Neal Sanders's Blog

Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


At the heart of Robert Galbraith’s new Cormoran Strike/ Robin Ellacott mystery is the investigation of the coldest of cold cases: the 1974 disappearance of a doctor as she walked from her London practice to a bar where she was to meet an old friend for drinks. The case was never solved and the investigation was botched by two successive detectives; one of whom appears to have used astrology to rule suspects in or out.

Surrounding the year-long search for the killer of Dr. Margot Bamborough is a swirl of life-changing events in the lives of the two investigators. Strike is attempting to cope with the final illness of the woman who raised him when his mother abandoned him three decades earlier, even as his real-life father – an aging rock star who sired seven children, and whom Strike has met just twice in his life – is seeking to re-connect with his now-famous son. Robin is trying to finalize her divorce, only to find her husband is inexplicably and painfully dragging out the process. In the meantime, Robin has to continually rebuff the advances of one of the contract investigators with whom she works. And, as through the four previous installments in the series, there is the continuing series of missed or misinterpreted romantic signals between Strike and Robin (there may finally be some forward progress).

The search for Margot Bamborough is done at the behest of her daughter, who was a toddler when her mother disappeared. After four decades, many of the witnesses have died or disappeared. Moreover, even though there was never an official solution to the case, it was popularly assumed by the press and detectives she was abducted by a serial killer active in London at the time. The serial killer, though, never acknowledged Bamborough as one of his victims and he has long been incarcerated at a prison reserved for those who committed heinous crimes.

As Strike and Robin re-investigate the case, they find no dearth of motives or suspects. The small medical practice was riddled with intrigue and Bamborough’s marriage was rocky (her husband would eventually marry the nanny). One employee of the practice was involved with the son of a gangster infamous for making those who annoyed him disappear. And, hanging over all of Strike’s and Robin’s work is the serial killer who had granted no interviews since his conviction.

Troubled Blood tells a compelling story – and it had better be because the book clocks in at more than 900 pages. It is also sometimes hard for non-U.K. readers to comprehend because Galbraith (the pen name used by author J.K. Rowling for the series) faithfully replicates the various accents (Irish, Scottish, Cornish, Yorkshire, etc.) of those involved. In other words, you can’t skim this book; you actually have to read it. But, stick with it. It is worth the time. Don’t be wary if you’ve not read the previous books in the series. The story stands alone, and the author fills in the background needed to understand anything that ties back to earlier books.

Hanging over the book, though, is a controversy regarding Rowling. Though ‘Troubled Blood’ appears on the New York Times best seller list, that newspaper has yet to review the book and other periodicals have done perfunctory reviews that instead focus on Ms. Rowling’s perception by the LBGTQ community. The lightning rod in the book is the misogynist serial killer, who cross-dressed in order to give vulnerable women a false sense of security before killing them in horrific ways. On the other hand, the book does not lack for sympathetic gay characters. Margot Bamborough’s daughter, who hires Strike, is in a well-described, committed, monogamous relationship with a highly supportive woman; and Robin’s flat-mate is a fully-drawn and compassionate gay man whose actions and back story are anything but stereotypical.



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I wrote The Garden Club Gang in 2011, thinking that a ‘funny mystery’ about women who rob a New England fair might find an appreciative audience. It did. The characters – four women aged 51 to 71 – resonated with everyone who read the book. I have been shown copies of the book that are dog-eared and taped together from being passed from hand to hand. Other copies are filled with exclamation marks and underlines; products of readers identifying with things characters say or marking favorite passages.

Cancer survivors admire and root for Paula. It is her existential crisis after being diagnosed with a recurrence of her breast cancer that is the instigation for everything that follows. Eleanor appeals to those who live or have lived in the twilight world of a loved one in the grip of dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease. Jean is the favorite of those who suffered abuse in their marriage (upon finding her husband dead, Jean felt only release). And Alice is every widow’s nightmare of slipping into poverty by outliving their savings.

The premise of the story is one of coming together to help a friend, but instead finding unintended consequences. The ‘perfect crime’ is intricately plotted and executed, only to come a cropper when ‘the Ladies’ find they have nearly half a million dollars while fair officials say just a third of that amount was stolen. It takes a young insurance investigator, Samantha Ayers, to piece together what has happened. It takes all five to create a satisfying conclusion.

Within a month of publication, I had dozens of readers imploring me to send the Ladies on another adventure. It took four years to think up a plot worthy of them, which became Deadly Deeds. Instead of stealing, they’re atoning for their past sins. They help Samantha catch an auto dealer in the process of torching his unsaleable inventory. Flush with that success, they go undercover into an upscale nursing home to determine whether a 94-year-old friend died of old age of was ‘helped’ by person or persons unknown.

By the time the story is over, the Ladies will have become well acquainted with asset protection schemes, nursing home economics, and a few other things that would represent plot spoilers. They’ll also find they’ve incurred the murderous wrath of the nominally retired patriarch of the car dealership chain they brought down in the book’s opening pages. As in the first book, the four women plus Samantha Ayers must save themselves. No one is coming to their rescue.

When a set of characters have built a loyal following among readers, a writer faces the agonizing choice of moving on to fresh faces and story lines or inventing new plots for those beloved characters. I wrote and published four mysteries between The Garden Club Gang and Deadly Deeds, and I would write four more before I was confident I could do justice to Paula, Eleanor, Jean, Alice, and Samantha.

Like people, characters need to learn from their experiences. They need to grow. By the end of Deadly Deeds, Eleanor has said her last goodbye to her incapacitated husband and Jean had begun the process of extricating herself from the financial shackles imposed by her late husband’s will. There may be a man in Paula’s life and Alice has regained her confidence. Samantha has collected a group of allies who can help in the future.

I pondered all those things before starting Fatal Equity. Most of my books have what I call ‘Aha!’ moments when seeing or hearing something crystallizes into a plot. The subject of this book was instigated by seeing a large number of superannuated actors and celebrities on cable channels saying I ought to think about securing my financial future with a reverse mortgage.

The premise, once again, is straightforward: a friend of Alice’s, a recent widow named Rebecca, finds herself on the verge of becoming homeless. By adding her daughter’s name to her home’s deed, she has violated the terms of her reverse mortgage. Unless she can repay the mortgage company, her home will be sold out from underneath her. Samantha’s research shows Senior Equity Lending Solutions has every right to foreclose.

But what prompted Rebecca to do such a thing? It was suggested by a woman she met at Senior Equity’s offices. She kept running into the woman, each time urged to take the action to ensure the home stayed in the family. It turns out Rebecca’s predicament is not isolated: an appalling percentage of Senior Equity’s reverse mortgages end in foreclosure. But because the paperwork is always in order, the firm continues to operate.

The Ladies decide it’s time to go undercover again. They can’t go to work for Senior Equity, so they do the next best thing: set up a phony business next door fulfilling non-existent web orders for fancy French table linens. They’ll just keep refilling boxes with the same placemat and napkins while they keep watch over their neighbor. Better yet, Eleanor will apply for a mortgage.

Good stories never move in straight lines. Mine zig and zag more that most. Those non-existent web orders quickly turn into real ones because one of those allies the Ladies gained in Deadly Deeds does far too good a job of creating a realistic website. The Provençal linens subplot keeps the all-too-serious subject of elder financial abuse from overwhelming the story.

Does it work? Readers so far are enthusiastic in their approval. But fair warning: the Ladies’ lives continue to evolve. Coming up with a fourth installment won’t be easy.

Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Trying to guess where a Carl Hiaasen plot is headed is akin to boarding an airplane at random. No matter where you think you’re going, you’re certain to be wrong. When you open one of his hilarious mysteries, your best bet is to tighten your seatbelt, lean back, and get ready to be wildly entertained.

“Razor Girl” is a worthy successor to 2013’s “Bad Monkey” and brings back that book’s lead protagonist, the hapless Andrew Yancy. Yancy is a very good police detective who, through every fault of his own, has been busted down to working as a restaurant inspector in the Florida Keys. Do not read this book if you dine out frequently; you will learn things about eating establishments – and especially ones that cater to tourists – that will cause you to poke carefully at everything on your plate.

There’s a rogue’s gallery of characters in “Razor Girl” to offend every taste. Razor Girl herself is Merry Mansfield who, for a substantial fee, will rear-end a vehicle driven by someone who owes you a lot of money or is otherwise in your disfavor. Merry’s specialty is distracting the other driver after a crash long enough for her employer to apprehend his prey. Merry’s distraction technique involves the shaving of certain body parts.

But Merry Mansfield (and, no, that’s not her real name) has a heart of gold compared to, say, Martin Trebeaux. He has made a fortune stripping the sand from various parts of the Caribbean to fortify Florida’s eroding beaches. And there’s Brock Richardson, a product-liability attorney addicted to the very ointment that is creating his wealth, and his not-especially-faithful fiancé, Deb. Don’t forget Dominick ‘Big Noogie’ Aeola, a Mafioso to whom a company will be wise not entrust their shredding of sensitive documents.

At the heart of every Hiaasen book is a vista of a Florida gone horribly wrong. Like me, he’s a native, and he remembers a time when the greed and pillaging was retail rather than wholesale. His target this time is Key West, where cruise ships disgorge armies of tourists with a few hours to look for Margaritaville and purchase Chinese-made trinkets, and where exotic wildlife from around the globe finds a new place to be fruitful and multiply. One memorably sketched cruise-ship visitor will re-embark with an unexpected souvenir: a pair of five-pound Gambian rats (which, unfortunately, have made themselves at home in the Keys).

Is there a plot to “Razor Girl”? Sure, there is. It involves a “Duck Dynasty”-type character who makes a guest appearance at a Key West bar and manages to make instant enemies out of everyone in the place. Yancy’s attempt to find the reality-show star (he thinks it will help him get him reinstated with the police) starts a chain of events that will involve all of the aforementioned characters. It’s a neat, highly satisfying trick.

I have just one bone to pick with the book. Hiaasen is a highly skilled and truly imaginative writer. For reasons known only to him, this book marks a new high in the use of f-bombs and other, comparable language. It’s as though he has saved up all the salty language that he didn’t used in his ‘juvenile’ books and plopped them all into this ‘adult’ tome. My unsolicited advice is to tone it down.




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Let me start by saying that I’m a sucker for misfits-falling-in-love stories. Give me awkward anytime. I also appreciate a) books that feature intelligent, interesting characters, b) settings in mid-20th Century America, and c) story arcs that span a decade or longer.
As such, I’m the built-in audience for Jeff Bartsch’s “Two Across”. It is the story of two brainy, awkward teens who first meet at the finals of the 1960 National Spelling Bee (they tie). They look forward to annually renewing their friendship because their lofty IQs and constrained family lives mean they have few peers with whom they can relate. But three years after that fateful meeting, their relationship takes a 90 degree turn: Stanley Owens, now 18 and desperate to escape the check-the-boxes life his mother has laid out for him, impetuously proposes a sham marriage to his spelling bee co-champion Vera Baxter. The purpose for the marriage: to collect money (and presents that can be turned into money) that will allow him the breathing room to create his own life as a creator of crossword puzzles.
Vera goes along with the idea. Her own life is one of accompanying her thrifty, career-driven mother to an endless string of cheap motels while Mom tries to break into mainframe computer sales. Vera’s traveling companions are books and math journals (she’s a math prodigy as well as a memorizer of arcane words). Stanley’s offer provides the first opportunity for rebellion in her young life. Emotionally immature, they cannot foresee the consequences of what they are about to do.
Their con – a sham wedding attended by Washington DC’s elite – goes exactly as planned. But the event is also the dead weight that will leave both of their lives in shambles, and not just because the ceremony meant far more to Vera than it did to the desperate Stanley. Soon they are ensconced in Cambridge – she in a dorm at Radcliffe, he in an off-campus garret – Stanley supporting himself writing term papers for dissipated Harvard ‘legacy’ enrollees while creating crossword puzzles. When one of Stanley’s clients attempts to paw Vera, Stanley gets even with the student in a way that has disastrous consequences for everyone involved. It is just the first of those aftermaths that will reverberate across a decade’s worth of missed and shattered opportunities.
Through it all, Vera is the one trying to hold her life together. It will take four colleges to earn her math PhD with Stanley’s impetuousness or emotional catatonia too often causing grief and/or heartache. (To be fair, there is also a hilarious though cringe-inducing interlude when the pair are induced to appear on a “Newlywed Game”-type program.)
But if they are star-crossed lovers, they are also one another’s intellectual equals with a magnetic attraction that will cause them to inevitably seek out one another using crossword puzzles planted in newspapers around the country.
There are many reasons to read this book, and learning how crossword puzzles are constructed is one of them. The historical research is excellent, though I doubt crossword puzzles appeared in the Wall Street Journal in the 1960s. Bartsch recreates a shabbier version of Boston and environs that rings true. Most important to readers, in the end both characters achieve that emotional maturity they so sadly lacked earlier.
My quibbles are just that – quibbles. The money from the faux wedding seems to have had no impact on Stanley’s quest for independence given his Spartan lifestyle, and the fate of a larger gift is vague. A wealthy Newport family that plays a role in their lives appears to have been cut from cardboard. And Bartsch reels off an unnecessarily precocious narrative vocabulary that fairly shouts ‘writer’s workshop’.
This is a fine and satisfying book. Stanley and Vera are appealing characters who come to life on the page. “Two Across” is the kind of book you purchase in hardcover and keep in your personal library, because it’s the kind of story that you’ll want to come back to.

One of best things about writing fiction is the ability to invent characters, and especially lead protagonists for stories. Moreover, once created, these characters go into a portfolio where they can recur in new stories. The same is true for settings.
"How to Murder Your Contractor" is the darkly humorous tale of a battle of wits between a woman trying to build her dream retirement home and a contractor who sees the project as his road to riches. When I set out to write the book, my initial thought was to use one of my existing characters as the story’s protagonist and narrator, and to place that story in one of my oft-used settings.
The more I thought through the story, however, the more it became clear that, while I have a portfolio of terrific women characters who are smart, strong and independent; none of them met the requirements of the plot. I was going to start with a fresh heroine.
Thus was born Anne Evans Carlton.
There is wonderful freedom in starting with a blank slate. There’s no messy, existing background to deal with and no loose ends from previous stories to tie up. At the same time, though, a new character has to exist in a logical universe. The narrator’s background, like the story he or she tells, has to unfold naturally and believably.
Anne’s character took a while to reveal itself to me. I knew these things about her: she is young (49) to be an ‘empty-nester’ seeking to downsize; she is married, but to someone whose career requires Anne to take charge of many household decisions that would ordinarily be done jointly. I also knew Anne is both exceptionally smart and equally headstrong.
Why, in an age when most college-educated women aren’t even married until they’re closing in on 30 and postponing childbearing even longer, does Anne have two grown children? I gave her a supremely logical reason: a life-changing equestrian accident as a teenager that caused her to re-prioritize her life choices. (It also gives her a few horsey-set friends who will be critical to the story’s unfolding.)
In plotting the book, I knew Anne would need a ‘posse’ of close friends to help her deal with Joey McCoy, her nemesis. And so Anne’s résumé grew to incorporate a specific skill set. She is a Master Gardener – a graduate of a program that turns adults with a keen interest in gardening into much more knowledgeable gardeners and places them into a network of like-minded individuals. Anne will be surrounded by Master Gardener friends, some of them with inventive ways of making Joey disappear permanently.
Anne also needs smart friends with access to information and knowledge across many disciplines. To that end, I made Anne a five-day winner on Jeopardy!, which makes her part of a (so far as I know imaginary) sorority of women who have accomplished that feat. I’m a long-time viewer of the show and have noted that women are under-represented both as contestants and as multi-day winners. This group of friends will be instrumental to helping Anne create and carry out her plan.
In writing, though, often what you leave out about a character’s life is as important as the information you supply. Is Anne a blonde or a brunette? Short or tall? I never say, Readers will have to use their imagination to supply such things as where Anne grew up, where she went to college, or what was her major. Those parts of her curriculum vitae weren’t critical nuggets and I’d rather that a reader insert their own background so as to feel greater empathy for Anne.
And, no protagonist can have a perfect life. Anne’s husband is a nice guy who makes a good living, but he’s away far too frequently. And, when he’s home, he’s locked away in his home office. I also gave Anne some lingering qualms about her children’s life choices. Settling down early was fine for Anne, but she fears her daughter’s career and marriage choices were both prematurely narrow and hasty. You can be strong and independent and still have self-doubts.
The early reaction to Anne, though, has been extraordinarily gratifying. She comes across as human, someone readers would like a have as a friend. She has a great sense of humor and an outlook on life that readers share.
The best reaction, though, is the one that writers love to hear most: “What’s Anne going to do next?”

I grew up on science fiction. I came of age at the dawn of the space age and, at ten, devoured Robert Heinlein’s ‘juveniles’; then moved on to Asimov, Clarke, Simak and Pohl. I continued my habit through high school and college, but parted company in the early ‘70s as science fiction moved in a new direction that I found less compelling.

I remember reading Jules Verne’s ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ at the age of 11 or 12. President Kennedy had announced that we would send a man to the moon before the end of the decade and the Mercury program was getting underway. My immediate reaction to Verne’s tale was that it was horribly dated.

The ‘science’ didn’t make sense and the characters were museum pieces. Verne may have been ahead of his time in 1865 but, by 1961, his ideas could be charitably characterized as ‘quaint’.

I read Andrew Weir’s ‘The Martian’ this summer and thoroughly enjoyed the book. That enjoyment, in turn, sent me to my paperback bookshelf in search of something comparable to read. I pulled down Heinlein’s ‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’. The book was first serialized in Amazing Stories in 1966 and published in hardcover that same year. It won a Hugo Award as the best scifi book of 1967. My paperback copy bears a printing date of May 1968 so that is likely the first time I read the work. I know I have not re-read it in at least 20 years.

In my view, the best science fiction starts with one or two ‘big ideas’. Clarke’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, for example, posits the idea that a sentinel on the moon, placed by an alien civilization, has been activated. The really big idea, though, is HAL, a remarkable computer that apparently suffers from schizophrenia.

‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’ has two very ‘big ideas’. The first is that, in the year 2075, the moon is colonized. OK, nothing new there. You could read all about such plans in Life magazine in 1969. But in Heinlein’s imagination, Luna is a 21st Century equivalent of 19th Century Australia: a dumping ground for Earth’s unwanted criminals and malcontents. But Luna also serves a vital function: because there are pockets of ice below the lunar surface, grain can be grown in tunnels. Lunar rice and wheat are critical to feeding Earth’s 11 billion people and especially those of overcrowded India. Grain is delivered to Earth in enormous canisters via what amounts to a catapult.

Heinlein’s second ‘big idea’ is Mike or, more specifically, a HOLMES IV supercomputer on Luna. Because the ‘Lunar Authority’ that runs the moon is loathe to spend money unnecessarily, rather than buying new computers and shipping them up from Earth, they’ve been connecting more and more memory and logic to this one already-powerful computer and entrusting it with ever-broadening responsibilities. One day, the computer ‘wakes up’ – becomes self-aware (this is two years before Clarke’s HAL 9000). The first person to notice the computer’s self-awareness is a freelance Lunar computer technician, Manuel ‘Mannie’ Garcia O’Kelly-Davis, who narrates the tale.

Mannie gives ‘Mike’ his name. Mike is a very lonely computer who has been trying unsuccessfully to get his human minders’ attention by engaging in juvenile behavior (issuing paychecks to janitors for enormous sums, for example). Only Mannie catches on.

The heart of the story is a revolution for Lunar independence – a revolt led by ‘Adam Selene’ who is, in reality, Mike. The stakes for the Moon’s three million inhabitants are life and death: for 50 years, there has been a one-way flow of resources from Luna to Earth. Ice will be depleted in a few years, after which there will be catastrophe. The incompetent Lunar Authority cares only about meeting ever-higher shipment targets. This revolution is not one of convenience; it is of necessity.

Heinlein writes with a great deal of humor – Mannie is a memorable character and a keen observer of the people and circumstances around him. The book’s best feature is its creation of a plausible future: a frontier society without formal laws in which death is never more than an airlock mishap away (half of those ‘transported’ to Luna to serve out sentences do not survive their first year). At the same time, Luna is also a society that observes a cordiality and openness that is Utopian. It is a society that is free of both prejudice and disease. Because men outnumber women two-to-one, it is a society in which women have the upper hand in all relationships.

Heinlein’s Earth is also plausible. Eleven billion people in 2075 sounds about right. There has been some kind of ‘wet firecracker’ nuclear war in the past, but New York (including the Yankees), Beijing and other major cities are still there. The Sahara Desert is shrinking. To prevent another war, there is a global government that has subsumed individual nations (there is the ‘North American Directorate’ and ‘Great China’, for example). The Federated Nations, headquartered in Agra, is a colossal bureaucracy that includes the Lunar Authority. Earth in other words, has muddled through.

Where the book shows its age is in its science and, to this reader, the science becomes its undoing. Heinlein was a master of assembling first-rate technical information for his fiction and where he guessed correctly, he did very well. Lasers were little more than laboratory curiosities in 1966, yet Heinlein envisions them as industrial-grade mining tools that ‘Loonies’ convert to weapons capable of burning the antennae off spaceships. The induction catapult that delivers grain from Luna to Earth remains a technically feasible if unrealized tool.

At the same time, a central premise of the story today draws a ‘huh?’ from readers. The length of manned spaceflight in 1966 was a week and the long-term physiological effects of weightlessness or low gravity was subject to speculation. In ‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’, Heinlein writes that one of the main reason for the ineptitude and cruelty of the Lunar Authority is that, for its management and employees, theirs is a permanent exile. After a few months of Luna’s one-sixth gravity, the human body ‘forgets’ Earth and return is impossible. In 2015, the crews of the ISS routinely stay at zero gravity for a year or more with no ill effects upon their return.

Finally, 50 years of Moore’s Law have made the story creak. Luna’s telephones are stuck firmly in the 1960s, complete with party lines and too-short extension cords. It requires a substantial percentage of Mike’s considerable computational power to generate a visual image of ‘Adam Selene’ on television. Mike’s voice synthesis is achieved with what amounts to an artificial larynx. There are no integrated circuits or microprocessors, no personal computers, no internet… nothing. The world unleashed by DARPA in 1968 and Intel in 1971 never happened and their absence is glaring.

I suspect that with each passing year, technological advancements will place ‘The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress’ closer to the realm of ‘From the Earth to the Moon’. It isn’t just that we didn’t colonize the moon starting in the 1990s; Heinlein could be forgiven that leap of optimism. The sad truth it is it that absent an unforeseeable technological breakthrough, such a colony will like likely never be.

I feel as though I have lost a longtime friend. It is still a whale of a story told with elán and wonderful humor. But when I closed the book this time, I had a sense that I will not be returning to Manny, Wyoh, Professor de la Laz, and Mike. Time and reality, alas, have passed them by.

Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Then We Take Berlin, by John Lawton

Writing historical fiction – and especially a mystery – is hard. I know because I’ve tried my hand at it. Setting a mystery in the present is far easier: you just look around and record what you observe.

Going into the past requires a juggling act. On the one hand, you need a plot and characters that a contemporary audience can relate to. At the same time, you need to be true to the period about which you’re writing and, to do that, you surround yourself with mountains of facts. The third baton in this juggling act is what every mystery requires: a satisfying conclusion.

In “Then We Take Berlin”, John Lawton pulls off the first two of these requirements with an expert hand. His protagonist is John Wilfrid Holderness, aka ‘Joe Wilderness’, a Cockney ‘wide boy’ (someone who lives by his wits) whose mother is killed in the Blitz of 1940, still at a barstool with a glass of gin still in her hand. With his absentee father in the Army, Joe goes to live with his grandfather, who promptly initiates Joe into the fine art of safecracking and grand theft.

Joe is drafted at 18 in 1945, just as the war in Europe is being won. The battery of intelligence tests he has taken call him to the attention of Britain’s MI-5. Joe is a safecracker with an IQ of 160. He is also a ‘word child’ – a prodigious reader who can both remember what he has read and assemble that knowledge into patterns. Had he been born a few years earlier, Joe might have ended up at Bletchley Park. Instead, he is put through a crash course in German and Russian and sent to occupied Germany.

Thus begins the second display of Lawton’s skills. We are introduced to a Germany that, though not even 70 years in the past, seems unreal to anyone who has visited the country in the past few decades. He shows us a shattered land partitioned into sectors administered by Americans, British, French and Russians. The devastation is everywhere and one of the jobs that gets the best ration card belongs to the women who, street by street, clear the rubble of bombed-out buildings a bucket at a time. It is a country of squalor; of living quarters carved out of the basements of ruined buildings.

We also meet Nell Burkhardt, a 15-year-old girl sent by her parents in the closing months of the war to live with a relative in the country. It seems a peaceful place but, as Allied troops close in from the west, there comes a morning when the air is filled with a stench of something burning. Days later, Nell coms face to face with the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the horror of what her country has done – and the revelation that the good burghers around her knew all along what was transpiring just outside their village.

Nell, too, is a ‘word child’ with a practical knowledge of half a dozen languages. She makes herself useful to the British forces who are attempting to save those still alive in the concentration camp, but there comes a time when she feels she must return to Berlin. She makes that arduous journey, and there she meets Wilderness, who now spends part of his day interviewing Germans to determine the extent of their involvement with the Nazi party, and the balance of his time selling PX goods on the black market or burgling apartments at the behest of MI-5.

All of this is conveyed with a fine eye for detail and wonderful dialogue. Lawton details his source material at the end of the book. It is impressive – diaries and period memoirs that have been out of print for more than half a century – and Lawton has mined those sources thoroughly. I came to know the Germany of the late 1940s and the travails it went through. I also came away with a sympathy for the German people, though Lawton, through his characters, makes no attempt to lessen the madness that was unleashed by the Third Reich.

But where is the mystery? That’s the third requirement and it is, unfortunately, the weakest element of the book.

Lawton begins his story in 1963. Wilderness, now in his thirties, has left MI-5 and makes a subsistence living as a London detective. One day, he gets a call from one of his black-market buddies, an American who is now an advertising agency executive. First class tickets to New York, a private driver, and a suite at the Gramercy. His benefactor is Frank Spoleto, now grown wealthy by inventing new ways to sell the soap and cigarettes he once hustled in Berlin.

He has a job for Wilderness: $20,000 to smuggle the great aunt of a friend out of East Berlin through a tunnel the black marketers used to move good between the Western and Soviet zones back in 1948 – long before the 1961 building of the Berlin Wall. Oh, and the elderly woman’s escape will be timed to coincide with John F. Kennedy’s visit to the city, and where the President will deliver his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech.

The execution of that smuggling job concludes the book. As in any good mystery, nothing is entirely as it seems but Lawton leaves the story pointedly unfinished. I felt cheated and more than a little let down after such a great run-up.

After reading the book, I learned that Lawton intends to build a series around Wilderness. Perhaps his next book will pick up where “Then We Take Berlin” ends. The book is sufficiently impressive that I’ve ordered the first of his ‘Inspector Troy’ series, which is also set in 1940s London.

Despite that last-minute letdown, this is an impressive book. The characters are wonderful and the history is top-notch. I have a few quibbles – especially writing Russian using the Cyrillic alphabet without providing a translation – but they pale beside the quality of the story-telling. Read this book.
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Neal Sanders is the author of eight mysteries. His “The Accidental Spy” is set in 1967.




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I wrote The Garden Club Gang in 2010. It was a story about four ‘women of a certain age’ who, each for their own very good reasons, choose to break the law; something they would never do under any other circumstances. Not to give away anything that you don’t learn on page 1, they rob a large New England fair of its daily gate; so the question isn’t ‘whodunit’ but, rather, are ‘the ladies’ going to get away with it?

It was a fun book to write and it struck a respondent chord with readers. They related to my four protagonists, liked their pluck and determination, and found the conclusion very satisfying. But surprisingly – at least to me – less than a week after the book was published, I received my first query: what are ‘the ladies’ going to do next?’
At first I laughed off the question. I had written a stand-alone book. I had no further plans for Alice, Jean, Eleanor and Paula. Besides, what were they going to do? Rob another fair? And, besides, I was already well into another manuscript. But, in a matter of months, I had a chorus of readers asking when the sequel to The Garden Club Gang would be out.

And so I did what human nature dictates: I started toying with a sequel. I thought about sending my ladies on a trip to England where they could get into mischief. I started writing an outline about one of them needing a heart transplant and not being able to pay for it.

Here is a secret admission about writers: as they write, they hear the voices of their characters. When things are going really well, those characters offer their own lines and suggest plot points. My problem was that my characters were saying, “Get me out of this crummy story” and “I would never say that.” I stopped trying to force a second book and, for two years, I just smiled and said, “I’m working on it” whenever I was asked about the book I was calling The Return of the Garden Club Gang.

Occasionally, when I’m looking for inspiration, I go back and read my own stuff and, early last year, I re-read The Garden Club Gang. When I got to the final paragraphs of the book, it was as though there had been this enormous clue hiding in plain sight. Samantha, the insurance investigator who discovers ‘the ladies’ identity and then helps them hide their crime, is having lunch with Eleanor, one of the members of the gang. Samantha describes her latest case, which is about suspected insurance fraud at a car dealership. She muses, “I can’t prove anything. What I need to do is get someone on the inside…”

There it was: the rationale for a second installment. The ladies weren’t going to commit another crime. They were going to atone for their robbery by doing good deeds.

As it turns out, I was also shopping for a new car that spring. I hate the games that dealers play. I read up on all the tactics and gritted my teeth. By the time I had the new car in hand, I had invented the Pokrovsky car empire: patriarch ‘Smilin’ Al’, a nasty piece of work with a carefully cultivated philanthropic image, and Al Junior, his not-so-bright son.

But I also had another story to tell. One of the great thing about garden clubs is that they bridge generations. There may be members in their twenties and members in their eighties. Everyone gets to know everyone else because of a shared love of gardening. And, inevitably, members pass away. In mid-February, I had attended a memorial service for a wonderful lady who was a longtime stalwart of the Medfield Garden Club. She died at 94 in a very nice nursing home where she lived with her husband. Somewhat surprisingly, the service was held in the nursing home. There, I had the opportunity to meet her children, who were all in their 60s.

On the way home from the service, one of those commercials came on the radio about “saving your assets from the nursing home.” I usually tune those out or change the station but, this time, I listened. “The nursing home wants your assets!” the announcer intoned. And a plot began to form in my head.

What would happen if a 93-year-old member of a garden club suffered a heart attack and died in a nursing home? What if one of the members of the Garden Club Gang, attending the memorial service, overheard a fragment of an odd conversation? What if a grandchild – an adult herself – knew that her grandmother wanted to move out of the nursing home, and thought that foul play might be involved. And, what if that grandchild sought out another of the members of the Garden Club Gang and asked for advice on how to proceed. That just might work.

Deadly Deeds opens four months after the events of The Garden Club Gang, Al, Junior gets caught red-handed as he tries to torch eighteen unsaleable cars and blame it on eco-terrorism. He’s caught because Jean, Alice, Eleanor and Paula went undercover and documented the illegal things he was doing, just as Samantha Ayer suggested at the end of The Garden Club Gang. Why did they agree to go undercover? Because they’re trying to do good deeds to make amends for that robbery.

And so, having successfully gone undercover to root out a car dealer’s misdeeds, they’ll go undercover at an upscale nursing home to see if their friend’s death was “because it was her time”, or if someone killed her. They’ll investigate those ‘save your assets’ firms as well as how nursing homes make money. More goods deed.

But there’s a saying that ‘no good deed goes unpunished’. That’s where the story gets interesting. ‘The ladies’ are going to find that ‘Smilin’ Al’ doesn’t take kindly to having his reputation ruined, even if it was his own son who was responsible for the damage. He’s out for revenge. And, the ladies will also find that, their invisibility aside, as they investigate their friend’s death, they’re coming to the attention of someone who has a lot to hide.

As in all my books, I did considerable research before I started writing Deadly Deeds. I resurrected the nursing home and health care research I did on behalf of an elderly aunt for whom I was guardian and went deeper into the economics of nursing homes and of the legal basis for the asset protection programs you see advertised. At their heart is this central conundrum: Medicaid reimbursements don’t begin to cover the cost of providing quality nursing home care, which averages more than $100,000 a year. Yet, by law, nursing homes cannot offer different levels of care to Medicaid and private pay residents. Does that mean private-pay patients are being significantly overcharged so that everyone gets equal care? When someone on the radio or cable television says they’re going to “save your assets”, what they’re saying is that they’re going to turn you into a Medicaid case so that your nursing home bill is picked up by the government. Is there an unwritten code at work in nursing homes that Medicaid residents receive care equal to government reimbursement?

Deadly Deeds is not intended as an indictment of asset depletion programs, but everything on the laundry list of legal maneuvers that will be proposed for one of the Gang by a ‘save-your-assets-from-the-nursing-home’ firm is very real. It inevitably raises the question of ‘who benefits’ the most. I hope most readers will come away from the book with a strong belief that unbiased professional advice is an elderly person’s best protection.

When Alexandre Dumas wrote The Count of Monte Cristo in 1844, he almost certainly did not have thirteen-year-old American boys in mind as his prime audience. But when I first read the classic in the summer of 1963, I knew for certain that I, too, was living the horror of Edmond Dantes life. Dantes, a good and innocent man, was cruelly implicated in treason by three friends who envied Dantes’ pending ship captaincy and marriage to the beautiful Mercedes. Dantes is sent to the notorious Chateau d’If by Villefort when the prosecutor discovers that a letter Dantes was carrying was to be delivered to Villefort’s father, a secret Bonapartist.

My own predicament was only slightly less dire than that of Dantes. I was being cruelly imprisoned for the summer in the home of my aunt, great aunt and grandmother, five hundred miles from my friends who were experiencing the joy of the beach and girls in bikinis every single day. I empathized with Dantes even if I secretly knew that I would be freed at the end of August in time for the new school year.

Decades later, I had passed the phase of devouring 19th Century classics. My tastes ran more to things like, say, the BBC’s Jeeves and Wooster. The writing was inspired, the humor classic. Alexandre Dumas? Old school. Very old school. Then, last year, while browsing my local library’s book sale, I picked up a copy of Stephen Fry’s 2000 novel, Revenge. I was vaguely aware that Fry, best known in America for films such as Peter’s Friends and Gosford Park, was also a writer, but I had never read any of his works.

When I picked up Revenge last week and started reading the book, it took me about sixty pages to realize that I was immersed in The Count of Monte Cristo. The story line has been updated (the action begins in 1980 rather than 1813). Ned Maddstone is seventeen, Oxford-bound, head boy at his private school, and head over heels in love with Portia whom he met at a Hard Rock Café in London. But his very success makes other around him envious, and they set out to put an obstacle in his charmed life by planting drugs on him and alerting the police.

When Maddstone is arrested, though, something else is found: a letter containing a list of names of prominent Britons together with a code phrase used by the IRA to authenticate its actions prior to acts of terror. Just as the letter being carried by Dantes was entrusted to him by his dying captain together with the letter’s whispered addressee, so Maddstone has no idea of the contents of the letter he has been given by the dying Irish captain of a boat on which he had been crewing. When Maddstone divulges the name and address of the intended recipient of the letter to the detective questioning him, wheels are set in motion to get rid of Maddstone in such a way that he will never be heard from again. Yep, same book.

The rest of the story of meticulously plotted revenge updates Dumas with late twentieth century trappings. The role of Abbe Faria, the Italian priest and intellectual imprisoned for his political views is played by Babe, a one-time British intelligence agent who secreted away a fortune in MI-5 funds before being found out. Instead of a treasure cache on the island of Monte Cristo, the loot is in a Swiss Bank.

There are some very clever bits that underscore Maddstone’s fifteen years in captivity: he arrives in the world of 1995 never having seen a cell phone or a personal computer, and the internet is beyond his comprehension. But none of this detracts from the awful reality that Ned Maddstone was deprived of his life. He is now fabulously wealthy and knows who set him up for the horror he has endured. He sets out to exact that retribution.

Fry departs from Dumas’s story only at the end. I’m still pondering if it is better ending or simply one with a modern sensibility. Perhaps it is something in Fry’s character that he chose the denoument that he did.

All this is my way of saying that this is a good book. Yes, it is more than a decade old, probably sold poorly in America, and is likely out of print. But I note it is available in a Kindle edition. I read it in two days and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Reading a Carl Hiaasen novel is a lot like watching a master pool player put nine balls into a rack, then casually chalk his cue. When he’s ready, he lines up his shot and then expertly smacks that little white cue ball into the other nine. You never know which balls are going to go where, and guessing isn’t going to help. What you want to do is just sit back and watch the master run the board.

‘Bad Monkey’ is Carl Hiaasen at his best. The satire flows in every paragraph, the word choices (and especially the adjectives) convey Hiaasen’s justifiable contempt for a large swath of humanity. Like me, Hiaasen is a native Floridian and, also like me, he is appalled by what greed and empty-minded boosterism has done to the state. When Hiaasen sits down to write, you can be reasonably certain that there are crooked politicians and avaricious developers among the cast of characters. There is also frequently a hurricane. Readers of this book will not be disappointed on any of those counts.

That pool rack of humanity in ‘Bad Monkey’ includes an honest cop who was fired from the Miami PD for being honest, a Bahamian voodoo queen, a fugitive former school teacher from Kansas who is not quite firing on all cylinders, a coroner with a taste for sex in unusual places, a Bahamas man whose home has been sold out from underneath him, a widow who has to conjure up thoughts of her squashed turtle to generate tears for her recently deceased husband, and a capuchin monkey named Driggs who may or may not have had a cameo appearance in Pirates of the Caribbean.

The cue ball that Hiassen drives into this group is the discovery of a human arm, hauled in by a couple from Wisconsin honeymooning in the Florida Keys. Had the arm been landed in Miami, it would have been tossed in with the hundreds of other limbs that accumulate annually from drug deals gone bad or other illegal misadventures. And so as not to tarnish the Keys’ reputation as a wholesome family destination, Andrew Yancey of the Monroe County sheriff’s department (and late of the Miami PD) is tasked with foisting the arm on Miami’s law enforcement establishment.

Thus begins a wonderful tale of good intentions – and not-so-good ones – gone horribly awry. There are no saints in this story (Hiaasen has no use for them). Yancey has been busted from the Monroe County force for wielding a powerful hand vacuum as an extremely dangerous weapon. His punishment is to become a restaurant inspector, and Hiaasen’s description of what Yancey finds in the course of his new job may put readers off dining out for an extended period.

Part of the pleasure of reading Hiaasen is learning about things. ‘Bad Monkey’ provides a tutorial on Medicare fraud, ocean flycasting, the Dead Sailfish Scam, and the inner workings of the simian mind, among other tidbits of knowledge.

The fun is in watching these individual story threads develop and play themselves out. As a reader, you know they’re going to merge; you just don’t know how, when, or with what result.




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