Erin Hart’s fourth novel in her acclaimed Nora Gavin series blends Irish legend and archaeology with present-day murder in a sad tale tinged with sweetness. In The Book of Killowen, American pathologist Nora and Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire are building a quiet life together in Ireland, healing Nora’s wounds and caring for Cormac’s elderly father, Joseph. Absent for much of his son’s childhood, Joseph is now suffering from a stroke, his ability to speak frustratingly garbled. When a bog body is found in Tipperary, near Killowen Bog, the trio and Joseph’s new caregiver move to Killowen Farm, a nearly idyllic retreat center and artist’s colony, to take over the excavation.

But the bog body has a modern companion—a murder victim. Detective Stella Cusack is eager to solve the crime, and the string of incidents that follow it, before losing the case to higher ups. Fortunately, her assistant has the experience with antiquities that she lacks. The murdered man’s identity is quickly discovered, and suspicions center on his estranged wife and her companion, frequent guests at Killowen Farm. But despite his brilliance, he had no shortage of faults—or enemies.

While Cusack untangles the secrets of the residents and neighbors, and their ties to the victim, Nora and Cormac study the treasures found with Bog Man for clues to his identity and his relationship to an ancient scriptorium once located nearby. Could he be the mysterious 9th-century philosopher and author of the controversial Book of Killowen? And where is the book? New secrets touch on the old, leading to blackmail and fiery danger.

The first book in the Nora Gavin series, Haunted Ground (2003), was nominated for Agatha and Anthony Awards for Best First Novel. In The Book of Killowen—Killowen means “Church of Owen”—Hart explores not only the mysteries of the Irish bogs, but also the ancient and modern mysteries of language and the power of secrets. Hart’s own language sings with sharp and powerful observations, of what she calls “characters in the great book of human events.” Pour yourself a Guinness, or brew a pot of tea, and dig in.

Leslie Budewitz’s debut mystery, Death al Dente, first in The Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, will be published by Berkley Prime Crime in August 2013. 

The Sound of Broken Glass, the 15th entry in Deborah Crombie’s popular series featuring Det. Inspector James and Det. Superintendent Kincaid, often flashes back to the seedy Crystal Palace neighborhood in southeast London. The area once boasted the famous Crystal Palace building, a huge glass exhibition hall reconstructed from its famous Hyde Park original in 1854, but then burned to the ground in a spectacular fire in 1936. The novel builds its core from the memories of those who once inhabited the neighborhood and had heard of the spectacular building, and the recurring theme of lives as fragile as glass weaves its way throughout Crombie’s new Gemma James/Duncan Kincaid mystery novel.

Broken Glass picks up the pieces of several interlocking stories from the past, all of which seem to have their genesis in the Crystal Palace neighborhood. Years earlier, Andy, a lonely but musically talented adolescent boy who’s often beset by older neighborhood bullies, befriends Nadine, a young widow. Tragedy and a mysterious betrayal appear to cause an end to the friendship, and Nadine disappears from the neighborhood.

In the present day, Andy, now beginning to make a name for himself as a rock guitarist, seems to be connected to the grisly death of a barrister. The victim confronted Andy during a performance just prior to the murder, which took place a bit later in a derelict hotel. When a second, similar murder of a barrister occurs, Scotland Yard takes up the trail in earnest.

Gemma and Duncan, now married, alternate childcare responsibilities, with Gemma currently at Scotland Yard while Duncan stays home on childcare leave. Gemma and her young assistant, Det. Sergeant Melody Talbot, seek to determine the tragic circumstances that bind Andy’s past and present in bonds that seem unbreakable. Duncan joins the sleuthing when he realizes that the young guitarist figured into a former case.

Those familiar with Crombie’s earlier novels will be pleased that this entry matches her previous books in suspense and writing prowess. Newcomers to the series will find a welcome backlog of previous James/Kincaid novels to whet their appetite after discovering this fine novel.

In A Cold and Lonely Place, the second novel of her new series, author Sara J. Henry returns with a plot that seems tailor-made for her character Troy Chance, a freelance writer who’s now working for a local newspaper in Lake Placid, New York. The first book in the series, Learning to Swim, won the author an Agatha Award and garnered bracing reviews from critics.

There is a mystery at the cold and lonely heart of this book, but first and foremost, it’s a poignant and haunting story about Troy’s search for the truth behind a young man’s life. Tobin Winslow, the person in question, has been discovered frozen beneath the ice of Lake Saranac, near the Winter Carnival’s ice palace. This tragic event throws the little community into disarray. An unfortunate news story by a rookie reporter somehow implicates Tobin’s girlfriend Jessamyn in the death and hits the Internet before it can be withdrawn.

Hoping to set the record straight, Troy accepts an assignment to write what she hopes will become Tobin’s real story. To Troy, Tobin seemed an attractive drifter who came from a moneyed past. He arrived in the Adirondacks and stuck around, taking up with Jessamyn but remaining elusive to those around him. Of Tobin, Jessamyn tells Troy, “He seemed like someone who could make anything happen, that anything was possible. That I could be anybody I wanted to be.”

Troy begins to write the story of a lifetime, about a young man with roots in a sad and unfulfilled childhood, underlined by a treacherous act against him that went so deep that he spent much of his life trying to separate himself from everything he once knew. When Tobin’s sister, Win, arrives in Lake Placid, she and Troy begin to put together the pieces of Tobin’s life by talking to those who knew him, from his nanny and teachers to old friends and acquaintances. They eventually unearth the facts behind the tragedy of his beloved older brother’s untimely death six years earlier, all leading up to Tobin’s arrival as a loner in this backwater town, where folks “don’t get involved with your life, except around the edges.”

This is a powerful, emotional journey for Troy, but ultimately a hopeful one, as she uncovers the stories behind one young man’s traumatic childhood, stories that will finally redeem him.

Set in the fictional South Berlin Teaching Hospital, Christoph Spielberg’s amusing crime series features the adventures of Dr. Felix Hoffman, a 40-something emergency room attending physician. Dr. H. remarks on everything with a jaded eye and a humorous air, and nothing is sacred. He skewers the medical profession; hospitals and their recent turn toward privatization; medical personnel and their motives; and healthcare’s draconian cost-cutting measures. Taking in the proceedings from his viewpoint is to catch everything just a little off-kilter, with a bit of a zany edge.

In The Russian Donation, the first of the series to be published in English, Hoffman gets into a muddle when an ER patient named Misha arrives via ambulance and promptly dies . . . or was he dead before he arrived? The situation mushrooms into a mystery when the official death certificate (signed by Hoffman) turns up a while later—filled out with a different cause of death. Then the patient’s medical file goes missing altogether. Dr. H. sets out to find who’s behind the mess and why, resulting in a smooth pairing of comedy and crime.

As seen through Hoffman’s sardonic and wary eyes, the privately administered South Berlin Hospital contains a rogue’s gallery of suspects, some downright Damon Runyon-esque (in a Germanic sort of way). There are odd goings-on in the blood bank, and the young resident who accompanied Misha’s stretcher into the ER is suddenly posted to America. The hospital’s COO, who’s been stonewalling Hoffman’s investigation, gets stonewalled himself. All of these dire and comic events get sorted out after Hoffman and his smart and sassy girlfriend hunker down with a stack of pilfered documents to figure out how everything connects.

Readers who like a good mystery sprinkled with wit and a touch of sarcasm will enjoy the thrusts and parries administered by author Christoph Spielberg, who studied medicine in the U.S. as a German exchange student before he published this series. The novel is ably translated by Gerald Chapple, who must have enjoyed a good chuckle or two as he worked.

Cover of Snow calls to mind a wisp of remembered verse from an old Agatha Christie story, bland but somehow menacing: “Snow, snow, beautiful snow. You slip on a lump and over you go.” But Jenny Milchman’s debut mystery novel, which begins with a sudden death, is not bland. It is filled with the claustrophobic tension that only a good thriller can provide. The suspense locks you in on every page, and snow piles up everywhere: thick, white, all-encompassing and holding everything in its freezing grasp. You can try to run, but you’ll probably slip and fall in a drift.

There’s definitely something wrong with the police force in Wedeskyull, NY, a remote town in the Adirondacks. After Nora Hamilton’s husband dies (by his own hand, we’re told), the widow seems to be alone in wanting to find out what’s behind this terrible event, of which she had no inkling. Turns out she knows very little about her hubby and even less about his second “family,” the close-knit town police force. His buddy cops are everywhere, showing up with no warning by Nora’s car and near her home. They appear to be protective—but they are watching her, leaving Nora in a circle by herself.

The doors of the community figuratively close in Nora’s face whenever she seeks answers. Most disconcerting of all is her mother-in-law Eileen, whose basement holds clues that Nora needs in order to solve the mystery of her husband’s death. At first Nora’s only ally seems to be a car mechanic, a wonderful literary creation named Dugger who appears to suffer from a form of autism, and whose conversations, spoken in obtuse rhymes, have to be deciphered. Nora also gets to know Ned, a local reporter—a man of many faces and layers—and together they set out to uncover the truth behind the ominous events that are buried under the snow of many winters.

When promo materials say there are deadly secrets buried within Cover of Snow—believe me, they are correct.

Portland, Maine, 1893: Police deputy Archie Lean is called on to view a crime scene—a mutilated body found in an abandoned building, with strange occult symbols drawn near the corpse. This is especially curious because the very same man had been shot dead and publicly buried two weeks earlier. Perplexed, Lean calls on private detective Perceval Grey, an associate from a previous case. Grey, a half-Abenaki Indian, possesses a sardonic wit and loner mentality that keep him at a remove from many others in the community. However, it’s clear that the two quick-witted and persistent detectives, together for their second sleuthing adventure (after The Truth of All Things), have formed a bond.

After studying the body and odd inscriptions, Lean and Grey are off and running. Solving the crime will take all of Grey’s Sherlockian instincts and Lean’s common sense, plus a lot of footwork back and forth between Portland and Boston, where the famous Boston Athenaeum holds a vital clue they must decipher.

A Study in Revenge offers two adventures in one, as Grey has recently responded to a dying man’s request to locate his missing granddaughter. The detective also gets embroiled in the search for a stolen artifact belonging to the man’s family, a so-called “thunderstone,” supposedly an ancient relic of great power. At this point in author Kieran Shields’s tale, we’re fair detectives ourselves if we’ve figured out how all these puzzle pieces will fall into place as the story develops.

The plot is awash in mysterious circumstances and suggestions of the occult. Looming large is the shadowy Jotham Marsh, a Moriarty-like figure who commands a mystical society called The Order of the Silver Lance—he’ll surely materialize again in future books. The story contains enough underground tunnels, rooftop chases, risings from the dead, treasure searches and strange decipherings to keep everyone busy, but despite all the activity, the story tends to bog down when pages of historical detail (from ancient Viking lore to descriptions of the geography of Boston) are inserted in the midst of the text. Readers determined to remain alert, however, will be rewarded with a rich and multi-layered adventure told with skill and attention to detail.

Take a small town in Cumbria, England, in 1783. Add a few generations of witches, an island holding an ancient tomb, a long-dead body discovered in the wrong place, a kidnapping, a golden artifact encrusted with jewels—and murder. Then you have Island of Bones, Imogen Robertson’s wonderful third historical suspense novel that features the eccentric anatomist Gabriel Crowther and his friend and associate in detection, Harriet Westerman.

The reclusive Crowther is a dense and complicated character, vaguely Holmesian in his approach, with an exterior that’s hard for his acquaintances to penetrate. Westerman has her own legacy of guilt and sorrow, but she’s just about the only person who knows how to handle her compatriot. Together they form one of the most intriguing duos in contemporary detective fiction. Theirs is a bond formed through an equal fascination for the particulars of crime, a commitment to finding the truth of a matter and a habit of forthright speech.

Crowther and Westerman form one of the most intriguing duos in contemporary detective fiction.

In Island of Bones, readers will at last discover part of Crowther’s backstory, though his past continues to haunt him. Invited by his sister to investigate a body found in a tomb (where it didn’t belong) alongside its rightful occupant, Crowther and Westerman travel to Cumbria, where they revisit the old estate where Crowther was raised and from which he fled 30 years earlier hoping never to return. The two amateur detectives are soon caught up in a very current evil that reaches back to past treacheries, and one that, when revealed, must also serve to lay some of Crowther’s family ghosts to rest.

This atmospheric, beautifully structured novel contains a host of well-drawn characters, including Crowther’s temperamental sister and wayward nephew; Harriet’s son, Stephen; and two of the book’s most attractive characters: a wanderer named Casper and his talking jackdaw, Joe. The intricate plot, though occasionally confusing, is laced with historical fact, and a note at book’s end explains some of the English background underlying the story.

Readers who love 18th-cenutury British history will not go amiss with this novel—a great read for a snowy twilit afternoon.

Marcia Muller’s writing instructor told her she didn’t have the goods to become a successful author, but in the early 1970s Muller tried her hand at mystery novels. The result, in 1977, was her first best-selling Sharon McCone mystery, Edwin of the Iron Shoes. Over the next 30 years, the award-winning author has penned 25 additional novels featuring P.I. McCone, each one an intriguing addition to the series.

McCone has come a long way, baby, since her start as a staff investigator with All Souls Legal Cooperative; now she’s the head of a San Francisco investigative agency. In Looking for Yesterday, McCone meets with Caro Warrick, a woman who’s been acquitted of killing her best friend, but who wants an in-depth investigation into the murder to uncover the real killer—thus truly exonerating herself in the public eye. The case has barely gotten started, however, when Warrick is murdered on McCone’s very doorstep.

The P.I. and her staff must pick up the pieces where there’s little to go on besides newspaper accounts of the trial. McCone collects a string of unconnected facts, searching for anyone with ties to Warrick: a sheep-grazing hermit; an old lover or two; some illegal arms smugglers; a reporter for a radical right-wing paper who’d trashed the victim during her trial; a string of dysfunctional family members . . . not to mention a body stuffed in a drainage pipe. The action ratchets up a notch when McCone finds herself in danger, crouched alone in a sabotaged elevator and, later, caught in a savage, devastating fire. Why are the stakes so high?

The story is laced with the interactions between McCone and her well-traveled husband, a high-flying international investigator, as well as her family and network of friends. Their lives are just a little too polished and prosperous, perhaps . . . it seemed a bit more real in McCone’s earlier days, without all the private jets, upscale (and numerous) homes, nifty outfits and easy money. But there’s a considerable upside as well. It’s a joy to read prose that slides like water over smooth stones, with nary a misstep or misplaced comma. Looking For Yesterday is an appealing read from a true professional.

Princess Elizabeth’s Spy is Susan Elia MacNeal’s tense second novel featuring MI5 secret agent Maggie Hope. In this installment, Maggie is sent for MI5 training to become a hands-on operative after leaving her job as a typist in Sir Winston Churchill’s wartime stable of aides.

After months in an intense program, Maggie wants be sent abroad for front-line intelligence gathering. Instead, her training and longtime expertise in mathematics lead her to a position as tutor to the 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth at Windsor Castle. However, Maggie’s real job entails keeping eyes and ears open undercover, alert to a possible Nazi plot against the Royal Family. With its stringent wartime atmosphere—and despite legions of Coldstream Guards marching about—the assignment at Windsor proves a dangerous one, with a passel of suspicious characters in residence at the castle. Maggie is able to make headway in unmasking a double agent while her math skills enable her to spot and decode some encrypted messages.

A snappy, addictive book set in wartime Britain.

The depiction of wartime Britain is fascinating, from the glimpse of a querulous Duke of Windsor sunning in Portugal, to the daily activities of the Royal Family, to a beetle-browed Winston Churchill planning espionage from his bath. Details like this give the story a romantic, as well as fact-based, flavor.

Princess Elizabeth’s Spy is a snappy, addictive book, although it lets down at the finale with a less-than-credible rescue mission and an unsurprising villain. Maggie’s turbulent relationship with her father—also an undercover agent—and her romantic entanglements form a crucial sub-plot, but “super spy” Maggie often appears to be a loose cannon in Britain’s network of experienced, hardworking intelligence officers when she’s unable to keep her personal life at bay.

A preview near the book’s end hints at a danger-filled drop behind enemy lines in Maggie’s next espionage adventure. We’ll be rooting for her to earn our confidence—and help the Allies win the war.

Grab your geography book and ’fess up that you don’t really know that much about the British colony of Gibraltar, or about the current politics between “The Rock” and its contiguous country, Spain. But Thomas Mogford’s debut crime novel, Shadow of the Rock, sets us straight on all things Gibraltar as he introduces Spike Sanguinetti, a Gibraltarian tax attorney and amateur detective with a strong taste for finding out the truth of a matter.

The attorney’s story takes one exotic turn after another as he travels to the Moroccan city of Tangier, just nine miles away across the Strait of Gibraltar. He’s looking for answers—and a murderer—as his old friend Solomon Hassan sits in a Gibraltar jail, accused of cutting the throat of a Spanish woman, stepdaughter of one of his employers in Tangier. Hassan, presumed guilty, has escaped to Gibraltar, and the authorities in Tangier want him back to stand trial.

This tightly written, highly readable story needs no car chases or special effects to lure readers into an all-night read.

Spike seeks information in Tangier from Hassan’s employers at the mysterious but high-flying renewable energy company Dunetech, poised to extend its multi-national control with an enormous solar energy site under construction in the Sahara. The attorney sets out to untangle the web of deceit and corruption at the energy giant. He also traverses the bars and back alleys of the famous Moroccan city, and travels into the desert with a young Bedouin girl, where he encounters the gleaming solar array, not to mention the ancient Bedouin tradition of Bisha’a (a painful lie detection ritual)—to his extreme discomfort.

Mogford assigns a starring role to the politics and locations of this romantic and captivating region, where the exotic locales are the stuff of old Bogart movies. This tightly written, highly readable story needs no car chases or special effects to lure readers into an all-night read. There’s an appealing cast of characters: Dunetech high mucky-mucks Nadeer Ziyad and Ángel Castillo; robed and turbaned Bedouins; a corrupt Tangier bar owner; and Spike’s inventive hotel neighbor, Jean-Baptiste, with his exquisite knowledge of the highways and backways of Tangier. The intriguing chemistry between Spike and a police officer named Jessica will assure her return in upcoming sequels.

Spike will turn your head in this engrossing new series. Attractively, he seems to be free of the quick-comeback, wise-cracking demeanor that mars so many of today’s fast-track detectives. A follow-up novel, The Sign of the Cross, is in the works.