Customer Reviews

Buried Diamonds

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Since inheriting a valuable painting from her Aunt Cady in the first installment of this series, Claire Montrose no longer toils at her uninspiring job vetting vanity plates for the DMV, but that doesn't mean her life is void of complications.

One day while jogging in her Portland neighborhood, Claire stumbles upon a diamond engagement ring lodged between the crevices of an old rock wall. Her old friend and roommate, Charlie, believes she recognizes the ring as the one which belonged to a friend who ended her engagement and then killed herself fifty years earlier. But how, they wondered, did the ring end up embedded in that old wall when Charlie is certain her friend had returned the ring to her fiancé when she broke the engagement?

Did the woman really commit suicide all those years ago? To Claire, the pieces of the story seem as fractured as the very wall in which she found the ring, so she sets out to learn more about the ring and the tragic woman to whom it once belonged. However, she better watch out because there's someone harboring a secret about those events who is poised to stop Claire dead-in-her-tracks before she learns too much.

Claire is a likeable character with a girl-next-door quality, an innate curiosity and a sharp intellect. She will need the latter to carry her through this case of past and present danger.

Two thumbs up and five stars to this intelligently written gem.

In Portland, forty-something Claire Montrose stops to catch her breath and to slow down her heart rate. She stretches her arms and legs using a crumbling stone wall as support when she notices a spot where the mortar fell off leaving a hole covered by a spider's web. Noticing how the sun reflects oddly off of the ole, she sticks her long fingers inside pulling out a diamond ring in an antique setting.

Upon returning to her home, Claire shows her prize to her roommate octogenarian Charlotte Heidenbruch, who immediately recognizes the jewelry. Charlie insists the gem belonged to her friend Elizabeth Ellsworth, who committed suicide herself years ago. The elderly woman though Elizabeth returned the ring to her fiancé Korean War veteran Allen Lisac, when they broke off. Unable to resist and encouraged by Charlie, Claire investigates what happened fifty years ago. The players in this tragedy do not realize that the suicide might have been murder and someone today is willing to kill to hide the truth of yesterday.

Fans of the series will appreciate the latest Montrose tale though newcomers will wonder about the license plates that start each chapter. The story line turns darker than previous novels as anti-Semitism raises its ugly head targeting Holocaust survivor Charlie. Still the investigation is fun even if Claire inadvertently sets off a series of events that leads to death and destruction for some of the participants then and now.

Harriet Klausner

I enjoyed this latest adventure of Claire Montrose. Claire is
a bright and likeable heroine and her investigation into the
suicide of Charlie's friend Elizabeth never flags. Flashbacks to the 1950's could have
slowed the novel in the hands of a less skilled writer but that is not the case here. This is
a darker novel than the earlier series entries but I think it is the best thus far.

Buried Diamonds is a good read and one I recommend, don't miss this one.

I read April Henry's first book, Circles of Confustion, a couple of years ago and loved it. I picked up her new book last week, and Henry hasn't missed a beat. Buried Diamonds is exciting, funny and very moving at points. The author has a real knack for creating vibrant, interesting characters that the reader really cares about. In this book, Claire's elderly roommate, Charlie, has a very significant role as the mystery involves an incident from her past. Learning more about Charlie and her tragic history added depth to the story. Highly recommended.

"Buried Diamonds" is a mystery with a historical element since there were flashbacks to events that occurred in 1952 and 1944. While the mystery was interesting and the solution not obvious, the clues weren't as subtle as they could have been. However, it felt realistic that Claire and the others didn't figure it out sooner. Like real people, the guilty person let slip things they shouldn't have yet Claire and the other characters "heard" what they assumed was meant rather than what was actually said.

The characters were varied and sometimes quirky. The suspense was created by tension in personal relationships and from physical danger. The setting details did a good job of bringing the story alive in my imagination.

There was a very minor amount of bad language. It was implied that most of the characters were having unmarried sex, but there were no sex scenes. Overall, it was an interesting mystery.

This book has more errors -- demonstrating a complete failure to proofread and copyedit -- than any other book I've ever bought in the Kindle Store.

With the simple discovery of a ring lodged into an old wall, Claire Montrose is bound to find out if the ring's owner -- a young woman -- had committed suicide 50 years ago. Tightly woven memories from the woman's friends and current-day subplots keep us wondering. All involved have secrets.

Coincidentally, Claire's roommate, the now-elderly Holocaust survivor Charlie, has as much need to know as anyone. The hardened, pragmatic, yet caring Charlie provides a nice counterpart to the sometimes bumbling and insecure Claire.

I tend to read books and appreciate writing that supposedly transcend genre (according to the marketers and official reviews, anyway), so I'd hesitated pick this one up owing to its clear mystery genre label. I should quit hesitating. The writing was solid. Many of the characters are elderly, which I found refreshing. They're given real lives -- some of them wild -- beyond the cliches and I wanted to know what they know and knew.

This book is set in Portland, Ore., both in the present and the early fifties. As a Portlander I appreciated the details of my city, but I liked even more those specifics of detail that only good writers bother with. In one scene, a lunch sandwich has been wrapped in wax paper instead of a baggie -- that really takes you back. Other details of motivation and memory tended toward the dark and reminded me of the writer Patricia Highsmith, for me a great thing.

The likable Claire was the central observer, the one who discovers, but sometimes she seemed a little flat in her dramatic need, as if she was simply along for the ride. This made for a somewhat long middle third of the book, where we get a lot of surmising and lot of visiting others for scant reward in the form of clues. Still, the variety of characters kept it moving along well enough.

The subplots were many, and some threatened to fade, but Ms Henry did well to keep them together. It all collides with a crash of secrets and betrayals and tragedy, yet Claire and Charlie are better off for it.

Okay, so I read only half of this half-baked book. I was offended by the author's use of the Holocaust. Sara Peretsky did a much better job of this in her last mystery, and even then I considered it taking liberties, but at least her rendering was not a cliche.

Who is this Claire, the main character? Is she a detective? Is she just a person who keeps encountering crimes by accident? What does she do for a living?

I might know had I read the earlier books, but I didn't, so hey, how about the author giving me a little background? Claire is incredibly boring. She never even eats anything interesting. And her boyfriend speaks like a textbook.

I quit reading after Claire's wraparound skirt was dragged off of her by a flushing toilet. Just too stupid to believe.