Wed 26 Aug 2009
Reviewed by Walter Albert: LORNA BARRETT – Bookmarked for Death.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Reviews[10] Comments
LORNA BARRETT – Bookmarked for Death. Berkley Prime Crime, paperback original; 1st printing, February 2009.
I ordered this sight unseen, attracted by the description of it as a bookstore mystery. What I didn’t realize was that it also included recipes, a seemingly popular device for some mystery novels that I have, up to now, avoided.
Zoe Carter, author of a popular series of mysteries, is murdered during a signing at Haven’t Got A Clue, a mystery bookstore in Stoneham, New Hampshire. Tricia Miles, the proprietor of the bookstore, has a rocky relationship with the town’s sheriff and decides to investigate the case on her own in an attempt to speed up the identification and capture of the murderer.
She has a sister, irritating to other people and, I suspect, to some readers as well; an ersatz boyfriend to whom she is not yet committed; and a tendency to put herself in situations that put her own life at peril.
Tricia and I both fingered the wrong suspect, but the outcome is only slightly delayed. One of the chief suspects is a woman who has a bakery. and she keeps bringing treats to Tricia that are described in such a way as to provoke a reader with a sweet tooth into an instantaneous and severe craving for an over-caloried snack.
I made it through the book without succumbing, but the fragrance lingers on. Now you know why I’ve avoided recipe mysteries.
Most of the characters are quickly introduced in the first chapter, which had me retracing my steps more than once to find out who in heck the author was talking about. Distinctive characterizations are not her strong suit, but the plot has some tricky, intriguing turns, the setting is affectionately evoked (with a bookstore cat, Miss Marple, to pull in the animal lovers).
In short, all the bases are hit for a conventional, undemanding cosy that’s dispatched with some flair.
Bibliographic Data: Author’s Name: Lorraine Bartlett.
Booktown Mystery Series, as by Lorna Barrett:
1. Murder Is Binding. Berkley, pbo, April 2008.
2. Bookmarked For Death. Berkley, pbo, Feb 2009.
3. Bookplate Special. Berkley, pbo, Nov 2009.
The Jeff Resnick series, as by L. L. Bartlett:
[After insurance investigator Jeff Resnick is mugged, he discovers the resulting brain injury has left him able to sense people’s secrets.]
1. Murder on the Mind. Five Star, hc, Dec 2005; Worldwide Mystery, pb, Oct 2007.
2. Dead in Red. Five Star, hc, June 2008.
August 27th, 2009 at 6:07 am
Walter, Like you I enjoy bookstore mysteries and over-caloried sweets. Despite the excellent review, I think I’ll avoid this book. The sweets, on the other hand….
August 27th, 2009 at 7:39 am
Just can’t get into the cozy thing. There are some excellent writers, and I’m sure I’m missing something, but save for a handful that have sort of a screwball comedy riff going for them I can’t warm to these. I’d rather just go to the bookstore for real — unless in the hands of Dunning, Block, Christopher Morley, Steve Berry, and a few others.
Still, it’s not the book, but me.
As for the recipes, short of the occasional Rex Stout or James Bond, that comes far too close to the gimmick mystery, a genre I generally avoid — what next, dress patterns, home decorating tips, gardening made easy? I was right, these really are PBS Mysteries.
August 27th, 2009 at 10:47 am
“…dress patterns, home decorating tips, gardening made easy … ?”
David, all of the above, whether you’re joking or not.
As in all genres and subgenres, there’s Good and there’s Not So Good.
As for me, I certainly don’t object to “gardening” cozies per se. My only complaint is that right now you could go into Borders, check out the mass market paperback mystery section, and conclude that there’s nothing but arts-and-crafts cozies, technothrillers, serial killers, vampire detectives and ersatz Dan Brown books.
For anything resembling old-fashioned detective fiction, you really have to do some hunting.
The same kind of discussion is going on following the Murray Leinster review in terms of finding an old-fashioned science fiction novel these days.
I suppose it’s a just a matter of getting older. The Golden Age of Anything, someone once said, is 18.
August 27th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
I do think the cozy has crowded out anything else, especially the gimmick cozy we are discussing here. And yes, the others are equally annoying, though to be fair most of the vampire, techono, and Dan Browns are in the general fiction section rather than the mystery in most bookstores.
I find much more I want to read in the growing trade paperback section of most mystery areas in bookstores — very seldom buy a regular mystery paperback anymore. Too many cozies and for me too many writers all trying to sound like each other. Not that there are no exceptions.
But I do think the modern cozy where murder takes a backseat to cats, book collecting, gardening, cooking, or whatever is a bad thing for the genre in the long run. They can be done well, and there are exceptions to every rule, but in general the casual attitude to the crime in favor of the recipe or whatever leaves me wanting a Big Mac or to dig up my flower garden.
Though to be honest I don’t have a lot more patience for the endless series that spend half the book performing the autopsy. Again it can be done well, and has been, but lately you would think medical examiners spent all their time solving murders when the truth is that takes up very little of their actual work. Most are far too busy to play Sherlock Holmes.
Still, I just had a great idea for a vampire medical examiner who is an amateur chef and plants night blooming flowers which he feeds to his psychic cat while they try to discover if there is a cat asleep under the table in Leonardo’s The Last Supper leading them to a secret conspiracy in the highest echelons of the Vatican to to prevent the chief mouser from eating meat on Friday …
What, it’s already been done?
August 27th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
In SF The Golden Age was 13. By 18 I was an old hand and not near as excited when the next issue of GALAXY came out. Of course that’s the year I started buying old issues of SF pulps in addition to digests.
August 27th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Almost forgot, speaking of the popularity of vampire fiction. At PulpFest, when Otto Penzler announced that the BIG BOOK OF BLACK MASK STORIES would be delayed because of THE BIG BOOK OF VAMPIRES, you could actually feel the atmosphere of disbelief and disappointment.
August 27th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
I’m auditioning to turn into a crotchety coot, but:
the popularity of supernatural anything is bad for readers, bad for our brains, bad for the country, and bad for the mystery!
It’s insane that great real mysteries with sleuths using their brains to reason out solutions can’t be found – but we’re deluged with psychic detectives, mind-readers and vampires!
August 27th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
I’m not sure supernatural fiction is any worse for our brains than any form of popular fiction. It’s not like the western is exactly realism, or the classic detective novel.
The problem is when it crowds out everything else and we are overrun with vampire, psychic, and other such sleuths. A little more variety, and a little more real imagination and not borrowed imagination would be appreciated.
But you won’t find me knocking Carnaki, Dr. John Silence, Morris Klaw, Paul Harley, or their ilk. There is a hard wired taste for the uncanny in most of us, and we can’t expect the mystery, of all genres, to ignore it.
Even Conan Doyle teased us with a vampire, a spectral hound, a worm unknown to science, and those Sumatran rats. For that matter Christie’s superb Harley Quinn tales have a distinct whiff of sulfur and brimstone about them.
Frank McSherry called it the Janus Solution, where the reader could never quite be sure if the rational or the irrational solution was the correct one.
Whatever else you might say about it, the frisson at the end of Carr’s The Burning Court is genuine and hard to deny. I’d hate to give that up in the name of pure rationality, not in a genre created by Poe.
August 27th, 2009 at 4:37 pm
Strangely enough, I agree with both Mike and David.
The current crop of psychic detectives and paranormal romances just doesn’t seem to compare with the authors and stories that David runs through. I say “doesn’t seem to” since I haven’t read much of the current crop, but I do enjoy all of David’s examples.
I don’t know why, I just do.
— Steve
June 23rd, 2010 at 4:30 pm
[…] back, after I’d read and reported on the second in the series (Bookmarked for Death, reviewed here ) for this follow-up […]