Food and music prominent in Bay Area authors’ whodunits
The Bay Area is home to great food, fabulous scenery, a mild climate and expensive real estate. It is also home to writers who find mysteries an outlet for their storytelling talent.
“A Measure of Murder” (Crooked Lane Books, $25.99, 336 pages) is Leslie Karst’s second book featuring restaurateur Sally Scolari. Karst, who divides her time between Santa Cruz and Hilo, Hawaii, was an attorney before turning to fiction.
She has created a rounded portrait of a woman faced with a big challenge. To Karst’s credit, she makes the different threads readable and believable.
Solari works in her family’s eponymous Italian restaurant while trying to develop Gauguin, the more upscale restaurant she recently inherited.
She also joins a local chorus, motivated by a chance to sing the Mozart Requiem. Then one of the tenors takes a header out of a window in the church where the choir meets, and Solari thinks the police were too quick to call it an accident.
Trying to balance choir practice and auditions with her two restaurant gigs and her amateur sleuthing is a tough job. Mostly it works, although there’s a chunk where not much happens except for Solari discussing what she’s learned with one character or another.
It will be worth seeing what she does next.
Susan Shea of Marin County looks abroad to the traditional English village mystery, this time set in France in “Love and Death in Burgundy” (Minotaur, $24.99, 272 pages).
Village mysteries have a long and honored tradition in England, going back to Miss Marple and her not-so-mundane life in St. Mary Mead.
Shea sets her tale in Reigny-SurCanne, not the most hospitable spot for English expats.
Katherine Goff, an artist, is sufficiently fluent in French to carve out a little place in the village, which is xenophobic in general and anti-German in particular. Katherine’s husband, Michael, is focused on revitalizing his moribund music career. Other characters include a light-fingered local girl and a visiting teenage boy whose father is a record producer.
A lunch at Katherine’s goes awry when an elderly German-born aristocrat crashes the party to confront a young man-about-town who formerly courted his daughter. Then the old man falls down an ancient staircase in his castle. When the police seem to do little, Katherine decides to help out — or meddle — in the case.
All of the characters have feelings about the old man, from the matriarch of the villagers, who suspects the victim committed some World War II skulduggery, to neighbors unsure of their own place in the village hierarchy.
The book is the first in a projected series. It suffers from characters that readers won’t care much about, and the interesting background doesn’t quite compensate. Perhaps it is not fair to compare it to Miss Marple, but writers of village mysteries have a high bar to hurdle.
Alan Chandler, the protagonist of “The RagTime Traveler” (Poisoned Pen Press, $15.95, 299 pages), is a terminally ill ragtime music expert whose world is that of music aficionados, particularly anything to do with Scott Joplin, the widely admired king of ragtime. The authors are a father-son duo. (The late Larry Karp lived in Seattle, son Casey lives in San Francisco.)
In the book, Chandler is drawn to Sedalia, Missouri, by the possible discovery of some never-seen Joplin music. Here’s the kicker: He appears to be traveling back in time to Joplin’s era. It is never clear if these sections are hallucinations brought on by his powerful anti-cancer drugs or events that are really happening.
This makes it possible to enjoy the story, and its rich musical background, without necessarily buying the whole timetravel thing.
The characters are well wrought, and Chandler’s relationship with his grandson Tom shows the power of the music extending to yet another generation.
Set in the early 1950s, “The Quiet Child” (William Morrow, $15.99, 304 pages) is a dark story about a family in a town called Cottonwood, struggling with devastating health problems. Author John Burley is an emergency room physician in San Francisco.
With two young sons, the McCray family faces blame and suspicion as their youngest, 6-year-old Danny, doesn’t speak. Danny’s silent existence troubles the entire town. As more and more townspeople fall ill, they focus their growing fears and anxiety on Danny,
Michael McCray, while he loves his family, fears the town may be right. Then, his sons are kidnapped, and the fearmongering gets worse. Minor mention is made of a nearby chemical plant. In 2017, it seems likely emissions from the plant are to blame for the illnesses.
The search for the boys is intense and overlaid by the fear that Danny is indeed evil.
Unfortunately, McCray makes some poor decisions, so the ending is disappointing and disturbing.