In the checkout line of an upstate New York convenience store, opportunistic small-time thief Eddie Parker spots a purse overflowing with cash. As the elderly owner finishes her transaction, Eddie maneuvers himself into position to relieve her of her stash. It does not go according to plan; within arm’s reach of his prize, Eddie feels a sharp scratch on his neck and, moments later, his world goes black. He wakes up in a small deserted town that looks like a movie set: buildings with false fronts, shops filled with empty containers, no food or water in sight and Christmastime temperatures dropping below freezing. The title of this thriller by James S. Murray and Darren Wearmouth is almost prophetic: You Better Watch Out. Eddie soon discovers that a handful of other folks have met a similar fate. And although they don’t entirely trust one another, they know that their lives depend on getting out of this place, and the best means to that end is teamwork. But, in true Agatha Christie fashion, one by one they meet their untimely demise, and most graphically. Here is the funny part, though (to me, at least): Fairly early in the book, I thought I had figured out who the villain was. Turns out, I was right—but I had no inkling whatsoever of the diabolical twist that would reveal itself in the final pages.
Havoc
In Christopher Bollen’s Havoc, octogenarian and self-confessed do-gooder Maggie Burkhardt narrates a tale of obsession, deceit and worse at a riverside hotel in Luxor, Egypt, during the height of COVID-19 restrictions. Following the death of her husband, Maggie is far afield from her Wisconsin homeland. Egypt was not her first choice for her retirement, but it is one of the few places welcoming tourists, and she has grown acclimated to the heat and the easy pace of life in the Royal Karnak, a hotel that exemplifies the term “faded glory.” Over time, she has become something of a fixture there, reveling in her role as “doyenne of all she surveys.” And then Otto shows up with his mother, and quickly establishes himself as Chief Nemesis to Maggie and all she holds dear. His childish pranks escalate to blackmail after he surprises Maggie doing something she clearly should not have been doing, and his demands seem to have no end in sight. That said, Maggie is rather duplicitous herself, both in her interactions with other characters and with the reader, as she tries to play the virtuous victim. The narrative is by turns creepy, snarky, humorous and every bit as atmospheric as you would expect from a story set somewhere like the Valley of the Kings. Oh, and there are a couple of murders: nothing too graphic, but quite definitely an affectionate nod to the sweeping, international mysteries of the 1940s.
Robert B. Parker’s Hot Property
After a popular series writer passes away, they often leave legions of fans clamoring for more adventures of their fictional heroes. Ian Fleming’s James Bond and Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander jump to mind. Other writers often take up the challenge, albeit with decidedly mixed results. But when Mike Lupica took over Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, it was a seamless transition. It’s as if he channels Parker from beyond the grave: setting, prose, dialogue—the works. In the latest installment, Robert B. Parker’s Hot Property, an attempted murder hits close to home. Ace criminal defense attorney Rita Fiore has been shot and is clinging to life but tenuously. She had been romantically involved with a young up-and-coming politician until his recent accidental (?) death, and now it appears that he may have been involved in some property shenanigans with mob overtones. For Spenser, Rita Fiore is family, as surely as if they had been related by blood, and he will leave no stone unturned in bringing her assailant to justice. Speaking of stones, another Parker protagonist, Police Chief Jesse Stone, makes a cameo appearance, and the two play off each other exceptionally well. Hot Property is a must for longtime Spenser fans and a terrific entry point for newcomers as well.
The Collaborators
If you are in the mood for a high-stakes global espionage novel, with secret agents jet-setting all over the world, you have come to the right place. Michael Idov’s The Collaborators doesn’t waste any time setting up locations or easing into the narrative. In the first sentence, a Russian MiG-29 fighter jet pulls up alongside an Antalya Airlines commercial flight from Istanbul to Riga, Latvia. They are in Belarusian airspace, and the MiG pilot clearly plans to force the Antalya 737 down or shoot it down. On board are a dissident blogger, a pair of fugitives in disguise and heaven only knows what other manner of dodgy characters. Meanwhile, in Riga, CIA agent Aria Falk waits anxiously for the blogger, initially unaware of the flight’s unplanned stop in Minsk. In other news, a financier who has been laundering Russian money for years has apparently killed himself by leaping off a yacht in the open sea, and the multibillion dollar fund he managed seems to have vanished along with him. The connection point for all these disparate events is Falk. Soon enough, he will become involved with Maya Chou, the daughter of the missing (and presumed dead) financier, and things will get very convoluted indeed. The Collaborators devotes little space to pyrotechnics, chase scenes and the like, but cleverness and subterfuge abound, followed by a believable, real-world sort of denouement. PS: Idov is a screenwriter in addition to being a novelist, and this book has silver screen written all over it.
Plus, a wicked holiday delight and a ripped-from-the-headlines espionage thriller in this month’s Whodunit column.
Fans of Jane Pek’s 2022 debut, The Verifiers, starring irrepressible, clever, bike-riding Brooklynite Claudia Lin, will be delighted to learn of Claudia’s return in The Rivals.
While she’s still reeling from the dramatic events—including murder, alas—depicted in The Verifiers, Claudia’s also proud to be a new partner in Veracity, a Tribeca-based private investigation agency that discerns whether clients’ prospective partners are being truthful on dating apps. But Claudia’s also nervous about her new role, thanks to her ongoing internal conflict about the ethics of Veracity’s work (are they background-checking, or stalking and hacking?) and her conviction that, despite her hard-won career advancement, her mother will nonetheless stick to her favorite “look at my lousy Chinese daughter topic of conversation.”
There’s the matter of her own love life, too: Sure, she’ll dutifully tail Amalia, the intelligent and gorgeous date of obnoxious new client Mason Perry (“His opinion of himself is so high, you can see it from outer space.”), but things get complicated when Claudia accidentally-on-purpose befriends her and starts wishing Amalia were her girlfriend instead. She’s also attracted to her mercurial co-worker Becks, but Claudia’s not sure if her feelings are reciprocated. Pek does an excellent job exploring the particular humor and suspense inherent in the mysteries of the human heart.
The author also delves into the gritty mysteries of the tech world as Veracity discovers a corporate conspiracy centered around dating apps, complete with manipulation via AI and the untimely demise of anyone who raises suspicions about the apps’ overlords. Even worse, Claudia’s brother, Charles, works for one of the “Big Three” matchmaking platforms, and she fears he’ll be harmed by their machinations: “He can’t even imagine how deep the deception actually goes, like a tunnel right to the molten center of the earth.”
It’s a lot for Claudia to juggle, especially on a bicycle. Anyone who appreciates a witty contemporary whodunit with a tech-y twist will enjoy the entertaining, thought-provoking goings-on in The Rivals as it explores the insidiousness of technology, the dark side of dating algorithms and the often amusingly complicated life of a dedicated amateur sleuth.
Amateur sleuth Claudia Lin delves into a dating app conspiracy in Jane Pek’s entertaining, thought-provoking The Rivals.
Food anthropologist and cooking show star Miriam Quinones-Smith is back in a delicious new installment of the Caribbean Kitchen cozy mystery series.
Miriam’s life is busier and better than ever. She and her husband, Robert, are raising two young children while sharing a home with her parents in Miami. Miriam’s so-called “Spanglish cooking show,” Abuela Approved, is thriving. And she hasn’t had to solve a murder in three years. But Miriam’s sleuthing-free streak comes to an end when her boss, Delvis, is declared a suspect in a murder that happened moments after filming the show. Then, a body is discovered at the site of Robert’s latest construction project, leading to serious disagreements between archeologists, academics and local tribal representatives. Plus, Miriam’s snobby mother-in-law recruits her to investigate a series of threatening notes sent to their family. There’s nothing Miriam takes more seriously than protecting her loved ones, so she dives into investigating the multiple mysteries.
Author Raquel V. Reyes sets the fun, fast-paced Dominoes, Danzón, and Death three years after the last book in the series (Barbacoa, Bomba, and Betrayal), allowing Miriam and her family to grow and change. Readers need not be familiar with the previous mysteries to enjoy this one, but fans of the series will enjoy seeing the characters flourish in new roles.
Miriam is a delightful character: She’s intelligent, hardworking and dedicated to her family. Between raising two young children in a bustling, intergenerational household and hosting her popular show, Miriam is a busy woman. Still, she manages to solve three mysteries with her quick thinking and determination. Reyes excels at balancing her many storylines in an engaging manner; the multiple mysteries are never overwhelming.
The novel is elevated by its engagement with Caribbean cuisine and culture, and Florida and Native American history, while Spanish speakers will appreciate how Miriam and her family communicate in an authentic blend of Spanish and English. Those who aren’t familiar with Spanish need not worry: Reyes skillfully provides context and translations for their conversations. No matter your background, there’s a lot to learn from Dominoes, Danzón, and Death—and a lot to love.
TV chef Miriam Quinones-Smith has three mysteries to solve in the engaging and endlessly interesting Dominoes, Danzón, and Death.
At the start of John Straley’s Big Breath In, 68-year-old Delphine is staying in a Seattle hotel across the street from the hospital where she is being treated for Stage 4 cancer. The marine biologist is far from everything she loves: her home in Sitka, Alaska; her son and grandson in California; and the whales she has spent a lifetime studying. She is lonely and frustrated, feeling “she had so much more work to do, more photographs to take, more data to go through, more students to foster toward their own research. She couldn’t stand ruminating about her illness.” After all, “what she loved about her life was the sensation that discovery is an unending relay race of research.”
Suddenly, however, Delphine finds herself in a very different kind of relay race. Her late husband, John, was a private investigator, and when one of his former colleagues asks Delphine to do some investigative work, she quickly becomes embroiled in a case involving an illicit infant adoption ring. Despite the danger and her exhaustion, Delphine feels alive again: “This was the opposite of dying and she drank it in.”
Straley has written 13 previous crime novels, but, as he explains in his moving acknowledgements, Big Breath In is inspired by his wife, a marine biologist who has had Parkinson’s disease for 20 years. He created Delphine in her honor, and she is a memorable, whip-smart fireball of a character—a “sickly, thin and bald” woman who carries a stun gun and doesn’t hesitate to jump on a 530-pound Sportster motorcycle that another dying cancer patient bequeaths to her.
Equally wonderful are Straley’s descriptions of whale behavior, which parallel the novel’s action throughout. Just as sperm whales “seem to foster a type of matriarchy” to care for their young, Delphine enlists the help of a group of women, including the motorcycle owner’s grieving widow and a lesbian biker gang, to hunt for the endangered babies. Despite the gruesome, gritty nature of the things Delphine sees and the characters she meets in her quest for justice, Straley’s prose shines with delightful images: “What the boys saw could have been a gathering of tribal huntresses from all the savannas of the world. In the middle of this herd sat Delphine on the Sportster.”
While this is a book about coping with serious illness and dying, it’s also about living, appreciating every moment to its fullest. BigBreath In is a nonstop, high-octane crime novel featuring an unforgettable heroine with a whale-size heart.
John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
Shelley Burr’s gripping sophomore mystery, Murder Town, is set in rural Rainier, Australia, a fictional small town located halfway between Melbourne and Sydney. It used to be known as a nice place to take a break from that long journey, what with its pretty Fountain Park and popular local businesses like Earl Grey’s Yarn and Teashop. But then the “Rainier Ripper” came to town and murdered three people. Now, 17 years later, Fountain Park is but one sad stop on a proposed Ripper-centric tour some residents view as their last chance to return Rainier to its former prosperity. Alas, on the eve of the big vote, the potential tour guide is murdered, leaving Rainier awash in terror once again. Can teashop owner and amateur sleuth Gemma Guillory solve the mystery—perhaps with input from Lane Holland, the investigator from Burr’s bestselling debut novel, WAKE—before the killer strikes again?
Congratulations on your second novel! Your first, WAKE, won the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger award in 2019 and soon after became an international bestseller. Now, here we are on the eve of Murder Town’s American debut! How has life changed for you between book one and book two? It’s been a whirlwind! The biggest life change between book one and two is that I gave up my day job in environmental policy and now write full time. Our family moved out to a rural area and I now split my time between writing and farm chores.
“I try to remember that a murder is a death, and a death leaves behind grieving people.”
Both of your books explore what life is like for survivors many years after a crime has occurred—their grief and anger, and their fear when mysteries remain unsolved and they don’t know if neighbors are friend or foe. What intrigues you about looking at these fictional cases from a longer-distance perspective, so to speak? I try to remember that a murder is a death, and a death leaves behind grieving people. It affects the person who found the body, the people who investigated the case, the people left wondering if they could have stopped it. I like to enter the story at the point where those impacts have had a chance to ripple outwards.
The challenge with a cold case is how to create a sense of urgency. If it’s been 10, 20 years, what’s the hurry to solve it now? I need to make sure I’m answering that question for the reader. Including a present-day crime changes that equation, but doesn’t solve it.
Did any real-life cases or favorite thrillers spark your desire to write crime fiction? For both WAKE and Murder Town, I had a moment where I was reading something about a real case that sparked an “I have to write this book” moment, but I wouldn’t consider either book based on the case I was reading about. When I read true crime or news stories, I’m not looking for details to add to stories, I’m looking for people in a situation that strikes a chord.
For Murder Town, that moment came while reading a news article about the South Australian town Snowtown. When I’m talking about the book at home, that’s all I have to say. At a writer’s festival, I can drop that name and watch the audience get what I mean immediately. Internationally it’s not as well known. The Snowtown murders are infamous here, both for their cruelty and for the unusual method of concealing the bodies. They were stored in barrels in a bank vault.
The article discussed the dilemma facing residents of Snowtown, a name synonymous with murder. Do they try to create distance? Change the name? Or lean into it? People stop in the town to take selfies in front of the bank. Should they capitalize on that?
I immediately empathized, and wanted to tell the story of people faced with a similar choice.
Your stories depict disturbing crimes and spend time in the minds of the people who commit them, the victims who endure them and those left reeling from grief and trauma. Is there anything in particular you do to get into the right headspace to craft these narratives, to inhabit these characters and to transition back to your real life afterward? Sunlight is my best friend. If I’m researching for a book, or if I’ve had to climb down into a dark place to write a scene, I make myself stop at lunchtime. That gives me a few hours to process it. Delving into those things in the evening and then trying to go straight to bed is a big mistake.
When I was writing my first book, I worked during the day, so I would write after my then-toddler daughter went to bed. There were some nights where I would write a sentence, go check if the window in her bedroom was locked, write a sentence, check the window . . .
You do an excellent, empathetic job of exploring the pros and cons of true crime tourism through the eyes of your characters, from victims’ disgusted families to business owners who acknowledge it’s unseemly (to say the least) but believe there are upsides. What did you hope to convey in Murder Town about “dark tourism,” as it’s been called: its popularity, its effects on survivors and more? It was important to me not to portray one side of the argument as right and the other as wrong. It’s a really difficult choice and the characters on every side have good reasons for feeling the way they do.
I did a lot of research into actual dark tourism. When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time in a town that runs on it. My grandparents lived in Glenrowan, which was the site of a shootout between police and the bushranger Ned Kelly. The town has a massive statue of Kelly, an animatronic show and just opened a new visitor’s center focused on the Kelly Gang. It’s a genuinely positive thing for the town, done with the full support of any living descendants. Another good example is the thriving industry of Jack the Ripper tours in London.
Those cases aren’t usually controversial, because the crimes were so long ago. What we tend to forget is that dark tourism and a fascination with true crime isn’t new. Ned Kelly tourism started immediately, it just survived a long time.
I don’t want to make a case for dark tourism being right or wrong, I just want people to remember that the victims are people, and their friends and family are hurting.
“We’ve always been a morbid species, and true crime has a long history.”
Money is of course on the minds of Rainier’s business owners, who’ve been struggling since a highway bypass compounded the town’s downturn after the murders and worry about descending into bankruptcy. What is it about that particular sort of financial desperation, that feeling of running out of options, that makes for compelling fiction? Money touches everything, and is very, very personal. It’s hard to imagine now, given how central money is to both books, but way back in the early drafts of WAKE, I actually tried to avoid making money a plot point. It had the opposite effect—it was distracting to early readers that the characters never seemed to worry about money or how to afford their lifestyle.
It’s easy to empathize with a character who is stressed about money, who wants to provide for their family and give their children a stable future.
It’s especially fascinating to read about Rainier locals who are parents, friends and neighbors—but also are the police officers who investigated the first murders, and must now keep everyone safe and calm while they contend with the new case. What about that particular collision of the personal and professional appeals to you? I live in a town about the same size as Rainier, and it’s impossible for the police to just be faceless uniforms. They’re behind you in line at the Country Women’s Association breakfast, they’re picking their kids up at the school gate, they’re grocery shopping at the same time as you. There’s a flipside to that as well—if you encounter the police in their professional capacity, the next CWA breakfast is going to be awkward.
In Rainier, every character is connected to every other character in at least two different ways. Every time one of them makes a decision, it echoes through that web of connections. The town’s two police officers are very much a part of that web.
You so fully paint a picture of Rainier’s landscape and how your characters move through those emotionally fraught spaces. Did you create an actual map, go on walks, etc., to help you get the physical and psychological aspects of that experience just right? The town has a significant geographical feature—it’s the exact halfway point between Australia’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne. There is a real town in that location, Tarcutta.
I stopped in Tarcutta while on a road trip (I was transporting our cat to our new home), and was struck by a sign: Turn left for Sydney, turn right for Melbourne. The two cities are nine hours apart. The idea of a town that defines itself based on two other faraway places immediately fascinated me.
I don’t like to take a real town and layer a dark history over it, but my fictional towns are always based on real ones. I’m too bad at geography to invent one from whole cloth. I need to be able to look at a map, see what a realistic layout looks like: Would it have its own school, how many businesses are there, how many streets, how many police officers. But, being a fictional town, I can always tweak those details to fit what the story needs.
You grew up in Newcastle but also spent a lot of time on your grandparents’ farm. How did that experience translate into writing about remote, isolated places? Are there any other aspects of your growing-up years that tend to infuse and inform your stories and characters, whether you realized at first or not? Newcastle and Glenrowan are in different states; every handover was a 16-hour round trip, so I saw a huge number of small Australian towns growing up. Out of all the characters, the nomadic upbringing of Lane Holland feels the closest to my own. Seeing all those towns left me fascinated by how different they all were, but also by the similarities. A lot of highway towns have a “thing” that sets them apart: Holbrook has a World War II submarine installed in a park, Gundagai has the Dog on the Tucker Box. That really informed the town of Rainier.
My core memory of my time on the property (my grandfather has asked me to stop calling it a farm, as while they had livestock and orchards and acres of paddocks, they didn’t actually make a living farming) is of walking those paddocks. We’d be turned out in the morning and told to come back when we were hungry. There were moments I could look up and realize I was the only person for kilometers. I wanted to capture that feeling of isolation in WAKE.
After the events of WAKE, private investigator Lane Holland is now a resident of the Special Purpose Centre prison facility. What was it like to spend time with Lane again? What sort of research did you do to help you capture the atmosphere of the prison? What was the most surprising thing you learned? I was surprised by how easy it was to slip back into Lane’s voice. Despite his circumstances, his story is far from over.
I read and listened to a lot of first-person accounts of life in prison. As with my towns, the Special Purpose Centre is fictional, but based on a real facility used for vulnerable prisoners. I also had to do a lot of dry reading of policy papers and prison rules (much of which is redacted for security reasons) and white papers on topics like how aging and dying prisoners live.
The most surprising thing I found is a case where a convicted murderer was placed in a prison where the aunt of his victim worked as a guard. I’d assumed there had to be policies to prevent a situation that explosive. Heartbreakingly, it was the aunt who ended up vulnerable—her niece’s killer went out of his way to torment her, and she had to leave her position.
What do you think about the ever-increasing interest in true crime? Do you think the help can ever justify the harm? Why do you think there’s such an intense societal fascination? I’m not convinced that it is increasing. We’ve always been a morbid species, and true crime has a long history. I think what is increasing is access to opportunities to create it; these days anyone with the drive and a microphone can start their own podcast or video series, whereas decades ago, creating a radio show or television series was much more challenging. I think that can be a wonderful thing—where would we be without Michelle McNamara’s work on the Golden State Killer? There are a lot of cases getting attention and resources from the true crime industry with the grateful approval of the friends and family of the victims. Other cases, not so much. That lack of gatekeeping also means a lot of content being produced by people who don’t feel bound by any journalistic code of ethics.
I love true crime. Respectful, compassionate, victim-centered true crime. I love works like A Light in the Dark, written by Ted Bundy survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin, or The Five by historian Hallie Rubenhold.
Are you a plan-things-ahead writer, especially when multiple secrets and surprises are involved, or are you more of a let’s-see-what-comes-up sort? Did anything that ended up in the book surprise even you? I’m very much a planner. I’m so impressed by writers who prefer to write crime fiction without an outline. Mine is my safety net. Any time I find myself stuck, I can go back to the outline, and every time it turns out that I left something out of a previous scene that’s essential to move forward.
But there are always surprises. Sometimes the characters develop in ways that mean they would never act the way they do in my outline. Sometimes I’ll stumble over something in the research that changes the direction of a subplot. Sometimes a character turns out more or less sympathetic than I expected and their ending feels too cruel or too lenient. That’s the fun part.
What’s up next for you—is there anything else you’d like to share with readers, in terms of upcoming books or other news? I’m hard at work on a third Lane Holland novel—we’re in the editing stage now.
Picture of Shelley Burr by Yen Eriksen Media.
In Murder Town, the acclaimed Australian author investigates the allure of so-called “dark tourism.”
The question of how best to set up a personal library has confounded many a book collector. When it comes time to arrange them, all those wonderful volumes can seem like the pieces of an unsolvable puzzle. The literature lover who’s searching for solutions will welcome Book Nooks: Inspired Ideas for Cozy Reading Corners and Stylish Book Displays by Vanessa Dina and Claire Gilhuly.
Packed with easy-to-execute design schemes and Antonis Achilleos’ fabulous photographs, Book Nooks offers tips on how to group books according to color and size, as well as strategies for using personal effects in an arrangement. For establishing a comfy reading area, there are options to suit every style, space and taste. The book also addresses the art of stacking (Yes, it can be a creative act!), suggests methods for bringing plants into the picture, organizing those prize cookbooks and integrating analog reading material into a teen’s room. With reading recs from noted authors and a look at Little Free Libraries, Book Nooks is a bibliophile’s best friend.
Hidden Libraries
DC Helmuth’s Hidden Libraries: The World’s Most Unusual Book Depositories is a perfectly on-point present for any reader, but especially one who loves to travel. This wide-ranging title profiles 50 remarkable libraries in locations across the globe. Staff stories, fascinating facts, spectacular imagery and a foreword from critic and librarian Nancy Pearl make it a winning tribute to the mission of libraries everywhere.
Hidden Libraries surveys a range of amazing physical spaces. The Kurkku Fields’ Underground Library in Kisarazu, Japan, is a book-lined grotto covered in grass, while the cocoon-shaped Heydar Aliyev International Airport Library near Baku, Azerbaijan, projects sheer architectural awesomeness. Examples of inspired resourcefulness regarding book circulation abound: In China, the Shenzhen library system distributes titles via vending machine. And Helmuth doesn’t dismiss even the most miniature of libraries. A handsome wooden cabinet filled with colorful books, the Little Free Library at the South Pole—startling against Antarctica’s unrelieved whiteness—seems to defy its frozen surroundings. Big or small, grand or humble, each library serves as a singular point of enrichment and connection, and Helmuth’s stirring volume honors these efforts.
The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge
With its quick-witted heroine Rory Gilmore, a voracious reader with dreams of attending Harvard, Gilmore Girls could very well be classified as a TV show for bookworms. The series, which aired from 2000 to 2007, made numerous allusions (339, to be exact) to books of all genres—titles favored by Rory and her friends. In The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge: The Official Guide to All the Books, Erika Berlin explores the novels, plays and poetry cited on the show, providing episode information and details on who read what.
Inspired by Buzzfeed’s 2014 list of all the books mentioned in Gilmore Girls, Berlin’s breezy volume takes a nostalgic look back at Rory’s world while sharing reading recommendations (Frankenstein, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, One Hundred Years of Solitude, the list goes on) and invaluable book-related advice, including approaches for becoming a more focused reader and easy ways to impose order on a chaotic book collection. Filled with photos from the show, this book is a sunny retrospective and a buoyant tribute to the reading life.
Buried Deep and Other Stories
For the fantasy fan, there’s no better gift than Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novik, bestselling author of the Scholomance trilogy, Uprooted and Spinning Silver. As this collection proves, Novik is a natural conjurer whose stories—rich with allusion and detail—feel effortlessly authentic. Each provides an escape into an alternative world that’s wholly realized.
“Dragons & Decorum”—a fantastical recasting of Pride and Prejudice, set in the Regency England of Novik’s Temeraire series—finds Elizabeth Bennet riding a winged dragon named Wollstonecraft. In “The Long Way Round,” Novik offers a taste of her next work (tentatively titled Folly) and introduces spirited protagonist Intessa Roh. “Vici,” another Temeraire tale, but this time set in ancient Rome, chronicles the unexpected camaraderie that arises between Marc Antony and a valiant dragon. Introductions from Novik accompany the anthology’s 13 stories, and readers will relish the context they give to her work. This is a transportive collection from an author who maps her narrative milieus with extraordinary precision.
The Man in Black and Other Stories
Crime fiction maven Elly Griffiths is known as a prolific writer, having penned the Ruth Galloway, Harbinder Kaur and Brighton mysteries series. But did anyone suspect she was writing short stories on the side? That’s right—Griffiths has long played around with short-form work, and her intriguing new volume, The Man in Black and Other Stories, spotlights this aspect of her artistry.
The atmospheric anthology brings together 19 pieces, in which, fans will be delighted to learn, Griffiths expands the backstories of some of her most popular characters. The volume’s eponymous story is a spooky sketch set just before Halloween that features Ruth Galloway. “Harbinger” tracks Harbinder Kaur’s all-too-eventful first day at Shoreham Criminal Investigation Department. And in “Ruth Galloway and the Ghost of Max Mephisto,” all three of Griffiths’ sleuths converge, as it were. Ingeniously plotted and leavened with humor, the pieces are brief but satisfying. From sinister tales to twisty whodunits, Griffith’s short stories deliver as much spellbinding suspense as a full-blown novel.
Got a serious bibliophile on your list? Tick that box with one of these titles.
The typically unflappable Bruno Courrèges is annoyed. While he was on medical leave, his position as chief of police was taken over by an overbearing new hire, and she has no intention of vacating it until he has been cleared to return to service. Moreover, she has lectured him regarding his general untidiness and inept record-keeping. For the time being, it is better for everyone concerned if Bruno beats a hasty retreat to somewhere else, anywhere else. So, for A Grave in the Woods, Martin Walker’s 17th installment in the popular series, Bruno is tasked with investigating (wait for it . . .) a grave in the woods. Three bodies are in the grave, all dating back to World War II: two German women and one man, an Italian submarine captain, oddly distant from his expected undersea context. Oh, and while we are on the topic of water, Bruno’s hometown of St. Denis—a sadly fictional village in the Périgord region of France—is bracing for an epic, climate change-fueled flood. The dams have held thus far, but it’s getting dicey. As Bruno digs deeper into the grave situation (sorry), questions dating back some 80 years are unearthed. Thus, there is perhaps more history than mystery in this episode of Bruno’s adventures, but there is nothing wrong with that. There is plenty of what readers come to St. Denis for: the food and wine; the camaraderie; and of course, Balzac the basset hound, surely one of the most engaging four-legged supporting characters ever to grace the pages of a mystery novel.
Midnight and Blue
Wow, you miss one book in a series, and the protagonist transforms from the number one cop in Scotland to a prison inmate. As Ian Rankin’s latest mystery, Midnight and Blue, opens, John Rebus is cooling his heels in the slammer. His crime: attempted murder, which is under appeal, but the wheels of justice are turning slowly. At first, he is incarcerated in the relatively safe Separation and Reintegration unit, where prisoners in danger (such as ex-cops) are assigned, but he is soon to be rehoused in the general prison population, in part thanks to a safe-passage guarantee from Edinburgh’s reigning crime lord, who credits Rebus for his ascent to the underworld throne. When a murder takes place in a nearby two-person cell, Rebus’ detecting instincts bubble to the surface, although he must be somewhat more circumspect than if he was out on the streets. In a parallel narrative, Rebus’ onetime colleague Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is investigating the disappearance of a teenage girl, a case that will come to have a tangential—or perhaps more than tangential—connection with the aforementioned prison murder. Author Rankin is in top form as he reinvents his flawed hero by having him navigate an equally flawed milieu, in what must be one of the most original locked-room mysteries ever.
Murder Takes the Stage
One of my favorite plot devices for a mystery—or really any sort of novel—is the revisiting of a familiar tale through the perspective of a different character, such as Gregory Maguire’s retelling of the Cinderella story, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Colleen Cambridge has mined this vein exceptionally well with her series featuring Phyllida Bright, housekeeper to Agatha Christie. This time out, the Christie entourage moves to London for Murder Takes the Stage, in which one of the author’s stories has been made into a West End play. Unfortunately, however, an actor whose surname began with the letter A turns up dead at a theater beginning with the letter A. Then, the body of an actor playing Benvolio is discovered at a theater beginning with a B. You can see where this is going, right? It’s a clever and delicious spin on one of Christie’s better known works, The A.B.C. Murders. Exactly one year ago, I opined that Cambridge’s previous installment in the series, Murder by InvitationOnly, “straddles the line between historical fiction and intricate, Christie-esque suspense quite well, without the cloying cutesiness that can sometimes plague mysteries on the cozier side of things. And Phyllida Bright is simply a gem.” I stand by that assertion 100%.
★ The Grey Wolf
An old legend tells of two wolves that battle inside each of us: a black wolf that represents anger, greed, arrogance, resentment, envy and ego; and a gray wolf that represents kindness, generosity, compassion, empathy, love and hope. Which one will win, you may ask? The answer is simple, yet profound: The one you feed. The Grey Wolf also serves as the title of Louise Penny’s 19th entry in her critically acclaimed series featuring Chief Inspector Gamache of the Sureté du Québec. The Grey Wolf is far and away Penny’s most ambitious novel to date, landing Gamache and his team squarely into the middle of ecoterrorism on a scale hitherto unimaginable in typically tranquil Canada. But as data begins to trickle in, it becomes apparent that the plot’s tentacles are farther reaching than anyone could reasonably have predicted, involving an order of Québécois monks who have taken a vow of silence, the highest levels of the Canadian federal government and even the Vatican. Equally troubling is evidence suggesting that key members of the Sureté may have been compromised, leaving the core team of Gamache, Beauvoir and Lacoste twisting in the wind as the stopwatch ticks away the minutes. The Grey Wolf is 432 pages long, and I read it in one sitting, because I could not put it down.
Plus, Colleen Cambridge gifts readers with another clever mystery starring Phyllida Bright, housekeeper to none other than Agatha Christie.
What’s better than traveling to Scotland with your besties, staying in a castle run by a literary legend and writing a book together? For Kat, Cassie and Emma, literally anything, but a job’s a job—until someone drops dead and they are the prime suspects. The Author’s Guide to Murder, co-written by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White, is the coziest of cozy mysteries, a celebration of feminism, friendship and solving a murder while wearing only the best in Land’s End plaid.
The trio of authors couldn’t be more different (Cassie’s a Southern mom of six who pens cupcake- and cat-themed cozy mysteries; Emma’s an East Coast scribe of enormous historical novels; and Brooklynite Kat writes erotica and sports sexy outfits) and they definitely aren’t the best friends they claim to be. They do, however, share an editor and a fascination with “Naughty Ned,” the laird of Castle Kinloch who collected old-timey “marital aids” before his mysterious demise in 1900. In the present day, Castle Kinloch is occupied by celebrated writer and not-so-secret misogynist Brett Saffron Presley—and each of the three authors has a connection to him too. Squabbling, rather than writing, ensues, but when another Castle Kinloch occupant is found dead, the three women band together to crack the case, discovering secret passageways, muscular shepherds and a whole lot about one another.
Individually bestselling authors Williams (Husbands & Lovers), Willig (the Pink Carnation series) and White (the Tradd Street mystery series) have previously teamed up on four historical novels, most recently The Lost Summers of Newport. From Cassie’s chirpy insistence on countless selfies to Emma’s propensity for obscure facts to Kat’s favorite “pantaboots” (tight trousers that seamlessly transition to stiletto footwear), each narrator possesses enough quips, quirks and juicy secrets for a trio of spinoff sequels, and the colorful cast of locals, including handsome detective Euan Macintosh, who can’t get his mind off Kat even when he’s investigating her for murder, add more flavor than the most buttery scone. The Author’s Guide to Murder is a triple-perspective, locked-room mystery that’s long on suspense, sass and sumptuous Scottish scenery. Grab a cuppa and dig in.
The Author’s Guide to Murder is a triple-perspective, locked-room mystery that’s long on suspense, sass and sumptuous Scottish scenery.
Ava Bonney of Birmingham, England, is not your typical sleuth, and she’s one readers of Marie Tierney’s debut mystery, Deadly Animals, will long remember. Living in a sparse apartment with her younger sister and selfish mother, 14-year-old Ava makes her own entertainment. Bones fascinate her—“We are our bones,” she says. To further her scientific studies, she has created a secret “body farm” to study the anatomy of decomposing roadkill that she finds. A former biology teacher who grew up in Birmingham herself, Tierney sets the book in the early 1980s of her youth, writing with the analytic precision of a scientist and the literary aplomb of a gifted storyteller.
During a morning outing to her farm, Ava discovers the body of 14-year-old local bully Mickey Grant and, soon after, the missing, now murdered 6-year-old Bryan Shelton. Ava quickly acts to preserve valuable evidence in danger of disappearing. Fearing the police won’t take her seriously, she pretends to be an adult while calling in Mickey’s murder, and enlists her best friend, John, to call about Bryan. “Their secret was gargantuan,” Ava and John realize. “It was scary and exciting, an adventure—but also a horror story.”
A serial killer is on the loose, and Ava begins a surreptitious partnership with Detective Seth Delahaye—who recognizes her genius—to track down the murderer. Ava and Delahaye’s initial cat-and-mouse communications burgeon into mutual trust and respect, forming the empowering heart of the novel. “Ava was custodian of the dead,” Tierney writes, “this she understood. The idea of hurting an animal, by accident or on purpose, was anathema to her.” As Ava stumbles across murdered bodies and tortured animal corpses, she has an “awful epiphany: this killer was just herself turned inside out: her fatal inversion.”
This noteworthy debut is a fast-paced, brilliantly plotted mystery, filled with short chapters and crisp prose. Gory—but never gratuitous—details of dead animals and humans abound, but all are in service of the plot, as well as Ava’s scientific interests and investigation. As the book progresses, the stakes become higher and danger creeps closer to Ava and John, leading to a dramatic conclusion. With Deadly Animals, Tierney has created an exceptional heroine who demands a sequel.
Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
Anyone who’s lived in a small town (or enjoys thrillers about them) knows that secrets, lies and betrayals are heightened by close proximity—especially in an isolated area that’s hard to get to, and even harder to escape.
Shelley Burr deftly captures and conveys that particular brand of tension in Murder Town, and turns it up several notches by making her fictional Rainier, Australia (located halfway between Sydney and Melbourne) a place once charming, now cursed.
Seventeen years ago, travelers routinely popped into Earl Grey’s Yarn and Teashop or picnicked in Fountain Park. But then a serial killer murdered three people in Rainier, and the town and its traumatized residents have never recovered.
In the present, over the objections of victims’ families, some residents are campaigning for outsider Lochlan Lewis to set up a “Rainier Ripper” tour that could bring in desperately needed revenue. Ghoulish true crime fans routinely show up to gawk and ask intrusive questions, so “Why not make it formal?” teashop proprietor Gemma Guillory muses. “Why not scrape a little bit of a living back from the horror they’d all endured?”
Alas, an entirely new horror emerges when Lochlan is found murdered in the fountain. Gemma decides to secretly investigate; it won’t be easy, but she’s tapped into the gossip pipeline and a pro at “glid[ing] through the day greasing every interaction with white lies and fakery.” Fans of Burr’s 2022 bestseller, WAKE, will be thrilled when private investigator Lane Holland joins her quest: He’s working remotely this time (from prison, to be precise) but has his own urgent reasons for pursuing the case. Can they pull it off before the Ripper’s legacy destroys Rainier once and for all?
Murder Town is a twisty rural noir rife with cleverly tangled character dynamics, claustrophobic suspense and an intriguing exploration of true crime fandom through the lens of a community struggling to heal even as terror strikes once again. And Gemma makes for a compelling tour guide through life in Rainier: She’s a community mainstay, protective parent and risk-taking undercover novice determined to drag the town’s darkest truths into the light, no matter the danger or consequences.
Shelley Burr’s rural Australia-set mystery Murder Town explores an intriguing angle of true crime fandom: so-called “dark tourism” of serial killer-related sites.
After solving an attempted murder in Emily Schultz’s Sleeping with Friends, book editor Agnes Nielsen is learning to navigate her newfound fame as a minor celebrity. She moves into an upscale condo building in Brooklyn and forms a quick friendship with her neighbor, the magnetic heiress Charlotte Bond. While attending a party at Charlotte’s, Agnes meets some of New York City’s biggest movers and shakers—and is possibly drugged by another guest. Agnes leaves the party, unsure why she was targeted, and within hours, Charlotte suffers a fatal fall from their shared building. The police investigation rules her death as accidental, but Agnes suspects the heiress was murdered. Though her memories of that night are hazy, Agnes leans into her recent success as a detective and launches her own investigation to find justice for Charlotte.
Brooklyn Kills Me is a sharp and original cozy mystery. It’s easy to root for Agnes: She’s still figuring out her life, but she’s also deeply committed to finding out what happened to Charlotte. She’s levelheaded and quick on her feet, even when dealing with powerful members of the New York City elite. Agnes’ investigation is aided by her friend Ethan Sharp, and the novel is better for it. Agnes and Ethan have a long and complicated friendship, but both care about each other and are integral to solving the murder. The duo is also genuinely funny, and Schultz expertly threads their humor through the novel, elevating it beyond a by-the-numbers cozy.
The central case is fast-paced and clever, with an exciting midpoint twist that deepens the mystery and reveals that Agnes may be in more danger than she realizes. A fun, fresh cozy with an engaging puzzle at its core, this second installment in Schultz’s series starring Agnes can be read as a standalone, with one caveat: The ending of Sleeping with Friends is revealed in this book, so readers be warned!
Emily Schultz’s Brooklyn Kills Me is a sharp, original and genuinely funny cozy mystery.
Morgan Talty follows up Night of the Living Rez with Fire Exit, a beautifully written novel that is sometimes funny, often heartbreaking and hopeful against ...
This remarkable novel is both a prequel and a sequel to Tommy Orange’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, There There, picking up with his unforgettable characters Orvil ...
In Where Wolves Don’t Die, Anton Treuer delivers an unflinching yet healing story that showcases Ojibwe culture while exploring themes of forgiveness and reconciliation.
In David McCloskey’s latest thriller, The Seventh Floor, the CIA team dedicated to eradicating moles is hilariously referred to as the “Dermatologists.” (I will never be able to unthink that.) There is no gentle introduction in this book, no setting of scene, no lulling the reader into a false sense of security. By the end of page six, a Russian agent is dead, having bitten down on his poison-filled Montblanc pen scant seconds before a team breaks into his office. A bit later, American agent Sam Joseph hangs upside down in a Russian black-ops site, pleading ignorance to a group of unbelieving interrogators. The heart of the matter seems to be that there is an extremely high-placed Russian mole in the CIA, with one team of facilitators dedicated to seeing that said mole remains securely in place, and a second team equally dedicated to ferreting them out. But this is the world of espionage, after all, and alliances are fluid at best and downright lethal at worst, with no handy brochure that lists true affiliations. The two main characters are Sam and Artemis Procter, the latter a no-nonsense CIA operational chief who irritates most people simply by walking into a room. Together, these two must navigate the minefields and expose the mole, or very likely die in the attempt. The Seventh Floor is not really about these heroes as much as it is about the process of flushing out a traitor, but it proves remarkably difficult to put down either way. PS, McCloskey knows whereof he speaks: He is a former CIA analyst who delivered classified briefings to congressional oversight committees, and he regularly wrote for the President’s Daily Brief, the top secret intelligence summary that appears on the desk in the Oval Office every morning. It shows.
Rough Pages
Lev AC Rosen’s Rough Pages is the third installment in his historical mystery series featuring gay detective Evander “Andy” Mills, a former San Francisco police officer who was outed and fired, and has now launched a private investigation firm serving the queer community in the City by the Bay. These postwar noir novels are set in the 1950s, when gay bashing was not only tolerated, but encouraged, even—or especially—by those sworn to “protect and serve.” Andy is drawn into a case involving the disappearance of Howard Salzberger, a bookstore owner who supplies a select clientele with queer books by subscription, and who may have run afoul of postal regulations prohibiting the distribution of “obscene materials.” At the center of the case is Howard’s missing notebook, which lists his subscribers: If the government gets hold of that, there will be hell to pay. The Mafia is also interested in obtaining the notebook, and among the mobsters, there is perhaps even less tolerance of queerness than there is by the government or general public. Rosen’s Evander Mills books are unsettling to read; like Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series, they unflinchingly depict historical—and in some ways, ongoing—discrimination against minorities. And like Mosley, Rosen takes his shots at the establishment by simply telling the day-to-day stories of marginalized people, the people who those in power tried to shove off into the shadows, but who persisted in living vibrant lives all the same.
Death by Misadventure
To begin with, a small confession: While reading Tasha Alexander’s latest Lady Emily mystery, Death by Misadventure, I happened upon the word “snarky.” As her novels are written in the vernacular of the time (in this case, 1906), “snarky” seemed to me to be very out of place. So I Googled the word, only to discover that its first recorded usage was in the year (wait for it . . .) 1906. I should have known better than to doubt Alexander. Lady Emily relates the story in the first person: A high-society murder takes place in the shadow of Neuschwanstein Castle, a killing that has roots dating back a generation, to the days of the castle’s creator, Bavaria’s Mad King Ludwig. Death by Misadventure is an Agatha Christie-esque locked-room mystery, with the victim and the cast of potential perpetrators snowbound after an Alpine storm renders the roads impassable. Lady Emily will investigate the murder, as she has done in the 17 previous novels; she easily rivals Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote in terms of acquaintances lost to untimely and violent demise. As is typically the case with locked-room mysteries, there are secrets and motives galore, but good luck figuring out “whodunit” before the big reveal. I certainly did not.
★ The Drowned
In the 1950s, in a field adjacent to the rocky Irish coast, a Mercedes SL sits idling. The driver’s door is open, but no driver is in sight. A local outcast happens upon the car while walking his dog, and is in turn happened upon by the car owner’s distraught husband, who cries out that his wife has thrown herself into the sea. Thus begins John Banville’s atmospheric mystery novel The Drowned. The local constable, a lout and a drunkard with no love for the aforementioned outcast, is first to investigate, but the situation requires an altogether more delicate and thorough touch. So Detective Inspector St. John (pronounced “sin-jun”) Strafford is called in from Dublin to preside over the case. And where Strafford goes, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that his colleague/adversary, pathologist and medical examiner Quirke, will not be far behind. As the investigation moves forward, Stafford and Quirke expose some troubling connections to an earlier case, a case that everyone thought had been solved, but now seems to have a few loose threads that require pulling. This is a book that deserves to be read slowly, not simply for the plotting and the characters (which are quite good in their own right), but for the sheer richness of the prose. The Drowned is genre fiction that rises to the level of full-on, capital L literature.
Lev AC Rosen’s critically acclaimed series has another win, plus new reads from Tasha Alexander and John Bancroft in this month’s Whodunit column.
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Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
“Family vacation” takes on a new meaning for grown children without kids of their own—like the couple trying their best to keep both sets of in-laws happy in Weike Wang’s Rental House.
