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Review

The Expectant Detectives

by Henrietta Thornton

Bridget Jones meets Thursday Murder Club in this tale of rural English women who meet in a prenatal class and learn far more than how to not kill your partner while the baby’s making its debut. The central character and narrator is Alice, who, she tells us, thought she’d surprise her boyfriend for his 30th birthday with a pregnancy. It’s a happy if slightly puzzling surprise, as Alice has little idea how to care for a baby and she’s terrified of birth. The overly chipper and hippy teacher of the class, whose clothes resemble “a chameleon caught in a kaleidoscope,” isn’t much help. Even less helpful is that one of the students gives birth during the class (would a first baby be that fast? Eh, it’s Bridget Jones with a baby. Moving on). And after that, the owner of the store downstairs from the class is found very dead. The rest of the class is still pregnant and they spend their time lumbering around the “posh hippy” town of Penton (“Population: seventeen people and a cow”) puzzling out village relationships, past scandals, and the intricacies of cloth diapers. This fun romp offers hilarious moments while taking on some real-life issues: the fear involved in becoming a first-time parent and the shadows of one’s own upbringing that can darken parenthood, all while Alice and friends undertake the whodunit. Ailes’s sequel, the perfectly named Dead Tired, meets the characters again after they’ve had their babies and will be out on the heels of this one, on June 4, 2024.

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Review

A Midnight Puzzle

by Jeff Ayers

Tempest Raj, a former magician, now runs Secret Staircase Construction, which, among other things, creates elaborate hidden passages behind bookcases. The more complex and baffling the construction the better. One of the company’s jobs is scrutinized when a woman falls down a secret staircase and almost dies. Tempest knows that the victim’s husband, Julian, set up the fall so he could sue Tempest’s company and avoid liability. One night, Julian calls Tempest to visit him at the historic Whispering Creek Theater, a venue recently purchased and upgraded by Tempest. She arrives to find Julian dead, with a sword through his chest. When a paramedic stumbles upon another blade that pops out one of the entrance doors, Tempest realizes the theater has been set with booby traps. Demanding answers, especially since the clues lead to questions about her past, Tempest will risk everything for the truth. Pandian creates a cast of characters that is straight out of the best cozy mysteries, and even though this is the third book in the series, the story is a perfect launch point for newcomers. The pacing and writing elevate A Midnight Puzzle to a must-read for the cozy mystery fan.

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Review

Bright and Tender Dark

by Henrietta Thornton

2019 bookends this murder mystery. In that year, student KC, a trans man, is the weary caretaker of a college dorm, picking up after his lazy peers and saving them from their drunken worst selves. The dorm he works in has a rumor-clad oddity: a young female student was killed there years ago, and the true-crime frenzy has made the building a magnet for professional and amateur sleuths. Their work sends us back to just before New Years Eve 1999, where we meet the victim, Karlie Richards. Karlie seems to have it all but, like everyone she meets, has dragged a weight of hopes, loves, and past mistakes to her new life in college. It’s the pre-#MeToo era as Karlie faces what turns out to be her final days, and readers will love to hate the professor who has a way too close relationship to his female students, and long to jump into the pages to warn the young women away. But there’s nothing we can do as Karlie’s doomed world comes to life and Pearson skillfully introduces several more characters who could have killed Karlie and more reasons why they would have done so. The divergent lives of the haves and have nots in college towns, and the experiences of evangelical students taking their first foray into a more secular world, are starkly painted in this dark debut novel by an author to watch.

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Review

Nosy Neighbors

by Brian Kenney

A tale both churlish and charming, in which Shelley House, a grand but dilapidated old mansion, is scheduled for demolition, forcing the residents to put aside their antagonism and fight the common enemy: the construction developer. Twenty-five year old Kat, of pink hair and punkish demeanor, has just rented a room in Shelley House and found a job as a dishwasher, convinced she’ll stay for just a couple of weeks. Why is she in town? It’s hard to say, except she partially grew up here with her loving grandfather, away from her substance-abusing mother, and something is drawing her back. Across the floor lives seventy-seven-year-old Dorothy Darling, a retired teacher who spends her days like Dickens’s Madame Defarge, recording the goings on of her neighbors. Both Kat and Dorothy are propelled by powerful secrets that stretch back years, and that only now—thanks to the corrupt cops and a vicious construction developer—they must expose to the light of day. With poignant characters and a richly drawn community, this is a novel readers will not soon forget.

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Review

What Mother Won’t Tell Me

by Henrietta Thornton

This debut novel should come with blood-pressure pills. The tension at first comes from strangeness: Mother; Father; their daughter, Juno; and son, Boy live a harsh, homesteading life alone on an island. Is it the present day? What part of the world are they in? Is the mortal danger from outsiders that the parents warn about real? The timing element is all that’s clear for a good portion of the book: it’s the current day, but apart from visits from the mailman who comes from the mainland, during which Juno and Boy must hide from view, the rest is unknown. Bit by bit, teen Juno’s desire for freedom and her determination to find out more about their situation despite her sinister, violent parents’ “seven commandments” (including “We must always kill quickly and painlessly”) ramp up the fear to a terrifying do-or-die scene. Readers will be rapt as they race to the end to find out who survives this nightmare that’s effectively mixed with a fairytale motif echoing one of Juno’s favorite stories. Menger’s previous work is in film, TV, and audiobooks: try his Audible Originals Monster 1983 and Ghostbox while you wait for this gripping thriller.

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Review

Blood Sisters

by Henrietta Thornton

“Where there’s pain, there’s blame,” which is why Syd Walker lives far from her Oklahoma roots and hasn’t seen her family in years. As a teen, Syd; her sister, Emma Lou; and her best friend, Luna, were attacked by a pair of masked Tsigilis, the Cherokee word for devils. Syd, who is Cherokee, shot one of them dead, but his gang killed Luna and her parents. She can’t forgive herself for not saving Luna, and the small town of Picher can’t decide, even all these years later, what she should have done that night. That past is now coming back with a vengeance as the epidemic of missing young Native women now seems to have swallowed Emma Lou, and the body of another young woman has been found, with Syd’s old work ID card in her mouth. Syd’s return home immerses the reader in the difficulty of returning to a place and people you’ve outgrown, the bitter choices we must sometimes make—Syd is now an archaeologist for the same Bureau of Indian Affairs that has cost her people so much—and the strength that love and loyalty bring. Lillie (an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) adds to the story details of Native history and current day life, with sardonic wit both tempering and highlighting the pain that pierces both times. A dark and propulsive thriller for fans of Kelly J. Ford.

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Review

Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies

by Brian Kenney

This series debut is sure to delight fans of traditional mysteries as well as those who prefer a good CWC (cozy with corpses). Successful author Eleanor Dash is off on a publicity tour of southern Italy with a rather motley crew of fellow mystery writers; her sister, who is also her manager; a busload of fans; two ex-lovers; a stalker; and a few hangers-on. No sooner does the reader pour a refreshing limoncello than there is an attempt on one of the characters’ lives: that of Charles, one of the exes and a rather suave ladies’ man whom Eleanor has featured in her novels and who receives royalties from her books (what? it’s complicated). In fact, Eleanor would love nothing more than to see Charles dead, although she’s more likely to kill him off in her next book than in real life. As the group ambles about Sorrento and Positano—having fantastic meals and dishing on the publishing industry while managing to dodge the occasional murder attempt—we are treated to the best feature of the book: Eleanor’s witty, droll, and sophisticated voice, on display in dialog, interior monologue, and, best of all, the many footnotes that pepper the text. As roles are upended, and the crime writers become detectives, we also learn more about Eleanor’s personal life, from her complicated relationship with her sister to her remaining passion for Oliver, the other ex. Perfect for fans of The Magpie Murders; the Finlay Donovan series; and Only Murders in the Building.

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Review

The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles

by Brian Kenney

Whenever you love a book—that would be me and the first book in this series, The Mimicking of Known Successes—you can only approach the next installation with some trepidation. So I’m happy to report that this book more than lives up to my expectations—although it’s important to read the books in order. It’s set against a rather simple mystery: 17 students and staff members are missing from Valdegeld, the Oxbridge-like university where Pleiti is a professor. This is a space opera and a detective story, a romance and a cozy mystery, with the investigation led by Mossa, Pleiti’s lover and a detective, who in this story explicitly asks Pleiti for her help. Set in part on Giant, the huge rings that surround Jupiter and where many humans have settled, this narrative includes a lengthy trip to far-off Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. The pleasures in this book are many. There’s the growing relationship between the two women, especially Pleiti’s worries that Mossa may not have feelings as strong as she does. There’s the brilliant world-building, with special attention to the far-off settlements the two women seek out, revealing the fascinating means of travel and the many smaller, human communities scattered across the vast planet. Finally, there are ruminations from Pleiti about the aim of returning to Earth, her research area, and the hints of political dissent. Brilliant on all counts.

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Review

The Deepest Lake

by Willy Williams

Noted for her historical and speculative fiction (The Spanish Bow; Annie and the Wolves), Romano-Lax ventures into suspense territory with this atmospheric, entertaining thriller about a grieving mother investigating her daughter’s mysterious death. Three months after her 23-year-old daughter was presumed to have drowned in Lake Atitlán, Central America’s deepest lake, Rose arrives in Guatemala. Although a six-week search failed to recover Jules’s body, Rose is unsatisfied with the official investigation’s conclusion. She wants to learn more about her daughter’s final hours and why Jules, who had a lifelong fear of water, was last seen swimming in the lake. A key but uncooperative witness is Eva Marshall, the best-selling memoirist and Jules’s literary idol, for whom the aspiring writer had just started working as a personal assistant before her disappearance. Frustrated with Eva’s refusal to schedule a visit or a phone call from Rose and her ex-husband Matt, a determined Rose signs up under her maiden name for an upcoming memoir-writing workshop taught by the charismatic Eva at her Guatemalan lakeside retreat. “Rose has no ambitions whatsoever as a memoirist, not even the tiniest desire to be published.…But you do what you must, after you’ve already tried everything else.” Despite the glamor and natural beauty of her surroundings, Rose senses something off both in Eva and in how she runs her workshop. Did Jules uncover a dark truth that led to her death? While crafting a taut tale of suspense, Romano-Lax also turns a gimlet eye on the sometimes-toxic writing-workshop industry and the social media demands that turn authors into marketers and branders. In spite of an epilogue that feels a bit forced, the author has written a satisfying tale about the sometimes-strained but always unbreakable bonds between mothers and daughters.

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Review

Dead Man’s Hand

by Jeff Ayers

A secret meeting between a rogue team of Ukranians desperate for peace and military intelligence officers from Russia sparks the chaos in Taylor’s latest Taskforce novel. The plan they concoct involves assassinating Putin, but Putin already knows of their plot. His solution is to have his most trusted officer run a counterattack once he commits an act of violence to keep Sweden from joining NATO. Pike Logan and his Taskforce team learn of the Swedish offensive, and soon, they are wrapped in an operation with massive complications. What they don’t realize is that Putin’s contingency, if he’s killed, involves launching the Perimeter Nuclear System known as the Dead Hand. Logan and his team must confront how someone can be the enemy when they have the same goals. Whether this is your first time with the Taskforce or your eighteenth, this series remains intense, timely, and worthwhile. Taylor is one of the best in the special ops world. Brad Thor and Jack Carr fans should already have Taylor on their mandatory reading list.

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