The Anatomy of Deception: a novel of suspense by Lawrence Goldstone

The Anatomy of Deception (Find this book in our catalog)

Publishers Weekly called this book a, "top-notch historical page-turner." Set in Philadelphia in the late 1880s, this book should appeal to a wide audience. I picked it up because it deals with the early days of modern medicine, and though it's main location is the seedier side of underworld Philadelphia, it also deals in part with characters who had a very real role in the foundation of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Goldstone combines his fictional characters in a masterly way with real life surgical luminaries such as William Osler and William Stewart Halsted, while scrupulously in his author's note denying that these real-life people were in any way involved with any wrong-doing. The fact is, that surgical students and surgeons like them easily could have been so involved because society criminalized or at least condemned the dissection of cadavers for research and teaching.

Anatomy of Deception is called, "an ingenous blend of history, suspense, and early forensic science." Goldstone evokes the dark horror of the time when gentlemen surgeons were little more than butchers, making it a point of honor to conduct operations in record time with no regard to loss of blood or elementary hygiene, which they thought a waste of time. The survival rate from these operations was almost non-existent, but the surgeons had no care for the fate of their patients, especially if the were poor. The author paints a picture of a medical establishment that thought the "lower orders" deserved no better.

William Osler, however, is painted as one who does care. He conducts a surgical class for promising young men and one woman who have an interest in making a difference. One such student is Dr. Ephraim Carroll. He is destined for a stellar career under the wing of Osler, who has been invited to Baltimore to set up a revolutionary new surgical department. Then Ephraim gets involved with another student with a mysterious lifestyle and his career looks as though it may be ruined. What has Ephraim's student friend to do with the corpse of a beautiful young woman in the morgue and also what does Dr. Osler know about the case? Then the other student dies and Ephraim confirms that he was poisoned. He feels compelled to solve a mystery that involves the society drawing rooms of Philadelphia as well as its back alleys. Ephraim is drawn into a maze of secrets, murder and unimaginable crimes and it looks as though his very future is threatened.

I enjoyed the sense of darkness and of a pervasive moral turpitude that the author evokes. The atmosphere of the book and the time period should appeal to to fans of The Alienist by Caleb Carr and of The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. Fans of these two books will also like the forensic details. This is an excellent period piece in the tradition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Poe but also a suspenseful and very ingeniously crafted mystery.

Ist To Die by James Patterson

Another reader's review from the Winter reading Program: 1st To Die (Find this book in our catalog):

"I enjoyed all of the James Patterson books. The chapters are very short and he leaves you with a cliff-hanger at the end of each chapter to make you read on to the next one. I usually read 3/4 of a book in one night! I guess my favorite was 1st To Die. It's a "Women's Murder Club" book so the main character, Lindsay, solved a murder, or she thought she had. The book has several twists and turns because Lindsay had to make changes in who she thought was the murderer. Great ending!"

submitted by a Winter Reader

More Readers' Reviews from the Winter Reading Program

Three bags full : a sheep detective story by Leonie Swann Find this book in our catalog

Reader's Review: "Three Bags Full is the story of a flock of sheep that finds their beloved shepherd, George, dead. His body has been impaled to the ground with a spade. They decide to find our who has killed their master. This is a witty, off-beat mystery that is at times philosophically astute, as the sheep often take humans' words on a literal level to comic effect and then make amazing deductions of reason from them. I thought this book very sweet, funny and sad (in a good way). I would recommend this to anyone who likes cozy mysteries, [and] animals, and who is looking for something different."

John Mortimer, Barrister and Writer Who Created Rumpole, Dies at 85

According to the New York Times of January 17, 2009, "John Mortimer, barrister, author, playwright and creator of Horace Rumpole, the cunning defender of the British criminal classes, died on Friday[January 16] at his home in Oxfordshire, England. He was 85."
Click here for the New York Times article.
Mr. Mortimer is known best in this country for creating the Rumpole character, an endearing and enduring relic of the British legal system who became a television hero of the courtroom comedy.
Here is a list of some of his titles:
Rumpole Misbehaves Find this book in our catalog
Quite Honestly Find this book in our catalog
Rumpole on Trial Find this book in our catalog
Rumpole and the Reign of Terror Find this book in our catalog
Rumpole and the Reign of Terror [audiobook] Find this book in our catalog
Rumpole and the Reign of Terror [large print] Find this book in our catalog
Rumpole and the Angel of Death Find this book in our catalog
Rumpole Rests His Case Find this book in our catalog
Rumpole and the Primrose Path Find this book in our catalog
Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders Find this book in our catalog
Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders [audiobook] Find this book in our catalog
Rumpole and the Age of Miracles [audiobook]Find this book in our catalog
Rumpole a la Carte Find this book in our catalog

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: a shocking murder and the undoing of a great Victorian detective by Kate Summerscale

Do you like a classical murder mystery set in an English country house? What’s more, do you prefer your murder to be set in the Victorian era, when in upper and middle class homes complex and rigid social conventions only too often bred secrets and perversions behind closed doors? If you do, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher should be just the thing for you; despite the fact that it is not a fictional tale at all, but a true story that took place in England in an upper class country home in Wiltshire in 1860.

Ms. Summerscale, a journalist and former literary editor, has written an enthralling true crime story that encompasses all the details that fans of true crime stories find essential: the crime, the suspects’ actions, the police investigations, blunders, and breakthroughs, and also the detailed proceedings of the various court hearings. At the same time, she has managed to pen a story that draws you in with its narrative style and does not get bogged down in the detail. The book is very well crafted and leads the reader on, not only through the details of the case, but also through Ms. Summerscale’s argument. She argues that this case was the real case that gave rise to the conventions and popularity of country house murder fiction continuing today. Many of the real details of the case appeared in fiction in the years that followed; for example, the case influenced tales like The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Mr. Whicher, one of the founding eight members of the Detective force at Scotland Yard, was the original popular heroic detective, and was interviewed and quoted by Charles Dickens. Like the fictional Cuff in The Moonstone, Whicher embodied for the public the archetype intuitive, intellectual detective, who caught criminals by using his powerful observation of people and clues. When Whicher’s long career was substantially ruined by this case in Wiltshire, there arose a further era of detective fiction where the detective is seen as either crass and inept, or as a dark influence, a lower-class intruder into the sanctity and secrets of the middle class home.

This book can be enjoyed on many levels. You can appreciate Ms. Summerscales’ scholarship in the infinite details of mid-Victorian English culture that she lays out for us, and in her deep knowledge of the crime fiction of the era and also of Scotland Yard and the judicial system. She writes perceptively of the people involved in the case, so that you soon begin to see that all the characters involved in the case are full of secrets. Ms. Summerscale compares this case to classical murder mysteries where everyone is a suspect with things to hide. The detective has to sift through all the secrets and see which suspect is hiding the fact that he or she is a murderer. In this case in Wiltshire, the person convicted may or may not have been the culprit. You will have to read the book to find out!

An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear

An Incomplete Revenge
by Jacqueline Winspear Find this book in our catalog.

Private investigator Maisie Dobbs is commissioned to investigate a series of petty crimes and mysterious fires in a Kentish village during the annual hop picking. Maisie is able to bring both her experience gained as a frontline dressing station nurse in the First World War and knowledge of her own roots to help solve the mystery.

I liked this book overall, but I had one or two problems with it. It is a great read for fans of cozy mysteries with substance. There are a number of writers today who hark back to the traditional cozy mysteries of the heyday of writers like Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayer. Just as these giants of the mystery genre did, the contemporary writers, including Jacqueline Winspear, examine questions of evil and its consequences down through time, revenge, forgiveness, retribution and redemption. Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs is a psychic and a student of human nature. Usually the stories she appears in deal in the psychological toll of war, as several of Christie's did. For me Winspear does a great job of dealing with these issues within the conventions of the mystery genre. These issues drive the plot, which is very believable and well-crafted. My only complaint with the plot is that the reader knows the solution to the mystery almost before Maisie does - it is perhaps rather obvious.

This transparency is perhaps because Winspear does such a good job of laying out for us all the historical background of the period between World Wars I and II in England. Given the background we understand the motives. Winspear is very good at conveying the class system and snobbery of the time. My quibble with "An Incomplete Revenge" is that for me the book does not have a light enough touch when dealing with these issues. Agatha Christie, writing in the 1930s was able to send up prejudice with gentle satire. Sometimes for me Winspear is either stuffy or didactic.

Her research is very extensive, obviously. Readers who like arcane or exotic details in their mysteries will love the descriptions of the way of life of the Roma, or Gypsies, who go hop picking every summer in Kent. I also particularly enjoyed Winspear's writing when she described the late summer weather, scents, and sights in the Kentish fields.

I'd love to hear from readers who have discovered other historical mystery writers like Jacqueline Winspear.

Here is another view on the book:
REVIEW: Publisher's Weekly 11/26/2007: In Edgar-finalist Winspear's enjoyable fifth installment in her Maisie Dobbs series (after 2006's Messenger of Truth), the psychologist/investigator digs deep into a village's long-buried secrets. Maisie's benefactor, tycoon James Compton, wants to buy an estate in the bucolic hamlet of Heronsdene, but is wary after a string of mysterious fires. Maisie soon proves Compton's suspicions correct when she encounters the shady current landowner and a vaguely menacing band of Gypsies in town for the seasonal harvest. The locals are also curiously tight-lipped about Heronsdene's wartime tragedy, when a zeppelin raid wiped out a family. Teasing out Heronsdene's secrets will take all the intrepid former nurse's psychological skills and test her ability to navigate between the Gypsy and gorja (non-Gypsy) worlds. Winspear vividly evokes England between the wars, when the old order crumbled and new horizons beckoned working women like her appealing heroine. Even if a few of the plot twists prove predictable, this jaunt back to a bygone era is as satisfying as a spin in Maisie's MG.