The Case of the Empty Tin by Erle Stanley Gardner

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

I highly recommend this 1941 Perry Mason mystery. Usually Mason novels start in the lawyer’s office or a public place where a client can button-hole him for legal advice. But this one starts in the cozy Gentrie household. The family owns a small hardware store so they have to watch every cent. They take in a roomer for extra income. They can preserves to save money on food. They depend on both a spinster sister and hired woman to keep the housekeeping and cooking in order for the three active kids. It has its share of strains but what family doesn’t?

I suppose a certain kind of Mason fan will find the beginning slow, but as a hardcore fan who’s read a couple dozen of them, I’m relieved when it starts out in a different way. Also, in a way that brings to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s making the mundane suspenseful, Gardner puts the typical middle-class family in the center of the mystery.

Other elements make this mystery outstanding in the canon. Mason blithely breaks the law with lying to police officers, house-breaking, and flouting traffic laws with reckless driving and speeding. Della plays a much bigger role, helping Perry break into houses and elude the law. She also helps Perry think by asking germane questions and introducing points that women know but men have no clue.

Remember that this novel was probably serialized in the weekly magazine Saturday Evening Post before it was published between two covers. Therefore, there is a certain amount of recapitulation in the dialogue to get new readers up to speed. We post-modern readers can skim these sections.

Finally, there is no courtroom sequence in this one. This may disappoint some fans and elate others. My bottom line is that this should be the next Mason you read if you’re a fan.

Fated by Benedict Jacka

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

FATED is the first in another urban fantasy series featuring a wizard in the big city. Alex Versus owns a magic shop in London and his skill is seeing the future. This can be pretty helpful, as it allows him to look at any number of possible futures until he gets to the series of choices that brings him what he wants. But it doesn’t always allow him to escape trouble.

The Council (there’s always a Council) approaches him for help in acquiring an object of great power, guarded by a number of magical traps, and they think Alex is just the person who can come up with the correct sequence of moves to defeat the barriers. There is mutual loathing between Alex and the Council, and it should tell Alex something that they’ve been unable to contact any other seer to do this job.

Meanwhile, Alex’s friend Luna brings him a weird little red cube, obviously something magical, but within minutes they’re both in trouble as three nasty Dark wizards show up spoiling for a fight.  Alex’s precognition tells him they would kill him if they knew about the cube, so he hides it, but it doesn’t stay secret for long.

Multiple powerful wizards all want this mysterious object and for all of them, the way to it goes through Alex. Precognition doesn’t help you much if all the possibilities end up with you dying. Alex is going to have to think fast.

There are a lot of familiar tropes in this series – there’s a shout-out to Harry Dresden early on and I saw another reference to a popular SF author. I really liked Luna and her curse, and I was happy when Jacka used it to good effect late in the book. I liked minor character Arachne better than Starbreeze who seemed a little too handy to have around.

While the tone of this book isn’t dark, this is a nasty wizard’s world. The Dark wizards philosophy is right out of Crowley – “Do what thou wilt” – and is survival of the cruelest. Slaves, torture, whatever, anything goes. The Council, or Light wizards, do not care about this as long as they’re not inconvenienced. Not a place I’d want to spend time in.

I found the pacing rather slow as Alex spends a lot of time explaining his world. Jacka manages to work some of it in as conversation with Luna, but there’s just a lot of exposition. I expect this gets less the farther you read in the series. There are some logic gaps about how things work, but it didn’t do much more than raise my eyebrows a couple times.  Alex is a pretty good character, not as sharp as Harry Dresden or as funny as Atticus O’Sullivan, but he’s very relatable. His precognition skill could make for some really interesting plots. At the time I’m writing this there are 12 in the series, so he’s definitely found a loyal audience. If I knew someone who had never read urban fantasy, I’d probably recommend Jim Butcher first, just because the pacing is better. But anyone who liked that ought to like this just fine.

Killer Moms: 16 Bizarre True Crime Stories of Murderous Moms
by Jack Rosewood

Review by jjares

When readers think of murderers, they think of men as the perpetrators. However, about 10% of murders are by women, most often for profit, pleasure, and revenge. Furthermore, women use poison more, while men use strangulation more. In addition, women are also far less likely to stab someone to death. Finally, there are even fewer women who kill their children. This is called prolicide – the killing of one’s offspring. This book outlines sixteen cases of mothers committing crimes against their children.

I think the value of sharing Christy Sheats’s story is to warn families with unstable partners to oversee them carefully. Although Christy had been in mental facilities for three suicide attempts, her husband decided to mention his desire for a  divorce on his birthday. So, to punish her husband, Christy murdered their two daughters in front of him. When the police arrived, she was waiting with her gun, and they shot her with a single shot. It was clearly ‘suicide by cop.”

Each story is interesting for its unique nature. For example, there’s the Casey Anthony case, which was the first court case tried on social media. In many ways, these compilations help bind stray facts together into a cohesive whole, so the reader can understand the complete story that may have occurred over months or years. One example would be the case of Andrea Yates (the mother in Houston who drowned her five children in the bathtub). Andrea’s case intersects with another mom behind bars, Dena Schlosser (Chapter 15).

The case that gave me pause was Megan Huntsman, who was on meth for more than a decade. She didn’t tell people she was pregnant eight or nine times that she gave birth.  Megan snuffed out their lives and wrapped each baby in a small box  Years later, when her husband cleaned the garage, he called the police about a tiny body in a parcel. There were a total of eight corpses resting in separate boxes, making Megan Huntsman a serial killer.  Another serial killer in this group of sixteen stories, Marybeth Tinning’s case is truly macabre.  It took nine children’s deaths to make the police suspicious.  Social Services even allowed the Tinnings to adopt a child — that died.

Jack Rosewood has a very readable style  One thing I was disappointed by, however, was that he didn’t allow his readers to make up their minds about truth or innocence  In another instance, I was disappointed that he would label Texans gun-happy: “It’s not easy to get denied for a carry permit in gun-loving Texas.” (page 8)  In the first story, Christy Sheats was turned down for a carry permit because of her mental health issues.
Indeed, medical experts now understand that some women experience postpartum depression or psychosis after giving birth. Probably the case of Andrea Yates did more to explain this psychosis to the American public than anyone else. Yet, tragically, so many innocent children had to die before medical science recognized the danger of unstable mothers. These are readable stories about an unusual subject — Mothers who kill their children.

Alas Poor Father by Joan Fleming

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Brigadier Basil Patricott has retired from a spy agency. He runs a greenhouse business in the English countryside. He’s a widower with two young sons. The older is rather plodding but the younger is smart, curious, and fearless. The boys make friends with an Irish eccentric who believes keeping and racing pigeons will equip the boys with all the skills they need to get on in life. The brother of the eccentric, however, warns him to keep the kids away lest their nefarious plans go ahoo. Patricott’s younger son makes his way past a series of locked doors. The ending rocks, though with not as many fireworks as I like in a thriller. This was published in 1973 but has aged pretty well. Keep a grain of salt the size of brick handy, however, when the English discuss the national characteristics of the Irish.

The Weight of the Evidence by Michael Innes

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Michael Innes was the pen name of Oxford professor J.I.M. Stewart. This 1943 novel is set in a redbrick university (six were founded in the industrial cities of England in the Victorian era) so it gives the Oxford author a chance to be waggish about provincial British universities of relatively recent founding as distinguished from ancient and venerable Oxford and Cambridge. The period detail is interesting to those of us into between the wars settings. His plots are improbable but I for one cannot resist a demise such as that met by Professor Pluckrose, who has been crushed to death by a meteorite which has fallen on him as he was chilling in a courtyard. This was not the Creator’s finger hitting the Smite Button. Someone shoved the meteorite out of a tower window. Series hero Yard Inspector John Appleby has to find out who and why.

Going for the Gold by Emma Lathen

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

This 1981 mystery is set at the same Lake Placid Olympics where the US men’s hockey team beat the USSR in the Miracle on Ice. Lathen – that is, the writing team of economist Mary Jane Latsis and attorney Martha Henissart – probably attended those Winter Games since they vividly capture the panopoly and excitement.

Being canny businesswomen, they also knew they were seeing the world change: the process in which mass media and intense public interest were turning sports into the economic and cultural behemoth that it is today. On a more relatable basis, the authors prove their State of New York street cred by realistically describing a massive blizzard. The storm also serves the plot because it paralyzes daily life for a couple of days, thus throwing off the time-table of the fiendish sniper who took down a French downhill skier in mid-flight.

Also consistent with genuine human behavior, Lathen has a Danish female skier, falsely accused of taking drugs, pressured by two men who think they know what is better for her than she knows herself. Protesting the false accusation of doping, Swiss athletes kidnap the narrow-minded president of the IOC and imprison him in a funicular hanging half-way up the mountainside. Another subplot involves a scandal in procurement thievery for the purpose of extracting kickbacks.

The series hero, John Putnam Thatcher, is a senior vice-president at the Sloan Guaranty Trust, the third largest bank in the world. Thatcher in fact runs the Sloan because the muddle-headed president, Bradford Withers, is a social butterfly who spends little time at the bank, much to the relief of his senior executives. Thatcher’s main task is dealing with a flood of counterfeit Eurochecks which might cost the Trust a half-million dollars. He is assisted by the touchy and testy stickler for detail Everett Gabler, who is always a superbly drawn character.