Susan Wittig Albert

Susan Wittig Albert’s China Bayles Mystery Series

Susan Wittig Albert is the prolific author of four mystery series. The China Bayles mysteries are my favorites. This is not a series where it’s necessary to start with Book One – Wittig Albert does a fine job of summarizing her detective’s background early on in all recent books in the series.

China Bayles walked away from a lucrative but life-sucking law practice in Houston to open Thyme and Seasons Herb Shop in the small town of Pecan Springs in the beautiful Texas Hill Country. Half her storefront is occupied by her best friend Ruby Wilcox’s Crystal Cave, a new age shop where Ruby does astrology charts and sells tarot cards, candles and crystals. Along with China’s various murder investigations over twenty-three books, she’s managed to add to her life a house, a professional detective husband, a stepson, an adopted niece (daughter of China’s half-brother, son of her father and his secretary) and numerous animals. Every book title is a plant, usually a medicinal herb, and every book is filled with plant facts and fables and the ubiquitous recipes.

Long-lived mystery series sometimes start feeling like the author is worn out, just writing to fulfill a book contract. Two recent books in the China Bayles series are proof that Wittig Albert just keeps getting better.

Bittersweet

Berkley Prime Crime, 2015

            China is on a rescue mission to help her mother Leatha cope with her stepfather’s heart attack, just before the grand opening of their former game ranch as a bird watchers’ retreat. Through her friendship with the area game warden, China gets involved in the investigation of the murder of a local veterinarian and the accidental (maybe) death of her mother’s assistant.

            Bittersweet, of course, figures prominently in the story. Bittersweet is the name of China’s mother and stepfather’s ranch. The story begins with China fuming about the spread of invasive Oriental bittersweet, Celastrus orbiculatus, to the detriment of its native American cousin, C. scandens. How Wittig Albert ties together bittersweet, trophy game farms and murder is fascinating.

Widow’s Tears

Berkley Prime Crime, 2013

Widow’s Tears is an odd but captivating divergence from a great series. This book is Ruby’s story. An old friend asks Ruby to help her clean out a house she’s inherited and wants to turn into a bed and breakfast. But when Ruby arrives at the empty house she discovers her friend’s ulterior motive for the invitation – she wants Ruby to use her known-only-to-friends sixth sense to communicate with the house’s resident ghost and ask it to leave.

Behind the house’s story is Wittig Albert’s well-researched and dramatized tragedy of the 1900 Galveston hurricane that destroyed the city and killed at least 8,000 people and many thousands more animals, the deadliest natural disaster in United States history. Probably everyone has heard of the great Galveston flood, even if only from the folk song, Wasn’t That a Mighty Storm. Widow’s Tears puts faces on this heartbreaking American story. And, yes, Widow’s tears is a medicinal herb.

How the Light Gets In

HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN

By Louise Penny

Minotaur, 2013

            Americans often stereotype Canadians as bland, dispassionate, humorless. But we are so wrong. Our neighbors to the north have lent us some of the most entertaining people on earth: William Shatner, Sandra Oh, Diana Krall, Margaret Atwood, Jim Carrey and the incomparable Leonard Cohen who gave voice to the Northern Lights. Another mystical Canadian voice was added with the publication of Louise Penny’s first mystery Still Life in 2005. Winner of numerous awards, she is the only author to have won the Agatha, one of the mystery world’s most prestigious awards, five times.

            Penny’s books are set in the fictional Quebec village of Three Pines, so untouched by the world it has no Internet or cell phone service and appears on no printed map or GPS. A great story-telling talent is bringing evil to this snowbound Eden while still making the reader want to live there. Though Three Pines by now must have the highest per capita murder rate in Canada, even the possibility of such an idyllic place may have set off a real state boom in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.

            No one can read a book set in Three Pines without wanting to stay at the bed and breakfast run by Gabri and Olivier, the gay couple who also own the local bistro; or to visit the bookstore of Myrna Landers, the burnt-out psychotherapist who landed in Three Pines by getting lost and found the perfect place to stay; or to have dinner with Clara Morrow, the oddest of artists, who may or may not be the sweet woman she appears to be; or to walk in the woods with Gilles, the former lumberjack who talks to trees; or, best of all, to eat exquisite French food in the bistro while listening to crazy Ruth. Penny’s best laugh-out-loud lines are said by or about one of greatest characters ever created by any author – the irascible, obscenity spewing, poetic genius Ruth Zardo, and her pet duck Rosa. Penny’s characters are easily embraced and not easily forgotten.

            Penny’s latest work, How the Light Gets In (the title is taken from Leonard Cohen’s Anthem, “there is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in”) finds her kind, insightful and usually unarmed detective, Sûreté du Québec’s Chief Inspector of homicide Armand Gamache, beset by departmental infighting. His archenemy, Sûreté head Sylvain Francoeur, seems determined to destroy Gamache even if it means destroying the homicide division along with him. Gamache’s long-time right-hand man and almost son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, has chosen addiction over friendship and deserted his mentor for Francoeur’s ready supply of pills. Gamache’s only allies within the Sûreté are his immediate superior, Thérèse Brunel and her computer hacker husband; his new assistant, Inspector Isabelle Lacoste; and possibly the very strange Agent Yvette Nichol.

            Gamache returns to Three Pines at the behest of Myrna, whose friend and former client, Constance Pineault, left Three Pines planning to return for Christmas and disappeared. Gamache and Lacoste find the elderly woman brutally murdered in her home in Montreal. We soon learn Constance was the last surviving Ouellet quintuplet, children whose birth had created a media sensation during the Depression. Research into the Ouellets unearths a sordid history of official and family lies, greed and perhaps something even darker.

            Meanwhile the Ouellet inquiry gives Gamache the cover he needs to remain in Three Pines, away from Sûreté scrutiny, while he probes the subversive conspiracy he believes Francoeur is leading. But Gamache has no concrete evidence of any plot and no idea of the alleged conspirators’ target. His obsessive accusations, his estrangement from Beauvoir and his recent insistence on carrying a weapon at all times have his friends concerned for his sanity, leaving him with fewer people to rely on.  

            Penny’s writing style and the characters she draws are not subtle. She makes us see what she wants us to see. Every mystery writer delves into human evil and every reader with even a passing grasp of history knows there is no limit to human capacity for evil. Penny’s mysteries acknowledge the evil but go on to question the limits of love and forgiveness. How the Light Gets In takes us to the outer limits of emotion and makes us wonder if perhaps there should be limits to love.

            The only possible downside to Penny’s books is that you can’t part with them. You have to keep a few always on your shelf so that in some future dark time in your life you can return to Three Pines and be saved.

Memorial Day Memories

            Today is Memorial Day, a day to remember and honor the men and women who have served our country in the armed forces. I’d like to begin sharing the memories of one of those patriots, my father, who served in the United States Navy during World War II.

            He left a trove of mementos from those years – photos of fellow crew members, a framed picture of his ship, his uniform, medals, a brief history of his long service, artifacts, souvenirs, shells and weapons from the South Pacific. But what I now find most informative and moving is the cache of letters my mother treasured through fifty years of marriage until her death – every letter my father wrote to her from the day they first met in 1941 until my father’s discharge from the Navy in 1946, a few weeks before I was born.

            My mother has been dead for nearly twenty years, my father nearly eleven. As the family historian I’ve been in possession of these letters since 1994, but unable to read them until recently. They were found in a box in my mother’s closet. Also in the box was a petrified slice of wedding cake and a dried rose, the remains of their expeditious wedding in 1944, during my father’s brief leave after serving in the Pacific for nearly two years.

            In 1994 I put the box in my own closet where it remained until my father’s death in 2002. I brought it out thinking that might be the time to start reading the letters. It wasn’t. The first card and letters were written by a stranger, a man in love, a sweet young man I had never known. I cried for their long ago love, but only as I would cry for the lovers in a Hallmark Channel movie, not my parents.

            No one in the family wanted the stone cake and dead rose, so I buried them with my parents and put the box of letters back in the closet.

            Last year while planting Dad’s favorite red, white and blue Memorial Day flowers at the cemetery, I decided it was time to read the “war” letters. Once I started I couldn’t stop. What happened to this young man in the war? Who were these young people that I only knew old? Why did Dad’s Navy career end in a hospital at Camp Peary?

            Thanks to Dad’s own recordkeeping I had enough information to order his military and medical records from the National Archives, where most World War II military records are now stored, and found more surprises.

            Now I plan to spend the next few years following Dad’s letters from the Boston Navy Yard to New Guinea and back, traveling where I can, talking to people, research, whatever I can.

            Mom and Dad’s story began at Lakeville State Sanatorium in Lakeville, Massachusetts, sometime in early 1941. The Lakeville hospital was originally built to treat tuberculosis patients and later expanded treatment to polio victims, including my father’s older brother, my Uncle Fred. Mom was a nurse’s aide, living at the hospital, when she met Dad on one of his regular visits to his brother. According to family legend it was classic love-at-first-sight.

            The first item in Mom’s letter box is a very ordinary Easter card one might have sent to a casual acquaintance in 1941. But on the back is note from Dad to Mom that today seems so guileless a proposal . . . “I don’t like to be too forward but I would really like to get better acquainted with you. Hope that you can spare me an evening soon” and he formally signed his full name. Obviously that first date, whenever and wherever, was a success.

            A few months later . . . Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941.

            Dad joined the Navy in February 1942. Mom and Dad became engaged in May. The letters of the long separations begin in June.

Dad's the tall, skinny guy on the far right, at South Boston Naval Annex in 1942.

Mom and patients at Lakeville Hospital, 1941[?]

Leaving Everything Most Loved Review

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Leaving Everything Most Loved

A Maisie Dobbs Novel

Jacqueline Winspear

Harper, 2013

            If you haven’t already been introduced to Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs mystery series, start reading them – they are wonderful. This is one of those series that should be read in order of publication, if possible; but each book can easily stand alone with the paragraph or two of background always provided by the author. Maisie began life in a London slum in Edwardian England as the daughter of a poor street seller of fruits and vegetables. When her mother died her father arranged a position for her as housemaid to a wealthy peer. Twenty years and ten books later Maisie is wealthy in her own right, lover of the peer’s son, James Compton, and mistress in the house where she once served. How Maisie made this unlikely leap in such a strictly structured society is told over the course of these beautifully written cozies.

            The charm of this series is the historical setting in early 20^th century London and environs. In addition Winspear gives us an unusual background shared by almost every character in the series – World War I and especially the effects of that terrible war’s carnage on the women who served at the front lines in France as nurses, including Maisie and best friend, Priscilla Partridge. Like the troops in the trenches the nurses, too, suffered the constant shelling and appalling living conditions. Maisie was seriously wounded in a bomb strike on the medical tent that ultimately killed her doctor fiance. Her loyal assistant, Billy Beale, was also badly wounded in the war and he and Maisie share the fears and effects of their trauma. All Maisie Dobbs books are shadowed by the scars of World War I and later books by the looming threat of World War II. Priscilla lost all her brothers in the first war and readers who know history can’t help but wonder how many of Priscilla’s sons will be lost to WW II. 

            In Leaving Everything Most Loved Maisie’s detective agency is hired to investigate the murder of Usha Pramal, a young Indian woman who had been living and working in London. Usha’s brother suspects – correctly, Maisie learns – that the London police did not conduct a thorough investigation and he spends weeks traveling from India to England to find his sister’s murderer. As soon as Maisie picks up the very cold trail, an Indian housemate of Usha’s is murdered before she can talk to Maisie. During the course of her investigation Maisie begins to have doubts about her vocation and longs to travel the world, the path taken by her mentor and benefactor, Maurice Blanche

            This is not the best book in the series, disappointing in dragging out Maisie’s continued refusal to marry James or let him go. If the sexes in this situation were reversed, readers would be horrified by the sexist use of Maisie by James. And Maisie’s dithering on the issues of marriage and career is jarringly inconsistent with the woman who has been so determined and ambitious for most of the series. Is this some sort of early onset mid-life crisis? Loyal readers will certainly expect a satisfactory resolution in the next book.

My Nook, My Books and a Blizzard

The recent storm activity that caused electric outages for days has made me reconsider downloading too many more books on my Nook. I intend to maintain a sizeable library of real (hard copy) books. E-geeks can disparage hard copy books as ‘dead-tree editions’ all they want, but I’ll be the one still reading next time the grid goes down for a week.

I do have good things to say about e-readers. My Nook is great for traveling. It fits in almost any bag or coat pocket. When I’ve read everything on it, I don’t have to go out in search of a bookstore – I’m holding one in my hand. I just download more books.

For my aging hands, the greatest advantage is the comfort of holding a single, almost weightless page. Holding open a hardcover book has become too painful, almost impossible, with only one hand; so my lifetime of reading hardcover books in bed is over. Mass-market paperbacks are easier to hold, as long as they’re under 400 pages; but they’re still very difficult to hold open for the hours I want to read. My Nook is perfect for reading in bed – easy to hold, easy to use, with either hand.

E-readers should have been an easy sell to an aging population that grew up reading books, but they seem to have been designed by people who didn’t. Why didn’t my Nook come with an installed light so I could read in bed? I think the newer models do have lights, but the light should have been a no-brainer. If you need tech support you have to talk to the “help” at Nook’s outsourced “service” department. (I’ve never had to call anyone to ask how to use a book.) I wish my Nook had a dictionary installed, one that I could easily access while reading. I still need a dictionary within reach to fully enjoy reading many books. And my Nook start-up is so slow I have to keep a magazine handy to read while the Nook is opening.  Books you just pick up, open and start reading.

And there’s that battery . . . Even when the grid is up and running, being tied to an electric outlet is the worst aspect of e-readers. You must remember to plug in your e-reader regularly or this will happen: A year ago I was near the end of a mystery when the low battery notice popped up. Okay, I thought, I’ll read faster. I wasn’t fast enough. The thing just died thirty pages before the denouement. Of a mystery!

As with my iPhone, people told me to charge my electronic devices in the car. Not so easy. First, you need a compatible charger for the car “outlet.” And then . . . Did I mention the blizzard? Wind chill temperatures were in the single digits. And I don’t have a garage. I was supposed to get bundled up to go out in the cold to shovel my way to the car to sit in my car for an hour to charge an electronic device? Nope.

Thankfully I don’t have to go out in blizzards to do this because they still print books and make candles and I have lots of both. There are few things in this life I can say with absolute certainty and this is one – no book will ever, ever have a dead battery.

Las Vegas Trip

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            True story.

            Thirty-odd years ago we took a two-week vacation to Hawaii. Having no desire to spend twenty continuous hours in the same plane, we arranged for stopovers in both directions. On the way west we spent a day in San Francisco with a college friend of mine. On the way back we decided to stop in Las Vegas so Nick could visit an old friend of a friend and I could see this legendary American Gomorrah for the first and – please, God – only time.

            The Las Vegas of 1979 was the strangest city I’d ever seen. Still has that dubious honor. I remember glassy-eyed people on the street who looked like they’d just come from tryouts for Night of the Living Dead, and casino patrons who’d smoked and drunk too much for decades. And the noise level inside the casinos . . . drinks glasses clattering, people groaning and screaming over losses and wins, bells dinging on slot machines. We spent half an hour looking for a relatively quiet place to have a drink.

            We’d planned to meet the friend of Nick’s friend from back East, a dealer at one of the larger hotel-casino complexes. Moe (I don’t really remember his name) had offered us a few nights at his house; but when we found him, he said his guest room was occupied by a new roommate and we’d have to spend our first night at the hotel.  So we booked a room that was incredibly cheap, about a third of what we’d expect to pay in Boston or New York. And the desk clerk somehow talked us into seeing their current “big show” with Buddy Hackett and Joey Heatherton. Who? You might well ask. Even then I had a hard time putting faces to those names.

             We had a few hours to shower and rest from our long flight. Our room did not disappoint – it was exactly what I expected a Las Vegas hotel room to look like, gaudy as anything I’d ever seen. Mirrors everywhere, all edged in fake gilt Grecian designs; a huge round felt-covered card table that could easily sit eight or ten; a bar for another half-dozen people; two full baths with enough tile and gilt-trimmed mirrors to outfit a sizeable Italianate house back East.

            But no bed. After a thorough search of the room for a secret, mirror-covered door to a bedroom, I called the desk and was told that there should be a bed in one of the sofas, though clearly the man who answered couldn’t imagine why we’d want one. People came here to drink and gamble, not sleep. We found it – the most uncomfortable sofa bed ever, so bad we pulled the mattress, such as it was, onto the floor and took a nap, praying we wouldn’t catch anything that couldn’t be cured by penicillin.

            The “big show” was one of the saddest events I’ve ever attended. Honestly, I’ve been to funerals that were more fun. The three drinks each, included with our tickets, came all at once; and apparently lots of people drank them all at once because Joey Heatherton’s opening song and dance act was interrupted several times by incredibly cruel people yelling, “Hey, Joey, how’s Lance?” even though she had divorced him years before. (Google Lance Rentzel for that sad story.) Buddy Hackett never appealed to me, but much of the audience seemed to think he was hilarious.

            The next night was a bit better. Moe’s roommate, Clyde (thankfully, I don’t remember his name either), had the overnight shift at the casino where he worked as a dealer and offered us his room for the night. We took a cab to Moe’s place and settled in the spare room.

            Fortunately we were fine living out of our bags because every inch of closet space was crammed with clothes – yards and yards of polyester – and the bathroom counter, medicine cabinet and shelf were covered with strange cosmetics for men like hair-growth creams and other “enhancers”, things that used to be advertised in the back of tacky magazines and on matchbook covers.

            I thought Moe was a sweet old man (he was probably younger than I am now). He asked if he could show us some pictures while we sat in his living room, waiting to go out to dinner. When he pulled out an overstuffed photo album, I steeled myself for the excruciating boredom of looking at dozens of family pictures.  But no, turned out Moe had no family. Instead I spent an hour looking at dozens of pictures of Moe’s special babies – racehorses he’d owned a piece of back in the day. Moe cooed over them the way a doting grandfather would talk about his grandchildren. More sadness.

            Moe and Clyde took us out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. They were wonderful company, filling the evening with stories about Las Vegas history and inner workings. After dinner they urged us to visit a few more casinos and instant wedding chapels (also open 24/7). The two old men left us and went off to work their respective shifts.  After less than a few hours, we decided we’d seen about as much as we ever wanted to see of Vegas and took a taxi back to Moe’s house. We had to catch a 7:00 AM flight back to Boston and decided to shower and go straight to bed.

            As soon as I stepped over the threshold of Clyde’s room, it felt strange, empty. The dresser top had been cleaned off.  The few decorative items on the walls were gone (calling them pictures would be a stretch). My uneasy feeling got stronger in the bathroom – every surface was empty.

            “Nick, check this out. Why would he clean out all his stuff in the bathroom?”

            “Maybe he was embarrassed and thought you hadn’t seen it yet.”

            But when he walked across the room and opened the closet, it too was empty. We couldn’t help wondering where Clyde had put a roomful of stuff, so we did a quick search of the apartment. No boxes of questionable toiletries, no piles of clothing anywhere. In the few hours we’d been gone, Clyde had cleaned out a ton of stuff. Instead of going to work?

            “You think maybe he was planning to leave and just never mentioned it?”

            “Weird. Let’s just forget it. We have to get up in six hours.”

            We went to bed and tried to sleep.

            At 1:00 AM, the phone next to our bed rang and Nick answered. Clyde’s girlfriend was looking for him. She worked the same casino. Clyde hadn’t turned up at work and the boss was mad. Nick played dumb and said only that he wasn’t there.

            Wondering what Clyde was doing running out on his girlfriend and Moe, we again tried to sleep.

            At 2:00 AM Moe came rushing in looking for Clyde. We pointed out the emptied bathroom, closet, etc. All he said was “Shit” and rushed off to his room. Soon we heard a loud series of shits. We followed the sound and found Moe sitting on the edge of his bed, head in his hands. 

            “He stole my gun,” Moe whispered.

            Now it was my turn to say, “Oh, shit.” I turned to Nick. “We might as well go to the airport because I’m definitely not going back to sleep in that bed.”

            “Why not?” Nick couldn’t imagine anyone would be stupid enough to do what Clyde had obviously done.

            I love mysteries and movies and knew what had happened. And Moe knew Vegas. I was the first to say it out loud, “Clyde’s been robbing the casino and he knows he’s about to get caught.”

            “Probably,” was all poor exhausted Moe could manage.

            “Nick, he stole money from the casino! Why else would he have taken off without a word to anyone? Why else would he steal a gun? Because he knows people with guns will be after him. We need to leave.”

            Moe agreed with me. “Linda’s right. You should get out of here. I can handle the guys who show up.”

            I started packing while holding the phone between my ear and shoulder waiting for the taxi company to answer. I did not want to be there when “the guys” showed up.

            We spent several very uncomfortable hours trying to sleep in vinyl chairs at McCarran airport with the constant noise of slot machines. (There was no public space in Las Vegas without a slot machine.) I couldn’t relax until we were on the plane. Finally back in Boston I almost kissed the disgusting Logan terminal floor, so happy was I to be home without having been shot.

            As for Vegas . . . never been back.