The Madrid Connection

Connections, #2

by

Tim Parfitt

Compelling why-done-it featuring a stolen Caravaggio and corruption in European football set in atmospheric Madrid, Spain.

The Madrid Connection is the second book in author Tim Parfitt's intriguing art mysteries Connections series, featuring British art detective Benjamin Blake, but it can easily be read as a standalone novel. With a bevy of well-developed characters, a vibrant setting, and a robust, complex plot, Parfitt's tale had me glued to my seat, wondering how all its intriguing elements would come together. 

Benjamin Blake is in Madrid to assist a client with an art restitution case when the renowned Prado Museum is broken into, a famous Caravaggio is stolen, and a beloved, elderly security guard is brutally murdered. When the government's Culture Ministry approaches him to help recover the missing masterpiece, he agrees, not realizing the theft was only the tip of a much more dangerous criminal plan. 

Although Benjamin Blake is the engaging main character of the book and series, he is surrounded by several other well-developed characters, each with a strong presence in the complex storyline. Elena Carmona, Kai Leroux, Mie Zhang, Inspector Barroso, Borja Falco, and Lorenzo Martelli all tell critical parts of the story that Blake is attempting to piece together, even as he's warned off the case. I enjoyed these strong perspectives as the story unfolded. 

An important aspect of the story is its vivid setting in Madrid, Spain. The city comes alive under Parfitt's touch, and readers get a definite feeling of place. The setting is almost a character in and of itself, with vibrant descriptions of sights, sounds, smells, everyday scenes, and the actions and attitudes of its people. 

While the plot is complicated, each separate storyline is developed through the perspective of a specific set of characters, making it easy to keep things straight. Not all is tense and focused on the terrible murders, though, as some of the situations depicted have humorous results for Blake, such as his Airbnb fiasco and his experiences with the BiciMad city bike. However, there are some graphic depictions of violence, but they are appropriate to the scene and story. The author keeps building the suspense with some surprising twists as those investigating the murder and the theft follow the few clues they have, and the seemingly unconnected storylines eventually converge. There are some clever surprises on the way to the final resolution, and the story ends with an intriguing teaser for the next book in the series. 

I recommend THE MADRID CONNECTION to readers of mysteries and thrillers, especially those with an interest in art, European football and betting, and Madrid.

For this and other book reviews, visit Reedsy Discovery.

Pintsized Pioneers at Play

Homemade Fun and Danger

by

Preston Lewis &Harriet Kocher Lewis

A fresh and fascinating view of pioneer life.

Pintsized Pioneers at Play: Homemade Fun and Danger by Preston Lewis and Harriet Kocher Lewis is a fun but eye-opening, memory-jogging journey into the past of the American West. Full of lively vignettes drawn from personal diaries, memoirs, and newspaper accounts of daily life as pioneers expanded their reach into the unsettled areas of the country, readers will get a real feel for what it was like to grow up in that earlier place and time. Lewis and Lewis have perfectly combined their respective knowledge, skills, and pasts to produce a fascinating nonfictional vision of this aspect of children’s lives. 

If you’ve read the previous book about children on the frontier, Pintsized Pioneers, you’ll already be aware of how much responsibility for the success of their families lay on the shoulders of even some of the youngest children. Money was hard-won, and almost everyone lived “off the beaten path,” so running to the store for toys was not an option. First, there weren’t stores on every corner, certainly not malls, and few had any amount of disposable income. Making do with what you had was key. Playtime came after chores, or as part of them, and school was as much a social event as it was educational (something we all realized when COVID isolated so many youngsters from their peers). 

While our ancestors led a more basic, structured life, they also enjoyed a freedom unheard of in today’s society. Children roamed far from home in remote locations under rugged conditions, all unsupervised: a glorious opportunity, but, at times, things happened. Children were lost, injured, or worse. The newspaper reports of lost and missing children and various mishaps occurring in the small towns were a reminder of this. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed the accounts of childhood activities, straight from the mouths of those recalling their youth. I loved that there were names and places associated with each precious memory, and that some of those stories came from well-known figures, such as Eliza Donner, a survivor of the tragic Donner Party expedition. 

The narrative is compelling and easy to read, one of those books you start and look up an hour or so later without realizing how much time has actually passed. Also, if you’re interested in early childhood development, be sure to read the introduction to understand how children mature and how their awareness of the ramifications of their actions changes. It might be a sobering realization of how lucky any of these children are to have survived, or of how vigilant their parents had to be while physically making a life for the entire family. 

I recommend PINTSIZED PIONEERS AT PLAY to readers, young or old, of tales of the Old West. 

For these and other book reviews, visit Boys' Mom Reads!

The Light in the Barn: A Domestic Thriller

by

Susan P. Baker

The mounting page-by-page suspense makes this book hard to put down!

The Light in the Barn by Susan P. Baker is a new domestic thriller featuring newlyweds, an old barn full of junk, and a serial killer on the loose! After a whirlwind courtship, recently-divorced Aurora married Jeff, a handsome, charming medical supplies salesman, and when her grandfather passed away soon after, they moved from Houston into the country farmhouse he left her. Ten months later, however, the honeymoon was over, as Jeff became increasingly critical of her every move and thought, maritally demanding, and spending much more time away on sales trips than at home. 

Aurora, a budding mystery writer, tried to balance her time working on her who-dun-it with clearing out the years of building materials collected and stored in the barn by her grandfather for a planned series of yard sales to help fund their own renovation efforts. However, late in the night before their first sale, with Jeff still out of town, Aurora surprises a trespasser dressed all in black lurking in the barn. Knocked down as he rushed away but unhurt, Aurora is shaken but returns to bed as she needs to get up early to set up and open the sale. With her girlfriends' help and Jeff eventually making a late-morning appearance, the sale goes well, with no signs of the evening visitor's return or of anything being taken. Ian, a handsome house flipper new to the small rural community, catches the eye of Aurora's best friend, Sarah, as he browses for materials he can use in his latest home restoration. 

Meanwhile, the county is experiencing a rash of young women being abducted from local shopping malls, their bodies later found dumped on the side of a road, often showing signs of having been run over. Sarah, having had no luck in attracting Ian's attention and unable to verify his identity online or through social media, begins to suspect the lifestyle of a house flipper might be the perfect cover for a serial killer. When Ian keeps showing up at the farmhouse while Jeff is on the road, wanting to search through the barn for more items he can use on his current home project, Aurora, too, begins to wonder if he might be THE ONE and that she may be THE NEXT. 

The story is tension-filled and fast-paced, with suspense building with every turn of the page. Aurora has been deeply hurt by her first husband's betrayal and is starting to realize she doesn't really know much about her new one, who has stopped being so charming or attentive and has shifted to verbal abuse and gaslighting her at every turn. The couple's confrontation over Chloe, the adopted guard dog, was nasty and shocking on Jeff's part. 

Everyone's suspicions grow when a murder occurs close to home, but there are a couple of good suspects to consider, complicating and already vexing case of who is really behind the disappearances and deaths of the young women. The final resolution came as an absolute surprise, with its "killer" twist. 

I recommend THE LIGHT IN THE BARN to readers of suspense and domestic thrillers. 

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advance Review Copy from the author through Lone Star Literary Life Book Campaigns.

A Retail Carol

by

Lee Vetter

It wasn’t the night they’d planned, but it turned out to be the night they needed.

A Retail Carol by Lee Vetter is an entertaining Christmas satire and an unexpected holiday treat; it is a story of desperation, connections, and redemption of random strangers brought together by time, place, and misdirected wants. The need they believed was critical for the perfect Christmas was the acquisition of the “IT” toy of the year – the Plastic-Thing-3000, but it turned out to be the need for human connection and understanding. 

The Westbrook Trading Company, with its aging edifice and barely on-the-edge relevancy, had miraculously held back a cache of what was to prove to be the “IT” toy of the holiday season that year and planned a stunning hourly raffle and midnight-hour final release of its stockpile for Christmas Eve. With the coveted Plastic-Thing-3000 having been sold out everywhere else for weeks, desperate parents crammed into the downtown store for a last-ditch effort at winning Christmas. Among the throng is a hopeful father of two and his single best friend for company; a worn-out single mother and her young daughter; a downtrodden husband, his clueless wife, and their bored teenage daughter; a local pastor with a secret past; the exhausted store employees; and the elderly store owner, who had concocted the last-minute holiday stand-off and hoop-jumping. Each customer goes to the store in hopes of scoring the prize of the season but comes away with something much more precious. 

The story is a novelization of a Christmas production and clearly conveys each scene and character encounter with precise, cinematic-quality images, humor, and touching emotional impact. The narrative unfolds from the multiple points of view of the main characters, and readers share in their thoughts and motivations for what is to come. While the story foreshadows and seems to promise that deserving characters will achieve their hearts’ desires this Christmas Eve, there are some truly unforeseen twists in the plot that will surprise, entertain, and warm the heart. I would have loved to have seen this performed on stage, and I know I will be sharing this book in the future. 

I recommend A RETAIL CAROL to readers of holiday stories. 

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advance Review Copy from Reedsy Discovery.

The Patsy

by

D.J. Hupp

An imaginative, fantastical, and totally absorbing alternate vision of the "truth" behind the JFK assassination.

The Patsy is author D.J. Hupp's debut novel, and in it he tackles one of the most well-known and much speculated about events in American history: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. The story launches via an alternate timeline that blends historical detail and creative fiction to build an imaginative, exciting account of the events behind Kennedy's tragic death that day. 

In The Patsy, JFK was not the target of an assassin on 11/22/63, but rather went on to successfully fulfill his first four years in office and even won a second term. However, his policies set the US on a disastrous collision course with the USSR, which culminated in worldwide nuclear obliteration, except for a handful of government employees, scientists, and their families who made it into secret underground bunkers where they've survived for the past 19 years. During this time, research on time travel advanced to the point that the bunker leaders developed a plan to send an agent back in time to kill Kennedy before his actions could lead to the eventual destruction of civilization on the planet's surface. 

The main character is 41-year-old Wayne Bronson, a young West Point graduate, when he entered the bunker. An expert marksman, trained on the same bolt-action rifle Oswald owned, he is tapped by the bunker commander to be sent back in time, inhabiting both Oswald's mind and body, in order to implement their plan to kill the president as his motorcade passes through Dealey Plaza past the Texas Book Depository: an event which never occurred in their timeline. The author makes the setting and time period come alive through strategically placed references to books, music, movies, television shows, and iconic Dallas landmarks and institutions. As a contemporary of the time period and a local to boot, the story was a magical trip to the past. I was fascinated by how Wayne's exciting fictional mission was so cleverly woven into the historical record of the actual events, including the known movements of the major figures involved on the days before, during, and beyond the assassination itself, as well as the imagined aftermath of the changes the manipulation of events had on the new present and especially Wayne's life. 

With its clever mix of fact and fiction and the very human reactions of the formerly bunkered characters to their sudden freedom, I recommend THE PATSY to readers of speculative or historical fiction. 

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advance Review Copy from Reedsy Discovery.