In Ranchero, a wonderfully original debut novel by Rick Gavin, former cop-turned-repo man Nick Reid speeds across the back roads of the Mississippi Delta in pursuit of a stolen 1969 Ranchero, painted a glorious Calypso Coral.

Nick had been driving the Ranchero himself, but it actually belongs to his eccentric elderly landlady Pearl, a widow of open heart and stubborn temperament. Nick was out to repossess a flat screen TV from a fellow named Percy Dwayne Dubois. But Percy Dwayne attacked Nick with a shovel, then disappeared in a cloud of calypso coral dust.

Nick had promised to love, honor and maintain Pearl’s pristine Ranchero, and he takes his promise seriously. There’s nothing for it but to chase down the car and the thief, who turns out to be just the tip of the Dubois iceberg. Nick and his 350-pound buddy, Desmond, drive off in hot pursuit through a tangle of Delta back roads and unforgettable scenery, where “everything was slower and hotter, the local manners approached baroque, and racing down a Delta road with crop dusters on the horizon was like driving into 1952.”

The story is peopled by folks stuck a few rungs lower than, say, a Damon Runyon-meets-Ma Kettle of an earlier era—although they retain that basic outlandishness. Author Gavin keeps the momentum going with escalating accidents and incidents, as violence mixes with a whole lot of stupidity to gain our hero a chance to reclaim the vehicle. Nick also contends with his boss, a crazy Lebanese man named Kalil, whose prized stuffed mountain lion appears to have been stolen. But everybody knows everybody down in the Delta, and we just know that cat will turn up again.

As one mile leads to another, then another, more members of the lowlife Dubois clan come out of the woodwork, and soon Desmond’s Geo Metro is full of misfit Delta crackers, each with an ax to grind or a suggestion to make. (Whether they’re helping or squashing Reid’s chances of reclaiming the Ranchero is up for grabs.) One drug dealer leads to another, leading to scenes of grit and squalor touched by the humor of misfits who inhabit a crazy world of their own. Nick admits to “the passing conviction that a niggling sort like me would never make anything happen quite the way I wanted it to. That view of the world is as much of the Delta as the black loam and the mosquitoes.”

Ranchero is a marvelous, scruffy and hilarious read.

Author Colin Cotterill has penned a new offbeat mystery series, and the first installment kindles in the mind like fireworks that bloom in showers of light. Killed at the Whim of a Hat is one of the most aptly titled books I’ve seen in a long time, and by far the best book I’ve read in an age.

Crime reporter Jimm Juree, recently of Bangkok, is down in the dumps. Her dreams of being promoted to senior crime reporter at Bangkok’s Chiang Mai Mail are dashed after her mother purchases a crumbling tourist resort in the tiny village of Maprao, far afield in southern Thailand, and the family moves, lock, stock and barrel.

Jimm’s bad luck at being in the pit of no-news land seems to change when a visiting abbot at the nearby temple is violently murdered. There’s also an odd skeleton or two, discovered buried deep in mud in a 1970s VW bus. Jimm seems on her way to a breaking news story or three. She gets a lot of help from crafty Lieutenant Chompu of the local police force and from her wondrously odd family. Together they make sense of the bizarre events.

A solid plot runs neck and neck with the plain and simple joy of reading a crackerjack narrative filled with droll humor and small asides that are never throwaways. In the current world of detective novels—where quick comebacks and sarcasm pass for humor and where characters jockey for top position as most snide or most trendy—this stands out as a beautifully crafted look at life with a Thai twist. Thankfully, Cotterill’s characters are so easy to picture they jump right off the page, yet are straight out of the town of whimsy.

Cotterill’s language is musical, with an offbeat cadence. What’s not to like in a book where you can read, of the crime scene: “From the road it didn’t look like anything special but when you got to the top of the dirt track you could clearly see that it really was nothing special.” Or where you can taste beer that “arrived so cold it poured like sleet from the bottle.” This stuff, on nearly every page, boggles the mind.

And I mustn’t forget an unsung hero named Sticky Rice. But you’ll have to read the book yourself to really get the hang of it all.

Can a book be dark and delightful at the same time? Author Elly Griffiths has just published her second Ruth Galloway mystery, The Janus Stone, set once again amid the grey seas and ever-changing tides of North Norfolk, England, where Ruth makes her home. With her perceptive, witty writing style, Griffiths has again brought her characters to the forefront, and readers will relish their return in a story that scores equally high on the scare and smile charts.

Ruth, who’s a forensic archaeologist, is investigating the remains of a child’s bones, discovered beneath the front doorstep of a turreted Victorian mansion, being demolished by developer Edward Spens to become an improbable “seventy-five luxury apartments” with “spacious landscaped gardens.” Among other tenants, the Gothic structure once housed the former Sacred Heart Children’s Home, but who and what else did it shelter? The original entrance arch, slated to remain standing, reads: Omnia Mutantur, Nihil Interit—“Everything changes, nothing perishes.”

In case you missed the first book (don’t!), Ruth is now three months pregnant, and the father, Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson of the Norwich police force, is very much present in this engrossing story that manages to be scary and romantic at the same time. Trouble is, Harry is happily married with two teenage daughters, so the identity of the baby’s father is a secret. But this is not a relationship that Harry, or indeed Ruth, is passing off as just a one-night stand. Instead, deeply drawn to one another, the twosome struggle with how to find a way through a seemingly impossible scenario.

Threading through the storyline are a series of inviting characters, both familiar and new: Ruth’s friend, chemistry lab assistant and sometime druid Cathbad, with his fine sixth sense and flowing purple cape, is front and center here; and there’s the enigmatic and attractive Dr. Max Grey; blue-eyed Father Hennessey; frail Sister Immaculata; friend Shona, with her love affair woes; and a host of ancillaries who add adrenaline, depth and mystery to this remarkable story.

The history surrounding this Victorian property makes for an engrossing archaeological dig, as we uncover layer after layer of intrigue surrounding the old estate’s former occupants. And little by little, too, we’re getting to know more about Ruth and Harry, who are beginning to seem like friends.

Readers unfamiliar with Charles Todd’s superlative Ian Rutledge mystery series, set in Britain in the aftermath of World War I, will soon learn that the Scotland Yard detective carries scars from his own service in the Great War. He’s haunted by the voice of Corporal Hamish MacLeod, whose refusal to follow a direct military order to lead his battle-weary men into yet another deadly skirmish ended in his execution by military firing squad—on Rutledge’s orders. Rutledge, himself a victim of shell shock, or what we’d now surely call post-traumatic stress disorder, finds the voice of Hamish echoing in his mind, throughout his waking hours and in his nightmares.

In A Lonely Death, Rutledge is faced with the deaths of four young men from the town of Eastfield in Sussex, all of whom served in the war, and who are murdered in separate incidents, each garroted and with the military identity disc of another, unknown, soldier in their mouths. With little to go on, Rutledge, alternately helped and hampered by Hamish’s warning voice, sets out to find the killer, someone who must be closely connected with the town and with the backgrounds of these returning soldiers.

In Eastfield, Rutledge deals with a slew of red herrings as he meets the townspeople, including a stiff-necked brewery owner; a teacher at the Misses Tate Latin School who has ties to the victims as schoolboys; a housewife caring for her war-injured husband; and police constables, inspectors, and sergeants galore. The plot leads the reader up many garden paths before yielding up clues that shed light on the tragic events. Rutledge searches for the elusive Daniel Pierce, brother of one of the victims, and seeks to uncover the identity of another shadowy figure: a long-forgotten fellow student from the boys’ childhood days and a victim of their schoolboy pranks.

As much an ongoing character study of a haunted man and war survivor as it is a mystery story, this complex and dark entry in a fine series will yield treasures to the patient reader, with its many threads of romance cut off by war’s tragedy and separation, including Rutledge’s encounter with the woman he loves, herself searching for a husband missing in action. These are among the harrowing legacies, sympathetically told, of a war that still rages within many of its survivors, and whose scars will take many a year to heal.