Bruce Tierney

You know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake up amid a team of disgraced Abu Ghraib prison guards who have kidnapped you and are becoming significantly fed up with your unwillingness to answer their questions. The victim is Isaiah Quintabe, known in his California neighborhood by his initials, IQ. Wrecked is Joe Ide’s third novel featuring IQ, and it’s the first time IQ has a chance of expanding his business into a full-fledged private investigation agency. At any given time, IQ fields a number of cases, but the one that becomes central to Wrecked has to do with the machinations of a Blackwater- esque mercenary, a man with little in the way of scruples and lots in the way of sadistic behavior. Wrecked takes Ide’s unlikely hero into new territory, with foes that test his mettle in ways his previous adversaries could not even fathom, and with a possible love interest that exposes an entirely new facet of IQ’s character.

ALL FOR JUSTICE
V.I. Warshawski, like all of us, is not getting any younger. She is well past the age of dangling upside down in search of clues or doing fishtail burnouts in her V-8 Mustang to avoid getting shot, and certainly past the years when she should be treading across thin ice floes to keep a priceless artifact out of the hands of a ruthless billionaire. But in Sara Paretsky’s latest thriller, Shell Game, age seems a nonissue, as V.I.’s latest crusade leads her to engage in all these dangerous activities and more. Two cases weave in and out of the narrative: the first, a murder charge hanging over the beloved nephew of V.I.’s godmother, surgeon Lotty Herschel, involving a Syrian archaeological dig and a dissident immigrant poet on the lam from ICE; the second, the mysterious disappearance of V.I.’s niece following a Caribbean junket that turned sinister in ways that no travel brochure would suggest. As is usually the case with Paretsky’s novels, there is considerable social and political commentary, so if you are a capital-C Conservative, you might want to give some thought to how much you are willing to have your convictions challenged. Everyone else can revel in the superb pacing, the well-developed characters and the crisp dialogue from one of the most consistently excellent writers in the genre.

KIDNAPPING IN TAIWAN
Readers don’t have to wait long—not even to the end of page one—to get to the setup for Ed Lin’s latest Taipei Night Market mystery, 99 Ways to Die. There has been an abduction of a prominent businessman, who happens to be the father of protagonist Chen Jing-nan’s erstwhile classmate Peggy Lee (not the husky-voiced jazz singer Peggy Lee of “Fever” fame, but rather the youngest daughter in a family of Taiwanese aristocrats). The kidnappers’ ransom demands are not for money; instead, they want access to a computer chip, which Peggy Lee claims to know nothing about. But chances are good that Peggy Lee is playing for time and saving face in a society where face is everything. Jing-nan, for his part, is not someone you’d think of as a PI—he runs a popular food shop in a Taipei night market—but Peggy Lee is headstrong, and if she wants Jing-nan on the case, he has little choice but to assent. 99 Ways to Die is the third in the series and is the most fleshed out of the three. Ultimately, Lin’s books are most appealing for the insider’s look at Taiwanese culture, the motley crew of supporting cast and the multiple laughs per page.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY
Imagine, for a moment, a Nancy Drew mystery told partially in flashback by Nancy herself, a girl grown up into the Best Detective in the World—her own rather immodest appellation—and now facing Her Most Perplexing Case. Then you will begin to have an idea of Sara Gran’s strange yet wildly entertaining novel The Infinite Blacktop. Somewhere along the way, our Nancy (whose name is actually Claire DeWitt) has evolved into a modern-day Sam(antha) Spade, with an overlay of street smarts and Zen calm counterbalancing one another in strangely effective ways. As the book opens, Claire comes very close to getting taken off the board permanently when her rented Kia is deliberately broadsided by a 1982 Lincoln, an event on par with a wooden rowboat getting rammed by the USS Nimitz. As she looks into who is trying to punch her ticket, she is drawn into a rethinking of the one case the Best Detective in the World has never been able to solve: the disappearance of her partner-in-crime-solving back when they were teenagers. As the narrative proceeds, another cold case gets woven in, and Gran deftly jumps back and forth between them, bringing the reader along for a wild ride across the decades.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

December isn’t typically the strongest of months for new book releases, but this year, what is lacking in quantity is more than made up for in quality, with books from four of the finest contemporary suspense writers from North America, Europe and Japan.

A BOGGLING MYSTERY
It’s 1944, the closing days of World War II. Two men dig feverishly in a peat bog in Scotland to create a hole large enough to accommodate a pair of American motorcycles. Fast-forward to current day, when the granddaughter of one of the men decides to unearth the motorcycles. The first motorcycle has survived its lengthy incarceration beautifully, but there’s a dead body where the second should be. Enter Karen Pirie, cold case detective (because, hey, cases don’t get much colder than this), in the fifth installment of Val McDermid’s popular Karen Pirie series, Broken Ground. Things take a turn for the weird(er) when the body, supposedly buried for some 70 years, is discovered to be wearing a pair of Nikes. McDermid’s books are relentlessly excellent, with sympathetically flawed characters, well-crafted storylines, a clever twist or two and crisp dialogue. It’s no wonder she is considered the queen of Scottish crime fiction.

A NEW CRIME DUO
Cold cases are a running theme this month, as Michael Connelly pairs series stalwart Harry Bosch with Renée Ballard in their first (but hopefully not their last) adventure together, Dark Sacred Night. Ballard first showed up in 2017’s The Late Show as a solo act, but she and Bosch work exceptionally well as a duo, investigating the unsolved 2009 murder of a young runaway. The case holds a personal component for Bosch, as the mother of the murdered girl is staying at his house. There aren’t many clues available after the passage of so much time, but Bosch is dogged in his pursuit, and his personal creed—everybody counts or nobody counts—gets a run for its money this time out. Connelly does an exceptional job of giving voice to both his protagonists. They share a bit of an outsider’s perspective—respected for their work but not always liked by their peers—and this is what makes them such a formidable team. My favorite Connelly books pair Bosch with protagonists from his other books, like Mickey Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer, and this latest pairing is truly inspired.

NEIGHBORHOOD SECRETS
Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s best-known suspense authors, and he has begun to carve a niche for himself in the rest of the world thanks to The Devotion of Suspect X, Malice and his latest Detective Kaga novel, Newcomer. Since we last saw Kaga, he has suffered a demotion from the Tokyo Police Department’s Homicide Division to a more local role in the quiet neighborhood of Nihonbashi. But his homicide experience soon gets him assigned to the team investigating the death of a woman found strangled in her apartment. Kaga’s Zen approach to crime solving is at odds with conventional police procedures, but it would be hard to find fault with his results. One by one, he interviews shopkeepers, neighbors and denizens of the streets, and he begins to create a picture of a homicide that has an entire neighborhood of potential suspects. Kaga, a modern-day Hercule Poirot, thinks even further outside the box than his Belgian predecessor, to the great delight of mystery aficionados.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY
Louise Penny’s novels are unique for how seamlessly they straddle the line between charming small-town mysteries and big-city police procedurals. As Kingdom of the Blind opens, protagonist Armand Gamache, former head of the Sûreté du Québec, receives a strange invitation to an abandoned farmhouse, and an even stranger request to act as executor of a will crafted by someone he never met. It is something of a wacky will, with bequests that suggest that the writer was not playing with a full deck of cards. And then a body turns up, and the document takes on a decidedly darker aspect. Meanwhile in Montreal, a huge drug shipment is about to hit the streets, in part because Gamache allowed it to slip through the cracks as part of his plan to bring down the cartels. Most of the drugs were rounded up—except for one large shipment that threatens to destroy many lives, perhaps including Gamache’s. Each Gamache adventure (we are now at the 14th) displaces the previous one as the best in the series. I have read each one twice—first as a one-sitting page turner, and then shortly afterward as a leisurely reread in which I revel in the artistry of the prose, the characterizations, the locales. It’s not to be missed!

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The literary exploits of John Lescroart’s San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy, now numbering 18, have been a mainstay of my reading pleasure since 1989’s Dead Irish. Fast-forward 30 years, and an older and wiser Hardy plies his trade ever more ably in The Rule of Law. Phyllis McGowan, Hardy’s secretary, has been a stalwart pillar of support in his personal and business life. But lately, she seems to have gone off the rails. First, there is her mysterious disappearance for several days, and shortly after that, her surprise arrest as an accessory to murder. The evidence, while not entirely damning, is at least suggestive. Extortionist Hector Valdez, who worked for a modern-day Underground Railroad specializing in spiriting immigrants without documentation out of the Border Patrol’s reach, was murdered at the time of McGowan’s disappearance. In the old days, Hardy had a good working relationship with the district attorney, and likely could have negotiated on McGowan’s behalf, but the new DA has a political and personal chip on his shoulder where Hardy is concerned. Thus, this time out, Hardy is doomed to spend as much time battling the supposed good guys as trouncing the supposed bad guys. Lescroart crafts some of the finest legal thrillers out there today, with interesting characters, complex relationships, a taut narrative and, of course, the (now expected, but still somehow surprising) twist ending.

The original plan was for Caroline to lend Audrey $150 for a bus ticket back to Minnesota to visit her dying father. But on the way to the station, Caroline glances over at her friend and says, “Road trip?”—thus setting the stage for Tim Johnston’s second gripping thriller, The Current. The trip will not end well. Being from Georgia, Caroline has no experience with driving in icy conditions, and after an unanticipated and uncontrolled skid, their car hovers atop a precipice above an icy river. They are shaken but safe, at least until they see the flare of headlights in the rearview mirror, then feel the tap of the bumper that nudges their car over the edge. One dies, one barely survives. The small Minnesota town is in shock. Rumors fly about the presence of a second car at the scene, and the whole situation reminds people of a similar case 10 years prior, one that was never solved. As the official investigation progresses, a grieving father, a dying sheriff and a determined young woman begin covert investigations of their own. All are in search of answers, but none is prepared for what they will find.

Fans of the exploits of Charles Cumming’s MI6 agent Thomas Kell will find a lot to like in the author’s new standalone spy thriller, The Moroccan Girl. Bestselling thriller author Kit Carradine is poised to attend a literary festival in Marrakech when he receives a request that would make any suspense writer champ at the bit: track down a mysterious woman, one Lara Bartok, and surreptitiously deliver a passport to her. However, Carradine’s “handler” has been remarkably spare with details concerning Bartok, leaving out such juicy morsels as the fact that she is a well-placed member of an international terrorist outfit and is quite capable of taking care of herself when facing a potential confidant or adversary (especially one whose espionage exploits are limited to his imagination and the printed page). Things heat up when rival intelligence agencies join the fray, all in search of Bartok for conflicting—and often lethal—reasons. And Carradine is about to find out the hard way that real-life espionage bears little resemblance to his page-turning depictions. Cumming channels the dreamy romance of classic spy movies (think Casablanca, Notorious, The Thirty-Nine Steps) and juxtaposes it with a modern, relentlessly intense and staccato delivery.

June 1947, Beverly Hills. Mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel has just been shot to death in his own home by person or persons unknown. Several hundred miles away, rancher Jonathan Craine tends to his daily chores. In an earlier life, Craine was the unofficial liaison between the Los Angeles Police Department and the movie studios, the “fixer” who kept stars and execs safe from exposure and prosecution—but that was a long time ago and far, far away from his current existence. That is all about to change, as hired lackeys from a sinister boss’s crime syndicate arrive by private aircraft to solicit Craine’s assistance in finding Siegel’s killer. And they won’t take no for an answer—cue the music portending graphic violence. Guy Bolton’s The Syndicate reads like a period thriller, with dialogue true to the golden age of film noir, which the author so obviously admires. The plot seamlessly blends fact with fiction, overlaying a series of real-life events with a fast-paced fictional narrative that is riddled with tension. And bullets.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

TOP PICK
It’s Christmastime in the U.K., and all the cops are hoping that maybe this will be the year they’ll get to spend the holidays with their families. It is not to be. “Everything is slack, unurgent. It all smacks of too late,” one of the detectives muses as they pull up to the crime scene. Someone at the scene comments, “She’s been more than killed. She’s more than dead.” And it was then, a scant 17 pages in, when I realized that I would not be putting this book down until I had reached the end. The detectives at the center of Patrick McGuinness’ Throw Me to the Wolves, narrator Ander and his partner Gary, could scarcely be more unalike. Ander is sensitive and introspective, while Gary is a throwback to an earlier time, when beating a suspect or drinking on the job, while not publicly condoned, was not privately condemned either. The suspect is a retired boarding school teacher, someone Ander knew from his school days a lifetime ago, a man seemingly incapable of such a heinous killing. Thus, two parallel narratives emerge, one about the investigation of the murder and a second about events of times long past. McGuinness delves into current events (Brexit, et al.) and lobs numerous digs at the tabloid media, all while delivering a first-rate whodunit. It’s only May, but Throw Me to the Wolves looks like a strong candidate for mystery of the year. Or any year.

Jeffery Deaver already has two major suspense series to his credit, and now he’s starting another with The Never Game, which features arguably the most unusual protagonist of his career thus far: itinerant reward seeker Colter Shaw. An expert tracker thanks to his survivalist father, Shaw travels the U.S. in a Winnebago in search of missing persons. In Berkeley, California, he undertakes an investigation into the disappearance of a teenage girl, a case the local authorities are treating as a simple runaway. It turns out to be anything but. The search leads Shaw to team up with a young female gamer, and it begins to dawn on them that the disappearance bears a striking resemblance to level one of a popular internet survival game called “The Whispering Man.” When a second disappearance occurs, their suspicions seem to be confirmed, except now the unidentified perpetrator has ramped up the difficulty level with an altogether more dangerous and potentially lethal set of outcomes. I would characterize Deaver’s previous novels as mysteries, but The Never Game occupies thriller territory, and it has film adaptation written all over it.

Young Carline Darcy appeared to have it all. Presumptive heir to Darcy Therapeutics, the largest pharmaceutical company in Ireland, by all rights she should have lived a charmed life. But early on, it all went sideways. First, there was her parents’ vitriolic divorce, fueled largely by her selfish and vindictive mother. Then her father was killed in a skiing accident, forcing her to live out her teen years with the unfeeling mother she had rarely seen over the course of her childhood. This personal history comprises the first chapter of Dervla McTiernan’s The Scholar, setting the stage for what’s to come. Fast-forward eight years, and Carline is a university student and researcher. One evening when Darcy Therapeutics medical researcher Emma Sweeney is returning home, she comes upon the dead body of a young woman, the apparent victim of a hit-and-run. Emma summons her boyfriend, Detective Cormac Reilly, to the scene. They are shocked to discover that the ID card carried by the corpse identifies her as Carline Darcy. And if they are shocked, it doesn’t hold a candle to the media frenzy about to be set loose. As the evidence mounts, it becomes increasingly clear that there is involvement on the part of Darcy Therapeutics and perhaps even Emma, whose “discovery” of the body is entirely too convenient for some people to swallow. Cormac must walk the fine line between loyalty to his lover and loyalty to the force, a path liberally strewn with land mines by the fiendishly clever McTiernan.

“Stone mothers” was a Victorian epithet for mental institutions, implying that within their stone walls help and nurturing could be found for those in need. In reality, of course, the opposite was often true. Stone Mothers is also the title of Erin Kelly’s latest thriller, set in and around a now-closed mental institution in the remote fictional town of Nusstead, England. Marianne Thackeray is no stranger to mental illness–her mother suffers from dementia, and her daughter hovers on the brink of mental instability as well. Marianne grew up in the shadow of Nazareth Mental Hospital, but she left some 30 years ago and made a good life for herself and her family. Now she is being dragged back to the town she escaped, first to assist her mother, then (rather more ominously) as a blackmail victim for a long-ago act that she thought would never again see the light of day. Before long, a former lover will become an enemy, a former enemy will become an unlikely ally, and the reader will be exposed to institutional horrors that make One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look as inviting as Disneyland. It’s disturbing to the max, but hey, that’s what we read thrillers for, right?

★ When Hell Struck Twelve
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, hand-picked his nephew, Captain Billy Boyle, to serve as his eyes and ears on the ground and to handle investigations and secret missions that are both vital to the Allied effort and exceptionally dangerous. Billy has a fair bit of experience in law enforcement, having served as a police detective in Boston in the years leading up to the war. But as the situation in Europe ramped up, he did what a lot of patriotic young Americans did in those days and enlisted in the Army. When Hell Struck Twelve finds the intrepid spy/investigator in search of a murderer and, at the same time, tasked with planting the seeds of deception regarding Allied plans for the liberation of Paris. The Germans are on the run, but there is every indication that they will leave carnage in their path as they abandon the City of Light, and it is up to Billy and his team to thwart them in that endeavor—and to try to stay alive in the process. I’ve read every book in James R. Benn’s series, reviewed most of them, loved all of them, and this is the best one yet. Watch for some great cameos by Ernest Hemingway, Andy Rooney, George S. Patton and others.

This Poison Will Remain
Fred Vargas’ This Poison Will Remain is the first of her novels that I have read. Yes, I said her: Fred Vargas is a female author who has topped the fiction charts in several European countries, and if there is any justice in the literary world, she will do the same on this side of the pond. Commissaire Adamsberg has been rather peremptorily summoned back to Paris from a fishing holiday in Iceland to investigate a nasty hit-and-run. Police officers are rarely afforded the luxury of pursuing just one case at a time, however. Adamsberg quickly finds himself investigating a series of deaths caused by bites from recluse spiders, small but occasionally lethal creatures that seem to have been working overtime in the vicinity of Nimes, France. Turns out that the victims were all once residents—rather unsavory residents at that—of the same orphanage. Now octogenarians, they are dying off one by one, each succumbing to the venom of the recluse. By turns wry and quirky, and with no shortage of plot twists, This Poison Will Remain will have Vargas’ new readers scurrying to find the six books that precede it. 

A Better Man
Once the Superintendent of Sûreté du Québec, Armand Gamache has been demoted to a position leading the homicide department. It was a demotion few believed he would accept, but he surprised the naysayers and took the job. As A Better Man opens, the spring thaw is beginning in the St. Lawrence River, and the elements are conspiring to spawn a 100-year flood, the river overflowing its banks as ice dams the flow at every bend. It’s not a propitious time to be investigating a murder, but a young woman’s body turns up in a small but volatile tributary of the St. Lawrence. Her husband is the prime suspect; no surprises there, as he is a mercurial and abusive man. But there are other possibilities, too: a pair, or perhaps a trio, of spurned lovers, as well as a high-ranking police official bent on tanking the investigation if doing so will shed a bad light on Gamache. All the while, the floodwaters rise inexorably. Louise Penny’s latest offers suspense galore, well-drawn characters we’d like to know (even the crotchety poet Ruth and her “fowl-mouthed” duck), a return to the fictional village of Three Pines—where we would all like to live—and some of the finest prose to grace the suspense genre.

The Bone Fire
S.D. Sykes’ The Bone Fire is the outlier in this column, and I mean that in a good way. Set in England in 1361, the year of the second major bubonic plague outbreak, it’s the story of a varied band of people, including noblemen, servants, a knight, a fool and a crusty Low Countries clockmaker with his sociopathic nephew/assistant in tow. This medieval cast of characters holes up in the remote island-fortress of Eden for the winter, sealing themselves off from the rest of the world until the danger of infection has passed. But mortal peril wears many masks, and one by one, people in the castle start mysteriously disappearing or dying—and not from the plague. It will fall to visiting nobleman Oswald de Lacy to solve the murders and protect his wife and young son. It’s a task for which he has some aptitude, but then the villain is no slouch either. And just about the time the reader has that “aha” moment, when they think they know the identity of the killer, that suspect dies a particularly gruesome death, and the reader gets sent back to square one. The Bone Fire is a classic and confounding locked-room mystery, with several promising suspects to choose from before the big reveal.

★ Galway Girl 
Ken Bruen peppers his tales of world-weary ex-Garda (Irish cop) Jack Taylor with shamrock bromides that are often thought provoking or darkly humorous as Taylor muddles his violent way through the damp and peaty Irish landscape. “In Galway / They were forecasting a shortage of CO2 (no, me neither). / Which is what puts the kick, fizz, varoom in beer, soft drinks. / Ireland, without beer, in a heat wave.” You can almost hear the “tsk tsk” as Bruen imagines the mayhem that will ensue. Galway Girl finds Taylor beleaguered by a trio of spree killers targeting the Garda, a priest whose moral compass has been severely compromised and a surly falconer with an injured but nonetheless lethal bird of prey. Taylor’s ongoing battle with the demon rum (actually Jameson Irish Whiskey, in his case) hovers in the background of every scene, like some ominous uncle, familiar yet anything but benign. Bruen’s command of language and metaphor is on full display in his trademark staccato verse, and his sense of place is superb. And to top it all off, the final scene is so artfully and powerfully rendered that I had to go back and read it again. And again. And I likely will again.

Lethal Pursuit
If you wanted to learn about Victorian England, you can read scholarly texts that dissect every nuance of societal caste and political intrigue. Or you can do what I do and pick up a Will Thomas novel featuring private enquiry agents Caleb Barker and Thomas Llewellyn, the latest being Lethal Pursuit. This time out, the duo is charged with the delivery of a satchel to Calais, the French seaport closest to England. It should be a pretty straightforward task, but the previous bearer of the satchel thought that as well—moments before his murder, just steps from his planned destination. Suffice it to say that more murders will follow, as the contents of the satchel are rumored to be holy religious documents dating back to the time of St. Paul, and a host of agents (on both sides of the spectrum of holiness) will go to any lengths to get their hands on them. Think a Victorian-era Archie Goodwin narrating the exploits of a sleuth with an Indiana Jones-esque penchant for derring-do, and you will begin to get an idea of the vibe of this series. There is really nothing out there quite like it. 

A Cruel Deception
The armistice that ended World War I silenced the mortar fire but did little to relieve chronic shortages of food and medical supplies, nor the debilitating malaise that gripped postwar Europe. For nurse Bess Crawford, peace means an imminent change of scenery. Just shortly after the opening of Charles Todd’s latest thriller, A Cruel Deception, Bess is summoned to her matron’s office and receives an assignment to travel to war-ravaged Paris. Her mission is to determine the whereabouts and condition of a young army lieutenant, who happens to be the son of the aforementioned matron. Early on, Bess turns up the missing soldier and finds him in pretty rough shape. Badly wounded, he has become addicted to laudanum while trying to deal with the pain. He suffers from sporadic amnesia, and Bess harbors some suspicions about both his backstory and his intentions going forward. A couple of military types offer Bess their assistance in her efforts to determine the truth, but she cannot shake the nagging doubt that one or both are rather too conveniently available in her life and may have goals that are at cross purposes to hers. As always, the mother-son writing team of Charles Todd does a magnificent job with atmosphere and dialogue, all while keeping their good-hearted heroine one step (but only one) ahead of the bad guys.

The Old Success
Martha Grimes’ series featuring Scotland Yard detective Richard Jury is unusual in several respects, not least of which is that the reader would never suspect that Grimes is an American writer. In terms of verbiage, slang and speech pattern, she channels the British vernacular flawlessly. This time out, in The Old Success, Jury is summoned to a small island off Land’s End, Cornwall, to investigate a murder in which much of the trace evidence has been washed away by the relentless waves that pound England’s most westerly point. It is but the first in a trio of murders that share a common factor or two, not to mention a handful of common suspects. Figuring into all of this somehow is another dead man, perhaps the only deceased person mentioned in the book who died of natural causes, whose passing left complicated opinions in its wake. Some people revere him as being just shy of a saint, while others hint at a much darker side, suggesting that had he lived a bit longer, he could have been the poster villain of the #MeToo movement in the U.K. Some interesting subplots (one with a race horse, one with a race car and one with an updated take on the Baker Street Irregulars) help to tie up some loose ends and keep the reader guessing as they wait for the surprising big reveal.

The month’s best new mystery & suspense titles.

The Missing American
Lonely-hearts internet scams out of West Africa are legendary and legion, the twin epicenters being Nigeria and Ghana. Kwei Quartey’s The Missing American focuses on Ghana, where the local word for this sort of scam is sakawa. Retired American bookseller Gordon Tilson has been in contact online with a beautiful Ghanaian widow, and when she tearfully tells him that her younger sister has been in an accident, he unhesitatingly offers to send money for the girl’s medical care. If you guessed that he has just become a victim of sakawa, please pat yourself on the back and advance to the head of the queue. It takes a personal visit to Accra, Ghana’s capital, for Gordon to fully realize that he has been duped, not by a doe-eyed Ghanaian widow but more likely by a team of clever and newly wealthy young men. In a parallel narrative, police officer Emma Djan, summarily dismissed from the Accra police force after refusing sexual advances from a superior, lands a job as a private detective. When Gordon goes missing from his hotel in Accra, Emma and Gordon’s son, Derek, launch a joint search, fearing the worst but hoping and praying for the best. Sakawa scams abound, overlaid with a witch doctor (or two) and a trio of likable, if occasionally gullible, protagonists. My prediction: We will be seeing Emma Djan again.

The Body Outside the Kremlin
In 1923, the Russian government established a prison camp on the remote island of Solovetsky in which to sequester opponents of the new Bolshevik regime. By some accounts, it worked all too well, serving as the prototype for the legendary Gulag system. At the outset of James L. May’s debut novel, The Body Outside the Kremlin, Tolya Bogomolov is serving time at Solovetsky for possession of forbidden books. Quick of mind and well-versed in novels of detection, Tolya is something of a natural when it comes to assisting in the investigation of a fellow prisoner’s murder. Two bonuses: 1) Whatever time Tolya spends sleuthing is time he doesn’t have to engage in hard labor, and 2) he is a potential suspect, so assisting the investigator will deflect some of the suspicion. In the days before Solovetsky housed a prison, the island was home to a monastery that held some very rare and valuable Russian Orthodox icons, which the murder victim was in the process of restoring. Some of those icons were rumored to have fallen into the hands of the secret police, which is not a group anyone would choose to cultivate as an adversary. That choice may have been made for Tolya without his consent. Historical, atmospheric (in a frigid sort of way) and exceptionally well-written, The Body Outside the Kremlin is a first-rate debut.

The Decent Inn of Death
World War II has just ended, and a pair of retired Scotland Yard policemen with decades of experience under their belts and plenty of time on their hands investigates a mysterious death in Rennie Airth’s The Decent Inn of Death. It all starts out innocently enough, when former chief inspector Angus Sinclair receives a last-minute invitation to the home of a friend. While there, he learns of the death of the church organist, Greta Hartmann, a German woman who apparently slipped on a rock while crossing a stream, hit her head and drowned. This explanation does not sit well with her housemate, however, and Sinclair is drawn into investigating the death. It seems that a recent encounter with a stranded motorist had left Greta shaken. It’s possible that she had recognized an escaped German war criminal and, worse yet, that he recognized her as well. Later in the narrative, series linchpin John Madden shows up, as does a blinding snowstorm, at which point an English manor house becomes the scene of a locked-room murder mystery that rivals the best of Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell or P.D. James.

★ Facets of Death
Botswana police Detective David Bengu is more commonly known by his nickname, Kubu, which is Setswana for “hippopotamus,” in a nod to his plus-size dimensions. In the latest adventure from the writing team known as Michael Stanley, the portly policeman finds himself in hot pursuit of a gang of diamond thieves who engineered a devilishly clever, broad-daylight heist. Three trucks left the diamond mine at Jwaneng, each carrying a locked box. One of the boxes contained diamonds and the other two only pebbles in an attempt to confuse any potential hijackers. To say that it didn’t work would be a monumental understatement. The diamond truck was quickly identified and hijacked, while the other two made it to their destination unimpeded. Kubu quickly arrives at the conclusion that the robbery could not have been pulled off without the assistance of an insider, but that line of reasoning leads to dead end after dead end (literally more than figuratively), as one by one the likeliest perpetrators die off violently. But where are the diamonds? A fabulous test of Kubu’s legendary deductive talents, Facets of Death is easily one of the best heist novels I’ve read since Gerald Browne’s classic 11 Harrowhouse.