"Deep and Deadly" by Keith Moray

It looks like suicide, but it will turn out to be murder.  

The body of the owner of the salmon farm on West Uist in the Hebrides is found floating in a fish retention area, a netted seawater area used is fish farming operations. It appears to be suicide, although no one is quite sure why the deceased would have taken his own life.

 

The death isn’t the only case for Detective Inspector Torquil MacKinnon and his team. Someone has been sending poison pen letters to seemingly everyone in West Uist. Tourquil himself has received one, as had the newspaper editor, local gamekeeper, a restaurant owner, the dead man, and numerous others. What is unsettling is that the letters are becoming increasingly threatening. Plus dead birds are turning up, poisoned, the local environmentalists believe, by the salmon farm and the chemicals it uses.

 

When the forensic examination confirms that the man didn’t drown where he was found, MacKinnon knows that he now heads a murder investigation. And the bodies begin to pile up.

 

Keith Moray

Deep and Deadly is the seventh DI Torquil MacKinnon mystery by British writer Keith Moray. It’s a good story but perhaps not as strong as its predecessors; there is considerable plot advancement at the end that might have been a bit more spaced out. There is less of Lachlan MacKinnon, Torquil’s minister uncle who might be a novel all to himself. And while the DI’s wedding is looming, we get very little of his fiancée or his ongoing battle with his superintendent boss. Still, I enjoyed the story; it’s always a treat to read about life on West Uist.

 

In addition to seven Inspector MacKinnon novels, Moray has also published three historical novels, The Pardoner’s Crime, The Fool’s Folly, and The Curse of the Body Snatchers; non-fiction books (under the pen name Keith Souter); and several westerns as Clay Moore. When he’s not writing, he practices medicine as a part-time doctor and medical journalist (he studied medicine at the University of Dundee). He lives in Yorkshire in England.

“Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era” by Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant

It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, you know. You’re reading a book, and you sense that what you have in your hands is a game-changer. 

This happened as I read the authors’ introduction to Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era. Co-authors Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant studied what many had long believed to be an exaggeration at best and mythical propaganda at worst – the number of underaged boys who fought in the Civil War – and discovered something startingly different. The result is a work that changes our understanding of the Civil War, arguably the most powerful event in the history of the United States.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

For Valentine's Day: Mary Oliver and "Felicity"

Sometimes, you find love where you least expect it. 

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) is not usually considered a love poet. at least in the traditional understanding of love poetry. We might first think of Shakespeare and his sonnets, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or Pablo Neruda, or Edna St. Vincent Millay. One of the best-known poems by William Butler Yeats is the love poem “When You Are Old.” Or the Elizabethan poets, and the Romantics. But Mary Oliver?

 

As it turns out, yes, Mary Oliver. 

 

In Felicity: Poems, published in 2015, Oliver included several love poems. They’re not what we might call “traditional” love poems; in some of them, she backs into the love theme. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"When the House Burns" by Priscilla Paton

The Minneapolis-St. Paul region, as one might expect, is in the backwash of unrest, both for the death of a suspected criminal at the hands of police and the pandemic just ended. Housing and rental prices are astronomical; just ask Detective Deb Metzger, who’s desperately trying to find a place to live, without success. She’s also mourning a potential love interest who’s marooned in Paris and might not be that interested to begin with. 

Her partner, Detective Erik Jansson, has a place to live; what he doesn’t have and sorely feels the need for is his own love interest. He’s divorced and sharing custody of his young son Benjamin. But he’s also a bit gun-shy romantically; his former wife, an attorney, sparked the divorce with an affair.

 

Metzger and Jansson are working for Greater Metro, or G-Met, a hybrid police unit that works both cities. They’re being booted out of their offices, as the source of the smell that’s been pervading the place has been identified as a broken sewer pipe. They’re working out of makeshift offices, their homes (at least Jansson has one), and their cars. 

 

They’re assigned a murder case – a real estate agent has been found gunned down in the driveway of a vacant home. And, of course, no one has seen or heard anything. Suspicion focuses on a homeless man who’d been stalking the woman, but he isn’t exactly easy to find. In the meantime, the two detectives almost stumble into what looks like unrelated events – an old unsolved arson case that claimed a life, the receptionist at the real estate office being harassed, another (and very attractive) real agent who worked with the victim seems to be getting her fair share of threats, and the land development firm the real estate agency had worked closely with may be up to its eyeballs in the wrong kind of business.

 

Priscilla Paton

When the House Burns is the third novel in the Twin Cities mystery series by Priscilla Paton. It’s well-plotted and well written on several levels. It’s an entertaining mystery. It tells you more than you might want to know about the real estate and development businesses. It’s filled with characters who don’t seem terribly fond of telling the police everything they know. And there’s an undercurrent of dark comedy running throughout the story, with some of the best stretches of dialogue between the police officers that I’ve read recently. 

 

The first in the Twin Cities series is Where Privacy Dies, published in 2018, followed by Should Grace Fail in 2020. Paton is also the author of Abandoned New England: Landscape in the Works of Homer, Frost, Hopper, Wyeth, and Bishop (2003) and a children’s book, Howard and the Sitter’s Surprise. She received a B.A. from Bowdoin College, a Ph.D. in English Literature from Boston College, was a college professor and taught in Kansas, Texas, Florida, Ohio, and Minnesota. She lives in Minnesota. 

 

With its almost quirky police officers and its strong plot, When the House Burns is both entertaining and a solid read. And it may make you think twice about what real estate agents and developers you work with. (It publishes tomorrow, Feb. 14.)

 

Related:

 

Should Grace Fail by Priscilla Paton.

Grace and peace

After Galatians 1:1-5 

His authority set

and stated, he

pronounces grace

and peace to those

reading and listening.

It’s something he 

usually does,

this pronouncement,

but this time he

includes a reminder

of the source of grace

and peace, what was 

done to provide

grace and peace, and

thanksgiving for both

the act and the result.

 

Photograph by Kirill Pershin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads - Feb. 11, 2023

Last week, it was Columbia Journalism Review’s four-part series on the media and Russiagate. This week, it the story the Columbia Journalism Review had but didn’t publish – the connection between The Nation Magazine and Vladimir Putin. Duncan Campbell at Byline Times publishes the story in full.  

And on that subject, James Heartfield at Spiked explains why the press fell for the Russiagate story, and why some are still desperately holding on to the hope that it’s still true, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

 

Terry Mattingly, part of the team at Get Religion that writes really insightful articles about how the press does and doesn’t cover religion, has an article at Acton Institute. If you think journalism is very, very different from what it used to be, it’s not your imagination. There’s been a huge shift in how journalism is practiced, and whom it’s practiced for. This help helps explain how newspapers, like my own hometown newspaper, had news columns and editorial pages that sound like echo chambers.

 

These stories matter. The country is not going to function, or function for long, without a free press doing the job it’s supposed to be doing.

 

More Good Reads

 

Life and Culture

 

The Crack-Up: How individual and civilizational identities collapse – Peter Hughes at Quillette.

 

What is Marxism? and Marxism’s Long Shadow – Kevin Flatt at The Gospel Coalition. 

 

Psychology studies that go viral are more likely to be bogus – Ross Pomeroy at Big Think.

 

The Deathwork of Devilish Dance: What a Grammy Performance Reveals about Secular Thought – Pierce Taylor Hibbs at Westminster Magazine.

 

The Twitter Files Reveal an Existential Threat – John Daniel Davidson at Imprimis.

 

Poetry

 

The Shadow of My Sorrow – Daniel Howard at Society of Classical Poets.

 

An Opportune Time (Out in These Streets) – Drew Jackson at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

At the Crossroads – Dana Gioia at Literary Hub.

 

News Media

 

Death of old-school journalism may be why Catholic church vandalism isn't a big story – Clemente Lisi at Get Religion.

 

Google now wants to answer your questions without links and with AI. Where does that leave publishers? – Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab.

 

British Stuff

 

The Dandy’s Perambulations – Spitalfields Life.

 

Faith

 

Tell Your Anxieties to Ask Permission – Tim Challies.

 

The Case for Pew Bibles – William Boyce & K.J. Drake at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

The Resilient Mother – Michele D. Morin at Desiring God.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Children aren’t the enemy of the writer – Billy McMorris at The Spectator.

 

The Death and Resurrection of Bilbo Baggins – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Ukraine

 

Return of the mercenaries: Putin’s hired killers have money on their minds – Patrick Cadick-Adams at The Critic Magazine.

 

American Stuff

 

The Truth Behind the Poetry: On the Facts and Myths of the American Revolution’s Early Days – Bob Thomson at Literary Hub.

 

Saving A Worn-Out Book: Amos Swan and a Regimental History – Jon Tracey at Emerging Civil War.

 

Londonderry Air, arranged by Arthur Frackenpohl – USC Concert Choir

Painting: The Scholar, oil on canvas by Ludwig Deutsch (1855-1935). 

Greeting in authority

After Galatians 1:1-15 

A letter, a theme

begins with a statement

of authority and, also, 

a little history, a reminder,

rather pointed, not so much

of who he was or his training

and education, but what 

he was, a man called to do

what he was doing, not by 

the authority of friends or

institutions but called

by God. It is a letter

from the man, but it also

on behalf of those with him.

In other words, he’s not 

a lone voice, he has

the calling of God and 

the backing of those

in authority. He speaks

with the authority he’s

been granted. And it’s time

to fasten your seatbelts.

 

Photograph by Illiya Vjestica via Unsplash. Used with permission.