The queen of the cozy mystery pens another suspense-filled delight

A “Florida Writers” Review by Phil Jason

Easter Hair Hunt, by Nancy J. Cohen. Orange Grove Press. 304 pages. Trade paperback $14.99.

Family, friends, and community – that’s what Ms. Cohen’s novels are all about, just as much as they are about crime and its detection. The blend is intoxicating. This latest addition to her Bad Hair Day mystery series is bound to please her large body of readers. Her main character, hair salon owner Marla Vail, once again finds herself running into a crime that she can’t help investigating. After all, when good friend “Blinky” Morris, last seen in an Easter bunny suit during an Easter egg hunt, is suddenly missing, and the bunny suit is found worn by a corpse, what would any self-respecting amateur sleuth do?

Though Ms. Cohen’s narrative takes us to many locations, by far the main setting is Tremayne Manor, a restored, privately owned historic mansion. Blinky, her friend and customer, had agreed to meet her there.

The owner of the mansion, Lacey Tremayne, had turned the estate into a business – a venue for special events like the Easter egg hunt for children with an accompanying fundraiser. The mansion is filled with gorgeous and tempting objets d’art collections. Marla suspects that the expense of purchasing and maintaining this showplace required that it become an income producer as well as a private residence.

There are signs that the balance sheet is on the negative side. In part, this is because the staff is rather large. However, there are signs that money is not being handled well. Could there be some crooked employees? Would any of these speculations shed light on Blinky’s disappearance or on the murder of the person found garbed in Blinky’s bunny suit?

Marla’s husband, police detective Dalton Vail, is soon on both cases: the murder and the disappearance. As ever, he is respective of Marla’s investigative skills while concerned about her safety, especially as she is now in the late stages of pregnancy with their first child.

Soon enough, there are signs of items missing as well as rare items having been replace my imitations. Marla finds her way of asking productive questions, even if they sometimes become accusatory. She thinks out loud with her friends, testing theories about means, motive, and opportunities of staff members and others who are frequently at the mansion. These include Lacey’s secretive son Daniel; Steve, the person who heads up security; the café manager; the beekeeper, those who attend to the estate’s copious plantings; Heather the head docent to oversees tours of the mansion; and many others.

That’s a lot of interviewing to do without getting people upset, but Marla holds her own when the conversation gets testy. Suspense? There is plenty of it, and the suspense thermometer heats up the investigations (both Marla’s and Dalton’s) uncover more and mores surprises.

By the way, there is a second murder.

Marla’s characteristically busy life is complicated by several other concerns beyond her pregnancy. Her mother Anita’s remarriage is pending, Marla will organize much of the Easter holiday feasting, and – don’t you know – she has a business to run. She also has become a kind of second mother to Dalton’s teenage daughter Brianna.

Marla is connected to so many people in so many ways. She is a nexus in the world of her South Florida suburban community, and through her Ms. Cohen brings that imaginary Broward County community fully to life.

In what has become a hallmark of cozy mystery writing, of which Nancy J. Cohen is the undisputed queen, readers will find a lot about preparing food, including an appendix of recipes.

Titles in Ms. Cohen’s “Bad Hair Day” series have been named Best Cozy Mystery by Suspense Magazine, won a Readers’ Favorite gold medal and a RONE Award, placed first in the Chanticleer International Book Awards and third in the Arizona Literary Awards. Nancy’s instructional guide, Writing the Cozy Mystery, was nominated for an Agatha Award, won first place in the Royal Palm Literary Awards and the TopShelf Magazine Book Awards and a gold medal in the President’s Book Awards. Active in the writing community, Nancy has served as president of Florida Romance Writers and Mystery Writers of America Florida Chapter. When not busy writing, she enjoys cooking, fine dining, cruising, and visiting Disney World.

Note: This review was accepted for publication by Florida Weekly,  in my “Florida Writers'” column, but FW has stopped using many freelancers, including yours truly. “Florida Writers” reviews, like this one, will continue to appear on this blog from time to time. 

“The Interpreter: A Novel,” by A. J. Sidransky

• Black Opal Books. 324 pp. Trade Paperback  $14.99

• Reviewed by Philip K. Jason
• published March 25, 2020

An unrepentant Nazi harbors key information about the whereabouts of a Holocaust survivor’s long-lost love.

 The Interpreter, the first installment in A.J. Sidransky’s “Justice” series, is a highly original look at the dimensions and consequences of the Holocaust that is at once emotionally devastating and technically impressive. It’s a work of fiction based on factual elements in the life of the author’s extended family.

The story of Kurt Berlin, and the Jewish Berlin family, needed to be told, and Sidransky fashions it as a testimony to the resilience of survivors and the demonic cruelty of Hitler’s regime and its brutal, sadistic culture.

The novel has two timelines. One takes readers into Vienna in 1939, focusing on Kurt as a sensitive and intelligent youngster in his teens. The other, which alternates with the first, presents an older and almost totally devastated Kurt in 1945 Brussels. While other locations come briefly into play, these two dominate.

Vienna in 1939 is reeling from the Anschluss of the year before, the annexation by Hitler of Austria into the now-expanded German nation. This forced union changed the game for Austrians, especially Austrian Jews, who had their heads in the sand. The future of a Greater Germany under Nazi rule stems from this early step.

In the Vienna chapters, the author follows the struggles of Kurt and his parents, Hertz and Berta, as they pass through the crippling of European Jewry. They accumulate resources to bribe petty officials and malleable non-Jewish neighbors; they shape and solidify Aryan identities; and they strive to arrange transport away from the hell that Europe is becoming.

The detail in these chapters is stunning. How does Hertz, who wears a Nazi armband, manage to pass himself off as the Reich’s new representative to the Dominican Republic? Largely, it’s through the simple ploy of dressing well.

Sidransky

Young Kurt has a special concern. His girlfriend, Elsa, though seemingly protected in a monastery, is still subject to great peril. Should he stay behind to be with her, or should he try to leave with his parents and other relatives?

The 1945 timeline conveys the immediate postwar situation in Brussels. Kurt is six years older than when we last encountered him in transit to a new life and U.S. citizenship. The American military is looking for ways to counter the Soviet push toward world dominance. Both the U.S. and Russia are seizing upon incarcerated Nazis with special abilities. It’s a strange competition.

Kurt, because of his superb language skills, is assigned as an interpreter for this project. Colonel McClain is the head of his task group. The selected prisoner, no doubt one of many, is Joachim von Hauptmann, an unrepentant, Jew-hating Nazi who seeks to make a deal. He has information as his bargaining chip. . . .

To read the entire review, as it appear in the Washington Independent Review of Books, click here:

White’s Doc Ford has been called an “enduring hero.” Long may he endure

Review by Phil Jason (accepted for publication in Florida Weekly, but freelancers like me are on forced hiatus)

Salt River, by Randy Wayne White. Putman. 368 pages. Hardcover $27.00.

Several centers of interest intertwine to provide an engaging addition to the Doc Ford series. This 26^th contribution to the series, coming two years after “Caribbean Rim,” shows that Mr. White has not lost his touch and is still among the elite thriller writers in the nation. 

Readers new to Randy Wayne White (hereafter RWW) need to know just a few things about his Doc Ford character. Doc is a marine biologist with an independent practice. He works, off and on, for a beyond top secret government agency. He is a skilled and avid fisherman with a love of boats and great skills of navigation and employment of shipboard gadgetry. He has an on and off romance with a female fishing guide, the beautiful and independent Hannah Smith (title character of four RWW novels). He has a middle-aged hippy-type friend named Tomlinson.  He loves his home territory of Florida’s Sanibel Island. He’s good with guns.

So what’s happening in “Salt River?” Doc has recently found himself in the possession of a horde of rare Spanish coins that he has wrestled away from disreputable treasure hunter. Shady government employees, one of them is IRS agent Leo Alomar and the other a Nassau customs agent Rayvon Darwin, “a mobster in uniform,” are looking for the leverage that will make Doc want to “share” his treasure. Doc’s skill set, we must assume, is up to the task of avoiding any traps set by these unscrupulous men.

Tomlinson has discovered that his youthful adventure “donating” to a for-profit sperm bank has created a growing family of young adults with Tomlinson DNA. These offspring have found each other and are looking for more siblings. They are planning an event at which daddy Tomlinson will get to know them. It’s not clear just what the motive of each happens to be. Tomlinson is particularly concerned about the motives of Deville, one of the young men.

Randy Wayne White Photo by Brian Tietz

One of Tomlinson’s seed, a beautiful young woman named Delia, makes a play for Doc’s attention and more. She knows how close Doc and Tomlinson have been for many years, and she has a dose of emotional instability that is dangerous to herself and to Doc. She can tease, she can attract sympathy, she is vulnerable, and she is also ashamed of her propensities.

Doc better be careful, especially as his relationship with Hannah Smith is not going as he would like. He fathered Hannah’s child and is working hard, and effectively, to prove himself a good father to their young son, who lives with Hannah. But Hannah is leary of Doc’s behavior. Too often he must fabricate stories to cover his disappearances when called to duty by that clandestine agency. Hannah knows when he’s fibbing. Delia’s presence doesn’t help matters.

RWW’s books do a fine job of mixing the familiar with the less familiar. He makes the Dinken’s Bay Marina setting in SW Florida an attractive place to live and work. The lifestyle is casual, the friendships pleasurable. Readers can watch Doc in his laboratory, housed at the marina, as he works on his scientific projects. His friend Mack runs the marina with a sure hand, keeping things dependably relaxing.

Mr. White paints this little world of fishermen and boaters with indelible hues. Sometimes danger shows up at or near the marina, but most often the danger is somewhere else and for one reason or another Doc is driven to contend with it.

RWW’s fans expect to be exposed to interesting locals in the SW Florida area and also the Caribbean islands. His secret life takes him to many places, and in this novel establishing a faux identity as Morris Berg is part of the tradecraft that keeps the plot humming.

RWW draws his familiar and new characters with confidence. He makes their individual voices and speech patterns distinctive. After a while, the alert reader will know who’s talking without the names being mentioned.

Doc remains as multi-dimensional as ever. A true friend, a man of courage and varied skills. A man with the self-knowledge that leads to an appropriate humility. His future with Hannah remains cloudy. Tomlinson’s zaniness remains outlandish and a constant text for Doc’s patience.

After the two-year wait, it’s good to have Doc back and in good form.

Mystery of Lord Byron’s daughter drives fascinating historical novel

A Shadowed Fate, by Marty Ambrose. Severn House. 192 pp. Hardcover $28.99.

Reviewed by Phil Jason  (review accepted by Florida Weekly, but fate  otherwise unknown). Please enjoy.

In this second book in her series, which promises to bring a large and avid readership, Ambrose has retooled a bit, changing the name of the series from The Claire Clairemont Mysteries to the Lord Byron Mystery Series. What’s in a name? Like the earlier “Claire’s Last Secret,” secrets play a large role in the plot and the motives of the character. This one could be called Edward Trelawny’s Secret, as his decade’s long subterfuge is now confessed, explained, and teeters on the edge of being forgiven. 

Claire, the main character, from whose point of view most of the book is narrated, seems to live both in the present time (July 1873) and the much earlier time of her youth and memories (1820-21).

Claire spent much of her life as young woman hanging out with the fashionable Byron-Shelley crowd of writers along with her stepsister Mary Shelley. This young British nobility of the arts lived as expatriates in Italy. Claire had little in the way of financial resources, but as part of this fashionable crowd, which also included Edward Trelawny, she made do.

Trelawny, who wrote a biography of Byron, was her would-be lover; but for Claire, Byron was the real thing. So much so that she gave him a child, Allegra, whose fate is the central question of the story.

Marty Ambrose

In the novel’s present time, Trelawny approaches the aging Claire with a confession of sorts. He breaks promises he had made to the long-deceased Byron that suggest that Allegra, thought to have perished in the near destruction of the convent in which she had been brought up, may have survived.

Byron had placed her there for her protection. A man who had many enemies through his role in the liberation of Greece and for other reasons, he wanted to protect his daughter from those enemies. Those who might be after Allegra would also be after her mother, and, indeed, there are many signs of nefarious doings, including attempts to rob Claire of her handful of papers and artifacts that could be sold for a significant price. These include originals of some of Byron’s writings and a rare drawing. This little horde was Claire’s assurance of some income as she would need it through the remaining years her life.

Along with the fact that Ambrose’s prose captures the nature of Claire and the other characters marvelously, readers are given the opportunity to get into their heads in attractive ways. A series of passages reveal Claire reading or remembering passages from Byron’s diary. Thus. we get to know Byron. In a few strategically placed passages, we are let into Allegra’s thought as the girl living a lonely, parentless life in the convent.  Her father, who she remembers, dares not visit her.

Ambrose shapes the action so that a visit to the convent is inevitable. Claire receives promises from the leader of the institution to check records with the hope of shedding light on Allegra’s fortunes. Is she still alive but hidden and protected in some other way? Did she indeed, perish in the convent catastrophe? Is there anyone else to turn to for information? There is, however all of her traveling to find the sought-for answers seem to be journeys in which she is being watched and shadowed.

Claire’s last hopes are the convent’s superior and the woman whom Byron fell in love with after ending his relationship with Claire. Teresa, equal in age to Claire, invites Claire to visit. She proves to be one of the many finely drawn minor characters that Ambrose weaves into the story. However, the meetings between the two women, pleasant duos of sympathetic hearts and minds, bring no resolution.

Other finely drawn secondary characters include Claire’s niece Paula, whom with her lover Raphael and young daughter Georgiana constitute Claire’s household. But it is Edward Trelawny, on hand through most of the novel, and determined to prove himself to Claire, who is the most fully developed after Claire herself

If you’re a fan of history, romance, and fictional biography, Marty Ambrose will keep you fully engaged with her uniquely orchestrated and poetically cast novel. Moreover, Ambrose provides a remarkable portrait of Italy during the fifty-year stretch in which her plot about Claire’s life and aspirations develops.