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Mystery & Detective

Review

The Hawthorne School

by Henrietta Thornton

Since Claudia Vera’s mom died, it’s just Claudia and her four-year-old son, Henry. She struggles to pay for the cheapest daycare in her Illinois town and is overjoyed when the exclusive Hawthorne School gives Henry a full scholarship, asking the awestruck mom only to volunteer at Hawthorne in return. Things soon turn decidedly odd. Claudia never sees any other parents, and the principal is increasingly insistent on Hawthorne’s unorthodox ways and on Claudia spending hours at the school doing unnecessary tasks. Oddness soon turns to a frightening effort to control—as the publisher’s discussion questions note, this book can be read as an allegory on narcissistic abuse—and Claudia finds herself in the most confusing and terrifying situation of her life. Scary, gothic schools are often found in mysteries, but this one differs in only featuring psychological horror (author Perry is a psychologist), no ghostly terrors. It also differs in presenting a Latinx mom and the use of Spanish (which you don’t need to understand to read the book) to both propel the narrative and help the protagonist. Perry excels in getting inside the head of an unsure mom and has written one of the most unusual and best mysteries of 2021. Fans of psychological mysteries and of the movie Get Out are the audience for this.

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Review

Deadly Summer Nights

by Brian Kenney

A midsize Catskill resort in the 1950s provides a rich setting for Delany’s latest series. Elizabeth Grady manages the resort, while her mother, Olivia—a retired theater and film star who inherited the venue—loafs about, deigning to occasionally show up at cocktail hour to dazzle the guests. Keeping the Haggerman’s Resort profitable is serious work, and Grady doesn’t think things can get any busier, when the body of one of the guests—loner Harold Westenham, a former college professor—is found floating in the lake. If that doesn’t cause enough of a ruckus, the police find a copy of The Communist Manifesto in Westenham’s cabin, bringing in the FBI and fueling a red scare among the guests. Faced with a hostile police force, Grady ends up taking on the investigation herself. While the detective work is low-key, and the resolution falls pretty much in Elizabeth’s lap, the real pleasures of this book lie in its setting, period, and characters, all of which are wonderfully realized. Cozy readers will be happy to return to Haggerman’s Catskill Resort any time.

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Review

The Heron’s Cry

by Brian Kenney

Subtle and nuanced, this novel is the prolific Cleeves at the top of her game. Detective Matthew Venn is called to a sort of artist commune, where a body has been found in one of the studios with a large shard of glass protruding from its neck. The victim, Dr. Nigel Yeo, is the loving father of Eve, a glassmaker who lives and works in the commune. This sets in motion an investigation that gains urgency as the days pass and the bodies begin to stack up. Cleeves takes on some tough issues here—including suicide—and it’s one of her darker books. But as always with this author, the murder narrative is delightfully punctuated with insights into the lives of Venn—still recovering from his evangelical upraising—his husband Jonathan, fellow detectives, and even several of the suspects. Cleeves is the author of the hugely popular Vera and Shetland series, the latter now finished. Broadchurch viewers should appreciate Cleeves’ wide-angle lens and focus on community.

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Review

The Return of the Pharaoh

by Henrietta Thornton

It’s controversial, but I often enjoy reincarnations of classics more than the originals. For example, Sophie Hannah’s Agatha Christie novels feature the same kinds of characters and plots as the originals but leave out the originals’ antisemitism. Arthur Conan Doyle’s works are less cruel than Christie’s, but they’re still steeped in an English class system that, at best, dismisses women and anyone not white. Nicholas Meyer’s revival, à la Hannah’s Poirot, features the best of the old and makes the stories kinder, yet still imparts the flavor of the beloved detective and his admiring sidekick. In this tale, which follows Meyer’s The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols, Watson again narrates, taking readers to Egypt, where his wife is recovering from TB while the intrepid detectives seek the Duke of Uxbridge, who has gone missing while seeking a pharaoh’s gold. Meyer explores the politics of Egyptology and of nineteenth-century Egypt, where local, Ottoman, and British interests met and clashed, while serving the expected crackling mystery and haughty characters waiting to be brought down. A must for fans of the series and of thoughtful historical fiction.

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Review

The Corpse Flower

by Henrietta Thornton

Although I’m on a break from Scandinavian authors, I tried Hancock’s debut anyway, attracted by the no-girl-in-the-title title and the promise of a journalist sleuth. It was the right decision, as the violent rage that seeps out of Stieg Larsson’s work and its ilk is here mostly transformed into determination with dashes of scathing honesty, friendship, and love. The misogyny is tempered too: the woman journalist who’s investigating a murderer in parallel with the police is middle-aged (refreshing!), sometimes weary, but realistically tough when it counts. The target of her investigation is also refreshing: a woman on the run for the murder she committed years before of a wealthy young man who, as far as investigators can tell, was a stranger to her. Letters from the fugitive mention a rare flower that smells like death; how this connects to her crime and why she’s remorseless are revealed in an understated way that stops short of the bleakness we’ve come to expect from Scandinavian works. Sure to leave readers wanting more from Hancock.

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Review

Murder at Mallowan Hall

by Brian Kenney

Christie fans, rejoice! This fall will see the publication of not one but two novels set in Christie’s Devon country home. Cambridge’s Murder at Mallowan Hall is a near-perfect traditional mystery—the first body is found in the library, stabbed in the neck by a fountain pen—set during a house party in the early 1930s. But Cambridge flips the paradigm and instead of focusing on the posh guests, tells the story from the perspective of the help, most notably Phyllida Bright, housekeeper extraordinaire. Bright, a friend of Christie as well as an employee, models her investigation on Poirot, right down to the classic denouement delivered by Bright in the library. Gender roles, sexual harassment, and same-sex love are key elements, but Cambridge succeeds in keeping the novel squarely in its era. Two words describe this book: absolutely delicious. Greenway was the real name of Christie’s Devon estate, and Rader-Day’s Death at Greenway is painstakingly realistic. The book opens in London during the Blitz—which is wonderfully described—and we meet Bridey Kelly, a nurse trainee who has made a fatal mistake and is banished to the countryside with 10 young children escaping the bombing. Their destination is Greenway, which Christie and her husband have given over to the evacuees. But the Devon countryside offers little solace, with standoffish residents, a coast too close to the war, and the corpse of someone who was clearly murdered. Deeply suspenseful, this novel brilliantly captures the horrors of the war years and how individuals managed to survive through hardships both physical and emotional.

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