Murder Past Due

Murder Past Due by Miranda James

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Maine Coons seem to be popular cats in fiction these days. This was a cozy whodunnit featuring a librarian and his Maine Coon cat. While the amateur detective's library skills were key to his ability to help solve the mystery, the Maine Coon cat was not. I expect the cat in a feline mystery series to be integral to the plot. Take the cat out of Murder Past Due, and you still have the exact same story.



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The Potter's Field

The Potter's Field nestles into the category of comfortable detective story that titillates just enough to keep the reader interested, but throughout reaffirms warm, safe, hearth and home values.  Although this was the first Brother Cadfael novel I've ever read, it is actually book 18 of 21 in a series that definitively ended with the death of the author, Edith Pargeter (Ellis Peters is a pseudonym).  

Pargeter was an accomplished historian and linguist.  Any hopes I had of language playing a role in the mystery were disappointed.  However, the detective plot is inseparable from its historical setting, and that inseparability is a hallmark of how successfully Pargeter blended mystery and historical fiction.

Certainly this Brother Cadfael novel pales next to it's monastic medieval mystery cousin, The Name of the Rose.  But taken for what it is, The Potter's Field is a pleasant, logically satisfying, and harmless read.

The Potter's Field is currently unavailable on amazon.com in either print or Kindle format.  The audio book is available at audible.com. 

The Silver Pigs

I didn't need Wikipedia to verify that Lindsey Davis, author of the The Silver Pigs, was born in England. Davis writes with distinctly British class-conscious humor. Like Terry Pratchett and China Miéville, Davis builds deliciously complex worlds teeming with distinctive characters and defined by social stratification. And, of course, his protagonist of choice comes does not come from the upper echelons of society.

The main difference between Davis and his spec fiction counterparts is that Davis isn't writing about a fantasy world, but is writing about Ancient Rome. In The Silver Pigs, protagonist Falco is the ancient version of a private eye. Falco has a lot in common with the Maltese Falcon-era private eye. His landlord is hounding him for the rent, a damsel in distress is seriously complicating his life, and his devotion to the case is going to force him into slave labor and freezing-cold deprivation in an ancient British mine. Oh, wait...I guess that last part is just Falco.

I am not an expert in the history of Ancient Rome. But having recently read Empires of Trust-- How Rome Built-- and America is Building-- a New World (Thomas F. Madden) I can verify that Davis got certain details about life in Ancient Rome correct. The attitude of Ancient Romans toward Ancient Greeks, for instance, was depicted by Davis just as Madden described it- somewhat the way Americans traditionally view the French as very intellectual and a little snobby. So, as with all truly fun mystery stories, the reader not only enjoys a good who-dunnit, but learns a little about an interesting topic at the same time- in this case, about life in the ancient world.

The Silver Pigs the first in a series of 19 (to date) Marcus Didius Falco mysteries. The Silver Pigs ranks #34,931 in Books on Amazon. There is no Kindle version available. However, Davis's most recent book in the series, Alexandria, is available on the Kindle. Alexandria ranks #2,674 in the Kindle store, and #4,876 in Books.

SF and mystery mags now available on Kindle

Dell Publications has joined Amazon's Kindle subscription list. Now you can subscribe to Asimov's and Analog on the Kindle. For mystery lovers, Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen are also available.