Mystery & Suspense Archives | Page 53 of 119 | BookPage

by Elyse Discher

The moment you think you have the latest Valerie Hart thriller figured out, Saul Black takes the narrative in a new and stunning direction. Exquisitely plotted, this police procedural unravels with the deftness and striking prose that Black fans have come to expect.

The plot of Anything For You hinges on the personal dysfunctions of two women who occupy vastly different spaces—one a homicide detective and one a killer—but feel remarkably alike in their intelligence and canny ability to read others. Valerie Hart is a seasoned homicide investigator with the San Francisco Police Department, and she’s working to stifle her self-destructive tendencies (booze, promiscuous sex and an addiction to work, to name a few) in order to make her marriage work. She’s even contemplating having a child; it's an idea that terrifies her as much as it excites her.

Valerie’s latest case is an example of how her personal life and work have become toxically entangled: The victim, prosecutor Adam Grant, once spent a night in her bed. Grant was brutally killed in his own home, with his wife barely surviving the attack. At first, it seems a cut-and-dry case in which a former inmate with a grudge against Grant is the perpetrator. But as Valerie digs deeper she learns that both Grant and the ex-con were linked by a mysterious escort known only as Sophia. Valerie knows she should remove herself from the case due to personal conflict, but she’s too invested to let go.

There’s an icy self-awareness and a self-deprecation to both Valerie and Sophia that helps them transcend typical femme fatale stereotypes. Black gives Sophia, in particular, a complex and sometimes unsettling back story that makes her feel like more of an anti-heroine than a villainess. By the time Valerie is closing in on her quarry, we are so invested in both of these characters, and in the incredibly intricate plot, that it is almost a disappointment to see the mystery solved. Black blends nuanced characters, immersive prose and complex plotlines so skillfully that it feels practically magical. When Valerie and Sophia finally meet face-to-face, readers will be breathless with anticipation and the promise of delicious secrets being revealed.

Historical Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense Historical Fiction

The Accomplice

Review by G. Robert Frazier

by G. Robert Frazier

It’s hard to believe that there are stories about the hunt for Nazi war criminals yet to be told. Numerous books and films already exist and seem to cover everything that can be said on the matter. So it was with some reservation that I approached reading Joseph Kanon’s new novel, The Accomplice, which promised a hunt for one such war criminal. Fortunately, Kanon’s skill as a master storyteller quickly allayed my fears.

The Accomplice is a fast-paced, emotionally charged novel. While the subject matter is familiar—there were moments of “I’ve heard all this before”—Kanon’s characters were so well-drawn and authentic in their portrayal that it was easy to put those early doubts behind.

Kanon’s riveting story takes place some 17 years following Nazi Germany’s downfall at the end of World War II. He begins by introducing us to Max Weill, a Jewish concentration camp survivor fixated on the atrocities at Auschwitz, where he was imprisoned, and on the man who terrorizes his every waking moment, Otto Schramm. An assistant to Josef Mengele, who oversaw gruesome experiments on camp prisoners and selected those to be sent to the gas chamber, Schramm is believed to be dead at the outset of the novel. But Max believes otherwise.

With Max critically ill from a heart condition, however, his obsession of bringing Schramm to justice falls to Max’s nephew, a CIA desk jockey named Aaron Wiley. Initially, Aaron is reluctant, believing there’s nothing to be gained by dredging up old wounds. But Aaron ultimately concedes, propelling him to chase leads to Buenos Aires where he encounters (and falls in love with) Schramm’s daughter, who may be more devious than she lets on.

Kanon, who previously wrote the critically praised spy thrillers Detectors and Leaving Berlin, uses taut prose and sly dialogue to dial up the intrigue and tension to satisfy any reader, including skeptics like me.

Joseph Kanon uses taut prose and sly dialogue to dial up the intrigue and tension to satisfy any reader.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Strangers at the Gate

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

by Linda M. Castellitto

In Catriona McPherson’s new thriller, Strangers at the Gate, Finn and her husband Paddy Lamb have a helluva week.

Things start out promisingly enough for the couple, who are making multiple life changes all at once. Paddy’s got a new law-partner job, Finn’s going to be a deacon and they’re leaving the city to move into a gatehouse on a sprawling estate owned by Paddy’s employer. Life’s looking up, even though, to Finn, it seems almost too good to be true.

And then, things go horrifically awry: after a lovely dinner with their new benefactors (the fabulously named Lovatt and Tuft Dudgeon), the Lambs discover the Dudgeons’ very, very bloodied bodies—apparent victims of a murder-suicide. Finn and Paddy keep this gruesome discovery to themselves (they’ve got their own reasons for avoiding police scrutiny), and wait . . . and wait . . . and wait . . . for someone else to come upon and report the crime. In the meantime, they strive for nonchalance as they get to know their new colleagues and neighbors, including well-meaning church folk and the beautiful, enigmatic Shannon.

But as Finn struggles to acclimate to her new and creepy surroundings—such a dark and craggy landscape, so many looming trees—her paranoia grows. And it doesn’t really stop, as McPherson ramps up the tension with ever more creative revelations and twists that will have readers eager to see what on earth is coming next. It’s a fascinating study of what can happen when we suppress our instincts or aren’t sure who to trust, and a delightfully torturous day-by-day recounting of the aftermath of a life-changing lie: everyone seems suspicious, using the proper verb tense is suddenly crucial and eccentricity begins to feel a lot more sinister.

Fans of McPherson’s award-winning work (the Dandy Gilver and Lexy Campbell series, plus numerous standalone novels) will relish whipping right through Strangers at the Gate, guessing and gasping all the way.

In Catriona McPherson’s new thriller, Strangers at the Gate, Finn and her husband Paddy Lamb have a helluva week.

Fiction, Literary Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller Literary Fiction

Your House Will Pay

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

Steph Cha’s nerve-scraping novel—with its biblical, plangent title and painfully relevant plot—could be described as triggering, depending on the reader. Your House Will Pay is based on a particularly sickening episode during a particularly sickening period in American history. In 1991 Los Angeles, Korean grocery store owner Soon Ja Du shot 15-year-old Latasha Harlins in the back of the head after accusing her of stealing. The horror was caught on video, and although Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, she never went to jail.

Who was this woman who pulled the trigger? Who was the girl she shot? To answer this, Cha has fictionalized the players, with Du turned into Yvonne Park and Harlins into Ava Matthews, and has brought them to life through the eyes of their loved ones. In Yvonne’s case, this means her taciturn husband, Paul, and their daughters, Miriam and Grace. After Yvonne kills Ava, the Parks escape into anonymity. They run a tiny pharmacy in a mall filled with modest Korean businesses and keep to themselves.

As for Ava, she and her brother, Shawn, were raised by their aunt Sheila after the death of their mother. Sheila’s son, Ray, is more like a brother than a cousin. The comings and goings of this African American family are far more dramatic than those of the reclusive Parks. Shawn and Ray have been in and out of gangs and, unlike Yvonne, in and out of jail. For most of the book, they’re middle-aged and determined to stay on the straight and narrow. Ray is a husband to the faithful Nisha and a father to their children, and Shawn is helping his girlfriend raise her adorable toddler. Then something terrible happens, and the Parks and the Matthewses are thumped back to square one.

The heart of the book is how alike these people are. They work, they eat, they pray, they love; their devotion to their families is painful. They are caught up in a racial pathology that came into play long before the Parks emigrated to America and before any member of the Matthews family was born. That pathology led them to turn on each other.

What Cha wants the reader to understand through her straightforward prose is that none of what happened between these two families had to happen, and everybody’s house pays.

Steph Cha’s nerve-scraping novel—with its biblical, plangent title and painfully relevant plot—could be described as triggering, depending on the reader.

Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller

Conviction

Review by Anna Zeitlin

by Anna Zeitlin

When Anna McDonald’s husband announces he’s leaving her for her best friend, she finds comfort in true crime podcasts—until she recognizes the victim of her new favorite podcast as a man she once knew. When her best friend’s has-been rock-star husband turns up on her doorstep, he becomes the unwitting accomplice in helping her unravel the podcast’s mystery. Soon they’re jet-setting around Europe as Anna becomes entangled with assassins and uncovers a plot involving one of the richest, most secretive people in the world. Much of Conviction takes place in Scotland, and narrator Cathleen McCarron does a great job with accents and secret identities. Denise Mina’s latest thriller is a fun, edge-of-your-seat listen that feels very contemporary with its use of social media and podcasts to drive the story forward.

Denise Mina’s latest thriller is a fun, edge-of-your-seat listen that feels very contemporary with its use of social media and podcasts to drive the story forward.

Audio, Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Audio Thriller

Whisper Network

Review by Anna Zeitlin

by Anna Zeitlin

A North Texas-based athletic wear company gets shaken up when the “bad man list” is passed around in Chandler Baker’s Whisper Network. When one of those bad men is up for a promotion to CEO of the company, enough is enough. Four very different women—from high-powered lawyers to a member of the custodial staff—come together to stand up to him and to the company willing to overlook his history of sexual harassment. This #MeToo revenge fantasy makes for a fun listen with a bit of mystery, exploring women’s lives, their relationships to work and how they deal with the bad men they are forced to answer to. Narrator Almarie Guerra does a nimble job portraying the different women with honesty and sympathy.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

What Rose Forgot

Review by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

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 & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Land of Wolves

Review by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

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.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Bomber’s Moon

Review by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

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.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Heaven, My Home

Review by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

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.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Seven Crows

Review by Elyse Discher

by Elyse Discher

If you take the John Wick and “Sons of Anarchy” series, blend them with the movie Taken and then dial the intensity up to 11, you have Seven Crows. This gritty thriller unapologetically celebrates its violent antihero, ex-con Killian Delaney, as she navigates the criminal underworld in search of her missing niece.

Killian Delaney grew up in a tough world. Before most people were graduating college, she was the “Old Lady” (aka girlfriend) to a member of the Crows motorcycle club, as well as a celebrated MMA fighter. When her boyfriend was gunned down in a hit by another club, Killian found the man responsible, Rank Cirello, and almost killed him, leaving him permanently disabled and in chronic pain. After nearly a decade in prison, Killian is out on parole, but Rank hasn’t forgotten her. His payback? To kidnap Killian’s 15-year-old niece Shannon and traffic her on the illegal sex market. This plot sounds dark, and it is, but it’s also surprisingly satisfying.

Seven Crows opens with a bang and doesn’t slow down. Spanning only a few days, the action is compressed into a breathless timeline. Killian recruits some of her old criminal friends and makes a few new ones as she (sometimes literally) burns through the underworld in search of Shannon. There are plenty of casualities along the way, but Killian never slows down in her pursuit and never flinches away from the trauma she inflicts.

This novel is staggeringly violent, but its violence feels almost cathartic, rather than gratuitous. Killian and Shannon live in a world dominated by dangerous men who commoditize (literally) the women around them. In one scene, Killian and an accomplice tear through a brothel that sells underage girls with brass knuckles and a shot gun, and it’s impossible to feel anything but a sense of justice watching them put these predators out of business. That said, I must add the caveat that, in keeping with its tone, the book references sexual assault in a candid and descriptive way that may be off-putting to some readers.

The ending of Seven Crows hints at the beginning of a series and I hope that comes to fruition. In the era of #MeToo, vicariously experiencing Killian’s brutal form of justice feels just right, rather than too much.

Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller

Sarah Jane

Review by Amy Scribner

by Amy Scribner

Sarah Jane Pullman has lived a hardscrabble life. Her mom disappeared at regular intervals throughout her childhood. Her tour of duty in the Middle East ended with an RPG that killed her patrol partner right in front of her. She has cooked at every out-of-the-way diner in the tri-state area and fled an abusive marriage. But Sarah Jane has a knack for taking life as it comes.

“Lives rarely go into the oven as goo and come out beautifully golden,” she says.

Author James Sallis has delivered a long list of excellent crime novels, as well as biographies and books of poetry. With its spare but insightful prose and probing exploration of the price of our sins, Sarah Jane fits among his finest.

The titular character has settled down as a small-town cop, managing the fender benders, bar fights and neighborhood quarrels that pass for crime in a sleepy Middle America town. She regularly sees a man she likes just fine, and although she tends to keep to herself, she has a handful of friends and many more admirers of her low-key approach to the law.

Sallis imbues his story with an astonishingly real sense of place, settling Sarah Jane in a town that is “the kind of place that has period gingerbread houses shouldered up against modern cookie-cutters, where hardware stores and gas-and-live-bait shops cling to town’s edge, where you hear the whisper of old-country vowels in local speech.”

When an unusually violent crime shakes the town, it soon becomes clear Sarah Jane’s long-ago choices have caught up with her. Her intense need for privacy rubs up against the community’s need for answers. Sarah Jane finds herself thinking about her “patchwork past” and how it has led her to a place she can call home. This book will leave you marveling about our ability to carve out a life, no matter how different it is from what we expected.

As Sarah Jane learns, “However hard you stare at maps and plan, you rarely get where you think you’re going.”

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

The Off-Islander

Review by G. Robert Frazier

by G. Robert Frazier

Readers yearning for a noir mystery in the vein of Mike Hammer or Sam Spade are in luck. Peter Colt has delivered just such a tale of intrigue with his debut novel, The Off-Islander.

Set in 1982, the book features all the classic tropes of noir: a lonely detective on a missing persons case, shady suspects and red herrings, sultry ladies to entice him, rainy streets and seedy bars, danger lurking at nearly every turn. The detective, Andy Roark, even totes around a copy of The Raymond Chandler Omnibus for when he needs moments of inspiration. What more could you ask for?

Colt, an Army veteran who served in Kosovo and Iraq and now is a police officer in a small New England city, captures his firsthand, on-the-job experience in moody prose. The novel spends nearly as much time exploring Roark’s inner demons from the Vietnam War and life afterward as it does with the case at hand, adding a deeply evocative perspective to events.

Approached by longtime friend and lawyer Danny Sullivan, Roark is tasked with finding the long-missing father of a California woman whose husband is seeking political office. He follows the cold case trail to Cape Cod and Nantucket Island, where the man once lived as part of a hippie commune in the late 1960s and received his VA checks in the mail.

It doesn’t take long before Roark’s probing questions about the island’s reclusive residents begin to uncover some unsavory details, all with dangerous repercussions. In typical gumshoe fashion, Roark is pushed over a bluff, his car is vandalized, and he’s shot at by a lurking sniper. Before long, even his friend Danny, who got him into the mess in the first place, is begging him to let things lie.

Of course, no respectable private dick would ever do such a thing, and neither does Roark. If you’re a fan of such fiction, you’ll want to see things through to the end, too.

Readers yearning for a noir mystery in the vein of Mike Hammer or Sam Spade are in luck. Peter Colt has delivered just such a tale of intrigue with his debut novel, The Off-Islander.