LAPD detective Lena Gamble is assigned to a double murder in MURDER SEASON, Robert Ellis’ third in the series. It’s a challenging enough assignment, but Gamble quickly learns exactly how tough it is when her own law enforcement allies turn against her.
She is awakened before dawn to learn that her day off has been canceled. Instead, she is called to immediately report to Club 3 AM, an A-list hangout in Hollywood, where she finds the bloody bodies of two men, both shot to death. One is Johnny Bosco, the club owner and one of the most connected men in town. The other man is Jacob Grant, a 25-year-old recently acquitted of raping and murdering a 16-year-old girl who lived next door.
[click to continue…]
TRESPASSER is Paul Doiron’s second novel featuring Maine game warden Mike Bowditch. Apparently, in the first, THE POACHER’S SON, Bowditch had to track down his criminal father and, in the process, made some enemies on the police force. These enemies continue to haunt him during this outing, so the conflict stems from both his efforts to solve the crime and personal conflicts with his colleagues and even his wife. Sadly, all this interpersonal drama doesn’t do much for the overall story.
While responding to a vehicle/deer collision call, Bowditch finds the car, but not the driver, a young woman by the name of Ashley Kim. He passes the case on to the state patrol, but her disappearance nags at him, and so he investigates, eventually discovering the poor woman, raped and murdered, in a nearby house. The police are none too pleased that Bowditch was clever enough to find the body, and apoplectic that he contaminated a major crime scene.
[click to continue…]
It’s no surprise why Sharyn McCrumb is a bestselling author. In THE DEVIL AMONGST THE LAWYERS, she accomplishes a feat most writers wouldn’t be able to pull off. She creates a large cast of fascinating characters, differentiates them significantly from each other, tells their own individual stories in relatively few words, and combines them all into a solid overarching story. It’s a character study within a mystery.
This book is the eighth in McCrumb’s “Ballad” series, set in the Appalachian mountains of Wise County, Va. A young woman has apparently killed her father in a fit of rage. For some reason, the case gets a bit of national attention, and so a few big-city journalists are traveling to the area to report on it.
[click to continue…]
M.L. Longworth’s debut novel, DEATH AT THE CHATEAU BREMONT, has a few appealing elements. Set in contemporary Aix-en-Provence, it features two well-drawn conflicted characters, Judge Antoine Verlaque and his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Marine Bonnet, a professor of law. Their interactions and motivations form the emotional core of the book, and the author goes to great pains to present all sides of their character: his off-putting snobbishness, her unappealing silliness, but matched also with his earnestness and her intelligence.
The two become involved in a case when a documentary filmmaker is found dead at the titular site. Verlaque is investigating whether the death was a suicide or an accident; Bonnet is brought in because she knew the man who died as a childhood friend.
[click to continue…]
A RIVER IN THE SKY is Elizabeth Peters’ 19th (!) novel featuring the archaeologist Amelia Peabody; her irascible husband, Emerson; and a barely controllable family that includes her biological son, Ramses; her acquired “daughter,” Nefret; and a number of others who protect and love the Peabody family body and soul.
Set in mid-1910 in Palestine, this outing involves the Peabody clan with the British government. They suspect an amateur archaeologist has plans to unearth the Ark of the Covenant, and to do so in an area that will arouse intense political and religious animosity. The government also suspects this amateur to be a spy.
[click to continue…]
