I love a good mystery, and all of these are excellent. But each book also has something else going for it.
“I Died for Beauty” by Amanda Flower is the third in her Emily Dickinson Mystery series, but it can also stand on its own. Along with the mystery plot, it’s historical fiction with a definite sense of time and place.
An extreme cold spell in January 1857 hits Amherst, Massachusetts, with “snowdrifts up to ten feet” and people dying from exposure. “It was the worst winter in my memory or in the memory of anyone I knew,” says narrator Willa Noble, poet Emily Dickinson’s maid and confidante. As people struggle to keep warm, a fire in the Irish community claims the lives of a husband and wife, leaving their young daughter orphaned. The local police conclude that the fire was an accident, but Emily is suspicious. How did the fire start? Was it arson? If so, why?
There is a whole undercurrent of bigotry: Society ladies disapprove of the visiting suffragist Lucy Stone; the wealthy look down on the Irish poor; and the other servants resent that Emily gives “special treatment” to Willa and treats her as a friend. Emily confronts some of the small-mindedness, although she’s not perfect; she’s a bit spoiled and has no idea how hard Willa works.
Once in a while we get reminders that Emily’s a poet, such as snippets of a verse she’s working on, or a statement such as “I have a poem that must be written.” At one point she tells her maid, “The truth about writing, Willa, is that you are never in complete control of it. Words will lead you down new paths. Not all those paths you want to take, but sometimes those paths open your eyes to an understanding that you could never reach in the practical world. You must be willing to go where they lead. … If you do not follow them, they will not return to you another day.”
I’ve been reading Flower’s books for a long time. She’s quite prolific, with more than 50 published works. My favorites are the lighter cozies, such as the Amish Candy Shop mysteries. But this is one of her more serious works (“Because I Could Not Stop for Death” is the first in this series), and I have to say, she just gets better. She has another fairly new series featuring Katharine Wright, sister of the famous Wright brothers.
I encourage you to support Amanda Flower. She lives just a few minutes from us, in Tallmadge. I think we could reasonably claim her as our own!
“The Queens of Crime” by Marie Benedict contains a mystery within the fictional account of the formation of the very real Detection Club in London in 1931. The narrator is fictionalized mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers (author of the Lord Peter Wimsey books). We meet her as she’s having tea with Agatha Christie. Dorothy is a founder of the Detection Club for mystery writers, made up of about two dozen men along with Dorothy and Agatha — “a veritable Who’s Who of mystery writers.” Dorothy proposes that she and Agatha invite more women, to “form a club within a club … to ensure that we have a place among the pantheon of preeminent mystery writers. Together, we would become a society of mutual admiration and support — for one another and for women everywhere.” Besides, the men can be downright hostile about not wanting any more women in the club.
They invite Baroness Emma Orczy (author of the Scarlet Pimpernel stories), Ngaio March (Inspector Alleyn), and Margery Allingham (Albert Campion), and Dorothy says, “Agatha and I could not have crafted a better cast of characters if we’d invented them ourselves.” These “five greatest female crime writers of the time” decide to call themselves the Queens of Crime.
Then Dorothy suggests, “What if we solved a real-life murder?” She brings up a “locked-room mystery,” the case of May, a young British nurse who went missing in France five months before, whose body has just been found. What follows is an interesting investigation, with the ladies sleuthing in two countries. How did she disappear while being watched? When did she die? Who killed her and why? The women say, “We must get to know May in order to understand what happened to her. We must treat her as if she were a character in one of our novels but never forget that she was very real. … We’ve got to be nimble, tenacious, and smart. Like our detectives.”
I hope the book sparks renewed interest in the novels of all these writers.
This is pretty yummy stuff. Marie Benedict is somewhat of a queen herself!
“The Grey Wolf” by Louise Penny is a thriller as well as a mystery. This is the 19th in the popular series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, set in Quebec, where he is the head of homicide. He and his wife live in the enchanting village of Three Pines.
Gamache gets a phone call from someone he fears, from his past. About the same time, he’s notified of a break-in at the couple’s second home in Montreal. Meanwhile, he’s investigating two deaths with no apparent connection except the method of killing. He has a puzzling encounter with a stranger who may or may not be giving him a warning, and he finds puzzling notes, including what looks like a shopping list. Gamache and his team travel to Europe, the United States, and around Canada to figure things out. When events turn violent, suddenly he’s in the middle of a terrorist plot involving politicians, police, the Montreal mafia, environmentalists, and monks, and he’s very likely to die. Who is on which side? “He could no longer trust people he’d trusted for years,” Penny writes. “Gamache knew … there was an informant … a scheming, manipulative, detestable opportunist. … Then Gamache had it. He’d been wrong. Very wrong. This whole thing was a lie.”
The plot was a bit complicated for me, but still enjoyable. The story ends but the threat isn’t over and will continue in the next book.
Happy reading!
Mary Louise Ruehr is a books columnist for The Portager. Her One for the Books column previously appeared in the Record-Courier, where she was an editor.