Category Archives: mystery

The Osiris Ritual by George Mann

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Our favorite steampunk detectives are back in George Mann’s The Osiris Ritual. First introduced in The Affinity Bridge, Sir Maurice Newbury and his assistant Veronica Hobbes are back in the late Victorian age, where Victoria survives due to a steampunk version of an iron lung. The book does a good job building on the excitement for Egyptian artifacts (set only a couple decades before the King Tut discovery excites the world) which makes it feel like it fits into history well. So, let’s see what Newbury and Hobbes are up to.

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James Ellroy’s LA: City of Demons followup

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Is anyone else watching James Ellroy’s LA: City of Demons? Or a better question might be, why am I still watching this? The subject matter is wonderful with great clips and photos about the crime from the time. They bring out interviews with people who were involved and generally do a wonderful job covering the topics. Then what’s the problem?

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Edgar Allen Poe

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ABC greenlit an Edgar Allen Poe pilot:

The crime procedural Poe follows Edgar Allan Poe as the world’s first detective. He employs unorthodox methods to investigate dark mysteries in 1840s Boston. The project will tell how some of Poe’s famous stories came to be, but only some episodes will be about a specific Poe story.

Almost sounds like a sequel to Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye (my review)

H/T IO9

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s novel The Shadow of the Wind was a huge bestseller in his native Spain after it was published in 2001. When it was translated to English a few years later, it became a huge bestseller in the England. What the beginning of the story reminded me of was the story Calliope from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman collection Dream Country. In the story Morpheus punished a man by giving him endless ideas and one of them was a man who got a library card to the library at Alexandria. While that’s not exactly what happens here, it is very close. The book is a gothic mystery book that revolves around books and a mysterious writer whose books have been mysteriously removed from the world…except when our protagonist finds one. And what happens next?

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James Ellroy’s LA: City of Demons

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The ID network (which apparently stands for Investigative Discovery) has a new series coming out: James Ellroy’s LA: City of Demons. It starts tomorrow (1/19) night and is scheduled to run through at least the end of February. The first episode deals with The Black Dahlia (the murder, not his great book or the bad movie) and Ellroy’s mother’s murder (as well as a couple recent murders) and Ellroy is off from there with Lana Turner, Confidential Magazine, LA Police, LA Gangs and a whole lot of other things you only read about in Ellroy’s LA Quartet (and you did read them didn’t you?).

It should be a fun ride.

Sherlock Holmes: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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After watching the Sherlock BBC Miniseries (my review), I decided to re-read the original Sherlock Holmes stories. And what better one to start with than Hound of the Baskervilles. It’s an interesting book because of not only the style that it was written in, but also because Sherlock Holmes is not even in the majority of the book. That’s a challenge to any author who has a popular character, that the public is clamoring to see, and to get a hugely popular book that hides the character for large swathes of the book.

In addition, this was a missing Sherlock Holmes story. Doyle killed off Holmes in 1893 at the end of the story “The Final Problem” (collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes), and this was the first Holmes story since his death. But this story was set at a time before his death and then published in 1902. Doyle had wanted to write other things, but felt that Holmes was keeping him from doing so. This book was Doyle’s return to Sherlock Holmes and led to Holmes actually returning the following couple of years.

So, what is the mystery to be solved?

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What Alice Knew by Paula Marantz Cohen

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In yet another Jack the Ripper story,  the author of What Alice Knew, Paula Marantz Cohen has brought in an intriguing set of detectives, the James family. Author Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady), his philosopher brother William (Pragmatism and Other Writings) and the titular sister Alice (The Diary Of Alice James) are investigating the murders. By bringing in the family dynamics and their social scene (including Oscar Wilde), the story becomes about more than just Jack the Ripper. So, how is it?

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Dust City by Robert Paul Weston

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Dust City by Robert Paul Weston is a cross between Bill Willingham’s Fables and Jasper Fforde’s Jack Spratt series. Weston decided to set his mystery in the fairy tale universe and it adds an edge to the series. But it’s not nearly as good as it’s competition. Possibly I’m judging harshly since it’s a YA title, but it’s not as good as I hoped it would be. What’s it about?

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The Chicago Way by Michael Harvey

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The Chicago Way by Michael Harvey is a noirish mystery set in modern day Chicago. It attempts to integrate Chicago into the novel and making sure that real life locations are brought into the story. And, as for the title, yes Harvey does reference the Sean Connery quote from The Untouchables in the acknowledgments. So, how well does Harvey do in updating the noir novel?

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