Martin Limón’s fine series of military police procedurals, set in South Korea in the mid-1970s, features George Sueño and his sidekick, Ernie Bascom—U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division agents who are the go-to guys when there’s a murder or some similarly sensitive issue regarding the military in the Land of the Morning Calm. The Line finds our heroes investigating the murder of a young Korean soldier whose body is found a few feet north of the line dividing North Korea from South. Technically, Sueño and Bascom shouldn’t have dragged the body back across the line into the South, but they’ve never been sticklers for details like that. When a suspect presents himself, the powers that be are eager to pin the murder on him. Sueño and Bascom think the whole thing is just a little too pat, however, and despite explicit orders to the contrary, they decide to delve into the matter. They find themselves caught up in a criminal enterprise that involves fraud, smuggling and perhaps human trafficking, plus the aforementioned murder. I have read every Limón book since 1992’s Jade Lady Burning, and I have every intention of continuing to do so; they are that good.

A SECRET THAT CAN’T BE KEPT
Catriona McPherson successfully channels the mystery chops of Agatha Christie and the dialogue skills of Noël Coward (apologies for the dated references, but this book has that sort of feel about it) in her standalone psychological thriller Go to My Grave. Back in 1991, there was a Sweet 16-ish party at a Scottish manor house that had seen better days, and something seriously awful happened. Now in present day, whether by happenstance or by design, several of the 1991 revelers find themselves back at the same B & B, which has been restored and is virtually unrecognizable. The eight guests are all family members, by blood or by marriage. But there is bad blood—and bad marriage—on display here, and another something awful is poised to take place. I’m not giving anything away to say that even a newbie reader of suspense fiction will feel a Stephen King-esque prickle of menace as things start to get out of hand, and even the most jaded of suspense aficionados should be gobsmacked by the twist at the end.

BECOMING BOND
Occasionally an author’s estate or a publisher gets the idea to craft a prequel to a popular series, and Anthony Horowitz performs this duty for ace British spy James Bond in Forever and a Day. As the book opens, M (the big boss of MI6) is discussing the death of agent 007, which initially seems odd, as this is at the inception of Bond’s illustrious career. But it turns out that the 007 under discussion is the previous holder of that particular license-to-kill number, and Bond is quickly promoted to take on his predecessor’s responsibilities. His mission takes him to the south of France, where he engages the first of the legendary villains that will characterize the adventures of Bond’s later life. The book uses some source material from original Bond author Ian Fleming, and of all the Bond books that have come out since Fleming’s death, this one may hew closest to the originals. The racy English sports cars, check. The sultry femme fatale, check. The oversize (both in girth and in ego) villain, check. Oh, and here’s a bonus: For those who have ever wondered why Bond drinks his martinis shaken, not stirred, this book is where you will find the answer.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY
Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series has been a mainstay of my professional and pleasure reading since the Shamus Award-winning The Guards (2001). The series follows the downfall of Galway cop Taylor and his efforts to climb out of the (very deep) hole he created for himself with his alcoholism and his exceptionally poor choices of friends and lovers. The opening pages of In the Galway Silence find Taylor a little more settled than before: There is a romantic interest that tentatively seems to be working out, a bit of money in the bank, and he has the drinking under control for the most part. When bad stuff starts happening, only Taylor’s harshest critic could assign the responsibility to him—although it goes without saying that Taylor is his own harshest critic. One child is kidnapped and brutalized, another murdered, and a killer is on the rampage. Taylor knows who the culprit is and is powerless to do anything about it. But you can push Taylor only so far, and when he snaps, he’s gonna go bat%#@& crazy, which is the high point of Bruen’s books for most readers. Taut plotting, a staccato first-person narrative, deeply flawed yet sympathetic characters and the windy, wet Irish milieu conspire to put Bruen’s novels into a class by themselves.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

December isn’t typically the strongest of months for new book releases, but this year, what is lacking in quantity is more than made up for in quality, with books from four of the finest contemporary suspense writers from North America, Europe and Japan.

A BOGGLING MYSTERY
It’s 1944, the closing days of World War II. Two men dig feverishly in a peat bog in Scotland to create a hole large enough to accommodate a pair of American motorcycles. Fast-forward to current day, when the granddaughter of one of the men decides to unearth the motorcycles. The first motorcycle has survived its lengthy incarceration beautifully, but there’s a dead body where the second should be. Enter Karen Pirie, cold case detective (because, hey, cases don’t get much colder than this), in the fifth installment of Val McDermid’s popular Karen Pirie series, Broken Ground. Things take a turn for the weird(er) when the body, supposedly buried for some 70 years, is discovered to be wearing a pair of Nikes. McDermid’s books are relentlessly excellent, with sympathetically flawed characters, well-crafted storylines, a clever twist or two and crisp dialogue. It’s no wonder she is considered the queen of Scottish crime fiction.

A NEW CRIME DUO
Cold cases are a running theme this month, as Michael Connelly pairs series stalwart Harry Bosch with Renée Ballard in their first (but hopefully not their last) adventure together, Dark Sacred Night. Ballard first showed up in 2017’s The Late Show as a solo act, but she and Bosch work exceptionally well as a duo, investigating the unsolved 2009 murder of a young runaway. The case holds a personal component for Bosch, as the mother of the murdered girl is staying at his house. There aren’t many clues available after the passage of so much time, but Bosch is dogged in his pursuit, and his personal creed—everybody counts or nobody counts—gets a run for its money this time out. Connelly does an exceptional job of giving voice to both his protagonists. They share a bit of an outsider’s perspective—respected for their work but not always liked by their peers—and this is what makes them such a formidable team. My favorite Connelly books pair Bosch with protagonists from his other books, like Mickey Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer, and this latest pairing is truly inspired.

NEIGHBORHOOD SECRETS
Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s best-known suspense authors, and he has begun to carve a niche for himself in the rest of the world thanks to The Devotion of Suspect X, Malice and his latest Detective Kaga novel, Newcomer. Since we last saw Kaga, he has suffered a demotion from the Tokyo Police Department’s Homicide Division to a more local role in the quiet neighborhood of Nihonbashi. But his homicide experience soon gets him assigned to the team investigating the death of a woman found strangled in her apartment. Kaga’s Zen approach to crime solving is at odds with conventional police procedures, but it would be hard to find fault with his results. One by one, he interviews shopkeepers, neighbors and denizens of the streets, and he begins to create a picture of a homicide that has an entire neighborhood of potential suspects. Kaga, a modern-day Hercule Poirot, thinks even further outside the box than his Belgian predecessor, to the great delight of mystery aficionados.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY
Louise Penny’s novels are unique for how seamlessly they straddle the line between charming small-town mysteries and big-city police procedurals. As Kingdom of the Blind opens, protagonist Armand Gamache, former head of the Sûreté du Québec, receives a strange invitation to an abandoned farmhouse, and an even stranger request to act as executor of a will crafted by someone he never met. It is something of a wacky will, with bequests that suggest that the writer was not playing with a full deck of cards. And then a body turns up, and the document takes on a decidedly darker aspect. Meanwhile in Montreal, a huge drug shipment is about to hit the streets, in part because Gamache allowed it to slip through the cracks as part of his plan to bring down the cartels. Most of the drugs were rounded up—except for one large shipment that threatens to destroy many lives, perhaps including Gamache’s. Each Gamache adventure (we are now at the 14th) displaces the previous one as the best in the series. I have read each one twice—first as a one-sitting page turner, and then shortly afterward as a leisurely reread in which I revel in the artistry of the prose, the characterizations, the locales. It’s not to be missed!

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

James Lee Burke is one of a small handful of elite suspense writers whose work transcends the genre, making the leap into capital-L Literature. You don’t have to get past the opening paragraph of The New Iberia Blues to see his mastery of the craft: “Desmond Cormier’s success story was an improbable one, even among the many self-congratulatory rags-to-riches tales we tell ourselves in the ongoing saga of our green republic, one that is forever changing yet forever the same, a saga that also includes the graves of Shiloh and cinders from aboriginal villages.” First-person narrator Dave Robicheaux is on hand and in fine fettle. Fans have watched Robicheaux age in real time, battling his demons, losing one wife, then another and another, raising the refugee girl he rescued from a submerged airplane when she was a small child and skating close to the edge (and sometimes over the edge) of the law. This time out, he will investigate the ritual slaying of a young black woman, nailed to a cross and left to the vagaries of the rising tide. There is a film company in town, and Robicheaux cannot shake the notion that they are somehow at the epicenter of this homicide, and as he gets closer to proving his thesis, the body count piles up. It is a long book, but I read it slowly, pausing from time to time to digest the first-rate prose, the atmospheric bayou setting and the complex interactions of people I feel I have known for 30-plus years.

In James Bond movies, one of the many ways of ratcheting up the tension is to introduce a Bad Thing About to Happen in, say, five minutes’ time, and to regularly return to the flashing digital countdown amid the action to see how much time is left before the Bad Thing transpires. Author Taylor Adams updates this suspense-building device in his supercharged novel No Exit with a dwindling cellphone battery peppering the high-tension text. The scene: a lonely snowbound rest area in rural Colorado, a place with little to no cellphone service, and a protagonist who has left her charger at home on what will prove to be the worst night of her life. At risk are a kidnapped child, albeit a rather resourceful one; a pair of innocent (or maybe not) bystanders; and the aforementioned protagonist, a college student named Darby Thorne, who was en route to her mother’s hospital bedside before her plans were interrupted by the freakish snowstorm and an even more freakish group of fellow strandees at the mountain shelter. Oh, and one last thing, and it really is the last thing—the twist ending is way cool.

Gytha Lodge’s suspenseful new psychological thriller, She Lies in Wait, tells the story of a ruinous outing and its aftermath decades later. Thirty- odd years ago, six friends went camping. Only five came home, and there was never a trace of the missing girl, Aurora Jackson. Her friends, a wide-ranging volunteer search party and even police with cadaver dogs turned up nothing—until now, when a young girl on a family holiday discovers a detached finger beneath a hollow tree within steps of the friends’ original campsite. Police Detective Chief Inspector Jonah Sheens knew Aurora peripherally from his high school days, but he decided to stay on the investigation—a decision his assistant, Detective Inspector Juliette Hanson, will come to question as the investigation proceeds. This isn’t the only secret that comes to light: One of the campers, an Olympic star in later life, displayed a morbid fascination with young women; another of the group, now a well-regarded politician, was caught by Aurora in flagrante delicto with another boy, and more importantly, he had placed a large supply of Dexedrine in the hollow of that tree. I am just scratching the surface of the secrets here. There are plenty more to unearth for yourselves.

In any gathering of mystery writers, Tim Dorsey would be the resident jester, providing more laughs per page than virtually anyone else. His amiably psychopathic protagonist, Serge Storms, is a modern-day Don Quixote, tilting at the windmills of politics, ageism, sexism and any other –ism that happens to catch his fancy. In his latest adventure, No Sunscreen for the Dead, Storms invades a Florida retirement community in the wake of a very public sex scandal featuring a 68-year-old retiree and her much younger boy toy. There are two reasons behind Storms’ invasion, one being that he is perversely fascinated by this salacious news item, the other being that he wants to find an interesting place to live out his golden years. He has all the necessary gear for that, including plaid shorts and knee-length black socks. And the white belt, without which the ensemble, well, c’est incomplète. As the plot develops, Storms gets conscripted into the investigation of some big-dollar swindling in the old folks’ community, and high jinks ensue. And because it is Dorsey chronicling said high jinks, be prepared for mirth—lots and lots of mirth.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The literary exploits of John Lescroart’s San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy, now numbering 18, have been a mainstay of my reading pleasure since 1989’s Dead Irish. Fast-forward 30 years, and an older and wiser Hardy plies his trade ever more ably in The Rule of Law. Phyllis McGowan, Hardy’s secretary, has been a stalwart pillar of support in his personal and business life. But lately, she seems to have gone off the rails. First, there is her mysterious disappearance for several days, and shortly after that, her surprise arrest as an accessory to murder. The evidence, while not entirely damning, is at least suggestive. Extortionist Hector Valdez, who worked for a modern-day Underground Railroad specializing in spiriting immigrants without documentation out of the Border Patrol’s reach, was murdered at the time of McGowan’s disappearance. In the old days, Hardy had a good working relationship with the district attorney, and likely could have negotiated on McGowan’s behalf, but the new DA has a political and personal chip on his shoulder where Hardy is concerned. Thus, this time out, Hardy is doomed to spend as much time battling the supposed good guys as trouncing the supposed bad guys. Lescroart crafts some of the finest legal thrillers out there today, with interesting characters, complex relationships, a taut narrative and, of course, the (now expected, but still somehow surprising) twist ending.

The original plan was for Caroline to lend Audrey $150 for a bus ticket back to Minnesota to visit her dying father. But on the way to the station, Caroline glances over at her friend and says, “Road trip?”—thus setting the stage for Tim Johnston’s second gripping thriller, The Current. The trip will not end well. Being from Georgia, Caroline has no experience with driving in icy conditions, and after an unanticipated and uncontrolled skid, their car hovers atop a precipice above an icy river. They are shaken but safe, at least until they see the flare of headlights in the rearview mirror, then feel the tap of the bumper that nudges their car over the edge. One dies, one barely survives. The small Minnesota town is in shock. Rumors fly about the presence of a second car at the scene, and the whole situation reminds people of a similar case 10 years prior, one that was never solved. As the official investigation progresses, a grieving father, a dying sheriff and a determined young woman begin covert investigations of their own. All are in search of answers, but none is prepared for what they will find.

Fans of the exploits of Charles Cumming’s MI6 agent Thomas Kell will find a lot to like in the author’s new standalone spy thriller, The Moroccan Girl. Bestselling thriller author Kit Carradine is poised to attend a literary festival in Marrakech when he receives a request that would make any suspense writer champ at the bit: track down a mysterious woman, one Lara Bartok, and surreptitiously deliver a passport to her. However, Carradine’s “handler” has been remarkably spare with details concerning Bartok, leaving out such juicy morsels as the fact that she is a well-placed member of an international terrorist outfit and is quite capable of taking care of herself when facing a potential confidant or adversary (especially one whose espionage exploits are limited to his imagination and the printed page). Things heat up when rival intelligence agencies join the fray, all in search of Bartok for conflicting—and often lethal—reasons. And Carradine is about to find out the hard way that real-life espionage bears little resemblance to his page-turning depictions. Cumming channels the dreamy romance of classic spy movies (think Casablanca, Notorious, The Thirty-Nine Steps) and juxtaposes it with a modern, relentlessly intense and staccato delivery.

June 1947, Beverly Hills. Mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel has just been shot to death in his own home by person or persons unknown. Several hundred miles away, rancher Jonathan Craine tends to his daily chores. In an earlier life, Craine was the unofficial liaison between the Los Angeles Police Department and the movie studios, the “fixer” who kept stars and execs safe from exposure and prosecution—but that was a long time ago and far, far away from his current existence. That is all about to change, as hired lackeys from a sinister boss’s crime syndicate arrive by private aircraft to solicit Craine’s assistance in finding Siegel’s killer. And they won’t take no for an answer—cue the music portending graphic violence. Guy Bolton’s The Syndicate reads like a period thriller, with dialogue true to the golden age of film noir, which the author so obviously admires. The plot seamlessly blends fact with fiction, overlaying a series of real-life events with a fast-paced fictional narrative that is riddled with tension. And bullets.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.