Italian-born author Elsa Hart lived in China for a time, absorbing knowledge of its history, customs and manners, and in her exceptional debut mystery, Jade Dragon Mountain, she evokes its essence for readers in often dreamlike, mesmerizing prose.

Scholar Li Du is in exile, wandering the geographic borders of 18th-century China, far from the imperial capital and his former role of librarian in the Forbidden City. Traveling alone, he arrives in the city of Dayan just a few days before a visit by the Emperor of China, an event carefully planned to demonstrate the ruler’s ability to predict a solar eclipse—a wondrous and frightening occurrence to be viewed by thousands, acknowledging the Emperor’s infinite power to command the heavens. Just before Li Du prepares to leave the city, an elderly Jesuit scholar is murdered in the home of a local magistrate, who insists Li Du delay his departure and apprehend the killer before the Emperor arrives.

The former librarian uses his observational acuity, scientific learning and familiarity with Jesuit culture to seek out the criminal. In this ancient culture where manners often conceal impulse, he begins to discover the secrets of those with a possible motive: a foreign merchant who brings wondrous instruments of science to entice the ruler; an anxious young priest; the magistrate’s consort, who finds her political power has become tenuous; a quiet and efficient secretary; and a traveling storyteller whose tales promise magic and mystery.

China’s ancient custom of taking tea is central to the Jesuit’s murder, and the author describes the journey of the leaves over many miles to reach the cities, as they absorb “the scents of the caravan: horse sweat, the musk of meadow herbs, and the frosty loam of the northern forest,” allowing those tasting the tea to “follow in their mind the entire journey of the leaves, a mapped trajectory of taste and fragrance.” A similar journey of the senses awaits readers of this book. The intricate, detailed mystery never disappoints, but Hart’s descriptions set the book apart, illuminating a world for readers to savor.

Jade Dragon Mountain is a compelling look into an ancient culture driven by intellectual curiosity, powerful symbolism and customs, overlaid by the gauze of appearances.

The fictional town of Idyll, Connecticut, is anything but idyllic for a gay police chief in 1997.

Former New York City detective Thomas Lynch recently became the Idyll police chief in an attempt to flee his guilt regarding his NYC partner’s on-duty death. In the 1997 macho police world, gay jokes are abundant, and though Lynch is out to his family, he keeps his personal life hidden from his colleagues. Everything threatens to collide when a chance sexual encounter places Lynch in the path of a young woman who’s murdered on a golf course only a few hours later. Lynch decides to solve the murder without revealing he had encountered the victim. Leading his team of officers is his first true test as chief, and he must balance being a confident leader with being one of the boys. Adding further drama is the town’s mayor, who wants the murder solved quickly to avoid negatively influencing the town’s huge festival, Idyll Days. Lynch’s diligent police work, mixed with intuition and a bit of subterfuge, ultimately triumphs, both in solving the murder and earning his men’s respect.

The story’s backdrop features small-town staples such as a Founders Day festival, a postal worker who knows everything and relatives who work in the various town departments. Author Stephanie Gayle’s attention to realistic details creates a fun portrait of small-town America.

Readers will hope that Gayle won’t be idle, and that this book will be the first of many with Thomas Lynch as the multidimensional and likable police chief.

It takes only a few pages of the suspenseful mystery After the Storm to hurl readers into the heart of a violent tornado touching down near the little town of Painters Mill in rural Ohio, bringing widespread destruction and even the death of an infant. In the twister’s aftermath, a different kind of damage works its way to the surface, as Chief of Police Kate Burkholder is called to the site of an old barn where human bones have been unearthed in the wake of the storm.

Linda Castillo is the author of six previous Burkholder mysteries, set deep in Amish country where the author was raised. She skillfully weaves the attitudes and habits of the Amish Ordnung—the disciplines of this religious community—with clear, dramatic portraits of the people who still follow the sect’s old ways in today’s modern world. Amish phrases add a distinct flavor to the narrative and are never confusing or out of place, providing readers with a bedrock sense of place and atmosphere.

Burkholder, originally from a conservative Amish family,  pursues her life and career outside the confines of that faith, but readers sense the detective’s affection for her family, despite their disapproval that she’s left the fold, as well as her respect for the plain—and often misleading—face the Amish community presents to outsiders. In After the Storm, that plain face turns violent, as Kate and her team search for the identity of the 30-year-old bones, leading her to terrible secrets that will upend a seemingly peaceful, bucolic world. The bones tell the story of an unimaginable atrocity whose legacy continues to scar lives right into the present day.

The author introduces the additional counterpoint of a secret that Kate carries in her own life, one that’s bound to affect her new relationship with state investigative agent John Tomasetti. The interplay of the couple’s feelings for each other can be tender and dramatic, at times terse and cutting, but always authentic.

After the Storm deftly follows a story of modern-day crime detection as it grinds against the implacable ways of a community bound by ties so strong that violence and betrayal seem to be their only destiny.

When a murder mystery is set in Washington, D.C., readers expect a good dose of politics, hallowed halls and monuments. That is not the case with Murder, D.C. by Neely Tucker, the second book in a series featuring crime reporter Sully Carter. Carter is a modern hero, emotionally and physically scarred from his Bosnian reporting days. He's a flawed individual who nonetheless retains his integrity when pursuing the truth of a story.

Now a stateside reporter, Carter needs a riveting story to help his lackluster career so he can return to overseas reporting. When young scholar Billy Ellison, the last member of the most powerful black family in Washington, is found dead in a drug-infested, no-man’s-land sliver of D.C. called Frenchman’s Bend, Carter writes an article about “the murder capital’s murder capital,” which creates a storm of controversy. Carter’s job is to investigate what an upper-middle-class young man was doing in the Bend in the middle of the night, but events in the story create multiple avenues to pursue. However, there are forces from the highest and lowest levels of society that actively thwart Carter’s probing scrutiny. Showing the same grit, determination and fearlessness that made him an outstanding war correspondent, Carter refuses to accept the existing state of affairs and pursues the twisted threads of Frenchman’s Bend to their untangling.

Murder, D.C. tackles issues of race, poverty and the unsavory slave history of the nation’s capital. The fictional Frenchman’s Bend was a slave holding pen for about 100 years, and the gruesome portrayal of the Bend’s history is recounted realistically due to Tucker’s historical research.

We usually celebrate our college alma maters with a sense of pride, while doing our best to forget high school altogether. But in Lori Rader-Day’s stunning second novel, a murder at a creepy roadside motel forces an unlikely heroine to revisit her painful high school years.

Somewhere in the cornfields between Chicago and Indianapolis, Juliet Townsend is trapped in a meaningless job as a maid at the seedy Mid-Night Inn in the small town of Midway, Indiana, “named for the fact that it wasn’t one place or another.” In high school, Juliet lived in the shadow of her best friend and track team rival, the beautiful and mysterious Madeleine Bell. Ten years later, Juliet’s still in town, living with her mother and scrubbing toilets after Madeleine left her behind for a glamorous life in Chicago.

Or so Juliet thinks, until the night Madeleine checks into the Mid-Night Inn. She’s still stunning, and sporting a giant diamond ring that Juliet—a kleptomaniac with a penchant for small, shiny objects—would love to get her hands on. But Madeleine isn’t there to gloat: She’s running from something and desperate to talk to Juliet. Overcome with jealousy, Juliet blows her off, and the next morning finds Madeleine’s corpse hanging from the motel balcony. When local police name her the most likely suspect, Juliet embarks on a mission to find the real killer by excavating her and Madeleine’s past as track stars at Midway High, when Madeleine mysteriously pulled out of a pivotal race and cost Juliet a scholarship.

Once again, Chicago author Rader-Day (The Black Hour) delivers a breathless psychological thriller with a killer first line, an irresistible mystery and lean chapters soaked with suspense. Comparisons to Tana French (A Secret Place) and Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) have become all too common in the mystery genre, but with two consistently great novels now under her belt, Rader-Day has proved their equal in crafting taut, literary mysteries with fascinating heroines.

In a windblown field near the sea in Norfolk, England, a land developer’s excavating machine uncovers first a silver wing, then the cockpit of an American World War II fighter plane, then the ghostly remains of a long-dead pilot staring up from inside.

Enter forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway, the central character in the engrossing mystery series by author Elly Griffiths. Like the previous books in the series, The Ghost Fields combines an atmosphere of eerie beauty, a reach that manages to encompass millennia and a style of low-key, dry humor that’s just plain satisfying.

The discovery of the grisly human remains ignites a series of mysteries. (The body, by the way, is not that of the plane’s pilot.) Soon Ruth and company are investigating throughout the Norfolk countryside, from the developer’s digging site to a derelict WWII American airfield—one of many known as “ghost fields”—to an old family estate whose lands date back to the Iron Age and may contain a few more skeletons in the closet—and elsewhere.

The success of Griffiths’ series is due in no small part to central character Ruth and a creative, comfortable cast of characters, including a couple of druids, one or two mismatched couples who nevertheless make a match, a crazy British family living out in the wilds and, of course, the irreplaceable DCI Nelson, a cop for all seasons if there ever was one. Nelson’s unconventional social skills make him one of the more intriguing antiheroes to come down the pike in ages. He’s irresistible precisely because he seems to be clueless about the depth of his relationship with Ruth. Though Griffiths describes him as “not a fanciful man,” we’re drawn to his blind spots as well as his sturdy confidence as he works alongside his three detective sergeants, who play no small role in the proceedings. The author’s addictive sense of humor raises the series a cut above the ordinary—not loudmouth, wise-guy humor, but rather more subtle and lasting.

Add to this the book’s salty, desolate atmosphere of endless marsh and lonely, ancient sands, and the book achieves a shivery aura of mystery you won’t soon shake, one that laces past with present in the inescapable march of time.

Author Seán Haldane explores the frontier culture of 1869 British Columbia in an award-winning novel that wades through people’s preconceptions and ideas about savagery and civilization, set at a moment when geographic boundaries are expanding and Charles Darwin’s ideas are just beginning to challenge old frames of mind. This singular story offers a lively, up-close look at Victorian manners and views of that time, set in the context of cold-blooded murder.

Young Chad Hobbes has come from Victorian England to settle in Victoria, British Columbia, and after searching for work he joins the area’s new police force, assuming the duties of a sergeant after a white man is found brutally mutilated and murdered near an Indian encampment. The book becomes a fascinating detective story as Hobbes, dissatisfied with the quick arrest of an Indian for the crime, painstakingly pulls apart the seams of the case to discover the real perpetrator.

Hobbes’ investigation begins to uncover odd stories about the murdered man—an alienist, or early psychologist, of the time—who pursues an interest in “magnetation,” methods that employ both sexual and mystical “treatments.” The sergeant’s discoveries multiply as he questions the people whose lives touched that of the mesmerist, including those who sought his help.

The eventual solution of this superb crime novel is described in satisfying detail. The book, however, is not so much about the crime as about the mindset of this late Victorian era, told in an unvarnished way as Hobbes visits pubs, docks, parlors and police offices, and by all manner of people, from low-born servants to military officers, from clergy to members of the “finer” classes, each with long-held attitudes about their class-bound society. Each story adds a different slant to the tale.

Haldane gets under the skin of his characters, stripping away the civilized veneer to reveal the inner thoughts and desires of each individual, often at great odds with their public facades. Hobbes himself is forced to grapple with a confluence of feelings when he falls in love with a young Indian woman and must contrast his own preconceived notions of how “savages” think and act with the very different people and circumstances he actually encounters. All this happens at a crucial time in history when traditional ideas come face-to-face with a new world that’s about to lay waste to long-accepted notions about human nature.

The World War II era is fertile soil for writers of crime fiction, and Francine Mathews follows hard on the heels of her exceptional Jack 1939 (2012) with a crackerjack espionage thriller, Too Bad to Die, both set in that time. Mathews, a former intelligence analyst for the CIA, knows all the tricks of the trade, and her novel imagines the words and actions of bona fide participants in one of the seminal events of that war—the Tehran Conference in 1943, where Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin come together to plan their final move against Nazi Germany, the invasion of Europe. The three Allied leaders are portrayed as multilayered personalities weighing their own countries’ post-war welfare against the cooperation needed at this crucial moment to win the war.

Mathews brings in yet another real-life figure from that era, the soon-to-be-famous author Ian Fleming, and imagines how he might have participated in the dangerous, game-changing meeting, as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

In real life, Fleming was an assistant to Britain’s director of naval intelligence; in Too Bad to Die, he gets to play a down-and-dirty role in Tehran after he uncovers a plot to assassinate all three Allied leaders at the conference. He must discover the identity of the assassin, a mastermind known only as the Fencer, as clues are sent to him from Britain via Alan Turing’s famed Enigma machine.

Young Fleming’s imagined early years at Eton and Sandhurst are played out in the shadow of his idol and father, Val, who died a hero during World War I, and in the details of Ian’s friendship with American and schoolmate Michael Hudson. There’s an imaginative take on how the character of James Bond takes shape in Fleming’s mind as he races against time to intercept the killer, aided—or perhaps impeded—by two women, a comely British Signals operator and a Soviet spy named Siranoush, who may or may not be leading him to his death.

We’re right behind Fleming as he races against time to discover the Fencer’s identity. The book is great sport for lovers of quick-fire espionage yarns, filtered through the lens of one of the most pivotal eras in world history. And if you haven’t figured out the identity of the would-be assassin pretty early on, you need to turn in your detective badge.