Lately it seems that each new crime debut must include some idiosyncrasy—the detective must have a quirk that sets him or her apart from the many crime solvers populating the suspense genre. They’re overeaters, opera lovers, poets, phobics, depressives or wise guys. Debut author David Swinson goes one step further, presenting his antihero, former cop and current part-time PI Frank Marr, as effectively part of the problem of drug-related crime he’s often out there solving.

In The Second Girl, Swinson makes sure we know only too clearly how Marr’s own drug addiction affects his day-to-day; how it can cloud the faculties and hold judgments hostage to the need for the next fix and a consistent resupply. Marr’s secret is a heavy one, though he stays away from crack and heroin, sticking to powder cocaine, pills and booze. But he’s constantly at risk of discovery by colleagues and friends. The only person who knows of his addiction is his former deputy chief, who forced the detective’s “early retirement” but left his record clean, due to both the fragility and success of the many cases Marr successfully resolved.

Marr has been on a days-long stakeout at the house of a D.C. drug gang. Only thing is, he’s hoping to score drugs for his own use on the sly. Instead, complications present as he searches the house and discovers a teenage girl, abducted and held captive. In the wake of the publicity Marr receives following her rescue, he gets tapped to help some former police colleagues search for another missing teen. He reluctantly agrees, walking an even more precarious line of possible discovery.

Readers learn in detail what it’s like to plan one’s whole life around scoring that next hit, maintaining a level of personal control and evading discovery. Just as lying and subterfuge are part of the world of crime Marr investigates, they are equally part of his own daily grind.

The crime story in The Second Girl is itself mildly interesting, and it’s clear that this detective doesn’t play by any rule book. He’s alternately clever, intuitive and violent in his pursuit of these street criminals. It’s Marr’s addiction and its effects on his life that take center stage here, and they’re given first-person immediacy in this fast-moving yet still introspective narrative. It’s often nerve-wracking, sometimes gruesome, but in the end carries a note of wearying sameness throughout.

Homicide detective Elouise “Lou” Norton is enjoying a lunch date at Johnny’s Pastrami with hunky Assistant DA Sam Seward when she gets a phone call. Her partner, Colin Taggert, calls her to a murder scene, where a body has been discovered lying in a wooded park outside of Los Angeles. The victim is a young teenage girl, which seems to fit with a recent pattern of crime in the LA area, except that the other girls in question are still missing and presumed kidnapped. This one is definitely dead.

The gruesome murder provides a fast-paced kickoff for Trail of Echoes, author Rachel Howzell Hall’s tense exploration of murder in a down-and-out LA neighborhood, and her third thriller after Land of Shadows and Skies of Ash. Hall pens an in-depth, believable portrait of the series’ black, female detective Norton, and it’s filled with realistic and whip-smart dialogue matched with tight, visceral descriptions of local scenes.

Norton and Taggert set off to inform the young victim’s mother of the tragedy, and the address turns out to be the same apartment building where Lou grew up. Like the homicide detective herself, the 13-year-old victim, Chanita, seemed to have been on a path that held the promise of escape from the gray, distressed area of housing projects where she lived. Norton finds the family apartment filled with Chanita’s expressive photographs, along with awards and citations honoring her young talent. This matches a framework common among the recent disappearances—they’re adolescents with talent and promise, all missing from the same LA neighborhood and school district, all close in age and race.

The detective and her team cast a wide net, uncovering several persons of interest: a neighborhood tough named Ontrel who claimed to be her protector; a Mexican dude named Raul Moriaga, who lives downstairs; her photography teacher and mentor, Payton Bishop; and even a selection of her mom’s old boyfriends. Important clues to identifying the murderer’s identity include the strange photograph of a flowering plant found in the victim’s bedroom and a series of creepy coded messages left anonymously for Detective Norton, including an odd statue or two posed on the hood of her car.

Full of toe-tapping, fidgety energy that’s tamped down and ready to brim over at any moment, Trail of Echoes offers an addictive read from a promising new author.

Crime, books and libraries make for a heady combination in Murder at the 42nd Street Library, the first in a new series by Con Lehane that mixes mystery with some of America’s most famous institutions of higher reading.

The librarian/sleuth of this tale is Ray Ambler, who curates the crime fiction collection at the lion-guarded flagship building of the New York Public Library in midtown Manhattan. In addition to its many literary allusions, the book is bursting with Big Apple sights, sounds and liveliness, with many neighborhoods, ballparks and landmarks sure to strike a chord with Manhattan aficionados.

Not one, but two people are murdered early on, one in a library office close to Ambler's, the other in Bryant Park near the library. The dead man in the park is a famous crime author whose papers have just been donated to the library’s crime fiction collection. Unable to help himself, Ambler begins to investigate. Not only is he an expert on every conceivable aspect and perpetrator of fictional crime, he also has the acquaintance of real-time NYPD homicide detective Mike Cosgrove, and the two hook up to look into the backstory of these oddly coincidental crimes. Working their sometimes separate, sometimes diverging trajectories, they begin the task of smoking out a murderer.

Murder at the 42nd Street Library operates on a kind of slow burn, increasing in tension—and complications—as the pages progress. In fact, at times the characters can get downright confusing. Readers may need a cheat sheet in order to keep track of Max, Nelson, Kay, Laura Lee, Lisa, Jim, Dominic, Adele, Bennie, Arthur and Harry against a convoluted backstory that involves plenty of odd marriages, extramarital dalliances, sex with minors, intrigues and betrayals. Just about everyone’s lying about something.

There’s a cool youngster named Johnny who brings a welcome air of innocence to this often-tawdry tale of adults who just can’t seem to keep their dalliances and power trips under control. Our hopes lie with Johnny and those who support and protect him.

Ambler the librarian has a disarming, low-key aura that wins us over, along with his well-calibrated iron fist/velvet glove shtick. And wait for it, there’s a honey of an unexpected ending.

Rain Dogs, the fifth in Adrian McKinty’s Detective Sean Duffy crime series, glows with luminous portraits and firmly anchored scenes. Readers don’t have to search for some kernel of illumination in what the author is saying—it’s there in plain sight, a welcome change from many of the overstuffed tomes of the current day. There’s barely a wasted word, and actions are never belabored—the phone never rings, you just get “Briiinnnggg.” Yet the book contains everything for the crime enthusiast, including a locked room (or should I say, castle), a brisk procedural, mystery with a noir look and great dialogue. It’s all set smack in the midst of the “Troubles” in 1980s Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Early one morning, a young journalist named Lily Bigelow is found dead beneath a high parapet inside the walls of the Anglo-Norman Carrickfergus castle, a tourist venue just outside Belfast. Search after search of the courtyard, dungeons and battlements appears to show that no one (unless it was the night watchman) could have killed her, though there appears to be no reason why she’d jump to her death.

Detective Duffy painstakingly retraces Lily’s tracks leading up to her death, delving into her recent conversations with fellow journalists and her assignment accompanying a Finnish trade mission to Northern Ireland as they decide whether to open a business in the Belfast area. Duffy is closely accompanied by Detective Constable Lawson, a cheeky, dead-smart lad full of dry observations—the perfect counterpoint to Duffy, who often wonders if the joke’s on him. Duffy is a flawed, vulnerable Irishman, 40-ish and struggling to convince himself—or maybe us—that his just-under-30 girlfriend isn’t too young for him. He’s fun and down to earth, and he talks to the reader in abbreviated sentences, so we’re drawn right into the snap of the book’s dialogue.

Pointedly, McKinty makes us aware of the daily dangers in Northern Ireland, as Duffy checks his car for bombs before each trip. The tragic murder of one of his colleagues is expressed simply, with stark effect. On the other hand, Duffy is full of humorous asides about his colleagues: “I said hey to some grizzled old cops who looked like rejects from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.”

McKinty’s writing is so good it makes your head spin, and Rain Dogs has it all: intriguing plot, good Irish humor and a straightforward telling.

Loren D. Estleman began his prolific career writing crime fiction back in 1976, and he’s written close to 100 books, all high in the excellence quotient. He’s considered to be a master of noir for both his PI Amos Walker series and his Westerns, most featuring U.S. Deputy Page Murdock.

Estleman’s most recent series features a film detective named Valentino, who tracks lost films as an archivist at UCLA. Shoot, the fourth book in this series, seems a perfect combination of Estleman’s many talents. Full of insider facts about Hollywood’s great Westerns and the genre’s famous stars, it offers a neat mystery with a hint of noir, and delivers a hefty dose of the author’s trademark sly humor. It’s full of deliciously unsavory characters, and we soon know better than to take any of it very seriously. After all, this is Hollywood, where “the sunsets are painted and the stairs don’t go anywhere.”

Valentino gets an invitation to a reception held at the soon-to-close Western-themed Red Montana and Dixie Day museum, hosted by Montana himself, retired as one of the last remaining cowboys of Western film and TV fame. Red draws Valentino aside and hires him for a tricky job: locate the thief who’s blackmailing the aging star over a stag film depicting his beloved wife and film co-star, Dixie, made before she became every red-blooded American boy’s image of fresh-faced, innocent, straight-shootin’ womanhood. Find the blackmailer, destroy the stolen print, and Red will gift Valentino a priceless film, Sixgun Sonata, long hidden from the public and deemed lost.

Shoot runs a gamut of sleazy Los Angeles characters that confuse, delight and amaze. In addition to the famous Montana, Valentino matches wits with a cast of Hollywood characters, including his rival film tracker, the voracious Teddie Goodman, a dragon lady complete with crimson-soled stiletto heels and “reptilian” fashion sense; a couple eager to extend their friendship in unusual directions; the unique Dixie Day herself, faded by illness and loss; Valentino’s boss, Kyle Broadhead, about to tie the knot with a smart looker half his age; and a bunch of sleazy hangers-on hoping to benefit from the Hollywood dream.

Estleman's knowledge and love of Westerns is on full display in Shoot, which is chock full of film references, stories, gab and allusions guaranteed to send you back to watching some of those old movies. Estleman even includes a filmography of his favorites.

Becca, beautiful and brilliant, comes from an influential family with a predilection for law degrees. As a first-year law student at George Washington University, she feels the pressure from final exams—and from a weighted secret she’s been harboring. To get her head straight for exams, she heads to her parents’ summer home in the misty mountains of North Carolina, the perfect quiet place to collect her thoughts. She’s brutally assaulted and murdered before she ever gets the chance to take those exams.

Enter prominent investigative reporter Kelsey Castle, who is immediately intrigued by the case and by the tiny town of Summit Lake. For such a big thing to happen in a little town, there is an unusual absence of media buzz, only the murmuring of gossip at the local coffee collective. After learning that the local police force has been pulled from the case, Kelsey begins to question a cover-up, and her suspicions are further bolstered by the lackluster investigation from the county and a botched autopsy report.

Shocking revelations about Becca’s death parallel Kelsey’s own awful encounter only weeks before. This further drives Kelsey’s fervor to reveal the truth of Becca’s story, no matter the obstacles or dangers. The small amount of celebrity from Kelsey’s recently published book gains her favor from locals and helps her find the answers, but she doesn’t know that retracing the steps of the dead will ultimately resolve her own demons and help her come into a new life.

With a soaring pace and teasing plot twists, Charlie Donlea’s debut mystery is like a cool drink of water with a twist of lemon. It’s refreshing to find a book that has such a well-developed plot and excellent writing to back it up.

Readers who fancy top-notch crime procedurals need look no further than the latest by seasoned Brit author Ann Cleeves. Harbour Street is her sixth mystery featuring Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope and her Northumbrian detective team. The first chapter unfolds on a Metro train that’s carrying a crowd of Christmas shoppers, one of whom doesn’t make it to the next stop alive. Vera’s top assistant, Sergeant Joe Ashworth, is in the train car where the fatal stabbing occurs, and he sees zilch until the train empties its passengers, all except for a lone, very dead elderly woman.

Who’d kill an elegant, self-contained older lady who seems to spend most of her days helping others? But this is no locked-room mystery, as Vera sets out to discover the truth, starting with victim Margaret Krukowski’s little attic room on Harbour Street and soon expanding to the street’s boat yard, church and local bar, as well as the Haven, a nearby hostel for homeless women. Margaret’s life begins to emerge through those who knew her: as “one of the family” to landlady Kate and her teenage kids; as friend and supporter to a downbeat, desperate woman of the Haven; and as a long-ago lover to more than one man who vividly remembers her. Yet she remains a private and secretive woman to those searching for her killer. Vera and her team delve into the past of Harbour Street to put together Margaret’s story and find a motive for her death.

This is an outrageously good book, one of the best procedurals to come down the pike in a while, with a comprehensible plot full of believable characters. Cleeves is superlative as she subtly and cleverly alters our perceptions of the main characters as the book progresses. Harbour Street’s colorful back-story is persuasively drawn, and its characters fit like pieces in a surprising puzzle.

Vera herself is a piece of work, as readers may know from Cleeves’ earlier books and thanks to the PBS TV series “Vera,” now in its fifth season. Overweight, opinionated and obsessive, Vera pursues often-eccentric lines of detection and makes unsparing demands on her team, including the hidebound but persistent Joe and the clever, self-absorbed Holly. Readers become party to the detectives’ private thoughts, petty grievances and jealousies that make them human and accessible to us.

One of the joys of reading a good mystery is feeling like a dope at the end, knowing that the answer was there in front of you from early on but the writer cleverly hid every single clue. Kate Morton’s The Lake House isn’t one of those books. This reviewer figured it all out by chapter 32, and even the book acknowledges that there are a few too many coincidences. Still, the story Morton tells is engaging.

The mystery involves a disappearance from a stately old home on the Cornish coast. But instead of a wayward wife, we have a little boy barely into toddlerhood. Theo, the much longed for son of Eleanor and Anthony Edevane, born after a trio of girls, vanishes during raucous Midsummer celebrations in 1933. For 70 years no one seems to have the foggiest idea what happened to him. Was he spirited away by gypsies? Was he murdered and his body buried somewhere on the grounds of Loeanneth, the ancestral estate? If the story were set in New Zealand, the reader might be tempted to think a dingo got him.

The timeline swings, mostly, between Theo’s disappearance and 2003. By then, Alice Edevane, the second of the sisters, reigns as an octogenarian author of best-selling mysteries and Sadie Sparrow, a young detective, has been relieved of duty for overzealousness. With time on her hands, Sparrow takes up the cold case that involves the long abandoned manse close to the home of her beloved grandfather. Alice, prodded by guilt and curiosity, helps her out.

Another pleasure of the book is Morton’s take on the aftermath of the First World War, which wiped out countless thousands of young men and left survivors like Anthony Edevane traumatized shells. Her other theme is family relations, particularly some characters’ experiences of motherhood. For Eleanor Edevane, motherhood is the fulfillment of her life. Alice Edevane is childless. Other women have had to give up their children, while others will do anything to have one. Anything at all.

Such contemplation of maternity gives this mystery novel a rare tenderheartedness. Whether you figure the puzzle out late or early, it is Morton’s compassion for her characters that keeps you reading.

In real life, British author Peter James rides regularly with the Sussex police on their rounds. This fascination with police procedures and the milieu of law enforcement is amply displayed in his best-selling Roy Grace crime novels, now in its 11th installment with You Are Dead.


A young woman named Logan drives into the darkness of her apartment’s parking garage and disappears into thin air. Before her cell phone goes dead, she screams to her boyfriend that someone is lurking near her car. At almost the same time, local construction workers unearth female human remains while digging through the pavement at a nearby building site. The 30-year-old skeleton that’s uncovered turns out to have strange similarities to those of Logan as well as to another missing young woman. Detective Superintendent Roy Grace and his Brighton-based crime team begin the detailed and painstaking work of uncovering and linking the common elements in these missing persons cases, revealing evidence of the abduction and murder of several young women going back decades. The investigation takes an eerie turn when the forensics team discovers evidence of a tattoo or brand marked on the excavated human remains, reading “U R Dead.”


The book’s most engrossing chapters follow the criminal task force as they search for the small details that may identify the killer. In more grisly chapters, we see aspects of the killer’s methods from another viewpoint, that of Logan, imprisoned in the dark and awaiting horrors she can barely imagine.


You Are Dead is an accurate, unsettling and sometimes mesmerizing depiction of the ways in which a crime squad carries out what seems an impossible task—identifying a killer starting with nothing more than a blurry footprint and unidentified, decades-old human remains. The task force detectives’ work makes readers feel immersed in the detection process from start to finish in a way not often related in such detail in crime novels. Occasionally there’s an “oh, please” moment, as when Grace moves into a hot-button danger scene alone rather than waiting for his on-scene backup. We know it builds suspense, but it’s a jarring note in this otherwise realistic story about meticulous and careful policing.