(Eric Giacometti and Jacques Revene, trans. Anne Trager, Shadow Ritual, Le French Book, 2015, 978-1-939474-29-2 (ebook)/ 978-1-939474-30-8 (trade paperback) /978-1-939474-31-5 (hardback))

Mysteries and thrillers set in historical contexts represent one of my weak points.  I’ve written a few that come close in their dependence on historical backstory (my character Castilblanco is a history dilettante) and have read many more.  The startling success of Brown’s The DaVinci Code caused a resurgence in the sub-genre, but you can also compare this novel to older books like Deaver’s Garden of Beasts, Follett’s The Eye of the Needle, and Forsyth’s The Odessa File.  That theme of old Nazis causing mayhem is one of the themes in this book.

The other is religion, Catholicism specifically (hence the reference to The DaVinci Code), and secret societies, in particular the Free Masons.  I have some family connections to Masonry and have even reviewed a non-fiction book on the subject for Bookpleasures (Jay Kinney, The Masonic Myth).  Like the books mentioned above, where the truth about Masonry ends and the fiction begins is part of the fun in these novels.  The same can be said about the Nazi history (what the Nazis did was hardly fun, of course).

This novel combines mystery and thriller aspects.  We know the dirty deeds and who’s doing them to whom (the “doing” is the thrill ride), but we don’t know why (the mystery).  Inspector Antoine Marcas, a Paris cop who’s also a Free Mason, has been invited to the French embassy in Rome where another guest, a Free Mason woman who researches historical documents, is ritually murdered, but the papers she’s carrying are saved.  The archeologist she’s supposed to meet in Jerusalem when she continues her journey is also ritually murdered and an ancient stone is stolen.  Marek meets the embassy’s security chief, Special Agent Jade Zewinski, close friend of the murder victim and ex-Special Ops, but Jade has no love for Masons and their secret ways.  The cop, reacting badly to the banshee, washes his hands of the case.

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(A. J. Hartley, Tears of the Jaguar, Thomas and Mercer – Amazon Digital Services, 2012, ASIN B007CJUA84)

My readers probably know I do my “official reviewing” of books with Bookpleasures.com, but that’s often limited to new releases.  I’m an avid reader, so I do a lot of casual reading too, some not so new, and I often write reviews for those books.  Many of the latter are Amazon reviews (readers can look me up there and find almost all of my reviews, because the Bookpleasures reviews are often reposted to Amazon, at the author’s or publishing company’s discretion).  I believe this is the first case where I’ve perused an ebook in my casual reading that deserves to be included in the Stealth Reads section of my webpage “Steve’s Bookshelf,” though.

This book has everything.  The plot is reminiscent of Preston and Child’s best,  The Relic, only better.  The characters are very interesting and well-drawn.  The two main settings—the author’s native Lancashire, England, and the Mayan ruins of Mexico—are both steeped in history and exotic mystery.  There is action galore; witchcraft and magic; the following of clues, many of them historical; and many misdirects.  Some have called this a thriller.  I call it a mystery/thriller/suspense tour de force combined with historical fiction that has so much research behind it that I wonder how long it took the author to put it all together.

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(Carolyn J. Rose, The Devil’s Tombstone, Amazon Digital, 2014, B00RC4X0XQ)

This mystery novel makes the series set in the Catskills around Hemlock Lake a trilogy.  75% is excellent mystery and suspense, but not as tightly focused as #2 (Through a Yellow Wood) or as fresh as #1 (Hemlock Lake).  It is another narrative jewel, though.  I love the setting and characters and Ms. Rose’s probing of good, evil, and all the gray area in between.  She does this as well as or better than, say, David Baldacci in One Summer or Wish You Well, two other books that show valid mystery and suspense stories can occur in rural America.

The mystery surrounds several cold cases that Dan Stone’s old boss, Sheriff North, assigns to him.  Although Dan and wife Camille are busy with a new baby, riding herd on teenager Julie, and counseling her brother Justin, the wife knows Dan needs a distraction and is happy when the sheriff deputizes him.  Although Dan keeps his investigations under wraps for the most part, two cases he solves early on add to his notoriety in the rural community, but the feud between the judgmental head of a traveling revival show and that community’s preacher presents a major problem.  The author ties all these threads together in a suspenseful climax.

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(Linda Hall, Night Watch, 2014, ebook ISBN 978-0-9877613-6-1, pbook ISBN 978-0-9877613-7-8, ASIN B00NKPI2WK)

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again.  One of the great pleasures I derive from reviewing books is discovering new authors I mightn’t notice otherwise.  Here we have an example.  Ms. Hall is a gifted writer and this novel is well written, entertaining, and different.  It’s a mystery with a different wrinkle.

Emmeline (Em) Ridge is a female boat delivery captain.  In other words, she’ll follow rich people around the oceans and deliver their sailing yachts to them.  En route to Bermuda, she is captaining a new fifty-two-foot luxury sailboat when she’s awaken below deck to learn that a crew member, Kricket Patterson, is overboard. It’s Em’s first sail after acquiring her captain’s license and not an auspicious start for the new captain.  Kricket’s the daughter of the owner of the yacht, but when the parents arrive to identify the recovered body, it turns out that she’s someone else who has Kricket’s passport.

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(John Hohn, Breached, 2014, ASIN B00OEXEK0K, ISBN 978-0692250921)

I started reading this author’s new book with great expectations.  I wasn’t disappointed.  While his first book, Deadly Portfolio: A Killing in Hedge Funds, was good, this one is better.  Breached is more an example of mixed genres, both psychological thriller and mystery.  Here I use the first differently than what tradition dictates.  It isn’t that the protagonist, a character from the first book, Detective James Raker (ex-Detective in this book), is suffering a psychological attack; it’s that two secondary victims, friends of Raker, have deep psychological problems.  Of course, to make this a mystery, there’s a real victim a la Madame Christie (and more are added as the story continues).  Raker and his girlfriend are visiting his old male friend in the North Carolina boonies when a dam inspector is shot.  The mystery revolves around why, or even if it was an improbable accident, but, in the process, the ex-detective has to deal with both the girlfriend and old friend’s psychological problems (more on this below).

I won’t throw out any spoilers about why the dam inspector was murdered except to say that someone wants to declare the dam unsafe.  Delving into the psychological problems of Raker’s friends is a related but almost independent story, making this book a study of two characters with ubiquitous problems that we tend to avoid talking about in our society.  This study makes Mr. Hohn’s book almost unique, because too many crime stories or police procedurals focus on the forensics and the sleuthing, treating the next literary serial killer or evil corporation, instead of examining real problems our society faces.

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(Lee Mims, Trusting Viktor, Midnight Ink, 2014, B00HNEPEZC)

[Note from Steve: The author has agreed to do an interview.  Readers can learn more about her and her writing life.  Coming soon!]

This novel is the kind I love to read and write—here you have a pulsating thriller.  But the book is also a two-fer, with mystery and suspense dominating the thriller elements.  Whatever you call the genre, it is an interesting and exciting read.

The background for this story can be found in real-life exploration and exploitation of natural gas deposits.  The protagonist, geologist Cleo Cooper, is a woman with two grown kids and an ex who isn’t quite sure he made the right choice in ending their marriage.  Cooper’s on-off-on-again flings with a Russian hunk, a graduate geology student studying in the U.S. (and the Viktor of the title), seem disconnected with a series of incidents where the author offers many misdirects about what is going on.  By writing in the first person, Ms. Mims slowly peels off the layers of a rather rotten onion that involves WWII deep ocean derelicts.  The protagonist’s discovery mission is what makes this story a classic and entertaining mystery.

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(Deborah-Riley Magnus, Finding Author Success, Path Maker Books, Second Edition, 2013, B00CHW2GLA)

For the newbie author, this ebook will be a helpful compendium of what can be done before, during, and after their book is launched—possibly necessary conditions for writing success (there are no sufficient ones—know the difference).  Either because they’re dated or time- or dollar-intensive, some suggestions are more practical than others, but there’s a lot of sage advice here.  Indie authors and traditionally published can adopt some of this advice to go beyond writing the book, so necessary in today’s book marketplace.

For authors with a few books, this guide is also useful in that it provides a sanity check on their PR and marketing efforts.  I, for one, couldn’t help coming up with some new ideas as I read.  I found particularly interesting Deborah’s “Battle Ready Check List.”  Tactics are discussed throughout the book, though, so a careful read is in order.  And Deborah is very good about reviewing the points she has made.

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(Quantum Zoo, D. J. Gelner and J. M. Ney-Grimm, eds., Orion Comet, 2014, ASIN B00L0MZFVQ)

This is an anthology of similar-themed stories.  The theme can be summarized by one word—zoo.  Add to that the genre speculative fiction and you have the logic of the title, although quantum mechanics doesn’t play any role here except for making a catchy title.  Note that I said “zoo” is the theme.  Theme lurks behind plot and other writing elements in these stories as varied as the people who wrote them.  I assume the editors said, “That’s the theme—take it and run!”

Some people love anthologies.  Essays, memoir pieces, and, above all, short stories are often collected.  An anthology might have just one author; or, it can have a group of writers, solicited by editors or otherwise.  In either case, if it’s a short story anthology, the reader has the chance to read an author’s story in a minimalist context, one often emphasizing only a few aspects of the writing craft—plot, dialog, characterization, and setting, for example.  I prefer plot above all, but the point is that the reader discovers an author in a stress-free and minimalist environment.  Note that, in all this trade lingo, I haven’t mentioned that readers might like short v. long, i.e. short story over novel.  I think that’s less important—a casual reader can just as well read a chapter of a novel as a short story.

That said, I found the stories in this collection entertaining, some more than others, as is expected in any collection.  The plots are creative with enough twists and misdirects to hold my interest.  Characterization is a bit lacking at times, but that’s expected in a short story—the writer has to shorten things up somewhere.  Dialog varies from OK to A+, and some of the settings are just fantastic, in multiple senses of that word.

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(Beverly Garside, I and You, 2013, CreateSpace, 978-1492187424)

How delicious satire is when it’s well done!  Irish have it in their DNA—just look at Shaw, Wilde, Swift, and others who have skewered the British elites—so I love satire even though I can’t write it well.  Political satire, of course, is generally hated by the satirized and loved by those who agree with it.  In this book, you’ll find political satire that is hilarious in its best moments and at least enjoyable in its worst, unless you’re a Libertarian.  If you fall into that cult that worships in Ayn Rand’s church, this book is probably not for you.

I’ve never reviewed a graphic novel before, but this one was so intriguing I couldn’t resist.  I came to the conclusion I might be doing something like this now if I’d had any success making my own comic books as I learned to read and not to draw between ages three and four.  My art was bad and what I put in those balloons was probably only slightly better.  Fine satire is always embedded in an interesting story, and Ms. Garside puts many entertaining things in those balloons and figure captions to make one.  Duimstra, the artist, has drawn well too, although I can only judge it with an amateur’s eyes.  I like what I read and see.

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(Joan Hall Hovey, The Deepest Dark, BWL Publishing, 2014, ISBN 978-1771452151)

One great pleasure I have as a reviewer/author is discovering writers who show me new and exciting ways to hold a reader’s interest.  Sometimes the writer is a newbie; other times she’s an old hand like Joan Hall Hovey, whose book is the first of hers I’ve read.  And then I’m happy to recommend my discovery to other readers.

Taut plotting, great characters, and chilling suspense make this thriller a book you can’t put down.  My first read was in two nights.  There is no mystery here—well, maybe a small one (see below)—as the tale moves along to its inexorable end: Three prisoners have escaped and they’re going to make Abby Miller’s life more hellish than it already is after losing her husband and daughter in a collision.  Their leader, Ken Roach (great name, by the way), has traveled a long distance in leading the deadly trio to Abby’s refuge at Loon Lake.  Why so far?  What’s his agenda?

Vivid prose imagery allows the reader to create mental scenes comparable to the real life tragedy of that doctor’s family that occurred near Danbury, Connecticut, or to the movies Cape Fear or Deliverance—the author’s prose, in fact, is quite sufficient for me.  Phew!  In situations like these, survival often depends on quick thinking and luck.  The reader will be in suspense right up to the end of the book wondering if Abby has enough of both.  Alfred Hitchcock would be smiling.

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