A winterfest of mystery favorites

A diverse group of suspense fiction greets mystery fans for the New Year.

REVIEWS BY BRUCE TIERNEY

Real-life Los Angeles prosecutor Christopher Darden (you may remember him from the O.J. Simpson trial) has teamed up again with veteran mystery novelist Dick Lochte for another episode in the trials and tribulations of Nikki Hill in L.A. Justice. Hill, an African-American prosecutor, and her boyfriend, Detective Virgil Sykes, find themselves wrapped up in a case involving a 10-year-old millionaire computer whiz, a wealthy playboy dilettante and a gorgeous corpse sprawled out across the bedroom floor. Stir in one vengeful gangster, a venomous teenaged girl and a brace of police officers who play fast and loose with the law, and you have a recipe for homicide, L.A.-style. The Darden-Lochte collaboration, their second (the first was bestseller The Trials of Nikki Hill), is a marriage made in heaven, or at least in Hollywood. Darden's intimate knowledge of the Los Angeles legal system and Lochte's crackling film-noir prose intertwine seamlessly as they craft another first-rate suspense thriller.


Is it possible to review one of Lilian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who . . . books without resorting to kitty alliterations and a vast (some might say half vast) catalog of pussycat puns? Feline protagonists Koko and Yum Yum (they are Siamese, if you please) direct the actions of their human minion, Qwilleran, with purr-ceptive grace and style. In their latest outing, The Cat Who Smelled a Rat the silken sleuths must sniff out an arsonist in remote Moose County ("four hundred miles north of everywhere"). With the help of a pair of neighbor kitties (subordinate claws?) and occasional human intervention, Koko and Yum Yum will bring the miscreant to justice (to say more would be to let the cat out of the you-know-what). Braun is one of the most prolific mystery novelists on the planet; her cheerfully charming mysteries (23 to date, plus a volume of short stories) have been delighting readers for over 30 years. There is no gratuitous gore, no adult language (although it must be said that she finds clever ways to call a spayed a spayed).


Greenwich Village, 1920. Christmas. Olivia Brown and her bohemian friends are celebrating the holidays in the speakeasies, blithely disregarding Prohibition. Olivia is a flask toting, wisecracking feminist, always on the lookout for a good man (although usually finding the bad ones). This Christmas is different from the ones that preceded it, for Olivia is involved ("to the tip of her pretty little nose") in a gruesome murder. With the help of her downstairs tenant, detective Harry Melville, Olivia must find the killer before he finds her. Murder Me Now is the second of the Olivia Brown series by Annette Meyers. The writing is reminiscent of the best of the early detective genre: Hammett, Chandler, West. You will find yourself longing for the simpler days when smoking, drinking and casual sex were taken for granted; when conversation was clever, stimulating and oh so seductive.


Simply put, any time Michael Connelly releases a new book, it is the "tip of the ice pick." Connelly is among the best of the current crop of mystery novelists, and A Darkness More Than Night does nothing to tarnish his reputation. World-weary L.A. police detective Harry Bosch is back for an encore performance, and there is a much-welcomed visit from retired FBI-guy Terry McCaleb. McCaleb has retired to an idyllic sailor's life on Catalina Island, a far cry from his days as an FBI profiler. Drawn out of retirement against his will, he profiles a murderer for a friend on the Los Angeles police force. The deeper he investigates, the more he becomes convinced that the evidence points to none other than Harry Bosch. In a brilliant move, Connelly pits his two most popular heroes against one another, and the loser may wind up in jail or dead. Count on Connelly to set the standard by which crisp suspense prose is measured.


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