Aside from romance, I also find myself reaching for the occasional crime novel or fast-paced thriller as my comfort reads. It sounds strange if I put it that way, but what I consider to be ‘comfort reads’ are books that can quickly transport or distract me, and thrillers can be very absorbing.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been very lucky with the genre lately. Here are my reviews of Stephanie Wrobel’s Darling Rose Gold (2020) and Jessica Moor’s The Keeper (2020), two of my most anticipated thrillers this year which turned out to be disappointments. Thankfully, I just finished Jane Harper’s Force of Nature (2017) this week, which turned out to be very satisfying.
Hi everyone! So, I saw other bloggers doing mini-reviews, and I thought that it’s perfect for me since I have a backlog of books I want to review, but don’t have enough thoughts on to fill a full review. So my Mini-Review Mondays will be a quick lightning round of books about a particular theme or books I’ve recently read.
Without further ado, I’ll be talking about the three murder mysteries I’ve picked up just this month. It’s strange to hear, but I find a good old-fashioned whodunnit very comforting. It actually makes sense that I was in the mood for murder mysteries at the start of the year – beginnings have always been daunting for me, and immersing myself in the clean, black-and-white world of murder mysteries may have given me the reassurance I needed to face the uncertainty of the new year.
In any case, here are the three murder mysteries I’ve read so far this January, in order of date read.
Magpie Murders is actually two books and two mysteries in one, but despite the length I devoured the book in the space of a few hours. It was enjoyable, gripping, and very, very clever.
At the beginning of the novel, we have our protagonist, editor (and, unbeknownst to her, future detective) Susan Ryeland, preparing to read the latest mystery by her publishing company’s most prized writer, Alan Conway. But the further along Susan gets in Magpie Murders – Conway’s manuscript – the more she realizes that it holds clues to solving a mystery that happens in real life – and that she seems to be the only one who sees it. So, with the insatiable and compulsive curiosity of a true mystery lover, Susan follows the trail of bread crumbs Conway has left for her in his novels to discover the identity of the killer.
This was a highly addictive page-turner that kept me up until early morning. Both mysteries were very tightly plotted – I can just imagine Horowitz storyboarding and sequencing everything on a large bulletin board just to keep track of all the little clues, details, and characters that have to be in place for both mysteries to come together neatly at the end – and I was delighted that a number of the clues that involved wordplay. It was still very satisfying to watch the clues from Conway’s Magpie Murders and Horowitz’s Magpie Murders line up.
I also found Horowitz’s commentary on mystery tropes interesting. Susan, for example, talked about how the solution to cases seem to depend in part on the serendipity of stumbling on particular clues, or how real-life interrogations don’t go as smoothly as fictional interrogations. They weren’t particularly subversive, though, since Horowitz ultimately uses the same conventions to forward and wrap up the mystery in the book. Still, the meta-fictional lens was refreshing – simultaneously a reverent acknowledgement of Christie’s legacy and a sly commentary on her bag of tricks.
All in all, this was a great read, and I’d be anxious to get my hands on the next book in this series.
Read from January 3-5, 2019
2. The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
I found that my appetite for cozy mysteries was really whetted after reading Magpie Murders, so I just had to pick this up – the Queen of Crime’s first novel (i.e., where the entire genre of murder mystery began). This doesn’t yet have subversiveness of her famous works (i.e., Orient Express and Roger Ackroyd), but all the familiar elements are there – Poirot’s mannerisms, the red herrings, and of course, all the clues hidden in plain sight. I kept changing my mind about the identity of the killer and couldn’t fathom how it was done until all was revealed at the last chapter.
My only complaint about this particular book was that it became too unwieldy towards the end – everyone seemed to be acting suspiciously in ways that really weren’t connected to the murder, and everyone seemed to have sufficient motive to kill. It made for very long and convoluted explanations from Poirot, which, admittedly, were too much for my ‘little gray cells’ to handle. I’m also not very good at visualizing spaces or remembering details like where X was at Y time, so it took me awhile just to comprehend the sequence of events that Poirot was laying out. (That might also be why I might never tire of murder mysteries – I’m just no good at keeping the clues straight, so I’m always surprised at the end!) Very enjoyable though, and exactly what I was in the mood to read.
This edition is part of an Agatha Christie box set that just arrived at my doorstep this week. I bought the set as a gift to my brother, since he wants to get into mysteries, but it actually doubles nicely as a gift to myself, since his books are stashed in my shelves anyway… 😉
Evil under the Sun is the 24th book in the Hercule Poirot series, and in it, Poirot investigates the murder of a famous actress on a beautiful island where he’s vacationing. Admittedly, I wasn’t as interested in the blurb as I was in the title, which I knew to be a biblical allusion. I always find titles drawn from other works intriguing since the work is poised to be a specific take on the work of origin.
As will be explained a few pages into the book, ‘evil under the sun’ is a phrase taken from Ecclesiastes 6:
1 I have seen another evil under the sun, and it weighs heavily on mankind:2 God gives some people wealth, possessions and honor, so that they lack nothing their hearts desire, but God does not grant them the ability to enjoy them, and strangers enjoy them instead.
Sure enough, this is one of the themes in the book – it seems that all the main suspects are wealthy or rich in some sense (in fame, for example), but can’t seem to completely enjoy their good fortune because they’re still longing for that elusive one more thing that would make their lives complete. In fact, this longing – or this desire, which is its more urgent form – underlies the conscious motivations of each suspect for committing murder.
As such, Christie plays with this notion of evil and achieves surprise by turning the notion of ‘evil’ around. But then, how the killer went about the murder strained belief. It was just too gimmicky, and I think not even the sharpest mystery reader would have been able to guess it with all the clues lined up.
Another thing that didn’t work for me: I found the third-person omniscient perspective disorienting, especially coming from the concentrated first-person narration of Captain Hastings in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It felt like a cheap trick for the omniscient narrator to zoom in on the characters during their most incriminating moments, only to abruptly cut the scene before further context can divest them of suspicion. It felt like an amateur writer’s sleight-of-hand rather than the more masterful manoeuvres of a respected author.
Also, compared to the three other Christie novels I’ve read, this was more bloated than usual with a cast of inconsequential characters. A number of them were introduced in the beginning, which made me think they would play an important part in the story; but despite their numerous appearances and the perplexing number of lines dedicated to their peripheral remarks, they contributed very little to the murder investigation itself.
I’m wondering if Christie used them in the story to form a composite image of the murdered actress’s character in the minds of the readers. In that sense, it’s an interesting device – after all, we don’t usually have access to the interiority of public figures; instead, we stitch it together from fragments of gossip. Christie achieves this effect by having every minor character voice their quite authoritative opinions of the dead actress, despite never having interacted with her before. Intriguing set-up, but I still wish she’d prune away some of the cast.
I sound like I’m nitpicking her work now – this always seems to happen when I sit to write a review – but really, I wasn’t thinking any of this while in the grip of the story. I always enjoy the compulsively readable nature of Christie’s works and I look forward to the next book I’ll pick up from her oeuvre.
Read from January 10-13, 2019
Mini-Review Monday: 3 Murder Mysteries I’ve Read This January
I’m still very much in the mood for murder mysteries or thrillers, so if you have any recommendations, please let me know in the comments! I’d really appreciate it. 🙂
The Turn of theKey, Ruth Ware’s fifth and most recent novel, is my introduction to her work, and I picked it up because, well, I was in the mood for creepy gothic houses and creepy kids. (It’s a really weird reading mood to have, especially right before the New Year, but oh well.) On those counts, it definitely delivered – the house was creepy and the kids were downright hellish – but sadly, all that elaborate atmospheric set-up had very little payoff at the end, and I was left feeling confused and vaguely betrayed for want of a satisfactory ending.
I’ll backtrack a bit. The Turn of the Key is told from the point of view of the protagonist, Rowan Caine, who is hired as a live-in nanny for four girls at the large, picturesque, sprawling home of Bill and Sandra Elincourt in the Scottish highlands, described as a house with gothic architecture fitted with modern technology (it’s something of a smart house). Throughout the first few chapters, Rowan repeatedly emphasizes how perfect the job opportunity is – “almost too perfect”, with its salary of £55,000 per year – as a way of foreshadowing the ugliness behind that veneer of perfection.
But then we’re already clued in to these dark undercurrents from the start, because Rowan’s story is framed as a series of letters to a lawyer she’s writing to from her prison cell while awaiting trial for her alleged murder of one of the Elincourt children. The letters are her desperate attempt to prove her innocence, and to convey the “ugly, unvarnished truth” of what really went on in Heatherbrae House.
So far, so good. For the first ten chapters or so, I was completely hooked – I love the epistolary format, and this sort of narrative framing had already positioned the readers (or me, at least) on Rowan’s side, as if I were Mr. Wrexham, the lawyer she was writing to. And I knew I would still try to be on her side, even if she proved to be an unreliable narrator.
Over the next few letters, Rowan narrates how she’d chanced upon the nannying position, how badly she wanted the job, and her subsequent interview with Sandra Elincourt (her employer). On that interview prior to accepting her job, she also met the girls – two school-aged and one baby – all of them sullen and bratty. One of them even warned Rowan to stay away from the house because “the ghosts won’t like it” – just as they had driven away the three nannies before her.
Rowan, however, is undeterred by these warnings, and once she’s hired as the nanny she moves in to Heatherbrae House with the family. But on her first day, Sandra and Bill Elincourt had some conference to attend to, so they leave Rowan with the kids and quickly take off. This struck me as outrageously irresponsible – who leaves their 8-year-old, 5-year-old, and few-month-old baby with a complete stranger? It seemed to me like the author’s way of keeping the couple out of the picture so the real action could happen, but I was curious enough about what would happen that this illogical decision on the part of the Elincourts didn’t really detract from the reading experience.
Sure enough, when the parents leave, strange things begin to happen. This is where Heatherbrae House really comes to life. It’s so central to the story that it becomes a character, and Ruth Ware excelled in her description of old-school creepy and modern-day creepy – imagine a home with gothic-style architecture, complete with a hidden poison garden for a backyard, but also with cameras installed in every room, disembodied Siri-like voices speaking from the walls to anticipate your needs, and technology suddenly malfunctioning in the middle of the night. The house felt nearly sentient, almost like it could be the antagonist of the novel. In fact, I couldn’t read this at night because I was half-afraid that the walls of my room would move – I wouldn’t have been surprised if Ware’s novel suddenly morphed into sci-fi/horror midway and Heatherbrae House really did come alive.
And, honestly, that might have made for a more interesting book than the events that followed. This is basically what happened next: the kids were difficult. Rowan loses her temper at them. Strange footsteps were heard in the middle of the night. Household items mysteriously disappear and reappear in their proper places. Rowan suspects the hot gardener and the old housekeeper are the culprits. The eldest Elincourt child comes home, threatens that she knows something about Rowan. . . . and then, suddenly, inexplicably, someone ends up dead.
What started out as a murder mystery morphed into a horror story, which then mystifyingly turned into something of a domestic drama. I can’t say much without giving the ending away, but I can say that even as I was thoroughly confused at the book’s genre-identity crisis, I raced to the end in hopes for some explanation for what was happening, or that the ending would tie back neatly to the beginning. But no such thing happened. Sure, we did eventually find out who the killer was, but that discovery wasn’t even particularly important anymore, smothered as it was by all the new elements that had been introduced too late into the story.
In conclusion, I was disappointed with this novel, especially since I wanted to like it at first. It might have been better had there been a few more chapters or an epilogue, or if she’d introduced the other elements earlier on in the story (or not at all, actually). Still, this wouldn’t detract me from reading Ware’s other works – I was still impressed by how she’d tried to frame this story, and I was genuinely spooked by the house. Here’s to hoping her other books will be better.
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