Dreams of Justice by Dick Adler Read Free Book Online Page A

Fielding and his admirable young assistant, Jeremy Proctor.
    A scene at the opening night of Oliver Goldsmith’s “She Stoops To Conquer” is worth the price of admission on its own. After laughing at “quite the funniest comedy we had ever seen or ever read,” Jeremy and Clarissa (another of Sir John’s wise and touching young wards) join another friend and Goldsmith himself for dinner—John Twigg’s famous turtle soup—at a tavern called Shakespeare’s Head in Covent Garden. The soup isn’t the only attraction: the place is a haven for high-end prostitutes. And indeed one of the guests that night, very drunk and being attended to by a pair of “broad and brawny” professionals, seems familiar. “His square spectacles had dropped down his nose and were attached only to his left ear…”
    It isn’t Franklin’s sex life that warrants the attention of Sir John and Jeremy so much as his involvement in a plot to smuggle to America some purloined letters concerning the treasonous political activities of various Colonial leaders. Sam Johnson, who played a major part in a previous book in the series, returns to lend his shrewd mind to this one, and Alexander’s perfect sense of pitch and proportion for the period makes every page glow with a most welcome blend of trust and amazement.
    IN THE KINGDOM OF MISTS, by Jane Jakeman (Berkley Prime Crime)
    Writing viable, interesting thrillers with noted artists as characters is never easy: the most successful practioners (Iain Pears, Jonathan Gash, John Malcolm, Nicholas Kilmer, among others) have to walk a very careful line between the fame and value of the art objects and the actual physical process of making them. Jane Jakeman does this so well as she describes Claude Monet painting his famous series of pictures of a mist-shrouded London in 1900 that you might not notice what else there is in her engrossing book: a richly-detailed story involving several major characters; easily-swallowed history lessons about the Boer War and how disruptive it was to Anglo-French relations (shades of the Iraq conflict); even a logical resolution of one of my least favorite crime staples—the identity of Jack the Ripper.
    Jakeman’s overworked and socially stigmatized police officer, Inspector Will Garrety, might make some readers think about Anne Perry’s William Monk, and her idea of a private floor at the Savoy Hotel where mutilated veterans of the Boer War are hidden from public view could be an earlier version of devices used in various World War I mysteries—most memorably and recently, Jacqueline Winspear’s “Maisie Dobbs.”
    But it’s the paintings which finally take center stage and give “In the Kingdom of Mists” its unique flavor. A young English diplomat, Oliver Craston, wanders into Monet’s room at the Savoy: “On the easel stood a picture that threatened to overwhelm him. As he looked, his mouth seemed to fill with the taste of the fog that hung above the river. He could recognize the grey-brown structure of Waterloo Bridge, the dark colors of coke and carbon… Oliver drew back, frightened at the implications of the picture, at the littleness of humanity and the darkness of the river.”
    INTERRUPTED ARIA, by Beverle Graves Myers (Poisoned Pen)
    On a chilly day in 1731, two young men arrive in the Italian city of Venice—as besieged then by nature and human frailties as the present-day version so well chronicled by such mystery writers as Edward Sklepowich and Donna Leon. Both of the men are castrati—singers who paid the terrible price of sexual mutilation in order to maintain their perfect child soprano voices. One of them, Tito Amato, returning to his native city after many years in Naples at the famed Conservatorio San Remo where he perfected his art, is about to become a star. The other, his best friend Felice Ravello, is a much sadder figure: despite the operation, his voice has cracked and thickened, and he must develop other musical skills to