The Accomplice, by Elizabeth Ironside, Felony & Mayhem Press edition, published in 2006.  368 pgs. Hardcover: $24.  Paper: $14.95. ISBN 1-933397-50-0

        In 1985, Elizabeth Ironside’s debut novel, A Very Private Enterprise, won the Creasey Award for best first mystery, given by Britain’s Crime Writers Association; in 1995 she was also short-listed for the same organization’s Dagger Awards for her second novel, Death in the Garden.  That novel was first published in the United States in 2005, and was named one of the 12 best books of the year by NPR. The Accomplice is the second of Ms. Ironside’s books to be published in the U.S. by Felony & Mayhem Press, which specializes in importing fine works of British crime-fiction never printed in America.

        The setting is Broad Woodham, a prosperous Sussex town, where the remains of a child are discovered in the garden of Asshe House, a beautiful Queen Anne currently undergoing renovation.  The owner, Jean Loftus, an elderly widow riddled with painful arthritis, has decided to move to more navigable surroundings and give the home to her stepson.   Connected by their Russian heritage, Jean (Yevgenia) has asked Zita Daunsey, her attorney, to handle the transfer.  After the remains are discovered, Zita assumes another task: find out the identity of the child. But first, Jean shows Zita a letter she has received from a young Russian student who calls herself Xenia Chornoroukaya, claiming that she and Jean are cousins—the last of the Chornorouskys—and she wants Yevgenia to write a letter of invitation so she can obtain a visa to visit England.  This letter and the arrival of Xenia sets in motion a tangled web of intrigue, anguish, betrayal, and eventually death.

Out of this setting, Ms. Ironside weaves a well-crafted mystery about the unusual circumstances surrounding the child’s remains, Zita’s search for his identity, the intrusion of the young Russian woman’s into the Loftus family circle, and the old woman’s shocking death.

Shifting between past and present, while employing multiple points of view, Ms. Ironside deftly maintains control of the cast and events to deliver a satisfying read. 

        Elizabeth Ironside is the pen name of Lady Catherine Manning, married to Sir David Manning, currently the British Ambassador to the United States.  Lady Manning holds a doctorate in Economic History from Oxford University and has lived in many countries, including India, Poland, Israel, France and Russia.  Her travels have greatly informed her work as a writer, especially with The Accomplice.

 

All’s Well That Ends, An Amanda Pepper Mystery, by Gillian Roberts, A Ballantine Hardcover, 272 pgs, $23.95. ISBN 918-0-345-48021-7. Release date: January 30, 2007.

        This is the end of Gillian Robert’s 14-book series starring the Philadelphia school teacher/ amateur sleuth, Amanda Pepper. 

It’s cold in Philadelphia.  At Philly Prep, where Amanda teaches English, she is confronted with the possibility that some of the money collected by her students for hurricane relief may be missing.  She tosses off the rumors that gambling by some of the students may have led to the shortage.  At the same time, Amanda’s husband, private investigator C.K. MacKenzie, is struggling to stay in school while trying to help his own family reconstruct their shattered lives after Hurricane Katrina.

Phoebe Ennis, the stepmother of Amanda’s friend, Sasha, has been found dead in her home.  Although ruled a suicide, Sasha suspects foul play and asks Amanda to help investigate the woman’s demise.  For Sasha, Phoebe’s errant son Dennis is the primary suspect, but Phoebe may have other enemies.  With Phoebe’s penchant for collecting kitschy knickknacks (that she called her “treasures”), telling tall tales about them and her ancestry to her neighbors and anyone else who will listen, and four marriages behind her, there’s a lot of ground for Amanda to cover. 

Meanwhile, Dennis hires a stager to help sell Phoebe’s house, the proceeds to be split between him and Sasha.  Soon after, the stager, Toy Rasmussen, is found dead in the house and the mystery of who

killed her and Phoebe and why, deepens.  While Amanda probes the neighbors for clues, MacKenzie investigates the backgrounds of Dennis, Toy and Phoebe.  In between, Amanda returns to her classroom at Philly Prep, where suspicions about the missing contributions are indirectly confirmed by the school’s secretary, the quirky Mrs. Opal Codd. 

MacKenzie uncovers a scam by Dennis to steal Sasha’s equity in the house, in which the dead Ms. Rasmussen played a role, and through fast action, he foils the plot. Dennis is still the prime suspect, but there are several loose ends.  After a pizza dinner where Amanda, C.K. and Sasha review what they’ve learned thus far, Amanda and Sasha return to Sasha’s condo to have a cup of tea and discuss Sasha’s new love interest. As they enter the building, Amanda senses something is amiss.  Once inside Sasha’s condo, she is sure someone is hiding there.  Dennis?

A couple of heart-racing pages later, and—zip!—Amanda, armed with one of Phoebe’s kitschy objects d’art, flushes the intruder out of Sasha’s darkroom.  Within minutes the intruder has confessed to the murders.  The excitement over, Amanda and C.K. rethink the course of their lives and decide to move to New Orleans.

Ms. Roberts’s wit and intelligent writing shine through this story, as well as her ably-drawn characters, but the overly-long classroom scenes bog down the action.  And, while I enjoy the occasional “surprise” ending, this one was a zircon in the jewel-studded crown of an otherwise successful and popular series.

 

Red Cat: A John March Novel, by Peter Spiegelman, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pgs., hardcover, $22.95. ISBN 978-0-307-26316-2. Release date: February 12, 2007.

        You can’t tell a book by its cover, but you can sure sell one with a cover as provocative as that of Red Cat.  From the author of two previous John March novels, Black Maps (which won the 2004 Shamus Award for Best First P.I. Novel) and Death’s Little Helpers, Peter Spiegelman continues his “neo-noir” series with the conflicted, brooding New York PI investigating a particularly sordid affair involving his brother, David.  It is not brotherly love that has brought David to John for help, as John is considered the black sheep of his staid merchant-banking family.  David has gotten entangled with a woman he met through the Internet; after several torrid sexual encounters, she is now stalking him, threatening to tell all to David’s wife and his colleagues.  The smug, bitter, sarcastic David March has come to John for convenience only and he never lets his little brother forget it.

        Whipping out his trusty laptop computer, March begins the search for “Wren.” Using the power of the Internet and its search engines, in addition to the usual gumshoe slog and interviews, he discovers that she’s not a blackmailer, but Holly Cade, aka “Cassandra Z,” a “performance artist,” who video-tapes her encounters and sells the tapes to art collectors.  When a body is pulled from the East River, generally unrecognizable except for the red cat tattoo on the inside thigh, the investigation takes an abrupt turn.  March realizes that it is only a matter of time before the body is identified and the police come looking for his brother.  As John March races to find the killer, the implications that his brother could have committed the murder weigh heavily on his mind.

                Speigelman’s literary flourishes, mostly concerning the gray and cold New York winter, play against a gritty style reminiscent of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.  At times the one-paragraph formulaic characterizations, no matter what the character’s importance, seemed written by a novice: a total physical appraisal of the character’s face and demeanor, followed by what they were wearing.  Though quirky and interesting, not one of the characters was likable enough to care about.  The two-page fight scene John March has with Jamie Coyle, Holly’s last boyfriend, was an over-the-top slugfest bordering on the comical.  Yet, flaws aside, the story itself is a compelling one—modern (sex, lies and videotapes), and cautionary—about total self-absorption, moral ambiguity, depravity, and the corruption of the human soul.