RIP Sue Grafton

Because much like the year before it, 2017 has to get in a few more celebrity deaths in before it ends. Sadly, that death is Sue Grafton, author of the popular Alphabet mystery book series.

I'm not going to BS and say that I'm a die hard fan of Sue Grafton. Unfortunately, I haven't gotten around to her books yet other than skimming A Is for Alibi once. But that was enough and she was immediately added to my TBR pile. I was planning on starting it next month.

The thing that first caught my attention was obviously the naming scheme. A series where every book is named after a letter of the alphabet? That piques your interest enough to at least pick up the first book and check it out. After that, the writing goes to work. I don't read a lot of mysteries, but the writing on the first ten or so pages of A Is for Alibi sure did their job.

As for the Alphabet series, fans of Kinsey Millhone have another, smaller reason to mourn. Sue Grafton was in the process of writing the final book, Z is for Zero, when she died and according to her daughter, Grafton doesn't want the book to be finished by someone else. Not a tragedy on the scale of Grafton herself dying, but certainly body blow for fans of the series.

Rules of Prey is done with

I said I was going to try and finish it by Thursday and I did. I really enjoyed it. The ending felt a bit rushed, like Sandford was trying to end the thing as quickly as he could without running the entire train off a cliff. It doesn't hurt story, but the resolution just felt abrupt.

Rating: 8/10.

Rules of Prey: John Sandford writes a pretty fine book

I haven't finished this book yet, but I can't not talk about! Rules of Prey, the first in the Lucas Davenport series, is just a damn good mystery.

Davenport is a police lieutenant working in Minneapolis who has to track down and stop a deranged serial killer known as maddog (real serial killers don't capitalize their names, apparently). This is one seriously twisted individual who gets off on watching the moment his victims die. He also leaves one of his rules behind on each of his victims, hence the title of the book. The story shifts between him and Davenport as the POV characters, with the former either planning and committing his murderers or watching the media coverage of it, while Davenport's chunk of the book involves the aforementioned attempts at catching maddog, as well as following his private life.

I really like Davenport. On one hand, he sort of fits the mold of the stereotypical lone wolf tough guy who, prior to the story, has killed five men in the line of duty in separate incidents and cleared on every one. Yet, the views into his private life show a depth that makes the character likeable. My favorite thing is that Davenport has a very lucrative side job designing table top role-playing and wargames. As a self-described nerd, I really dug that bit of originality. It's like if Colombo wrote fantasy novels or something.

We see other parts of his private life as well, such as his relationships with Jennifer Carey and Carla Ruiz. Carey is a reporter with one of the news stations in town and honestly, I don't like her. She constantly waffles between caring for Davenport and wanting to form a relationship with him, and acting like a total asshole to him while digging for any kind of scoop she can report on. In one instance, it ruins a character's life when she not only outs him as a suspect in the murders, but also as a gay man. Rules of Prey came out in 1989, so public knowledge of his orientation isn't exactly going to help him even after he's been completely cleared of suspicion.

Carla Ruiz is notable for being the only one of the maddog's victims to survive. She manages to fight him off and leave me badly bruised for his trouble in the process. Davenport takes a liking to her and vice versa and they end up forming a relationship of sorts while she's hiding out in his cabin in the woods. I'm pretty sure there's some serious ethical problems with a police lieutenant having a romantic relationship with a crime victim, but I don't recall it ever being addressed.

maddog himself is interesting because of his day job as a mild mannered lawyer. It's established in the first chapter that he's two scoops of nuts. He refers to all of his victims as Chosen and himself as the One. He only kills when he finds a new Chosen and even then, only when the urge to kill reaches an unbearable point. Fair warning for those who might be triggered by it or otherwise not okay with depictions of sexual assault, but yeah, there's sexual assault. maddog rapes his victims before he kills them, though in one case he admits that he doesn't have to in order to get off on the murder itself. Fortunately, it's not graphic or even remotely detailed, so there's that.

But man, John Sandford can ratchet things up to 11 real damn quick. There's a scene in the book where the police are staking out the home of a TV reporter Davenport has been feeding false information to in the hopes that the maddog will try and attack her and get caught in the trap. He almost does, but manages to flee, which leads to one hell of a clusterfuck between a pair of cops and a homeowner. Basically, during the foot chase, maddog crosses through a backyard and riles up a pair of dobermans. Those dogs attack the first cop as soon as he jumps into the yard and his partner naturally comes to his defense and her own and shoots them. Well, about this time, their owner bursts into the backyard with a shotgun and not knowing what the hell is going on, opens up and shoots the second cop twice. Her partner then avenges her by blowing the homeowner away. The ensuing chaos allows the maddog to escape. It's an utterly wild scene.

I'm aiming to finish Rules of Prey tomorrow and I believe it's building to a satisfying climax.

I've pretty much committed myself to the mystery genre

And maybe I ought to be committed!

So anyways, the public library in my town does a book sale twice a year and the second one was last week. The last two days are a bag sale where you can fill up a bag for $3 ($1 on the last day) and it's one of my favorite times of the year because I can stock up on books for cheap. Now, in the past, I've had a habit of buying a ton of books and unfortunately never reading them, so this time I went a different route. They didn't have much in the way of science fiction and fantasy that piqued my interest, so I decided to focus on buying mysteries instead.

And buy, did I ever. Counting the ones I already owned, I now have an entire small bookcase full of mystery novels. There's too many to name individually, but here's a rundown on all I grabbed:

Twelve of Martha Grimes' Richard Jury
Nine of Tony Hillerman's Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee and John Sandford's Lucas Davenport
Seven of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey
Two Alexander McCall Smith (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and The Sunday Philosophy Club), John Mortimer (Rumpole and another book), and Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford
One Sue Grafton, Dennis Lehane, Jo Nesbo, and Karin Slaughter.

So yeah, it's a lot. I plan on easing myself into the genre rather than diving headfirst. I've read a few mysteries before, so that should help the transition.

A twofer: Shotgun Saturday Night & Cursed to Death by Bill Crider (Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mysteries)

A photographer I ain't.

I don't read a lot of mysteries, but occasionally one will cross my path that I'll find myself reading posthaste. In this case, it was two books that I breezed through in two days. Because they're so short, I decided to include them in the same post rather than separately.

Title: Shotgun Saturday Night
Author: Bill Crider
Series: Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mysteries
Genre: Mystery
Published: 1987 (originally), 1989 (Ivy Books reissue)
Publisher: Ivy Books
Format: Paperback
Pages: 169

Rating: ★★★★☆ 4 out of 5 stars.

The series, as the above says, centers on Dan Rhodes, the Sheriff of fictional Blacklin County, Texas. Shotgun Saturday Night is the second of the series and I started with it literally for no other reason than because none of the public libraries in my area have the first book, Too Late to Die. In any case, Blacklin is a small county of only twenty thousand and its sheriff department is even smaller, accounting only Rhodes, deputies Buddy (I don't believe his last name is ever given or if Buddy is even his real name) and Ruth Grady. I don't know if this is all of the deputies Rhodes has or not, but that seems awfully tiny for a sheriff's department. I know that Andy Taylor made do with just Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show, but Blacklin County isn't exactly Mayberry.

Then there's Lawton and Hack Jensen. The former works as the department's jailer and the latter as the dispatcher. They're both well past retirement age, but work for the department for very little just for the sake of having something to do. My favorite running gag of the series revolves around them reporting to Rhodes about a call in of what at first seems like a serious crime but turns out to be nothing of consequence. They string him along by slowly revealing the details until finally revealing what it actually was. For example, in Shotgun Saturday Night, someone calls in about a dead body in a ditch. It's actually an inflatable sex doll.

Another important character is Ivy Daniels, Rhodes' girlfriend/fiancee. She acts as his sounding board and helps where she can with his investigations. Their relationship is a minor plotline, with him trying to process his feelings for her and if he wants it to lead to something more permanent.

Did I mention that this book has one of my favorite opening sentences?

Sheriff Dan Rhodes knew it was going to be a bad day when Bert Ramsey brought in the arm and laid it on the desk.

It certainly hooked me.


While Shotgun Saturday Night is only 169 pages, you get a surprising amount of story for how brief it is. It starts off with local handyman Bert bringing in the arm and news that he found three boxes fill with severed limbs while clearing brush from a property. From there, the pace picks up with Bert being blown away by a shotgun. So Rhodes has to investigate both the body parts, Bert's murder, and whether there's any connection to the two. If that wasn't enough, he learns from Bert's mother that she heard motorcycles (or as her and Hack calls them, motorsickles) the night her son died. He then discovers that the local handyman was once a member of Los Muertos, a biker gang known to traffic in marijuana. Mrs. Ramsey also accuses a newcomer named Buster Cullens of the murder because he rides a motorcycle and is currently shacked up with a woman named Wyneva who had previously been living with (or in sin, as Mrs. Ramsey puts it) her son.

Then four members of Los Muertos show up because why not? From there, the plot speeds up. We find out that the severed limbs are nothing more than medical waste. A doctor had dumped the amputated limbs after taking tissue samples because he had no way of incinerating them. Nobody would have known if Bert hadn't spotted them under the brush pile.

Meanwhile, Rhodes gets his butt kicked a lot. He certainly didn't get elected sheriff based on his fisticuffs. He gets into three fights in Shotgun Saturday Night and wins one. Barely. To be fair, he got jumped by three bikers in the first fight and blindsided in the second. The third fight was one on one, but the other guy had a motorcycle, so it was an uneven battle. I don't want to spoil the main plot, but Bert's murder is not who you expect it to be.

All in all, Shotgun Saturday Night is a quick read, but worth picking up if you can find it.

What I liked: The cast of characters are memorable. I also enjoyed Rhodes struggling with solving Bert's murder. I'm not a fan with "super-sleuth" detectives who can solve crimes easily, I like when a character has to work and work at it until the case is solved. It adds a lot of realism to the story. The budding friendship between Ruth and Hack was also good. The latter is uncomfortable with the idea of a woman being a deputy, but over the course of the book, Ruth works him over with bribes and flattery until he finally accepts her.

What I didn't like: Nothing that I can think of.

Title: Cursed to Death
Author: Bill Crider
Series: Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mysteries
Genre: Mystery
Published: 1987 (Walker), 1989 (Ivy Books)
Publisher: Ivy Books
Format: Paperback
Pages: 171
Rating: ★★★☆☆ 3.5 stars

These books aren't certainly short, aren't they? In this one, Dr. Martin, a local dentist disappears after being "cursed" by a witch who had been renting a house from him. Shortly thereafter his wife is found murdered in their home. Rhodes has a number of suspects ranging from the aforementioned witch, another renter, and his wife (before she was killed). Meanwhile, it's the Christmas season and Rhodes is still dealing with his relationship with Ivy and whether to make their unofficial engagement official.

Honestly, not much happens in Cursed to Death. Unlike Shotgun Saturday Night, there's not three different plots running concurrently, just Dr. Martin's disappearance and his wife's murder. The resolutions to those cases are both equally surprising not least of which is because of the resolutions is accidental.

Something that did bug me is Betsy Higgins, the self-proclaimed witch. It's revealed that not only is she not a witch, but that she's a "man". I'm using air quotes because they appear to identify as a woman and not as a man. I don't know if their trans or not, so I can't rightly say that the Rhodes and the other characters referring to them with male pronouns is transphobic. I mean, this book came out in the late 80s, so you can't expect Bill Crider to have been aware of trans politics back then.

Things I liked: The crimes. Like I said before, I like when characters have to work hard at solving the mystery and Rhodes certainly had do just that. Ruth Grady if for nothing else than her non-ironic use of sentences such as "Freeze, scumbag!" and "I mean it, sucker!" She rapidly became my favorite character aside from Rhodes and Hack.

Things I didn't like: The issue with Betsy Higgins' gender identity. If Cursed to Death had been written more recently, maybe this part of the book would have been treated differently.