Mystery & Suspense Archives | Page 38 of 119 | BookPage

by Bruce Tierney

★ Heaven, My Home
Attica Locke’s atmospheric thriller Heaven, My Home takes place in the northeastern Texas town of Jefferson, a once-prosperous trading center fallen on hard times (“the city square was like a courtesan who’d found Jesus”). Texas Ranger Darren Matthews investigates the disappearance of a 9-year-old boy who didn’t return from a solo boating adventure on nearby Caddo Lake. The missing boy is the son of Aryan Brotherhood leader Bill King, a convicted and incarcerated murderer. Jefferson was one of the first settlements composed primarily of freed slaves, in addition to a band of Native Americans who successfully dodged the wholesale relocation of tribes to Oklahoma during the U.S. westward expansion. The town is now home to their descendants. Add those aforementioned white supremacists into the mix, and the town becomes a veritable powder keg awaiting a spark—such as a black landowner whose animosity toward his bigoted tenants is well documented, and who is the last person to have seen the missing boy. Few suspense novelists display a better grip of political and racial divides than Attica Locke, and she spins a hell of a good story as well, introducing characters and locales you will want to visit again and again.

Bomber’s Moon
Although Archer Mayor’s latest novel, Bomber’s Moon, is considered part of the Joe Gunther series, Gunther himself plays a comparatively minor role. The serious investigative work is left to two of the Vermont-based cop’s well-regarded acquaintances: private investigator Sally Kravitz and photographer/reporter Rachel Reiling. The crime is most unusual. A thief has been breaking into the homes of people who are away but stealing nothing. Instead, he adds spyware to his victims’ communication devices and then waits to see how he can profit from it. But he is not the first person to pursue such an endeavor in this small Vermont town. Kravitz’s own father followed a similar path back in the day (and perhaps still does). He is well aware of this new interloper into the “family trade” and displays more than a little admiration for his successor’s skills—until the new guy gets murdered. The leads, scant though they are, seem to center on a high-priced private school, and before things resolve, there will be significant financial improprieties, more than a bit of class warfare and an increasing body count. The nicely paced Bomber’s Moon is replete with well-developed characters and relationships, with the unusual bonus of oddly likable villains.

Land of Wolves
Many of you will be familiar with Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire via television rather than books, but as is often the case, the books have nuance and detail that are difficult to replicate on screen. In Craig Johnson’s latest Longmire novel, Land of Wolves, the stalwart lawman is back in Wyoming after a south-of-the-border hunting expedition. In the nearby Bighorn Mountains, a wolf has apparently killed a sheep, which doesn’t seem especially unusual in the Wild West. However, tensions ratchet up considerably when the shepherd is found hanged, his dangling feet savaged by a wild animal, most likely the aforementioned wolf. Johnson uses this as a jumping-off point for broad-ranging discussions about wolves, the history of sheep ranching, the use of open rangelands and other social and ecological issues of the contemporary West. But there is no hint of a textbook in Johnson’s voice. Instead, it’s rather like hearing a modern Old West story told by a favorite uncle, one who fills in the little details that bring immediacy and life to a suspenseful narrative.

What Rose Forgot
Nevada Barr, bestselling author of the Anna Pigeon series, pens a superlative standalone chiller with What Rose Forgot. Right from the outset, it appears that Rose has forgotten quite a lot. First, she awakens in a forest, clueless about how she got there. The next time she wakes up, she is in a home for elderly dementia patients, still somewhat clueless although with the nagging suspicion that she does not belong there. So she secretly stops taking her meds. This is not immediately life-changing in and of itself, but it does serve to solidify Rose’s belief that she does not belong in a dementia ward. After making good on her escape, Rose joins forces with her late husband’s 13-year-old granddaughter, who possesses remarkable skills that help cover her step-grandma’s tracks. The longer Rose stays off the medications, the more she becomes convinced that someone (or ones) are out to get her. But is Rose just paranoid? What if she’s not? What Rose Forgot capitalizes on the resourcefulness of a pair of quite clever women and an equally clever pair of teens, all dedicated to stymieing some particularly unpleasant members of the opposing team. When a mystery features a 68-year-old protagonist, one could be forgiven for assuming that said mystery will fall into the cozy subgenre. What Rose Forgot is anything but.

Mystery

Mystery

Cozies: October 2019

Feature by Heather Seggel

by Heather Seggel

★ Word to the Wise
A mystery set in a library just feels right. Jenn McKinlay’s newest Library Lover’s Mystery, Word to the Wise, lets the comfort of a familiar location set up a truly creepy premise. Library director Lindsey Norris is busy with her job and happily planning her wedding. The attention of a patron who is new in town seems odd but innocuous, but it quickly becomes clear that Aaron Grady is a stalker. The more Lindsey learns about Aaron, the more she begins to doubt her own gut; she knows something feels wrong, but is she overreacting? When his body is found on library property, the killing appears to have been set up to incriminate Sully, Lindsey’s fiancé. To clear Sully’s name, she’ll have to dig into Aaron’s past, bringing herself into the killer’s orbit. McKinlay lets the first third of the story breathe, effectively ramping up the tension. Once Aaron is out of the picture, the pace picks up as the search for the killer intensifies, and the conclusion is a wild ride indeed.

Late Checkout
Halloween in Salem is a bit like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Chaos reigns, and the streets are a mess, but everyone has a good time. Late Checkout finds Lee Barrett losing hours at her TV news gig just as things get busy for the holiday. She volunteers at the library to pass the time and almost immediately finds a dead body in the stacks. It’s a big scoop, and with the help of her Aunt Ibby, Lee begins to research the victim. There are interesting forays into the work of running a small TV station and appearances by Lee’s charming and possibly clairvoyant cat. Author Carol J. Perry juggles these details with finesse and moves the plot toward a creepy conclusion that adds a few shivers to this cozy.

A Golden Grave
In Erin Lindsey’s A Golden Grave, Rose Gallagher should have the world on a string. She’s a Pinkerton agent working with a gorgeous partner—a far cry from her old life as a housekeeper—but that change in status has tested old friendships, and Rose still can’t pass for a society dame. A plot to assassinate New York City mayoral candidate Theodore Roosevelt keeps her hopping among ballrooms, political mixers and Nikola Tesla’s lab, where Mark Twain wisecracks while watching for the next fireball to appear. Lindsey balances history, a budding romance, a dash of paranormal activity and surprising humor. (A scene involving the as-yet-unveiled Statue of Liberty is surreal and hilarious.) In the language of its time, this is a corker.

Mystery

Mystery

Slapstick suspense

Feature by Kathryn Justice Leache

by Kathryn Justice Leache

For readers in the mood for murder and mayhem with a light touch come two laugh-out-loud mysteries from Lynne Truss and Susan Isaacs.

In the first entry of Truss’ mystery series, 2018’s A Shot in the Dark, the year was 1957, and 22-year-old Constable Twitten, an upper-crust know-it-all whose father was a famous criminal psychologist, had just joined the Brighton police force. His arrival came not a moment too soon, as his boss, Inspector Steine, and senior officer Sergeant Brunswick had (through their sheer blundering obliviousness) nurtured a thriving community of thieves, murderers and con men in Brighton. The majority of these lawbreakers report to the police station’s charlady, Mrs. Groynes, who leads a double life as the mastermind of Brighton’s seething criminal element—but only Twitten knows the truth about their Cockney compatriot.

When The Man That Got Away begins, Twitten is reading Noblesse Oblige by Nancy Mitford, a real book that addressed vocabulary differences between English social classes, albeit in a somewhat satirical way. The bestseller becomes a running motif of the novel: “It’s been quite controversial,” Twitten tells Inspector Steine, who has clearly not personally caught a whiff of the controversy. “And I’m sure the whole field of socio-linguistics has practical applications for policework, you see, but people keep getting annoyed when I talk about it, so I should probably bally well belt up about it, sir.”

When a bright young civil servant, Peter Dupont, has his throat slit in broad daylight, Constable Twitten launches an investigation, despite Inspector Steine’s boneheaded insistence that Peter died by suicide. Mrs. Groynes claims she can help—but can straight arrow Twitten bring himself to partner with a cold-blooded criminal, no matter how nice her cakes and cuppas are?

Truss expertly mines this slapstick absurdity for maximum amusement. When a couple of “Brighton Belles” encounter a strange old man on the pier trying to pass himself off as nobility-in-exile and trying to fence gold bricks for 25 pounds apiece, “the two women exchanged glances. They’d been warned about con men, but they’d somehow imagined that a con man would be a little bit harder to spot.” At one point, Mrs. Groynes absent-mindedly reveals a familiarity with the criminal underworld no charlady should have, and “Twitten watched as the ghost of a question crossed Brunswick’s face, but (as usual) didn’t settle.”

The Man That Got Away is a dark, screwball crime novel in the vein of the 1955 British film The Ladykillers that will also appeal to fans of Truss’ runaway bestselling grammar guide, Eats, Shoots & Leaves—as well as Anglophiles in general. Chock full of clues, criss-crossing subplots and wry dialogue, Truss’ latest is a pleasure from start to finish.

The inimitable Susan Isaacs, master of sardonically witty observation and genre-bending suspense, is back with Takes One to Know One, her first standalone novel since 2012. Thirty-five-year-old FBI agent Corie Geller has traded in her badge for the chi-chi enclave of Shorehaven, Long Island: “When I married Joshua Geller and adopted Eliza a year later, I had such a bubbly version of suburban life. Ah, normality! I pictured a racially and ethnically diverse group of friends holding Starbucks cups, dressed like a Ralph Lauren ad, each demanding to know if I thought Naguib Mahfouz deserved to win the Nobel Prize.”

Josh and Eliza provide the cozy stability that Corie has always craved, and life as an agent was never really part of her plan anyway. After 9/11, Corie ended up being using her degree in Arabic to follow her dad into law enforcement in the counterterrorism division of the FBI. But when Corie becomes a mom and moves to the ’burbs, leaving the bureau for a job “on the outskirts of publishing”—reading Arabic-language novels and evaluating them for potential translation—feels like a natural end point for her first career. “There was nothing more I thought I wanted than what Josh offered,” Corie observes. She’s happy enough to let new acquaintances assume she has always worked in publishing rather than voluntarily share details of her former career.

But Corie realizes she misses her life as a special agent when her past beckons from the strangest of places—her weekly lunch meet-up of freelancers, none of whom know the truth about Corie’s professional past. Pete Delaney, a freelance packaging designer, captures her attention by sitting in the same spot at lunch every week and keeping a watchful eye on the parking lot. Yet aside from this quirk, “truly, the only intriguing aspect of Pete—a guy so careful, so predictable—was that he was so nothing. His friendly neighbor shtick felt like an add-on, as if he recognized that he, too, needed some gear to tote around.” The FBI academy trained Corie not to ignore her gut—and her gut ends up leading her into a possibly hair-brained investigation that ensnares her retired cop dad, her college best friend and her former lover—but leaves her husband completely in the dark.

With shades of Agatha Christie and “Law & Order,” blended with the high drama of a conventional suspense thriller and a generous portion of Isaacs’ signature wry and brainy observational humor, Takes One to Know One will be catnip to longtime Isaacs fans and new readers alike.

For readers in the mood for murder and mayhem with a light touch come two laugh-out-loud mysteries from Lynne Truss and Susan Isaacs.

In the first entry of Truss’ mystery series, 2018’s A Shot in the Dark, the year was 1957, and 22-year-old Constable Twitten,…

Mystery

Mystery

Whodunit: November 2019

Feature by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

★ Galway Girl
Ken Bruen peppers his tales of world-weary ex-Garda (Irish cop) Jack Taylor with shamrock bromides that are often thought provoking or darkly humorous as Taylor muddles his violent way through the damp and peaty Irish landscape. “In Galway / They were forecasting a shortage of CO2 (no, me neither). / Which is what puts the kick, fizz, varoom in beer, soft drinks. / Ireland, without beer, in a heat wave.” You can almost hear the “tsk tsk” as Bruen imagines the mayhem that will ensue. Galway Girl finds Taylor beleaguered by a trio of spree killers targeting the Garda, a priest whose moral compass has been severely compromised and a surly falconer with an injured but nonetheless lethal bird of prey. Taylor’s ongoing battle with the demon rum (actually Jameson Irish Whiskey, in his case) hovers in the background of every scene, like some ominous uncle, familiar yet anything but benign. Bruen’s command of language and metaphor is on full display in his trademark staccato verse, and his sense of place is superb. And to top it all off, the final scene is so artfully and powerfully rendered that I had to go back and read it again. And again. And I likely will again.

Lethal Pursuit
If you wanted to learn about Victorian England, you can read scholarly texts that dissect every nuance of societal caste and political intrigue. Or you can do what I do and pick up a Will Thomas novel featuring private enquiry agents Caleb Barker and Thomas Llewellyn, the latest being Lethal Pursuit. This time out, the duo is charged with the delivery of a satchel to Calais, the French seaport closest to England. It should be a pretty straightforward task, but the previous bearer of the satchel thought that as well—moments before his murder, just steps from his planned destination. Suffice it to say that more murders will follow, as the contents of the satchel are rumored to be holy religious documents dating back to the time of St. Paul, and a host of agents (on both sides of the spectrum of holiness) will go to any lengths to get their hands on them. Think a Victorian-era Archie Goodwin narrating the exploits of a sleuth with an Indiana Jones-esque penchant for derring-do, and you will begin to get an idea of the vibe of this series. There is really nothing out there quite like it.

A Cruel Deception
The armistice that ended World War I silenced the mortar fire but did little to relieve chronic shortages of food and medical supplies, nor the debilitating malaise that gripped postwar Europe. For nurse Bess Crawford, peace means an imminent change of scenery. Just shortly after the opening of Charles Todd’s latest thriller, A Cruel Deception, Bess is summoned to her matron’s office and receives an assignment to travel to war-ravaged Paris. Her mission is to determine the whereabouts and condition of a young army lieutenant, who happens to be the son of the aforementioned matron. Early on, Bess turns up the missing soldier and finds him in pretty rough shape. Badly wounded, he has become addicted to laudanum while trying to deal with the pain. He suffers from sporadic amnesia, and Bess harbors some suspicions about both his backstory and his intentions going forward. A couple of military types offer Bess their assistance in her efforts to determine the truth, but she cannot shake the nagging doubt that one or both are rather too conveniently available in her life and may have goals that are at cross purposes to hers. As always, the mother-son writing team of Charles Todd does a magnificent job with atmosphere and dialogue, all while keeping their good-hearted heroine one step (but only one) ahead of the bad guys.

The Old Success
Martha Grimes’ series featuring Scotland Yard detective Richard Jury is unusual in several respects, not least of which is that the reader would never suspect that Grimes is an American writer. In terms of verbiage, slang and speech pattern, she channels the British vernacular flawlessly. This time out, in The Old Success, Jury is summoned to a small island off Land’s End, Cornwall, to investigate a murder in which much of the trace evidence has been washed away by the relentless waves that pound England’s most westerly point. It is but the first in a trio of murders that share a common factor or two, not to mention a handful of common suspects. Figuring into all of this somehow is another dead man, perhaps the only deceased person mentioned in the book who died of natural causes, whose passing left complicated opinions in its wake. Some people revere him as being just shy of a saint, while others hint at a much darker side, suggesting that had he lived a bit longer, he could have been the poster villain of the #MeToo movement in the U.K. Some interesting subplots (one with a race horse, one with a race car and one with an updated take on the Baker Street Irregulars) help to tie up some loose ends and keep the reader guessing as they wait for the surprising big reveal.

Mystery

Mystery

The lady doesn’t vanish—she investigates

Feature by Heather Seggel

by Heather Seggel

Three new mysteries gain extra depth from their settings in decadent Gilded Age New York, interwar London and rural World War II-era Britain.

Dowager countess Philomena Amesbury left England behind for the bright lights of turn-of-the-century Manhattan when the miserable husband she was practically sold off to finally had the good sense to die. Now Phil is determined to live life to the fullest—and it certainly helps that her bills are paid by a mysterious benefactor, Mr. X, who periodically leaves clues in her path. In Tell Me No Lies, author Shelley Noble turns Phil loose on a case with suspects to spare.

When the young heir to a fortune is found stuffed into a laundry chute after a party, investigating detectives would like nothing more than for Phil to butt out. But she received a heads-up about the case from Mr. X, and before long she’s on the intriguing trail. The clues lead her through the Plaza Hotel and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but much more is revealed at a country house where tempers grow short and the fog makes it dreadfully hard to see who’s milling about. Add in some tantalizing romantic potential (Lady Phil’s benefactor won’t show his face, but he does occasionally show up and spend the night) and a hot air balloon chase, and you’ve got suspense steeped in Gilded Age glamour, and a very good time indeed.

The Body on the Train pits investigator Kate Shackleton against, well, almost everyone by story’s end. Scotland Yard enlists her to help identify the titular body, which was found in a sack on a train carrying rhubarb. Kate finds credible information hard to come by among the Yorkshire residents she talks to. The train may have departed from there, but the community’s internal struggles have made them wary of outsiders. Soon Kate is investigating a second murder along with a labor dispute and a battle over land use—and trying to save her own neck in the bargain.

Author Frances Brody lets Kate wander at will, and it’s a pleasure to follow her. She stays at the home of a friend under the pretext of creating a local photography feature, and the photos she takes of people and places are described so vividly you can almost see them. The struggle to balance the rights of workers and the needs of an impoverished community makes for a tense backdrop, and Kate’s relationship with her friend is strained as she learns more about the friend’s role in both. When everyone’s motives are suspect, it’s impossible to know who to trust, and this thriller makes great use of that fact in a truly chilling climax.

Poppy Redfern is doing her bit for England’s war effort. Her family home and farm have been seized so the U.S. Air Force can use them, and Poppy serves as an air raid warden, helping with drills and checking the village for any glimpse of light through the blackout curtains. But when two young women who had been dating American servicemen are found strangled to death, suddenly wartime allies seem like potential enemies stationed too close to home. In Poppy Redfern and the Midnight Murders author Tessa Arlen layers suspicion on top of suspicion against a backdrop of privation and English resolve.

Local distrust of the “Yanks” runs so high that it may well divert attention away from a killer hiding in plain sight. But Poppy’s easy friendship with one of the Americans could be leading her to trust too readily. (It’s hard to be mad at someone who can get real beef in the midst of rationing.) She works out her theories of the case via a novel in progress whose protagonist always seems to have the answers she lacks. Vivid settings and high emotions keep the suspense at fever pitch, but it’s the characters that make Arlen’s series kickoff such a stunner.

Three new mysteries gain extra depth from their settings in decadent Gilded Age New York, interwar London and rural World War II-era Britain.

Mystery

Mystery

Whodunit: December 2019

Feature by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

★ How the Dead Speak
Val McDermid’s latest installment in the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, How the Dead Speak, is a bridge novel. Although not specifically required, it helps to have read the past few books in the series, particularly 2017’s Insidious Intent. As that book ends and this one begins, Hill and Jordan are nursing their disparate wounds in remarkably different ways. Hill, in prison for manslaughter, is putting his energy toward writing a book on forensics, and Jordan, no longer with the Bradfield Police department, is trying to eke out a living as a private investigator of sorts. They don’t have much interaction any more, as Hill feels that his presence in Jordan’s life exacerbates her PTSD. But a large cache of skeletons has been found in a closed Catholic home for children, and Hill and Jordan’s old unit has been put in charge of the investigation, a political hot potato due to recent years’ media coverage of pedophile priests and sadistic nuns. There is the distinct possibility that a serial killer is at work, or the even more disturbing possibility that the serial killer, if indeed one exists, might be a member of the clergy. As always, the narrative is tight and marvelously paced, the characters are flawed but enormously sympathetic, and the suspense factor is simply off the charts.

Murder at the Opera
There’s no shortage of conflict to test amateur sleuth Atlas Catesby in D.M. Quincy’s Murder at the Opera. Catesby finds himself at the murder scene of a well-known London chanteuse/courtesan. The likeliest suspect is the victim’s lover, the same titled gentleman suspected of having killed Catesby’s sister years before. Couple that with the fact that the second-likeliest suspect is a former lover of Catesby’s, a competitive lass whose lucrative singing job was on the verge of being usurped by the murder victim. Further down the suspect list is Catesby’s estranged nephew, Nicholas, son of the primary suspect and heir presumptive to a title and fortune if his father is found guilty. The novel is set in 1815 London, where class distinctions mean everything and aristocrats can literally get away with murder. Catesby, however, is ably assisted in his investigation by Lady Lilliana Sterling Warwick, a thoroughly modern (in 1815 terms) young widow with the nose of a private investigator and the social connections to open some regal doors. It’s easy to picture the pair as a Regency Nick and Nora Charles—urbane, yet with a strong undercurrent of “get ’er done.”

The Second Sleep
We go 350-odd years further back in time for Robert Harris’ thriller The Second Sleep—to 1468, to be precise. Consider other terrific medieval mysteries as Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Ross King’s Ex-Libris, and get ready for an exceptionally intricate tale that will take you in unexpected directions and then pummel you when you get there. Cleric Christopher Fairfax is called upon to officiate at the interment of a parish priest. It’s a simple enough task: Write a few words of banal praise and read the appropriate scriptures to usher the man to his final resting place. But Fairfax doesn’t sleep well the night before and instead visits the dead man’s library, where he happens upon all manner of heretical books that have been banned by church and state alike. Contrary to his upbringing, training and better judgment, Fairfax begins to read. At this point in the review, I am torn between revealing any more or just letting the reader unearth surprise after surprise until they begin to get a glimmering of what is really transpiring here. So, after some consideration, I will just leave you with this quote: “the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy, an apple with a bite taken out of it.” Chew on that for a while . . .

Impossible Causes
With her latest work, British young adult author Julie Mayhew turns her hand for the first time to adult suspense fiction. The resulting Impossible Causes is atmospheric and downright creepy, with boarding school intrigue, paganism and unexplained death. The action takes place on remote Lark Island—remote thanks to the fog that rolls in and sticks around for seven months without a break. It’s just the sort of eerie atmosphere to send high school girls running for the hills to fantasize about forbidden sexual liaisons and to play at summoning evil spirits. But let’s not forget about the aforementioned unexplained death, around which the suspense spins. The person who claims to have found the body is Viola, a teenage expat out walking her dog (because isn’t it always the dog walker who happens upon the dead body?). When the explanation finally does arrive, it is quite different from what you might expect. Impossible Causes channels The Wicker Man (the original one with Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee) quite successfully without being in any way derivative: lonely island, check; upstanding protagonist, check; strange animistic local goings-on, check; sexual deviancy, check; mounting sense of dread, check. And even though a number of the main characters fall into the young adult age range, the book is in every respect geared toward a fully adult audience.

Audio, Memoir, Mystery

Audio Mystery Memoir

Audio: December 2019

Feature by Anna Zeitlin

by Anna Zeitlin

★ Medallion Status
In his laugh-out-loud new memoir, Medallion Status, John Hodgman navigates his new life as a former celebrity, as he discovers that he’s less famous than a pair of Instagram dogs. He explores his obsession with achieving higher levels of loyalty status to his favorite airline and shares the private spaces he’s been admitted to, including a party where a man who walked on the moon feels unworthy of attending, a top-secret lounge at the airport and his favorite fancy Hollywood hotel. He also shares places he’s been prohibited from entering, including a Scientology center said to contain a bottomless pit and Mar-a-Lago. In this excellent memoir full of astute moments of nuanced observation, Hodgman explores his myriad interests, from extinct hockey to ska, which inform his unique perspective. This is definitely one you’ll want the audiobook for, as Hodgman’s delivery really helps his jokes land. There’s also one line in the memoir that Hodgman can’t bear to read aloud; you need to hear the A-list celeb he brings in to read it.

Make It Scream, Make It Burn
Leslie Jamison’s essays in Make It Scream, Make It Burn cover a wide range of topics. In the opening essay, “52 Blue,” she talks about a whale whose call is twice as loud as all other whales in the ocean, and about his human devotees who have ascribed their own meanings to his call, projecting loneliness or heartbreak onto the whale and creating stories about his life. In other essays, Jamison learns about people living through the video game Second Life, about a photographer who spends 20 years traveling to Mexico to photograph the same family and about her own experience of becoming a stepmother and buying the wrong Frozen doll. Jamison reads in a direct, matter-of-fact voice, underscored with a tinge of longing. Her narration emphasizes the melancholic but hopeful tone of the book.

Now You See Them
Detective Edgar Stephens and magician Max Mephisto return in Elly Griffiths’ fifth Magic Men mystery, Now You See Them, set in mid-1960s England amid battles between gangs of mods and rockers. When an American matinee idol comes to town and one of his biggest fans goes missing, Detective Stephens is on the case, but his wife, a former detective, gets ideas of her own for how to solve it. As more young women disappear, the race is on to find the kidnapper in this light mystery with a fun setting. With a background in British theater, James Langton brings his acting chops to the narration. His proper English accent is well suited to the material.

New audiobooks from John Hodgman, Leslie Jamison and Elly Griffiths make for excellent listening.

Fiction, Mystery, Nonfiction, Speculative Fiction

Nonfiction Fiction Speculative Fiction Mystery

Book Clubs: December 2019

Feature by Julie Hale

by Julie Hale

★ The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye
Reading groups will enjoy untangling the threads of Lyndsay Faye’s historical whodunit The Paragon Hotel. In 1921, Alice James, who’s been mixed up with New York mobsters, comes to Portland, Oregon, bearing a bullet wound. Alice, who is white, takes shelter at the Paragon Hotel—a sort of safe house for the city’s African American population, which has been harassed by the Ku Klux Klan. When Davy Lee, a multiracial boy who’s a favorite at the hotel, disappears, Alice pretends to be a journalist researching his case. Along the way, she crosses paths with a wide cast of characters, including Blossom Fontaine, a nightclub singer with a questionable past; wealthy Evelina Vaughan, a white woman with stakes in the boy’s disappearance; and an assortment of belligerent cops and racist thugs. Faye’s smart, stylish and suspenseful tale tackles timeless topics of race and gender.

Black Is the Body by Emily Bernard
In her powerful collection of personal essays, Bernard reflects upon her experiences as a black woman in America, sharing poignant reminiscences of her Southern childhood and insights into her life in the place she now calls home—the predominately white state of Vermont.

North of Dawn by Nuruddin Farah
This piercing novel finds Somalian immigrant Mugdi living a quiet life in Oslo until his troubled son, Dhaqaneh, commits suicide. When Dhaqaneh’s strict Islamist widow and children come to live with Mugdi and his wife, the process of assimilation changes them forever.

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
In this dystopian tale, Lia, Grace and Sky live apart from society on an island with their parents. They receive no outsiders except for women in need of a ritual that protects them against the world’s poisons.

Last Stories by William Trevor
Last Stories is a stunning final collection from the beloved Irish author (1928–2016). Trevor’s unembellished prose stands in striking contrast to the weight and complexity of the ideas he explores, including mortality and the nature of love.

Mystery

Mystery

Whodunit: January 2020

Feature by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

The month’s best new mystery & suspense titles.

The Missing American
Lonely-hearts internet scams out of West Africa are legendary and legion, the twin epicenters being Nigeria and Ghana. Kwei Quartey’s The Missing American focuses on Ghana, where the local word for this sort of scam is sakawa. Retired American bookseller Gordon Tilson has been in contact online with a beautiful Ghanaian widow, and when she tearfully tells him that her younger sister has been in an accident, he unhesitatingly offers to send money for the girl’s medical care. If you guessed that he has just become a victim of sakawa, please pat yourself on the back and advance to the head of the queue. It takes a personal visit to Accra, Ghana’s capital, for Gordon to fully realize that he has been duped, not by a doe-eyed Ghanaian widow but more likely by a team of clever and newly wealthy young men. In a parallel narrative, police officer Emma Djan, summarily dismissed from the Accra police force after refusing sexual advances from a superior, lands a job as a private detective. When Gordon goes missing from his hotel in Accra, Emma and Gordon’s son, Derek, launch a joint search, fearing the worst but hoping and praying for the best. Sakawa scams abound, overlaid with a witch doctor (or two) and a trio of likable, if occasionally gullible, protagonists. My prediction: We will be seeing Emma Djan again.

The Body Outside the Kremlin
In 1923, the Russian government established a prison camp on the remote island of Solovetsky in which to sequester opponents of the new Bolshevik regime. By some accounts, it worked all too well, serving as the prototype for the legendary Gulag system. At the outset of James L. May’s debut novel, The Body Outside the Kremlin, Tolya Bogomolov is serving time at Solovetsky for possession of forbidden books. Quick of mind and well-versed in novels of detection, Tolya is something of a natural when it comes to assisting in the investigation of a fellow prisoner’s murder. Two bonuses: 1) Whatever time Tolya spends sleuthing is time he doesn’t have to engage in hard labor, and 2) he is a potential suspect, so assisting the investigator will deflect some of the suspicion. In the days before Solovetsky housed a prison, the island was home to a monastery that held some very rare and valuable Russian Orthodox icons, which the murder victim was in the process of restoring. Some of those icons were rumored to have fallen into the hands of the secret police, which is not a group anyone would choose to cultivate as an adversary. That choice may have been made for Tolya without his consent. Historical, atmospheric (in a frigid sort of way) and exceptionally well-written, The Body Outside the Kremlin is a first-rate debut.

The Decent Inn of Death
World War II has just ended, and a pair of retired Scotland Yard policemen with decades of experience under their belts and plenty of time on their hands investigates a mysterious death in Rennie Airth’s The Decent Inn of Death. It all starts out innocently enough, when former chief inspector Angus Sinclair receives a last-minute invitation to the home of a friend. While there, he learns of the death of the church organist, Greta Hartmann, a German woman who apparently slipped on a rock while crossing a stream, hit her head and drowned. This explanation does not sit well with her housemate, however, and Sinclair is drawn into investigating the death. It seems that a recent encounter with a stranded motorist had left Greta shaken. It’s possible that she had recognized an escaped German war criminal and, worse yet, that he recognized her as well. Later in the narrative, series linchpin John Madden shows up, as does a blinding snowstorm, at which point an English manor house becomes the scene of a locked-room murder mystery that rivals the best of Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell or P.D. James.

★ Facets of Death
Botswana police Detective David Bengu is more commonly known by his nickname, Kubu, which is Setswana for “hippopotamus,” in a nod to his plus-size dimensions. In the latest adventure from the writing team known as Michael Stanley, the portly policeman finds himself in hot pursuit of a gang of diamond thieves who engineered a devilishly clever, broad-daylight heist. Three trucks left the diamond mine at Jwaneng, each carrying a locked box. One of the boxes contained diamonds and the other two only pebbles in an attempt to confuse any potential hijackers. To say that it didn’t work would be a monumental understatement. The diamond truck was quickly identified and hijacked, while the other two made it to their destination unimpeded. Kubu quickly arrives at the conclusion that the robbery could not have been pulled off without the assistance of an insider, but that line of reasoning leads to dead end after dead end (literally more than figuratively), as one by one the likeliest perpetrators die off violently. But where are the diamonds? A fabulous test of Kubu’s legendary deductive talents, Facets of Death is easily one of the best heist novels I’ve read since Gerald Browne’s classic 11 Harrowhouse.

The best mystery & suspense novels of January 2020.

Mystery

Mystery

Whodunit: February 2020

Feature by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

February's hottest mystery releases include the latest historical from mother-son writing duo Charles Todd, bestselling British writer Sophie Hannah and more.

★ A Divided Loyalty

Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Ian Rutledge, the central character of the wildly popular series by mother-and-son writing duo Charles Todd, embarks on his 22nd adventure in A Divided Loyalty. A murder victim has been discovered in the center of a stone circle. Another officer was originally assigned to investigate, but Rutledge is deployed to reopen the case after he successfully completes a separate investigation displaying some similarities to the stone-circle murder. The deeper Rutledge becomes involved in the investigation, the more likely it looks that a fellow officer was the perpetrator. Rutledge finds this troubling not only from a public relations perspective but also because he respects and likes the officer in question. But the evidence is damning and proceeds to become more so with each passing day. Rutledge is one of the most complicated and finely drawn characters in contemporary crime fiction. Suffering from shell shock after his experiences in World War I, he carries on regular conversations with a dead soldier from his command, a man who disobeyed orders while under fire and was executed by Rutledge for his disobedience. There’s not a weak episode to be found in Todd’s terrific series.

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Perfect Little Children

Picture this: You haven’t seen your friend Flora in a dozen years, nor her husband, Lewis, nor their kids, Emily and Thomas. Then, almost as if by accident, you see her step out of her silver Range Rover, and she looks exactly the same, no sign of aging whatsoever. OK, that could happen. Diet, exercise, perhaps a little nip-and-tuck surgery—those could do the trick. But then her kids step out of the car as well, and you overhear Flora speak to them: “Oh, well done, Emily. That’s kind. Say thank you, Thomas.” But the thing is, Emily and Thomas should be teenagers by now, and these children are preschoolers. This is the situation faced by Beth Leeson in Sophie Hannah’s latest thriller, Perfect Little Children, and she cannot wrap her mind around it. So she does what any red-blooded suspense heroine would do—she noses around a bit. And then a bit more. And with each new piece of information she acquires, she becomes more convinced that there is a crime to be uncovered, and that her former friend may be in mortal danger. This notion begins to border on obsession, and the reader gets to watch as it becomes more and more deeply rooted. So what on earth is going on? Genetic age manipulation? Some strange, dark mind game? Or is Beth simply losing her marbles, one by one? Whatever the case, this is another satisfying psycho-thriller from the queen of the genre.

Alone in the Wild

Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton series continues in Alone in the Wild. Deep in the Yukon Mountains, the totally off-the-grid town of Rockton is a perfect escape for criminals and battered spouses alike. After being accepted by the council and paying a hefty fee, new residents say goodbye to any communication (electronic or otherwise) with the outside world. There’s only one firm rule in place: no townspeople under the age of 18. So when Detective Casey Duncan and her partner in both work and romance, Eric Dalton, stumble upon a murdered woman holding a barely alive baby, they feel no small measure of consternation about what to do with the child while launching an investigation into the murder. The denizens of Rockton are a motley crew and certainly not the preferred cross-section of society to be engaged in childcare. Armstrong has created a unique milieu for setting her suspense novels, which is no easy task nowadays. Read one, and you will want to read the rest.

The Good Killer

If you’re up for a first-rate page turner, look no further than Harry Dolan’s The Good Killer. Iraq vet Sean and his partner, Molly, have been living under the radar for years, harboring a virtually priceless secret and trying to remain invisible to a pair of dangerous enemies. Then, by sheer unfortunate happenstance, Sean uses his military training to take down a spree killer in a Houston mall. Sean makes a fairly clean getaway, but his face and license plate number are captured by mall security cams, and he becomes something of a reluctant celebrity. Meanwhile, Molly is attending a yoga seminar in Montana, where she is required to surrender her cell phone and renounce all contact with the outside world. Sean has no choice but to drive there and collect her before anyone else can. He heads north in an aging Camry with a faulty alternator, woefully under-armored vis-à-vis the opposing teams. The rest of the book is basically one long and harrowing chase scene, right up to the explosive climax. Block out sufficient time to read The Good Killer in one sitting. It’ll be hard to stop once you get started.

February's hottest mystery releases include the latest historical from mother-son writing duo Charles Todd, bestselling British writer Sophie Hannah and more.

★ A Divided Loyalty

Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Ian Rutledge, the central character of the wildly popular series by mother-and-son writing duo Charles Todd,…

Classics, Fiction, Mystery, Science Fiction & Fantasy, YA, YA Fiction

Science Fiction & Fantasy Fiction YA Fiction YA Mystery Classics

The Hold List: Zombie apocalypse survival teammate

Feature by the editors of BookPage

by the editors of BookPage

In the event of a zombie apocalypse, it would be wise to have a plan in place. Perhaps most importantly, who would be on your team? We’ve picked our preferred partners—magical powers are allowed, but no dragons, bears or mythical beasts!

Edmond Dantès from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

I have long resigned myself to my own lack of apocalypse survival skills. I can’t run without getting winded. I don’t have combat skills. I can’t farm or dress wounds or build shelter or tools. In truth, I would be among the first to go—unless I aligned myself with someone wealthy and powerful. Edmond Dantès is the perfect choice: rich, scrappy and weirdly fixated on avenging himself against those who have wronged him. We could quite comfortably wait out the apocalypse from inside his château. And if that fails, the man owns his own island. Everybody knows zombies can’t swim, so a quick yacht ride to the Island of Monte Cristo would solve our little army-of-the-undead problem.

—Christy, Associate Editor

Sabriel from Sabriel by Garth Nix

Like many of my colleagues, my talents are perhaps better suited to rebuilding the world after the zombie apocalypse than surviving it in the first place. That’s why I need someone like Sabriel on my team, and not only because she possesses a bandoleer of seven magical bells with the power to send the dead back through the nine gates of death to their final rest, although I acknowledge that will come in handy. But Sabriel is also resourceful, adept at other forms of magic, brave and kind. As we make our way to a population-sparse area like—ha, as if I’d tell you my plans—I know she’ll leave me behind only if she absolutely has to, and if I get bitten, she’ll make my death swift and ensure I stay dead.

—Stephanie, Associate Editor

Frank Mackey from Faithful Place by Tana French

My biggest fear wouldn’t be zombies, as they are usually stupid. I’m more afraid of humans in a crisis, as they are, historically, the worst. And that’s why I want Irish undercover cop Frank Mackey on my team. First introduced in Tana French’s The Likeness, Frank becomes the central character in Faithful Place, which puts his ability to pursue multiple, sometimes conflicting objectives—while manipulating almost everyone around him—to the hardest test, as he has to do it to his own dysfunctional family. If he can do that and emerge (somewhat) in one piece, he’d easily survive the human chaos of an apocalypse. Frank is also funny as hell, so we’d have some laughs while trying not to die.

—Savanna, Associate Editor

Vasya from The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

To give myself a real shot at living through this, I need a partner with knowledge of mythical and otherworldly situations, as well as the powers to match—and I need her to live in the middle of nowhere. In Katherine Arden’s debut novel, headstrong young Vasya is an heir to old magic and has the abilities to protect her family from dangers that are plucked straight out of folklore. She’s got a great attitude—which I’ll appreciate when I get upset about the situation—and she excels at riding horses and saving people, so we’ll get along great. We’ll treat the apocalypse like it’s a long winter night, hidden away so deeply in the wilderness of northern Russia that we might not even notice when the end of the world is over.

—Cat, Deputy Editor

Captain Woodrow F. Call from Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Genre-bending is prominent in today’s cultural landscape. From rock with hip-hop beats to Mexican-Korean fusion, the lines have dissolved. All of these hybrids make me think that a cowboy would feel right at home in the zombie apocalypse, and Captain Woodrow F. Call—brave, strong, levelheaded and loyal to the bone—is the paragon of cowboy-ness. Take, for example, when Call saves Newt, the youngest member of the Hat Creek Outfit, from a soldier harassing him. Call beats the man to a pulp until Gus McCrae has to lasso him off. The only explanation Call offers for this violent outburst: “I hate rude behavior in a man. I won’t tolerate it.” Just imagine what the man would do to a zombie!

—Eric, Editorial Intern

In the event of a zombie apocalypse, it would be wise to have a plan in place. Perhaps most importantly, who would be on your team?

Fiction, Mystery

Fiction Mystery

Whodunit: March 2020

Feature by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

Rural noir, historical horrors and a tense courtroom drama are featured in this month's best new mysteries.

The Deep

The “unsinkable” Titanic has engendered story upon story. What is less known is that the Titanic had a sister ship, the Britannic, that outlived its sibling by only four years. Alma Katsu’s latest thriller, The Deep, weaves together narratives of the two doomed luxury liners through the experiences of Annie Hebbley, who sailed on them both. Annie served as a maid/stewardess on the Titanic in 1912, then as a nurse on the Britannic in 1916 after it was converted into a wartime hospital ship. In between postings, she spent several years in an asylum and at first, Annie remembers almost nothing of the iceberg crash she experienced on the Titanic, or its aftermath. But then her memories of seemingly paranormal experiences on the doomed ship start to return. She is not unlike Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining, a none-too-together person who’s drawn toward the occult somewhat against her will. The reader will wonder whether the evidence of the supernatural are just figments of Annie’s imagination or something more sinister. And even though you know what will happen—these ships are gonna go down—it does not diminish the eerie suspense one iota.

The Holdout

Los Angeles, 2009: A jury remains deadlocked in the trial of African American teacher Bobby Nock, accused of murdering 15-year-old student Jessica Silver. The evidence is pretty overwhelming, and 11 jurors agree on a guilty verdict, but Maya Seale, juror number 12, disagrees. One by one, the other jurors come around to her way of thinking, and Bobby is acquitted. In the second story arc of Graham Moore’s gripping legal thriller The Holdout, we fast forward to 2019, by which time several jurors have expressed their reservations about Nock’s acquittal. The 10-year anniversary of the crime occasions a TV documentary on the alleged murderer, the trial and the jurors. One juror in particular, Rick Leonard, strongly regrets his acquittal vote and embarks on a mission to find the evidence that will prove Bobby guilty. He doesn’t get far into his quest before he is murdered—in Maya’s hotel room. While the earlier crime drama is revisited on network TV, a rather more pressing contemporary crime drama unfolds as Maya attempts to prove her innocence. Have your page-turning fingers limbered up, because The Holdout will give them a workout.

The Last Passenger

After establishing PI Charles Lenox in about a dozen mystery novels, author Charles Finch penned a prequel series chronicling the early adventures of the detective. The third and final installment, The Last Passenger, takes place in 1855 London, where a dead body has been found in a train car in Paddington Station. The victim has the look of a member of the gentry, but every piece of evidence that could lead to his identification has been painstakingly removed. As often happens in mysteries, an overworked and plodding policeman enlists the help of the urbane PI in solving the crime, and the PI develops an entirely different take on the situation. Finch’s plotting is excellent, his characters well developed, but it is his prose that truly shines. He evokes the writing style of 19th-century English authors—Wilkie Collins jumps to mind—lending a degree of authenticity to the narrative found in comparatively few historical novels. Finch also incorporates then-contemporary international politics, especially the burgeoning abolitionist movement in the U.S., in this exceptional and atmospheric mystery.

★ The Bramble and the Rose

Rural noir has roots dating back at least to James M. Cain, and writers such as James Lee Burke, C.J. Box and Attica Locke carry on the tradition today, exposing readers to the dark side of country life (and death). Tom Bouman, a relative newcomer to the scene, scored big with his 2014 debut, Dry Bones in the Valley, which won the prestigious Edgar Award for best first novel that year. His latest, The Bramble and the Rose, is third in the series featuring small-town cop Henry Farrell. Henry’s town, Wild Thyme, Pennsylvania, has indeed provided a wild time for retired PI Carl Dentry, and not in a good way. His decapitated body has been discovered in some nearby woods, the severed head secreted in the hollow of a tree. When Henry’s ex is murdered before she can tell him something she knows about Dentry’s murder, Henry finds himself the main suspect in the case. And as he delves further into the growing number of mysteries that plague his small town, he becomes not only the chief suspect but also the target of person or persons unknown. There is a free-form stream-of-consciousness element to Henry’s first-person narration that is very appealing—world-weary yet cautiously optimistic.

Rural noir, historical horrors and a tense courtroom drama are featured in this month's best new mysteries.

The Deep

The “unsinkable” Titanic has engendered story upon story. What is less known is that the Titanic had a sister ship, the Britannic, that outlived…

Mystery

Mystery

Two haunting small-town mysteries

Feature by G. Robert Frazier

by G. Robert Frazier

Small towns are supposed to be safe—nestled away from the dirty streets, the riffraff, the greed and the vice more common in big cities. They are places where you can leave your doors unlocked at night, where you can trust your neighbors. So when crime does come calling, it is even more shocking. Such is the case in two fantastic new novels: Before Familiar Woods by Ian Pisarcik and The Evil Men Do by John McMahon.

In Before Familiar Woods, North Falls, Vermont, is still reeling from the deaths of two young boys three years ago when the unexplained disappearance of the boys’ fathers sends fears skyrocketing. With the law unable—or unwilling—to help (it’s been less than 48 hours since the men disappeared), Ruth Fenn takes it upon herself to find her husband, who is one of the two missing. But as her late son, Mathew, was ultimately blamed for the previous deaths, few people in town are inclined to aid in her search.

When Milk Raymond, an Iraq war veteran, returns home to raise his son, Daniel, Ruth sees a kindred spirit in him. After Daniel is abducted by his mother, Ruth and Milk team up to get him back before tragedy can strike again. The two plots inevitably intersect resulting in an unexpected, violent finish.

In his debut novel, Pisarcik paints vivid passages that firmly establish the cold isolation of the town itself as well as Ruth’s role as town outcast. A sense of hopelessness and foreboding permeate the novel, which builds slowly but steadily towards its stunning conclusion.

The Evil Men Do, John McMahon's exhilarating follow-up to his Edgar Award-nominated debut novel The Good Detective, is a more traditional small-town whodunit. Detective P.T. Marsh and his partner Remy Morgan follow a series of leads surrounding the mysterious death of real estate mogul Ennis Fultz, found deceased in his home in Mason Falls, Georgia. But seemingly every clue prompts new questions, new suspects and even fewer answers.

Like Ruth in Pisarcik’s novel, Marsh is haunted by the death of his son under tragic circumstances, leading him to an excessive drinking habit and a less-than-positive reputation within the police department and community at large. When his father-in-law has a suspicious accident, it raises new complications and deeper secrets that threaten to upend his fragile police tenure even further.

McMahon delivers the story in straightforward, terse prose. The approach easily pulls the reader in as Marsh's case ramps up in complexity and scope, both personally and professionally. Fans of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series of novels will find much to like about this novel and its down-to-earth hero.

As Marsh puts it, “A murder scene is like the most exquisite painting you’ve ever seen. You notice the brushstrokes. The smudges. They all reveal something about the artist, some unconscious pattern.” Both Pisarcik and McMahon prove to be artists in their own right, each passage written with the care devoted to a brushstroke in a larger masterpiece.

Small town crimes have always held a special fascination for readers. Small towns are supposed to be safe—nestled away from the dirty streets, the riffraff, the greed and the vice more common in the big cities.