Tough job, but someone's got to do it.
Donald goes to the small L.A. suburb where the accident took place and starts poking around. It doesn't take long before he figures out something bigger is going on. Typical Gardner, there are about 10 car accidents on the day in question (I'll never forget that Perry Mason book where 10 different people were in one swimming pool one night--all without running into each other or the owner of the house). It was a super quick read.
Maggie's father dies, and Maggie discovers that he never sold Baneberry Hall and now she owns it. She's determined to get to the truth of the matter so she decides to move in while she fixes it up to put it on the market. The house certainly does seem haunted: lights and record players turn on by themselves, Maggie keeps seeing shadows of people both inside and outside, and things keep disappearing. Since her dad recounted all the same things in The Book, it's starting to look like maybe it all wasn't such a big lie, after all. It all made sense in the end, but it was disappointing. I think I would have preferred if the house had actually been haunted.
I won't spoil it, but there were a lot of good twists and turns. I like Riley, like Lindsay's other dark hero, Dexter Morgan, I know he's a bad guy and I shouldn't root for him, but of course that's why Lindsay writes the way he does.
While in Jerusalem, they uncover and thwart a plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock (at least, I think that's what was happening. I got lost a few times). It was actually pretty good, I enjoyed it (despite not really knowing what the heck was going on most of the time). Not as good as the first one, but definitely better than the last few.
I've certainly heard the theory that Charles Lindbergh faked his son's kidnapping and killed him on accident, but that's always what those theories have suggested: it was an accident. Lindbergh was known for playing practical jokes that were usually only amusing to him. He once hid Little Charlie in a closet and let the frantic household search all over for him, growing increasingly panicked, until he admitted what he had done (a laugh a minute, that Colonel Lindbergh). In fact, when his nanny, Betty Gow, went to check on Charlie at 10 p.m. the night of the kidnapping and found the little boy wasn't in his crib, she went down to the study and accused Lindbergh of taking him as a joke.
Pearlman's theory is much, much darker than a practical joke gone wrong and a hasty fake ransom note to cover up his accidental killing of his son. It seems to fit all the known facts pretty well. Lindbergh was a big believer in eugenics and purity of blood. He made a big deal about finding the right mate to have perfect, healthy children with. So he was probably disappointed that his little namesake, first born son wasn't completely perfect. Charlie had rickets and was on a pretty strong supplement his doctor prescribed to try to correct the issue. He also had a larger than normal, squarish head and might have suffered from hydrocephalus. Of course in the 1930s they didn't have shunts and things like that to drain the buildup in the brain. Nevertheless, there's no evidence that Charlie couldn't have grown into adulthood and lived a long, normal, happy life. Lindbergh was working with a Dr. Carrell, who liked to conduct experiments on living animals, cutting them open and removing organs and seeing how long his subjects would live. Using pumps that Lindbergh helped design, he would see how long he could keep these removed organs viable. So Pearlman's theory is that Lindbergh, seeing himself as a man of science, decided to donate his son to the greater good and faked his kidnapping. He built the ladder, which was never meant to hold anyone (and couldn't--tests showed the rungs would break if more than about 100-125 pounds were placed on it), set it in the mud below his son's nursery window to make the impressions, discarded it in the grass 75 feet from the house, and went inside to stage the kidnapping, which was definitely an inside job. Just looking at the nursery window where the "kidnapper" supposedly entered, there was a big trunk with a suitcase and toys on top of it. You really want us to believe someone from the outside opened the window, climbed into the dark nursery, vaulted over the trunk with everything on it, grabbed the 30 pound nearly two year old, left the note on the window sill, climbed out onto that jenky as hell ladder (that would have broke anyway), closed the window, and made off with the baby? No, of course not. Bruno Richard Hauptmann was completely innocent, and Colonel Lindbergh knew it.
When Charlie's body was found, his face was completely white, despite supposedly lying in the brush for two months. Most of his organs were missing, but there were no animal bite marks on his bones and no vermin or maggots present. When they turned him over and his face got wet, it turned blue. By the time his body made it to the morgue for the cursory autopsy (Lindbergh wouldn't allow a full one and had the body cremated immediately, Anne didn't get to see him even) he'd turned black. Pearlman theorizes that Dr. Carrell put some sort of preserving chemicals on him so he wouldn't decompose before they could get rid of his body. All in all it was a fascinating, well researched book. It's a shame we won't ever know what really happened to the Lindbergh baby, and that Hauptmann was unfairly executed for a crime he had no part in.
More twists and turns await the two once they arrive at Kingfisher Hill, along with another murder. The ending was actually a little bit of a let down, but it made perfect sense. Not all murders can be sensational.
Sherlock sends Mary a telegraph and asks her to join him at the home of an old friend of his, the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, who has spent his life on Dartmoor. The reverend has been seeing phantoms: a coach with a woman, accompanied by...you guessed it...a large dog. Of course in the Doyle story Sherlock proved the hound was no more than a big dog painted to glow in the dark and look spectral. Sherlock and Mary separate to comb for clues. There were some funny bits, Mary really is very witty, and the mystery was interesting. Still not as good as the "Beekeeper's Apprentice", but I like it better than books 2 and 3.
Mike and Velda are leaving a restaurant one evening (remember when we could actually eat in restaurants? Good times) when they witness a hit and run. A pretty rare Ferrari nearly kills young Vincent Colby, who is the son of a wealthy investment banker and in the profession himself. Vincent survives but undergoes an alarming personality change as a result of the accident, having fits of violent anger. His father, Vance, hires Mike to look into Vincent's personal life to see who might want to kill him. Turns out young Vincent was not quite the upstanding young man his father thought he was. There were some good, fun classic Hammer moments.
I reread the fourth Outlander book, "Drums of Autumn" by Diana Gabaldon. Jamie and Claire are in America, homesteading. Back in 1971, Brianna and Roger both find Jamie and Claire's death notice separately. Roger doesn't want to tell Brianna because he's afraid she'll go through the stones to warn them, Brianna doesn't want to tell Roger because she's afraid he'll try to stop her from going through the stones.
Nothing good ever happens from keeping secrets, folks. That is 100% the moral of this book. So many bad things could have been avoided if everyone had been honest with everyone else. Seriously.
So Brianna goes through the stones, Roger finds out and follows her. Lots of fun scenes with Brianna at Lollybrach and Brianna meeting Jamie and later Lord John Grey, who is the best (as an aside, I've typed his name so many times in texts that my app automatically fills it in when I type "Lord". So there's that). I do think I'm going to have to put a pause on rereading the rest of the series, though, as I have a bunch of library books I want to get through.
Sherlock and Mary are visited by an archeologist they briefly met in Palestine several years earlier, Dorothy Ruskin. Dorothy has a letter she wants Mary to have, a letter purportedly written by Mary Magdalene nearly 2,000 years earlier. Dorothy is killed a day later, hit by an automobile. Sherlock and Mary investigate and quickly discover it was not an accident. There were definitely some fun moments, but she set the bar pretty high with the first book.
Mary is about to turn 21 and gain her independence from her much hated guardian aunt, as well as her substantial inheritance. She's also about to graduate from Oxford. Very exciting times! A friend of hers, Ronnie, introduces her to the Temple of God, run by a female preacher named Margery (shades of Aimee Semple McPherson). Several wealthy young women have died recently under suspicious circumstances who were associated with the Temple, leaving large bequests to Margery's church. Mary decides to offer herself up as bait to see if the deaths were really accidental or not. I don't want to say too much and spoil the book, but the whole mystery aspect wasn't really interesting, Margery was just a weird character, and Sherlock was acting bizarre. I had a lot of "WTF just happened?!" moments while reading this book. Oh well. Like I said, here's hoping book 3 is better.
At any rate! Sherlock is in his mid-fifties, retired and living in Sussex, tending bees, when he meets young Mary Russell. Mary has a keen mind and Sherlock finds a kindred spirit. Mary soon becomes his student, and the two of them rescue a kidnapped child of an American senator before things get really sticky.
Heller is in Cleveland the day Marilyn Sheppard is murdered, and goes to the scene with his friend, Eliot Ness, to check it out. Fast forward a few years later to Sam's murder trial, and Heller investigates, trying to get to the truth of it. No luck, Sam is convicted and sent to prison. About ten years later, F. Lee Bailey takes his case and gets him a new trial and once again, Heller tries to get to the bottom of it. It was really interesting, I don't know enough about Sam Sheppard to say if Collins came to the "right" conclusion or not, but it was a fun journey.
Roger Ackroyd is murdered, and Belgian detective Hercule Poirot comes out of retirement to help the police solve the case. Lots of red herrings, lots of clues, and lots of people lying helped make it a true mystery until the very end.
Here's last year's review:
http://bekkisbookblog.blogspot.com/2019/11/chaos-outlander.html
And the first time I read it, back in 2012:
http://bekkisbookblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/explosive-eighteen-crank-sybil-exposed.html
This one supposedly takes place in the beginning, before Hannah solved her first mystery, yet Mike and Norman are both good friends, which didn't happen right away in the beginning of the books. The timeline was just all over the place. If you cut out all the bits about Hannah thinking about what to bake, baking it, describing how she baked it to 16 different people, then had all 16 different people try whatever she had baked and describe how much they liked it, the book would have been about 20 pages long. There was one ridiculous scene where her cat, Moishe, woke her up in the middle of the night by knocking over things in the pantry, then she had to describe exactly what happened to Mike and Norman over breakfast the next day. I'm like...uh...I just *read* what happened, you don't need to rehash it two pages later. I haven't gotten that senile just yet.
The mystery was a man named Joe who had amnesia and Hannah helped him remember who he was. It was silly.
Oh, TEAM NORMAN!! Seriously, Norman deserves so much better than to be trapped in these dull books with this dull girl who doesn't realize how wonderful he is. We need to rescue Norman.
The only minor beef I had was with "The Orient Express". He tried to make the case that Agatha Christie based it on the Lindbergh kidnapping. Now, maybe that inspired her, but the book bears zero resemblance to the crime (I've read everything about the Lindbergh kidnapping I can get my hands on, and I'm excited about a couple of new books coming out). Other than that, it was a very interesting book.
I know, I know. About twenty years ago, when I first got really into William Faulkner and was tearing through all of his books, I realized that because he was dead, there would be no more. So once I finished reading them all, that was it. I decided to "save" a few, and this was one of them.
"Pylon" is about a group of barnstormers. Roger Schumann, his mechanic Jiggs, his parachuter Jack Holmes, and his wife Laverne and their son Jack (maybe--Jack might also be Holmes' son, no one knows for sure) are in New Valois (a thinly disguised New Orleans) for an airshow. An unnamed reporter gets caught up in their drama, much to his detriment. Roger crash lands his plane on the next to the last day, but he's determined to fly in the big race the last day to win the $2,000 prize. Unfortunately, the plane falls apart in the air and Roger is killed.
I can't imagine this was an easy book for Faulkner to write. He flew airplanes himself, but his youngest brother Dean was really into flying, and ended up being killed in a plane crash. Faulkner felt so guilty for introducing his brother to the dangerous sport that he assumed responsibility for Dean's young pregnant wife and pretty much raised their daughter, a girl named Dean after her father. It wasn't the best book I've read by him, but it had some good moments. It was just very dark and didn't have much of the black humor that most of his other books have.
Flem Snopes married a pregnant Eula Varner and gave her bastard child his name. Whether is was a good name or not is debatable, depending on who you ask in Jefferson, Mississippi. The Snopeses are either scheming or hapless, but never harmless. Upon returning from their honeymoon with a six month old that can already walk, Eula takes up with the bank president, Manfred de Spain. Everyone in town knows and waits for Flem to do something, but he doesn't. Flem's playing the long game, and no one does it better. Once Eula's daughter, Linda, gets to be a teenager, Gavin Stevens, the county lawyer, befriends her and tries to better her mind and convince her to go to college somewhere far away. It ends with Eula's suicide and Flem consenting to let Linda go to New York, with some very funny moments in between (the rake and used condom corsage, for one). Faulkner knows how to paint a vivid picture, that's for sure!
I love historical mysteries and unsolved true crime. As a teenager, I was fascinated by the Lizzie Borden case, the Lindbergh kidnapping, Jack the Ripper, the Black Dahlia, and so many others. I ripped through the true crime section at the library, reading everything I could get my hands on. Somehow I managed to stumble across this book when it was first published. I'm glad I did! Not sure how I managed it--that time period in history wasn't of interest to me yet (it would be a few more years before I would devour everything I could read about the Tudors). Fields looks at the evidence surrounding the disappearance and perhaps murder of Edward IV's young sons, Edward and Richard, who were last seen sometime in 1483 in the Tower, after their uncle Richard became King. No one knows what really happened to them, if they were murdered or spirited away. If they were murdered, who did it? Richard certainly had a motive, but if he did murder them, he made a clumsy botch of it by not displaying the bodies in order to quell potential rebellions and pretenders, something Henry VII had to deal with. Others had a much better (in my opinion) motive, like Henry Tudor himself (stay with me for a minute, I promise I'll make it as simple as I can, because it really is complicated). Richard had the children of his brother Edward and Elizabeth Woodville declared illegitimate after learning his brother was precontracted in marriage to another woman before marrying Elizabeth. He takes the throne. Now, Henry's troops defeat him at Bosworth and Henry takes the crown and marries Princess Elizabeth, the eldest daughter of Edward and Elizabeth. But wait! She's illegitimate. So Henry has to reverse that--but if he does, then not only is she no longer illegitimate, her brothers benefit as well. Now Edward, if alive, is truly the rightful King. If Edward is dead, then Prince Richard becomes King Richard IV. So who benefited most from the boys being dead? Richard III, who already held the crown by right after the Council declared the Princes illegitimate, or Henry VII, who had no rightful blood claim to the throne and was married to the illegitimate daughter of Edward IV? It's easy to see that Richard had no cause to kill those boys and most likely didn't. I doubt we'll ever really know what happened, but for folks looking for the facts plainly told, you can't beat this book.
I heard about this book being one of the first fictional books that didn't make Richard III out to be a tyrant. Bowen published it in 1929. It wasn't bad, but it definitely was silly and, to overuse a word, cheesy. It starts when Richard's father, the Duke of York, is killed when Richard was 8 and he and his older brother George were spirited off to the Low Countries while their older brother, Edward, continued to fight the Lancasters for the throne. On the boat ride, Richard is frightened by a man he thinks is the devil, and this man pops up periodically the rest of his life, leading Richard to think the house of York is cursed. She left out major time periods of his life, unfortunately, like his time in Middleham with Warwick. A reader less well versed on RIII would have wondered why exactly he was so hurt by Warwick's later betrayal. She also used really overly formal medieval language. Her historical details weren't quite on track, I caught a few major blunders, but for being almost 100 years old (no internet back then!) she didn't do too badly.
And on a related note, tomorrow is the anniversary of Good King Richard's birthday. Which might explain my current reading choices :)
I liked Penman's Richard. Not as much as O'Brien's, Penman's Richard did some things that made me want to smack him, but he was honestly very well rounded and had his flaws, like I'm sure he did in real life. She brought the time period and all the dozens of characters to life, it was very skillfully done. We got to see Richard on the battlefield with his older brother, King Edward, we got to see him in conversation with his mother (surprisingly touching), his wife, his best friends. Penman makes it clear that Richard's downfall was due to treason and trusting the wrong people. After he died, several of the remaining characters worried about his reputation, since it seemed like Henry Tudor was trying to erase everything good about him and make him out to be a monster. One day history would only know what was written about him and no one would be around to speak up for him, they lamented. I'm so glad history is finally able to speak up for him again. I had to admit, when I got to the last 100 pages or so, I had a hard time reading it, knowing what was coming.
Okay, still trying to get used to this new Blogger format. It's a little weird.
First up: "Faster" by Neal Bascomb. Set in the 1920s and 1930s, it covered the competitive early years of car racing. The German Mercedes dominated the field, and German race car drivers were considered the elitist of the elite. Driver Rene Dreyfus was Jewish, and therefore not welcome on most teams during the rise of the Third Reich. He partnered with an American heiress and a French car manufacturer and against all odds beat the Mercedes in a few key races. It was interesting and I learned a lot about early Grand Prix auto racing and how insanely dangerous it was.
Another Richard III book, this one about his mother, Cecily Neville, the Duchess of York (I'm also reading a book about his father, Richard, Duke of York, so the two intertwined quite a lot. At least until he died). Cecily and Richard were married when they were children, so it took a long time before they were living together as husband and wife and having kids, but once they started they didn't stop. Cecily had at least 12 children that we know about. Six died in infancy, making the future King Richard III the baby of the family when his little sister died. Not much is known for sure about Cecily Neville, even important women in Medieval England didn't get much documentation. Hers had to have been a sorrowful life at times, though, losing her husband and second son, Edmund, fighting the Lancasters. Even when her eldest son, Edward, was King, he was married to a woman she didn't like. Her son George so envied his older brother he tried to depose him and take the crown himself. And then there was poor Richard. Cecily lived for about a decade after Richard was murdered at Bosworth. In her will, she left a prayer book that most likely belonged to her youngest son to Henry Tudor's mother (and her cousin) Margaret Beaufort. I had a good laugh at that. The irony! John Ashdown-Hill also mentioned that the bones that are generally believed to be those of the Princes in the Tower most likely aren't: since finding Richard's bones, we know he had a full set of normal adult teeth. The bones that are often touted as his nephews' show a genetic dental deformity that for many years scholars thought they had inherited from Cecily Neville's line. But Richard didn't have it, so it makes the idea that those bones belonged to his nephews that much less likely. Interesting, as all Ashdown-Hill's books are.
