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Review

The Rose Arbor

by Brian Kenney

A richly depicted, absolutely haunting, and totally compelling novel from the consummate historical crime novelist Rhys Bowen. It’s 1968, and Liz Houghton is writing obituaries when she really wants to be a reporter. The disappearance of a young girl prompts her to go rogue and take on the investigation—with help from her roommate, Marisa, a police detective. Liz finds echoes of 1968 in the disappearance of three girls during World War II, lost while being evacuated to avoid the bombings. She eventually discovers the village of Tydeham, abandoned since it was taken over by the military during the War. Mysteriously drawn to the village—and with the help of a young man she meets there—Liz begins to make connections between what happened in the past and what lives on in the present. Parentage, great country estates, elderly and vulnerable parents, romance, and young women elbowing their way into the professions are all part of the tale. Perfect for book groups, purchase extra copies.

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Review

I Need You to Read This

by Brian Kenney

Like a lot of New Yorkers before her, Alex Marks came to the city to escape her past and forge a new identity. She finds work as a copy editor, but remains withdrawn, no dating!, with her only friends the staff at her neighborhood coffee shop. But when her hero, Francis Keen, the famous editor of the advice column, “Dear Constance,” doesn’t just die, but is murdered, Alex finds herself applying for her job—surprising herself at her ambition. Alex adored Francis, and even though they never met, she was beholden to Francis’ advice over the years. Miraculously, the paper’s editor in chief recognizes the kinship they share and gives Alex the job. But then she starts to receive sinister, vaguely threatening letters that motivate her to find Francis’s murderer. Fast, frightening, and ultimately fulfilling, the narrative takes a full 180 degree flip. Anticipate several brutal episodes of domestic violence.

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Review

Squeaky Clean

by Henrietta Thornton

Davey Burnet’s life is boring, tough drudgery, made no easier by his shame and frustration over having caused a lot of his own problems. He works at a Glasgow car wash where the work is both boring and freezing and the annoying customers bested only the even more draining pothead boss. But Davey wishes for the boredom back when an impulse decision brings a world of trouble down on him and the business. After nouveau-criminal-riche Paulo McGuinn takes to bringing his ostentatious vehicles to be cleaned and Davey “borrows” one of them to make it to a custody hearing for the daughter he desperately wants to see, the car is wrecked and suddenly Paulo is the de facto owner of the car wash and of Davey’s grim future. Paolo’s just-one-of-the-lads bonhomie is a wafer-thin veneer over viciousness; not taken in by it is DI Alison McCoist, whose pecking away at the car wash’s goings on are Davey’s only hope. While this fast-moving tale is dark and has moments of real terror, it’s also grimly hilarious, especially in McSorley’s skewering of Paolo’s inflated self regard. The dialog takes some getting used to, with the character’s thicker than thick Glasgow accents faithfully reproduced, but once readers acclimatize they’re in for a rollicking, satisfying read.

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Review

The Noh Mask Murder

by Willy Williams

First published in 1949 and now elegantly translated into English for the first time, this award-winning atmospheric puzzler by a celebrated author from Japan’s golden age of detective fiction is both an intricate locked-room mystery and a metafictional take on how to write such a crime novel. In the summer of 1946 at a bathing resort, Akimitsu Takagi, a devotee of mystery fiction and an aspiring amateur sleuth, runs into Koichi Yanagi, an old school friend who has just returned to Japan after serving in Burma. Koichi now works for the respected Chizui family, whose members appear to be as cursed as Edgar Allen Poe’s Usher siblings. Ten years earlier, the patriarch, Professor Chizui, died of an apparent heart attack, although Koichi suspects foul play; his wife was institutionalized in an asylum; and recently their daughter also lost her sanity. One night, an eerie figure wearing a demonic hannya Noh mask is spotted in the upstairs window of the Chizui mansion; Taijiro, the professor’s brother, asks Akimitsu to investigate. By the time the sleuth arrives on the scene, Taijiro has been found dead in an armchair in his locked bedroom, with the mask on the floor beside him and the scent of jasmine lingering in the air. When Akimitsu learns that someone has ordered three coffins, he fears that the worst is yet to come. The author cleverly structures his plot like a Russian nesting doll, with one puzzle embedded within another puzzle inside another puzzle, until it is resolved in a surprising and satisfying conclusion. Agatha Christie and S.S. Van Dine fans will enjoy this twisty tale.

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Review

Puzzle Me a Murder

by Brian Kenney

Call me old-fashioned, but when I’m reading a cozy, I like a corpse to make an appearance in the first quarter of the book. Puzzle Me a Murder delivers not just a corpse, but the body of George Milliner, the husband of Ruby, who just happens to be best friends with Alice Pepper. And Alice is totally at the center of this book. Director of the local public library (job and library are portrayed 100 percent accurately), Alice rules from her huge, old Craftsman house, her settlement in the divorce, surrounded by friends and family. So when George is murdered—he was last seen in his house chasing a young, scantily clad, blonde-haired woman—Alice, Ruby, and others spring into action, and having a granddaughter on the police force certainly helps. While cooking, eating, and working on puzzles provide the crew with some down time, Alice and Ruby are more often out and about ferreting information to help determine George’s murderer. What they find is shocking: corruption in local government, blackmail from vendors, and the harassment of some of West Hazel, Oregon’s leading citizens. There’s a buoyancy to this book that makes it a delight to read, while still capturing the evil that dwells among us. I am so looking forward to another Alice adventure.

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Review

The Grey Wolf

by Henrietta Thornton

Quebec Detective Inspector Armand Gamache, so beloved of readers after 18 outings that showcase his fierce love for his family and his quiet investigative smarts, here finds himself far from his village of Three Pines, both in his investigation and emotionally. After he accepts a mysterious invitation to meet someone at a Montreal Cafe and the rendezvous ends in a terrorist attack, Gamache must hit the road to find out who his coffee date was and why he was seemingly murdered. Clues are few and Armand can’t trust his department as there are signs of an informant, but the lives of millions of Canadians are on the line. There’s a rich religious element here, with Gamache traveling to monasteries and even having a Vatican nun grilled as to her past. This book contains a more frightening thriller element than in some of Penny’s previous tales. But as the author’s acknowledgment so poignantly states, “Home. That’s really what the books are about.” Readers will happily follow Gamache back there to his beloved Reine-Marie and their now overflowing brood. A tense, satisfying tale.

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Review

Seraphim

by Henrietta Thornton

Every book has words, is comprised of words, but this book is about words. The ones that 16-year-old Robert Johnson used when his charter school teachers, who treat optimism as a kind of hygiene, told him he should confess to the murder of Lillie Scott, a hero of the rebuilding of New Orleans, who hired at her restaurant those down on their luck. The words the boy can’t or won’t say about what really happened, which barely matters anyway since the system will drag him in now or later, formed as it is of “strange empty words in the shape of language but without any meaning.” And the words that are unsaid as Lillie “[lies] down in the street so noiselessly, slow like a sheet in the breeze flutters to the ground.” Shoulder to the wheel of all this is Ben Alder, a former rabbinical student and son of a linguist, and his dude of dudes, Grand Old Dude of York, Mayor Van Dude of Dudetown, Boris Pasternak. These public defenders ask for every case involving a child, and Ben becomes Robert’s lawyer. All the boy wants is to talk to his dad. But Ben doesn’t tell him that he’s also representing the father, who, unknown to the boy, is in the same jail. Ben has “no questions that are small enough for the courtroom,” but still wrangles his fear and his clients through the morass to a satisfying outcome, one that will leave readers with large questions of their own, mainly about this country’s treatment of Black boys. Debut novelist Perry, a former New Orleans public defender, has wonderfully distilled a world of hurt onto the page.

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Review

Dog Day Afternoon

by Jeff Ayers

Former defense attorney Andy Carpenter tries to stay retired, but another case lands in his lap. When there’s no hope of winning due to overwhelming evidence, that is when Andy shines and can’t say no to getting to work to prove his client’s innocence. A mass shooting leads to the police quickly finding a suspect, Nick Williams. Nick is a friend of someone Andy trusts, so he takes the case. Nick’s alibi is that he was kidnapped, held in an empty room, and chained to a wall for three days. The police don’t believe him at all. With such a flimsy alibi, Andy and his team get to work. Rosenfelt’s series combines the best of cozy mysteries, suspense, legal thrillers, and humor to create a terrific story that is refreshing and fun 29 books in. Andy is snarky, and his inner monologues and legal discussions with Tara, his golden retriever, will put a smile on the face of even the most jaded reader. Whether this is your first read featuring Andy Carpenter or the 29th, this is another winner in the franchise.

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Review

Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain

by Brian Kenney

In the first book in the series, Kalmann, we were introduced to our hero, a young man who’s neurodivergent—although he uses many terms to describe himself—and who works as the self-appointed sheriff of Raufarhöfn, a fishing village in northern Iceland. His world is contained—he lives with his mother, his best friend he sees only online—but his life is still fraught with dangers, from fishing on the Greenland Sea to encounters with polar bears. Kalmann remains well regarded in his village, and it is his sense of humor that often helps him survive. But in Kalmann and the Sleeping Mountain, we are stunned to find Kalmann in West Virginia, visiting his Dad, whom he has never met before, and getting swept up, along with his Dad and his MAGA buddies, in the January 6, 2021 riots in the Capitol Building. Incredible! While he is soon put on a plane back to Iceland by a kindly FBI agent, Kalmann’s world is changing. His beloved grandfather has recently died, and, Kalmann learns, he may well have been a Russian spy. Could he have been murdered in his nursing home? Another possible murder in the village, and a risky trip to an abandoned U.S. radar station with an aunt, forces Kalmann to rethink his family and village and his role in both. Both heart-rendering and hilarious, “there is no need to worry” as Kalmann famously declares. “Kalmann is in charge.”

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Review

I Dreamed of Falling

by Henrietta Thornton

This novel of small-town heartbreak, grittily emotional in a way that’s reminiscent of Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, introduces the lovably flawed Grady family: Roman, his partner, Ashley; their son, Mason; Roman’s mom, Tara; and her partner, John. They all barely hold it together financially and every other way in their part-time Airbnb in upstate New York. The house needs extensive repairs, but who has the money? Instead they’re muddling along, with Tara mainly raising Mason and his parents resenting her takeover. Then Roman finds Ashley dead on the riverbank behind her drug-addict friend’s house. As word gets out that Ashley had a bag of pills in her pocket, everyone in town assumes it was an overdose. But Roman wants real answers, and his digging creates a realistic, relatable saga of poverty mixed with love and bad choices. All the characters here are memorable, but four-year-old Mason and his bottomless, bewildered grief are particularly well drawn. A family and a story to remember.

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