Bruce Tierney

Top Pick in Mystery, October 2018

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.

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.

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

We have another cross-global collection this month, with mysteries from the U.S., Denmark, Canada and even Botswana! First up is Death of the Mantis, number three in the series featuring portly policeman David “Kubu” Bengu. Kubu’s debut adventure, A Carrion Death, earned author Michael Stanley (a pen name for two authors, Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip) the nod as our Top Pick a couple of years back. Both authors are old Africa hands, and their experience with the land and its people permeates every paragraph. This time out, Kubu is solicited by an old school chum to look into a murder case involving Bushmen, by nature a peace-loving group of folks quite disinclined to take a human life. Although Kubu is able to cast reasonable doubt regarding the guilt of the Bushmen, he decides that the case merits his continued participation, a choice that will put him, his staff and even his family in grave peril—and from a most unexpected source. Released as a trade paperback with a list price of only $14.99, Death of the Mantis is, without a doubt, Bargain Mystery of the Month!

Glasgow Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, last seen in Still Midnight (2010), returns in Denise Mina’s latest police procedural thriller, The End of the Wasp Season. Heavily pregnant with twins, Morrow is basically counting down the days until her maternity leave. She is looking forward to not having to deal with her dim-bulb boss on a day-to-day basis, not having to endure the petty bickering of her underlings and not having to think about anything unrelated to the two growing presences in her belly. Then Sarah Erroll is murdered, and Morrow’s world careens off in directions she could not have begun to imagine. No ordinary murder, this one is unusually savage: The woman’s face has basically been obliterated, stomped past recognition by not one, but two pairs of matched sneakers, identical but for the sizes. To make matters worse, the shoes broadly match those worn by the children of Morrow’s girlhood friend, a good-time girl fallen on hard times. Complicating the story even further is the suicide of a wealthy businessman—which may be connected to Sarah’s death. Mina excels at describing the minutiae of police work, inexorably leading to the solution of the crime, as well as the convoluted but exceptionally believable interpersonal dealings of the cops and criminals alike. Read one Mina novel, and you’ll be back for more.

Thomas Enger, already a legend in his native Norway, seems destined for similar acclaim on American shores. His debut novel, Burned, features disfigured investigative reporter Henning Juul, just now returning to work after the fire that destroyed his apartment and his good looks, and took the life of his young son. Juul doesn’t have to wait long to find himself back in the thick of things: It falls to him to look into the murder of a young woman who was buried to her neck in an Oslo public park, then stoned to death. It has the look of a Middle Eastern Sharia punishment, and indeed, the girl’s boyfriend is a Pakistani native; at first blush, he appears to be a very good fit for the murder. Or is he just a good fit for a frame? Enger forces his readers to confront their own (often well-hidden) prejudices, all the while delivering a gripping narrative that begs comparison to Stieg Larsson. A capital-B Bonus: This book is $15—possibly the best $15 you’ll spend on a mystery this year! By the way, you heard it here first: Enger is also a talented composer, with several movie themes to his credit; his tunes are evocative of Philip Glass or Amethystium. Check out his website at thomasenger.net and have a listen.