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Review

City Under One Roof

by Brian Kenney

How’s this for a setting: a 205 unit high-rise building in rural Alaska that houses the entire town’s population as well as stores, offices, and more. Welcome to Point Mettier, a pretty creepy village to begin with that only gets worse when body parts—a foot, a hand—wash up on the frozen shore. The local cops seem ready to shrug off the remains—lots of tourists fall off those cruise ships!—when they’re joined by Anchorage detective Cara Kennedy, who takes the matter a whole lot more seriously. What was meant to be a quick visit becomes a much longer excursion as the first brutal storm of the season moves in, closing off the tunnel, the one way in and out of town during winter. With time to spare, Cara digs deeper into the community, only to discover that almost everyone in Point Mettier has a secret to hide. A simmering romance with one of the other officers provides Cara with much needed distraction, but soon enough a violent gang, hanging out in a nearby Native village, takes center stage. This is a successful, well-paced first novel that juggles a range of cultures, a handful of strong characters, and a nuanced protagonist, delivering a very satisfying ending. And get this: Point Mettier pretty much actually exists. Check out Whittier, Alaska.

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Review

Blackwater Falls

by Henrietta Thornton

Inaya Rahman is stuck between two worlds. She’s a detective with the Community Response Unit of the Denver police department, which was created after 2020’s protests against police brutality. When she’s called to a horrific scene —a little girl, Razan Elkader, has been murdered and nailed to the door of the mosque where Rahman worships—she knows she can help, but she’s facing her usual problem: “too brown for the badge, too blue for her co-religionists.” She forges on, in private dealing with her family’s worries that the police force is too dangerous and her mother’s fretting that Inaya isn’t married yet. Outside forces are far less gentle: a biker gang affiliated with a local Evangelical church is far from happy that Syrian refugees have settled in the town and none too worried about bringing Razan’s murderer to light. Khan’s (Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty Mysteries, Khoran Archives Fantasy Novels) fast-moving but thoughtful series debut goes far beyond newcomers-vs.-racists tropes to look at real life in a changing town. Rahman is a tough, lovable and often funny protagonist who will appeal to fans of Joanna Schaffhausen’s Annalisa Vega.

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Review

That Summer in Berlin

by Henrietta Thornton

Hopes and fears are nested within secrets and lies in this historical romance/spy novel that moves from English drawing rooms to the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The same fraught layers form the novel, which sees pensive Viviane Alden travel to Germany with her flighty stepsister, Julia, to visit eligible distant acquaintances. The author’s note from Canadian author Cornwall (The Woman at the Front) explains that right up till 1939, intermarriage of English and German aristocracy was encouraged as a way to avoid a repeat of the Great War. The young women are matched with Otto and Felix, sons of the house, who, like Viviane and Julia, show how different siblings can be. Otto is a devoted Nazi who’s rising in the ranks, while his brother, a chemist who flaunts his family’s expectations by working with a Jewish Nobel prize winner, wants none of his brother’s fascist displays. Berlin during Hitler’s reign, and the fawning of international celebrities who thought the dictator a buffoon who’d soon disappear, are chillingly portrayed here. They form an ever more sinister backdrop to Viviane’s clandestine photography of wartime activities in partnership with a dashing journalist/spy. This has an air of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, with its sweeping vistas and wartime romance; fans of the debutante politics of Bridgerton will find intrigue here too.

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Review

Marple: Twelve New Mysteries

by Brian Kenney

A dozen terrifically talented and diverse authors—including Alyssa Cole, Lucy Foley, Val McDermid, and Dreda Say Mitchell—reimagine that most iconic of amateur sleuths: Miss Jane Marple. Billed by the publisher as a way to introduce a new generation to Miss Marple—likely best done by Christie’s books, actually—this collection reads more like fanfiction and is sure to delight Marple enthusiasts, who comprise a great swath of mystery fiction’s readership. Miss Marple is no stranger to the short story, having been first introduced to readers in a 1927 magazine. But here we see her in some extraordinary circumstances, while never losing sight of who she really is. A formal dinner at one of the Oxford colleges descends into sexual harassment and Quaalude popping—to tragic ends. A brief stop-over to visit an old school friend in a country village results in the sort of complex murder we expect only Miss Marple to decipher. When a young woman keels over dead at a wedding, Miss Marple teams up with her Caribbean-born friend, Miss Bella. But not all the stories involve murder; stolen pearls ruin a Christmas dinner, until Miss Marple slowly drops the pieces into place, to the surprise of the other guests. Fun to read in print, this collection would make a great audiobook.

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Review

Such a Good Mother

by Henrietta Thornton

Rose O’Connell’s never been confident. At her downmarket English school, she was bullied as “Rotten Rosie” after her father was publicly disgraced. While her life has since improved, her husband struggles to find work and they’re deep in debt. Then she gets her son, Charlie, into The Woolf Academy, an exclusive school in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood she grew up in. In fact, it’s her old school, but it’s now completely unrecognizable, as is the house she grew up in, where Amala Kaur, the CEO of the new school, lives. Woolf Academy seems too strict with Charlie yet indulgent of the other children, and while Rose is determined to do whatever it takes to help her son, she quickly finds that the mean girls she faced years ago have nothing on the circle of snooty women in charge here. It’s complicated and confusing when things begin to thaw and Rose is invited into the inner circle after the mysterious death of one of its members; slowly readers will begin to wonder if there’s anything she won’t do to please Amala and her ice-queen clique. By the time Amala wants something that made me gasp out loud—just the first of several gut-punching twists—it seems too late for Rose to salvage her marriage, her career, and even her sense of self. For readers of mean-girl titles and those who enjoyed The Hawthorne School by Sylvie Perry.

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Review

The Nurse’s Secret

by Henrietta Thornton

Una Kelly is a pickpocket in 1883 New York City, artfully dodging the police and turning her loot over to the head of her pickpocket ring, the quietly ruthless Marm Blei. Una is saving her pay to leave this miserable life, but it’s slow going, so she chances a side gig—selling a trinket she steals rather than turning it over to Marm. This puts her at the site of a murder, and now she’s accused and on the run. Her unusual hiding place—one of the country’s first nursing schools, at Bellevue Hospital—is the intriguing, politics- and emotion-laden setting for most of the book. Only educated ladies are accepted as nurses, but Una is neither schooled nor genteel, and faking both. Her nervous, always-on-your-toes code switching will be familiar to immigrant readers as well as anyone who’s reached for something out of grasp, and heavy doses of realism are thrown in as Una fights bullies while making a great friend and even finding romance. Skendandore’s (The Second Life of Mirielle West) intrepid heroine continues investigating the crime she’s accused of, too, making the book a thoroughly enjoyable and compelling medical history, mystery, and romance. Side benefit: a look at attitudes toward the then-emerging science of blood transfusion.

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Review

A Dreadful Splendor

by Brian Kenney

Is it a gothic romance? Yes, indeed. Is it a mystery? That, too. In fact, A Dreadful Splendor uses nearly all the tropes of the gothic, adding a bit of humor to the mix. Genevieve Timmons, all of 19 years old, is a spiritualist, a conjurer, adept at calling forth the dead to assuage the grief of the living—and lining her own pocket. Trained by her mother, who is recently deceased, Genevieve has hit a bad patch and is in jail until she’s approached by a gentleman who wants her to summon the dead bride of his boss, Mr. Pemberton. Except when Genevieve arrives at Somerset Park, Mr. Pemberton’s estate, she discovers that the widower believes his bride was murdered, and he wants Genevieve to stage a session so powerful it will reveal the killer. (As for Mr. Pemberton, he’s one part Mr. Darcy, one part Heathcliff, and one part Maxim de Winter. Brooding and beautiful.) With days to go before the séance, there’s plenty of time for Genevieve to rattle around the estate, research the past, and become terrified of a ghost who may well be the real thing. Lots of fun for readers who enjoy historical mysteries with a double serving of atmosphere.

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Review

Augusta Hawke

by Brian Kenney

Best known for her cozy British series, here Malliet abandons the country vicarages and Oxbridge colleges for Old Town Alexandria, Virginia directly across the Potomac from the District of Columbia, and home to the witty Augusta Hawke. Hawke, herself a mystery author, is a bit of a recluse, a state brought on by the pandemic and the recent death of her husband. Fortunately, her four-story townhouse provides plenty of distractions, including—with a nod to Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”—casually observing the neighbors. So when the Normans, the young couple across the way, go missing, Hawke has plenty to tell the cops, including details of a fight she witnessed between the couple. When their car is found abandoned in a marsh, Hawke decides it’s time to take on the case, so to speak, and heads off to investigate. Perhaps the story has the making of a true-crime bestseller? The pleasure in this book lies in the arch and humorous Augusta, her interior musings as well as her interactions with others, her caustic take on the publishing industry, and the ridiculous situations she gets caught up in. May this be the introduction to many more outings with Augusta.

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Review

Bad Fruit

by Henrietta Thornton

Lily lives in Greenwich, England with her Singaporean mother and white English father, but really she lives entirely in a world of her mother’s creation and control. The teen must wear only pink sweaters to please mama, and she even dyes her hair black, wears colored contact lenses, and uses makeup to look more Chinese instead of the ang moh gui, or white devil, her mother accuses her of being. She’s also forced to taste-test spoiled orange juice to make sure it’s just the right level of rancid that mama enjoys, a bizarre task that will be readers’ first signal that something is seriously off here. The emotionally and sometimes physically abused teen is about to get out as she’s been accepted at Oxford University to study law—guess who chose that—but her subconscious seems to have other plans. What at first look like panic attacks turn out to be flashbacks to traumatic events—but ones that happened to mama. How Lily can have memories of her mother’s past, what made mama this way, and whether Lily can ever thwart her nightmare mother and useless father are puzzles that will keep readers rapt right till the end of Singaporean author King’s dark exploration of “the terrible economics of responsibility and blame.” This is one case in which the characters don’t have to be likable for the book to be brilliant. From the awful-mother-tiptoeing-daughter dynamic to weirdness with oranges, Bad Fruit is a perfect readalike for Joanne Harris’s Five Quarters of the Orange.

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Review

The Perfect Crime

by Brian Kenney

An anthology of 22 short stories that are selected to witness, as Maxin Jukubowski writes in the introduction, “an explosion of crime and mystery writing by writers of all colours and ethnic backgrounds, winning awards and enjoying critical acclaim, as well as opening up a whole new readership in the process.” And this marvelous collection certainly doesn’t disappoint, with crime stories from diverse cultures, featuring works by S.A. Cosby, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Rachel Howzell Hall, Sanjida Kay, Walter Mosley, and so many more. It’s fun to encounter authors you think you know trying out something entirely new, such as Abir Mukherjee, who leaves behind 1920s India for a very contemporary tale of crime that ends in a most pleasing way. In fact, many of the stories are full-blown mysteries, just boiled down to their essence, with the shocking, O. Henry-like twists that readers love. Oyinkan Braithwaite’s “Jumping Ship,” a brilliant recounting of a love affair that goes way, way off the rails is so surprising it demands the reader give it a second, or even third, reading. A surefire way to introduce readers to authors, The Perfect Crime is a required purchase for all public libraries.

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