Top Pick in Mystery, December 2018

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Conventional wisdom cautions, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but thankfully, author Stuart Turton must not have gotten the memo. His debut novel, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, is a daring and wildly imaginative spin on the tried, tested and true English manor house murder mystery trope that manages to be both comfortingly familiar and absolutely unlike anything readers have ever encountered before.

Turton’s devilishly devious debut opens in a forest with our protagonist screaming the name Anna. With his next inhalation, he realizes that not only does he have no idea who Anna is, but he also has no memory of anything at all—including his own identity. As he struggles to make his way out of the forest, a shot rings out, and a woman appears to be killed before his very eyes. In a panic, he manages to make his way to the foreboding and elegantly decaying estate of Blackheath in search of assistance. However, our narrator eventually comes to realize that the forest murder is but the first of many, and that solving this crime is not his ultimate objective. Rather, a mysterious masked man informs him that beautiful heiress Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed that night, and it is up to the protagonist to figure out who committed the crime. If he fails to uncover the killer before the day is done, he’ll wake up in a different guest’s body to relive the day and try again. After the eighth day, his memory will be wiped clean, and he’ll start the cycle all over again. Only when the murderer is unmasked will Blackheath release its hold on our dilettante detective and allow him to leave the grounds for good.

Blending elements from Quantum Leap, Groundhog Day and Clue, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle turns the conventional murder mystery novel on its head while simultaneously elevating the genre to new, exhilarating heights. Turton has crafted a dizzying game of cat and mouse that will keep readers on their toes as they attempt to keep up with the various loops through time and make sense of all the clues that are scattered by the various hosts over the course of the day. Initially the reader’s confusion mirrors that of the narrator, but this only increases the reader’s sense of satisfaction when the many pieces of Turton’s complex puzzle begin to slot into pace and all is made clear.

An intellectual thriller that would likely stump the likes of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle, The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a must-read for any reader wishing to give their little gray cells a workout.

Top Pick in Mystery, October 2018

Imagine, for a moment, a Nancy Drew mystery told partially in flashback by Nancy herself, a girl grown up into the Best Detective in the World—her own rather immodest appellation—and now facing Her Most Perplexing Case. Then you will begin to have an idea of Sara Gran’s strange yet wildly entertaining novel The Infinite Blacktop. Somewhere along the way, our Nancy (whose name is actually Claire DeWitt) has evolved into a modern-day Sam(antha) Spade, with an overlay of street smarts and Zen calm counterbalancing one another in strangely effective ways. As the book opens, Claire comes very close to getting taken off the board permanently when her rented Kia is deliberately broadsided by a 1982 Lincoln, an event on par with a wooden rowboat getting rammed by the USS Nimitz. As she looks into who is trying to punch her ticket, she is drawn into a rethinking of the one case the Best Detective in the World has never been able to solve: the disappearance of her partner-in-crime-solving back when they were teenagers. As the narrative proceeds, another cold case gets woven in, and Gran deftly jumps back and forth between them, bringing the reader along for a wild ride across the decades.

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

Readers don’t have to wait long—not even to the end of page one—to get to the setup for Ed Lin’s latest Taipei Night Market mystery, 99 Ways to Die. There has been an abduction of a prominent businessman, who happens to be the father of protagonist Chen Jing-nan’s erstwhile classmate Peggy Lee (not the husky-voiced jazz singer Peggy Lee of “Fever” fame, but rather the youngest daughter in a family of Taiwanese aristocrats). The kidnappers’ ransom demands are not for money; instead, they want access to a computer chip, which Peggy Lee claims to know nothing about. But chances are good that Peggy Lee is playing for time and saving face in a society where face is everything. Jing-nan, for his part, is not someone you’d think of as a PI—he runs a popular food shop in a Taipei night market—but Peggy Lee is headstrong, and if she wants Jing-nan on the case, he has little choice but to assent. 99 Ways to Die is the third in the series and is the most fleshed out of the three. Ultimately, Lin’s books are most appealing for the insider’s look at Taiwanese culture, the motley crew of supporting cast and the multiple laughs per page.

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