The East Bay Mystery Readers' Group -

2 March 2004 Meeting Recap

THE ADVENTURESS (Amateur Sleuth) - Carole Nelson Douglas - GOOD+

Diva/detective Irene Adler and her bridegroom, handsome barrister Godfrey Norton, are honeymooning in Paris when they become embroiled in an investigation: a drowned sailor's body has been recovered from the Seine, and on his chest is a…

DI Tom Thorne is up against is a particularly creepy specimen who savagely killed three victims but his fourth, Alison, has undergone a deliberately induced stroke and although all her senses are intact,

she is totally unable to move or communicate. This hideous condition, called

Locked-in Syndrome is, however, quite possibly the killer's first

miscalculation…

Amanda Witham enjoys wearing the eighteenth century garb while working as a tour guide at Williamsburg, Virginia's Melrose House. When archeologists discover two-century-old

bones in the nearby garden, Amanda received visits from the ghost of James

Grant who persuades her to uncover the truth about his untimely death. Upon

traveling to Scotland Amanda finds herself embroiled…

BOOKMAN’S PROMISE – VG

John Dunning – 3^rd in series (Investigative mystery)

Cliff Janeway former homicide cop turned antiquarian bookseller, is thrilled with his purchase of a first edition by nineteenth-century explorer Richard Burton, but the book brings more grief than it does pleasure.

After an elderly woman arrives in Janeway's store claiming that the Burton belongs to her, Janway finds himself in the middle

of a…

ONCE UPON A TIME – G+

Barbara Fradkin – 2nd in series (Canadian – police procedural)

When an old man dies a seemingly natural death, only Inspector Michael Green finds it suspicious. Talking to the man's family only increases Green's curiosity. A search of his house turns up an old tool box

with a hidden compartment containing a German ID card from World War II. Gradually,

suspects emerge, including members of the man's own…

In 1922, Scientific American offers five thousand dollars for evidence of "conclusive psychic manifestations." Inspired by this real-life event, Inamorata follows Martin Finch, a twenty-three-year-old Harvard graduate student and

member of Scientific American’s investigative committee, on the…

Jack Ruskin, a well-respected New York lawyer, is also living every parent's nightmare after his teenage daughter becomes the victim of a sexual predator. As Jack

tends to her, his sorrow and pain gradually grow into hot-blooded rage and he

decides to take matters into his own angry hands. This is a novel where the "good"

guy is…

BLOOD HOLLOW – Ex

William Kent Krueger – 4^th in series

When the corpse of a beautiful high school student is discovered four months after her, all evidence points to her boyfriend, local bad boy Solemn Winter Moon. However Cork

O'Connor, Aurora's

former sheriff, is convinced he’s innocent. In a battle to clear Solemn's name,

Cork encounters

small-town bigotry, bureaucracy…

Ex-Crusader, now trader in holy relics and general sword for hire, Sir Richrad Straccan has lost the woman he loved to his enemies. His first task is to find her. His second, to escort the great bell, Gaudete, to its resting

place in Durham.

His third to save from her enemies a young woman, the Gleemaiden of…

OH BEULAH HEIGHT – G

Reginald Hill – 17^th in series

With modernity raising its head in Yorkshire, the Water Board decided to flood a local valley to make a reservoir. Of course they had to bulldoze the homes of Dendale, and relocate the families. That was

when three little girls disappeared. Andy Dalziel, a young detective in those

days, took the case hard. No bodies were ever…

DATING DEAD MEN – G

Harley Jane Kozak – 1^st book

Los Angeles greeting-card artist and card-and-gift shop manager Wollie Shelley is dating forty men in sixty days as research for a bestselling author’s book, How to Avoid Getting Dumped All the Time.

Wollie is meeting plenty of eligible bachelors but not falling in love, not

until she stumbles over a dead…

THE FRUMIOUS BANDERSNATCH - Ex

Ed McBain – 53^th book in 87^th precinct series

Bison Records' self-styled impresario Barney Loomis runs into a snag in his effort to catapult his newest performer, Tamar Valparaiso, to stardom. As Tamar is lip-synching the provocative video of her first album

aboard a rented yacht, two men in Saddam Hussein and Yasir Arafat masks snatch

her before a stunned…

Set in 1908 Cairo, Captain Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt (head of Cairo’s CID, focused on political, not police, matters), investigates the attempted

murder of prominent politician and philanderer Nuri Pasha. Ostensibly the

target of…

Set in a rogue- and scalawag-ridden Victorian London, 16-year-old Sally Lockhart has no time for the usual trials of adolescence: her father has been murdered, and she needs to find out how and why. But everywhere she turns, she

encounters new scoundrels and secrets. Why do the mere words "seven

blessings" cause one man to keel over and die at their utterance? Who…

When Sean Donovan, cousin to Sheriff Susan Wren, goes to interview Wakely Fromm, who's been in a wheelchair since fighting a forest fire 20 years earlier with his best friend Jack Garrett, governor of Kansas who wants to be

President; he finds Fromm dead in his bathroom, shot in the head, apparently by

his own hand.

Normally I find a plot with…