Best known for the hilarious Southern romp Handling Sin (just released in paperback), author Michael Malone has shown a unique ability to question what he calls the moral, political and social dimensions of the old South versus the new, while at the same time telling entertaining and well-crafted stories. After an absence of more than 10 years, Malone returns to the popular detective duo of Uncivil Seasons (1983) and Time’s Witness (1989). In First Lady, he has created another irresistible blend of mystery, romance, heartache and revenge in an appealing Southern setting. Hillston, North Carolina, home of Haver University, has been praised by both the governor and the press as being one of the safest small towns in the state. Hillston’s reputation and the reputations of the local police chief, Cuddy R. Mangum, and his best friend and chief of homicide, Lt. Justin Savile V, are called into question when a second nude female body is found mutilated in the woods outside of town. The killer leaves a body tag on each victim addressed to Justin and Cuddy, making the case a personal challenge. The mayor and the local press, attracted by the sensational nature of the murder, seem intent on impeding the progress of the case. The fact that the deputies in the local sheriff’s department act like the Keystone Kops at crime scenes doesn’t help matters. The sheriff’s office is also the cause of another headache for Cuddy. The only son of one of the town’s best families was arrested for shooting his pregnant wife on New Year’s, and the sheriff’s department tainted the evidence so badly that a not guilty verdict is inevitable. In desperation and frustration over the mounting bad press, Cuddy announces that he and his department will find the serial killer the press has dubbed Guess Who in a week or resign.

As with his previous detective novels, Malone has again created a cleverly constructed plot along with imperfect, nuanced characters. Justin, who drinks a bit too much, loves old things and considers the homogenization of his hometown a travesty, while Cuddy has been, and will always be, in love with the one woman he can’t have. Their banter is believable, smart and funny, filled with references to Colonel Sanders and other things uniquely Southern. Michael Malone’s return to this intrepid pair of detectives and their colorful small town life will delight armchair detectives everywhere. His characters, their relationships and the fictional town of Hillston charm long after the final page.

Pam Kingsbury lives and writes from her hometown of Florence, Alabama.

Every professor learns the hard way that scholarship does not prepare the scholar for classroom teaching. David Nolta’s first novel hinges on an equally reliable proposition: scholarship, no matter how brilliant, does not make the scholar well-equipped for love or marriage. The murder of beautiful Virginia Vanderlyn, wife of one of Clare College’s most distinguished professors, is a brutal instance of the sorry state of affairs in the academy. Despite the high concentration of brain matter on one small campus, no one (or so it would seem) least of all Virginia’s archaeologist husband knows that she is dead and buried under the floorboards of the Vanderlyn mansion until 10 years after the deed is done. These various proofs of idiocy do not, however, add up to a typical satire on academic life. The subtitle of Grave Circle, “An Ivory Tower Mystery,” invites the reader to think of the book as a murder mystery; but at the same time “Ivory Tower” promises a comedy of manners, a promise fulfilled by the author’s affectionately tongue-in-cheek portrait of New England college life.

There is nothing satirical about the novel’s heroine, either, apart from her outlandish name. Nolta presents a vivid portrait of the inscrutable Antigone Musing, professor of chemistry, as she sits musing (no other word for it) on the arrival of her brother Hiawatha. Nolta almost immediately undercuts the pomposity of these names with the more manageable nicknames Hi and Tig. Such good-natured abbreviations fairly sum up the delightful psychology of the novel: everything falsely inflated gets the stuffing knocked out of it, including both the inevitable love story and the unexpected family romance that unfold. Making their amateur investigations of Virginia Vanderlyn’s murder, Hi and Tig form a fascinating, if ineffectual, duo of novice detectives. And as the mystery nears its suspenseful climax, Grave Circle summons the strange and satisfying feeling that something much more is afoot here than the “game.” To try to name that feeling would be academic. Michael Alec Rose is an associate professor at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music.

Since concluding his acclaimed Berlin Noir trilogy, author Philip Kerr has explored speculative fiction, mystery, science fiction and even the young adult genre. He returns to WWII-era Europe with Hilter’s Peace, an intense and masterfully duplicitous story that revolves around the Big Three Conference involving Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in Teheran in 1943. After losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the debacle at Stalingrad and being overwhelmed all along the eastern front, Hitler and his Nazi brain trust know that Germany cannot possibly win the war. Secret peace negotiations have begun, but as FDR says with understatement, It’s a delicate situation. Things become even more complicated when war atrocities committed by the Soviet Union come to light, specifically a mass grave containing the bodies of 4,000 Polish officers and a letter describing the nightmarish deaths of more than 50,000 German POWs. Two focal characters in the unfolding drama are Willard Mayer, a Harvard-educated philosopher with more than a few skeletons in his closet, and Walter Schellenberg, a general in Hitler’s SS serving as the head of Foreign Intelligence. Mayer, who is working for the Office of Strategic Services as a German intelligence analyst, is inexplicably called upon by FDR to accompany him to Teheran. But as the meeting draws nearer, so does the chance that his past political indiscretions will be uncovered. Schellenberg, meanwhile, has found out about the top-secret meeting and is planning to end the war once and for all.

Masterfully blending fiction and fact and replete with espionage, intrigue and clandestine military adventure Hitler’s Peace will not only appeal to WWII aficionados but also to fans of suspense novelists like Clancy, Ludlum and DeMille. Paul Goat Allen is a freelance editor and writer in Syracuse, New York.

eath by misadventure: that’s the coroner’s verdict in the death of Ann Butts, found dying in a London gutter on a rain-soaked night in the winter of 1978. Case closed. Or is it? “Mad Annie,” as she is known to her neighbors, is an unpopular, antisocial person, who drinks, mutters to herself and lives alone with a menagerie of stray cats. She is cruelly ridiculed by her neighbors for her strange behavior. She is also the only black person living in the neighborhood.

Mrs. Ranelagh, our narrator, finds Annie dying in front of her house and for a brief but powerful moment, they make eye contact. The problem is, no one but Mrs. Ranelagh believes that Annie was murdered, and she pays a heavy price for her conviction. At great personal cost, she makes it her mission and eventually her obsession to prove that Annie’s death was not accidental. She becomes depressed, agoraphobic and loses her job. While the Ranelagh family eventually leaves England, Mrs. Ranelagh does not leave her obsession behind.

The Shape of Snakes, a powerful tale of justice and redemption, is actually two stories: Annie’s and Mrs. Ranelagh’s. The author deftly explores not only what type of person would kill Annie, but what type of person would spend 20 years searching for justice. There are no superheroes or over-the-top villains in The Shape of Snakes, just a fascinating cast of deeply flawed, complicated and, at times, downright grim characters. They reveal their sordid lies and sad secrets through sizzling conversations that practically scorch the pages with their intensity.

Writing in the first person, Walters skillfully intersperses her story with personal letters, correspondence, documents, medical records and e-mail. It’s a smooth and ingenious way to introduce characters, unravel clues and span a 20-year time period. It’s also a bit like following a trail of tantalizing crumbs through the forest. Can Mrs. Ranelagh break through the wall of silence and complicity in her search for justice? With an endless list of suspects, The Shape of Snakes is an intriguing mystery that will keep you guessing until the very end.

C. L. Ross, a life-long mystery lover, reads, writes and reviews in Pismo Beach, California.

Suspense, history, literary fiction, espionage, romance and psychological drama Secret Father, the compelling new novel by acclaimed writer James Carroll, is all of this and more.

Told by father and son, the story is set in Germany during the summer of 1961. The Cold War between East and West is escalating, and construction will soon begin on the Berlin Wall. During this tense time, Ulrich, Michael and Katharine leave their American high school in West Germany and travel, without telling their parents, to the Communist side of Berlin for the May Day celebration. Their escapade springs from youthful rebellion but quickly brings serious consequences. Shadowed by his unknown birth father’s past, Ulrich has taken a flight bag belonging to his stepfather, a U.S. intelligence officer. The bag what it contains, who will view its secrets and what will happen to Ulrich for possessing it is at the crux of the story.

The teenagers are detained by the Stasi, East Germany’s notorious secret police. Paul, Michael’s widower father, and Charlotte, Ulrich’s beautiful German-born mother, must attempt to rescue them before their actions cause an international incident that could destroy them and the world’s tenuous peace.

Secret Father, Carroll’s first novel in nine years, is being published this month on the 42nd anniversary of the building of the Berlin Wall. The author of Constantine’s Sword, which examined the role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust, and An American Requiem, a National Book Award-winning memoir, Carroll himself spent time in Germany in the 1960s as the son of a U.S. general. In fact, Carroll and two friends took a trip to East Germany, but their experiences were less harrowing than those of the fictional characters in the novel.

Gripping and beautifully written, Secret Father is a remarkable evocation of a tumultuous era and of the power that secrets can hold across generations.

Cindy Kershner is a writer in Nashville.