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Mystery & Detective

Review

A Nutcracker Nightmare

by Henrietta Thornton

Alex Wright and her sister, Hanna Eastham, co-owners of Murder and Mayhem: Killer Chocolates and Bookshop, are hard at work preparing goodies in their Montana store for the Festive Foods Chocolates Competition. It’s just their luck that at the same time as they’re hard at work preparing sweets for the local high-school reunion they’re also smack in the middle of their busiest season, the winter holidays. Still, they’re muddling through until a murder at the reunion stops the community in its tracks. A man who was unpopular in school and has increased his enemy count by being “gropey” at the reunion (Hanna suspects he has “an octopus in his bloodline”) meets his not-so-sweet end. And unbelievably, Hanna is suspected in the killing. The elements we love in a cozy are all here: tight family relationships, romantic interests with law enforcement, off-screen killings, food, and bookstores. What’s not to love? This one has rich characterization to boot and a story that will keep readers guessing till the last Strychnine Strawberry chocolate is but a gooey memory.

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Review

The Final Curtain

by Brian Kenney

Keigo Higashino makes the unbelievable become credible in this expansive novel that takes an extremely personal turn. After leaving her husband and son behind a decade ago, the mother of Tokyo Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga lived out a quiet life in remote Sendai. Kaga only learned of her location after her death, and while sorting through her meager possessions and interviewing her one friend, he gains no answers to the many questions he has about his mother’s disappearance and life. Today, sixteen years later, Kaga is investigating the murder of Michiko Oshitani, a resident of Sendai who is found strangled to death in Tokyo—a place where she has no known connections. Why was Oshitani in Tokyo? With the help of his cousin, also a police detective, Kaga follows a series of twists and turns to finally arrive at a connection between Oshitani’s murder and the death of his mother that is absolutely staggering. Beautifully written and superbly translated, this is the concluding volume to a brilliant four-part series, and the plunge into Kaga’s personal life makes this title especially satisfying.

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Review

The Lover of No Fixed Abode.

by Henrietta Thornton

This strange, beautiful tale wedges readers into the crowded boats and alleys of Venice while whisking them along on a three-day romance with a Roman princess and the down-at-heel tour guide she falls for. The two seem to float above the city’s watery fray even before meeting. After meeting, they withdraw completely into their own emotional realm, “literally liquefied” by their fascination and passion for each other. Time is immaterial, they agree, as they find themselves “precariously suspended between being and non-being,” contemplate “intimate perplexities on who is who, where the I ends and the you begins,” and eat “a variety of little inventions.” The love story, which as the translator’s note explains, features more robustly in the book than the crime tale related to the princess’s work as an art dealer, soon provokes questions in the reader. Where is the tour guide from? Why must he leave Venice despite his grief over losing the love he has just stumbled upon? The answer to the mystery is startling and brings up many questions about the nature of life and how the past, and past injustices, can resonate today. Try this after Danielle Trussoni’s The Puzzle Master; you’ll come back to Earth eventually

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Review

The Second Stranger

by Brian Kenney

An incredibly taut “locked inn” suspense novel that features just a handful of characters over an intense eight hours. We’re in a small hotel in the Scottish Highlands with a blizzard raging. It’s incredibly remote, and the only other sign of life is Porterfell, a prison far in the distance. It’s Remie Yorke’s last night managing the hotel—not that there is that much to manage with just two guests, one of whom has disappeared. In the morning, Remie will be on her way to Chile with no plans to ever return to Scotland. Meanwhile, the hotel grows even more isolated as the roads shut down and phone lines and internet access die. Suddenly a police officer, Don Gaines, appears. Beat-up, he claims to have been in an accident transporting a prisoner from Porterfell—a dangerous prisoner who’s now on the loose. Gaines goes about securing the hotel, when another officer shows up claiming to be Officer Don Gaines. He’s just as convincing, with the appropriate identification. Will the real Donald Gaines please stand up? Lest it seems as though I’m sharing spoilers, be assured that this is just the beginning. There’s plenty more to be revealed in this absolute nail-biter of a thriller.

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Review

The Night of the Storm

by Henrietta Thornton

The scene: Hurricane Harvey hitting affluent Sugar Land, TX, in 2017. Readers will fear the worst, knowing how bad the storm became, but Jia Shah feels she’ll be safe at her sister Seema’s sprawling, ostentatious house. Her brother-in-law, who luckily knows everything, assures all that nothing can happen to his house. Misogyny’R’Us mother-in-law and overbearing sister notwithstanding, Jia believes that once she and her son ride out the storm—and her family’s endless comments about her dire fate as a divorcee—they can get back to life as they knew it. Then Jia notices that the neighborhood seems curiously empty. Except, that is, for a neighbor who stares in the window. Soon things become far more than just creepy as the bodies start to pile up. Debut author Parekh builds tension wonderfully as the storms outside and inside the house threaten to wipe out everything Jia holds dear; she also excels at provoking exasperation at the backbiting family’s antics while crammed into an inescapable nightmare. For those who like locked-room and closed-circle dramas.

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Review

Reykjavík

by Brian Kenney

A classic mystery from Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Iceland’s prime minister, and bestselling Icelandic crime writer Ragnar Jónasson. Back in 1956, a 14-year-old girl, Lara, disappeared without a trace at the end of the summer. She had been working as a maid for a well connected couple who spent summers on Videy, a remote island off the coast from Reykjavík. Eventually, Lara’s disappearance became Iceland’s most infamous unsolved case. On the 30th anniversary of the event, Valur Robertsson—a young, ambitious journalist—takes up the case, publishing a series of articles that imply he has new information, setting the nation on edge. But just when the public expects a revelation, the narrative takes a 180-degree spin, and the threat of violence becomes all too real. While it’s a well-done mystery, Reykjavík also provides tremendous insight into Iceland at a time of change, expasnion, and corruption. Sure to appeal to a broad swath of crime-fiction readers.

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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

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

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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