Mystery & Suspense Archives | Page 88 of 119 | BookPage

by Barbara Clark

“The body slid heavily from the table and for a brief moment seemed to hang in the air, then broke the water’s surface with a tremendous crash. For a moment, not longer, a white ghost seemed to linger just beneath the surface, but before anyone could be sure they had seen a final glimpse of the ensheeted body it was already speeding toward the depths.”

This salty description in A Burial at Sea is one of many atmospheric touches in the fifth book in author Charles Finch’s Victorian mystery series. For the newly initiated, the series features Charles Lenox, Member of Parliament and (possibly) retired amateur detective. Here, Charles is on a mission to Egypt and the newly built Suez Canal at the urgent request of his brother, Edmund, a staid civil servant—and member of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

This seaworthy mystery adventure starts out mildly enough, but after a snowy, lamplit meeting between Charles and Edmund, Charles boards the ship Lucy, bound from London to Egypt and Port Said. He travels on what the ship’s crew believes is a diplomatic journey, but is really a clandestine mission meant to counter France’s influence in the newly burgeoning port. There’s murder aboard ship, however, and Lenox finds his detective skills pressed into service by the ship’s captain. He is soon investigating the ship’s logs, decks and wardrooms— even climbing to the crow’s nest—for clues to a brutal killer.

In this descriptive tale, the mystery and mayhem are equalled by the fascinating lore and adventure of life at sea in the 1870s. Readers are treated to first-class descriptions of all things nautical and seaworthy, including spars and songs and storms at sea; which deck is which and who goes there; and even a breathtaking game of Follow the Leader, where crew members outdo each other with death-defying acrobatics from the mizzenmast and crow’s nest.

Sandwiched in between the grog and salt beef rations, there’s shipboard gossip that hints at mutiny, mermaids and more, but talk is valuable in this contained community and may contain clues to the identity of the murderer. Lenox must listen carefully and take caution for his own life.

Readers of this expertly written adventure will welcome the change of venue from the parlors of England’s genteel classes to excitement on a seagoing vessel. Reef the mainsails! Ship ahoy!

Memoir, Mystery, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Mystery Memoir

Remembering a life of crime

Review by Catherine Hollis

by Catherine Hollis

Reading Agatha Christie’s autobiography is like sitting down to tea with an especially chatty, good-natured auntie; one would never suspect her of slipping arsenic in your drink. The Queen of Crime, it turns out, was also a gifted and engaging memoirist, and readers who missed out on the 1977 publication of An Autobiography will be delighted with its reissue, timed to celebrate the 120th anniversary of Dame Christie’s birth.

As Christie’s grandson Mathew Prichard notes in his foreword, much of this autobiography focuses on her childhood, a happy and imaginative time that laid the groundwork for her future writing career. Young Agatha was a natural storyteller, creating imaginary friends known as The Kittens, and later inventing The School, a series of stories she spun about a group of schoolgirls. Learning about poisons while working in a pharmaceutical dispensary during the First World War gave Christie the idea for a detective story, which eventually became The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first published book; witnessing the plight of Belgian refugees in England inspired Christie to make her detective Belgian—and thus Hercule Poirot was born. A marriage to handsome airman Archibald Christie was happy for a time, but Archie, it turns out, couldn’t much bear unhappiness. Agatha’s mother’s death in 1926 led to his affair and her infamous disappearance later that year. Christie doesn’t address the disappearance directly here, but says enough about her mental state to support theories that suggest she’d had a nervous breakdown of sorts.

Funny anecdotes about surfing with Archie in Hawaii and Cape Town (who knew Dame Christie could stand-up surf?), a happy second marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan and periods spent with him on site in Iraq and Turkey are all fascinating. Christie’s enjoyment of the “indulgence” of memoir writing is apparent on every page of this lovely book, giving it a cheerful tone, as if she’s just turned to face you across the tea table to tell you a story. Packaged with a CD of newly discovered recordings of Christie dictating portions of the book, An Autobiography is essential for both mystery and memoir readers alike.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

A wild and wacky ride

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

In Ranchero, a wonderfully original debut novel by Rick Gavin, former cop-turned-repo man Nick Reid speeds across the back roads of the Mississippi Delta in pursuit of a stolen 1969 Ranchero, painted a glorious Calypso Coral.

Nick had been driving the Ranchero himself, but it actually belongs to his eccentric elderly landlady Pearl, a widow of open heart and stubborn temperament. Nick was out to repossess a flat screen TV from a fellow named Percy Dwayne Dubois. But Percy Dwayne attacked Nick with a shovel, then disappeared in a cloud of calypso coral dust.

Nick had promised to love, honor and maintain Pearl’s pristine Ranchero, and he takes his promise seriously. There’s nothing for it but to chase down the car and the thief, who turns out to be just the tip of the Dubois iceberg. Nick and his 350-pound buddy, Desmond, drive off in hot pursuit through a tangle of Delta back roads and unforgettable scenery, where “everything was slower and hotter, the local manners approached baroque, and racing down a Delta road with crop dusters on the horizon was like driving into 1952.”

The story is peopled by folks stuck a few rungs lower than, say, a Damon Runyon-meets-Ma Kettle of an earlier era—although they retain that basic outlandishness. Author Gavin keeps the momentum going with escalating accidents and incidents, as violence mixes with a whole lot of stupidity to gain our hero a chance to reclaim the vehicle. Nick also contends with his boss, a crazy Lebanese man named Kalil, whose prized stuffed mountain lion appears to have been stolen. But everybody knows everybody down in the Delta, and we just know that cat will turn up again.

As one mile leads to another, then another, more members of the lowlife Dubois clan come out of the woodwork, and soon Desmond’s Geo Metro is full of misfit Delta crackers, each with an ax to grind or a suggestion to make. (Whether they’re helping or squashing Reid’s chances of reclaiming the Ranchero is up for grabs.) One drug dealer leads to another, leading to scenes of grit and squalor touched by the humor of misfits who inhabit a crazy world of their own. Nick admits to “the passing conviction that a niggling sort like me would never make anything happen quite the way I wanted it to. That view of the world is as much of the Delta as the black loam and the mosquitoes.”

Ranchero is a marvelous, scruffy and hilarious read.

Nick had been driving the Ranchero himself, but it actually…

Film, Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery Film

Getting the scoop in an atmospheric Scottish mystery

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

A.D. Scott’s intriguing mystery, A Double Death on the Black Isle, is set in the 1950s in the Scottish Highlands. If townsfolk want to keep tongues from wagging and dodge the stares of neighbors, they better avoid pregnancy before marriage, working on the Sabbath and being caught in a public bar (only if they’re female). In this community, local customs and gossip play commanding roles, and though it’s a small enough town, there’s still room for a little enmity between the farmers and the fishermen, the year-rounders and the nomadic Traveling People.

The mystery kicks in when fisherman Sandy Skinner, newly married “above his station” to Patricia Ord Mackenzie—a member of the estate-owning Highland gentry—dramatically plunges over the Falls of Foyers to certain death. That same day, the volatile Fraser Munro, whose family manages the estate’s lands, is found dead in a ditch near Devil’s Den. Coincidence or connection?

We join the cast and crew of the Highland Gazette, a newly re-launched newspaper, as they rush to cover the story of a fishing boat that’s been bombed and sunk, followed in quick succession by the two unexplained deaths on neighboring Black Isle. Scott, who is also the author of A Small Death in the Great Glen, book one in this Highland series, draws readers right into the sights, sounds and nostalgia of a small-town newspaper, where reporters still hit the streets in search of a story and deadline day is an adrenaline rush of untangling loose ends.

Joanne Ross, a typist and budding reporter at the Gazette, is the protagonist of this novel, although my favorite character may be reporter Rob McLean, who is ambitious, funny and quick at nosing out a story. He’s got his eye on the future, although readers will be very disappointed if he takes another job and exits this series. Memorable characters also include Hector Bain—he of the green cap and orange hair and a passion for photography—and the Black Isle residents themselves, who sneak one and all into your reading consciousness, like Janet Ord Mackenzie (mother of Patricia), whose gothic air and ring-bedecked pointy finger remind Joanne’s young daughter of the queen in Snow White.

A Double Death on the Black Isle is filled with alliteration and atmosphere. Just about every character seems to be related somehow, and it’s occasionally difficult to keep the Allies, Agneses and Alistairs all straight. However, the end result is worth sticking around for and readers will be left anticipating the next installment.

Fiction, Suspense

Fiction Suspense

Time-traveling to our troubled past

Review by Tony Kuehn

by Tony Kuehn

There is a perfect future. No disease, no hunger, no war. Zed is a time-traveler, come from this utopia. He is one of the few from his time who know the quagmire humans slogged through in order to arrive at their perfect present, and he has been sent to guarantee that our darkest night, worst of the worst—the genocides, disasters, assassinations, all of it—happens just the way history says it did. It’s the only way to ensure humanity is led to the perfect future born from the flames of the past.

Naturally, this isn’t as simple as watching ships sink and planes crash, since there is another faction determined to avert the horrors of the past, regardless of what this may do to the future.

Superficially, this is a time-travel book, and as such the attendant paradoxes and questions of parallel timelines and determinism are all in the back of one’s mind, but forget about that for a moment. What The Revisionists really offers, at its heart, is a chance to see our crazy, mixed-up world at arm’s length. The observation is often keen, even razor-sharp, and author Thomas Mullen—whose previous books have been historical novels—manages the deft trick of the insider writing as an outsider without sounding smug or disingenuous, or falling into any of the other traps that have snagged lesser observers of human nature.

The Revisionists meanders through the interconnected lives of Zed and those around him, each one in turn struggling with the Big Questions of morality and absolutes. Of course, the reality presented within its pages is one of nuances, and is ultimately far less simple than we like to pretend, but Mullen makes no bones about that. When all the layers are peeled back, this novel is about choice and consequences, and it just so happens to involve time travel. This is an excellent, thought-provoking read that checks boxes for sci-fi lovers as well as students of humanity.

Cozy Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Cozy Mystery

Stitching together the evidence

Review by Barbara Clark

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

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.

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.

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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 & 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

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.

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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,…