Mystery & Suspense Archives | Page 88 of 119 | BookPage

by Barbara Clark

Clare O’Donohue has penned three previous mysteries in her Someday Quilts series, and like the others, her latest, The Devil’s Puzzle, is a haven for those who love a good mystery as well as the history and colorful ambiance involved in the craft of quilting. O’Donohue is also a television writer who has worked on shows for Food Network and the History Channel, and she was a producer for HGTV’s "Simply Quilts."

Twenty-something Nell Fitzgerald lives with her grandmother Eleanor in the small town of Archer’s Rest. There’s a hole being dug in their back garden, where rose bushes are planned as a gift to Eleanor, who, at 74, is about to receive a proposal. Instead, the landscapers dig up a skeleton. Reactions from the townsfolk follow on the heels (or bones) of that discovery, led by Jesse, Nell’s boyfriend and also the chief of police; various official (or officious?) town bigwigs who are planning the town’s 350^thanniversary celebration; and the Someday Quilters, an eclectic group of women friends—including Nell—who work in Eleanor’s quilting store, Someday Quilts, a landmark in the town.

Whose bones are these? What stories from the past must be dug up to uncover the history that will explain the strange discovery? The sleuthing that follows nicely mirrors the quilters’ work, as they choose pieces of bright cloth to stitch into a meaningful pattern that expresses a style or era from the past. Both real and wannabe quilters will be delighted at the lore and explanations of this historical craft that are inserted neatly into the text, adding color and depth to the plot.

The Someday Quilters and their extended families form a comfortable core for the series, and the story fans out from their daily interactions, as they meet at the aptly named Jitters coffee shop to mull over quilts and clues. The curious Nell must contend with the knotty politics that seal the lips of the librarian, town historian, old-time movie theater owner, mayor, witchy reclusive lady and other sundry characters who alternately impede and enhance her search for the skeleton’s identity.

Even though I can’t help but think that any smart police officer would jettison a nosy girlfriend who sticks her “civilian nose” into every conundrum and crime that happens in town—still, that’s what makes for a good story with a dash of romance to boot, isn’t it?

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Game, set, match for Israeli spy

Review by bookpagedev

by Thane Tierney

Even in the 21st century, Renaissance-era political mastermind Machiavelli’s advice has its applications—something that modern-day Israeli spy Gabriel Allon has ignored at his peril. As Machiavelli said, “If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”

When we last left Daniel Silva’s most enduring hero in Moscow Rules, the sometime art restorer and deep-cover operative had effected a harrowing escape from the clutches of Russian arms dealer Ivan Kharkov, a self-styled oligarch who amassed a fortune in the ruble’s rubble during the economic land-grab of post-Soviet capitalism. In the process, Allon not only threw a Molotov cocktail into Kharkov’s plot to funnel weapons to al-Qaeda, but he spirited off with a top-ranking Russian intelligence officer—and Kharkov’s wife. But he didn’t quite follow Machiavell’s advice.

In The Defector, the edge-of-your-seat sequel (and ninth in the Gabriel Allon series that began with 2000’s The Kill Artist), Kharkov is both shaken and stirred, and he’s not about to let Allon simply resume his quiet life in Umbria, restoring a 17th-century altarpiece for the Vatican.

The book’s opening gambit involves the disappearance of defector Colonel Grigori Bulganov from his London haunts, and indeed the novel unfolds like a match of speed chess against a global backdrop, with grandmasters Allon and Kharkov always thinking three or four moves ahead, making smaller sacrifices in pursuit of some elusive, decisive advantage. While Allon has the support of his Israeli “office,” he starts the match one pawn down, as the official British intelligence position is that Bulganov has re-defected, and they’ve washed their hands of him. For Allon, it’s not quite so easy to walk away, as Bulganov has saved his life, not once, but twice. And Kharkov’s counting on Allon’s sense of honor to lure the special op into a deadly checkmate.

With a dollop of Simon Templar, a dash of Jack Bauer, the urbanity of Graham Greene and the humanity of John LeCarré, Daniel Silva has hit on the perfect formula to keep espionage-friendly fans’ fingers glued to his books, turning pages in nearly breathless expectation.

Thane Tierney, an unworthy student of Capablanca’s Chess Fundamentals, lives in Los Angeles.

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

An engrossing new voice in suspense

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Four women dead and a serial killer on the loose—we’ve read it all before. But wait! This familiar opening scenario is just a jumping-off point for London author Jane Casey’s U.S. debut novel, The Burning. After the discovery of a fifth victim, we’re off and running in a totally new direction. The work of the quadruple killer, though it hangs around throughout the book like a thorn in the side, turns out to be secondary to the main plot.

The M.O. of the fifth murder, that of the young and talented Rebecca Haworth, differs in crucial forensic ways from the other four, so Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan and her superiors treat it as a murder unto itself. Casey’s considerable talent lies in discovering a new trail that readers will follow eagerly as she draws each character closer into our circle of interest.

The action develops via the alternating thoughts of detective Kerrigan and those of Louise, Rebecca’s best friend. Instead of focusing on the drama and gory details surrounding a serial killer’s deeds, the book morphs into a page-turner as readers learn about Rebecca’s former life and seeming successes. The author is adept at creating a drama that is rich with details about the victim—her doting parents; a liberal assortment of doomed affairs with the opposite sex, including the handsome and cruel Gil; and her friends and fellow workers, effusive in their praise for the victim.

Rebecca’s early years as a student at Oxford were marred by a traumatic and unexplained death; her later relationships with men turned murky; and prior to her death she began an inexplicable slide into drug addiction. Detective Kerrigan, struggling with her own vulnerability and image within the department, undertakes the complicated process of merging these fragments into a whole cloth.

The Burning stands apart from others in the genre by virtue of its deft characterizations and engrossing backstory. What looks like a thriller and starts out as a gory crime scene morphs into a compulsively readable character study by a writer I hope will return for another spin with her witty and perceptive detective.

Fiction, Mystery

Fiction Mystery

Bohjalian’s ghostly mystery

Review by Megan Fishmann

by Megan Fishmann

Over the past two decades, best-selling author Chris Bohjalian has written about everything from a woman’s madness following a sexual assault (The Double Bind) to a midwife’s trial for manslaughter (Midwives). Now he has given readers a spellbinding, heart-pounding novel partially inspired by his own life in The Night Strangers.

In 1987, Bohjalian purchased a Victorian house, only to discover a mysterious sealed door in the basement. But it wasn’t until 2009, when pilot Sully Sullenberger was forced to (successfully) land his plane on the Hudson River, that Bohjalian had the second thread he needed for The Night Strangers’ terrifying plot. His protagonist, Chip Linton, is a pilot who lives to tell the tale of his emergency landing on Lake Champlain. But Flight 1611 ends up with 39 casualties among the 40-odd passengers and crew. Thirty-nine just happens to be the same number of bolts that seal shut a hidden door in the basement of the new house Chip and his lawyer wife Emily move to with their twin daughters Garnet and Hallie. This retreat to the mountains of northern New Hampshire is an attempt by Chip to come to terms with the crash. However, peace doesn’t come easily.

While Chip goes about refurbishing the house (discovering the boarded-up door and random weapons hidden in nooks and crannies in the process), Emily and the twins realize this small White Mountain village is populated with numerous greenhouses and self-proclaimed herbalists. As Chip’s grief slowly descends into a type of madness, Emily begins to question why the town is so obsessed with teaching her daughters the tricks of the plants.

The Night Strangers will frighten its audience with ghostly girls, spooky spirits and more, keeping readers on the edge of their seats. Lovers of herbal lore (or witchcraft) will have an especially hard time putting it down. Told through several different narrators, this is one perfect book for Halloween.

RELATED CONTENT

BookPage's Cat Acree talks to best-selling author Chris Bohjalian about The Night Strangers:

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction

Pirates, a parrot and plenty of fun

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Author Laurie King’s many readers will be delighted to learn that her character Mary Russell, known to mystery fans as the wife of famous sleuth Sherlock Holmes and a detective in her own right, is off on a new adventure.

The play’s the thing—or in this case a moving picture—and a film within a film forms the imaginative backdrop in Pirate King, a wild and woolly tale that plays artfully with the confusion between reality and make-believe.

Chief Inspector Lestrade of the Home Office asks Russell to go undercover and look into the disappearance of a young production assistant from the movie set of a film of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. She is to investigate a possible connection between the Fflytte Films Company and a lively trade in drugs and firearms that seems to follow on the heels of many of the company’s productions. Hired as a replacement for the missing assistant, Russell finds herself knee-deep in a world of cinematic sets and crackpot characters who are making believe they’re real. This witty and comic foray into the silent silver screen of a bygone era has the normally elegant Russell expending a lot of energy—and patience—in the midst of a cockeyed world: a film about a film about the operetta The Pirates of Penzance.

Russell, who’s neither a tunesmith nor a fan of operetta, finds herself more alarmed at being in the vicinity of a D’Oyly Carte production “than by the thought of climbing storm-tossed rigging in the company of cut-throats.” Film director Randolph Fflytte, however, has a taste for “realism,” and cast and crew shuttle from stem to stern on a weary-looking brigantine in this high seas comic adventure. It’s one thing to have actors acting as pirates, but to enlist real pirates to play pirates in a play? It’s a recipe for misadventure in true Keystone Kops fashion, as Russell is soon to discover.

She’s up to her neck in kidnapping, cutlasses, topmast stays’ls and port deadeyes, and way too far up in the rigging for her own taste. There’s also the Pirate King himself to contend with, decked out in ostrich plumes, with a parrot that spouts English lyric poetry. And Holmes himself appears, in a hilarious overboard (literally) scene. Undaunted, Ms. Russell—armed with weapons of her own—manages to scale the barricades and quell the uprising, to the satisfaction of all hands.

The play’s the thing—or in this…

Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense

Betrayal in the bayou

Review by Eliza Borné

by Eliza Borné

Read just a chapter of Sandra Brown’s Lethal and you’ll figure out in a hurry why the Texas-born author has written so many New York Times bestsellers (60, in fact). She sets the stakes high and early—and you can’t help but keep reading.

Honor Gillette is a smart, practical and attractive young mother living in the small town of Tambour, Louisiana. She’s also a widow, since a car accident that killed her police officer husband. Though Honor is devoted to Eddie’s memory, he’s been gone for two years, and she’s managed to create a happy life for herself and her four-year-old daughter, Emily.

That all goes out the window when Emily sees a bloody man in the front yard. Assuming the man is hurt, Honor (pausing from icing cupcakes) attempts to help—until he pulls out a gun and forces her back inside. It turns out the man, Lee Coburn, is a suspected murderer who opened fire at a warehouse the night before, and he’s now wanted by the police.

Though he initially seems like your typical pushy and cold-hearted criminal, Coburn turns out to be a bit more complicated than that. It’s not food and shelter from the cops he’s after, and he’s not out to murder a mom and her daughter. Instead, Coburn has specifically sought out Honor for information she may be hiding about her late husband . . . who may not have been as honest as he seemed. And Coburn may not be as evil as he appears, either.

Before long, Honor and Emily have been swept up in Coburn’s quest for clues, and they’re all three running from the law. Honor doesn’t know who to trust, or even if Coburn is good or bad. Her world is turned upside down when Coburn reveals that there’s an illegal human- and drug-trafficking trade going strong in her town, and some of her husband’s lifelong friends might be involved—and want her dead.

Readers have come to expect such dramatic plot twists from Sandra Brown, who started her writing career in 1981 and now has more than 80 million books in print. A native of Waco, Texas, she worked in modeling and television before turning to writing full-time.

A master at building suspense, Brown is especially good at keeping her readers guessing. Just when you think you can trust a character, she will plant the seed of suspicion, and you’ll be forced to configure the puzzle in a whole new way.

Lethal is packed with chase scenes and action, but not to the detriment of developed characters. Readers will passionately root for Honor and Emily’s safety, and be tugged by the widow’s dilemma: To trust an accused murderer . . . or not?

Get ready to raise your blood pressure a few notches this fall with Sandra Brown’s Lethal—and I dare you to guess the identity of the villain.

Honor Gillette…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

The games people play

Review by Leslie Budewitz

by Leslie Budewitz

“We aren’t us anymore,” one of the focal characters of Laura Lippman’s newest stand-alone thriller, The Most Dangerous Thing, thinks of her childhood clan. “Maybe we never were.”

Many of us can recall a time and a group of friends that seems to symbolize our childhoods, to represent those years forever—no matter how long they lasted or how they ended. For the Halloran brothers—Tim, Sean and Gordon (aka Go-Go)—and two neighborhood girls, Gwen and Mickey, that time was short but vivid. Kids still ran freely in the 1970s, and these five spent long hours exploring the wooded park near their Baltimore homes. As they began to mature, Gwen and Sean paired off. With Tim focused on school and a future scholarship, smart-but-reckless Mickey and impulsive young Go-Go spent more time in the woods, some of it with a reclusive man who lived in a shack, played the steel guitar and disappeared for months without explanation.

Then one night in 1979, in the midst of a hurricane, a tragedy simultaneously united and divided the five. No one individual knew the whole story, but what they did know, they kept to themselves, and they drifted apart.

Now, more than thirty years later, Go-Go, the youngest at 40, is found dead. Accident or suicide? After his death, the secrets of the past resurface, and the remaining four are thrown together again. Tim and Gwen, separately, learn facts that compel them to search for the truth, both past and present. Tim, Sean, Gwen and Mickey must confront the past for themselves, deciding what to do about it now, and how that knowledge will reshape their memories and influence the future. Lippman’s series character, private investigator Tess Monaghan, makes a brief appearance.

Lippman writes with confidence, using shifting point of view and even a section in second-person plural that captures perfectly that time of childhood when children are not yet fully conscious of themselves as individuals rather than as part of a group. She portrays the shifting sands of adolescent sexuality and relationships with insight and compassion, although Mickey’s revelations may unsettle some readers.

Lippman’s novels have won every major mystery and crime fiction award. They are less about crime, though, than about cause and effect: what we think we remember, and what memories mean to us. After you read The Most Dangerous Thing, you will not think of your own childhood in quite the same way.

Leslie Budewitz’s reference for writers, Books, Crooks & Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law & Courtroom Procedure(Quill Driver Books) is just out.

“We aren’t us anymore,” one of the focal characters of Laura Lippman’s newest stand-alone thriller, The Most Dangerous Thing, thinks of her childhood clan. “Maybe we never were.”

Many of us can recall a time and a group of friends that seems to symbolize our childhoods,…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

When the past returns

Review by bookpagedev

by Amy Scribner

When last we left Jackson Brodie, the excellently quirky retired police detective in Kate Atkinson’s equally excellent series, he was stranded in Edinburgh during the Scottish summer arts festival, unwittingly pulled into a murderous, greedy mystery. To say Brodie is a man with a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (for him, at least—others generally benefit from his stumbling upon their misery) would be an understatement.

In When Will There Be Good News?, a melancholy Brodie has parted ways with his girlfriend Julia (although he suspects they might have a biological tie: "They had maintained a low-grade kind of communication with each other; he phoned her and she told him to sod off, but sometimes they spoke as though nothing had ever come between them. Yet still she maintained the baby wasn’t his.")

Nearly killed in a massive train wreck, Brodie is rescued by Reggie Chase, a girl who hears the accident and comes to help. Reggie, it turns out, is a 16-year-old orphan who works as a nanny for Dr. Joanna Hunter. Dr. Hunter witnessed the brutal murder of nearly her entire family when she was only six years old, and just as the killer is due to be released from prison, she disappears. Reggie, who idolizes her employer, is left wondering where she went and enlists a reluctant Brodie to help her find out.

To reveal much more of the plot would require a roadmap resembling the tangled interchange of several major highways. Besides, why spoil the treat that awaits anyone who picks up this book? Atkinson, whose previous Jackson Brodie mysteries Case Histories and One Good Turn firmly established her as the master of deftly interwoven plot lines, is better than ever in When Will There Be Good News? This smart, surprising, darkly funny novel takes the reader on a wild ride that starts with the gut-wrenching first chapter and doesn’t stop until the final page. How does Atkinson do it? Doesn’t matter—so long as she keeps it coming. She has hinted that this book may be the last in the series, at least for a while. To which I say: long live Jackson Brodie.

Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

RELATED CONTENT
Review of Case Histories

When last we left Jackson Brodie, the excellently quirky retired police detective in Kate Atkinson's equally excellent series, he was stranded in Edinburgh during the Scottish summer arts festival, unwittingly pulled into a murderous, greedy mystery. To say Brodie is a man with a knack…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

New series is a whimsical delight

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Author Colin Cotterill has penned a new offbeat mystery series, and the first installment kindles in the mind like fireworks that bloom in showers of light. Killed at the Whim of a Hat is one of the most aptly titled books I’ve seen in a long time, and by far the best book I’ve read in an age.

Crime reporter Jimm Juree, recently of Bangkok, is down in the dumps. Her dreams of being promoted to senior crime reporter at Bangkok’s Chiang Mai Mail are dashed after her mother purchases a crumbling tourist resort in the tiny village of Maprao, far afield in southern Thailand, and the family moves, lock, stock and barrel.

Jimm’s bad luck at being in the pit of no-news land seems to change when a visiting abbot at the nearby temple is violently murdered. There’s also an odd skeleton or two, discovered buried deep in mud in a 1970s VW bus. Jimm seems on her way to a breaking news story or three. She gets a lot of help from crafty Lieutenant Chompu of the local police force and from her wondrously odd family. Together they make sense of the bizarre events.

A solid plot runs neck and neck with the plain and simple joy of reading a crackerjack narrative filled with droll humor and small asides that are never throwaways. In the current world of detective novels—where quick comebacks and sarcasm pass for humor and where characters jockey for top position as most snide or most trendy—this stands out as a beautifully crafted look at life with a Thai twist. Thankfully, Cotterill’s characters are so easy to picture they jump right off the page, yet are straight out of the town of whimsy.

Cotterill’s language is musical, with an offbeat cadence. What’s not to like in a book where you can read, of the crime scene: “From the road it didn’t look like anything special but when you got to the top of the dirt track you could clearly see that it really was nothing special.” Or where you can taste beer that “arrived so cold it poured like sleet from the bottle.” This stuff, on nearly every page, boggles the mind.

And I mustn’t forget an unsung hero named Sticky Rice. But you’ll have to read the book yourself to really get the hang of it all.

Cozy Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Cozy Mystery

Murder by kelp

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

In 2003, television comedy writer Laura Levine created a female sleuth in the person of freelance copywriter Jaine Austen. Jaine soon became a member in good standing of a select club of wisecracking female detectives, including famed fictional P.I.s Stephanie Plum and Kinsey Milhone, all of the quick comeback school of detecting.

After penning her first book, This Pen for Hire, Levine went on to please mystery fans with her clever plots and wry humor. Now she has penned her 10^th installment in the series, aptly titled Pampered to Death, wherein Jaine heads off for a week of spa relaxation at The Haven, a dubiously named retreat that turns out to be a “fat farm,” or weight loss center, where weigh-ins are public torture and dessert consists of a wilted slice of mango.

The Haven becomes a perfect setting for Jaine’s hilarious brand of detecting, her one-liners as abundant as the book’s off-beat characters—including the sleuth’s cat, Prozac, a feline who’s dying for a bacon bit amidst all the lean cuisine. Equally comic are Jaine’s asides, when she shares what she imagines her compatriots are saying. In Jaine’s mind, the spa owner calls her “a tub of lard” when she’s really only calling out Jaine’s weight at the daily weigh-in, a number Jaine describes as a “carefully guarded national secret.”

The early pages are devoted to a spa-full of suspects—seems everyone at The Haven has a motive for wanting spa guest and B-list movie actress Mallory Francis out of the running . . . for good. The A-list of possibles includes Mallory’s disgruntled personal assistants; the pill-popping spa owner; former co-star Clint; and a jealous athletic instructor whose husband is dallying with the bodacious film star.

After the body is discovered—strangled with spa-healthy kelp—Jaine’s detecting begins in earnest. Her desire to escape the premises at the earliest possible moment is thwarted by the police, who want no one to leave town ‘til the murderer is apprehended. That’s plenty of incentive for Jaine to employ her detecting skills, even after she nearly becomes a victim herself, held under water by unknown hands in the spa’s Jacuzzi.

Unfortunately, there are distracting and un-funny e-mails scattered throughout the book. Minus those, this humorous send-up of health spas is sure to score high in reader caloric count—a tasty treat for Jaine Austen fans everywhere.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

A stunning suspense debut

Review by bookpagedev

by Stephenie Harrison

No one ever said growing up would be easy, but Karen Clarke never expected it to be quite so hard. Having spent the last few years dutifully pursuing a college degree and making all the sensible choices about her future, Karen has a chance encounter with a free-spirited and captivating drama student named Biba that throws her careful plans out the window. Intoxicated by Biba’s friendship, Karen finds herself caught up in a hedonistic world of drugs, sex and a total lack of responsibility. She is fiercely devoted to Biba and will do almost anything to protect her friend, until one night ends with two people dead. The resulting string of events will test Karen’s loyalty and call into question everything she has come to believe—including the lines she herself is willing to cross in order to keep from losing everything she holds dear.

The Poison Tree, Erin Kelly’s first novel, is a stunning debut. Perfectly paced, it starts with a bang and teems with twists that will keep you guessing right up until its thrilling and shocking conclusion. Kelly masterfully ratchets up the suspense, constantly causing readers to reappraise what is true as well as which dark and dirty secret will be unearthed next, all while nimbly maneuvering back and forth in time to keep tensions running high.

Veteran mystery fans looking for nail-biting thrills will find plenty that is fresh and surprising about The Poison Tree, and Kelly’s masterful plotting and intricately crafted story make the comparisons to Tana French and Donna Tartt well-deserved. Exhilarating and satisfying, this is a book that reminds us just how rewarding and flat-out fun a really good book can be. Take the phone off the hook and cancel your evening plans, because this is one book you’ll want to read from cover to cover in order to see how everything shakes out.

Fiction, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Mystery

Murder and memory

Review by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

The pre-publication hyperbole on S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep has easily matched that of any fiction debut in recent memory, with accolades from luminaries such as Dennis Lehane, Mo Hayder and Val McDermid. So what’s all the fuss about? The basic premise, that of an amnesia victim suffering from debilitating short-term memory loss, has been thoroughly mined in print (James Hilton’s Random Harvest, G.H. Ephron’s Amnesia) and cinema (50 First Dates, Memento). Where Watson diverges from the formula is in his exhaustive exploration of one woman’s spiral into paranoia. Does Christine have a happy marriage, or is it a total sham? Does she have a son, and if so, did he die in Iraq, or is that just a figment of her overworked imagination? And what’s up with her doctor, anyway? From early on, it is clear that her husband is not being entirely truthful with her, but to what end—Christine’s well-being or something darker? On the sly, Christine begins keeping a journal, documenting the inconsistencies in the stories she is told by those she thought she could trust, leading to a showdown of epic proportions.

So, what’s the verdict? Well, Before I Go to Sleep is unquestionably a suspenseful and gripping psychological thriller, relentlessly paced, but there are a couple of stumbling points that stretch taut the fabric of coincidence in the interest of furthering the plot. That said, the novel is a noteworthy debut indeed, and it’s not difficult to see why this former British NHS worker has caused such a stir in literary circles.

Read an interview with S.J. Watson about Before I Go to Sleep.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

The Hannibal lectures

Review by Thane Tierney

by Thane Tierney

“Aren’t all novelists liars?” asks the noted—and notorious—Professor Richard Aldiss during his seminar Unraveling a Literary Mystery. Well, yes. Yes they are. And sometimes the people who study them might be not only liars, but murderers as well. LIT 424, despite its unassuming title, is no ordinary class. Aldiss is conducting it from his jail cell, where he’s serving time for killing two of his former students.

In Dominance, the follow-up to his New York Times bestseller Obedience, author Will Lavender returns to a campus setting for a novel that pulls the reader into a world where words like “text,” “meaning” and “narrative” contort into funhouse-mirror grotesques. And the consequence of misplaced trust, whether in an individual or in one’s own intellect, could be a matter of life and death.

The story, which jumps back and forth between the 1994 class and the present day, attempts to answer the question that was the central "literary mystery" of the seminar: Who is Paul Fallows? The short answer is that he’s a novelist, now deceased, whose aptitude for secrecy and seclusion makes J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon seem positively gregarious by comparison. But the nine students in the class, and most particularly the protagonist, Alexandra “Alex” Shipley, are destined not only to uncover Fallows’ myriad riddles, but to engage in a sort of shadowy lit-crit technique known as the Procedure.

Seventeen years out, the class has seen its number reduced by two; the remaining seven gather, Big Chill-style, at the home of Dean Stanley Fisk prior to the funeral of murdered classmate Daniel Hayden. There’s no Motown soundtrack for this particular movie, though; it’s more like Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho. Alex, now a professor of literature at Harvard, has been tasked by the police and by her former professor to be their eyes and ears among the assembled mourners, since it’s possible that someone from a long time ago has a grudge to settle.

Lavender is Houdini-level dexterous at the sleight-of-verb necessary to keep the reader guessing, doubting, perplexed and attentive throughout the book. Characters lie, memories lie, senses lie, and underpinning it all is the game-that’s-not-a-game, this enigmatic Procedure, that pulls like an uncontrollable undertow from beyond the grave. Who is Paul Fallows? Maybe the students in Dominance would have been better off never knowing the answer, but Lavender’s readers will be abundantly rewarded.

Thane Tierney is a former employee of the University of California, Irvine, one-time home of literary deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, who would have loved this book.