The best part about the movie, to me, was learning about Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, who didn’t often receive credit for her contributions but who was Hitchcock’s partner in more than just marriage. I’ve watched and reviewed a bunch of Hitchcock’s movies, but I’d never even heard of her, and couldn’t have even told you if he’d been married.

Directed by Sacha Gervasi, the movie picks up after the release of “North by Northwest,” with Hitchcock (played by Anthony Hopkins) riding a high while simultaneously searching for his next subject, something that will make people stop asking him about retirement. He almost irrationally decides that a movie based on the story of American serial killer Ed Gein is something he simply MUST do, never mind qualms about censors and poor taste, or that it’s perhaps more horror than suspense, or that the studio doesn’t want to finance it for all of those reasons.

In the meantime, Alma (played by Helen Mirren) is tired of being taken for granted and of watching Hitch’s grand obsessions with his beautifully blonde leading ladies, and when a friend asks her to help with his film and showers her with attention, she begins to spend more time with him. I won’t give anything away by saying how this problem is resolved.

But maybe I shouldn’t have said “showers.” If you’re a “Psycho” fan, you’ll also enjoy the backstory about the film — how Hitch motivated Anthony Perkins’ performance, his relationship with Janet Leigh (Scarlett Johansson) and his method for getting her to scream realistically in that dreaded shower scene. Oh, and if you’re worried about that, this film doesn’t show anything scary or gory. For instance, when the scene plays in the theater, all we see is Hitchcock working through it in the lobby.

Needless to say, “Psycho” was a tremendous success, and “Hitchcock”‘s closing moments we get a hint as to the director’s next film. It’s the movie that I’ll never review, because my Mom saw it in the theater, before I was born, an experience that left her so afraid of a certain member of the animal kingdom that she made me afraid of them, too.

“Hitchcock” (movie) originally appeared on How Mysterious! on May 24, 2013.

Cell 8 refers to the longtime home of John Meyer Frey, convicted of murdering his girlfriend when he was just 17 years old, a cell on death row in an Ohio penitentiary. Frey eluded execution when he died of heart failure.

Years later, a cruise ship band member watches as a creepy drunk dude surreptitiously accosts women on the dance floor. John Schwartz is completely disgusted by the guy, so he calls hime out. When he refuses to leave, Schwartz brutally kicks him in the face from the stage, nearly killing the man. Schwartz then goes home to his wife and child, expecting the police any time.

He’s not disappointed. When our old friend Ewart Grens, grumpy insomniac police officer, hears that the victim may be brain damaged, he orders that Schwartz should be picked up immediately. If you’ve read previous Roslund and Hellstrom books, you’ll recall that Grens’s wife suffers from brain damage, so he of all people knows the severity of Schwartz’s crime.

There’s just one problem. A search of international police records indicates that John Schwartz doesn’t exist, and that the man held in a Swedish police cell — a man terrified by the mere thought of a cell door closing behind him — is actually John Meyer Frey. As the investigation continues, it becomes very clear that the authors and most of the characters are unapologetically, morally opposed to capital punishment, and those who aren’t are ugly Americans whom no one could support.

The conclusion may be somewhat outlandish, but the ugliest of the ugly Americans gets his due, and all of the loose ends are tied. In addition to the gravity of the capital punishment debate, there are lighter moments that have actually stuck with me as much as the main story: Grens attending a music concert (it doesn’t go well), his wife appearing to show some awareness of what’s happening around her, a boat ride for her benefit. Perhaps Grens can escape his years-long self-imposed misery.

Roslund and Hellstrom, Cell 8 originally appeared on How Mysterious! on May 22, 2013.

A Dying Fall is the fifth Ruth Galloway mystery, and I like the series more the more it goes along. Ruth’s life is so much more complicated now — she has a 2-year-old daughter, Kate, with a man who’s married to someone else; her career hasn’t gone the way she thought it would; her best friends are her boss’s wife and an aging druid (who, coincidentally, had a child with a woman who’s married to someone else) — and her desire to get involved in solving mysteries is tempered by her knowledge that her daughter depends solely on her.

This time, though, Ruth feels compelled to get involved because the murder victim is an old college friend, Dan Golding, like Ruth an archeologist at a not-terribly prestigious university in England. He makes an amazing discovery, yet something has made him afraid enough to contact Ruth for help. Just before she gets his letter, however, his house burns down with Dan in it. When his supervisor, Clayton Henry, asks her to come to Pendle University to examine Dan’s finding, she can’t refuse. She packs up Kate and Cathbad, the druid, and they head to Lancashire to investigate. When Ruth sees the bones Dan found, she quickly realizes there’s a big, big problem.

But archeology isn’t her only problem. Ruth knows that Kate’s father, DCI Harry Nelson, is in the area visiting family, and sure enough, they can’t help but run into each other. Nelson’s wife, Michelle, knows about Ruth and Kate, but his mother and sister don’t, and he wants to keep it that way. But his mother insists on inviting Ruth, Kate and Cathbad to tea. Awkward!

One thing I especially liked about this book is that visiting Pendle University gives Ruth the opportunity to examine university life from the outside: Dan’s department is completely dysfunctional, with people who drink too much, join hate organizations, have affairs with each other and steal money. No wonder Dan was afraid. Ruth also gets to find out how Dan saw her, and she confronts her own career trajectory in looking at his.

Recently I’ve reviewed a couple of series that are getting stale, if not past their due dates, but this one is still fresh and growing. If you like archeology, academic mysteries, female sleuths, or mysteries with lots of character development, I can honestly recommend Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway series. My thanks to the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for sending a review copy of A Dying Fall.

Elly Griffiths, A Dying Fall originally appeared on How Mysterious! on May 20, 2013.

A couple of years ago I struggled to finish the Vintage Mystery Challenge. And by struggled I mean I could barely get myself to get started, and I only had to read four books but I almost didn’t make it over a period of 12 months. D’oh! But, I did finish, on the last day of the year, and my reward was a free book. I picked Hazel Holt’s Murder on Campus because I always like a good academic mystery.

Holt’s main character is Sheila Malory, a widow from England who’s been invited to a small college in Pennsylvania to teach a class on 19th century women and to work with a couple of graduate students interested in the same topic. I hadn’t read any of the other books in the series, but apparently Mrs. Malory is not an academic, as she was intimidated by the prospect of fulfilling these duties, but she is an expert on the subject and it doesn’t seem to take her long to adjust. She is welcomed by two friends who live in the United States, a woman who lives in New York and her sister who teaches in the department.

Unfortunately, though, Mrs. Malory’s new department is rife with politics, factions, and murder. Just after she arrives, a particularly loathsome member of the faculty is found murdered, and it seems that nearly everyone had a motive to kill him, or at least wish him dead. The investigating officer, a small-town cop who likes Shakespeare, sees an opportunity to ask Sheila to investigate for him, a convenient reason for them to meet from time to time.

On the academic side, the story’s not terribly realistic, although no worse than some and better than many academic mysteries I’ve read. I’m not denying that academic politics can be cutthroat, but the way this department operates is like nothing I’ve ever encountered, particularly the way individual faculty members have power and decision-making abilities without having a line of authority to support them. On the other hand, I enjoyed the fact that faculty members are actually seen working, at least sometimes.

As for the mystery, it’s not one that I could’ve solved given the same information that Mrs. Malory had, but I didn’t feel cheated and did feel surprised when she revealed the killer.

All in all, this was a quick, light read, and it’s one I’m sharing with an academic mystery loving colleague the next time I see her.

Hazel Holt, Murder on Campus originally appeared on How Mysterious! on May 16, 2013.

#1 on the list: Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind, recommended by my friend and fellow academic Laurel, and — finally — loved by me. Set in Barcelona, the book tells the story of young Daniel (Don-yell), whose father brings him one day to the cemetery of lost books. He’s allowed to wonder through miles of lost, obscure, forgotten old books, rescued by the city’s booksellers, and to choose one book, which turns out to be The Shadow of the Wind, by Julian Carax.

Daniel reads the book and becomes completely entranced by the story. But not everyone likes it. A secretive, disfigured man calling himself Laín Coubert (a character in Carax’s book) seems determined to get his hands on it.

Over the years Daniel grows up, and his interest in the book waxes and wanes, but after a time he becomes determined to find out what happened to Julian Carax — where he is, why he stopped writing, why someone has destroyed all of his books save his own copy of The Shadow. His investigation is intertwined with his personal life, including his relationship with his father, a young friend and an new, older friend, and his tentative attempts at love and relationships with women. The Spanish Civil War and its aftermath provide historical context, and depth.

I listened to the book on CD, and I thought that was appropriate since it’s a story about storytelling. Narrator James Wilby has a smooth and confident delivery that somehow matched Daniel both young and older, and he pronounced Spanish names (both place and people) correctly without trying to adopt an accent throughout the whole book.

If you like stories about books (The Book Thief, The Library of Shadows), I really can’t recommend this book enough. Thanks, Laurel, for recommending it to me.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind originally appeared on How Mysterious! on May 14, 2013.

Julia and her husband are moving into his family apartment, which she learns had been confiscated from a Jewish family during the war. This fact dovetails perfectly with a story she’s investigating for work, the anniversary of the 1942 roundup of French Jews during World War II, and she realizes that her family has indirectly benefited from Nazi war crime. She decides to try to find out more about the family, the Starzynskis, as well as learn what happened to them after the roundup.

It doesn’t take long for Julia to find out that the family was sent to Vel’ d’Hiv, a velodrome, where they were held in miserable conditions until they were separated and put on trains to leave France. As the family was rounded up, though, young Sarah had the presence of mind to hide her little brother in a secret closet, and she still holds the key. Thus, she’s forced to try to escape and hurry back to Paris to rescue her brother.

Julia continues to investigate, learning that her elderly father-in-law witnessed as a child the scene when Sarah arrived at her old home, and never forgot it. But that’s not the end of the mystery. Julia wants to know if Sarah survived the war and if so what happened to her afterward, and even though her fascination with Sarah’s story puts further strain on her troubled marriage, she presses forward with her investigation.

In the end Julia finds out exactly what happened to Sarah, but doing so changes her own life and the lives of people who knew Sarah. The film forces us to see that knowing our own histories matters, and that the effects of war continue long beyond a declaration of peace. The ending was a bit maudlin, in my opinion, but the powerful scene when Sarah returns to her old home was not just almost too much to bear but something I am unlikely to forget. As Julia says, “When a story is told, it is not forgotten.”

Kristin Scott Thomas, who plays Julia, and Melusine Mayance, who plays Sarah, were both strong, neither overplaying their parts despite facing horrors that people would rather forget. The film was directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner in 2010, and most of it is in French with subtitles.

Sarah’s Key (movie) originally appeared on How Mysterious! on May 10, 2013.

This one isn’t so much a mystery as a spy story, although as spy stories go it’s as nontraditional as Clash was for crime fiction. It’s much more an opportunity to get into someone else’s shoes, to try to understand another culture, getting past the barriers of language, religion and culture to see life as they do.

The story focuses on Issa, who’s actually an Italian named Christian Mazzari, but whose family background and language skills allow him to go undercover as a Tunisian immigrant to investigate a terrorist cell in the Muslim immigrant community in the Viale Marconi neighborhood. Issa slowly works his way into the community and finds he can actually do some good, helping various immigrants with problems from government paperwork to rude Italians in the market.

Along the way he meets Safia, an immigrant from Cairo with her husband, who demands that she wear a veil and stay at home; her undercover job is working as a hairdresser behind her husband’s back, and she’s pretty good at it, too. Safia is an awesome character, unbowed by her personal situation with a sense of humor you just have to read to enjoy. When she and Issa meet up in the course of his work, secrets and ironies abound.

Issa’s investigations end with a twist that I just loved, and Safia’s situation is also satisfactorily resolved. Yet the reader is not left with a happily-ever-after, ride-into-the-sunset ending, because the immigrants of Viale Marconi linger, both their dreams and their realities unmasked amid Lakhous’ humor.

Amara Lakhous, Divorce Islamic Style originally appeared on How Mysterious! on May 8, 2013.

You may wonder if that bothers Hamish; yes, but it also serves his purposes. He wants nothing more than to hang out in his own little station in Lochdubh, a village where you can usually figure out who did something because you already know all the people involved well enough to understand their motives. That, and get married, but he or circumstances always manage to put an end to his romantic feelings about Priscilla and Elspeth, or the woman of the day (in this case the lovely Jessica… or is she?).

In The Death of Yesterday, M.C. Beaton’s 29th book in the series, Hamish returns to the gloomy town of Cnothan, where no one will tell the police anything and everyone is either grumpy or mean.The mystery this time surrounds Morag, a spiteful and annoying young woman who recently moved to Cnothan and who’s managed to stir up a lot of trouble in a short amount of time. She announces that she thinks she’s been drugged, but no one seems to care and her story doesn’t seem particularly credible until Hamish decides there might be something to it and searches for her until he finds her corpse.

As usual, the men above Hamish in the police ranks find ways to undermine his investigation, especially Jimmy, who’s supposedly his friend but is always taking credit for his ideas, and Blair, who hates him to the point of stroke. Yet Hamish always manages to work around them to solve the mystery.

Sadly, this series has gotten stale. I didn’t even bother to review The Death of a Kingfisher, and although I thought this one was a bit better, I’m pretty tired of the same characters doing the same things over and over in every book. Surely Hamish can get past Priscilla and Elspeth, and surely at some point Blair will be removed from the force, and surely Beaton can escape the formula these stories have fallen into so we can all enjoy crime in the Scottish Highlands again.

M.C. Beaton, The Death of Yesterday originally appeared on How Mysterious! on May 6, 2013.

I’d heard so many good things about The Book Thief that it was as easy pick when my university’s honors program invited me to choose a book for a small group discussion. Some of the students told me they’d had it on their to-read list since high school!

The Book Thief is the story of a young girl growing up in Nazi Germany. When her Communist parents are unable to care for her, she’s sent to live with couple whose two children are grown. On the train ride along the way, her little brother dies, and at his burial Liesel steals her first book: a guidebook for gravediggers. If this isn’t an odd enough choice, it’s made even stranger by the fact that she can’t read.

Yet reading will become her salvation. Liesel’s new father teaches her to read, using the gravedigger’s book, and reading becomes integral to her life. When things go bad in the underground bomb shelter, Liesel begins to read aloud, calming the children, and adults, around her. When her foster parents take in a Jewish refugee, he writes her a book. When the mayor’s wife sees her love for the written word, they forge a strange and life-saving relationship.

If I told you the book was narrated by Death, would that put you off? I hope not. Death is a gentle character who has occasion to observe Liesel many times, given the amount of death surrounding her, and who even had a chance to read the book that is crucial to her life. Death is sometimes funny, offers foreshadowing that softens the blows that the reader knows Liesel will have to face, and in some strange way adds a lightness to the narrative even while solemnly collecting the thousands and millions of souls who die in the short years of the war.

Liesel continues to steal books throughout the story, once even from a mound at a book burning, and we cannot be surprised when she and her foster family break the Nazi rules even if they can’t break the Nazi culture. The question that the students and I spent the most time discussing was the possibility of being moral in an immoral time and place, when the basic humane acts are against the law. Stealing a book becomes not only understandable but commendable and a first step toward living a moral life under absurdly evil conditions.

I can’t recommend The Book Thief enough. The 11 students liked it, too, and we all passed it along to others to read.

Markus Zusak, The Book Thief originally appeared on How Mysterious! on May 2, 2013.

Gemma takes the lead in this one; her husband, Duncan Kincaid, is on family leave, caring for their adopted child, Charlotte, who continues to have trouble adjusting and can’t handle being left at preschool on her own. Gemma’s new position as detective chief inspector puts her in charge of an investigation into the murder of a barrister, whose body is found in a seedy hotel, tied up and strangled on the bed. During the investigation, Gemma’s assistant, DI Melody Talbott (whose father owns a popular tabloid newspaper and who’s a lot wealthier than you or me), falls for a guitar player, and Duncan helps investigate on the side by talking to friends in the business. But then, a second barrister is killed in similar circumstances, and the team must figure out the connection between the victims.

The setting, the Crystal Palace area of London, has historical roots that are described in brief introductory quotes at the beginning of each chapter. Since I’d never even heard of the Crystal Palace, this was an interesting side story that begins with the London Exhibition in 1851 and ends with its destruction by fire in 1936.

This time it’s Duncan’s turn to face a life change. At the end of the book, once Gemma and her team have wrapped up the murder investigation and saved a life or two, Duncan has also solved Charlotte’s daycare problem and heads eagerly back to work. And what he finds is not at all what he expected.

Deborah Crombie, The Sound of Broken Glass originally appeared on How Mysterious! on April 30, 2013.