Bruce Tierney

Part suspense tale, part Joy Luck Club and part Sophie’s Choice, The Devil of Nanking is a lyrical novel in which secrets foreshadow the undoing of their bearers, and exposure of the secrets offers redemption. History, folklore and ancient taboos are interwoven seamlessly with the modern-day mystery, which begins when Grey, a young Englishwoman, arrives penniless in Tokyo, nursing a major obsession. Grey, of course, is not her real name. She acquired it from a bedmate at a hospital some years before: “I was grey. Thin and white and a little bit see-through. Nothing at all left alive in me. A ghost.” A ghost with an obsession, however: a scholar’s urge to acquire a rare bit of film footage from the 1937 Nanking massacre.

Before the beginning of World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army had invaded China. By winter of 1937, the army had reached Nanking. The atrocities were unspeakable; by some accounts more than 400,000 Chinese were murdered, piled in a mountain of corpses at the city’s edge. More than five decades have passed, but Grey feels that the key to her search lies with Dr. Shi Chongming, a guest lecturer at Todai University in Tokyo, who had been a resident of Nanking at the time of the massacre. In between meetings with the standoffish professor, Grey must find a way to make some quick money, so she accepts a job as a hostess at a trendy Tokyo nightspot. Here she meets an elderly yakuza, a man with a terrible secret. Grey is no stranger to terrible secrets herself, and she is about to uncover yet another with the help of the inscrutable Dr. Chongming.

By way of warning, this is a disturbing book, and there are scenes of graphic (but in no way gratuitous) violence which are necessary to portray such horrific events. By any measure, The Devil of Nanking is a novel that resonates long after the last page has been turned.

Many of you will be familiar with Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire via television rather than books, but as is often the case, the books have nuance and detail that are difficult to replicate on screen. In Craig Johnson’s latest Longmire novel, Land of Wolves, the stalwart lawman is back in Wyoming after a south-of-the-border hunting expedition. In the nearby Bighorn Mountains, a wolf has apparently killed a sheep, which doesn’t seem especially unusual in the Wild West. However, tensions ratchet up considerably when the shepherd is found hanged, his dangling feet savaged by a wild animal, most likely the aforementioned wolf. Johnson uses this as a jumping-off point for broad-ranging discussions about wolves, the history of sheep ranching, the use of open rangelands and other social and ecological issues of the contemporary West. But there is no hint of a textbook in Johnson’s voice. Instead, it’s rather like hearing a modern Old West story told by a favorite uncle, one who fills in the little details that bring immediacy and life to a suspenseful narrative.

Attica Locke’s atmospheric thriller Heaven, My Home takes place in the northeastern Texas town of Jefferson, a once-prosperous trading center fallen on hard times (“the city square was like a courtesan who’d found Jesus”). Texas Ranger Darren Matthews investigates the disappearance of a 9-year-old boy who didn’t return from a solo boating adventure on nearby Caddo Lake. The missing boy is the son of Aryan Brotherhood leader Bill King, a convicted and incarcerated murderer. Jefferson was one of the first settlements composed primarily of freed slaves, in addition to a band of Native Americans who successfully dodged the wholesale relocation of tribes to Oklahoma during the U.S. westward expansion. The town is now home to their descendants. Add those aforementioned white supremacists into the mix, and the town becomes a veritable powder keg awaiting a spark—such as a black land­owner whose animosity toward his bigoted tenants is well documented, and who is the last person to have seen the missing boy. Few suspense novelists display a better grip of political and racial divides than Attica Locke, and she spins a hell of a good story as well, introducing characters and locales you will want to visit again and again.

Inspector Konrad Sejer returns in Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s stark and oh-so-dark The Whisperer. The titular whisperer is Ragna Riegel, whose vocal cords were damaged in a botched operation, rendering her unable to speak in anything but the most hushed of tones. The surgery is just one in a series of unhappy life events that have left Ragna something of a recluse, her day-to-day existence repetitive and boring—that is, until she receives an anonymous and succinct death threat: “You are going to die.” At first, the police are somewhat lackadaisical in their response, treating the incident as little more than a prank. But as follow-up messages arrive, Sejer finds sufficient cause to launch an investigation, if not for the reasons Ragna might have preferred—he is suspicious that Ragna is in fact the perpetrator of a crime, and not a victim at all. Sympathetic by nature, Sejer nonetheless chips away at Ragna’s facade in the hope of exposing her crime, all the while finding himself moved by the loneliness and grief of her life. Fossum excels at this sort of psychological suspense, and as such, she is one of the leading lights of the Scandinavian whodunit genre. 

Has anyone ever gotten an unexpected late-night call that didn’t immediately kickstart their anxiety? In the case of Ohio PI Roxane Weary, protagonist of Kristen Lepionka’s The Stories You Tell, the caller is her brother Andrew. The last time he’d called in the middle of the night had been to tell her that their father had died. This time doesn’t appear to be as dire, at least at first blush. A distraught former fling, Addison, had shown up at Andrew’s apartment and then disappeared, leaving behind only the record of a brief phone call and a deep scratch on Andrew’s neck from when he grabbed her arm in an attempt to keep her from running off into the cold night. But when Addison doesn’t turn up the next day, or the day after that, her family and friends begin to get worried, the authorities get summoned, and Andrew is on the hook as the last person to have seen her, the wound on his neck taking on ominous overtones. But from here it gets complicated—and moves from complicated to lethal in very short order. Roxane is easily one of the edgiest and most deeply flawed suspense heroines since Robert Eversz’s Nina Zero. Read this one, and you’ll soon be perusing the bookstore shelves for the previous two books in the series.