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Review

Burn This Night

by Henrietta Thornton

Kate Myles has a lot going on. The former LAPD cop, her career ruined by a pain-pill addiction brought on by a car crash, has lost her marriage and custody of her beloved daughter, Amelia. She’s now working as a private detective, rolling her eyes at old-time movie assumptions. It’s far from glamorous, and she’s far from ready for more drama in her life. But no matter: while living at her mom’s, she discovers paperwork that leads her on a quest to find biological relatives, a plot line that includes an intriguing aspect of the use of DNA in crime cases, and that also leads her to Idlewood, a town with a sad history. Hired to clear the name of a drug addict who’s accused of killing his sister in an arson attack, she also investigates a local cold case, of a young woman who was killed years before. How all these things are related is the story of every small town, with Kenna perfectly portraying the intertwined regrets, missed opportunities, and love that make each place unique. Better again is her portrayal of Myles, a gutsy, lovable character who pushes herself to the brink and more for those she loves. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

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Review

Sleep In Heavenly Pizza

by Brian Kenney

Settle in for a truly wonderful read as Geneva Bay, Wisconsin prepares for the holidays. For pizza chef Delilah
O’Leary, and her crew, a glitzy Chrismukkah catering gig in one of the local mansions gets things started, but when Delilah’s family shows up out of the blue with their own set of hostilities and anxiety-producing behavior in tow, things take a decidedly unpleasant turn. And any hopes that the next day’s annual snow-sculpting championship will cheer everyone up—Delilah attends with now-boyfriend Detective Calvin Capone (yes, that Capone family)—are dashed when a corpse is found frozen in the ice. Quigley employs a large cast of characters, from the formerly incarcerated and now dishwasher “Rabbit” (where did he disappear to?) to Sonya, Delilah’s bestie who helps Delilah sort out her relationship with Capone, to Delilah’s grumpy sister Shea, who most definitely has something up her sleeve. The miracle is that we can follow each character with ease, their identities are so well drawn, while caring about each of them. Add to this a bucketful of red herrings sure to send readers in a dozen different directions. Fire up the pizza, cue Mariah Carey, and make sure the cat is comfortable: cozies just don’t get better than this.

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Review

Anyone But Her

by Henrietta Thornton

The love surrounding a beloved neighborhood institution shines through in Swanson’s latest, in which a 1979 Denver record-store owning mom is shot dead in a robbery, her forlorn young daughter, Suzanne, left behind. But Suzanne’s hapless dad has the perfect solution. It’s all figured out! His old girlfriend, Peggy, is moving in. Peggy seems much too eager for this arrangement. She’s also far more motherly toward Suzanne’s devastated little brother, Chris, than Suzanne would like, while nasty toward Suzanne herself. But Suzanne’s mom used to call her daughter “my little seer,” and indeed, after some time, she gets visits from her mom, hearing again her “warm, round voice–like the sun speaking.” When we fast forward in alternating chapters to 2004, adult Suzanne is moving back to Denver from California with her husband, disgruntled teenage daughter, and nine-year-old son. Trying to settle in, she opens a new business in her mom’s old shop, but sinister things start cropping up–a girl is missing in town, and elements of the case are strangely familiar. Then there’s the rat left on the family’s doorstep. What it all means leads this protagonist on a frightening and gripping path to the truth about what happened in 1979, a tale that is enriched with details on the music of the time and the feeling of enduring love. For fans of T. Jefferson Parker’s A Thousand Steps, which is steeped in the same emotions, and all who love a solid mystery

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Review

Glen Affric

by Willy Williams

The best-selling French author of psychological suspense makes her U.S. debut with an intense and heartbreaking homage to an American literary classic, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. For 16-year-old Léonard, who suffered brain damage as an infant, there is no place in the village of Granviller to escape the school bullies who torment him daily. The only people kind to the powerfully built but mentally challenged teen are his adoptive mother, Mona, who discovered the abused toddler in a ditch; his best friend, 13-year-old Victoria, the daughter of Mona’s boss; and furniture restorer Sacha. Léonard finds consolation in nature (“no animal or tree has ever made fun of him for being different”) and dreams of joining his older brother in beautiful Glen Affric in the Scottish Highlands. But Jorge has not been in Scotland, as Mona had told her son; for the past 16 years, his brother has been in prison, convicted of the brutal rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, a crime he claims he didn’t commit. After Jorge is paroled, the siblings finally meet for the first time, but Jorge’s attempt to rebuild his life is hobbled by a hostile community. As the brothers endure mounting cruelties and injustices, their tentative relationship blossoms into a tender and abiding love. When both are accused of another murder, readers will cheer on Jorge and Léonard’s flight to Glen Affric. Will they make it? Giebel has written a haunting, dark, and tough read that in its emotional brutality may remind some readers of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life.

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Review

The Big Empty

by Jeff Ayers

Traci Beller is a popular influencer with millions of followers inspired by watching her bake. It’s been ten years since her father, Tommy, never returned home, with the local police attributing it to him abandoning his family. Now, Traci wants answers. She reaches out to the best detective to learn the truth, Elvis Cole. Elvis has his work cut out for him trying to track down someone missing for a decade, but he’s willing to give it a shot, though he’s doubtful he will uncover anything more than what the police could find. But the detective stumbles upon a mystery involving the last person who saw Tommy alive and refuses to talk about it. He starts seeing the same dark-colored vehicle following him and soon learns that people don’t want him to discover the truth and are willing to kill anyone to keep everything secret. This case started as a simple missing person case for Elvis, but becomes the one that could be his last. Crais masters compelling crime fiction by blending humor, terrific main characters, and suspense into a phenomenal package. Empty might be in the title, but this story is far from it.

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Review

Loose Lips

by Brian Kenney

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. This book will have you quickly rearranging your life so that you can get to the all-so-worth-it ending ASAP and without any distractions. A classic closed-circle mystery, it features nearly 300 women and practically no men on a literary cruise to nowhere called the “Get Lit Cruise.” The cruise has been organized by best-selling author and writing guru Payton Garrett, who’s brought along some friends to lead the seminars. These include an MFA frenemy known as the ghostwriter who, under the pseudonym Belle Currer, is a well-known mystery writer (we first met her in Donovan’s The Busy Body). Belle is hands-down one of the most wickedly droll narrators in mysteries these days—hip, full of fun, yet still capable of being terrified. And terror there is, when murder visits the high seas, leaving corpses in its wake. It’s easy to compare this novel to those from Agatha Christie and Anthony Horowitz, but Loose Lips is very much its own thing, and Belle very much her own unique character. I can’t wait to feature this book in next spring’s book discussions.

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Review

White King

by Henrietta Thornton

The last in the Antonia Scott trilogy offers more tightly plotted terror and a brilliant ending. Antonina has long graduated from the secret program, Red Queen, that made her already-high IQ into a finely tuned weapon. Red Queen (2023) and Black Wolf (2024) saw her working for Mentor at various underworld tasks that needed a cold genius, all the while waiting for her husband, Marcos, to wake from the coma caused during an attack by one of her enemies. Now she’s let Marcos go, but the dangerous work and attacks continue. Others in the Red Queen program are being targeted worldwide, and Antonia’s longtime and beloved sidekick, Jon Gutiérrez, has been targeted in a macabre way. The two face a terrifying countdown during which they must solve crime puzzles posed by the sinister Mr. White. There’s a lot going on here, and it’s best if readers have read the previous books; fans of the related Netflix series, Red Queen, will also be in line to get further inside the thinking of the show’s mysterious lead character and to know how her perilous odyssey ends.

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Review

Head Cases

by Henrietta Thornton

Gardner Camden has found his perfect home in the FBI’s PAR, or Patterns and Recognition division. Like the department itself, Camden is thought of by other agents as weird, and it doesn’t help that he almost had PAR disbanded by making a terrible mistake that’s kept secret till near the end of the book. Still, he’s brilliant at noticing what nobody else does and relentless at finding the worst of the worst of criminals. He found one of those years before, dead in a fire. But in the case that opens this fascinating thriller, the same man is found dead at a crime scene, with numbers scrawled on his body. Next more killers are found murdered, also with messages to PAR, or maybe to Camden, at the scene. Finding out who is killing serial killers, and why, takes Camden and his lovable team on cross country treks and through psychological torture as the suspect won’t hesitate to go after all the team holds dear. Camden’s first-person narration brings readers inside the head of a steadfast but quirky man (“I’ve been called…Unconcerned. On the spectrum. A weirdo”) as he puzzles out wicked and tangled crimes and the minds behind them. McMahon’s debut novel, the first book in his P.T. Marsh series, was a New York Times Top 10 Crime Novel and a finalist for both the Edgar Award and the ITW Thriller Award, and his other books have been lauded as well. This is more great stuff and a must for your TBR pile.

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Review

The Case of the Missing Maid

by Brian Kenney

A wonderful foray into turn-of-the-19th-century Chicago, with women entering the workforce, immigrants transforming the city, and the LGBTQ community tucked away in hidden nightclubs. Harriet Morrow, all of 21 years old, is the first woman hired as a detective by the prestigious Prescott Agency—a decision that pleases almost no one, neither the male detectives nor the female typing pool. But working as a detective has always been a dream of Harriet’s, and now, with her parents dead and her younger brother to support, it’s a necessity. So too are the pants she wears, giving her the freedom to comfortably bike around Chicago while also exploring her identity as a lesbian. Within an hour on the job, Harriet gets her first assignment: to find a maid who has disappeared from one of the posh mansions on Prairie Avenue—and Harriet has only a few days to locate her. It’s magical how Osler transports us around Chicago, from the the large Polish community to queer social spaces to the ritzy homes of Chicago’s elite. Harriet is a wonderful lead character, and Osler brilliantly combines his protagonist’s growth into adulthood and Chicago’s emergence as one of the nation’s largest cities. This book is asking to be the first in a series

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Review

Young, Pamela Samuels and Dwayne Alexander Smith. Sounds Like a Plan.

by Brian Kenney

A fun, fast-reading thromance (that’s thriller+romance) with echoes of the old TV Show Moonlighting (if Cybill Shepherd were carrying around an assault rifle in her trunk.) Mackenzie and Jackson are two Black private investigators who are hired by the same client to track down a missing young woman. The first one to locate her will receive a cool $50,000. The two PIs are as different as can be. Princeton-grad Mackenzie comes from a seriously affluent family, with a mother who can only register disgust at her daughter’s choice of career. Jackson grew up in tougher circumstances and came up through the LAPD before hanging out his own shingle. Mackenzie is struggling to get her business off the ground, while Jackson is highly successful but can’t stop indulging in fancy cars and an even fancier wardrobe. The narrative flips between the two personalities, chapter-by-chapter, which gives the authors a chance to explore their characters’ personal lives while keeping the story moving briskly along. As their paths cross, the tension between Mackenzie and Jackson builds, while their struggle to survive becomes paramount. Smith and Young have laid out everything that’s necessary for the making of a wonderful series.

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