Tag: mystery

#BookReview Sanctuary Motel by Alan Orloff @levelbestbooks

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About the Book

Mess Hopkins, proprietor of the seen-better-days Fairfax Manor Inn, never met a person in need who couldn’t use a helping hand — his helping hand. So he’s thrown open the doors of the motel to the homeless, victims of abuse, or anyone else who could benefit from a comfy bed with clean sheets and a roof overhead. This rankles his parents and uncle, who technically still own the place and are more concerned with profits than philanthropy.

When a mother and her teenage boy seek refuge from an abusive husband, Mess takes them in until they can get back on their feet. Shortly after arriving, the mom goes missing and some very bad people come sniffing around, searching for money they claim belongs to them. Mess tries to pump the boy for helpful information, but he’s in full uncooperative teen mode — grunts, shrugs, and monosyllabic answers. From what he does learn, Mess can tell he’s not getting the straight scoop.

It’s not long before the boy vanishes too. Abducted? Run away? Something worse? And who took the missing money?

Mess, along with his friend Vell Jackson and local news reporter Lia Katsaros, take to the streets to locate the missing mother and son — and the elusive, abusive husband — before the kneecapping loansharks find them first.

Format: eARC (254 pages) Publisher: Level Best Books
Publication date: 24th October 2023 Genre: Mystery

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My Review

The Fairfax Manor Inn may be a bit run down (and the adjoining mini golf course may have seen its last hole in one) but the motel is a place of generosity and philanthropy thanks to Mess Hopkins who has a heart of gold and makes a wonderfully engaging protagonist. I think most of us would agree with his view: ‘So many people in this world . . . needed help. And not just a cup of sugar or a hand moving a heavy sleeper sofa into the basement. Serious life-changing help.’ Unfortunately his Uncle Phil, who has been given reponsibility for overseeing the business in the absence of Mess’s parent, would be the exception.

Mess forms a really touching relationship with Kevin, the teenage son of the missing woman, although doing so takes a lot of patience. By the way, if you’re wondering how Mess got his nickname, you’ll have to read the book.

I loved the cast of secondary characters, particularly Mess’s friend and sidekick, Vell, who has a seemingly inexhaustible list of contacts. He boasts, ‘I got my own personal Internet, on the streets. People see me coming, they’re dying to tell me stuff. Think of me like Vellipedia.’ I also really enjoyed the back-and-forth banter between Mess and Vell. Mama (although she’s actually Vell’s grandmother) is another fantastic, larger than life character. She has a laugh ‘like a thunderstorm’, is a giver of huge bear hugs, has turned her ability to read people into a money-making venture and believes there’s no such thing as a table with too much food. Just as well, as both Vell and Kevin, have seemingly insatiable appetites.

If Mess and Vell are the good guys then of course you need some bad guys to even things up and the author provides us with plenty, including the missing woman’s abusive husband and some heavies working for the local organised crime head honcho. Mess and Vell have some narrow escapes and in the process of resolving the mystery of the disappearance of Kevin’s mother uncover some distinctly dirty goings-on.

A motel with its ever changing population of guests is a great location around which to base a crime mystery series so I’m looking forward to future arrivals at Fairfax Manor Inn, plus seeing if its owner can avoid making a ‘mess’ (sorry!) of his budding relationship with Lia.

Sanctuary Motel is an enjoyable crime mystery with a plot that will keep you guessing and characters you’ll find yourself rooting for.

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Level Best Books via NetGalley.

In three words: Entertaining, intriguing, humorous

Try something similar: In Strangers’ Houses by Elizabeth Mundy

About the Author

Alan Orloff has published ten novels and more than forty short stories. His work has won an Anthony, an Agatha, a Derringer, and two ITW Thriller Awards. He’s also been a finalist for the Shamus Award, and has had a story (‘Rule Number One’) selected for the Best American Mystery Stories anthology.

He loves cake and arugula, but not together. Never together. He lives and writes in South Florida, where the examples of hijinks are endless (Photo/bio: Author website)

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#BookReview Unnatural Ends by Christopher Huang @Inkshares

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About the Book

Sir Lawrence Linwood is dead. More accurately, he was murdered – savagely beaten to death in his own study with a mediaeval mace. The murder calls home his three adopted children: Alan, an archeologist; Roger, an engineer; and Caroline, a journalist. But his heirs soon find that his last testament contains a strange proviso – that his estate shall go to the heir who solves his murder.

To secure their future, each Linwood heir must now dig into the past. As their suspicion mounts – of each other and of peculiar strangers in the churchless town of Linwood Hollow – they come to suspect that the perpetrator lurks in the mysterious origins of their own birth.

Format: eARC (402 pages) Publisher: Inkshares
Publication date: 20th July 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction, Crime

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My Review

A new author to me, Christopher Huang is described as a fan of ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction and that’s easy to see because Unnatural Ends has many of the features you’d expect in a classic crime novel – a murder victim found in a locked room, a will, a series of suspicious deaths – plus a touch of the Gothic in the ancient and forbidding Linwood Hall with its stone walls and towers, and servants’ passageways.

To say the contents of their father’s will comes as a surprise to Lord Linwood’s three grown-up children – Alan, Roger and Caroline – is an understatement. They had not expected to be pitted against one another in a contest whose prize is inheritance of the entire Linwood estate. Having said that, perhaps it shouldn’t have come as that much of a surprise given their upbringing was more a series of tests by their stern, exacting father than a conventional childhood.

The story alternates between the points of view of the three children so we see how they approach – both separately and together – the search for clues to the identity of the murderer, the means by which the murder was carried out and its motivation. But we also get occasional glimpses of recent events in their lives and recollections of growing up at Linwood Hall, a place dominated by their father. ‘Father himself was like the prelude to a storm, a gathering darkness.’ As the story unfolds and they discover more, these recollections take on a very different complexion. And what they discover is distinctly unsettling and quite unexpectedly dark.

Unnatural Ends is a really cleverly constructed crime mystery with the customary helping of red herrings, sleights of hands and unexpected reveals. But what particularly stood out for me is how the author incorporates into the motivation for the dastardly deeds a philosophy – a quite distasteful one, actually – that was surprising prevalent at the time. Plus a bit of Nietzsche for good measure. And at one point, Caroline read my mind by commenting, “This is King Lear, isn’t it?”. (I do love a bit of intertextuality.)

I usually include a ‘try something similar’ recommendation along with my reviews but in this case it could have been pretty much anything from the oeuvre of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham or Ngaio Marsh because Unnatural Ends pays homage to all of them without being a slavish copy. In the end, I came up with something slightly off-the-wall.

I really enjoyed Unnatural Ends for its ingenious plot and clever evocation of ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction.

My thanks to Adam at Inkshares for my digital review copy.

In three words: Clever, engrossing, intriguing

Try something similar: House of Tigers by William Burton McCormick

About the Author

Christopher Huang was born in Singapore, where he lived out the first seventeen years of his life. He moved to Canada in the expectation of cooler weather, returning to Singapore the following year to serve his two years of National Service in the Singapore Army. He studied architecture at McGill University, and lived the next twenty-odd years in Montreal. He now lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he has yet to find a proper jar of real, actual Bovril. (Photo: Author website)

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