Murder Mysteries

Today is D's birthday, he who doesn't believe in making a big fuss of days and anniversaries. Still, Happy Birdday, dear, and Many Happy Returns! Pray that you may grow wiser and more like Christ each new day.

Lately, D has taken to reading murder mysteries, following my good example. He's always been reading tomes on theology, philosophy, education, especially home education, apologetics, Darwinism and creation science... He started with PD James' Death in Holy Orders, then bought Michael Connelly's Lost Light to compare between a British and an American murder mystery. James is slow, philosophical and eloquent while Connelly reads like a movie thriller with more action and drama. Now he's reading In the Presence of the Enemy written by Elizabeth George, a California resident whose mystery novels are set in England. EG's elegant, meticulously plotted Scotland Yard murder mysteries have been compared favourably with PD James' polished literary eloquence.

For a while, a few months ago, I was enamoured of both these ladies, especially with PD who was past 80 years old when Death in Holy Orders was published in 2001. Both books, together with several other novels, had been given by Suseela who had bought them second hand from Payless Books and finished with them. After that intro to PD, I found other titles, including an Omnibus PD James, and have read the following:
Death of an Expert Witness, Shroud for a Nightingale, The Skull beneath the Skin, A Taste for Death, Devices and Desires, Original Sin.
Of EG's, I've only read one more of her many: Deception on His Mind.
Satisfying, gratifying, and instructive.

What you learn: that in a murder case, one, everyone is a suspect, especially the immediate family and near relations and friends. Everyone is capable of murder, given the circumstances and opportunity.
Two, there are no secrets after a murder is discovered. The investigator probes and digs and unveils past events, actions, words... all is laid bare and will be revealed in a court of law if someone is charged with the murder. Witness the recent murder trials of Canny Ong, Noritta Samsuddin.

I had enough of murder mysteries after a while, but now I've begun The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It's a collection of stories written not by Conan Doyle but in the Conan Doyle style by various bestselling authors such as Anne Perry, Stephen King, Edward D. Hoch. So far the first 3 stories are good enough to make me want to go on with the 14 more.

Concerning my father-in-law, further tests have revealed that the cancer is confined to one lobe of the liver and is operable. Since he is a healthy 77 yr old (age according to the medical report), the doc recommends it, although statistically, the mortality rate for these kinds of operations is 20%, i.e. one in five don't make it out of the operating room alive. D's brothers and the 2 sisters in Singapore are now communicating by email and phone and praying.