AHMM, May 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The knife . . . in the first place, Brandt wasn't stabbed at all. But it sure led to a whole bunch of stories. Tina claimed Bob had it, and that's why she used the taser on him, and inadvertently tased Brandt too. Bob swore he had no knife, and that it must have been Glen. Cassie, the waitress, said she had just brought our hamburgers when the fight broke out. Glen claimed that he never picked up the knife, or if he did, he didn't remember it, and he stuck to that story like glue. And they couldn't prove he did, because some idiot at Mellette's had picked up the knife and it got passed around the crowd. So much for forensic evidence.

  Tina was fairly nonchalant about legal charges, even when investigation proved that Glen and Tina had met, at least flirted, and perhaps done more, at that Denver meeting. She said it had meant nothing, and she was probably telling the truth. But it didn't sound so good in court to a jury that didn't like her. Tina was convicted of simple assault and sentenced to a year in jail and a ten thousand dollar fine. Her lawyer got them to change her punishment venue to Minnehaha County, and after that she vanished. Everyone agreed that she got away with murder, fairly cheaply. But Brandt's children sued her for her share of his fortune, and that's still on-going. They just might win.

  Glen never got charged and never came back. Wind power will eventually come to Laskin, but it won't be through his Consortium.

  Bob got hit the worst: He was convicted in the court of public opinion of total stupidity, and that's a hard thing to live with in a small town.

  We only talked about it once. We were having a beer in his backyard, while Elsie bounded around.

  “She really had me fooled,” he said, and I didn't have to ask who “she” was.

  “I know. I'm sorry.”

  He shook his head. “You just never know.”

  We sat there, silent, watching Elsie as she sniffed everything in creation.

  “I've had it with dating,” Bob said.

  “Probably a good idea,” I said.

  There was a long silence, then Bob asked, “Want to go camping next weekend?”

  “How about the weekend after?”

  I didn't have the heart to tell him I had a date with Grant.

  Copyright © 2012 Eve Fisher

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Department: BOOKED & PRINTED

  by Robert C. Hahn

  A persuasive case can be made that the field of mystery and suspense has never been as wide, varied, and deep as it is today. Making that case is beyond the scope of this column, but this month's titles do illustrate today's broad range of innovative approaches to traditional genre models.

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  Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries provided a searing portrait of blacks in Los Angeles from immediately after WWII to the late 1960s. He also has set an equally compelling contemporary series in New York City that features Leonid McGill in a clever variation on the tarnished knight. The fourth book in the series is all i did was shoot my man (Riverhead, $26.95).

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  Mosley often writes strong secondary characters who capture readers as much or more than the ostensible hero. Easy Rawlins was undoubtedly the primary focus of the eleven books in that series (ten novels and one short story collection), but his dangerous and deadly friend “Mouse” Alexander stole many scenes. Bookseller Paris Minton might be the lever that moved Mosley's three novels Fearless Jones, Fear Itself, and Fear of the Dark, but it was his principled friend Fearless Jones who loomed large in each of the novels.

  Leonid McGill needs no such assistance to hold center stage. McGill's past and his present are complex and offer many possibilities for Mosley's rich imagination to explore. McGill is an ex-boxer and a reformed, or reforming, bad guy who is seeking to right his wrongs when and where he can. His wife, Scandinavian-born Katrina, frequently drinks too much and takes lovers freely. Of McGill's three children, only one is his biologically, but he is a father to them all, and all are challenging in one way or another. Twill, eighteen, is his favorite—bright and frequently balanced on the edge of legal and illegal activities. Oldest son Dimitri, twenty-three, is getting ready to move from the family apartment to live with his Belarusian girlfriend, former prostitute Tatyana Baranovich. Sweet-natured Shelly is just on the cusp of womanhood, which presents a new set of problems for McGill to worry about.

  In ALL I DID WAS SHOOT MY MAN, the best yet in the series, McGill tries to help Zella Grisham, a woman he helped frame for a fifty-eight-million-dollar robbery she had nothing to do with. Zella was guilty of shooting her philandering man, but McGill's frame earned her a hard eight years in prison before he smoothed the path for her release. But McGill's attempt to atone for this crime turns out to be full of deadly repercussions and he needs all his wiles to protect not only Zella but his own contentious family.

  Mosley's brilliant gift of language and complex characterizations lift his Leonid McGill novels to the highest ranks of modern fiction.

  * * * *

  Best known for his horror and fantasy novels, Peter Straub has won numerous Bram Stoker awards as well as World Fantasy and British Fantasy awards. In mrs. god (Pegasus, $23.95), he channels the eerie suspense of Edgar Allan Poe's tales of imagination.

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  MRS. GOD was originally published as a novella in 1990 in the collection of short stories Houses Without Doors, and the same year in an illustrated, limited edition by Donald M. Grant. Now available for the first time in a stand-alone trade publication, Mrs. God harkens back to the tales of Poe in its almost claustrophobic, brooding intensity where the lines between reality and fantasy blur and blend to produce nightmare.

  William Standish, a rather unaccomplished professor at Zenith College in Illinois, is thrilled when offered the rare opportunity to stay at Esswood House, the famous home of the Seneschals in Lincolnshire where major literary figures such as D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, and Henry James had stayed and written, as had minor figures such as poet Isobel Standish, who is viewed by William as his path to tenure.

  Even before Standish arrives at Seneschal House things begin to go wrong as he loses his way in his rental car on poorly marked roads, encounters a strange man when he stops to look at a road marker, and gets unceremoniously thrown out of a pub for no fault of his own that he can recognize.

  Finally arriving at Seneschal House he is relieved to meet Robert Wall and to be shown the impressive library in the labyrinthine house where papers donated by many literary figures including Isobel are stored. Standish grows more and more bewildered by his surroundings, the strange notebooks of Isobel and the prolonged absence of his host as his opportunity of a lifetime segues into the nightmare of his life.

  Straub uses plenty of conventional touches—rumors about an old murder, locked rooms, and strange corridors, voices heard but people unseen, lights where there should be none, and silhouettes where there should be no people—and imbues them with an eerie intensity.

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  Bret Lott, the author of Jewel, an Oprah Book Club selection, as well as The Man Who Owned Vermont and A Stranger's House, introduced Huger Dillard in 1998's The Hunt Club, his first foray into the mystery genre. Huger Dillard returns in DEAD LOW TIDE (Random House, $25), a captivating thriller that beautifully melds a family drama in a rural setting with larger concerns.

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  Young Huger (pronounced You-gee) Dillard was fifteen years old when the haunting actions that occurred in The Hunt Club took place. Now twenty-seven, Huger lives in Charleston with his mother, Eugenie, and the man he calls “Unk,” his father Leland Dillard.

  A radical change of fortune has taken the family from “have nots” to “haves,” and they now live at Landgrave Hall Golf and Country Club in a forty-two hundred square-foot “cottage.” Unk, though blind, still loves to play golf so long as no one can see him, which is why Huger and Unk sneak on to the course at night illegally, poling up Goose Creek in
a jon boat, to indulge his passion.

  It is Unk's accidental discovery of a sunken body while approaching the shore as well as the seemingly innocuous winning at poker of a pair of advanced night-vision goggles from a naval officer that launch the Dillards into an affair that will bring to light long-buried family secrets and a surprising threat to the region.

  Lott's second foray into the suspense genre is enormously successful as he plumbs the depths of his rural characters amidst a palpable Charleston atmosphere and adds a plot that ventures solidly into the territory of the modern thriller.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Fiction: FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY

  by Ron Goulart

  The revelation and the knock on the door occurred on the same foggy Southern California autumn evening. About an hour apart.

  Wes Goodhill had been sitting on the new sofa in the living room of their Santa Rita Beach cottage, a clipboard resting on his knee. His wife was gracefully slouched in a comfortable armchair, watching the local news on a small flat screen television set that rested on a stand out of Wes's line of vision.

  Suddenly Casey jumped to her feet. “Oh, my gosh,” she explained, pointing a slightly shaking forefinger at the screen.

  “What?” He jumped up, dropping the clipboard and scattering the rough animation sketches he was making.

  The news reporter was saying, “. . . police found that the self-styled ‘Psychic to the Stars’ had fled her palatial rented residence allegedly to avoid arrest on charges of fraud as well as . . .”

  “Case, what is it?”

  Very pale, the blonde young woman gestured again toward the screen, not speaking.

  “The present whereabouts of Madam Molesworth are unknown,” continued the newsman.

  Putting an arm around his wife's slim shoulders, Wes frowned at the colored news photo of an attractive dark-haired woman in her late fifties that appeared now. “Do you know her?”

  After swallowing twice, Casey replied, “Yes, she's my mother.”

  * * * *

  Casey absentmindedly hooked her finger through the handle of the cocoa mug but didn't lift the cup from the kitchen table. “I'm somewhat knocked for a hoop,” she said.

  “Knocked for a loop,” he corrected from across the table.

  “Exactly.”

  Wes, impatiently, said, “Okay. I made us each a cup of hot cocoa, we're seated face to face in our cozy kitchen—tell me about that woman.”

  “I'm pretty darn sure, Wes, that it's my mother.”

  “I was under the impression, gathered from you and your disreputable and fortunately absent from our vicinity father, that your mother was no longer among the living. That she was defunct, moved on to glory, long gone and—”

  “If you'll let me get a word in sideways, I'll explain.”

  “Edgewise,” he corrected. “I thought you'd gotten over your habit of lying, but—”

  “I've never fibbed to you about her,” Casey told her husband. “All I did was withhold information. That's not the same—”

  “Okay, so tell me now.”

  “Well, my mother and father separated when I was barely out of my teens. I went to live with my Aunt Hulda,” she began, absently tapping the cup with the side of her thumb. “She just couldn't put up with the fact that my father was somewhat disreputable.”

  “Somewhat? The guy's a world class con man, as well a prince of thieves and an all around scoundrel and for good measure—”

  “That's exactly why my mom couldn't put up with the guy.”

  Wes frowned. “But she is, according to the news, a con artist herself. A fake psychic who—”

  “She apparently got into that line of work after we parted.” Casey lifted her cup, took a sip. “I haven't seen her at all for, oh, ten years at least.” The fog was growing thicker, pressing at the kitchen window panes.

  “What was she back then?”

  “A librarian,” answered Casey. “Or so I thought.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Well, Wes, now that I think about it, she did keep pretty odd hours for somebody employed at a library.”

  “This is great, Case,” he said, a trace of self-pity in his voice. “It looks like your DNA has con artist genes on both sides. When we have kids, they'll probably—”

  “I'm wondering what's become of her since she disappeared from that palatial rented Brentwood home.”

  “She's holed up somewhere hiding out. The cops were about to grab her for some audacious fraud she was in the midst of. Now, you're absolutely certain Madam Molesworth is your mother?”

  “Without a shade of a doubt. For one thing—”

  “Shadow.”

  “For one things she used to read to me from her favorite book of fairy stories when I was, you know, seven or eight. It was by a woman named Mrs. Molesworth. That's where Mom got the name.”

  “What's her real name?”

  “McLeod just like mine,” she answered. “Helena Dart McLeod. Her father was a prominent physician in Buffalo. Dr. Dart.”

  “Or so she told you.”

  Casey grew thoughtful. “Oh, I don't think my mother would lie to me about something like that. Besides, as I remember, she kept a picture of a distinguished-looking man with a beard on the piano. Her dad.”

  “A beard is not a sure sign that the guy had a license to practice medicine. He might—”

  An enthuiastic knocking had begun on their front door.

  Wes rose up. “I'll see who it is.”

  The knocking ceased as he crossed the living room of the beach house. Far away in the night a forlorn foghorn sounded.

  Then the knocking started again, with even more brio.

  “Okay, okay!” he called out.

  Wes opened the door to find a slim dark-haired young woman in her early thirties standing out there in the mist.

  “Hi,” she said, smiling tentatively, “I don't know if you remember me, Wes—”

  “I do, yes,” he said evenly. “Yes, I do.”

  “I'm Casey's sister, Kate.”

  “My God, first her mother, now you.” he said. It's like a plague of locusts. Only with McLeods.”

  * * * *

  The morning matched his mood. It was grey and chill. Even Wes's office at SpareyArts Animation seemed grey and chill.

  He was hunched at his drawing board, but he wasn't drawing. “There are times in a man's life when he just isn't up to designing a gay dinosaur,” he decided.

  “I never thought much of that concept anyway,” said his friend Mike Filchock, who was occupying a somewhat lopsided white wicker chair across the room. "The Dino Who Came Out Of The Closet. Not a hot title for a kid cartoon on cable.”

  “No, this is for an adult TV cartoon,” Wes told him. “For that upcoming channel, All Gay, All Day.”

  “Not destined to be a hit, old buddy.”

  “What about that new reality show you're scripting, Dancing With Felons? How's it doing?”

  “Cancelled after five shows,” replied his writer friend.

  “Thought you said it was a hit?”

  “It was, until the network became dissatisfied.”

  “What caused that?”

  “Well. On the rehearsal for the sixth show, a few of the felons escaped.”

  “How many?”

  “Oh, not more than four or five,” said Filchock. “But enough show biz badinage. Fill me in on the hordes of McLeods who've descended on you.”

  “Actually it's only Kate's sister who's showed up in person. So far.”

  “But you told me on the phone last nigth that Mother McLeod was also in the offing.”

  “All that we know is that she's somewhere out and around in L.A. Although Kate has an idea.”

  Filchock, who was wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and tweed slacks, requested, “Refresh my memory. Is this particular lady the one who calls herself Kate Coventry? The lady who tried to lure you and your bride into a scheme involving a
stolen object of art a few years back?”

  “That's the same Kate, yes.” He sighed. “We were hoping she was up to no good someplace far distant from us.”

  “Instead she's been in Los Angeles and environs?”

  “She teamed up with her mother some three months ago. We found that out last night.”

  Filchock said, “When I was writing the Famous Crooks show for Fox three seasons ago, we did a script about a fake spirit medium who—”

  “My . . .” Wes produced a faint disgruntled groan. “My mother-in-law isn't a phony medium or channeler,” he explained. “She's a fake psychic who had just about convinced Walter Gormley that she'd located his long lost only daughter.”

  “Walter Gormley, the billionaire CEO of GormTech?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  Filchock recalled, “His daughter ran off about ten twelve years ago, while she was in her teens. A multitude of private eyes and law officers have never found a trace of the girl.”

  “Casey's mom convinced Gormley that she was getting vivid impressions as to where the daughter was. Melody Gormley, if alive, would be in her late twenties.”

  “Eureka!” Jumping up, the writer snapped his fingers. “She was planning to pass Kate off as the missing heiress.”

  Wes nodded. “Kate's few years older, but there's a fair resemblance,” he said. That's why Casey's mom recruited her daughter to work with her on this caper.”

  “Why did Kate come barging in on you guys? Did Gormley call the cops on Moms McLeod?”

  “Nope, the police came after her about an earlier psychic con,” said Wes. “Kate thinks a rival of Casey's mother grabbed her.”

  “And what does Sister Kate want of you and Casey?”

  “Firstly, Kate's afraid that she may get grabbed, too, and considers our place as a hideout,” he said, “and she also wants to help us find Mrs. McLeod and rescue her.”

  * * * *

  Casey was standing on the narrow lawn in front of their beach house when Wes drove into their driveway. The waning afternoon was even grayer and more chill that in the morning. His wife wore an expression similar to that of a child whose puppy has just been run over by an SUV.