Superior Death
Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
  • An Inferior Novel
  • Wonderful Discovery
  • Beautiful visual images +Disturbing situations
  • I'm Hooked
  • Cold and Wet
Superior Death
Nevada Barr
Manufacturer: Putnam Adult
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0399139168

Book Description

The inaccessible wreck, Kamloops, has rested at the bottom of Lake Superior for nearly seven decades, the bodies of its ill-fated crew eerily preserved in the frigid waters. But now there is an extra corpse on board -- a newly slain interloper suspiciously dressed in 1920's clothing.

It is Anna Pigeon's jobas a ranger with the U.S. National Park Service to help protect wild and lonely places from civilization's corrupting touch. Now a bizarre mystery held firmly in a Great Lake's icy grip is drawing Anna into a nightmare of greed adn cold-blooded murder. And what she finds waiting beneath the surface could prove fatal.

Customer Reviews:

1 out of 5 stars An Inferior Novel.......2007-09-20

One of the many problems from which this book suffers is a lack of regional and cultural context. As someone who has lived in the Keweenaw Peninsula, I was looking for descriptions or insights the author might offer regarding the area and its people, but these were conspicuously lacking. Obviously, the author had spent some time in the park, but her portrayal was such that Isle Royale seemed to be surrounded by cardboard cut-out locales. Even though Houghton (the location of the park headquarters) is visited, referenced in numerous ways, and even made the location of a lesbian community of interest to sorting out the sexual preferences of various characters, it remains a cipher -- a nearby blank canvas upon which the author can paint some plot conveniences, but nothing else. Readers will learn more about New York City from this book than they will about western Upper Michigan. Likewise, the people and culture of the Keweenaw Peninsula are pretty much absent from the book, unless one counts the moment where a character -- written sympathetically at that point -- compliments the protagonist for having a capacity for introspection she finds absent in those from the Upper Peninsula.

A second major flaw is the over-use of convenient details and timing. So many coincidences just happen to occur during the short period of time covered by the book that the word "implausible" seems inadequate. I realize this is fiction, but even science fiction writers have recognized for decades that good writing demands reasonable limits upon what an author can do within a particular genre or universe. A novel consciously written and marketed as an action thriller, for example, may stretch credibility in order to move from one over-the-top sequence to another, but since that is the point of the exercise, a reader can buy the book expecting to accept the story on its own terms. This was not the case with "A Superior Death", which I purchased expecting to find a mystery novel set on Isle Royale, not a tale that incorporated so many conveniences as to depart the mystery genre entirely and gravitate into Matthew Reilly territory.

I will describe the following examples in fairly generic language, for the sake of those who still want to read the book. A) One of the most obvious cases of laughably far-fetched convenience is the coincidence by which the protagonist catches on to the killer. B) Two characters possessing a crucial teddy bear originally appeared to have been deliberately written as odd for the purpose of making them interesting, yet after a couple of ludicrous coincidences by which the protagonist is saved, it became obvious that their oddity was also the author's cover for not having to come up with a rational explanation for the series of events. C) A character accidentally chokes to death while engaged in an activity that was, for the character, fairly routine; furthermore, this death was not related to the flow of the story, but conveniently occurred at the end of the book in order to provide a warped kind of closure (since, as other characters make unsubtly clear, the reader was being manipulated into being satisfied with this person's death). D) A missing-person subplot is stretched across the entire length of the book -- long after the official disinterest in locating her was plausibly sustainable, particularly given that the murder victim's wife claimed she hadn't initially reported her husband's disappearance because she thought he had gone to be with the other woman in question.

The identity of the killer wasn't too hard to guess, simply because there was no other justification for the prominence of the person in the story, and the author's attempts to cause the reader to consider other suspects were so ham-handed, the discerning reader is unlikely to take the blind alleys seriously. One of those dead-ends involved two diving partners of the murder victim; the three of them refer to themselves as the Three Musketeers. The problem is that the murder victim was nicknamed after d'Artagnan, who was not one of the Three Musketeers. Yet the author uses this very identification to allow the protagonist to link a knife to the dead man due to the initials "d'A". Clearly, if the author had identified the victim with the actual name of one of the Three Musketeers (Athos, Porthos, and Aramis), any mark on the knife would probably have been either less distinctive or more obvious, depending on the number of letters used in the inscription. So, in order to artificially create a mystery-within-a-mystery, the author has to wrongly identify d'Artagnan as one of the Three Musketeers, and then have at least four characters (the dead man and his partners, as well as the protagonist) consistently follow the same mistake. That's as ludicrous as writing a mystery about a murdered sports buff in which one of the puzzles requires the deceased, his friends, and the detectives to brazenly and consistently identify a famous football player with the wrong team.

Finally, while the author offered some details regarding the underwater condition of the Kamloops shipwreck, it (like the Keweenaw) appears to exist merely as a blank canvas for the author's own purposes. The story of the sinking of the Kamloops, including the deaths of those who came ashore and the subsequent discovery of the bottle containing the note written by Alice Bettridge, would have added a lot of background and depth to the events of the novel, even if treated only briefly. Instead, "A Superior Death" seems analogous to a book in which characters deal with wreckage or artifacts from the Endurance, without any overview of the Shackleton expedition. I suspect the reason the author passed up such a golden opportunity is that the motive she creates for the murder requires her to designate the captain of the Kamloops as engaging in criminal activity during the fatal voyage. If there were historical evidence to support such a charge, then the events of "A Superior Death" could not have happened (because there would have been no secret), and it otherwise seems rather unseemly to impugn a historically-identifiable dead man in such a way. It seems reasonable to guess the author and her publisher felt they could not describe the real crew, their story, and their names, and then go on to claim that the lawbreaking dead captain mentioned in the story was a fictional construct bearing no resemblance to the real person, living or -- in this case -- dead. Regardless of the underlying decision-making process, the resulting work manages to ignore the fascinating human history behind the disaster, while appearing to taint the memory of one of its victims.

Those looking for books about Isle Royale should instead consider the excellent titles by Howard Sivertson (Once upon an Isle: The Story of Fishing Families on Isle Royale and Tales of the Old North Shore: Paintings and Companion Stories), Tom and Kendra Gale (Isle Royale: A Photographic History), Peter Oikarinen (Island Folk: The People of Isle Royale), Jim DuFresne (Isle Royale National Park: Foot Trails & Water Routes), and Daniel Lenihan (Shipwrecks of Isle Royale National Park: The Archeological Survey), among others. Everyone else merely searching for a good read should simply look elsewhere.

5 out of 5 stars Wonderful Discovery.......2007-06-29

Nevada Barr was recommended to me by Sara Paretsky and I agree - her stories are great. The characters are rich and the background interesting. The story is fast paced and intriguing with a nice twist at the end. Good read.

3 out of 5 stars Beautiful visual images +Disturbing situations .......2007-06-28

This books gives a wonderful, vivid discription of Isle Royale National Park. I knew nothing about diving around ship wrecks and found this book entertaining and informative.



The story is fairly mysterious but I felt the solution was forced. The connection between Molly PIgeon's client and the wine in the ship wreck was quite a stretch - but this IS fiction.



I was very disturbed at the resloution of the pedophile problem. The character, Patience, was brazen enough to murder, to dive in dangerous waters and leave a trail of crimes yet she lacked the real courage to bring a true pedophile to court. I can see this happening but I can't see others sitting back and letting this happen.



I also found the Hawk/Holly incest situation disturbing; of course this does happen. I saw it coming so it seemed out of character for the clever Anna to hook up with Hawk and I was dissapointed this transpired.

5 out of 5 stars I'm Hooked.......2006-12-12

I read the first Anna Pigeon book, Track The Cat, and I was somewhat intrigued. After reading A Superior Death I am hooked on Navada Barr's character, Anna. I could feel her clausterphobia and her fear under the water. Anna and her friends are quirky and entertaining. This book is an easy and enjoyable read.

5 out of 5 stars Cold and Wet.......2006-10-03

This time our heroine, park ranger Anna Pigeon, is stationed on an island in always-cold Lake Superior, and one-too-many bodies show up two hundred feet down on a 1927 shipwreck. Anna, no lover of the deep and a bit claustrophic at that, must dive on the wreck to investigate, then dive again to resolve. Brrr. Even in the heat of a midwest summer, this novel gave me chills.

Nevada Barr is a national treasure. Having now read all her books, I can't wait for her next one.
Cradle to Grave: Life, Work, and Death at the Lake Superior Copper Mines
Average customer rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • balanced and broadly relevant portrayal of conflict in an American industry
  • Essential overview of "Copper Country" history.
  • Very readable and well-balanced
  • Students Perspective
  • A Copper Country students must read
Cradle to Grave: Life, Work, and Death at the Lake Superior Copper Mines
Larry Lankton
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0195083571

Book Description

Concentrating on technology, economics, labor, and social history, Cradle to Grave documents the full life cycle of one of America's great mineral ranges from the 1840s to the 1960s. Lankton examines the workers' world underground, but is equally concerned with the mining communities on the surface. For the first fifty years of development, these mining communities remained remarkably harmonious, even while new, large companies obliterated traditional forms of organization and work within the industry. By 1890, however, the Lake Superior copper industry of upper Michigan started facing many challenges, including strong economic competition and a declining profit margin; growing worker dissatisfaction with both living and working conditions; and erosion of the companies' hegemony in a district they once controlled. Lankton traces technological changes within the mines and provides a thorough investigation of mine accidents and safety. He then focuses on social and labor history, dealing especially with the issue of how company paternalism exerted social control over the work force. A social history of technology, Cradle to Grave will appeal to labor, social and business historians.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars balanced and broadly relevant portrayal of conflict in an American industry.......2007-05-23

While tracing my ancestry back to Polish copper miners in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, I picked this book up simply to help me learn more about life in those times. Though I was looking for something lighter than this scholarly work, I was captivated nonetheless. The relevance of this work extends far beyond just copper mining, and describes conflict between labor and management on several fronts- finding balance between social welfare vs. social control; technological innovation vs. resistance to change, improved efficiency vs. diminishing resources, and the ultimate labor union vs. management showdown.

Without wholly casting management as a villain, this book uncovers some raw truths by delving into management correspondence. Everything's under a microscope- the management's fear of lawsuits from injured workers, resistance to conceding an eight hour work day, resistance to development of a railroad (a threat to facilitate striking?!), spying on suspected union activists, and surreptitious infiltration of the Finnish press to manipulate employee morale. At the same time, management is often portrayed for being humane- sparing jobs for the men with the largest families, providing decent housing for most employees, and giving back to the community during economic depressions. Lankton perhaps best acknowledges the double-edged sword of corporate paternalism in the closing chapter - "paternalism was not only a means of social welfare, but a means of social control, and the companies had no intentions whatsoever of sharing control with their men."

Unfortunately, we get much more of a glimpse of the internal conflicts of management rather than the day-to-day life of the miners, presumably because management correspondence is much better documented.

The only other criticism I have of this book, which is common to most other works of its type, is its often thoughtless avalanche of statistics. Lankton description of costs of mining equipment, wages, numbers of injuries and deaths, etc. isn't put into context by displaying overall rates and dollar figures adjusted by inflation. So the Quincy mining company spent $26,557 on rock-drill equipment in 1872-73... what does that mean in today's dollars? So what if "In 1906, men took 24,675 baths courtesy of their company"... how many is that per person? Some tables and charts would also help illustrate statistical trends, but there's not a one in this book.

But that doesn't even put a dent in the value of this sweeping review of technology in society.

5 out of 5 stars Essential overview of "Copper Country" history........2002-08-15

I found this book tremendous in explaining why people first came to such a cold and snowy land and why there are all these rotting hulks of machines and buildings everywhere. My father and grandfathers worked in the iron mines of Michigan's Marquette Range, but on it there is much less physical evidence of the mining that occurred. Mr. Lankton's book is facinating in it's exploration of so many facets of life in the Copper Country and life's rise and fall when tied to one industry. I hope to find a book like this about the Marquette Iron Range.

5 out of 5 stars Very readable and well-balanced.......2001-10-09

Lankton's book is a welcome change from so many modern histories crammed with academic jargon. It is concise, easy to read, and chock-full of excellent primary source material. Lankton gives the reader a real feel for the place and period, and paints a balanced picture both of mine workers and management. All of the conflicting and complimentary motivations and incentives come out well, in one of the few works on American mine labor that look fairly at both sides and don't read like an IWW tract. Actually hard to put down - not something you can say often about a labor history book! Great work.

Really gave me a feel for my Finnish ancestors, who worked the mines from turn of the century until the Big Strike. A great documentation of a period whose physical remnants are fast disappearing.

4 out of 5 stars Students Perspective.......2000-03-12

In my senior year at Michigan Tech, I was forced into the reality that I couldn't take only engineering and science class's. I reluctantly signed up for Mr. Lanktons class and subsequently read the course text, "Cradle to Grave". This book was outstanding in it's detail of the area during the mining boom and it's decline. It gives a great account of the miner and the miner's family. What it means to be "owned by the company store". To get all of these accounts was very interesting having done plenty of "exploration" in the Keweenaw on my own. In my professional life Larry's book has proven a valuble refrence for understanding the difficulties in introducing new technology into a heavy labor-intensive industry.

5 out of 5 stars A Copper Country students must read.......1999-12-29

Having first encountered both Mr. Lankton and this book while a student at Michigan Technological University, I found the book both engrossing as well as informative, which made taking the classs that much easier. Not overly techincal, but just enough to keep the reader informed. This is a must read for anyone interested in the history of the Copper Country. It is also a good source of information on pre-WWII mining practices, including paternalism and labor strife. It also includes details of life outside of the copper mines. Enjoy
Superior Death (Avalon Mystery)
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • Superior Death - Smooth read - Good story
  • Superior Death
  • Strongly recommended for it unique structure and fascinating and intricately woven story
Superior Death (Avalon Mystery)
Matthew Williams
Manufacturer: Avalon Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

ContemporaryContemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0803497687

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Superior Death - Smooth read - Good story.......2006-05-15

I was very impressed with this first novel by the author. It was a "keep reading" story and the surprise ending was not given away. I'm looking forward to a sequel.

5 out of 5 stars Superior Death.......2006-05-12

I thoroughly enjoyed this quick moving well written novel by the young new author Matt Williams. I am anxiously awaiting the next Lake Superior mystery. Enjoy!

5 out of 5 stars Strongly recommended for it unique structure and fascinating and intricately woven story .......2006-05-07

Superior Death by Matthew Williams is a gripping and evocative new thriller depicting the life of the small-town reporter Vince Marshall and his hot-pursuit of the truth and justice in his evermore secretive town. With a potentially cheating wife, a degrading and extremist boss, and the police deciding his mother to be the prime suspect for the mystery of a local woman's death, Superior Death deftly maneuvers the language and plot for a highly mystifying tale as Marshall delves deeper into the terrifying truths encumbering his small town. Superior Death is very strongly recommended for its unique structure and fascinating and intricately woven story for all fans of mystery fiction, and most particularly those familiar with the northern Upper-Michigan Peninsula.
A Superior Death (An Anna Pigeon Mystery)
Average customer rating: Not rated
    A Superior Death (An Anna Pigeon Mystery)
    Nevada Barr
    Manufacturer: Recorded Books LLC
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Audio Cassette

    MysteryMystery | Mystery & Thrillers | Books on Cassette | Audiobooks | Formats | Books
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    ASIN: 0788718967

    Product Description

    Narrated by Barbara Rosenblat. Eight audiocasettes.
    Geology of the Superior talc area,: Death Valley, California (California. Division of Mines and Geology. Special report)
    Average customer rating: Not rated
      Geology of the Superior talc area,: Death Valley, California (California. Division of Mines and Geology. Special report)
      Lauren A Wright
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Unknown Binding

      GeneralGeneral | Geology | Earth Sciences | Science | Subjects | Books
      ASIN: B0007EMPO8
      Shipwreck of the Mesquite: Death of a Coast Guard Cutter
      Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
      • Great story, EXCELLENT photos
      Shipwreck of the Mesquite: Death of a Coast Guard Cutter
      Frederick Stonehouse
      Manufacturer: Lake Superior Port Cities
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Paperback

      ContemporaryContemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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      ASIN: 094223510X

      Customer Reviews:

      5 out of 5 stars Great story, EXCELLENT photos.......2003-05-08

      A few years back I borrowed this book from my local library. The TRUE story of the Cutter Mesquite is very intruiging, but I must say the best part of the book is the crystal-clear full color underwater photos of the wreck. Unlike most underwater wreck photos, these are bright, clear, in color and best of all interesting. You can see photos of a file cabinet with one drawer open and tons of soaked files still hanging from it. Also a xerox machine, and other office supplies and crew supplies that were perfectly good and usable but for some reason were not removed from the Mesquite before it was scuttled. It looks as though it was business as usual on the cutter right up until the very end.
      Unfortunately this book is out-of-print, and I cannot seem to find it on ebay. A shame. Let's hope they re-issue it very soon! A must for Great Lakes wreck enthusiasts!
      A Superior Death
      Average customer rating: Not rated
        A Superior Death
        Barr Nevada
        Manufacturer: G.P. Putman's Sons
        ProductGroup: Book
        Binding: Hardcover
        ASIN: B000UEVAIW
        A Superior Death
        Average customer rating: Not rated
          A Superior Death
          Nevada Barr
          Manufacturer: Headline
          ProductGroup: Book
          Binding: Paperback
          ASIN: B000QRVBC8
          A Superior Death
          Average customer rating: Not rated
            A Superior Death

            Manufacturer: Putnam
            ProductGroup: Book
            Binding: Paperback
            ASIN: B000GLW0TC
            A Superior Death (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)
            Average customer rating: Not rated
              A Superior Death (Anna Pigeon Mysteries)
              Nevada Barr
              Manufacturer: Morrow/Avon
              ProductGroup: Book
              Binding: Paperback
              ASIN: B000HOV206

              Castle Rouge
              Average customer rating: Not rated
                Castle Rouge
                Arthur Conan \ Douglas, Carole Nelson Doyle
                Manufacturer: Forge
                ProductGroup: Book
                Binding: Hardcover
                ASIN: B000GLJNCO
                Castle Rouge: A Novel of Suspense featuring Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler, and Jack the Ripper (Irene Adler)
                Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
                • Not for the faint of heart!
                • So glad to have found Carole Nelson Douglas
                • A Victorian era mystery with a feminist point of view
                • And the Castle ran red with blood...
                • And the Castle ran red with blood...
                Castle Rouge: A Novel of Suspense featuring Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler, and Jack the Ripper (Irene Adler)
                Carole Nelson Douglas
                Manufacturer: Forge Books
                ProductGroup: Book
                Binding: Mass Market Paperback

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                ASIN: 0765345714

                Amazon.com

                Blend Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes with Dracula lore, toss in a copious complement of czarist Russian history, and the result is Carole Nelson Douglas's Castle Rouge, her grisly but gripping sequel to 2001's Chapel Noir.

                Disaster has struck opera diva-turned-detective Irene Adler Norton. The American adventuress who bested Holmes and thereby won his admiration (in "A Scandal in Bohemia") thought she'd cornered the elusive Ripper on the grounds of the 1889 world's fair in Paris, but instead, he fled to Eastern Europe after kidnapping her friend and biographer, Penelope "Nell" Huxleigh. Now, while Irene--assisted by theatrical manager Bram Stoker, daredevil Yankee reporter Nellie "Pink" Bly, and British spy Quentin Stanhope--sets out for Prague, hoping to rescue Nell, and as Holmes and Dr. John Watson revisit Saucy Jack's earlier homicidal activities in London, Nell finds herself imprisoned, together with Irene's barrister husband, in a crumbling Transylvanian castle, under the malevolent scrutiny of a Russian woman agent and a brutish lust-murderer endowed with hypnotic powers.

                Douglas builds considerable intrigue on her way to a surprising solution to the Ripper's identity. Yet it's unfortunate that this sixth Irene Adler yarn focuses more on the prudish Nell and her discomforts as a hostage (no proper corsets-- how shocking!) than on its more intrepid chief protagonist, or even on Pink, whose capacity for audacious exploits was better realized in Chapel Noir. Regrettable, too, is the plot's shift from Paris to the eldritch extremes of Bohemia. Stoker points out that "the region reeks with bizarre legend and folktales," yet Castle Rouge's action takes place well apart from the Gypsy villages that might have provided cultural color. --J. Kingston Pierce

                Book Description

                Irene Adler is the only woman ever to have outwitted Sherlock Holmes in A Scandal in Bohemia; she is as much at home with a spyglass and revolver than with haute couture and gala balls. Her adventures are the stuff of legend, for she has faced down sinister spies, thwarted plots against nations, and led an unlikely group, including the bachelor of Baker Street and his faithful cohort Watson, through the cellars and catacombs of 1889 Paris to capture Jack the Ripper. But disaster scattered those allies and the Ripper has escaped....With the help of an unreliable prostitute named Pink, and theatrical manager Bram Stoker, who would later pen Dracula, Irene follows the clues that lead back to Bohemia, and on to new and bloodier atrocities. And when pursuers and prey reunite at a remote castle in Transylvania, the Ripper is cornered and fully unveiled at last....

                Customer Reviews:

                4 out of 5 stars Not for the faint of heart!.......2007-05-15

                This heartstopping end to the two book story about Jack the Ripper written by Ms. Douglas has heart-stopping action from the beginning to the end. The book continues the story of Irene Adler's search for her missing husband and her missing companion. The book flips back and forth from Irene and her group and to Nell and Godfrey who are being held captive in a decaying castle in Transylvania. This is a much darker story than Chapel Noir, but the plot is gripping, and as always, Ms. Douglas' period detail is wonderful. I know that I couldn't put the book down. There's not much mystery in this one though, but the theories that are put forth as to the identity of Jack the Ripper are intriguing. This is a wonderful series and Irene Adler is a great character.

                4 out of 5 stars So glad to have found Carole Nelson Douglas.......2004-10-09

                I picked this book up at the library one day while I was passing time waiting on my children. The word Castle caught my eye, and the Jack the Ripper plot idea intrigued me. Always searching for(and all too rarely finding) a good writer, I was immediately delighted with the quality of Ms. Douglas' writing. In classic Dickensian style she weilds words in unexpected ways as to be sometimes powerful, sometimes subtle, sometimes shocking, but never ordinary.

                The story and characters are in themselves intriguing. By assembling in one story Jack the Ripper, Bram Stoker (author of Dracula) Sherlock Holmes, Nelly Bly, the Prince of Wales, Baron de Rothschild along with other sordid characters, both fictional and non, you have the soup into which Ms. Douglas tosses the reader to stew. We watch as Irene Adler solves both the Jack the Ripper case once and for all, and reveals the source of Bram Stroker's inspiration. Along the way we get to explore the seedy underbelly of late 19th century London, Paris, Prague and Transalvania. It's a scandolusly delicious romp!

                If you like historical fiction or mystery, and value skillful writing, I commend you to Ms. Douglas.

                5 out of 5 stars A Victorian era mystery with a feminist point of view.......2004-04-29

                Irene Adler is a character created by Arthur Conan Doyle and the only woman who ever outsmarted his famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. Carole Nelson Douglas has taken Irene and turned her into a detective with her own series of mystery novels. In this book, Castle Rouge, the action picks up from the previous volume Chapel Noir, with Irene seeking out the person or people who have perpetrated Jack the Ripper like murders in Paris a year after the Whitechapel murders in London. She is in desperate pursuit because it appears that her colleague Nell Huxleigh and her husband have been taken by the same culprits. But who are they? In this second volume Irene leaves Paris first for Prague and then a castle in Romania. Who is responsible for this international crime spree? Don't read the Selected Bibliography at the end of the book until you have finished it. You may find a spoiler of a clue there,
                A long tale that stretches across two large volumes, but the excitement never flags. Highly recommended - a feminist point of view on the Victorian era.

                5 out of 5 stars And the Castle ran red with blood..........2004-01-31

                This is the sequel to Chapel Noir, and a great book in and of itself. A interesting suspect for the Ripper. It leaves the reader to stare at the man's rather imposing picture and wonder "Could it have been?" Well...

                #1 He was alive and kicking during this time period (1888)

                #2 He is well-known for his hypnotic power over women

                #3 He is also well-known for his religious fanaticism, which would explain why most Ripperologists find religious or occult symbols in the murder patterns

                #4 He is now known to have been hopelessly insane

                #5 By train, as the map in the book shows, it's not that far from Russia to London

                #6 The murders DID NOT end with Mary Kelly, even in London, and it's easy to see a serial killer like the Ripper repeating himself elsewhere. Ted Bundy is a perfect example.

                And Pink did turn out to be someone you could rely on in a pinch, n'est c'est pas? Quoth the Raven...

                5 out of 5 stars And the Castle ran red with blood..........2004-01-30

                The sequel to Chapel Noir, which I bought instantly upon finishing the first is terriffic! What a twist on the Ripper! And to all of you nay-sayers out there, The Raven has some history.

                #1. I TOLD you Pink was famous under a pseudonym. She was the perfect companion for Irene in the race to save Nell.

                #2. This Ripper suspect was definately alive during said time period and proved himself to be both hopelessly insane and perverted sexually, as well as a religious fanatic. It would explain the Chi-Rho patterns that Irene makes of the murders, non? Or other authors of Ripperology's "Masonic Symbols".

                #3. It would explain where Bram Stoker got the setting and background for "Dracula".

                #4. Are you so foolish as to think that a serial killer like Jack-the-Ripper having got away with it once wouldn't do it again? Or even that Mary Kelly was his LAST victim? If so, you need to do some research.

                I liked these volumes so well, I bought the others I didn't have. So, Carole Douglas, my compliments. Quoth the Raven...
                Castle Rouge: An Irene Adler Novel
                Average customer rating: Not rated
                  Castle Rouge: An Irene Adler Novel
                  Carole Nelson Douglas
                  Manufacturer: Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
                  ProductGroup: Book
                  Binding: Paperback
                  ASIN: B000L358HG
                  Two Mystery Novellas: An Occurrence at Castle St. Goar:Le Bateau Rouge (The Red Boat
                  Average customer rating: Not rated
                    Two Mystery Novellas: An Occurrence at Castle St. Goar:Le Bateau Rouge (The Red Boat
                    Allen Brookins-Brown
                    Manufacturer: Writer's Showcase Press
                    ProductGroup: Book
                    Binding: Paperback

                    ContemporaryContemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
                    AnthologiesAnthologies | Mystery | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
                    ASIN: 0595236022

                    Books:

                    1. Tales of Ordinary Madness
                    2. Tell Me Your Dreams
                    3. The 13th Juror (Dismas Hardy)
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                    7. The Cat Who Smelled a Rat (Cat Who...)
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                    9. The Day After Tomorrow
                    10. The Death Collector (Smart Kids)

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