“The body slid heavily from the table and for a brief moment seemed to hang in the air, then broke the water’s surface with a tremendous crash. For a moment, not longer, a white ghost seemed to linger just beneath the surface, but before anyone could be sure they had seen a final glimpse of the ensheeted body it was already speeding toward the depths.”

This salty description in A Burial at Sea is one of many atmospheric touches in the fifth book in author Charles Finch’s Victorian mystery series. For the newly initiated, the series features Charles Lenox, Member of Parliament and (possibly) retired amateur detective. Here, Charles is on a mission to Egypt and the newly built Suez Canal at the urgent request of his brother, Edmund, a staid civil servant—and member of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

This seaworthy mystery adventure starts out mildly enough, but after a snowy, lamplit meeting between Charles and Edmund, Charles boards the ship Lucy, bound from London to Egypt and Port Said. He travels on what the ship’s crew believes is a diplomatic journey, but is really a clandestine mission meant to counter France’s influence in the newly burgeoning port. There’s murder aboard ship, however, and Lenox finds his detective skills pressed into service by the ship’s captain. He is soon investigating the ship’s logs, decks and wardrooms— even climbing to the crow’s nest—for clues to a brutal killer.

In this descriptive tale, the mystery and mayhem are equalled by the fascinating lore and adventure of life at sea in the 1870s. Readers are treated to first-class descriptions of all things nautical and seaworthy, including spars and songs and storms at sea; which deck is which and who goes there; and even a breathtaking game of Follow the Leader, where crew members outdo each other with death-defying acrobatics from the mizzenmast and crow’s nest.

Sandwiched in between the grog and salt beef rations, there’s shipboard gossip that hints at mutiny, mermaids and more, but talk is valuable in this contained community and may contain clues to the identity of the murderer. Lenox must listen carefully and take caution for his own life.

Readers of this expertly written adventure will welcome the change of venue from the parlors of England’s genteel classes to excitement on a seagoing vessel. Reef the mainsails! Ship ahoy!

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.