A TASTE FOR DEATH by PD James

I prefer Scandinavian mysteries, with colorful and sometimes perverted characters, but this is an English mystery, and most of the characters are subdued and buttoned up.  There’s no shortage of violence, though, as Paul Berowne, a former member of Parliament, and a homeless man named Harry Mack, both have had their throats slashed in a church vestry.  Adam Dalgliesh is the Scotland Yard detective investigating the murders, or possibly a murder/suicide, along with John Massingham and Kate Miskin.  Berowne has a slew of unsavory family members and acquaintances who had motives for killing him, including his beautiful but vacuous wife Barbara, her arrogant lover, her flamboyant brother, and Berowne’s daughter’s insurrectionary lover.  This is the 7^th Adam Dalgliesh (how do you pronounce that?) novel in the series, but it is my first.  Perhaps since Dalgliesh has been introduced in previous novels, his personal life does not garner a lot of personal attention.  However, the author does give us some meaty background on Kate Miskin, who perhaps appears for the first time in a Dalgliesh novel.  I really liked her combination of humanity, ambition, integrity, and competence.  As with most murder mysteries, the bulk of the novel involves introducing the suspects and fleshing out their possible motives and opportunities, not to mention their flimsy alibis.  Complicating the investigation, or perhaps lending clues to it,  are three other deaths, all women, tied to Berowne’s past—a fatal car accident, a drowning, and a suicide.  The story unfolds nicely, and a couple, but not all, of the innocent people survive hair-raising encounters with the murderer, and I have to say that I liked that the murderer, despite his/her hubris, does not manage to take out all the good guys.

THE LOST GIRLS OF PARIS by Pam Jenoff

The writing and grammar in this book in the first 25 pages was so bad that I wished for a CliffsNotes version.  “Had began”?  “Mired by politics” instead of “mired in politics”?  Then there’s this sentence from page 14:  “But today the responsibility weighed down heavy upon her.”  Really?  How about “weighed her down” or “weighed heavily upon her”?  I became even more depressed when I discovered that the publisher is Park Row Books, an imprint of Harlequin.  I soldiered on through this book anyway and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the plot.  Like The Alice Network, this is about a group of British women participating in undercover activities—this time during WWII in France.  Marie is the recruit we follow most closely.  She speaks excellent French, and this skill lands her some precarious assignments, beyond her main job as a radio transmitter.  A second plot follows Grace, who lives in NYC in 1946, two years after Marie goes undercover, and discovers a suitcase containing a dozen photos of women, one of whom is Marie.  Grace’s story is not realistic, but sometimes I don’t mind a little stretch in the believability department, and that was the case here.  She embarks on a quest to learn the identities and fates of the women in the photographs, armed only with the name of the case’s owner—Eleanor Trigg, who is the third main character in this story.   A couple of characters manage to hide on their persons a grenade and a key, respectively, despite having been imprisoned and tortured, amplifying my aforementioned complaint about believability.  However, if you can ignore the writing and suspend disbelief, you may find yourself turning pages pretty swiftly.

THE POWER AND THE GLORY by Graham Greene

This novel, published in 1940, is about a man on the run during a purge of priests in Mexico in the 1930s.  The hunted man is known as the “whisky priest” because he has a serious drinking problem.  He frequently sees his picture posted next to another wanted man—an American serial killer.  Our priest is a self-proclaimed bad priest who has defied the state’s mandate that priests marry, even though he has fathered a child.  He journeys from village to village, visiting with all sorts of people--from a dentist to a banana farmer.  Each time that he has an opportunity to escape over the border, he gets called to attend an ill or dying person, knowing that he may be walking into a trap.  His nemesis is a mestizo who keeps turning up at inopportune times and who wants to deliver the priest to the authorities for the reward.  I liked the idea of this novel better than the actual novel.  Graham Greene is undoubtedly a great writer, but this novel has a smattering of unnamed characters, including the priest.  Personally, I found this aspect of the novel confusing and annoying.  For example, there’s a lieutenant and a jefe, but maybe there are more than one of each; I was never really sure.  To make matters worse, the author frequently uses pronouns with ambiguous antecedents.  In any case, I am always amazed at how much history I have learned through fiction.

THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW by Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman weaves her signature magical realism into this WWII novel without making it seem too frivolous.  In Berlin, Hanni is desperate to get her 12-yer-old daughter Lea to Paris, and the rabbi’s daughter Ettie, who also wants to escape, is willing and able to create a golem—a mythical person formed from clay.  The golem, whom they name Ava, is to be Lea’s protector in her perilous journey.  Hanni must stay behind to take care of her invalid mother, where neither woman is likely to survive the Holocaust.  Lea and Ava arrive at a distant cousin’s home in Paris, where Lea becomes very close to Julien, a boy of about her same age.  The novel follows the paths of Ettie, Lea, Julien, his brother Victor, and Ava, who is not supposed to have a soul but becomes more human the longer she remains on earth.  More importantly, she becomes attached to this world, although it is her duty to become clay again, once Lea is safe.  I particularly enjoyed the first part of this novel, but as the characters became separated, I had trouble keeping up with the farmers, priests, and doctors who helped them stay alive.  Ava waivers only once in her devotion to Lea, and that mistake threatens to cause a rift between the two.  Her character is obviously mystical, and there are herons with exceptional capabilities, but the other characters and the plot are very real and very poignant.  There was one aspect of the ending that I did not quite understand, but Ava’s reluctance to leave our beautiful world was a reminder of how lucky we are to be alive on this magnificent planet.

THE REDEEMER by Jo Nesbo

This is my first Jo Nesbo thriller, and I found it to be a little challenging.  Not only are the Norwegian names sometimes hard to keep up with, but as each section ends and another begins, the setting changes as well, and the he or she in the narration is someone entirely different from the character in previous section.  Sometimes I figured out who the author was tracking, and sometimes the author provides a name or some other clue.  Then there are other times when you don’t know who was being referenced until the book wraps up.  I don’t know if this abrupt shift in narration is a hallmark of Nesbo’s work or if it is something he tried in this novel only.  This is basically a murder mystery involving a Croatian hitman and a cast of characters who work for the Salvation Army, plus Harry Hole and the Oslo police, of course.  Since they have military ranks in the Salvation Army (is that true here, too?), I sometimes confused them with the police officers.  All of my disorientation aside, the big question is who hired the hitman, and I never would have figured that out.  Some of the side mysteries were a little easier to solve, despite the author’s heavy-handed attempts to lead the reader in the wrong direction.  Inspector Harry Hole is the heart of the story, with an estranged wife and a problem with alcohol.  Too many of this type of novel, and not just the Scandinavian ones, have a melancholy detective with a boatload of flaws.  Except for his line of work, the assassin is in many ways more sympathetic than Harry Hole.  This ambivalence that the author apparently intends with regard to the hitman is probably the best thing about this novel.