Instagram Facebook X-twitter Linkedin
Science Fiction & FantasyRomanceNonfictionMystery & SuspenseFictionChildren's & YAYA FictionYASuspenseSocial ScienceScience FictionPopular FictionPop CulturePicture BookParanormal RomanceMemoirLiterary FictionChildren'sArts & Culture

Best Hispanic and Latinx titles of 2024 (so far)

Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 to October 15) by reading one of these excellent books by Hispanic and Latinx authors.
Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 to October 15) by reading one of these excellent books by Hispanic and Latinx authors.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Death at the Sign of the Rook

A murder-mystery party blurs the lines between dramatic artifice and harsh reality in Kate Atkinson’s sixth Jackson Brodie mystery.
A murder-mystery party blurs the lines between dramatic artifice and harsh reality in Kate Atkinson’s sixth Jackson Brodie mystery.
Previous
Next

Sign Up

Get the latest ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

All Mystery Coverage

Filter by genre
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

A murder mystery for dog lovers

Review by Trisha Ping

What's it about?
Best-selling author Rita Mae Brown is launching a series that introduces two new animal sleuths—but this time, they're of the canine persuasion. In A Nose for Justice, Mags moves in with her great-aunt Jeep after losing her Wall Street job, bringing her dachshund Baxter, who clashes with Jeep's German shepherd mix King. But Baxter and King have to put their differences aside when a killer targets their small Nevada town and Mags teams up with local Deputy Pete Meadows to solve the mystery.

Bestseller formula:
Talking dogs + romance + murder mystery + Nevada history

Favorite lines:
Baxter lifted his head, sniffed deeply. "Something's in the creek bed." . . . Transfixed, the two animals stared at the human corpse stashed there. One wouldn't see it from the road. Coyotes had eaten some of the best parts—including the nose and lips—but since it froze at night what wasn't chewed was well enough preserved.

Worth the hype?
Should be another winner for dog lovers and fans of Brown's Mrs. Murphy series.

What's it about?Best-selling author Rita Mae Brown is launching a series that introduces two new animal sleuths—but this time, they're of the canine persuasion. In A Nose for Justice, Mags moves in with her great-aunt Jeep after losing her Wall Street job, bringing her dachshund Baxter, who clashes with Jeep's German shepherd mix King. But […]
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

A debut novel with deadly secrets

Review by bookpagedev

If ever the adage "things aren’t always what they seem" applied to a novel, it would be to The Lake of Dead Languages. In her debut novel, Carol Goodman spins a tale that keeps the reader guessing on multiple fronts. The novel begins in the present day, when protagonist Jane Hudson returns to her alma mater, the Heart Lake School for Girls in the Adirondacks, to teach Latin. Newly divorced, Jane seems to have fled to Heart Lake to take refuge and re-evaluate her life. But the reader quickly discovers she has a past to reconcile when a page from her teenage journal reappears after more than two decades . . . and one of her students tries to kill herself.

Part two of the novel flashes back to Jane’s teenage years. Here the reader has a chance to get to know the younger Jane, a lonely girl who lives on the other side of the river ("in Corinth, it’s the river and not the train tracks that divide the haves from the have-nots"). Her mother encourages her to take Latin for the sole purpose of meeting, and hopefully befriending, the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers. And it is in Latin class that Jane is befriended by siblings Matt and Lucy Toller two of the three teenagers who later commit suicide during Jane’s senior year at Heart Lake School.

The reader looks on as Jane steps through the veil of young adulthood when she loses her virginity and faces the death of a parent. But the trials of growing up are further complicated as the circumstances of the trio of tragic deaths are slowly unraveled. The reader begins to wonder if the student deaths were really suicide and comes to realize that Jane may be the only one who can answer that question.

While avid mystery readers may find they can figure out "whodunit" before the final page of most novels, The Lake of Dead Languages holds its secrets to the end. If it weren’t for Goodman’s keen ability to weave a mystery of multiple layers, each revealed with exquisite timing, her picturesque prose would be reason enough to keep the reader turning the pages.

Amy Rauch Neilson is a writer and editor in Belleville, Michigan.

 

If ever the adage "things aren’t always what they seem" applied to a novel, it would be to The Lake of Dead Languages. In her debut novel, Carol Goodman spins a tale that keeps the reader guessing on multiple fronts. The novel begins in the present day, when protagonist Jane Hudson returns to her alma […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Real-life figures join WWII spy story

Review by bookpagedev

John Lawton’s striking new suspense novel, Bluffing Mr. Churchill, is set in the period between the height of the London Blitz and America’s entry into World War II. In this prequel to Lawton’s Inspector Troy series, an Austrian who has insinuated himself into the upper echelons of the Nazi SS and has spied first for Poland and then for the United States is now on the run. The narration rotates among several points of view those of the spy, his Nazi pursuers, his American handler, several British agents and the British policeman who ultimately must make sense of what has occurred. As the main action is playing out, Nazi officer Rudolph Hess lands a plane in Scotland on a mysterious true-life mission that has never been fully explained.

The author also brings other historical figures such as Reinhard Heydrich, a brutal SS chief, to life, and grants memorable cameos to a number of famous men and women who personified the times. One of the most chilling scenes involves Heydrich’s examination of the hands of a corpse that the fleeing spy has tried to pass off as his own. A surgeon has neatly removed the hands from the corpse and Heydrich’s assistant has a great deal of trouble deciding how to carry them into the room. He settles on a silver desert tray, and the fastidious Heydrich examines them very casually as if it were all part of a perfectly normal day. Another of the cameos is made by H.G. Wells, and in a comment that illustrates Lawton’s deftness in handling a broad range of tones, Wells is described as “having endured as much of his own silence as he could manage in the course of a single meal.” Freddie Troy is kept mostly on the sidelines in this novel, but all of the characters are vividly sketched. The exposition of their backgrounds is pointed and efficient, and their voices are differentiated enough for the reader to keep them straight but not so much that they seem caricatured. Overall, Bluffing Mr. Churchill is a historically fascinating story that is masterfully told. Martin Kich is an English professor at Wright State University.

John Lawton’s striking new suspense novel, Bluffing Mr. Churchill, is set in the period between the height of the London Blitz and America’s entry into World War II. In this prequel to Lawton’s Inspector Troy series, an Austrian who has insinuated himself into the upper echelons of the Nazi SS and has spied first for […]
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

T.R. Pearson’s latest slice of small-town life

Review by bookpagedev

In Polar, Deputy Ray Tatum has two mysteries to solve: the disappearance of Angela Dunn, a wordless child who wanders into the woods, never to be seen again by her parents, and the sudden prophetic powers of the formerly worthless Clayton, a shiftless town institution best known for his preference for the porn channel. One mystery will be solved, while the other remains tantalizingly out of reach.

But these strong narrative engines are not what really drives Polar, T. R. Pearson’s latest novel. What Pearson seeks to do, instead, is capture the feel of small town life and the myriad personalities that give it texture, without resorting to the usual platitudes that pretend such towns have more than their share of unspoiled innocence. In other words, Pearson’s small-town Virginia is no Mayberry. Nor is it inhabited by the Cleavers.

The novelist thinks nothing of interrupting the flow of his narrative to give the life story of a minor character who may never appear in the book again. This doesn’t constitute an aesthetic flaw. After all, the true, unvarnished motivations of man are what Polar is really all about.

It’s about characters like Ivy Vaughn, a woman who remains in such a high dudgeon she never pays attention to the road and leaves a trail of dead animals in her wake. It’s also about Mrs. Dunn, who turns the loss of her daughter and husband into profit, launching a career as a radio celebrity whose collective losses make her an authority on flagging American morals.

And, of course, there is Clayton, whose television satellite is arced over his garage at an angle that betrays, for all to observe, his addiction to televised erotica. Clayton seems an unlikely candidate to be blessed with the gift of second sight. But fate, which has a definite sense of humor in a T.R. Pearson novel, chooses Clayton to become a small-time, small-town prophet.

Only Deputy Tatum is able to turn Clayton’s obscure prognostications to good purpose in his search for Angela. Motivated by the haunting memory of his own dead child, Ray pursues Angela’s story long after the media, the FBI and even the girl’s parents have given her up for lost. Using the prism of Tatum’s grief, Pearson critiques small-town pretensions and, by extension, America’s chronic hypocrisies.

In Polar, Deputy Ray Tatum has two mysteries to solve: the disappearance of Angela Dunn, a wordless child who wanders into the woods, never to be seen again by her parents, and the sudden prophetic powers of the formerly worthless Clayton, a shiftless town institution best known for his preference for the porn channel. One […]
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Sinister secrets in a small town

Review by Rebecca Stropoli

It is something of a literary tradition to portray the small town as a breeding ground for dark secrets that emerge to shatter its innocuous facade. In his gripping new novel, Lost Souls, Michael Collins effectively depicts the sinister underside of an unnamed, economically depressed Midwestern town coping with the aftermath of a horrific tragedy. As the story unfolds, long-buried secrets about the town's residents and leaders come to the surface, with ultimately ruinous consequences.

The tale opens on Halloween night, when three-year-old Sarah Kendall is reported missing. Local police officer Lawrence, the novel's narrator, is the one who discovers the child's lifeless body buried beneath a pile of leaves by the side of the road. Fittingly dressed in an angel costume, little Sarah appears to be the victim of a hit-and-run accident.

When high school football star Kyle Johnson, the struggling town's bright shining hope, is named as the prime suspect in the accident, Lawrence becomes the key player in a cover-up designed to absolve Kyle of any wrongdoing. Promised a promotion to police chief by the crooked mayor, Lawrence initially goes along with the scheme. But as his unease intensifies, he is determined to discover the truth about what happened. In Lawrence, Collins has fashioned a complex character who struggles with demons of his own. Divorced and dealing with the remarriage of his wife and custodial loss of his young son, Lawrence leads a solitary and booze-soaked existence. With his spare and haunting prose, Collins skillfully creates parallels between the undoing of the town and Lawrence's own emotional downslide. The Irish-born Collins, whose past works include the Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Keepers of Truth, writes adeptly about a corrupt American culture. You may not want to live in Collins' version of small-town USA, but this literary visit is a dark, page-turning pleasure.

Rebecca Krasney Stropoli lives in New York City.

 

It is something of a literary tradition to portray the small town as a breeding ground for dark secrets that emerge to shatter its innocuous facade. In his gripping new novel, Lost Souls, Michael Collins effectively depicts the sinister underside of an unnamed, economically depressed Midwestern town coping with the aftermath of a horrific tragedy. […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Haunted by the past

Review by Trisha Ping

Growing up in small-town Australia, Gerard Freeman was raised on his mother's stories of her idyllic childhood on an English estate called Staplefield. But after he discovers concrete clues to that past an old photograph and a manuscript hidden in her bedroom, the reminiscences end. And that's where the mystery begins in John Harwood's shiver-inducing debut novel, The Ghost Writer.

Confused by his mother's steadfast and sudden refusal to speak of the past, lonely, bookish Gerard finds comfort in the unexpected arrival of a pen-pal letter from a paralyzed orphan girl named Alice Jessell. As they exchange letters, their friendship grows into a courtship of sorts, marred only by the fact that Alice refuses to think of meeting while she is still paralyzed. Years pass, and Gerard attends college and takes a job as a librarian while waiting for Alice to recuperate, a goal that always remains just out of reach. After his mother dies, Gerard finds the manuscript she had refused to let him read, and realizes that the home and family in his great-grandmother Viola's Gothic ghost story bear a striking resemblance to those in his mother's own tales. He advertises in a London newspaper for information about her family, the Hatherleys, and an elderly woman claiming to be the heir to their estate invites him to come and look through the home his mother abandoned. What he finds there challenges everything he believes about the people closest to him.

Harwood's atmospheric debut is reminiscent of A.S. Byatt's Possession as it weaves Viola's turn-of-the-century horror stories into the main narrative. Parallels appear between these tales and the clues Gerard uncovers about his mother's past, and the line separating fact and fiction is blurred as the novel reaches its chilling climax. More than just a literary thriller, The Ghost Writer is also a tale of the intoxicating pleasures of reading and writing and the danger that comes from always trusting the narrator.

 

Growing up in small-town Australia, Gerard Freeman was raised on his mother's stories of her idyllic childhood on an English estate called Staplefield. But after he discovers concrete clues to that past an old photograph and a manuscript hidden in her bedroom, the reminiscences end. And that's where the mystery begins in John Harwood's shiver-inducing […]
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Beach Read

Review by Sheri Swanson

Sassy, Irish-Jewish PI Tess Monaghan, protagonist of Laura Lippman's popular series, returns in the suspenseful By a Spider's Thread. This time out, Tess takes on a referral from her Uncle Donald (of the Weinstein side of the family) and finds herself getting in touch with her Jewish side. Hired by Mark Rubin, a devout Orthodox Jew, to find his wife and three children, Tess spars with tradition, treachery and of course Tyner, her former employer and soon-to-be uncle-in-law. She works this case without help from any of her usual companions: boyfriend Crow, former roommate Whitney, former client-now-friend, Jackie. However, ex-nemesis Gretchen O'Brien reappears as the leader of a whole new web of support for Tess and other women PIs. Rubin's penchant for privacy and naiveté regarding his wife and the state of his marriage make for an initially unsympathetic client. His oldest son, Isaac, however, instantly wins our hearts as a scrapper an instinctive survivalist. Without his beloved books to keep him company, Isaac spends his time concocting new ways to escape, or at least contact his father. Through him, we see a softer side of Mark, that of a father who wishes "first and foremost that you would be a virtuous man" but who also uses Advanced Mission Battleship to teach his son that he need not be the smartest one to win.

Trapped with a mother not acting herself and a man posing as his father who clearly considers him a threat, Isaac reminds us of both the resilience of children and their sometimes overlooked maturity beyond their years.

With her usual bullheadedness, Tess bends rules, interferes where she's not welcome and experiences a handful of near-death experiences. In the process, she attains a new level of self-perspection, and takes what fans might hope is a first step in the right direction. Acclaimed author Lippman knows how to keep the reader guessing: the only thing we know for certain is that in this case, the butler didn't do it.

Like Tess, Sheri Swanson has a grandmother Weinstein.

Sassy, Irish-Jewish PI Tess Monaghan, protagonist of Laura Lippman's popular series, returns in the suspenseful By a Spider's Thread. This time out, Tess takes on a referral from her Uncle Donald (of the Weinstein side of the family) and finds herself getting in touch with her Jewish side. Hired by Mark Rubin, a devout Orthodox […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Hoag delivers L.A. thriller via courier

Review by Jay MacDonald

L.A. traffic can be murder, especially for Jace Damon, the determined bike courier in Tami Hoag's 10th thriller, Kill the Messenger. When a sleazy lawyer dispatches Jace to deliver a parcel, the address turns out to be a vacant lot. A mysterious car creeps toward him with obvious menace, and soon the teen messenger is on the run. When the lawyer is later found murdered, the mismatched male-female homicide team of Parker and Ruiz join the hunt. With the killer, the cops and the sinister sedan on his tail, Jace must risk all to save himself and his younger brother Tyler, who lives with him in a Chinatown hovel.

BookPage speed-dialed Hoag at her L.A. home for details on her latest thriller.

BookPage: What brought you to Los Angeles, literally and fictionally?
Tami Hoag: I moved out here three years ago because I was in love. The relationship didn't work out, but I love it here. There's an energy and enthusiasm. Everybody comes here with a big dream, and while a lot of them don't happen, there's always a chance that it will.

Did L.A. traffic inspire the plot for Kill the Messenger?
Actually, the kernel of it came eight years ago when I happened to catch a TV news program about bike messengers in Los Angeles. They talked about how bike messengers run between lawyers and the court, and right away I was thinking, here's a connection between the whole law enforcement community that no one has ever thought about. What can they be pulled into? How can these people get into trouble? That's always foremost in my mind.

You wrote about sisters in Dark Horse. What attracted you to return to siblings in Kill the Messenger?
Probably the fact that I'm the youngest in my family, by a lot the next youngest is 10 years older than me. So I didn't really have that sense of having a big brother or big sister to help guide me as a friend. That relationship interests me. Jace and Tyler are sort of two sides to the same character; they have a lot in common but they also complement each other in different ways.

One thing that sets your thrillers apart is that you tend to reward the good guys in equal measure to the punishment you dish out to the bad guys. Did you always have such a strong sense of karma about your work?
I'm big on that. That is part of what really attracted me to writing thrillers. The arc of development of the good guy is as important to me as the bad guy. They go on this journey and it's going to change them somehow. They aren't going to be the same people as they were before.

Did you don a helmet and try your hand as a bike messenger?
I didn't get that brave, no; my bike riding days are long past! They ended when I hit my dog with a bike and flipped over and ended up skidding down the road. It was, OK: I'm not meant to ride a bike.

But you've ridden horses competitively all your life! (Laughs) I know! That's what everybody says: "You won't get on a motorcycle but you will get on a horse that will throw you into space?!" Well, yeah. Somehow that's different.

The team of Parker and Ruiz is a classic odd couple. How did you cook them up?
Parker is sort of the L.A. Sam Kovac (Kovac and Nikki Liska are featured in the Minnesota-set Ashes to Ashes and Dust to Dust). When I started the book, I had Kovac so in my mind and it wasn't working for me. Then this metrosexual guy came forth. He's like Kovac's L.A. cousin: into fashion, drives a Jag. That was fun to write. Ruiz is one of those characters who just sort of walked in fully formed, and her whole purpose was to just put him into a tailspin. She kept him so off-balance, which I thought was fun instead of having the guy so cool and under control.

Could this become a new series?
I am definitely going to go back to those characters because I so enjoyed writing them. I loved them all the way to the end of the book, which is very unusual. Usually by that time, the characters have so taken over and they're going in all these directions and it's like, I'm sick of you people! Solve your problems! Wrap it up! And with these characters, I didn't feel that at all.

 

L.A. traffic can be murder, especially for Jace Damon, the determined bike courier in Tami Hoag's 10th thriller, Kill the Messenger. When a sleazy lawyer dispatches Jace to deliver a parcel, the address turns out to be a vacant lot. A mysterious car creeps toward him with obvious menace, and soon the teen messenger is […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Ludlum’s classic saga is Bourne again

Review by Paul Allen

When Robert Ludlum died in March of 2001, millions of fans mourned the passing of a brilliant and prolific storyteller and the loss of future novels featuring his most popular character, CIA operative Jason Bourne.

But after the tremendous international success of the 2002 film adaptation of The Bourne Identity starring Matt Damon (its sequel, The Bourne Supremacy, is scheduled to hit theaters July 23) and the ever-increasing demand worldwide for a new installment in the Bourne saga, the Ludlum estate turned to Eric Van Lustbader, author of best-selling thrillers like The Ninja and Black Heart and one of Ludlum's friends. Lustbader, a longtime admirer of Ludlum's Bourne sequence, says he "jumped at the chance, because the estate promised I could do my own story and write in my own style." The result, he says, surprised even him. "In many ways it's the best novel I've ever written."

The Bourne Legacy begins with David Webb (aka Jason Bourne) retired from the CIA and teaching linguistics at Georgetown University. But when an assassin almost kills him on campus and he is framed for the murder of his two closest friends, Webb is forced to revert to his deadly Bourne persona. With the full force of the CIA and a relentless assassin closing in on him, Bourne must stay alive long enough to figure out who set him up, and why. His desperate quest, which takes him to Paris, Crete, Budapest and Iceland, also leads him to the last place he wants to go his past. Lustbader was right: The Bourne Legacy is arguably his best work to date. (And the shocking bombshells that he drops regarding the character of Jason Bourne will have fans of this series talking for months.) Powered by highly volatile, raw-edged emotion, and dozens of complex characters, each with their own intriguing history, The Bourne Legacy will leave readers furiously turning pages until its breathtaking (and heart-wrenching) conclusion.

When Robert Ludlum died in March of 2001, millions of fans mourned the passing of a brilliant and prolific storyteller and the loss of future novels featuring his most popular character, CIA operative Jason Bourne. But after the tremendous international success of the 2002 film adaptation of The Bourne Identity starring Matt Damon (its sequel, […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

What makes a hero?

Review by bookpagedev

Journalist Stewart Dubinsky, a character who’s appeared in several of Scott Turow’s legal thrillers, wants to write a book. Instead, he finds a story he’d never imagined.

When his father, David Dubin, dies, Stewart discovers a packet of David’s wartime letters to his fiancŽe with a note referring to his court-martial. Stewart had always known his father served as an Army lawyer in World War II, meeting his mother in a concentration camp, but the fiancŽe and the court-martial weren’t part of that story. As Stewart investigates, he discovers that the lives his parents claimed to have lived were far less dramatic, and far less heroic, than the truth.

Still a working lawyer, Turow is known for intelligent, gripping thrillers that lead readers into the shadowy corners of life. In Ordinary Heroes, he dives into a different world: an Army lawyer’s search for a truant OSS officer during the darkest days of the war in Europe, and a son’s search for the truth about his parents.

David Dubin’s former lawyer, now an elderly retired judge, gives Stewart his father’s written account of his journey from loyal lieutenant to infantry captain to accused man. David is assigned to investigate and arrest Maj. Robert Martin, who pulled off a series of raids that helped turn the Allies’ luck. But Martin’s clash with authority brands him as insubordinate and worse. David participates in a raid with Martin’s crew including an intriguing Polish girl, Gita. Following Martin’s trail with his intrepid sergeant, David parachutes into ever-changing territory, then leads a weary band of survivors in the Battle of the Bulge. Still uncertain whether he’s chasing a traitor or a hero, David pursues Martin into Germany, to the camp where he once again meets Gita.

A masterful, passionate storyteller who handles his latest literary challenge with assurance, Turow pays homage in Ordinary Heroes to all who ever dared pursue love or justice amid the horrors of war. Leslie Budewitz practices law and writes in northwest Montana.

Journalist Stewart Dubinsky, a character who’s appeared in several of Scott Turow’s legal thrillers, wants to write a book. Instead, he finds a story he’d never imagined. When his father, David Dubin, dies, Stewart discovers a packet of David’s wartime letters to his fiancŽe with a note referring to his court-martial. Stewart had always known […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Le Carr delivers another absolute winner

Review by bookpagedev

For more than a generation, British author John Le CarrŽ has written spy novels that both define and transcend the genre. His latest book, Absolute Friends, is his best work in years, another impassioned portrayal of the forces that drive global politics. Ted Mundy is a thistledown of a man, blown wherever fate and his own whims take him. His resume is endless: ex-’60s radical, failed writer, businessman, schoolteacher, spy. It is this last role that comes back to haunt him with the reappearance of his old friend and fellow traveler, Sasha, who offers financial security and a chance to fight the good fight once again. A mysterious benefactor wants to finance a school that will counter what he sees as propaganda supporting the war in Iraq. Mundy eventually realizes, however, that some things can look too good to be true. Absolute Friends is an absolute page-turner, yet in some ways, plot is superfluous to this novel. We are drawn into the plot because we care about the characters, from the simply drawn minor actors to the meticulously assembled protagonist. Absolute Friends is as much an examination of the human soul as it is an intriguing commentary on 21st century conflicts.

 

For more than a generation, British author John Le CarrŽ has written spy novels that both define and transcend the genre. His latest book, Absolute Friends, is his best work in years, another impassioned portrayal of the forces that drive global politics. Ted Mundy is a thistledown of a man, blown wherever fate and his […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

A tempting meal in the Havana Room

Review by bookpagedev

Colin Harrison, author of Afterburn and Manhattan Nocturne, is at it again in this provocative story about one man’s despair and his desire to maintain normalcy. The Havana Room, a delicious mystery that will keep you guessing, is perhaps Harrison’s most intriguing book yet.

The narrator is Bill Wyeth, a clever New York real estate attorney who finds his life upended after accidentally killing his son’s friend in a freak peanut oil accident. Wyeth’s life disintegrates before his eyes when he loses his job, his family and his sanity. Thrown into a pit of despair, Wyeth claws his way through Manhattan’s darkness, hoping for happiness but finding nothing. That is, until he visits an antique steak house managed by an emotionally complex young woman named Allison Sparks. Day after day, he soaks in his misery, eating at table 17 and idolizing the woman he knows nothing about. But that changes when he finds himself in the notorious Havana Room, a section of the restaurant known for its history and secrecy. Sparks asks Wyeth to provide late-night legal advice to her friend, business Jay Rainey. Stuck in a cruel world of what-ifs and social ironies, Wyeth reluctantly helps out. But before he knows what hit him, Wyeth is knee-deep in Rainey’s checkered past. Dodging Chilean businessmen and gun-toting goons, Wyeth removes himself from the situation before it costs him his life. The Havana Room is an obsessively detailed, tantalizing account of a man’s devotion to his family and his eagerness to both find, and hide, the truth. Harrison’s talent at creating quirky, well-structured characters is matched by his ability to interweave them into a plot riddled with fantastic twists and literary U-turns. All in all, The Havana Room is a gripping story about redemption and devotion that will have you rooting for the lonely underdog. Nicholas Addison Thomas is a writer in Fairfax, Virginia.

Colin Harrison, author of Afterburn and Manhattan Nocturne, is at it again in this provocative story about one man’s despair and his desire to maintain normalcy. The Havana Room, a delicious mystery that will keep you guessing, is perhaps Harrison’s most intriguing book yet. The narrator is Bill Wyeth, a clever New York real estate […]
Mystery & SuspenseCozy Mystery

Vengeance is up for grabs

Review by Barbara Clark

Sometimes it’s a bad day for news. If you work for a newspaper, that means that nothing is happening. News and Features lounge about, trying to cobble something together, and the editor worries about what can be mustered up for page one, or for the editorial space.

On a particular December day, the staff at the Alpine, Washington, Advocate faces such a challenge, with House & Home (Vida), News desk (Mitch) and editor/publisher/heroine (Emma) discussing the dearth of options for tomorrow’s paper. Fortunately for page one, the sound of police sirens on the street alerts the newsroom, and word that an eccentric artist named Craig Laurentis has been shot and wounded quickly spreads throughout town.

 
At about the same time, Sheriff Milo Dodge pushes open the newsroom door, carrying three anonymous messages he’s received that claim the innocence of one local, Larry Peterson, long ago convicted of murder and serving a life sentence. Milo also brings word that said convict has just died of a heart attack in prison. The anonymous notes were written before Peterson died, but the “coincidental” news is unsettling.
 
Thus begins The Alpine Vengeance, Mary Daheim’s 22nd entry in her Alpine Alphabet series, in which the author revisits a previous book, The Alpine Fury (book six, of course!) where Peterson’s crime and punishment topped off a story that involved Emma and many others in the extended-family atmosphere of small town Alpine.
 
Emma reruns these past events in her mind, but after she pens an obituary on Peterson’s sudden death, she herself is visited by a fourth anonymous message, this one coldly menacing. If Peterson was innocent, who was he protecting? Emma and Milo pursue the case, not willing to let sleeping—or would it be dead?—dogs lie. The duo also pursue their ongoing romance, liberally spiced by the compelling character of Milo.

Alpine is a veritable Pandora’s box of characters, and by this time (letter “V”) the author might have done well to append a cast of characters or family tree to help us cope with all the Petersons and their cousins and kin. The book’s action is oiled by quick-fire and frequently witty dialogue, with an occasional wet snowstorm thrown in to evoke the Pacific Northwest atmosphere. As the story develops, seemingly disconnected threads begin to seam together alarmingly into whole cloth. The events in Vengeance quickly prove that everything’s up for grabs as far as old murders are concerned.  

 

Sometimes it’s a bad day for news. If you work for a newspaper, that means that nothing is happening. News and Features lounge about, trying to cobble something together, and the editor worries about what can be mustered up for page one, or for the editorial space. On a particular December day, the staff at […]

Want more BookPage?

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Mystery & Suspense

FictionThriller

Paul Tremblay

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

more info

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.

read more
All Mystery

Author Interviews

More Interviews

Recent Features

All Features