Reviewed By Liz

ISBN 0-446-61028-3
Okay, I have read a fair number of culinary themed mysteries in my time, but this one takes the cake! There aren’t just a few mentions of food in this book and some recipes – this book is packed with food. Part of that is due to the fact that the main character, Charly Poisson, is a French chef and is cooking every day for his restaurant. But this mystery is also centered around another company in the food industry, so we get inside their test kitchen, too.

Charly is an interesting character. He is slightly out of synch with the world around him, but in an endearing way, and is admired by his staff and customers for his amazing cooking talent. He also isn’t very interested in investigating the source of the body in his pond – he is too busy juggling the various personalities who patronize his restaurant and move in and out of his life. But Charly does try to be accommodating and ends up backing into the investigation that way. Fortunately, he has his loyal staff and some good friends to come to his rescue when he needs it.

This book was peopled with a lot of characters, which meant that many went unexplored. However, there are other books in the series and I look forward to learning more about the restaurant staff, in particular. Readers always have a fondness for a well-behaved mobster so Ugo Buonsarde has to be my favorite character in this book. But the rich and rakish Honoria Wells is close behind. This mystery is suitable for cozy fans and is a fast and good read that will intrigue your palate.

Did I guess it? Yes. Will I read more? Yes.

Mystery Book Reviews by Liz at http://reviewedbyliz.com ©2007

Buy it from Amazon!

ISBN 0-738-70872-0
I love this book! Murder Passes the Buck is one of those tongue-in-cheek mysteries that suspend reality enough that you can go along for the ride and just enjoy the wacky characters and their adventures. And these characters are a little wacky. Baker has set this book in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and peopled it with Yoopers (think U.P.’ers and you eventually get to Yoopers).

I have to admit that I was predisposed to this book because I do live in Michigan – but I am a Troll, not a Yooper. Trolls live under the Mackinac Bridge in the Lower Peninsula, Yoopers live above. I have met a few Yoopers here and there and they are different. The ones I have met are tremendously resourceful and hardworking and willing to eat any varmint that comes their way – all of which comes from living in a hostile climate, I suspect. Baker has created an entertaining and fun look at life among the Yoopers by keeping it farcical and light-hearted.

Our heroine, Gertie Johnson, has decided that her neighbor was murdered in his hunting blind and when her lazy son Blaze, the Sheriff, says it is an accident, she decides to investigate. She tromps all over the frozen North with her grandson Little Donny and her friends Cora Mae and Kitty and, along the way, teaches herself how to drive (sort of), dyes her hair orange (okay, that was an accident), and learns how to use a stun gun (OOPS!).

This book is very funny, the mystery is pretty good, and the characters and setting are fantastic. If you like a comedy/adventure mystery, this is right up your alley.

Did I guess it? Yes. Will I read more? Just as soon as the next one comes out!

Mystery Book Reviews by Liz at http://reviewedbyliz.com ©2007

Buy it from Amazon!

ISBN 0-670-03467-3

Every once in a while you pick up a book by a new author, not knowing what to expect, and are completely blown away. This happened last year, when I read Craig Johnson’s The Cold Dish. Wow! So I was really excited when I saw that his second book, Death Without Company, was out. And frankly, book number two is every bit as good as the first one.

Sheriff Longmire of Wyoming is back with his long-time friend, the intriguing Henry Standing Bear, crusty former Sheriff Lucian Connally, and Deputy Vic Moretti, a transplant from the big city whose bold attitude and colorful language spice up the book. I will warn you, though, this book takes place just a few weeks after the first one and the events of that book are discussed and the ending revealed. If you think you might like these books, read The Cold Dish first.

So what makes these books so good? Just the basics – good writing, setting, plot, characters that are really interesting, and a little humor thrown in. This book flows seamlessly and sucks you into the story of a modern murder and how it might be related to past events – and there are enough suspects populating this book that you have lots of people to audition for the role of bad guy.

This book is not going to be appropriate for cozy-only readers. It’s not a hack and slash, but it does have some grit to it. This book reminds me of the early Robert B. Parker Spenser books, and if you enjoyed those, you will find this right up your alley. If you are looking to try something a little outside of your comfort zone, the quality of the writing and the approachable style make this a perfect choice.

Did I guess it? Only parts. Will I read another? Just as soon as it is available!

Mystery Book Reviews by Liz at http://reviewedbyliz.com ©2007

Buy it from Amazon!

ISBN 0-803-49448-3

I really enjoyed this book, but everything I can think of to say about it sounds bad. If I say it is a simple mystery it sounds boring. If I say it is old-fashioned, it sounds dated. If I say it is light, it sounds dull. And if I say it reminds me of a Nancy Drew mystery, who knows what you will think. But it is all of those things and really good, too!

Maggie is a young teacher who heads off to a small resort for some quiet time on her vacation. She immediately finds the body of a former student in the woods and decides to do a little nosing around because the girl worked at the resort. She is assisted by fellow vacationer and new friend Dyna, who is a little flighty but very likeable. Together they investigate the resort staff and find that they aren’t all as nice as they seem.

This is a well-written, straightforward light mystery. It is a smooth, fast, and enjoyable read. Cozy readers will like it just fine. And those of us who fell in love with mysteries as kids by reading Nancy Drew stories will find the style of the story and the young heroines seem familiar – this is sort of a walk down memory lane.

Did I guess it? Yes. Will I read more? Absolutely.

Mystery Book Reviews by Liz at http://reviewedbyliz.com ©2006

Buy it from Amazon!

WARNING – THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS!

I recently read a “light” mystery that I found incredibly depressing – Death on a Silver Platter by Ellen Hart. Pretty much everything bad that could happen did. The characters have multiple family members die, they end up alone, and discover that no one around them is what they appear to be because most of their lives were based on lies. The main character, her husband, and the murderer (who gets away undetected) are the only ones who end up happy.

Now when I have a negative reaction to a book, I often check out other reviews to see how other readers saw felt about the book. Professional reviewers rarely say anything negative about a book, so I go to Amazon in the hopes of finding a review not written by a friend or relative of the author. A real reader, in other words. And I found one who also didn’t care for the book. But I found three others who loved it, including one that blew me away. This reviewer stated that the book had a happy ending. A happy ending? Did we read the same book?

I decided to sleep on the review and started pondering what constitutes a happy ending in a murder mystery. First of all, in a murder mystery, someone is going to die. So for the victim and anyone who loves them there isn’t going to be a happy ending. That is sort of a given. But beyond that, authors have developed several different types of endings. Since happiness is subjective, how we feel about these different endings probably dictates whether or not we feel the book has a happy ending.

So let’s examine some different mystery endings. The following resolutions do not necessarily exist independently of each other. In books with multiple plots/mysteries/bad guys, you can have lots of combinations of resolutions.

1) The mystery is solved.

This may seem very basic, and it is the underlying principal of the mystery genre, but not all authors provide satisfactory solutions and leave the reader frustrated. For many people, the fact that the correct answer to a problem is found is the most important and most rewarding aspect of a mystery story.

Have you ever read a locked room mystery? If you demand a rewarding resolution to your mystery, this may be your type of book. These are books in which a puzzle is put forward for both the book characters and the reader to figure out. These books are less about the characters and more about the puzzle. I highly recommend John Dickson Carr, who is widely recognized as the master of the locked room mystery.

2) Justice is done.

For some readers, the book isn’t over until the authorities apprehend the bad guy and they know that justice will be done. This is the traditional resolution for mystery stories. It satisfies our need for order, safety, and justice. It goes back to our basic beliefs that good will be rewarded and evil punished. For some people, this element just has to be present in the story or it isn’t right.

3) Justice is sort of done.

For some people, the most important thing is that the bad guy is punished somehow, if not through official legal channels. This plays itself out in different ways. The classic example is Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Twelve people conspire together and murder the man who ruined their lives years before. Detective Hercule Poirot solves the complicated mystery, but can’t (or doesn’t want to) prove it and everyone goes free. In this instance, the crimes of the victim are so heinous that the reader feels no sympathy for him and that justice has been satisfied because he has been killed by the parties he has wronged.

This type of ending is more about vengeance and may involve vigilantism. Some readers feel that this “eye for an eye” method is wrong, but others find it very satisfying. Whether you like it or not will depend on your personality and how the author sets it up.

4) The characters all end up happy.

I think of this as the “romantic comedy” ending. The obstacles to everyone’s happiness (the murder victim and the murderer) and satisfactorily dealt with and everyone can live happily ever after. I usually find this type of ending in the lightest of mysteries, the cozies. A book with this type of ending can be very rewarding to read. Evil is removed, goodness prevails, everyone including the reader ends up happy. If you like this kind of ending, it may be that no other type of book will do for you.

5) The important characters end up happy.

This is more typical of mysteries today, particularly series mysteries. In a series mystery, the author has to keep finding murderous situations into which to drop the hero, but then bring them out relatively unscathed. As a result, the secondary characters introduced to provide the mystery often end up with their lives in shambles while the main character skips merrily back to their own life.

If you like the main character in a series, have developed a relationship with them, and want the series to continue, you learn to accept this type of ending as a necessary evil. But this type of ending can also be perceived by the reader in a very negative way. The nosy amateur detective insinuates themselves into somebody else’s tragedy, stomps all over them to solve the mystery for their own amusement, and then leaves the emotional disaster area forever to proceed to their next adventure. I’m willing to bet that you have had this exact reaction to a story, yes?

6) The mystery is solved but the bad guy gets away.

This is not a very rewarding ending. It is usually written by the author to lay the groundwork for the next book. The classic example is by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with the arch villain Moriarty. Moriarty got away every time because these stories were initially serialized in small pieces in the newspaper and Doyle had to keep the readers coming back for the next episode. But his next episode was usually the next week, not a year later. Like Doyle, modern authors who use this ending usually give up the henchmen guilty of lesser crimes to try to placate frustrated readers.

As evidenced by the popularity of things like comic books and soap operas, lots of people enjoy the neverending story. If you are really into a series and like to have something to look forward to, this may be a perfectly satisfactory ending for you.

6) The mystery isn’t solved.

AAAARGGGH! This is the must frustrating type of mystery ending. This is the book you finish, throw against the wall, and curse the author’s name. You stomp around the house, mutter imprecations, and scare the cat. You walk up to innocent bystanders and tell them about the horrible book you just read. Sound familiar?

I suspect that authors who have written several books get fed up with the other endings and can’t resist trying this one out. Frankly, this ending is probably more like real life. How many murders go unsolved in real life? Many, many more than go unsolved in fiction. We all know that. But the vague, tapering off ending that this provides isn’t what we read mysteries for. We want a resolution of some kind. We all have different ideas of what constitutes a happy ending, but whatever that means to us, it is what we want. An unresolved mystery is never the happy ending we want and it is the worst thing an author can do to a reader. It is also the most memorable, because it is the last and most important part of the book. What happens at the end of the book can wipe out everything that has come before and how we feel about it is what we take away from the experience of reading that book.

What is your idea of a happy ending? It is probably a combination of several of the elements listed above. And it probably changes depending on the author, the style of the book, and whatever is going on in your own life as you are reading the book. We need different things from books at different times. If we have turbulence in our lives, we might crave something calming and with a super happy ending. If we are bored, we might need something stimulating and thought-provoking.

Which brings me back to where I started. I hated this book. It wasn’t enough for me that the main characters and murderer ended up happy because everyone else was completely miserable. But I can understand how somebody who had been following the series and was attached to the characters might find their happiness the most important part of the book and consider that to be a happy ending. If I were in their position, I might, too. And I didn’t write the author off completely because of the ending. I will read more of her books and see if I like them better. Because I can recognize that the book was well-written – and they might have endings I like better!

Mystery Book Reviews by Reviewed By Liz.com ©2006

ISBN 0-44900731-6

This is the first of Ellen Hart’s Culinary Mysteries I have read and, except for a restaurant review in the beginning of the book, there was no other food involved. This book is later in the series and seems to have drifted away from the premise – hardly the first themed series that this has happened to, but a little misleading since the cover plainly states “Culinary Mystery.”

In this book, hotel owner/restaurant reviewer/sleuth Sophie Greenway becomes involved in what is about to be a ghastly mess in her friend Elaine’s family life. Let me start by saying that this book is well thought out and plotted. It also has some interesting (if largely unexplored) characters. However…

This book contains two murdered family members, infidelity in five different relationships, homophobia, sexism, racism, pedophilia, child pornography, three illegitimate children, one fatal car accident, one attempted suicide, blackmail, one attempted murder, two assaults, and lies, deception, and manipulation on the part of pretty much everyone in the story. I don’t recall any cruelty to animals or cannibalism, but I might have missed them. In the end, Elaine’s family is shattered and the only people who are happy are Sophie, her husband Bram, and the murderer. In short, this book is a serious downer.

Now I don’t demand that all of the books I read have happy endings, but I do feel the need to tell readers that a book is as depressing as this one. Why? Because readers have the expectation that they will be entertained, enthralled, mentally stimulated, and even amused. When they finish a book and wonder if slashing their wrists is the next order of business, they will be angry if no one warned them.

Did I guess it? Yes. Will I read another one? Yes. Hart is obviously a good writer and put together a well-constructed book. I will read another one in the hopes that the content isn’t so depressing. Perhaps I will start at the beginning – closer to the culinary theme.

Mystery Book Reviews by Liz at http://reviewedbyliz.com ©2006

Buy it from Amazon!

ISBN 0-7862-2542-4

This is another book I have read before and was pleased to get again by accident. Published in 2000, this is the first book in his puzzle lady series and Hall brought something new and fresh to the mystery scene with it. While this book has some of the standards – a small town cop who needs help with a murder investigation, an overzealous reporter/love interest, and the amateur detective heroines – his plot unfolds a little differently than most of the books we have seen recently.

One of the reasons for this is that he has introduced two heroine detectives in this book, Sherry Carter and her aunt Cora Felton. These two live together but split up during the book to investigate/muddy the waters of the crimes. Having two equally important streams of information coming at the reader makes the book more complex and interesting.

The other interesting thing about this plot is that the two women and trying to find out other people’s secrets while desperately trying to conceal their own. Cora Felton has a nationally syndicated crossword puzzle column, which her niece actually writes. They used Cora’s sweet grandmotherly image to sell it, but now have a problem keeping secret the facts that she doesn’t know much about crossword puzzles and that she is quite the party girl of the senior set.

There were a few annoying things about this book, two of which I think are probably editing mistakes and won’t go into here. The other is a style issue. This book has more dialog than most mysteries I have read. This isn’t bad, necessarily, but there are several long conversations in which the speaker isn’t identified and you have to backtrack to figure out who is talking. I am going to assume that Hall got the short end of the editing stick on his first book and these issues won’t exist in his other books.

Did I guess it? Yes, sort of. Will I read another one? Absolutely.

Mystery Book Reviews by Liz at http://reviewedbyliz.com ©2006

Buy it from Amazon!

ISBN 0-7582-0817-0

Every writer starts with a blank page and makes many choices during the course of writing a book. The choices they make form the characters, plot, setting, and everything else vital to a good book. Here are some of the choices Ripley had to make…

Our heroine has just come face to face with the man who murdered and dismembered a young woman. He has been released from a mental hospital after just four years of confinement and crashes a party in his old neighborhood. Since she discovered his previous crime, his presence terrifies our heroine, so she leaves the party early, goes home and

A) locks all the doors and hides under the bed for a week.

B) locks all the doors and calls the police to get a restraining order.

C) arranges to be in the house by herself with the front door unlocked so he can come in and attack her.

Our heroine has realized that she has had an intruder in her home twice and has discovered a potentially lethal booby trap in her garden shed. Being security conscious, she immediately

A) moves to a hotel for the night and the following day has a security system installed and buys a guard dog.

B) moves to a hotel for the night and the following day changes all the locks on the house.

C) stays in the house that night, has all the locks changed the next day, and then puts an extra key in the fake rock in the front flower bed where the killer can (and does) easily find it.

Our author creates two characters who are self-centered and self-important. They are reluctant to cooperate with the police because their time is too valuable for their questioning and their house and yard too nice to be searched. They treat the police as bumbling idiots and the husband keeps making phone calls to the chief of police to try to “influence” the investigation. When this doesn’t work in their favor, they secretly peer through their neighbors’ windows at night to gain information to use against them. These characters are

A) the next victims of the killer because they are so obnoxious.

B) the killers themselves because they are so unlikable and the reader won’t feel badly when they are imprisoned or killed in a shootout.

C) the heroine and her husband.

It is an unfortunate fact that Ripley chose C for all three questions. The first two scenarios show a lack of creativity in plot and character development that is insulting to the reader. And the third thing is just weird. Why would you create main characters that are unpleasant? The husband is an officious ass and the wife is little better. Call me old-fashioned, but I like to read books about characters that I enjoy in stories that are well thought out.

Did I guess it? Yes. Will I read another one. No.

Mystery Book Reviews by Liz at reviewedbyliz.com ©2006

Ever get to a party and find the hostess running around frantically in her underwear, not quite ready for guests? I feel a little like that hostess. You see, we hadn’t planned on “launching” Reviewed by Liz until January or so, when we would have a few more reviews. So we have been posting reviews, tinkering with the graphics and tools, but not linking to anyone or advertising what we are doing over here.

So you could have knocked us over with a feather when we looked up our page statistics and discovered that people have discovered our site. Several people from all corners of the globe have been watching while we twiddle switches and generally goof off here. So we figured we had better say hello. Hello! And welcome. Since several of you have been watching us for a while now, you know that this is a work in progress. But we are surprised and delighted that you have already found us and we would love to hear from you.

I’ll start. I’m Liz. My husband Bob, daughter Emily and I all live in Michigan and we are gearing up for a long, cold winter full of good books. I am picking up eight or so from the library today, including two I am really looking forward to. – Death Without Company by Craig Johnson and The Bookwoman’s Last Fling by John Dunning.

Dunning has written a short series of books about Cliff Janeway, a used book dealer, that are really good and tremendously informative. And I read Johnson’s first book last year and about laughed my you-know-what off. Absolutely hysterical writing mixed with a good plot and super characters. Hopefully, these gentlemen will have kept up the good work they have done in the past.

At the moment, I am reading Death on a Silver Platter by Ellen Hart and Summer Garden Mystery by Ann Ripley. Neither have really grabbed me yet, but I’m not very far into either of them.

What are you reading today? Please feel free to jump in on any post with comments, questions, or even requests. We look forward to hearing from you!

Mystery Book Reviews by Reviewed By Liz.com ©2006

Here is a small diversion in honor of the latest Dick Francis book “Under Orders” reviewed yesterday.

Have fun!

Click here to see and print our word search puzzle!

Mystery Book Reviews by Reviewed By Liz.com ©2006