MY SOUL TO TAKE is Yrsa Sigurdardóttir’s second book featuring Icelandic lawyer Thóra Gudmundsdóttir, and continues her chosen theme of having Thóra investigate two crimes at once that are related, one set in the present, and one set in the past. This time, one of her real estate clients has decided that the property he bought is haunted.

Since he is building a spiritual spa on the site, he is furious about this and wants a settlement with the sellers. When Thóra starts to sniff around, the female architect at the site is brutally beaten, raped and killed, with long pins shoved into the soles of her feet. Not long after that, the male aura reader of the resort is found trampled to death by a stallion. He has a dead fox tied to his chest, and the same pins driven into his feet.

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Scouring out the weekly singles scene … in comics!

With Marvel Comics celebrating seven decades in business, it’s been putting out a series of one-shots focused on its earlier characters, featuring a brand-new story with yesteryear reprints in the back, all sporting its original Timely Comics shield. One of them is THE HUMAN TORCH COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1, featuring the original Torch — not Johnny Storm. Scott Snyder and Scott Wegener provide a terrific throwback tale tinged with racial overtones, while the backup story from 1940 has the Torch meeting Toro, the Flaming Torch Kid, at a circus. You can tell the story is old just from its first page, with lines like “The Torch is attracted by the gay colored tents” and “Can’t say — but it’s mighty queer!” And that’s all part of its charm.

Another in the birthday series is SUB-MARINER COMICS 70TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL #1. Roy Thomas and Mitch Breitweiser’s anchoring piece featuring Prince Namor is moody and noir-ish, while Mark Schultz and Al Williamson’s “Vergeltungswaffe!” leans more toward the character’s fantasy origins, being set underwater. Closing out the fin-footed fun is Bill Everett’s debut of the Sub-Mariner from 1939’s first issue of MARVEL COMICS. Boy, is it ever primitive, and boy, do I like it. Namor’s never been among my favorite superheroes — partly because I can’t figure out if he’s really that or a supervillain — but this is a nice little trio of tales, each very different.

Like the clown princes of comics, Scott Gray and Roger Langridge tear THE FANTASTIC FOUR’s villainous dragon character of Fin Fang Foom a new one in the one-shot FIN FANG FOUR RETURN! #1. The pair has turned the creature into comic relief before in MARVEL MONSTERS, but here are a half-dozen more stories, also starring fellow monsters Gorgilla, Googam and Elektro. They get psychoanalyzed by Doc Samson; FFF works as a chef in a Chinese restaurant; Gorgilla gets the CURIOUS GEORGE treatment; Googam gets adopted; Elektro gets arrested; and FFF saves Christmas. Self-deprecating fun all around, and the kind of thing comics companies should do more of.

Given that THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN: THE SHORT HALLOWEEN #1 one-shot is written by none other than SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE players Bill Hader and Seth Meyers, you’d think it’d be funny, but it’s really not. Then again, it doesn’t appear to be designed to be joke-driven. But it’s certainly amusing, based upon its premise, with a drunk Halloween celebrant dressed as Spidey constantly confused for the real deal, and vice versa, on a night when The Furious Five unleashes a not-so-well-planned reign of terror. Sometimes celebrity writers are brought on just for their name value, but Hader and Meyers adequately display genuine love for the material. Kevin Maguire drew the fine art. —Rod Lott

Here’s another column of novels that have been made into films, including another stab at one of the Dortmunder books, Michael Caine with a machine gun, and a certified classic with the late, great Charles Bronson and a very young Jeff Goldblum. (This is actually the fourth book I’ve covered that became a Bronson vehicle. Can you tell I’m a fan of his films?) All are on DVD, I believe (one as an import-only), so for those to lazy to read, you have that option. But as we already know, the books are always superior to the films … especially this first one.

BANK SHOT by Donald E. Westlake — George C. Scott is not who I think of when I think Dortmunder. Robert Redford was not a great choice, either. Talk about a botch job of turning this 1972 book into the 1974 film, with whole parts ignored and others added that just fall flat.

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle must be one of the most difficult authors to imitate in style. Thousands have tried, but few have ever been able to capture his measured, lilting Victorian sentences — every word carefully chosen, intense drama hidden beneath the chasteness of a very careful prose, a pause in the direction that modern editors would never allow today.

So when the Conan Doyle estate, Daniel Stashower (the author of a Doyle biography), and Leslie S. Klinger (the editor of THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES) all praise author Lyndsay Faye’s DUST AND SHADOW: AN ACCOUNT OF THE RIPPER KILLINGS BY DR. JOHN H. WATSON for its perfect pastiche of Doyle’s style, and her capturing of the inimitable characters Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes, the reader takes note.

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Not only has Max Allan Collins penned the novelization for Stephen Sommers’ summer blockbuster G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA, but he’s also gotten the chance to play around further with the property, simultaneously delivering an original prequel novel in G.I. JOE: ABOVE & BEYOND.

Consider it an origin story — not of the high-tech, desert-based international organization known as G.I. Joe, which remains a secret to 99 percent of the population — but of two of its core members: Conrad “Duke” Hauser and Wallace “Ripcord” Weems. Good pals, they’re “mere” members of the U.S. military before being drafted by Gen. Hawk to join G.I. Joe’s elite team. Already included among its members are highly trained specialists like the lovely Scarlett, the gung-ho Gung-Ho and the masked, mute ninja known as Snake Eyes.

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Let’s start off with the fact that I love mysteries about stamp collecting, and in fact, collect any fictional work that involves the hobby or postal matters as its main subject. So, I was very excited to learn that Alan Bradley’s THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE involves a stamp-related murder.

And I was overjoyed to meet his precocious protagonist, 11-year-old Flavia de Luce. Remarkably, Bradley writes very well in first-person as the de Luce girl, and while she is certainly a remarkable prodigy in chemistry and science, there is an air of childish reality about her as well that is pleasing.

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Nick Horrigan just left his job and is having problems sleeping, so when he wakes up one fateful night just as a SWAT team bursts into his apartment, you know that Gregg Hurwitz’s TRUST NO ONE is going to feel like a speeding bullet. The reason for the rude awakening is due to a terrorist’s demand that he can only meet with Nick, which is a shock to him, since he is totally clueless when shown photos of this terrorist.

Nevertheless, he’s dragged off into a helicopter and taken to where the bad guy is planning on blowing up a nuclear reactor. It’s only when Nick comes face to face with this person that he is told the truth: The reason he was chosen was because of his deceased stepfather, Frank, a former Secret Service agent. In reality, this man is not a terrorist, but one of Frank’s associates. And he has been holding onto some information that only Nick can be given.

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People who have read this column for a while will notice something: I rarely cover books that are more than 400 pages. That is done for one simple reason: Those bricks of books better deliver or I’d seriously be pissed off at wasting my time trying to plow through them. It’s not that I don’t like reading really long tomes — hey, I enjoy Charles Dickens — but it’s a daunting task to start one, especially if you have to slog your way through them … which hopefully is not the case with the three I chose. Consider them potential summer reading, since everyone is always looking for a nice, long read to enjoy while on the beach or by the pool.

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Vish Puri is the head of India’s Most Private Investigations Ltd., where confidentiality is the watchword, and the success rate is 100 percent, in Tarquin Hall’s THE CASE OF THE MISSING SERVANT. Supported by a strong and indomitable cast of women — including his fascinating secretary Elizabeth Rani and his iron-willed Mummy — the company also features a group of delightful assistants nicknamed Tubelight, Flush, and Facecream. It’s kind of like the Indian A-Team as they solve crimes and do background checks, in this endearing first effort in what will hopefully be a series.

Puri disdains comparisons with Sherlock Holmes, but he still considers himself an astute master of the arts of deductive reasoning. But when a man is accused of murdering a servant, and the servant girl has gone missing, all of his powers will be put to the test. The family that employed the girl knew nothing about her but her first name, Mary. And now Puri must find this Mary — last name and origin unknown, no photograph available — in a land that contains one-sixth of the world’s entire population.

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My guess is that most BOOKGASM readers have heard of The Shadow, the hero pulp crime fighter who is frequently thought of as the first of his kind — you know, rich guy who roots out evil by disguising himself and adopting an odd but catchy nom de vigilante, like … oh, say, Batman, for instance. But before The Shadow’s first magazine adventure in 1931 came Zorro’s first appearance in 1919 and The Scarlet Pimpernel’s print debut in 1905.

Which brings us to another of those pulp masked action heroes: The Spider. He was Richard Wentworth during the day, another of those indolent millionaire playboys who seemed to be two for a nickel during the Depression. His gal pal was Nita Van Sloan and together they busted more insidious crime than J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.

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Nearly a year after the debut issue, SHERLOCK HOLMES MYSTERY MAGAZINE #2 is finally available, with another 130-ish pages of mostly all-new material, perfect-bound and edited by the ever-reliable Marvin Kaye.

It begins with Kim Newman’s reviews of a handful of Sherlock Holmes-oriented books, which are welcome, but many of the titles are several years old. With so many new titles published every season, it’d be nice to see those covered instead. Holmes’ landlady Mrs. Martha Hudson returns with a faux advice column that’s more annoying than anything, especially with the inclusion of recipes.

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With WHO KILLED ART DECO?, his second work of fiction in so many years, former GONG SHOW host Chuck Barris branches out in this parody of mystery writing. It’s not a straight-out spoof, but there are plenty of elements inside to show he must have devoured the works of certain authors.

Actually, you could call this two stories in one, since the first half of the book is taken up with a family drama that carries to the end, while the second part focuses on a rookie private investigator. The novel opens with a brief history of the Deco family and its patriarch, Arthur Deco Sr., a man who is very set in the way things should be. He is also racist, homophobic and a bully.

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