Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 23, 1992 TAG: 9202230297
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by GEOFF SEAMANS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Murder in Ordinary Time.\ By Sister Carol Anne O'Marie. Delacorte. $18.Like her sleuth, Sister Mary Helen, the author is a Catholic nun who lives in the San Francisco area. Her picture of life in the order presumably is accurate, so far as it goes. Not that it goes very far. This is a quick-read mystery that, despite its undertone of humor, constantly threatens to cross the line into cloying sweetness.
Still, the story has a saving grace: A key clue is the ineffable superiority of oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips over those with raisins. That's an assumption that any serious cookie-eater will find true to life.
The Stand-In.\ By Deborah Moggach. Little, Brown. $19.95.\ Stephen King on his better days might have made a passable novel of the absurd premise of "The Stand-In": unsuccessful British actress assumes the person of American movie star for whom she's a look-alike stand-in for lighting checks before the actual filming.
But Moggach is no King. Her foreshadowing is too unsubtle to be scary, and so frequent as to make the story too too predictable to be suspenseful.
Land Kills.
By Nat & Yanna Brandt. The Countryman Press. $18.95.
This tale of greed and murder stars crusading editor Mitch Stevens, journalism professor and former big-city newsman subbing for the summer as editor of a small-town daily in Vermont. Expecting an uneventful couple of months, Stevens instead finds himself directing coverage of a series of suspicious deaths that don't seem as accidental as officialdom says.
Amid the cliches (evil developers, profits-oriented publisher vs. noble newsman) are a decent mystery story and realistic insights into how small-town newspapering works.
Whoo?\ By Richard Hoyt. Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. $17.95.
The literary world is well-stocked these days with fictional detectives who operate out of venues far from New York or L.A. Hoyt's John Denson is a Seattle shamus. The literary world is well-stocked, too, with murder mysteries set against a backdrop of contemporary social, economic or political issues. The issue here is the fight between Pacific Northwest loggers and environmentalists over the fate of spotted owl.
Hoyt, though, is an entertaining writer with a style and wit far above the norm; in "Whoo?" detective Denson is but one in a numerous cast of memorable characters. And while the novel has bad guys, the spotted-owl controversy is presented with a measure of understanding for the conflicting views of both sides.
Highly recommended.
The Summer of the Danes.
By Ellis Peters. The Mysterious Press. $16.95.
OK, so Umberto Eco quality is too much to expect. But this medieval murder mystery, another in Peters' series featuring Brother Cadfael of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, is truly bad.
Any semblance of plot is suffocated by atmosphere so dense a sword couldn't slice through it. The battle scenes are laughable. And assuming that people in the 12th century actually spoke in the florid style of written chronicles of the era strikes me as akin to assuming that life before the invention of color film must have been in black and white.
Geoff Seamans is an editorial writer for this newspaper.