At the Stroke of Madness, by Alex Kava

FBI Special Agent Maggie O’Dell is getting ready to take some vacation time when she gets a call from Dr. Gwen Patterson, a psychologist she knows.  Gwen is concerned because one of her patients, Joan Begley, is missing.  Joan had gone to Connecticut to attend her grandmother’s funeral.  Gwen’s last contact with Joan was a message Joan left on her answering machine telling Gwen that she was planning to meet a man she had been corresponding with on the internet.  At first, Maggie doesn’t take the disappearance too seriously and just does a little half-hearted checking.  Then, in a Connecticut town near where Joan was staying, the body of a female is discovered in a quarry.  Is it Joan?  Maggie decides to forego her vacation and go to Connecticut—where she will discover an unusual serial killer is on the loose.  This was a worthy addition to the O’Dell series and I liked Kava’s care in portraying the locals involved in the story. 

Dirty Work, by Stuart Woods

Stone Barrington, the ex-cop New York lawyer, is back in this latest Woods novel.  Stone has been keeping sporadic company with a lovely British secret agent with the code name Carpenter and she is in New York working on a case.   Years ago on Carpenter’s first assignment, a young girl’s parents were mistakenly killed.  The girl, Marie-Therese du Bois, is now grown and she is systematically eliminating every agent that was involved in the death of her parents.  Carpenter fears that she is next and her agency has mounted an operation to find du Bois, who is a master at changing her appearance.  Stone, and his ex-partner Dino, get involved when du Bois murders the husband of one of Stone’s clients.  In an effort to resolve the situation, Stone meets du Bois and brokers a deal, which backfires and leads to an escalation in the violence and the cat and mouse chase is back on.   Stone is a likable character and this was an entertaining read.

Mr. Paradise, by Elmore Leonard

Mr. Paradise is Tony Paradiso, a single, eightysomething retired lawyer rattling around in a huge Detroit mansion run by a live-in staff of two—Montez, his right-hand man, and Lloyd, who does the cooking and cleaning.  For entertainment, Mr. Paradise keeps Chloe, a former escort, on an exclusive $5000 a week retainer.  Chloe lives in a downtown loft with her roommate, Kelly, a Victoria’s Secret model.  Everybody except Kelly is expecting to get something when Mr. Paradise passes on.  Montez decides to speed up the process by hiring two hitmen to bump off Mr. Paradise.  As often happens with these things, the hit goes horribly wrong.  Enter Frank Delsa, homicide detective for the Detroit Police.  Frank has been widowed for about a year and has been losing himself in work.  Now, though, he’s starting to feel ready to get back into life.  But, before he can do that he’ll need to sort out just what happened at the Paradiso manse.  This was a terrific read with the always wonderful, always distinctive trademark Leonard characters in an entertaining plot with spot on dialogue. 

The Amateur Marriage, by Anne Tyler

We’re in Baltimore, as we are with most Anne Tyler novels.  It’s early December of 1941 and Michael Anton, 20, is working in his family’s grocery store.  Suddenly, several neighborhood women bring in another young woman, Pauline, who has cut her head in a fall.  Michael takes charge and patches her up and in the process he and Pauline become totally captivated with each other.  From then on they are thought of as a couple and begin courting.  When America enters World War II Michael enlists but is injured during training and sent home.  Caught up in the war, Pauline and Michael decide to marry; on the day of the wedding Pauline almost backs out but decides to take the fateful plunge.  And, Pauline and Michael will spend the next forty years, told wonderfully in chapters that each jump ahead about six years or so, wondering how their lives would have been different if they had never met through the happenstance of her accident.  I don’t read that many women authors—the ones I do mostly write mysteries and suspense novels—but I always make time for an Anne Tyler novel.  I know I’ll be entertained with an interesting story that will at times have me sad, at times have me laughing out loud, and always have me interested in what happens next with characters that I care about.


 
 
 
 

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