Tag Archives: California

The Ghost Orchid, by Jonathan Kellerman****-*****

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4.5 stars rounded upward. My thanks go to Random House Ballantine and NetGalley for the review copy. This book will be available to the public February 6, 2024.

The Ghost Orchid marks the thirty-ninth entry in the Alex Delaware series, one of the longest series in publication. It’s easy to see why it’s lasted so long. The protagonist and side characters are engaging, and the dialogue never loses its sparkle.  In this one, Alex has been recovering from a savage beating that he took at the hands of the murderer in our last mystery. Milo, his BFF, is a homicide cop who often hires him to assist the LAPD with cases where a psychologist is needed, but now Milo is so mired in guilt that he can hardly look at his friend. Finally, with a nudge from Delaware’s longtime (and slightly boring) girlfriend, Milo includes him in another case, and we find snappy dialogue that never fails to entertain.

This time it’s a double homicide in Bel Air. The man and woman are found by the pool, naked and dead. The investigation reveals that he is the son of a mega rich European shoe magnate; she is the wife of another rich man, a young, socially awkward member of the ruling elite who isn’t pleased to learn what his wife has been doing when he’s away on business. But then we learn that she was using an assumed name, and so the whole thing is even more mysterious. Who is this dead woman, and who killed her?

At the same time, Alex is engaged to interview a child in his early teens whose adoptive parents have decided to bail. They are divorcing; neither of them wants the kid.

The main storyline is a lot of fun. Everyone enjoys seeing the super-rich suffer. With wealth of this magnitude, there’s no chance any of Kellerman’s readers will identify with the male murder victim or the husband of the female victim, either. The way it’s resolved is believable, and it’s done without any of the prurient or kinky sex that Kellerman inexplicably included for a handful of books in this series a few years back. The half star is withheld from my rating because the other storyline, the one about the teenager, sort of fizzles without going anywhere, and it’s hard to see why he included it in the first place. Kellerman’s career, and this series, were originally launched around crimes where kids were involved, often as witnesses, and those initial books are fascinating. I’d love to see the author return to his roots, write some more episodes that incorporate his credentials and experience in child psychology.

You can read it as a stand alone novel if you choose, but you’ll want to read the others afterward.

Nevertheless, if you are looking for a fast, fun whodunit, this book is a hard one to beat. I highly recommend it to those that love the genre.

Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon****

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Nina Simon’s debut novel, Mother-Daughter Murder Night, marks a fine beginning to an auspicious career. My thanks go to Net Galley and William Morrow for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

The story unfolds with three generations of women—Lana, Beth, and Jack—solving a murder mystery together. Lana, the grandmother, has just received dreadful news from her doctor, and she’s forced to rely upon Beth, her estranged daughter, for help to and from chemo appointments. Jack is her granddaughter, Beth’s daughter. Although all three are important characters, Lana is the protagonist.

Lana doesn’t deal well with helplessness.

No sooner has she moved into the little beach house in central California where the other two reside, than Jack, a teenager with a job as a kayak tour guide when not in school, finds a dead body while she is working. Suspicion initially falls on Jack, and so Beth and Lana dive in, first seeking to prove that Jack is innocent, and then, led by Lana, to find out who actually did it.

Amateur sleuth books come with an inherent challenge to the author, because obviously, civilians that have never worked in law enforcement are badly outmatched by actual cops. They don’t have the tools, the connections, or the experience to carry it off, and so such mystery novels sometimes end up looking ridiculous. Simon holds her own here nicely.  Another issue I see frequently is with characters that are children. Jack is a teen, and she’s a bright girl, but Simon doesn’t fall into the trap of creating an unbelievably smart teen in order to justify making her walk and talk exactly like an adult. Jack has the naivete and occasional bad judgement common to kids her age, and because of this, the story rings true.

There are a couple of things that I’d change if I could. First, the whole “fiercely independent” and “tiny firecracker” personas are badly overused and becoming a cliché. The second may be partially due to my own false assumptions. Between the cover and the title, I initially thought this would be a comic caper, with the women planning to mete out some vigilante justice with hilarious missteps and hijinks along the way. Although the book has its moments, it’s not as funny as I anticipated.

Nonetheless, this is a fun read, easily followed, and with more character development than one usually sees in a novel of this nature. The chemo occasionally seems a little too easy on Lana, but it’s not beyond the pale; after all, different people tolerate these things at different levels. There’s never a moment where I slam down the book due to disbelief. I appreciate the working class realism in Beth and Jack’s lives.  

I recommend Mother-Daughter Murder Night  to those that enjoy the genre, and I look forward to seeing what Simon writes next.

Back to the Garden, by Laurie R. King*****

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Laurie R. King is best known for her Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes historical detective novels, but I have long preferred her contemporary mysteries. Back to the Garden is her latest of these, and it is excellent. My thanks go to Net Galley and Random House Ballantine for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

Our protagonist is Raquel Liang, a detective based in San Francisco. When a long-dead body is found in the garden of the Gardener Estate—a famous mansion and grounds that sound faintly reminiscent of Hearst Castle—Liang, who is working on a task force to find and identify victims of serial killer Michael Johnston, becomes involved in the case.

Rob Gardener is the heir to the estate, and he had clashed often and bitterly with his grandfather before his demise in the 1970s. Upon learning of his windfall, Gardener turned the manse into a commune, with murals on the walls of what were once imposing, grandiose rooms and vegetable gardens where more formal floral ones previously stood. Now the place is being restored, and as gardeners work to clear a thicket of overgrown hedge, a huge statue topples over, exposing the bones of someone long interred there.

Meanwhile, in a hospital in the big city, convicted serial murderer Michael Johnston lies dying. During the same period that the commune reigned, Johnston was spiriting girls and young women off so that he could murder them. Improved technology has provided a number of leads, but the window in which the cops can extract information from the old bastard is rapidly closing. Liang suspects that the body found on the estate, which dates back to the same time that Johnston was slaying women in the area, may be one of his, and so she makes frequent visits to learn as much about the place and its residents, past and present, as possible.

The intriguing bit about this mystery is that the members of the commune, other than Rob himself, didn’t use their birth names, and it makes them tricky to trace. With names like Meadow, Pig, and Daisy, they could be just about anybody. Is one of them the body beneath the statue?

King does a fine job of segueing from past to present and back again, and of juggling a moderately large number of characters. As I read, I never have to flip back to be reminded of who someone is. The reader should know, however, that this is not a thriller. It isn’t written in a way to grab you by the hair and make your pulse pound. The pace is a bit more laid back, but for some of us, that is a pleasure. I never lost interest, and I could read this thing while eating my lunch without gagging.

There’s a good deal of period nostalgia, and so I suspect that the greatest appeal will be to Boomers.

Highly recommended.

Mecca, by Susan Straight*****

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Susan Straight is a force to be reckoned with. I knew this after I finished reading I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots after it came out in 1992, and after I sought out, bought, and read everything else she’d written that was available. When I discovered that her new novel, Mecca, was available on Net Galley, I leapt on it. My thanks go to Net Galley and to Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

Mecca, an ironic title if ever there was one, is a story of race, class, and gender, and the way that they play into the “Justice” system in California. Add a generous seasoning of climate change and its horrific effects in dry, dry Southern California, and a fistful of opioid addiction, and you have a heady mix indeed. But these are all well worn ground at this point, and this book is exceptional, not because it examines complex current events, but because of Straight’s facility in building visceral characters we care about, and launching them into this maelstrom in a way that makes it impossible to forget.

We begin with Johnny Frias, an American citizen of Latino heritage. As a rookie and while off duty, he kills a man that is raping and about to murder a woman named Bunny. He panics and gets rid of the body without reporting what’s happened. Frias is on the highway patrol, and he takes all sorts of racist crap all day every day. But his family relies on him, and when push comes to shove, he loves his home and takes pride in keeping it safe.

Ximena works as a maid at a hotel for women that have had plastic surgery. One day she is cleaning a room and finds a baby! What to do? She can’t call the authorities; she’d be blamed, jailed, deported, or who knows what. She does the best thing she can think of, and of course, there’s blowback anyway.

And when a young Black man, a good student with loads of promise that has never been in any trouble at school, or with the law, is killed because the cops see his phone fall out of the car and decide it’s a gun…?

I find this story interesting from the beginning, but it really kicks into gear in a big way at roughly the forty percent mark. From that point forward, it owns me.

As should be evident from what I’ve said so far, this story is loaded with triggers. You know what you can read, and what you can’t. For those of us that can: Straight’s gift is in her ability to tell these stories naturally, and to develop these characters so completely that they almost feel like family. It is through caring about her characters that we are drawn into the events that take place around them, and the things that happen to them.

This is a complex novel with many moving parts and connections. I read part of this using the audio version, which I checked out from Seattle Bibliocommons. But whereas the narrators do a fine job, I find it easier to keep track of the characters and threads when I can see it in print. If you are someone that can’t understand a story well until you’ve heard it, go for the audio, or best of all, get both.

Highly recommended.

When the Stars Go Dark, by Paula McClain***-****

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I have never read Paula McClain’s work before, but a number of Goodreads friends expressed enthusiasm about her novels, so I decided to see what the excitement was about. I came away a little underwhelmed, but nevertheless, thanks go to Net Galley and Random House Ballantine for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

Our protagonist is Anna Hart, and she’s a missing persons detective in San Francisco. A tragedy has sent her running off to lick her wounds, and the bulk of the story is dark and brooding in tone. Then a missing persons case appears that bears striking similarity to one she was confronted with many years ago, and she becomes a dog on the hunt. There’s a bit of magical realism sprinkled in, things she “just knows” that help her solve the case.

Here is a note I wrote during the first half of the book, and it effectively sums up how I felt for most of the story:

“This is one of those stories where the first person narrator bobs and weaves, trying to tell us a few things while withholding all sorts of important, motivating events in her past. It’s getting tiresome, and I want her to just fucking spit it out so that we can move on.”

I suspect that if McClain had used a lighter hand with the veiled references, mentioning them less frequently and then returning to them later, I might have had a more charitable viewpoint.

As it stands, I wouldn’t call this a bad novel, just not a great one. If you are a fan of her earlier work, you may love this book just as much. But if you haven’t read McClain before and are about to lay down your money for just one book within this genre, I advise you to choose something else.

At the Edge of the Haight, by Katherine Seligman****

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At the Edge of the Haight tells the story of a homeless youth, Maddy Donaldo, who lives with her dog, Root, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. But one day she runs across a young man lying dead, and the man that is almost certainly his killer locks eyes with her. He tells her, “Keep a handle on the fucking dog…I know where to find your ass.”

I was invited to read and review this award-winning novel by Algonquin Books. My thanks go to them and Net Galley for the review copies. It’s for sale now.

At first, I am not sure I’ll like this book. It seems a bit self-conscious, a bit like a public service announcement or an infomercial. I wonder what I have gotten myself into. But about a quarter of the way in, it wakes up and begins to flow. It becomes my dedicated bathroom book, since I’ve been given a physical review copy, and I find myself brightening when I enter the loo. There are any number of places when the author has the opportunity to use an obvious plot device, but she chooses something better. By the end of the story I believe Maddy as a character, and I appreciate the way it ends.

My home town, Seattle, has an enormous problem with homelessness, estimated in the tens of thousands, and most of them are native Seattle-ites that have been priced out of the housing market. I know one of the people out there; others have squatted in my yard until my dog made them feel unwelcome. Not one part of this city is entirely free of tents, cardboard shacks, and other makeshift shelters. So this subject is never far from my thoughts.

The fact is that there aren’t nearly enough shelter beds, whether in open rooms with mats on the floor, hotels with doors that close and provide privacy, or other options, but in reading this book, it is also clear that there are times when it’s better to walk away from free shelter. Take our friend Maddy. The shelter she sometimes frequents is one where the probable killer has seen her. She can’t go there safely. There are shelters where she can’t take her dog. There are others that sound pretty good, but a night filled with the screams of a neighbor experiencing a mental health crisis make the private niche way deep in the park more appealing. The cops range from businesslike 3 AM bush beaters (“You can’t camp here!”) to the overtly cruel, and most of the homeless know better than to try to confide in them. And so it goes.

The main part of this story involves a couple—Dave and Marva—that are the parents of Shane, the murder victim. They live on the other side of the country, and they never understood why Shane wouldn’t come home. No one besides Maddy recalls having seen Shane, and so although she has only seen him once—dead—they latch onto her, vowing to help her since they couldn’t help him. Between their grief and ignorance, however, they bumble around and breach boundaries in ways that are outrageously presumptuous, and when they drag her to their home for Thanksgiving, they introduce her as someone that “knew Shane,” which of course she didn’t. Maddy feels bad for these folks, but she doesn’t want to be their project. It’s a bizarre situation for her to be in.

Though it is marketed as commercial fiction, I think a lot of teens would embrace this story. I suggest that Language Arts teachers in middle and high schools add it to their shelves, as should librarians. The vocabulary is accessible, and despite the quote I lead with, there’s very little profanity.

Recommended especially for teenage readers.

The Guncle, by Steven Rowley*****

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How do you spell instant parenthood? It’s the last thing GUP—the appellation bestowed on Gay Uncle Patrick—expected, and the transition is hilariously rocky. My thanks go to Net Galley and Putnam Penguin for the review copy; this book is for sale now.

Patrick’s whole life appears to be on hold. He was on television for a good long while, and so both fame and fortune are his. He doesn’t actually have to do anything, and since the demise of his beloved partner, he hasn’t wanted to. Then one of his closest friends, Sarah, who had been his college roommate, dies, and everything changes.

Grant and Maisie, Sarah’s children, are six and nine years old respectively. When the memorial service concludes, Patrick is blindsided by Joe, Sarah’s husband. While she was on her deathbed, she made Joe promise that when she was gone, he’d go into rehab—but of course, someone has to take the children. Joe wants that someone to be Patrick.

The humor is ribald at times, but never over-the-top. Patrick knows nothing about children. Nothing! In a daze, he returns home with his charges in tow, and he has to learn on the job. Maisie is at a somewhat bossy age and is only too happy to tell him what to do and how to do it, and oh is it fun to watch. As the fog lifts, Patrick begins making small changes to create a more child-friendly space, but mostly, he embraces his unconventional situation. There’s a Christmas celebration in the middle of summer; there’s a party. And as he steps up to his new role, he realizes that he should return to work; he has heirs now, after all.

Aunt Clara arrives, and she demands the children return with her. She knows how to do this. She frowns on nearly every aspect of Patrick’s life. But Patrick is amazed to realize he is willing to fight to hang onto them.

Some may be surprised to find a book like this earning a five star rating; it’s not serious literature. It’s fun; it’s fluffy. But this reviewer rates each book on its excellence compared to others of its genre. As a humorous novel, it shines. As a feel-good book, it’s terrific. As beach reads go, what can be better?

Perhaps it’s indicative of Rowley’s skill that I have found myself writing review notes in his voice. This doesn’t happen often. But as for you? You should get this book and read it, because all of us need a mood elevator, and in that respect, it’s a bargain. Highly recommended!

Pretty Things, by Janelle Brown*****

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Nina is a second generation grifter, a talented thief that uses social media to spot and follow the conspicuously wealthy, then set up an opportunity to rip them off. But now Nina has gone straight; her college education has made it possible to earn an honest living. However, her mother’s chemo bills are stacking up, her mom too weak to find and execute her own ten-finger specials, and so Nina finds herself back in the game.

My thanks go to Net Galley and Random House for the review copy. This book is for sale today.

Vanessa Fucking Liebling is an heiress, a spoiled daddy’s girl that has found an avocation as a social media influencer. She thinks nothing at all of dropping tens of thousands of dollars for a single dress that she will wear once; she is courted by upscale manufacturers of women’s clothing, accessories, and you-name-it, and she flies free of charge to famous cities around the world with a small coterie of women like herself, the chosen ones that have the Instagram followers that make their endorsements so valuable. But when her father dies, Vanessa soon learns that the money problems he’s tried to tell her about are indeed real. With her party budget in the crapper and a schizophrenic brother to look after, Vanessa ditches the New York fashionistas and heads to the family’s vacation home, Stonehaven, located in Lake Tahoe, California. She is about to come nose-to-nose with destiny.

Our two protagonists, Nina and Vanessa, are featured alternately in the first and third person respectively; in addition, we catch snippets of their earlier lives and the critical events that have molded them.

Though Nina is a crook, I find her easier to like and bond with than Vanessa. Nina, despite her dishonesty, cynicism, and the immense chip on her shoulder, is an underdog, a scrappy fighter determined to better herself and to take care of her mama. She isn’t a violent offender, and the marks she steals from are so filthy stinking rich they hardly notice the loss of a wristwatch here, an antique vase there. It’s hard not to feel that if the world were a fairer place, the dilettante wouldn’t have that much stuff to start with, and Nina wouldn’t have to scramble to get by and take care of her sick mother.

Vanessa, by contrast, is a much harder sell. Brown develops the hell out of this character, showing her gradual awakening as she realizes how shallow her entire existence is, and how devoid she is of any true friends. At first I am having none of it. Poor little rich girl indeed; cry me a river! But Brown keeps chipping away at my resistance, and eventually I see Vanessa as a flawed human being with problems, rather than a rich person that deserves whatever karma comes her way.

My first book by this author was Watch Me Disappear, a glorious work of suspense that kept me enraptured till the last twenty percent, at which point I was consumed by dismay. Therefore I read this book with avidity, and yet at the same time I am on the alert, wondering if this story will also be resolved with a you’ve-gotta-be-kidding-me ending. My fears prove groundless. The main storyline as well as the smaller bits all come together in a way I find deeply satisfying. The ending is a complete surprise.

My one small criticism at the outset was the schtick about Nina’s mother’s chemo. It’s been done, and done again, and done again. I’m thinking I’d like the story better if she would just let the grifter be a grifter, rather than carrying on about poor, dying mom. However, there’s an additional twist at the end that I did. Not. See. Coming.

In the end, this book is the total package. I wouldn’t change a single thing.

Highly recommended. Get this book now!

Heavy on the Dead, by G.M. Ford*****

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Leo Waterman is one of my favorite detectives, but the opening of this twelfth entry finds him trying to keep a low profile and stay out of trouble. In Soul Survivor, which precedes this one, Leo and his bodyguard, Gabe more or less destroyed a white supremacists’ compound in Idaho, and now they are both wanted men. They’ve traveled as far south as they can from their mossy, misty Seattle homeland without leaving the country, but even in Southern California, trouble follows them.

My thanks go to Net Galley and Thomas and Mercer, and of course to author G.M. Ford, whose annual entries in this entertaining series have become one of the best parts of summer.

It’s a tricky thing, braiding dark social issues with humor, and Ford does it expertly. At the outset, Leo and Gabe find the body of a dead child on the beach. They are trying not to be noticed, but they can’t just leave him there. As the story progresses, cop Carolyn Saunders quietly encourages Leo to dig further into the incident, because the official story smells fishy; she can’t do it without risking her job, but Leo is retired, and as long as he can stay out of view of his would-be assassins, he can pretty much do as he likes. When the story concludes, the role of Saunders is left open. She may be back, or she may not. Her role here is to advocate that Leo stand on the side of justice but within sane limits; this is a role previously occupied by Leo’s ex-girlfriend, Rebecca. The real fun is had when Leo and Gabe team up, since neither one of them gives a single shit about their social standing or, when it comes down to it, their own personal safety.

As far as I know, the character of Gabe, a sidekick with loyalty, heart, and the tenacity of a pit bull, is the first gender-fluid character to show up regularly (okay, twice so far) in a long-running series. I love this character.

A longstanding hallmark of the Waterman series is the large yet sometimes invisible homeless population. This was true in 1995 when Ford published Who in Hell is Wanda Fuca, and that was before homelessness burgeoned and became a national issue. As far as I know, Ford is the first to feature homeless people in every book of the series; although his characters are often quirky and sometimes bizarre, they are ultimately human beings possessed of worth and dignity. I’ve believed every one of them, and so it’s no surprise that I believe the man with the barcode tattooed on his forehead, the one that bites Leo when he collides with him while running from cops. I like how this thread of the story resolves, too.

As the plot moves forward, we have assassins chasing the assassin that is chasing Leo, and it is simultaneously suspenseful and hilarious. This is important, because the crimes that are uncovered in pursuit of the truth about the dead child on the beach are dark indeed. In less skilled hands, the issue of human trafficking could well trip my ick-switch, that boundary line each of us possesses where the sordid but compelling central focus of a detective story suddenly becomes too sickening to be fun anymore; but the author’s less-is-more instinct is on point, and so once we touch that hot stovetop, we withdraw and move on to other things, circling back—briefly again—at its conclusion.

Anyone that reads the genre unceasingly across decades develops a mental list of overworked character and plot devices that we never care to see again; at the same time, a badass writer can take one of those elements and make it seem brand new and shiny. For me, the place where so many protagonists arrive, the one where they are knocked out, or drugged, or simply overpowered and tossed into the back of a truck (or van, or car) is one that can make me close a book. Nope; done.  But in this instance, the truck abduction is a critical component, and to try to carry off the climax and conclusion in any other way would be artificial and most likely hamper the pace. But to aspiring writers: Ford is an experienced professional; don’t try this in your book.

This book will be for sale July 23, 2019, and earlier entries in the series are selling digitally for a buck each. Get your plastic out now; you can thank me later. Highly recommended.

Your Life is Mine, by Nathan Ridley***-****

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Last spring, author Nathan Ripley set the world on fire with his sinister debut novel, Find You in the Dark, and so I could hardly wait to read his new release. Big thanks go to Net Galley and Atria for the review copy.  Although this psychological thriller is a solid effort, there is an unevenness of quality that holds it back.

The opening is strong, both urgent and original:

Before a shooter is a shooter, he’s just a man in a room. It’s what follows that brings the background to the scene, to the way we remember it. The domestic dispute reports, the spotty employment record, the legal and illegal firearms history, the I-always-knew neighbors. Before all of that, he comes into the room with his gun, hidden or not, and he is a just a man. Chuck Varner was holding his daughter’s hand when he walked into the mall. My hand. He took me up that escalator and told me that he loved me. He told me to walk away from the mall and go back to my mom once he was done…I was seven years old.

Blanche Potter is a journalist, and she tells us that she is fine now. She has shed her horrifying past and her psycho parents like a ratty old coat, and her way of processing the experience that marked her childhood is by creating a documentary about it. The only person in her life now that knows who is she is, is her childhood friend Jaya. Jaya’s mother took Blanche in, introduced her to normal life. Jaya means everything to Blanche.

Unfortunately, another journalist has uncovered her past and is making demands. Emil Chadwick is the son of the biographer that spilled her family’s private details to the world back when Blanche was still a child; he threatens to out Blanche if she doesn’t cooperate with the work he is doing now.

The story is told in the first person primarily by Blanche, but it’s punctuated by Emil’s narrative and that of his mother Jill. We learn that Varner left followers that are still intent on fulfilling the mandate of chaos that Varner named “Your Life is Mine,” and at least one more mass shooting is in the offing. As Blanche untangles the truth, she reveals the secrets that she has withheld from her colleagues as well as her loved ones for all these years.

Blanche’s character is expertly handled, and of course she isn’t fine at all; she’s just good at compartmentalization. Ripley is deft as he introduces elements that tug at one fragile string and then another that are holding Blanche together emotionally. No one can read this story without believing Blanche and cheering for her, the plucky, bright young woman determined to proceed with her life despite a desperate, harrowing childhood.

But a thriller like this has to have a powerful resolution, and this one doesn’t. Within the last fifteen percent of the book, Blanche makes errors that don’t characterize her as we know her, and that cannot be accounted for by her development. The ending is more fizzle than boom, and to add insult to injury, Ripley moves to a third person narrative at the ninety percent mark; it’s awkward and jarring.

I like this author’s work and will continue to read it. As for you, I recommend you get it free or cheap, unless your pockets are deep ones.