The Railway Conspiracy
The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and S.J. Rozan is the follow-up to their critically acclaimed historical mystery The Murder of Mr. Ma, the first book in the Dee and Lao series. The Chinese central characters, Judge Dee Ren Jie and Lao She, are, um, not exactly detectives, not exactly spies, but well-equipped with the skill set to be either should the situation demand. Their kung fu skills range from decent to exemplary, their disguises are easily Mission: Impossible-class and their powers of deduction run the gamut from exceptionally insightful to exceptionally flawed, depending upon the beauty and/or the deviousness of the women in their sphere(s) at any given moment. The narrative is set in 1924 London, where Chinese Communists are gaining a bit of traction and influence following the success of the Russian Revolution a few years earlier. Real-life figures Zhou En Lai, Bertrand Russell and banker A.G. Stephen figure strongly in the story, albeit with a markedly different take regarding the death of the latter, whose murder kicks off the story. The villainy is delicious in an Agatha Christie sort of way, with rare poison and Japanese katanas as the means of dispatching unwanted rivals. It is always a good sign when a book in a series makes the reader want to dive back into the one(s) that preceded it, and that is definitely the case for me with The Railway Conspiracy.
The Reluctant Sheriff
It is kinda hard to imagine a suspense novel set in both small-town Kentucky and the French island of Corsica, but Chris Offutt makes it work rather well, actually. The Reluctant Sheriff begins in the town of Rocksalt, in the eastern hills of the Bluegrass State. Mick Hardin is the temporary (and as the title suggests, reluctant) sheriff of Eldridge County until his sister, who was shot in the line of duty, is cleared to resume her work. When a murder rocks the town, the prime suspect is none other than the current husband of Mick Hardin’s ex-wife, which dredges up all the emotional and conflict-of-interest baggage one might expect. Meanwhile, in Corsica, Johnny Boy Tolliver, former deputy of Eldridge County, is lying low in a one-room stone cottage deep in the countryside. We don’t know why, but we do know that someone is after him. It takes remarkably little time for him to “get into it” with some talented—but not talented enough—adversaries, sending them on their way, alive but battered. What little we do glean about his situation is that he has an on-site handler named Sebastien, whose services Mick has secured for some reason. Offutt toggles between these two distant locales, chapter by chapter ratcheting up the suspense levels until just before the snapping point. A very well-rendered action novel, The Reluctant Sheriff is sure to appeal to Jack Reacher fans.
A Lesson in Dying
A Lesson in Dying is the first book of Ann Cleeves’ successful Inspector Ramsay series. Originally released in the U.K. in 1990, it is now, 35 years later, being released for the first time in the U.S., and it has aged quite well indeed. You may be surprised to find that Inspector Ramsay plays a less conspicuous role than he does in later installments, but don’t let that put you off: The book is strong in other aspects, and Ramsay has ample amateur assistance. The mystery centers on the murder of Harold Medburn, a thoroughly despised school headmaster in the Northumberland village of Heppleburn. Adding a sinister element of suspense to the proceedings, the events surrounding the murder take place on Halloween or, as the English refer to it, All Hallows’ Eve. There is no dearth of suspects; the victim in question was universally loathed, so much so that if none of the villagers would do the deed, the reader would be sorely tempted to do so on the villagers’ behalf. A Lesson in Dying, like the five books in the series that followed it, is a very English mystery, beautifully written, neatly splitting the difference between, say, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ruth Rendell.
★ The Impossible Thing
Belinda Bauer’s magnificently executed The Impossible Thing has my vote for the most unusual crime novel in recent memory. The narrative spans a century or so and involves a brace of oologists, both then and now, bent on pursuing their quite illegal hobby. Do you know what an oologist is? Or a guillemot? Neither did I. An oologist is a collector of eggs (seriously), and a guillemot is a North Atlantic seabird known for its eggs, the most colorful in all the avian world. Red ones are the rarest and thus the holy grail of oologists. In the modern day, Nick, an avid gamer living at home with his mum, prowls their attic in search of things to sell so that he can buy a pricey new gaming chair. When he happens upon a carved wooden box containing a pointy red egg, he figures he can offload it on eBay. A respondent to the ad gets Nick’s address to view the egg, but before that can happen, the egg is stolen. Nick’s analytical friend Patrick leaps to the quite reasonable hypothesis that the would-be buyer must be the thief, so they concoct a scheme to expose the miscreant and retrieve the egg. Subplots abound—some of them dating back to the years between the World Wars, when a plucky young Yorkshire lass made the startling initial discovery—with the egg as the unvoiced yet central character of them all.
