Tunnelling to the Truth

The World Beneath (A Joe Tesla Novel) by Rebecca Cantrell (Self-published e-book, 5 December 2013).

Reviewed by Marlyn Beebe.

On his way to ring the bell on Wall Street the day his software company goes public, Joe Tesla is overcome by an attack of agoraphobia so strong that he is unable to leave his hotel at Grand Central Terminal.  He ends up living in a house built in the midst of the tunnels by the lead engineer on the construction of the original Grand Central Terminal, which is now owned by Tesla's college roommate Leandro Gallo and his twin sister Celeste.

Joe manages to keep himself occupied.  He has an office set up so that he can work in his underground home if necessary, and he's become incredibly well-read.  At night, when the trains aren't running, he and his psychiatric service dog Edison walk around the tunnels using night-vision goggles.  (Yes, Edison has his own goggles.)

On their travels, they occasionally run into homeless people or maintenance workers, but few people go as deep into the tunnels as Joe and his dog.  One night, he and Edison come across a strange set of footprints, which become more troubling as they appear more often.  He eventually follows them to find a man pounding on a brick wall with a sledgehammer.

What they discover behind the wall sounds completely implausible, but is based on historical events.

Rebecca Cantrell has created a gripping, thrilling story that is at once historical and contemporary.  Historical mystery and political thriller fans (and probably cozy readers, too) will be hooked after the first page.  This was an unputdownable book for me, and (from comments I've read) for many others, too.

Rebecca Cantrell’s Hannah Vogel mystery/thriller novels have won the Bruce Alexander and Macavity awards and been nominated for the Barry and RT Reviewers Choice awards; her critically-acclaimed cell phone novel, iDrakula was nominated for the APPY award and listed on Booklist’s Top 10 Horror Fiction for Youth. She and her family recently left Hawaii’s sunny shores for adventures in Berlin. Find Rebecca Cantrell on Facebook, Twitter, and at www.rebeccacantrell.com.




FTC Full Disclosure: Many thanks to the author for the advance copy of the e-book.

Listening to Mysteries

The Boyfriend by Thomas Perry (Tantor Audio book, 5 March 2013).

Reviewed by Marlyn Beebe.

I feel very fortunate to be able to download e-galleys of books from various publishers through services like Edelweiss, and I'm always delighted when I'm granted access to a title I've requested.  Even more so when it's by one of my favorite authors.

I love Thomas Perry's Jane Whitefield series, but it's been over a year since Poison Flower was published.  When I thought I saw the availability of a galley of The Boyfriend (which I mistakenly thought was a standalone), I jumped at it.  When I received approval, I was surprised to realize that it was an audiobook.  I reserve book listening for  driving, but since my trips are seldom very long, it doesn't seem worthwhile.  However,  I gamely downloaded the book, and though it took me 6 weeks, I managed to listen to the whole nine hours without too much confusion.  

The protagonist of the story is Jack Till, a former Los Angeles police detective turned P.I. (who first appeared in 2007's Silence).  In The Boyfriend, Jack lives still lives in the L.A. area.  He has a 24-year-old daughter named Holly, who has Down Syndrome and lives in a group home not far from her father's home.

Jack is visited at his office by a couple who ask him to find the killer of their daughter, Catherine Hamilton.  Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton believe that because Catherine was an high-class call girl, the police are being lax about their investigation.  Jack takes the case, and soon discovers that young women who share Catherine's profession have been murdered every few months in cities around the country.  At first, there doesn't appear to be anything linking these women, apart from their appearance: they are all strawberry blonde, and similar in features and build.

But as Jack digs deeper, he learns that they were all killed in the same manner, with a 9 mm handgun, and probably by the same guy.  Jack calls him "the boyfriend", but has difficulty finding information on the man's background.  As he follows the boyfriend across the country, he discovers a seriously disturbed and dangerous man who just may be Till's match.

Robert Dean has a deep, compelling reading voice, which is a good match for the suspenseful story, and more than once I found myself sitting in my driveway waiting for a chapter to end.


FTC Full Disclosure:  My thanks to Tantor Media and Edelweiss for the audio-download of the book.

In the Bleak Midwinter

Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman (Ballantine hardcover, 15 January 2013).

Reviewed by Marlyn Beebe.


Nora Hamilton wakes up one morning and almost instantly can feel that something is wrong.  Searching the house for her husband Brendan, she finally finds him in the attic.  He's committed suicide.  Her immediate reaction, of course, is that he would never have done such a thing, and despite the assurances of his colleagues on the police force in the tiny town of Wedeskyull, New York, that there could be no other possibility, she remains unconvinced.

After the funeral, she finds herself unable to continue her day-to-day life without confirming her suspicions, but she finds herself stymied at every turn by the police chief, the other officers, or the local townspeople.  Despite the fact that she's lived in the small Adirondack community since she married Brendan six years earlier, she's still perceived as an outsider.  She gets support from very few people, including a local journalist (also a "newcomer"), her family, and Brendan's aunt (who really only helps by not hindering her). 

Despite the fact that her search leads her into some remote parts of the mountains in the middle of winter, and at times she even fears for her life.  Milchman describes the frigid winter surroundings so well that  I found myself shivering often while I read this (which may make it the ideal book for a sweltering summer afternoon).

The story is suspenseful and creepy, but gripping and difficult to put down.  It's an exceptionally written first novel, and will likely be enjoyed by fans of Julia Spencer-Fleming and Louise Penny.


Many thanks to the publisher and Edelweiss for the e-galley of the book.

Where E’er We Tread, ‘Tis Haunted, Holy Ground

Sharing the Hidden Heart of Ireland

A guest post by Erin Hart. 

People often ask why I chose Ireland as a setting, and I always say it’s the other way ‘round—I’m fairly certain that Ireland chose me. For some reason, I've been drawn to that little island more than any other spot in the world ever since I was a child. There's just something about the deeply complex and contradictory nature of the place, all those layers of history one on top of the other—that lends a particular resonance to the kinds of stories I feel compelled to tell. I’m attracted to the otherworldly quality that emanates from certain spots in Ireland, and one of my aims in writing stories set there is to share some of those wonderful hidden places.

I’m fortunate to have some really good connections. My husband is an Irishman and a traditional musician; his name is Paddy O’Brien (not making that up!) and he plays the button accordion. Whenever we travel in Ireland, we visit musician friends and go to informal sessions where tunes and songs are traded. Those places aren’t exactly top secret, but they’re usually off the beaten path. You have to know where to go, or you risk straying into a bar where a DJ is blasting ordinary pop music, or even American-style country, also very popular in Ireland. If you’re looking for traditional music, it helps to know someone who knows where to find it. Paddy and I have gone into bars out the West, in Clare and Connemara where the locals are mad for set dancing, and have their own signature sets (danced in a square, with eight people and a bit of fancy footwork), that the people in that particular locality have been doing for a hundred years or more. All right, it does help if you bring along a well-known, world-class musician to play for them, but still…

When I take groups to Ireland, which I’ve been doing for the past three years, we visit many of the locations from my stories. There’s a lot of traditional music in my novels, because the main characters, Cormac Maguire and Nora Gavin, are both musicians. (He plays the wooden flute and she’s a traditional singer, as I am.) In the beginning the choice to make the characters musicians seemed like a handy way to give them a little extra dimension, but it also seemed pretty authentic, since many of our musician friends are also schoolteachers and journalists doctors, policemen, and scientists in real life. So many people in Ireland play traditional music that it seemed quite natural to have characters who’d bring along instruments when they traveled to an excavation site, just in case there might be a good local session nearby. As time went on, the music also became a way to flesh out the stories, a chance to slip plenty of history and culture into the mix, and to give the characters a true grounding and connection to the places they come from. 

So when I bring people to Ireland, we always try to hit some music or singing sessions, like An Góilín – the traditional singer's club that meets at the Teachers’ Club on Parnell Square in Dublin, or instrumental session at The Cobblestone in Smithfield or Hughes’s pub in Chancery Street. Old friends are regular performers at all those venues. If you’ve never been to one, a traditional session is a feast of music—jigs, reels, hornpipes, a whirl of notes that will leave you exhilarated and sated by the end of the night—even if you’re not drinking porter.

I’m also fascinated by traditional culture, folklore, and folkways. My stories often involve ancient rituals from thousands of  years ago, still practiced today in Ireland—and there are many: bonfires set alight on the tops of hills at certain times of the year, crosses woven of rushes, trees adorned with rags and ribbons beside holy wells, and otherworldly ringforts said to be inhabited by the little people. 

My husband  used to work in the industrial peat bogs of the Midlands, so we often cross these dark bogs, strange places where all surface vegetation cut away, where blackened peat from just after the last Ice Age still remains underfoot—not quite the picture of green Ireland that so many hold in their imaginations. I asked Paddy to take me to the place where he’d worked, since I was writing about a similar workshop in LAKE OF SORROWS. We parked the car, and as we approached the large machine shed, I asked, “Will anyone here remember you?” He said, “You must be jokin’. I haven’t been here since 1969.” But as we got closer, a man in a brown canvas coat stepped out of the doorway, looked us up and down once, and said, “O’Brien—what do you want?” The exploitation of the bogs might be bad for the environment, but in that part of the country, it was the only good job to be had. Everyone Paddy had worked with—way back in 1969—was still working there.

But the most fascinating thing about the industrial bogs is that they’re also the spots where much of Ireland’s archaeology is going on these days, and where artifacts and bog bodies still turn up with an almost alarming regularity.  At the National Museum in Dublin, we visit an exhibition called “Kingship and Sacrifice,” which features the remains of several bog people, thought to be human sacrifices during the Iron Age. One of these men was discovered by my husband’s cousin, Kevin Barry, while he was clearing a drain in a bog being developed for gardening peat moss. If this really is a small world, there’s no place smaller than Ireland. Everyone is linked to everyone else somehow, and if you need to get in to see the state pathologist or a member of the murder squad, you’ve nothing to do only ask your friends, and someone will come up with a connection. At least, that's what happened to me.

In researching THE BOOK OF KILLOWEN (Scribner, March 5), I visited the bog where the Faddan More Psalter, a 9th-century book of Psalms, was discovered, buried in a bog. My aunt and I went to interview Ned Kelly, an archaeologist and Keeper of Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. And we visited many old ruined chapels and monasteries, and exhibits featuring some of the few existing manuscripts left from the days of the ancient scribes. We toured a friend’s organic farm, and visited with a local cheesemaker and his goats to get the flavor of the locality where this story is set. 

Of course on the HAUNTED GROUND tours, we also visit regular stops like museums and woolen shops and the Guinness brewery (practically required by law!) We also go to an old distillery, tiny pubs out the West, and we usually stop at the most haunted castle in Ireland where the current human inhabitant tells stories and plays a few tunes on the whistle. We venture down narrow, hedge-lined roads to wild boglands, rocky coastlines, hidden streams, and coral beaches that resemble ground-up bones;  we clamber around ruined monasteries and ancient burial places. It’s easy to miss these hidden places, and that’s why I enjoy sharing them so much, these spots where you can feel the connection to the past, where you can almost hear strains of ancient music in the wind that goes through you, right down to the bones.


Erin Hart writes archaeological crime novels set in the mysterious boglands of Ireland. Before a wayward detour into crime fiction, she worked as an arts administrator, editor, copywriter, journalist and theater critic. Her debut novel, HAUNTED GROUND (Scribner, 2003) won the Friends of American Writers award and Romantic Times' Best First Mystery, was shortlisted for Anthony and Agatha awards, and was named by Book-Of-The-Month Club and Booklist as one of the best crime novels of 2003. LAKE OF SORROWS (Scribner, 2004) was shortlisted for a Minnesota Book Award, and FALSE MERMAID (Scribner, 2010) was named by Booklist as one of the Top Ten Crime Novels of 2010. Her latest, THE BOOK OF KILLOWEN, is being published by Scribner on March 5, 2013.  Erin lives in Minnesota with her husband, Irish button accordion player Paddy O’Brien, with whom she frequently travels to Ireland, to carry out essential research in bogs and cow pastures and castles and pubs.


Please drop by Stuff and Nonsense today for a review of THE BOOK OF KILLOWEN, to be released tomorrow.

Red Herrings Stink

A guest post by Nancy Springer.

I’m not sure I really am a mystery writer. Up until I received my first Edgar, I thought I was a generic novelist interested in crime. I don’t plot, I don’t murder a character before chapter three, and I don’t plant red herrings. As far as I’m concerned, the less my fiction resembles a fox hunt, the better.

Fox hunt?


Well, you know how we refer to traditional mystery writing: Sleuth hounds sniffing out the trail of the criminal, but led astray by red herrings. That’s fox hunt imagery. In many a jolly good British fox hunt, a prankster dragged a red herring across the fields, because the odor of the smoked fish was so strong it would almost certainly throw the hounds off the track.

Contemplating overdressed people on expensive horses galloping behind a pack of dogs, Oscar Wilde dubbed fox hunting “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the inedible,” thus begging the question: why? Why kill a fox? I have often wondered similarly, why the first body, the second body, and the third body?

I prefer to write crime fiction that is corpse-optional, about missing persons, abduction, stalkers, family secrets, bad guys poaching endangered animals or other environmental crimes. There are many non-cadaverous alternatives to murder, and they occur to me naturally enough when I try to write a mystery novel, as opposed to a fox hunt. I consider plotty plots with red herrings to be egregiously deceptive. Instead, I try for an original, character-driven work, a well-crafted narrative with no need for artifice. I say fences, foxes, red fish, forget it.

Why? Because a fox hunt is essentially an old-fashioned, frivolous pursuit, and so is the contrived murder mystery. Many of us, self included, enjoy a good the-butler-did-it, but today’s world, crime is no game. Nor, I think, do we want it to be. In today’s atmosphere of bad news, domestic abuse, drug trafficking, violence in the schools, and worse, I think there’s a need to acknowledge that villainy is not a cozy, orchestrated logic problem; evil is here, now, and it is messy. I think we need to write honest no-tricks mystery. Red herrings stink.

Nancy Springer has written fifty novels for adults, young adults and children, in genres that include mythic fantasy, contemporary fiction, magical realism, horror, and mystery -- although she did not realize she wrote mystery until she won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America two years in succession. Dark Lie is her first venture into adult suspense.

Born in New Jersey, Nancy Springer lived for many decades near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, of Civil War fame, raising two children, writing, riding horseback, fishing, and birdwatching. In 2007 she surprised her friends and herself by moving with her second husband to an isolated area of the Florida panhandle, where the birdwatching is spectacular and where, when fishing, she occasionally catches an alligator.

A review of Dark Lie is posted on Stuff and Nonsense today.  I'm also giving away a copy of Dark Lie, courtesy of The Penguin Group.  Please stop by and comment to enter!

Books Within a Book

Miss Me When I'm Gone by Emily Arsenault (William Morrow trade paperback, 31 July 2012).

Emily Arsenault's third novel, like the first two*, blew me away.

In this story, Gretchen Waters, the modestly successful author of a series of essays called Tammyland, written during a trip to Nashville after her divorce, dies after falling down a slippery staircase.  Her dear friend Jamie Madden is asked by Gretchen's family to complete the follow-up book which was nearly finished.

As Jamie soon discovers, this involves going through boxes and boxes of paper and notebooks as well as computer files on top of her job as night-shift copy-editor at a newspaper.  She learns that Gretchen was nowhere near finishing the book, but in fact was writing on a different topic altogether:  focusing on the violent death of her mother when Gretchen was about seven. 

Intrigued, Jamie, who is heavily pregnant,  starts retracing the trail of Gretchen's research, contacting and visiting all the people her friend had, not really knowing why she's doing it.

What's wonderful is that Arsenault includes chapters excerpted from Tammyland, as well as Gretchen's notes for the new book.  In essence, she has created three (well, almost) books in one.  Any one of these stories would be fascinating on its own, but by intertwining them, Arsenault has taken what could have been a tangled mess, and turned it into awesome piece of work!





FTC Full Disclosure: Many thanks to the publisher, who sent me an advance copy of the book for review purposes.

*The Broken Teaglass (Delacorte, 2009) and In Search of the Rose Notes (Morrow, 2011)