Back From the Beach Mysteries
A Review By Charles King
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Back From the Beach Mysteries
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Bubbles A Broad |High Country Fall | After the Rain | Brimstone |
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Okay, so the days are definitely getting shorter, that lovely summer greenery is looking brown around the edges, and any smart trip to the beach includes a set of sweats packed along with the requisite sun block. In other words, we’re counting down the minutes to Labor Day and autumn colors (or what passes for them in Northern California, anyway) via the time-lapse magic of back-to-school sales. How to take your mind off the sad prospect of impending gloomy weather and Christmas shopping day countdowns? How about a few enjoyable end-of-the-summer mysteries? Find a comfortable folding chair, put your feet up and your Ray Bans on, and savor a couple of the following titles before you have to bundle up full time. |
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The rusting, steel-rich Lehigh Valley may not be on many lists of East Coast hot spots, but as the home of Bubbles Yablonsky, the heroine of Sarah Strohmeyer’s ongoing mystery novels, there’s often more going on in the place than one might assume. Bubbles, a beautician cum newspaper reporter cum amateur detective, is in trouble up to her shapely, Spandex-covered tush in Strohmeyer’s new Bubbles A Broad (Dutton, $23.95) the fourth novel in the series. The novel begins when Bubbles is confronted by Carol Weaver, recently escaped from prison for poisoning her steel executive husband by scratching him with cyanide-soaked fingernails. Weaver believes that she has been framed by a nefarious character who intends harm to the local steel industry. She implores Bubbles to clear her good name and catch the bad guys, to boot. Bubbles, being Bubbles, agrees, pursuing the case while working at the beauty shop, dealing with her nutty Mom, trying to prepare her daughter for college, and playing footsy with hunky boyfriend (and crack news photographer) Steve Stiletto. If this sounds more than a bit over the top, it is, and then some. In Bubbles, Strohmeyer is blessed by a heroine who may look like Peggy Bundy and sound like Jennifer Tilly, but whose heart is all Marge Simpson. In a real sense, the mysteries in Strohmeyer’s the mystery novels don’t really matter much. The books are really an excuse to hang out with Bubbles for a few hours and observe her chaotic life and wacky take on the world. In that sense, the books follow a similar road to those by Janet Evanovich, though with broader (no pun intended) humor. If you like Evanovich’s books, give Bubbles A Broad a try. You might end up putting the Lehigh Valley on that hot spot list after all.
Central North Dakota most definitely qualifies as a bucolic locale, but in Chuck Logan’s new After the Rain (Harper Collins, $24.95) it also serves as the target of some particularly nasty post-9/11 doings. The book is the sixth in a series featuring former Navy Seal and Minnesota undercover cop Phil Broker, and his wife Nina Pryce, a Marine Corps touch gal with a taste for high caliber weaponry. This description could serve as the basis of a bad comedy, but to Logan’s credit the author has constructed an edgy fictional world where sometimes surreal episodes of violence seem nearly normal. The key to Logan’s success is that his characters pay, often in blood, sometimes with less visible wounds, for the choices they make. After the Rain serves as a sequel to last year’s Vapor Trail, which ended with Broker on his way to Langdon, North Dakota to pick up his daughter Kit where Nina has left the girl to protect her. But when Broker arrives in town, he finds his daughter and wife enmeshed in a military black ops effort aimed at a suspected terrorist cell. Now a decaying Midwest farming community, Langdon had once been the center of Cold War Minuteman II operations, the miles of rich farmland ringed by empty missile silos and government installations. Broker’s first order of business may be to secure his daughter’s safety, but he also recognizes that Nona’s mission needs his help if it has a chance to succeed. Like Logan’s other Broker/Pryce novels, After the Rain is well plotted and executed in elegantly direct prose, but the book’s emotional punch rests on Logan’s ability to create believable characters that are likeable despite their bluster and faults. This new book also delivers a number of often searing arguments between Phil and Nina that manage to explore the depths of both their anger toward and abiding love for one another. In sum, After the Rain is the latest work by an author whose writing has gained moral and emotional weight with every book.
While Chuck Logan’s fictional world is often realistic in the extreme, the one created by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child in Brimstone ($25.95, Warner) drifts dangerously, if amusingly, close to fantasyland. Preston and Child are masters of explainable occult mysteries, a sort of X-Files world on the outside that masks a basically rational, if often bloody, core. In Brimstone, the authors reunite their eccentric FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast with Vincent D’Agosta and Laura Hayward, who were both featured in previous Preston/Child novels. Actually, the characters reappearance provides a look into an unusual facet of the authors’ works. Rather than following the same character from novel to novel, Preston and Child have created a world where protagonists from one novel serve as a secondary characters; associates, significant others, or foils, in others. The model echoes the one Stephen King utilizes in many of his novels, with a similar result that is both pleasantly disorienting and oddly comforting. Brimstone begins with a murder of apparently supernatural origin, when the body of art critic Jeremy Grove is discovered nearly incinerated in a locked attic room reeking of sulfur. Since a cloven hoof print is found burned into the room’s floorboards, the New York tabloids suggest, in headline type, that Grove had died as the result of a pact with the Devil. Pendergast takes an interest in the case from the beginning and, being Pendergast, pursues an esoteric investigative approach to the events in the attic. Enlisting D’Agosta’s aid, the FBI agent begins an arcane effort interrupted when an associate of Grove’s suffers the same awful death. When violence begins turning toward Pendergast and D’Acosta, the duo follow the trail to Italy and a mysterious castle in the hills above Florence. All in all, Brimstone is a good romp that readers who enjoy mysteries, suspense, and the supernatural. If you have yet to make the acquaintance of Preston and Child, you have numerous delights in store.
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