Review: Point of Graves (J Dennis Robinson). A mystery! I was excited that this was the book for the next Music Hall book club (which is two days away) just because it is my favorite reading material and I hadn’t read a mystery in quite a while. The author will be making a presentation to our group, followed by a question and answer session, which should be very interesting. We read another of his books some years back, a non-fiction account of the murders on the Isles of Shoals, well done and well-received. This is a good story set in the lovely old town of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and it always adds a layer of enjoyment to recognize familiar names and places. For his first foray into mystery fiction, he has done a fine job. There are several threads to the tale, a good cast of characters and their backgrounds, and lots of history , much of which was new to me who lives twenty miles away, so less steeped in the town lore than I suspect many of my friends in the group are. A local odd character about town is found dead against the gravestone of William Whipple, one of the town’s most famous figures, ruled a suicide. For years he had been carrying around a manifesto he was working on, which was not on him at the time of his death. Ace Randall was known to be paranoid. He was living rent free along with another sketchy fellow named Roy as guests/companions of Cicero Ladd, a centenarian African American who becomes embroiled in a local hot-button issue: developers want to build a much-needed parking garage on land he claims is the site of a long lost African American cemetery. Levi Woodbury, local museum caretaker with a mystery in his own background, becomes involved with all these people, along with his own friends. Several red herrings and a satisfying ending. It is subtitled “A New England History Mystery “, so perhaps there are more to come.

on the bench near the entrances