mystery – Page 6 – Shelf Life

Hope Rides Again: An Obama Biden Murder

Obama and Biden are back! This time they’re in Chicago solving the mystery of who stole Obama’s Blackberry and killed the thief.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden return to solving crimes in Hope Rides Again: An Obama Biden Mystery, the second in the series written by Andrew Shaffer and starring the former president and vice president.

“It’s a totally separate mystery from the first book,” says Shaffer while sitting at a table where a long line had formed waiting for him to autograph copies of his novel at a two-day book fair in Lexington, Kentucky. “The first was set in Wilmington, Delaware and this one is set in Chicago on Obama’s turf and takes place in the spring around St. Patrick’s Day which is certainly a holiday they take seriously there.”

Indeed, Shaffer, who at one time lived in Chicago, says he revisited old haunts and new places for background as the two BFFs hunt for Obama’s Blackberry and the murderer of the their who originally stole it.

Though the premise of the two joining together as detectives is somewhat zany, Shaffer describes his book as dealing with serious topics as well.

“But I try to do it in a lighthearted way,” he says. Also, fun are the covers for both books including the first in the series, Hope Never Dies. Harkening back to the vivid colors of 1960s, the first shows Biden driving a convertible while Obama stands in the front seat pointing out the way as they chase their quarry. In the latest, Obama leans down from a swaying rope ladder tethered to a helicopter, his arm outstretched to help Biden up.

One person who thinks the mysteries are fun is the former vice president. When Biden was campaigning in Kentucky (Shaffer and his wife, a romance writer, live in Louisville), he was contacted by the campaign who set up a meeting.

“I didn’t know whether he liked the book or not or what he was going to say,” says Shaffer adding that the Biden hadn’t read either book but signed his copies. “It was really kind of different to have a character in your book sign your book. I found out later that people have been bringing my books to his campaign stops and asking him to sign them, so he was probably thinking who’s the guy who wrote this?”

It’s tricky writing about people we know publicly but not in person says Shaffer.

“I think in ways I know them too well because I know their history and what I think they would do and say, because I’ve written about them and I’ve seen and read about them for eight years,” he says. “When I heard Biden speak in Kentucky, I was like my Biden wouldn’t say that.”

Shaffer’s book might have garnered a few votes for the vice president.

“I met one person who said I can’t wait to vote for them again because now they’re detectives,” he says.

Ifyougo:

What: Andrew Shaffer book signing

When: Tuesday, July 9 at 6 p.m.

Where: The Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, IL

Cost: Free but RSVP is suggested

FYI: 773.752.4381; semcoop.com

What: Andrew Shaffer book signing

When: Wednesday, July 10 at 7 p.m.

Where: Anderson’s Bookshop, 123 W Jefferson Ave., Naperville, IL

Cost: This event is free and open to the public. To join the signing line, please purchase the author’s latest book, Hope Rides Again, from Anderson’s Bookshop. To purchase, stop in or call Anderson’s Bookshop Naperville.

FYI: 630-355-2665; andersonsbookshop.com

The Mykonos Mob

In The Mykonos Mob, the tenth book of the Greece-based mystery-thriller series written by New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Siger, Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis finds himself face-to-face with the nation’s top crime bosses, all of whom are as perplexed as he is about who’s responsible for the murder of a corrupt former police colonel who ran the island’s protection rackets. In the meantime, Kaldis’ s wife, Lila, is trying to find an identity for herself beyond wife and mother and teams up with an ex-pat with a shady side. The two decide to mentor exploited young island girls, a charitable act that unknowingly negatively intersects with her husband’s investigation.

Siger, who left a lucrative career as a partner in a Wall Street law firm to write mysteries, says that Greece provides an inexhaustible source of material for the two central elements of his series–the serious, modern-day issues his characters need to confront and overcome, and a perspective on those issues found in the ancient past.

“There is no place on earth more closely linked to the ancient world than Greece,” he says. “It is the birthplace of the gods, the cradle of European civilization, the bridge between East and West. Spartan courage, Athenian democracy, Olympic achievement, Trojan intrigue—all sprung from this wondrous land.”

It’s also a place he knows very well.

“Each year I live on Mykonos longer than any other place on earth, and have for about a dozen years,” says Siger, noting that he first visited the island 35 years ago at a friend’s suggestion who thought he’d love Greece. “She was right. From the moment I stepped onto the tarmac at the Mykonos airport, I felt as if I were home. That very first day I happened to pass by a jewelry shop on my way into town from my hotel, though I forget how the proprietor lured me inside. Unbeknownst to me, I’d stumbled upon the most loved man on Mykonos. A consummate gentleman and fervent booster of the island, he had an extraordinary circle of local, national and international friends, all of whom made a point of regularly stopping by to say hello to him.”

Becoming an insider almost immediately has helped him craft stories about the workings of the islands both from a political and social viewpoint.

“My ideas come from the strangest sources, often unexpected,” says Siger. “More bizarre than where they come from is how often my fictional plots have an unnerving tendency to come true. For example, my second novel in the series, Assassins of Athens featured a character in the mold of Greece’s current Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras years before his rise to power; my third book, Prey on Patmos, anticipated by seven years the current turmoil involving Mt. Athos, the Russian government, and the Patriarch in Constantinople, and many of the details surrounding the fictional assassination serving as the backstory latest book, were just reported by the Greek press as key details of an actual assassination that occurred long after The Mykonos Mob was written.”

For more about Jeff Siger and his books, visit jeffreysiger.com/

The Lost Night by Andrea Bartz

In Andrea Bartz’s mystery novel, The Lost Night, Lindsay Bach believes she remembers the night her once-best friend Edie committed suicide. It’s seared into her brain. Or so she thinks. Over dinner, a long ago friend who has just moved back to New York suggests that she wasn’t with the group like she believes. Could that be true? Getting a friend to hack into her old email account, Bach backtracks a decade ago to when she and her group of friends were post graduates starting jobs, consuming too much alcohol, partying too hard and falling in love—often.

With each new revelation about that time and her part in the days leading up to Edie’s death, Bach has to employ the skills she uses to fact check magazine articles for her job to do the same in her life. The questions are many, but the most important ones are did the captivating and beautiful Edie really commit suicide or was she murdered? And did Bach have something to do with her death that she can no longer remember.

Bartz, who earned her master’s degree at Northwestern University and the author of Stuff Hipsters Hate, her blog turned book, says she wanted to write a book like those she likes to read—tomes by female mystery writers like Tana French, Gillian Flynn and Jessica Knoll. For inspiration, she turned to a time in her life—New York City in 2009. Like her favorite writers, the novel struck a note and even before the book was published at the end of February, it had already been optioned by Cartel Entertainment as a limited series with actress Mila Kunis’ Orchard Farm set to produce.

“It was a crazy time and we were partying while the world was burning,” she says of her time as a 23-year-old. “I thought of this time and how bizarre it all was and then interlaid it with a mysterious death. It opens up a certain subculture that I hope is interesting to readers, it certainly was introspective for me.”

The novel, atmospheric, intense and intriguing, reflects an interest in psychology and memory that has always interested Bartz—and Bach, the character Bartz describes as being most like her. In an early chapter, Bartz tells a lover how drunk blackouts mean that the incidents that occurred never were recorded in our memories. They don’t exist and yet they happened.

“We’ve all had those incidents where someone will describe an event and say you were there and you don’t remember it,” says Bartz, noting there’s something both creepy and disorienting about how there’s no hard and fast truth just different memories

So, it is with Bach, who is shaken out of her of complacent lifestyle by having to grapple with the truth—as elusive as it is.

Ifyougo:

What: Author Andrea Bartz will be answering questions about her new novel The Lost Night, and magician Jeanette Andrews will be wowing the audience with a short performance.

When: Wednesday, March 13 at 7-9 pm

Where: The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N Lincoln Ave, Chicago, IL

Cost: Free

FYI: (773) 293-2665; words@bookcellarinc.com

Brian Gruley’s Bleak Harbor

Life is indeed bleak for many of the town’s residents in Bryan Gruley’s newest mystery, Bleak Harbor (Thomas & Mercer 2018; $24.95). Carey Peters’ autistic son is missing, lured away by the offer of a milkshake and his mother and stepfather need to come up with $5.145 million to get him back. Carey, frantic about her son, also has other secrets. After receiving a promotion to executive assistant, finance, at Pressman Logistics in Chicago, she ends up in bed with her boss, Randall Pressman, after the two share a celebratory dinner. It gets even more complicated. She turns down future intimate opportunities with Randall– she is married, after all. When Randall retaliates by harassing her at work, Carey steals incriminating documents proving his involvement in illegal activities and blackmails him for their return.

But that’s just part of the many ominous doings in Bleak Harbor. Pete, Carey’s husband, runs a medical marijuana dispensary and was buying cheap supplies from a Detroit drug ring. Besides her blackmail scheme, Carey’s mother, the malevolent family matriarch, Serenity Meredith Maas Bleak, has her own hidden past. Yes, Carey is related to the founder of the town which Gruley based upon a darker version of Saugatuck, a lovely waterfront destination in southwest Michigan.

Gruley, who shared in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Wall Street Journal in 2002 for its coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and is now a staff reporter for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek, draws upon his investigative journalism for ideas.

“As a journalist, I’ve written stories from a lot of small towns,” says Gruley. “What I often discovered was that, whatever the larger theme of the story I was writing, be it an antitrust investigation or telecom deregulation, the real story was rooted in small ‘p’ politics—vendettas, rivalries, and grudges between the locals.”

Gruley took a liking to Saugatuck as a model for Bleak Harbor while reporting a story there for The Wall Street Journal some years ago. Part of the interest is because of the lost village of Singapore, a boom town near Saugatuck during the rebuilding of Chicago after the Great Fire.

“I learned about Singapore when I was reporting that WSJ story, and it fascinated me. A timber town buried in the dunes—what’s not cool about that,” says Gruley. “As for Pete and Carey, I started from a premise that they each had secrets they were hiding from each other and that those secrets might have put their son in danger. I had no idea at the start what those particular problems might be, but they came to me as I wrote. In Pete’s case, his struggles with the legal marijuana business stemmed in part from my reporting on a medical marijuana entrepreneur for a Bloomberg Businessweek story.”

Gruley added mystery writing to his resume with his Starvation Lake trilogy (also based in Michigan). His first, Starvation Lake won the Strand Magazine Critics Award and was an Edgar Award nominee and his second, The Hanging Tree not only was the No. 1 IndieNext Pick for August 2010, a Michigan Notable Book for 2011 and a Kirkus Reviews Best Mystery of 2010 but has also optioned for a movie by writer-director John Gray. Even before its December 2018 release, Bleak Harbor became a #1 bestseller through the Amazon First Reads program.

Gruley, who lives in Chicago, says Bleak Harbor isn’t quite as nice as the Saugatuck he and his wife enjoy visiting.

“But that’s OK, because I’m writing about dark deeds and dark people, and I think the title should indicate that,” he says.” I don’t think of myself as a dark person–except, perhaps, when the Red Wings aren’t playing well. But I do gravitate to the sad, the brooding, the melancholy, the menacing, in the stuff I read, watch, and listen to: for instance, Lehane’s Mystic River, the film “Manchester on the Sea,” the twisted lyrics of Richard Thompson. I love the Star Wars movies, but my favorite is probably the darkest, “The Empire Strikes Back.”

Given that penchant and the doings in Bleak Harbor, Gruley says the name Happy Harbor just wouldn’t have worked.

Ifyougo:

What: Bryan Gruley book events

When & Where:

Book Signing & Meet and Greet

January 8 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Cook Memorial Library

413 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Libertyville, IL

(847) 362-2330; cooklib.org

Authors on Tap

In conversation with Jonathan Eig

Wednesday, January 16 @ 7 pm

The Beer Shop

1026 North Blvd

Oak Park, IL

(847) 946-4164; beershophq.com

Conversation with Gregg Hurwitz

Friday, February 1 @ 7:00 pm

Volumes Bookcafe

1474 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Chicago, IL

(773) 697-8066; volumesbooks.com

Who Murdered the Supreme Court Candidate: Mental State, a mystery novel by Law Professor M. Todd Henderson

The murder of a good friend and fellow law professor inspired M. Todd Henderson to write Mental State (Down and Out Books 2018; $17.95), his first mystery novel.

“He was a professor at Florida State University and had just dropped of his kids and was pulling out of the driveway when he was shot,” says Henderson who teaches at the University of Chicago’s law school. It turns out the friend, Dan Martel, was murdered by two hitmen hired by his ex-wife’s family to gain full custody of their children. Henderson considers himself a storyteller and using those skills he channeled his feelings into an immensely readable mystery involving the deadly political machinations put in place to hide the past of a sexual predator in order to secure a place on the Supreme Court. It’s an interesting premise and certainly timely though this book was written well before the Brett Kavanaugh nomination and besides, Henderson’s judge is liberal.

“My interest in law at a policy level is about power and what people are willing to do to achieve their ends,” says Henderson.

In Mental State, Professor Alex Johnson, a professor at a renowned law school on Chicago’s southside (think University of Chicago) is murdered before he can reveal that the man being considered for the Supreme Court sexually abused him when they were both young. The death is first thought to be a suicide but FBI agent Royce Johnson, the victim’s brother, doesn’t believe his self-centered, narcissistic sibling would do such a thing. Once Royce proves it was murder, the next frame-up goes into place (the bad guys are good at backup plans) pinpointing the murder on one of the professor’s law students. But Johnson’s inability to quit trying to solve the crime soon puts himself on the wrong side of the law, his comrades at the FBI and an array of federal officials determined to make sure the president’s pick for the highest court in the land goes through without a hitch. If that means a few murders and ruined lives to achieve this, well, it’s for the greater good.

Ifyougo:

What: M. Todd Henderson discusses “Mental State.” He will be joined in conversation by Jeff Ruby. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

When: Thursday, October 18, 2018 – 6:00pm – 7:00pm

Where: 57th Street Books, 1301 E 57th St., Chicago, IL

Cost: Free

FYI: (773) 752-4381; events@semcoop.com

Journalist Fiona Barton keeps suspense going with ‘The Child’

As a journalist, Fiona Barton investigated crimes, attended trials and then wrote and filed her stories. But as the author of the just-released “The Child” and her best-selling novel, “The Widow,” both psychological thrillers, Barton had to switch gears.

“It sounds ridiculous, but I had to stop being a reporter in order to write a novel,” Barton says. “I knew how to write — I’d been doing it for a living for more than 30 years, but what I was writing came from other people. Journalism is listening, probing, testing other people’s words and telling a story concisely and often under 500 words,” she says.

“Writing ‘The Widow’ meant unlearning a lot of things. It was incredibly hard at first and I got to 10,000 words and thought I had nothing left to say, but there was a moment where I gave myself permission to fully invent. It was a real crunching of gears but wonderfully liberating to be free to create my own world in both books.”

Barton’s done it again with “The Child,” which brings back Kate Waters, the newspaper journalist who first appeared in “The Widow.” Wanting to impress her boss, Kate follows up on the discovery of a small skeleton in a recently demolished building. Barton says that the inspiration for the story came from exactly the same place that Kate finds it in the book.“As a journalist, I’m always looking for stories,” she says. “I tore interesting items out of newspapers and magazines — my hairdresser hated me — and shoved them in my handbag for later. They were often just a few lines in a story but it was the unanswered questions that drew me in. One of the scraps of paper lurking in the bottom of my bag many years ago was about the discovery of a baby’s remains. Like Kate, I wanted to know who the infant was? Who had secretly buried it? And who else knew?”

HOME by Harlan Coben

Patrick and Rhys, two young boys from wealthy families went missing ten years before the night that Win, a relative of Rhys who prides himself on keeping his emotions under control but has no trouble with violence when provoked, spots Patrick in near the tracks at Kings Crossing, a seedy area where prostitution and drugs are rampant. harlan-author-photo-final_photo-credit-claudio-marinesco

Unsure of how to approach Patrick after all these years and wondering if he does so, whether Rhys will be lost forever, Win finds that the decision is already made when three dangerous looking men approach the young man. Wanting to save Patrick, he confronts the men and, though he subdues all three, Patrick disappears again.

“I had blown it,” Win tells himself, knowing that after all his years of fruitlessly searching, if the one lead that came his way was lost, he wouldn’t be able to help the boys’ parents who were trapped in a limbo of despair, crippling anxiety and unending heartbreak.

And so beings Home (Dutton 2016; $28), the latest mystery by author Harlan Coben, who has had nine home consecutive #1 New York Times best sellers, reintroduces us to one of his most popular heroes, sports agent Myron Bolitar as he and Win try to find the boys and reunite them with their grieving parents.

Asked where he gets his ideas, Coben, whose books have sold 70 million copies around the world, says that anything can stimulate an idea.

“The hard part is knowing which ideas will work and being able to develop that idea into a workable story,” he says. “An idea is not a plot and it’s not a novel. Turning it into a story is where the real work comes in.”

Ifyougo:

What: Meet Harlan Coben

When & Where: 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, September 21, Union League Club, 65 W. Jackson Blvd., Chicago; 7 p.m. Wednesday, September 21, Skokie Library, 5215 Oakton St., Skokie.

FYI: (847) 446-8880; thebookstall.com

Steve Hamilton in Chicago to discuss his latest mystery “The Second Life of Nick Mason”

“He’s made a deal with the devil,” says New York Times bestselling author Steve Hamilton about his latest book, “The Second Life of Nick Mason” (Putnam’ 2016; $26) . “Everywhere he goes he’s watched, everyone he touches is in danger and all he wants to do is reunite with his wife and daughter.”

To get out of prison after five very long years instead of serving 25-to-life, Mason agrees to a mysterious agreement with Darius Cole, who is serving a double-life term in the same prison but still rules his criminal empire from his cell. What it means is Mason gets to live in a luxurious Chicago Gold Coast mansion stocked with gourmet food and drink and drive the super-fast sports car that’s parked in the garage. The downside? He has to do Cole’s bidding and so, every time his cell phone rings, Mason finds Author Photo of Steve Hamilton (c) Franco Vogt himself embark on ever increasingly dangerous—and need we say—illegal assignments. To make matters worse, he’s being tracked by the same police detective who put him behind bars to begin with.

Hamilton, one of only two authors to win Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards for both best novel and best first novel, is meticulous about his research.

“When I was writing ‘The Lock Artist’ which is about a safe cracker, I found the best one in the world,” says Hamilton who is from Detroit but now lives in the Catskill Mountains in New York State. “I learned how to pick locks. In fact, I keep my lock picks on my desk and pick locks everyday just to keep my touch.”

He’s also been to maximum security prisons, like the one Mason is so desperate to leave that he’s willing to agree to anything.

“There’s so much of Nick I can relate to,” says Hamilton, whose books include The Alex McKnight series starting with ‘A Cold Day in Paradise.’ “You’d do anything to get out of those prisons just like Nick and I have a daughter like he does and it would just kill me not to see her.”

Ifyougo:

What: Steve Hamilton book signing

When: Monday, May 23 at 7pm

Where: Anderson’s Bookshop, Anderson’s Bookshop La Grange, 26 S. La Grange Rd., La Grange, IL

Cost: Free

FYI: (708) 582-6353

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