Haunting and Homicide is an entertaining start to a cozy mystery series set in New Orleans starring a ghost tour guide—who can actually see and speak to spirits.
Haunting and Homicide is an entertaining start to a cozy mystery series set in New Orleans starring a ghost tour guide—who can actually see and speak to spirits.
I don’t mean this to sound melancholy, but I haven’t spoken to my father since he died. I know a lot of people do that with their dead, but it’s not in me. He’s not there anymore—definitionally—and it feels like cheating to make him up as I would a fictional character. Too easy, too narcissistic, too small, and that last in particular. However well I knew him, the homunculus version I still carry around in memory is barely a single leaf from the text. I’m left with myself: the person created by my parents and by my own continuing encounter with the world, first with them and now without. I am the only ghost of them I will ever know.
Which made this book something like a benign, elective haunting. I stood over George Smiley’s world and built it anew: his friendships, his conviction, his disastrous yet loving marriage. I let the differences between myself and my dad—which sons and fathers insist upon, but which, despite very real variations and radically different lives and choices, are only ever part of the story—fade away. I know the rhythm of his voice. I know he distrusted Latin and favored German; that he admired Conan Doyle, as I do, and Wodehouse and Dickens. I can quote his occasional misquotations from his favorite stories. I know him, to the extent that any human being knows another.
That said, I’ve spent my professional life, for good and sufficient reason, drawing a clear line between his work and mine, and been so successful in doing so that people are still startled to find out we’re related. In writing Karla’s Choice, I let that piece of self-protection go and turned my face toward the Smiley novels as I might toward any other fictional universe I was working with. Writing is instinct, not cognition. You take an idea and make it into words, but first you have to taste it. In Gnomon, the flavor was layered mystery, every line a puzzle of itself; in Titanium Noir, the stark, bone-dry irony of crime in a city where billionaires grow physically immense in a mirror of their consumption. In Smiley’s world, you have to drink deep to know what you’re getting, because even as every character springs to life from a cursory sketch, almost everything is left intentionally blank: People only say what they mean when they’re confident they will be misunderstood; truth is what they all want and dare not give. The core of my father’s writing is the lie—not that everything is deceptive, but that anything could be, and yet we believe in one round, unhappy fellow in glasses to show us that it is possible to know the truth, and even to do something worth doing with it.
The trick, I think, to my father’s complex, shadowy novels, is very simple. You have to let the writer be exposed, and give voice to your fear, your grief, your love—and, in the end, to the thing every writer has and doesn’t dare admit: your hope.
Photo of Nick Harkaway by Nadav Kander.
How Nick Harkaway, son of the late John le Carré, channeled his father’s voice to write a new George Smiley novel.
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.”
What are your bookstore rituals? For example, where do you go first in a store? Lee Child: My first concern is how good of a breakfast I ate. How much weight can I carry home? I know there are going to be 20 or 30 titles I want. I usually glance at the front tables but start at the back, for the undiscovered gems. Then I calculate how much strength I have left and pick up what I want from the new titles.
Andrew Child: For me this depends on whether I’m browsing or going in for a specific title. I much prefer to browse! How I approach this depends on the layout of the store. Does it have different rooms? Multiple levels? I take stock of the geography and go from there, usually at random. For example, there’s a store in the town nearest to us in a building that started life as a brothel. There’s a central “parlor” that houses the new releases and popular categories, and a bunch of side rooms that now contain the more specialized genres. I like to pick one of the smaller rooms on a whim, start there and move on as the mood takes me. The only consistent factor in visiting a bookstore is to make sure I take a very large bag.
Tell us about your favorite library from when you were a child. LC: I started at a tiny local place but quickly read all the books there, so I graduated to a bigger library in the neighboring municipality, which was a long walk and a scary trip on a high footbridge over a canal. I remember it as a huge glass-fronted palace full of books. Ironically, I just got involved in a campaign to secure its funding, and as an adult I realize it’s perfectly normal size. That place both enabled and created my life.
AC: My favorite is my first—the same tiny local place that Lee started in. However, the family moved before I had read everything there and the library in the town we wound up in was just not the same. Not welcoming in the same way. Something to do with the layout or the lighting, maybe? Or the way the librarians sat behind glass screens at a high, impersonal counter? The experience of visiting wasn’t as much fun, but I still went there. I had to. It was the only source of books.
“I have literally never walked past a bookstore without going in and checking it out.”
While researching your books, has there ever been a librarian or bookseller who was especially helpful, or a surprising discovery among the stacks? LC: Deep stock in a chain bookstore helped me: I found a book about money laundering in the narcotics trade—moving and storing so much cash was an industrial-sized problem for the bad guys. The details within led to the spine of my first book, Killing Floor.
AC: I find that “research”—the profound, story-defining kind rather than fact-checking—works the opposite way around to what people often expect. I never set out to find an interesting topic to write about. I write about a topic I already find interesting, and the reason I find something interesting often stems from a suggestion from a bookseller. For example, a book about white-collar crime that was recommended to me in a store contained a section on malicious ways to short stock, and that became a central theme in Too Close to Home.
Do you have a favorite bookstore or library from literature? LC: Not really—I’m so thrilled with the real-world examples I didn’t feel the need for more.
AC: Not literature, but TV. I would love to visit the shop in Black Books, an offbeat British comedy in which the curmudgeonly store owner seems intent on not selling books.
Do you have a “bucket list” of bookstores and libraries you’d love to visit but haven’t yet? What’s on it? LC: All of them. Every single one has a quirk or a choice that makes them fascinating. I have literally never walked past a bookstore without going in and checking it out.
AC: My favorites tend to be the kind of quirky gems you discover by chance, tucked away down a backstreet or in a neighborhood you stray into by mistake. As a result, there’s no real way to foresee what they’ll be and where you’ll find them, so it’s not possible to make a list in advance.
What’s the last thing you checked out from your library or bought at your local bookstore? LC: Yesterday I bought a book about linguistic choices in framing political arguments. I love insights into how things are done.
AC: My most recent purchase was The Battle of the Beams by Tom Whipple, which is about the way that the development of radar shaped the outcome of World War II.
How is your own personal library organized? LC: Organized is a big word, and I’m not sure I can lay claim to it. Generally, I keep fiction and nonfiction in separate rooms, or at least separate bookcases. Beyond that, nothing. Any form of organizing means every time you get a book, you have to move every other book. That’s way too much!
AC: Lee may be horrified at this, but Tasha [Alexander, his wife and fellow mystery novelist] and I keep our library organized via an app. Every book we buy is added—mainly because we got fed up with the quantity of duplicate purchases we were making.
Bookstore cats or bookstore dogs? LC: Dogs for sure, the same as every other walk of life.
AC: Why pick between them? Why not have one (or more) or each?
What is your ideal bookstore-browsing snack? LC: I’m part of a generation that saw books as expensive, rare and precious, so I wouldn’t dream of eating or drinking in a bookstore or library.
AC: I don’t eat or drink while browsing, either, but I do love it when bookstores have a built-in coffee shop. That way I can dive right into my newest purchase and caffeinate at the same time.
Photo of Lee and Andrew Child by Tasha Alexander.
We asked the brothers behind the iconic suspense series about their favorite libraries and bookshops.
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.
It’s probably manageable if the leader of the free world goes off the deep end, or if the continent that drives the world’s economy loses its collective mind . . . unless both things happen at the same time. In 1914, at the beginning of Robert Harris’ latest novel, Precipice, the stars align to create a war so horrific in its size and scope that it would later (wrongly, as it turned out) be called “the war to end all wars.” Meanwhile, British Prime Minister H.H. Asquith has fallen head over heels for Venetia Stanley, an aristocrat 35 years his junior.
Did we mention he is married?
It should be also said at this juncture that, while Precipice is a work of fiction, virtually all of the characters are real, as is the correspondence from the PM to his inamorata. In fact, the letters (which she saved) provide some of the only historical insight into meetings that determined Britain’s decision to involve itself in the continental conflagration. The lone fictional character, a Scotland Yard Special Branch officer named Paul Deemer, has been tasked with monitoring what, if any, secrets are being spilled in the lovebirds’ copious correspondence (Asquith wrote to Venetia as many as three times a day).
Harris steers the reader through the slalom course of this ill-fated love story, set against the backdrop of the war’s more consequential casualties. His supporting cast, ripped right out of the society pages, includes the ruthlessly ambitious David Lloyd George, who would succeed Asquith as PM; the poet Rupert Brooke, who is enamored of Asquith’s daughter; Winston Churchill, whose hubris led to disaster at Gallipoli; and King Edward VII, who had somewhat scandalously anointed Asquith as PM in Biarritz, France, rather than on British soil.
Harris’ ear for language is keen, capturing both Britain’s elite and hoi polloi with effortless grace. Of course, he is aided by Asquith’s actual words, quoted from one of the avalanche of love letters: “Do you know how much I love you? No? Just try to multiply the stars by the sands.” Certainly more poetic than Charles’ phone calls to Camilla, though every bit as moonstruck.
Despite the fact that anyone acquainted with modern British history already knows the outcome of the story (spoiler alert: we won the war), Harris’ skill keeps the action taut and the reader focused. And the novel echoes a much older bit of classical English political fiction: As Shakespeare said, the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.
Robert Harris’ Precipice dramatizes a real-life scandal: On the eve of World War I, the British prime minister engaged in a national security-jeopardizing love affair.
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.
It seems like an impossible task to resurrect a beloved character, much less to do so in the voice of the most iconic espionage thriller writer after Ian Fleming. But in Karla’s Choice, author Nick Harkaway, son of the late John le Carré, manages to accomplish both, adding more nuance to the mythos of his father’s seemingly inimitable George Smiley.
Karla’s Choice takes place in 1963, shortly after the events of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and British intelligence officer Smiley is questioning his place in “the Circus”: le Carré’s nickname for Britain’s MI6. Smiley’s reeling from the recent death of his colleague, Alec Leamas, and has become cynical after discovering his home country employing the same morally gray strategies of their Communist enemies.
Smiley is fully intent on retiring when a Soviet hitman defects, turning himself in to a young Hungarian emigre, Szusanna. He soon finds himself swallowed back into the fold of espionage, first agreeing only to interview Szusanna and the defector, but eventually traveling back to Berlin, the site of his recent trauma. As he excavates Soviet spy networks and counterintelligence plots, Smiley learns more about his nemesis, an agent named Karla who will feature heavily in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Smiley is an unlikely spy. Unassuming, a little frumpy and rather forgettable, his strength is his ability to blend in; he is a “Gray Man” in a genre of action heroes. He’s also a man conflicted about his country’s actions in a new type of war, where violence is carried out on a faraway stage. Despite being set in the 1960s, Smiley’s concerns will resonate with readers who are familiar with today’s geopolitical conflicts.
Karla’s Choice may be best suited for fans of le Carré or vintage espionage thrillers: George’s world is a cerebral one—a chess game with a barely known enemy—not one of action or explosions. Harkaway mimics the tone of le Carré’s novels, which after 80 years may feel opaque and ponderous to newcomers.
However, Harkaway also does his late father justice in capturing Smiley’s subtlety and his shrewd ability to read the people around him. This, and the focus on the history of his nemesis, Karla, adds depth to the existing Smiley narrative, making Karla’s Choice a worthy and elevated addition to le Carré’s series.
In Karla’s Choice, author Nick Harkaway ably updates his father’s iconic George Smiley novels while lovingly preserving the tone and mood of the original novels.
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.
In Amanda Peters’ The Berry Pickers, Ruthie, a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq child, disappears from a farm in Maine where her migrant family is employed during the ...
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.
Praised by horrormeister Stephen King, Paul Tremblay’s shocking new novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, is an often graphic account of one family’s ordeal when their vacation is shattered in a cult-like home invasion. We asked Tremblay about the book’s origins, its dark path and his inner fears that helped forge the novel.
