VICTIMS – Jonathan Kellerman

I have read all of the books in Jonathan Kellerman’s long-running series featuring Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis. Alex is a psychologist, a consultant with the Los Angeles police department. His experience has been with children, both as victims of abuse and as abusers who victimize others. Milo is a lieutenant in the homicide division. The two have become close friends through all the years of looking at the worst human beings can do to each other.

“Something I need you to see, Alex. Here’s the address.” Vita Berlin is a woman in her fifties. Her neck has been broken and, post mortem, she has been eviscerated. Her body was found by her landlord so no difficulty in making an identification. But according to the landlord’s description of Vita as a person, the list of people with whom she had problems includes just about everyone she ever met. ” ‘Maybe she’s got some family who will mourn…but no one who has had anything to do with her is going to say thy miss her.’” Vita’s home was neat in the extreme; there was nothing to reveal her pe3rsonality. The only thing in her apartment of interest to the police is a pizza delivery box. There are twenty-eight independent pizza delivery businesses within easy distance of Vita’s apartment. Milo checked them all, including the chains. None used the boxes. Nothing on the outside of the box suggests that food had been in it. When it is dusted for prints and then unsealed, Milo and Alex find a piece of white paper taped to the bottom on it is a ?.

Marlon Quigg is victim #2. He is found on a wooded path frequently used by dog walkers. He is a successful accountant, happily married, the father of two daughters. He is killed in the same way as Vita Berlin. Gloria “got back down near the body, started rolling it. Stopped and reached under and drew something out. Piece of paper, folded into a packet, corners perfectly square. She photographed it closed, then spread a sterile cloth under it and spread it open. White, standard letter size. In the center, a simple message: ?

Three more bodies are discovered, all killed in the same way. There are no witnesses but as the police repeat interviews with people who were familiar with the victims, one detail emerges. The victims were stalked over the course of a few weeks before they were killed. A man wearing a hevy coat lined with shearling is described as being in each area. This is Los Angeles; most people don’t own a heavy coat. For lack of a name, the suspect is named for the only thing they know about, his coat. They have no idea who “Shearling” is.

The victims range from a medical doctor to a homeless man. They seem to have nothing in common. At first, the police feared the suspect was choosing his victims randomly but as the investigation moves on the police believe that he is working from a list. The only positive element of that conclusion is that they don;t have to consider the entire population of greater Los Angeles as potential victims. But knowing there is a list doesn’t get them closer to knowing who is on it.

VICTIMS is the twenty-seventh book in the Alex Delaware/Milo Sturgis series. These are police procedurals and in this book Alex’s girlfriend, Robin, has a couple of small scenes. Milo’s partner, Rick, is only mentioned. This story belongs to Alex, Milo, and “Shearling”. Kellerman’s books may be described as formulaic but with Kellerman that isn’t a bad thing. In each book Alex deals with people who have been victimized when they were young and who carry the damage into the lives of others. Kellerman addresses one of the most tragic of society’s problems, the inability to protect the most vulnerable. Some of the author’s books have been on the New York Times Best Seller list. Kellerman has found a formula that always works.

THOSE WHO LOVE NIGHT – Wessel Ebersohn

The title of this second book in the Abigail Bukula series, THOSE WHO LOVE NIGHT, is based on a line from KING LEAR.

“Things that love night love not such things as these.”

Lear is about family, unconditional love, and loyalty.  So is this story.

It is at night that the worst fears are realized. Janice is asleep when the sounds of the diesel engines wake her.  Her husband is no longer beside her and she can hear raised voices in the street.  She joins Wally outside and asks. “Is it them?”  “Yes, I think so.  Get the children.”

“Both were asleep when Janice reached them.  The girl was four and the boy not yet three….She bent to pick up the boy, but she felt the child inside her move, and shook them both instead.  ‘Wake up – wake up quickly.  We have to run away.’

From her position she could see the first of the personnel carriers as it entered the village….Soldiers leaped from the back, their rifles held in both hands, the fixed bayonets flashing in the lights of the next vehicle.  She knew who they were.  This was Five Brigade….She had heard about their bayonets and the way they used them.  The orders by which they functioned demanded that, if the rebel women were pregnant, they were to be killed and their dissident sons with them before they were born.”

Twenty-seven years later, Abigail finds herself in some difficulty in South Africa.  As an outspoken attorney in the Justice Department, she is furious when a new regime orders that the Scorpions, an elite force that loves making the arrests of high-profile criminals in the full-glare of television lights.  They are to be replaced with the Hawks, a group more amenable to the political ambitions of their overlords.  Abigail is offered a significant promotion on one condition: she must take a six month sabbatical while the restructuring takes place.

Abigail is not a woman who deals well with free time.  She is rescued from months of boredom when she receives an envelope from Kristj Patel, a lawyer in Zimbabwe.  Included in the packet are two labeled photographs.  One is an old photo of her cousin, Katy, Janice’s daughter.  The other photo is a recent picture of her cousin, Tony, a boy Abigail didn’t know existed.  Tony is being held in Zimbabwe as a member of the dissident group known as the Harare 7, a group pledged to bring down the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe.  The group is facing the death penalty.

Abigail goes to Zimbabwe, a country she knows and loves.  She practiced law there for a few months so she is familiar with the justice system.  The first thing she must do is get a court order allowing Tony in jail.  As another attorney, Kristj Patel is helpful but Abigail really needs the help of prison psychologist, Yudel Gordon.  It has been four years since they last worked together but Yudel makes himself available, well aware of the circumstances under which Tony and his associates are being held.

Wessel Ebersohn has a gift for creating on the page the psychological terror that sets the stage for the story.  That much of the atmosphere of place is a result of the time in which the characters live. Five Brigade was ” formed in 1981 and was used in genocidal operations against Ndebele-ethnic Mugabe opponents in Matabeleland.^[4]“.  Janice’s experiences in the beginning of the book are those of real women.

Ebersohn writes of Abigail, “The events of the last few days had brought back memories that she would rather than the death of her aunt have left hidden.  She had been in a safe house in Lesotho when the house was attacked and her father murdered by soldiers of the old regime.  Two years later her mother had been killed by a parcel bomb.  “In some ways, the way they had died was easier for her to accept than the death of her aunt.  Her parents were victims of the racist regime that she had accepted as evil, an enemy of the people.  Her aunt’s death, on the other hand, had been at the hands of what she had been taught was an army of liberation.”

THE OCTOBER KILLINGS is a personal story told within the context of a country.  THOSE WHO LOVE NIGHT is the story of the people of Zimbabwe framed by examples of people trying to make the country into a democracy.  Each book is independent of the other but the reader might benefit from reading them in order of publication.

A RE-POST: THE OCTOBER KILLINGS – Wessel Ebersohn

In March 2011, I posted the following review.  I am putting it up again because I plan to review the second book in the series, THOSE WHO LOVE NIGHT, tomorrow.

October 21, 1985

“The convoy stayed in the shadow of the hillside until after darkness had fallen.  By the time the ten armored personnel carriers started moving, the trees on the far side of the valley had long faded into poorly defined shadows….Like most nineteen-year-olds of his time and culture, Leon was a patriot.  He knew that, if need be, he was willing to die to defend his country.”

Abigail Bukula was fifteen-years-old when the white apartheid  security forces crossed into Lesotho and attacked the camp where she was staying with her parents and other leaders of the African National Congress.  It was early in the morning of October 22.  The anti-apartheid activists, branded as terrorists, were sleeping when the security forces came for them.  Abigail watched as her parents were murdered.  She would have died, too, if it not for that nineteen-year-old boy who took a risk and saved her life.

October 13, 2005

It has been twelve years since the new South African  government had taken the reins of power and leadership.  Abigail, an attorney happily married to the editor of one of the nation’s major newspapers, is the face of the new South Africa.  Educated in London and at Harvard, Abigail is chief director of one one of the departments of the government in Pretoria.  She has buried the memories of the night in Lesotho; she is not the teenager who watched her parents die, she no longer allows herself to be one of the six survivors who escaped the hate-fueled rampage.  Abigail is a woman who will not let herself be anyone’s victim by reliving the horrors of her life.  On this day, the senior members of the justice department are holding an award ceremony for Michael Bishop, a hero of the struggle to end apartheid.  ” ‘Yes,’ the minister said, ‘a genuine hero of the struggle.  While the rest of us were getting educated at international universities, he was in the front lines, risking his life.  It just shows how sound our nonracial policies are’. The last reference was to the fact that Bishop was white.”  But Michael Bishop never arrived and the ceremony honoring him went on without him.

Three days later, Abigail is buried in the details of an international conference that will showcase South Africa on the world stage.  Abigail does not want to be distracted when Johanna, her assistant, comes to tell her that there is a white man who is insisting on seeing Abigail.  Johanna tries to send him away but he refuses to leave.  When Abigail hears the man is Leon Laurens, Johanna is unprepared for Abigail’s reaction. She is shocked as Abigail changes from the supremely confident woman she knows to a much younger girl.  Her bearing and her voice and her voice are different.  Abigail has never forgotten the young soldier and she can’t refuse to see him but the mention of his name erases the past twenty years and this brings her back to the night in Lesotho.

There is a powerful connection between the two that has not been lost in twenty years.  Leon comes to Abigail, desperate for her protection, not for himself but for his wife and children.  There were 20 men in the group who invaded the house in Lesotho, led by Colonel van Jaarsveld.  The colonel is in prison.  Leon is the only one of the twenty recruits who is still alive.  Over the years, all the others were killed on October 22, the anniversary of the raid.

Abigail wants to save Leon but she needs help.  She contacts Yudel Gordon who was a prison psychologist before the end of apartheid.  He lost his job but he has recently signed a contract to help at the prison.  Yudel is the only one who can get Abigail  in to meet with the only other surviving member of the security force, van Jaarsveld.  Abigail tries to convince van Jaarsveld to help them save Leon but van Jaarsveld is an unrepentant supporter of the old apartheid social divisions.  He has killed too many people to care about one more life.

To save Leon, Abigail and Yudel join forces to find Michael Bishop.  Neither have any doubt that the assassination of the security forces is the work of Bishop who didn’t see the end of apatheid as a pardon for the people who murdered blacks with impunity.  Michael Bishop is an avenging angel for the dead of the anti-apartheid struggle.  The rest of the country may want to forget those days but those days, when he made himself judge and executioner, defined his life.

It is a stunning accomplishment that the author was able to convey the inhumanity of apartheid, the struggle that will likely take generations to resolve (the American Civil War began in 1860, 150 years ago, and we still suffer the consequences of the slavery that was the excuse for starting it) within a story that the reader will not want to put down. In fact, Abigail and Yudel are so real that many not want to let them go; finishing the book is saying goodbye.  Ebersohn indicates that THE OCTOBER KILLINGS is the first in a series and I hope it is true.  In the 1990′s, Ebersohn wrote three books featuring Yudel Gordon, A LONELY PLACE TO DIE, DIVIDE THE NIGHT, and THE CLOSED CIRCLE.

Ebersohn writes a very good story but his characters will keep readers coming back.

STARTING OFF WITH A REALLY BAD PUN……

Dan Waddell posted this piece on Murder Is Everywhere.  Off the west coast of Ireland are the Aran Islands where the industries are fishing and the cottage industry of women who make the oatmeal colored Irish knit sweaters.  Each of the sweaters are made of wool pretty much as it comes off the sheep.  The sweaters are worn in Ireland’s famous wet weather because the lanolin in the wool that keeps the sheep dry isn’t removed from the wool before it is used.

Each handmade sweater has specific differences in the patterns, a code of sorts that identifies the knitter.  If I had to choose between a sweater and garlic in any sort of beveridge, the sweater would always win.

The Kids are All Wight

Apologies for the lateness of this blog, but I’ve just returned from a brief family holiday back in time. I say back in time, but I mean the Isle of Wight, though the effect is the same. The biggest island that belongs to this island is an old-fashioned place. When I mentioned I was going on Twitter I was followed by a spambot. But even she was innocent. She asked that I call her on Bembridge 452 for a jolly good time and she’d describe her shapely ankle.

The Isle of Wight was Queen Victoria’s favourite place. It still cleaves to her memory, or at least tries to. The pace of life is slow; there are no motorways; the mobile phone signal is intermittent and one of its main attractions is a garlic farm. I used this often to whip the kids in line. ‘Stop squabbling or we’ll go to the garlic farm!’ It worked a treat. Especially when I told them it sold garlic fudge (true.) Just the sheer ghastly prospect of eating that was enough to draw immediate silence. They also sell garlic beer. I think we have the new alternative to Guantanamo Bay.

There are, thankfully, many other attractions, not least the Jurassic coastline, its crumbling cliffs and glorious windswept beaches. The coastline is being eroded by a metre each year, and each slight fall or storm brings out thousands of fossil hunters seeking prize dinosaur finds. Our children spent many a happy hour scouring the sands for fossils. I will now spend several less happy ones standing on and tripping over lumps of worthless rock. Their guide made the mistake of telling them about a schoolboy who found a fossil worth £20,000. We ended up with bags of stuff, even if the the best find was fossilised dinosaur crap. The metaphor is way too easy.

But from rocks to rock (see what I did there.) While there is something quintessentially old-fashioned about the Isle of Wight, and well-heeled, given that it’s home to the yachting set, it also has its place in music history. The Isle of Wight festival of 1970 is infamous, not least for witnessing one of Jimi Hendrix’s last performances, an incendiary one, before which he was believed to have consumed at least two bottles of garlic beer.

And see what happened next…

Anyway, no guesses for the prize at the next Bouchercon MiE panel…

cheers

TEN MYSTERIES FROM JASMINE HALL AND ONLINE COLLEGES

Jasmine Hall,  from a blog on Online Colleges,  forwarded this fascinating article today.  Each story would make a great platform on which to base a book in part because there are so few details.  In some cases, there were witnesses.  In others, it seemed victim and killer must have known each other.  In all cases, a young, bright student was killed.  In none, did the police identify a motive.

The 10 Most Notorious Unsolved College Crimes

by Staff Writers

February 14, 2012

If all you watched on TV was CSI, you’d start to think it’s impossible to get away with murder these days. With all the dusting, printing, X-raying, and blue-lighting, the technology would seem to have closed the book on the idea of the perfect murder. And yet, we know that’s not the case. There has always been a small segment of horrible crimes that go unsolved, and even with all our forensic advancements, trails still go cold and files get shelved. These are the notorious stories of 10 college victims whose murderers have never been brought to justice.

1. Betsy Aardsma

   The bizarre case of Betsy Aardsma has confounded police for over 40 years. A cute, smart grad student at Penn State, Aardsma was well-liked and had recently become engaged. She was so studious, she was in the library over Thanksgiving break when she was stabbed once in the heart with a small knife. A man hurriedly leaving the section told a librarian, “Somebody better help that girl,” and several witnesses were able to describe him. Aardsma died five minutes later. Police never identified the man, and today the murder is officially a cold case.

2. Suzanne Jovin

   This well-liked Yale student was active in volunteer work and sang in a school orchestra. On December 4, 1998 while walking back to her apartment after a charity fundraising event she had organized, Jovin was stabbed from behind 17 times. She was found at an intersection, bleeding on the street, at 9:55 p.m.; at 10:26, she was pronounced dead. The only suspect to come under scrutiny was James Van de Velde, Jovin’s thesis advisor, but he was cleared due to lack of evidence. The only clues in this cold case are DNA from under Jovin’s fingernails, prints on a Fresca bottle from an unidentified person, and a brown van.

3. Charles Sessums

   What started with some innocent football game ribbing ended with blood on the field. During halftime of the 1926 Baylor-Texas A&M game, a float went past the Aggie cheering section with Baylor women holding up signs with scores from Baylor wins. Three Aggie fans mistook the women for guys in drag and knocked one of them off the float, causing immediate chaos as fans from both schools poured onto the field. In the melee, Corps cadet Charles Sessums was concussed by a navy-suited man wielding a 2×4. Sessums died of a blood clot the next morning, and no one has ever been charged for his killing.

4. Thomas Burkett

   Though officially ruled a suicide, Thomas Burkett’s parents and many others believe the young man was murdered. The story of the Marymount College student’s death in 1991 is rife with weird details — a young man suspected of being a drug informant for the CIA; police laughing at the parents while their son’s body is wheeled away; two ambulances dispatched to the scene, one of which stops to let someone retrieve something from a ravine before turning off its emergency lights and driving away. Burkett’s car was not inspected by police, and one cop told the parents to “clean the mess up,” thereby ruining crime scene evidence. If Burkett was killed, his killer will almost certainly never be known.

5. Cecilia Shepard and Cheri Jo Bates

   The Zodiac Killer is one of the most notorious monsters in American history. In the late ’60s and early ’70s he killed at least five people and claimed to have killed 37 in his taunting letters to newspapers, and to this day his identity remains unknown. Two of his victims were college students. Cheri Jo Bates left the campus library at Riverside City College in California one evening and was stabbed 14 times and nearly decapitated. On a picnic with a friend, 22-year-old Cecilia Shepherd was tied up and stabbed 10 times and died two days later.

6. Jack Davis, Jr.

   At the very least, someone committed a crime by giving 20-year-old Jack Davis, Jr. alcohol on the night of October 16, 1987. After the man’s body was found in an Indiana University of Pennsylvania campus stairwell five days later, the autopsy declared Davis had died by vomiting, passing out, and inhaling his own vomit and choking. But subsequent investigation by various journalists and a detective has cast serious doubt on the accidental death theory. The body was exhumed in 1990, revealing previously-overlooked head trauma and a telling lack of vomit in the air passage. Yet with no new leads, the case has since been closed again.

7. Roy Weber

   On Christmas Day, 2003, campus security at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island discovered Roy Weber’s body by the side of a road. The 22-year-old male prostitute had been shot in the head. Some have suggested that because Weber was a hustler and a drug addict, the ensuing investigation was not thorough. Nevertheless, the only lead police have is a black-and-white photo of a man caught on a low-income apartment complex security camera. He is the last-known person to have ever spoken to Weber, and police have never identified him.

8. Donnie Farrell

   It was Homecoming Weekend in October 2007 at Rowan University in New Jersey. A group of men approached 19-year-old Donnie Farrell and five friends and asked them for directions to a party. After he told them that two of the men, in what police would call an “extremely swift attack,” suddenly leapt at Farrell, punching and kicking him. Before Farrell’s friends could react, the men had stolen Farrell’s wallet and fled. Farrell died the next day. Community members were stunned at the violent, unprovoked act, which police do not believe was race or gang-related. They have never made an arrest in the case. Journalism students at Rowan have started a project in hopes of keeping the case alive.

9. Jill Lyn Euto

   When Jill Lyn Euto did not show up at her mother’s house to watch the 2001 Super Bowl with her family, her mother became concerned. When she called the next day at Jill’s work to be told Jill had never shown there either, she went immediately to Jill’s apartment. There she found the 18-year-old Syracuse freshman murdered with a butcher knife from her kitchen. No locks had been broken, nothing was taken, and the dog was unharmed, leading police to believe Lynn had known her attacker. Still, no arrests have ever been made.

10. Tara Louise Baker

    Whoever murdered Tara Louise Baker went to great lengths to cover his tracks. After killing the bright, ambitious law student at the University of Georgia early in the morning of January 19, 2001, a white man of average build set fire to her house and fled. Police interviewed students and a $26,000 reward was offered, but not a single arrest has been made. Only recently did the governor’s office release a death certificate for Baker, giving her family a small sense of closure and preventing unscrupulous people from taking out credit cards.

NIGHT ROUNDS – Helene Tursten

NIGHT ROUNDS refers to the time, near midnight, when nurses and the doctor on duty assess the conditions of the patients.  Night rounds often coincide with a change in shifts.  It is, on one hand a busy time because there is usually a small staff to do all the work.  On the other hand, a ward with  patients, many heavily medicated, is a quiet place, the only time of the day when it is.

One night, Nurse Siv Persson is in charge when there is a shut down of power to the hospital.  The back-up generator fails to turn on.  A respirator alarm goes off and Siv has to handle the emergency.  The other nurses seem to have disappeared and it takes some time before the doctor appears.  The patient does not survive.

As Siv makes her way back to the nurses’ station,  she looks through the window of the door leading to the ward.  “In the old light from thw windows, she could see a woman moving through the stairwell, her back to the nurses’ station.  The woman’s white collar glowed against the dark fabric of her calf-length dress.  Her blond hair was pinned back severely, and above it she wore a starched nurse’s cap.”

“‘You’re absolutely certain this was the nurse you saw last night?’  Superintendent Sven Andersson frowned down at the thin woman sitting at the desk.  “Yes, I am!’    ‘Well, Nurse Siv, you can certainly understand my difficulty here,’…’ The woman in the photo has been dead for fifty years!’”

Nurse Tekla died by hanging herself in the attic.  Lowender Hospital is a private hospital, owned by the Lowender family who have passed the hospital and their medical profession down through the generations.  Siv is a practical woman but she is convinced of this twenty-first century haunting.

NIGHT ROUNDS is about family and about those who find it difficult to find the family they have misses.  Detective Inspector is grounded be her family, her husband, Krister, a chef, and her fourteen year-old twin daughters,  Katerina and Jenny.  Irene and Krister are learning the tightrope walk of raising teenagers whose interests and passions are far more complicated than dolls and bikes.  The Lowender family finds their life’s work in danger of disappearing and newly revealed secrets about old betrayals.

The author builds NIGHT ROUNDS with every word.  To tell a little about the plot is to tell too much.  The series in English to date consists of DETECTIVE INSPECTOR HUSS, THE TORSO, and NIGHT ROUNDS. The books are set in Goteborg, Sweden, a city second in size to Stockholm.  Irene works in a large police department but Irene and her cohorts seem to be reliably normal.  as much as possible, Irene doesn’t bring her work home.  She is thankful that Krister does.  The book deals with murder but not in great detail.  Characters matter as does place.

The books need not be read in order in that they are not published in order in English.  Each can be enjoyed as a stand-alone.

MAD AS HECK

I am becoming increasingly removed from my relationship with the Catholic Church.  The US Bishops’ Conference praised President Obama  for the compromise he offered on birth control.  That was before the right forced them to change their minds.  Separation of church and state no longer applies if it is the right who want to tighten the ties that bind. The bishops have reversed themselves.  An article on Yahoo includes this line: ” Republicans have seized on the issue, seeking to put Obama on the defensive as signs of economic improvement appear to have re-energized his re-election bid.”

Rush Limbaugh promised on January 20, 2009 that he would use all his resources to see that Obama failed.  Apparently the Godly Catholic team of Boehner and Gingrich have given the bishops the orders that they in turn have received from Limbaugh.  Christians are now following a hate monger who has no respect for the church.  The leadership of the US Catholic church can’t get out of the bedrooms long enough to notice the empty refrigerators and pantries in homes across this country.  One of the most memorable of Christ’s miracles is the multiplication of the loaves and fishes.  The central part of the Mass involves bread and wine.  The Gospels relate multiple stories involving Christ and food.  “They knew Him by the breaking of the bread.”

The Catholics who are using birth control or have used it should consider that they are guilty of the only sin that seems to matter.  If with good conscience they were able to make their own decisions as to the practice of birth control it would seem they can make their own decisions about how they should vote.  Romney says the poor can take care of themselves.  In response to that statement, what would Jesus do?

The bishops  are more than a bit late taking a stand on moral issues.  This is nothing less than a bold statement  in which they announce that they are controlled by the Republican party.  Against all the principles of Christianity they are making it clear that the value of life begins at conception and ends outside the delivery room door.  The right hates Obama more than it loves the poor, the hungry, the elderly, and the children who are supposed to be the future of the country.

The right is telling all those who elected Obama in 2008 that their vote counted for nothing.  Limbaugh’s minions refer to themselves as “ditto heads.”  They are proud to admit that they have given up their right to freedom of thought to a man who does not respect the people who follow him blindly.  More than 50 years ago,  Nikita Khrushchev thumbed his nose figuratively at the United States when he said Communists did not have to do anything to destroy the United States because it would fall from within.  The right denies it, but this is class warfare.  The rich get richer snd the middle class falls into poverty.