Bruce Tierney

Things aren't what they appear in some of this month's best mysteries—plus, a tale of murder during Hollywood's golden age.

Lightseekers

Many Nigerian-set suspense novels have riffed on the money scams perpetrated on gullible retirees abroad. Not so for Femi Kayode’s thriller Lightseekers, which centers the religious and class violence of Africa’s wealthiest country. Investigative psychologist Dr. Philip Taiwo, who has recently returned to his homeland after a stint in the United States, is hired to find out who murdered the son of a prominent local businessman. The assignment is a bit out of his wheelhouse, as he is much more comfortable theorizing about crime than taking part in a hands-on investigation. Plus, arrests have been made, and there is evidence galore, so Philip frankly doesn’t see what he can add to the investigation. That said, he is under a certain amount of pressure from the victim’s family, and there is a paycheck involved, so he unenthusiastically signs on. He is aided in his efforts by some unlikely sidekicks: a driver who is much savvier than one might expect; a vampishly beautiful attorney who causes Philip to question his marital vows; and a harried police chief, initially recalcitrant until Philip turns up evidence too compelling to ignore. The milieu is drawn especially well, which is unsurprising given that Kayode trained as a clinical psychologist in Nigeria. Steam-bath humidity, sizzling yams, road dust in every breath, danger lurking around every corner—welcome to Kayode’s Nigeria.

Nighthawking

The title of Russ Thomas’ latest thriller, Nighthawking, refers to a practice not dissimilar to grave-robbing—clandestine late-night metal detecting and potential plundering at archaeological sites, cemeteries or other locations of historical interest. One particular nighthawker got a bit more than he bargained for this time around: A foray into the Sheffield Botanical Garden in search of buried treasure instead turned up the body of a young woman, a stabbing victim, her eyes covered with a pair of coins from ancient Rome. It falls to Detective Sergeant Adam Tyler and his protégé, Detective Constable Mina Rabbani, to investigate. The case gains international implications when it is discovered that the victim was a botany student from a prominent Chinese family, and that her life in the U.K. was not what it seemed to be. Tyler and Rabbani are an interesting pair: He is gay, she is Muslim, both are relative outsiders with respect to the insular world of Yorkshire policing, and both routinely suffer the slings and arrows of innuendo. Nighthawking is their second adventure together, after last year’s Firewatching (also a terrific read), and I hope there will be many more to come. 

Smoke

Smoke, Joe Ide’s latest mystery featuring quixotic brainiac Isaiah Quintabe, finds our hero far afield from his Long Beach, California, home. He has disappeared into the unfamiliar wilds of the Golden State’s mountainous north, on the lam from more than one person who would like to see him dead. At other points in his career, he probably would have stayed to duke it out with the bad guys, but he has fallen in love and doesn’t want to risk putting his sweetheart in harm’s way. Isaiah’s once-sidekick, Juanell Dodson, assumes a larger role in Smoke than in earlier novels as he tries to leave his dangerous former career behind in a bid to save his marriage. Dodson holds down the SoCal part of the narrative as the street hustler reluctantly morphs into an ad agency account exec, while Isaiah becomes embroiled in the more perilous pursuit of a serial killer, drawn into the case by a none-too-stable escapee from a psychiatric hospital. Isaiah is something of a sucker for a person in need who presents him with a good story, and this story is perhaps the most intriguing he has come across to date. 

★ Windhall

Windhall by Ava Barry spins the tale of a modern-day copycat murder that echoes the high-profile slaying of a Hollywood movie star in 1948, at the beginning of the end of the golden age of Hollywood. The star in question, Eleanor Hayes, was found badly disfigured and quite dead in the garden of Windhall, the estate of film director Theo Langley, after a party that would have been regarded as legendary even if it hadn’t featured such a macabre coda. Initially, Theo looked pretty good for the murder—Eleanor had stopped showing up to work on his latest movie and seemed terrified of something—but as the investigation wore on, the so-called evidence became less compelling, and finally charges were dropped. Theo disappeared from view for decades. Although from time to time there were reported sightings from far afield, there was never much in the way of corroboration, and his story took its rightful place in Hollywood lore, one of the great unsolved mysteries of the golden age. The present-day murder piques the interest of investigative journalist Max Hailey, who is somewhat obsessed with Windhall and its closely guarded secrets. For years he has suspected that Theo was guilty, and when it turns out that the director has mysteriously returned to Windhall just in time for the new murder, it all seems a bit too preposterous to be simple coincidence. Windhall is Barry’s first novel, and it is one heck of a debut. She nails her protagonist’s first-person voice and vividly channels the Hollywood vernacular and vibe both past and present. 

Two 1940s-set mysteries, a striking new series and a real doozy of a final twist await you in this month’s Whodunit column.

A Gambling Man

To be known by only one name lends a certain je ne sais quoi to the stature of a hard-boiled PI. It has worked well for Andrew Vachss’ dark avenger Burke and Robert B. Parker’s sybaritic strongman Spenser, and it works just fine for David Baldacci’s mononymous sleuth Archer. It doesn’t hurt that Archer’s second outing, the 1949-set A Gambling Man, takes place during the gumshoe golden age, when men smoked “Luckies,” drove luxurious European roadsters and were pursued by women of rapier wit. Archer is an ex-con, so some shenanigans are required to obtain a license to ply his trade in his new home of California. The ink isn’t even dry on said license before he’s assigned his first case, an extortion attempt on a mayoral candidate in the seaside community of Bay Town. Then an alluring chanteuse who was connected to the case is brutally murdered. It will not be the last death to rock Bay Town, and the newly minted PI’s mettle will truly be tested. Baldacci establishes bona fides for this historical mystery with great delicacy, deftly navigating the cliche minefield and giving his readers a sense of the milieu without drowning them in minutiae. He delivers a cracking good suspense novel in the process.

Thief of Souls

Brian Klingborg’s Thief of Souls features one of the best opening sentences I have ever read in a mystery: “On the night the young woman’s corpse is discovered, hollowed out like a birchbark canoe, Inspector Lu Fei sits alone in the Red Lotus bar, determined to get gloriously drunk.” Lu Fei is a deputy police chief in Raven Valley, a backwater township in northeast China, close to the North Korean border. Not much happens in Raven Valley as a rule, but that somnolence is about to be upended. Almost immediately after the victim is discovered, a suspect is identified: a wannabe boyfriend whose phone yields surreptitious photos of the young woman and whose job in a meatpacking plant would afford him access to the sort of surgical knife that was used to eviscerate her. The city police officer called in to take over the investigation wants a quick solution to the case and is perfectly willing to let the “boyfriend” fill that bill. But Lu has doubts, and he conducts a quiet side investigation that turns up additional unsolved killings with the same modus operandi. Politics and turf wars ensue as Klingborg, who has lived and worked in Asia, peppers the story with narrative detours into Chinese history and pertinent commentary from the likes of Confucius, Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese philosophical luminaries. This auspicious mystery begs for a sequel. Please let it be soon. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Brian Klingborg on why modern China is the perfect setting for a mystery.

A Peculiar Combination

The title of Ashley Weaver’s series starter, A Peculiar Combination, is a sly reference to the main character’s occupation as an opener of locked boxes—and more specifically, locked boxes that do not belong to her. Set in London during World War II, the novel opens as Electra McDonnell, safecracker extraordinaire, and her mentor, Uncle Mick, get nabbed in a sting operation set up by a British spy agency. They’ll be given a Get Out of Jail Free card if they participate in a government-sanctioned safe heist in which some phony sensitive papers will be substituted for the real documents, thus misleading the Nazis. It all goes hopelessly awry when they arrive at the scene of the would-be crime and discover the safe is wide open, its owner dead on the floor. In the wake of this failure, Electra finds herself in the unusual (for her) position of wanting to see the operation through to its conclusion, even though she’s been freed from her contract with the government. In for a penny, in for a pound and all that. It’s a lighter read than many a mystery with the same setting, but A Peculiar Combination delivers the requisite suspense and misdirection that will keep the hard-boiled crowd on board as well.

★ The Final Twist

Jeffery Deaver’s The Final Twist lives up to its name admirably, even delivering said twist on the very last page of the book. (Don’t cheat by looking at the ending.) Main character Colter Shaw could scarcely be more different from Deaver’s famous sleuth, the brilliant forensic consultant Lincoln Rhyme. Colter is a mountaineer and a survivalist; he’s action-oriented where Rhyme is cerebral. And unlike Rhyme, who works closely with law enforcement, if Colter has to bend the law to serve his ends, he will do it without remorse. He supports himself by finding missing people and collecting the reward money. His life’s mission, however, is finishing his father’s work and destroying BlackBridge, a mercenary corporation that has been distributing drugs in a San Francisco neighborhood to drive down property values so they can swoop in and purchase tracts for pennies on the dollar. Shaw strongly suspects that BlackBridge had a hand in his father’s “accidental” death, and he means to dispense some Old West justice once he finds out the truth. A couple of subplots, one involving Colter’s long-lost brother and another centered on a legal document from a century ago that may have a breathtaking impact on modern-day California politics, flesh out the narrative, distracting the reader until Deaver wallops them with the shocking final page. 

Would you rather wake up next to a corpse or find out that your best friend might be a serial killer?

Lie Beside Me

The two faces of Louise are as follows: Sober Louise is a classical harpist, insecure, mousy and willing to go along to get along. Drunk Louise is a whole other story. She’s flirtatious, physical (both amorously and pugilistically) and something of a tabula rasa the following morning. And so it is when she wakes up next to the corpse in her bed, the sheets tacky with drying blood. Any idea who the dead man is or how he got there? Nope and nope. Although Gytha Lodge’s Lie Beside Me is nominally a police procedural, much of the narrative is delivered in the first person by Louise, who is arguably not the person best positioned to offer an unbiased account. As Louise rehashes memories and attempts to fill in her blank spaces, the story also follows the investigators and forensics team who are putting their case together and beginning to single out Louise as the prime suspect. But the case will become a fair bit more complicated before its resolution, and another decent suspect or two will present themselves. Lie Beside Me is clever, entertaining and peppered with the sorts of twists and turns that routinely propel suspense novels to the top of bestseller lists the world over.

One Half Truth

In Eva Dolan’s sixth entry in her cracking good Zigic and Ferreira series, One Half Truth, Detective Inspector Zigic and Detective Sergeant Ferreira are called upon to investigate the apparent execution of Jordan Radley, a young journalist who was shot at close range and left by the roadside. It bears the hallmarks of a gang-related slaying, but further investigation suggests that Jordan had been working on some sort of exposé, subject matter unknown due to the fact that someone, presumably the murderer, broke into Jordan’s home and made off with his laptop, phone and anything else that might provide a clue. What Zigic and Ferreira do know is that Jordan was researching the now-defunct Greenaway Engineering company; his article was presumably going to take a critical look at the devastating effects of its closure on the community. And now, seemingly everywhere the police look, the ghost of Greenaway looms large. This series’ central investigative team has morphed over the course of six books, with personalities and relationships changing and growing as one might expect in real life. That said, each book is a true standalone volume, with backstory provided where needed. Dolan’s style is evocative of Mark Billingham or Peter Robinson. One Half Truth is a no-nonsense police procedural with purposeful plotting, compelling characters and the requisite twist or two to keep the reader guessing.

We Were Never Here

In the mood for an eerie psychological thriller? Look no further than Andrea Bartz’s We Were Never Here. Meet Emily and Kristen, longtime friends who live halfway around the world from one another. Emily’s in Milwaukee, Kristen’s in Australia, but they meet annually for a girls trip to far-flung ports o’call: Vietnam, Uganda, Cambodia and, this year, a trip through the mountains and valleys of central Chile. The first two trips were idyllic, but things went sideways in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, when Emily was assaulted by a sadistic South African backpacker. Kristen came to her rescue, brandishing a handy floor lamp like a Louisville Slugger and connecting squarely with the attacker’s head to land an instant death blow. The police were never called because the two women were terrified by perennial horror stories of being locked up abroad. After a year of nightmares, Emily has more or less recovered her equilibrium. But now, the unthinkable: History repeats itself in Chile, and another backpacker lies dead on another hotel room floor at the hands of Kristen. Creepy, right? It’s about to get creepier. When Kristen suddenly moves back to Milwaukee, their relationship begins to show more cracks. The further Emily withdraws, the more obsessive Kristen becomes. And then things go very dark indeed. Of all the books I have read recently, this is the one that has “film adaptation” writ large upon it, with alluring locales, Hitchcockian tension and possibly the best pair of female leads since Thelma and Louise.

★ Moon Lake

Joe R. Lansdale has long been on my “must read ASAP (as soon as published)” list. His latest, Moon Lake, is a standalone thriller, although there is wiggle room for a series should readers demand it. Back in the 1960s, the East Texas town of Long Lincoln was intentionally submerged into Moon Lake, its residents moved to higher ground. Daniel Russell was a teenager at the time, with a ne’er-do-well father and a mother who’d recently gone missing. One night, Daniel’s father inexplicably bundled him into the family Buick and deliberately jumped a bridge guardrail, plunging the car into Moon Lake. Daniel barely survived, and his father and the car disappeared. Ten years later, Daniel receives news that the Buick has been located, along with his father’s remains and some unidentified bones in the trunk of the car. Those bones may well be his mother, who has still never been found, so Daniel returns to Long Lincoln to claim his father’s remains and to research his family’s disturbing history. When his questions intrude on the nefarious doings of the town’s elite, Daniel quickly becomes persona non grata, and it appears likely that he is destined for a second plunge into Moon Lake. Lansdale nails the storyline, nails the suspense, seriously nails the dialogue and has created yet another character worthy of a series.

Louise Penny has somehow outdone herself again with her latest Inspector Gamache mystery.

My Sweet Girl

Sri Lankan writer Amanda Jayatissa’s debut, My Sweet Girl, is a dark thriller of international deceit and murder, narrated in alternating chapters by 12-year-old Paloma, who is adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage by a wealthy American couple, and her adult self 18 years later. The Paloma of the present day is estranged from her parents and haunted by hallucinations (or are they?) of a strange woman who eats the faces of beautiful young girls. One evening, Paloma returns to her apartment and finds her roommate brutally murdered, after which she flees the scene and gets blackout drunk. By the time the police arrive, the scene has been sanitized, leaving no trace of any such killing, but how can that be? Paloma doesn’t know, and neither do we. As the story unfolds, the reader begins to recognize incongruities between the younger and older Palomas, incongruities that are not easily reconcilable and are increasingly unsettling. I thought I had twigged to the ending before the Big Reveal, and I was quite proud of myself. But I was way wrong. I love it when that happens.

Road of Bones

September, 1944. As James R. Benn’s 16th Billy Boyle novel, Road of Bones, opens, the U.S. Army investigator is hitching a ride to Ukraine aboard a B-17 bomber. And then all hell breaks loose: German fighter planes drive the bombers into ground fire range, and one by one the American airplanes fall, including the one carrying Billy’s friend, Big Mike Miecznikowski. Some of those aboard the disabled bomber parachute to an unknown fate below, but it is not clear whether Big Mike is among them. Billy’s airplane makes it safely through to Poltava air base in Ukraine, where he has been tapped to investigate the murder of a pair of soldiers, one Russian, one American. If the Russians have their way, it will be an American taking the fall. Optics are everything, right? Billy must balance his investigation with his personal need to learn the fate of his friend and also somehow placate the Russians at every turn—no mean feat. A fascinating subplot has Billy encountering the Night Witches, an all-female band of Russian fighter pilots who took stealth bombing to a new level by turning off their engines as they approached their targets, silently gliding in to deliver their deadly payloads. As always, Benn covers all his bases with a taut narrative, relatable characters and crisp dialogue. Road of Bones is another superlative installment in the best World War II mystery series on offer.

The Darkness Knows

Thirty years ago, a Reykjavik businessman named Sigurvin disappeared. A suspect, Hjaltalín, was arrested at the time but later released for lack of evidence. Now, thanks to climate change, the melting of an Icelandic glacier has exposed Sigurvin’s frozen body (surely the textbook definition of a “cold case”). Arnaldur Indridason’s latest novel, The Darkness Knows, finds retired police detective Konrád, the original investigator on the case, at loose ends. He has never entirely recovered from the death of his wife, and truth be told, he is somewhat bored with life nowadays. Konrád’s initial mandate is simply to re-interview Hjaltalín, who is now incarcerated for a different crime, but he continues to maintain his innocence. Konrád has no official standing, but the case nagged at him when he first worked on it, and he finds it beginning to nag at him once again. So he launches what is essentially a private citizen’s investigation, stripped of most of the tools of his trade. It is slow going, as might be expected of a decades-old case, and Konrád is not as spry as he once was. So if you are looking for explosive action and edge-of-the-seat suspense, it would be best to look elsewhere. The Darkness Knows is slowly and deliberately plotted. No stone is left unturned; indeed, no stone is left undescribed. But Indridason is a consummate storyteller, one of the cream of the Nordic noir crop, and if methodical police procedurals are your thing, you have come to the right place.

★ The Madness of Crowds

The Madness of Crowds is Louise Penny’s 17th novel featuring Sûreté du Québec Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. The chief inspector is well known among his compatriots and readers alike for staring down ethical dilemmas, and this time he is facing a real conundrum. In Gamache’s Canada, there is a growing (or festering, depending on your viewpoint) movement dedicated to the idea of withholding care or outright euthanizing older and disabled people in order to preserve valuable resources for those likely to have better outcomes. The de facto leader of the movement is professor Abigail Robinson, a statistician whose numbers are more on target than her morality. The argument has polarized Canadians to the point of violence, and it falls to Gamache to provide security for Professor Robinson as she speaks to an unruly crowd of both supporters and naysayers. Gunshots ring out, and Gamache secures his charge, preventing tragedy. But then the professor’s assistant is brutally bludgeoned to death shortly afterward, in what was perhaps a case of mistaken identity. Gamache has personal feelings about this ethical dilemma, as one of his grandchildren has Down syndrome and would be affected if the laws that Robinson advocates for were implemented. Gamache’s decision to afford protection to a constituent who, even theoretically, threatens a family member isn’t one he takes lightly. The Madness of Crowds is not an easy read by any means, but it’s easily one of the best mystery novels (or novels of any genre) in recent memory.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Robert Bathurst narrates the audiobook edition of The Madness of Crowds.