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.

There’s trouble among the upper crust of 1930s London society, and in Ashley Weaver’s absorbing second mystery, Death Wears a Mask, the lovely and aristocratic Amory Ames is once again at the ready. She unmasked a murderer in Weaver’s 2014 debut, Murder at the Brightwell, and now a wealthy acquaintance has sought her help in ferreting out a thief.

Amory attends a dinner party at the Barrington residence, where Serena Barrington sets the stage by confiding to Amory that someone in their circle is making off with her favorite pieces of jewelry, including a ruby earring, an emerald ring and a bunch of sapphires and diamonds, all of which disappeared during social gatherings at her home.

As with detective stories of this genre, the suspects are all present at the dinner, where Serena privately asks Amory to keep her eyes and ears open for clues. The two even hatch a scheme to expose the perpetrator at the next party, a costume ball where once again all the suspects will be on hand. We know, of course, that something will go wrong at the masquerade ball: A shot rings out, and the body of Serena’s nephew, complete with tiger mask, is discovered, shot with his own weapon.

Weaver is a master of clever drawing-room repartee, and readers will have a pleasant time unraveling the mystery, which involves not only robbery and murder but several characters with distinctly unsavory pasts and modes of operation.

As with the first book in this series, Death Wears a Mask revolves around various fraught relationships, front and center being Amory’s ongoing duel with her super-attractive husband, Milo, whom she suspects of various indiscretions with the opposite sex, sometimes captured by gossip columnists and avid photographers at apparently inopportune moments. This theme of romantic doubt, a staple of many mysteries and romances, is clever at first, but our heroine’s wounded innocence begins to chafe once we see that Amory—who receives the attentions of notorious rake Lord Dunmore—is doing pretty much the same thing.

Hopefully this tiresome back-and-forth will be resolved by book number three, as the couple are clearly meant to be a clever crime-fighting duo, 1930s-style, and are much more intriguing and fun when they pursue criminals together.


The dead man’s ID says his name is James Putnam. The unfortunate victim of a motor vehicle accident, Putnam was killed instantly on the highway when an oncoming car jumped the divider and plowed head-on into his Porsche.

The problem is that James Putnam has been dead for 15 years.

The aptly titled The Guise of Another, the second thriller from Allen Eskens, shifts into high gear as police detective Alexander Rupert of the Minneapolis Frauds Unit begins a search for the real story: not only for the real James Putnam, but for the reason someone has been impersonating him. The detective uses a cache of letters to discover the imposter’s name, and then tracks both “Putnams” to New Jersey and their former incarnations as college roommates. Alexander works with his brother, Max, a fellow police detective, as the case spirals out from identity theft to a convoluted maze of corruption and crime at the highest levels.

Alexander connects the case to a 15-year-old event involving blackmail and murder aboard a corporate yacht. But uncovering this violent event sends Alexander down a dangerous path. Drago Basta, a powerful assassin working with giant defense contractor Patrio International, is intricately involved with the yacht explosion, and he emerges from the shadows to follow the detective’s every move.

Alexander is no simple character himself, as he tries to counter charges of police corruption leveled against him as well as his police colleagues, triggering his move from narcotics to fraud. And there seems to be no lack of trouble involving the women in his life: Desiree, his faithless wife; Billie, a savvy New York cop whose initiative puts her in jeopardy; and Ianna, who possesses the means to overturn the criminals’ advantage.

Poor editing and lapses in style hinder a smooth read, but The Guise of Another moves at top speed, and although it’s a skin-deep thriller, there are enough plot twists to keep readers absorbed, right through the surprising epilogue.

“I'm just a guy passing through. . . . [I’m] a coincidence.” That's how Jack Reacher explains his presence in the tiny Oklahoma town of Mother’s Rest. A laconic ex-military detective with no fixed address, Reacher got off the train with no deeper motivation than a desire to know the source of the town’s strange name. Once there, he finds a reason to stay—Michelle Chang, a private detective on the hunt for her missing partner. The sleuth disappeared shortly after calling her to Mother’s Rest for help on a case. But what mystery could he have been solving in the middle of nowhere? Was it really dangerous enough to cause his disappearance? And just why are the townspeople in such a hurry for Reacher to leave?

The pair team up to find answers. To do it, they’ll have to track down the mysterious client who hired Chang’s partner just before he went missing. Their search will take them to from Oklahoma City to Chicago to LA, and bring them into contact with strange characters, like a genius computer programmer who’s obsessed with searching the dark web. The closer they get to the truth, the more people want to keep them away from it—from Ukranian crime bosses to angry hog farmers. None of them particularly scare the effortlessly competent Reacher; his opponents may be armed and dangerous, but, as he points out, “only temporarily.”

Though this is the 20th Jack Reacher novel, newcomers will be won over by the pleasures of identifying with a noirish-badass hero who can outthink, out-punch, out-shoot and out-quip a bad guy at lightning speed. Lee Child is brilliant at generating suspense, but amid all the heart-stopping action scenes, Make Me also offers flashes of deadpan wit and captures the spare, dusty rhythms of Oklahoma farm life. The book’s opening coincidence is just the first of many ingenious plot devices, and a series of masterfully timed revelations will lay bare the chilling truth about Mother’s Rest.