The Taken: A Hazel Micallef Mystery (Hazel Micallef Mysteries) [Hardcover]

Inger Ash Wolfe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 15, 2010 | Series: Hazel Micallef Mysteries

Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef is having a bad year. After major back surgery, she has no real option but to move into her ex-husband’s basement and suffer the humiliation of his new wife bringing her meals down on a tray. As if that weren’t enough, Hazel’s octogenarian mother secretly flushes Hazel’s stash of painkillers down the toilet.

 

It’s almost a relief when Hazel gets a call about a body fished up by tourists in one of the lakes near Port Dundas. But what raises the hair on the back of Micallef ’s neck is that the local paper has just published the first installment of a serialized story featuring such a scenario. Even before they head out to the lake with divers to recover the body, she and DC James Wingate, leading the police detachment in Micallef ’s absence, know they are being played. But it’s not clear who is pulling their strings and why, nor is what they find at the lake at all what they expected. It’s Micallef herself who is snared, caught up in a cryptic game devised by someone who knows how to taunt her into opening a cold case, someone who knows that nothing will stop her investigation.

 

The second novel featuring Hazel Micallef, “a compelling, unlikely hero” (Entertainment Weekly), is a stunning and suspenseful exploration of the obsessive far reaches of love, confirming Inger Ash Wolfe as one of the best mystery writers today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Lovers of twisty but plausible plotting and an out-of-the-ordinary lead will embrace Wolfe's standout second police procedural featuring Canadian Det. Insp. Hazel Micallef (after 2009's The Calling). A bizarre case brings Micallef, who depends on her ex-husband and his new wife as she recovers from a serious back injury suffered in the line of duty, back into action sooner than planned. A body fishermen dredge up from the bottom of a lake in Port Dundas, Ont., turns out just to be a mannequin, but numbers on the dummy lead Micallef to a Web site streaming video that appears to show a man being tortured by his abductor. In a frantic search for clues, Micallef concludes that the kidnapping is somehow linked to a fictional story being run in installments in the local newspaper. It's a testament to Wolfe's storytelling gifts that her reveal of the criminal's identity about midway through heightens rather than diminishes the tension.
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Review

THE TAKEN (star)

What looks like a prank lures a Canadian police chief into an investigation of a bone-chilling crime.

Hazel Micallef (The Calling, 2008) is none too pleased to be recuperating from back surgery in the home of her ex-husband. But her mother Emily is too frail to care for her 62-year-old daughter, and Andrew Micallef's new wife Glynnis seems determined to be nerve-wrackingly kind to her invalid predecessor. So Hazel barely minds being called back to the Port Dundas OPS when DC James Wingate, who never really wanted to be in charge of the provincial Ontario outpost, gets a report of a body pulled from Lake Gannon by tourists. The "body" turns out to be a mannequin, but a number stamped on the headless dummy's torso leads to a video feed of what looks like someone held captive in a basement. Meanwhile, The Port Dundas Record begins to publish chapters of a work by local writer Colin Eldwin, whose plot eerily tracks the Lake Gannon discovery. Eldwin is gone; his wife suggests he's in Toronto cheating on her. But the chapters keep arriving, each with a clue to a crime that hasn't yet been discovered, much less solved. And as the video feed becomes more disturbing, Hazel finds herself at odds with Ray Greene, the former deputy slated to become her boss as the provincial force is consolidated, and with the Toronto police, who resent Ontario's intrusion onto city turf.

Beautiful writing is just one of the pleasures of this Chinese-box puzzler. -Kirkus Reviews (starred)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (July 15, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151013535
• ISBN-13: 978-0151013531
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #912,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Well Worth the Wait, June 16, 2010

By 

Charlotte Vale-Allen (CT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Taken: A Hazel Micallef Mystery (Hazel Micallef Mysteries) (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

I have been anxiously waiting for another Hazel Micallef book--after falling completely in love with Hazel in her first outing, The Calling. And, happily, author Inger Ash Wolfe lives up to the standard she set with that first book. The characters, as before, are rich and round; the plot is complex and unpredictable; the humor is natural to the characters and never for a moment feels forced. This is writing and plotting of the highest order. And even the secondary characters are fully developed. I am not going to give a plot summary--that's available in the product description. What I am going to do is encourage everyone to get to know Hazel; she's addictive. She's an actual adult and a parent, with all the fears and foibles, tics and heartaches and, finally, acceptance that go along with the accumulation of years of living. Highly recommended!

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not Taken with This Book, August 12, 2010

By 

P. Bigelow (St. Louis, MO) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Taken: A Hazel Micallef Mystery (Hazel Micallef Mysteries) (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

This is Wolfe's second novel featuring DI Hazel Micallef. Micallef, who has recently had back surgery and must temporarily move into her ex-husband's basement to recuperate. The police are called to a local lake where a body has been reported found. From that point, the story begins to develop.

Rather than the author giving the reader key information, it seems that she has assumed that everyone has read the first book where, hopefully, she explicitly tells the reader where the book is set, why Micallef needed back surgery, what motivated her to move in with her ex-husband and his new wife, etc.

There were a plethora of scenes that stopped my reading, for instance, introducing minor characters, but not giving enough information about them so that when she reintroduces them later, the reader is left wondering who these people are. Or having Micallef confined to bed only to jump up a few pages later and rush out of the house to go to a crime scene. Or the one that really stopped me cold was Micallef getting into the bath tub by herself, having her husband appear with her dinner and feeding it to her while she sits in the tub and then she purposely drops a greasy rib into her bath water.

I think some of the problem I had with this book was that the story line was implausible. Here is a 62-year-old woman who has only just had major back surgery (and still has stitches in) getting out of bed to go to crime scene. Surely, her recovery time would be longer - much longer. Add to all this, the author throws in my pet peeve: a supposedly intelligent cop goes into a potential suspect's home alone and, in this case, goes into a dark basement with him and then remains in the basement while he goes back upstairs.

I wanted to like this book. It has everything that would make me like it - a mature woman detective, an interesting sounding plot, and starred reviews. But I felt no connection to any of the characters and the story moved so slowly that it was hard to stay engaged, in fact, my mind wandered to other matters, like my grocery list, as I read it.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great encore in a fab new series, October 10, 2010

By 

S. McGee (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Taken: A Hazel Micallef Mystery (Hazel Micallef Mysteries) (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

This second novel in the series of mysteries featuring Hazel Micallef, a rural Ontario police chief, is one of those rare discoveries -- a mystery series that really grabs me and has me completely believing that the cast of characters the author crafts aren't fictional inventions but real people.

Hazel Micallef is recovering from her pursuit of a very odd kind of killer in the first book (The Calling), literally. She's flat on her back, after back surgery, in the basement spare bedroom of the house she and her aged mother are forced to share temporarily with her ex-husband and his new wife until she's well enough to go back home. She's in agony, which only Percocet helps deal with, and she's bored out of her wits. So she is almost grateful when reports of a body found in a lake by fishermen force her back into the office. Until the body turns out not to be a body, but the first clue in a manipulative game being staged by someone bent on murder -- or is it revenge? Whatever the case, Hazel and her team are the criminal's tools.

I loved the characters, the writing, the author's ability to communicate a setting, and the deeply twisting (and twisted) plot of this novel that had me turning the pages more and more rapidly. I particularly enjoy Hazel, who is ruthlessly honest with the world -- to her own detriment, sometimes -- but also with herself. As she tells her sidekick, the equally appealing James Wingate, she has "a man trapped in my computer, live animals and body parts appearing on my desk, a CO who thinks I've outlived my usefulness and expensive gifts coming from missing friends, I also happen to have a pill problem ... So I'm slightly less than OK." In other words, she is human, flawed and thus appealing in a way that a glam 30-something detective just couldn't be.

Ultimately, this crime novel ends up being about love -- and the price of love and what people will do in the name of love. This is an intriguing mix of the cosy setting (rural Ontario, where the usual crimes run to someone throwing a cup of hot Darjeeling at someone else) with a gritty crime and deeply nasty criminal. Highly recommended; I can't wait for the next in this series and hope that Hazel has a long crime-solving career ahead of her.