You can’t always tell a book by its cover, which is certainly the case with Wendy Tyson’s Killer Image. Protagonist Allison Campbell advertises herself as an “image consultant,” but she’s actually a lifestyle coach, only one semester short of a PhD in psychology. When a powerful politician drags in Maggie, his reluctant goth daughter, for a makeover, Allison ignores the girl’s appearance and looks for the cause of her hostility. She doesn’t have far to look, because Maggie’s family is dysfunctional in the extreme. So dysfunctional that young Maggie winds up accused in the Satanist torture-murder of a local attorney. But Maggie isn’t the only troubled character in the book; so is Allison. This is where Killer Image rises above the standard whodunit fare. This is a deep, complicated book where the ravages of child prostitution, Alzheimer’s disease, and alcoholism ruin countless lives. Author Tyson isn’t shy about leading the reader away from Philadelphia's Main Line and into seedy topless bars and tragic family histories. She’s also not afraid to point a finger at politicians who use their families as stage dressing, hiding their ambition behind “family values.”
In R.D. Cain’s The Filthy Few, no one is perfect, not even the cops. In fact, cops are among the worst characters in this fast-moving crime novel set in Canada. Ambitious police officers David Morrison and Jake Radix aren’t patient enough to advance their careers through responsible police work, so they devise what they think is an ingenious plan. They swipe money from the police station evidence locker to set up a buy with Toronto drug dealers. Once they turn the dealers in, they believe, they’ll quickly move up the ranks. Unfortunately, not only are the two crooked, they are idiots, so their plans don’t quite work out. Caught up in the resulting Morrison/Radix mess are Steve Nastos, an ex-cop, now part-time PI; Karen Grant, Nastos’ ex-partner-turned-journalist; Ann Falconer, a prostitute in the Witness Protection Program; and her boyfriend Rob Walker, who is accidentally shot and killed by the idiotic Morrison and Radix. Along the way we also meet police psychologist Dr. “No Frills” Mills; James Moretti, leader of the Dogs of War biker gang; Viktor Kalmakov, a Russian philanthropist (also described as a mass murderer); and Vince Druer, a conflicted hit man. What with all the betrayals and killings (dozens, as it turns out), there are few dull moments in The Filthy Few. The serpentine plot can be hard to follow at times, and so are the characters, some of whom operate under aliases. And in contrast to the title, the filthy are not few—the filthy are legion. My favorite in this motley assortment of do-badders is Karen Grant, who retains such lust for her ex-partner that at one point he describes her as “a borderline stalker, ten seconds away from boiling a rabbit.” For a sequel, author Cain might want to consider using Karen as his lead character. She’s that awful—and that wonderful.
It’s 1997, and in Terence Faherty’s Eastward in Eden, Owen Keane, a failed seminarian and an amateur sleuth with a weakness for detective fiction, has been in a funk for two years after witnessing the devastating suicide of a young girl. He wants nothing more than to disappear where no one can find him. When an old friend asks him to travel to Kenya to do a life-and-death welfare check on a mutual friend, Father Philip Swickard, Keane decides rural Kenya would be a perfect place to hide out. After arriving in Nairobi, Keane, a white-knuckle flier, catches a ride on a puddle jumper to the little village of Somolet where the diminutive Father Swickard’s mission is located. The father is less than pleased to see him. No need to worry about him, he insists. Everything is just fine. Well, except for the ghost, the reincarnation of Chief Wauki who ruled 100 years ago. Said chief insists on the return of the stolen Sword of Wauki, or threatens to do bodily harm to Father Swickard. Then there’s a mystic named Mugo who dresses like Gandhi and comes and goes at will. He doesn’t care for the father, but the feeling is mutual. Father Swickard believes Mugo has kidnapped his young acolyte Daniel. Oh, then there are the land raiders who Father Swickard speaks out against regularly because they are driving farmers from their land and murdering anyone who tries to stop them. When the phony Chief Wauki is found hacked to death on Father Swickard’s doorstep by the very sword he insisted be returned to him, the evidence, obviously planted, points to the good father. Keane must put his sleuthing skills to the test to clear Father Swickard and find out who really killed Wauki. There are plenty of suspects. It seems the outspoken Father Swickard has riled many people and interests, including the Kenyan government.
Owen Keane has been among the missing for 14 years, and this, the eighth book in the series, is a welcome return of an interesting, likable character. Multi-award-nominated Faherty has a way with characters and many stand out. Basil, the ten-year-old who becomes Keane’s helper, guide, and friend; Chief Constable Mwarai who is torn as to where his allegiance lies; and Chief Joseph Wamba, the hugely overweight ruler of the Nihuru people are but a few. Faherty seamlessly weaves the landscape and wildlife of Kenya into a mystery with many satisfying twists and turns. Hopefully, Keane will not wait another 14 years before his next outing.
Nothing and nobody is ever totally at ease in Anne Emery’s Collins-Burke mystery series. That continues in Blood on a Saint, the seventh outing for the unlikely duo of Monty Collins, solicitor and bluesman, and his best friend, Father Brennan Burke, the acerbic hard-drinking priest at St. Bernadette’s in Halifax, Nova Scotia. When the figure of the Virgin Mary appears to a young woman over the statue of St. Bernadette in the church’s courtyard, a carnival atmosphere ensues; Father Burke calls the souvenir and food carts that pop up “korny kiosks of katholic kitsch.” Then sleazy Pike Podgis blows into town. He plans to feature the goings-on at the church on his even sleazier TV show. When another young woman, a rival of the original Virgin Mary sighter, is found dead at the foot of the statue, Podgis is arrested, and Collins finds himself reluctantly representing him. Add to the mix a street person found in a coma with blood on his face not far from the body. When he regains consciousness, he no longer speaks English, only French. Collins and Burke initiate their own investigations, but to their mutual ire, find they can’t compare notes. After all, nothing is more sacrosanct than the confessional and solicitor-client confidentiality.
Emery, a resident of Halifax, knows her town well and creates a strong sense of place. She’s also well-versed in the Catholic faith and takes her readers on fascinating side journeys into the sightings and miracles that are part of Catholic lore. Music is another of her loves, and she has no problem showing the irascible Father Burke singing Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater” with the children’s choir, and in the next moment, “Bad to the Bone” in the face of a bad guy who’s accosted him. Strong characters dominate the book, particularly that of the complex, flawed, and eternally fascinating Father Burke. Those who enjoy Collins’ familial trials will be happy to know that his estranged wife Maura is front and center, as is her son Dominic. It’s another great outing for Collins and Burke and for a series that will be around for a long time to come.
A holy miracle brings out the worst of human nature in Halifax, Nova Scotia.Michael Krikorian introduces Michael Lyons, a Sinatra-loving, hard-drinking Los Angeles Times reporter, in his debut novel, Southside. Lyons is fearless when it comes to interacting with gangbangers. That is until he’s on his way to meet with King Funeral, leader of the Hoover Criminals, one of LA’s deadliest gangs. Only two blocks from City Hall a middle-aged black man steps from a car, a purple Grape Street Crips rag on his head, shotgun in hand. He shoots Lyons in broad daylight, wounding him. Within minutes the newsroom is taking bets on who shot him. He’s made enemies over the years, mostly members of the street gangs he writes about, but also the husbands of women he’s taken a fancy to. When the LAPD doesn’t appear to be putting a lot of effort into finding Lyons’ assailant, the Los Angeles Times publishes a scathing editorial. Then an audio tape surfaces of Lyons arranging his own shooting with King Funeral. His cred is gone. Embarrassed, the LA Times fires him. In order to vindicate himself—he and Funeral were only joking around, he protests—Lyons scours Southside Los Angeles to discover who shot him and why. When three seemingly unrelated killings take place, Lyons begins putting the pieces together and finds the common denominator—a shot caller named Big Evil, a prisoner at California’s maximum security prison Pelican Bay.
This is a nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty story of what really goes down on the gang-ridden streets of Southside Los Angeles. Krikorian’s voice is authentic. Born in LA, he’s not only written gang pieces for the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, but has lived in gang neighborhoods. He readily admits the well-plotted Southside is heavily autobiographical with him in the Michael Lyons role, and that many of the other characters are people he knows; he writes letters and sends books to many old acquaintances who are incarcerated. Through his gang characters—Big Evil, Terminal, Poison Rat, and Lil Mayhem among others—Krikorian brings the mean streets to life; and through their parents, he shows the grief of being incapable of saving children from the war on the streets. Southside is powerful, aside from an overabundance of minor characters, and is the first in a series of four, centering on Los Angeles. The next novel, already in the works, is Westside, to be followed by Northside and Eastside.
If you’re a fan of pulp fiction, the real thing, then you’ll be happy to learn that Mysterious Press, in conjunction with Open Road Media, is bringing back some of the classic tales from Black Mask in ebook format. As of this writing, four single stories and one collection have been released. The stories are “Red Goose” by Norbert Davis, “Pigeon Blood” by Paul Cain, “You’ll Always Remember Me” by Steve Fisher, and “Gambler’s Don’t Win” by W.T. Ballard. The collection is the real find, however. Jerry Tracy, Celebrity Reporter contains every story (25 in all) that Theodore A. Tinsley published about the title character. It’s also available in print, but it’s a bulky item at over 1000 pages. Tinsley has a fine wisecracking style, and his stories have vigor and heft and clever plotting. This Black Mask writer deserves to be brought out of the shadows of his better-known peers, and this collection should do the job.
Hilary Davidson has become quite well known for her traditionally published novels, but she got her start in online and small press publications devoted to short crime fiction. Now Davidson has collected nine of them in The Black Widow Club: Nine Tales of Obsession and Murder. The title story is from Needle, and it asks if murder can be a family tradition. It’s hard to pick a favorite here, but I really like the idea of a dead man trying to solve his own murder in “Undying Love.” Davidson continues to publish short stories both at online sites like Beat to a Pulp and in traditional formats such as Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
One new anthology appropriate to the season is The Big Book of Christmas Mysteries, edited by Otto Penzler. Big is the right word for this massive volume, nearly 70 stories in ten categories (“A Pulpy Little Christmas,” “A Traditional Little Christmas,” “A Sherlockian Little Christmas,” and so on). Familiar favorites like Doyle’s “The Blue Carbuncle” mingle with lesser-known works by John D. MacDonald (“Dead on Christmas Street”), and current greats like Ed Gorman (“The Christmas Kitten”) consort with classic stars like Rex Stout (“Christmas Party”). If you’re looking for a surefire Christmas gift, here it is.
Otto Penzler is the editor of Kwik Krimes, which contains even more stories than his Big Book of Christmas Mysteries collection (over 80). These stories, however, are shorter, as the title would indicate. In fact, they’re all told in fewer than a thousand words. Penzler plucked some of them from electronic magazines and commissioned others. They’re all fast and fun. As the blurb says, they “come and go as quickly as a gunshot.” (Disclaimer: I have a story in this book.)
Early Crimes by Max Allan Collins isn’t strictly a short story collection. Instead, it’s two stories and a short novel that will be of particular interest to anyone wanting to see work from the beginning of the writer’s career. The two stories were written in the late 1960s, though not published at the time. One of them, “Public Servant,” is in the Jim Thompson vein, and very effectively so. The other is a sort of Mickey Spillane/James M. Cain mash-up that’s interesting in its own right.
The first book I ever read by Loren D. Estleman was a Sherlock Holmes novel, so I was glad to see a new story by him in Sons of Moriarty and More Stories of Sherlock Holmes, which he also edited. It’s the title story, and the coda gives hope that there will be more in this vein.
Isabella Alan, aka Amanda Flower, presents Murder, Plain and Simple, first in her Amish Quilt Shop Mystery series. Capitalizing upon familiarity with Ohio Amish country, Alan masterfully re-creates the insular nature of a small town hewing to tradition. Propelled by fond memories and love of Amish quilts, Angie Braddock welcomes the opportunity to return to Ohio when her beloved aunt dies and bequeaths her a quaint quilt shop. Unfortunately, a surly Amish neighbor contests Angie’s claim to the property and the deed has vanished. It is no surprise, then, that Angie becomes a prime suspect when she discovers the man’s corpse in her stockroom. Luckily, she has friends—old and new—who help her solve the murder in the nick of time. Alan’s rich characterizations, skillful plotting, and evocative descriptions coalesce in this surefire winner. I am already eagerly awaiting Murder, Simply Stated, slated for spring 2014 release.
Barbara Ross has concocted a wicked good series opener, Clammed Up, the first Maine Clambake Mystery. Echoing a refrain common to the cozy genre these days, Ross conveys her protagonist, Julia Snowden, back to her hometown to run a business, in this case the foundering Snowden Family Clambake Company. Julia leaves New York and her high-powered position as a venture capitalist, to employ her corporate skills to negotiate a reprieve from the bank seeking to foreclose on the family business. While Julia does succeed in creating a satisfactory business plan, the agreement permits the business only a few days of income-losing downtime. Nonetheless, Julia optimistically proceeds, beginning the season with a wedding event that she has agreed to host on the family’s island. This enterprise rapidly sours when the best man disappears, leaving the groom behind on the mainland to retrieve him. Yes, matters deteriorate further when the wedding party arrives and discovers the missing best man—hanging in the ancestral Snowden home. Immediately, Julia’s business plan is threatened because of days lost to the investigation. I won’t reveal additional plot strands—indeed, they are plentiful. Instead, I heartily recommend that you pick up this book and devour it forthwith. I ardently hope that Barbara Ross continues the momentum she has generated in this excellent series debut.
Check out series opener Murder at Hatfield House, by Amanda Carmack (aka Amanda McCabe). Set in Elizabethan England during a time of political and religious tumult and treachery, Murder at Hatfield House introduces Kate Haywood, a musician who, along with her father, attends Princess Elizabeth during her exile from court during the reign of Queen Mary. Intrigue abounds as various factions vie for power, while Elizabeth maintains a low profile, biding her time. Alas, this modicum of peace is disrupted when one of Queen Mary’s particularly nasty envoys descends upon Hatfield House, hoping to unearth evidence of Elizabeth’s heresy. He is ultimately foiled and finally felled by the arrow of a mysterious cloaked archer. Elizabeth manages to escape the violence unscathed, assisted by Kate, who becomes her spy, of sorts. Kate becomes adept at gathering intelligence from townsfolk and servants, culminating in her attempt to corner the mysterious cloaked figure. In fact, Kate is so clever and dogged in her pursuit that she comes perilously close to death, as she successfully tracks, identifies and thwarts the murderer. As the book draws to its close, Queen Mary dies, and Elizabeth ascends to the throne, ensuring that we have not seen the last of the intrepid Kate.
A vivid reimagining of the treachery surrounding Elizabeth I's ascension to the throne of England.Shelley Freydont’s Silent Knife is a fine Christmas mystery. This new Celebration Bay Mystery finds upstate New York town events coordinator Liv Montgomery striving to orchestrate a festival devoid of murder and mayhem. Yes, the season is not all merry and bright, especially when Santa Claus is slain. Happily, Liv runs the killer to ground and saves Christmas, after all. Silent Knife is the ideal stocking stuffer for your favorite cozy mystery lover.
The Gods of Guilt is the sixth in Michael Connelly’s bestselling legal series featuring the shrewd criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. Known as “the Lincoln Lawyer” because his law office is the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car, Haller instills both ire and admiration in his opponents for his nearly unbeatable defense strategies.
A defense attorney’s job is to give his client the best possible defense. Sometimes that means the guilty go free. As the book opens Haller is haunted by the deaths of two women who were killed by a man he defended and got off. They’ve became members of his personal jury, his constant judges, his gods of guilt.
When Haller takes on a new case, he believes he is representing another person from what his disillusioned daughter calls the dregs of society, Andre La Cosse, a digital pimp accused of killing one of his business partners. However, the evidence is circumstantial and many things trouble Haller about the murder, including the appearance of a “mystery man.”
Haller recognizes the murdered woman as a former client, one he brokered a deal for years earlier that kept her out of jail and sent a notorious drug dealer away for life. As he reviews the facts and the players in that courthouse agreement, Haller discovers a startling connection to another lawsuit involving the victim. As Haller investigates, he becomes convinced that La Cosse was set up, that he is that one-in-a-hundred client who is actually innocent. With this knowledge, he builds the perfect defense, but can he and his client survive a sequence of vicious attacks long enough for him to present it?
Suspenseful, intense, and intellectually stimulating, The Gods of Guilt draws the reader behind the scenes and into the courtroom to witness a complicated battle to redeem an innocent man’s life and to expose corruption deep in the system.
Connelly’s complex interweaving of plots and attention to the details of the law make The Gods of Guilt an exciting and satisfying legal thriller. Readers will applaud his protagonist, despite Haller’s penchant for manipulating the law to suit his own purposes. Knowing he can feel guilt goes a long way in making him likable.
Complex plotting and attention to the detail make Mickey Haller's latest outing a satisfying legal thriller.Gossip, revenge, sex parties, murder—and that’s just the biology department at the University of Copenhagen in this Scandinavian noir by Danish author S.J. Gazan. With her dissertation only two weeks away, doctoral candidate Anna Bella Nor is horrified by the gruesome death of her supervisor, Dr. Lars Helland, found dead with two items in his bloody lap: his severed tongue and her thesis. Her thesis contends that birds are descended from dinosaurs, a fiercely debated hypothesis. In fact, two camps of researchers are fighting about it like a couple of Tyrannosaurus Rex. Careers and fellowships hang in the balance.
As Police Superintendent Søren Marhauge investigates the murder, he uncovers bizarrely tangled relationships between staff members and the victim. When another corpse, that of Anna Bella’s fellow grad student and friend, is found, she comes to believe the murderer is someone she knows.
Anna Bella is a single mother who has sacrificed plenty for her career and is not about to let a little thing like murder stand in the way of getting her doctorate. Anna is a smart and engaging character. You can’t help but root for her, and hope she finds a way out of this academic nightmare.
Although the plot is complicated, the motivations in the end are clear. Author S.J. Gazan, a graduate of the University of Copenhagen with a degree in biology, mixes real science with finely drawn, eccentric characters.
When the action begins in Catriona McPherson’s latest 1920s novel, the witty and wealthy Dandy Gilver, leading partner in the Gilver and Osborne Detective Agency, responds to an urgent telephone call from a childhood friend: find out what is wrong with the caller’s suddenly reclusive and morose sister, Fleur Lipscott.
So, leaving her understanding husband behind at the family estate in Edinburgh, the adventurous Dandy immediately heads off with her sleuthing assistant, Alec Osborne, to the southwestern coastal village of Portpatrick, Scotland. It is there that Fleur has been a teacher at the pleasantly situated St. Columba’s College for Young Ladies, but as Dandy is soon warned by one of Fleur’s colleagues, the school has become “a place of great wickedness.” Then the distraught Fleur makes a startling announcement when she says, “I have killed four people.” She continues by warning that there is no telling “when it might happen again.”
Of course, Dandy doubts the truth of such shocking statements, and she is understandably concerned about Fleur’s state of mind, but—as Dandy soon discovers when an unidentified woman’s body washes up on the nearby beach—"there is a seething tangle of dark passions here in Portpatrick.” And with that as the starting point, the fascinating investigation continues onward to a surprising conclusion.
It must be further noted here that the author, Catriona McPherson, is an entertaining writer with first-rate abilities. Especially noteworthy are her cleverly-crafted plots and her memorable renderings of picturesque settings and characters’ personalities. In reviewers’ past praise of the series books Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains and Dandy Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for Murder, McPherson has been compared with Agatha Christie and Jacqueline Winspear. However, the author’s consistently entertaining Dandy Gilver novels may also remind readers of works by Dorothy Sayers, especially because of the titular sleuth’s aristocratic pedigree and fierce loyalty to friends; moreover, even Dandy’s husband, Hugh, like everyone else, is often surprised by his wife’s unflappable independence, determination, and ingenuity.
The bottom line is this: If for an evening’s entertainment you are looking for a novel that is reminiscent of the very best cozy Golden Age mysteries, you will not want to miss Dandy Gilver’s latest adventure.
After splashing into the mystery universe in 2005 and winning an Edgar for her first novel, Officer Down, it’s now been a long four years since Theresa Schwegel’s last book, the brilliant Last Known Address. It’s been worth the wait.
One of Schwegel’s distinctions as a writer is that she can create a universe of believable characters of all ages and ethnicities. A thirtysomething mother of a toddler in real life, she manages to somehow inhabit their heads. Such empathy is nothing less than a gift, one shared by writers of only the very highest caliber. In this new novel, she manages to get inside the head of an 11-year-old boy.
Joel Murphy lives in a somewhat sketchy neighborhood of Chicago, with a police officer father and a mother who drinks a bit. Joel’s dad, Pete, is assigned to the department’s K-9 team as he’s somewhat in disgrace, and his love for his dog, Butchie, is more than shared by Joel. Pete’s disgrace is never fully described until toward the end of the novel, but the salient point is that it’s forced the family to move to an unfamiliar neighborhood where none of them feel comfortable.
Though it’s never stated explicitly, it’s clear Joel has some form of Asperger’s. His sister, Mike, is in full-fledged teenaged angst and acting-out mode, and she and Joel might as well be from different planets. But when Joel witnesses a horrifying act of cruelty by some older boys in his new neighborhood, and realizes one of them is friends with his sister, he’s fully protective of her.
One night, as his mother drinks and watches television on the sofa, Joel discovers that Mike has gone out to a party to meet this boy, and so he sneaks out of the house with Butchie. Butchie is an exquisitely trained animal, but even Butchie can’t overlook certain signals (he’s trained to find drugs). When things go horribly wrong at the party, Joel takes Butchie and runs away. To Joel it makes perfect sense; to his family, it’s an implosion.
The choices made by everyone, but especially the ones made by Joel and his father Pete, are poor, and driven by emotion. It makes the heartbreaking and lonely journey Joel takes through Chicago, traveling through increasingly dangerous neighborhoods, more tense and suspenseful.
The most sensible character in all the proceedings is Butchie, who breaks your heart just because he’s a dog and can’t make his recalcitrant humans behave as they should.
While this story has a technically happy ending, it’s tempered with the same things that temper real life. The compromises and accommodations that loom after the story end are implicit.
Gleefully profane and joyfully blasphemous, the prose in Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor books is so unapologetically lyrical and right that it fooking hurts. The ex-Garda is back, once more clean and relatively sober, the possibility of a new love in the air, and relatively at peace with himself. It’s a peace, of course, that will not last.
The Galway Bay that Jack loves (and sometimes hates) with such intensity is slipping further away each day; the echoes of past glories lost under the roar of a Celtic Tiger that now lies spayed and neutered. But even more pressing is the appearance of a selfstyled vigilante, known only as C-33, who’s taken to bumping off various alleged wrongdoers, and sending letters to Jack, urging him to join in on the purge. It’s an invitation that Jack at first declines, but soon enough his two best friends, ex-con turned Zen master Stewart and up-and-coming cop Ridge are drawn into the killer’s web.
But fear not—even as the novels have increasingly slipped into a sort of Celtic magical realism; a bleak phantasmagoria of staggering coincidences, half-glimpsed impossibilities and possibly supernatural events (was that really Satan buying Jack a drink in an airport bar in The Devil?), they are rooted in reality. No matter how fantastic the events, the sand and grit of real life, in all its hellish pain and loneliness and violence and brutal beauty, crunches wonderfully underfoot.
And through it all, Jack somehow (almost) perseveres; a rough, battered Sisyphus, falling on and off the wagon, his head awhirl in a Jameson and Guinness-fuelled swirl of poetry and half-remembered Springsteen lyrics, doomed to an endless cycle of rolling the heavy stone of existence uphill, only to watch it invariably come crashing down again, destroying everything in its path. Jack may ruefully admit he’s “never been all right,” but somehow that makes these books all the more inspiring. Because it’s not that Jack so often fails—it’s that he tries. Despite himself. No matter how black Bruen paints it, there is also an unabashed celebration of life here. To read these books is to fly.
Claire Malloy, the main character here, is like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, only younger and with an attitude, a stronger libido, and a sometimes biting sense of humor. Okay, maybe she isn’t very much like Miss Marple, except that she frequently gets involved with small-town murders and solves them.
In this, the 19th mystery in the Malloy series, Claire is living with her new husband, the local deputy police chief, Peter Rosen, and her 16-year-old daughter, Caron. While unsuccessfully trying to master the art of French cooking and occasionally looking in on her bookstore, the Book Depot, she decides to volunteer at the local Literary Council as an ESL (English as a Second Language) instructor, along with her daughter. When one of the adult students is found dead and the body hidden in the council offices, Claire moves into detective mode.
Who among her newly minted associates at the school could have done such a thing, and why? As she talks to the various suspects, a number of potential motives appear, including lust, money, and revenge. But could her investigations lead to danger for herself? You bet it could.
I have to confess here that I had never previously read any of Hess’ books, including the 16 mysteries in her Malice in Maggody series, but I now plan to remedy that. In addition to a really good mystery (I was surprised by the ending), I thoroughly enjoyed the humorous dialogue, especially between Claire and her daughter, Caron, who goes toe-to- toe with her mother in the biting humor department.
Clair Malloy: newly wed, teaching ESL, cracking jokes...and solving murders.Kansas born and bred, Charlotte Hinger admits to being fiercely loyal to her home state. This comes through clearly in her Lottie Albright series, which is set in Carlton County on the wind-blown plains of Western Kansas. In Hidden Heritage, the third in the series after Lethal Lineage, Victor Díaz is killed at the local feed yard where he is foreman. Not only was he garroted and shot, but he ended up in the yard’s manure pit, the pool created from washing out livestock trucks.
Undersheriff Lottie and her deputy husband, Keith, are already stretched thin time-wise. Besides their law enforcement duties, Lottie serves as the director of the Carlton County Historical Society, while Keith is a semi-retired vet and rancher, a job made even more stressful by a drought that is devastating crops. There’s stress on the home front as well. Lottie’s twin sister and her stepchildren do not get along (Lottie calls her stepdaughters the Three Furies).
Lacking suspects or a motive for Victor’s murder, Lottie and Keith’s boss, Sheriff Sam Abbott, has no choice but to ask for help from dour Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) agent Frank Dimon. Unfortunately, this gives Dimon one more reason to push for a regional crime center, which would force out local law enforcement, including Sam, Lottie, and Keith. Then Doña Francisca Bianco Loisel Montoya Díaz, a curandera (healer), great-grandmother of the victim, and head of a family that helped colonize Kansas, tells Lottie she knows why Victor was killed: land she believes the government has cheated her family out of. Lottie uses her research skills to check out Doña Francisca’s allegations, learning a lot about the old woman’s mysterious world of traditional healing along the way.
Hinger is an award-winning novelist and Kansas historian. She skillfully interweaves fact and fiction while painlessly educating readers on Kansas history—the Ku Klux Klan, which was anti-Catholic as well as racist; the prevalence of Sears Roebuck houses, with building materials, down to the last nail, sold in mail-order kits; and land grants that generated many lawsuits, some of which are still ongoing. Hinger also knows the livestock trucking business, which she makes surprisingly interesting. She’s created a sympathetic protagonist in Lottie, and her other characters are no less well drawn, especially Lottie’s twin, Josie. All in all, a satisfying installment to a series that deserves to be around for a long time to come.
As a big Hercule Poirot fan and an inveterate punster, I was immediately drawn to the title of this mystery about a coffeehouse owner and her husband attending a mystery writers’s conference aboard a night train to nowhere in the Florida Everglades.
Maggy Thorsen’s beau, Sheriff Jake Pavlik, is scheduled to be one of the guest speakers at this faux re-enactment of Christie’s classic when, you guessed it: a real murder occurs. To make matters worse, a sudden rainstorm washes out the tracks, leaving the attendees stranded on a train with a murderer in the middle of the crocodile- and python-infested Everglades, and no way to communicate with the outside world.
A first person narrative such as this depends to a large extent on how well you like the narrator...and I liked Maggy. In addition to having a strong sense of curiosity and intuitiveness, which most amateur detectives need, she’s also mostly kind and funny, but she can become a bitch on wheels (pardon the pun) when called for.
There’s certainly enough danger and more than enough suspects to keep the reader entertained throughout this eighth Maggy Thorsen mystery. I particularly enjoyed the list of characters—and the characters they portrayed in the re-enactment—listed in the front of the book, along with a drawing of the train showing where the various cars were situated. As in the classic, the murder victim here was not well liked, and each of the suspects interviewed had a good motive for killing him...which made identifying the murderer a challenge. And, oh yes, there really is an espresso bar on the train. All aboard!
The Game is Tom Wood’s third book to feature his assassin-for-hire, the man known in professional circles only as “Victor.” The book begins with a compelling set piece as Victor stalks his latest target, another freelance assassin named Felix Kooi, through the streets of Algiers, succeeding in eliminating him. Normally, this would be the end of the matter, but Victor is subsequently asked by the CIA to impersonate Kooi, whose services are being sought to augment the cumulative skill set of a group of ruthless mercenaries. Victor agrees, and finds himself in the midst of a nest of human vipers, a place where the slightest mistake will cost him his life.
Wood exploits the situation for all it’s worth, as Victor’s skills are tested to their limits by the tensions within the group, which manifest both psychologically and physically, with some of the group literally at each other’s throats. The tension builds to a gorgeous crescendo, as Victor, who is not privy to the group’s plans until the very last moment, finds himself in the middle of what is about to become an international incident. Because they’ve been seeing the action through Victor’s eyes throughout, the audience is pulled directly into the harrowing scenario as the point-of-view character must figure out how to sidestep the seemingly inevitable, deadly fate his teammates have had in mind for him all along.
Terrorism is the threat faced by former CIA Agent Dan Morgan killer in Leo J. Maloney’s second novel, Silent Assassin, a threat embodied by Morgan’s human adversary, the international arms dealer Nikolai Novokoff, and by the frightening bioweapon the ex-KGB operative wants to unleash on an unsuspecting populace. Over the course of the novel, Morgan and his colorful colleagues pursue the terrorist from Budapest to Boston, with several hair-raising side trips along the way.
Although he’s working with a familiar character type, and an even more familiar plot, Maloney keeps things interesting with vivid, pulse-pounding prose, and through judicious use of a couple of intriguing subplots. These involve the true nature of Morgan’s new employers and some work-life balance issues for Morgan, which, as you might imagine, are heightened due to the nature of his profession. Maloney’s resolution of both his main and secondary story lines ultimately proves satisfying.
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