EQMM, Sep-Oct 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "A very prudent decision,” Arroyo said. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm already late for the press conference. By the way, Mrs. Ford, since the new project won't be a restoration, your services are no longer required. You're fired. God bless you both.” And he was gone.

  "I can't believe you're going to let him buy you off,” Lydia said.

  "What am I supposed to do? Tell the law I think Arroyo had his own building bombed as part of a fund-raising scam? And when they ask me for proof, what do I say then?"

  "And that's it? You're really going to take the money and run?"

  "Arroyo owes my men that money and they need it. Throwing it back in his face would be a grand gesture, but it won't buy many groceries come winter. As far as running goes, to be honest, the sooner I see this place in my rearview mirror, the happier I'll be."

  "Damn it, Dan, it's wrong! You can't let Arroyo get away with this!"

  "I don't think he will."

  "But if you won't go to the police—"

  "Black Luke had big plans for this place, too. It didn't work out for him. It won't for Arroyo, either."

  "Why not?"

  "I'm not sure. It's just a feeling I have. There's something wrong about this place, Lydia. I've felt it from the beginning. I told you once that buildings talk to me. This one's saying get the hell out. While you can."

  * * * *

  Dan Shea and his men packed up and headed north to Valhalla the next day. A rare treat for a construction crew, a vacation paid in full by Arroyo's ministry for a job they'd barely begun.

  Shea spent the autumn months working alone in the golden forests of the north, felling logs, cutting them to size, then snaking them out of the woods with a borrowed horse. Building a new addition onto his father's house.

  He did all of the labor by hand, measuring his talent and abilities against the skilled work his grandfather did long before he was born. But he didn't finish the job by himself.

  Around Christmas, an interior designer arrived to work on the project. She took a room at a local bed and breakfast but spent most of her time at Shea's home, helping with the remodeling job. Small towns being as they are, rumors sprang up about the two. But died just as quickly.

  The lady in question is a bit older, you see, and very much a lady. And in the northern counties, Dan Shea and his roughneck crew aren't people to cross. Besides, Shea and his lady are so obviously happy together that the gossip seemed pointless.

  In the spring, down below, a new construction crew from Detroit began work on the Arroyo Chapel expansion. But when they excavated the parking lot to pour the new foundations, the shock and revulsion of what they found brought the project to a screaming halt.

  Saginaw police immediately taped off the site as a crime scene while state forensic techs from Lansing tried to sort out the carnage. It took months just to disinter the bodies, let alone identify them all. Perhaps they never will.

  By then, Arroyo's project was as dead as the corpses buried beneath the Chapel parking lot. His financing evaporated overnight. Why build apartments in a place no one will ever want to live?

  After a few unhappy weeks in bankruptcy court, the reverend fled to Florida, flat broke.

  Leaving the Black Chapel much as it was. Empty. Abandoned.

  By night, streetwise lookouts still prowl its bell tower. But not even hardcore junkies will go inside the great nave anymore.

  Too dangerous, they say. Perhaps the blast made the walls unstable. Loose bricks and fixtures seem to fall with deadly accuracy. Locals claim the Chapel is seeking new tenants for its ravaged cemetery.

  The truth is, bone deep, people are simply terrified of the place. And they should be.

  Its paint is peeling away like rotting skin now, but it makes no difference. The bricks beneath are stained black as sin.

  And inside, voices echo in the cavernous murk of the ruined nave. The mad ranting of Black Luke, answered by the murmurs of the unquiet dead.

  So it remains. A shattered hulk looming over a gutted graveyard in a forgotten neighborhood. A malevolent structure so dark that even on the sunniest days, it seems to stand in shadow. As though the evil within is bleeding the very light from the air.

  ©2006 by Doug Allyn

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  BLOG BYTES by Ed Gorman

  Here are some blogs well worth reading.

  January Magazine offers a sophisticated, knowing look at some of the key novels and story collections being published today. Editor Linda L. Richards and Senior Editor J. Kingston Pierce give mystery readers the sort of reviews that are easy to read but also thoughtful in their commentary. January has increasingly become one of the go-to places for influential pieces on both books and trends. There are also features, interviews, and retro reviews. One of my favorites. www.janmag.com

  Thrillingdetective.com traces the history of the private eye novel in print, film, radio, magazine, and comics. Publisher-Editor Kevin Smith is a fine writer and has gathered other fine writers to provide his ever-growing reader base with everything from original fiction to interesting polls. Reviews, essays, historical overviews—the site is packed with goodies for readers who like their material with a little tough thrown in. You can spend several nights engrossed by the various subgenre histories you'll find here. www.thrillingdetective.com

  Sandra Scoppettone's Writing Thoughts provides some of the most real and brutal truths about writing I've ever read anywhere. Sometimes the writing goes well and Sandra is happy (and we're happy for her) and sometimes it doesn't go so well and she's unhappy (and we're unhappy for her). Sandra is an important and impressive novelist and reading her entries about how her current novel is progressing is a fascinating look at the creative process. This is much like a reality show in print. Excellent work here. sandrascoppettone.blogspot.com

  MysteryNet.com is a triumph of intelligence, enthusiasm, and sweeping knowledge of every aspect of the mystery world. Famous authors in interviews and essays; unmatched interactive elements; original fiction; the most up-to-date events calendar anywhere, and so many other features there's no room to list them here. All served up in the slickest package to be found on a mystery site. Given the general appeal of this savvy and eminently readable site, I imagine it gets more hits from the average reader (as opposed to hard-core fan) than any other blog. www.mysterynet.com/books

  Ed Gorman's own blog entries appear on Mystery*File on-line. www.mysteryfile.com

  Copyright © 2006 Ed Gorman

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  THE JURY BOX by Jon L. Breen

  Unsurprisingly, given the 21st century's inauspicious beginning, many crime writers are still setting their books in the 20th. Some would like to avoid such spoil-sport modern features as cell phones, the Internet, and constantly advancing criminalist forensics. However, the five last-century historicals considered below are set long enough ago ('20s through ‘50s) to prove they're up to more than that.

  *** Paul Malmont: The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, Simon and Schuster, $24. This first novel makes good use of a promising gimmick: take some 1930s pulp magazine writers—in starring roles, Walter B. Gibson, Lester Dent, and L. Ron Hubbard; in supporting roles, H.P. Lovecraft, “Doc” Smith, and an ex-Navy officer using the alias Otis P. Driftwood—and immerse them in a pulp magazine plot, complete with hidden treasure, weird science, zombies, and opium dens. The style fits the story. “God,” prays one writer, “if you get me out of this, I promise I'll never abuse adverbs again.” Only a few pages later, Malmont abuses one himself: a character is described as “sobbing almost inconsolably in her delight.” The author cites many good sources on pulp history, but he must have missed Francis M. Nevins's biography of one minor character: the factual details on Cornell Woolrich are off the mark.

  *** Hal Glatzer: The Last Full Measure, Perseverance/Daniel, $13.95. In the third of a series that offers lively writing and impeccable period detail, musician Katy Green accepts a gig on the Hawaii-bound Lurline in Novemb
er 1941 and encounters shipboard murder, an island treasure hunt, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The final chapters will satisfy both the thriller reader and the fan of fair-play detection.

  ** Carolyn Haines: Penumbra, St. Martin's/Minotaur, $23.95. In 1952 Mississippi, Marlena Bramlett, the young wife of a wealthy citizen, is brutally injured in the course of an adulterous picnic, and her six-year-old daughter disappears. Jade Dupree, a half-black hairdresser who also prepares corpses for the local mortician, is Marlena's not-officially-ac-knowledged-but-known-to-the-whole-town half sister. Local deputy Frank Kimball is a World War II veteran who sees dead people. That's only part of the large cast of this ambitious Southern gothic with supernatural overtones. While too many stock characters and clichés un-dermine its early promise, it's undeniably involving.

  ** Sandra Scoppettone: Too Darn Hot, Ballantine, $24.95. New York private eye Faye Quick, minding the store while her boss is off fighting World War II, looks for a missing soldier at his girlfriend's request and finds the naked body of another man in her quarry's hotel room. The good-humored, colloquial first-person narrative reminded me of Robert Campbell's Jimmy Flannery, and the ‘40s references are spot-on. However, the initially intriguing plot fizzles out, and some will find character names borrowed from ‘40s actors (e.g. Van Widmark) more distracting than charming.

  ** Kerry Greenwood: Flying Too High, Poisoned Pen, $24.95. Phryne Fisher—flapper sleuth, nude model, and wing-walking stunt pilot of 1920s Melbourne—takes on her second case, first published in Australia in 1990. Her two investigations concern the death of an abusive husband and father and the kidnapping of a preternaturally precocious six-year-old girl. There's fun along the way, but here, too, the ending is a severe letdown.

  **** Loren D. Estleman: Nicotine Kiss, Forge, $23.95. Detroit's Amos Walker, always a man out of his time, has moved into the 21st century but clearly would be happier in the 20th. Though recovering from wounds received in a shooting, Walker plays out the P.I. code by searching for the vanished career criminal who took him to the hospital. In a complex case involving cigarette smuggling, counterfeiting, and the Department of Homeland Security, Estleman again proves himself one of the finest stylists in the mystery genre.

  **** Gerald Seymour: Traitor's Kiss, Overlook, $24.95. In a terrific example of post-Cold War spy thriller, old and new ways of thinking in the British intelligence establishment clash over efforts to rescue a Russian naval officer whose identity as an agent for Britain has been compromised. Downbeat, suspenseful, and intelligent work from a practiced hand.

  *** Barbara Allan: Antiques Roadkill, Kensington, $22. Thirtyish divorcee Brandy Borne returns to her Iowa hometown, where her theatrical and slightly mad mother Vivian has sold the family heirlooms to an unscrupulous antiques dealer, who is subsequently murdered. One suspects this is intended as a send-up of the amateur-detective cozy genre: the an-tiques tips at the end of each chapter are facetious; the chapter titles use enough puns for a whole series of books; and at least three plot developments (though not the murderer) will be foreseen by experienced mystery readers. The first-person narration, mostly by Brandy, is very funny and the whole book enormously entertaining. (Allan is a collaboration of Barbara Collins and Max Allan Collins.)

  ** Deborah Morgan: The Majolica Murders, Berkley, $6.99. Also interested in the old and valuable is former FBI agent turned antiques picker Jeff Talbot, whose agoraphobic wife Sheila has a going business selling them on eBay. Some good character touches, Seattle background, and antiques lore compensate for a slow start and a far-fetched plot.

  ** Stephen Frey: The Protégé, Ballantine, $24.95. Christian Gillette, financial wheeler-dealer, returns for his second adventure. If you don't mind flat prose and dialogue, an unlikable hero, and an everything-but-the-kit-chen-sink plot with a foreseeable “surprise” twist, this one has enough narrative drive to be a passable time killer.

  Mark Campbell's compact critical/bibliographic reference The Pocket Essential Agatha Christie (PocketEssentials/Trafalgar, $8.95) has been updated (it covers the Poirot TV series with David Suchet through 2004's The Hollow and the first four adaptations with Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple), adds an index, and offers larger type than the edition first distributed in the U.S. in 2002.

  Speaking of Christie, her short stories get a superb reading from Hugh Fraser, TV's Captain Hastings, in two collections from Audio Partners: The Labours of Hercules ($29.95 cassettes, $31.95 CDs), about Poirot's self-imposed final twelve cases (though he didn't stick to that decision), and The Listerdale Mystery ($29.95 cassettes or CDs), including some of the author's best non-series shorts. Fraser's readings of several Christie novels are available from the same publisher.

  Copyright © 2006 John L. Breen

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  EL TRAMEGRA by Margaret Maron

  Margaret Maron's 12th Deborah Knott mystery, Winter's Child, has just been published by The Mysterious Press. Most readers know that before she created Deborah Knott, the bestselling author penned sev-eral books in her Sigrid Harald series. The protagonist of this new story is Sigrid Harald's housemate, Roman Tramegra.

  * * * *

  From: RTramegra

  To: SigridHarald

  Date: 16 May

  Subject: Je Suis Arrivé en France&!

  My deqr Sigrid:

  So your mother and Mac have eloped, if one cqn call taking a cab over to City Hall eloping? When fast cars and crossing stqte lines aren't involved, where is the romance and drama of an elopement? And one can hardly say it was unexpected, especially if Anne took you along as a zitness:

  Nevertheless, although it was two days past the fact before I read your message, I immediately raised a glqss of very good Riesling toward New York; Todqy, I learn from your lqtest message that I should have been facing east. Hanoi? What an odd place to honeymoon. I fear all those years as a globe-hopping photojournalist have given Anne a taste for the outre. Your old boss may no longer be a homicide captain, but he isn't out of danger, is he?

  As for Germany, the weather was cold and rainy and you saw how horrible it was for me to write with the Y and Z transposed on the keyboards I found along the way. (French keyboards are just as execrable. The Y is where God intended, but now the Z and W have switched positions. As have the A and Q—Wuts qlors! as the French would say if they had to use an American keyboard.) Happily, I leave tomorrow to join my tour group in Spain.

  I still have hopes of gathering exotic local color for a chapter in my nez thriller. I've decided to put the Zall Street terrorist story aside for now and concentrate instead on the one about the international art thieves. You may have resigned from the NYPD, but that doesn't mean I shan't be picking your brqins about what you've learned about the art world since inheriting poor Oscar's paintings. After all, my dear, what's a housemate for if not to share esoteric knowledge?

  In the meantime, it's off to Bqrcelona1 Let us hope the Spanish keyboard is more sensible:

  Roman

  * * * *

  From: RTramegra

  To: SigridHarald

  Date: 20 May

  Subject: Oviedo!

  Dear Sigrid:

  Really thought I would have found an Internet cafe before this. What a whirlwind it's been! Barcelona—or “Barthelona,” as the natives call it—was wonderful. Fantastic architecture.

  As for Spanish keyboards, the letters are laid out properly—sing praises to the God of Small Things!—although some number keys have 3 symbols attached to them so as to leave space for Ñ, Ç, and ¿—none of which I plan to use.

  It's a mixed bag of “wine and culture pilgrims” that I've joined and I use the term advisedly because we're going to finish up in Santiago de Compostela (loosely translated as St. James of the Starry Field) and we've already seen numerous real pilgrims in their khaki shorts, Birkenstocks, and backpacks hiking westward toward that great cathedral. Most of the group's been together these past 10 days and there are 12 of us in all, which necessitates 2 vans. Our
leader, Carson Forbes, is a prof. of Modern History at Columbia. Late 40s. His assistant driver, Luis Campos, is a young Spaniard¿—some sort of relation to Forbes’ wife, who was actually born in Santiago. She plans to meet us there at the end of the trip.

  The other late arrivals, Lester & Millie Anderson, are mid-forties and they actually know you. Or at least they know who you are. Their real estate agency in CT represented the couple who bought Oscar's country house from you. They—the buyers—love bragging (discreetly, of course!) that a world-famous artist once owned the house.

  My roommate is a Jack Daniels. ("No relatives in KY,” he's quick to say.) Owns Porsche franchises in Connecticut and on Long Island. Widowed. His much-younger sister Marie and his daughter Jackie are also on the tour. Jackie's an art major due to graduate from college in December and she's gathering material for her senior thesis. We've had several interesting chats about writing for money. (She's actually read a couple of the travel articles I wrote before I sold Murder in Midtown to St. Stephen's Press and is charmingly complimentary.) Marie is only a few years older than Jackie, and they are more like sisters than aunt and niece. Was a little surprised that Jack would rather room with a stranger than pay the singles supplement, but I guess that's how the rich stay rich. By counting pennies. Just between you and me, however, he counts them so closely that it's starting to rasp on the rest of us. Every time we share a meal not covered by the tour, poor Jackie and Marie are mortified when the bill arrives because Jack always insists that everyone's share be calculated to the last euro instead of just splitting it evenly.

  There are two sets of Brockmans. Barbara and Richard are 50-something attorneys from Boston; Philip and Kate are his nephew and wife, also attorneys. Like me, the Andersons and the Daniels women are here for art and culture, so Luis drives us to the museums and churches. Jackie has enough Spanish that she sits up front with him and translates whenever his rather good English falters. They seem muy simpático.