand jury. It’s an excellent plot device because we don’t know what the grand jury trial is about; we don’t know who is on trial or what the charges may be. But we do know that it comes too late:

“In April 2008, Neal Logiudice finally subpoenaed me to appear before the grand jury. By then, it was too late. Too late for his case, certainly, but also too late for Logiudice. His reputation was already damaged beyond repair, and his career along with it.”

It’s a powerful beginning to a novel that kept me on the edge of my seat, sneaking a few pages here and there over breakfast and in the car, from beginning to end. Andrew Barber is our witness. We find out immediately that he is the former Assistant District Attorney. His son, Jacob, has been charged with the brutal murder of a classmate.

They live in a small town and every move the Barber’s make is under the microscope. His wife, Laurie, has always been well-liked by her neighbors and at the center of the social whirl; suddenly, she’s an outcast. Andrew has to leave the District Attorney’s office, Jacob is out of school, and they find themselves locked in the house together, avoiding their neighbors, and utterly miserable.

The book discusses how far a parent will go to defend their child. Andrew is certainly willing to fight and claw his way through the courtroom — he understands that process, he understands the research and investigation that goes into a murder case — and he is not willing to entertain even the thought that Jacob is guilty. He sees it as an attorney: it doesn’t matter what he did, it matters what they can prove. If he can be found not guilty, we can deal with the rest later.

Laurie is riddled with doubt. She desperately wants to believe in Jacob’s innocence, but it becomes clear almost from the start that the Barbers don’t really know their son. He’s a teenager and he has a ton of secrets — some innocent, some guilty — and as each one is revealed it shakes her confidence in him and in herself as a parent. And Jacob isn’t the only one in the house with something to hide.

I loved the use of the grand jury to move the plot forward. We get frequent snippets of Andrew on the stand and it quickly becomes clear that we are getting Jacob’s trial in retrospect. The trial is over and something else has called for this new trial. It could be an appeal, it could be some misconduct on Andrew’s part, it could be something that has happened to Laurie, we don’t know for sure. I probably imagined every possible outcome, all sorts of scenarios that could have lead us to this point. You’re never quite sure, so you’re never quite sure until the very end of the novel. It was one of those books where I really wanted to get to the end and find out what happened, but at the same time I wanted to drag it out, enjoy the suspense and the story.

There are a few moments in the story that require a little suspension of disbelief, but that’s true of many stories. It wasn’t enough to kick me out of my happy place, enjoying the way the drama unfolded. Honestly, the thing that bothered me the most was the prosecutor’s name: Neal Logiudice. I simply could not wrap my head around the pronunciation given (<i>la-JOO-dis</i>), the emphasis seemed wrong and every time I came across it, it was like a record skipping. When I started thinking of him as just Neal, it got a lot easier.

This is a terrific novel, exploring a damaged family that is living a nightmare. We see the story of a mother and child unfold through the eyes of the father, who has his own agenda. The courtroom drama is interesting, the investigation is surprising, and every page held my complete attention. It’s the sort of book that makes you start looking up the author’s other work to add it to your TBR list.

My copy of Defending Jacob was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

There are a number of things about In Search of the Rose Notes  that I really liked. For one, I love the way that author Emily Arsenault portrays the friendship between Nora and Charlotte, both as children and later as adults. I love the mystery storyline, the way the children pursue their “investigation,” the difficulty that Nora has dealing with it as an adult. I thought the portrayal of Nora was especially good, the way she has grown away from her childhood home and the difficulties she has going back to it and seeing her classmates as adults. And most of all, I enjoyed the skillful way that Arsenault leads you from one suspect to another, the way that she subtly points the finger at different players in this game, so that it is easy to believe any one of them could have murdered Rose.

When Nora and Charlotte were eleven years old, they were best friends. They made plans for their around-the-world trip when they got out of high school. They did their schoolwork together. They played the elaborate games that kids dream up together. And they spent their afternoons with Rose, Charlotte’s babysitter, until one day, Rose walked out of their lives and out of the world.

Rose’s remains have been discovered, buried in a shallow grave near one of their old childhood haunts. Nora feels compelled to return to her hometown and reconnect with her old friend, Charlotte, and revisit the long-ago days when Nora and Charlotte tried to investigate Rose’s disappearance. They might have pulled their methods from crazy science fiction stories, but they were earnest in their desire to find her, to solve a mystery that left a gaping hole in their lives.

I have to admit that I probably suspected everyone in this novel, including Charlotte and Nora, at one time or another. It’s an excellent look at the way that time changes our perception of events, the way that we never really know our close friends, and the ways that people grow up and grow apart. Charlotte was a bit of a bully, always pushing Nora around, assuming that Nora would give her her way. Nora was a girl with secrets, including one desperate act that got everyone’s attention — something she has never told her husband about. She has trouble seeing her old classmates as anything other than the kids they were, tied up in prom night revelations and childhood grudges. I loved the way these storylines played out.

My copy of In Search of the Rose Notes was a review copy, provided free of charge.

This was a fun read. When it comes to the backside of Hollywood, you have to admit that Cheryl Crane, daughter of screen legend Lana Turner, really knows her stuff. The Bad Always Die Twice is a Hollywood murder mystery with all of the fun details that only an insider would know.

Nikki Harper is a Hollywood real estate agent, selling those megamillion dollar mansions in the hills with her partner, Jessica Martin. They are young, pretty, celebrity-savvy girls:

“One of Jessica’s most endearing qualities was that she wasn’t any more impressed by celebrities than Nikki was. Their only difference was that Nikki had grown up with them and Jessica slept with them. The combination of their personalities made them a great team at work.”

Sort of sets the tone for their interaction. Jessica is the pretty, flashy girl who flirts with the gentlemen clients and reels them in. Nikki is less flashy, with a more understated style, and the Hollywood chops to make the deals. And when Jessica is accused of murder, Nikki puts those Tinseltown connections to work.

The real star of the story is Victoria Bordeaux. She is stunningly beautiful, incredibly poised, an old-school screen goddess in the style of, well, Lana Turner. She is also Nikki’s mother. Nikki’s relationship with her mother and her mother’s particular flair for dealing with people are the best parts of the book. Nikki is a great character, with a complicated love life, interesting friends and the sort of foibles that will make her a fun read. Still, Victoria is what will keep me coming back — you can just tell that she’s going to be very involved in whatever Nikki does…and that’s not a bad thing at all.

I was a little wary taking this on — sometimes you suspect that a writer got their contract based more on a celebrity pedigree than their writing talent — but it was a real pleasure. I wouldn’t put Nikki up there with my new detective lady-love, Keye Street, but I would certainly enjoy picking up the next Nikki Harper mystery.

My copy of The Bad Always Die Twice was an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

I was really looking forward to reading this book! From the minute it arrived, it sat on the shelf, in the To Be Read pile, and whispered to me every time I walked by. You could tell by the cover that it was going to be racy. There was also the subtitle, “A Novel of Sex & Violence”, to give you a clue. And the publisher — Hard Case Crime. Doesn’t that just sound like it’s going to be a great book? And Lawrence Block’s Getting Off did not disappoint.

This is a novel about a female serial killer, but a woman so interesting that sometimes you forget just what she is. She picks up men in bars, takes them home and has sex with them, then she drugs them and kills them. She takes their money, their credit cards, whatever she needs to pay her bills. When she gets bored, she moves on — new city, new neighborhood, new name. She’s been doing some version of that since she left home (and believe me, her leaving home was a story in itself).

Katherine (at least that’s how she starts out) is a woman on a mission. She has decided that she needs to kill every man she’s ever had sex with. Now for some of us — most of us, I would guess — that’s not a really long list, at least not compared to Katherine’s. There are probably hundreds of men on her list, but since she kills most of them, it’s not too daunting. If only she could find them all…

Okay, this is not a book to leave around for the kiddies to read. There are parts that are downright raunchy. (I consider that a plus.) Of course, if you didn’t figure that out from the cover, this is probably not warning enough. Katherine is a very disturbed person, but yet, I almost found myself rooting for her. (In one situation, I was definitely on Team Katherine, although I think she was Missie by then.) And then, just as you’re almost enjoying her exploits, she does something horrible. Something that you can’t overlook. And you’re a little disgusted with yourself for forgetting that she’s a vicious, disturbed serial killer. How can you not love a book you get that caught up in?

The ending…I wondered where Block was going with this one. I didn’t exactly think he had written himself into a corner, but I was sorting through possible scenarios and not coming up with much. It managed to surprised me and I love the way things wrapped up. I’ve come across a lot of books that are great right up to the last chapter, then they fizzle. This delivered a very interesting ending.

This book was originally written under the name Jill Emerson. According to Jill’s webpage, she hasn’t had a book out since 1975! It’s a surprising assortment from a male author, and worth checking out. (If you scroll to the bottom of her webpage, there are links and descriptions of the other novels.)

My copy of Getting Off was an Advance Reader Copy, provided free of charge. A copy of this went out in the Serial Killer box for my recent Black Friday Giveaway. I hope my winner is enjoying it!

You start out feeling very sorry for Lucian Glass. He’s late picking up his girlfriend; she ends up dead. He meets with an important witness; he gets bashed over the head and the witness ends up dead. He has nightmares, compulsions, crippling headaches. But what if it is all his fault? What if this is all related to his past…his past lives.

In The Hypnotist, Lucian Glass is a member of the FBI’s Art Crime Team. He is caught up in the case of Malachi Samuels, a renowned reincarnationist who is searching for Memory Tools, artifacts which may finally prove that reincarnation exists and help us access our past lives.

It’s a complicated plot, with much of it is centered in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There are stolen paintings, artwork with shady origins, espionage and an assortment of plots and subplots, designed to keep a reader guessing. There’s a Matisse, a statue of a Greek god, and a Trojan horse. Throw in some startling coincidences, some past-life drama and a little romance, and you’ve got a pretty entertaining mystery.

I was a little confused in the beginning of the book; there is a lot of talk about Memory Tools, but no real explanation of what they are. I’m not sure if this was explained in Rose’s earlier novels on reincarnation (The Reincarnationist and The Memorist), but even Google didn’t give me much information. But that’s a fairly small complaint. A little reading and I was pretty sure I knew what it was we were hunting for (although I admit that I have no idea how a “pot of fragrant wax” is going to help).

This is an excellent book for those who like their mysteries with twisty plots. The action comes at you from all directions and time periods. I found it very easy to sit down and lose myself in the tangled storylines.

My copy of The Hypnotist is an Advanced Reader Copy, provided free of charge.

In a sense, The Woodcutter is a fairy tale. Not a cute Disney fairy tale, but one of those old Grimm Brothers’ tales, with heartbreak and revenge and bad folks meeting nasty ends. Even while parts of the story have a very modern feel, there are still ties to its more mythic underpinnings. I really enjoyed that part of the story.

Wolf Hadda is a successful businessman who describes his life as a fairy tale. His father was a woodcutter, the groundskeeper for a castle, and he grew up in a cabin in the woods. He fell in love with the daughter of the castle’s owner and eventually won her hand. But everything changes when he is accused of a shocking crime and gets swept up in accusations and investigations. In typical Wolf fashion, he doesn’t wait for the wheels of justice to grind him up. In a bid for freedom (more stubborn than desperate), there is an horrific accident that leaves Wolf crippled, disfigured, and near death. He wakes up to a world in which his friends have deserted him, his wife is divorcing him and he has been all but convicted of child pornography. His fairy tale is over.

Years later, he agrees to see the prison psychiatrist, Alva (from the Swedish for “elf”) to talk about his conviction. Their talks lead to acceptance and recognition of his crimes and, eventually, to parole. That’e when the fun begins.

The most interesting part of the book for me was Wolf’s prison interviews with Alva. The reader, of course, begins by assuming that Wolf is innocent; Alva is convinced he is guilty. Everything he says is proof of denial, every aspect of his childhood lays the groundwork for his future perversions. She takes nothing at face value. It was both fascinating and frustrating to me as a reader — you want to shout at Alva that she is being unfair to Wolf, but, of course, her reactions are perfectly normal for someone working with convicts — I’m sure most of her patients insist that they are innocent.

Wolf takes up residence in his old family home, adjacent to the grounds of the castle where his in-laws still live. The rustic cabin, the isolation, the disgust of his neighbors — it would be a very difficult existence for most men, but Wolf seems to thrive. After all, he is a man with a purpose…

This is really a terrific story. Some of it requires some suspension of disbelief, especially in the later chapters, but it is a modern-day crime mystery set against a fairy-tale backdrop of castles and woods and cliffs. Wolf is a fascinating character and I was not at all surprised that Alva became somewhat obsessed with him; it would be easy enough to do. The differences between Wolf’s family and that of his “princess”, Imogen, are startling and play an important role in the story, both the modern plot and the myth behind it. It’s a thick book — 500+ pages — but the story draws you in and keeps you turning pages throughout. Definitely worth the reading time and effort.

My copy of The Woodcutter was an advanced reader copy, provided free of charge.