Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl

 

I was privileged to receive a preview of Will Ferguson's latest novel Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl. Published by Goose Land Editions, the novel is a delightful twist on the buddy cop story. Superintendent Mamoru Kaito comes from Okinawa to Hateruma Island in extreme southern Japan to inspect the police operation of Officer Shimada. Mr. Ferguson describes the relationship between the younger Kaito and the nearing retirement Shimada layered with the cultural work life balance specific to Japan. The plot is driven by the search for the disappearing girl of the title who is the sister of Superintendent Kaito. 

Kaito's search for his sister Chloe is the motivation to meet Shimada and they soon set off on a "vacation" together first to Nagasaki City where she first disappeared. There are echos of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie to be heard, but my mind was drawn to Janwillem van de Wetering and his Amsterdam cops Detective-Adjutant Grijpstra and Sergeant de Gier. 

The tone of the book is wonderfully balanced, which can be a difficult task given a missing person story. I always like learning something while being entertained by a story and the descriptions of Japanese culture, police, and family dynamics really added to my knowledge of Japan. Officer Shimada and the Disappearing Girl gets my highest recommendation. 

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The Resistance Man

 The Resistance Man is the sixth book in the Bruno series by Martin Walker. I think the review I read in Audible probably best describes the intrigue that the author provided. I’m cheating by using a quote from another source, but if you’ve been following my reviews of this series, you’ll surely forgive me for taking this shortcut. I may have done this once before in the 1934 reviews that we’ve posted. I continue to be well entertained by this series. 

“It's summer in St. Denis for chief of police Bruno Courrèges, and that means a new season of cases. This time there are three weighing on his mind. First, there’s the evidence that a veteran of the French Resistance is connected to a notorious train robbery; then, the burglary of a former British spymaster's estate; and, finally, the murder of an antiques dealer whose lover is conveniently on the lam.

“As Bruno investigates, it becomes clear that they are connected--however, figuring out how will take every skill he possesses. Add in juggling the complex affections of two powerful women, maneuvering village politics, and managing his irrepressible puppy, Balzac, and Bruno has his hands full once again.”

I listened to the audiobook format which was once again narrated by the very capable Robert Ian MacKenzie. Another important reason for my enjoyment of this series which takes place in rural France is that the author skillfully ties the location of the small village and its inhabitants to past wars. Geography is an important topic in all of these books. Thus, while St. Denis is a rural village, it has not been free from traumas in the world which have left scars on its population.

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The Mogul

 

This is the 11^th R.G. Belsky book that has been reviewed in this blog, and it’s my fifth one. We have reviewed about 500 different authors, and there are only a few of them that we’ve read more than Belsky. I can say without doubt that he’s one of our favorites. The book is entitled The Mogul and the characters who wrote stories for the The Sentinel, a daily newspaper in New York City. The story takes place mostly during the 1980’s which was really the highlight era of print journalism. The Sentinel hired hundreds of reporters, and this paper had a daily subscription of one million readers. The primary protagonists were the owner of the newspaper, Billy Blaine, and the paper’s city editor, Nick Marston. Nick was already a reporter for the paper when Billy bought it. Although Billy was an unpredictable and demanding owner, he and Nick got along well until the end. It was clear that they both were willing to cut corners and manipulate the stories they were printing, all of the sake of selling papers.

Meanwhile, the private lives of both men were highly dysfunctional, especially Billy’s. We learn early on that Nick’s son was killed at the age of 18 in a traffic accident. That happened on a night that Nick was supposed to go with Sean to a Yankees game, but as he often did, Nick opted out of the game because of a story that he was working on. The death of Sean was the beginning of the end for Nick’s marriage. Meanwhile, Billy’s son, Wilson, was overly protected by his parents and given the privileges of being from a very wealthy family. Wilson had scrapes with the legal system, but good lawyers always got him out of any real punishment.

Among all the reporters was Carrie Anne Cody, a 23-year-old beauty who had just graduated from the school of journalism at Northwestern. On paper, she looked like a straight A student, although it was eventually discovered that she lied about that. Although she was being paid relatively low wages as a beginning reporter, she somehow afforded to pay rent in the most ritzy area of Manhattan. She lied about having her income subsidized by her wealthy father and she really wanted nothing to do with her parents. Both Nick and Wilson found her presence to be entrancing.

The principal characters in this book were believable and three-dimensional. The reader learns that Carrie Anne Cody knew that Billy was running illegal schemes to support his extravagant life style, and she knew that Nick was going along with Billy’s illegal schemes. It became her goal to bring them both to public shame and bankruptcy. Carrie Anne was writing a novel that would expose Billy’s schemes. Meanwhile, she sought information about the business dealings of The Sentinel, and she was willing to do anything to get the information she wanted. As the book progressed, we learned the remarkable origins of Billy’s past relationships and how that tied into Carrie Anne’s history.

The plot is very well-developed, and the reader is not given enough information until the end of the book to know who it was that killed her. The ending to this story is most cleverly revealed. The pace of the story was fantastic. I read it in only two sittings on consecutive days. Given my reading of Belsky’s prior books, I expected to be totally entertained, and this work did not disappoint.

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The Devil's Cave

 The Devil’s Cave is the fifth book in the Bruno series by Martin Walker. If you’ve been following my reviews of the first four books in this 21-novel series, you’ll know I’m hooked, and yes, I’ve already downloaded the sixth book, all of which I’ve enjoyed in audiobook format by the excellent narrator Robert Ian MacKenzie. This book opens with a dead woman floating down a river towards St. Denis. The formerly beautiful woman was lying face up for the world to see her nakedness. Her identity was the first mystery in the story. Then there were the satanic symbols that marked her body.

Complicating the story was a domestic physical abuse case, the promise of a high end real estate development that just might keep this small town afloat (unlike so many countryside towns which had been abandoned), and the return of the Red Countess who had a long and very controversial history dating back to before WWII.

Once again, the author Martin Walker has provided an excellent plot with the further development of the usual cast of characters, Bruno, Isabelle, Pamela, J.J., the Baron, and the news photographer. Importantly, a new basset hound Balzac is introduced along with Hector, Bruno’s horse. I am fully entertained by these stories.

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The Crowded Grave

 The Crowded Grave by Martin Walker is the fourth book in the Bruno, Chief of Police series. Once again, the skillful narrator was Robert Ian MacKenzie. As usual, while focusing on the idyllic St. Denis in France’s Perigord region, which is in a westerly central very rural area of the country, Walker brings in significant outside forces. In this case it was a French-Spanish summit being held there while being threatened by Basque separatists. At the same time, an outside animal rights group was descending on St. Denis because this was the region that produced nearly all of the foie gras that was consumed in France and was exporting that worldwide. They were demonstrating against the force feeding of geese to produce this product. Also, there was the discovery of a prehistoric grave in which a man, woman, and child were found, huddling with one another. There was an archaeological dig going on there, and at this same site, a 20-year-old murder victim was discovered. It was thought he had been involved in the Basque-separatist movement. Walker skillfully moves his protagonist and antagonists in and out of the issues in St. Denis and the world at large.

Bruno continued to be admired by most of the local citizens, and his culinary skills and taste in wines were described in detail. He was a single man who continued to struggle with making a choice among the women who he was seeing. The plot was well developed, and the characters that surrounded Bruno were three-dimensional, and this reader found them to be struggling with their own emotions. In other words, I found myself caring about them. I won’t detail it here, but there is a heart-breaking end to one of the important characters in the series.

In searching for the author in this blog, I found that ECD had previously reviewed a book by Walker. Pointing out one of the differences between the reviewers was that ECD was not drawn to the focus of life in the Perigord, while I (WCD) was enamored by it. ECD reviewed The Coldest Case, the 14^th book in the series. I expect that I’ll eventually read these books in order, so it will be a while until I get to that particular Bruno story.

The Bruno series – my advice is to keep reading.

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The Equation: The Secret They Don't Want You to Know

 The Equation is a future dystopian story written by Ivan Carl. The protagonist is Nathan Brooks, a graduate student whose beloved professor, Adrian Holt, was murdered. The timing of the book was at least a couple hundred years in the future, probably even further ahead. Governments were no longer as we know them today. Rather, there are a group of people who make decisions that affect everyone on the planet. They believed that humans needed to be managed. It is their goal to keep everyone working harder and harder, not ever to attain contentment. It is their belief that those who were content were a threat to the society that they had created. It was Holt who developed an equation that represented that circumstance. The equation was C= H+W/T, or contentment equal health plus wealth divided by time. Holt was murdered by the conspirators known as The Continuum because they thought if Holt’s finding were published, it would lead to their undoing.

Holt left Nathan some obscure clues that he was able to follow. Then he was joined by Lucia who had worked on behalf of the Continuum for 12 years, either killing or discrediting various people who wanted to challenge the Continuum. When Nathan appeared on the scene, she had a change of heart. Lucia felt guilty about her skilled help to suppress whatever the Continuum wanted shut down. At the risk of her own life, she decided to become Nathan’s partner since she knew just how the Continuum would track him. Hiding from them was impossible. As Nathan and Lucia worked to find data that would support their views, it was Lucia who said of the Continuum, “They’re protecting their own relevance. Their own power. The system doesn’t fear chaos. It fears sufficiency. Because sufficient people don’t need to be managed.”

I actually tried to enjoy this book, but I could not reach an understanding of why contentment or sufficiency were such a danger. There were parts of the book that hit me as being redundant, but the conspiracy to control by keeping people in the dark about the value of their work simply did not seem so dire. On the one hand, Carl was also writing about the world we live in now in which I see people working 80 hours a week to just get ahead in life, but they never quite reach satisfying lives. Certainly there are people alive today who work so hard the lives they lead are actually very unfulfilling, but by the 50% mark of the book, I was simply uninterested in reading any more. While I was quite sorry to see that Holt had been killed and that Nathan’s life was also in danger, the story just never actually gripped me in a way that I expect from a god book. I doubt that my opinion will be universal – the book just wasn’t for me.

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Black Diamond

 Black Diamond is the third novel in the Bruno, Chief of Police series by Martin Walker. See the reviews of the first two books which I've written recently. Once again, the narrator is the wonderful voice of Robert Ian MacKenzie. I’ve obviously gotten hooked by the team work of Walker and MacKenzie, so I’ve already gotten the next two books. I suppose you could read the books out of order or to consider them stand alone books, but I think reading them in the order of publication is very entertaining as the reader has a chance to learn about Bruno and his cohorts in the order the author intended.

As we learn more about the delightful life in rural France, we learn a lot about their cuisine and their wines, all of which seem to be more important to Bruno than many of the murder mystery characters that I’ve read in the past. In this book Bruno, a single man, continues his romantic entanglements, and it is clear that he loves life in St. Denis as much as anything else. One of his favorite culinary treats are truffles, and Walker spends some time explaining how they are best prepared. As the Chinese have discovered truffles, the value of them has increased several fold. It’s the truffle market that provides the scene for one of Bruno’s friends. Bruno is determined to solve that crime. The continued development of Bruno’s character and the cast that surrounds him is most enjoyable. The unfolding of the plot is done perfectly. Just planned to get hooked on this series the way I have. The next two books which I'll start shortly are The Crowded Grave and The Devil’s Cave. 

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