2013: Assorted Mysteries

[bibliogramma]

Tess Gerritsen, Girl Missing
Kathy Reichs, Bones of the Lost
The Detection Club, The Floating Admiral
Rory Clements, Martyr

I'm never quite certain what is going to make a mystery series interesting to me. Obviously, the protagonist matters quite a bit, the setting and time period matters as well, and I seem to prefer crime-solvers who actually have to make observations and reasoned deductions rather than just race about with a gun until they find a killer. Even knowing that, some characters that you'd think would intrigue me, just don't.

However, two series that do appeal to me - at least in part because the sleuths are female and forensic science is a key part of the equation - are Kathy Reich's Temperence Brennan novels and Tess Gerritsen's Rizzoli and Isles series.

So naturally, I devoured Reich's most recent novel with dispatch and delight. Gerritsen did not have a new nivel out last year, so I thought I'd try one of her medical thriller standalones, Girl Missing. Protagonist was a female medical examiner, so I thought it likely that it would appeal to me, and it did.

I also read and enjoyed a rather unusual detective novel, The Floating Admiral. Wikipedia has this to say about it:

The Floating Admiral is a collaborative detective novel written by fourteen members of the Detection Club in 1931. The twelve chapters of the story were each written by a different author, in the following sequence: Canon Victor Whitechurch, G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley. G. K. Chesterton contributed a Prologue, which was written after the novel had been completed.

The various authors did not know who their collaborators had tagged as the killer and no loose ends were allowed. These strictures were ably dealt with, producing a consistent and highly readable mystery with both a number of plot twists and a fully satisfying conclusion. Fun read.

Having enjoyed historical mystery series such as the Brother Cadfael mysteries by Edith Pargeter (writing as Ellis Peters) and much more recently the Dame Frevisse and Player Joliffe mysteries by Margaret Frazer, I went in search of other series set in interesting time periods. My first choice was Rory Clements' John Shakespeare novels, set in my beloved Elizabethan England, in which the master playwright has a brother in the service of the Queen's spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. And It was a good choice. Well-written, with a good sense of the history and politics of the time - including the religious turmoil - and a finely realised protagonist. I will be reading more of the investigations of John Shakespeare.