Sinister Sisterhood: A Crime Thriller With Amazing Women Protecting Animals

Publicist Wiley Saichek asked me about reviewing crime thriller Sinister Sisterhood by Jane Badrock when I told him I'd posted my review of  my last read for this blog, Ambush.  He said that it would contain the strong women characters that I wanted to see when I read for Flying High Reviews. So I accepted the review copy that he sent me.

                          

Wiley was definitely on the money when he said that there would be strong women in Sinister Sisterhood.  I was very pleased with some of these characters.

Sinister Sisterhood centers on an employment agency named Elle's Belles.  Owner Elle Scarlett donates part of her profits to organizations that help animals.  She became committed to animals due to the influence of her Aunt Pat who lives near a tiger sanctuary in India and volunteers there.  I loved Aunt Pat. 

Another favorite of mine was the professional cleaner Chloe May Chopra who could clean absolutely anything.   You might call her a ninja cleaner if a ninja had cleaning skills.  She also has what might be considered a paranormal power if this were a fantasy novel.  Since it isn't, let's say that her intuition is very well developed.  Some readers might consider Chloe improbable, but I loved seeing a woman who cleans rooms in hotels becoming a major hero.

Elle's Belles wander into dangerous territory.  Women are trafficked, and there is a conspiracy to bomb hotels, in addition to their animal activist activities of investigating the hunting of endangered animals and the smuggling of their body parts. Buckle your seat belts, readers. It gets rather wild out there.

Yet it's also fun.   There are some great lines.  Author Jane Badrock must have an advanced degree in witty description.  During a flashback dealing with the background of the Elle's Belles computer expert we learn that she "took to Chicago the way Al Capone took to tax evasion".

If the reference to Al Capone leaves you with the impression that some of these woman characters aren't exactly girl scouts, you'd be right.  There are those who skate over the border between the law abiding citizen and the criminal on a regular basis.  There are also those whose ideas of ethics are very situational.  Badrock likes the idea of her heroines being badass.  Her philosophy is that "women can be as capable and as horrible as men".  I wouldn't have said that I'd be up for that before I read Sinister Sisterhood, but Badrock made me like it by always being entertaining.

        

The Darkness Rolling by Win and Meredith Blevins

I read and reviewed the first Blevins' collaboration, Moonlight Water on my personal blog here.  I first encountered Yazzie Goldman, the fictional male protagonist of  The Darkness Rolling, in Moonlight Water.  Yazzie is part Navajo and part Jewish.  Although Moonlight Water was contemporary fiction, The Darkness Rolling is the first book in a series of historical mysteries that begin right after World War II.  During the war Yazzie received training in NCIS investigative techniques.  I thought that he had potential as a mystery detective.

The reason why I decided to review this book for Book Babe is because there's a rather prominent female character.  She is the real Hollywood star, Linda Darnell.  I knew virtually nothing about her before reading The Darkness Rolling.  After finishing it, I wanted to know a lot more.

                               

 The Darkness Rolling is actually a crime thriller rather than a mystery. The perpetrator is revealed to readers early in the book.  The suspense arises from how he is caught and captured.

 Yazzie Goldman is hired as part of the security team for Linda Darnell during the filming of a movie directed by John Ford in Monument Valley.  The movie's name is never mentioned in the book.  Based on internal clues and online information about Linda Darnell's career, I'd say that it has to be My Darling Clementine (1946) in which Darnell played a Mexican dancer.  I learned from this novel that Darnell was actually part-Cherokee.  This was confirmed by multiple web pages dealing with Linda Darnell.

This book could have been a standard thriller about a star being stalked. One of the reasons why it wasn't was because of Linda Darnell as portrayed by the Blevins.  She absolutely refused to be treated as a victim.  She was not going to be pitied or allow herself to be sidelined.

Yazzie's rather unusual family also contained several wonderfully strong women.  I especially admired Iris Goldman,  a highly independent artist.  I'm hoping to see more of her in future novels in this series.

I do have to say that Yazzie's grandfather, Mose, was the most extraordinary character.  He had recently had a stroke before the novel began, and his speech was tremendously impaired.   Yet in a crisis he could surmount his medical condition with a toughness and resourcefulness that was nothing short of amazing.

There was some good Navajo cultural and historical content in this novel.  A reference to the Navajo chief Hoskininni led me to research him.  I learned that when the U.S. Army forcibly relocated the Navajo, Hoskininni led many Navajos into hiding where they remained until the Navajo were allowed to return.  I found a very colorful account of Hoskininni's life at Dine Biographies.

So I enjoyed The Darkness Rolling very much.  It was unexpected, and I loved a number of the characters.  I will definitely read the next in the series.

                                       

                             

Queen of the Night by J. A. Jance

Anna Faktorovich's academic study on mysteries and romances which I reviewed here, led me to try the mystery author J.A. Jance, who I'd never read before.  I was intrigued with what Faktorovich wrote about this author in her study.  So I took a look at descriptions on Goodreads of the books she'd written,  and decided that I'd probably enjoy reading this one.  It's a crime thriller rather than a mystery.  Readers won't need to see the major serial killer case solved.  The suspense lies in how the perpetrator's crime spree will finally be stopped. 

Queen of the Night is actually #4 in a series, but reading out of order never dismays me.  I believe that books ought to stand on their own.  If they don't, it's not my responsibility to remedy the situation by reading other books.  I will only read more books by the author if  I am hooked by the first one I tried.  That's why I'm so careful about my choice of first read by an author.  The Queen of the Night has a story line that deals with the legends and customs of the Tohono O'odham of Arizona.  I tend to like mysteries and thrillers that involve Native American background.  I definitely knew that I'd come to the right place when I saw that Jance had dedicated the book to Tony Hillerman.

                                             

The book opens with a really wonderful Tohono O'odham legend that is both feminist and anti-war about how the night blooming cereus flower came to be.   The annual blooming of this flower is a pivotal event in the plot.  I also loved discovering the concept of  "ghost scent".  This means that the scent of the night blooming cereus reminds the Tohono O'odham  of its story.

Yet it was a quote from Psalms that kept on running through my head when I thought about the stories of a number of the characters in this book.  I heard it  sung in Hebrew in my mind, but the best English version of the quote is:  "The stone that was rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone." (Psalms 118:22) Over and over Jance shows that people who are despised triumph.  I'm fond of underdogs, so this is very heartwarming to me.  The backgrounds of Dr. Lani Walker and Dan Pardee are the most compelling examples.

I do feel that Jance reached deep for the full humanity of all the prominent characters including the serial killer.  I don't mean that they were all sympathetic, but I understood where they were coming from.  We saw the heart of some of the relationships depicted in this novel.  The relationship between Diana Ladd and Brandon Walker was particularly moving.

This was a strong book that also taught me a bit about the Tohono O'odham.  I will definitely want to read another book in this series soon.