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Forgotten Book Friday – FOOLISH UNDERTAKING

admin — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:13:00 +0000

FOOLISH UNDERTAKING

MARK DE CASTRIQUE

Poisoned Pen Press HC 02/06

In Gainesboro, a small mountain community in North Carolina, Barry Clayton had to give up a promising career elsewhere when he was needed instead at the family business, Clayton and Clayton Funeral Directors. Because of Alzheimer’s disease, Barry’s father could no longer work, and Uncle Wayne needed someone else to keep the Clayton family business from going under. So, of course, Barry returned to help.

But when a client (a dead body) suddenly disappears from the funeral home, Barry—after notifying the local sheriff Tommy Lee Wadkins—realizes that he must also draw upon his own prior training and experience as a former police officer in order to recover the body as quickly and as discreetly as possible. After all, Clayton and Clayton “never lost a body in nearly eight decades of business,” and now is no time to break with tradition.

Barry and Tommy Lee, though, have a very difficult case on their hands, and the identity and prestige of the missing man makes the situation even more complicated and urgent. The missing man is Y’Grok Eban, a Vietnamese immigrant with an extraordinarily impressive record of having heroically assisted many American servicemen in his country in the 60s and 70s, and Y’Grok is scheduled to be buried later in the week when dozens of political and military dignitaries, veterans, and other Vietnamese immigrants are scheduled to attend the funeral.

The early investigation suggests that Y’Grok’s disappearance may, however, be related to something sinister that happened decades ago in Vietnam. Clues begin to accumulate: A cryptic tattoo speaks of a long-buried past; a few of the mourners who arrive for the funeral seem to be too closely guarding old secrets; and an enigmatic message in a letter announces that “Raven has come home!” But when shots are fired at Barry, and when one of the most important persons in town for the funeral is brutally murdered, Barry and Tommy Lee know that they must move quickly to prevent further mayhem in tiny Gainesboro.

FOOLISH UNDERTAKING, Mark de Castrique’s third entry in his cop-turned-reluctant-undertaker series, is incontrovertible proof that this North Carolina native and resident knows how to write a first-rate mystery thriller. A cleverly constructed, fast-paced plot and a colorful cast of characters (including a generous supply of suspects) will keep readers entertained and guessing all the way to the end of the recommended whodunit.

Forgotten Book Friday – The Minotaur

admin — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 11:47:00 +0000

The Minotaur by Barbara Vine
Shaye Areheart, March 2006
ISBN 0-307-23760-5
Hardcover

The irrepressibly prolific and consistently impressive writer Barbara Vine (a.k.a. Ruth Rendell)—“the best mystery writer in the English-speaking world” (Time) and “a writer who is at the height of her powers” (Daily Mail)—has now given readers one of her most disturbing and provocative mysteries, The Minotaur.

First, let us consider the name that serves as the title of Barbara Vine’s mesmerizing novel: The Minotaur of ancient Greek mythology, as readers will recall, was an unpleasant creature with a bull’s head and man’s body. It seems that King Minos of Crete had failed to make a required sacrifice of a bull to the god Poseidon, and that unforgiving god was so perturbed that he had caused the king’s wife, Queen Pasiphaë, to lust after the previously required sacrifice. Well, the troubled offspring of that divinely ordered but admittedly unseemly union was the Minotaur (which must have been fair enough warning to the Greeks that they should neither defy gods nor engage in unseemly behaviors with other species). Eventually confined in the infamously difficult labyrinth, the voracious monster regularly devoured sacrificial human beings until it was finally stopped by Theseus (whose own life—not coincidentally—was also complicated by plenty of relationship problems).

Now, as for the enthusiastically recommended novel, The Minotaur, consider the following: Kerstin Kvist, visiting England from her home in Sweden, takes a job at Lydstep Old Hall, a singular estate with plenty of atmosphere and entirely too many mysteries. Julia is the impatient matriarch who presides over the Cosway family which includes four daughters—Zorah, Ida, Ella, and Winifred—and a son, John—the person for whom Kerstin has been hired as nurse and attendant. When she is introduced to John, she is told simply that he has been diagnosed as schizophrenic, he will not tolerate any physical contact or any deviations from his obsessive schedule, and—regardless of any other problems that might arise—he must take his daily medications (otherwise John’s behavior may become a bit—different).

“There’s madness in the family,” Kerstin is told. “And of course what John wants John gets,” she hears from someone else. She also soon realizes that the Cosways keep some of the rooms shut up and locked in the old homestead; the most closely guarded room, it seems, is the library (which, as it turns out, has a rather intricate floorplan). The Cosways, as Kerstin discovers, are a fractured family entrapped in their own labyrinth of family secrets, vanities, and prejudices. They cannot escape the past, they are mired down in the present, and they cannot accept the inevitabilities of the future. And the more Kerstin learns about Lydstep Old Hall and the Cosways, she worries that she may have made a frightening mistake in taking the job. Then, when people begin dying—suddenly and violently—Kerstin is even more concerned.

Barbara Vine pulls out all the stops in The Minotaur and deftly uses the conventions of the 19th century gothic novel to deliver a chillingly vivid tale of greed, passion, and murder. Find out why P. D. James says that “Barbara Vine has transcended her genre by her remarkable imaginative power to explore and illuminate the dark corners of the human psyche.” Discover why Scott Turow says that Barbara Vine is “surely one of the greatest novelists presently working in our language.” Find out why I offer this promise: Readers will not soon forget the monstrous personalities and the dark secrets that threaten to destroy Lydstep Old Hall!

Forgotten Book Friday – The Limehouse Text

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:39:00 +0000

The Limehouse Text by Will Thomas
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, July 2006
ISBN 0-7432-7334-6
Hardcover

It is early February in 1885, and the narrator of The Limehouse Text, Thomas Llewelyn, has been employed for nearly a year by Cyrus Barker, London’s singularly resourceful private enquiry agent. Previously seen by readers in Will Thomas’s Some Danger Involved and To Kingdom Come, this memorable detective and his assistant now find themselves involved in one of their most dangerous and baffling cases.

Barker’s previous assistant, Quong, had been murdered a year earlier, and his body had been found floating in the tidal waters near London’s Limehouse district, “the Oriental quarter of town.” At that time, Barker—the taciturn Scotsman who had twenty years earlier seen combat in China’s Taiping Rebellion, the martial arts expert who uses razor-sharp pennies as weapons, the man-about-town who has a special fondness for a mysterious woman, first-rate food, fine clothing, and good books, especially the Holy Bible—made a promise to Quong’s father: Barker would track down and bring to justice whoever was responsible for Quong’s murder.

Now, however, even after all this time had passed, the police have found a new clue: a pawn ticket that Quong had hidden in the lining of his clothing. Barker soon realizes that Quong had used the pawn shop as a hiding place for a very important treasure: a Chinese book of martial arts secrets, a book that apparently had been taken from the Xi Jiang Temple in China. The mysterious book—The Limehouse Text—has now attracted the covetous interest of any number of ruthless villains, and when the Barker, Llewelyn, and the police join forces to find the pawn shop, redeem the ticket, and recover the book, the problems and the dangers quickly escalate.

First, Barker and Llewelyn learn that the former pawn shop owner had recently died under mysterious circumstances. Then, the policeman who had continued his investigation and had found numerous clues into Quong’s death is shot and killed. Later, Barker’s butler is attacked and injured when he confronts an intruder in Barker’s home. As the “accidents,” assaults, and murders accumulate, Barker and Llewelyn quickly realize that Quong’s murder “was not merely an unsolved case but an ongoing one in the midst of which one could easily be killed.” Moreover, Barker and Llewelyn must acknowledge that the enigmatic book continues to exert its strange power, becoming “the cause of our present misery and a good deal more to come.” In an intriguing and exciting race against time and danger, Barker and Llewelyn must solve the complicated mystery of “the Limehouse text.”

At the end, borrowing a plot device from the early twentieth century’s golden age of mysteries, the author Will Thomas orchestrates a dramatic denouement in which the brilliant Barker gathers all the likely suspects in one room. When the case of The Limehouse Text is finally solved, in a splendid flourish of bravado and deductive reasoning that would have impressed even Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Barker patiently explains everything to the Watson-like assistant, Llewelyn. Of course, almost everyone—certainly including Llewelyn (and this reader)—had been foiled throughout the adventure. Only the gifted Cyrus Barker had the wherewithal to focus upon the correct clues, ignore the red herrings, outsmart the scoundrels, and then reach the only sensible conclusion. Watching Barker finally untie all the tangled strands of the knotted plot and explain his solution is simply delicious icing on the well-made cake in this thoroughly entertaining mystery.

Forgotten Book Friday – A Sound Like Thunder

admin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:28:00 +0000

A Sound Like Thunder
By Sonny Brewer
Ballantine, 288 pages
ISBN 0-345-47633-6

Returning to Fairhope, Alabama, the setting for his praiseworthy The Poet of Tolstoy Park, Sonny Brewer’s commendable new lyrical novel features Rove MacNee, who navigates through memoir and memory, recalling his youth on the eve of World War II.

Passionate about cast-net-fishing, sailing, and books—by Emerson, Twain, and Whitman—sixteen-year-old Rove in late 1941 finds himself overwhelmed by problems. First, Rove is worried about his parents who “were playing out their unhappiness in different ways.” Moreover, Rove can now barely tolerate his father, Captain Dominus MacNee, a whiskey besotted merchant sailor whose “eyes [previously] never misspoke even the farthest corners of his mind.” And Rove’s mother has also changed; now intolerant of her husband and struggling to communicate with her family, Lillian MacNee seems lately to prefer the companionship of a German immigrant, Joseph Unruh.

Meanwhile, as the adult triangle approaches a tragic crisis, Rove becomes involved with Anna Pearl Anderson, “the prettiest girl on the Eastern shore,” the one girl who could quicken his pulse “with the least of her antics and attention.”

Rove soon believes that he must distance himself from the emotional maelstrom of life in not-so-bucolic Fairhope, and he turns to his singularly reliable outlet, the Sea Bird, his twenty-five foot sloop, which offers him the enthralling possibility of a Huck Finn escape to a life of Emersonian self-reliance.

But, as Rove will learn, especially through his new friendship with the sagacious artist Walter Anderson, a sixteen-year-old cannot simply sail away from his problems until he has faced certain startling truths. Self-reliance, in fact, may be more complicated and may require more introspection and maturity than Rove had anticipated.

Like Faulkner’s agonistic families, O’Connor’s anxious adolescents, and Welty’s guileless innocents, Brewer’s characters in the compelling A Sound Like Thunder invite readers to meditate upon the challenges of learning to live and love—those universal “terrors of the heart”—and like Yeats—one of Rove’s father’s favorites—to reflect upon a time wherein “everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

Forgotten Book Friday – Tilt-a-Whirl

admin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 06:00:00 +0000

Tilt A Whirl
By Chris Grabenstein
Carroll & Graf / Avalon

In the seaside resort community of Sea Haven, New Jersey, the police don’t have much to do. John Ceepak, formerly a military policeman with a thirteen year career in the Army, has recently been hired as Sea Haven’s new chief of police. And twenty-three year old Danny Boyle is a part-time summer-season addition to Sea Haven’s tiny police department. Ceepak, the obsessive-compulsive law enforcement professional, and Boyle, the happy-go-lucky amateur, usually get relief from their otherwise boring routines only when minor problems occasionally crop up with the tourists and residents in Sea Haven.

Suddenly this summer, though, Ceepak and Boyle have almost more than they can handle. In fact, they have a major murder mystery on their hands. Reginald Hart, a real estate tycoon with plenty of money and at least one too many enemies, has been murdered early one morning. Someone perforated the late and perhaps not so great Hart with multiple gunshots while he sat with his twelve year old daughter Ashley on the otherwise vacant Tilt-A-Whirl in Sea Haven’s Sunnyside Playland Amusement Park. Ceepak and Boyle, enjoying breakfast as usual in one of Sea Haven’s favorite eateries, discover the crime quite abruptly when the one apparent witness to the crime—young Ashley, now covered in blood—runs down the street screaming for help.

Immediately Ceepak and Boyle are on the case. And even though the state authorities also will quickly become involved in the case, the seaside resort professional and amateur begin their own investigation. Ceepak and Boyle study the crime scene, collect evidence, interview the traumatized witness, talk to Hart’s family, and cast the net wider and wider as they look for possible suspects.

As Ceepak’s young assistant, narrator Boyle becomes something like a humorous and naïve John Watson to idiosyncratic Ceepak’s headstrong and relentless Sherlock Holmes in Tilt A Whirl, author Chris Grabenstein’s first installment in a promising new series. Following in the stylistic footsteps of Carl Hiassen and John D. MacDonald, Grabenstein has presented readers with a witty, fast-paced plot overflowing with quirk characters and unexpected twists and turns. As a thoroughly entertaining whodunit tale of murder, duplicity, greed, and friendship, Tilt A Whirl is a highly recommended nonstop thrill ride.

Forgotten Book Friday – Long Time Gone

admin — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:30:00 +0000

Long Time Gone by J. A. Jance

Publisher: William Morrow/HarperCollins. ISBN: 0-688-13824-1

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a five year old girl named Bonnie, according to her version of events, saw two grownups do something really bad to a very nice neighbor woman named Mimi. And afraid of what the mysterious grownups might do to her because of what they said to her when they realized she had seen what they had done, Bonnie promised those bad people that she would never ever tell anyone what she had seen.

Now, something like half a century later, Sister Mary Katherine—the Mother Superior of a small convent on Whidbey Island in Washington—is having a very disturbing, recurring nightmare about something that threatens her emotional health (and the peace and quiet of the tiny convent). When she seeks the help of a hypnotherapist named Frederick MacKinzie—a friend whom she remembered from high school—Sister Mary Katherine very soon finds herself relying upon the help of yet another acquaintance from high school, Jonas Piedmont Beaumont.

Now working with the Seattle unit of the Washington State Attorney’s Special Homicide Investigative Team, the former Seattle homicide detective J. P. Beaumont, deferring to pressure—and orders—from his superiors, involves himself most reluctantly in Sister Mary Katherine’s nightmare. Almost immediately, after Beaumont talks with Sister Mary Katherine, the questions begin accumulating: What does Sister Mary Katherine really remember? Did it really happen? When did it happen? Who was involved? What—if anything—can be done about it now? And as for Beaumont and the Special Homicide Investigative Team—known fondly by its few select members by the unfortunate acronym, the SHIT squad—is Sister Mary Katherine’s nightmare eligible for the squad’s specialized investigative skills?

At the same time, J. P. Beaumont’s friend and former colleague from the Seattle police department, Ron Peters, has become the prime suspect in the murder of his ex-wife. Beaumont, unable to believe his friend’s complicity and also unable to turn his back on a friend in need, quickly immerses himself in the investigation much to the consternation of his superiors in the SHIT squad and the local law enforcement officials. Beaumont is willing to put his reputation and his life on the line for his friend, but—when the evidence in the case begins to accumulate—Beaumont wonders if his loyalty is well-placed, and he wonders if his investigative skills and instincts are leading him astray.

Beaumont becomes more deeply involved in what he believes are two “disaster bound” cases: Sister Mary Katherine’s nightmares and Ron Peters’ apparent involvement in murder. Both cases are complicated mysteries filled with intricate twists and turns, and both cases confront the normally brilliant yet occasionally flawed Beaumont with seemingly insurmountable challenges.

In Long Time Gone, J. A. Jance’s 18^th novel featuring the resourceful and resilient detective J. P. Beaumont, Jance has demonstrated that she is at the top of her form. Even though Beaumont has matured during his 20 years in Jance’s intricately plotted and imaginative novels—he is now in his late 50s—and in spite of his personal difficulties and his professional challenges, Beaumont has not by any stretch of the imagination slowed down. More importantly, he has become even more fascinating and complex. Beaumont fans will not be disappointed.

Forgotten Book Friday – The Patriots Club

admin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:00:00 +0000

The Patriots Club

By Christopher Reich

Delacorte

ISBN 0-385-33728-0

Everything is finally going quite well for Thomas Bolden. After a difficult and lonely childhood, Thomas went on to graduate summa cum laude with a double major in math and economics from Princeton University. Then he had attended the Wharton School on a full scholarship after which he turned down a job with the World Bank, passed on a Fulbright scholarship, and took instead a prestigious job at the powerful investment banking firm of Harrington-Weiss in Manhattan. And now thirty-two years old, Thomas has been romantically involved for three years with a wonderful woman, Jennifer Dance, a teacher of high-risk middle school students in Greenwich Village. To make life even better, Thomas has just been named the Harlem Boys Club Man of the Year because of his youth-mentoring activities. Life is nearly perfect. So what could possibly go wrong?

On a Tuesday night in mid-January, Thomas and Jennifer, are attacked by two muggers in lower Manhattan. Quickly, the mugging turns into something much more sinister. As an injured Jennifer falls to the pavement, Thomas is grabbed by the muggers and inexplicably kidnapped and whisked away in a Lincoln Town Car. Within hours of his bizarre abduction by murderous thugs intent upon receiving answers to questions about which Thomas knows absolutely nothing, Thomas seizes upon an opportunity to flee for his life. Immediately, however, the young investment banking executive’s flight to freedom and safety becomes severely compromised by an incredible series of harrowing events—not the least of which is a murder of a prominent corporate executive for which Thomas becomes the prime suspect, a murder which alienates Thomas from all of his friends and associates, a murder which keeps Thomas on the run also from the police.

Thomas—desperate to clear himself of the charge of murder and at the same time protect Jennifer from further harm—begins to discover the reasons for his mysterious abduction and all the problems that have disrupted his previously perfect life. Slowly but surely he learns about a secret organization that may have the answers and solutions: The Patriots Club.

The Patriots Club, an exclusive and powerful organization rooted in America’s past, having evolved from the country’s Founding Fathers, may know something that will help Thomas. But more significantly, The Patriots Club may also be implicated—either by accident or intent—in a conspiracy that may be the reason for all of Thomas Bolden’s recent problems, a conspiracy that may still seek to destroy Thomas, and a conspiracy, in fact, that may threaten the safety and stability of American business and politics at the highest level.

The author Christopher Reich has adroitly created another fascinating and thrilling novel in The Patriots Club. As critics of Reich’s previous four novels have noted, “Reich does for finance what John Grisham does for the law” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “Reich deftly blends Wall Street and bullet-dodging” (USA Today) in fast-paced exciting thrillers. That praise—and more—equally applies to The Patriots Club, an exciting story filled with great action, fascinating intrigue, incredible surprises, compelling historical connections, and powerful contemporary significance.

Forgotten Book Friday – H. P. Lovecraft: Tales

admin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:00:00 +0000

H. P. Lovecraft: Tales

Edited by Peter Straub

Publisher: Library Classics of the United States. ISBN: 1-931082-72-3

I want to offer you three absolutely unassailable arguments why you must have this book.

First, this 838 page book contains twenty-two of H. P. Lovecraft’s most entertaining and disturbing tales of horror and fantasy. Read the tales and find out why Stephen King has called Lovecraft the “dark and baroque prince” of the 20^th century horror story, and discover why Joyce Carol Oates has called Lovecraft “The King of Weird.” You will understand the accuracy of their praise and the devotion of millions of Lovecraft fans when you read this collection of fantastic tales, many of which were first published in the 1920s and 1930s in such pulp magazines Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. Enjoy, for example, “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” a ghoulish detective tale in which a man succumbs to ancestral influence of alchemy and necromancy; explore the primal mythic mysteries in the haunting Escher-like Antarctic ruins of “At the Mountains of Madness”; accompany a frightened narrator as he encounters a small town’s horrifying subhuman population in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”; and watch as a meteorite—if that is what it really is—releases its terrifying influence in “The Colour Out of Space.” And the eighteen other stories are equally fascinating.

Second, this hardcover book is superbly edited by the distinguished novelist and short story writer Peter Straub (whose works include Ghost Story, Floating Dragon, and In the Night Room). Straub has selected the best of Lovecraft’s many stories—although that was perhaps the easy part of his editorial challenge—but he has done something exceptionally noteworthy in this collection: Straub has provided a biographical and critical chronology to accompany the texts, and—even more valuable to all readers—he has provided a richly detailed treasure of annotated end notes for the individual stories.

Third, this exquisitely printed and produced book, the 155^th edition in the Library of America’s prestigious series, is a handsome, enduring volume. Because of the publisher’s commitment to preserving America’s best literature in the best possible editions, you simply cannot find a better book (at such a reasonable price) anywhere else.

So, in the final analysis, the bottom line is simple: I give this book my highest possible recommendation.

Forgotten Book Friday – THE SECRET SUPPER

admin — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:00:00 +0000

The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra
(Translated by Alberto Manguel)
Atria (Simon and Schuster), March 2006
ISBN 0-7432-8764-9
Hardcover

Let me begin by whole-heartedly recommending The Secret Supper, Javier Sierra’s international best-seller which was originally published in 2004 as La Cena Secreta in Spain and is now finally available in Alberto Manguel’s excellent English translation.

However, before you begin reading The Secret Supper, one of the most provocative and interesting novels of the last decade, you might want to prepare yourself in several ways:

• First, absolutely forget about other recent novels that attempt to develop similar fictional themes (e.g., The Da Vinci Code and its many clones) because Sierra’s singularly remarkable novel deserves special consideration for the ways in which the author masterfully confronts the theme of conflict between faith, reason, passion, and truth;
• second, consult the library or the Internet and find yourself a viewable copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, The Last Supper, which you will probably want to consult frequently as you travel along the labyrinth of Sierra’s plot; the original of The Last Supper, incidentally, appears on the north wall of the refectory of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan;
• third, take some time to reacquaint yourself with the story of Jesus’ final days, the crucifixion, and the aftermath as that story appears in the Christian gospels of the New Testament;
• and fourth, keep in mind Leonardo da Vinci’s advice to one of the characters in The Secret Supper: “Everything, absolutely everything has a hidden meaning.”

The action begins in 1497. Pope Alexander VI and the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church have received cryptic messages from someone who has mysteriously identified himself (or herself) as the Soothsayer, a self-proclaimed prophet of apocalyptic dangers. Because of what the Soothsayer has said, the Catholic church worries that it is about to be jeopardized by a sinister plan which threatens to undermine and replace Christianity with something like Platonism and “turn Milan into a new Athens.” Moreover, one of the people suspected of being somehow involved in or privy to the secret strategy is none other than Leonardo da Vinci, the artistic genius who has recently been commissioned to complete a painting at the new monastery in Milan.

Father Agostino Leyre, the novel’s narrator, is being sent from Rome to Milan to find the identity of the Soothsayer and determine the scope and plausibility of his disturbing claims. Moreover, Father Agostino must somehow confront the unpredictable and rebellious Leonardo da Vinci—an “impudent scoundrel” and “strange prodigy, God’s most singular creature”—and discover in spite of overwhelming odds the extent of Leonardo’s knowledge of what the Vatican worries may be one of the most pernicious heretical schemes to have ever challenged Christianity.

Join Father Agostino in his pursuit of the truth (and his passionate determination to solve “a riddle worthy of the Sphinx”), as he navigates uneasily in a world of subterfuge, esoteric writings, aesthetic duplicity, and murder. As you do so, you might want to consider the following features in Leonardo’s painting: Why has the artist omitted the Holy Grail, halos, and the Eucharistic Bread? Whose images really appear among the disciples? Why does the disciple who is apparently Saint Peter have a knife in his hand? While considering the painting (and Sierra’s text), you might also want to consider the significance of Leonardo’s provocative statement: “Years ago, I learned that if you wish to hide something [ . . . ] the best place to do so is where everyone can see it.”

And, finally, you really ought to carefully consider Leonardo’s advice to an apprentice: “All appearances are deceiving. And truth lies where you least expect to find it.”

Forgotten Book Friday – THE EMPRESS OF INDIA

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 06:00:00 +0000

The Empress of India by Michael Kurland
St. Martin’s Minotaur, February 2006
ISBN 0-312-29144-2
Hardcover

In early 1890, the Bank of England needs help. A shipment of gold (in exchange for newly minted paper currency) will be coming to London from India on board The Empress of India, and all sorts of potential problems stand in the way of a successful (and uninterrupted) transfer. So, of course, the bank’s officials turn to the one person in the world who can be relied upon to prevent any criminal interference: Sherlock Holmes.

As Holmes prepares for the case, he does a little preliminary investigating. After all, the security of the Bank of England was compromised previously when someone gained access by coming up into the bank from the sewer tunnels beneath the building. However, in the course of his enquiries, Holmes disappears in an accident (or is it because of criminal activity?) when he is swept away in a torrential flood within one of the sewer tunnels beneath the Bank of England’s facilities. Nothing other than some of Holmes’ tattered and drenched clothing was found after the incident.

Now with Holmes missing and presumed dead, his indefatigable nemesis Professor James Moriarty enters into (and dominates) the action. For his own reasons, Moriarty quickly makes plans to leave England and go to India where it will take passage on The Empress of India. By exercising his ingenious criminal mind, it is there that Moriarty seems to be planning a singular crime that is surprisingly (and apparently) unrelated to the shipment of 4 million pounds worth of gold. And as for the gold itself, without Holmes on the job, and with a fascinating cast of respectable (and not so respectable) characters on board The Empress of India, even the most elaborate security measures may not be sufficient to protect the Bank of England’s assets.

But, at this point, I cannot say more except to say this: Michael Kurland has done it again! As author of 40 other works (including 3 Professor Moriarty novels and 2 Sherlock Holmes anthologies), Kurland consistently delights readers with highly entertaining, well-written books. The Empress of India, more than being a mere mystery featuring Moriarty rather than Holmes, is filled with historical and cultural details (especially focusing upon life in British-colonized India at the end of the 19th century); moreover, Kurland’s novel is a fast-paced tale of an impossible crime (complicated by unlikely allies versus unlikely foes engaged in an absorbing quest for a seductive prize). This is quite simply a baffling mystery with a solution that will absolutely floor readers! So, readers, travel aboard The Empress of India and see if you can solve this recommended mystery.