PLACES IN THE DARKNESS by Chris Brookmyre

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

Looking for a gritty mystery set in a space station?  Got it –  PLACES IN THE DARKNESS by Chris Brookmyre.

Space station Ciudad de Cielo – City in the Sky – is engaged in humanity’s quest for the stars. Here it is that the spaceships are being tested and will eventually be built to carry us to new worlds. In the meantime, it is a home for 100,000 people, embodying a society that is supposed to reflect the very best that people can become. Everyone is working for its noble ideals.

Yeah, you didn’t really believe that either. People are people, and wherever we are, there’s going to be noble ideals, sure, but there will also be veniality and corruption. In CdC, there’s bootlegging, prostitution, graft and more. What there isn’t is outright murder. Sure, a few “accidents” happen now and again, which are covered up quickly by the Seguridad. You can’t let that stuff get back to Earth, after all, they might send their own security forces to crack down. Nope, all is well, nothing to see here.

Nikki “Fix” Freeman is an officer in the Seguridad and also one of the most corrupt out there. She runs a protection racket and drinks herself to oblivion almost every night. Everyone knows Nikki. Most of them are afraid of her.  Alice Blake is an idealistic bureaucrat newly sent from Earth as a deputy with the Federal National Governments – she’s a big deal charged with oversight of the Seguridad. She believes in the noble aspirations of the station, that there isn’t any corruption and if there is, she can root it out.

Just as Alice arrives on station, a horribly mutilated corpse is discovered in a cargo bay. This is so bad it cannot be hidden.  There are no homicide investigators on CdC…except Nikki.  Nikki is appalled to be chosen. Nothing about this can be good for her. But there’s not much choice.  And Alice is appalled at just how crooked Nikki is. Then more bodies start to pile up. Is this the work of a deranged killer? Or does it have an even more sinister motive?

Brookmyre gives the reader clues right in the beginning where he’s going with it.  His pacing is very good, with Nikki lurching along from disaster to disaster until everything she knows starts to look suspect, what she remembers might not be real, and what she doesn’t remember might kill her.  We can be sure that Alice is going to have surprises of her own and Brookmyre doesn’t disappoint us there either.  We get two strong female characters who change over the course of the book. Excellent sense of place with descriptions of how the space station is put together and a little about how it’s run. The desriptions of the “lens” and the mesh implants give a sense of how people interact.  I would have liked a bit more about the normal day to day ops, but the novel is not about normality, so no matter.  The identity of the initial murderer was a fun surprise. I didn’t guess the ultimate villain but an alert reader might not have any problem there. I think the motive got a little too convoluted towards the end, but it wraps up nicely.

Peeper by Loren D. Estleman

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

In this 1989 parody of the late Eighties hard-boiled detective novel, main character Ralph Poteet is a drunken, thieving, conniving sleaze of a PI. He’s not a sociopath like the protagonist in a Jim Thompson novel but he can’t help but make the wrong choices that only make the situation worse for himself and others. Through a combination of bad luck and sheer stupidity, he finds himself suspected of murder and arson.

The language is often pretty foul. The jokes are guy-oriented, which means the reader might feel coarse and crass in still finding them funny in our more enlightened era of 2023. If readers take the goings-on too seriously, they may feel sad, especially if they remember Detroit bleeding population and businesses in the Eighties.

But readers of a certain age will enjoy the references to Eighties pop culture such as Brooke Shields, Popeil’s Veg-O-Matic, and what I suspect is a fictitious long-playing album called “Slim Whitman Yodels Songs of Faith.” Readers like me who know SE Michigan and feel a sentimental feeling anyway will like the nod to the Uniroyal tire on eastbound 94 in Allen Park (no giant Presto Whip cans in Dearborn on Telegraph because they were removed in 1983 – an unhappy day indeed).

I’ve been reading Estleman for about 30 years and enjoyed the PI Amos Walker books in the 1990s. This book is a successful attempt to parody his own character. But he still manages to develop an original character and surprising twists and turns of plot. Unlike most comic mysteries, it does not feel too long by the end. Its incidents are darkly humorous but overall the hard-boiled genre is mocked for its pretentions and cynicism, especially in terms of its portraying the world as more unfair, uncaring, and corrupt than it really is.

The Doctor, the Hitman, and the Motorcycle Gang: The True Story of One of New Jersey’s Most Notorious Murder for Hire Plots by Annie McCormick

Review by jjares

New Jersey locals woke up to the news that one of their famous radio personalities had been murdered in her home. Vivacious April Kauffman, an advocate for veteran’s issues, was found dead on the floor of her bedroom, shot twice. However, this appalling crime took six years to unravel in court. This turned out to be one of New Jersey’s most notorious murder-for-hire cases. Before it was all over, a highly-regarded physician and a motorcycle gang were brought down for April’s death.
It takes a bit to get involved in this story. The author sets the stage by explaining April Kaufmann’s life and how she got to the point where someone decided she needed to die. In the beginning, it looked like there could not be a more unlikely murder victim. April had it all; she was widely known for her philanthropic activities. She didn’t just move mountains for veterans; she assisted anyone who asked her for help. Yet, on May 10, 2012, locals learned that this famous advocate for many causes was dead.
After a whirlwind courtship, Dr. James Kauffman and April married. April was so caught up in Jim’s story about his military service in Vietnam that she turned her radio program’s focus to veteran issues. However, after some time, April learned that Jim was never a green beret in the service; April was devastated.
Due to how Jim’s story affected her, she had lined up many activities to help veterans. She knew that when veterans found out that Jim’s story was a fraud, she would be smeared with the same lies. At about the same time, April found out that her husband ran a pill mill through his office, using a local unit of the national Pagan Motorcycle Gang.
The doctor was clever; the paperwork in the office showed that these were actual patients with real needs for pain medications. He gave the patients scripts for 120 OxyCodone narcotic prescriptions, which the motorcycle gang members resold for $20+ per pill. They made so much money that the doctor added a lab scam. When April started to notice, she told Jim she wanted a divorce. Jim told her she wasn’t getting half of his “empire.” He would kill  April’s daughter (from another marriage) if April didn’t drop the divorce idea immediately. Unfortunately, April didn’t understand the depth of Jim’s rage. Dr. Kauffman was also angry that people called him Mr. April.
Most of the book is about how April got justice; it took six years. Because the Pagan Motorcycle Gang is noted for their deep-seated animus against betraying each other, it was hard to crack their bond to get anyone to talk. Finally, it became known that the doctor offered $50,000 and unlimited OxyCodone prescriptions to murder his wife.
Many people will be aware of this story because of ABC’s 20/20 investigative program. The author of this book takes the time to give the backstory of the main characters involved. She also gives credit to Atlantic County Prosecutor Damon Tyner. He reignited the case once he was elected. This is a fascinating, multi-layered story about a tragedy in New Jersey.

The Haunted Monastery by Robert van Gulik

Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)

Judge Dee is travelling back to his headquarters in Han-yuan with his three wives and his faithful assistant Tao Gan when sudden autumn storms compel the party to shelter in a Taoist monastery.

He is exhausted but eager to gather background information on the recent deaths of three young women in the monastery. However, as an official in a Confucian bureaucracy where observing etiquette is a big deal, he is forced to conduct hypocritically polite conversations, watch a mystery play and participate in a banquet of macrobiotic fare he can’t stomach.

Adding to the comedy is a poet who writes rude verses about the abbot and a vaudeville girl whose bear loves only her and is dangerously crabby with everybody else. In a funny scene with another entertainer woman, she asks Judge Dee for his advice on how to deal with Sapphic advances to which our judge gives advice more tolerant than we’d expect from a magistrate in the 670s.

More sobering, however, through a window, he sees a one-armed woman being assaulted by a soldier. And he notes an odd relationship among a young woman who wants to become a nun, her chaperone, and her brother. In a story that takes place in the course of only one night, Judge Dee is pitted against the most dangerous kind of crook: the smart guy who’s gone off the rails by thinking the rules don’t apply to him.

The perp is pretty easy to figure out in this story that depends mainly character and setting for its interest. I wonder, too, if Taoist monks in fact wore cowls, attended matins, or got promoted to be almoners and priors. At about 270 pages, the length is just right, with a fast last third of the mystery making up for the rather plodding first two-thirds.

Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor

Review by Cyndi J. (cyndij)

JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER by Jodi Taylor is the first in a long series; as I write this there are about 14 entries.  This start is a very fun time-travel fantasy, with a minimum of technical jargon and a maximum of action-filled trips into the past.

Dr. Madeline Maxwell (Max) an historian who’s more than a little prickly, not inclined to trust authority, but very smart,  is recruited by her old professor to interview at St. Mary’s which is dedicated to historical research. But as they walk through on the way to her interview, Mrs De Winter repeats to everyone they see that Max “hasn’t had the interview yet”. Max is understandably confused. Why would that be so important? Why does a historical research university have – wait, blast doors? What’s going on?

It turns out time travel is a real thing, and that’s what St Mary’s does. And it’s a secret, of course. It’s understood that you can’t change the past. History won’t let you – should someone attempt, even inadvertently, to make a change that affects the future, history will drop a convenient rock on you.  At any rate, you can’t make changes and you can’t bring anything back. (Right. They always say that.) But Max is in, she’s hooked, no one is getting her out of there. This is a dream come true and she will do anything to be part of it.

It’s very dangerous though, there’s a wall of  honor for the historicans who have lost their lives on missions. As the book opens, St Mary’s is pretty short on historians as there have been a number of deaths, oops…mishaps. Out of each new class, only about 40% graduate, but Max is determined she’s going to be there. As it turns out – of course – there is more danger behind St Mary’s walls than she knows. Not everyone wants it to succeed.

Taylor has done a wonderful job building this world, I can see it in my mind’s eye. It moves at a breakneck pace. Max is a very engaging protagonist and the book is told from her POV. Not all the characters feel completely 3D, but most are good. Don’t think too much about the time-travel paradoxes, that’s not the point here, and Taylor winks at them in passing. There’s time travel, and romance and love and betrayal, and blasters, and dinosaurs! Very entertaining and I have already put the next on my reading list.