Bruce Tierney

February's hottest mystery releases include the latest historical from mother-son writing duo Charles Todd, bestselling British writer Sophie Hannah and more.

★ A Divided Loyalty

Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Ian Rutledge, the central character of the wildly popular series by mother-and-son writing duo Charles Todd, embarks on his 22nd adventure in A Divided Loyalty. A murder victim has been discovered in the center of a stone circle. Another officer was originally assigned to investigate, but Rutledge is deployed to reopen the case after he successfully completes a separate investigation displaying some similarities to the stone-circle murder. The deeper Rutledge becomes involved in the investigation, the more likely it looks that a fellow officer was the perpetrator. Rutledge finds this troubling not only from a public relations perspective but also because he respects and likes the officer in question. But the evidence is damning and proceeds to become more so with each passing day. Rutledge is one of the most complicated and finely drawn characters in contemporary crime fiction. Suffering from shell shock after his experiences in World War I, he carries on regular conversations with a dead soldier from his command, a man who disobeyed orders while under fire and was executed by Rutledge for his disobedience. There’s not a weak episode to be found in Todd’s terrific series.

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Perfect Little Children

Picture this: You haven’t seen your friend Flora in a dozen years, nor her husband, Lewis, nor their kids, Emily and Thomas. Then, almost as if by accident, you see her step out of her silver Range Rover, and she looks exactly the same, no sign of aging whatsoever. OK, that could happen. Diet, exercise, perhaps a little nip-and-tuck surgery—those could do the trick. But then her kids step out of the car as well, and you overhear Flora speak to them: “Oh, well done, Emily. That’s kind. Say thank you, Thomas.” But the thing is, Emily and Thomas should be teenagers by now, and these children are preschoolers. This is the situation faced by Beth Leeson in Sophie Hannah’s latest thriller, Perfect Little Children, and she cannot wrap her mind around it. So she does what any red-blooded suspense heroine would do—she noses around a bit. And then a bit more. And with each new piece of information she acquires, she becomes more convinced that there is a crime to be uncovered, and that her former friend may be in mortal danger. This notion begins to border on obsession, and the reader gets to watch as it becomes more and more deeply rooted. So what on earth is going on? Genetic age manipulation? Some strange, dark mind game? Or is Beth simply losing her marbles, one by one? Whatever the case, this is another satisfying psycho-thriller from the queen of the genre.

Alone in the Wild

Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton series continues in Alone in the Wild. Deep in the Yukon Mountains, the totally off-the-grid town of Rockton is a perfect escape for criminals and battered spouses alike. After being accepted by the council and paying a hefty fee, new residents say goodbye to any communication (electronic or otherwise) with the outside world. There’s only one firm rule in place: no townspeople under the age of 18. So when Detective Casey Duncan and her partner in both work and romance, Eric Dalton, stumble upon a murdered woman holding a barely alive baby, they feel no small measure of consternation about what to do with the child while launching an investigation into the murder. The denizens of Rockton are a motley crew and certainly not the preferred cross-section of society to be engaged in childcare. Armstrong has created a unique milieu for setting her suspense novels, which is no easy task nowadays. Read one, and you will want to read the rest.

The Good Killer

If you’re up for a first-rate page turner, look no further than Harry Dolan’s The Good Killer. Iraq vet Sean and his partner, Molly, have been living under the radar for years, harboring a virtually priceless secret and trying to remain invisible to a pair of dangerous enemies. Then, by sheer unfortunate happenstance, Sean uses his military training to take down a spree killer in a Houston mall. Sean makes a fairly clean getaway, but his face and license plate number are captured by mall security cams, and he becomes something of a reluctant celebrity. Meanwhile, Molly is attending a yoga seminar in Montana, where she is required to surrender her cell phone and renounce all contact with the outside world. Sean has no choice but to drive there and collect her before anyone else can. He heads north in an aging Camry with a faulty alternator, woefully under-armored vis-à-vis the opposing teams. The rest of the book is basically one long and harrowing chase scene, right up to the explosive climax. Block out sufficient time to read The Good Killer in one sitting. It’ll be hard to stop once you get started.

Remarkable protagonists and surprising settings make this collection of suspenseful stories stand out. 

★ The Shooting at Château Rock

Martin Walker’s wildly popular Bruno, Chief of Police series chronicles the adventures of Benoît “Bruno” Courrèges, chief of police of the fictional town of St. Denis in the Périgord region of southwestern France. Bruno loves horseback riding, basset hounds, truffles, fine wines, gourmet cooking, rugby and beautiful women, not necessarily in that order. In The Shooting at Château Rock, the affable but diligent policeman finds himself on the trail of some pretty nasty killers who are possibly connected to the Putin administration in Russia. Two parallel but interconnected real estate deals anchor the plot, one of them centered on a retirement village that is inexplicably bleeding thousands of euros every month, the other involving the palatial home of a former rock star whose son is enamored of a young Russian flautist with more than a passing connection to the aforementioned killers. Those who have read this column for a while know that Martin Walker’s books get reviewed often. This is because: a) they are consistently excellent; b) I really want to know Bruno, to eat at his dinner table with his charming and entertaining guests, to play fetch with his basset hound, Balzac; and c) I really want to be Bruno.

The Fire Thief

When the body of a teenage boy turns up on a lava beach in Maui, the initial assumption is that he had a surfing accident. That assumption is laid to rest after a shark’s tooth is discovered in the boy’s skull. It is quickly determined that the tooth is not there as a result of bad dental hygiene on the part of a sea predator. The boy was bludgeoned to death by an ancient Hawaiian war club, or a modern reproduction thereof, lined with shark’s teeth at the business end. The arrival of Detective Kali Ma¯hoe on the scene foreshadows one of the most compelling meldings of mystery and mythology since Tony Hillerman first put pen to paper in the Leaphorn and Chee series. As sightings of a legendary and malevolent faceless spirit mount, Kali must question her own long-held beliefs while remaining rooted in modern police procedures. Debra Bokur’s page-turning debut novel, The Fire Thief, covers all the bases I need in a mystery: individualistic lead, check; Hercule Poirot-level detection skills, check; plot-driven narrative that does not neglect other stylistic elements, check. It earns bonus points for depicting a lovely palm-ringed island destination, warts and all (high crime rate, the endless enmity of the haves and the have-nots). Even paradise has a seamy underbelly.

Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery

The summer of 1967 was the Summer of Love. If you were straight, it was a year promising unfettered experiences of the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll variety. If you were gay, however, you could be fired or evicted (or worse) if outed. The clubs you visited would routinely get raided. And so it comes to pass that lesbian ex-CIA agent Vera Kelly loses her lover and her job on the very same day. She isn’t going to get any sort of job reference, so after evaluating her highly particular skill set, she opts to open a private investigation agency in Rosalie Knecht’s second Vera Kelly book, Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery. Most callers assume Vera is the secretary; when they find out she is the lead (and sole) investigator, they hang up. But just as her financial situation is getting dire, she lands a client—a Dominican couple hoping to track down their missing nephew, the scion of a prominent Santo Domingo family. Vera bounces between the Big Apple and the Caribbean in search of answers, always staying one step ahead of the bad guys. And maybe, if she is lucky, she will save the life of a desperately ill child who has, up to now, been a pawn in a deadly political chess game. Knecht’s stylish mystery is impossible to put down and just begging for a third installment.

What You Don’t See

Cass Raines was once one of the few African American women on the Chicago police force, before she hung out her shingle as a private investigator. In Tracy Clark’s latest mystery, What You Don’t See, the take-no-guff PI finds herself serving as bodyguard/babysitter to Vonda Allen, a spoiled and decidedly annoying magazine publisher who has been receiving graphic death threats. When Cass’ assignment partner, Ben Mickerson, is badly slashed by a mystery assailant while accompanying Vonda to a book signing, Cass must delve into the personal history of her client in a frantic endeavor to ferret out a killer before they can strike again. Complicating matters is the fact that Vonda displays no desire whatsoever to help out; it would appear that whatever secrets she is guarding are more important to her than whatever danger she may be in. Subplots abound, as they do in real life, and Clark works them in smoothly, lending interesting, everyday challenges to a narrative that already has no shortage of excitement.

A detective finds himself in the crosshairs of danger in T. Jefferson Parker's latest mystery, one of four August standouts.

★ Then She Vanished

There is a certain symmetry on display when an Iraq veteran working as a private investigator takes on a missing persons case for a brother-in-arms—semper fi and all that. Then She Vanished, T. Jefferson Parker’s fourth Roland Ford mystery, lodges the detective firmly in the crosshairs once again, as he discovers that his Republican war hero-turned-­politician client, Dalton Strait, is not nearly as squeaky clean as he is portrayed in his bio and that the disappearance of his wife, Natalie, is suspicious to say the least. And let’s throw in a brewing war between California’s recently established legal marijuana dispensaries and a south-of-the-­border drug cartel affected by this new order. Oh, and for good measure, add a bomber intent on sowing chaos and insurrection, who previews his next target on the nightly TV news and may be connected to Ford’s case. As told in the first person from Ford’s perspective, there is no contrived mystery to be found here. We find out what is happening as Ford connects the dots—and he is very good at connecting the dots. I’m not giving away the ending here at all, but on the last page there is a sweet nod to author John D. MacDonald and his beloved character Travis McGee, without whom an entire generation of modern suspense novelists would have had no archetype.

He Started It

One of the funniest memories of my childhood was a fight with my younger brother that was brought to a halt summarily by our mother, who asked angrily, “What’s the problem here?” My brother’s classic response: “It all started when Bruce hit me back . . .” So naturally, Samantha Downing’s He Started It was a shoo-in. Narrated in the first person by middle child Beth Morgan, the tale opens with a family trip to carry Grandpa’s ashes to their final resting place. But this is no ordinary family in an SUV on a nameless Alabama highway. This family bears most of the dis- and dys- prefixes you might care to apply: disturbed, disjointed and most decidedly dysfunctional. Their deceased grandpa, for his part, has added to the chaos by leaving a vast estate to be divvied up among the siblings after they have re-­created a road trip they took with him when they were kids. Dutifully, and each with an eye on the prize, they make their way westward through the South. Then, as they are wont to do in suspense novels, things go remarkably sideways remarkably quickly, and at least one family member appears to be a killer. And who the heck is that guy in the black pickup truck that keeps turning up at the most inopportune moments?

Under Pressure

I reviewed Robert Pobi’s first Lucas Page novel, City of Windows, exactly one year ago. In that book, the double amputee ex-FBI agent found himself drafted back into service to unravel a series of sniper killings. He was the perfect choice for the assignment, given his exceptional talent for processing information and considering bits and bytes of intelligence that lesser detectives might overlook. In his latest adventure, Under Pressure, Lucas is called upon to investigate an unusual bombing at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, in which 702 of the city’s wealthiest and most powerful people are killed, but there’s somehow remarkably little property damage. Lucas is a reluctant draftee, having settled rather comfortably into academia after suffering grievous bodily harm during the tragic events that ended his FBI career. But if Lucas has a character flaw at all, it’s that he cannot resist a challenging puzzle. The bombing is confounding on several fronts, both in terms of methodology and intended target(s). Was the attack aimed at one of the attendees in particular? What type of bomb can even do such a thing? There’s no sophomore slump here. Pobi has seriously upped his game.

The Silence of the White City

Eva García Sáenz’s White City Trilogy, of which the first novel, The Silence of the White City, has just been translated into English, is already a bestseller in Spain (as well as the basis for a popular Netflix series). It’s set in the atmospheric Basque Country of northern Spain, in the city of Vitoria. As the story opens, Inspector Unai “Kraken” López de Ayala is summoned to the scene of a homicide reminiscent of a series of murders that took place 20 years before. The accused killer, a respected archaeologist, was apprehended thanks to evidence supplied by his twin brother, a policeman. The archaeologist has languished in prison ever since, becoming something of an armchair criminologist in the intervening years. Clearly, he cannot have committed this latest murder, so does that suggest that he was innocent of the earlier murders, that he had an accomplice who was never charged, or is there a contemporary copycat killer? In much the same way that Cara Black or Donna Leon portray Paris or Venice in their respective mystery series, Sáenz lovingly depicts a unique and fascinating city, weaving in Basque folklore and culture while spinning a very complex and rich story.

Get lost in a sensational German thriller, an Agatha Christie-esque historical mystery and more in October's best mysteries.

The Orphan’s Guilt

John Rust, by all accounts an amiable lush, has just been stopped (yet again) for erratic driving. This could be the ticket that costs him his driver’s license, so he hires a shrewd defense attorney. The defense is centered on extenuating circumstances, in that the defendant’s brother, who never recovered from a brain injury suffered in childhood, has just died. Rust was his brother’s only caregiver and, save for his battle with the bottle, is considered to be a saint by all who know him. The defense of a DUI might not seem like the sort of storyline that would engage a reader for several hundred pages. No worries on that count, though, because Archer Mayor’s The Orphan’s Guilt, the 31st installment in the popular series featuring Vermont homicide investigator Joe Gunther, explodes into an investigation of a decades-old corporate scam in which millions of dollars disappeared; the unearthing of a cold case of child abuse with modern-day ramifications; and a murder or two for good measure. All avid mystery readers know the old adage “follow the money.” You’ll need to be on your toes to follow the money this time, and what it leads to is downright lethal.

A Pretty Deceit

Anna Lee Huber’s fourth mystery featuring intrepid English intelligence agent Verity Kent, A Pretty Deceit, opens near a World War I battlefield in Bailleul, France. Still numb from the news of her husband’s death in combat, Verity delivers a message to a field commander and, moments later, the command post is hit by a mortar shell and blown to bits. In the next scene, she is blithely motoring in the Wiltshire countryside a year and a half later, riding shotgun in a new Pierce Arrow roadster expertly driven by her husband. Wait a minute. Um, didn’t he die? Turns out not; communications were not always accurate in those times, and thanks to that, Verity has a new lease on life. Her contentment will not last long, though. While visiting a titled auntie who has fallen on postwar hard times, Verity finds herself on hand for the immediate aftermath of what may be a homicide on the estate grounds. Combine that with priceless heirlooms gone missing, a disappeared staff and a ghost sighting or two, and you have the makings of a historical mystery to delight fans of Agatha Christie or Daphne du Maurier. 

Back Bay Blues

The first time readers met Andy Roark, in Peter Colt’s 1982-set noir thriller The Off-Islander, he was a cop. Not anymore. He is also no longer a soldier deployed to Vietnam, although he carries strong influences from both professions into his new gig as a private investigator. Three years have gone by since the events chronicled in The Off-Islander, and now Andy returns for his sophomore appearance in Back Bay Blues. Despite the passage of time, his connection to Vietnam has only grown stronger. He has befriended Vietnamese refugees in Boston who fled their country by sea after the fall of the South Vietnamese government. So it is natural for him to enter into the investigation of the murder of a Vietnamese journalist, Hieu, whose death has been dismissed by police as a mugging gone wrong. But Hieu’s associates strongly suspect that he was on the verge of exposing the criminal leanings of the powerful anti-Communist group known simply as the Committee, a move that is not (and in Hieu’s case, was not) conducive to long life. As Andy becomes more and more drawn into the case, he demonstrates to both himself and the reader that although you can take the man out of Vietnam, you cannot take Vietnam out of the man.

★ Dear Child

Fourteen years ago, Munich college student Lena Beck disappeared. Now she has apparently been found, having escaped the newly deceased madman who kept her under lock and key in a remote cabin along the Czech border. When her overjoyed father meets her at the hospital, however, he is shocked to discover that this woman is not his Lena. The woman’s young daughter who escaped the woods with her, however, is a dead ringer for Lena, and a hastily administered DNA test confirms that the child is indeed Lena’s daughter. So what happened to Lena? The investigation in Romy Hausmann’s debut thriller, Dear Child, which is already a sensation in her native Germany, moves along in fits and starts, jumping between the perspectives of the young girl, Hannah; the grieving father, Matthias; and the mysterious woman called Lena, who is not the Lena of happy endings, at least not for the Beck family. And the one person who could tie up these disparate and conflicting narratives is, well, dead on the cabin’s living room floor, his head bashed in by a snow globe. I didn’t even try to figure out whodunit. I just kept turning pages, wondering what the hell was going to happen until I had finished the book in one sitting, in the small-numbered hours of the late night.

Thomas Perry makes his long-awaited return to the acclaimed Butcher's Boy series in this month's Whodunit column.

Snowdrift

Nightmares about the abduction of her childhood best friend, Lollo, have bedeviled police officer Embla Nyström for half of her 28 years. One of those jarring nightmares opens Helene Tursten’s latest thriller, Snowdrift. The dreams always follow the same script: Three shadowy figures huddle over a curled-up Lollo, then one turns and spots Embla, bolts across the room and hisses menacingly, “Say a word to anyone, you’re dead.” Fourteen years pass with no word about Lollo, until Embla gets a phone call from her missing friend. The connection is quickly broken, however, with no further contact. After a fitful night’s sleep, Embla is summoned to the scene of a homicide. The victim turns out to be well known to her: It’s one of the three brothers she believes were responsible for Lollo’s abduction. Embla eagerly embarks on the investigation, though her goal is perhaps not so much to find the killer as to uncover some further trace of Lollo. It soon becomes a case of “be careful what you wish for. . . .” As always in Tursten’s books, the well-drawn characters and first-rate suspense provide fine examples of the dark delights of Scandinavian noir.

The Art of Violence

Cold open: A man walks up to a private investigator, accosts him with a gun and demands that the investigator prove the man’s guilt in a series of murders—not his innocence, note, but his guilt. Unusual request, but it makes some sense. Years back, after being slipped a strong hallucinogen, Sam Tabor killed a woman, stabbing her, by his count, “seven billion times.” Faced with the choice of a temporary insanity plea and an unspecified sentence to psychiatric lockdown, or a defined length of time in the slammer, Sam pleaded guilty and went to jail. Now he’s out, and he’s convinced that he’s killed again. The Art of Violence is the latest in S.J. Rozan’s excellent series featuring PI Bill Smith and his partner, Lydia Chin. I almost don’t want to say more; there are too many nuances and red herrings, and I don’t want to inadvertently give anything away. But here are a couple of freebies: The client is a well-known artist who is often described as “tormented,” the flavor of the month in the fickle Manhattan art milieu. A blackout alcoholic, he doesn’t remember killing anyone, but the crime scene “signature” is eerily evocative of his first crime.

Eddie’s Boy

Thomas Perry’s debut, The Butcher’s Boy, earned him the coveted Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel back in 1983. At the time, the book virtually defined a new subgenre of thriller: the “Hired Killer Summoned Out of Retirement by Someone Trying to Kill Him.” Eddie’s Boy, Perry’s latest novel, opens with not one but four would-be assassins trying—and failing miserably—to take out the Butcher’s Boy. Retired, and known these days as Michael Shaeffer, he is still savvy enough to know that if someone sent four trained killers, there will be more in the wings waiting for their turn. So he scoots from England to Australia, but it will not be far enough. Michael has one ace in the hole, though, in the form of a tenuous relationship with a Justice Department official who tips him off to the impending parole of a career criminal who once hired the Butcher’s Boy, then reneged on the payment. Soon afterward, our hero neatly framed him for a murder, watching as the innocent man (well, innocent of this killing at least) was carted off to jail. There’s a lot more backstory and a lot more innovative executions along the way as Michael tries to stop the attempts on his life. A new Butcher’s Boy book arrives only once every decade, if that, and this one is well worth the wait.

★ How to Raise an Elephant

Over the course of its 21-volume run, Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series has become one of the best-loved series in its genre. In some ways it is defined by what is absent: murders or essentially violence of any sort. But the tiny African country of Botswana holds its own in the suspense department, its small mysteries strangely compelling and never descending into treacly sweetness. In this latest outing, How to Raise an Elephant, our intrepid sleuth, Precious Ramotswe, must rescue—no surprise here—a newborn elephant left orphaned by poachers. Said little elephant has a mind of its own, with results both comedic (imagine a 300-pound baby pachyderm rolling around delightedly in the back of a minivan) and tragic, with a look into the cruelty of the ivory poaching trade. There’s also a noisy neighbor who angrily calls her philandering husband an “anteater”; a sketchy relative who will impart a life lesson we can all benefit from; and the ongoing adversarial relationship between Grace and Charlie, the two opinionated employees at Mma Ramotswe’s agency. I have read all of this wonderful series, reviewed most and wholeheartedly look forward to each and every one.

Some of the biggest names in the genre knock it out of the park, and one half of an acclaimed Scandi-noir writing team goes it alone in this month’s Whodunit column.

Serpentine

Cases don’t come much colder than the 36-year-old murder of Dorothy Swoboda, whose burned-beyond-recognition remains were found in a similarly scorched late-model Cadillac down a steep embankment off of Los Angeles’ serpentine Mulholland Drive, thus providing the title of Jonathan Kellerman’s excellent Serpentine. Now, all these years later, the case has been assigned to LAPD Lieutenant Milo Sturgis, who enlists consulting psychologist Alex Delaware as backup. Neither expects much to come of further investigation. The cops back in the day had their suspicions, but nothing panned out. Nowadays the case files are sketchy, and the best line of inquiry seems to be to interview some of the original investigating officers and witnesses and see what insights they might have had that never made it into the official case files. Only problem is, Milo finds that virtually everyone with any insight into the case has met an untimely death. There is no statute of limitations on murder, so it would appear that someone is doing his (or her) level best to stay one step ahead of this latest investigation, and in this case “level best” makes for a scorching good read.

Before She Disappeared

Lisa Gardner’s thriller Before She Disappeared introduces us to Frankie Elkin. For a time, Frankie struggled to find some purpose in her life, some reason to keep moving forward while in recovery for alcoholism. She discovered her niche as an advocate for missing persons, seeking out those who have disappeared, the unimportant, the hitherto forgotten. She does this on a volunteer basis, taking no payment, propelled along by a remarkable success rate, at least by one metric: She is very good at finding people. Unfortunately, the subjects of her searches routinely turn up quite dead. There is hope yet for her new case, however. Haitian teenager Angelique Badeau was a stellar and motivated student, intent on a career in medicine. Then, nothing. She disappeared nearly a year ago, leaving virtually no trace. As Frankie’s investigation progresses, it offers an up-close look into some of the issues that plague American society today—racism, antipathy toward immigrants and the trafficking of young women—while providing a blistering narrative and sympathetic characters (even an annoyingly endearing cat!). Before She Disappeared is billed as a standalone, but I’m thinking it would be the perfect setup for a terrific series.

Knock Knock

It’s likely that regular readers of this column are familiar with my gushing over mystery novels from Europe’s frozen north, a subgenre known as Scandinavian noir. After the death of his longtime writing partner Börge Hellström, Swedish writer Anders Roslund returns with Knock Knock, his first solo novel and the next installment of his and Hellström’s gripping series featuring police superintendent Ewert Grens and undercover informant Piet Hoffman. Every cop has one nagging case that they were unable to solve, a case that remains within their being, waiting for some kind of closure. For Ewert, it was the murder of a family 17 years ago in which only a 5-year-old girl was spared, although she was unable to yield any usable clues to the killings. Now there has been a break-in at the same apartment, and Ewert, who is on the verge of retirement, would like nothing more than to see this case resolved before he rides off into the sunset. Meanwhile, Piet, having been outed as an informant, is being blackmailed by lethal munitions brokers, his family threatened to the point that they must go into hiding. Roslund cleverly interlaces these two disparate storylines, and readers will marvel at just how much action can take place in a period spanning only three days. Knock Knock has handily reaffirmed all my Scandi-noir gushing.

★ Blood Grove

It is a fair bet that if Walter Mosley has a book coming out during any given month, a) it will get reviewed here, and b) there’s an excellent chance it will be the best mystery of that month. Case in point: his latest, Blood Grove. Private detective Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is nudging 50 years of age in this novel, which is set in late-1960s Los Angeles. The Vietnam War has taken its toll on the nation. Hippies are tuning in, turning on, dropping out. Racism is rampant. And in the middle of this uneasy milieu, Easy gets approached by a vet suffering from what we now call PTSD. The vet spins an incredible story: He went to the aid of a screaming woman in distress at a remote hilltop cabin, stabbed her attacker and then lapsed into unconsciousness. When he awoke, there was no woman, no stabbed man, really no indication whatsoever that any of his memories were anything more than a hallucination. Nothing is quite what it seems in this place, in this time, in this book. Lurking just beneath the surface are a heist gone bad, a gangster or three on the vengeance trail and a trio of lethal ladies. And there are all manner of ’60s cultural references, from Lucky Strike cigarettes to Edsel cars to free-love clubs—not to mention a character who bears more than a passing resemblance to real-life record producer Terry Melcher, who was briefly associated with Charles Manson. I read it all in one sitting, as I just could not stop turning the pages.