Mysteries Recent Picks
July 2009
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Liars anonymous, Louise Ure. (2009)
Starred Review. At the start of this taut crime novel from Shamus Award-winner Ure (The Fault Tree), Jessie Dancing, an operator for a roadside emergency service in Phoenix, Ariz., receives a call from a driver in Tucson, Darren Markson, who sounds as if he's being murdered. Not content to merely contact the local police, Jessie tracks down Markson's family and is surprised when his wife tells her he's still alive. Back in her hometown of Tucson, Jessie's past returns to haunt her, including her acquittal three years earlier for a cold-blooded murder she may or may not have committed. When a young woman she meets near the site of Markson's phone call gets blown up in her car, Jessie is once again thrown into a world where the lines between guilty and not guilty blur. As Ure slowly peels back the layers of scar tissue to reveal Jessie's past crimes, the investigation of the woman's murder takes on even more depth as readers come to realize just how damaged the feisty heroine truly is. (Publishers Weekly)
Mating season, Jon Loomis. (2009)
*Starred Review* When Kenji Sole is found stabbed to death in her lavish Provincetown, Massachusetts, beach home, Detective Frank Coffin and Sergeant Lola Winters have no lack of suspects. The beautiful and wealthy victim had a voracious appetite for sex with a rotating cast of older, married men, whose bedroom activities she recorded surreptiously, while her carriage-house tenant ran a home-based porn business. And she had just threatened to have her rich attorney father declared incompetent after he changed his will to favor his young mistress rather than his daughter. Amid the investigation, Coffin must find his dementia-suffering mother, who has run away from her nursing home, and work at impregnating his girlfriend, who desperately wants a baby. Meanwhile, Kenji's hidden DVR becomes the hot potato that could solve the crime. Coffin's second outing (after the acclaimed High Season, 2007) hardly could be better: Loomis' prose is crisp and smart, and his characterizations ring true, with none more appealing than Coffin himself, a cop with a phobia of corpses. Reminiscent of Robert B. Parker at his best. (Booklist)
Midnight fugue, by Reginald Hill. (2009)
Crime fiction fans are devoted to Reginald Hill's excellent sequence of Dalziel & Pascoe novels, and there is a burgeoning interest in his equally adroit series featuring the canny private eye Joe Sixsmith (notably The Roar of the Butterflies, one of the most compelling entries in the series). However, for the real Reg Hill aficionado, it's Fat Andy and his more sophisticated colleague who inspire the real dedication, so the arrival of a new book, Midnight Fugue, is a cause for celebration - particularly as a refutation of the information in the title of Hill's recent novel, Dalziel is Dead. Gina Wolfe arrives in north Yorkshire seeking her missing husband, believed dead. Her new fiancé, a policeman in the Met, suggests the caustic copper Andy Dalziel might be of help - and everyone involved discovers that dark events of years ago have a way of causing troubling eruptions in the present. It's hard to believe, but it's been nearly four decades since readers first encountered the well-read, sensitive detective Peter Pascoe and his partner, the brash but winning Andy Dalziel, in A Clubbable Woman. Hill has always rung the changes in the series with new wrinkles but the key factor in the series' continuing success (leaving aside the ratings-winning TV adaptations) is Hill's eagerness to take on key societal issues (always, however, married to reader-grabbing plots) - and that characteristic is abundantly evident in Midnight Fugue, with the two protagonist striking sparks off each other in the usual highly satisfying fashion. (Amazon.co.uk)
Murder at Graverly Manor, Daniel Edward Craig. (2009)
Swashbuckling hotelier Trevor Lambert watched the last place he managed burn to the ground in Craig's Murder at Hotel Cinema (2008). Now, in his entertaining third outing, Lambert's back in Vancouver, Canada, near his family but jobless and depressed until he discovers Graverly Manor, an inn, for sale near picturesque Lost Lagoon. He decides his own BîB might be just what the doctor ordered, even if it's haunted by its former owner, Lord Andrew Graverly, and Graverly's chambermaid lover. Andrew's eccentric octogenarian widow, Elinor, hires Lambert to manage on a trial basis to see if he's serious. Clarissa, a pretty guest looking into the inn's past, distracts Lambert briefly as he deals with strange sounds, awful smells, a semidemonic cat and murder. Craig's lively mix of the macabre with his ever-urbane humor keeps this neo-Victorian melodrama from collapsing from its familiar haunted house theme. (Publishers Weekly)
Bleed a river deep, Brian McGilloway. (2009)
When a controversial US diplomat is attacked during the opening of a Donegal gold mine, Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin is disciplined for the lapse in security. The gunman turns out to be a young environmentalist - related to an old friend of Devlin's. Within days, the killing of an illegal immigrant near the Irish border leads Devlin to a vicious people-smuggling ring. Then Bradley himself is found dead near the mine and Devlin begins to suspect that the business is a front for something far more sinister than mere mining. Bleed a River Deep is the new novel from one of the most acclaimed young crime-writers around, a labyrinthine tale of big business, the new Europe, and the dispossessed. World politics, industry and organised crime collide in McGilloway's most accomplished, most gripping, and most powerful novel yet. (Amazon.co.uk)
Dropped dead stitch, by Maggie Sefton. (2009)
Sefton's seventh puzzler to feature Kelly Flynn, crafty sleuth of Fort Connor, Colo., and the House of Lambspun knitters (after 2008's Fleece Navidad) finds them worrying about their friend Jennifer Stroud, who's been raped. Though Jennifer initially refuses to report the attack to the authorities, she agrees to attend a weekend workshop for women who've suffered sexual violence. Kelly and physical therapist Lisa Gerrard are teaching a fiber class for the May retreat at Lazy C Ranch, whose owner, Cal Everett, turns out to be Jennifer's assailant. When Cal's found dead, pushed over the railing of a steep deck with Jennifer's latest afghan project draped over his body, Jennifer becomes a murder suspect. Sefton skillfully handles a sensitive topic while weaving in happier moments for her amateur detectives, such as the marriage of Mimi Shafer, Lambspun's owner, and Burt Parker, a retired Fort Connor detective.(Publishers Weekly)
Neptune Avenue : a Jack Leightner crime novel, by Gabriel Cohen. (2009)
Starred Review* Contemporary Brooklyn is one of the wellsprings of crime fiction. With many dozens of ethnic enclaves sitting cheek by jowl, it is a roiling place that challenges even the skills of veteran NYPD Homicide Detective Jack Leightner. In this third Leightner novel (following The Graving Dock, 2007, and Red Hook, 2001), Jack finds himself plumbing the mysteries of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn's Russian enclave. He's after the murderer of a friend, a Russian immigrant he shared a hospital room with while recovering from a bullet wound; but what lonely Leightner finds first is love, or at least infatuation, with Zhenya, the victim's wife. Principled and soulful, Leightner chastises himself for his feelings while his investigation takes him from Crown Heights to Coney Island. But plot takes a backseat here to character-Jack's and Brooklyn's-as Cohen treats crime fans to quirky details of Jack's world and a knowing glimpse of an amazing place blessed and afflicted by a surfeit of "tribes" that sometimes go to war and are always suspicious of outsiders. Cohen's novels belong, with those of Norman Green, at the top of every Brooklyn crime-fiction list. (Booklist)
Can't never tell : a southern fried mystery, Cathy Pickens. (2009)
Feisty attorney Avery Andrews seems to be settling back into Dacus, her South Carolina hometown. About a year ago she was a high-powered malpractice attorney in Columbia, South Carolina. Now, at the beginning of July, she is still learning how to be a small-town general-practice lawyer. Fortunately, there are a couple of puzzles at hand to which she can apply her lawyerly mind. First, her precocious seven-year-old niece discovers that a mannequin in a carnival fright house is a real skeleton. Who was it, how old is it, and where did it come from? The next day Avery attends a picnic with her sister's family and other college faculty members. A faculty wife falls off a waterfall. Was she pushed, and if so, who was responsible? Pickens won the Malice Domestic Contest for Best Traditional Mystery (for Southern Fried, 2004), and this fifth in the series solidifies her as an assured voice in the cozy subgenre. Unlike other cozy authors, Pickens never resorts to caricatures of either southerners or lawyers. (Booklist)
Don't look back, by Scott Frost. (2009)
Lieutenant Alex Delillo must face a dangerous serial killer in Scott Frost's fourth book for Headline. It starts with a body found lying in the centre of the Rose Bowl's dark field, surrounded by thousands of empty seats. For Lieutenant Alex Delillo, it's the beginning of a nightmare. The sixteen-year-old girl is found wrapped in a sleeping bag and as Delillo opens it she discovers that the body is frozen solid. The mystery deepens further when her partner, Harrison, recognises her as the daughter of a prominent lawyer who disappeared three years before. A search of the stadium reveals the only other clue - a copy of an etching by the nineteenth century artist Francisco Goya. It's a picture of a dead woman in the exact same pose as the frozen young girl. The girl's death is swiftly followed by others. All of the victims are prominent in the community and each body is posed as a copy of a Goya painting. For Delillo and Harrison, one thing is clear - their killer is treading in the footsteps of a great artist who despised the Establishment and now it seems no-one in power is safe. Not even their boss, Chief Chavez... (Amazon.co.uk)
Capture, Robert K. Tanenbaum. (2009)
New York County DA Roger Butch Karp, his wife, Marlene Ciampi, and daughter, Lucy, go up against a cartoonish crop of new and old villains in the over-the-top 21st thriller from bestseller Tanenbaum (after Escape). Their antagonists include Karp's chief nemesis, sociopath Andrew Kane, whose face transplant has failed and left him, well, without a face; David Grale, who may or may not be a foe, but who commands from his lair deep in the city's subway tunnels an army of stinking, filthy homeless men and women; the nefarious Sons of Man, a group that's been plotting against America for hundreds of years; and terrorists bent on striking a blow that will topple the U.S. government. While battling these madmen, Butch is also prosecuting a famous perverted Broadway producer who's killed a beautiful young actress in his apartment. Despite or because of the overkill, Tanenbaum's many fans are sure to be satisfied. (Publishers Weekly)
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