Customer Reviews

Calculated Loss (Madeline Carter)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In Calculated Loss, Madeline Carter, an intelligent and somewhat humorous former stockbroker, investigates the suspicious suicide of her ex-husband Braydon Gauthier, a man who had seemingly become someone completely different from the man she had married.

Remarried and far more successulf than Madeline had ever known, Braydon apparently committed suicide because of a lost star in the restautrant rating business. But his note and last meal are definitely suspect, especially since Madeline knew Braydon well enough to know he'd never eat duck a l'orange.

She is hired by her ex-mother-in-law to look into Braydon's business, but Madeline finds more than some cooked books. And as the suspects line up in a long row, she finds herself in a precarious position.

Filled with interesting characters and witty humor, Calculated Loss is a crash course in stocks and pinks, day trading and the world of haute cuisine. Linda L. Richards has penned another sensational, tasty mystery that will take you through the city of Vancouver in such rich detail you'd swear you were standing there. From one Canadian author to another, kudos, Linda!

Cheryl Kaye Tardif

Author of Divine Intervention

CALCULATED LOSS is just okay. This is an intelligently written book, but I found it a rather slow-paced experience with little suspense.

Madeline Carter is a former stockbroker who currently makes her living in Los Angeles as a day trader. At the beginning of this novel, she learns that her ex-husband, Chef Braydon Gauthier, has committed suicide.

Madeline further learns that her ex's family wants her to attend the funeral in Vancouver. This is despite the fact that she hasn't seen Braydon in nearly ten years. When Madeline attends the funeral, she quickly learns that the circumstances surrounding her ex-husband's suicide are quite suspicious.

This novel is readable, but takes a long time to get started. Much of the novel is devoted to the thoughts, opinions, memories, and ruminations of the main character. I ultimately found Madeline to be a rather bland and passive heroine. Instead of taking action, she spends most of her time in this book thinking about and reacting to the behavior of others.

This is also one of those novels where the heroine often learns things by pure luck. There are multiple scenes in this novel where Madeline just magically happens to be at the right place at the right time to learn a key new piece of information. After a while, this unbelievable string of coincidences strained credibility for me.

This isn't a badly written novel by any means, but I would avoid this mystery if you're looking for a fast-paced suspense novel with a believable plot.

This is the best of the series. It was a fun read, easily done in a day. Don't expect the rest of the series to be as entertaining.

I've long enjoyed the Madeline Carter series by Linda L. Richards, as she manages to do what I thought was impossible. Namely, make the intricacies of finance and day trading not only understandable, but incredibly fascinating. With CALCULATED LOSS, Richards shares with the reader not only the details and stresses of day trading but also the incredibly entertaining world of professional cooking and celebrity chefs.

When Madeline hears that her ex-husband has committed suicide, she's plunged back into her bittersweet memories of a marriage she left when her professional ambitions combated with Braydon Gauthier's more lackadaisical approach to life. Since the end of their marriage Bray's life completely changed though, as he eventually became a celebrity chef with his own television cooking shows, bestselling cookbooks, frozen food line, and numerous restaurants. But the loss of a star of his flagship restaurant apparently caused him to poison himself, leaving his mother and sister shattered and requesting Madeline's help in figuring out the family's complex corporation.

The family also awakens doubts about whether Bray really did kill himself, a suspicion Madeline excuses as grief until she hears the method of Bray's poisoning. Believing that he would never had consumed a last meal of duck with orange sauce (how cliché!), Madeline begins to explore the murky practices of Gauthier Fine Foods and the new life Bray created without her.

This is a wonderfully engaging novel that entertains the reader with food and finance information while never giving short thrift to the plot or characters. Madeline's realization that her memories of the Braydon conflict with the man he became is both bittersweet and realistic and adds considerable depth to a Madeline, who has grown more and more likeable with each new novel. This is a very witty series that continues to improve and leave readers eagerly awaiting each new installment into the life of Madeline Carter.

When she hears the news that her celebrity chef and former spouse Braydon Gauthier committed suicide, day trader Madeline Carter is shocked because that seems so out of character for the upbeat bigger than life gourmand. Feeling an obligation and having divorced amiably, Madeline attends Braydon's funeral in Vancouver while wondering why he killed himself.

However, when she learns he killed himself by dining on a poisoned duck a l'orange and beef Shiraz, Madeline knows instantly he was murdered. She tries to explain to the local police her rationale, but they blow her away as a griever in denial. Knowing Braydon would never have had that type of combination that separately are delights but together kills the palate, she begins investigating starting with his finance even as someone watches her closely to insure if she seems too close to uncovering the truth, a second suicide of a the grieving "widow" will follow.

CALCULATED LOSS is a fascinating amateur sleuth tale starring a heroic protagonist whose logic for why Braydon died is odd, but shows she knew her ex spouse. When the police tell her to forget it, Madeline cannot; so she begins her inquiries seeking a motive as to why someone poisoned the gourmet chef. Linda L. Richards provides a delicious Vancouver whodunit that never slows down until the final meal is served.

Harriet Klausner

Overall, "Calculated Loss" is a middling mystery novel: middling in plot, middling in memorability. There is no particular reason to shout its praise, nor is there reason to denounce it for any unforgivable sins.

As light-weight mysteries go, "Calculated Loss" is rather slow-moving. Some writers write short. Others write long. Linda Richards is one of the latter, sometimes achieving Jamesian (P. D., not Henry) ponderousness. At the beginning of Chapter 17, for example, she uses 294 words in six paragraphs to say, in effect, "I woke up. It was Monday and still raining. I took a hot shower and then made a cup of coffee. I wasn't in the mood to work at my computer." Now, let me be clear on this point, there is nothing wrong or even objectionable about the manner in which Ms. Richards wrote her book: it's just slower than it might otherwise be. And it makes Richards' "Calculated Loss" a 409 page book, when it might in other hands have been a 250 pager.

This is a book for the many, many readers who seek a pleasant way to pass some time while traversing familiar literary territory. Here, a more-or-less financially independent young woman learns of the untimely death of an old acquaintance; she develops suspicions about the circumstances of that death, investigates (lightheartedly committing a felony or two while gathering information), offers lame explanations for her willful refusal to inform the police or anyone else in authority, becomes endangered herself, and manages to tie up all the loose ends in the final chapter. In short, been there, done that, but I'll probably be picking up another book very much like it ... soon.

As I said, a middling book, but even middling mysteries are fully capable of providing hours of solid pleasure to the well-disposed reader, so I am assigning four stars as my rating.

But...

It was not until I actually started reading the book that I discovered it held elements of particular interest to me.

The main action of the novel takes place right here in my own city of Vancouver. (The cover illustration shows a color-enhanced photo of the Downtown Core of the city, neatly silhouetted against the nearby mountains.) Ms. Richards demonstrates a pretty good notion of the actual layout of the place, making the meanderings of her protagonist through the city quite easy to follow. The city's streetscapes are very much as the author describes them. Expensive condos are located in the right places, as are poorly built, catastrophically leaking ones. Kitsilano is accurately portrayed as a funky but basically pleasant neighborhood and parts of the Downtown Eastside are correctly condemned as a festering disgrace to such a prosperous and orderly city.

On the other hand, Ms. Richards has clearly been mainlining entirely too much of the Visitors Bureau's tourism propaganda. When Madeline first arrives at Vancouver International Airport (YVR), she steps outside to sniff the British Columbian air: "This is a thing I do, have always done: this testing of the air when I get off a plane. I love that moment. When you first ingest the local air, when you taste it, roll it around your tongue like a fine wine. It's only at that moment--when you've just left an air-conditioned airport after getting off an air-conditioned plane--that you can truly taste the essential being of a place. Taste it right down to its constituent components. On this day I tasted earth and things growing richly, and I tasted salt and the sharp tang of the sea." [Page 69]

Right, I've done that, myself. I usually find the airport air delicately perfumed with the scent of jet fuel. Being mostly a huge concrete slab, YVR is a bit short on earth and things growing richly, at least in the vicinity of its front doors, and that sharp tang of the sea is a downright puzzler, since Madeline would be moving toward the nearby Fraser River, beyond which lies Vancouver.

**SPOILER ALERT**

Despite ample--more than ample!--hints and foreshadowings, it is not until well past the middle of the story that Madeline, described as a high-powered former stockbroker, twigs to the possibility that a major embezzlement may be in progress. Speaking as one who was once condemned to serving a term as an auditor for one of the big international accounting firms operating right here in Vancouver, it strikes me that Madeline the high-powered stock broker is remarkably naive. Among other things, she not only does not know the function of an audited corporate financial statement, she doesn't seem to know that such things exist. The specific form of the embezzlement outlined in the book is simple-minded. I guarantee you that any audit team I ever led would have discovered it, probably on the very first day.

During an unauthorized and surreptitious search lasting--oh--ten minutes, I suppose, Madeline finds a couple of files that conveniently set out the details of the felonious scheme in full. Ha! Don't I wish! Once, with unlimited access to every financial record in a company, I spent days identifying, tracing and documenting what I thought was a "temporary defalcation" (don't ask) involving a nice, round one million dollars. I reported this to the senior audit partner, who sat back in his big, expensive chair, grinned at me and handed over reports almost identical to mine from each of my predecessors. We had all seized on what turned out to be the slovenly habits of an honest but incurably sloppy middle manager. (Discovering this chronic problem was looked upon as a rite of passage for new audit team members, it turned out.) The company being audited was in the "oil patch," where stuff like that just happens.

And, of course, later when I had escaped from the public practice of accounting, I discovered that my new boss, the man who had hired me, my friend, my mentor, had acquired two of the most expensive habits known to mankind: fast women and slow horses. He needed money. So he stole it. And he attempted to lay a trail that pointed straight back to me.

But that's another story.

As for this one, "Calculated Loss," four give-it-the-benefit-of-a-doubt stars.