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Literary

Review

Death at the Sign of the Rook

by Brian Kenney

The five novels featuring former police officer Jackson Brodie—this would be the sixth—are each a bit idiosyncratic. But Atkinson’s many fans need to brace themselves for this title, a delightful, cozyish homage to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. We start out at a Murder Mystery Weekend in Rook Hall, “a country house hotel located within Burton Makepeace House, one of England’s premier stately homes.” Dowager Marchioness Lady Milton and her hateful offspring have already auctioned off most of the artwork, commercialized what they could, and sold the remaining cottages. Back to Jackson, hired by a brother and sister to track down their mother’s carer, who disappeared with a Renaissance portrait—artist and provenance unknown—shortly after their mother died. There are some extraordinary similarities, not in the art itself, but between how the Renaissance work, and a Turner painting that went missing from Burton Makepease House several years back, were stolen. Which is how Jackson ends up at the Mystery Weekend. This book dazzles in three ways. One, the interior monologues—Atkins goes deep into the lives of many of the characters—are just brilliant. Two, the dialogue is terrifically clever, with the aristocrats in particular pulling no punches. Three, the gathering for Mystery Weekend brings together all manner of participants, from the vicar to a California cardiologist to an army major to a couple of corpses, in an evening that turns out to be as dark as it is comic. And did I mention the snowstorm that traps them all in Burton Makepeace House?

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Review

The Drowned

by Willy Williams

Spotting a sleek Mercedes SL sports car parked in a sloping field below a house, its engine still running and the driver’s door left open, Denton Wymes, on his way home from fishing, pauses to investigate. It’s a moment that the isolated loner will soon regret as he becomes caught up in a missing-person case that will turn his life upside down. Before Wymes can retreat, a man named Armitage approaches, claiming his wife has thrown herself into the sea. Together they walk up to the house to telephone for help. Armitage’s behavior is odd (“he seemed more excited than distressed’) and Wymes senses that the tenant answering the door, Charles Rudduck, recognizes Armitage. Called in from Dublin to investigate is Detective Inspector St. John (pronounced “Sinjun”) Strafford, who is also juggling a complicated personal life (an estranged wife and a lover who is the daughter of his colleague, state pathologist Quirke). In late 1950s Ireland, divorce is illegal, and Anglo-Irish social tensions remain strong. Banville deftly captures the prejudices and suspicions between the groups. “You’re not a Paddy, then” says Armitage to Wymes, who stiffly corrects him that he is Irish, but not “bog Irish.” In a mostly Catholic police force, Strafford stands out as the rare Protestant. His investigation gradually uncovers secrets that go back years and into previous series installments, but enough back information easily guides new readers through the complex plot. Banville ends his fourth Strafford/Quirke crime novel (after The Lock-Up) on a haunting, ambiguous note. With its complicated, not always likable protagonists, this beautifully written book will appeal to fans of literary mysteries in the vein of Kate Atkinson’s and Tana French’s works.

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Review

The Puzzle Box

by Henrietta Thornton

This sequel to Trussoni’s 2023 The Puzzle Master (my favorite book of all time!) finds savant Mike Brink once more faced with a puzzle that others have found unsolvable. This time his help is requested by the Japanese imperial family, who dispatch another puzzle genius, Sakura Nakamoto, to whisk him from New York to Tokyo. Mike is well known for his work creating puzzles and taking part in competitions in which participants recite the string of numbers that form pi, his synesthesia allowing the numbers to appear “as a scale of color at the edge of his vision.” These are the upsides of the accident that left him an affable genius. But there are drawbacks. He’s so far been unable to form any romantic relationship and struggles to understand himself. So when Sakura tells him that the beautiful Dragon Puzzle Box, a puzzle that’s uber-famous in Mike’s world, is available for him to try, and that it will help him to understand his gift, he jumps at it. This is no ordinary box—others who have tried to open it have had fingers amputated or been poisoned by the puzzle’s booby traps. Work on it takes Mike on thrilling journeys not only to fascinating Japanese locales but further into the recesses of his mind than he thought possible. Engrossed readers will happily make the trips with him. While you’re waiting for this wonderful follow-up, get The Puzzle Master and read our interview with Trussoni when that book was published.

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Review

The Trials of Lila Dalton

by Henrietta Thornton

This brilliantly disorienting debut takes place on Assumption Island, a cold, rocky British outpost in the north Atlantic. Lila Dalton finds herself in an island courtroom being addressed by an impatient judge who clearly expects her to argue for her client. Lila has no idea how she got to this courtroom, how to be a barrister, what the case is…she doesn’t know anything, including who the stranger in the mirror is. Things take a turn for the (even) worse when she gets anonymous notes telling her that she’d better win acquittal for the murderer she’s representing if she ever wants to see her daughter again (that would be the daughter she didn’t know she had). The various characters working for and against Lila (we’re often unsure which direction a character is leaning, adding to the dark, compelling tale) are well drawn, with each adding complications and drama. Spare but gripping dialog propels the strange story to an appropriately dizzying conclusion. For fans of Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly.

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Review

Trust Her

by Henrietta Thornton

This sequel to the Northern Ireland-set Northern Spy (2021), in which Tessa Daly desperately searches for her sister, Marion, who has either been kidnapped by the IRA to work for them or is actually a terrorist, finds Tessa hiding in Dublin from the terrorists who want revenge. She’s enjoying a quiet, if lonely, life with her four-year-old son when she’s kidnapped by a gang that includes a childhood friend. He’s now in the IRA and wants Tessa’s help to turn an MI5 agent toward the Republican side. That starts a terrifying ordeal for Tessa, who walks a tightrope between British officialdom and homegrown extremists while keeping her son safe and pursuing a forbidden romance. As in the previous book, Berry portrays a modern Ireland that’s a maelstrom of contradictions, grief for the past and hope for the future, and fear that the country’s core can never really change. But there’s still hope for the Daly family, whose caring and exasperation toward one another makes this local drama into a universal fable of love overcoming all.

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Review

The Dredge

by Willy Williams

“Some families are haunted. The stuff of the past, the traumas and the ghosts—they just go on and on,” thinks Caleb “Cale” Casey, a successful real-estate broker in Hawaii who has been estranged for almost 30 years from his brother Ambrose, who runs a construction company back in their small Connecticut hometown. Both are tormented by a terrible secret that they buried as teenagers in Gibbs Pond. When a real-estate developer announces plans to dredge the pond in preparation for further development, Cale reluctantly returns home. Unbeknownst to the brothers, Lily Rowe, the contractor in charge of the dredging, also suffers from a dark family history, a childhood of abuse and neglect, shared with her troubled sibling Ray, that led to a shocking act of violence. How these well-drawn traumatized characters and their secrets collide in the present day, permanently changing the course of their lives, is the theme of Flaherty’s beautifully written debut. His Connecticut is not the monied suburbia of Rick Moody and John Cheever, but a rural working-class community more reminiscent of Daniel Woodrell’s Ozark mountain towns. After a strong buildup, the conclusion felt a bit anticlimactic. Still, this sad novel about the corrosive effects of family trauma and pain will linger in readers’ minds.

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Review

Day One

by Henrietta Thornton

There’s a moment in this story of an English village school shooting when a mother tries to call for her son. “[T]he space left by her inhale was filled with elbows, shoulders, and no words came out,” a description that’s just one of the shivers readers will get from Dean’s unflinching look at horror. But the book’s not really about the shooting itself, though that awful event gets its share of pages. Nor is it about the shooter, though he too gets his due, in a section that readers should know includes a horribly accurate look at a verbally, emotionally, and physically abusive man. Rather, Dean puts her magnifying glass on what happens after, when those who question everything except conspiracy theories move in with their claims that the massacre never happened and the victims never existed. A split-second decision by someone from the small town is later blown up by the right wing and adds interesting shadows to the killer/victims dichotomy. Those who wanted Alex Jones ground to dust will be intrigued by this fuller look behind his kind of rabid cruelty, and fans of Dean’s Girl A and of psychological thrillers are also a great audience for this. A realistic and absorbing look at media gone wrong and the lives it scorches.

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Review

Neferura

by Brian Kenney

With a doctorate in Egyptology, it would have been easy for Malayna Evans to have fallen down the bottomless hole of historical detail. But instead, this is a beautifully balanced novel, rich in the experiences of life in the backstabbing court of Pharaoh Hatshepsut while also focused on the engaging and ultimately tragic life of her daughter, Neferura, princess and high priestess of Kemet. Neferura lives to support the people, but she is often distracted by court machinations, especially those of her misogynistic half-brother, Thutmose, who wants to end her mother’s rule, become Pharaoh, marry Neferura, and produce an heir. Neferura’s interior thinking is powerfully engaging, and setting the novel largely among women, whose struggles to lead are always under scrutiny, is incredibly refreshing. But Neferura’s own story feels nearly revolutionary: to survive, she befriends the wisewoman, a much-tattooed priestess of sorts, who is in touch with a network of women who devote themselves to supporting Neferura, even to the point of risking their own lives. Add to this several standout characters, such as Neferura’s life-long tutor who helps guide her actions, and you have a cadre ready to protest their princess. Powerful and poignant, this is a treat for fans of historical mysteries.

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Review

That Night in the Library

by Henrietta Thornton

You know those cute programs where kids leave their teddy bear for a library sleepover? This is nothing like that. Instead, staying in the library overnight are student workers who have just completed a tough interview process for the one permanent job on offer in the university’s rare-books department (Jurczyk is mining a setting similar to her 2022 The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections), a toxic workplace if ever there was one. Also attending is non-student Ro, along because he can provide the drug, acid, that will kickstart a ceremony that student Davey has meticulously planned. Davey has invited Ro and five others to re-enact a Greek tradition around the Persephone myth, in which intoxicated pilgrims face either death or the thing they most fear, in order to conquer the fear. The tortured inner voice of narrator Faye, the shyest library employee, is used to wonderful effect by Jurczyk to chronicle a frenzied, terrifying night in a locked room—the library’s basement cage—that starts with a killing. The ending here is a shock, and along the way the author delivers chills that are packed with narcissistic venom and choking claustrophobia. This will be a hit with those who enjoyed Jurczyk’s previous work. If you like myth retellings, try one of the many versions of the Irish Tír na nÓg story, which mirrors elements of the tale of Persephone.

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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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