Wednesday, April 02, 2025

Booked (and Printed): March 2025

 

Booked (and Printed)

March 2025

 

Ah, Spring is in the air—wait, it’s snowing? Right now? March’s weather was topsy-turvy with a handful of warm days sprinkled like so many chocolate chips in a mostly chilly month. It was also a month that found my review writing for the blog woefully inadequate to my reading.

Of the seven books and two shorts I read during March, I only wrote three reviews—one is for SKIN AND BONES AND OTHER MIKE BOWDITCH STORIES, by Paul Doiron, scheduled for release on May 13. In a phrase, Skin and Bones is great, but you’ll have to wait until May 12, a Monday, to read what I really think about it. Another is for the forthcoming true crime title, THE CLEVELAND JOHN DOE CASE, by Thibault Raisse, about a 2003 suicide that turned into an enigma when it was discovered the dead man had lived under an alias for decades. Scheduled for a Tax Day release, April 15, you’ll find my review on this same bandwidth on Monday, April 14. The final review, and the only one to actually appear at the blog in March, was for Henry Slesar’s terrific mystery story, “THE TIN MAN,” which appeared in the June 1984 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine—read the review here.

Now for the other seven titles I neglected to mention even though, for the most part, they were damn good. PALMS, PARADISE, POISON, by John Keyse-Walker (2021), is the third (of four) Constable Teddy Creque mysteries. Set on the tiny Caribbean Island of Anegada, which is part of the Royal Virgin Islands, Teddy is battening down for an approaching hurricane when he receives a message from headquarters about an escaped prisoner named Marianna Orro, or as she calls herself, Queen Ya-Ya. A practitioner of Santeria, Queen Ya-Ya is not only scary, but she is dangerous, too. Teddy is sure Ya-Ya will run for a bigger island, but of course, she ends up on Anegada as the first ever prisoner in the island’s one cell jail. At least until she engineers an escape with what appears to the witnesses as mind control. Teddy chases Ya-Ya from Anegada to rural Cuba.

Palms, Paradise, Poison, is as good as Keyse-Walker’s first two Teddy Creque novels; which is saying something because those earlier books were marvelous. The setting, while shifting from Anegada to Cuba, is as vibrant as ever—I could almost feel the sand between my toes—and makes for a nice respite from these cold Northeastern winters. The Santeria infused in the narrative made for some interesting reading, but the real treat is kicking around with Teddy for a few hours.

 

One of my reading goals for 2025 was to add more variety to my leisure reading. With that purpose in mind, I read Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch’s WW2 young adult novel, THE WAR BELOW (2014). The teenage Luka, a Ukrainian, escaped from a Nazi labor camp and is torn between returning to the camp for his friend Lida or making his way across the Carpathian Mountains to Kyiv where, he hopes, his father will still be alive. Going back to the camp for Lida is hopeless since it will put him back in the hands of the Nazis and so he decides his only choice is to find his father. Luka makes scant progress moving through the mountains in winter, but he does make a new friend and stumbles upon the Ukrainian Insurgent Army fighting the Nazis and then the Soviets as they push in from the east. There are some interesting discussions about Ukraine’s abuse by both the Soviets (both pre- and post-war) and the Nazis, but it was obviously written for younger teenagers because it lacked much of the nastiness of the conflict. The War Below is a good book for your teenage readers, but be ready to help them put it in context with the happenings of the 1930s and 1940s, both Nazi and Communist, because the narrative never goes much beyond Luka’s own story.

My quasi-reading challenge with Minotaur Books led me to ONE MAN’S PARADISE, by Douglas Corleone (2010). Paradise won the St. Martin’s Press/MWA First Crime Novel Award and while it is obviously a first novel—the pacing isn’t perfect and the protagonist makes more than a couple wildly immature decisions—it is also a readable distraction. Kevin Corvelli, a New York criminal lawyer, comes to Honolulu to make a fresh start after failing to win an acquittal for an innocent client that was murdered in prison. Covelli vowed he would never work a felony case again, but when his office landlord, also a lawyer, drops a high-dollar murder case in his lap, all Corvelli sees are the dollars. The case is murky with at least three solid suspects, all with motive and opportunity, but what Kevin can’t see shapes the court case. Paradise’s setting is sharp and while the climactic ending is frayed with a where did that come from? feeling, it’s a solid debut and I’ll likely read more of Corleone’s work.

I came to Joyce Carol Oates’s marvelous writing late in the game, back in 2015 when I took over Mystery Scene’s “Short and Sweet: Short Stories Considered” column and started seeing her stories in magazines and collections. But since then, I’ve been an advocate for Oates’s often surreal and always meaningful tales. Her 1992 novel, BLACK WATER, is a brilliant fictional retelling of the Chappaquiddick Incident where Senator Ted Kennedy crashed his car into a pond and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. The names have been changed—Kopechne is “Kelly Kelleher” and Kennedy is, mostly, referred to as “The Senator”—and it is told from the perspective of the drowned woman. The effect of Oates’s evocative prose, the images of Kelleher’s life in flashback form, and the claustrophobic blackness of her drowning are powerful. Everyone should read Black Water because it is a literary powerhouse and it illuminates the feminine experience in America during the second half of the 20th Century.

March also saw me return to Jack M. Bickham’s Brad Smith series, which has become something of a literary comfort food for me. DROPSHOT (1990), the second book in the series, is set on the Caribbean Island of St. Maarten and I enjoyed jumping into Smith’s world as much this time as I had the prior five or six readings I’ve made of Dropshot. Read my old gangster review here.

And finally, the other short story I read, “ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD,” by Swedish crime writer, Karin Tidbeck (2018), is a brilliant tale asking if the past ever dies. Four teenagers venture into the woods on a dark Swedish night looking for a mythical supernatural phenomenon, but only two of them return. Years later, the survivors find themselves back at the scene hoping to find something that will relieve their grief and guilt. But as everyone knows, personal tragedy has a long shelf life.

Whew.

Fin—

Now on to next month…