Three of my favorite cozy writers serve up a St. Patrick’s Day themed trio of mysteries set in coastal Maine and the result is a dark but slightly sweet brew with a kick, just like Irish Coffee. Though I find holiday themed trilogies vary in quality this one delivered suspense, entertainment and solid plots without being farfetched or tired.
The Leslie Meier mystery opens with Lucy Stone doing a special feature article on local teenagers who are competing in a regional Celtic Irish step dancing contest and Lucy travels to Portland to attend. What starts out as a fun and spirited event is ruined by an embarrassing accident to the most talented dancer and accusations fly exposing the ambitions and loyalties of the dancers and their protective mothers. Later on one of the parents is found mysteriously dead and the ex-husband becomes the primary suspect. The rivalries spill over into other town Continue reading “Irish Coffee Murder – Leslie Meier, Lee Hollis, Barbara Ross”
This mystery is set in a Victorian London swathed in smoggy fog with omnibuses pulled by horses, railways clattering by, steamboats on the Thames, smoke filled pubs and posh squares lined with newly built townhouses. The London of an evolving Scotland Yard when ‘case files’ were considered a novel policing technique and women riding bicycles was considered risqué, when men routinely wore top hats and women perched small hats on their heads and wore elaborate dresses with bustles. The heroine is also a novelty a single woman journalist working on Fleet Street for a daily paper. She is struggling to survive after a career setback and is offered a lifeline by a young Scotland Yard inspector who needs her insider knowledge to assist him in solving the scandalous murder of a famous actress, Lizzie Dixie, whom she was friends with. Penny Green agrees to help only if she is re-instated at her old job and she tries to balance her own sorrow with her desire to find justice for her old friend and Annie, her daughter. Penny’s connections in the theater world gain access for her and the inspector to meet with the Drury Lane theater proprietor Sebastian an early supporter of Lizzie and Lizzie’s husband an overbearing successful showman in the style of a P.T. Barnum.
This mystery is fresh and original and invokes the era of victory gardens, rationing, scrap metal drives and the music, fashion, movies and values of WWII 1940’s America. Set in Progress, a prosperous town with its own local newspaper the story is told from the perspective of Irene, acting editor-in-chief replacing her dad who is serving on the Pacific front. Irene was formerly limited to the women’s page but is running the paper following local stories and war news while managing staff and editing the paper. A series of anti-Semitic attacks and vandalism against shop owner and neighbors, is big local news which exposes the divisions between supporters of the war and those sympathetic to the Third Reich. That story overlaps another when her best investigative reporter takes off to follow up on a secret lead and is found dead, days later at the bottom of his cellar stairs. Meanwhile her mother rents a room to a young mysterious NYC singer Katherine who moves to town to work in the local Ironworks factory just re-tooled to produce massive quantities of parts for tanks, airplanes etc.
This is a roaring 20’s mystery featuring the spirited Jane Wunderly, a young widow traveling with her aunt and staying at the Mena House, a luxury resort situated outside Cairo, Egypt near some of the great pyramids. It is a cosmopolitan mystery with sharp pointed dialog and continental manners and customs but not stale or cliched because of the fresh and natural objective tone of Jane Wunderly’s narration.
This mystery is a World War 2 expose of the risks, perils and bravery of the SOE agents who were made prisoners by their own organization because they were considered to be security risks and compromised and couldn’t be allowed back into the field or released from duty. Though it’s fiction the rules and premises are real and it could have happened – perhaps not as dramatically – but very plausible.
Medieval mysteries have long been a favorite of mine because the atmosphere invokes a time and place so different from modern life with its open society, comfortable, consumer oriented lifestyles, its a window into a much darker age of barons, abbeys, feuding lords, robbers, struggling serfs and towns folk. This series focuses on the fiefdoms of religion during that time when abbeys, monasteries, churches, hospitals and schools were all religious institutions and provided hope and comfort. It’s the 12th in the Abbess of Mieux series and features Hildegard, an understanding, competent nun determined to successfully complete her penance by going on a mission to a northern English Benedectine monastry during the Twelve Days of Christmas holidays in 1389 during the troubled reign of King Richard.
