Not Forgetting Adèle, a Cozy Read for Those Who Liked Jane Eyre

 

I had planned to review the Sherlock Holmes mystery, but time whizzed by with the election, Thanksgiving, my birthday, and a new exciting project coming up that I'll post about later. Now my husband has that book, and I'll have to wait for him to finish before I can re-read it and review it. 

But wait: In the meantime, I read another book that I think most readers of this blog would enjoy. 

Not Forgetting Adèle takes place in the Victorian Era, during the time of Jane Eyre. I am a Brontë fan and have been ever since I was a teenager, and I always wondered about the young girl in Jane's care when Jane was the governess in Jane Eyre. Here is my review: 

            Julia Harbour’s gothic mystery, Not Forgetting Adèle, is a sequel to Jane Eyre. The novel’s protagonist is the young girl Jane taught when she was a governess at Thornfield Hall. Edward Rochester had rescued Adèle after her mother, his former mistress, abandoned her in a Paris hotel and made him Adèle’s guardian. As the story opens, the grown Adèle has joined the Rochesters in their new home at Southfield after two years at a finishing school in Geneva, Switzerland. 

            At this point in her life, Adèle is haunted by two questions: She would like to know why her mother abandoned her, and she would like to have her secret conviction confirmed that Rochester is her true father. While in Switzerland, she learned of her mother’s new marriage to an Italian count. and wrote a letter to the newspaper that posted the news. She is hoping the letter will be forwarded and inspire a reply. It is this letter that sets the tale in motion, a tale with subplots and twists and turns all deftly handled by this author as she weaves them into a satisfying conclusion. 

            Harbour knows her Victorian England and give us scenes that ring true. Her characters are well-rounded—and full of surprises. (More than one person is not who he or she claims to be.) Adèle is an appealing protagonist, spunky, a bit insecure from her difficult start in life, but determined, adventurous, caring. The chemistry that grows between Adèle and the mysterious Jack Whitaker (not of her class) keeps good tension throughout. Jane, now a mother of two and expecting a third, provides a serene foil to the stormy Edward and the conflicted Adèle. And familiar characters from the original Jane Eyre, including Jane’s cousins, show up in new roles. Not Forgetting Adèle is a pleasurable read on all counts. 

You can get a copy of Not Forgetting Adèle HERE .

On another note, I hope you have a safe and enjoyable Christmas and Hannukah and Kwanzaa, or any other holiday you celebrate at this time. It is heartening to read of the two vaccines that have come out and will eventually be available to everyone. Till then, stay safe and well during this Covid-19 crisis. Please do follow all the precautions.

How will you be spending the holidays? Normally, my husband and I spend Christmas Day with our god-family in Martinez and stay overnight to avoid night holiday driving. This year we will stay home and do some phoning and Skyping. And reading, of course! 

Irregular Lives: The Untold Story of Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars

Once again, I'm hooked on a new Sherlock Holmes novel, this one by Kim Krisco. I always enjoy it when the “Baker Street Irregulars” show up in a Sherlock Holmes story, and this tale is a particularly touching one. For readers not familiar with the canon, the Irregulars were a group of street urchins in three of the original adventures written by Sir Arthur Canon Doyle (A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, and “The Adventure of the Crooked Man,” one of the stories in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.) Basically a street gang, they are led by a boy named Wiggins, and Sherlock employs them as street spies.

Irregular Lives jumps forward to the year 1919. WWI is over, but future threats to world peace loom. In Ireland, the Irish Republican Army is fighting British forces. Against this backdrop, Holmes, who has retired to his farm in Sussex Downs, receives an invitation by a mysterious S. P. Fields to a photography exhibit on Russell Square in London. Naturally, he attends, and finds the photographs are pictures of the “Irregulars” when they were children. Each photograph brings a memory of a particular case, and each case stirs emotions in Holmes, a man famous for keeping his life cerebral.

Then a second invitation to a special dinner at a posh home in Belgravia comes for both Holmes and Watson. They arrive and find all of the adult Irregulars in the photographs are there to honor the impact Holmes had on their lives. All but two, that is—Wiggins and Ruck. Those present have struggled up from their former Spitalfields lives, though, to Holmes’s dismay, the host works for an armament company. Then Wiggins shows up in a dreadful state and Ruck enters, packing a gun. What began as an inspiring evening evolves into a case that involves blackmail, murder, kidnapping, armaments dealing, a secret new weapon, the IRA, and Holmes’s personal enemy, the daughter of Moriarty.

The story is told in multiple points of view, and the author gives us a more rounded out Sherlock without changing his basic nature. The first part of the book sets the reader up nicely for the personalities of the adult Irregulars and Holmes’s reluctant awakening to an almost “parental” concern for them. The author has also made the London of George V palpable. The reader can walk the streets of that era in all the neighborhoods mentioned and almost see them and feel them firsthand. This is historical fiction at its best, as well as a deeply engrossing adventure that draws the reader in until the last page.

                 

Kim Krisco writes both fiction and nonfiction. You can learn more about him on his Amazon author page HERE (and pre-order his book as well. It will be released November 16, 2016.)

You can connect with him on Facebook HERE

Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer at Scotney Castle

At last I can get back to the Sherlock Holmes and one of the many good novel pastiches that abound at MX Publishing.

Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer at Scotney Castle, is full of surprises, even for the great detective himself.

The adventure begins in early summer of 1904. The President of the Kipling League, David Siviter, sends Sherlock Holmes a telegram, inviting him to Crick’s End in Sussex that afternoon to give a talk to the League as an expert on “the criminal mind.” The League includes Siviter (poet and children’s writer), Alfred Weit, Sir Julius Wernher, and Viscount Van Beers, all rich and powerful men, devotees of Kipling and adamant believers in empire. Pevensey, a famous, if mediocre, painter will also be on the premises.

Holmes accepts, but is suspicious. Ignoring the telegram’s instructions as to times and stations (and the promise that a chauffer will be waiting for them), he makes his own arrangements for a different train route that allows him and Watson to arrive at their host’s mansion three hours earlier than Siviter planned.

Following a long and effusive introduction by Watson, Holmes gives his talk, explaining his methods and giving examples from cases that Watson has made famous. After meeting Pevensey, who has completed two paintings commissioned by Siviter, the two are taken to Etchingham station for the trip home.

At the station, news headlines again arouse Holmes’s suspicions. The unclad body of a man has been discovered in a wagon pond at Scotney Castle, not far from Crick’s End. Watson thinks the death may be accidental or self-inflicted. Holmes feels the Kipling League is behind the death and hires a carriage to take them back for a confrontation, which leads to a serious quarrel between him and Watson. To tell why Holmes is convinced of what he calls “the smack of a great crime,” would create spoilers for the reader. Let me just say that his suspicious involve a discrepancy between two paintings, a strange hatband, an ill-fitting hat, and linseed oil, among other clues. 

There was much to like about this story. Symonds captures the flavor of the early Edwardian era in the settings and furnishing and the language of the time. His characters are interesting, and for the most part, Holmes and Watson feel true to character. There were times, however, when I felt they were a bit overdrawn. And there were some sections where too much detail slowed the story. That said, a reader will find this an intriguing case and will enjoy trying to put the facts together that explain who the dead person was and how his body ended up in a wagon pond at Scotney Castle.

Sherlock Holmes and the Dead Boer at Scotney Castle is available at:

Amazon,  Strand Magazine,  Book Depository,  and MX Publishing, 

and all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA.

The Conan Doyle Notes: The Secret of Jack the Ripper

The author, Diane
Gilbert Madsen with a
Corona Typewriter.
(I used to type on one
of those. Memories!)

            I’m a Sherlock Holmes fan, which is why many of my reviews lately are of Sherlock-related books. Today’s review, however, is of a contemporary mystery novel revolving around notes left by Sherlock’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.       

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
who was as great a sleuth
as his brain child.

          In The Conan Doyle Notes, new papers have been discovered that shed light on a question that haunted Victorian London’s populace: Who was Jack the Ripper? People are willing to kill for these papers, and the first chapter gets off to a rip-roaring start:

            DD McGill, a Chicago insurance investigator, is tailing a client suspected of insurance fraud when her bookseller friend, Tom Joyce, calls about an exciting discovery: While appraising the library collection at the David Joyce Grange estate, he found a small brown leather diary suggesting Grange had Doyle’s manuscript, The White Company, as well as notes proving Doyle knew who the Jack the Ripper was. Then DD hears a sound as if the phone has been dropped and Joyce’s voice yelling someone is trying to kill him. The phone goes dead.

            After calling 911, DD races to the mansion. An ambulance has taken Tom Joyce to the hospital. At the hospital, she learns he is in a coma due to injuries from falling down stairs. But DD suspects he was pushed. Why else would he say someone was trying to kill him? And who would have pushed him? She returns to the mansion, masquerading as Tom Joyce’s assistant appraiser, and the game is afoot.

            Madsen presents the reader with a fine array of suspects: Ivy Douglas, niece of the Dowager (Grange’s son’s wife who mysteriously died a year earlier.) Philip Green, a Sherlockian expert working with the estate. John Turner, “The Pretender” – who claims his mother was a mistress of one of Grange’s sons and wants his share of the estate. James M. Dodd, from Morrison, Morrison and Dodd Executors. Mr. Toller, the butler, and his wife, who knows secrets. More and more names unfold as DD investigates in a highly unorthydox manner. There is no way I can tell you how she investigates without giving spoilers right and left. More deaths follow, and I can’t tell you who the victims are, either. But the plot twists are dazzling and keep you guessing in every chapter.

             Interesting subplots are woven in: Mitch Sinclair, DD’s hunky boyfriend is involved in hush-hush work that keeps him in Paris. Woodley, DD’s colleague in the insurance fraud case, is getting surly. And someone is stalking DD, leaving threatening notes under her door.

            A quirky supporting cast adds spice: The 80-year-old Carabine twins, across the hall from DD are vigilant crime stoppers and follow the Cook County Crime Stoppers website, hoping to get on the show. Auntie Elizabeth, “The Scottish Dragon”, claims she is “fey” and knows things. Wolfie, Tom Joyce’s pet wolf, only eats burgers from McDonald’s. Karl Patrick, DD’s lawyer, is the lawyer you definitely would want on your side.

            DD is an engaging sleuth – smart, with a humorous slant on life, a bit too impulsive for her own good, and a loyal friend.

            The author’s setting details are just the right brush strokes to plunge a reader in DD’s Chicago without distracting from the plot’s forward movement.

            An added bonus is the way information about Doyle is woven into the story. This is a book to be enjoyed on many levels.

            Quote: “Everybody knows he wrote the famous Sherlock Holmes stories, but I had no idea he also introduced downhill skiing to Europe; metal helmets for combat soldiers; the inflatable life preserver for sailors; energetically championed divorce reform; and was an early proponent of constructing a tunnel connecting England and France.”

You can follow Diane Gilbert Madsen on Twitter

You can also visit her on Facebook  

Visit Diane’s Website (where you can see a cool trailer and read the first two chapters.)

Visit her Blog (and sign up for her newsletter.)

And you can buy the book at Amazon 

Diane Gilbert Madsen is the author of the award winning DD McGil Literati Mystery Series including “A Cadger’s Curse;” “Hunting for Hemingway” and her newest, “The Conan Doyle Notes: The Secret of Jack the Ripper,” which was awarded Honorary Mention at the London Book Fair and the Chicago Writers Association 2014 Book Awards, garnering 5-star reviews such as:

“Diane Gilbert Madsen’s “The Conan Doyle Notes: The Secret of Jack the Ripper” was the best book I’ve read in a long, long time. I was hooked by page six and couldn’t stop reading. Spellbinding, intriguing and with a beguiling wit, Ms. Madsen delighted me to no end.” --  Catherine Lanigan, author, Romancing the Stone,  Jewel of the Nile & Love Shadows.

   

Diane is the former Director of Economic Development for the State of Illinois where she oversaw the Tourism and the Illinois Film Office when The Blues Brothers and The Hunter were being made.  She later ran her own consulting firm and is listed in The World Who’s Who of Women and Who’s Who in Finance & Industry and in the 2014 edition of Who’s Who for Executives and Professionals, Florida Chapter.

Diane is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, the International Association of Crime Writers, the Chicago Writers Association, and the Florida Writers Association.  She has published articles in The Hemingway Review, PBS Expressions Magazine; Mystery Scene Magazine; Mystery Reader’s Journal; Sisters in Crime Newsletter and The Write City Magazine, and has an upcoming article in the fall issue of The Baker Street Journal.  Diane was a guest speaker at the 2013 International Hemingway Colloquium in Havana, Cuba.

She lives with her husband Tom and Angel, their Japanese Chin, at Twin Ponds, a 5-acre wildlife sanctuary on Cape Haze in Englewood, Florida. She is a member of the Caladonian Club of Florida West and the St. Andrews Society of Sarasota as well as The Pleasant Places of Florida Sherlock Holmes Association.