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by Michael Lee

Author Steven Pressfield has forged a considerable reputation as a historical novelist, focusing on the more ancient civilizations. His 1998 novel Gates of Fire, about the 300 Spartans who defended Thermopylae against an overwhelming number of Xerxes’ troops in 480 B.C., helped inspire a whole new wave of interest in that heroic encounter. Now he turns his sights on the desert war of World War II and the formidable talents of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the so-called “Desert Fox.” Told as a written memoir from a young British lieutenant, R. Lawrence Chapman (aka Chap), Killing Rommel chronicles the deadly mission of a commando unit, the Long Range Desert Group, as it tries to outmaneuver Rommel and assassinate him. It’s a daring, even reckless endeavor that takes a special group of men.

Pressfield has never been shy about sharing his vast knowledge of ancient weaponry and now, moving to the era of World War II, he hasn’t lost a step or a spear. And yet he’s smart enough not to allow didactics to get in the way of good drama. While the weapons have changed greatly, the men in the trenches haven’t, and few writers handle the intense camaraderie of fighting men better than Pressfield. The desert itself emerges as a character, as in this passage where Chap muses on its timelessness and his relationship to it. “I am an ordinary Englishman, barely out of my university years. Yet here I sit, in the vastness of the African night, surrounded by mates who could have stepped from Caesar’s legions or Alexander’s phalanx.” As you ride in the tanks with the men toward the conclusion of the novel, you come to realize that what happens to Rommel doesn’t really matter. The German commander is respected on both sides for his gentlemanly behavior toward troops. He refuses to execute POWS or Jews, earning the wrath of Hitler and sealing his own fate. No, it’s what happens to the men we’ve come to know through Pressfield’s masterly characterizations that has become so vital.

Michael Lee is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

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, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Dave Robicheaux goes West

Review by bookpagedev

by Leslie Budewitz

Katrina’s floodwaters have receded, and Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel have gone to western Montana for an extended fishing trip. No surprise, except perhaps to them, that they find themselves both fishermen and bait.

The murder of two college students near their host’s property lures Dave and Clete, who soon find themselves threatened by the henchman of an old enemy who was killed in a plane crash at the end of the pair’s last trip to Montana, chronicled in Black Cherry Blues (1989). When it seems that the young lovers’ murders are linked to a wealthy family, the Wellstones, who have ties to Galveston and New Orleans, Dave is hooked.

Meanwhile, an Iraq war veteran turned private prison guard named Troyce Nix is on the trail of an inmate who stabbed him and escaped. His target, Jimmy Dale Greenwood, once sang with the wife of one of the Wellstone brothers, and fathered her child before being wrongfully imprisoned. Now, Greenwood is determined to take her away. But Nix is nearly as nasty as the Wellstones, and it seems clear that neither singer will ever be free – unless Dave and Clete can figure out the connections in time.

Swan Peak is James Lee Burke’s 17th Dave Robicheaux novel. In the series, the Pulitzer nominee and two-time Edgar winner creates a world that is frightening yet comforting in its familiarity, unnerving yet satisfying, because while justice is not always obtained, it is sought unswervingly and fought for passionately.

Swan Peak is the story of old loves, old grudges and old crimes resurfacing. It is also a story of choosing redemption. Series fans may miss the bayou, but they’ll be glad they took the trip west with Dave and Clete.

Leslie Budewitz lives and writes at the foot of the Swan Mountains in Montana.

Katrina's floodwaters have receded, and Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel have gone to western Montana for an extended fishing trip. No surprise, except perhaps to them, that they find themselves both fishermen and bait.

The murder of two college students near…

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.

Cozy Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Cozy Mystery

Mystery in the countryside

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Leslie Meier has penned more than 14 Lucy Stone mystery novels, and her latest, English Tea Murder, has arrived just in time for her many fans to stash it in their summer beach bags and take it to the seaside. This book has a perfect title, invoking the surprise and thrill of murder as well as a British atmosphere of tea shops, country hedgerows, shadowy cathedral carvings and crypts and cozy row homes with tiny gardens.

Leave it to Lucy to be sitting across the aisle from a dead guy on an airliner en route to London. College teacher George Templeton expires in front of her eyes, after his asthma inhaler falls into a glass of water as he gasps for air. Lucy and three friends are on a group tour to London, and the deceased is (or was) the tour leader. The group includes a mix of students, parents and a few townies like Lucy and her friends, one of whom teaches a class in the college’s night school. Templeton’s death arouses odd and violent emotions in the group, but what’s their rhyme or reason? It begins to seem as though many people had a reason to cheer his death—including the tour guide sent to take Templeton’s place.

Lucy, in her listening way, hears various stories from her tour-mates, and a rather skewed, crooked pattern (involving a near-death plunge off a pier in Brighton and, much later, another murder) begins to take shape. How do these incidents connect, and is there something—or someone—at the center, turning this wheel of misfortune?

There’s plenty here to please Meier’s followers and fans of cozy mysteries: Lucy and her friends shop their way about the countryside, and Meier pays homage to all the tried and true British high points, from the Tower of London and its resident ravens to tea shops, strawberry jam and Devonshire cream, to the glories of Stonehenge at sunset. Though it’s hard to believe that Lucy could be quite as naïve as she sometimes seems (after delving into, what, 14-plus crimes?), she does knit up the ravell’d sleeve of another one—but not without leaving readers guessing as to what the future has in store for her characters.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Stolen innocence

Review by Maude McDaniel

by Maude McDaniel

Working just a smidgeon outside the law, Casey Woods’ crew of experts, “Forensic Instincts,” tackles the daunting case of a kidnapped kindergartener, Krissy, in Andrea Kane’s The Girl Who Disappeared Twice. Years before, Krissy’s six-year-old aunt was also kidnapped—and never heard from again. Now Krissy’s mother, family court judge Hope Willis, desperately seeks help, official or otherwise, to locate her missing daughter.

FI tackles the job with all the esprit that comes naturally to a psychologist, an almost-super-skilled techno-savant and a former Navy SEAL (not to mention Hero the bloodhound). Assembling the disparate facts of Krissy’s disappearance, they form a picture that confronts the guilty, satisfies the romantic and brings a gratifying answer to the whole puzzle.

Known for her ability to seamlessly combine the emotional and technical threads of her stories, Kane succeeds once again with The Girl Who Disappeared Twice.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

A murderous Irish summer

Review by Jillian Quint

by Jillian Quint

Benjamin Black’s previous mysteries—all set in 1950s Dublin—have been lauded for their tight pacing, intelligent plotting and ambient setting. This writerly skill comes as no surprise, however, as Black is actually the pen name of Booker Award-winning novelist John Banville, who brings his literary acumen (and deeply Irish sensibility) to his noir mystery side project.

A Death in Summer, his newest offering, deftly follows suit, reprising the amateur detective stylings of wry and moody medical pathologist Quirke, who continues to struggle against the memory of his own troubled Catholic childhood and painful lost love.

This time, Quirke sets out to find the truth behind the murder of Richard Jewell, a much-despised newspaper tycoon whose gunshot-to-the-head “suicide” screams foul play. Jewell’s wife, the wonderfully disaffected—i.e., French—Françoise,seems an obvious suspect (though this doesn’t stop Quirke from becoming romantically entwined with her), as do a whole host of individuals ranging from lowly Dublin goons to men and women of prominent social standing. Quirke’s daughter, Phoebe, and assistant, Sinclair, also take roles in the investigation, and Black gracefully moves between his characters in a fashion that leaves readers hanging on his words and hungering for more.

In short, A Death in Summer does everything that a good mystery should do: tantalize without conspicuously withholding, divulge clues in measured and surprising ways and interweave the lives and woes of the series’ recurring characters. Moreover, Black stands out within his genre by gesturing towards social issues larger than each book itself—in this case, the era’s unspoken prejudices and great evils and misconduct within the Church and clergy—without letting such moral quandaries overtake the story.

A welcome voice in the mystery genre, Black has established a series worth following and a central character worth coming back to.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

In the name of the father

Review by Megan Fishmann

by Megan Fishmann

Chevy Stevens’ debut thriller, Still Missing, was a runaway hit, and her hotly anticipated follow-up, Never Knowing, is nearly impossible to put down.

Sara is a feisty single mother—simultaneously running a carpentry business and planning her wedding—who feels an uneasy void in her life. With little connection to her adoptive parents, she decides to investigate the identity of her birth parents. Her search leads to a startling discovery: Sara’s birth mother was the rape victim and sole survivor of the elusive Campsite Killer.

As the killer strikes out on another murderous rampage, Sara slowly learns more about herself—and her biological father. Through phone calls, the killer manages to torture Sara and yet also endear himself to her. Hiding this news from her family and fiancé, Sara risks her job, her relationship and even her own daughter to catch the man who has evaded everyone, including herself.

With heart-pounding action and a main character whose faults only make her more engaging, this spine-tingling novel grapples with the danger and pain of unrevealed truth.

Chevy Stevens’ debut thriller, Still Missing, was a runaway hit, and her hotly anticipated follow-up, Never Knowing, is nearly impossible to put down.

Sara is a feisty single mother—simultaneously running a carpentry business and planning her wedding—who feels an uneasy void in her life.…

Mystery

Mystery

A turn-of-the-century detective

Review by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

Readers of historical novels who discover Detective Simon Ziele will glom onto Stefanie Pintoff’s series of mysteries in a hurry. The first entry, In the Shadow of Gotham, garnered an Edgar Award in 2010.

Secret of the White Rose, the third in the series, is again set in turn-of-the-20th-century New York City, and filled with detailed historical settings and descriptions of the city’s helter-skelter atmosphere. This includes clopping horse-drawn cabs and early electrical cars, the Tombs prison, row houses, downtown opium dens, gaslit streets . . . and anarchist violence.

This time out, Ziele is investigating three murders of three prominent judges, linked by a Bible and a white rose left near each victim. Is this the work of an anarchist cell, or are there more personal motives for the murders? New York’s hard-boiled and judgmental police commissioner, Theodore Bingham, believes that the anarchists are responsible—one of the dead judges had been presiding over the trial of Al Drayson, a notorious anarchist leader who is in the dock for murder—and he is not interested in having his opinions overturned or thwarted.

Throughout this intricate and ingenious story, Pintoff shows how even the seemingly clearest clues or motives can be called into question. Ziele’s ongoing association with a wily criminologist, Alistair Sinclair, is fraught with such ambiguity, and the interchange between these two colleagues considerably ups the ante in this superior plot. True-to-life historical details form a major part of the story’s allure. It’s easy to read oneself right into the atmosphere of that time and place, maneuvering New York’s twilight streets with the detective as he puts to use the new forensic methods emerging in the field of criminology.

Even more engrossing is the thin line the author draws between the “good guys” and the “bad guys.” She sets us down in the midst of people’s obsessions and, ultimately, actions. While occasionally a little heavy-handed with its anti-anarchist spiel, Secret of the White Rose stays absorbing and surprising, as it dissects a series of mystifying crimes and inspects the reasons why many of our assumptions can be mistaken.

Secret of the White Rose, the third in the series, is again…

Mystery & Suspense, Romantic Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense Romantic Suspense

Doctors in danger

Review by Lois Faye Dyer

by Lois Faye Dyer

Lisa Jackson and Nancy Bush are each best-selling authors on their own, but the Oregon sisters raise the stakes when they join forces to pen a terrifyingly suspenseful novel, Wicked Lies.

At a small hospital on the Oregon coast, nurse Laura Adderley is relieved to be getting a divorce, but devastated to discover that she and her ex-husband’s sole attempt to reconcile has resulted in a pregnancy. She’s even more appalled when she learns her onetime nemesis, the infamous psychotic killer Justice Turnbull, knows she’s carrying a child. She hears his voice in her mind—and she knows he’s coming for her and her unborn baby. Because Justice has escaped after murdering his jailers at Halo Valley Security Hospital . . . and retribution is his sole focus.

Fortunately for Laura, reporter Harrison Frost is following a lead on a news story about Turnbull’s escape. At first, Harrison only wants information from the pretty nurse, but before long he’s committed to stopping Turnbull. Because if he can’t, Laura will be dead.

Wicked Lies is a riveting, can’t-put-it-down, heart-pounding good read. If you love suspense with enough twists and turns to tie you into knots, this one’s for you.

Lisa Jackson and Nancy Bush are each best-selling authors on their own, but the Oregon sisters raise the stakes when they join forces to pen a terrifyingly suspenseful novel, Wicked Lies.

At a small hospital on the Oregon coast, nurse Laura Adderley is relieved…

Fiction, Suspense

Fiction Suspense

Twisted sisters

Review by Deb Donovan

by Deb Donovan

The term “page-turner” is undoubtedly used much too often to describe a gripping novel of suspense, but Sister, a terrific debut by British author Rosamund Lupton, certainly fits the bill. And more than that, it’s a poignant and perceptive depiction of the emotional bonds between two sisters—bonds which remained strong even as years passed and an ocean came between sisters Beatrice and Tess.

Lupton uses an intriguing device throughout the novel—writing in the form of a letter from Beatrice, the older sister who has moved to New York, to her dead sister Tess, who stayed in London to be near their mother. The letter begins just as “the trial” is about to begin—so the reader knows that suicide was not the cause of Tess’ death, as the police first surmised—but it’s the whole thread of events leading up to the trial that provides the novel’s never-ending suspense.

Bea, who is usually in touch daily with Tess, has been on a trip with no cell or Internet service for several days, and so she learns of Tess’ disappearance from their mother, and flies immediately to London. She moves into Tess’ flat and is in constant contact with the police until Tess’ body is found in an abandoned park restroom, her arms slashed. Bea’s letter to her sister moves back and forth in time, relating all the details of her suspicions that Tess was murdered and her investigations into Tess’ relationships in search of possible suspects, including the married father of her recently stillborn child, her psychiatrist and a student who was obsessed with her. Then the letter shifts to the present, where Bea is giving detailed testimony to the prosecuting attorney.

The result is a superb thriller, full of twists and turns, false leads and a surprise ending—all seamlessly woven into a touching story of a sisterly bond that one imagines closely matches that of the talented first-time author and her own (still very much alive) sister.