“As a Diné person who has worked in forensics for 16 years, I saw death,” Ramona Emerson says. “I saw death all the time.”
She speaks by phone from her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, explaining how her Navajo heritage and work as a forensic photographer and videographer informed the creation of Rita Todacheene, a forensic photographer for the Albuquerque Police Department. Emerson’s first mystery starring Rita, Shutter, was a surprise hit that garnered numerous accolades and awards, including a spot on the National Book Award longlist.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone to read it, to tell you the truth,” she admits. Emerson, who is also a documentary filmmaker, adds, “I’ve never had anyone be interested in what I was doing.”
Indeed, there has been great anticipation for Exposure, the second book in her projected trilogy. Rita is summoned to photograph a horrific crime scene in the opening chapter: the murder of a retired police detective, his wife and six of their children. The oldest son, a teenager, is a suspect, but the ghost of one of his murdered sisters leads Rita to believe he is innocent.
“. . . you gotta worry about how much you’re putting your psyche and your mental stability and your own body on the line to get work done.”
Rita’s ability to see and hear the spirits of the dead is both a gift and a curse: The constant din of their voices becomes physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausting. Navajo tradition, however, makes it taboo to talk about death, so Emerson had serious concerns about how her character might be received. “You don’t talk about people once they have died. You have a four-day mourning period and it’s done,” she explains. “So, my biggest fear about writing Shutter was that I was going to have some sort of Navajo backlash.” Instead, she happily discovered, many Native readers thanked her for openly discussing the subject.
“There are Navajo Nation police officers who see death—and nurses, doctors and forensic workers,” Emerson says. “Pathologists, scientists, all these people who work with life and death. And we do our jobs because that’s what we’re trained to do, and we’re good at it. And so, this second book is about this idea of Rita realizing that she has a spiritual side that she’s not tending to.”
“It’s a really big part of your work-life balance,” she continues. “Like, you gotta worry about how much you’re putting your psyche and your mental stability and your own body on the line to get work done. And a lot of what I write about in Exposure was Rita’s own healing, embracing the ideas of Navajo traditional culture, and why it’s there to protect you.”
Emerson has experienced a few paranormal events—although quite different from her character’s encounters. Once, while teaching a summer film workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she and two others heard a strange noise in an editing room where they had been having odd technical problems with the equipment. They all turned around and watched a coffee mug move on the table, all by itself. “We saged that editing room out so fast!” says Emerson. In addition, on the same campus, she felt something grab her behind the bleachers in the black-box theater, where she and others were filming a production. “I thought maybe I just stumbled and there was something behind the curtain. But about 30 minutes later, when I got in my car, I had three huge scratches on my arm.”
Emerson has also had her own share of nightmares from difficult cases. In fact, Emerson’s late grandmother was so worried about her granddaughter that she took her to see a medicine man about a year and a half into the job. And in Exposure, Rita’s grandmother travels from the Navajo Nation town of Tohatchi—where Emerson herself grew up—to bring a medicine man to help Rita when her job becomes overwhelming.
Like Rita’s grandmother, Emerson’s grandmother played a pivotal role in her life. “She taught me to read and she was a big reader,” Emerson recalls. “She was real big on stories. She bought me my first video camera. She took me to the movies, even if she didn’t want to watch them. She just supported that idea of being a storyteller. I wrote these little stories and she always read them.” Although she died in 2001, Emerson notes, “She’s still a big part of my life. I always think about her.”
Despite her abiding interest in stories, Emerson never set out to write crime fiction, and her path to becoming a novelist has been particularly long and winding. Surprisingly, writing has never come easily to her. “It’s hard for me to sit in one place and do one thing for a long period of time,” Emerson says. Instead, her life’s dream was to make movies, and her initial attraction to film involved a touch of forensics, almost as though foreshadowing her future career.
Growing up in Tohatchi, there wasn’t much to do, so she and her friends watched VHS tapes that they rented from a man in a trailer “with like a hundred crazy strange movies in there.” That included a horror film, Faces of Death, about a pathologist who presents a variety of gruesome deaths. Once the adults left the house, Emerson recalls, “we’d go and get all of that horrible, horrible stuff that we weren’t supposed to watch, and we’d watch it right away.” Harkening back to Navajo taboos about discussing death, she adds, “So when we watched Faces of Death and didn’t explode, we figured that it’s all just a bunch of hooey.”
“When I’m writing, I feel like I’m walking through the room with a video camera and describing it for you.”
Later, when her mother took her to see Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues in a theater, Emerson was transfixed, and decided she wanted to make her own films. After studying film at the University of New Mexico, she had trouble finding a job, which is how she ended up as a forensic photographer. She blindly called a man whose audiovisual company had police contracts. “He was kind of a mean, gruff, walrus-looking guy, and his name was like 10th on the Yellow Pages list.” Eventually, she says, she did photography as well as video work for him, “because I was the only one who could put up with him. He was so mean.”
In addition to photographing crime scenes, part of her work was making what she calls “day in the life” documentaries to show how peoples’ lives had been compromised by injuries. “My job,” she explains, “was to get the worst stuff on camera and make sure companies settled cases before they got to a jury. Because they knew if the jury saw my video, they would give them way too much money.” She adds, “I would have dreams about these people for months. I think the live people were the ones that stayed with me more than the dead people.”
However, she says that in both her forensics work and her fiction, focusing carefully on the details of dead bodies helps humanize victims. “I would always think, ‘Oh my God, this is so horrible. This is somebody’s daughter. This is somebody’s mom.’ That’s where my mind always went. And so, by talking about the details, and everything that you could possibly say about who they are and what happened to them kind of honors them in a way.”
It’s no surprise, then, that Emerson’s prose is so immediate, her descriptions so vivid. “When you’re doing a documentary and you want people to understand who a person is, you film their room, you film their hands,” she explains. “You show how dirty their fingernails are. You look at their shoes, where they live, what the town is like, all of that stuff. I think I just attack stories the same way as I would attack a visual story.” She adds, “When I’m writing, I feel like I’m walking through the room with a video camera and describing it for you.”
Plus, she says, “I think people don’t realize how long you’re there [photographing crime scenes]. On TV, it’s like everybody’s in and out in 10 minutes, but when you have a big murder scene or you’ve got something like that first scene in Exposure where there’s a whole family, that could take two or three days of processing. You take thousands of photographs, pictures of every little thing, even if you don’t think it matters. You spend a lot of time out in the boonies by yourself photographing really weird things, or in strange positions, underneath vehicles. So, I think just giving readers the breadth of how many photographs Rita takes gives people a real idea of how hard it is to do the work physically.”
Emerson’s years of forensic work had a bonus of giving her access to her boss’s cameras and editing equipment. She began making her own movies as well, and she and her husband, Kelly Byars (also a filmmaker), formed a production company called Reel Indian Pictures. Byars is a member of the Choctaw Nation, and heritage is a primary focus for both. Their documentaries include The Mayor of Shiprock, about a group of young Navajos who meet each week to improve their small community in Shiprock, New Mexico.
Emerson also enrolled in a creative writing MFA program at the University of New Mexico, obtaining her master’s degree in 2015. While there, she began writing stories about her grandmother, and was also writing about some of her forensic cases as background for a possible documentary about Navajos who work in forensics. The resulting pages were what she describes as “a weird collection of research and stories”—and she couldn’t figure out how to unify the hodgepodge.
At the same time, Emerson enrolled in a 16-week CSI course offered by the Albuquerque Police Department, hoping to learn more about forensic science and technical procedures. The topic of the first session was a terrible case involving a woman who jumped off a highway bridge, with accompanying graphic photos. “I think half of our class didn’t come back after that,” she recalls. “It was brutal. But I went home and wrote about that case.”
“. . . it shouldn’t have to take our deaths to be able to tell our stories.”
When she presented the chapter to her MFA class, her mentor, novelist Sherman Alexie, responded, “I’m so disturbed. I’m sickened by that chapter. But I want you to make that your first chapter. And add six to 10 pages more, because I also want to know every detail.” Emerson took his advice. “Once I did that, everything else started to fall into place. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ ” Suddenly, her musings and observations coalesced into a first draft of her debut novel, Shutter.
All told, however, the writing process took 10 years—quite different from the almost rapid-fire way she wrote its follow-up. “I really had 10 years to lament over every page of that first book,” she says. “This time, I just had to move on.” One thing that helped was that she was also working on a docuseries (Crossing the Line) about border town violence and death in several communities surrounding the Navajo Nation, including Albuquerque and Gallup, New Mexico—both of which are crime scene locations in Exposure. “It was easy for me to research both things at the same time,” Emerson explains. “And it just kind of fell into place.” She adds that she has witnessed policing from the perspective of officers, the court system and lawyers, but also notes, “It’s a different kind of experience for people of color. Policing is about enforcing white laws on brown bodies. I think a lot of people think police protect them, but brown and Black people don’t believe that police are there to protect them. And I think that’s probably why I speak about that a lot in my stories, and about corruption.”
Just as Rita Todacheene speaks for the crime victims who can no longer voice their stories, Emerson works to champion Native women in both her books and films. “I really feel like there’s not another group of women who are more underrepresented than Native women,” she says. “They’re never talked about; they’re never given a chance. And that’s why I feel the thing I have to do is give them power or give them a voice. Now, because of the missing and murdered Indigenous women’s movement, Native women are more visible. But it shouldn’t have to take our deaths to be able to tell our stories.”
Emerson is already hard at work on the third book about Rita—although fans are likely to clamor for more after that, even though her story began as a planned trilogy. “I may take a break after the third book and write a different book,” Emerson says. “But I have a feeling that somebody is going to try to resurrect Rita at some point, and it’ll be tough to keep her down as a character.”
Photo of Ramona Emerson by Ungelbah Davila Shivers.
For the forensic photographer-turned-mystery novelist, humanizing the victims of violent crimes is more than just a profession: It’s a calling.
Fans of The Thursday Murder Club mysteries will devour the first book in Richard Osman’s newest series, We Solve Murders.
Amy Wheeler is a bodyguard for Maximum Impact Solutions, a British private security company. Her latest assignment has her protecting Rosie D’Antonio, a brash, bestselling author who offended a Russian oligarch with her latest book. As the women hide out on a private island, Amy realizes she may be in trouble: Three of her previous clients have been killed, all while she was nearby. Is someone targeting Maximum Impact Solutions? Or Amy herself?
After Amy narrowly survives an attack, the women go on the run, and Amy contacts the only person she trusts: her father-in-law, Steve. The former London cop is mostly retired, though he takes on private investigator jobs to stay sharp. Steve is a homebody at heart, preferring to spend his time with his cat, Trouble, though he never misses the weekly pub quiz with his friends. Still, when Amy needs him, Steve hops on a plane to help figure out who’s setting up Amy and why.
We Solve Murders is an outstanding mystery novel, rife with red herrings and numerous suspects, as well as Osman’s signature humor and heart. It’s a pitch-perfect blend of the cozy mystery and thriller genres: The sleuths are working out the intricately plotted mystery on their own, without the help of law enforcement; the overall tone of the book is breezy and fun, despite the body count; and the mystery takes the main characters all over the world, exposing them to danger and some unsavory individuals. There’s a little violence—Amy is a bodyguard and someone is trying to kill them, after all—but little to no gore. Steve is the quintessential cozy mystery sleuth, while Amy is a perfect choice to lead a thriller novel. In combining the two, Osman gives readers the best of both genres.
While the central puzzle is excellent and well-crafted, the heart of the novel lies with Amy, Steve and Rosie. Amy and Steve share a sweet bond, and both are battling trauma and loss in their own ways. And Rosie is in a league of her own: The older author is fabulous, brave and hilarious in equal measure. She helps Amy and Steve become better versions of themselves, and steals just about every scene she’s in. Another standout character is the mysterious “Francois Loubet,” the mastermind behind the killings. The novel is interspersed with messages from Loubet, who uses ChatGPT to further disguise his true identity. Readers will enjoy following Osman’s clues to figure out who Loubet is and why he’s targeting Amy and Maximum Impact Solutions.
Mystery fans have been richly rewarded with We Solve Murders, and will be happy to know that Osman has more in store for these characters.
In We Solve Murders, Richard Osman accomplishes the seemingly impossible: a cozy mystery-thriller mashup.
“The air was still cold as I readied myself to begin another morning in my paper suit.” Those words come from Rita Todacheene as she narrates Exposure, Ramona Emerson’s second book in her projected trilogy of mysteries starring the Navajo forensic photographer. The first, Shutter, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and from the very first page, Exposure is equally—if not more—electrifying than the first, allowing both fans and newcomers to jump right in.
It’s winter in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Emerson uses the season to great effect, with shivering investigators and frozen bodies, which the double entendre of her perfect title nods to. Rita has been summoned to a particularly brutal crime scene, where a retired police detective, his wife and six of their seven children have been murdered, with the oldest son being questioned as a suspect. Earlier in the night, she had been awakened by the ghost of one of the dead, a little girl who announces, “We’re waiting for you.” It’s a chilling, explosive start, and this unsettling young voice gives Rita surprising insights into the murders.
Be forewarned: Emerson’s crime scenes are viscerally authentic—she worked as a forensic photographer herself—although Rita’s empathy and compassion are always at the forefront, and there’s even occasional humor to be found from the ghosts. As in Shutter, Rita’s paranormal gifts continue to not only aid her police work, but also help her unmask often uncomfortable truths, including police corruption. However, the long hours, unbearable sights, endless voices are pushing Rita over the edge. She laments, “The dead were everywhere, and I couldn’t unsee them. Their souls gathered inside me.” Rita also faces big life changes: Someone she loves dies, and an intriguing new character appears. Rita’s beloved grandmother and a medicine man, Mr. Bitsilly, soon come to her aid. As Mr. Bitsilly realizes, “Something has her soul in its grasp. It could be one thing or a lot of things, but it will kill her if we let it stay.”
Emerson, a Diné writer and filmmaker who hails from Rita’s own hometown of Tohatchi in the Navajo Nation, masterfully commands these tightly wound plot strands, varying the tension and pacing with comforting moments with Rita’s beloved elderly neighbor, Mrs. Santillanes. Lots of lives—and souls—are on the line in the evocative Exposure, and Emerson adroitly takes on a variety of weighty themes. Rita Todacheene is a gritty, believable character with a heart that is equal parts steel and soul. Readers will immediately be clamoring for more.
Exposure is equally—if not more—electrifying than Ramona Emerson’s debut, the National Book Award-longlisted Shutter.
Texas Ranger Darren Mathews wants out of his genre.
Or that’s what the husband of Attica Locke, author of the Highway 59 mystery trilogy, said when he finished reading Guide Me Home, Locke’s exceptional final volume in the series.
“It’s as if he’s kind of done with the cops and robbers of it all,” Locke says of Darren, the flawed lawman who first entranced readers in 2017’s Edgar Award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird. There, Darren slipped into seedy Aryan Brotherhood bars to help a grieving wife solve her husband’s murder. His uncle William was the first Black Texas Ranger, and Darren followed in his footsteps, wearing his silver star with pride. 2019’s Heaven, My Home saw him investigating the disappearance of a white supremacist’s son, as Darren’s marriage unraveled and his drinking got worse. Throughout both books, Frank Vaughn, a white district attorney with political ambitions, tries to expose Darren for lying to secure the freedom of an elderly Black man, who was accused of a crime he didn’t commit.
Guide Me Home is set three years after Heaven, My Home. Vaughn is still building his case, and a depressed, soul-weary Darren decides to take an early retirement from law enforcement. The very day he turns in his badge, his troublemaking mother, Bell, shows up uninvited at his family home. Bell blackmailed Darren in Heaven, and she is the key witness in Vaughn’s case. But she brings with her something Darren cannot resist: the kernel of a case. Sera Fuller, a Black college student, has gone missing, and the members of the all-white sorority she joined know more than they’ll admit.
Highway 59 snakes from the northeastern corner of Texas down through Houston, Locke’s hometown, and sweeps southwest to the border. “We would drive up and down Highway 59 all the time to go visit grandparents and relatives,” Locke tells BookPage from her home in Los Angeles. “And those car rides were my early kind of daydreaming out the window, thinking about stories, just making stuff up in my head.”
“I worry that readers would be like, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing here?’ . . . It has a different kind of energy about it.”
Locke often shifts from project to project, writing novels (Pleasantville, The Cutting Season) and for TV (Empire, When They See Us). The years she spent writing Guide Me Home were catastrophic: COVID-19, the murder of George Floyd and the 2023 Writers Guild strike all weighed heavily on Locke’s mind as she sent her hero hurtling toward ruin. She asks readers to grope around in the dark with Darren as he confronts truly painful truths, with the central mystery at times taking a backseat to his internal conflict and family drama.
“Darren is also just my whole heart,” Locke says. “And I worry that readers would be like, ‘Wait a second. What are you doing here? He’s not doing all the shoot ’em up, bang, bang, tough guy stuff. Where is all that?’ . . . It has a different kind of energy about it.”
And yet, Locke’s take on the missing girl trope is a standout in a genre that sheds girls like skin cells. While Sera is away at a nearby college, her family lives in an insular gated community called Thornhill, where families work in chicken and pork processing factories on-site in exchange for their cookie-cutter houses, K-12 schools and top-notch health care. As is usually the case, the utopian concept is, in practice, anything but. Rather, it’s a modern sharecropping system that keeps workers from ever accumulating wealth, all while they breathe acrid air from factories that might just be making people sick. Sera’s father, a Black Trump supporter named Joseph, has become a puppet for the rich white people who own Thornhill, ready and willing to be the Black face of the “movement” for “compassionate capitalism.” He is clearly lying when he denies that Sera has disappeared from her college campus: Her belongings are found in the trash, including her medication for sickle cell anemia.
Thornhill only truly clicked one day as Locke walked her dog: “I was thinking about two things that became really clear to people during COVID. We are not taking care of each other in terms of health care. It’s just really fucking difficult to be alive and have health care in this country. And capitalism does not give a shit about workers. . . . I’m realizing the ways in which COVID laid bare these two facts, and somehow they found their way into the soul and the plot of the book.”
The other valve in the dark heart of Guide Me Home is the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump and the escalating danger and sense of alienation it caused for Black Americans. Locke writes that Darren is “profoundly, unimaginatively sad in this world,” in the “fever dream that had been the years since Donald Trump was elected. Years that had laid bare the fragility of democracy.”
“This book series inadvertently became a treatise on the Trump era in a way that had not been intended,” Locke says. “I think in the series, Texas is often a stand-in for America. There’s a reason there’s that saying, ‘As Texas goes, so goes the nation’ . . . there is a sense that Darren’s ambivalent feelings about loving Texas are, I think, a mirror for a lot of people who have ambivalent feelings about how do we love our country through its worst impulses.”
Darren can’t imagine living anywhere else, even as the state constantly disappoints him. It disappoints Locke, too. “When I watch it from afar, it frequently breaks my heart to think of the Greg Abbotts of the [state] being what the rest of the world thinks Texas is,” she says, “when I know it to be, on the ground, infinitely more complex and infinitely less hateful. Now, I say that knowing full well that there are wild pockets of hateful people everywhere, and there are a lot of hateful people in Texas. But there are, I would argue, to some degree, more that aren’t.”
It’s not lost on Locke, or on Darren, that being a Black cop is complicated. As the series progresses, Darren is at odds with two competing ideologies handed down by the uncles who raised him, Texas Ranger William and defense attorney Clayton: Must Black people be protected by the law, or from the law? Locke lays this out in chapter one: “Sure, it was a sentiment among Black cops these days that ‘Black Lives Matter’ meant a gun and the law had their purpose—safeguarding Black folks in every corner of American life. But Darren felt resentful of the idea that Black cops somehow bore the sole responsibility for this. Surely it was someone else’s turn to do the work of righting the country’s racial wrongs, case by trauma-inducing case.”
“It frequently breaks my heart to think of the Greg Abbotts of the [state] being what the rest of the world thinks Texas is.”
Locke echoes this yearning: “There is a limit to what Black and brown folks can do alone to right some racial wrongs. And we kind of need help. And the hope is always that there will be folks who will consider that, just like I didn’t ask for the history on my back of slavery . . . You [meaning this white interviewer] also didn’t ask for all the privileges. You didn’t ask for it, but it’s real. So what do you do with it?”
All of this comes to bear on Darren’s psyche and heart. His alcoholism, present but not destructive in the first two books, is now raging. And his upbringing, developed marvelously in Bluebird and Heaven, comes into question. As an infant, Bell relinquished him to his uncles, and she’s breezed in and out of his life ever since, growing more manipulative and nasty with each episode. Her blackmailing him was the last straw. Darren’s trauma over her abandonment was so severe that he never asked her what happened, but took his well-meaning uncles’ version of the story as the truth. As he investigates Sera’s disappearance and Thornhill’s suspicious origins, he uncovers questions that only Bell can answer. Locke, whose daughter starts college this fall, hopes Guide Me Home will “flip how children see their parents.” The book’s dedication—“For every mother whose child knows only half the story”—conveys this hope, and Bell’s as well. Darren can only find home once he solves one final mystery, that of his own origins.
The Highway 59 series closes during the 2019 holiday season. In a few months, a global pandemic will take over the world. Darren has no idea what’s coming, but, thanks to Locke’s brilliant storytelling, readers will have faith that he’ll be all right.
I’m a latecomer to the Vera Stanhope series: I’m not a total newbie, but I definitely have some back catalog to catch up on, especially as author Ann Cleeves’ latest, The Dark Wives, is a crackerjack mystery. Rosebank Home is a halfway house for troubled teens. At the moment, it is also the center of an investigation into the disappearance of one of the aforementioned troubled teens, Chloe Spence, as well as the site of the grisly murder of staff member Josh Woodburn. The question at hand is whether Chloe committed the deed and then made good her escape, or if she witnessed the murder and has now gone into hiding. Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope would like to believe option number two, not least because the girl’s diary strongly suggested that she had quite the crush on Josh. Vera’s colleagues on the force are somewhat less persuaded. And then another corpse is discovered, and there’s still no sign of Chloe. Matters come to a head during the annual pseudo-pagan Witch Hunt, an enormous game of hide-and-seek which takes place in the dead of night next to the titular Dark Wives, a Stonehenge-like rock formation in northern England. Cleeves’ opinion on for-profit children’s facilities and their potential to harm society’s more vulnerable members is clear, but whichever side of the political fence you occupy, The Dark Wives is a hell of a good story.
Spirit Crossing
You would think from his name that Cork O’Connor was Irish: You’d be half-right. But he’s also Ojibwe, and the ex-sheriff and ex-PI is deeply steeped in the traditions of his mother’s northern Minnesota tribe. Spirit Crossing is number 20 in William Kent Krueger’s long-running series, and it draws heavily upon Ojibwe legends of the recently deceased who have become lost on the Path of Souls. While foraging for wild blueberries, Cork’s grandson, Waaboo, happens upon a makeshift grave site and experiences a vision of one such lost soul. Two young women, one of them Ojibwe, the other the daughter of a state senator, have recently gone missing. The investigations could not be more different: The senator’s daughter is high priority; the Ojibwe girl, not so much. But Waaboo is adamant that the lost soul is neither of those girls. So, of course, the powers that be are happy to turn the less headline-grabbing investigation over to the Lake Ojibwe Tribal Police. The supernatural element is subdued, similar to how Tony and then Anne Hillerman treat such matters in the Leaphorn, Chee & Manuelito series; it’s simply a part of the narrative, and the reader can decide for themselves whether Waaboo’s insights contribute materially to the solving of the case, or are just superstition. It’s a fine line to walk, but Krueger does it rather seamlessly, in my estimation.
Death at the Sanatorium
Icelandic author Ragnar Jónasson can always be counted upon for fast-paced, cleverly plotted mysteries, and his latest, Death at the Sanatorium, is no exception. The 1983 murder of hospital nurse Yrsa was never exactly solved, but when her employer apparently died by suicide shortly afterward, the investigation fizzled out, with most assuming that he had taken his own life in atonement for taking the life of another. Before that happened, the hospital’s caretaker was a prime suspect; he was a strange character, the odd man out in a facility that employed mostly well-educated professional staff. Fast-forward 30-odd years, and a new character is added to the mix: Helgi Reykdal, a master’s degree candidate studying the deaths at the hospital (which was once a sanatorium, hence the title) and the investigation that followed for his thesis. Helgi intends to critique the initial investigation methodology, not reopen the case. He’s under pressure both from his partner and his potential employer to accept a position with the Reykjavik police, but the more he delves into the 1983 crime, the more Helgi suspects there was some malfeasance at play . . . and some of the players are still alive and influential. Death at the Sanatorium is a solid addition to Jónasson’s already impressive body of work, with a final-pages surprise that I totally did not see coming.
★ Talking to Strangers
This month’s star goes to Fiona Barton’s Talking to Strangers, a police procedural like no police procedural you have ever read. The story centers around two murders in Knapton Wood, England: one well over a decade old, one in the present day. The three protagonists have little in common except for their dogged determination to get at the truth: Lead detective Elise King, who is slowly recovering from breast cancer surgery; Kiki Nunn, a gifted investigative reporter trying to make a name for herself, but stuck in a dead-end gig; and Annie Curtis, the mother of the first murder victim who is seeking answers about her young son’s death and its possible connection to the current case. Barton jumps back and forth, chapter by chapter, among her protagonists, with Elise’s and Annie’s sections recounted in third person, while Kiki’s are told in first. As evidence begins to mount that the latest murder may involve a group of anonymous social media predators, Kiki decides to go undercover to investigate. Not to give too much away, but this decision will be exceptionally costly, even as it brings the case closer to a solution. Elise, Kiki and Annie pursue their separate lines of inquiry, each drawing on information not available to the others, sometimes stepping on one another’s toes along the way, all moving relentlessly toward the deeply satisfying and surprising “Perry Mason Moment” of a denouement.
Plus, the latest from Ann Cleeves, William Kent Krueger and Ragnar Jónasson round out this month’s Whodunit column.
4 historical mysteries and thrillers that stray off the beaten path
Whether it’s an underexplored setting, a genre mashup or a distinct voice, these unique books will satisfy those looking for something a little different.
With Agony Hill, Sarah Stewart Taylor kicks off a thoughtful, thought-provoking historical mystery series set in a time with shocking parallels to the present.
Billy Boyle breaks up a Nazi art smuggling ring in James R. Benn’s enthralling The Phantom Patrol, which will delight history buffs, art lovers and ...
Whether it's an underexplored setting, a genre mashup or a distinct voice, these unique books will satisfy those looking for something a little different.
Flavia de Luce burst onto the cozy mystery scene in 2009, and now the precocious 12-year-old chemistry prodigy is back for the 11th time in bestselling author Alan Bradley’s What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust.
Once again, Bradley beckons readers into post-World War II England—specifically, Bishop’s Lacey, a hamlet in the countryside. Flavia roams the area on her bicycle, Gladys, searching for things to test in her home laboratory (ensconced in Buckshaw, the crumbling de Luce manor) and, lately, places to escape “pestilent little cousin” Undine, who’s come to Buckshaw after becoming an orphan.
Flavia, now an orphan as well, tends to the mansion with the help of two beloved adults: Dogger, handyman and helpmeet, and the estate’s housekeeper, Mrs. Mullet, who’s also been cooking for their neighbor Major Greyleigh, a former hangman who is found dead as the book opens. Alas, the police consider Mrs. Mullet the prime suspect because she accidentally served the major a dish of poisonous mushrooms directly before his demise.
Convinced of Mrs. Mullet’s innocence, Flavia resolves to solve the crime and clear the cook’s name. After all, she’s so important to her—and as a bonus, it’s yet another opportunity to test her sleuthing mettle: “I have to admit that I’d been praying . . . for a jolly good old-fashioned mushroom poisoning. Not that I wanted anyone to die, but why give a girl a gift . . . without giving her the opportunity to use it?”
As Flavia questions locals, sneaks into crime scenes and conducts experiments, she realizes the murder is just the tip of a very strange iceberg looming over Bishop’s Lacey. Is the usually chatty, now oddly reticent, Mrs. Mullet hiding something? And some of the American soldiers still stationed at nearby Leathcote air base seem especially interested in the goings-on. Might they be involved?
Bradley’s intrepid amateur sleuth is witty and whip-smart as ever, and Bishop’s Lacey remains both a colorful backdrop and a microcosm of a nation in transition, paralleling Flavia’s own trepidation at entering adulthood. A layered plot rife with dastardly deeds and shocking revelations makes for an intriguing and entertaining read, and nicely tees up the (one hopes) next installment in the irresistible Flavia de Luce series.
In Alan Bradley’s 11th mystery starring preteen sleuth Flavia de Luce, the chemistry prodigy faces murder by mushroom and her own impending adulthood.
“I didn’t know anything about Gustav Klimt except that he liked naked ladies,” notes Billy Boyle, the narrator of ThePhantom Patrol, the 19th entry in James R. Benn’s series of action-packed World War II mysteries. Billy has become involved with efforts to return the priceless sketch, a study for Klimt’s painting Water Serpents II, to its rightful owner after it was appropriated from a Jewish family in Vienna.
Billy, a former Boston cop, is a detective on the staff of his “Uncle Ike”—none other than the famed General Eisenhower. Billy’s “older cousin of some sort” makes a brief appearance, commenting, “even a fella from Abilene can appreciate fine artwork.” (Newcomers to the series can easily jump in; Benn succinctly fills readers in with relevant bits of backstory.) Billy’s also trying to track down a violent network of Nazi art smugglers, and it turns out even bigger trouble is brewing: It’s the winter of 1944 and France has been liberated, so these thugs have little to lose. Just a few pages in, the bullets start to fly and the bodies begin to fall in Paris’ Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Billy eventually finds himself in Belgium’s Ardennes Forest in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, traipsing through snow and cut off from communications.
Benn excels at making history work in his favor. For instance, he includes J.D. Salinger and actor David Niven as fairly major characters—both of whom did indeed serve during WWII. Benn nimbly traverses between moments of absolute horror (the scene of a murdered family at their farmhouse, and the massacre of American GIs) to numerous lighthearted moments, understanding how desperately they were needed for those who endured war’s horrors. Niven, for instance, comments about a German posing as an American: “I should have known . . . The chap never asked for an autograph.”
Fans of The Monuments Men and The Curse of Pietro Houdini will relish ThePhantom Patrol, and newcomers to Billy Boyle’s investigations will be immediately intrigued and ready for more. The book’s art-related plot will appeal to a wide variety of readers, as will Benn’s snappy but detail-rich prose. History buffs, military enthusiasts, art lovers and thrill-seekers alike will all be enthralled with this enticing blend of high-stakes action and old-fashioned detective work.
Billy Boyle breaks up a Nazi art smuggling ring in James R. Benn’s enthralling The Phantom Patrol, which will delight history buffs, art lovers and thrill-seekers alike.
The Jig Is Up takes readers to the fictional Irish-themed town of Shamrock, Massachusetts, where residents are gearing up to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day—despite the recent murder of an Irish step dancer.
When single mom Kate Buckley receives a text from her younger sister, Colleen, asking for help, she packs up her two daughters and their cat to travel to Shamrock, her hometown. Colleen has a history of impetuous decision making, and Kate fears that this time, her sister is in over her head—or worse, that something’s happened to their aging parents or the bed-and-breakfast that they run. But when Kate and her daughters arrive, Colleen is tight-lipped about her problem. Hours later, Kate and Colleen discover the lifeless body of Deirdre, a champion Irish step dancer and Colleen’s best friend. Kate learns that her sister fought with Deirdre before her death, and Colleen is soon named a person of interest in the case. Believing in her sister’s innocence, Kate sets out to clear Colleen’s name and find the real killer in Shamrock—before they strike again.
The Jig Is Up is a well-crafted cozy mystery that deftly explores complicated family dynamics. Kate is the dependable oldest sibling: She’s an accountant by trade and never stops worrying about her younger siblings, her parents or the B&B. Colleen may prove to be a divisive character; she can be selfish and flighty, and often refuses to acknowledge the seriousness of her situation. Still, Kate and the other Buckleys love and support her, even when her lies threaten their livelihood. Complex relationships like this aren’t always depicted in cozy mysteries, and it’s refreshing to see. And as The Jig Is Up is the first novel in a planned series, there’s plenty of room for Kate, Colleen and the rest of the Buckley clan to grow.
Kate’s daughters, Maeve and Bliz, feature prominently in the story, too. They are authentic, relatable characters who are integral to the plot, especially as their involvement in the local Irish dance show provides Kate with several opportunities to further investigate the murder. Kate’s love for her daughters is palpable, and it underscores the message of the novel: Family is everything.
At times, the mystery of Deidre’s murder does take a back seat to exploring Kate’s relationships with her family, friends and Shamrock itself. However, future installments of the series may very well benefit from the thoughtful world building Mathews has done in this first Irish Bed & Breakfast mystery.
The Jig Is Up is a well-crafted cozy mystery that deftly explores complicated family dynamics while also transporting readers to an adorable Irish-themed town.
The finale of Attica Locke’s beloved Highway 59 series starts with a shocker: Darren Mathews, the deeply moral, and deeply complicated, Black Texas Ranger hell-bent on destroying the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas, turns in his badge.
Darren is worn down. A wily district attorney has relentlessly pursued his prosecution for a lie Darren told to protect an elderly Black man. Worse, the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president has left Darren in a state of utter despair, with his alcoholism “shaking him from the inside out.” Even with a stable girlfriend (whose presence will make fans of the series cheer), Darren is hurtling toward a breakdown when an unexpected source tells him about a Black teenage girl who has gone missing from a bizarre, dystopian community called Thornhill.
Both 2017’s Edgar Award-winning Bluebird, Bluebird and its follow-up, 2019’s Heaven, My Home, force Darren up against society’s worst humans. But his most needling nemesis is not the Aryan Brotherhood, corrupt lawmen or plain old everyday racists. It’s his manipulative mother, Bell, who abandoned him to his uncles in his infancy. Guide Me Home changes the story by making Bell the Dr. Watson to Darren’s Holmes. It’s an uneasy truce, and readers will sympathize with both characters in equal measure as they unravel the Thornhill mystery.
Many mystery fans are willing to overlook hackneyed turns of phrase and oft-used literary tropes for a walloping plot. But with Locke, there’s no need. Her language is precise, refreshing and often beautiful. The close third-person point of view immerses readers in Darren’s pain and confusion as the ghosts of his family emerge, including that of the father who died before Darren was born.
Guide Me Home isn’t a standalone novel; readers new to the Ranger will want to start with Bluebird, Bluebird and proceed chronologically to appreciate the literary triumph that is the Highway 59 series.
Attica Locke’s language is precise, refreshing and often beautiful in Guide Me Home, the final installment in the literary triumph that is her Highway 59 mystery series.
Fans of Kate Atkinson’s policeman-turned-private eye Jackson Brodie, who debuted in 2004’s Case Histories, will be thrilled to learn he’s back for a sixth outing in Death at the Sign of the Rook.
Jackson last appeared in 2019’s Big Sky, where he contended with crime in an English seaside village. In Death at the Sign of the Rook, a small Yorkshire town serves as a wintry backdrop for art theft and a chaotic murder-mystery party that blurs the lines between dramatic artifice and harsh reality.
We begin with Ian and Hazel Padgett, who have just hired Jackson. Their mother has recently died, an oil painting is missing from her home, and the Padgetts suspect their mother’s caregiver, Melanie, has stolen it. As Detective Constable Reggie Chase joins Jackson in tracking down Melanie, they learn that a painting went missing from nearby estate Burton Makepeace two years ago, and it’s suspected that it was taken by the housekeeper. At one point, Reggie thinks irritably about how Jackson always says “a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen.” Is there a connection between the women, the paintings and the thefts?
In and among the sleuths’ investigatory advances, Atkinson immerses the reader in the inner lives of her emotionally complex cast: the officious Lady Milton; Simon Cate, a vicar who doesn’t believe in God; and Ben Jennings, an injured former army major. Every character’s inner monologue is detailed and eccentric, rife with existential contemplation and dry wit. Their personalities gradually and tantalizingly unfurl, as do their connections to one another (and, perhaps, the mysterious crimes).
Death at the Sign of the Rook kicks into high gear when the cast converges at Burton Makepeace for a murder-mystery weekend. A major snowstorm traps everyone overnight, cell phone service has gone out, and an escaped prisoner—dubbed “Two-Cop Killer Carl Carter” by the media—might be roaming the area, too. While the detectives struggle to discern fact from fiction, murder most foul and hectic hilarity collide as dark secrets are finally revealed. It’s a twisty treat of a read that will totally absorb fans of Atkinson, Agatha Christie and, of course, the inimitable Jackson Brodie.
A murder-mystery party blurs the lines between dramatic artifice and harsh reality in Kate Atkinson’s sixth Jackson Brodie mystery.
India Mullen’s taut performance highlights the devastating, long-term effects of traumatic events in the audiobook of When We Were Silent, Fiona McPhillips’ debut novel.
Despite her traumatic past, Louise (Lou) Manson is living a relatively normal life. That changes when Ronan, the brother of her former close school friend, Shauna, shows up. Ronan, now a lawyer, persuades Lou to testify in a lawsuit against Highfield Manor, jeopardizing her newfound stability by unearthing secrets and lies that have been buried for decades. Mullen brings out the complex emotions that surface when Lou is forced to relive the incidents that occurred when she attended the prestigious Dublin private school for girls. With her full-bodied voice and unhurried pace, Mullen conveys an unsettled atmosphere and the intricate dynamics between all the players—villains and victims—as their paths reconverge and the truth of what happened to the girls, including Lou, is revealed.
Fans of Megan Miranda’s The Perfect Stranger and Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared will enjoy this suspenseful and haunting listening experience.
In When We Were Silent, India Mullen’s skillful narration brings out the complex emotions that surface when Lou Manson is convinced to testify against the prestigious Dublin private school she attended decades prior.
In 2013, Lindsey Davis, the author of the Marcus Didius Falco mysteries set in ancient Rome, embarked on a new series featuring Falco’s daughter, Flavia Albia, who learned the sleuthing craft at her father’s knee. In the 11 years since, Davis released the same number of well-crafted puzzlers, but her 12th installment, Death on the Tiber, represents a series high mark. As the story opens, the body of a woman is discovered floating in the Tiber River, setting off a gang war the likes of which Rome has not seen in quite some time. The victim was a British woman named Claudia Deiana, who had traveled to Rome in search of the man she believed to be her husband, Gaius Florius Oppicus, a previously exiled Roman mobster who has ostensibly returned to the fold, eager to resume his nefarious activities. Flavia is intrigued by Claudia and the manner of her death, and worms her way into the official inquiry—albeit quite unofficially. There is no dearth of suspects: the anonymous but exceptionally effective assassin from a rival gang; Florius Oppicus’ actual wife in Rome, or someone doing her bidding; and any number of opportunists looking to sow some chaos in the underworld. This is easily the most entertaining of the series to date. Flavia Albia is smart, independent, snarky and brutally funny, while the supporting characters are eminently relatable. Pro Tip: Davis begins the book with a list of characters, major and minor. Don’t gloss over it. It is very helpful for keeping the many characters straight; it’s also absolutely hilarious.
★ The Lost Coast
Clan Kellerman, I gotta say wow, just wow: I cannot recall another family of novelists quite so prolific and uniformly excellent. The Lost Coast, the fourth collaboration between pere et fils Jonathan and Jesse, finds PI Clay Edison conducting a routine investigation into the assets of the recently deceased Marisol Salvador. It does not stay that way long, as each newly unearthed discovery leads Clay deeper into the rabbit hole as he uncovers a series of cons that date back decades and continue, unabated, to the present day. His client bails upon seeing the complexity of the situation—and realizing the unlikelihood of a satisfactory resolution to the case—but Clay is intrigued and carries on pro bono. He journeys north to a mysterious California seaside community called Swann’s Flat, which is anything but flat: It’s borderline inaccessible even by four-wheel-drive. The residents are an odd lot; there are only 13 of them, and all but three or four are trouble waiting to happen. Problem is, neither Clay nor the reader can readily identify who falls into which camp. Clay eventually enlists the aid of Regina Klein, a PI who had once been involved in a peripheral part of the case, and who shares his curiosity. (An aside: I hope we see her again; she is potential series-star material.) Of all the Clay Edison books, this one is easily the most suspenseful—don’t miss it.
★ Murder at the White Palace
One of the more unusual professions for a mystery protagonist has to be running a lonely hearts club, but that is basically the job held by Gwen Bainbridge and Iris Sparks, the amateur but very talented sleuths of Allison Montclair’s Murder at the White Palace. The milieu is postwar London, circa 1947, and the holiday season is coming up. The pair decide to throw a New Year’s Eve party, but the venue situation is grim: All the large halls that survived the Blitz are booked solid. Iris, however, has connections; Her gangster boyfriend, Archie Spelling, owns a nightclub that, with any luck, will be renovated in time for their New Year’s bash. But repairs on a war-damaged wall unearth (or rather, “unbrick”) a dead body. Turns out the dead man was one of a group of suspects in a major crime against the mob, and although it happened before the war, there are those who would still like some answers as to where the swag from that crime ended up. And others would equally like to keep that answer buried deep in the past. Which faction will outmaneuver the other, and how many people will die in the process? This is a terrific series, one that rockets to the top of my reading list whenever a new installment arrives, and Murder at the White Palace continues that tradition in fine fettle.
★ The In Crowd
Floating bodies seem to be a running theme this month, first in the Tiber, and now in the Thames in Charlotte Vassell’s police procedural thriller The In Crowd. This body, discovered by a rowing team out for their weekend exercise, is that of Lynne Rodgers, a suspect in an unsolved £10,000,000 embezzlement case. Fastidious DI Caius Beauchamp (pronounced the French way, “Bo-shom,” never “Beecham”) gets tapped by a prominent politician to take point on the investigation, although it is unclear what the politician’s motivation may be. Meanwhile, across town, an attractive young milliner named Callie is helping out with preparations for her friend’s high-society wedding. That she will meet Caius will come as no surprise to anyone who ever reads mysteries, but the interplay between the two moves the narrative forward in unexpected ways. Vassell skewers the ruling class and their pretensions exceptionally well, and you will cheer every time one of them receives their comeuppance. There is comedy, there is suspense and the dialogue is witty and incisive. And I didn’t guess the ending, always a plus for me.
Plus, standout new titles from Lindsey Davis, Allison Montclair and Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman in this month's Whodunit column.
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