Tag Archives: mystery

The Golden Spoon

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I’ve always enjoyed baking more than cooking. Maybe it’s not being responsible for someone maintaining their well being but being able to offer an added pleasure. Maybe it’s the sugar.

From Off the Shelf:

“Mixing murder, baked goods, and a famous television show creates the perfect recipe for a delicious mystery. THE GOLDEN SPOON follows the six bakers invited to compete on TV’s hottest baking show, Bake Week, which takes place on the grounds of the striking Grafton estate in Vermont. But when the competition turns deadly, everyone is a suspect. Smoothly blending each character’s storyline together to create a shocking twist,”

If you are a fan of the Great British Bake Off – which always inspires me – you will enjoy Jessa Maxwell’s treat.

I Have Some Questions For You

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On days when I only want to stare out the window and can only manage cheese sandwiches and yogurt (and of course chocolate) for sustenance, I can justify never leaving my couch if I have a page turner like Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You – a complicated mystery focusing on one death with so many tangential subplots.

Bodie Kane, a successful podcaster, returns to her New Hampshire boarding school alma mater as a visiting lecturer and finds herself investigating, with her students, the death of her roommate twenty years earlier. Bodie is convinced the school’s athletic trainer Omar Evans who was convicted is not the murderer. As she investigates fellow students and the music teacher who seemed a little too friendly, Bodie remembers incidents from her time as a poor student among wealthy and entited class mates.

Gabino Iglesias for NPR notes “it is a dark, uncomfortable story about murder, racism, sexual abuse, grief, the nature of collective memory, privilege, the way humans want to be at the center of tragedy even when they’re not, and feeling like an outsider. This is a novel about questions, with the biggest question of them all – Who killed Thalia Keith? But as Makkai cleverly inserts choice news clippings of other cases with implications for miscarriages of justice into the main plot, she raises more questions stretching into the failures of the American criminal justice system, the public’s obsession with stories of violence, and influence affecting outcomes. Was the man who has served more than twenty years in prison really the murderer? Is it too inconvenient to change the verdict?

Although the story morphs into a legal thriller in the last half of the book, Makkai carefully keeps bringing the reader back to reality. She tells who the real killer is, but she does not tie up loose ends. There is more for the reader to think about than whodunit.

So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano

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This short work has all the elements of a noir detective mystery, while also being disturbing and haunting. Having read about the famous Nobel Prize winner but never having read one of his works, I decided So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood, published in 2015, translated from French, was the place to start.

The novel focuses on an aging, reclusive author named Jean Daragane living alone in his Paris apartment. One day he is disturbed by a telephone call from a stranger, Gilles Ottolini, who has found Daragane’s lost address book and presses him about a long-forgotten name in it, Guy Torstel, whose name appears in Daragane’s first novel.

Although he cannot immediately remember Torstel, Jean nevertheless finds himself reading through a dossier about a 1951 murder case, given to him by Gilles’s girlfriend, Chantal Grippay, These papers have names that were once familiar to him, including Torstel. Slowly, a half-forgotten history unfolds. Daragane begins to remember periods in his past when, abandoned by his parents, he lived with the showgirl-courtesan Annie on the outskirts of Paris. He recalls “secret staircases and hidden doors”; Modiano hints at a murder, a cover-up, a flight to Italy – a quietly haunting search for the truth of a postwar French childhood, where nothing is certain.

The ending of the novel comes abruptly, leaving the reader wondering which of Daragane’s memories are accurate and which have been embellished from childhood reveries. More importantly, Modiano leaves the reader with the question of how reliable memory is, and how an event or word can trigger long buried or forgotten recollections. I seem to have more of those these days – finding an old photo that recreates a moment long ago. Recently, a comment from someone I have not seen for years brought tears to my eyes, as I recalled a peripheral experience I thought I had forgotten. Or, as Modiano might posit, maybe had not happened at all, except in a dream.

Modiano’s story effectively nudged me from the seemingly unresolved detective story I was reading into thoughtful and sometimes haunting musings in unexpected directions. Short, confusing, and powerful. I will look for more of his complicated, shape-shifting novels.

Perhaps the best way to understand Modiano is to heed the Stendhall epigraph he provides in the beginning pages: “I cannot provide the reality of events; I only convey their shadow.”

Addendum

It seems I have read not only this author but also this book – before in 2015 and 2017. Maybe that only makes the case for memory being unreliable.

What Rose Forgot by Nevada Barr

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Talk about scary! A woman in her sixties who can’t cope with her husband’s death, suddenly goes crazy. A little too close to home. I was prepared not to like this book, but I was quickly caught up in the drama.

Barr creates an adventure with murder and nefarious characters, and turns a feeble grandmother into a Ninja. In addition to her amazing skills I can only imagine are acquired through fear induced adrenaline, Rose solves the crimes, saves a fellow elder, and finds a new purpose in life.

Fun, inspiring, and not too formulaic.

Recommendations for Independent Bookstore Day

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Although it’s been a while since I’ve walked into a bookstore, or any store, I still like to buy my ebooks from independent book stores. And, yes, I still read – not as much as before – but here are a few books I’ve bought and recommend:

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

For supporters of women in math and sciences, the obstacles the main character faces will ring true. Elizabeth Zott, after overcoming her miserable childhood, can’t seem to get a break as she tries to forge a career in chemistry. Sidelined by male colleagues at work and cheated out of a doctorate, she finds love with a rower and fellow scientist, only to lose him before their child is born. Her ongoing frustrations will be familiar to a generation of career women with children, but the character is also funny, ambitious, and determined. As she morphs into a modern day Julia Child, the laughs get better. A fun book with a message – as Elizabeth Egan noted in her review: ” She’s a reminder of how far we’ve come, but also how far we still have to go.”

One Italian Summer by Rebecca Searle

Ah, to be back climbing the steps of Portofino! Searle’s story will transport you to the beautiful Italian town, and you will instantly feel its charm. Having been there (for a cooking class), the descriptions of the food, the sea, the steps, the old women, brought me back and makes me want to go again. Katy Silver takes the trip to Italy she has planned with her mother. Her mother dies but with a heavy touch of suspending belief, you will meet her anyway as Katy discovers not only the beauty of Italy but also the unexpected joy of hanging out with her younger mother.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

I didn’t become a fan of St. John Mandel until I watched Station Eleven on Netflix. The Sea of Tranquility is another catastrophe story taking the reader through three worlds in three distinct time periods, The novel opens in 1912 when the son of an aristocratic British family is banished to Canada for some rash dinner-table remarks about colonial policy, and then vaults into the 23rd century for ‘the last book tour on Earth,” with an author named Olive Llewellyn, whose home is a colony on the moon, and whose novel about a worldwide pandemic has become a surprise blockbuster, and finally to Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a loner detective living on the moon in the 25th century in a colony called the Night City. Mandel connects the plots across time to examine what really matters. A good book for fans of science fiction but also If you just need to take yourself out of the present for a while.

French Braid by Anne Tyler

One of my favorite authors, Tyler uses an area I know well as her backdrop – Baltimore. With her quiet style, Tyler slowly weaves a story of family. Jennifer Haigh in her review for the New York Times, notes ““French Braid” is a novel about what is remembered, what we’re left with when all the choices have been made, the children raised, the dreams realized or abandoned. It is a moving meditation on the passage of time.” Read her review for more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/20/books/review/french-braid-anne-tyler.html

The Club by Ellery Lloyd

Thrillers are always a great distraction to the world at hand, and if you are a fan of Ruth Ware, you will enjoy Lloyd’s ride. From Publisher’s Weekly: “The Home Group is a glamorous collection of celebrity members’ clubs dotted across the globe, where the rich and famous can party hard and then crash out in its five-star suites, far from the prying eyes of fans and the media. The most spectacular of all is Island Home–a closely-guarded, ultraluxurious resort, just off the English coast–and its three-day launch party is easily the most coveted A-list invite of the decade… as things get more sinister by the hour and the body count piles up, some of Island Home’s members will begin to wish they’d never made the guest list. Because at this club, if your name’s on the list, you’re not getting out.” A page turner.

The Paris Apartment by Lucy Foley

If you know Lucy Foley from “The Guest List,” you will enjoy her latest. Like a game of Clue,  this story keeps readers guessing whodunit until the book’s final pages.

And here are a few books I have preordered and looking forward to:

Book Lovers by Emily Henry

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

The Lioness by Chris Bohjaloan

Love Marriage by Monica Ali