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Thomas Perry makes his long-awaited return to the acclaimed Butcher's Boy series in this month's Whodunit column.

Snowdrift

Nightmares about the abduction of her childhood best friend, Lollo, have bedeviled police officer Embla Nyström for half of her 28 years. One of those jarring nightmares opens Helene Tursten’s latest thriller, Snowdrift. The dreams always follow the same script: Three shadowy figures huddle over a curled-up Lollo, then one turns and spots Embla, bolts across the room and hisses menacingly, “Say a word to anyone, you’re dead.” Fourteen years pass with no word about Lollo, until Embla gets a phone call from her missing friend. The connection is quickly broken, however, with no further contact. After a fitful night’s sleep, Embla is summoned to the scene of a homicide. The victim turns out to be well known to her: It’s one of the three brothers she believes were responsible for Lollo’s abduction. Embla eagerly embarks on the investigation, though her goal is perhaps not so much to find the killer as to uncover some further trace of Lollo. It soon becomes a case of “be careful what you wish for. . . .” As always in Tursten’s books, the well-drawn characters and first-rate suspense provide fine examples of the dark delights of Scandinavian noir.

The Art of Violence

Cold open: A man walks up to a private investigator, accosts him with a gun and demands that the investigator prove the man’s guilt in a series of murders—not his innocence, note, but his guilt. Unusual request, but it makes some sense. Years back, after being slipped a strong hallucinogen, Sam Tabor killed a woman, stabbing her, by his count, “seven billion times.” Faced with the choice of a temporary insanity plea and an unspecified sentence to psychiatric lockdown, or a defined length of time in the slammer, Sam pleaded guilty and went to jail. Now he’s out, and he’s convinced that he’s killed again. The Art of Violence is the latest in S.J. Rozan’s excellent series featuring PI Bill Smith and his partner, Lydia Chin. I almost don’t want to say more; there are too many nuances and red herrings, and I don’t want to inadvertently give anything away. But here are a couple of freebies: The client is a well-known artist who is often described as “tormented,” the flavor of the month in the fickle Manhattan art milieu. A blackout alcoholic, he doesn’t remember killing anyone, but the crime scene “signature” is eerily evocative of his first crime.

Eddie’s Boy

Thomas Perry’s debut, The Butcher’s Boy, earned him the coveted Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel back in 1983. At the time, the book virtually defined a new subgenre of thriller: the “Hired Killer Summoned Out of Retirement by Someone Trying to Kill Him.” Eddie’s Boy, Perry’s latest novel, opens with not one but four would-be assassins trying—and failing miserably—to take out the Butcher’s Boy. Retired, and known these days as Michael Shaeffer, he is still savvy enough to know that if someone sent four trained killers, there will be more in the wings waiting for their turn. So he scoots from England to Australia, but it will not be far enough. Michael has one ace in the hole, though, in the form of a tenuous relationship with a Justice Department official who tips him off to the impending parole of a career criminal who once hired the Butcher’s Boy, then reneged on the payment. Soon afterward, our hero neatly framed him for a murder, watching as the innocent man (well, innocent of this killing at least) was carted off to jail. There’s a lot more backstory and a lot more innovative executions along the way as Michael tries to stop the attempts on his life. A new Butcher’s Boy book arrives only once every decade, if that, and this one is well worth the wait.

★ How to Raise an Elephant

Over the course of its 21-volume run, Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series has become one of the best-loved series in its genre. In some ways it is defined by what is absent: murders or essentially violence of any sort. But the tiny African country of Botswana holds its own in the suspense department, its small mysteries strangely compelling and never descending into treacly sweetness. In this latest outing, How to Raise an Elephant, our intrepid sleuth, Precious Ramotswe, must rescue—no surprise here—a newborn elephant left orphaned by poachers. Said little elephant has a mind of its own, with results both comedic (imagine a 300-pound baby pachyderm rolling around delightedly in the back of a minivan) and tragic, with a look into the cruelty of the ivory poaching trade. There’s also a noisy neighbor who angrily calls her philandering husband an “anteater”; a sketchy relative who will impart a life lesson we can all benefit from; and the ongoing adversarial relationship between Grace and Charlie, the two opinionated employees at Mma Ramotswe’s agency. I have read all of this wonderful series, reviewed most and wholeheartedly look forward to each and every one.

A missing laptop, a treasure map and two bizarre murders await in this month's Whodunit column.

Bryant & May: Oranges and Lemons

Author Christopher Fowler’s Peculiar Crimes Unit investigates exactly what you’d expect: cases that are far from your everyday, humdrum homicide. But as Bryant & May: Oranges and Lemons—the latest entry in the popular series—opens, it appears that the unit will close up shop, having fallen victim to budgetary cuts and some remarkably public blunders. The chief will tend his garden on the Isle of Wight, while one detective chief inspector is barely clinging to life in the hospital and the other has dropped off the radar completely. But then the Speaker of the House of Commons (the U.K. analog of Nancy Pelosi) is nearly killed by a falling crate of oranges and lemons. This would have been written off as an accident, save for the fact that it took place within spitting distance of the Church of St. Clement’s, of nursery rhyme fame (“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s”). Thus, the incident appears to fall directly within the purview of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, which is quickly confirmed by more nursery rhyme-themed crimes. As is the case with other books in the series, the setup is improbable (bordering on bizarre), the characters droll, the prose exceptionally clever and often hilarious and the “aha” moment deliciously unexpected.

The Butterfly House

Scandinavian mystery novels enjoy such constant appreciation from suspense fans worldwide that they’ve become an established subgenre unto themselves, with no signs of flagging. Danish writer Katrine Engberg hit the scene in 2020 with her critically acclaimed bestseller, The Tenant, and as 2021 opens, she returns with The Butterfly House. The Copenhagen police are summoned to a rather macabre display: A young woman has been found in a fountain, her body completely exsanguinated. It is clearly a murder, which is bad enough in its own right, but when another body is found the following day, also drained of blood, also in a fountain, it becomes starkly clear that a serial killer is at large. The case falls to Investigator Jeppe Kørner, one of the two protagonists of The Tenant. The other, Kørner’s partner Anette Werner, is on maternity leave at the moment, but that won’t stop her from taking part in the investigation. Engberg has crafted a fine police procedural. She is an author to look out for, one who will be cited years hence as a key player in Nordic noir.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Katrine Engberg on crafting a murder mystery rooted in human psychology.

Picnic in the Ruins

Picture a Tony Hillerman-style tableau: a red rock desert beneath a deep azure sky, imbued with the history of the sacred rituals and artifacts of the Southern Paiute. Now add a Tim Dorsey or Carl Hiaasen-esque overlay, awash in desiccated Ford pickup trucks, characters who embody the word “characters,” ulterior motives and belly-rumbling hilarity, and you’ll get an idea of the strange trip you’re about to embark on in Todd Robert Petersen’s Picnic in the Ruins. We open with a bungled burglary that would have been screamingly funny for its ineptitude if not for its deadly outcome. Now the perps are on the lam, treasure map in hand, with the really bad guys—the smarter criminals—in hot pursuit. Other assorted protagonists include an anthropology Ph.D. candidate banished to the wilds of Utah, a somewhat shady government dude, a German tourist on some sort of personal quest (Old West folklore is huge in Europe) and a cast of off-the-grid “desert rats” who add big yucks at every turn. Beneath all this, Petersen poses some intellectual questions, such as who really “owns” land, what rights and responsibilities such ownership conveys and how the inevitable collisions between titled owners, the public good and the ancient claims of sacred ground should be addressed.

★ Someone to Watch Over Me

Reboots of major suspense series after the death of the author have been a mixed bag at best; witness, for example, the hit-and-miss follow-ups to Ian Fleming’s books featuring MI6 superspy James Bond. But some series nail the reboot from the get-go, and Ace Atkins’ continuation of Robert B. Parker’s franchise featuring mononymous Beantown private investigator Spenser and his lethal sidekick, Hawk, falls firmly into the latter category. Someone to Watch Over Me finds the ace sleuth conscripted into retrieving a laptop from an exclusive Boston men’s club. Spens er’s client is his own young protege, Mattie Sullivan, who is building an investigation business of her own. Mattie has correctly surmised that her boss will carry a great deal more authority in demanding the return of the computer amid the club’s misogynistic all-male milieu. But as often happens in mystery novels, a seemingly simple initial task explodes into something exponentially more complicated, here threatening to link a loosely knit cabal of high-ranking socialites and politicians to a human trafficking organization operating offshore in a remote and private Bahamian island. Needless to say, these people will stop at nothing to save their reputations and their livelihoods, and it will take all of Spenser’s considerable talents to stay one step ahead.