Bruce Tierney

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Find Me

Three women take center stage in Alafair Burke’s latest thriller, Find Me: NYPD detective Ellie Hatcher, attorney Lindsay Kelly and amnesiac Hope Miller, who remembers nothing of her life prior to a devastating car crash she survived 15 years ago—or so she says. Now, sans ID or history, Hope works under the radar for a real estate agent, getting paid under the table to stage houses for prospective buyers. Then, as often happens in novels about amnesiacs, a random aha! moment triggers a memory, and we’re off to the races. Hope disappears, blood is spilled and the DNA found at her last-known location matches that of unidentified blood found at an old crime scene halfway across the country. The crime in question is one of a spate of killings thought to be the work of a serial killer, and the case was supposedly solved 15 years ago. Lindsay, who has been Hope’s friend ever since her accident, begins to investigate her disappearance and eventually draws Ellie into the fray. Ellie’s father, who was also a cop, was assigned to the same serial killer case that’s somehow connected with Hope’s disappearance. The two women feverishly piece together the disparate parts of the story, and Burke’s masterful control over pacing and plot reveals will make readers just as anxious to uncover the truth. 

A Narrow Door

Joanne Harris’ darkly humorous and deliciously evil A Narrow Door is a quintessential and unputdownable English mystery. Rebecca Buckfast, headmistress of noted Yorkshire boarding school St. Oswald’s and one of the first-person narrators of this tale, is nothing if not straightforward. She recounts the steps she had to take to become the first female head of the school in its 500-year history. Rebecca doesn’t sugarcoat anything, including the two murders she committed (“one a crime of passion, the other, a crime of convenience”), and yet it is difficult not to respect her motivations and even like her. Sort of. Meanwhile, a parallel tale is offered up by St. Oswald’s teacher Roy Straitley, in the form of a diary that outlines the discovery of what appears to be human remains in a construction site on the school grounds. As Roy’s and Rebecca’s stories unfold, both of the narrators take satisfaction in the secrets they are hiding from each other—or, more precisely, the secrets they think they are successfully concealing. A Narrow Door is an exceptionally good novel, such a masterpiece of storytelling that when Rebecca likens herself to a modern-day Scheherazade, it doesn’t feel like hyperbole in the slightest.

Silent Parade

By all accounts, 19-year-old Saori Namiki was on track to become the next big thing in the world of J-pop music. And then, inexplicably, she vanished, and stayed missing until her remains were discovered three years later in a suburban Tokyo neighborhood. Another body is found at the same place: Yoshie Hasunuma, an unremarkable woman save for her stepson, Kanichi, who is widely believed to have skated away from a murder charge years ago and looks pretty good for this latest double homicide as well. In the same way that Scotland Yard Inspector Lestrade often sought the assistance of supersleuth Sherlock Holmes, Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department Chief Inspector Kusanagi regularly summons brainiac physicist Manabu Yukawa, known as Detective Galileo, to consult on particularly difficult homicides. Keigo Higashino’s Silent Parade showcases the fourth such pairing, and is in many ways the most intricate. Detective Galileo must reconsider his theory of the crime again and again, tweaking it repeatedly until he is more or less satisfied with his assessment. He is a very clever man, smart enough to stay a step or two ahead of the police department, the perpetrator (or perpetrators?) and the reader, and that is no mean feat.

BOX 88

The title of Charles Cumming’s latest espionage thriller, BOX 88, refers to a fictional clandestine ops organization that is jointly operated by the United States and the United Kingdom. BOX 88 does not possess a license to kill a la James Bond, but the management certainly utilizes a “license to look the other way” on occasions when wetwork is required. BOX 88 begins a series starring Scottish spy Lachlan Kite, who in this book must come to grips with a very cold case: the 1988 downing of PanAm Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Close to half the narrative consists of flashbacks to immediately after the plane crash, when Lachlan was a green recruit. In the present day, Lachlan lets down his guard at the funeral of his old friend, with disastrous results. He is kidnapped by an urbane-seeming Iranian man who turns out to be anything but urbane when it comes to securing intelligence from a perceived enemy combatant. Worse yet, the kidnapper’s team has also captured Lachlan’s very pregnant wife. If torture will not get them what they want, perhaps threats to Lachlan’s family will do the trick. Despite his mistake at the funeral, Lachlan is a seasoned operative and, if anything, more dangerous to his captors than they are to him. Meanwhile, British intelligence agency MI5 is in hot pursuit, not to help Lachlan but rather to out him as an operative of a rogue agency. The suspense is palpable, the characters flawed but sympathetic in their own ways and the story gripping. In a month of really excellent reads, BOX 88 is a clear standout.

In a month overflowing with superb mysteries and thrillers, a deliciously evil boarding school-set thriller and a pitch-perfect espionage novel rise to the top.
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The Left-Handed Twin

Edgar Award-winning author Thomas Perry returns with The Left-Handed Twin, his ninth novel featuring guide Jane Whitefield, a member of the Wolf clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians. The term guide does not entirely describe Whitefield’s job; she serves as a one-woman witness protection program, spiriting people out of life-threatening situations and into new and safer existences. This time out, she assists a young woman who testified against her boyfriend in a murder trial only to see him acquitted and bent on revenge. The first part of the task is fairly straightforward, utilizing the obfuscation skills Jane has honed over the years, but it all starts to go sideways when the ex-boyfriend enlists the help of the Russian mob, a group with an agenda of its own in locating Jane: extracting information from her about past clients who ran afoul of the mob. Suddenly, she finds herself on the run, and the safest places for her are the forests and fields of Maine’s Hundred-Mile Wilderness, one of the ancestral Seneca territories where she holds the home-court advantage over lifetime city dwellers. Still, her Russian adversaries are nothing if not determined, and there are at least a couple of times when readers will wonder if this is the book where Jane’s story comes to an untimely end.

Bryant & May: London Bridge Is Falling Down

Spoiler alert: London Bridge Is Falling Down marks the final installment of Christopher Fowler’s beloved Bryant and May series. With each passing book, the Peculiar Crimes Unit, which solves murders that stump other branches of law enforcement, finds itself more critically threatened with closure. Both protagonists, cranky Arthur Bryant and the urbane and charming John May, are getting rather long in the tooth (in Bryant’s case, long in the dentures), and cases don’t present quite as frequently as they once did. So in hopes of postponing the inevitable, Bryant goes in search of a case and turns one up: Amelia Hoffman, age 91, whose death does not entirely fall into the catch-all of natural causes. Hoffman had something of a chequered (the English spelling must be used here) past, as it turns out, and before long the case develops into a full-blown conspiracy investigation. The narrative neatly straddles the blurry line separating espionage fiction from straight-up suspense, and adds for good measure a mean streets of London travelogue and more than a little laugh-out-loud but still dry British humor. Lovers of this series need not despair (well, not yet). Next year, we will see Bryant and May’s Peculiar London, a companion travelogue of sorts in which fan-favorite characters will hilariously dish on their home city while ambling about its streets, and there will be no dead bodies to be found anywhere.  

So Far and Good

For the better part of 30 years, I have counted myself as a major fan of John Straley’s sporadic series featuring Alaska-based PI Cecil Younger. From the outset, 1992’s Shamus Award-winning The Woman Who Married a Bear, the books have combined grittiness, social issues and introspection with whimsy and slapstick, as the hapless investigator moves from crisis to crisis, both business and personal. So Far and Good, the latest adventure, finds Cecil serving seven-plus years in prison for homicide, arguably a necessary one. His daughter, Blossom, visits him regularly, and this time she has an interesting tale to tell: Her best friend took a DNA test to surprise her mom with an ancestry-related gift and discovered that she and her “mom” were not in any way related. As it turns out, this friend was abducted as an infant, and the case has remained unsolved for the past 16 years. Should be a happy ending, right? Instead, it serves as the catalyst for a suspicious suicide, a near-homicide and assorted disappearances. And Blossom joins the missing, it will take all of his considerable savvy, not to mention a reversal of his inherent unluckiness, to set his world back in order (more or less) once again. 

★ War Women

The year that John Straley’s first Cecil Younger book appeared, 1992, also marked the debut of Martin Limón’s excellent series featuring George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, military police partners stationed in Itaewon, Korea, in the 1970s. Several plot lines wind around one another in the pair’s latest outing, War Women. First off, there is the disappearance of their best confidential informant, along with some particularly sensitive classified documents about impending military exercises. Then there is the nosy reporter who has acquired explicit, potentially career-ending photos of an Army general and the hasty cover-up attempts that spiral speedily out of control, the suspense building until the final, nerve-shredding shootout. But these events are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. A culture of abuse targeting female service members has permeated every level of the military hierarchy, and there are those who will kill to keep that culture thriving. Bascom and Sueño, while still their customarily smart-aleck selves, are more thoughtful this time around. They’re not overcome by the gravity of the situation, but they’re certainly affected by it. War Women is the most sobering of the series to date, while still being a book readers will want to devour in one sitting. 

Thomas Perry gives fans the gift of another Jane Whitefield thriller and a beloved series comes to an end in this month’s Whodunit column.
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The Shadows of Men

Calcutta, 1923: Then, as now, the state of Muslim-Hindu relations evoked an image of a short-fused powder keg, awaiting only the striking of a convenient match. The murder of a prominent Hindu theologian provides said spark, setting the stage for Abir Mukherjee’s fifth novel, The Shadows of Men. Police Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee are tasked with unraveling the circumstances of the homicide before holy war breaks out in the streets and alleyways of West Bengal’s most populous city, Calcutta. Things take a complicated turn almost immediately, as Banerjee finds himself framed for the aforementioned murder and thus removed from the state of play, at least in any official capacity. But he and Wyndham have never been what you’d call sticklers for the rules, and this time will prove to be no exception. Their investigation, at times in tandem but more often in parallel, will carry them to Bombay, which is unfamiliar turf to both of them. There they will discover that there is more afoot than just age-old cultural and religious enmity, and that certain third parties may harbor a keen—albeit covert—interest in fanning the flames of mutual intolerance. The narrative is first-person throughout, switching from Wyndham’s perspective to Banerjee’s in alternating chapters, an unusual and clever approach that keeps readers dead center in the melee, while at the same time poised on the edges of their seats.

All Her Little Secrets

Wanda M. Morris’ debut novel, All Her Little Secrets, is a multilayered, atmospheric thriller with subplot atop subplot. In a 200-odd-word review, I can barely scratch the surface. The main characters are Atlanta corporate attorney Ellice Littlejohn, a Black woman who is the lead counsel for a thriving transport company; her brother Sam, a ne’er-do-well who skates very close to the edge of legality, and sometimes over the edge; her auntie Vera, once a ball of fire, now laid low by advancing episodes of dementia; and CEO Nate Ashe, a Southern gentleman who might be looking out for Ellice’s interests but who also might be a corrupt businessman attuned to the optics of displaying a minority woman in a position of power. Then there is a murder, and another, and it becomes next to impossible for Ellice to determine who is in her corner. Examinations of racism, sexism, ageism and classism (and probably other -isms I have forgotten about) abound, making All Her Little Secrets a very timely read, in addition to being one heck of a debut.

Psycho by the Sea

A handful of pages into Lynne Truss’ hilarious new installment in her Constable Twitten series, Psycho by the Sea, I found myself imagining it as a BBC TV series with an eccentric “Fawlty Towers” sort of vibe, perhaps with a screenplay penned by Graham Greene. The characters are delightfully overblown, the storyline whimsical (well, if a cop killer who boils his victims’ severed heads fits your notion of whimsy).The novel is set in 1957 in the English seaside town of Brighton, which is not the sort of place that jumps to mind as crime central. Still, a number of locals make a good living pushing the boundaries of the law, including Mrs. Groynes, the lady who makes the tea at the Brighton police station. Privy as she is to the daily departmental goings-on, she ensures that the constables will be conveniently far from wherever her crimes are set to take place. When the severed-head-boiling killer escapes from the psychiatric detention facility he has called home for several years, perhaps aided in that getaway by a staff psychotherapist, all manner of ghoulish things begin to take place in the otherwise somnolent resort. While Psycho by the Sea is not the most suspenseful story on offer this month, it is easily the funniest, the quirkiest and the most entertaining read of the bunch. 

★ Silverview

When John le Carré passed away in December 2020, he left a gift behind for his readers: Silverview, one last novel from the master of espionage. The story goes that le Carré began work on the book nearly a decade ago, but it was held for publication as the author “tinkered” with it (a sly nod to his 1974 book Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy?). The tinkering paid off. Silverview is one of his best works, an intricate cat-and-mouse tale in which just who is the feline and who is the rodent is up in the air until the final pages. When bookshop owner Julian Lawndsley meets Edward Avon, he is virtually bowled over by the larger-than-life demeanor of the elderly white-haired gentleman. Together they hatch a plan to expand Julian’s bookstore. Meanwhile, British intelligence has launched an investigation into a long-ago incident in Edward’s life, one that suggests he may still be in the spy game. If this is true, it’s anybody’s guess who his employer might be, for it is certainly not the home team. Not that the home team could even remotely be considered the good guys, mind you. But I suppose treason is treason, irrespective of the morality of the players. Perhaps even more world-weary in tone than the le Carré books that preceded it, Silverview will make readers look askance at the sort of things their countries do on the world stage.

The Shadows of Men Calcutta, 1923: Then, as now, the state of Muslim-Hindu relations evoked an image of a short-fused powder keg, awaiting only the striking of a convenient match. The murder of a prominent Hindu theologian provides said spark, setting the stage for Abir Mukherjee’s fifth novel, The Shadows of Men. Police Captain Sam […]
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When you launch your search for a chilling suspense novel to read on vacation, why limit yourself to the tried-and-true favorites? Many new authors are trying their hands at whodunits this season, and I’ve found four whose debuts are great candidates for your summer reading list.

You have to love a story that sets its entire tone in the first sentence: “The shovel has to meet certain requirements.” And, in a mystery novel at least, where there is a shovel, can a burial be far behind? With his debut novel, Bad Things Happen, author Harry Dolan has channeled the great noir mystery novelists like James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. He has crafted a sly and suspense-filled tale set in the environs of a mystery periodical, Gray Streets. The stories in Gray Streets follow a simple formula: plans go wrong, bad things happen, people die. But then real life for our protagonist David Loogan starts to look a lot like a plot for a story in Gray Streets when he gets roped into helping his boss dispose of a corpse. And quickly, plans go wrong, bad things happen, people die. And let me say this: the characters in Bad Things Happen are masters at telling lies. There are layers upon layers of deceit, several murders, a veritable Pike’s Place worth of red herrings and a convoluted storyline guaranteed to intrigue. Oh, and if you can guess the culprit(s), you’re better at this than I am!

Escaping the past
By most measures, it would be difficult to like a character, who, by page 13, has shot and killed his longtime friend and mentor simply to save his own skin. Still, even if you don’t exactly like Paul Dark, you cannot help but be drawn into his machinations as he desperately tries to cover his tracks and distance himself from treason charges in Jeremy Duns’ cracking debut thriller, Free Agent. The tale begins in the closing days of WWII, when Dark was a young secret agent tasked with the clandestine execution of Nazi war criminals. Seduced by a comely young Georgian (that’s Georgia as in “Back in the USSR,” not as in “Georgia on My Mind”) nurse, Dark is recruited as a double agent for Mother Russia. Fast-forward 20 some years: a KGB officer, eager to defect to the West, has a piece of valuable information to trade for asylum—the identity of the British double agent embedded all those years ago. Dark must go into cleanup mode, and fast. All the players seem to have agendas within agendas, leaving the reader to wonder just who is playing whom, and how, and why. A diabolically clever novel that will keep you guessing until the final moments.

Be careful what you wish for
It is easy to look at the lives of others and think, if I could be like them (or have their stuff or date their girlfriend), then I would be happy. For Jay Porter, the protagonist of Attica Locke’s debut thriller Black Water Rising, the pie-in-the-sky dream was to be a lawyer, no easy feat for a young black activist in the 1970s. He has pulled it off, but it isn’t bringing him the recognition and financial security he had hoped for. His clients are “B-list” at best: his major case at the moment involves a young escort allegedly injured while plying her trade in a moving car, resulting in an epic denouement featuring a crash into a phone pole. It is not the sort of case of which dreams (or careers) are made. It scarcely matters, though, because Porter’s life is about to take a turn he could not have anticipated in a hundred years: he saves a drowning woman, and in doing so, unwittingly becoming a pawn in a deadly game involving a warring union, some good-old-boy oilmen, and the power elite of Houston. Locke could easily be compared to T. Coraghessan Boyle, Walter Mosley or Dennis Lehane: for one thing, she is in their class as a wordsmith, but more than that, she locks into a tumultuous period of American history, reflecting the social class structures and their attendant injustices through the eyes of her protagonist. Black Water Rising is an excellent book by any measure, but as a debut, it is nothing short of astonishing.

Fighting crime in a sleepy Amish town
I almost didn’t read Linda Castillo’s debut suspense novel, Sworn to Silence—a novel about an Amish cop in Ohio, penned by a former romance novelist, for heaven’s sake—until I happened to glance at the back cover, where I found exceptionally complimentary blurbs from Alex Kava, Lisa Scottoline and C.J. Box, three writers I admire greatly. I’m afraid I am as much a sucker for a good blurb as the next guy, so I decided to give the book a try. Painter’s Mill police chief Kate Burkholder is a “lapsed” Amish woman living outside the enclave, shunned by the Amish community for having embraced modern ways. She is a good choice for police chief, however, with strong law enforcement skills and an insider’s knowledge of the Amish language and people. When a series of murders rock sleepy Painter’s Mill, they strongly resemble four unsolved rape/murders of 16 years before, even down to details—which were suppressed in the original case. But that cannot be, for that killer is long dead—Kate knows that for a fact. Or does she? Kate will have to dredge up (literally) a skeleton from her distant past if she is to have any hope of solving the current batch of murders, and keeping the perpetrator from killing again. With high suspense, just a bit of romance and a very clever villain, Sworn to Silence is a rare example of a book that can be judged by its (back) cover.
 

When you launch your search for a chilling suspense novel to read on vacation, why limit yourself to the tried-and-true favorites? Many new authors are trying their hands at whodunits this season, and I’ve found four whose debuts are great candidates for your summer reading list. You have to love a story that sets its […]
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It’s always a pleasure to read books by longtime favorite authors, but finding a new writer who can keep you up all night is a special treat. Here are three new voices in crime fiction, each worthy of recognition.

Fina Ludlow could have taken the easy route—a cushy corporate gig with her family’s high-powered law firm—but it had the look of a velvet prison. Instead, she dropped out of law school and hung out her shingle as a private investigator. Grudgingly, her domineering father has kept her somewhat in the fold, utilizing her sleuthing talents whenever they are required for a first-class (read: underhanded) defense of a clearly guilty client. It is a matter of devotion, after all, that defines the family’s values and offers up the title of Ingrid Thoft’s engaging debut, Loyalty. When Fina’s sister-in-law abruptly disappears, the cops focus on the husband, Fina’s older brother Rand, who was seen carrying a large chest to his boat, then sailing off and returning with no chest to be found. Fina senses that there is more here than meets the eye, but she pursues the case out of familial obligation. Her allegiances will be tested, as will her detective skills, for it is likely that someone close to her is singularly undeserving of her loyalty.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read an interview with Ingrid Thoft for Loyalty.

SUMMER SUSPENSE
Having lamented the disappearance of such complex and haunted stalwarts as John Rebus from the mystery pantheon, let us welcome a wonderfully troubled new entry, Barcelona police inspector Hector Salgado, in Antonio Hill’s The Summer of Dead Toys. The charge against Salgado: police brutality. The fallout: probation and self-imposed exile to his homeland of Argentina. Now, however, Salgado is back, and he needs a far-reaching case to take his mind off the savaged Nigerian girl and the sleazy human trafficker who provoked his uncharacteristically violent behavior. Instead, Salgado’s boss gives him an easy re-entry into the workforce, a no-brainer case of an accidental death (or perhaps suicide) of a young man who fell from an apartment window. That initial assessment doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny, however, and the case files quickly become littered with tales of drug deals gone sour, cover-ups protecting the rich and the resurfacing of crimes long buried. This fine debut will appeal to fans of Nesbø and Rankin, especially ones who enjoy a little Catalonian sunshine illuminating the darker corners of their mysteries.

VIRTUAL SINS
Jonathan Holt’s gripping debut, The Abomination, book one of a planned trilogy, is unique in that it is set in two places in one time—sort of. Both settings are modern-day Venice: one, the beloved city; the other, a brick-by-brick cyber replication courtesy of a website called Carnivia, in which anonymous users can conspire and move information clandestinely throughout virtual Venice without government interference. Meanwhile, a highly unusual murder takes place. The victim is a woman dressed in the sacred robes of a Catholic priest—but the Catholic Church does not recognize female priests, and the corpse becomes known as “the Abomination.” The case is assigned to Captain Kat Tapo, who quickly finds her pursuit leading her in strange directions: to superannuated U.S. military bases, unforthcoming clerics and the convoluted virtual world of Carnivia. The Abomination is a tantalizing debut, a masterful melding of religious mystery, political intrigue and just a bit of fantasy/sci-fi.

It’s always a pleasure to read books by longtime favorite authors, but finding a new writer who can keep you up all night is a special treat. Here are three new voices in crime fiction, each worthy of recognition. Fina Ludlow could have taken the easy route—a cushy corporate gig with her family’s high-powered law […]
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You know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake up amid a team of disgraced Abu Ghraib prison guards who have kidnapped you and are becoming significantly fed up with your unwillingness to answer their questions. The victim is Isaiah Quintabe, known in his California neighborhood by his initials, IQ. Wrecked is Joe Ide’s third novel featuring IQ, and it’s the first time IQ has a chance of expanding his business into a full-fledged private investigation agency. At any given time, IQ fields a number of cases, but the one that becomes central to Wrecked has to do with the machinations of a Blackwater- esque mercenary, a man with little in the way of scruples and lots in the way of sadistic behavior. Wrecked takes Ide’s unlikely hero into new territory, with foes that test his mettle in ways his previous adversaries could not even fathom, and with a possible love interest that exposes an entirely new facet of IQ’s character.

ALL FOR JUSTICE
V.I. Warshawski, like all of us, is not getting any younger. She is well past the age of dangling upside down in search of clues or doing fishtail burnouts in her V-8 Mustang to avoid getting shot, and certainly past the years when she should be treading across thin ice floes to keep a priceless artifact out of the hands of a ruthless billionaire. But in Sara Paretsky’s latest thriller, Shell Game, age seems a nonissue, as V.I.’s latest crusade leads her to engage in all these dangerous activities and more. Two cases weave in and out of the narrative: the first, a murder charge hanging over the beloved nephew of V.I.’s godmother, surgeon Lotty Herschel, involving a Syrian archaeological dig and a dissident immigrant poet on the lam from ICE; the second, the mysterious disappearance of V.I.’s niece following a Caribbean junket that turned sinister in ways that no travel brochure would suggest. As is usually the case with Paretsky’s novels, there is considerable social and political commentary, so if you are a capital-C Conservative, you might want to give some thought to how much you are willing to have your convictions challenged. Everyone else can revel in the superb pacing, the well-developed characters and the crisp dialogue from one of the most consistently excellent writers in the genre.

KIDNAPPING IN TAIWAN
Readers don’t have to wait long—not even to the end of page one—to get to the setup for Ed Lin’s latest Taipei Night Market mystery, 99 Ways to Die. There has been an abduction of a prominent businessman, who happens to be the father of protagonist Chen Jing-nan’s erstwhile classmate Peggy Lee (not the husky-voiced jazz singer Peggy Lee of “Fever” fame, but rather the youngest daughter in a family of Taiwanese aristocrats). The kidnappers’ ransom demands are not for money; instead, they want access to a computer chip, which Peggy Lee claims to know nothing about. But chances are good that Peggy Lee is playing for time and saving face in a society where face is everything. Jing-nan, for his part, is not someone you’d think of as a PI—he runs a popular food shop in a Taipei night market—but Peggy Lee is headstrong, and if she wants Jing-nan on the case, he has little choice but to assent. 99 Ways to Die is the third in the series and is the most fleshed out of the three. Ultimately, Lin’s books are most appealing for the insider’s look at Taiwanese culture, the motley crew of supporting cast and the multiple laughs per page.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY
Imagine, for a moment, a Nancy Drew mystery told partially in flashback by Nancy herself, a girl grown up into the Best Detective in the World—her own rather immodest appellation—and now facing Her Most Perplexing Case. Then you will begin to have an idea of Sara Gran’s strange yet wildly entertaining novel The Infinite Blacktop. Somewhere along the way, our Nancy (whose name is actually Claire DeWitt) has evolved into a modern-day Sam(antha) Spade, with an overlay of street smarts and Zen calm counterbalancing one another in strangely effective ways. As the book opens, Claire comes very close to getting taken off the board permanently when her rented Kia is deliberately broadsided by a 1982 Lincoln, an event on par with a wooden rowboat getting rammed by the USS Nimitz. As she looks into who is trying to punch her ticket, she is drawn into a rethinking of the one case the Best Detective in the World has never been able to solve: the disappearance of her partner-in-crime-solving back when they were teenagers. As the narrative proceeds, another cold case gets woven in, and Gran deftly jumps back and forth between them, bringing the reader along for a wild ride across the decades.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

You know it’s going to be a bad day when you wake up amid a team of disgraced Abu Ghraib prison guards who have kidnapped you and are becoming significantly fed up with your unwillingness to answer their questions.
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Martin Limón’s fine series of military police procedurals, set in South Korea in the mid-1970s, features George Sueño and his sidekick, Ernie Bascom—U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division agents who are the go-to guys when there’s a murder or some similarly sensitive issue regarding the military in the Land of the Morning Calm. The Line finds our heroes investigating the murder of a young Korean soldier whose body is found a few feet north of the line dividing North Korea from South. Technically, Sueño and Bascom shouldn’t have dragged the body back across the line into the South, but they’ve never been sticklers for details like that. When a suspect presents himself, the powers that be are eager to pin the murder on him. Sueño and Bascom think the whole thing is just a little too pat, however, and despite explicit orders to the contrary, they decide to delve into the matter. They find themselves caught up in a criminal enterprise that involves fraud, smuggling and perhaps human trafficking, plus the aforementioned murder. I have read every Limón book since 1992’s Jade Lady Burning, and I have every intention of continuing to do so; they are that good.

A SECRET THAT CAN’T BE KEPT
Catriona McPherson successfully channels the mystery chops of Agatha Christie and the dialogue skills of Noël Coward (apologies for the dated references, but this book has that sort of feel about it) in her standalone psychological thriller Go to My Grave. Back in 1991, there was a Sweet 16-ish party at a Scottish manor house that had seen better days, and something seriously awful happened. Now in present day, whether by happenstance or by design, several of the 1991 revelers find themselves back at the same B & B, which has been restored and is virtually unrecognizable. The eight guests are all family members, by blood or by marriage. But there is bad blood—and bad marriage—on display here, and another something awful is poised to take place. I’m not giving anything away to say that even a newbie reader of suspense fiction will feel a Stephen King-esque prickle of menace as things start to get out of hand, and even the most jaded of suspense aficionados should be gobsmacked by the twist at the end.

BECOMING BOND
Occasionally an author’s estate or a publisher gets the idea to craft a prequel to a popular series, and Anthony Horowitz performs this duty for ace British spy James Bond in Forever and a Day. As the book opens, M (the big boss of MI6) is discussing the death of agent 007, which initially seems odd, as this is at the inception of Bond’s illustrious career. But it turns out that the 007 under discussion is the previous holder of that particular license-to-kill number, and Bond is quickly promoted to take on his predecessor’s responsibilities. His mission takes him to the south of France, where he engages the first of the legendary villains that will characterize the adventures of Bond’s later life. The book uses some source material from original Bond author Ian Fleming, and of all the Bond books that have come out since Fleming’s death, this one may hew closest to the originals. The racy English sports cars, check. The sultry femme fatale, check. The oversize (both in girth and in ego) villain, check. Oh, and here’s a bonus: For those who have ever wondered why Bond drinks his martinis shaken, not stirred, this book is where you will find the answer.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY
Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series has been a mainstay of my professional and pleasure reading since the Shamus Award-winning The Guards (2001). The series follows the downfall of Galway cop Taylor and his efforts to climb out of the (very deep) hole he created for himself with his alcoholism and his exceptionally poor choices of friends and lovers. The opening pages of In the Galway Silence find Taylor a little more settled than before: There is a romantic interest that tentatively seems to be working out, a bit of money in the bank, and he has the drinking under control for the most part. When bad stuff starts happening, only Taylor’s harshest critic could assign the responsibility to him—although it goes without saying that Taylor is his own harshest critic. One child is kidnapped and brutalized, another murdered, and a killer is on the rampage. Taylor knows who the culprit is and is powerless to do anything about it. But you can push Taylor only so far, and when he snaps, he’s gonna go bat%#@& crazy, which is the high point of Bruen’s books for most readers. Taut plotting, a staccato first-person narrative, deeply flawed yet sympathetic characters and the windy, wet Irish milieu conspire to put Bruen’s novels into a class by themselves.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

November's best mysteries include both the beginning of Bond and a house party gone murderously wrong . . .
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December isn’t typically the strongest of months for new book releases, but this year, what is lacking in quantity is more than made up for in quality, with books from four of the finest contemporary suspense writers from North America, Europe and Japan.

A BOGGLING MYSTERY
It’s 1944, the closing days of World War II. Two men dig feverishly in a peat bog in Scotland to create a hole large enough to accommodate a pair of American motorcycles. Fast-forward to current day, when the granddaughter of one of the men decides to unearth the motorcycles. The first motorcycle has survived its lengthy incarceration beautifully, but there’s a dead body where the second should be. Enter Karen Pirie, cold case detective (because, hey, cases don’t get much colder than this), in the fifth installment of Val McDermid’s popular Karen Pirie series, Broken Ground. Things take a turn for the weird(er) when the body, supposedly buried for some 70 years, is discovered to be wearing a pair of Nikes. McDermid’s books are relentlessly excellent, with sympathetically flawed characters, well-crafted storylines, a clever twist or two and crisp dialogue. It’s no wonder she is considered the queen of Scottish crime fiction.

A NEW CRIME DUO
Cold cases are a running theme this month, as Michael Connelly pairs series stalwart Harry Bosch with Renée Ballard in their first (but hopefully not their last) adventure together, Dark Sacred Night. Ballard first showed up in 2017’s The Late Show as a solo act, but she and Bosch work exceptionally well as a duo, investigating the unsolved 2009 murder of a young runaway. The case holds a personal component for Bosch, as the mother of the murdered girl is staying at his house. There aren’t many clues available after the passage of so much time, but Bosch is dogged in his pursuit, and his personal creed—everybody counts or nobody counts—gets a run for its money this time out. Connelly does an exceptional job of giving voice to both his protagonists. They share a bit of an outsider’s perspective—respected for their work but not always liked by their peers—and this is what makes them such a formidable team. My favorite Connelly books pair Bosch with protagonists from his other books, like Mickey Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer, and this latest pairing is truly inspired.

NEIGHBORHOOD SECRETS
Keigo Higashino is one of Japan’s best-known suspense authors, and he has begun to carve a niche for himself in the rest of the world thanks to The Devotion of Suspect X, Malice and his latest Detective Kaga novel, Newcomer. Since we last saw Kaga, he has suffered a demotion from the Tokyo Police Department’s Homicide Division to a more local role in the quiet neighborhood of Nihonbashi. But his homicide experience soon gets him assigned to the team investigating the death of a woman found strangled in her apartment. Kaga’s Zen approach to crime solving is at odds with conventional police procedures, but it would be hard to find fault with his results. One by one, he interviews shopkeepers, neighbors and denizens of the streets, and he begins to create a picture of a homicide that has an entire neighborhood of potential suspects. Kaga, a modern-day Hercule Poirot, thinks even further outside the box than his Belgian predecessor, to the great delight of mystery aficionados.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY
Louise Penny’s novels are unique for how seamlessly they straddle the line between charming small-town mysteries and big-city police procedurals. As Kingdom of the Blind opens, protagonist Armand Gamache, former head of the Sûreté du Québec, receives a strange invitation to an abandoned farmhouse, and an even stranger request to act as executor of a will crafted by someone he never met. It is something of a wacky will, with bequests that suggest that the writer was not playing with a full deck of cards. And then a body turns up, and the document takes on a decidedly darker aspect. Meanwhile in Montreal, a huge drug shipment is about to hit the streets, in part because Gamache allowed it to slip through the cracks as part of his plan to bring down the cartels. Most of the drugs were rounded up—except for one large shipment that threatens to destroy many lives, perhaps including Gamache’s. Each Gamache adventure (we are now at the 14th) displaces the previous one as the best in the series. I have read each one twice—first as a one-sitting page turner, and then shortly afterward as a leisurely reread in which I revel in the artistry of the prose, the characterizations, the locales. It’s not to be missed!

 

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

December isn’t typically the strongest of months for new book releases, but this year, what is lacking in quantity is more than made up for in quality, with books from four of the finest contemporary suspense writers from North America, Europe and Japan.

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James Lee Burke is one of a small handful of elite suspense writers whose work transcends the genre, making the leap into capital-L Literature. You don’t have to get past the opening paragraph of The New Iberia Blues to see his mastery of the craft: “Desmond Cormier’s success story was an improbable one, even among the many self-congratulatory rags-to-riches tales we tell ourselves in the ongoing saga of our green republic, one that is forever changing yet forever the same, a saga that also includes the graves of Shiloh and cinders from aboriginal villages.” First-person narrator Dave Robicheaux is on hand and in fine fettle. Fans have watched Robicheaux age in real time, battling his demons, losing one wife, then another and another, raising the refugee girl he rescued from a submerged airplane when she was a small child and skating close to the edge (and sometimes over the edge) of the law. This time out, he will investigate the ritual slaying of a young black woman, nailed to a cross and left to the vagaries of the rising tide. There is a film company in town, and Robicheaux cannot shake the notion that they are somehow at the epicenter of this homicide, and as he gets closer to proving his thesis, the body count piles up. It is a long book, but I read it slowly, pausing from time to time to digest the first-rate prose, the atmospheric bayou setting and the complex interactions of people I feel I have known for 30-plus years.

In James Bond movies, one of the many ways of ratcheting up the tension is to introduce a Bad Thing About to Happen in, say, five minutes’ time, and to regularly return to the flashing digital countdown amid the action to see how much time is left before the Bad Thing transpires. Author Taylor Adams updates this suspense-building device in his supercharged novel No Exit with a dwindling cellphone battery peppering the high-tension text. The scene: a lonely snowbound rest area in rural Colorado, a place with little to no cellphone service, and a protagonist who has left her charger at home on what will prove to be the worst night of her life. At risk are a kidnapped child, albeit a rather resourceful one; a pair of innocent (or maybe not) bystanders; and the aforementioned protagonist, a college student named Darby Thorne, who was en route to her mother’s hospital bedside before her plans were interrupted by the freakish snowstorm and an even more freakish group of fellow strandees at the mountain shelter. Oh, and one last thing, and it really is the last thing—the twist ending is way cool.

Gytha Lodge’s suspenseful new psychological thriller, She Lies in Wait, tells the story of a ruinous outing and its aftermath decades later. Thirty- odd years ago, six friends went camping. Only five came home, and there was never a trace of the missing girl, Aurora Jackson. Her friends, a wide-ranging volunteer search party and even police with cadaver dogs turned up nothing—until now, when a young girl on a family holiday discovers a detached finger beneath a hollow tree within steps of the friends’ original campsite. Police Detective Chief Inspector Jonah Sheens knew Aurora peripherally from his high school days, but he decided to stay on the investigation—a decision his assistant, Detective Inspector Juliette Hanson, will come to question as the investigation proceeds. This isn’t the only secret that comes to light: One of the campers, an Olympic star in later life, displayed a morbid fascination with young women; another of the group, now a well-regarded politician, was caught by Aurora in flagrante delicto with another boy, and more importantly, he had placed a large supply of Dexedrine in the hollow of that tree. I am just scratching the surface of the secrets here. There are plenty more to unearth for yourselves.

In any gathering of mystery writers, Tim Dorsey would be the resident jester, providing more laughs per page than virtually anyone else. His amiably psychopathic protagonist, Serge Storms, is a modern-day Don Quixote, tilting at the windmills of politics, ageism, sexism and any other –ism that happens to catch his fancy. In his latest adventure, No Sunscreen for the Dead, Storms invades a Florida retirement community in the wake of a very public sex scandal featuring a 68-year-old retiree and her much younger boy toy. There are two reasons behind Storms’ invasion, one being that he is perversely fascinated by this salacious news item, the other being that he wants to find an interesting place to live out his golden years. He has all the necessary gear for that, including plaid shorts and knee-length black socks. And the white belt, without which the ensemble, well, c’est incomplète. As the plot develops, Storms gets conscripted into the investigation of some big-dollar swindling in the old folks’ community, and high jinks ensue. And because it is Dorsey chronicling said high jinks, be prepared for mirth—lots and lots of mirth.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

James Lee Burke is one of a small handful of elite suspense writers whose work transcends the genre, making the leap into capital-L Literature. You don’t have to get past the opening paragraph of The New Iberia Blues to see his mastery of the craft: “Desmond Cormier’s success story was an improbable one, even among […]
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The literary exploits of John Lescroart’s San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy, now numbering 18, have been a mainstay of my reading pleasure since 1989’s Dead Irish. Fast-forward 30 years, and an older and wiser Hardy plies his trade ever more ably in The Rule of Law. Phyllis McGowan, Hardy’s secretary, has been a stalwart pillar of support in his personal and business life. But lately, she seems to have gone off the rails. First, there is her mysterious disappearance for several days, and shortly after that, her surprise arrest as an accessory to murder. The evidence, while not entirely damning, is at least suggestive. Extortionist Hector Valdez, who worked for a modern-day Underground Railroad specializing in spiriting immigrants without documentation out of the Border Patrol’s reach, was murdered at the time of McGowan’s disappearance. In the old days, Hardy had a good working relationship with the district attorney, and likely could have negotiated on McGowan’s behalf, but the new DA has a political and personal chip on his shoulder where Hardy is concerned. Thus, this time out, Hardy is doomed to spend as much time battling the supposed good guys as trouncing the supposed bad guys. Lescroart crafts some of the finest legal thrillers out there today, with interesting characters, complex relationships, a taut narrative and, of course, the (now expected, but still somehow surprising) twist ending.

The original plan was for Caroline to lend Audrey $150 for a bus ticket back to Minnesota to visit her dying father. But on the way to the station, Caroline glances over at her friend and says, “Road trip?”—thus setting the stage for Tim Johnston’s second gripping thriller, The Current. The trip will not end well. Being from Georgia, Caroline has no experience with driving in icy conditions, and after an unanticipated and uncontrolled skid, their car hovers atop a precipice above an icy river. They are shaken but safe, at least until they see the flare of headlights in the rearview mirror, then feel the tap of the bumper that nudges their car over the edge. One dies, one barely survives. The small Minnesota town is in shock. Rumors fly about the presence of a second car at the scene, and the whole situation reminds people of a similar case 10 years prior, one that was never solved. As the official investigation progresses, a grieving father, a dying sheriff and a determined young woman begin covert investigations of their own. All are in search of answers, but none is prepared for what they will find.

Fans of the exploits of Charles Cumming’s MI6 agent Thomas Kell will find a lot to like in the author’s new standalone spy thriller, The Moroccan Girl. Bestselling thriller author Kit Carradine is poised to attend a literary festival in Marrakech when he receives a request that would make any suspense writer champ at the bit: track down a mysterious woman, one Lara Bartok, and surreptitiously deliver a passport to her. However, Carradine’s “handler” has been remarkably spare with details concerning Bartok, leaving out such juicy morsels as the fact that she is a well-placed member of an international terrorist outfit and is quite capable of taking care of herself when facing a potential confidant or adversary (especially one whose espionage exploits are limited to his imagination and the printed page). Things heat up when rival intelligence agencies join the fray, all in search of Bartok for conflicting—and often lethal—reasons. And Carradine is about to find out the hard way that real-life espionage bears little resemblance to his page-turning depictions. Cumming channels the dreamy romance of classic spy movies (think Casablanca, Notorious, The Thirty-Nine Steps) and juxtaposes it with a modern, relentlessly intense and staccato delivery.

June 1947, Beverly Hills. Mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel has just been shot to death in his own home by person or persons unknown. Several hundred miles away, rancher Jonathan Craine tends to his daily chores. In an earlier life, Craine was the unofficial liaison between the Los Angeles Police Department and the movie studios, the “fixer” who kept stars and execs safe from exposure and prosecution—but that was a long time ago and far, far away from his current existence. That is all about to change, as hired lackeys from a sinister boss’s crime syndicate arrive by private aircraft to solicit Craine’s assistance in finding Siegel’s killer. And they won’t take no for an answer—cue the music portending graphic violence. Guy Bolton’s The Syndicate reads like a period thriller, with dialogue true to the golden age of film noir, which the author so obviously admires. The plot seamlessly blends fact with fiction, overlaying a series of real-life events with a fast-paced fictional narrative that is riddled with tension. And bullets.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fans of the exploits of Charles Cumming’s MI6 agent Thomas Kell will find a lot to like in the author’s new standalone spy thriller, The Moroccan Girl. Bestselling thriller author Kit Carradine is poised to attend a literary festival in Marrakech when he receives a request that would make any suspense writer champ at the bit: track down a mysterious woman, one Lara Bartok, and surreptitiously deliver a passport to her.

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Top Pick
You have to wonder why one would bother to initiate a murder investigation immediately after half the world has gone kablooey in a nuclear holocaust. But I suppose there is not a lot else that takes precedence over a murder investigation in the wake of nuclear war. Some bastion of civility remains in a small boutique hotel in the Swiss Alps, where a young girl has just been killed. It matters not that the lead investigator in Hanna Jameson’s The Last has no investigative experience—the list of possible suspects is quite short, and motives and opportunities are severely limited by the world events of the past 60-odd days. There are security videos, but the power has been turned off to preserve energy for the upcoming winter when it will be needed for heat. And the caretaker who controls access to the power is something of an enigmatic character, not to mention a prime suspect in the murder, so there won’t be a lot of help from that quarter. Meanwhile, all communications are down, bands of predatory looters in search of food plague the countryside, and slowly but surely the aforementioned “bastion of civility” degrades into some distinctly un­civil behavior. This genre-bending novel neatly embraces dystopian fiction and murder mystery, with the Omega Man starkness of the former and the requisite twists and turns of the latter.

There’s a lot of history between characters Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, dating back to 1990’s Savage Season. The two have had each other’s backs through adventure after adventure, and they have solved cases and cemented their unlikely brotherhood (by East Texas standards) of a straight white guy and a gay black guy. In The Elephant of Surprise, Joe R. Lansdale’s dynamic duo doesn’t expend a lot of energy developing their relationship further; there simply isn’t time. There isn’t even a moment available for self-reflection or friendship evaluation from the moment they rescue a young albino Asian woman with a nearly severed tongue until the epic storm in which they pilot a prison bus of innocent survivors through deep flood waters in an attempt to escape a killer posse of bad guys. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single one of the book’s 256 pages sans bullets, blood spatter, murder and mayhem, all of which are overlaid with Hap’s dry Texas wit. The Elephant of Surprise is the read of the year thus far for adrenaline junkies, action-hero aficionados and, as is always the case with Lansdale’s novels, fans of clever and unexpected similes and metaphors. “The windshield wipers slaved back and forth like a mean librarian wagging her finger at a loud child. . . .”

I have to confess to strongly preferring first-person narration for suspense novels, perhaps because I cut my teeth on the laconic voice-overs of film noir. That said, I quite like Anne Perry’s third-person omniscient voice in her Daniel Pitt novels, the second of which is Triple Jeopardy. The London-set narrative is delivered in period-correct Victorian dialect and prose, which gives it the feel of having been written in another era entirely. The case centers on the alleged bad acts of a man hitherto protected by diplomatic immunity and on his defense in the English court by newly minted barrister Daniel Pitt. It is the first case of Pitt’s career in which he is lead barrister, and it is both a heady and decidedly frightening proposition for him. His client is on trial for embezzlement, but there is the very real possibility that further crimes, including assault and jewel theft, figure in as well—and perhaps even murder. Enlisting the help of his friend Miriam fforde Croft, an early practitioner of forensic sciences, Pitt divides his energies between defense and investigation, and just about the time you have your “aha!” moment, things take a sharp turn in another direction altogether. 

When Anne Hillerman took over the series that made her father, Tony, famous, she gave voice to the female characters in the series, bringing them into the mainstream narrative without taking anything away from the male characters upon whom the series was built. Hillerman wisely left the best parts of her father’s beloved characters’ storylines intact while creating compelling new additions. This time, in The Tale Teller, three parallel tales merge with unexpected results for each of the three protagonists. Retired cop Joe Leaphorn is investigating a case that the local museum director would like to have cleared up before her imminent retirement, that of a priceless traditional Navajo dress that has gone missing. Leaphorn’s former colleague Jim Chee is involved in an investigation of jewelry thefts, largely of Native American antiques. And Bernadette “Bernie” Manuelito must, somewhat reluctantly, share the stage with the FBI in the investigation of a murder on a popular running trail in the Arizona desert. As is always the case with Hillerman novels (either Tony or Anne), the supernatural is never far from the reader’s mind. Witchcraft and Native American lore permeate the narrative in a way that has appealed to readers for nigh on 50 years, with no end in sight.

Top Pick You have to wonder why one would bother to initiate a murder investigation immediately after half the world has gone kablooey in a nuclear holocaust. But I suppose there is not a lot else that takes precedence over a murder investigation in the wake of nuclear war. Some bastion of civility remains in […]
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TOP PICK
It’s Christmastime in the U.K., and all the cops are hoping that maybe this will be the year they’ll get to spend the holidays with their families. It is not to be. “Everything is slack, unurgent. It all smacks of too late,” one of the detectives muses as they pull up to the crime scene. Someone at the scene comments, “She’s been more than killed. She’s more than dead.” And it was then, a scant 17 pages in, when I realized that I would not be putting this book down until I had reached the end. The detectives at the center of Patrick McGuinness’ Throw Me to the Wolves, narrator Ander and his partner Gary, could scarcely be more unalike. Ander is sensitive and introspective, while Gary is a throwback to an earlier time, when beating a suspect or drinking on the job, while not publicly condoned, was not privately condemned either. The suspect is a retired boarding school teacher, someone Ander knew from his school days a lifetime ago, a man seemingly incapable of such a heinous killing. Thus, two parallel narratives emerge, one about the investigation of the murder and a second about events of times long past. McGuinness delves into current events (Brexit, et al.) and lobs numerous digs at the tabloid media, all while delivering a first-rate whodunit. It’s only May, but Throw Me to the Wolves looks like a strong candidate for mystery of the year. Or any year.

Jeffery Deaver already has two major suspense series to his credit, and now he’s starting another with The Never Game, which features arguably the most unusual protagonist of his career thus far: itinerant reward seeker Colter Shaw. An expert tracker thanks to his survivalist father, Shaw travels the U.S. in a Winnebago in search of missing persons. In Berkeley, California, he undertakes an investigation into the disappearance of a teenage girl, a case the local authorities are treating as a simple runaway. It turns out to be anything but. The search leads Shaw to team up with a young female gamer, and it begins to dawn on them that the disappearance bears a striking resemblance to level one of a popular internet survival game called “The Whispering Man.” When a second disappearance occurs, their suspicions seem to be confirmed, except now the unidentified perpetrator has ramped up the difficulty level with an altogether more dangerous and potentially lethal set of outcomes. I would characterize Deaver’s previous novels as mysteries, but The Never Game occupies thriller territory, and it has film adaptation written all over it.

Young Carline Darcy appeared to have it all. Presumptive heir to Darcy Therapeutics, the largest pharmaceutical company in Ireland, by all rights she should have lived a charmed life. But early on, it all went sideways. First, there was her parents’ vitriolic divorce, fueled largely by her selfish and vindictive mother. Then her father was killed in a skiing accident, forcing her to live out her teen years with the unfeeling mother she had rarely seen over the course of her childhood. This personal history comprises the first chapter of Dervla McTiernan’s The Scholar, setting the stage for what’s to come. Fast-forward eight years, and Carline is a university student and researcher. One evening when Darcy Therapeutics medical researcher Emma Sweeney is returning home, she comes upon the dead body of a young woman, the apparent victim of a hit-and-run. Emma summons her boyfriend, Detective Cormac Reilly, to the scene. They are shocked to discover that the ID card carried by the corpse identifies her as Carline Darcy. And if they are shocked, it doesn’t hold a candle to the media frenzy about to be set loose. As the evidence mounts, it becomes increasingly clear that there is involvement on the part of Darcy Therapeutics and perhaps even Emma, whose “discovery” of the body is entirely too convenient for some people to swallow. Cormac must walk the fine line between loyalty to his lover and loyalty to the force, a path liberally strewn with land mines by the fiendishly clever McTiernan.

“Stone mothers” was a Victorian epithet for mental institutions, implying that within their stone walls help and nurturing could be found for those in need. In reality, of course, the opposite was often true. Stone Mothers is also the title of Erin Kelly’s latest thriller, set in and around a now-closed mental institution in the remote fictional town of Nusstead, England. Marianne Thackeray is no stranger to mental illness–her mother suffers from dementia, and her daughter hovers on the brink of mental instability as well. Marianne grew up in the shadow of Nazareth Mental Hospital, but she left some 30 years ago and made a good life for herself and her family. Now she is being dragged back to the town she escaped, first to assist her mother, then (rather more ominously) as a blackmail victim for a long-ago act that she thought would never again see the light of day. Before long, a former lover will become an enemy, a former enemy will become an unlikely ally, and the reader will be exposed to institutional horrors that make One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest look as inviting as Disneyland. It’s disturbing to the max, but hey, that’s what we read thrillers for, right?

TOP PICK It’s Christmastime in the U.K., and all the cops are hoping that maybe this will be the year they’ll get to spend the holidays with their families. It is not to be. “Everything is slack, unurgent. It all smacks of too late,” one of the detectives muses as they pull up to the […]
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Starred review
Ragnar Jonasson’s second Hulda Hermannsdóttir novel, The Island, finds the 50-ish Reykjavík detective investigating the connections between two murders. One was supposedly solved 10 years past, and the second, a modern-­day killing, appears to have been an accidental fall—until ligature marks characteristic of strangling are identified on the victim’s throat. The story of the first death is simple enough. In 1987, a girl and her soon-to-be lover go off to the fjords for a romantic weekend. It begins blissfully and ends with the girl lying dead on the floor of their summer home and the boy fleeing the scene. Her father is arrested for the crime and commits suicide while in custody. Open and shut, but there are some nagging suspicions. More than one person is aware that the presiding officer, something of a climber in the police department, tampered ever so slightly with the evidence. Fast-forward 10 years to 1997, and the dead girl’s friends, including the aforementioned lover, go off to a remote island together for a reunion. One will not survive the outing, and Detective Inspector Hermannsdóttir will investigate, uncovering layer after layer of deceit. The Island was short-listed for Crime Novel of the Year Award in Iceland. Read it, and you will see why.

I read a lot of suspense novels, and Martin Walker’s Bruno Courreges (aka Bruno, Chief of Police) ranks near the top of my list of fictional characters I would like to be friends with—for his kindness and good humor, as well as his exemplary culinary skills, the fruits of which I would dearly love to sample and which are tantalizingly detailed in each installment of the series. The opening of his latest adventure, The Body in the Castle Well, finds him halfway down a cistern, peering downward into the dark toward an agitated kitten perched atop a floating entity that appears to be a body. The body turns out to be that of Claudia, a young American art student who was conducting a quiet investigation of noted art scholar and collector Monsieur de Bourdeille. The extensive fortune of well-regarded, elderly and reclusive Bourdeille may have been built on the shaky foundations of deliberate false attributions, a scandal that Claudia was on the verge of revealing. As always, Walker deftly weaves disparate storylines into the narrative, this time incorporating the wartime French Resistance, chanteuse Josephine Baker and a brief history of falconry as a pastime of noblemen. As is the case with all the Bruno novels, The Body in the Castle Well is not to be missed.

Mark Billingham’s Detective Inspector Tom Thorne is akin to Ian Rankin’s John Rebus and Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole: a deeply flawed character with a plethora of personal and professional problems, but a damned fine investigator in his own way. In Their Little Secret, Thorne delves deeper than warranted into the seemingly clear-cut suicide of Philippa Goodwin, a woman who threw herself in front of a train. The victim had ample reason, having been bilked of her life savings by an enterprising con man who preys upon middle-aged women. Although it isn’t strictly in Thorne’s purview, he cannot help but put some effort into the “why” of the suicide, and he quickly discovers that there is a lot hiding beneath the tip of that iceberg. The murder of a young man at a nearby beach yields DNA that matches the unidentified con man, but then another, seemingly unrelated killing strongly suggests that there are two murderers at work in tandem, perhaps with the unwitting help of one or more outsiders. With lots of surprises and some very crisp, staccato storytelling, it’s impossible to put down Their Little Secret.

On one level, Owen Laukkanen’s Deception Cove is the story of a man and his dog. But let’s not confuse this with a feel-good narrative, because the man, Mason Burke, is an ex-con recently released from prison for first-degree murder, and his dog, Lucy, is a frightened yet aggressive pit bull mix rescue. Deception Cove is also the story of Jess Winslow, a female ex-Marine whose demons grew too strong for her to control, resulting in her being shipped back from Afghanistan to her home in America to deal with her PTSD as best she could. Mason trained Lucy while he was in prison, and Jess received the dog as a service animal to help her deal with her condition. Little did any of them—least of all Lucy—realize how their lives would become inextricably intertwined via a drug deal gone bad, a small-town police station full to the brim with corrupt cops and a Nigerian mercenary with a very itchy trigger finger. Mason and Jess are well fleshed-out characters with backstory galore. Their interactions are at first laced with distrust, but then the two guarded individuals gel in unexpected ways, hustling them toward an exceptionally intense climax. Here’s hoping we meet them again, and soon.

Starred review Ragnar Jonasson’s second Hulda Hermannsdóttir novel, The Island, finds the 50-ish Reykjavík detective investigating the connections between two murders. One was supposedly solved 10 years past, and the second, a modern-­day killing, appears to have been an accidental fall—until ligature marks characteristic of strangling are identified on the victim’s throat. The story of […]

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