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Deadly Animals

Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
Deadly Animals, Marie Tierney’s brilliantly plotted debut mystery, introduces readers to Ava Bonney: a 14-year-old English girl obsessed with decomposing bodies.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Big Breath In

John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
John Straley’s nonstop, high-octane Big Breath In introduces the unforgettable Delphine, a 68-year-old cancer patient-turned-investigator.
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Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

The might to remember

Review by bookpagedev

Maggie Wilson remembered what happened that night she was left for dead. Her then-husband Nate came home drunk. She could see him in the doorframe still, raising his hand to strike her. She never doubted that memory. But then, five years later, someone else confessed to the attack.

This gripping first novel by Paul Jaskunas reads like a memoir as he captures the earnest voice of this beautiful young woman, turned into the village freak by the savage attack. Her testimony sent Nate to prison, and Maggie, now 28, must consider that she might have misremembered. Maybe it wasn’t her husband after all. Maybe that powerful memory was false.

Tautly written, Hidden opens with Maggie’s description of the scene when the police arrive and find her unconscious and bleeding on the floor of their farmhouse near the picturesque Utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. The reader gradually learns much about Maggie: how she happened to marry so young, and how she came to violate her marriage vows with a co-worker; how she wants to lose herself. “Mine is a secretive country,” Maggie says. “It was settled by people who came here to hide.” Supporting characters come off well in this novel, and that’s what keeps it compelling. Manny, the 78-year-old neighbor Maggie drinks gin with is as memorable as her tedious, devoted mother, or Nate, who makes the mistake of taking his domineering father for a role model.

No simple story of good and evil, this novel keeps you guessing. Jaskunas, who is himself an epileptic, gives convincing descriptions of the seizures Maggie undergoes following her injuries. He tells how seizures feel from the inside. In fact, Hidden is a well-told story of what an experience like Maggie’s would feel like from the inside how it might feel to no longer trust your memory. Anne Morris is a reviewer from Austin, Texas.

Maggie Wilson remembered what happened that night she was left for dead. Her then-husband Nate came home drunk. She could see him in the doorframe still, raising his hand to strike her. She never doubted that memory. But then, five years later, someone else confessed…
Mystery & SuspenseCozy Mystery

Digging up bones

Review by Joanne Collings

The older I get, the more aware I am that there are just too many books being published. There's no way to keep up and read everything, so I've made reading guidelines for myself. One I settled on a few years ago was simply not to read any featuring a non-professional as the protagonist-detective. Personally, I would rather not know if my dry cleaner is finding dead bodies on the premises regularly, and, if I had a literary agent, I would certainly prefer that he or she concentrate on selling my book rather than on solving crimes.

Now Rosemary Harris has punctured my neat, serviceable little rule with her new series, which begins with Pushing Up Daisies. Her heroine, Paula Holliday, who was downsized from her media job in New York City, has started a landscaping business in suburban Connecticut. What better profession to give an amateur sleuth—she has an excuse, after all, to be digging around in the dirt, which is a natural place to find a body. There are archeologists, true, but landscaping is a less exotic, more believable job. Paula becomes involved in a mystery when she uncovers the remains of a long-dead baby on the estate of a pair of deceased sisters. Eventually there is a contemporary crime that also catches Paula's growing interest in detective work; the solutions to the mysteries central to the plot are surprisingly complex. Paula does have professional and personal reasons to become involved, so the reader doesn't have to be distracted by wondering why she doesn't leave the police work to the police. (And the policeman here, in the person of the overweight Mike O'Malley, is a person of interest, both to the reader and certainly to Paula.)

Harris, who is a master gardener herself, takes care not to pile on too much horticulture; actually, I would have preferred more. But the strengths of Pushing Up Daisies involve place, character and often sprightly dialogue. And note the scene in which the villain is unmasked: It's highly original and involves a maze, crushed oyster shells and buttercream icing.

Joanne Collings writes from Washington, D.C.

The older I get, the more aware I am that there are just too many books being published. There's no way to keep up and read everything, so I've made reading guidelines for myself. One I settled on a few years ago was simply not…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Grisham’s latest legal thriller has sure appeal with readers

Review by Katie Lewis

Making a move that is guaranteed to delight his fans, John Grisham returns to form with his first legal thriller in three years, The Appeal.

The novel finds Grisham in familiar territory—the courtroom—but it begins in an unconventional way: with the end. When the verdict is announced in the novel's first chapter, readers are immediately thrown into the case and the controversy that surrounds it. The husband-and-wife legal team of Wes and Mary Grace Payton is representing Jeannette Baker in an effort to prove that her son and husband died as a result of contaminated water. On the other side of this battle is the chemical company accused of dumping toxic waste into the water supply. After a protracted trial and agonizing deliberations, the jury finally delivers its verdict. The chemical company appeals to the Mississippi Supreme Court, though lawyers don't anticipate a favorable outcome. Enter Wall Street billionaire and chemical company owner Carl Trudeau, who purchases a court seat with pocket change—a few million dollars. The fate of the case is left up to the nine state Supreme Court justices, one of whom is ensnared in conspiracy. The judicial system may never be viewed in quite the same way again.

Grisham's literary dynasty and avid fan following have been built on his remarkable ability to produce a blockbuster novel every year, nine of which have been turned into feature films. Beginning with 1991's The Firm, his second novel and first big success, Grisham established his place in thriller history by writing suspenseful tales about the judicial system. Fans have come to expect frequent twists and turns that leave them on the edge of their armchairs.

Though Grisham has made successful detours from this formula recently, with the comic novel Playing for Pizza and his first nonfiction work, The Innocent Man, his return to the legal fiction realm is an event long anticipated by both avid readers and Grisham himself. "I still enjoy writing the legal thrillers," Grisham has said of his latest book, "and don't plan to get too far away from them. Obviously, they have been very good to me, and they remain popular. I plan to write one a year for the next several years." Grisham, who turns 53 this month, has more than 225 million books in print worldwide, and his work has been translated into 29 languages. A decade ago, Publishers Weekly estimated that Grisham's earnings had made him a billion-dollar man. Not bad for someone who began writing as a hobby. The Arkansas native and Ole Miss-educated author's pastime evolved into a career—though only 5,000 initial copies were printed of his 1988 debut A Time to Kill, which took him three years to write—after years of practicing law. His detailed mastery of the legal genre, which focuses on lawyers and their associates, is due in part to his personal understanding of the legal system.

Grisham's most recent appearance in a courtroom came in 1996, when he honored a long-standing commitment to represent the family of a railroad brakeman killed in an accident. A jury awarded the family more than $600,000 in the case. Grisham, who served in the Mississippi legislature during the 1980s, retains a keen interest in politics (he hosted an early fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2007) but says he has no intention of running for office again. "I enjoy watching and participating in politics from the sidelines, but it's best to keep some distance," he says.

Bookstore patrons and moviegoers may find it difficult to keep their distance from the nonstop writer—and who'd want to?—but there is little risk of a complete Grisham overload: Though his work can be found on the bookshelves and the big screen, don't expect to catch him pitching Gillette razors while you're flipping channels. The intensely private author continues to refuse offers of personal appearances and sponsorship, and he seems to live a tranquil life. He and his family divide their time between a home in Mississippi and a plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia, remaining largely out of the public eye. This eagerly anticipated return to the genre that made Grisham a household name is another page-turning installment from start to finish. A verdict has been reached: The people are craving another Grisham legal thriller.

Making a move that is guaranteed to delight his fans, John Grisham returns to form with his first legal thriller in three years, The Appeal.

The novel finds Grisham in familiar territory—the courtroom—but it begins in an unconventional way: with the end. When the verdict is…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Beach Read

Review by bookpagedev

Memorial Day is traditionally a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation’s service, but in Vince Flynn’s newest Mitch Rapp novel (Transfer of Power, The Third Option, Separation of Power, etc.), the peaceful May holiday will include much more than morning parades and afternoon barbecues. Memorial Day is the target date for undercover al-Qaeda operatives in the States to detonate a nuclear bomb in the nation’s capital during a dedication ceremony for the new WWII memorial. Their target: the president, leaders of Great Britain and Russia, and a few hundred thousand ill-fated infidels.

Counter-terrorism operative Mitch Rapp has one helluva score to settle. A Syracuse University All-American lacrosse player who lost the love of his life in the Pan Am Lockerbie terrorist attack in 1988, Rapp’s thirst for vengeance led him to dedicate his life to fighting terrorism by any means necessary.

Now decades later, Rapp (an amalgam of John Wayne, General George Patton and Dirty Harry) has a potential disaster on his hands. After a clandestine raid on a village on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border nets Rapp some high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders, he learns of a plot to transport a nuclear weapon into the States. But after Rapp takes his shocking findings to his boss, CIA director Irene Kennedy, and later, the president, he finds himself quickly embroiled in political claptrap. As precious hours tick away, self-righteous politicians bicker about how to handle the imminent disaster. Meanwhile, sleeper cells are becoming active and terrorists are converging on Washington, D.C., with a bomb that could turn the nation’s capital into a radioactive wasteland. In usual Mitch Rapp fashion, he takes matters into his own hands.

Flynn’s protagonist is reminiscent of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and Dale Brown’s Patrick McLanahan: all are extremely intelligent, incredibly focused, unwaveringly patriotic loose cannons that readers can’t help but root for. And that essentially describes Memorial Day: a highly intelligent read that is virtually impossible to put down. Paul Goat Allen is a writer in Syracuse, New York.

Memorial Day is traditionally a day of remembrance for those who have died in our nation's service, but in Vince Flynn's newest Mitch Rapp novel (Transfer of Power, The Third Option, Separation of Power, etc.), the peaceful May holiday will include much more than morning…
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

A twisty tale to get lost in

Review by Joanne Collings

Just thinking about Laurie R. King's Touchstone makes my shoulders do that snuggling motion you know, the way you wriggle them as you settle into a really comfortable chair. There's an ancient family afghan keeping your legs warm and a mug of something hot and delicious nearby. It's winter, but you're warm, and soon you'll be transported elsewhere.

Where you'll be after opening Touchstone is 1926 England, a little London, a bit of Cornwall, but mostly Hurleigh House in Gloucestershire, the country home of one of the England's oldest, most distinguished and highly eccentric families. Harris Stuyvesant, an agent of the Bureau of Investigation ( Federal has yet to be added), is on foreign shores to investigate the role of Lady Laura Hurleigh and her Labour politician lover in a series of bombings in the U.S., one of which permanently injured Stuyvesant's younger brother. While trying to get some answers difficult because the British government is preparing for what is expected to be a disastrous general strike Stuyvesant meets the mysterious Aldous Carstairs, who offers to help him in his investigation as long as Stuyvesant helps him with a pet project that just happens to have connections to Stuyvesant's case.

Despite his recognition that Carstairs is slimy and political and no doubt as dangerous as a puddle of gas, Stuyvesant, who, like every other important character in the novel, has a secret motivation, allows Carstairs to involve him with Bennett Grey, a wounded veteran and friend of the Hurleigh family, who, Carstairs reveals, "knows things he should not be able to, as if he sees into people." Grey is the touchstone, the key to The Truth Project, the obsession that runs Carstairs' life. He got away, but now Carstairs sees a way to get him back and Stuyvesant can be used to make that happen. California author King is best known for the best-selling Mary Russell novels, a series that proposes new investigations (and a wife Mary Russell) for Sherlock Holmes. Touchstone is not part of a series, but King is so skillful, so adept at plotting and making her characters come alive, that she leaves you wishing that it were.

Joanne Collings is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

Just thinking about Laurie R. King's Touchstone makes my shoulders do that snuggling motion you know, the way you wriggle them as you settle into a really comfortable chair. There's an ancient family afghan keeping your legs warm and a mug of something hot and…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

An assassin on the loose in Japan

Review by bookpagedev

John Rain, a solitary man, lives only with the ghosts of his violent past for company. Cloaked in anonymity, he slips along Tokyo’s modern bustling streets, inconspicuous in a city of 26 million people. This isn’t completely effortless since he is an ainoko, a half-breed, born to a Japanese father and a Caucasian mother. Rain, a martial arts and surveillance expert, is also an assassin. Because Rain’s specialty is ingeniously making his victim’s death appear to be accidental, his services are frequently in demand.

Freelancing in Tokyo, Rain owes allegiance to no one. No longer a mercenary, nor samurai, he creates his own code of conduct and takes great pains to remain a nameless, faceless enigma to his clients. All that is about to change when he is hired to assassinate a Japanese government official.

Rain’s credo is to trust no one and expect the worst. He typically fulfills his contract, pockets his ample fee and vanishes back into the populace. However, this is no ordinary contract. Events spin out of control as Rain finds himself the one being hunted. Reluctant to trust anyone, he enlists the aid of a young protŽgŽ whose illicit skills include computer hacking. Furthermore, since even a solitary warrior must have a love interest, Rain courts a beautiful jazz pianist who has a connection to the murdered government official. Marked for death, Rain and his two companions follow a dangerous trail of clues that lead to treachery and corruption. Rain Fall, Barry Eisler’s debut novel, is a suspenseful thriller filled with double-crosses, duplicity and relentless action. Eisler’s experience of living and working in Japan lends realism to his depiction of the compelling intricacies of Japanese society. He is particularly skilled at describing Tokyo’s smoky jazz clubs, love hotels, stylish whiskey bars and subway and train stations teeming with an endless flow of citizens. And though the world-weary personality of John Rain seems a bit over the top at times, Eisner’s samurai warrior is the kind of superhero who might attract Hollywood’s attention.

C.

L. Ross reads, writes and reviews in Pismo Beach, California.

John Rain, a solitary man, lives only with the ghosts of his violent past for company. Cloaked in anonymity, he slips along Tokyo's modern bustling streets, inconspicuous in a city of 26 million people. This isn't completely effortless since he is an ainoko, a half-breed,…
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

The enduring quest for the Holy Grail

Review by bookpagedev

In the elaborate thriller Labyrinth, two women mysteriously linked across eight centuries take up the quest to find the legendary Holy Grail and guard its secrets against those who would use its power for evil ends. Author Kate Mosse spins an exciting tale of intrigue and peril, with female characters who don’t wait for men to lead. With valor and cunning, they plunge headlong into the eternal search for truth.

First up is Alice Tanner, who makes a surprise find while helping with an archeological dig in the mountains of southwest France near the historic city of Carcassonne. Drawn by an odd sense of familiarity, she discovers a cave with startling contents: two battered skeletons and a ring bearing an arcane design of a labyrinth that matches a larger carving on the cave wall. Next the action moves to Carcassonne in the year 1209, where Ala•s fears for her people as crusaders from northern France approach, ready to wipe out the supposed heresy of the Cathar Christians prevalent in the region. When her father faces service in their defense, he asks her to help protect an ancient grail secret he has sworn to guard. Mosse deftly weaves the two women’s stories together like a medieval tapestry, developing suspense as she moves from one era to the other with exquisitely devised parallels, the well-researched background providing depth and color. She deserves special kudos for her imaginative take on the grail itself. Mosse touches on themes made popular by Dan Brown’s Da Vince Code the grail, the history and legends of France. While Brown bows to history, Mosse immerses her story in it. She has a home in Carcassonne, and her novel shows her intimate familiarity with the ghosts and landscapes of the area. A bestseller in Britain, Labyrinth is Mosse’s third novel, and her first to be published in the U.S. It’s an exciting read, especially for those who love strong female protagonists, history and epic adventure. Janet Fisher writes from southwest Oregon.

In the elaborate thriller Labyrinth, two women mysteriously linked across eight centuries take up the quest to find the legendary Holy Grail and guard its secrets against those who would use its power for evil ends. Author Kate Mosse spins an exciting tale of intrigue…
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

When the sleuth is a shrink

Review by bookpagedev

As Keith Ablow’s Compulsion opens, we meet Massachusetts psychiatrist Dr. Frank Clevenger, who is haunted by an encounter two years earlier with a maniacal mental patient (described in grisly detail in Ablow’s Projection). This shattering experience has left him weary and disillusioned. Wanting to keep his distance from violence and death, he has sworn off consulting on forensic cases.

Clevenger, a victim of childhood abuse, is a complex character. His list of excesses, including smoking, gambling, drugs, alcohol and rescuing troubled women, could fill a textbook. Attempting to stay sober and sane, he substitutes coffee and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle for scotch and cocaine. Never married, his choices in women are questionable, running the gamut from society damsels-in-distress to disrobed dames in seedy strip clubs. Can Clevenger keep his own demons at bay while helping others deal with theirs? Enter the wealthy, socially prominent, politically powerful and profoundly dysfunctional Bishop family of Nantucket. North Anderson, Nantucket’s chief of police, enlists Clevenger’s help when one of the Bishop’s twin babies is murdered. Against his better judgment, Clevenger is drawn into the murder investigation. Thus begins the first link in a violent chain of events as he delves deeper into the Bishop family’s disturbing secrets. He risks everything to confront the evil side of human nature. How far can you walk in darkness without losing your way forever? Frank Clevenger is about to find out. Compulsion allows us to explore Frank’s psyche, as well as those of the characters he encounters as he attempts to match wits with a psychopath. The protagonist is flawed but driven to deliver justice; the villain is suitably frightening. Ablow’s strong characterizations extend to the supporting cast, who are just as complicated and entertaining. The author, a practicing forensic psychiatrist, uses his extensive knowledge of mental illness and violence to lend authenticity to Compulsion, weaving a suspenseful mystery around riveting insights into the criminal mind. This latest addition to the Frank Clevenger series is an engrossing thriller that belongs on your summer reading list. C.

L. Ross reads, writes and reviews in Pismo Beach, California.

As Keith Ablow's Compulsion opens, we meet Massachusetts psychiatrist Dr. Frank Clevenger, who is haunted by an encounter two years earlier with a maniacal mental patient (described in grisly detail in Ablow's Projection). This shattering experience has left him weary and disillusioned. Wanting to keep…
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Racing to stop a deadly epidemic

Review by bookpagedev

Joshua Spanogle’s debut novel will have readers compulsively washing their hands for months. A medical student at Stanford, Spanogle knows his subject, and the result is a chillingly realistic medical thriller with real urgency.

Isolation Ward opens as a mysterious outbreak of hemorrhagic fever strikes a run-down hospital in a decaying Baltimore neighborhood. The early symptoms of the viral infection resemble a bad case of the flu but quickly escalate to something much more horrific and an alarming percentage of those infected are dead within weeks. Dr. Nathaniel McCormick, a hard-charging medical detective from the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the Centers for Disease Control, is called in to investigate. What he uncovers is shocking: all those inflicted with the sickness are mentally handicapped residents from group homes in the area, and all have sexual links with another group home resident, an alleged rapist named Douglas Buchanan. McCormick’s investigatory style, which can best be described as antagonistic, leads him to some surprising clues, but his complete lack of couth gets him pulled from the front lines just as possible leads start surfacing. After being shipped off to California to follow up on a minor loose end, McCormick finds himself right in the middle of a jaw-dropping plot that could save millions of lives and destroy even more.

Readers will have a hard time putting down this incredibly fast-paced novel and will be disturbed by its far-reaching implications, but a minor flaw can be found in its protagonist, the ill-tempered and overly sarcastic McCormick. An unpleasant blend of loud-mouthed brat and insensitive know-it-all, the headstrong character is not always an easy one for readers to identify with. That small criticism aside, Isolation Ward is definitely a medical thriller worth reading. Paul Goat Allen is a freelance editor and writer in Camillus, New York.

Joshua Spanogle's debut novel will have readers compulsively washing their hands for months. A medical student at Stanford, Spanogle knows his subject, and the result is a chillingly realistic medical thriller with real urgency.

Isolation Ward opens as a mysterious outbreak of hemorrhagic…
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Shakespeare’s greatest secret

Review by Tim Davis

When fire damages the new Globe Theatre in London and disrupts rehearsals for Hamlet, young American director Kate Shelton finds herself enmeshed in a malignant drama of staggering proportions in Jennifer Lee Carrell's first novel, Interred with Their Bones. Just prior to the fire, Shakespearean scholar Rosalind Howard had given Kate an enigmatic gift in a small box, and she included this cryptic admonition: If you open it, you must follow where it leads. Then Rosalind is brutally murdered precisely in the manner of Hamlet's father. As the police look into Rosalind's bizarre death, Kate realizes that the box's contents a Victorian mourning brooch may be the most important bit of evidence. Following Rosalind's injunction, Kate takes it upon herself to find her friend's killer.

Kate is immediately confronted by a series of ever-increasing dangers, but she soon discovers to her surprise that she is not alone in her quest for the truth. Ben Pearl, Rosalind's strikingly good-looking nephew, turns up in the nick of time and becomes an indispensable friend and ally.

Piecing together an elaborate puzzle, Kate and Ben travel around the world to Harvard and the American southwest in pursuit of a tantalizing series of literary clues hidden in the words of Shakespeare, Cervantes, the Holy Bible and ciphered texts that will lead them to the murderer and unlock one of history's greatest literary secrets. Taking her title from Mark Antony's ironic eulogy in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Carrell, the author of the much-praised nonfiction book The Speckled Monster: A Historical Tale of Battling Smallpox, has proven that she knows how to write a fast-paced, highly entertaining novel. Erudite and complex, Interred with Their Bones draws readers into an allusive labyrinth embellished with the words and plots from the plays of the upstart Crow, as one contemporary dubbed the Bard. Here is a novel that will appeal to mystery-thriller fans as well as Shakespeare aficionados.

Tim Davis teaches literature at the University of West Florida.

When fire damages the new Globe Theatre in London and disrupts rehearsals for Hamlet, young American director Kate Shelton finds herself enmeshed in a malignant drama of staggering proportions in Jennifer Lee Carrell's first novel, Interred with Their Bones. Just prior to the fire, Shakespearean…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Wasn’t that a mighty storm

Review by Leslie Budewitz

Unleash with Category 5 fury a modern master of mood and metaphor. Turn him loose on a city in turmoil. Let him speak with the righteous indignation of Dave Robicheaux, the recovering alcoholic, Cajun detective who struggles for justice whether within the system or outside it. Then settle in for a heck of a read: James Lee Burke's The Tin Roof Blowdown.

In the whirling winds of Hurricane Katrina's landfall, a junkie priest takes a bus into the 9th Ward. A white father and daughter struggle to cope after her gang rape. Across the street, a crime boss a florist by day has fled to higher ground. And four young black men on the prowl in a stolen boat hit the jackpot in the florist's empty house. As they flee, gunfire leaves two dead, one paralyzed and the fourth Bertrand Melancon terrified and on the run. New Iberia Sheriff's deputy Robicheaux is lent to New Orleans to help out, where he investigates the shooting and the theft. As Dave gets closer to learning what Melancon found in the florist's home, and to what happened in the flooded streets, he finds himself and his family the target of forces as destructive and unforgiving as the wind and water.

The Tin Roof Blowdown is Burke's 16th Dave Robicheaux novel. Twice an Edgar Award winner, once a Pulitzer Prize nominee, Burke is justifiably admired for his rich prose and for the character of Robicheaux, a complex, compassionate man always striving to understand human motivation. Everything readers love in Burke's novels is intensified by the storm, and by Robicheaux's barely controlled rage at the government's inability to take care of those most in need in a vibrant old city. Deft shifts of points of view allow for a more fully fleshed story than Robicheaux alone could tell.

This is a powerful portrayal of the human cost of a storm that will long reverberate, and that blew the roof off the illusion of equality in America. Like Robicheaux, readers will be pondering the true nature of good and evil long after the last page.

Leslie Budewitz writes from northwest Montana.

Unleash with Category 5 fury a modern master of mood and metaphor. Turn him loose on a city in turmoil. Let him speak with the righteous indignation of Dave Robicheaux, the recovering alcoholic, Cajun detective who struggles for justice whether within the system or outside…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

A real-life firefighter’s scorching tale

Review by bookpagedev

<B>A real-life firefighter’s scorching tale</B> Earl Emerson, a 24-year veteran of the Seattle Fire Department, is best known as the author of two popular series featuring Thomas Black and Mac Fontana. In <B>Vertical Burn</B>, he introduces a new character, Seattle firefighter John Finney. Firefighting is a family tradition for the dedicated Finney, with grandfather, father and brother all in the profession.

"It was the most interesting job in the world. Getting up in the middle of the night to do who knows what. Anything could be out there waiting for him. Absolutely anything," Emerson writes. As it turns out, something very bad is waiting for Finney. One night, and one devastating warehouse fire, change his life forever.

Only Finney is convinced that the Leary Way fire on that fateful June evening is arson. Adding to the mystery, Finney’s crew arrives first on the scene when at least five truck companies should have been dispatched ahead of them. Events spiral out of control. Finney escapes the burning building; his partner does not. Heat stress and carbon monoxide poisoning cloud his recollection of the events.

Firefighting, like all professions, has its cardinal rules. Foremost, it’s bad to lose a partner in a fire, but unforgivable to be the cause of that loss. The worst thing a firefighter can do is panic, and Finney stands accused of just that. Burned, depressed and tormented by survivor’s guilt, Finney becomes obsessed with the Leary Way fire. As a result, his credibility and career suffer. However, as Finney attempts to unravel a sequence of apparent coincidences, his life gets much worse. Is it a sinister conspiracy or a case of paranoia? The tension escalates as Finney tries to save not only his career, but possibly his life as well.

Emerson gives us a ringside seat to firefighter protocol and procedures intermingled with relentless suspense. The details are realistic, including techniques to clear smoke from buildings, engines versus ladder rigs and the Knox Box (which allows firemen to enter commercial buildings without breaking down the door). <B>Vertical Burn</B> sizzles with excitement, plenty of Pacific Northwest atmosphere and a harrowing finale. It’s a convincing tale populated with the courageous individuals who fight fires and the scoundrels who set them. <I>C.

L. Ross reads, writes and reviews in Pismo Beach, California.</I>

<B>A real-life firefighter's scorching tale</B> Earl Emerson, a 24-year veteran of the Seattle Fire Department, is best known as the author of two popular series featuring Thomas Black and Mac Fontana. In <B>Vertical Burn</B>, he introduces a new character, Seattle firefighter John Finney. Firefighting is…

Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Deadly land squabble on the Vineyard

Review by bookpagedev

Nothing so animates the contentious natives of Martha’s Vineyard as the question of proper land use. To propose the slightest alteration of the landscape is to launch an endless series of loud public meetings and a barrage of vitriolic letters to the editor. Imagine the hubbub and intrigue, then, when a local dowager spurns her estranged son and strange granddaughter by selling her 200 unspoiled acres to that lowest of life forms, an off-island developer. Soon after this happens, the lawyer who negotiated the deal turns up dead inside this same disputed acreage.

Thus begins Cynthia Riggs’ second mystery set on Martha’s Vineyard. Determined to make sense of all the commercial and personal crosscurrents set in motion by the sale is 92-year-old Victoria Trumbull, the poet, newspaper columnist and tireless snoop Riggs introduced last year in Deadly Nightshade.

If the lawyer’s death is murder, as Trumbull believes it to be, then there’s no shortage of suspects. Besides the disinherited family members who may be carrying grudges, there are at least four distinct groups scrambling to wrest the newly acquired land from the developer a gaggle of Utopians looking to build their own upscale paradise on the spot, some civic types who seek to turn the place into a public park and campground, a cabal of rich doctors intent on creating an exclusive golf course and the beleaguered and underfunded conservationists who want to preserve the land the way it is.

This last group involves Trumbull in the action (as if she needed an excuse) by asking her to search the warred-over turf for any endangered species of plants that might bring development to a quick halt. Helping Trumbull carry out her mission as well as test her suspicions are the long-suffering local police chief (also a woman) and an inquisitive 11-year-old sidekick.

Riggs, who bases the character of Victoria on her own dauntless mother, knows the Island its flora, fauna, families, legends, customs and rumors so well that every pace she puts her senior sleuth through becomes another delightful discovery.

Nothing so animates the contentious natives of Martha's Vineyard as the question of proper land use. To propose the slightest alteration of the landscape is to launch an endless series of loud public meetings and a barrage of vitriolic letters to the editor. Imagine the…

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Paul Tremblay

There’s no going back in this apocalyptic home-invasion thriller

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Praised by horrormeister Stephen King, Paul Tremblay’s shocking new novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, is an often graphic account of one family’s ordeal when their vacation is shattered in a cult-like home invasion. We asked Tremblay about the book’s origins, its dark path and his inner fears that helped forge the novel.

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