http://bookbag.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/bookbag en jstrafford@timesdispatch.com Copyright 2009 2009-11-16T04:22:53-05:00 http://bookbag.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/bookbag/murder_can_ruin_your_wedding/ The day their fans have waited for through seven mysteries is here:  Veterinarian Jessica Popper and lawyer Nick Burby are getting married. But only a few pages into Cynthia Baxter’s “Murder Had a Little Lamb” (367 pages, Bantam, $7.99), the eighth entry in her “Reigning Cats and Dogs” series, things come to a screeching (literally) halt.  Just as Jessica is about to say “I do,” a scream comes from the kitchen of the estate that’s the site of the outdoor wedding.  Running into the house, Jessica and Nick find the body of Nathaniel Stibbins, a distant cousin of Nick’s that he and Jessica didn’t even know was invited to the wedding. Nick’s imperious mother, Dorothy, orders Jessica, who has had some success as an amateur sleuth, to find out who killed Nathaniel.  To do so, Jessica volunteers to teach a class at a private girls school on Long Island where Nathaniel taught art. There, she discovers that Nathaniel was a lying, ambitious, womanizing cad.  But who killed him?  The scorned headmistress, the frustrated colleague, a disgruntled student — or someone from his more distant past? Jessica ferrets out the culprit, of course. And Baxter concocts another pleasurable tale a plausible plot, an appealing heroine and a crew of lovable critters. And as for Jessica and Nick, you’ll have to read this one yourself to find out.  2009-11-16T04:22:53-05:00 http://bookbag.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/bookbag/the_guest_departs/ Uninvited guests can be a real pain, but when one gets herself killed ... That’s the problem facing Tricia Miles, owner of Haven’t Got a Clue mystery bookstore in Stoneham, N.H., in “Bookplate Special” (320 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $7.99), the third entry in Lorna Barrett’s series. Tricia’s old college roommate, Pammy Fredericks, has been freeloading for two weeks when Tricia tells her it’s time to move on. Not long after, Pammy is found dead in a trash cart behind the restaurant owned by Tricia’s sister, Angelica. Mix together a long-buried secret, a diary, blackmail, pumpkin vandalism and Tricia’s terrier-like determination to find the killer, and the plot moves quickly to an unexpected conclusion. And who could resist a cat named Miss Marple? Barrett is skilled at making her characters flawed and fully believable. This book-based book is a perfect autumn read — right down to those smashed pumpkins — for mystery aficionados. 2009-11-01T23:37:48-05:00 http://bookbag.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/bookbag/a_knight_for_hard_days/ What a series of days for a former knight. Crispin Guest returns for a second outing in Jeri Westerson’s “Serpent in the Thorns” (273 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), and the story’s even more exciting than “Veil of Lies,” the first in the series. It’s 1384 in London, and Guest has been working as a tracker (a medieval private detective) since being stripped of his knighthood and property for participating in a failed plot against King Richard II seven years earlier; only the appeal of the king’s uncle saved Guest from execution.  This time around, he’s approached by a simple-minded kitchen girl who has found a body in the room she shares with her sister. The body is that of a French courier sent with his colleagues to give a holy relic to Richard. The French hope that the gesture will end in a rapprochement between the two countries. As he investigates, Guest finds himself in mortal danger, under suspicion again of threatening the king’s life. Richard’s life is surely in peril, but Westerson’s plot twists several times before the would-be assassin’s identity is revealed. Westerson is a devotee of all things medieval, and her scholarship shows in her fiction.  Combine the historical lore with an intricate plot and a winning protagonist, and this is a series with broad appeal. 2009-10-07T20:24:37-05:00 http://bookbag.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/bookbag/something_old_something_new_--_and_someone_dead/ It’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding. It’s worse luck to kill her. And it’s not good at all for Agatha Raisin in “There Goes the Bride” (277 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), the 20th entry in M.C. Beaton’s series featuring the intrepid if infuriating private detective in England’s Cotswolds. Agatha and a group of friends have traveled to the wedding of Agatha’s ex-husband, James Lacey, to the lovely, dim-witted and much younger Felicity Bross-Tilkington. But Felicity is shot to death before she can arrive at the church, and Agatha and James fall under suspicion. They’re soon cleared, but Agatha takes on the investigation, more bodies pile up and Agatha finds herself in peril before the case is closed. Beaton’s books are quick, entertaining reads, and this one conforms nicely, with plenty of amusing excursions into Agatha’s life outside work. 2009-10-05T19:55:16-05:00 http://bookbag.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/bookbag/short_and_sweet/ The short story deserves a place on the endangered-species list, and the novella ... well, the novella may be nearing extinction. But don’t tell that to award-winning novelist Peter Robinson, whose series featuring Detective Inspector Alan Banks of the Yorkshire police has won acclaim and popularity. Now, in “The Price of Love and Other Stories” (356 pages, Morrow, $24.99), Robinson collects 12 shorter pieces, including two Banks novellas, two Banks stories and eight unrelated stories in a triumph equal to that of his novels. The Banks novellas, of course, are the lure for longtime fans (and one of them, “Like a Virgin,” was written especially for this collection).  But don’t ignore Robinson’s non-Banks material.  “Cornelius Jubb” focuses on racial injustice during World War II, “Walking the Dog” turns the noir upside down, and “The Cherub Affair” plays off the private-detective stories of old, including the voluptuous blonde who shows up at the private eye’s shabby office seeking help.  With an eye for the unexpected and a touch of the wry, Robinson treats readers to an old-fashioned, and extremely tasty, buffet. 2009-10-04T20:33:32-05:00 http://bookbag.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/bookbag/murder_can_be_a_drag/ The device is right out of Agatha Christie: The amateur sleuth gathers the suspects in the drawing room and unmasks the killer. But in Mehmet Murat Somer’s “The Gigolo Murder” (255 pages, Penguin, $14), the amateur sleuth is an unnamed computer hacker by day and drag-queen club owner by night, and he/she’s a hoot. Set in Istanbul and a sequel to Somer’s “The Kiss Murder,” this one’s a fine whodunit with elements of hacking, loan-sharking and blackmail, and an evocative picture of folks with different sexual orientations thrown together to solve a particularly nasty crime.   2009-09-27T11:55:52-05:00 http://bookbag.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/bookbag/a_mystery_of_her_own/ Instead of “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, perhaps we should ask “Who was Virginia Woolf afraid of?”. It’s what the talented novelist Stephanie Barron does to dramatic and suspenseful effect in “The White Garden” (336 pages, Bantam, $15), an English period-piece mystery. And as she did in “A Flaw in the Blood,” a fictional take on Queen Victoria and the curse of hemophilia, Barron offers a shocking alternative to history. The story begins when Jo Bellamy, a youngish garden designer from Delaware, wins a commission from a megamillionaire and his trophy wife to design for their estate in the Hamptons a copy of the white garden made famous by the British writer Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst Castle, where she lived with her writer and diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson. But Jo has a connection beyond the professional one.  Her beloved grandfather, Jock Bellamy, was from Kent and had worked as a garden laborer at Sissinghurst before immigrating to the U.S.  And just a day after telling him about her new assignment, Jo is horrified to learn that the 84-year-old Jock has killed himself. Once at Sissinghurst, Jo finds a diary marked “Jock’s book” that seems to have been the product of Woolf.  But the first entry is dated March 29, 1941 — a day after Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse but three weeks before her body washed up. But if Woolf didn’t die on March 28 and instead ran off to Sissinghurst to visit her former lover, Sackville-West, what happened in those three weeks that led to her real death? And where are the pages that have been torn from the book? Jo sets out to learn more and connects with Peter Llewellyn, a rare-books expert at Sotheby’s who calls in his former wife, university professor Margaux Strand, for help. When Margaux absconds with the diary and Jo’s patron, Gray Westlake, inserts himself into the situation, Jo and Peter must try to regain the diary (and its missing pages) and solve its secrets. Barron, whose prose is evocative and whose characters are engaging, excels at placing an ingenious stamp on the semi-historical novel, and her take on Woolf and her comrades in the British intelligentsia is fascinating, moving and disturbing.  The reader needs constant self-reminding that this is but a story, and it’s to Barron’s great credit that she makes fiction seem so unnervingly real. 2009-09-27T11:52:01-05:00 http://bookbag.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/bookbag/death_life_and_the_blurred_distinction/ If OCD stood for original chronic dread, Douglas Clegg would be its master. The talented author of the spooky tale returns, in time for Halloween, with a little gem: “Isis” (128 pages, Vanguard Press, $14.95), a dark and chilling tale of calling back the dead. Iris Villiers lives with her mother and two older twin brothers (the fourth child, the eldest son, is away at school) in her father’s ancestral estate in Cornwall.  Among the other inmates of the estate is her demented grandfather and a gardener who tells stories of recalling the dead to life.  And when a tragic accident claims the life of a beloved brother, Iris learns that she can speak to the dead, with terrifying consequences.  Clegg, a native of Alexandria who lives in New England, is brilliantly adept at building the fright level at just the right pace, and “Isis” is no exception.  Turn down the lights and let this engrossing little tale cast its spell on an hour of your time. And let it teach you one of life’s valuable lessons:  letting go. 2009-09-22T22:54:55-05:00 http://bookbag.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/bookbag/sex_drugs_rock_--_and_death/ Some authors dazzle with a debut novel, only to find themselves never able to replicate their first effort. Others start out with a fairly good effort and improve, and that is the case with “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (288 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), the second entry in Deborah Grabien’s series featuring aging rocker JP Kinkaid. As the book opens, JP — one of the megastars of Blacklight — is doing session work in San Francisco for his friends The Bombardiers. Trouble is, the group’s lead singer recently died, and his replacement is an arrogant and abrasive creep. When the creep is found dead — smashed in the forehead with his guitar — JP and his longtime love, Bree Godwin, again find themselves involved in a murder case. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is more of a whodunit than Grabien’s debut, “Rock & Roll Never Forgets,” with Grabien creating a cast of suspects and playing fair with clues. What hasn’t changed is the keen sense of life backstage and all the hard work that goes into creating music that Grabien imparts to the reader. Rockers — aging or not — will find this enjoyable and realistic. 2009-09-16T22:41:32-05:00 http://bookbag.mytimesdispatch.com/index.php/bookbag/tomb_and_trouble/ Among its more notable inhabitants are writers Honore de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde and Richard Wright; singers Edith Piaf and Jim Morrison; composers George Bizet and Frederic Chopin; painters Rosa Bonheur and Camille Pissarro; actors Yves Montand and Simone Signoret; and even Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin. In a second novel in the series featuring bookseller Victor Legris, “The Disappearance at Pere-Lachaise” (304 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), Claude Izner makes the famous Parisian — tourist attraction and artistic wonder — the scene of murder. The seeds of Legris’ second investigation are sown when Odette de Valois disappears while visiting her husband’s family’s tomb in Pere-Lachaise in 1890. Her frightened maid, Denise — knowing that Victor and Odette had once been lovers — tells the bookseller her story. Not long after, Denise is found drowned in the Seine. With an eye for detail and an intuitive sense of human nature, Legris solves a series of murders. And Izard includes a wealth of Parisian color and a complex plot that shows that Paris, a city of great generosity, is also a place where great greed is not unknown. 2009-09-16T22:39:15-05:00