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by Harvey Freedenberg

British mystery and thriller writer Mo Hayder (The Devil of Nanking) will please her growing body of fans with this latest novel, her fourth. It’s a book best read on a night when the wind howls and the rain lashes against the windows. Just be sure the doors are locked.

Joe Oakes, a journalist whose specialty is debunking hoaxes, is summoned to Pig Island, off the coast of Scotland, by the members of a religious cult known as the Psychogenic Healing Ministries, to calm the uproar caused by a video of a half-human, half-animal creature cavorting on the island’s beach and rumors about the practice of satanic rituals there. When Oakes encounters the PHM members, he finds a seemingly benign, if slightly furtive, group of voluntary exiles from conventional society. But the group lives in fear of its charismatic founder, Malachi Dove, who’s fled to the other half of the island to live in grim isolation, walled off from his former followers by a line of pig skulls, an electrified fence and chemical waste drums.

Not satisfied with the evasive explanations for Dove’s frightening behavior offered by the island’s inhabitants, Joe sets off to find the truth. His investigation leads indirectly to a horrific act that devastates the PHM community and to the discovery of Dove’s daughter, Angeline, who is afflicted by a bizarre congenital deformity. With Angeline in tow, Joe flees to the mainland, where his troubled wife, Lexie, who narrates a significant portion of the novel in counterpoint to Joe, has been awaiting his return. From that point on, the novel recounts the heart-pounding race between the authorities who are trying to bring Dove to justice for the crimes they believe he’s committed and the deranged killer. Pig Island is not a book for the squeamish, but it’s one that will keep readers turning the pages until the horrifying mysteries of the island ultimately are unraveled.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

British mystery and thriller writer Mo Hayder (The Devil of Nanking) will please her growing body of fans with this latest novel, her fourth. It's a book best read on a night when the wind howls and the rain lashes against the windows. Just be…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Moonlight Mile

Review by Tony Kuehn

by Tony Kuehn

It’s often said that history repeats itself, and it would appear that literary history—at least where Dennis Lehane is concerned—is no exception. In the world of private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, it’s been 12 years since four-year-old Amanda McCready vanished in Gone, Baby, Gone, only to be returned to her neglectful and conniving mother by a morally and ethically conflicted Kenzie. Now 16, Amanda, whip-smart and hardened by chronic parental neglect, has once more disappeared into the swirling eddies of Boston’s organized crime cartels. Her aunt Beatrice yet again appeals to Kenzie and Gennaro to find out what happened to Amanda, by extension offering a chance to lay to rest the demons that plagued them after the resolution of Amanda’s first disappearance. Kenzie is no longer a young man; now married (to Gennaro) and raising their own four-year-old daughter, he has more at stake personally than ever before, and the myriad complications of Amanda’s latest disappearance, along with the ghost of her previous kidnapping, have a personal immediacy that he can’t escape. As with any tale of crime and intrigue, there is far more at stake than Kenzie can guess, and he is quickly drawn into a situation that far outstrips his aging sensibilities and capabilities.

The sixth book in the Kenzie and Gennaro series, Moonlight Mile is as much a meditation on what it is to love another person as it is a slyly woven action tale, in which the heroes are getting older while the challenges they face seem only to become more morally fraught and powerful as time passes. What is left for someone when the life they once lived and loved, full of danger, blood and excitement, is no longer one they can sustain? How do you do right by the world when every choice hurts either those you love or those you strive to help? Lehane manages to address these weighty questions, deftly skirting tired moral platitudes and all the while keeping the reader’s pulse pounding. Those who enjoyed the previous books will certainly enjoy this one, while new readers will have the opportunity to enjoy the crackling chemistry Kenzie and Gennaro share, all the while being drawn into tightly plotted action that keeps the pages turning. Snappy dialogue, questions with morally ambiguous answers, a sense of the enduring humanity that manages to draw people together despite their situation, and a winking acknowledgement of the ironic comedy that is life all come together to give this book a sense of reality that is both rare and refreshing.

The sixth book in the Kenzie and Gennaro series, Moonlight Mile is as much a meditation on what it is to love another person as it is a slyly woven action tale.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Evanovich delivers a new series with spunk

Review by Eliza Borné

by Eliza Borné

What's it about?
Lizzy Tucker has just moved from New York City to Marblehead, Massachusetts, to claim her inheritance—her great-aunt Ophelia’s house, built in 1740—and take a job as chief cupcake baker at Dazzle’s Bakery in Salem. A few months after her move, though, life gets difficult. A man named Diesel informs Lizzy that she’s an Unmentionable, “a human with special abilities,” and she must help him track down the SALIGIA Stones—seven stones holding the power of the seven deadly sins. If the Stones fall into the wrong hands, there will be hell on earth. Complicating matters is Wulf, an evil guy also on the hunt for the Stones; the unpredictable Carl the monkey; and Lizzy’s budding attraction to Diesel. In Wicked Appetite, the first book in Janet Evanovich’s Unmentionables series, can Lizzy and Diesel get their hands on gluttony, the first of the sins?

Bestseller formula:
Easy-to-love heroine + sexy male leads + suspenseful plot + romantic tension

Favorite lines:
Diesel hauled himself up behind the wheel and went to work shoveling locks. I watched him for a while, wondering who on earth he was. When I found myself fantasizing him naked, I gave myself a mental slap and looked for something else to do. If I’d had my computer, I’d have googled SALIGIA Stones. In the absence of the computer, I called my mom.

Worth the hype?
Her sentences may not be the most beautifully-crafted I have ever read, but Janet Evanovich knows how to write a page-turner. Readers looking for a fun new series about an independent and slightly frazzled heroine will not be disappointed with Wicked Appetite.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Medieval crime scene investigations

Review by bookpagedev

by Iris Blasi

Four children turn up murdered in 12th-century Cambridge, England, and the restless Catholic townspeople immediately pin the blame on local Jews. As the Jews flee to the safety of the castle, King Henry II seeking the truth as much as the return of his Jewish citizens to their tax-paying status hires a highly recommended investigator from the Salerno School of Medicine in Sicily to uncover the true killer. Enter Adelia, the so-called mistress of the art of death, who is not at all what Henry had been expecting. Whereas in Sicily, women attend medical school (Adelia studied a rudimentary form of forensic science, dissecting dead pigs in a Salerno lab), in England a female doctor would be labeled a witch. Adelia must keep her real identity under wraps, posing as the assistant to her own Muslim manservant while he acts as the doctor. Meanwhile, Adelia sets about her real work, mining the bodies of the murdered children for clues about their killer. Her task is made no easier by the fact that everyone is a suspect, including the handsome tax collector, Sir Rowley, whom the previously nun-like Adelia seems to be falling for. An overly formal narrative voice makes for a slow start, as antiquated speech and archaic vocabulary provide multiple stumbling blocks for readers trying to orient themselves in the medieval landscape. Those who trudge through the stilted first quarter of the book, however, will be handsomely rewarded for their efforts. Author Ariana Franklin’s in-depth research (she is the author of historical novels and biographies under her real name, Diana Norman) produces a gripping narrative with meticulous detail about everything from the topography of Cambridge to race relations to medical conventions of the era. The issue of religious warfare strikes a particularly modern chord. When Adelia asks Rowley just what the Crusades are achieving, he responds, They’re inspiring such a hatred amongst Arabs who used to hate each other that they’re combining the greatest force against Christianity the world has ever seen. It’s called Islam. Iris Blasi is a writer in New York City.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Our Kind of Traitor

Review by Cat Acree

by Cat Acree

The newest addition to John le Carré’s extensive list of novels proves that this master of the espionage genre is still at the height of his authorial powers. Filled with Russian spies, financial and political scandals and even a few games of tennis thrown in for good measure, Our Kind of Traitor has all the necessary elements for a rip-roaring, intelligent thriller that never lacks in high-wire suspense.

When young British couple Perry and Gail decided to splurge on a Caribbean tennis holiday, they never imagined their dream vacation could go from fun in the sun to deadly dealings so fast. Without really being sure how it happened, they find themselves inexplicably linked to money-launderer Dima, who has ties to the Russian mafia. He enlists the couple’s aid in seeking amnesty from the British Service in exchange for information concerning corruption in the British banking system. Before they have the chance to say no, Perry and Gail find themselves acting as pawns in a sinister game well beyond their depths, one that will take them on a whirlwind tour through Paris, Switzerland and beyond, always with the British Secret Service nipping at their heels.

Le Carré has managed to capture a snapshot of history and immortalize it in the suspenseful and morally complex Our Kind of Traitor, which is based on a December 2009 article in The Observer claiming that at the height of the economic crisis in 2008, it was drug money keeping the British financial system afloat. A member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, le Carré is well-positioned to infuse the thrilling story with the gravitas necessary to set it apart from your dime-a-dozen drugstore pulp fiction. A solid addition to his oeuvre, Our Kind of Traitor does not disappoint, and readers should be prepared for one heck of a ride.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Djibouti

Review by Arlene McKanic

by Arlene McKanic

Dara Barr, documentary filmmaker and protagonist of Elmore Leonard’s latest, Djibouti, is a tough girl. This hard-driving, hard-drinking Academy Award winner has to be tough, after all. Along with her trusty cameraman, a genial six-and-a-half-foot-tall African-American chap named Xavier, she’s made films of Bosnian women, neo-Nazis and the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Dara’s latest, riskiest project is filming the pirates of Somalia, who, fortified by cheekfuls of khat and AK47s slung over their shoulders, think nothing of taking over supertankers from their rickety little skiffs. The piracy brings in millions of dollars that fund everything from luxury cars to prostitutes to beachfront mansions to more khat. Loot floating around brings complications, and things get very complicated very quickly.

Dara and her friends quickly get mixed up with an Al Qaeda psychopath who doesn’t want people to know his real name as much as he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in solitary confinement. Dara and Xavier encounter this maniac several times and are no more frightened of him than they would be of any other drinking buddy—an impressive feat, and one that’s necessary if they want to finish their movie. Then there’s the tanker full of liquid natural gas—a floating bomb, in other words—and rumor has it that the killer’s jihadi pals would just love to light it up if a cut of ransom money isn’t forthcoming. That is, unless someone else gets to the ship first.

Told in short, punchy chapters, Djibouti, with its East African setting and focus on topical Somali piracy, might seem a departure for Leonard, but it’s not. Once again, he concentrates on crooks, moviemakers and other hustlers, folks whose moral compass, if they have one, might be a little askew, who let nothing get in the way of their goals, and whose bravery seems indistinguishable from foolhardiness. Djibouti is a nasty good time.

Told in short, punchy chapters and set in East Africa, Djibouti might seem a departure for Leonard, but it’s not.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

The lost secrets of an ancient library

Review by bookpagedev

by Ed Morris

What would the fallout be if someone could prove that the modern state of Israel is in the wrong place that it occupies a territory far distant from the one divinely promised the Jews and specified in the original version of the Old Testament? What if the historical Israel had actually been located in what is now Saudi Arabia? Would the revelation of these facts inevitably bring the always bubbling Mideast to a full boil? It is around these potentially apocalyptic prospects that Steve Berry weaves The Alexandria Link. His premise is that the contents of the fabled Library of Alexandria including the Old Testament still exist at a secret site, the whereabouts of which have been made known only to a succession of wise and deserving scholars. So now the race is on to find the library, with one faction intent on exposing Israel’s tenuous historical hold on the land.

To play out this adventure, Berry brings back characters he introduced in The Templar Legacy. Chief among these are Cotton Malone, the retired government spook; his former boss, Stephanie Nelle; and the beautiful but deadly Cassiopeia Vitt, who functions here as Nelle’s guardian angel. There are so many doublecrosses it practically takes a scorecard to keep track of them. Breathlessly paced, The Alexandria Link is a wonderful dramatic ride.

Cozy Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Cozy Mystery

Trying to catch a break in the newsroom

Review by Cathy Shouse

by Cathy Shouse

A Bad Day’s Work, the debut novel of former CNN staffer Nora McFarland, is more than a compelling mystery—it’s a unique glimpse into the life of a small-town television news photographer. The story of Lilly Hawkins of Bakersfield, California, may be fiction, but the author’s fresh voice and careful attention to detail make the intrigue real—and will have readers rooting for the photographer, called the “shooter” in newsroom lingo.

Lilly can use all the fans she can get. Backstabbing takes center stage, since her co-workers want recognition at any cost—the end goal being a better job in a bigger city.

The action starts on page one with a middle-of-the-night call to go out and videotape a crime scene. But the station’s news director hesitates to send Lilly because she has made several serious blunders recently. She convinces him she can handle the assignment, but faces unusually strong resistance at the scene as she tries to get the important footage. Things deteriorate further when she gets to the office and finds she has made yet another mistake. And somehow she gets caught up in the ever-unfolding crime, leading to even greater traumas.

Some of Lilly’s problems arise because she’s a terrible judge of character, trusting people she shouldn’t and suspecting those who are on her side. For example, there’s her uncle, who is Lilly’s main champion in solving the case, but can barely stay on the right side of the law. Andunfortunately, she’s also falling for her least favorite slick reporter.

This cozy mystery-with-an-edge is especially appealing because the characters are not typecast. Far from bland, their zaniness is reminiscent of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series. Plus, the reading group guide includes a terrific interview with the author. The next installment of this excellent new series can’t come soon enough.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

More international intrigue from Fesperman

Review by Todd Glasscock

by Todd Glasscock

Sam Keller, a corporate auditor for pharmaceutical giant Pfluger Klaxon, is used to business travel, but his next trip will be far from routine. In Dan Fesperman’s new thriller, Layover in Dubai, Sam’s trip turns nightmarish when Nanette Weaver, vice president of corporate security and investigations, enlists him to rein in colleague Charlie Hatcher while between flights in Dubai. Charlie’s overindulgences in booze and women have embarrassed the company and placed newly acquired assets in Dubai at risk.

When Sam and Charlie arrive in Dubai, Sam acts as chaperone during a night out, only to discover Charlie’s adventures seem less seedy than Weaver had conveyed . . . until their last night in town, that is, when Charlie drags Sam to the York Club, a bar and brothel. At the club, Charlie disappears with a prostitute into the building’s bowels, only to turn up murdered in one of the club’s offices within the hour.

When Sam falls under suspicion, detective Anwar Sharaf comes to his aid. Sharaf is assigned to investigate fellow officers purported to be working with Russian mobsters, including the one investigating Charlie’s murder, Lt. Hamad Assad. When Sharaf sees Sam is innocent and suspects Assad is connected to the crime, he follows Sam into a rabbit hole of murder, mobsters and madams of ill repute.

After the first body drops, Fesperman delivers standard thriller fare: crooked cops, double-crosses, chases, evasions and narrow escapes. However, he enhances and elevates the story with his exotic setting; clearly Fesperman’s travels in the Persian Gulf—he was a reporter during the first Gulf War—have played a huge role in shaping this novel. Dubai, seen through Sam’s eyes, is as alien as a sci-fi spaceport: a city set in an exotic desert landscape, where tourists visit its bustling malls and bundle up to ski on artificial snow. Layover in Dubai primarily succeeds because of its setting, an alien culture expertly presented; but Sam, an average Joe rather than spy or detective, whose only resources are his wits and Sharaf’s considerable help, also adds to its charm. This is a fast-paced thriller that’s perfect for adrenaline junkies looking for a satisfying read to keep them on their toes.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Did she or didn’t she?

Review by bookpagedev

Did she or didn’t she? Pam Lewis’ suspenseful first novel, Speak Softly, She Can Hear, opens with an incident that spirals into the macabre. Two teenaged girls who attend a posh school in New York have planned to use a ski trip to Stowe, Vermont, as a cover for a liaison with an aspiring actor who has agreed to deflower them. Carole Mason is an intelligent but self-conscious girl. Her friend Naomi is the edgy product of a flamboyantly dysfunctional family. The actor is named Eddie, and from the start it’s clear that he’s bad news.

After Eddie and Carole have had sex at a seedy motor lodge, another woman named Rita shows up. Eddie tries to involve the drunk Carole in a threesome, but she ends up instead crouching clumsily at the head of the bed, more in the way than intimately involved. Suddenly, Eddie breaks through Carole’s drunken haze, announcing that Rita is dead and claiming Carole has somehow broken her neck. After Naomi shows up, the three of them drag Rita’s corpse into the woods behind the motor lodge, where they bury it in the deep snow.

Carole can never clearly reconstruct how she might have killed Rita, and since the story is told from her point of view, the reader shares her confusion. For the rest of the novel, Carole tries to get away from the memory of that night and from Eddie and Naomi, but she somehow keeps circling back to it and to them. Without any explanation to her parents, she drops out of Vassar, goes across the country to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and then comes back to settle in Montpelier, Vermont. There she opens a restaurant called Chacha’s and falls in love with a black man named Will. The author cleverly integrates the suspense elements of the story with a perceptive depiction of the social and political tumult of the ’60s. The dramatic climax is not entirely a surprise, and the resolution is a little too neat, but Lewis’ skill in depicting character, incident and milieu make this a very promising debut. Martin Kich is a professor at Wright State University.

Did she or didn't she? Pam Lewis' suspenseful first novel, Speak Softly, She Can Hear, opens with an incident that spirals into the macabre. Two teenaged girls who attend a posh school in New York have planned to use a ski trip to Stowe, Vermont,…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

A feverish race to the end

Review by Karen Trotter Elley

by Karen Trotter Elley

Much to the delight of his fans, the brilliant, fabulously wealthy, king of cool FBI Agent Aloysius Pendergast is back in action and out for revenge. Pendergast, the brainchild of best-selling coauthors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, has been the driving force behind 13 previous novels, including Relic, Dance of Death and The Book of the Dead (the only books in the series that the authors recommend reading in sequence).

Their latest book, Fever Dream, is a stand-alone read that exemplifies the authors’ mastery of the suspense genre. The story unfolds as Pendergast and Helen—his much-beloved wife of two years—are relaxing at the end of an African safari. Their peaceful moment is interrupted when Pendergast is summoned to kill a rogue, man-eating lion and Helen—who is a crack shot—goes with him. She is killed during a vicious attack, but an emotionally scarred Pendergast survives the tragedy. Some 12 years later, he discovers that her weapon had deliberately been loaded with blanks. Obviously, his wife had been murdered.

He sets out to find her killer and commandeers his closest ally, NYPD Lt. Vincent D’Agosta, in a search that takes them from Africa to the swamps of Louisiana. Meanwhile Vincent’s love, NYPD Homicide Captain Laura Hayward, is not happy. This isn’t the first time that Pendergast has taken her Vinnie along on a chillingly dangerous ride.

Clues drop and bullets fly as they get ever closer to the elusive truth when Pendergast uncovers Helen’s obsession with artist John James Audubon—and a quest for a missing Audubon painting that proves to be the motive for her death. He can’t help but wonder if he ever really knew his wife.

When deeper, darker secrets are revealed, a disgruntled Captain Hayward is forced into the fray as the killers close in and the action heats up even more as the tale races to its violent conclusion. At the end, though, some questions remain unanswered. Sequel, anyone?

Although the authors live 500 miles apart, their writing is seamless and totally absorbing, the byproduct of a friendship that began around 1985 when the two first met. At the time, Preston worked for the American Museum of Natural History, and Child was an editor, a rising young star in the book-publishing world. They soon became close friends and the rest is history—mixed with heady doses of science and mayhem. Preston & Child fans won’t want to miss Fever Dream.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Gruber delivers a fast-paced terrorist thriller

Review by Alice Sullivan

by Alice Sullivan

The Good Son contains all the elements of a bestseller: well-developed characters, a devilish plot and hairpin turns that keep you guessing and surprised until the very end of the book. Author Michael Gruber (The Book of Air and Shadows, The Witch’s Boy) weaves three stories together, bringing the reader deep into the surroundings and mind of each character as the story plays out.

Writer Sonia Laghari plans a peace-keeping symposium in Pakistan—only to be captured by terrorists. Her many secrets and unusual past make her both feared and hated among her captors and fellow prisoners. Laghari’s son, Theo, is a soldier who exploits his military connections to wage a war of his own and devise a plot to rescue his mother. Back in the United States, Agent Cynthia Lam stumbles on intelligence that the Pakistanis are making nuclear weapons. When she discovers a scam, her aspirations of moving up the ranks at work are compromised.

In The Good Son, Gruber delves into the hot topics of the day—religion, terrorism and big government. Readers will tear through the pages, entranced by the depth of the plots and entertained by the fast pace of the storyline. Gruber’s impeccable research skills are on display here as he captures cultural nuances in descriptions and conversations.

Anyone who enjoys suspense, action, adventure and political thrillers will not be disappointed with The Good Son, which keeps the reader hooked through the end. Consider yourself warned: the story is not resolved until the last few pages.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Two sides of tragedy

Review by Kari Edgens

by Kari Edgens

Some writers ease the reader into their story, but Nancy Pickard dives right in with The Scent of Rain and Lightning. By page six, she has set up the framework of her novel and by the end of the first chapter, the reader is hooked on a tale of murder, mystery, family and love.

Jody Linder is infamous in the town of Rose, Kansas. On a dark and stormy night 23 years earlier, someone shot and killed Jody’s father; her mother disappeared and is presumably dead. From that night on, three-year-old Jody Linder was a girl with a story. Now Jody’s three uncles have upsetting news: Billy Crosby, the man convicted of killing her parents, has been released from prison and granted a new trial, thanks to the effort of Billy’s lawyer son, Collin. After years of comfortably living with justice—knowing the man who killed her parents is behind bars—Jody’s world crumbles as everything she has believed is thrown into question.

If anyone can understand the notoriety surrounding Jody, it’s Collin. The same town that coddled Jody treated Collin like a pariah as the two grew up side by side. Despite avoiding each other for their entire lives, Jody and Collin have a connection, and with this new case, Jody begins to see that hers was not the only life affected by this tragedy.

Against the backdrop of a small town like Rose, the reader understands how one event can define both a town and its people’s history. The standout feature of this novel is Pickard’s creation of complex characters that are deeply tied to history and setting. The characters are flawed, possessing feelings that aren’t resolved and struggling with the idea of accepting a new version of the truth. Pickard constructs a puzzle of interlocking events into which, as the story progresses, we slowly see how each character fits. The Scent of Rain and Lightning grabs you from the beginning, and Pickard holds you until the end, keeping you guessing the whole way through.