Tag Archives: Mystery

Review | The Dragon Turn, Shane Peacock

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The Dragon Turn is the fifth book in Shane Peacock’s Boy Sherlock Holmes series, and the first one I’ve read. I’m a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, so reading a book about a teenage version of him will either be an absolute delight or an absolute disaster, depending on how Peacock chooses to portray him. I was also worried I might’ve outgrown YA adaptations of older characters. For example, I used to devour The Nancy Drew Notebooks, the Starfleet Academy series, even the Young Jedi Knights series. Now, while I still like YA, I’ve felt no desire to go back to those books.

I really liked Dragon Turn. Its mystery is more mystical (it involves a dragon) than I expected a Sherlock Holmes story to be, but, like all Holmes stories, presents a logical solution. A magician called the Wizard of Nottingham is killed. All that’s left of him are his blood and spectacles in the office of his professional and romantic rival Hemsworth. The climax of Hemsworth’s act involves a dragon, which offers a possible, gruesome explanation to the disappearance of the Wizard’s corpse.

Peacock’s Sherlock is a highly intelligent, logical fifteen year old, who already has plans of becoming a detective when he gets older but who, in the meantime, just wants to keep a low profile. He’s half-Jewish, and so faces discrimination, which may explain part of his desire to remain below the radar. So, rather than take credit for mystery solving, Sherlock feeds information to Lestrade, a young police officer intent on impressing his Inspector father. I love this characterization of Sherlock and young Lestrade. The adult Holmes is such a confident, almost arrogant man, and I love seeing this younger version of him as more vulnerable, insecure and self-conscious. He’s sympathetic in a much different way from the adult Holmes, yet he maintains the intelligence and logic that so characterize Holmes as a detective.

I also enjoyed seeing Lestrade as a young man longing for approval. I was expecting either a bumbling, incompetent Lestrade or an absolute bully, so I was pleasantly surprised to see him so sympathetic. He’s still incompetent as a detective, but his desire to impress his father casts a whole new light on his approach towards detecting.

Peacock even gives Sherlock a love life, which I don’t usually enjoy in mysteries, but which I liked here. Romance also prompts a reluctant Sherlock to get involved in the Wizard’s case. Sherlock’s girlfriend Irene Doyle (who, I presume, will grow up to marry a Mr. Adler and later become The Woman in Holmes’ life) was promised a boost in her stage career by Hemsworth, so she convinces Sherlock to help prove Hemsworth’s innocence. It’s a complicated case, and soon even Sherlock isn’t sure about what really happened to the Wizard. I did figure out the answer before the big reveal, but then the book is aimed at readers much younger than I am (never mind how much younger), so that’s really nothing to brag about. (I’m still bragging, though. I almost never guess the answer before the big reveal!) Still, Peacock pieces together the puzzle well, and I loved seeing Sherlock before he became the infallible detective we all know.

Dragon Turn is a wonderful book. I think its target audience (ages 10 – 14) will love it for its adventure, mystery and characters, and, as an older reader, I enjoyed it for the way Peacock wrote Sherlock Holmes. On a minor note, I much prefer Beatrice Leckie to the more worldly and manipulative Irene Doyle. As far as I know, Beatrice is a wholly Peacock-created character, and she’s just a lovely Betty Cooper-type character, and I’m crossing my fingers that Sherlock will eventually end up with her, if only in Boy Sherlock Holmes.

Review | Dark Vineyard, Martin Walker

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I love Martin Walker’s Bruno, Chief of Police series. Captain Bruno Courreges is a combination of Guido Brunetti and Tom Barnaby, and he solves mysteries in the small town of Saint-Denis in France. He never carries his official gun and has “long since lost the keys to his handcuffs.” He’s a gourmet chef and gentleman detective, and really, how can you resist such a lush, beautiful setting?

So I was thrilled when Harper Collins Canada finally released the Harper Weekend paperback of Dark Vineyard, the second in the Bruno series. A beautiful little edition that can fit in my purse, it’s the perfect companion to my lunch break, preferably spent lounging on a park bench on a beautiful day. Lush, beautiful and romantic are rarely words I use to describe mysteries, but in this case, St. Denis is so utterly tangible that the words just fit.

In Dark Vineyard, American wine mogul Fernando Bondino has come to St Denis to buy up the local vineyards to use for his company’s production. Bruno fears this means the end of the way of life he loves in St Denis. Then people start getting killed. It’s an even more complex mystery than the one in Bruno, Chief of Police, and Dark Vineyard is more tightly plotted, with a more logical string of clues to the big reveal.

Dark Vineyard is also filled with charming characters, from talented young winemaker Max to flirtatious Quebecois Jacqueline. The mystery features arson, a love triangle and a corpse in a vat of wine. It’s a puzzling whodunnit, and, because of the characters and the setting, an absolute delight to read.

What really makes Dark Vineyard such a wonderful book, however, and this is probably true of the Brunetti and Barnaby books as well, is the detective himself. It’s natural to root for the underdog, and Bruno’s town feels like the ultimate underdog of locations, a small-time indie in a world of Walmarts. The Bruno stories provide a wonderful escape, contemporary tales in a town apparently untouched by modernity. And Bruno, by clinging on so tightly to that way of living, is a champion of the underdog, a man of peace in a crusade against those that threaten this leisurely way of life. Sitting on a park bench surrounded by tall, grey office buildings, it’s lovely to imagine living in Bruno’s world, and it’s natural to cheer him on as he struggles to protect it.

In Dark Vineyard, this struggle becomes even more pronounced, because of Fernando’s plans to buy out the town and change its very character. Bruno’s girlfriend lives and works in Paris, and wants him to join her there; after all, he has a standing job offer from the Paris police force. Yet moving away from St Denis will mean giving up a lot of who Bruno is. His struggle to keep his town is touching, especially because his personal feelings may conflict with his professional desire to solve the recent crimes.

Bruno is a man to admire, and his town is a place I want to visit. In an early scene, Bruno walks off in the middle of a haircut to investigate an argument at a nearby wine shop. A customer had broken a bottle of wine and was refusing to pay for it.

Knowing the way to the shelf of Petrus, Bruno led his small entourage to the altar of this temple to wine, and stopped, looking mournfully at the smashed bottle on the tiled floor. Out of respect, he removed his hat…

Here is a detective who mourns the death of a bottle of good wine, who considers a day in the market as “a gathering of friends,” and who genuinely cares about his town and the people in it. Walker’s description of Bruno cooking a truffle omelette (his specialty!) for a dinner party is as mouth-watering as any of Paola Brunetti’s meals, and St Denis is even more lush and beautiful than Tom Barnaby’s Midsomer villages.

Fans of Donna Leon, Caroline Graham, Agatha Christie, foodie mysteries or cozy mysteries — you’ll love Bruno Courreges. The third book in the series, Black Diamond, is already available in hardcover, and the mystery revolves around truffles rather than wine. As a total foodie, I love the subjects of Walker’s mysteries, and I can’t wait till Black Diamond comes out in the lovely Harper Weekend edition next year!

Review | Sanctus, Simon Toyne

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I read Simon Toyne’s Sanctus because of the above trailer. [Note: If you like zero spoilers, ignore the above trailer. It convinced me to read the book, but it also made the first few chapters seem slow, because I already knew what was going to happen.] Promotion for Sanctus focused heavily on its similarities with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. To be honest, while I’m a thriller fan, the deluge of “next Dan Brown” conspiracy thriller books that came after Brown’s success has made me cynical about that type of book.

Still, the trailer did intrigue me enough to check it out. There are definite plot similarities to Da Vinci Code, though the cinematic quality of Toyne’s writing, especially at the beginning of the novel, also reminded me of James Rollins. Unlike Brown and Rollins, however, who both rely heavily on research for their books, Toyne chooses to locate Sanctus in the fictional Citadel, a Vatican-like city-state in Turkey. As well, rather than the Catholic church, it is a fictional religious order of monks that guards the novel’s big secret. This detracts a bit from the impact of the novel, as it then becomes easier to believe the whole thing fiction and therefore Toyne’s revelations didn’t have as much impact on me as Brown’s. However, this decision also frees Toyne to imagine a secret and a conspiracy far beyond the realm of the ordinary.

I enjoyed Sanctus. The novel began a bit slow for me. From the trailer above, I already knew what the monk was going to do. Also, with so many characters in the first few chapters, it felt like a montage of scenes, and I couldn’t find a character to latch on to and care about. Still, once the story gets going, I really enjoyed reading about Inspector Arkadian and Liv Adamsen.

Sanctus is about how one monk’s actions endanger the secrecy surrounding the mysterious Sacrament hidden from the public for centuries by a group of monks. The monk’s sister, Liv, might be an integral part of a prophecy surrounding this Sacrament, and she is hunted by the monks trying to keep the secret and a group of people who want the secret to be revealed.

Toyne writes well, and Sanctus is an enjoyable read. For most of the book, however, it just didn’t grab me as much as I thought it would. I think that’s because it felt so much like The Da Vinci Code, except with the bad guys belonging to a fictional religious group and the clues pertaining to a religious document that doesn’t exist (or at least makes no claim to exist) in the real world. So while I was gasping at Brown’s observations about the Mona Lisa or alternate gospels, I viewed the document in Sanctus with detachment.

It wasn’t enough of a fictional world to completely transport me (as, for example, the world in Lord of the Rings, where I take a prophecy as significant because it feels significant within that world), nor did it have enough hooks in reality to completely grip me (as in the best James Rollins books). I did care enough about the characters to want to keep reading about them, but not enough to make real emotional investment (as I did with Spycatcher). Sanctus is a good book, a well-written, well-paced thriller, but nothing about it really struck me.

At least, that was true until the big reveal. When I found out what the Sacrament was, and why it was significant, I was completely, utterly blown away. I think I was still expecting a Da Vinci type reveal, so I figured that whatever the Sacrament was, it would have the same impact on me as the monks’ sacred document did. Well done, Mr. Toyne. I absolutely did not see that coming. Also, I realized why it was a good thing that Toyne stayed away from the extensively researched worlds of Brown and Rollins.

Sanctus is the first volume of the Ruin trilogy, and I’m curious about where Toyne will take his story for the next instalment. To be honest, I can’t imagine how he’ll take this story to a full trilogy. Then again, as my experience of reading Sanctus showed, Toyne’s imagination can certainly trump mine.