Heather Seggel

Mystery & SuspenseMysteryCozy Mystery

Murder in the Corn Maze

Review by Heather Seggel

Stella Reid has barely corralled the seven young ones who call her “Granny” when disaster threatens their beloved fall tradition. Murder in the Corn Maze, G.A. McKevett’s second Granny Reid mystery, brings small-town heart to an especially tough case.

Granny has barely sorted the kids into who is and is not going through the annual corn maze in McGill, Georgia, when granddaughter Savannah (who, as an adult, stars in McKevett’s other cozy series) finds a skull in the mud. There are signs that this body may be the mother of Stella’s dear friend and that the killer may have been behind the murder of her own mother. No wonder Stella protects her grandkids with such ferocity.

Stella struggles with the ghosts of her past while dealing with the challenge of keeping food on the table for seven kids, to say nothing of refereeing their squabbles. She’s stern but sets a good example that they try their best to follow. It’s a special treat to see young Savannah deal with her early childhood trauma by channeling all her energy into the study of law enforcement, digging in to help solve the case while compartmentalizing the traumatic nature of her discovery.

The story incorporates heavy topics like the legacy of slavery and mistreatment of Native Americans without overwhelming what is ultimately a small-town page turner. The conclusion is chilling, but readers will be hungry for the next installment of this warm-hearted, 1980s-set series.

Stella Reid has barely corralled the seven young ones who call her “Granny” when disaster threatens their beloved fall tradition. Murder in the Corn Maze, G.A. McKevett’s second Granny Reid mystery, brings small-town heart to an especially tough case.

Mystery & SuspenseMysteryHistorical Mystery

A Capitol Death

Review by Heather Seggel

A body falls from the Tarpeian Rock, a looming structure that overlooks the ancient Roman Forum. People assume it’s a suicide, but a woman insists she saw someone push the vitcim. When an investigation is called for, Flavia Alba is ready to help. A Capitol Death is a traditional whodunit set in ancient times, but it feels remarkably fresh.

Author Lindsey Davis (Pandora’s Boy) balances grit and frivolity with ease. Flavia feels like the love child of Philip Marlowe and Carrie Bradshaw—she’s on the case, observing and reporting with care, but keeps a running line of saucy commentary on everyone throughout. This death would hardly raise a fuss were it not for the Imperial Triumphs, a sort of war parade/street fair hybrid set to take place. The dead man organized the entire affair and made plenty of enemies in the process, on top of being widely disliked in general. Flavia researches the case and then comes home to the drama of her home, still under construction, with ever-changing staff and their own drama. Stolen moments with her husband, and their snappy repartee, are sweet side trips.

Her childhood as a British orphan gives Flavia an acute awareness of class and difference. She can gently mold herself to fit in almost any situation and draw people into her confidence. The story builds with numerous twists toward a thrilling conclusion, but much of the pleasure comes from the deep, realistic world Davis has created and the people who inhabit it.

A body falls from the Tarpeian Rock, a looming structure that overlooks the ancient Roman Forum. People assume it’s a suicide, but a woman insists she saw someone push the vitcim. When an investigation is called for, Flavia Alba is ready to help. A Capitol Death is a traditional whodunit set in ancient times, but it feels remarkably fresh.

Children's & YA

Beatrice on Her Own

Review by Heather Seggel

Beatrice Sims has done her best to adjust. After shipping out from London to escape the Blitz, she finds herself in New Mexico due to a child resettlement program, slowly making friends and finding her way in the U.S. When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, her guardian, Clem, is called to Washington, D.C., to help train military nurses. At just 13 years old, Beatrice must move again. Beatrice on Her Own lets this fish-out-of-water heroine adapt to constant change while keeping her wits about her.

Author Rosemary Zibart’s sequel to True Brit balances some heavy realities, like the internment of Japanese people (many of them American citizens), with lighter fare that is also historically accurate. A subplot about a program recruiting dogs for military service leads Beatrice to befriend a boy who is shy but talented, as she asks for his help designing a poster for the program. An afterword explains how much of the story is drawn from real history and can open a discussion with readers about current events on the U.S. southern border.

The episodic, interwoven threads of Beatrice on Her Own will appeal to younger YA readers, who will find much to delight in despite the wartime theme. Young readers will cheer for this plucky main character as she struggles to do the right thing.

Young readers will cheer for this plucky main character as she struggles to do the right thing.

Mystery & SuspenseMysteryCozy Mystery

Peach Clobbered

Review by Heather Seggel

Anna Gerard’s Peach Clobbered introduces Nina Fleet, new to Cymbeline, Georgia, and tentatively converting her gorgeous home into a B&B. Harry Westcott claims the house as his rightful inheritance, though he may have hurt his credibility a bit by showing up to argue his case in a penguin suit, then collapsing with heatstroke. Next thing you know, half a dozen displaced nuns are living chez Nina, and someone wearing the same penguin suit has been murdered. Nina, the sisters and Harry try to solve the crime, but what happened is far from black and white. Nina is a spirited lead, and the town is full of supporting characters that add to the mosaic of Cymbeline. Peach Clobbered is a perfect armchair vacation of a book.

Peach Clobbered is a perfect armchair vacation of a book.

Mystery & SuspenseMysteryCozy Mystery

A Lady’s Guide to Gossip and Murder

Review by Heather Seggel

If practiced well, the oft-maligned art of gossip can unearth as much evidence as a CSI team. Just ask the Countess of Harleigh, back for a second turn in A Lady’s Guide to Gossip and Murder. The American transplant has found her footing amid England’s upper crust. She’s looking forward to a quiet end to summer until a friend, Mary Archer, is found murdered and Lady Harleigh’s own cousin is questioned. A romantic subplot or two don’t slow the hunt for Mary’s killer, which may involve a blackmail scheme and thus an ever-expanding suspect pool. After all, gossip is well and good until it’s about you. Author Dianne Freeman handles class disparity with care and has created a world that readers will want to explore in more depth as the series continues. 

If practiced well, the oft-maligned art of gossip can unearth as much evidence as a CSI team. Just ask the Countess of Harleigh, back for a second turn in A Lady’s Guide to Gossip and Murder.

Mystery & SuspenseMysteryCozy Mystery

Aunt Dimity and the Heart of Gold

Review by Heather Seggel

The English village of Finch has been beset by an ice storm instead of the usual picture-perfect Christmas snow, but Lori Shepherd insists on a bit of cheer by making a run to dear friend Emma’s annual party. While she’s there, a car hits the ice and lands in a ditch outside. They invite the frazzled driver, Matilda “Tilly” Trout, inside, where she is able to answer a question that has long puzzled Emma—the odd-looking room in Emma’s home is a former Roman Catholic chapel. Lori, Emma and company find a compartment inside the chapel that contains actual treasure, but how did it get there? There are no murders to solve in Aunt Dimity and the Heart of Gold, just a story in need of unraveling. Nancy Atherton’s series finds kindness and human connection in frosty times, and the good hearts of Finch will warm yours.

There are no murders to solve in Aunt Dimity and the Heart of Gold, just a story in need of unraveling.
Science Fiction & FantasyYA FictionYAScience Fiction

Teen Titans: Raven

Review by Heather Seggel

At just 17, Raven Roth’s life takes a hard turn when a car crash kills the foster mom who was going to adopt her. The crash also wipes Raven’s memory clean. Afterward she moves from Atlanta to New Orleans to try and finish her senior year while recuperating. While her own thoughts are still foggy, other people’s thoughts begin to crowd her mind—and if someone crosses her and she wishes them harm, beware.

As written by Kami Garcia, Raven’s brain is already overloaded with typical high school worries and drama before the additional thoughts move in. Illustrator Gabriel Picolo draws these thoughts like fat lightning bolts, reaching across the classroom and prodding Raven in the head. Raven’s aunt and foster sister try to help her regain some sense of self, but they’re also protecting her from powers on the verge of exploding. A critical showdown near the end of the story is beautifully drawn, with ghosts emerging to come to Raven’s aid as she faces a monstrous foe. 

Teen Titans: Raven is a story of self-discovery, and what’s unearthed may be hard to bury again.

At just 17, Raven Roth’s life takes a hard turn when a car crash kills the foster mom who was going to adopt her. The crash also wipes Raven’s memory clean. Afterward she moves from Atlanta to New Orleans to try and finish her senior year while recuperating. While her own thoughts are still foggy, other people’s thoughts begin to crowd her mind—and if someone crosses her and she wishes them harm, beware.

YA FictionYA

Like a Love Story

Review by Heather Seggel

Author Abdi Nazemian brings emotional depth and a dreamy soundtrack to the story of a teen love triangle set in New York during a turning point in the AIDS crisis.

It’s 1989, and Iranian teen Reza is new to the city, having recently left Toronto to live with his mom and new stepfather. Reza knows he’s gay but is terrified to say so, let alone act on it. He quickly befriends the two coolest freaks in his new high school. Judy is a skilled fashion designer, and her best friend, a photographer named Art, is the school’s only out gay student. Both Judy and Art are devoted to Judy’s uncle, Stephen, an activist who is dying of AIDS. And Judy and Art are both attracted to Reza, but in order to follow his heart, Reza will have to confront both his fears and his family.

While the main characters in this story are all fictional, the ACT UP demonstrations vividly depicted here really happened, and cameo appearances by artist Keith Haring and musical icon Debbie Harry put the reader right in the middle of it all. Uncle Stephen makes Art a collection of index cards with info about important figures in queer history—like Marsha P. Johnson—and readers will hopefully be inspired to do further research.

I was in high school a little before these kids, and the fear and isolation they go through rings painfully true, as does the unfettered joy that comes when you find your people. Like a Love Story made me cry, but it also made me feel mighty real.

Author Abdi Nazemian brings emotional depth and a dreamy soundtrack to the story of a teen love triangle set in New York during a turning point in the AIDS crisis.

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Black Mountain

Review by Heather Seggel

Isaiah Coleridge may have gone legit as a private investigator, but his past life as a mob enforcer dies hard. When he’s hired to investigate a killing that mimics a prior hit, his former bosses expect results—and failure to please them is not an option. Coleridge digs in, but what he finds is not typical mafia tit-for-tat but something much darker. Black Mountain is a thriller that gets uncomfortably close to pure evil and lets you breathe in the stench.

Laird Barron (Blood Standard) doesn’t spare his half-Maori hero much. The story opens with Coleridge taking a bullet while defending himself against a pair of thugs, but he can be tender if guarded with his girlfriend and her young son. When Coleridge follows the trail of what turns out to be a serial killer, it leads him into a labyrinthine world of sophisticated weapons that can debilitate with sound or light, though they’re being used by someone who is also masterful with a knife.

The ugliness of the human condition contrasts with the gorgeous Hudson Valley, and Coleridge’s country shack is a refuge from the people who so often cross his path. His office, though, is a noir gem straight out of Hammett or Chandler, right down to the smoky glass in the door, and he has run-ins with a showgirl cut from similar cloth. After a harrowing showdown as the chase concludes, there’s a scene so tender it nearly induced whiplash. For all the darkness in Black Mountain, it has a hero who burns bright.

Isaiah Coleridge may have gone legit as a private investigator, but his past life as a mob enforcer dies hard. When he’s hired to investigate a killing that mimics a prior hit, his former bosses expect results—failure to please them is not an option. Coleridge digs in, but what he finds is not typical mafia tit-for-tat but something much darker. Black Mountain is a thriller that gets uncomfortably close to pure evil and lets you breathe in the stench.

YA FictionYAThriller

You Must Not Miss

Review by Heather Seggel

Katrina Leno’s You Must Not Miss is a YA thriller with teeth. 

Sixteen-year-old Magpie Lewis has a yellow notebook. As her home life falls to pieces around her, she starts writing fiction about a new and perfect world she calls Near, one where her father hasn’t cheated on her mother and then left, where her mother hasn’t spiraled into alcoholism, where her sister still cares for her and where Magpie’s best friend hasn’t made her into a pariah at school. 

When Magpie finds a doorway into Near, it isn’t long before she realizes that the world she’s created is the perfect location to test how much power she holds and exact some revenge.

Leno (Summer of Salt) spares her main character very little. Assailed from all sides, Magpie has deadened herself against pain. Even her burgeoning friendships with the kids at the cafeteria’s reject table can’t keep her from the addictive pull she feels from Near, the alternate reality that erases all the real world’s harm. When Magpie starts to lure people from the real world into Near, the horrors unfold quickly, but readers can never be sure what’s real and what Magpie has imagined. That off-kilter feeling runs throughout the book.

Book clubs will have a great time arguing different theories of what really happens in Leno’s thriller, which has a resolution that raises at least as many questions as it answers and a protagonist who can be hard to love at times. The murkiness of Magpie’s everyday reality and the too-bright sparkle of her fantasy world—where the power of imagination can be as dangerous as a drug—combine to great effect. 

You Must Not Miss is a gritty, unsettling modern-day fairy tale.

Sixteen-year-old Magpie Lewis has a yellow notebook. As her home life falls to pieces around her, she starts writing fiction about a new and perfect world she calls Near, one where her father hasn’t cheated on her mother and then left, where her mother hasn’t spiraled into alcoholism, where her sister still cares for her and where Magpie’s best friend hasn’t made her into a pariah at school. 

YA FictionYA

We Contain Multitudes

Review by Heather Seggel

In Sarah Henstra’s We Contain Multitudes, an unlikely duo are paired up as pen pals for a weekly writing assignment, an arrangement that leads to friendship and even love.

Senior Adam “Kurl” Kurlansky and sophomore Jonathan “Jo” Hopkirk couldn’t be more mismatched: Kurl plays football and works for his family’s roofing business, while Jo plays the mandolin and loves Walt Whitman so much he dresses like him.

Telling the story solely via their exchanged letters, Henstra pulls off an especially neat trick: Jo and Kurl start off as different as night and day in both voice and temperament, but over time they begin to sound more like one another as they discover common ground and learn a bit more about each other’s lives. Jo is bullied mercilessly at school but is also grieving a loss from early childhood; Kurl is obsessed with his brother’s military service in Afghanistan, yet he fails to make the connection between combat trauma and his own perilous home life. Henstra doesn’t sugarcoat any of these challenges, which makes the teens’ love story a hard-won treasure. Throughout the Minneapolis-set novel runs a sad and lovely thread about Prince, which encourages playlist creation while reading.

There’s something about seeing the world through these boys’ separate points of view that brings the story to life in a visceral way. We Contain Multitudes is a heartbreaker in many ways, but it’s ultimately a beautiful story about how love (and poetry) are sometimes enough to carry the day. 

In Sarah Henstra’s We Contain Multitudes, an unlikely duo are paired up as pen pals for a weekly writing assignment, an arrangement that leads to friendship and even love.

YA FictionYA

Dig.

Review by Heather Seggel

Printz Honor-winning author A.S. King’s novels (Please Ignore Vera Dietz, Still Life With Tornado) are in another solar system entirely, so it can be hard to give readers a taste of what her stories are like without just handing them the books.

In Dig, her latest work of surrealist fiction, she follows five teenagers. A boy throws himself into snow shoveling and house painting in an attempt to save for a car that will help him find his dad. A girl works the drive-thru at an Arby’s and deals drugs from the window. The Freak—but what exactly is she?—moves between worlds and tries to tie a family together. These are just three threads in this tangled root ball of a story. There’s also First-Class Malcolm, who’s taking care of his terminally ill dad, and Loretta the Flea-Circus Ring Mistress.

These teens are the grandchildren of Gottfried and Marla, a couple who made their wealth developing subdivisions and are now pretty miserable. They cut off their kids and left them to their own devices, and now a traditional family gathering threatens to finally expose the extent to which their legacy of harm has eaten away at them all. 

King brings an intense surrealism to Dig’s discussion of racism and respectability politics. Plot points like the grotesque flea circus and the Freak’s magical ability to “flicker” from place to place don’t seem so exotic when placed next to scenes in which a suburban mom polishes her antebellum souvenir. Each generation hopes the next will improve; in Dig, that hope feels more urgently needed than ever.

In Dig, her latest work of surrealist fiction, she follows five teenagers. A boy throws himself into snow shoveling and house painting in an attempt to save for a car that will help him find his dad. A girl works the drive-thru at an Arby’s and deals drugs from the window. The Freak—but what exactly is she?—moves between worlds and tries to tie a family together. These are just three threads in this tangled root ball of a story. There’s also First-Class Malcolm, who’s taking care of his terminally ill dad, and Loretta the Flea-Circus Ring Mistress.

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

The Killer in Me

Review by Heather Seggel

In Ireland, history drapes itself over the present day like fog. Detective Chief Superintendent Frankie Sheehan finds herself searching for a serial killer whose present-day atrocities keep pulling her back in time in The Killer in Me. Olivia Kiernan’s latest mystery has a whipsaw plot and list of suspects that will chill your blood.

DCS Sheehan is called to a crime scene in a church; two victims are posed on the floor, one topless and the other in priest’s vestments. The murders gnaw at her, but she’s distracted by a campaign to clear the name of Seán Hennessey, who at just seventeen was convicted of murdering his parents and attempting to kill his sister. Now a free man, a new documentary seeks to clear his name, but if it succeeds it will be a terrible blow to the police department. Meanwhile, another body has been found. Frankie’s caught in the middle of what seem at first like separate issues, but they gradually merge into a race against time to prevent things from coming much too close to home.

Kiernan spins this tale with gritty realism—you can feel the damp chill of an Irish summer and smell the creosote and salt along the coast. Investigators are stymied again and again as evidence is contradicted or searches come up blank. And Frankie struggles with her own recollection of events, wondering if there was anything she could have done to prevent the original murders—a member of the family reached out to her mother for help at the time, but Frankie was just a child then. This lingering guilt crashes into concern about the impact new revelations might have on her current job.

Pitting loyalty to family against the search for truth and justice, The Killer in Me is a high-stakes noir page turner.

In Ireland, history drapes itself over the present day like fog. Detective Chief Superintendent Frankie Sheehan finds herself searching for a serial killer whose present-day atrocities keep pulling her back in time in The Killer in Me. Olivia Kiernan’s latest mystery has a whipsaw plot and list of suspects that will chill your blood.

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