Nevermore, by Harold Schechter

Harold Schechter, who has written several true-crime books regarding serial killers, has written four novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe as narrator and detective (along with the help of other historic personages.) Considering Schechter's penchant for documenting serial killers, you can rest assured that each of the Poe books will have some gruesome deaths...

I have only read the first book, Nevermore, and while I liked 90% of it, the graphic descriptions of the murders did put me off. Of course, anyone who reads books in which the coroner is the detective will be used to that kind of gore and not mind it!

Schechter's contention is that some of the events that happened real-life to Poe he then used for his short stories, like "The Fall of the House of Usher." Poe is a sympathetic character (as he was in real life, apparently. After his death, his "executor" turned out to be a man who really, really disliked him, and set about besmirching his name while profiting from his writing!)

At the beginning of this story, EA Poe is living in Baltimore with his 13-year old cousin and his cousin's mother. (Yes, Poe marries his cousin, but it must be remembered that back then, girls did get married very, very young. [Today, they just have sex very, very young.]]

He has written a review of Davy Crockett's autobiography, and that gentleman is so upset by it that he calls upon Poe and wants to have a public duel. Poe agrees. Before they can fight, however, they stumble across a murder....the first of several. Poe, the creator of Auguste Dupin, sees some clues that the police miss. This so impresses Crockett that he forgets the duel, and they team up to solve the crimes.

A few sample paragraphs:
"Where is Virginia?" I inquired after planting a filial kiss upon my aunt's ruddy cheek.

"Still abed."

"She sleeps like the dead." I remarked with a heartfelt sigh. "It is the repose of the innocent."

Muddy's broad broaw wrinkled as she inspected my countenance. "My gracious, Eddie, but you do look peaked. Another bad night?"

I acknowledged the accuracy of her observation with a melancholy nod. "Slumber - that blessed but fickle benefactress-withheld her sweet nepenthe from my soul."

She regarded me for a long moment before inquiring, "Do I take that to mean 'yes'?"

"That is, indeed, the significance I intended."

She patted my cheek. "Poor troubled boy," she commiserated. "I cannot help but believe that you would sleep more soundly if you spent less time locked up in that stuffy room, brooding on death and premature burial and whatnot. Perhapos you should try writing something...cheerier. Why, look at that delightful poem by Mr. Longfello, "The Village Smithy." Surely you could compose something equally charming if you would only put your miond ti it."

The earnest, if misguided, simplicity of my dear, well-meaning Muddy elicited from my lips a soft, indulgent laugh-whosde tone, however, was not untinged with a rueful awareness that the man of creative genius must ever be misunderstood, even by those most sympathetic to his strivings.

"Oh, Muddy!" I exclaimed. "Can I not make you see? The true artist must endeavour to give shape to the teeming phantasmagoria of the soul-to those swirling shapes and shrouded forms that spring, like a hideous throng of netherworld demonds, from the dark inner reaches of his own harrowed heart and anguished brain!"

The humor in the book comes from dialog such as this, where Poe's takes in two paragraphs what a simple person would say in two words. Usually, the dialog is between Davey Crockett, an intelligent man who neverthless speaks with a rustic accent, and Poe. However, these are not so frequently placed to be annoying, and overall Poe proves himself to be a man of rare courage. (The definition of courage being someone who feels the fear and does it anyway. This Poe is a man who feels the terror and does it anyway.)

Nevermore - Edgar Allan Poe joins Davy Crockett to solve a series of shocking murders in Baltimore in 1835.
The Hum Bug (2001) - Poe teams with Showman PT Barnum to solve a series of murders in New York.
Mask of the Red Death (2004) - Poe joins forces with Kit Carson to track down a liver-eating murderer. This also takes place in New York.
The Tell-Tale Corpse - Poe meets author Louisa May Alcott while in Massachusetts and they team up to solve a murder.

Dangerous Depths, by Kathy Brandt

As an aspiring scuba diver, I wanted to find a book that dealt with mysteries and scuba diving. One series I found was that featuring police diver Hanna Sampson, who appears in:

1. Swimming with the Dead (2003)
2. Dark Water Dive (2004)
3. Dangerous Depths (2005)
4. Under Pressure (2006)

Dangerous Depths takes place in the British Virgin Islands.

From Wikipedia: The British Virgin Islands consist of the main islands of Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Anegada and Jost Van Dyke, along with over fifty other smaller islands and cays. Approximately fifteen of the islands are inhabited. The capital, Road Town, is situated on Tortola, the largest island which is approximately 20 km (12 mi) long and 5 km (3 mi) wide. The islands have a total population of about 22,000, of whom approximately 18,000 live on Tortola.

I include this information because it isn't given in the book. A few of Brandt's characters speak with an island accent, but other than that the reader doesn't really get the feel of being in the British Virgin Islands, for all that there's plenty of investigating underwater going on.

Hannah Sampson is a police diver who comes to the British Virgin Islands to escape from her life in Denver:

I'd first come to the islands on a special assignment, investigating the death of the Denver police commissioner's son, a scientist doing research in the BVI. He'd disappeared while out diving only to be found seventy feet under the water, just off the coast of Tortola, trapped inside a wreck, dive tank empty. The commissionwer had been devastated wanted one of his own people in the Denver PD and an experienced diver checking things out. He'd sent me.

After I'd apprehended the killers, John Dunn, the chief of Tortola police, had asked me to stay and offered me a job, and I'd decided to give it a try. He needed a diver and underwater investigator on his team, and I needed to get away.

Hannah lives on a boat called the Sea Bird. At midnight, she is waked by an explosion and runs on deck to see her friend, Elyse Henry's boat, on fire. Hannah dives into the water to save her friend, who later ends up in hospital in critical condition.

Her police captain believes the explosion was an accident - Elyse must have had a faulty stove on board - but Hannah believes it was attempted murder, and she sets out to investigate Elyse's movements in the last few weeks, to see if someone has a motive for her death.

And she finds one, in men who dislike Elyse's environmental work to save the endangered green sea turtle. But does their dislike extend to murder?

Truth to tell, I'm ambivalent about the book. The mystery is excellent, but it is hard to wade through the writing. (No pun intended.)

Many authors write so well that one loses oneself in the book, eventually unaware one is even reading. Others don't do so well - among them Clive Cussler and Kathy Brandt (although Brandt's grasp of the language is better than Cussler's!) But so much detail is given that it takes one right out of the story.

Here are a few paragraphs:

"Yeah. I'll tell you what though - it's a much nicer job in the crystal waters of the tropics. Back in the States I was retrieving bodies from icy lakes and brown polluted water. Mostly, diving blond. I'll take this any day."

We were quiet for the rest of the ride and I found myself thinking about the diving I had done in the States. And I thought about losing Jake. He'd been the team leader. It had been a frigid January morning, and we'd been on assignment, diving for a body in an alpine lake.

We'd bagged the body and taken it to the surface, then returned to examine and collect evidence. We were on our way back to the surface when I turned to make sure Jake was behind me. He wasn't. I went back, frantic, searching for him in the dark, icy water. By the time I got to the surface, I was hypothermic and out of air. The team found his body the next day.

Jake and I had lived together for over a year and had finally decided to make the big commitment. The wedding was to be that weekend. Instead, I'd ended up standing in the cemetery, watching the snow falling on his casket. I hadn't heard what the minister said that day. I made a promise back then never to get that close again. It hurt way too much.

and here's an underwater description:

We descended slowly. Every few feet, I pinched my nose [one can do this with masks that leave the nose free] and blew to equalize the pressure in my ears. Carr was doing the same. Visibility was about twenty feet, with a slight current. The deeper we got, the darker it became/ At fifty feet, I could see the outline of the wreck. The boat was completely intact and lying on its right side at the edge of a precipice that dropped into nothingness. There was no indication from this vantage that there had been a fire.

I stopped and shot photos [Cussler at this point would have told you what camera and filmn she was using! So would Ian Fleming, admittedly.] Then we continued to the bottom. I checked my depth-gauge: seventy-six feet. Both Carr and I spent a second adjusting the air in our buoyancy compensator vests, just enough so that we were hovering above the bottom. Then we headed for the wreck, our lights on. As we moved in, I shot pictures from every angle, making sure to place the boat in context. Then we moved in closer. We would not touch anything on this first dive, just to get an idea of what we were up against. Carr knew that he would stay behind me and follow my lead.

Check this book out from the library, and it's worth a read. I wouldn't buy a copy though.

On the Slam, by Honor Hartman

On the Slam, by Honor Hartman, is "A Bridge Club Mystery." There are only two books in the series to date, On The Slam in 2007, and The Unkindest Cut, in 2008.

Meet Emma Diamond: novice bridge player, recent widow, and the kind of person who never leaves her grocery cart sitting willy nilly in the parking lot. And now, after a vile woman in her new neighborhood in Houston is poisoned during a bridge game, Emma has a new identity: amateur detective.

I didn't really care for this book, yet another in a series of amateur female detectives who have no career, yet are better detectives than the police. Emma Diamond is a widow, who plays bridge (and the bridge notes at the end of the book are interesting). The woman who was murdered hardly seems vile, and Emma is annoyingly unaffected by her death.

The novel takes place in Houston, Texas, but I didn't get a "sense of place," it could have taken place anywhere.

A few paragraphs

I glanced over at the doorway, and Nate McGreevey sttod watchintg, again looking past me at someone else in the room. I started to speak to him, but Janet came in just then and and picked up a small paper plate. She spooned a large amount of the spinach dip onto it, then added a handful of wheat crackers on the side. At this rate, there might not be spinach dip left for much longer.

Janet caught my expression, and her gaze hardened. "There's plenty of food for everyone," she said.

"Yes, of course," I murmured politely and started to turn away.

She wasn't paying any attention to me. She scooped up a large dollop of spinach dip with a cracker and popped it into her mouth. She smiled as she chewed.

I heard her murmur "yummy" as I headed bck to my table.

Then, suddenly, I heard gasping, choking sounds from behind me.

I turned back and, to my horror, Janet was clutching her throat with both hands. Her plate had dropped to the floor in front of her. She reached out a hand toward me,, but I was rooted to the spot.

A split second later, I recovered my voice. I yelled out, "Gerald! Something's wrong with Janet."

The room went completely still behind me, and for a long moment, no one moved. No one except Janet, that it. She collapsed against the island, hands still clawing at her throat. The platter of crudites went flying as she elbowed it on her way down.

Between A Wok and a Hard Place, by Tamar Myers

Between A Wok and a Hard Place, Tamar Myers, 1998

Author Tamar Myers prose begins to grate on me after a while, and I cringe at her pun-laden titles, but her books are certainly popular. I've just checked out her website and learned her biography, which is pretty interesting. Her parents were missionaries in the Belgian Congo, where she was born and grew up for the first 16 years of her life. So when she talks about culture shock (having never driven, never used a phone, never used a vending machine, she knows what she's talking about! She's been in the US since 1964. http://tamarmyers.com/bio.htm

So, to the plot of Between A Wok and A Hard Place:
Ever since her brand new husband flew the coop, Magdalena Yoder, owner of the quaint Penn-Dutch Inn, has had time to kill. And now the local Amish commmunity has a murder in its midst: an Asian tourist found strangled and run over by a horse and buggy. It isn't a crime Police Chief Melvin Stoltzfus can easily handle; after all, he was once kicked in the head by a bull he was trying to milk. But he's smart enough to deputize Magdalena.

Soon Magdalena is off visiting the neatly kept farms of the Plain People, in search of the truth. Although not an outsider, she's about as welcome as a fox in a henhouse. Something dangerous is being concealed behind their dour faces and determination to protect their own. And as for Magdalena, finding a killer may just put her between the rock of faith and a hard place called justice....

Opening paragraph

I was a virgin until I married at age 46. Use it or lose it, my sister Susannah always said. Maybe she was right.

Of course this is none of your business. I am a God-fearing womanvand I certainly do not intend to discuss my sex life with you. It is imperative, however, that you understand that I was still in a state of shock when the events I am about to relate happened. After all, I had been married only a month, and what Mama had only hinted at paled in comparison with the real thing. I was born and raised on a farm and had seen animals-cows and horses-but never a naked man. How was I to know they looked like that? Thanksgiving is forever ruined for me. I can't even look at a turkey neck now without feeling embarrased.