A BOX OF PANDORAS by Steve Brewer
E-book original, Kindle and Nook 2012

Steve Brewer’s famous character Bubba Mabry is nowhere in sight. This book belongs to Loretta Kimball, President and Newsletter Editor of the International Michael Girard Fan Club, operating from the one-horse town of Pandora. In reality, Pandora is barely a one-horse town. It’s more like a half-horse town but thanks to the Internet it’s a perfectly adequate place for the headquarters of an international fan club.

The story is from Loretta’s point of view, written in first person, so we are caught up in her life from the first page. Opening line: “When I first heard that my film idol was coming to New Mexico, you could've knocked me over with a feather boa.”

Michael Girard will arrive in Santa Fe as star of a film festival ramrodded by the Santa Fe Silver Screen Society. Santa Fe is only a three-hour drive, and Loretta uses her wifely wiles to persuade her husband Harley to pack a tuxedo and take her to Santa Fe.

As fan club president, Loretta is friends with Girard’s assistant. She’s assured of a chance to hang out with the VIPs and do an interview with Girard. Harley buys a tux from eBay and off they go. The festival is a lark. Brewer makes hilarious hash out of everything from the posturing of drama queens to equipment malfunctions, to hangers on, to wannabe film producers trying to sell a project.

The only real fly in Loretta's ointment is an old high school nemesis named Mitzi. A congenital scene-hogger, Mitzi is president of everything in Pandora. She shows up at the festival dressed to kill, trailing Loretta like a shadow. Mitzi is the center of attention – until the first body drops.

Brewer does have a way with words. A character takes a high dive from a hotel window and lands on the sidewalk at Loretta's feet. (Quote) She looked like a bag of elbows. I leaned closer. Her face was smashed on one side, flattened against the unyielding concrete. The other eye was wide open, looking right at me. I screamed at the top of my lungs. (End Quote)

Loretta reels from the shock until her imagination goes into overdrive and she decides that a famous actress probably lured the victim up to the roof for a private chat under the stars: "Why, that would be lovely -- whoops, splat."

More murders spur Loretta into action, determined to find the killer, save Girard’s reputation and get that interview. The secret to her success: “I've raised two children and sent them to college. After that, most everything seems doable."

This is a funny, gossipy small-town mystery. I loved the characters and hope to meet them again.

Review by Pat Browning

PLAYING WITH POISON
By Cindy Blackburn
CreateSpace Paperback, 2012
Kindle E-book, 2012
Book #1 in CueBall Mystery series

This book was bright and breezy, an easy read that kept me laughing.

Opening line: “‘Going bra shopping at age fifty-two gives new meaning to the phrase fallen woman,’ I announced as I gazed at my reflection.”

The speaker is Jessie, the protagonist. Her friend Candy pokes her head around the dressing room door and says, “I hope my figure looks that nice when I’m old.”

Really, now, fifty-two isn’t that old, and it doesn’t bother Jessie as much as it seems to bother everyone else, especially Captain Wilson Rye of the Clarence, North Carolina Police Department.

And why is it any of Rye’s business? No sooner has Jessie paid for the royal blue bra and matching panties and hauled them home than her doorbell rings. Candy’s handsome fiancé stumbles in, flops down on Jessie’s couch and dies. Enter Capt. Rye. Since the victim died on her couch, Rye figures Jessie for the killer and becomes an unwelcome fixture in her life.

Jessie writes steamy romance novels under the name of Adele Nightingale. Like everyone else on the planet she has a work in progress. The working title is “Temptation at Twilight” and passages are scattered throughout this book, making it part of the fun.

Jessie’s loft features a roof garden overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains and The Stone Fountain bar, where she likes to play pool. Not that she plays for money these days. She pays her bills with royalties from her novels which Jimmy Beak, an obnoxious local newscaster, tells the world are “almost pornographic.”

The attractive Capt. Rye keeps dogging Jessie with yet another set of incriminating questions. During a search of her loft he ogles her book shelf and pinches her copy of “A DELUGE OF DESIRE.” He admits later that he only read the good parts. Twice.

Jessie’s real life associates are every bit as colorful as her fictional characters. There’s Lt. Densmore, who’s deathly afraid of heights. There’s Bryce, the bartender at The Stone Fountain who keeps changing his college major because he can’t decide what he wants to be. There’s Ian, Jessie’s asinine ex-husband, and his equally asinine new wife. There’s Jessie’s cat Snowflake, who likes to sit on laps.

And there’s Candy, whose taste in clothes runs to mini-skirts and stiletto heels, who inherits money under the terms of her murdered fiance’s will, and whose old boy friend shows up hot to trot.

Jessie decides to clear her own name and keep Candy out of jail by ferreting out the killer. The denouement, while fraught with peril, is just plain funny.
Review by Pat Browning

 

A FINE AND DANGEROUS SEASON by Keith Raffel                                       
Kindle, E-book Original 2012 

For someone like me who followed the Kennedys and the Cold War on TV, this book packs a wallop—Jack Kennedy as I never knew him; Castro, Krushchev, Kennedy's advisors, Jackie and Bobby as I remember them.

Is Keith Raffel’s A FINE AND DANGEROUS SEASON a best seller? If not, it should be. Will it be a movie? If not, it should be. Usually I like a book for its characters and setting, with plot coming in third, but this book has all three jostling for equal time.

Nate Michaels and Jack Kennedy were best friends at Stanford University in 1940. The friendship foundered after a betrayal and Nate has nursed a grudge all the years since. Yet when Jack, now President of the United States, calls and asks for his help, Nate goes to Washington. His presence has been specifically requested by Maxim Volkov, another old friend from Stanford, now a top KGB agent. With Soviet missiles at the ready in Cuba and American military on alert, Kennedy wants to try back channel diplomacy to avoid a nuclear war.

Nate has a chip on his shoulder the size of a suitcase. This is the scene where he walks into the Oval Office:
(Quote)
*For the first time in twenty-two years, I was looking at Jack Kennedy in person. He was returning my stare, leaning forward on his rocker. His face itself had filled out—no, more than filled out, it had puffed up. The blue-gray smudges under his eyes contrasted with the orangey tan of the rest of his face.
*I heard the door click shut behind me.
*“Long time, Nate.You look good.”
*He held out his hand from the rocker, and I took it without thinking. His grasp was firm, keen, undulled. I'd read that the custom of shaking hands arose to show that you held no weapon and that you came in friendship. I flexed my fingers and let my hand drop.
*“My father used to say the three ages of man were young, middle-aged, and you look good,” I said.
*He laughed. “Wise man, your dad.”
(End Quote)

Nate is a high-tech entrepreneur living a quiet life in Palo Alto, California. Kennedy wants someone he can trust, a counterpoint to yes-men and experts with their own agendas. Nate quickly learns that in Washington, it’s not where you stand that counts, it’s where you sit. He sits behind Kennedy, an objective set of eyes and ears at crisis meetings.

Raffel's book is in three parts. Parts 1 and 3 are set during the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962); Part 2 goes back to 1940, with Nate and Jack Kennedy both at Stanford University in California. They make an unlikely pair of buddies. Nate is "a red diaper baby" whose father was counsel for the longshoremen's union. Jack is the celebrity son of an ambassador and an author (WHY ENGLAND SLEPT).

Nate says: “I liked Kennedy; I couldn't help it. Here we sat. a Russian Jew and an Irish Catholic, one a wealthy apostle of social Darwinism, the other a socialist always short of money, both blessed and cursed with famous fathers. Still both of us were whiling away time in Palo Alto going to classes, kindred spirits just waiting for the gathering storm to break.”

The talk on campus is of football, whether Roosevelt will win reelection and whether the U.S. should stand with England against Hitler. We learn what soured the friendship. Part 2 leads into the World War II years.

The real Jack Kennedy’s service in the U.S. Navy is well known; the fictional Nate Michaels pilots a B-17 bomber in the Army Air Corps. His flashbacks are shocking. There was nothing romantic or glamorous about those bomb runs; they were a stinking, terrifying mess.

Part 3 takes us back to 1962, with Nate and Maxim passing messages between Jack Kennedy and Nikita Krushchev. Generals on both sides are chomping on their cigars, eager to fight. Out to sabotage negotiations are agents of GRU (Soviet military intelligence). Kennedy is determined to give Krushchev some wiggle room, a chance to save face while removing his missiles from Cuba.

As a bomber pilot, Nate expected to die every time he went on a misson. He considered himself lucky every time he got back to base in one piece. Now he’s in a Cold War, with GRU agents shooting at him, and his luck holds. The ending is upbeat, with a neat little surprise.

Raffel knows the Washington scene first hand. After graduating from Harvard Law School he served as counsel to the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The book’s title comes from a quote by Thomas Merton, Anglo-American Catholic writer, mystic and social activist: "October is a fine and dangerous season in America."

This book was free on Kindle Feb. 20, 2013. There's an excerpt on Raffel's web site at www.keithraffel.com.

Pat Browning

DESERT WIND by Betty Webb
Poisoned Pen Press, Hardcover and Paperback, 2012
E-books, Kindle and Nook, 2012
Blackstone Audio, Audible Audio and MP3CD 2012
Book #7 in Lena Jones Series 

Fasten your seat belt. DESERT WIND gets off to a leisurely start, with some back story, some scene setting and character introduction. When it finally kicks in, you may feel a jolt.

This is a Lena Jones series mystery but the story really belongs to a cowboy named Gabe. He’s a young Korean vet when we meet him in Chapter One. The year is 1954; the place is Snow Canyon, Utah. Gabe is a wrangler on the movie set where his hero, John Wayne, is filming “The Conqueror.”

Snow Canyon is 90 miles downwind from an earlier nuclear test site in Nevada and the red dust blowing in a hot wind gets to everyone. People are beginning to cough. Twenty-five years will pass before we catch up again with Gabe, leading to a chapter that moves me to tears. Gabe’s story is the heart of this book.

In the present day, PI Lena Jones and her partner Jimmy get involved in a murder in Walapai Flats. Their business, Desert Investigations, is in Old Town Scottsdale, at the edge of Arizona’s Salt River Pima/Maricopa Indian Reservation. Walapai Flats is a complicated six-hour drive from Scottsdale, but Jimmy’s adoptive brother, Ted, is being held as a material witness in a murder investigation. Lena follows Jimmy to the touristy little town a few miles from the Grand Canyon.

The murdered man was a PR flack for the Black Basin Uranium Mine. The opening has been delayed thanks to a vocal opposition group, but the promise of jobs means others are willing to ignore earlier devastation wrought by a uranium mine on Navajo lands. To help prove Ted’s innocence Lena questions everyone who might shed light on an alleged argument that led to the murder. She runs into a conspiracy of silence in a town where everyone knows everyone else and many are related. Her persistence makes her a target.

There’s almost too much going on in this book. In nightmares Lena relives her childhood rape and other brutalities, and I found those episodes distracting. For me, the story is about responsibility for wholesale death caused by nuclear testing and unsafe mining practices. In the case of mining, the villains are motivated solely by greed.

The desert setting is described beautifully, and the book is full of memorable secondary characters. One of my favorites is Monty, a no-nonsense farrier. Lena’s assessment of Monty: “Angels don’t always wear wings; sometimes they wear leather aprons.” Another favorite is Olivia, an investigative reporter from New York, who puts Lena in the right place at the right time. For a grace note, there’s the ghost of John Wayne, the Duke himself, back in the saddle where he belongs.

HEARTSHOT by Steven F. Havill
St. Martin's Press, Hardcover 1991
Poisoned Pen Press, Paperback 2007
Poisoned Pen Press, E-book 2012
Book #1 in the Posadas County Mysteries series
Free for Kindle download

Steven F. Havill’s Bill Gastner mysteries are among my favorite procedurals -- just straightforward stories told in easy-reading narrative style. Havill’s writing is elegant. He never strays from his storyline, told from one viewpoint. He never uses two words when one will do but gives a full picture of the setting and characters. His dialogue is real, with profanity when called for.

 HEARTSHOT, first in the series, introduces Gastner and Estelle Reyes. I have followed them through several other books but had never read this one.

We meet Bill Gastner as Undersheriff of Posadas County, New Mexico. A Korean War vet and a lawman for 20 years, he’s 60-something and overweight, a workaholic who lives on cigarettes and coffee, a heart attack waiting to happen. Reyes is the juvenile officer, new on the job but thorough, efficient and low-key. Originally from Mexico, she graduated first in her class at the Police Academy in Santa Fe

The story opens with a Fourth of July parade, later followed by a horrific car crash killing five teenagers. Gastner and Reyes are on the scene within minutes. A stash of cocaine is found in the wreckage. Who had enough money to buy so much cocaine and who is selling it? It could be anyone. Posadas is close to the Mexican border. Residents cross back and forth between Mexico and Posadas with minimal hassle.

The new sheriff is a political animal who considers Gastner an antique but handy for ferreting out a drug dealer. The sheriff brings in a young, freshly-minted patrolman from Gallup to pose as Gastner’s ne’er-do-well grandson and work undercover at the high school.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing in Posadas but not much else, if you don’t count the vigilante tendencies of some residents. In a conversation with Gastner, a retired doctor makes this observation:

 (Quote)
 “We know fast cars can kill, and we know they especially kill the young. And yet we allowed five youngsters to pack themselves in that vehicle...with alcohol included. We don't require much training for a driver's license. We allow parties...We gamble that the ones who are killed--and we know they will be, every year--we gamble that they aren't our own....Humans are strange creatures. It takes a catastrophe of royal proportions to drill through the average person's complacency.”
 (End Quote)

Relieving the tension periodically are flashes of humor. Officer Baker is described as calling his pregnant wife 20 times a day to check on her condition. Gastner muses: “Todd Baker was one of those officers whose voice on the radio always sounded like a recording. He would have said, ‘I don't like cabbage,’ in the same tone as ‘The world is ending.’ Only his pregnant wife could get him excited.”

That “catastrophe of royal proportions” comes about, tying the little community of Posadas in knots. Gastner’s unraveling of the knots leads to a white-knuckle ending.

Special Note: Book #10 in the series -- RED, GREEN OR MURDER -- is one of the books I donated in hardcover to the local library in memory of my brother-in-law. Currently it’s a free e-book on Kindle.

Review by Pat Browning

Genre:  Suspense
Title:    Deadly Stakes                       
Author:  J.A. Jance
Rating: 10  of 10      
Publisher:  A Touchstone Book by Simon and Schuster
Copyright:  February 1, 2013             
ISBN:  978-1-4516-2868-5    
Series:  Ali Reynolds
Publisher URL: http://www.simonandschuster.com
Reviewed by © 2013 Vivian Zabel

Review:

            I opened the newest J. A. Jance Ali Reynolds novel, ready to crawl between the covers and become part of the story.  As usual with any of her works, Deadly Stakes, the eighth in the series, grabbed my attention and kept me awake late, late into the night because I could not put the book down. Ali and her family and friends keep me company with each Jance work.

            Jance brings back characters from Left for Dead and weaves them into a new mystery. Lynn Martinson, once the dupe of a cyber-sociopath, has “discovered” a new and happier life, she thinks. However, once her new boyfriend’s ex-wife is discovered murdered, the couple become embroiled as suspects.

            Lynn’s mother comes to Ali for help, and Ali works to find the solution so the innocents couple can be freed. Along the way she discovers A.J. Sanders, who actually first discovered the body when he tries to retrieve a mysterious box left him by his estranged father. Another body found in the same location ties A.J. and Lynn closer together than realized.

            The touches of romance and family life make the novel more believable than expected. The final scenes with B. and Ali make me want to shout, “Finally!”       

            Well, done, J.A. You continue to outdo yourself with each manuscript you pen.

            I recommend Deadly Stakes for anyone who enjoys good suspense and intrigue. J.A. Jance is at her best, as I say after every Jance novel.