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Review

Murder by Degrees

by Brian Kenney

Set in post-Civil War Philadelphia, this is historical crime fiction that goes deep into the many strata of society, from recent immigrants to medical students, from the police to the very rich. At its heart is Dr. Lydia Weston, practicing medical doctor and professor at the Women’s Medical College. When Anna Ward, a patient of Lydia’s, is found dead in the Schuylkill River, Lydia refuses to believe she died by suicide. Instead, Lydia manages to become part of the police investigation. Fortunately, Anna kept a diary, and by examining the patient’s writings and her cadaver, Lydia is able to begin to piece together some of what happened. Anna’s story takes us all over the city, displays the antipathy so many had for women doctors, and exposes the risks Lydia took to solve the murder. For readers who love to be transported to another era. Fans of Jacqueline Winspear and Victoria Thompson will love this book.

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Review

Christmas Presents

by Henrietta Thornton

“Everybody knows everything about you in this stupid town. And they know nothing.” What people in Madeline Martin’s rural New York town know about her is that she’s the daughter of the town’s longtime, beloved sheriff and she owns The Next Chapter, her dream bookstore. They also know, but rarely mention, that she survived a brutal attack ten years before, one that saw her friend Steph murdered and two other friends, sisters Ainsley and Sam, disappear. What they don’t know is that Maddie’s never recovered emotionally and longs to know what happened to her friends. There’s still no word on the missing teens, and it’s a few days before the anniversary of the attack, which also means Christmas is a few days off and the bookstore is humming. Superstar author Harley Granger chooses this as his moment to visit and start his research on whether the man doing time for the crime is guilty, what happened to Ainsley and Sam, and, most urgently, where a newly disappeared exotic dancer could be. All breathlessly documented on social media, of course. Fans of Unger will know her thrillers match top-notch writing with gripping stories; this one won’t disappoint in that regard and offers the bonus of a satisfying family story in Maddie and her father.

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Review

The Raging Storm

by Brian Kenney

The third in the Two Rivers series has DI Matthew Venn and colleagues off to the tiny town of Greystone on the Devon coast. While much of Devon is popular as a vacation spot, Greystone’s color palette (gray, grayer, and grayest) combined with the dark, turbulent sea makes for a forbidding destination. To the locals’ delight, Greystone’s only celebrity, Jem Rosco, a famous sailor and adventurer, has returned. He spends his nights in the local pub, where he lets it be known that he’s back in town to meet up with someone special. A former lover? Perhaps. Except Rosco suddenly disappears before we find out, his body found naked, curled up in the bottom of a dinghy that’s anchored in a cove. A cove with a superstitious history. With her usual brilliance, Cleeves balances Venn and Co. as they spread out across the town seeking information while also drilling deeply into the lives of a handful of leading suspects. Personal tensions arise. Matthew’s team members compete with one another. Matthew himself is uncomfortable in Greystone, having spent part of his cult-ridden childhood in the town. And Jonathan, Matthew’s husband, has a secret he’s not ready to share. When this novel ends, it’s with a bang, not a whimper, sure to delight readers of what is one of the very best series being written today.

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Review

The Bitter Past

by Henrietta Thornton

The high desert of eastern Nevada is Borgos’s setting for this series debut, and it opens with the most violent death Sheriff Porter Beck has seen. A retired FBI agent, Ralph Atterbury, looks to have been tortured for hours, his skin removed in strips and his nipples blowtorched. It can’t be a routine break-in, but what could the man have done that would inspire such rage? Flashing back to supposedly a more apple-pie time, Nevada in the Cold War, we meet Freddie Meyer, a young man who’s humble enough to go steady with Kitty Ellison, a bookish girl who “wasn’t the most striking” of her friends. In due course, Kitty’s physicist father helps Freddie get a job—he’s just so gosh-darn grateful!—at the nearby atomic testing site’s top-secret project. Readers are let in on the audacious, almost unbelievable plan that unfolds, one that Beck slowly uncovers as he seeks the identities of Atterbury’s killer and a Russian spy who he believes worked at the testing site all those years ago. Beck has the nice-guy relentlessness that readers love in an investigator. His love interest, present-day FBI agent Sana Locke, adds wiles and beauty, and the Cold War storyline is gripping. I can’t wait for the next from Borgos.

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Review

First Lie Wins

by Jeff Ayers

Ryan Summer helps a young woman named Evie Porter with a flat tire, and shortly afterward, they are inseparable in Elston’s twisty thriller. He falls head over heels for her, but in Evie’s case, the relationship is an assignment from her mysterious boss she has never seen, Mr. Smith. Her orders are to get close and obtain information about Ryan’s business. As time passes, she finds herself falling for her mark, and one evening, while meeting some of Ryan’s friends, she meets Lucca Marino. Evie’s real name is Lucca Marino, and this woman is using Evie’s real-life identity and background. It’s clear her boss has put a target on her back, and she will have to use all her manipulative skills to stay alive, even if that means she has no realistic chance of returning to her old life. Retirement is not an option. Elston has crafted a story that stretches credulity a bit, but works. Readers will be dying to finish this fast enough so they can decipher what’s going on, and it’s a guarantee that they’ll find the truth unexpected. Fans of Hank Phillippi Ryan and Megan Miranda should seek this out.

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Review

Death of an Author

by Brian Kenney

ou don’t have to struggle to find reviews of Death of an Author, a crime novella written with several sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) programs. The claim is that 95 percent of the book is computer generated, mostly using ChatGPT, and reviewers are transfixed by the notion that AI can produce anything that halfway functions as fiction. Especially since the AI-produced fiction we already have is pretty miserable. But the real question is: how does it hold up as a mystery, the genre the title clearly lays claim to? Surprisingly well, actually. In no time at all, mystery readers will encounter the tropes that assure them they’re in familiar territory, with enough mild plot developments to keep the pages flipping, if not flying, and language that ranges from the clunky (diction!) to the lovely. Scholar Gus Dupin is invited to the funeral of Canadian literary star Peggy Firmin, “a pioneer of using artificial intelligence to manufacture literary artifacts,” who was murdered in the outskirts of Toronto. While he never met Peggy, Gus has spent the better part of his life writing about her. Her funeral turns out to be an exclusive affair—with some fun walk-ons, like Michael Ondaatje—and feels as though it’s lifted right out of Agatha Christie, if the Dame had access to avatars. And guess who’s the prime suspect? The story moves on, becoming a bit too meta, too smarty pants for this reader. But let’s just agree that it’s fascinating and fun. I reviewed it as an ebook, but the publisher produces primarily audiobooks.

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Review

Some of Us Are Looking

by Henrietta Thornton

O’Connor’s second tale starring rural Irish veterinarian Dimpna Wilde at first has all the markings of a cozy. A female protagonist whose job is a magnet for drama, animals—including a talking African grey parrot called Bette Davis,who plays a major role in the story—and a love interest who’s in law enforcement. But cozies usually involve a sanitized crime, and this is where O’Connor takes a decided swerve out of the gentle side of the genre. The murder mystery that Dimpna finds herself enmeshed in is the killing of a young woman, Brigid, who early in the story shows up at the vet clinic with an injured animal. It’s a hare that has a cut on its leg from someone, Brigid says, trying to remove its foot. The gruesome motif is repeated when Dimpna finds Brigid tied to a tree, dead and with her hand cut off. At the same time, chalked graffiti around the town asks, “Who put Bella in the witch elm?”, just one of the intertwined puzzles facing Dimpna and the man she’s falling for, Inspector Cormac O’Brien, as they investigate the town’s many intriguing residents and visitors. While this absorbing story stands well on its own, you’ll want to go back to the first in the series, No Strangers Here, to spend more time with this smart, kind vet and her knack for attracting trouble.

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Review

Just Another Missing Person

by Brian Kenney

What do we know about lying? That one lie often begets others. That lies find a way of escaping their boundaries. And that knowledge of a lie can give you power over the liar. DCI Julia Day is leading the investigation into the case of a young woman who’s gone missing. A brilliant detective, Julia is slightly suspicious of this case—the pieces don’t quite fit together—when she’s carjacked and forced to agree to lie about the alleged perpetrator. Except the story hardly ends there. As the investigation unravels, more cold cases come alive and more lies are exposed. McAlister brilliantly leads us into the lives of parents, driven mad by grief, and Julia’s own relationship with her daughter, the well-spring of so many falsehoods. Readers will appreciate a police procedural that is deeply embedded in character. That moves adroitly between the lives of cops and civilians. And that explores the difficulty of making sound moral choices. McAlister is the author of Wrong Place Wrong Time, a Reese’s Book Club Pick.

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Review

After That Night

by Jeff Ayers

Nothing was ever the same for Sara Linton after the night she was attacked. Though the police apprehended the culprit, Sara has struggled to deal with the trauma ever since. She’s now engaged to GBI Special Agent Will Trent, and they are crafting wedding plans. When Sara promises to pursue justice for another young woman, who dies, she has no idea that this will force her to confront the darkness and memories she has been avoiding for years. Will wants to help, and what they uncover leads to connected attacks with ties to recent incidents. Slaughter is a master of telling a story with horrific elements and spinning it to be both clinical and compelling. She dives into the characters we love and provides more insight into what has made them who they are, which makes them come alive on the page. The ABC television series Will Trent was recently renewed for a second season, and its popularity will steer readers to pick up this book. Whether a newcomer to the series or a fan who has read the previous entries, readers will find this one of the best to date.

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Review

I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died

by Brian Kenney

Flower does a magnificent job of opening up the world of mid-19th century Amherst, the Dickinson family, and especially young Emily, who has yet to become the eccentric recluse of her later years. In this volume, Austin and his wife have returned from their wedding trip and moved into the mansion next door to the family home, just in time to welcome their houseguests Ralph Waldo Emerson—who has come to lecture at Amherst College—and his secretary, Luther. Narrated by Emily’s maid Willa Nobel, we’re privy to all the family gossip, while Emily seeks a way to share her writing with Emerson. But the death of young Luther, who’s found in a bed of black-eyed Susans, sets Emily and Willa on a path to satisfy the great Emerson’s questions, quell the vociferous speculation, and clear the Dickinson name. This series is historical crime fiction at its best, balancing insight into the past with a fast-moving investigation into the crime.

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