Book Reviews by vicki rock

This is the fourth in the 6:20 Man series. Travis Devine is called that because of the scheduled train that he catches each morning from Mount Kisco to Manhattan. Devine is now a federal investigator after years of military service as an Army Ranger.

When investigative journalist Theresa Lee is shot on a Manhattan street and the man she was meeting, William Walker, Jr., is kidnapped, Devine is called in. Walker is an intelligence analyst and travels to Australia frequently for his job. His estranged wife’s family, the Woolwines, are billionaires. Lee works for the New York office of The Focus is Liberty, an international news reporting service.

Devine’s boss is Emerson Campbell, head of the Office of Special Projects. Campbell is afraid the attack is linked to homeland security so he assigns Devine to investigate. Then Walker’s body is found in Australia. Campbell sends Devine to Australia. When he gets to Sydney, Devine is partnered with Detective Sergeant Anais Jones, a homicide detective.

Devine and Jones have to unravel a complex mix of rogue intelligence operations, Russian mobsters, international relations, data centers and high finance.

This is the fourth installment in the 6:20 man series. It can be read as a stand-alone. The characters are good and the story has twists that add to the plot.

I rate it four out of five stars.

In the spring of 1881, Charles Lenox is in his detective agency for a meeting with a new client, Violet Goodhue. She comes from a poor family, but she met a man, Arthur Mill, who is now missing.

Arthur Mills left three months earlier for his father’s estate. But when Violet went to his father’s home, the housekeeper told her that they haven’t seen Arthur in six months. Charles agrees to take the case.

Charles’ late cousin’s daughter, Angela Lenox, came from India with her companion, Sari. Both young women are Charles’ wards. Angela, who is engaged, lives with Charles’ older brother, Sir Edmond Lenox. Sari lives with Charles and his wife, Lady Jane. Sari is heartbroken. She and Lord Snow’s nephew, David Lawrenson, were interested in each other, but Snow refused to agree to the match.

Then late one night, Edward wakes Charles to tell him that there’s been a murder in the House of Commons. Robert Baddeley, a charismatic, womanizing Member, has been found dead.

This is the 16th in the series. Charles Finch’s books have a strong sense of place and time; the reader feels what it must have been like in Victorian England. I was surprised by the plot twist and by the identity of the killer. This is an enjoyable series that doesn’t have to be read in order.

I rate it four out of five stars.

In the cloisters of Golgotha House, near Flavia de Luce’s home of Buckshaw, a nun lies dead. When her fellow sisters prepare her corpse for burial, they discover that Sister Garance has been living a lie for years.

Cynthia Davidson, the vicar’s wife, tells Flavia of the death because Vicar Denwyn Davidson of St. Tancred, was consulted about what the nuns should do. They think that Flavia and her business partner Arthur W. Dogger can investigate Sister Garance’s past. Dogger is also the de Luce family gardener. The town is Bishop Lacey.

It is soon after Flavia’s sister Ophelia’s wedding. Her other sister, Daphne, is still at home as is their cousin, Undine. Flavia’s mother died years earlier. When Flavia tells Dogger about Sister Garance’s death, he says that he knew her. He was wounded in World War II and the convent operated a program for soldiers with PTSD.

Flavia and Digger deduce that Sister Garance had a connection to the Yukon before entering the convent. But how does that relate to 1950s England?

Flavia is one of my favorite fictional characters. She is a little over the top with what she says, but her attention to her extended family is admirable. Alan Bradley created something special with this series of twelve novels. He wrote a farewell letter to the readers at the end of this book because he was planning for it to be the final installment. He died in May at the age of 87.

I rate it four out of five stars.

The Heights is London’s premier luxury high-rise apartment. When nighttime concierge Dwayne Hogarth, 23, is found dead in the lobby, Detective Sergeant Gillian Gish responds.

Detective Inspector Jack Milton is already on the scene. Mick Bentham is leading the forensics team. Hogarth’s body was discovered by his girlfriend, Rosa. The building’s owner and developer Allan Franklyn lives in the penthouse duplex.

Residents include an art dealer, a young pop star, a foreign heiress and a gangster’s wife, Maeve Gallacher, who held a party that night on the fourth floor of the building. Her husband, Eddie Gallacher, has been wanted for years. Dwayne’s brother Mark was the DJ.

A fight broke out at the party and Richard Hollister and Ray Stanton removed Mark from the apartment. When Dwayne intervened, Stanton punched Dwayne in the face. There is a gap in security camera footage.

The story moves slower than most police procedure novels. There are numerous characters to keep track of and most of them are not likable. Despite these drawbacks, it is a good mystery and the ending comes as a surprise.

I rate it four out of five stars.

When retired LA Homicide Detective Harry Bosch was 11, his mother was murdered and he became a ward of the state. He was housed in MacLaren Children’s Center, where abuse was rampant.

Decades after its closure, a massive class action lawsuit has resulted in a multibillion-dollar settlement for former residents. But when Bosch’s half-brother, defense attorney Mickey Haller, tells Harry that he is entitled to $400,000, Bosch says he doesn’t want the money. He wants justice.

Bosch’s friend, Charles Lamb, nicknamed Chops, died in MacLaren when he was 15. Chops’s body was found in a hidden space under a staircase that the staff used to discipline the kids who knew it only as “the hollow.” Bosch remembers Vernon Bishop, an abusive staff member. Bosch volunteers with Detective Renée Ballard, who heads the LAPD cold case unit, to reopen the investigation.

This plot is very intense as Bosch works on the Chops investigation as well as helping with two other cases. The past and present cases at times intertwine. The characters are good and I enjoyed reading the chapters of Bosch’s past. Michael Connelly is the author of 42 novels in several series all of which you will enjoy if you like police procedural novels.

I rate it four out of five stars.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is awakened from a deep sleep by a telephone call. The caller says “There’s a body in Lost Nation.”

“Where?” demands Gamache as he scribbles on the pad by his bed. But the line goes dead.

The head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec has no idea where Lost Nation is, or who woke him at his home in Three Pines. What he does know is that the man was terrified and the voice was oddly familiar. And the caller had Gamache’s private number.

The call came from Clara Morrow’s phone number. She is a friend and neighbor of the Gamaches. And so Gamache is thrust out of a deep sleep and into the surrounding forests in search of the mythical Lost Nation and a body.

When Gamache and his team of Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his second-in-command, and Inspector Isabelle Lacoste find both, the situation only grows more bizarre. The unidentified dead man is dressed in clothing from an era more than a century ago. He’s lying on top of a grave in a long-abandoned cemetery.

Soon, Gamache and his team are investigating ties to a forgotten shipwreck, lost documents belonging to a female Victorian botanist, a mysterious plant not seen in a century and a firm that specializes in genealogical research.

This is the 21st in one of the best series being written. The characters are excellent and all the strands of the story: crime, history and botany, are expertly woven together. There is a lot of depth in Louise Penny’s novels and this is one of her best.

I rate it five out of five stars.

Batter Gray has been called a thief, a rebel, an upstart, a traitor and an inmate. Batter is in his early twenties and lives in New York City. It is the 1980s.

He had an identical twin, but his brother was stillborn. Batter is named after his mother’s heroic dog. His mother, Rainey, is a professional type face designer, and his father, John, a historian at a community college.

Batter has always loved poetry. As a child he wanted to be a poet. His parents are concerned about his future. He attends a liberal arts college. When Batter was 11 a teacher showed him a poetry anthology published by a company called Peck & Peck, but he was later told that the company went out of business.

After college graduation, Batter is working two part-time jobs when he by chance finds the Peck & Peck building. The publisher is back in business. He gets a job, but it isn’t what he expected. And how does Batter end up being an inmate?

The multi-layered plot and the characters are definitely quirky. The plot reveal about the dog is laugh-out-loud funny. At times the reader will wonder where this absurd story is going, but it is enjoyable.

Bonnie Garmus is also the author of the bestselling “Lessons in Chemistry,” published in 2022.

I rate it four out of five stars.

Harlem, New York. Luke Cage is walking while on a cellphone call with his girlfriend, Jessica Jones, when he witnesses a man jumping through a window. Both Luke, known as the “hero from New York,” and Jessica have super powers. He stops to confront that man, Polar Bear Man, who is wrecking cars.

While that is going on, Luke missed a call from Majestic, Virginia, where his aunt, Letty Lucas, and his cousins, Raymond and Rashon, live. Rashon is dead. Rashon was working at a factory that manufactures medical devices. Luke was recently hired to investigate that factory and had asked Rashon to snoop around.

The sheriff’s department says Rashon’s death is an open investigation. Luke doesn’t believe they are investigating.

“Truth to Power” is part of the Marvel Crime series that began with “Breaking the Dark” by Lisa Jewell and “Enemy of My Enemy” by Alex Segura. It can be read as a stand alone novel.

While I liked S.A. Cosby’s earlier crime novels, I couldn’t get into this one. There is a lot of fighting and Marvel-style superhero action. I found his earlier books to be page-turners, but this one seems to be slow moving.

I rate it three out of five stars.

Jay Turner’s mother died and he is returning to their Boston townhouse to clean it out for sale. He has no siblings and his mother raised him alone. Jay is now 29 and has been a history teacher for six years.

His mother was also a historian and an author and editor. She had donated a valuable book from 1477 to a museum in Philadelphia. The book had been commissioned by Vlad Tepes of Wallachia, the feudal lord known as Dracula. She warned Ju about dangers associated with the book.

Jay is clearing out her possessions and finds a partially burned scrap of newspaper bearing the name “Gael Brogan.” Soon after, a deliveryman leaves behind a package containing a small antique volume bound in leather. Did the museum return the donation?

He sets out to learn more about Gael Brogan, a prominent nineteenth-century actor whose last and most famous role was based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. As Jay begins to dig deeper he gets the help of a grad student named Rhiannon.

This isn’t marketed as a sequel to Elizabeth Kostova’s earlier novel, “The Historian,” but Jay Turner is the son of one of the main characters in “The Historian.” The main problem with “Mystery Play” is how many plot threads are extraneous and are just dropped. There are fascinating ideas here, but many result in dead ends. And at almost 600 pages, it drags. I remember enjoying “The Historian.” While hardcore Dracula fans may enjoy “Mystery Play,” I was disappointed.

I rate it three out of five stars.

Out on the moor, in the snow, a white house stands beneath an electrical pylon. It is a house full of memories and of old things. The house is named Kirkhill.

An unnamed middle-age man, who recently went through a bitter divorce, moves into the two-bedroom house sight unseen. He is surprised to find that his cellphone doesn’t work there. There are some of the previous owners’ belongings still inside. Then in the middle of the night, the landline rings, but when he picks up the receiver the line is dead.

The man goes into town, but nobody will talk about the previous owners of the house. When he returns to Kirkhill, he hears a sound coming from the pylon, like someone saying “I know what you did.” He finds a diary kept by a woman, Caroline Sanderson, who talks of her husband, Arthur. He then finds Arthur’s journal. They had two children, Greg and Lucy, and a dog, Bailey.

And he keeps finding new tennis balls. Then a young woman comes to the house, looking for her lost dog. She says her name is Lucy and that Caroline and Arthur killed themselves. The man becomes obsessed with Caroline.

This is an intense psychological fast-paced thriller. The narrator alternates between logic and terror until he no longer knows what is real. Readers will wonder if he is having a mental breakdown or if the house is haunted or something else. They will race through it to find out the answer.

I rate it five out of five stars.

Livia Cable has made her peace with her life in the Tennessee farm country where she grew up, until a shocking phone call from Sigurd, an old lover whom she hasn’t seen in over 20 years, shakes her.

Her husband, Charlie, is a farmer. Livia teaches piano and plays for several churches. She met Sigurd in 1989 when she was in college. He was older and a union organizer. At the time she was living with Jon Link. She was then Livia Bohusz, a music conservatory student estranged from her family.

Her brother, Cyrus, died of suicide when he was 17 and she was 11. Her mother was dismissive of her musical abilities and was abusive. Her father was a dairy farmer and a rural mail carrier. She’s known Charlie since childhood.

The story goes back in time. When Jon Link is accepted into a summer program in Munich, Germany, he and Livia break up. Sigurd also moves on. Then Livia’s hand is injured and she can no longer play at a professional level. She returns home. Livia’s decision if she should meet with Sigurd means confronting her past and deciding if reopening it will heal her or upend her current life.

Barbara Kingsolver won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for “Demon Copperhead.” I enjoyed “Partita” even more. Barbara Kingsolver weaves a deeply moving story of passion, regret, music and life in rural communities. I had to look up what the title means. A partita is a musical composition, typically for a solo instrument, that consists of a series of dance-inspired movements.

I rate it five out of five stars.

Paul and Chelsea Tanner are on their honeymoon in Paris. Chelsea has posted a daily schedule of their trip. They don’t realize that someone has been watching them since the third day.

Chelsea did a semester in Paris while she was in college and is proficient in French. Paul, who graduated from the Naval Academy, now works for the Department of Justice. They are on a day trip in a private car driven by Malik Farro when Malik is drugged and they are kidnapped.

Chelsea’s father, Lowell Clayburn, is an orthopedic surgeon. Her mother, Justine, becomes concerned when a day goes by without a text from them. She calls Fritz and Linzy Tanner, Paul’s parents, who also haven’t heard from the couple. Then Chelsea’s parents get a video showing Chelsea with a $2 million ransom demand. They call their son, Sam, for help.

Fritz Tanner works for a company that is a defense contractor. Sam goes to his office to tell him of the kidnapping. Lowell and Justine decided they won’t call the FBI, and that Lowell will go to Paris to pay the ransom. Fritz and Linzy then get a similar ransom call.

Although they pay the ransoms, Chelsea is released but Paul isn’t. When Lowell and Chelsea return to the U.S., their flight is met by two FBI agents. Then Rea Claire Russo and Stuart Nash are recruited to be the bait in an elaborate CIA rescue operation.

It is intense. The main characters are good, but my problem with the novel is the number of characters who are introduced but either play minor roles or are not heard from again. The lead up to the rescue is a little long, with the rescue itself shorter. Still, John Grisham’s many fans will enjoy it.

I rate it four out of five stars.