Three Great Books #50

A mystery within a mystery, exploring the deepest ocean, and a supernatural foodie thriller.

Marble Hall Murders, by Anthony Horowitz

I love a hefty but fast-paced British crime novel in the summer (or pretty much any time). This is Horowitz’s third featuring Susan Ryeland, an editor, and Atticus Pund, the fictional detective hero of the series she edited before the author died in an untimely fashion. (You’ll enjoy this even if you haven’t read the first two Susan Ryeland books, though it will reveal some plot points of the earlier ones.) Susan has moved back to London after a stint living in Greece and is looking for work when a publisher calls her in to discuss a new project. An Atticus Pund continuation novel is in the works, and the proposed writer is Eliot Crace, the grandson of a rich, famous, and now-deceased author of a beloved children’s series. Susan is impressed with his efforts (which we get to read, too), but just like his predecessor, Eliot seems to be using the novel to settle scores and point to the culprit of what he thinks was a real-life crime: the supposed murder of his grandmother. Horowitz is a master of this genre, and I loved the mystery within a mystery structure (a literary BOGO!).

The Underworld, by Susan Casey

This book about the people who explore the ocean’s most profound depths came out in 2023, just months after OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded. Notably, there is no mention of Titan in this book; Casey said subsequently that her sources warned her to stay far away from it, especially as a passenger. Instead, she writes about people who explore the “deep ocean” — anything from about 650 feet to 36,000 feet — while taking every safety precaution, using independently tested submersibles. “Limited to the ocean’s top hundred feet, as I was, the real abyss eluded me, as if it were an abstraction rather than a destination….What kind of a place was it? What was it like to be there? What would you see if you went?” she writes. Casey visits the abyss herself, chronicling the host of amazing creatures that have evolved to survive under conditions of cold, dark and extreme pressure, and calling for protection of the delicate environment from the looming threat of deep-sea mining. I’m too chicken to scuba dive, let alone go down in a submersible, but this stoked my curiosity about a part of our planet that is essential to life but about which we know very little.

Aftertaste, by Daria Lavelle

If you love lush descriptions of food and ghost stories, “Aftertaste” is for you. Eleven-year-old Kostya Duhovny is still reeling from the death of his father when he inexplicably tastes his dad’s favorite Ukrainian dish while sitting at a public pool in Brighton Beach. Other, unfamiliar aftertastes follow, but when he tells his mother, she checks him into the psych ward. As an adult, he discovers that by preparing the dishes that were significant to a departed person, he can bring back their ghost to share one final meeting with a loved one who is desperate to see them. A psychic, Maura, to whom Kostya reveals his experiments, warns him that bringing back the dead is dangerous (duh!). But he can’t stop pursuing it, eventually accepting backing from a Russian gangster to open a restaurant specializing in culinary encounters with the dead. I loved the characters, especially Kostya’s best friend Frankie, and the mixture of supernatural and food-sceney details felt totally new. The ending is lovely and, yes, bittersweet.