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by Barbara Clark

Readers who fancy top-notch crime procedurals need look no further than the latest by seasoned Brit author Ann Cleeves. Harbour Street is her sixth mystery featuring Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope and her Northumbrian detective team. The first chapter unfolds on a Metro train that’s carrying a crowd of Christmas shoppers, one of whom doesn’t make it to the next stop alive. Vera’s top assistant, Sergeant Joe Ashworth, is in the train car where the fatal stabbing occurs, and he sees zilch until the train empties its passengers, all except for a lone, very dead elderly woman.

Who’d kill an elegant, self-contained older lady who seems to spend most of her days helping others? But this is no locked-room mystery, as Vera sets out to discover the truth, starting with victim Margaret Krukowski’s little attic room on Harbour Street and soon expanding to the street’s boat yard, church and local bar, as well as the Haven, a nearby hostel for homeless women. Margaret’s life begins to emerge through those who knew her: as “one of the family” to landlady Kate and her teenage kids; as friend and supporter to a downbeat, desperate woman of the Haven; and as a long-ago lover to more than one man who vividly remembers her. Yet she remains a private and secretive woman to those searching for her killer. Vera and her team delve into the past of Harbour Street to put together Margaret’s story and find a motive for her death.

This is an outrageously good book, one of the best procedurals to come down the pike in a while, with a comprehensible plot full of believable characters. Cleeves is superlative as she subtly and cleverly alters our perceptions of the main characters as the book progresses. Harbour Street’s colorful back-story is persuasively drawn, and its characters fit like pieces in a surprising puzzle.

Vera herself is a piece of work, as readers may know from Cleeves’ earlier books and thanks to the PBS TV series “Vera,” now in its fifth season. Overweight, opinionated and obsessive, Vera pursues often-eccentric lines of detection and makes unsparing demands on her team, including the hidebound but persistent Joe and the clever, self-absorbed Holly. Readers become party to the detectives’ private thoughts, petty grievances and jealousies that make them human and accessible to us.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

An unsettling journey

Review by Sheri Bodoh

by Sheri Bodoh

British author Charles Lambert’s latest, The Children’s Home, is like a strange dream in which you can’t quite tell if you’re awake. Morgan, its disfigured, 20-something protagonist, lives isolated in his powerful family’s sprawling home. His estranged sister sent a housekeeper to live with him, and soon after, children began arriving. They appear with no backstory—one, in fact, materializes out of thin air—and Morgan and the housekeeper, Engel, become parents of sorts. The resulting story is a weird, poignant journey reminiscent of Calvino that explores fear, power, revenge and redemption.

When one of the children falls ill, Dr. Crane enters the scene. He befriends the young hermit and becomes a fixture at the house. When government agents arrive inquiring about rumors of “strays” living there, Crane speaks for Morgan, who is afraid to let strangers see his face. As Morgan and Crane observe strange, sometimes frightening, behaviors in the children, eerily related discoveries are made in attic trunks and in Morgan’s grandfather’s books. Eventually, circumstances force Morgan to balance his fear of being seen against his concern for the children’s safety.

Lambert’s story is addictive, although readers looking for concrete answers to its riddles may be disappointed. But while the book leaves many mysteries intact, its potent, often brutal, images have a lasting power. Things feel just a notch off in this world, like a walk through a quietly disturbing dream. It stays with you after, like that dream, trying to tell you something gravely important.

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

Riot Most Uncouth

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Read a page or three of Riot Most Uncouth and you may wonder why you’d want to stick around while young Lord Byron, author Daniel Friedman’s overwrought and outlandish protagonist, makes his eccentric, in-your-face debut. But stay on for a few more pages and you’ll find yourself intrigued and then committed to Friedman’s lavish, over-the-top plot and larger-than-life characters.

As with his award-winning fictional octogenarian Buck Schatz (Don’t Ever Get Old), Friedman’s imagination has run away with him again through volatile Byron, who is busy cutting a swath of drunkenness and sexual debauchery through the halls of Cambridge University in the company of his companion, a bear named the Professor. Byron, who fancies that his detective powers are unrivaled, is sure he can solve the case of a murder most gory that has been committed in Cambridge. He sets himself upon the task while not for a moment changing his dramatic lifestyle. His persistent, drunken intrusions into the crime scene upset the search undertaken by two apparent private investigators, Knifing and Dingle, who operate separately and rate pretty high in the “strange” category themselves.

The case escalates with more graphic murders, and Byron becomes suspect numero uno in some quarters, enduring a wild, punishing arrest attempt in a runaway carriage. But he’s implacable in his own fears that the crimes somehow involve his father, the long-gone and assumed dead Mad Jack, and his tales of vampires, told to Jack when he was a child living in horrific domestic circumstances. Byron is in thrall to these stories of the undead that frighten, repel and attract him in equal measure. It’s easy to get hooked on Byron’s wild imaginings as he reels out his wavering and fantastic but ultimately spot-on deductions.

Friedman has created a rogues’ gallery of bizarre and seamy characters in this bauble of a story that rankles, reeks and ultimately delights. Readers who start out wishing that Byron could be imprisoned for something—anything, really—may end up with an unexpected affection for Friedman’s overblown but endearing creation, hoping that young Byron will return to entangle us again in a mad quest for . . . whom? Perhaps the Cambridge murderer, who may have disappeared, or even some new embodiment of Byron’s father’s eerie fantasies. The poet is confident he’s up to the challenge.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Demons spur a veteran hero

Review by G. Robert Frazier

by G. Robert Frazier

Beneath the suspense-filled action of a homegrown terrorist plot, Nicholas Petrie’s debut novel, The Drifter, follows the compelling story of one former Marine’s struggle to reacclimate himself to civilian life while honoring his commitment to a fallen soldier. That alone is reason to keep reading, but Petrie amps up the stakes in surprising fashion, creating a story that is moving, thrilling and satisfying on every level.

Like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, Peter Ash is a loner with an uncompromising sense of honor and duty. A soldier home after deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Ash is already battling personal demons in the form of a “white static” that constantly threatens his ability to function. The condition, a byproduct of post-traumatic stress, manifests itself whenever he enters confined spaces, forcing him to eschew the modern conveniences of hearth and home for uneasy nights spent under the stars or in his beat-up pickup truck where the wide windows ease his troubled soul.

Upon learning that one of the men he commanded overseas has committed suicide, a guilt-ridden Ash leaves the relative safety of his new lifestyle to aid the widow the man left behind. In the process of rebuilding the woman’s porch, and his own life, Ash finds his former soldier’s mangy dog standing guard over a suitcase filled with $400,000 in cash and four blocks of C4 explosives. Ash sets off on a trail of discovery, both internally as he learns to cope with his affliction and externally as he attempts to determine the origins of the money and the purpose for the explosives—all while trying to keep the widow and her children safe from the men who actually killed her husband.

Petrie’s meticulous research into the effects of PTSD on the nation’s returning veterans and the internal war many of them still fight as they try to resume their normal life brings an added dimension to his main character, but without being preachy. The result is an intimate story of personal discovery as well as an obsessive pageturner of a book.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

The danger living upstairs

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Just after well-known British mystery writer Ruth Rendell died in May of this year, at the age of 85, her life and talents were described in the media with words like “brilliant,” “discomfiting” and “challenging.” Readers who’ve long been gripped by Rendell’s imaginative crime fiction, however, knew that already. From her popular Chief Inspector Wexford series with such hallmarks as the top-notch An Unkindness of Ravens and Not in the Flesh, to standalone classics like A Dark Adapted Eye (as Barbara Vine) and A Judgment in Stone, right up to her last, Dark Corners, the author’s unsettling prose has always attracted legions of readers.

Rendell’s final novel, her 66th, achieves the same high quality of work and complexity of character that have been typical of her fiction. Dark Corners indeed visits the dark corners so familiar in her other works: an eerie creepiness disguised as something plain and innocuous; a dark character or two who ominously invade the reader’s consciousness; that page the reader almost doesn’t want to turn.

Carl Martin is a newly published writer with a lovely woman in his life, and he has just inherited a home in an upscale London neighborhood. Who could ask for more? But Carl makes a big mistake—he decides to take in a tenant for the upstairs flat. It sounds harmless, at least to Carl, but renter Dermot is anything but. In true Rendell style, the everyday and innocent gets pushed into the dark and disturbing, as Dermot’s invasion into Carl’s life is relentless, turning it—and the reader’s comfort zone—prickly and unbearable. What follows is a descent into blackmail, murder and drunken oblivion. As one character quietly tells Carl: “I can see you’re suffering, but there is a way to end this, and you know what that is.”

Other writers might have ended with the story duly resolved, with the circle of crime and punishment neatly closed. But Rendell’s clever nightmares usually have something trailing off after the proper ending, so we aren’t quite finished. So it is with Rendell’s last engrossing novel.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Murder unveils conspiracy of Franco’s elite

Review by Lizzie Davis

by Lizzie Davis

In 1952, Barcelona trembles beneath the oppressive, tyrannical regime of Franco’s fascist party. Ana Marti, a young journalist sick of detailing debutantes’ fashions and high-society scandals, gets her big break when socialite Mariona Sobrerroca is brutally murdered in the exclusive upper part of the city. Ana’s shocked to be assigned such an important case, but she holds her ground while working with Barcelona’s finest detective, Isidro Castro, despite his misogynistic grumblings about working with a woman.

The police announce that the murder was nothing more than an intruder and an incident of unfortunate timing. Ana concedes her curiosity—until she uncovers a bundle of love letters that insinuate a much different story. To meld the pieces of the real account together, Ana enlists the help of her languages-savvy cousin, Beatriz. Ana and Beatriz must tread lightly, as their family is already ill favored for their sympathy for the Republic, and Beatriz has even been ostracized for her writings. As they disentangle truth from lies to nullify the original statement, the two women expose political hypocrisy that will ultimately threaten their lives.

Rosa Ribas and Sabine Hoffman are the writing team behind the pseudonym Sara Moliner. Drawing from Ribas’ experiences of growing up in Francoist Spain and Hoffman’s education in philology, the two authors create a powerful voice that thunders with cultural wit and historical fact. Setting the scene takes a while, but the reader’s patience is rewarded as the historical-political plot sears with sensational revelations implicating the dictatorship’s influential leaders. This is Ribas and Hoffman’s first time working together and surely not to be their last, as The Whispering City is already highly acclaimed in Spain and has been translated into several languages.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

A secret melody’s shadowy history

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Violinist Julia Ansdell is the troubled heroine of Playing with Fire, a haunting new literary suspense novel by Tess Gerritsen, the best-selling author of the Rizzoli & Isles series and a number of standalone thrillers such as The Bone Garden and Harvest.

On a trip to Rome, Julia finds a strange piece of anonymous music penciled on a loose sheet tucked inside an old book of gypsy melodies. Upon returning to Boston, she plays the piece on her violin, only to find that the music seems to spark violent behavior in her 3-year-old daughter, Lily. Though no one believes her about Lily’s odd violent episodes, Julia becomes increasingly concerned and finally returns to Italy to seek out the music's strange origins.

Alternate sections of Playing with Fire flash back to another story, that of a young Jewish violinist named Lorenzo Todesco in World War II-era Italy, a time of horror and cruelty when fascists come to power and anti-Semitism reaches its apex. This parallel narrative weaves its way toward Julia as she searches for the music’s composer and the origins of its evocative yet disturbing melody.

Gerritsen, a former practicing physician as well as a talented amateur musician, dramatically evokes the strange, stirring melody that imprints itself in the past and present. The author created the musical piece titled “Incendio” that simmers at the heart of Playing with Fire. The melody simply appeared in her head one morning, and immediately she knew the book would center on “the power of music to transform.”

Accurate historical details about an Italy on the brink of terrible war raise this story well above that of an ordinary thriller. Tension rises from readers’ historical hindsight and the sad knowledge of events that will soon unfold. As Playing with Fire reaches its stirring conclusion, the two stories combine into one melody, bringing to light the terrors of past events, the beauty of an innocent love and one young man’s courage that transformed and transcended history’s inerasable marks.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

The ripples of a cold-case on the Cornish coast

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

One of the joys of reading a good mystery is feeling like a dope at the end, knowing that the answer was there in front of you from early on but the writer cleverly hid every single clue. Kate Morton’s The Lake House isn’t one of those books. This reviewer figured it all out by chapter 32, and even the book acknowledges that there are a few too many coincidences. Still, the story Morton tells is engaging.

The mystery involves a disappearance from a stately old home on the Cornish coast. But instead of a wayward wife, we have a little boy barely into toddlerhood. Theo, the much longed for son of Eleanor and Anthony Edevane, born after a trio of girls, vanishes during raucous Midsummer celebrations in 1933. For 70 years no one seems to have the foggiest idea what happened to him. Was he spirited away by gypsies? Was he murdered and his body buried somewhere on the grounds of Loeanneth, the ancestral estate? If the story were set in New Zealand, the reader might be tempted to think a dingo got him.

The timeline swings, mostly, between Theo’s disappearance and 2003. By then, Alice Edevane, the second of the sisters, reigns as an octogenarian author of best-selling mysteries and Sadie Sparrow, a young detective, has been relieved of duty for overzealousness. With time on her hands, Sparrow takes up the cold case that involves the long abandoned manse close to the home of her beloved grandfather. Alice, prodded by guilt and curiosity, helps her out.

Another pleasure of the book is Morton’s take on the aftermath of the First World War, which wiped out countless thousands of young men and left survivors like Anthony Edevane traumatized shells. Her other theme is family relations, particularly some characters’ experiences of motherhood. For Eleanor Edevane, motherhood is the fulfillment of her life. Alice Edevane is childless. Other women have had to give up their children, while others will do anything to have one. Anything at all.

Such contemplation of maternity gives this mystery novel a rare tenderheartedness. Whether you figure the puzzle out late or early, it is Morton’s compassion for her characters that keeps you reading.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Suspense

Science Fiction & Fantasy Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense Science Fiction

A treasure hunt for truthers

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

Several years ago, after researching his true crime book The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, James Renner was diagnosed with PTSD. It’s not uncommon for journalists to suffer such effects after witnessing trauma for a story, and Renner’s 10 years of hunting serial killers and writing about unsolved murders caught up with him. Fiction provided an unexpected safe haven, and his genre-bending time-travel thriller, The Man from Primrose Lane (2012), was a crime he could finally solve. His latest thriller, The Great Forgetting, digs at a much larger mystery, one with more questions, no generic answers and therefore plenty of room for an imaginative author to play. The result is a mix of conspiracy theorist paranoia, alternate history and cross-country adventure.

The story begins with an epilogue—our first clue that nothing is as it should be—which provides several bizarre nuggets of information: Fourteen years after 9/11, the coroner who oversaw and organized the remains of Flight 93 returns to the crash site, where he finds a severed monkey’s paw, clasping a man’s watch that reads, “RIP, Tony Sanders. 1978 to 2012.” And on the monkey’s palm is tattooed a bright red swastika.

In 2015, Jack Felter has returned home to Franklin Mills, Ohio, to help care for his father, who suffers from dementia. Franklin Mills is a place Jack would like to forget—especially his former love interest Sam, who immediately enlists Jack’s help in finding her husband (once Jack’s best friend), Tony Sanders, who has been missing for three years. Tony’s trail leads Jack to an institutionalized teen named Cole, who promises to reveal Tony’s whereabouts if Jack listens to Cole’s story—and begins boiling his water to counteract the pacifying effects of Fluoride. Jack soon learns about the Great Forgetting, a vast conspiracy that conceals the true events of World War II, contradicting everything he knows about history, science, the government and even time itself.

The Great Forgetting explores humanity’s desperation to forget the worst things that happen to us and the worst things we do to each other. It never loses speed as it reveals large-scale histrionics and builds to a zealous reveal. However, in Renner’s attempt to exorcise our prejudices and transform history, he risks alienating his audience, as many readers may find themselves defensive of their living memory, holding tighter to their real history. Perhaps some things can’t be rewritten, even for fiction’s sake.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

In-depth police procedural

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

In real life, British author Peter James rides regularly with the Sussex police on their rounds. This fascination with police procedures and the milieu of law enforcement is amply displayed in his best-selling Roy Grace crime novels, now in its 11th installment with You Are Dead.

 A young woman named Logan drives into the darkness of her apartment’s parking garage and disappears into thin air. Before her cell phone goes dead, she screams to her boyfriend that someone is lurking near her car. At almost the same time, local construction workers unearth female human remains while digging through the pavement at a nearby building site. The 30-year-old skeleton that’s uncovered turns out to have strange similarities to those of Logan as well as to another missing young woman. Detective Superintendent Roy Grace and his Brighton-based crime team begin the detailed and painstaking work of uncovering and linking the common elements in these missing persons cases, revealing evidence of the abduction and murder of several young women going back decades. The investigation takes an eerie turn when the forensics team discovers evidence of a tattoo or brand marked on the excavated human remains, reading “U R Dead.”

 The book’s most engrossing chapters follow the criminal task force as they search for the small details that may identify the killer. In more grisly chapters, we see aspects of the killer’s methods from another viewpoint, that of Logan, imprisoned in the dark and awaiting horrors she can barely imagine.

 You Are Dead is an accurate, unsettling and sometimes mesmerizing depiction of the ways in which a crime squad carries out what seems an impossible task—identifying a killer starting with nothing more than a blurry footprint and unidentified, decades-old human remains. The task force detectives’ work makes readers feel immersed in the detection process from start to finish in a way not often related in such detail in crime novels. Occasionally there’s an “oh, please” moment, as when Grace moves into a hot-button danger scene alone rather than waiting for his on-scene backup. We know it builds suspense, but it’s a jarring note in this otherwise realistic story about meticulous and careful policing.

Mystery, YA, YA Fiction

YA Fiction YA Mystery

One man, many timelines

Review by Norah Piehl

by Norah Piehl

British teen Stella Park (known to all as Spark) needs to escape her widowed mother’s constant neediness. Spark’s brother, Dan, has been successful in distancing himself, finding an internship across the pond in New York City. When Spark learns that Dan’s benefactor, John Stone, is seeking a summer assistant to help organize his papers, she jumps at the opportunity.

When Spark arrives at the grand Stone estate in rural Suffolk, she soon realizes that this is hardly an ordinary summer job. Why does Stone possess incredibly detailed firsthand accounts of life in the 17th-century Versailles court? And why are those written in the same handwriting as more contemporary papers? Spark begins to grasp the truth behind Stone’s complicated history—and to suspect that she may have her own role to play in his story.

Linda Buckley-Archer, best known for her acclaimed Gideon trilogy, combines a historical narrative with a modern-day mystery and a liberal dose of fantasy to create a richly textured novel. Readers will enjoy exploring Stone’s papers alongside Spark, developing their own theories and making their own surprising discoveries about past, present and future.

This article was originally published in the November 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

Masquerade and murder

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

There’s trouble among the upper crust of 1930s London society, and in Ashley Weaver’s absorbing second mystery, Death Wears a Mask, the lovely and aristocratic Amory Ames is once again at the ready. She unmasked a murderer in Weaver’s 2014 debut, Murder at the Brightwell, and now a wealthy acquaintance has sought her help in ferreting out a thief.

Amory attends a dinner party at the Barrington residence, where Serena Barrington sets the stage by confiding to Amory that someone in their circle is making off with her favorite pieces of jewelry, including a ruby earring, an emerald ring and a bunch of sapphires and diamonds, all of which disappeared during social gatherings at her home.

As with detective stories of this genre, the suspects are all present at the dinner, where Serena privately asks Amory to keep her eyes and ears open for clues. The two even hatch a scheme to expose the perpetrator at the next party, a costume ball where once again all the suspects will be on hand. We know, of course, that something will go wrong at the masquerade ball: A shot rings out, and the body of Serena’s nephew, complete with tiger mask, is discovered, shot with his own weapon.

Weaver is a master of clever drawing-room repartee, and readers will have a pleasant time unraveling the mystery, which involves not only robbery and murder but several characters with distinctly unsavory pasts and modes of operation.

As with the first book in this series, Death Wears a Mask revolves around various fraught relationships, front and center being Amory’s ongoing duel with her super-attractive husband, Milo, whom she suspects of various indiscretions with the opposite sex, sometimes captured by gossip columnists and avid photographers at apparently inopportune moments. This theme of romantic doubt, a staple of many mysteries and romances, is clever at first, but our heroine’s wounded innocence begins to chafe once we see that Amory—who receives the attentions of notorious rake Lord Dunmore—is doing pretty much the same thing.

Hopefully this tiresome back-and-forth will be resolved by book number three, as the couple are clearly meant to be a clever crime-fighting duo, 1930s-style, and are much more intriguing and fun when they pursue criminals together.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Only survivor, only hope

Review by Adam Morgan

by Adam Morgan

For nine months The Girl on the Train has been lauded as the best thriller of 2015, but it has some real competition with the arrival of The Killing Lessons, a dark, violent novel from British author Glen Duncan (The Last Werewolf) writing under the pseudonym Saul Black. Set in San Francisco and Colorado, it’s a cross-country race to catch two serial killers that channels the atmosphere of Scandinavia’s celebrated TV noirs with female heroes like “The Killing” (Forbrydelsen) and “The Bridge” (Broen).

Rowena Cooper is baking Christmas cookies for her children when two men appear in her home in the mountains of Colorado, one holding a shotgun, the other a knife. Though they murder Rowena and her son, her 10-year-old daughter Nell manages to escape into the woods. Meanwhile in San Francisco, a team of investigators has been hunting these murderers for months, after they abducted, raped and murdered seven women in different cities before transporting their bodies to another state. The men leave objects inside their victims as a signature—a balloon, a fork, a museum flier. Lead investigator Valerie Hart isn’t sure if they’re meaningful or random, but she’s not sure of anything anymore. Once driven and naive, Valerie has become jaded, resigned and dependent on a drink ever since she “killed love” in her own heart. Though Valerie soon makes a long overdue break in the case, the only person alive who can help her identify the serial killers is young Nell, still missing in the Colorado mountains, who may have escaped one grisly fate only to meet another.

Violent but never gratuitous, Duncan’s first crack at a thriller is a master class in suspense. Phrases like “page-turner” and “it kept me up all night!” get thrown around a lot in the book business, but The Killing Lessons is hands-down the most compelling, addictive novel I’ve read this year.