“All happy families are alike,” Leo Tolstoy famously noted, “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The way to unhappiness is unique in Megan Abbott’s compulsive, disturbing fever dream of a novel where Katie and Eric Knox experience the luck—good or bad being the big question—of having given birth to a natural athlete. Their daughter, Devon, is the teen queen of the gym, tiny but, skill-wise, head and shoulders above the other girl gymnasts who are hoping to turn their ultra-structured, gruelingly tested, hyper-competitive young lives into Olympic gold. Abbott previously has displayed an ability to channel teens in all their surprising, changeable moods (The Fever, Dare Me). That talent is fully present here, too, but the novel’s focus is on Katie Knox who has devoted most of her otherwise uneventful adulthood to serving Devon’s wants and needs. Her younger child, a son, is suffering from scarlet fever, but that seems only a minor distraction as Katie begins to uncover the many secrets, at least two of them criminal, her hot mess of a husband has been hiding in his overzealous attempt to make Devon all that she can be. Katie’s problem is that she’s not sure what, if anything, she should do about it. Abbott’s inventive plot twists are designed to push this fascinating-if-not-precisely-likable protagonist to the breaking point, providing the kind of emotional flare-ups that give Lauren Fortgang the opportunity to do more than merely read. Along with an impressive aural interpretation of Abbott’s prose, she finds the perfect teen voices, full of arrogance, snark and entitlement, magnified by their parent-enhanced feelings of self-worth.
Laura Lippman’s new standalone, focusing on another of Tolstoy’s unhappy families, introduces us to James Brant, his son J.L., and daughter Lu (for Luisa) of Wilde Lake Village in Columbia, a Baltimore area planned community. The focus is on Lu, a widow in her late 30s, recently elected to a post once held by her father, states attorney of Howard County of which Columbia is an affluent part. When Lu’s first murder trial, the prosecution of local misfit Rudy Drysdale, ends prematurely with the suspect’s suicide, she decides to find out more about him. This investigation eventually leads her to the discovery of some unpleasant family secrets she missed while growing up. This is an intriguing premise for a mystery novel, but what Lippman delivers is something a bit less conventional. The current murder involving Drysdale is little more than a MacGuffin—a device used to trigger the novel’s nuanced study of family dynamics and, enhanced by Lippman’s reportorial skill, the history and sociology of an “ideal American village” and its less-than-ideal effect on its citizens. The contemporary chapters of the novel follow Lu objectively in present tense, while Lu assumes the role of narrator during her memory trips into the past. This has led the audio producers to employ dual readers. Nicole Poole adds a measured, mature, sophisticated quality to the chapters observing Lu’s present-day progress, while Kathleen McInerney is given a bit more to work with emotionally in her enactment of the young Lu, growing up in the household of a loving but not always available single father, observing the misbehaving older friends of her brother, and puzzled by disturbing events that will take her decades to understand.
A preface of less than a page, explaining the meaning of the title, demonstrates the author’s storytelling mastery from the very first, with a detailed background, sympathetic characters in peril, suspense, and a sadly ironic ending. Warning that the contents are “true stories told from memory...of a creative writer in what we may delicately call the evening of his life,” le Carré (the pseudonym of David Cornwell) explores in consistently entertaining and informative memoirs and anecdotes the interconnected worlds of espionage, literature, entertainment, politics, law, diplomacy, war, nature, and journalism. Personal details are relatively few—there’s little about his marriages beyond celebrating both wives as “loyal and devoted” and admitting he was less than an ideal husband—but he does include a substantial chapter about his relationship with his father, a “conman, fantasist, occasional jailbird....”
Among the notable figures encountered are prime ministers (Harold MacMillan, Margaret Thatcher), literary giants (Joseph Brodsky, Stephen Spender, Graham Greene), actors (Alec Guinness, Richard Burton), film directors (Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola), and the little-known originals on whom some of le Carré’s characters were based. The backstory of Jerry Westerby, protagonist of The Honourable Schoolboy, is especially unusual.
The first chapter introduces two early female sleuths, one real and flamboyant (Chicago policewoman Alice Clement), the other fictional and understated (Catherine Louisa Pirkis’ Loveday Brooke). From there alternate chapters trace the parallel development of women detectives in fiction and in fact. The nonfictional coverage is confined almost entirely to the United States, while fictional references extend to Britain and Australia.
The literary history begins with Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolfo (1794) and includes fairly obscure early works. The year Poe’s Dupin first appeared (1841) also saw the publication of Catherine Crowe’s Adventures of Susan Hopley; or Circumstantial Evidence. Considerable coverage is given 1860s pioneers, Andrew Forrester’s Mrs. Gladden and W. Stephens Hayward’s Mrs. Paschal. Anna Katharine Green is celebrated for the introduction of spinster sleuth Amelia Butterworth and young society investigator Violet Strange. (Given how prominently Green figures, it’s a pity that her middle name is misspelled more times than not.) The 20th century brings both the usual suspects (from Miss Marple, Miss Silver, and Hildegarde Withers to Kinsey Millhone, V.I. Warshawski, and Kay Scarpetta), and some more obscure characters, like Torrey Chanslor’s Beagle sisters and Sam Merwin, Jr.’s Amy Brewster. Films and TV are not ignored, including a tantalizing celebration of the 1930s Torchy Blane series, usually starring Glenda Farrell.
Describing women detectives in fiction, Janik is consistently on the money, but she makes the all-too-common error of overgeneralizing both Golden Age detection and the American hardboiled. That “the tenor of American detection narrowed” with the coming of the hardboiled pulps is simply not true, and contrary to what most contemporary writers seems to believe, there was an American Golden Age.
Quibbles aside, this is an excellent contribution to mystery scholarship and a likely Edgar nominee. Janik’s research is deep and well-informed, buttressed by 25 pages of notes but no separate bibliography, making full information on the sources cited possible but sometimes difficult to find.
The Highway Kind is a thematic crime anthology featuring stories built around people and their cars. It includes 15 entertaining original tales. C. J. Box contributes a satisfying suspense story with a rural Wyoming setting titled “Power Wagon” in which young accountant Brandon and his very pregnant wife are trapped by a group of toughs on Brandon’s recently deceased father’s ranch without phone or internet service. “Driving to Geronimo’s Grave” is a vivid, moody crime story set during the Great Depression with a dark humor only Joe Lansdale can pull off. Ben H. Winters contributes a twisty revenge tale involving a minivan titled “Test Drive” that is both satisfying and surprising. Wallace Stroby’s “Night Run” is a marvelously written road rage story asking more questions than it answers, in a good way, and one that I hope Mr. Stroby sees fit to expand into a larger story one day.
The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories is a posthumous publication of four superior uncollected stories by P. D. James. The title story is the puzzle of an unsolved murder on Christmas Eve in 1940. It is told by an aging crime novelist who, as a young war widow, was invited to her estranged grandmother’s estate where the murder occurred. The plot is pristine and the conclusion is as subtle and satisfying as anything the genre has to offer. The complex and clever “A Very Commonplace Murder” is as surprising as it is entertaining, without ever cheating the reader with a false clue. The final two stories feature Ms. James’ series character DCI Adam Dalgliesh. “The Twelve Clues of Christmas” finds Dalgliesh in a very Agatha Christie-esque tale as a young sergeant investigating a suicide far from his own jurisdiction. In “The Boxdale Inheritance” DCI Dalgliesh investigates the source of an inheritance tainted by the rumor of murder, but what he finds is unsuspected and even sweet.
A heroine with a drinking problem is the star in Chris Dolan’s Lies of the Land. From the first page, where hapless criminal prosecutor Maddy Shannon wakes up next to a man she doesn’t recognize, we know we’re in for a comic, if bloody, treat. Highly intelligent, Maddy is well aware that her appetite for booze, cigarettes, and men may prove to be her undoing, but she repeatedly throws caution to the wind and overindulges anyway. This time out (after the excellent Potter’s Field), Maddy is on the hunt for what the Scots term a “signature killer,” a murderer who leaves a Glock pistol and a bullet at the scene of each of his kills. When one of the killer’s victims turns out to be a highly placed corporate attorney, Maddy must run the gamut of the city’s rich and powerful. As Maddy dryly points out, “Kill a lawyer and suddenly half of Glasgow looks guilty.” Like Maddy, the prose here is smart and snappy, but every now and then author Dolan gives us an insight into the dark heart of hatred in passages delivered by the murderer himself. Although we don’t get to meet the signature killer in person until the final pages, we are treated throughout to his musings about death: “Everything that has ever happened has led to you lying there on the floor, in your bed, falling, falling. Death knows what to do. When the lever must be thrown, the curtain dropped. The trigger pulled.” This is a killer who is quiet, thoughtful, and sometimes even merciful, whereas Maddy is always brash and impulsive—the killer’s opposite. Yet, in a way, the two are made for each other, which makes the denouement both shocking and heartrending. As funny as Lies of the Land is, after turning its final page, the reader is left with a serious question: When, if ever, is killing justified? And if killing is sometimes justified, should it be done at the hands of the State, or the individual who’s been harmed? It’s hard for a novel to successfully blend the tragic with the comic, the cruel with the compassionate, but Lies of the Land does just that. And it does so perfectly.
Having read and enjoyed every Agatha Christie mystery ever written, I can attest that this new Hercule Poirot puzzler is as close as anyone can come to the original Christie masterpieces. In fact, it is even more densely plotted than most of Dame Agatha's. To top it off, it also features a meticulously drawn floor plan of the mystery's mansion to help readers orient themselves as the action proceeds.
As the story begins, Lady Athelinda Playford invites Poirot and a Scotland Yard detective named Edward Catchpool to a party at a wealthy estate in County Cork, Ireland. Poirot accepts the unexpected invitation because his little grey cells tell him that there may be murder afoot. His friend, Catchpool, thinks he’s been invited to share his detecting expertise with mystery writer, Lady Playford. As usual, the little Belgian detective gets it right.
At a sumptuous dinner on the first evening, Lady Playford announces that she is changing her will, leaving everything to her wheelchair-bound male secretary whose serious kidney ailment will presumably allow him only a very short time to live. This shocks everyone at the table, including Playford’s son and daughter, their significant others, and even the secretary himself. Before the evening is over, a murder is committed, and everyone at the mansion becomes a suspect.
Narrated primarily by the Scotland Yard detective, the ensuing mystery takes a myriad of twists and turns and includes so many red herrings, you could start a fish store. In true Christie fashion, the denouement includes a gathering of all of the potential suspects in one room while Poirot produces a motive for just about everyone present until he finally uncovers the actual murderer.
The only quibble I have is that the plot is incredibly devious, and, as a result, the unmasking of the killer takes longer than most Christie novels—but then again, maybe that is a plus for readers who enjoy very intricate plotting.
David Morrell concludes his brilliant Thomas De Quincey trilogy (after Murder as a Fine Art and Inspector of the Dead) with another tale that fictionalizes a true-life case: the first murder committed on a British railway train. Someone has killed wealthy solicitor Daniel Harcourt in a first-class train compartment, then thrown his body out of the window and onto the tracks. Thomas De Quincey and his daughter Emily hear the death struggle from their adjoining locked car, but are powerless to help until the train reaches its destination in the small village of Sedwick Hill. (In 1855, when the book takes place, train compartments were configured like today’s cattle cars; locked from the outside, with no aisles connecting one car to the next.)
After alerting the local authorities, they join the search for Harcourt and eventually find his mutilated corpse beside the tracks. A hurried telegram to London summons Scotland Yard detectives Sean Ryan and Joseph Becker, old friends of the De Quinceys who welcome Thomas' help. Still, the investigation does not go smoothly, hindered in part by De Quincey's opium addiction. The writer is notorious throughout Victorian England after publishing his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and though—aided by his ever-vigilant daughter—he is attempting to taper off of the drug that has ruined his life, his shaky state does not inspire confidence among the dead man’s high-and-mighty business associates.
One of the meatier aspects of the De Quincey trilogy is that it is set amid real historical events, which lends the books considerable poignancy. The English public has lost its faith in its inept military and political leaders with the disastrous Crimean War (1853-1856). There are even rumblings of revolution. The hostilities between England and Russia are further complicated by the sudden death of Czar Nicolas I. Although the official cause of death is typhus, many Russians believe his German doctor, who is now on the run in England with Russian agents hard on his heels, poisoned him. The De Quinceys’ pursuit of Harcourt’s killer sweeps them into this roiling sociopolitical maelstrom, with Queen Victoria as their only ally. A powerful ally, to be sure, but in 19th century England, the Queen’s power is much less than absolute.
Author Morrell’s careful attention to historical detail is evident here, with copious mentions of real people and real events, both great and small. We learn of nurse Florence Nightingale’s courage in the Crimea; we visit a popular London attraction named the Monster Globe; we even get a short, humorous treatise on the literary works of Sir Walter Scott, because De Quincey once wrote a novel named Walladmor and attributed it to Scott. Moreover, the laughably bad thing became an international bestseller.
For all its carnage and grim happenings (the pages about the fate of orphaned children in Victorian England are truly horrifying) Ruler of the Night is a joy to read. The novel expertly immerses us in another country and another time, while delivering characters so real they could be living next door to us right now. In that same vein, many of us have encountered people struggling with addiction, as is the haunted De Quincey. Thus, for all its Victorian trappings, Ruler of the Night is a novel that feels as timely as ever.
On a beautiful summer morning in the outskirts of Uppsala, Sweden, a young mother and her six-year-old daughter are brutally killed in a horrific hit-and-run accident. But was it really an accident? Their husband and father, Sven-Erik Cederén, a pharmaceutical researcher whose successful startup is about to go public, has gone missing, and there is little evidence for dedicated detective Ann Lindell and her diligent, close-knit homicide team to go on. The few facts they uncover provoke more questions than answers. Who was Sven-Erik’s lover? Why did he recently buy land in the Dominican Republic—with company funds? Is the takeover of a local TV news broadcast by animal-liberation activists connected to the case? Slowly, distracted by ongoing personal troubles, Lindell pieces together the details. It takes persistence, intuition, and luck, but eventually a shocking revelation emerges.
The story in Stone Coffin builds incrementally, and inexorably, to its cynical conclusion. It conveys a realistic portrait of police work, where methodical attention to detail results in occasional, sudden bursts of insight, while powerful bureaucratic forces move mysteriously behind the scenes. Lindell’s anxiety over her personal life mixed feelings about her own workaholic tendencies, and cordial relationships with colleagues are convincing and relatable. The writing is spare and precise, with lyrical portrayals of interpersonal relationships and the power of nature. (For example, two seemingly unconnected characters share a love of gardening.) The characters represent a wide range of believable individual personalities. Stone Coffin is a police procedural that refuses to wrap everything up neatly in a simple, happy ending. It remains true to life, believable, and troubling to the last word.
In Every Man a Menace, crime writer Patrick Hoffman follows multiple characters through the complex and dangerous world of illegal drug trafficking, particularly the psychoactive drug MDMA (commonly known as ecstasy). The reader is first introduced to Raymond Gaspar, an ex-con freshly out of prison, who is asked to keep tabs on an unpredictable San Francisco drug dealer. Many of the pages that follow feel slow as Hoffman plays his cards close to the vest. Where Gaspar's assignment is taking him seems unclear as Hoffman gives readers a sense of place and character, but holds back on revealing the overarching story. It is not until the action moves on to Semion Gurevich, an Israeli drug trafficker in Miami whose job is to move product into the United States, that the story picks up. There’s also a mysterious woman, with whom Semion is infatuated, and an ever-widening circle of characters up and down the supply chain. As each new character is introduced, the significance of minor details, including drug-induced visions at clubs and people who are mentioned off-handedly, becomes increasingly significant to piecing together the truth of the novel. It is a slowly building fugue where each new viewpoint is layered over the others, and wherein only the reader begins to piece together the tale's larger details, motivations, and truths.
This clever technique of adding layers from different viewpoints serves Hoffman well until the end of the novel, when the structure overtakes the carefully built characterizations and setting in the expediency of wrapping up loose ends. It leaves readers with a denouement that feels more like an exercise in plot arrangement than a thrilling climax.
There’s no sign of any sophomore slump as blogger-turned-author Sarah Ward follows up last year’s impressive debut In Bitter Chill with another excellent crime novel set in rural Derbyshire.
Twelve years ago Lena Fisher confessed to strangling her husband in bed. A year after she’s released from prison, her “late” husband is found shot in an abandoned morgue. So whom did Lena really kill all those years ago? Why did she say it was her husband, and was she the one who finished the job now? Both Lena’s sister Kat, a counselor, and the police are scrambling for answers, especially after Lena disappears and a teenage boy starts delivering bizarre packages, including an ancient gun from the First World War.
Ward adroitly builds intrigue in A Deadly Thaw. Detectives Sadler, Palmer, and Childs make a welcome return, and the story line moves smoothly as we switch between their perspectives and that of Kat, and between the present and past. Ward has a particularly good touch for authentic characters; flawed and very human, full of foibles and inconsistencies. The crime plot is finely woven, threaded with real-life social issues without ever slowing the momentum or becoming soap-boxy. Overall, A Deadly Thaw underlines Ward’s emergence as a fresh talent well worth reading.
Large quantities of vigilante justice are served up in John Clarkson’s Bronx Requiem, the latest installment in the James Beck series.
On the same day Packy Johnson is released from jail, he ends up dead. This is troubling to Beck, because Packy was one of the main reasons Beck survived prison himself. Filled with regret and anger, Beck decides to do the next best thing: get revenge. Along with a few close associates, Beck pursues Packy's killer and the truth behind his friend's death. It doesn't take much digging before stumbling on a prostitution ring in which Packy’s daughter Amelia, nicknamed Princess, works for pimp Derrick Watkins.
If a fast-paced, gritty action thriller with the occasional brain being blown out of its skull is what you crave, look no further than Bronx Requiem. With an entertaining plot and a likable-enough cast of criminous characters, the novel works best when we are still guessing as to how far up the chain of command the crimes being committed go. Secondary characters could benefit from better delineation, especially the players in Beck’s group of Brooklyn pals, but Clarkson’s breakneck pace leaves the novel’s blemishes largely in the dust.
Edgar Allan Poe and the London Monster is an impressive and stylish first novel. Its inspiration is factual—a maniac dubbed the London Monster terrorized fashionable women in 18th century London by cutting or stabbing their “derrieres” on public streets—but its telling is fictional.
Edgar Allan Poe, as suggested by the title, is the protagonist and he is joined by his own literary creation C. Auguste Dupin, the detective in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” The year is 1840, 50 years since the London Monster’s last known victim, and Edgar Allan Poe has in his possession several letters written between his maternal grandparents, Elizabeth and Henry Arnold, both actors, that appear to implicate them in the crime. It piques the curiosity of both Poe and Dupin, who meet in London to solve the mystery, and are indirectly aided by an elusive stalker of Poe's who mysteriously provides additional letters with clues to help the two detectives in their quest.
Edgar Allan Poe and the London Monster is both unique and entertaining. Edgar Allan Poe is painted as something of his own stereotype (drunken, neurotic), Dupin is refreshingly vivid and well drawn, and the Arnolds—made known only through their letters—are enjoyably eccentric. The mystery is familiar, but its true strength is the atmospheric telling and its literary playfulness. As an example of the latter, the promotional copy for the novel states that “over 30 Poe stories, poems, and essays” are alluded to in the narrative, of which I counted only a handful. Another bit of whimsy is the character of Charles Dickens, a constant correspondent of Poe's, though one who is far too busy to make a personal appearance.
This is a lovely book. Set in Venice at the tail end of WWII, it is a countdown of days until the Germans withdraw and Mussolini is left to his fate. Surviving the war on the outskirts of Venice is Cenzo Vianello, a fisherman who discovers a lifeless girl floating in the water one night.
Shortly after pulling the body onto his boat, German soldiers force him to board their gunboat so they can ask him some navigational questions. Understandably nervous about the corpse hidden under his tarp, Cenzo is surprised that it has vanished. He is even more surprised a moment later when he guides his boat away from the Germans and discovers the corpse sitting up and eating his dinner.
And thus begins the story of the village fisherman and Giulia, a young aristocratic Jew who has escaped the Wehrmacht SS, but whose family has been taken (and most certainly murdered). Cenzo hides Giulia for a short time in his village, disguising her as his assistant and teaching her to fish until it becomes clear it is too dangerous for her to remain there. He arranges for Giulia to be smuggled out of Italy to safety, but soon discovers that they have been betrayed. Her courier is dead and she has vanished near a resort at Lake Como in Salo, the last known hideout of Mussolini and the present home of Cenzo's despicable brother, the fascist propaganda film star Giorgio. Despite his hatred of Giorgio—who seduced Cenzo's wife before she died in the war—Cenzo's search for Giulia in Salo brings the two estranged brothers together again.
The Girl from Venice could have become overly complicated and confusing, but in the hands of Martin Cruz Smith, with his light, lovely, poetic prose, and his easy way with a story, it becomes an organic narrative where each new development grows naturally from the one before it, and the denouement is a true work of art. The parts of the book about fishing, especially, have an almost magical quality. The book is billed as a historical thriller, but the hunt for Giulia is something gentler than that—though no less suspenseful or poignant. For all of Smith’s lightness of touch, however, the emotional weight of The Girl from Venice is affecting and deeply moving—one of my favorite reads of the year.
It is always interesting to me to read a historical mystery about an era with which I was not previously familiar. Here the murder takes place in Rajpore, a small Indian state under British rule in 1909. The victim is British Major William Russell, the acting resident in charge. The method: poison. The primary crime solver here is the sole Indian ruler of Rajpore, Maharaja Sikander, an intelligent and benevolent man who thrives on solving mysteries, particularly those involving murder.
On the surface, Major Russell appeared to be a pukka sahib, a good, upstanding man, but just below the surface, he was anything but. As Sikander delves deeper into his background, more and more abominable acts are unearthed...and more and more possible suspects emerge. Who had the best motive? And who had the best opportunity? The investigation takes the maharaja from luxurious palaces to the grungiest underbelly of Rajpore society.
The majority of the investigation involves questioning and re-questioning the possible suspects and trying to stay clear of British Superintendent Jardine, a brain-dead officer in charge of the case who hasn't a clue and has already determined that an innocent man is the culprit. Fortunately, in true Poirot fashion, Sikander finally gathers all of the suspects and British authorities into his magnificent banquet hall where he gradually eliminates all of the possible killers and finally announces the murderer and the motive—all followed by an unexpected twist!
In the detective tradition of Poirot, Holmes, etc., Sikander has a right-hand man with whom he exchanges playful banter throughout the story, in this case, a seven-foot, bullnecked giant of a Sikh warrior named Charan Singh, who, though older than his master, can still hold his own both in battle and badinage. Though the writing is often ornate, I guess that's par for the course in a book about Indian royalty.
The first in a series, this novel takes some time setting the parameters for books to come, but it’s a charming setup and I think most readers won’t mind. Janet and Christine, longtime best friends, have come together in retirement to take over a bookshop in tiny Inversgail, Scotland, where they plan to open, along with their daughters Tallie and Summer, a tearoom next door and a small B&B in the upstairs portion of the shop.
Complicating matters are renters in Janet’s nearby house, so she’s occupying the B&B with daughter Tallie for the time being. She and Christine take a detour past the house one day just to see if the renters are actually there, and find not only a house full of garbage but also a dead woman in the garden shed. The dead woman turns out to be the unpopular local gossip columnist Una Graham, and the four women begin an informal investigation into who wanted Una gone—much to the annoyance of the local constabulary.
MacRae populates her book with various local characters, including an old woman who knits by the bookshop fire and doesn’t say a word—she just buys knitting books. (From a bookseller’s perspective, that’s what’s known as a “dream customer.“)
Speaking of dreams, I can’t count the number of times I've heard bookshop customers mention that they want to own a bookstore in retirement (they are forgetting part of the job is lifting very heavy boxes of books). In this cozy Janet, Christine, Tallie, and Summer’s bookshop may be a wee bit more bustling than it might be in actuality, but I can go ahead and accept that in the name of fun, as readily as I do cozies where the main female characters are able to consume vast quantities of junk food with no physical repercussions. This is a pleasant, gentle read with a suitably complicated solution, four main characters of different backgrounds, and an interesting little town. It is a recipe that could easily give itself over to a long and enjoyable series.
When pieces of human flesh start appearing in barrels of herring sold abroad, private investigators Dandy Gilver and Alec Osborne are called upon by the Scottish herring distributor to get to the bottom of the piscine problem. They are asked to travel incognito to the fishing village on the rocky and windswept Banffshire coast and quietly resolve the issue without attracting the kind of publicity that could potentially destroy the industry and the village. Since Dandy is happily married while Alec is not, they decide to go as a sister-and-brother pair of philologists studying the quaint—and often indecipherable—local language.
Their investigation is hampered not only by the local dialect, but also by the early December weather, which alternates between rainy, windy, sleety, and snowy, with waves crashing ever higher along the coast. Despite these handicaps, the intrepid pair discovers that more than a half-dozen strangers have passed through and seemingly disappeared from the area, the body of a fisherman who recently drowned was never recovered, and the woman he was engaged to has also gone missing.
One of the most enjoyable features of this mystery is learning the very strange ways by which the villagers determine who marries whom, how weddings are conducted, and how children are named, as explained by a variety of unusual characters. Dandy, short for Dandelion, gets to have the most fun engaging with the village women once she is accepted into the fold. Alec gets less information from the more taciturn male villagers, but has valuable insights about the case as the investigation continues.
The denouement takes place during the worst storm to hit the Scottish coast in years, but it leads to a breakthrough in the case and a surprising ending. Warning: you may need to don a sweater to get through this unusual novel.
FBI special agent Evangeline “Eve” Rossi and her Vidocq team of “ex-cons and barely reformed thugs” are a force to be reckoned with, as Stephanie Pintoff continues to prove in her second series novel. In City on Edge, Eve and her team are asked to help find 13-year-old Allie, the daughter of New York City Police Commissioner Logan Donovan. Allie was kidnapped during the chaos that followed an assassination attempt on her father that occurred during preparations for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Eve soon realizes that the assault on Logan was merely to cover up Allie’s abduction. The investigation becomes personal when another child, connected to Eve’s team, is kidnapped.
Pintoff, who won a Best First Novel Edgar for her historical The Shadow of Gotham, again draws on history for her new series. Eve’s team is named for Eugène François Vidocq, a 19th-century French criminal and criminalist, who became the founder and first director of the crime-detection Sûreté Nationale and the head of the first known private detective agency. Considered to be the father of modern criminology, Vidocq has inspired stories by Victor Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe, and Honoré de Balzac.
Pintoff's Vidocq band of crime fighters’ nontraditional ways allow them to go where normal detectives can’t, and knowing how criminals think because they were once criminals themselves doesn’t hurt either. But City on Edge falls short on characterization. Despite the dossiers about Eve and her team that are interspersed between chapters, more development is needed. Each person seems drawn from a comic book, including Eve.
City on Edge shines when showcasing Pintoff’s affinity for the hidden corners of New York City, such as the staging area for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, as Eve and her crew go into parts of the city that few people know about. Pintoff keeps the suspense high and readers’ expectations off-kilter. Anything can happen in City on Edge, and it does.
I love it when I find a story and a character that completely captures my interest. This is the case in Livia Lone, a story about a woman who goes from being a human trafficking victim to a cop and then a killer. While I’m not normally a proponent of vigilante justice, the fact that Livia murders criminals who have beaten the justice system somehow seems right after all that she’s been through. Sold by her parents, abused by sex traders and the “hero” who took her in, she has found a way to survive by creating her own set of rules. The only soft spot on this tough woman is her love for her missing sister, Nason, who was taken by the traffickers to a different location when Nason was 11 and Livia was 13—and whom she has been searching for ever since. It is her search for Nason that propels Livia and her story down an ever-darkening moral path.
The story is told in chapters that alternate between Then and Now, so that as present-day Livia goes about her job as a cop hunting down criminals, readers can see how her decisions and actions are influenced by what came before. It also helps to break up the unrelenting ugliness of her younger years.
In many ways, this is a difficult book to read, especially when you consider that thousands of men, women, and children are suffering in real life the same fate as Livia and her sister. Maybe that is why Livia’s quest to dispense justice in her own way is so satisfying; there’s no doubt that the traffickers deserve their fate. Author Barry Eisler also does an excellent job of humanizing Livia so that she does not come across as a vengeful killing machine, but as someone who tries, and often fails, to control the demons inside. While Livia is flawed and dangerous, she is also vulnerable and relatable, which is quite an impressive feat. I hope that this is not the last that we hear of Livia Lone.
No one expects to come home from a honeymoon and find a dead body in their kitchen, but even fewer people would decide to launch their own murder investigation when the police don’t seem to be making the case a priority. Luckily for readers, Grace Scott, a newspaper reporter and photographer, decides to do just that, which results in her traveling all over Europe trying to track down the story of the man who expired in her kitchen—Lucian Grabole. In the process, she not only infuriates her new husband, but puts herself in the crosshairs of some very dangerous people.
It is easy to see that author Louise Millar was at one time both an editor and a freelance writer—she obviously understands a reporter’s obsession to follow the story, regardless of the consequences. A somewhat parallel story line runs alongside Grace’s, as another reporter, Sula McGregor, chases her own hot lead on two murdered men, neither realizing that at some point both mysteries will collide in a rather shocking way.
Grace is a well-developed character, and I liked watching her evolve from her role as a “good wife” to the globe-trotting journalist she was meant to be. Her husband, Mac, is a little too one-dimensional for my tastes, given his role as the domineering new husband who expects her to stay at home, but the reasoning for this becomes clear as his backstory is revealed. There is an additional story line that focuses on a man living in the store under Grace and Mac’s apartment, and this thread kept me intrigued the entire time as I tried to unravel his identity, much as Grace tried to unravel Lucian’s tale.
In this, the last in Irene Hannon’s romantic suspense series Men of Valor, Finn McGregor is suffering both physically and emotionally from his stint as an Army Ranger. To decompress and escape his loving, but sometimes overbearing family, he retreats to an isolated cabin in the woods of Beaumont, Missouri. The boredom and quiet of nature evaporate when he meets his neighbor, the beautiful book editor Dana Lewis, who is on the run from her own demons.
One morning Dana awakes to find her property has been vandalized. At first it seems like only one in a string of such incidents around Beaumont, but when the attacks on her continue and become even more dangerous, Finn and Dana, who are falling in love, join forces to figure out who is behind them.
At the same time, Beaumont police chief Roger Burnett is fighting his own battle: his wife is living with Alzheimer’s in an expensive long-term care facility for which the money is running out. Then he receives an offer that just may be the answer to his nightly prayers—if he, who has always lived on the straight and narrow, can turn a blind eye to its moral compromises.
Author Hannon has published more than 50 books. Thriller readers who appreciate their suspense with likable characters, an intriguing plot, and a serving of romance will find Hannon delivers again with Tangled Webs.
Show me a book cover with cute puppy faces sticking out of Christmas stockings and I’ll probably buy it no matter what. Fortunately, David Rosenfelt’s The Twelve Dogs of Christmas (on the heels of Who Let the Dog Out?) lives up to its adorable cover, even though it’s about murder. Several murders, in fact. The first to fall is Randy Hennessey, who has complained to the zoning council that his puppy-rescuing neighbor, Martha “Pups” Boyer, is foster mom to 26 dogs, more than her New Jersey town’s legal limit of three. Dutifully following the law, the council orders Pups to get rid of her dog collection by Christmas, but dog-loving attorney Andy Carpenter bounds to the rescue. With some fancy courtroom footwork, he manages to get Pups’ doggie brood a lifelong reprieve.
Things really go to the dogs, though, when Hennessey is found shot to death and the police find a handgun in Pups’ basement that ballistics tests prove killed Hennessey, as well as Pups’ husband and another man a year earlier. As soon as the police learn that her husband’s death left Pups millions in real estate, they arrest her. Yet more woe is to come. During a jailhouse interview, Carpenter finds out that Pups is dying from malignant mesothelioma and has only months left to live. She wants the trial over quickly so she can spend her final days with her dogs.
Orphaned puppies and a dying widow can be tough stuff to read, and if it weren’t for Pups’ feisty attitude and author Rosenfelt’s snarky humor, The Twelve Dogs of Christmas could have been a tragic downer. But the scenes where Pups and Carpenter crack each other up with sly jokes about the New Jersey legal system elicit chuckle after chuckle. But for all Pups’ and Carpenter’s jokes and the book’s light tone, murder remains serious business, and when Carpenter starts working the case, he discovers just how serious it really is. Not only was Pups’ husband shot dead, but Little “Tiny” Parker, the man killed alongside him, was a local gangster, which leads Carpenter into some scary places. In order to prove Pups innocent of triple homicide (don’t forget the puppy-hating neighbor), our hero attorney has to find the real killer. This being a Christmas-themed book, I feel it is appropriate to assure you that Carpenter does crack the case—the motive and the murderer come as a big surprise—and by the end, justice has been served and all is well once more in the peaceable kingdom of New Jersey.
Whether she is writing for print or reporting for TV, Jane Ryland is the consummate journalist—tenacious, ethical, and a believer in justice. And that is how she approaches her latest assignment on sexual abuse on college campuses in Hank Phillippi Ryan’s engrossing Say No More.
Jane is on her way to an interview at the fictitious Adams Bay College for a segment on sexual assault when she witnesses a hit-and-run accident as a luxury car plows into a delivery van and then speeds away. The investigative reporter calls in the driver’s license plate, believing that will be the end of it.
Meanwhile, homicide detective Jake Brogan is investigating the mysterious death of Adams Bay adjunct professor Avery Morgan, a former Hollywood screenwriter. Avery’s body was found floating in her swimming pool in the exclusive Boston community called The Reserve. Was it suicide, an accident, or murder?
Say No More’s compelling plot and appealing characters make this a standout in an already strong series. Ryan's protagonist is no tabloid reporter out for sensation—Jane wants the truth and she pursues it with honor and principles. Longtime readers of the series will also appreciate that the attraction between Jane and Jake has grown into real love. Now engaged—though secretly—the couple still must juggle their personal lives with the fact that their professional lives often are at odds. In this fifth book in the Jane Ryland series, Ryan skillfully merges Jane’s story on sexual assault and the hit-and-run accident with Jake’s caseload, using her story to examine the timely and important issue of sexual assault on campuses and the fact that many go unreported or unpunished.
Milo Cavalli is not your stereotypical police investigator: he is young, handsome, sexy, single, and very, very rich. Half Italian, half Norwegian, he moves easily between the two cultures in this first in a new Norwegian thriller series by Asle Skredderberget. When Ingrid Tollefsen, a researcher in the Oslo branch of a US pharmaceutical firm, is killed in a Rome hotel room, Milo is asked to investigate as he knows the laws of both countries. The only clue is a cryptic, waterlogged note left by Ingrid. When Milo learns her teenage brother was killed two years earlier in an unsolved case, he has a hunch there may be a connection. As he travels from Oslo to Rome to New York and back, trying to solve the murders, he must also deal with his feelings for three very different women. His problems with women don’t end there: he discovers he has a half-sister, and he takes on the plight of a reluctant witness to Ingrid’s brother’s murder—a young undocumented woman who has been hiding from the authorities. Milo agrees to help her with her legal woes if she will tell him what she knows about the murder.
While the main plot of The Oslo Conspiracy is intriguing, a few too many subplots—some of which feel arbitrarily dropped into the story—muddy the waters. Skedderberget’s characters, however, are spot-on and hopefully some of the minor characters, such as Milo's gay half-sister Sunniva and his criminally inclined cousin Corrado Cavalli, will reappear in future books. An interesting start to another Scandinavian series.
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