What is a, if not the, hallmark of a mystery novel? I've said it before, and I'll say it again: as Raymond Chandler is my witness, it's muddle. Sometimes, as with Chandler, it's nearly impenetrable muddle, and sometimes, as with Dorothy L. Sayers, it's logical muddle (oxymoronic though that may sound). But either way, when it's done well, as those two writers do it, it's satisfying muddle for the reader.

Does muddle sound like a pejorative comment, as if the author didn't know what he was doing? Why should it? Life's a muddle, an only partially successful attempt to impose order upon disorder. We can't really know what's going to happen next, and often we don't know the reasons for what happened before. Most often, there are none.

The perfect conditions, in other words, for mystery, as William Boyd has learned well. A writer who has turned his hand to everything from the comic (A Good Man in Africa) to the historical (The New Confessions), he now turns it, in Armadillo, to what amounts to a mystery.

The author lays out the question up front, in the novel's epigraph from W.V. Quine's From Stimulus to Science: There are surprises, and they are unsettling. How can we tell when we are right? We are faced with the problem of error. The person chiefly faced with this unsettling condition of life, this problem of error, is Lorimer Black, the armadillo of the title. Boyd also helpfully provides a dictionary definition of armadillo: little armed man. That's our Lorimer, so obsessed with the notion of protection that he collects ancient armor helmets. He carefully makes minute alterations in his dress and appearance because [t]hey functioned, in a way, as a form of invisible armor.

Except that it's not Lorimer; it's Milomre Blocj, born in England of Romanian Gypsies. (The 'j' is silent and there is a dot under the 'c,' Lorimer's father would constantly explain.) The difficulty of pronouncing his birth name is not the only reason Lorimer changed it. He is fascinated with name-changing. It seems to be another form of armor.

Protection from what? On one level, from his unpolished family, particularly his loutish brother, Slobodan. More essentially, going back to the issue raised in the epigraph, from uncertainty. It is his consciousness of uncertainty, we can say with some certainty, that makes it difficult for Lorimer to sleep.

Because Lorimer works in a business that ostensibly provides a measure of certainty in an uncertain world: insurance. Except he is what his boss calls the rogue element in insurance. He is a loss adjuster. He investigates large insurance claims for fraud. It pays him well. It's not the business that causes his uncertainty; he's in the business because of his affinity for uncertainty.

Lately, however, a more immediate form of uncertainty has entered his life, stemming from a fire at a hotel under construction. He successfully challenges the multimillion-pound claim on the grounds of arson and reaps a nice bonus for his efforts.

He also reaps a number of enemies from among those who stood to gain from the claim. Then things turn queer. Despite Lorimer's triumph, his boss, aptly named Hogg, begins to turn against him. His car is blow-torched, probably by a disgruntled insurance claimant. He is mugged, perhaps by the husband of an actress named Flavia he is besotted with, perhaps by the insurance claimant. Then, even queerer, those who had been outraged by the denial of their insurance claim are suddenly quite amiable, and Hogg acts aggressively suspicious of him. Is some sort of double-cross being worked here? Is Lorimer being set up? It grows increasingly unclear who is doing what to whom and why.

From a position of steady normality . . . he now found himself adrift in uncertainty and chaos, we are told. And, to a South African businessman who mysteriously enters, and further muddles, the picture, he remarks, "As I keep saying to people: I simply don't understand what's going on." Never fear, though, he figures it out. He also figures out a way to protect his scapegoat hide from those who apparently want to nail it to the jailhouse door.

It would be unfair to reveal more. After all, this novel, for all its stylishness, is at bottom a mystery with clues for each reader to work out. It's not too much to say, however, that Lorimer also gets the girl. Or so it would seem. There's always that element of uncertainty.

Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Janesville, Wisconsin.

A cat with an attitude, that's Midnight Louie. Carole Nelson Douglas has been permitted by this former motel-cat (abandoned in a litter, living off lizards and room service trays) to adopt and hang about with him, writing a series of mysteries (now totaling nine for each life?) featuring Louie as the smart-sass narrator. Louie refers to Douglas as my biographer. The series action is set in Las Vegas, which this mystery-solving cat calls my kind of town all night action; crime and punishment; dolls, dudes, and shady dames; moolah and murder; neon and nefarious doings. Ah, but this hard-boiled cat noir has the heart of a cozy. Both sides of his split personality are covered in the latest from Douglas and Louie a collection of 17 stories (both hard-boiled and warm fuzzies) featuring a variety of animals who step in where humans fear to tread, solving mysteries and providing clues to their detecting human colleagues.

The introduction is by Lawrence Block, whose Burglar series features a bookstore cat, Raffles. This mouser doesn't detect, but clearly Block knows how valuable an animal is to a story so much so that he once attempted to have the Edgar Awards divided into two categories: Books with Cat and Books without Cat.

These stories then are the perfect fix for those of us who love mysteries and animals. Midnight Louie himself has deigned to introduce each morsel in his unique style, providing additional crunch to this bowlful of stories.

Among the anthropomorphisizing writers are Lilian Jackson Braun (The Cat Who series), who Louie refers to as The First Lady of Feline Fiction, and Anne Perry, whose conversion from Victorian noir to crime most furry is ap- paw-lauded by Louie. Other included WHOAs (Writers Hot on Animals) are Nancy Pickard, Bill Crider, Barbara Paul, and J. A. Jance. Douglas herself contributes a story, for which Louie begins his introduction, My collaborator cheats on me. She also adds an afterward on the topic of the Adopt-a-Cat program, which combines bookstore-signing events with cat adoptions.

There are no dogs (in the sense of failures) in the collection, but dogs do make an appearance. As do elephants, a Tasmanian devil, an owl and a pair of lovebirds (of the feathered variety), hamsters and raccoons, and, of course, cats lots of cats and kittens. As Midnight Louie might growl, this compilation is the cat's meow.

George Cowmeadow Bauman wrote this with Biblio and Ginger Rogers, his blue-point Siameasers, who added inspiration to the review and hair to the keyboard.

Daughter of the Morning Star, the 17th book in Craig Johnson’s riveting mystery series, proves that Sheriff Walt Longmire does his best work on the page, even compared to the acclaimed Netflix adaptation of the series, “Longmire.”

Longmire walks a fine line, serving the predominantly white populace of Absaroka County, Wyoming, as well as the members of the Cheyenne Indian Nation who live on the local reservation. When Chief Lolo Long of the Cheyenne Tribal Police asks for his assistance in investigating death threats against her niece, Jaya Long, the standout star of the Lame Deer Lady Stars high school basketball team, Longmire’s penchant for justice makes it easy to say yes.

With the help of his best friend, Henry Standing Bear, Longmire begins an intensive investigation that he believes is tied into the disappearance of Jaya’s older sister, Jeanie, a year ago. Jeanie was with friends on her way back from a party in Billings, Montana, when their van broke down. While repairs were being made, she wandered off, never to be seen again.

Longmire and Bear take the usual route of interviewing all of Jeanie’s contacts, hoping to find something the police or FBI missed. Some of the witnesses are helpful enough; some, not so much. A farmer, Lyndon Iron Bull, claims to have seen her singing in a snowstorm and warns of an ancient Cheyenne legend known as Wandering Without, “a spiritual hole that devours souls.”

Writing from Longmire’s point of view for the entirety of this fast-paced mystery, Johnson uses crisp prose and sharp dialogue to create a sense of immediacy as the investigation moves toward its inevitable, thrilling conclusion. The case also allows Johnson to incorporate horrifying statistics about how young Native American women are substantially more likely to be murdered, to be sexually assaulted or to commit suicide than the national average. Longmire knows that what happened to Jeanie and what’s threatening Jaya lie anywhere along that spectrum, and that’s what scares him. As readers, you’ll be scared too.

Annalisa Vega probably shouldn’t be investigating the latest murder linked to a serial killer, dubbed by the press as the Lovelorn Killer, who last struck in her Chicago suburb 20 years ago. Her father was the original investigator in the case and her boyfriend during her teenage years, Colin, was the son of the seventh murder victim.

But Annalisa’s a detective herself now, and, perhaps seeing this as a way to help her dad exorcise his demons from never having solved the case, she dives headlong into Joanna Schaffhausen’s multilayered mystery, Gone for Good.

Annalisa quickly learns the latest victim, local grocery store manager Grace Harper, was investigating the original spate of killings with an amateur sleuth club called the Grave Diggers. The similarities between her death and those of the earlier victims—all were found bound and gagged, dead on the floor of their homes—convinces Vega that Grace was closer to solving the case than even she might have thought, which prompted the killer to come out of hiding.

Schaffhausen, who has a doctorate in psychology and previously worked in broadcast journalism, uses her expertise to delve into the minds of her characters, extracting their hopes, desires and fears in equal measure. The author brilliantly explores Annalisa’s emotional connections with the characters around her. She’s not only been reunited with Colin for the first time in years, but her partner on the case is her ex-husband, Nick, who is also a detective. Both situations prompt a flood of emotions that threaten to cloud Annalisa’s judgment.

Chapters told from Grace’s perspective are cunningly interspersed with Annalisa’s traditional gumshoe detective work, yielding additional insights along the way. While Schaffhausen throws in a few red herrings, all the clues are there for readers if they pay keen attention. And even if readers should figure things out ahead of Annalisa, the action-packed ending and final twist are more than worth seeing Gone for Good to its finish.

Readers who enjoy murder mysteries with lots of intertwined plotlines, quirky characters and zany hijinks topped off with a healthy dose of horniness will be delighted by bestselling author Darynda Jones’ A Good Day for Chardonnay.

The small tourist town of Del Sol, New Mexico, is populated by unruly residents who are staunchly community-minded and happen to be, per Sheriff Sunshine Vicram’s hilariously lusty inner monologues, quite desirable. To wit, her chief deputy and BFF Quincy is “sexy feet, AF inches” tall. And her lifelong crush, local-badboy-turned-wealthy-distillery-owner Levi Ravinder? Well, he and his crime-aficionado family look “as though [they were] chiseled by the gods . . . [with] lean, solid bodies and razor-sharp jawlines.”

But while Sunshine is often mightily distracted by eye candy, she’s also dedicated to—and excellent at—her job. She’s been back in town for four months after being away for 15 years, and she has multiple mysteries to solve. The newest include a bar fight gone terribly wrong; resurfaced cold cases with ties to her own traumatic past; and a raft of false confessions. On top of that, the mayor is pressuring her to figure out if the Dangerous Daughters secret society (rumored to have run the town for decades) is real or just local legend.

And then there’s Sunshine’s daughter Auri, whom fans met in series kickoff A Bad Day for Sunshine. The smart, reckless teenager is determined to solve crimes just like her mom, and she pursues a sweet old lady who might be a serial killer. Auri is also Sunshine’s personal mystery: at 17, the sheriff was abducted by Levi’s uncle and held captive for five days, after which she emerged pregnant and with severe memory loss.

Will Levi’s family finally answer Sunshine’s questions about her abduction? Can she catch the marauding raccoon that’s terrorizing the town? How are the cold cases tied to these complex new crimes? With her trademark warmth and humor, Jones answers some of these questions and raises even more, nicely teeing up the next installment in Sunshine’s complicated, sexy and highly entertaining life story.

Anyone who has ever served as a caregiver to an older parent or grandparent will instantly relate to Freddy Bell in Caroline B. Cooney‘s new mystery, The Grandmother Plot. As her closest living relative, Freddy has taken responsibility for his grandmother Cordelia Chase, who is slowly becoming more and more affected by dementia.

While Cordelia resides in Middletown Memory Care (or MMC, “an institution that cared for people who once had memories and would never find them again”), where she is warm, safe, fed, bathed and medicated, Freddy feels compelled to visit her frequently. Freddy suffers from what he deems “nonvisitation guilt,” which he compares to malaria: “You had a bout of suffering and then you improved and forgot you ever had it, and then you had another bout.”

As if Freddy needs the additional pressure. A glass blower by trade, he’s up to his neck in commitments to supply glass pipes for the clientele of the Leper, a local drug kingpin. Already trying to stay one step ahead of the Leper’s enforcers, who are out to collect the money he owes, Freddy’s life is further complicated when a fellow resident of MMC appears to have been deliberately suffocated, potentially putting his grandmother in danger.

With its amateur sleuth and realistic conflicts, the personable Grandmother Plot falls somewhere between a cozy and a domestic thriller. Besides Freddy, who is compelling enough on his own, Cooney populates this mystery with a cast of quirky characters (including a young woman with an obsession for pianos) who offer much-needed levity to the plot.

The author of the popular YA thriller The Face on the Milk Carton, Cooney has a knack for creating memorable characters that immediately resonate with readers. She sensitively depicts Cordelia’s horror at losing everything she ever knew, as well as Freddy’s journey to finding the courage and compassion to care for and forge new memories with his grandmother. As such, The Grandmother Plot is more than a simple crime caper; it is one with a whole lot of heart.

History, mystery and legend collide in The Night Hawks, the atmospheric and intense 13th entry in British author Elly Griffiths’ bestselling series starring forensic archaeologist Dr. Ruth Galloway.

Ruth has recently returned to the Norfolk fens, leaving behind a job at Cambridge University as well as her ex-boyfriend Frank Barker. She’s now head of archaeology at the University of North Norfolk, complete with a lovely large office and employee David Brown, who seems to love dismissing her authority almost as much as he loves going on digs. Another constant presence at the digs are the Night Hawks, a group of licensed metal detectorists who are excited at the prospect of buried treasure at nearby Blakeney Point beach. Alas, while the eventual discovery they make there is notable, it’s not in the way they’d hoped. Certainly, a hoard of Bronze Age artifacts is an excellent find, especially with a very old skeleton in their midst—but nearby, they also find the much more recent corpse of a man with a tattoo that resembles the mythical Norfolk Sea Serpent.

As special advisor to the local police, Ruth is called to the scene by Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson, who is the father of her 10-year-old daughter, Kate. She and the police have just begun to unravel the bodies’ and artifacts’ origins when there is another gruesome discovery: the presumed murder-suicide of a married couple at a remote farmhouse that locals believe is haunted by the Black Shuck, a harbinger of death in the form of a huge black dog with frightening red eyes. Even stranger, the Night Hawks discovered this tragedy as well, and the investigators begin to wonder if the group, rather than simply stumbling across crimes, is somehow involved in them.

Like the seaweed that lays in messy heaps on the rocky Norfolk beach, the interplay among Griffiths’ appealingly varied characters becomes ever more tangled as the story progresses, making for an intriguing mix of secrets, loyalties and ulterior motives. The Night Hawks will delight longtime fans and new readers alike with its spooky-beautiful setting, layered mysteries and authentically complex relationships.