News Blog @ Wellington City Libraries

Love a good mystery? Here’s a selection of the newest to land on our shelves …

Very bad men / Harry Dolan.
“Anthony Lark has a list of names—Terry Dawtrey, Sutton Bell, Henry Kormoran. To his eyes, the names glow red on the page. They move. They breathe. The men on the list were once involved in a notorious robbery. And now Lark is hunting them, and he won’t stop until every one of them is dead. David Loogan—editor of the mystery magazine Gray Streets—is living a quiet life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with Detective Elizabeth Waishkey and her daughter. But soon David and Elizabeth are drawn into Lark’s violent world. As Elizabeth works to track Lark down, David befriends Lucy Navarro, a reporter with a crazy theory about the case that threatens to implicate some very powerful people. And when Lucy disappears, David decides her theory may not be so crazy after all…” – (adapted from Amazon.com summary)

Flowering Judas : a Gregor Demarkian novel / Jane Haddam.
“Twelve years ago, Chester Morton disappeared from his hometown in Mattuck, New York, leaving no trace and never to be heard from again. For the past twelve years, his mother has kept the search for her son alive—paying for a billboard overlooking the local community college, putting up new flyers every week, hounding every law enforcement agency she can get to listen. Her determination has made his disappearance very high profile but it’s also been damaging to her family, her children and to herself. Now, Chester’s body is finally found—hanging from the very billboard that has been advertising his disappearance. Chester’s corpse, however, is recent—meaning that Chester had been alive, somewhere, until very recently. Under pressure and with limited resources, the local police turn to Gregor Demarkian—a former FBI agent and a frequent consultant on such cases—to try and unravel the truth buried within this very complex and tragic case and find out once and for all what really happened all those years ago…” – (adapted from Amazon.com summary)

Winter of the lions / Jan Costin Wagner ; translated from the German by Anthea Bell.
“Every year since the tragic death of his wife, Detective Kimmo Joentaa has prepared for the isolation of Christmas with a glass of milk and a bottle of vodka to arm himself against the harsh Finnish winter. However, this year events take an unexpected turn when a young woman turns up on his doorstep. Not long afterwards two men are found murdered, one of whom is Joentaa’s colleague, a forensic pathologist. When it becomes clear that both victims had recently been guests on Finland’s most famous talk show, Kimmo is called upon to use all his powers of intuition and instinct to solve the case. Meanwhile the killer is lying in wait, ready to strike again. In Kimmo Joentaa, prizewinning author Jan Costin Wagner has created a lonely hero in the Philip Marlowe mould, who uses his unusual gifts for psychological insight to delve deep inside the minds of the criminals he pursues.” – (adapted from Syndetics summary)

Fallen angels / Connie Dial.
“Two ex-cops are currently turning out mysteries centering on the LAPD’s Hollywood Division: Joe Wambaugh, who left the job fairly early after establishing the genre of gutsy, raucous police procedurals, and Connie Dial, who retired as commanding officer of the Hollywood Division after 27 years, including patrol, undercover, and narcotics work. Wambaugh gives readers a totally wild ride, often veering off into tangentially related war stories and cop humor, careening back into plot limits just in time. Dial’s ride (this is her third novel) is much more controlled when it comes to obeying conventional limits with plot and characters. Captain Josie Corsino, beset at home with an absentee husband and a troubled adolescent son, almost finds working in the byzantine politics of the L.A. police a relief. The plot focuses on how Corsino oversees the investigation into the murder of a 17-year-old Hollywood starlet at a notorious “party house” in the Hollywood Hills. The investigation quickly uncovers a netherworld of connections that can destroy careers. As with Wambaugh, the great thing about Dial is that readers know her take on the LAPD and the craziness of Hollywood crime is based on long reflection…” – (adapted from Booklist summary)

Bonefire of the vanities / Carolyn Haines.
“Despite the wishes of her overprotective fiancé, Sarah Booth Delaney can’t give up her detective work, no matter how dangerous it becomes. It’s too much a part of her. On this case, avoiding danger might be impossible—she’s on the trail of a porn-star-turned-psychic operating from a haunted estate on the edge of town. Medium Sherry Cameron promises to reunite grieving family members with their dearly departed, but it seems vaguely suspicious that Sherry will only accept emotionally vulnerable and tremendously wealthy clients. Aging billionaire Marjorie Littlefield fits the profile perfectly—her daughter died in a tragic accident as a young girl, she’s been estranged from her son for decades, and she’s planning to leave her considerable inheritance to her cat. Convinced she’s uncovered a scheme to separate a lonely woman from her fortune, Sarah Booth talks her way onto the estate as a maid, where she finds Marjorie and several other wealthy eccentrics ready to commune with the dead. Between chores, Sarah Booth explores the estate, mingles with the other staff…and finds a few dead bodies. But which guest or staff member might be the killer? Even Jitty, Sarah Booth’s personal haint, won’t tell until Sarah Booth has uncovered all of Sherry’s well-kept secrets…” – (adapted from Amazon.com summary)

Wicked business : a Lizzy and Diesel novel / Janet Evanovich.
“Lizzy Tucker’s once normal life as a pastry chef in Salem, Massachusetts, turns upside down as she battles both sinister forces and an inconvenient attraction to her unnaturally talented but off-limits partner, Diesel. When Harvard University English professor and dyed-in-the wool romantic Gilbert Reedy is mysteriously murdered and thrown off his fourth-floor balcony, Lizzy and Diesel take up his twenty-year quest for the Luxuria Stone, an ancient relic believed by some to be infused with the power of lust. Following clues contained in a cryptic nineteenth-century book of sonnets, Lizzy and Diesel tear through Boston catacombs, government buildings, and multimillion-dollar residences. On their way they’ll leave behind a trail of robbed graves, public disturbances, and general mayhem. Diesel’s black sheep cousin, Gerwulf Grimoire, also wants the Stone. His motives are far from pure, and what he plans on doing with the treasure, no one knows . . . but Lizzy Tucker fears she’s in his crosshairs… Treasures will be sought, and the power of lust will be unmistakable as Lizzy and Diesel attempt to stay ahead of Anarchy, Grimoire, and his medieval minion, Hatchet, in this ancient game of twisted riddles and high-stakes hide-and-seek…” – (adapted from from Amazon.co.uk summary)

A deeper darkness / J.T. Ellison.
“As a medical examiner, Samantha Owens knows her job is to make a certain sense of death with crisp methodology and precision instruments. But the day the Tennessee floods took her husband and children, the light vanished from Sam’s life. She has been pulled into a suffocating grief no amount of workaholic ardor can penetrate—until she receives a peculiar call from Washington, D.C. On the other end of the line is an old boyfriend’s mother, asking Sam to do a second autopsy on her son. Eddie Donovan is officially the victim of a vicious carjacking, but under Sam’s sharp eye the forensics tell a darker story. The ex-Ranger was murdered, though not for his car. Forced to confront the burning memories and feelings about yet another loved one killed brutally, Sam loses herself in the mystery contained within Donovan’s old notes. It leads her to the untouchable Xander, a soldier off-grid since his return from Afghanistan, and then to a series of brutal crimes stretching from that harsh mountainous war zone to this nation’s capital. The tale told between the lines makes it clear that nobody’s hands are clean, and that making sense of murder sometimes means putting yourself in the crosshairs of death…” – (adapted from Amazon.com summary)

The cold room / Robert Knightly.
“NYPD detective Harry Corbin hasn’t been allowed to work on a homicide case for almost a year following his unearthing of corruption amongst his colleagues and superiors. So when a young woman’s body is found dumped and mutilated on a sweltering New York morning, Corbin jumps at the chance to redeem his career and solve the case. Identification of the Jane Doe proves to be difficult until Corbin stumbles upon a link to a Queens Catholic church that provides sanctuary to Eastern European immigrants. What then follows is a journey into the dark and secretive world of illegal immigrants, where humans are exploited and life is cheap…” – (adapted from Syndetics summary)

Dead men and broken hearts / Craig Russell.
“November 1956. The world is in turmoil. While the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Uprising boil away in the background, Lennox has more immediate concerns, like getting his personal life, and his business, back on track. So, when a woman comes into Lennox’s office and hires him to follow her husband, whom she suspects of leading a double life, it seems the perfect case. Straightforward, typical – if a little sordid – and most of all, legal. But as he begins to dig deeper, Lennox realizes that this is no ordinary case of marital infidelity. He finds himself caught by the police in a room with a dead body; pursued by shadowy members of the intelligence community; and once more a target of the Three Kings, the crime bosses who between them run Glasgow’s underworld. Lennox must again draw on the violent, war-damaged part of his personality that he has tried to keep buried, in order to survive…” – (adapted from Amazon.co.uk summary)