Lockdown by Laurie R. King

Lockdown: A Novel of Suspense by Laurie R. King --- 383 pages

Laurie R. King is best known for her Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series but she has also written a number of contemporary mystery/suspense novels, including the Kate Martinelli series and several other stand alone novels.

In Lockdown she sets up a nightmare scenario that has grown all too familiar in real life: a struggling small town California middle school is sent into lockdown in the midst of Career Day when it becomes the target of a mass shooter acting out his fantasy of retribution and vengeance.

King says in her Acknowledgements at the end of the book that this is an idea she has been working on for twenty years, and that the structure of the story is in part created by a series of previously published short stories written over that period, and here linked together to create a multiple point-of-view narrative, jumping forward and backward in time. This allows her to show events from many perspectives and to build suspense through foreshadowing.

It's a compelling theme, playing to our worst fears and secret hopes. I found it very different from King's other novels. While she does a good job of building the suspense, the plot is convoluted. Perhaps it would have been tighter and more focused if she had not tried to include some of the short stories? The ghost element seemed rather awkwardly sandwiched in.

But even one of King's minor efforts is well worth the time spent reading.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

All the Little Liars by Charlaine Harris

All the Little Liars: An Aurora Teagarden Mystery by Charlaine Harris --- 229 pages

After a considerable hiatus, Harris returns with a ninth book featuring her intrepid small town librarian sleuth.

Aurora is about to embark on a whole new life with her second marriage to mystery and true crime writer Robin Crusoe, and a baby on the way at long last. But all that marital and maternal bliss gets put abruptly on hold when Aurora's fifteen-year-old half brother Phillip (who came to live with her to escape the fallout of his parents' catastrophically failing marriage) suddenly goes missing along with two of his friends, Josh and Joss, and an eleven-year-old girl named Lisa they were giving a ride home after soccer practice.  It's bad enough that the four kids seem to have vanished into thin air, but the ante gets upped considerably when another friend of theirs is found dead in an alley. Then Clayton Harrison, the spoiled son of a wealthy local family abruptly disappears, and his girl friend commits suicide.

Phillips as the new kid in town, and known to have a troubled past, is immediately suspect, but Aurora knows her half brother is a decent boy and fights to defend him in absentia.  She's convinced that all of this has something to do with the three girls who have been bullying Lisa. One of the bullies is Clayton Harrison's younger sister.

As time passes, Aurora becomes convinced the police are looking in the wrong places. She's been thinking furiously, and suspects the kids are being kept under wraps right there in town, in the last place anyone would suspect.  And she's determined to find out, because Aurora is convinced that the long this mystery goes on, the less likely there will be any happy ending.  Christmas is coming, and she wants her brother back.

Charlaine Harris writes mysteries that start out like a cozy, but end up something a little more Southern Gothic in tone. This one however seems a little stale.

Click HERE to see the review from Kirkus.

Click HERE to read the review from the Criminal Element Blog.

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling --- 503 pages

J.K. Rowling's much anticipated first post-Harry Potter book is advertised as "a big novel about a small English town," and her first written for adults. At 503 pages it does qualify as big; and the setting, the seemingly charming village of Pagford, is a small English town. And yes, the subject matter and the language are definitely aimed at adults, although some of the key characters are teenagers in the throes of very turbulent adolescences.

Like Agatha Christie and so many other English novelists, Rowling puts the microcosm of her small town under the microscope to reveal, in pitiless detail, the desperate lives behind the bright facades and false bonhomie of Pagford, when the unexpected death of one of Pagford's leading citizens sets off a "take no prisoners" war over his vacant seat on the town Council.

But what is really sad about this book (as several reviewers have pointed out), is that ALL the characters are so unpleasant, so unlikable and so wrapped up in their own grievances that it's impossible to care very much about what happens to any of them.  It remind me more than anything of the 18th century English artist William Hogarth, who chronicled the sordid and brutish underbelly of society in such works as "The Rake's Progress." Rowling's opinion of humanity seems pretty grim and not for the squeamish or faint of heart.