Customer Reviews

Claire and Present Danger (An Amanda Pepper Mystery)

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It's official! Series heroine Amanda Pepper and her long-time, ex-cop lover, C.K. Mackenzie have finally decided to commit matrimony. On top of moonlighting with C.K. as private investigators to help keep the wolf from the door while C.K. works on his PhD in criminology, now all she has to do is face up to the pressures of a new term at Philly Prep while bracing herself for a close encounter of the first kind with C. K.'s unconventional parents and pacifying her own demanding family anent her as yet up-in-the-air wedding plans. What Amanda really doesn't need when the novel opens is the added complication of overbearing, reluctant mother-in-law-to-be Claire Fairchild who hires them to do a background check of her wealthy son Leo's enigmatic new fiancee, Emmie Cade, and suddenly winds up very dead because someone has decided to call a halt to their investigation by poisoning her. In for a penny...Amanda doggedly tracks down Emmie's past only to discover that it's a checkered one indeed. There seem to be way too many loose ends for her to make sense of until a clever killer makes one simple yet fatal slip. Amanda may teach English, but she's enough of a mathematician to add up the pieces that quickly point to the real culprit in the veritable nick of time in the slam-bang finale to this thoroughly engrossing caper.

As always, the ex-teacher in me takes an enormous amount of pleasure in following Amanda into her classroom and watching her in action. Ms. Roberts has crafted a thoroughly literate, utterly delightful puzzler that kept me guessing right up to the climax. This delightful series just keeps getting better and better as new characters arrive on the scene to share Amanda and C.K.'s lives, and I'm really looking forward to spending more time with Gabby and Boy.

High school English teacher Amanda Pepper has her hands full with the new school year and planning for her first meeting with her prospective inlaws. Still, a high school teacher planning on getting married needs some extra money and Amanda is flattered to get her first independent job at the private detective agency where she works. The task should be straightforward--do an identity and background check on a woman for her prospective mother-in-law. Except who has been sending those nasty notes to the mother-in-law? And what should Amanda do when the mother-in-law turns up dead?

Author Gillan Roberts creates a memorable character in Amanda Pepper. Her worries about the upcoming in-law fest, concern for the teenage ostracism she sees in practice in her school (which blends nicely with her use of THE LORD OF THE FLIES in the classroom), and determination to get to the bottom of the mystery even when she is told that her job is over all make her sympathetic and admirable. Roberts's writing is fast-paced and involves the reader at multiple levels.

I especially enjoyed the way that Roberts blended together Amanda's teaching experience, her own mother-in-law concerns, and the themes of ostracism into the mystery. CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER is almost a fractile experience--every scene is, in some sense, a microcosm of the entire novel. Maybe it's Roberts's experience as an English teacher that makes her write this way but I certainly found it enjoyable and interesting.

CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER is not filled with constant sleuthing or hard-core detection. Whole chapters go by that are only connected to the mystery symbolically. And experienced mystery readers are likely to wish for a few more red herrings for suspicion to fall upon. Trust me, neither of these detract from the reading experience.

Gillian Roberts takes on a topic of recent nonfiction best-sellers, the long-term effects of teenage cruelty. She finds parallels in her classroom, in the mystery she's hired to solve and in the reading she assigns her teens.

This tightly written book deftly weaves together several subplots: Amanda's job at Philly Prep, where she has learned to manage her wimpy headmaster; Amanda's classroom, where she teaches Lord of the Flies with creative, contemporary techniques; Amanda's romance with C.K. Mackenzie and the impending descent of the inlaws; and most important, Amanda's foray into private investigation, under Mackenzie's supervision, which furnishes the main plot driver.

Hired to investigate a wealthy man's prospective bride, Emmie, Amanda and C.K. quickly learn the woman has a dark and complex past. Their investigation moves with lightning speed when Amanda coincidentally meets Emmie's old friend, Vicki. When Emmie realizes she has been investigated, she insists there's another side to the story, albeit a rather implausible one.

When Amanda finally figures out the real truth, we readers are treated to a delightful scene where we gain a new appreciation for Amanda's future mother-in-law. True, there are some coincidences that move the plot, but the book offers what cozy mystery readers want: a fast read, not too much danger, interesting characters, and some deeper points to ponder.

The pace and polish of this book show the author continues to grow and move her skills to the next level. I hope Amanda's marriage doesn't slow her down. And while I enjoyed the classroom scenes, I can't help wishing Amanda would find a more fulfilling, better-paying career. She's too smart to toil in underpaid anonymity under the supervision of an incompetent Headmaster Havemeyer.

The appearance of a new Amanda Pepper novel is always welcome. Anthony Award-winning author Gillian Roberts has gently but skillfully evolved her creation over the course of several novels, molding Pepper into a credible character in improbable situations. Pepper is a full-time high school English teacher and part-time private investigator. The latter occupation is performed with her fiancé, C.K. Mackenzie (the initials, we are informed, don't stand for anything other than C.K.). Amanda and C.K. are fish of separate species out of different ponds. Mackenzie is a Louisiana transplant who runs a private investigation service in Philadelphia, while Pepper is a lifelong resident of the City of Brotherly Love. It is an interesting combination, and when their diverse backgrounds bring them into conflict, it more often than not results in warmth instead of sparks.

CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER continues the name-game play on words that Roberts initiated a couple of novels back. The Claire in this case is Claire Fairchild, an aristocratic matron in declining health whose son, Leo, is engaged to Emmie Cade. No one knows a thing about Cade --- itself a serious faux breach of Philadelphia society etiquette --- and the worries of the elderly Mrs. Fairchild are compounded when she begins receiving anonymous letters, indicating that her erstwhile daughter-in-law doesn't have just a skeleton in her closet but rather whole graveyards full. Mrs. Fairchild hires Mackenzie's firm to investigate Cade's past. Though the grand dame seems at first to be merely a worrisome busybody, Pepper finds that Cade's past seems to be marked by a sequence of mysterious deaths, name changes, and disappearances.

Just when Pepper and Mackenzie are about to present their findings to Mrs. Fairchild, however, the dowager passes, apparently of natural causes. Mackenzie feels that the agency has done its job, and since the client is dead, the matter should come to an end. Pepper, however, is certain that Mrs. Fairchild has been murdered, and was murdered because of the investigation that she initiated. Pepper finds out she is right...and wrong. She has trouble convincing Mackenzie of any intervention until help arrives --- from a most unexpected source.

CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER is a very well done drawing room mystery novel that sustains reader interest from the first page to the last. Roberts does an excellent job of balancing and conflicting Pepper's personal and both of her professional lives, while keeping the plot of the story memorable and the narrative moving ever so gradually forward. Roberts also manages to draw a parallel between events in the life of one of Pepper's students and Pepper's own past without making it too much of a stretch. An important milestone for Pepper and Mackenzie also occurs in this novel, as does the introduction of at least one character with the potential for significant appearances in the future.

CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER is ultimately a milestone in the Amanda Pepper series, and is a must-read not only for readers who have been with the series from the beginning, but also for those who are ready to jump on for future journeys.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

Claire and Present Danger is a murder mystery in the Amanda Pepper series. Our heroine is recently engaged to C K McKenzie who has left his position as a homicide detective and is now a student at Penn State. She is also a teacher at a not too prestigious private school and this story takes place during the first days of the new school year. To make ends meet for the student and teacher who are planning their future lives together, Amanda takes on a part-time job helping CK as a Private Investigator. All of these factors swirl about and contribute their own patina to the meat of the story.

The story itself revolves around a different relationship. It seems that an attractive widow appeared in Philadelphia's social circles and very quickly ensnared one of the most eligible bachelors in town. A bachelor, who has made a lot of money, no less! The fly in the ointment is that the bachelor's mother - Claire Fairchild - is suspicious of the young widow and gets even more suspicious when anonymous letters appear in her mailbox claiming to know that the young widow has a history of her previous husbands and lovers dying in semi-mysterious situations. Of course, the mother is now worried about what kind of gold digger is spinning her son's head and she call in the Investigative team.

Amanda really wants to help work the case for the money and the prestige. Not only will this help her PI career, but it will help distract her from the pressures of meeting her future in-laws for the first time; introducing them to her own parents; getting a handle on the new students that she has; dealing with the ditzy secretary at her school; dealing with the headmaster; dealing with a domineering mother of one of her new students; dealing with the apparent teenage problems of another of her new students; and on and on.

Due to all these factors, it really seems to me as if the murder storyline almost interferes with the story of Amanda's complicated life. The author does a nice job of pulling all the threads together towards the end of the book and the conclusion is satisfying because we could see it coming in echoes of the other threads in this story.

The writing is light and witty. Introducing major characters like a new mother-in-law can be difficult and the way this book handles it is by creating a very memorable, colorful, and "unusual" character who will probably play a large part in any future volumes of this series. I mean, how can you resist a lady from the South who claims she is a witch and performs her witchcraft in the Northeast United States on her very first visit?

The one thing that marred this story for me somewhat was the excessive self-introspection and thoughts about female to female relationships during the teenage years that this book is chock full of. Maybe because I am of the male persuasion, I had a hard time understanding why Amanda is so full of remorse and has to explain various episodes and behaviors in great detail. I will admit that I found her description of the difference between how men and women deal with telephone conversations to be absolutely hysterical, but the wittiness fails after you realize how much of this book is devoted to this kind of self-analyzing psychotherapy.

I will read other Amanda Pepper mysteries because I enjoyed the wit of the author and the setup of the characters (as improbable as they are). I recommend you try this one to see if you like it as well.

In case you just tuned in: 30-something Amanda Pepper teaches English at a prep school in Philadelphia. Her live-in fiance, Louisiana native C. K. Mackenzie, recently resigned his position as a homicide cop to pursue a Ph.D. in criminology. Though they've collaborated informally to solve murders in the past, the couple now works part-time after school hours in a private investigation firm. After all, poorly-paid private school teachers and beginning graduate students have to watch their pennies, and additional income helps.

Enter Claire Fairchild, an elderly woman who hires them to do a background check on her daughter-in-law-to-be, Emmie Cade. Amanda and C.K. easily uncover a number of sordid details from Emmie's dubious past. When they stop by Claire's condo to drop off the information (and hopefully get paid for their work), they discover that their client has died, presumably from a heart attack. But what really happened? And was Emmie involved? While Amanda wants to sort it all out -- against C.K.'s better judgment -- she's simultaneously bombarded with visits from her future in-laws and her own Florida-based parents, and everyone's pressuring the two to set a wedding date and get on with marriage plans. And it's the first week of school, for heaven's sakes; Amanda's also dealing with adolescent angst and _The Lord of the Flies_ to boot. How many balls can she juggle? We keep turning pages to find out.

A lot of the focus of the book was on "detective" Amanda Popper's engagement to her former homicide detective boyfriend CK Macalester. She is about to meet his parents for the first time and they are about to meet her parents and she's worried -- will his parents approve of her? Will there be conflict between the sets of parents? What will she wear? And then there are classroom scenes (Amanda teaches English at a private school in Philadelphia) -- seemingly irrelevant, although it becomes clear that there is thematic unity between the classroom issues and the mystery that unfolds.

Amanda and CK (he's quit his job and is getting a PhD in criminology) have a part-time partnership as private investigators, mostly doing background checks. Amanda is sent to interview someone requesting a background check, just to make sure this is on the up and up. It turns out this woman wants a background check on her future DIL -- which makes Amanda rather upset as she faces the prospect of meeting her own future inlaws. But there is reason to be concerned, so Amanda takes on the job.

Much of the book is spent on subplots (classroom scenes and meet-the-inlaws stuff) and yet in the end, you can see how it all fits together and was not as irrelevant as it seemed as you were reading it. This was a fairly masterful accomplishment from a literary viewpoint.

I stopped short of giving the book five stars because I nevertheless would have liked a bit more mystery. I plan to read this whole series, though, because I really like Amanda Popper and Gillian Robert's literate, witty style.

A light, enjoyable read. I truly like Amanda Pepper.

But... I've finally figured out the big flaw in this series, or rather in the relationship between Amanda and CK. Simply put, the man that Amanda intends to marry absolutely REFUSES to take her seriously.

Over and over again, she has proven herself to be an intelligent, competent woman. But over and over again, CK just laughs and pats her on the head whenever she states an opinion that HE doesn't agree with. CK is truly the most passive-aggressive character that I have ever "read".

And the advice that Amanda gets from her future mother-in-law, married to the same type of man? "Oh, you'll learn how to manage him." How quaint.

Run, Amanda!

Amanda Pepper is a high school teacher at Philly Prep in Philadelphia. She is also engaged to C. K. Mackenzie, former homicide cop and now studying to get his PhD in criminology and moonlighting as a PI with Ozzie. Amanda is moonlighting working with Mackenzie.

Mackenzie sends her to do an interview. She wants to do a good job on this her first solo investigation. Claire Fairchild doesn't make it easy. She wants Amanda to investigate her future daughter-in-law, Emmie. The problem is that Claire gives Amanda sketchy information about Emmie -- she says that this is why she wants her investigated. Amanda meets Emmie and likes her. Amanda is about to meet her future in-law's and is not sure she wants to investigate Emmie. But there are the anonymous letters Mrs. Fairchild received about Emmie.

When Amanda begins probing into Emmie's past, she finds there was a fatal accident that may have been murder. There are more questions about accidents in her past. Then things heat up when more things start happening. Is Emmie behind them or a victim herself? Amanda rushes to find the truth before it is too late.

I have enjoyed this series for some time. This is the best one yet as I enjoyed Amanda working with Mackenzie on this case. Yes, he still had his doubts and didn't go along with everything Amanda came up with, but I felt they were on the same side most of the time.

I also enjoy Amanda's interaction with her high school students. It is fun getting a glimpse into that side of her life in each book, some more than others.

I hope Mackenzie will become more involved in the stories in the future now that he is a PI.

The introduction of Mackenzie's parents is very interesting. His mother is a real character.

I highly recommend this book. It is a great cozy mystery.

As always with Amanda Pepper mysteries, there is more going on than a "mere" murder mystery. This time, it's LORD OF THE FLIES and how contemporary its themes remain. It's this little extra that Gillian Roberts always adds, this something that makes the books about more than solving the crime at hand, that I enjoy. Which is not to say that this book isn't fun. CK is as adorable as ever, and while there is less Macavity than I would have liked, there are the charming MacKenzie parents added for entertainment. And Amanda's sharp observations about teaching and Havermeyer are always great. Only one complaint -- I figured out the who in this whodunit LONG before Amanda did. The "why" was pretty clear early on, too. So as much as I enjoyed it, I came away feeling a twinge of disappointment. If only she'd spent as much time on the plot as she did on the atmosphere!