The Edgar Awards 2020

Congratulations to this year's nominees for Edgar Awards!

Best Novel:

Fake Like Me by Barbara Bourland
The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths (our review)  -- the winner
The River by Peter Heller (our review)
Smoke and Ashes by Abir Mukherjee
Good Girl, Bad Girl by Michael Robotham (our review)


Best First Novel by an American Author:

My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim  -- the winner
The Good Detective by John McMahon (our review)
The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott
Three-Fifths by John Vercher
American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson (our review)


Best Paperback Oirginal:

Dread of Winter by Susan Alice Bickford
Freedom Road by William Lashner
Blood Relations by Jonathan Moore
February's Son by Alan Parks
The Hotel Neversink by Adam O'Fallon Price (our review)  -- the winner
The Bird Boys by Lisa Sandin (our review)

Please see the Mystery Writers of American's website for more categories and nominees: http://www.theedgars.com/nominees.html

The Edgar banquet is scheduled for April 30, 2020, in New York City, at which time the winners will be announced.

As we review more of these titles, links will be provided.

Message into the ether

Sometimes MBTB just tosses a message into the air, hoping whoever needs to see it will see it.

Walter "Cool Walt" Satterthwait was more than a mystery writer to some of us at MBTB (Portland). We went to Reed College in Portland with him. He earned his sobriquet there because, well, he was cool.

We were thrilled when he got his mystery books published. There were five books in his Joshua Croft series, set in Santa Fe. There were three in his Pinkerton agent series. There were standalones and a couple of Lizzie Borden books. (One of his works was edited by the redoubtable Sarah Caudwell.)

In the end, Walt struggled to write as various ailments overtook him. Many fans, friends, and fellow writers contributed to a GoFundMe account to let Walt finish what he knew would be his last book amongst the inspiring scenery of Greece. Alas, his stay did not last long, as medical needs sent him back to the U.S. In the end, he was still trying to write, still trying to communicate with the group of people who continued to call and write him.

MBTB's Jill Hinckley wrangled his electronic communications, and she and her husband, Ron, talked often to him, as he lay in a care facility in Seattle.

He died on Wednesday morning. We don't know how much work he had done on his last novel, but if there is anything to say about it, we will say it.

MBTB mourns a friend, an accomplished writer, and a free spirit.

Peace, Walt.

The Blaze by Chad Dundas

G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 384 pages, $26

If you’ve got a good gimmick, (almost) all is forgiven. Chad Dundas has a good gimmick for “The Blaze.” His main character, Matthew Rose, suffered brain injury while a soldier in Baghdad. He has been returned to the U.S. without proper treatment for the amnesia that was a result of a bomb explosion. What Matthew Rose has is a pretty complete loss of who he is. Friends, family, colleagues are strangers to be met again. If they liked or loved him, he doesn’t remember. If they didn’t, he is easy prey.

After returning to live with his mother and stepfather in Florida, Matthew is too lost to seek proper treatment, to fight against government bureaucracy, to get help. He is traumatized by the war and by the loss of people he doesn’t remember but mourns anyway. Then Matthew’s father dies.

Matthew returns to Missoula, Montana, where he grew up, to attend to his father’s affairs, such as they are for a piss-poor poet and alcoholic. He meets people he should know intimately. He fakes it sometimes and at other times he admits his disability. But he senses there is something very wrong about his reaction to his hometown. He is uncomfortable. People tell him he was a sullen teenager, a boy who raged against his father, a man who abruptly left town to join the military. Even his closest friends, Georgie Porter and Scott Dorne, are at a loss to help him figure out what had soured him on the place. 

Georgie is now a reporter. She was his girlfriend for a while, but they broke each other’s hearts. His silence hurt her worst of all. As teenagers Scott and Matthew got high together, passed the time, and then parted, each no wiser than before about what the other was going through. Scott is now a janitor at the college in which his father is a professor. The connection between Matthew and his ex-friends is awkward, but they seem willing to help him solve the mystery of what happened when Matthew was a teenager.

As Matthew meets more people, he vaguely feels his unease has to do with a store fire that took place when he was about twelve years old. That makes no sense because the store was a beloved hangout for the kids and the neighborhood families. His, Georgie’s, and Scott’s families would discuss community politics and how to “stick it to the man” in the backyard of the store while the kids played.

Matthew decides to pack up his father’s meager possessions but instead comes across a break-in at his father’s home. The intruder escapes and Matthew almost dies in an ice-encrusted river trying to catch the person. What could be so valuable among his father’s ratty things? This also makes Matthew aware how unusual it was to have arrived just the day before and to have happened upon a house fire not far from where he used to live. A young university student, Abbie Green, died in the fire. Matthew does not know her, but to be fair, he does not know whether he knew her. It seems unlikely, nevertheless. Could the candy store fire over a decade ago have anything to do with the recent house fire? It wouldn’t be a normal person’s first reaction, but this is a mystery book, so the answer is: maybe.

The amnesia thing carries the book pretty far. Is Matthew talking to someone who is lying or telling the truth? helpful or distracting? a killer or worse? As snippets of Matthew’s memory emerge, they begin a slow illumination of the horrible story that underlies why Matthew left town.

When I wasn’t hollering “Call 911!” or “Don’t go into the forest!” or “Has that gun been oiled recently?” I enjoyed the contrivance. FYI, my personal sense of self-before-others would not have allowed much of what Matthew kept saying yes to. But then I’m not in a mystery book or a Hitchcock movie*.

*Seriously, I still check the upper lighted windows of the motel for a mummified corpse rocking in a chair.

A House of Ghosts by W. C. Ryan

Arcade Crimewise, 384 pages, $25.99 (c2019)

If you shook Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew up in a bag, you would get “A House of Ghosts.” It’s got the flavor of an old-time mystery. The two main characters are a plucky young woman and a dashing undercover agent. Of course.

Kate Cartwright grew up with lords and ladies in Great Britain, but she doesn’t live a life of leisure. Instead, her effort and brain power are applied to her job in the War Department. It is 1942, or thereabouts. She is dying for an assignment that’s more glamorous than her routine codebreaking. And so that’s what happens.

Kate’s parents’ good friends are Lord and Lady Highmount. During vacation times, the Highmounts hang out at a splendid pile called Blackwater Abbey, about a mile off the coast of England. There used to be an abbey and now there is a mansion plunked on top of where the abbey used to be. Now Kate and her parents have been invited to join the Highmounts for the winter solstice and to join in a séance.

Kate is hesitant to join such a gathering, apparently because there was a “disaster" — forever unrevealed — at the Abbey, and the less said, the better. But duty calls. Captain Mansfield Smith-Cumming, aka “C,” has ordered her to attend and see what she will see. What she will see will surely involve the ghostly comings and goings of the flickering afterlife of a good number of former living souls. Why? Because Kate can see ghosts, a talent she reluctantly will acknowledge sometimes. 

Accompanying Kate will be her former fiancé, Rolleston Miller-White, a staff officer at the War Department. He, too, will see what he will see. He has no ghostly talent, however. It is awkward because Kate and Rolleston quietly disengaged themselves not too long ago. You must carry on anyway, says “C.”

The picture is complicated further by the attendance of another mysterious War Office employee, “Robert Donovan.” He will play “Frank Donovan” (the name change seems the product of unfocused editing), injured and mustered-out military hero. (Neither Robert nor Frank nor Donovan is his real name, anyway.) More awkwardness ensues when Donovan turns out to have been Rolleston’s superior officer in the trenches but is now playing his valet. Furthermore, it eventually comes out that Donovan knew one of the Highmount sons and also Kate’s brother, Arthur, all presumed dead, killed by a horrible shelling that collapsed tunnels and spread mustard gas. There were very few survivors. Donovan is one of them, just by luck o’the Irish.

So why are Kate, Donovan, and Rolleston there on behalf of the War Department? There may be a traitorous spy celebrating the solstice on the remote island. Francis Highmount’s business is arming the British fighting forces with his deadly weapons. There may be plans afoot to steal information.

The Highmounts and the Cartwrights hope to contact their dead sons through Madame Feda and Count Orlov, the mediums who will launch the otherworldly connection.

There are other characters, including an invalided soldier whose trauma in the collapsed tunnel sparked his ability to see ghosts. Of course, Donovan knows him as well. (Author Ryan makes it feel as though it was a very small war and the participants kept tripping over each other.) There is a doctor who is attempting to help the invalid. There is a family of retainers (brother, sister, in-law) who take care of the abbey, island, and Highmount family. There may be mysterious others — ghostly or real — who are intent on murder or mayhem.

And lastly, there is a dread storm that strands everyone on the island. The better for the (maybe) murderer to have their way. And there you have the classic locked room mystery with red herrings a-plenty, that may or may not play fair, that will entertain, that will send ghostly shivers down your spine. (The ghostly stuff is pretty mild, so no worries that there will be a Jack Nicholson maniac trying to chop his way through a door.)

“The Ghost House” is very enjoyable. There is at least one dead body. There are secrets the mansion reluctantly gives up. There is an ossuary. There are bashful blushes.

So enjoy!