When A Mystery Isn't What You Expected

I needed a mystery for my next mystery book club meeting, but I didn't get the usual sort of mystery this time.  That's why I lined up a more conventional mystery for my next read.  So this book has been given the title of A Ghastly Catastrophe.  I got the novel from the library.

Veronica Speedwell, the female protagonist of the series, wants to sue Bram Stoker for writing a novel with similarities to her life.  I don't think it's all that similar.  Her lawyer advised her not to engage in litigation. Veronica nevertheless said "Bram Stoker is a thieving blackguard!" I wrote in my notes that I can't be too upset about a fictional character I've just met thinking she's had her life stolen.

So Speedwell and Stoker have been investigating murders together, but the novel is written from Veronica Speedwell's perspective.   This is the tenth book in the series.  As my readers probably know, I read out of order.  I haven't read any other title in this series. 

I expect that the overwhelming majority of people who read this review will know that Bram Stoker is the author of  Dracula.  He apparently hasn't written it yet within the series continuity.

                                               

      

 Speedwell and Stoker's latest case depicted in A Ghastly Catastrophe  is the death of Maurice Quincey who had been found dead in a carriage outside a cemetery.  He had two puncture wounds on his neck that dripped blood,  but Stoker said that there is no such thing as vampires.  Speedwell wanted to find out the truth, but Stoker wanted nothing to do with it.

There is a Hippolyta Club in the novel.  All the members have to be women with original minds.  Why?  Did Hippolyta in Greek myth have an original mind?  I don't recall any mythic evidence that she did.  I looked her up on Wikipedia and didn't see any indication in the article that she did.  I wonder if the author really meant the historical figure, Hypatia.  The link is to an article that discusses Hypatia's mathematical work. 

 In A Ghastly Catastrophe there was also a discussion of Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley's famous ghost story competition.  John  William Polidori was Byron's physician and was also present on that occasion.  He wrote The Vampyre, a short story based on the one that Byron told.   Lord Ruthven was a name Polidori got from Glenarvon, a novel in which the author, Lady Caroline Lamb, satirized Lord Byron.  I'd imagine that Polidori didn't exactly hold Byron in the utmost esteem if he was reading a novel of that period that made fun of his aristocratic employer.

The Brisbanes were a pair of aristocrats who became involved in the cases that Veronica Speedwell and Bram Stoker were investigating.  Lord Brisbane turned out to be part Romany. His Romany mother left her people to marry Lord Brisbane's father.  Speedwell learned this when a search for a Romany witness brought them to a Romany camp.  

That's when I found out that Romany don't do divination for each other.  Reading palms or  cards is something Romany do for their survival.  It's not really a Romany cultural practice.  The Romany called Magda read for Stoker.  She asked him to "knock on the cards as if upon a door."  I've never seen that in a card reading.  So I ran a search on it.  I'd imagine that she thought Stoker would like knocking on the cards or be impressed by the idea. There were reasons for knocking on the cards that I found when I did a search for it that resonated for me.  

          *To clear energy--This is clearing residual energy from previous readings.

          *To ground the cards making them more receptive to the reader's energy.              

          *Finding the answers to specific questions.

          *Inviting the spiritual realm such as spirit guides or higher powers. 

Magda dealt five cards in the shape of a cross.  It occurs to me that the cross shape need not be the Christian symbol.  It could represent a crossroads that the person being read for might be experiencing in his or her life.   She called it  "the Cross of Destiny". 

Magda said that the cards were "Romany Oracle Cards".  They were drawn in Bohemia. She informed him that the cards "might call forth memories, emotions and fantasies".

She said the first card represented the present.  Magda called it Sweetheart.  The woman was reading a letter and smiling.  

The second card represented the past.  Magda called it Sorrow.  Veronica knew Stoker's former wife had been a painful experience.  She had been cruel.  

The third card is the near future.  There was a letter on the card with illegible writing.  Magda  said that a communication would come that would be very significant and that it would come soon.  Veronica now thought that Magda was a fraud.  

The fourth card was Misfortune, but it was a burning building.  I'd say that's a good deal more than a misfortune.  It would be a disaster.  There was a fireman on the card, but the water in his hose was obviously inadequate.

The last card was Death.  I've read that the Death card didn't have to be an actual death.  It could be major change. 

    She gave Stoker a white stone and said it came from a place where the magic was old and had never been forgotten.  She called it a Hag Stone. I wondered why a Hag Stone would be white.  In reading about Hag Stones, I learned that they might be stones of any color containing at least one hole.  She said Stoker should wear the Hag Stone to protect him.  He would know when he no longer needed it and could take it off.

Eventually, Veronica and Stoker solved the case, and the villains were defeated.  Vampires usually aren't interesting to me and these weren't at all. The most interesting aspect were the Romany characters, but they didn't appear for very long.  So I gave it a C+. 

                                                           

                                                             

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prison Librarian in Kentucky

 After having read The Mountains We Call Home, I thought it was odd that the book had been given that title.   Perhaps it was done to link it to the earlier books in the series which were much more tied to mountain life.  It seemed to me that the plot of this novel was centered more on life in prison.  That was where the female central character largely spent her days.

                                                       

The protagonist Cussy was arrested because she was a non-white woman who married a white man.  He too was arrested.  This meant that this pair who loved each other were living in a gender separated prison.

This book also brings to the fore ethical issues in the treatment of prisoners in Kentucky during the early 1950's.  I considered the policy of routinely lobotomizing prisoners particularly heinous.  An article by Esther Annorzie on the subject called A Procedure Gone Wrong  provides an overview on why lobotomy was adopted and the reasons why it has been discontinued.

In "A Note From The Author" at the back of the book, I learned about some library improvements.  One example is that Kim Michele Richardson, the author, got an initiative signed into law in Kentucky to establish 26 libraries in courthouses.  Indiana, California and Ohio are also interested in installing libraries in courthouses.  

Bookmobiles are generally used in isolated areas of the U.S. that don't have libraries.  Kentucky has more bookmobiles than any other state.  Author Richardson tells us this is because Kentucky places a high priority on literacy.  I would suggest that Kentucky also doesn't have very much funding to build libraries.  Kentucky isn't by any means the poorest state.  That is Mississippi which almost certainly doesn't have the funding to provide very many bookmobiles.   On the other hand, the choice of whether to build a library or give the community a bookmobile might be partly based on racism in Mississippi. African American Mississippi author W. Ralph Eubanks gives us his  Bookmobile Memories, but he doesn't ask why there was no library. He was evidently grateful for the bookmobile.  

Actually, I think bookmobiles may be inadequate in some cases.  There could be isolated areas, for which bookmobiles are intended,  that might be better reached with wings. Winged dragons guard treasure, and books are indeed treasures for book deprived readers. A small plane could be painted as if it were a dragon.  So we might have Book Dragons that fly into the more extremely isolated places to transport books. It's a thought.

 

                                                        

                                                      

 

 

 

 

                                             
     

                                                       

                                               

Women's Suffrage in Tennessee

Only one more state was needed for women's suffrage to become law throughout the United States in  the novel City of Betrayal by Victoria Thompson. Tennessee seemed to be that final state even though passing women's suffrage there would be a challenge. Suffragists are among my favorite historical subjects.  I checked this book out from the public library.  It's my first read of May 2026.

                                                       

   

 No one was willing to introduce it in the state legislature at that point, but the junior U.S. Senator of TN wanted their state to be responsible for the ratification of women's suffrage. A TN State Senator said that those in favor of women's suffrage were being accused of allowing "petticoat government", but ironically women weren't wearing petticoats at that point.

 TN suffragists were looking for a replica of the Liberty Bell so they could ring it when the women's suffrage amendment passed.  They found one that was half the size of the original, and the crack was painted on.

Tom Riddick gave the report of the Amendments Committee.  He said that the South needed to stop being backwards. He had the pledges of 64 members of the House to ratify the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  If ratification failed in TN, Riddick said he'd be ashamed of being a Tennessean.  One suffragist said that "Taxation without representation should no longer apply to the women of the United States." This implies to me that if women's suffrage failed, women should revolt as men had in 1776 due to taxation without representation.  

President Woodrow Wilson sent a telegram asking the Speaker of the TN House to support women's suffrage.  The people sitting in the gallery shouted their approval. One woman started chanting the President's name. When the vote was held, there was a tie.  When the tie was announced, one member of the House who hadn't voted said he would vote in favor.  He was threatened and accused of having been bribed.  He escaped out of window, and then went in the window of the library.  I was pleased that the library was considered a place of safety.  The librarian was startled.  The Anti-Suffrage legislators tried to reverse pro-suffrage votes and said they would hold indignation meetings in districts where representatives voted in favor of women's suffrage.  Yet national ratification of the suffrage amendment eventually passed.  The Anti-Suffrage supporters kept on trying to nullify women's suffrage until the Supreme Court ruled against nullifying it. Warren G. Harding was the first President elected with women's votes.

The Tennessee legislators who voted in support of women's suffrage were brave men.  I wasn't surprised that there was so much conflict over the issue.  There is still controversy over women's rights in the U.S. and it still takes courage to support them.

                                                          

                                                               

 

 

 

 

Knave of Diamonds: 2025's Mary Russell Novel Gets A Review

I do love Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell series.  I've reviewed Dreaming Spies on this blog here ,  Island of the Mad  also on this blog here  and The Lantern's Dance, last year's Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell novel here . In addition I reviewed Back To The Garden, a standalone Laurie R. King book  here.  I downloaded a copy of this book from Net Galley.  This means the publisher approved my receiving of this book probably due to my publishing reviews on one of my blogs, and on Goodreads.

I was hoping that Knave of Diamonds would be as dramatic as Island of the Mad or as complex as The Lantern's Dance.   This post on the most recent Laurie R. King mystery will not be quite as positive as those previous reviews.  

                                               

 I noted that Mary Russell referred to an American dancer as "Josephine something or other" who had come to Paris to join a "revue negre".  This means that the dancer is African American and is likely to be Josephine Baker.  I reviewed Josephine Baker's Last Dance by Sherry Jones on this blog here.  So Mary Russell had never heard of Josephine Baker, and there is no reason why she should have heard of her.  She had no connections to either African Americans or the dance world.  

Jacob Russell, Mary's Uncle Jake, is a prominent character in Knave of Diamonds.  There are numerous chapters from his viewpoint.  Fortunately, the chapter viewpoints are labeled.  This isn't always the case in multiple viewpoint books.  So I was relieved not to have to do detective work to figure out which character was speaking.  

Jake is a thief, but not entirely reprehensible. Although more ethical than some thieves,  Jake is no Robin Hood.  He may rob from the rich, but he keeps the proceeds for himself.

One detail that I thought I'd include in this review is that Jake didn't realize that a signet ring could be important even though it wasn't part of the Irish Crown Jewels whose theft was the central event of the plot.  Lords used signet rings to validate documents.  So the Vicars, who were the noble family involved in the case, should probably have considered it a significant heirloom. The signet ring didn't come up elsewhere in the plot, and I thought that was rather curious.

The Stealing of the Irish Crown Jewels by Myles Dunegan, which is a factual account of the actual theft of the Irish Crown Jewels,  which is fictionally described  in Knave of  Diamonds, is cited by Laurie R. King as source material.  I decided to buy a Kindle copy, and hope to review it eventually.   

In conclusion, I was intrigued by the historical aspect of Knave of Diamonds and want to find out more about it even though I experienced the novel as overlong.

 

                                                           

 

 

 

                                                      

 

 

 

 

 

Suffragette Mystery, 1912

 I'm finally reviewing a novel that is allowing me to return to Flying High Reviews three months after I last posted here.  It does center on a strong female protagonist.  I'd like to try to read those more frequently. 

I purchased Lady Rights a Wrong from my public library's bookstore. I was hoping that the suffragette protagonist, Lady Cecilia Bates, would be a character who would capture my interest.  

Cecilia is investigating the death of suffragette leader, Amelia Price, which seems to be an accident.    

                                     

 

Cecilia wanted to learn how to ride a bicycle.  Once you've learned that skill, it makes you more independent.  Unfortunately, as I know from experience, learning to ride a bicycle involves a great deal of falling before you've mastered it.  In that era, it would be considered quite improper for a lady to be seen falling. 

I was engaged by this book through a good proportion of my reading process, but I have to say that I eventually found it tiresome.  I imagine I will give it a B- grade which would be two stars on Goodreads.

                             
                                             

                                      

  

                                      

 

 

 

The Queens of Crime

 I haven't posted a review on Flying High Reviews in 2025 until now.  This is a blog for books containing strong female protagonists.   It's taken me about two and half months to find them.  I'm not surprised that this review deals with a book I've chosen from the library rather than one that was sent to me by an author or publisher.  

                                

 Queens of Crime by Marie Benedict deals with a group of  real life mystery authors.  Benedict chose  Dorothy Sayers as the viewpoint character.  The others are Agatha Christie, Baroness Orczy who is referred to as Emma in this novel, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.

From the Wikipedia article on Ngaio Marsh, I learned that Sayers, Christie, Allingham and Marsh have been called the Queens of Crime. Baroness Orczy, who is not known for writing mysteries, is not included in that group.  She is best known for having written the historical fiction, The Scarlet Pimpernel, but she also had written crime novels about which I know absolutely nothing.  In fact, Benedict's novel, the subject of this review, was the first time I learned that Baroness Orczy had written anything other than The Scarlet Pimpernel.  So I definitely got an education from reading this book. 

I feel that I need to mention that although I have read Sayers, Christie and the one well known novel by Orczy, I have never read any books by Margery Allingham or Ngaio Marsh. 

The authors discuss how they write. Agatha Christie says that for her characters come last.  It definitely shows.  That is not a compliment.  Although I watch Poirot on television, I don't find him interesting as a protagonist.  She may start with plot, but her plots are formulaic.  Christie was the first mystery author I read.  Since then I've discovered authors I prefer whose work is more complex.

Dorothy Sayers says that she creates biographies for her characters. She wondered if they should create a biography for the missing May Daniels even though she isn't a fictional character. IMAO, that's definitely the wrong direction. That should be self-evident.   She has an actual life which they need to uncover, not create.  Knowing about her life should be a starting point for their investigation into her disappearance.  

Dorothy realized that May shouldn't be viewed the same way as a fictional character after she attended the police briefing about May's disappearance.  After that, it felt very real.  She shared the information that the police provided with the other women in their group.

Since May's disappearance is the central mystery of the novel, I can't include any further information about it.  I also can't reveal how the novel ended.  I would give it the grade of B.  This means that I liked it, but didn't love it.

 

                                           

 

 

 

Return to Blood: Underwhelming Sequel to Better the Blood

I was really looking forward to Return to Blood by Michael Bennett.  It's the sequel to Better the Blood which really wowed me.  See my review of Better the Blood here.  Return to Blood was a good deal less engaging.

There were point of view switches that sometimes confused me because it took me some time to determine who the point of view character was,  and when it was taking place within the novel's chronology.  I suppose there might be readers who enjoy trying to figure out what's going on in a book.  The only thing I want to figure out in a mystery is whodunit.   I suppose that makes me a traditional mystery reader.  I don't want to find the book's entire structure mysterious, as I occasionally did while reading  Return to Blood.  

Narrative confusion causes me to lose my involvement with the characters.  If I don't know who's speaking, I can't integrate it with what I'd previously learned about the character or identify with what the character is experiencing.

                                    

                                         

The protagonist Hana Westerman has left the police, but she has had a long-term  involvement with a man who remains a police officer. At one point he tells Hana that "blue is in your DNA".  This is a reference to blue police uniforms.                                      

There is an important Maori character who had left his tribe and is described as always trying to find a place where he can fit in.  We're never told why he left his tribe.  I would think that this would be a key to understanding him.

I think that I was supposed to be engaged by the fact that the victim, Kiri, was in recovery from drug addiction.  Lorraine, who was a police investigator assigned to Kiri's case, spoke to her recovery group.  She wanted to be supportive toward the group.  The perpetrator was known early in the process, so Lorraine didn't have to treat them as suspects.  Lorraine needed to clinch the case against this killer and arrest him before he killed again.  That was the suspense aspect.  I'd imagine that the recovery group was regarded by police as a pool of potential victims.  That would have been a very predictable direction for the plot.  There was enough predictability in the development of the killer's past without that. 

Return to Blood is peppered with Maori vocabulary.  The word Muru is said to mean justice in this book. Yet when I looked it up on Wikipedia, the article stated that it meant compensation for offenses which is much more specific.  It made me wonder whether I wasn't understanding these Maori words correctly. 

Another example is that the Maori god Tahirimatea is called the god of thunder and lightning in Return to Blood, but Wikipedia says that he is the Maori god of weather in general.  So Michael Bennett might not be portraying the connotations of Maori words with exactitude.

Bennett tells us that Maori consider yellow the color of serenity.  This clashes with my view of yellow.  I primarily associate it with the yellow traffic light that warns me that it will soon turn red. I also associate it with sunlight which increases visibility.  Brighter sunlight means that I know more about what I'm seeing.  So the color yellow is a complex concept for me with more than one meaning.

 A poem written by victim Kiri is included in the book.  I particularly liked the line "so we make homes out of each other".  This resonated for me. I do believe that people consider certain individuals a personal "home" even if they live in a place that they call home.

There is an incident in which the perpetrator chased a religious girl with a scarf on her head.  She hit him on the head with a hockey stick. It seems likely to me that this girl would have been Islamic.  A Jewish girl with a scarf on her head wouldn't have played hockey.  In a Jewish context, the scarf means that she belonged to a particular type of extremely devout separatist community called Haredim.  She wouldn't have been anywhere except home, or in a religious school for girls where they didn't play sports.  An Islamic girl with a scarf on her head could have been attending public school.

I wasn't nearly as impressed by Return to Blood as I'd been by Better the Blood.  This sequel lacks the intensity of the previous novel, and the plot needed more organization.  Toward the end, I was turning pages wishing that Return to Blood would be over.