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.

Grant’s trial was followed by the entire city and made national headlines as L.A.’s latest “Trail of the Century.” But everyone was stunned and outraged when a “not guilty” verdict was returned, due mostly to the police department’s faulty handling of evidence.
 
Gamble’s superiors are immediately convinced that the father of the dead girl killed Grant in a fit of revenge, but ended up killing Bosco in the process. So they lean on Gamble to quickly build the case against the dad and make the whole mess go away before it causes the department more extreme embarrassment.
 
Shortly after she begins her investigation, some inconsistencies begin to bother her. Defying her superiors’ orders, she re-examines the original case against Grant. It doesn’t take long for the word to spread throughout the entire department, and Gamble finds herself completely unsupported in her efforts — and a target herself while she searches for the murderer.
 
With the original prosecution referred to as a “slam dunk,” and an assumed killer — in the trial of public opinion — set free due to police incompetence, Ellis’ novel can’t help but carry echoes of the infamous O.J. Simpson trial. The author readily acknowledges this in his narrative, as well as other lesser-known cases where the mishandling of evidence resulted in unexpected verdicts. As the story progresses, however, Ellis adds several factors that distinguish this from its predecessors.
 
His style is mostly straight-ahead and to-the-point, with some noticeably impressionistic passages that open and close the novel. Yet, at every moment when a conclusion seems obvious, Ellis tosses in twists and surprises that propel the story to different levels, keeping us guessing until the final page.
 
The combination of unanticipated revelations and the effectively portrayed sense of utter alienation that eats away at Gamble’s confidence make this the most intense and haunting entry of the series to date.

Unfortunately, the dust jacket design, with its inclusion of a Hollywood Walk of Fame star, along with the word “season” in the title, might make readers assume the novel is intimately involved with movies and TV. Other than the murder scene set in Hollywood, the book only minimally deals with the entertainment industry.
 
What’s certain is that Gamble, thanks to MURDER SEASON, is now among the growing list of female crime-fiction protagonists as worthy of following as any of their male counterparts. —Alan Cranis

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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.

When he begins to make connections between this case and a much earlier case with a similar M.O., things really get heated. The D.A. and the police already have a man in jail for the earlier case of rape and murder, and they don’t need Bowditch to stir up trouble. Which, of course, he continues to do, this time by finding the body of a man with his throat cut. The man was the police’s prime suspect, and now he’s dead.

Doiron has a clean style with an eye for action, and his plotting structure is fairly strong. What’s less to like are the unrealistic motivations of his characters. Bowditch displays quite a bit of self-destructive behavior, going off to confront people when he has no business doing so, and the other police colleagues are little better, expressing considerable rage at minor comments as if they were on steroids. His own wife doesn’t even tell him she’s pregnant. Most of the other Maine inhabitants we meet would put “white trash” in the 1 percent bracket, and apparently, the state is a haven for sex offenders. Who knew?

Having your protagonist as a game warden is an interesting conceit, but making him behave like an inner-city detective investigating murders is a disconnect to me. This isn’t a bad book; it’s certainly very readable, but there needs to be a little more joy, a little less constant conflict with the men and women who are supposed to be on our hero’s side, a little more higher purpose.

At one point, a character discusses the likelihood of Bowditch quitting his job, and based on everything he goes through in this book and who he has to deal with, that’s exactly what I would expect. —Mark Rose

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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.

We meet Henry Jernigan, the accomplished pro with a haunting secret; Rose Hanelon, the sad cynic; and Shade Baker, the disinterested photographer. We also encounter Carl Jennings, a local reporter from Tennessee who hopes that his youth and the fact that he’s a local may help him get the big story.

The actions and attitudes of the journalists are the real story here, as the murder case itself paradoxically gets scant attention. Set in the 1930s, but concerning something which could just as easily reflect our situation today, McCrumb explores the stance of big-city elitists who deign to visit what we now call “flyover country” in the search of local color.

Jernigan and Hanelon don’t care at all about the people or stories they cover, and even Baker, who grew up in a similar area, fights the fight but has to take the photos they want because after all, it’s a job. Along the way, we are exposed to these journalists’ vicious bigotry and cynicism. Is journalism about truth, about telling stories the readers expect to hear so they aren’t confused by incongruous details, or is it just about selling newspapers?

While the author lays the anti-journalism tirade on a bit too thickly, she manages to create a tale that only indirectly deals with the murder case (handled snappily in an epilogue) and focuses instead on the characters surrounding the trial, and how their actions affect the town in which the crime occurred. Matched with her usual attention to detail (yes, she really does know how a 1930 Ford Model A “heater” works), her brisk and accurate descriptive prowess, and her basis of real-life stories, this is another series entry you’ll want to read. —Mark Rose

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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.

The investigation seems to be heading nowhere when the dead man’s brother is also found at the château, strangled to death. Verlaque and his team, with the assistance of Bonnet, now must investigate what seem to be two murders.

The police work here is intriguing and unravels naturally. The setting is different and descriptions are evocative of the area. The focus on food and wine is welcome. The characters are interesting and could easily support a series. The plot’s a bit thin and the presence of the Russian mafia doesn’t help matters, but the most egregious drawback here is the horrendous copyediting that apparently doesn’t bother the publisher Penguin.

The novel is riddled with unfortunate textual phrasings, due either to the author’s purported bilingualism, or just laziness at the publisher’s. Examples include the overuse of the cloying word “tummy,” the disjointed phrase “whipping around the room the pages of the newspaper she had been reading” (p. 24) or the obviously wrong “other wealthy usually men wore” (p. 33). On page 260, a character throws her purse over a fence, but on page 275, it’s located in the car. Name spellings differ. Each instance may be minor, but they tend to be distracting.

The ending wraps up a bit too neatly for my taste as well. So overall, it’s not a perfect book by any means, but entertaining enough for the character study and locale. —Mark Rose

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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.

So they draw the Peabody family into the intrigue and insist that they keep a watch over this mysterious man. Meanwhile, Ramses, while working on a different dig, manages to get himself kidnapped, and his efforts at escape and the family’s efforts to recover him, take up a significant portion of the book. Of course, his abduction is also tied to this mysterious spy/amateur archaeologist.

Peters, a synonym for respected Egyptologist Barbara Mertz, has a light and breezy style that meshes well with the delightfully silly family dynamic of the Peabodys. Amelia and Emerson bicker and flirt and tease and manipulate like any long-married loving couple, and the entourage reminds me of the nonfiction stories of Gerald Durrell and his eccentric family. This is all fun and frothy, and fans of the series will be immensely pleased by this addition.

For a first-time reader to the series, however, it is perhaps a little too light. I would have preferred more historical background and even — gasp! — some actual archaeology instead of the rather flighty story of the family moving around while Ramses tries to escape his captors.

The series is a strong one with a huge number of fans, so if you’re interested in the time and location (1880s to 1920s Egypt and Palestine) then you should definitely take a look, but maybe start with the first book in the series, both in the series timeframe and by publication date, CROCODILE ON THE SANDBANK. —Mark Rose

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Dublin-born, now London-residing author Jane Casey’s second novel, THE BURNING, introduces a proposed series character in Detective Inspector Maeve Kerrigan of the London Metro Police. If this debut is any indication, we are in for plenty of intriguing psychological suspense presented in the format of police procedurals.
 
The Burning Man, a serial killer of women — so-named because of his method of burning the bodies of his victims and leaving them in abandoned areas outside of town — is haunting London. Kerrigan is part of Operation Mandrake, the police team assigned to investigate and capture him.

She sees the assignment as a way to advance her career in the face of the sexism and prejudice to her Irish origins that have dogged her from day one, so she devotes every waking moment to the investigation, even at the expense of her already-tenuous personal life.
 
Another charred woman’s body is discovered. Upon closer examination, several deviations from the Burning Man’s usual method are noted. A copycat killer is suspected. But before drawing this conclusion, Kerrigan’s supervisor assigns her to individually and privately probe the killing of this latest victim, revealed as Rebecca Haworth.

As Kerrigan interviews Haworth’s friends and family, she pieces together the life of this one-time successful executive with all her private demons. Each revelation brings Kerrigan closer to determining if Haworth is the latest victim of the Burning Man or just someone whose murder is made to look like the work of the serial killer.
 
The story is told mostly through Kerrigan’s first-person narration, with frequent observations told by Louise, Rebecca’s best friend. This divided narration is effective at first, but quickly becomes annoying with its insistence, as if Casey does not yet completely trust her main protagonist to carry the entire story. Yet there is no denying that the Kerrigan chapters are by far the richer and better written.
 
The author deserves praise for not taking the expected procedural path, instead devoting Kerrigan’s efforts to a seemingly related murder victim. The promise of this departure, unfortunately, is never fully carried out, as the plot and its resolution become sadly predictable. Adding insult to injury, Casey resorts to the overused technique of a series of press clippings to tie up all the various loose ends at the novel’s conclusion.
 
Still, the portions told by Kerrigan show Casey’s impressive skills at character insight and motivation. With a bit more attention to plot detail, and a lot more faith in the strengths of her main character, she has all the makings of a major contemporary crime-fiction talent. —Alan Cranis

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THE REDBREAST by Jo Nesbø is actually the third novel to feature the unfortunately named Norwegian inspector Harry Hole, but it’s the earliest one you can get in an English translation (by Don Bartlett, released in 2006, but newly released in paperback). There are two earlier novels that will hopefully be brought to the English-speaking world at some point.

Hole is a real piece of work. A recovering (just barely) alcoholic, he is a star detective, but tends to play by his own rules and of course, this gets him into hot water. For instance, he is performing routine surveillance duty during the visit of the U.S. President to Norway. He sees a man in a toll booth that was supposed to have been vacated.

As the president’s motorcade nears, he has no option but to shoot the man in the toll booth. Turns out it was an agent of the Secret Service. Oops. Sure, it was the U.S.’s fault, but no one wants this to get out. So Hole is promoted to an out-of-the-way position and made out to be a hero to save face for both the Norwegian and the American governments. Politics as usual.

Hole soon finds himself in another political morass as his new job has him investigating neo-Nazi groups. Someone has brought into Norway a very expensive, and very deadly, Märklin rifle. But no one knows who.

In a story that bounces between the end of World War II and the present, Nesbø explores Nazism as it thrived and as it revives in certain parts of Europe, and Hole tries to resolve the killings in the present day with what triggered it all 60 years ago.

It’s a very traditional Nesbø thriller, which is to say that it’s excellent. Character dynamics are off the chart. Here, we meet Hole’s hated colleague, Tom Waaler, and see his corrupt hand at work, and we grieve with Harry when — spoiler alert for the remainder of the pararagraph — his first partner is killed halfway through the novel. (I especially loved the seven chapters where Harry calls the answering machine of his dead partner and explains to the tape recording how they are progressing on the investigation into her death. On the seventh day, he gets a recording that the number has been disconnected — brutal, chilling and very affecting.)

It’s a great start to the whole series, and you can follow that up with the next book, NEMESIS, released in 2008. A bank robber takes a woman as hostage and indicates that the manager has a certain number of seconds to unload the ATM and give the robber the money. The manager takes a few seconds too long, so the robber kills the hostage, then continues to rob other banks, and the pressure is on to find the Expeditor (as the press refers to him).

But there is another subplot brewing. Hole seems to have had yet another alcoholic blackout when he was with a former flame. And the next day, that woman ends up dead. It looks like suicide and so it’s deemed by the police department. Hole is confused, then worried when anonymous emails start showing up in his inbox, implicating him in something a lot more dangerous than a hangover.

This is Nesbø’s style, to drag you in and make you think what you’re seeing and reading makes sense, then to pull the rug out from under you. He does it brilliantly. These first two books in the series (at least those that are in the English language) are strong, well-plotted, rich in character (with the first featuring the much-missed Ellen Gjelten and the second featuring the delightful and very strange Beate Lønn ) and profoundly satisfying.

Look, you don’t have to read the books sequentially, but you really should read the books. Nesbø is one of the leading lights of Scandinavian crime fiction, and he needs to be on your shelf. —Mark Rose

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S.J. Rozan continues her mystery series featuring the P.I. team of Lydia Chin and Bill Smith in her latest novel, GHOST HERO. Lydia takes the lead here in an unusual case that affects her in unexpected ways.
 
Lydia is hired by a man named Jeff Dunbar, who says he is an art collector. Contemporary Chinese paintings are very hot in the art world, and there are rumors that new paintings have been discovered by Chau Chun, the artist known as the Ghost Hero, renowned for adding subtle political messages into his traditional works. Trouble is, Chau Chun has been dead for 20 years, killed during the Tiananmen Square protests in China. Dunbar wants Lydia to use her connections with the Chinese-American population to track down the new paintings, if they truly exist.

Lydia and Bill first consult a contemporary Chinese art expert named Jack Lee, only to discover that he is an investigator who also has been hired to look for the rumored paintings. Reluctantly, Lydia and Bill decide to join forces with Jack. Not long after, Lydia finds that her client is not who he says he is, and that several other individuals — including some connected with both the Chinese and American government — either want to know where the rumored paintings are, or want Lydia to immediately stop her investigation.
 
In spite of her client’s deception and the veiled threats now surrounding her, Lydia and Bill embark on a scheme, with Jack’s help, to not only find the paintings, but determine if they are authentic and why so many people in and out of the art world want to get their hands on the pieces.
 
The story is presented through Lydia’s first-person narration and is lighter in tone from previous Chin/Smith novels. The dialogue is spiced throughout with sarcastic humor, mostly about Lydia and her on-again, off-again partnership with Bill, or about the challenges of being an American-born Chinese (or an “ABC,” as she and Jack call it) and torn daily between the traditions of her origins and the lure of modern-day America. 
 
There are moments when the humor threatens to dominate the narrative, especially in scenes where Bill presents himself as a wealthy Russian art collector, complete with an overabundance of jewelry and the world’s most obnoxious accent. But Rozan seems to sense this danger and presents additional complications and plot revelations — along with the occasional hint of violence — to balance things out.
 
Perhaps most surprising and unexpected is how the case touches Lydia. As she learns more about the traditions of Chinese art she reflects upon her heritage, her parents and her life as an American-Chinese woman. Along the way, she comments on the numerous stereotypes and racist attitudes that she has either ignored or simply resigned to (like when her mother refers to Smith as “the white baboon,” or when she herself refers to American men who are attracted to Asian women as men who “like rice”).
 
These moments of character depth, along with the challenging complications of the plot and its ties to contemporary Chinese history, and the behind-the-scenes revelations of how competitive and downright cutthroat the art world can be, combine to make GHOST HERO one of the strongest titles of the series.
 
Rozan’s Chin/Smith novels are among the many series popular with mystery readers who enjoy solving puzzles in the company of familiar fictional friends. But every now and then, a work like GHOST HERO shows how even the most familiar series can take unanticipated and rewarding risks with a proven formula. —Alan Cranis

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Craig Johnson’s series of contemporary Western mysteries featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire are absolute gems. THE COLD DISH is one of my all-time favorites, and JUNKYARD DOGS is quite favorable as well. Now with his latest and seventh installment in the series, HELL IS EMPTY, Johnson puts Sheriff Longmire into grave danger, in a tale that has him confronting his own death and the nature of what a life is lived for.

Longmire and some of his colleagues are transporting a motley crew of Native Americans into the wilderness to discover the gravesite of a boy one of them has killed. The murderer, one Reynaud Shade, is, as one of his companions notes, the kind of guy who gives nightmares to the guys who give the rest of us nightmares. Longmire meets up with the FBI who are interested in Shade as well.

The first 50 pages or so go pretty well; Longmire has transferred the prisoners to the FBI and is eating a meal back at the lodge. And then he discovers an improvised handcuff key in one of the sandwiches that had been given to the men. If there’s one here, then there might be another one with Shade.

From here out, it’s one long thrill ride of murder, mayhem and pop psychology about death and the sacred lands of Absaroka County, Wyo. There is much of the numinous Native American in Johnson’s writings. While the characters are often fascinating, such as the Sheriff’s great friend Henry Standing Bear, they also tend to have a lot of mysterious wisdom to impart, which may or may not get a little tedious, depending on your tastes. We get a little more of it in this account because of the book’s structure.

Longmire is separated from his deputies (who are great characters and their tangential appearances aside, are missed here) as he heads up the mountain alone to confront Shade and his crew. Along the way, he meets the giant mountain man Virgil White Buffalo who lives in this remote area and decides to help the sheriff. This new team encounters both a series of man-made obstacles (Shade and his men) and the natural obstacles of the beautiful but brutal Wyoming terrain (snow, cold, ice, fire).

It’s an exciting read to be sure. The author is a deft hand at characterization, saying far more with fewer words than most writers can manage. And the story, though limited in scope to a chase up the mountainside, is riveting. It’s like a prose version of DIE HARD, a constant chair-edge thriller that has you worrying about Longmire’s safety and his sanity.

Craig Johnson writes books about the modern West, about what this area once stood for and hopefully still does, of the people who love and respect the area, of facing down death in a frankly entertaining way. You should read them. —Mark Rose

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I love historical mysteries, the choice of setting, the mannerisms, the facts an author chooses to let you see and those he or she chooses to hide. And so Michael Gregorio’s A VISIBLE DARKNESS is quite interesting in that regard. Set in the Prussian area in the first decade of the 1800s, it describes an occupation by the French that is very unwelcome. The Prussians hate the French, and the French manipulate and abuse the Prussians as much as they can.

Here, the Prussian magistrate Hanno Stiffeniis is surprised by an urgent call to the Baltic coast. Girls who have been hired to dive for amber are being found mutilated. The French are embarrassed. Their plans are to remove the girls anyway with automated amber mining equipment, but it’s important to find this killer, this potential saboteur, before things get wildly out of hand.

The French powers feel, that by hiring a Prussian magistrate and by influencing him to find some pathetic Prussian peasant guilty, this will help their cause. Stiffeniis is made of stronger cloth than that.

The historical aspect of the book is the strongest, the setting and conflict between France and Prussia is something rarely seen in detective fiction, and the subject of amber and the insects occasionally found within, is ripe for a philosophical discussion that is promised, but not quite fulfilled, by the book in question.

In short, I wanted more.

Gregorio’s characterization of Stiffeniis is warm and full-blooded, but once we get beyond this man, things become much more cardboard. The plot is dizzying, and the subject fascinating, but only partially explored. There is this connection to the real-world philosopher Immanuel Kant that is teased (especially by other books in the series) but not really brought to bear for the casual reader. It’s likable and interesting because of the subject matter and the time frame, but what seems to be lacking is depth.

I like Stiffeniis as a character, but I see so little of his motivations or beliefs — not just re: Immanuel Kant, but in regarding his society as well. Maybe this is my failing. I want Umberto Eco, but I get a police procedural with Grand Guignol events and gratuitously gory scene descriptions. This wants to be a serious historic-scientific mystery, but relies too much on overblown drama and too little on the aspects that could truly make this series a masterpiece. —Mark Rose

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Camilla Läckberg is yet another Scandinavian queen of mystery in a field that now seems almost dominated by writers from Northern Europe. THE ICE PRINCESS is her first novel, originally published in 2003 and now translated by Steven T. Murray, but she has seven others (and one children’s book) that have been published. In this debut, she introduces her series characters Erica Falck and local Fjällbacka policeman Patrik Hedstrom.

Falck has returned to her home after the death of her parents to clear out the house. Her sister, Anna, and the despised brother-in-law, Lucas, want to sell the old home in order to get the money to make a new start in London. As this family conflict rages on, one of Erica’s old childhood friends is found dead in a bathtub with her wrists slashed. It is most definitely not a suicide.

During the course of her own investigation, Falck reunites with another childhood friend, Hedstrom. The two of them subtly begin to work together to find out who might have killed the woman, and to unravel other mysteries of the sleepy little town: what part does Nelly Lorentz, cannery factory heiress, play in this whole affair and why does she know the murdered girl’s sister so well; why did the alcoholic artist Anders have a relationship with the victim, and plenty more besides.

Most of these puzzles are solved by the end of the book, though the dustup over the family home takes a nasty turn and remains unresolved, presumably to be addressed in subsequent books. The plot is very strong, with some rather horrid secrets to be discovered. Descriptions and settings are adequate. Dialogue is a little weak in that it comes across as stilted and fake.

And unfortunately, the detection isn’t really up to par. One of the major breaks in the case comes when Hedstrom finds a notepad. Someone has written something on the top piece, then torn that page off. Of course, Hedstrom uses a pencil to color in the paper underneath so he can read the impressions made on the paper. Cliché!

Läckberg also makes the cardinal sin of having her characters discover something which they know is important, but she refuses to tell the reader in order to keep the suspense high. That always feels like cheating to me. Still, the emotional sincerity feels right and if you want another example of how mystery fiction is done in the frozen north, then the author fits right into the pantheon with this first novel featuring a duo of very likable series characters. —Mark Rose

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Peter Robinson’s 19th novel featuring Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, the new-to-paperback BAD BOY, may not be the strongest in the series, but it’s admirable for its unusual focus on the character of Banks’ daughter, Tracy, and its sneakily subtle comment on his notorious rogue style of operating and official protocol.

The tale begins with Banks on holiday in America, and Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot fielding a confused woman at HQ. The woman wishes to speak to Banks, a longtime friend, but with him away, she reluctantly informs Cabbot that she has found a handgun in her daughter’s room. She does not seem to know that handgun possession carries an almost automatic five-year sentence in jail (thank God I live in the U.S.), and Cabbot wrestles internally with how she would handle the situation as a mother. Knowing the outcome, could she turn in her own daughter?

Well, the actual outcome is even worse. Playing everything completely by the book and following all the rules, the armed response team shows up at the house, but the situation goes awry, and the girl’s father is Tased. Suffering from a heart condition, he dies shortly thereafter.

In this instance, protocol fails. It may have been better all around if Banks had been there. As a friend of the family, he might have been able to forestall any confusion and secure the gun without bodily harm or threat of imprisonment. Circumstances get worse: The gun-toting girl had been living with Tracy Banks. She won’t say where the gun came from, but Tracy knows that it must have belonged to the girl’s boyfriend. Mimicking her father’s own impulsive and often reckless behavior, she goes to warn the boyfriend. And then things get even worse. Sometimes going off half-cocked works, sometimes it doesn’t. Same with official protocol.

Robinson is a supremely skilled best-selling author who is a master of dialogue and character, and it shows in the length and quality of this series. Banks’ American sojourn was an interesting touch, although his absence from the first part of the novel is sorely missed. It’s initially infuriating that the women in his life, Cabbot and Tracy, both seem to make phenomenally bad decisions, and the ending seems rather abrupt, though ultimately satisfying.

Still, with all of that, lovers of Banks will be pleased; newcomers will want to start with earlier books and work their way forward to this one. —Mark Rose

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In VIENNA TWILIGHT, Frank Tallis’ fifth mystery featuring psychiatrist Dr. Max Liebermann and Detective Inspector Oskar Reinhardt, we get yet another solid tale of early 20th-century Austria, its culture, its food and its disturbing criminals. Unfortunately, this one also has an air of prurience about it absent from earlier novels in the series.

Liebermann and Reinhardt are puzzled by the death of a young lady who has had a hatpin rammed into her foramen magnum, the area at the base of the skull that can be easily penetrated with a weapon. It is determined that she was killed while having consensual sex. This peccadillo allows Tallis to bring in the psychiatry with visits from Sigmund Freud and lengthy discourses on sexual deviance.

When a second woman is found murdered in the same way, Reinhardt realizes he needs to catch this sicko fast. And while the deductive work is as strong as earlier efforts in the series, and the descriptive touches of Austrian food and music just as charming, the focus on the combination of sex and death mixed with a side plot of underage sexual abuse is a bit of a jarring note. Tallis wants to make points about why sex and death are commingled in men’s minds, and he does so well enough in a mystery while he’s trying to tell a story. Still, I wouldn’t be handing this book to a 12-year-old to read.

If you’re a fan of the series, you’ll continue to enjoy the interaction between Liebermann and Reinhardt, but if you’re new to Tallis, start off with VIENNA SECRETS or FATAL LIES first. —Mark Rose

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I’m sorry to say that I found wanting Robert Goddard’s FOUND WANTING. While he is a master at descriptions and his overall style is quite readable, he fails to make his main characters either interesting or appealing, they behave in extremely odd ways without sufficient motivation, and the plot is a train wreck.

Civil servant Richard Eusden is tasked by his ex-wife to take an attaché case to Richard’s longtime friend, Marty Hewitson. The case belonged to Marty’s grandfather. In it, according to Marty, are some documents written in Danish that concern the legendary Grand Duchess Anastasia, last of the Romanovs.

Sigh. At least it’s not the Knights Templar.

There’s also some type of connection between the documents and a giant Danish business conglomerate. Marty believes he can sell the information contained in the documents for a significant amount of money.

But when Eusden travels to Belgium to deliver the case, he is accosted by an acquaintance of Marty. This man has tied Marty up and is threatening to starve him to death unless the case is given to him. Eusden agrees and manages to save his friend, only to find out that Marty had never entrusted him with the actual case; it was a decoy.

And thus, the madcap adventure begins as Marty and Eusden travel around the continent alternately obtaining and losing the case, and all the while aggravating the business conglomerate.

There’s just something missing here. The plot is completely insane with a wrapup at the end that will have you grinding your teeth, and the constant moving around of the characters and their antics with the attaché case sound more like a comic movie than a gripping thriller.

If this were Goddard’s first novel, I don’t think we would have heard of him after. But he has a huge following and is well-respected. This one, though, is a swinging strike. —Mark Rose

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The timeframe and setting of Judith Rock’s THE ELOQUENCE OF BLOOD will appeal to many readers. Set in 1686 in the heart of Paris, the series character of Charles du Luc attends to his duties as a teacher of dance and rhetoric at the Jesuit-run Louis le Grand school. Once a soldier, du Luc has turned to the comforts of religion and routine and he seems quite comfortable in his role at the school.

Well, if by comfortable, you mean eating bean pottage every day and living in cold, dark rooms. For the school is running low on funds, and belt-tightening (or cassock-tightening) will be a necessity. News comes of an enormous bequest that will be made to the Jesuits from the Mynette family as the matriarch has passed away peacefully, and the school’s leaders are cheered. But there’s a hitch.

There is another Mynette, a girl who was adopted by the senior Mynette and who has a claim to the same bequest. However, her adoption papers seem to have been lost by the courts. The school’s leader is annoyed that the solicitor never even told him of this Mynette girl. It gets worse: The girl is found stabbed to death. The public, quick to judge, believe the Jesuits are behind the murder in order to get the money.

Now, du Luc must do what he can to find the real murderer. His superior at the school is confident du Luc can succeed because of his work in THE RHETORIC OF DEATH (the first book in the series), but the search will be complicated by an angry Parisian populace who are not afraid of committing violence against Jesuits.

Rock nails everything about characters, dialogue, setting, historical research, pacing and story development. It was fascinating to learn about Parisian life in the late 17th century, the religious situation with the Jesuits and Huguenots, the status of servants, the running of a Jesuit school, and all of this detail is woven so seamlessly into the story that the reader never falters.

But I was disappointed in the climax. Du Luc performs an admirable amount of detection and legwork in attempting to solve the crime, but the culprit is someone completely out of left field, kind of breaking what up to then had been a rather intriguing effort at plotting.

Still, the character of du Luc and all the Jesuit brothers at the school is really the driving force here. Coupled with the charm of the Parisian setting and the interesting religious background, Rock has the start to an excellent historical detective series. —Mark Rose

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Jill Edmondson’s debut novel, BLOOD AND GROOM, was a delightful discovery, as it featured the tough-as-nails, but still self-aware and flawed Sasha Jackson as a private investigator uncovering heinous crimes. Her follow-up, DEAD LIGHT DISTRICT, stays true to the characters but falters a little in its predictability and a few trite scenes.

Jackson is asked by the madame of a bordello masquerading as a bed and breakfast to locate one of her workers, who has gone missing. The madame just wants to make sure she is safe. Jackson starts the investigation and is very quickly warned off the case as someone paints “Back Off, Bitch” on her garage door. As readers of this series will know, this just excites Jackson and makes her work even harder to find the missing prostitute, one Mary Carmen.

The reader ends up knowing more than Jackson does, as Edmondson intersperses a few chapters as if they were written by Carmen. In one way, this spoils the suspense, but it also gives us an insight into another character, and one ends up wishing these interludes would have been either further fleshed-out or more frequent so we could get Carmen’s side of the story. Because Mary Carmen does not want to be found.

In any event, as the investigation continues, Jackson discovers the murder of a pimp in Montreal, where Carmen’s last trick often visited. Did this last trick kill the pimp and perhaps Mary? And then, when the owner of the bordello is found shot and lies uncommunicative in intensive care, Jackson realizes she has swum out into very deep water. Carmen would never have shot the madame, so just what exactly is going on?

Edmondson keeps the tone light with occasional jokes and sarcastic wit, and her plotting is decent. Where she really excels is in showing investigational procedures. It’s a lot of leg work and asking dumb questions until you get that tiny little jewel of information you need to unravel the case. Edmondson’s series character is worth the attention for those who appreciate contemporary P.I. fiction. —Mark Rose

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I get a kick out of Scandinavian detective fiction. No matter the author, almost all the books feature the same traits: horrific crimes, a preoccupation with the nanny state and its institutions, a strange fascination with street names and a geographic exactitude for character location, a protagonist who is often severely emotionally damaged, and everyone (and I mean everyone) experiences intense bouts of mental anguish, extreme navel-gazing and drama-queen reactions to situations.

A few examples from the book under review include: “He saw himself gulp,” “she felt his look condemn her to the underworld” and “Annika clenched her jaw to stop herself exploding, noting that her boundaries had evaporated.” That last comes as Annika is picking up her kids at school.

But even with those oddities, they’re also usually quite entertaining. Scandinavian detective fiction is often strong on character (it has to be with all that introspection), and it’s not afraid to look at the home life and intimate personal emotions of the characters. It’s why the genre appeals to so many, and Liza Marklund’s RED WOLF (in a translation by Neil Smith) is no different. It’s also coupled with an intriguing plot.

Marklund’s main character, Annika Bengtzon, is a Swedish tabloid journalist who often reports on crime and terror. She’s been involved in terrorist attacks before (notably in THE BOMBER, the events of which are still deeply affecting her n this book).

This time, Bengtzon is tracking down a mysterious incident at the F21 air base that occurred in the late 1960s. A fighter plane exploded on the runway, and a young conscript died. No one was ever detained for the crime. One of Bengtzon’s contacts up north has additional information that has just come to light.

But when she goes to visit this contact, she finds out that he has been killed in a hit-and-run accident. Accident? Not likely. Bengtzon digs deeper and finds an eye witness who claims the hit-and-run was deliberate. The police agree. Shortly thereafter, the eyewitness is found and murdered as well.

As the story unfolds, Marklund gracefully ties in the present-day crimes with ’60s revolutionary protests, discussing the love students had for Mao and Lenin, and how the internecine bickering between the Socialist factions ended up in outright conflict. While the main plot is strong, even the two subplots hold water.

Annika’s friend Anne is attempting to develop a terrestrial broadcast channel in conjunction with American backers and is frustrated at Swedish intervention. And Annika’s husband, Thomas, is involved in a merger between the Swedish Association of Local Councils and the Federation of County Councils (see, I told you they love to talk about bureaucratic institutions). Both the subplots are important in the overall tale.

If you like Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø, Karin Fossum, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and all the rest, you’ll enjoy Marklund and her impressive character of Annika Bengtzon. It’s a fun to read tale with a neat historical fillip about terrorism and protest in the 1960s. —Mark Rose

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Imogen Robertson’s debut novel, INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS, is an absolute gem, a mystery set in 1780 in Sussex with ties to the American Revolution that will appeal to both historical fiction and pure mystery fans.

One of our protagonists, the redoubtable Mrs. Harriet Westerman, is a strong-willed type who, when she finds a man murdered on her property, does not shrink from duty, but instead sends for our other main protagonist, the scientist Gabriel Clowther. The man has written a treatise on the marks murder makes on the body, and Westerman has read this obscure article. Together, these two team up to find the culprit.

The author goes to great lengths to show the reader the constraints a woman, even one of such strong intellect as Westerman, experienced in the time period. If she asks impertinent questions, her reputation will be sullied. Even to show interest in the crime displays vulgarity, and people will talk. She needs Clowther, a sour hermit who has his own dark secret, to ask the rough-and-tumble questions necessary in their pursuit.

And it’s quite a pursuit. It turns out the murdered man was hired by Lord Thornleigh, the Earl of Sussex who has vast properties adjacent to Westerman’s, to locate his elder brother, the right and proper heir of Thornleigh Hall. The brother left the family years ago in order to marry his true beloved, who was unacceptable to the family. The murdered man claimed to have information but was unable to impart this before dying.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Westerman and Clowther, a London music store owner is brutally stabbed to death in front of his two young children. As we quickly realize, it is this man who is the elder Thornleigh. But who has gone to such lengths to kill him?

Back at Thornleigh Hall, our erstwhile detectives Westerman and Clowther have even more corpses to examine. A maid has supposedly committed suicide, but she was bound with rope around her hands before the hanging, and a tradesman who knew the first murdered man is poisoned with arsenic. These are most certainly not accidents.

The investigation takes a number of twists as new evidence is brought to light, or new obstructions are thrown in our heroes’ path. But almost all of the characters are extremely well drawn and believable, dialogue seems as accurate as can be, and you will thrill to the successes and bristle at the setbacks Westerman and Clowther experience. This is a thick, chewy, satisfying novel of which I would most certainly like to see another in the series. Recommended. —Mark Rose

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Harlan Coben’s 10th Myron Bolitar novel, LIVE WIRE, starts off strong, keeps your interest, and ends dynamically in a way that kicks off a new series in Coben’s first young-adult novel, SHELTER. In LIVE WIRE, the author shows that he is still a master of the game.

It’s interesting. Having just read one of his earlier novels, 1991′s recently reissued MIRACLE CURE, I had a few negative things to say about its bloat, character behaviors and plot. Twenty years later, you can see how much Coben has improved. His dialogue is leaner; his characters grab you by the heart, even when a little preposterous (such as the inimitable Windsor Horne Lockwood III); his plots are smoother; and the pacing has become more polished.

In short, Coben is a craftsman of the best-selling airport type of novel: You’ll read it quickly, you’ll engage with the characters, and you’ll look forward to the next installment.

In this episode, sports agent Bolitar is handling the marital difficulties of former tennis pro Suzze Tervantino. She is eight months pregnant with the baby of one Lex Ryder, who is one-half of the musical duo HorsePower, a band so famous and well-loved that they haven’t toured for 15 years, yet still top the charts with their CD releases. On Facebook, Suzze receives a message that indicates the baby is not Lex’s. He sees this, gets upset, and goes missing. Suzze wants Bolitar to find him.

When Bolitar tracks down Ryder, he also inadvertently runs into Kitty Bolitar, his own sister-in-law. Kitty is married to Brad, Myron’s estranged brother whom he has not seen in years. Kitty wants no part of a family reunion and runs from Myron. And from this point, the entire case spirals wildly out of control involving the mob, the music industry, a tragic death from the past, bitter familial recriminations and much more.

LIVE WIRE is one of Coben’s strongest books in the franchise, with a searing look inside the Bolitar family, great character development and a serviceable plot. Great series. —Mark Rose

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Claude Izner’s third novel featuring the indomitable Parisian bookseller Victor Legris, THE MONTMARTRE INVESTIGATION, starts out gruesomely enough, with a horrific train crash and the murder of a young girl at boarding school. Set in late 19th-century Paris, the author goes to great lengths to depict accurately the nightlife of both the well off (dancing at Le Moulin Rouge) and the street life (the goatherd who lives among his beasts).

But Izner perhaps spends too much time acquainting us with street names, famous people of the day, and irrelevant historic details that are handled, oddly, by a few pages of footnotes. One comes away knowing that he has done a tremendous amount of research, and unfortunately, has tried to cram it all into an overwrought work.

It’s a shame because there are definitely some good elements here. The inhabitants of the bookstore — Victor; his colleague, Kenji Mori; and their assistant, Joseph — develop an interesting familial dynamic that gets more complicated by the end of the book.

The way that Victor investigates his case is very strong, as he slowly assembles bits and pieces from the few clues he has, and we can see the puzzle unravel as he and Joseph tackle each lead as it comes. This is tempered by the occasionally overblown dialogue and the possibly deliberate slightly antiquated writing style.

Now available in paperback, it’s all very romantic and theatrical, but a little grating too. Joseph’s mutterings about Victor, Joseph’s mother’s put-upon airs, the squealing of middle-age dowagers as they read supposedly scandalous but utterly banal serialized fiction to each other, sometimes just goes a touch too far. It’s like the caked-on makeup of the dancing girls: a bit too much window dressing to hide the drab interior. Perhaps it’s all an acquired taste. If you have an interest in Paris and the timeframe, it’s serviceable. —Mark Rose

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I probably would have loved John Feinstein’s THE RIVALRY: MYSTERY AT THE ARMY-NAVY GAME when I was an adolescent (or, as the publishing industry insists they be called, “young adult,” which is like calling it “jumbo shrimp”). It’s about two things I love dearly: football and writing. But even during my less-sophisticated teenage years, I would have had trouble believing in the characters, and I would have bristled at some of the writing choices the author makes.

It’s odd because Feinstein is one of the best nonfiction sportswriters around, with a ton of well-received books to his credit. But there’s something about writing for the young-adult market that tones his style down to blandness, and that messes up his pacing.

THE RIVALRY is the fifth book in the series featuring teenage journalists Stevie Thomas and Susan Carol Anderson. Somehow, these two are occasional feature writers for major newspapers, and while they’re good kids who always do their homework and still manage to attend major sporting events such as the Super Bowl and the World Series, they always seem to be magnets for serious trouble.

Here, the two students are hired by Washington, D.C., newspapers to provide colorful stories about the Army-Navy college football game, which is to be held in the nation’s capital. President Barack Obama will be in attendance, so the Secret Service goes to great lengths to make the stadium secure. The young teens are of course, super-excited to be at the game and to write about preparations for the game the week beforehand, but soon, they seem to encounter what could be a very sinister plot indeed.

Unfortunately, problems with this book appear very early on. Every other page sees our doughty youth journalists meeting a famous person. Name-dropping is heavy going at the best of times, but when we’re spending pages having Stevie meet a rude Bobby Knight, or kiss ass with Bob Woodward, the reader gets jaded very quickly. There’s also a regrettable bit where Feinstein tries to mimic Woodward’s Midwestern accent; the less said about this attempt, the better.

There are some positives. Feinstein provides some history on Army and Navy, and he obviously respects these fine institutions. He gives us a little background on some of their game traditions, provides a nice little brief on sports betting (hey, better kids learn about it from a book than by being fleeced on the streets), and has some nice examples of strong character and moral rectitude. And the plot is really well-done.

But the decision to break up an essentially linear story into short chapters that bounce back and forth between the days leading up to the game and game time itself, breaks any tension and, frankly, confuses the reader.

This book may be just the ticket for the child mad about sports and/or journalism, but if you want a really good book about the Army-Navy game, you should probably read A CIVIL WAR, a nonfiction account written by none other than … John Feinstein. —Mark Rose

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It’s instructive to look at early books from accomplished writers, to see how they have grown and changed over the years. For instance, best-selling author Harlan Coben has a run of 10 Myron Bolitar novels that are tense packages of action and investigation, all of which sell well and are highly appreciated. But he also has a slew of standalone novels, and one of his earliest is 1991′s MIRACLE CURE.

Actually Coben’s second book, the recently reissued MIRACLE CURE takes place in the early days of AIDS medical investigation. Dr. Harvey Riker and Dr. Bruce Grey believe they are on to a special serum called SR1 that actually turns HIV-positive patients HIV-negative. They have been proceeding cautiously at their clinic, attempting to confirm these remarkable results, when all of a sudden, Dr. Grey commits suicide.

And then, one of the cured patients from the clinic is found horribly mutilated and murdered. It all becomes too much when a second patient is found murdered, stabbed multiple times. You know there’s a third murder on the way, and was Dr. Grey’s death really suicide?

As the press looks into what they insist on calling the Gay Slasher serial killer, television news reporter Sara Lowell and her New York Knicks basketball star husband, Michael Silverman, are relentlessly dragged into the investigation, spearheaded by NYPD homicide cop Max Bernstein, a walking bag of nervous tics who is drawn in an entertaining manner.

While all of this is going on, there is also a conspiracy of powerful men, senators, wealthy televangelists and a former surgeon general working to destroy the funding that goes to the clinic. Could they be behind the murders?

Coben’s strengths, his pure and purposeful dialogue, his crystal-clear descriptions of action scenes, all show through here. But the weaknesses here are also much more prevalent. As the author himself concedes in an introductory page, the novel feels very dated in its depictions of how AIDS is perceived, although at the time written, yes, there was considerable bigotry and misunderstanding of the disease. The book is also extremely bloated with too many main characters, an outrageous and grasping plotline that seems to have had new twists added onto it at random in order to plug up holes, and character behaviors that are highly unlikely.

As Coben notes, if you’ve never read him, choose a different novel first. Get to like him through the Bolitar series, then come back and pick up MIRACLE CURE and see how one of this country’s best mystery authors developed his craft over the past decade. —Mark Rose

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THE MAN WITH THE BALTIC STARE is the fourth (and rumored final) novel featuring Korean Inspector O from James Church, a pseudonym for, per the jacket copy, “a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia.” Like its predecessors, it is a complex and moody glimpse at a part of the world few have experienced and know very little about. Yet while mostly intriguing, Church challenges the readers’ patience to a point where only the most devoted — or most curious — will accept.
 
For the past five years, Inspector O has living alone atop a mountain in North Korea. His retirement may have been forced by the government he once served, but he seems satisfied to live out his days in sparse wooden hut he built himself. Then, as autumn approaches, he’s suddenly summoned to the office of Major Kim in Pyongyang.
 

Kim has a delicate assignment for Inspector O. North and South Korea are currently cooperating behind the scenes to insure stability in the north. A young man has been chosen to lead the transitional government, but recently has been accused of brutally murdering a beautiful and expensive prostitute in a hotel room in Macau.

O is not assigned to investigate the murder, but expected to lead the suspicions of the local investigators away from the accused young man and generally make the case go away. Nonetheless, O agrees on condition that he will immediately be returned to the solitude of his mountain. As he begins his assignment, he discovers that members of the former regime, foreign powers and even top-ranking organized crime bosses have a stake in his work and do their best to interfere with his results.

The novel is presented in O’s subtle, first-person narration. Church opens the narrative with a very effective sense of detachment as Inspector O is yanked from the peaceful acceptance of his retirement and thrust into a world that has changed drastically in his absence. Major Kim and the other representatives of the current political world enhance this ambience by keeping the nature of the inspector’s abrupt reactivation to themselves, in spite of insistent questions and threats to defy everyone and return to his mountain.
 
Unfortunately, Church carries this detachment to extremes, and it isn’t until nearly halfway into the novel that we learn the true nature of O’s assignment. Along the way, we get bits of insight into his past, the conditions of his retirement, and the complexities of the current ruling parties in Korea. But by the time O and the reader finally learn the details, our interest has been diminished. The resulting whirlwind of events, which carry him not only to the scene of the murder in Macau, but to other parts of the globe, seemed rushed and overly complicated.
 
What saves this awkward structure is our enduring fascination with O. The more complicated and confusing the events become, the more he relies on his self-reflective philosophy and the lessons from both his professional and personal life. His presence is the one reliable constant amid all the frustrations and conflicts the story presents.
 
The uninitiated reader, or those who have not experienced any of Church’s previous novels, would benefit from a little background research into the complexities of contemporary Korea to truly appreciate THE MAN WITH THE BALTIC STARE. This knowledge won’t eliminate the novel’s structural faults, but will help make them a bit more endurable. —Alan Cranis

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Brad Parks’ second novel featuring New Jersey reporter Carter Ross follows on the success of his debut effort, FACES OF THE GONE, which won a Nero and a Shamus Award. His new one, EYES OF THE INNOCENT, starts out with a tear-jerking story of a young woman working two jobs trying to feed her two children and keep a roof over their head.

Unfortunately, as she is working one of those jobs, a fire breaks out in her home and kills the two children. She is heartbroken and unburdens herself of her story to Ross and his summer intern, who is not all that affectionately known as Sweet Thang.

Ross writes the story, but at the last minute, feels something is wrong and has it held. Meanwhile, Sweet Thang invites the heartbroken mother to stay with her through the night. Not only is that a big journalistic mistake, it’s a mistake in general, as the mother hauls up and steals Sweet Thang’s jewelry. And then the whole story really begins to unravel.

Parks’ Ross character is well-done, a hard-bitten cynic who still tries to be a gentleman, and who has a refreshing take on the powers and pitfalls of journalism. The Sweet Thang character is significantly overdone, but the interaction between the two provides for much of the humor in the book.

Fast-paced, readable and with a timely plot, an engaging series character and a serviceable backdrop of investigative journalism, EYES OF THE INNOCENT should appeal to many readers. —Mark Rose

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The irrepressible Flavia de Luce is back in Alan Bradley’s third novel featuring the 11-year-old girl detective, A RED HERRING WITHOUT MUSTARD. She and her two sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, and their absent-minded father live in a gigantic moldering estate house in a small English village that all comes right out of a MASTERPIECE THEATRE drama set in the 1950s.

Flavia is an endearing and precocious child, whose specialties include performing chemistry experiments in her homemade laboratory, taking revenge on her sisters, and often combining the two. In this installment, Flavia accidentally sets fire to a gypsy fortune teller’s tent at a local fair; out of remorse, the girl invites the lady to stay on the grounds of Buckshaw, the de Luces’ ancestral home.

Unfortunately, the woman is found later beaten nearly to death. Flavia alerts the authorities, and not much later, finds another body, this time a poacher by the name of Brookie Harewood, who is hanging from a statue of Poseidon in the Buckshaw gardens.

Who is attacking all these people? Well, the good Inspector Hewitt will certainly need the help of Flavia to solve the case.

Fans of Bradley should be reassured that all the elements of the series are present in this latest endeavor, both good and bad. Yes, there are the wildly improbable plot points and the overdone eccentricities of certain characters, but there’s also the cheery, breezy style that sounds perfectly apt coming as it does from the mouth of a bright pre-teen.

Bradley has the Flavia de Luce character and attitude down, and her charm, intellect and vigor are the appeal here. It’s a good series, amusing, cozy without the clichés, and this third novel begs for a fourth to follow. —Mark Rose

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Late 18th-century French private investigator Aristide Ravel returns in Susanne Alleyn’s PALACE OF JUSTICE. Although this is the fourth book in the series, it is actually the second in chronological order, so if you’re new to the series, you may want to start with THE CAVALIER OF THE APOCALYPSE, pick up this one, and follow it with GAME OF PATIENCE and A TREASURY OF REGRETS. Or you could just start here, because wherever you begin, you’ll want to read the others and follow Ravel’s rather curious career.

PALACE is set in Paris in the year 1793, during the Reign of Terror, as the Republic in its birthing throes morphs from regicide to populist tyranny. The guillotine has been busy, and it’s not always a sure thing that its victims are guilty.

Ravel is disgusted at the Republic Tribunal’s rapaciousness, but there is little to say; complain too much and you may be the next victim. Paris can’t seem to get enough headless corpses. So it’s especially unnerving when a corpse without a head is discovered in the district of Ravel’s friend, Commissaire Brasseur. Is someone performing private executions?

The victim, a friendless prostitute, seems to have had a hard life and a horrid death as her throat was slit, and then her head removed postmortem. Ravel and Brasseur begin their investigation only to be horrified at the discovery that she is not the first headless corpse to be discovered in the city. There have been more, many more, and there seems to be a serial killer on the loose.

There is far more to this story than just that brief recounting, and I won’t provide any spoilers. What makes Alleyn’s historical mystery writing superior is the amount of knowledge she imparts about the time to the reader. Obviously well-researched, the author makes you feel exactly what it would be like to live in fear of saying the wrong thing, to be accused of incivism, to be branded a traitorous royalist. Her sense of the Parisian setting and street life is sound, but one never feels you’re getting raw facts dumped on you. Instead, she weaves everything into a carefully crafted story that has multiple twists and exciting vignettes.

Ravel is a fascinating character: emotional but sane, fair but firm, a no-nonsense operative who works closely with the police but has the touch of the common man as well. He is the perfect protagonist for a series of novels that looks deeply into the history of the French Revolution, and yet manages to tell a ripping good mystery at the same time. Recommended. —Mark Rose

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Steve Hockensmith’s THE CRACK IN THE LENS is the fourth installment of the HOLMES ON THE RANGE series, a set of tales set in the 1890s and featuring cowboy brothers “Old Red” Gustav and “Big Red” Otto Amlingmeyer.

Old Red is an ardent admirer of Sherlock Holmes, whom he believes to be real, so he has undertaken a side career in amateur “deducifyin’,” if you will. The series is farcical, written from the point of view of the narcissistic Big Red, and much of the humor comes from the gruff interaction between the two siblings and their adventures in the Old West.

I found it instructive to read this book after finishing Simon Brett’s BLOTTO, TWINKS AND THE EX-KING’S DAUGHTER, another farcical mystery. There, I felt Brett laid it on far too thick, never letting up on his character’s mannerisms, and concentrating more on the details of the jokes than the storyline itself. In effect, he overegged the pudding. Hockensmith does not make this mistake.

He does not degrade his story by insisting on a constant barrage of cornpone dialect, and the rare usage of it is welcome. His wit is often droll, and comes in the unspoken comments that Big Red makes as he is writing the story down. But most importantly, there is an actual emotional story that is being told in THE CRACK IN THE LENS.

Five years ago, Old Red was in love with a brothel worker named Adeline. They were saving as much money as they could in order for her to break away from the system, and they could both settle down. But Adeline is brutally murdered in a back alley, sliced to ribbons, and butchered like a hog. Old Red couldn’t handle the resultant grief. Now, five years later, he returns to San Marcos, Texas, in order to look into the crime and see if he can discover who killed her.

But the residents of San Marcos aren’t very glad to see him again. Threatened by the ex-brothel keepers, and nearly arrested by both the town marshal and the county sheriff who have become enemies over time, Old Red and Big Red must keep investigating all while the threat of a lynching becomes very real indeed.

This series is a delight (WORLD’S GREATEST SLEUTH! is the latest). The characters seem real and likable, dialogue is realistic as can be, and the books have a fun and wild sense of humor that doesn’t just keep bludgeoning the reader into submission. Well-done. —Mark Rose

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Simon Brett’s BLOTTO, TWINKS AND THE EX-KING’S DAUGHTER tells you all you need to know in its title. This is a farce, a peculiarly British institution that is wildly over-the-top, but unfortunately, only occasionally funny (like the interminable series of the UK’s CARRY ON movies). Blotto and Twinks are two well-bred aristocrats, brother and sister, and really best friends with each other. They tend to call each other “gumdrop” and “biscuit barrel” all too often.

At present, the ex-King of Mitteleuropia and his entourage are staying with Blotto, Twinks and their mother, the Dowager Duchess, in their castle. The king is in temporary exile as his brother, the usurper Vlatislav, has gained the crown by underhanded means. But then, a member of the King’s entourage is murdered.

This will not do, for it would ruin the reputation of the Dowager Duchess to have a man killed inside her house, so she manages to get that hushed up with the complicity of the higher-ups in the police department. But then, another catastrophe: The ex-Princess Ethelinde is abducted and her disappearance cannot be explained away. What an embarrassment!

So the Duchess decides to send Blotto to rescue the princess (er, ex-princess). Blotto is keen to go. And Twinks, because she knows that Blotto is not the sharpest tool in the shed, and that she compensates for him with her impressive “brainbox” (as Blotto insists on referring to her intellect), travels along in disguise. It’s all a big lark.

And it can be a lot of fun if you’re up for it. But it’s not a subtle humor. Brett tries to get laughs out of funny-sounding names, class distinctions between aristocracy and servants, and Blotto’s immense stupidity. A line or two can make one smile, but page after page of it wears thin.

Clever bits, such as when Blotto is trying to explain the rules of cricket to the Mitteleuropians (who do not speak English), and Twinks translates for him (who does speak the language, but of course, she provides completely different information because Blotto will be none the wiser), work well, but they are a little too few and far between.

It’s not terrible, because Brett writes extremely well, but it’s not terribly funny, either. Humorous genre books are difficult to write. Terry Pratchett has made a career out of writing them. Steve Hockensmith is trying to do the same. Brett already has a hugely successful career, and I’m not sure this is the direction he should be going. —Mark Rose

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I’ve learned something very important reading all of Don Easton’s novels: If a character is introduced in the first chapter, that person most likely won’t be seeing chapter two.

DEAD ENDS, the fifth book in the Jack Taggart series, shows Easton still has plenty more miles left in his protagonist. It opens with Easton setting up the crime that will lead Taggart into the world of gray he inhabits as an undercover Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer: the murder of a retired priest who was a boarder in apartment run by a woman who also has a daycare. But it’s the tenants in the basement who drive Taggart into a full-on badass, because they run a meth lab.

Easton really loves to make his bad guys as evil as possible. I mean, a meth lab in the basement of a daycare! But that’s nothing for anyone who has read the previous four books in this series. Easton really loves to get his hooks into the readers and never lets up in the brutality of his crime-ridden world.

Once Taggart starts investigating, he finds out that one of the people involved with the lab was someone he arrested once before, but got off. But once again, Easton has no problem letting the bodies drop in his books. As soon as Taggart gets close to his prey, the suspect is killed by Satan’s Wrath, the motorcycle gang prominently featured in previous books.

Taggart finds a way into the world of these meth-makers by his own means: namely, turning one of the criminals into an informant. It turns out that there is a mastermind meth-maker who goes by the name of Cocktail, and he has become suspect No. 1 in the murder.

Brutality is in abundance in this entry — nothing super-graphic, mind you, but you definitely don’t want to be around this crowd. Easton’s writing is rather addictive; there are moments where you can see the action as clear as if it were happening right in front of your eyes. New readers might get a little baffled by references to Taggart’s personal life or events of the prior novels, but not too heavily. For longtime readers, there is a nice surprise. I’m hopeful for more Easton to arrive sooner than later. —Bruce Grossman

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Now in paperback, THE GOD OF THE HIVE by Laurie R. King is the direct sequel to her THE LANGUAGE OF BEES, a genre crossover with her strong and independent Mary Russell character now married to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s equally strong and independent Sherlock Holmes. Where the previous novel detailed the horrific religious cult headed up by the maniacal Thomas Brothers, and reveals to the surprised Sherlockians among us that Holmes has a son and a granddaughter, this book begins right as that one ends, with the probable death of Brothers, and Russell and Holmes wanted by the police.

Russell takes the little girl, Estelle, and attempts to return to London in order to clear up the problem with Lestrade and the police. Holmes takes his son, Damian, and plots a different course of escape. The book is mostly involved with the escape routes and the efforts to which Russell and Holmes go to in order to protect their charges. While they are separated and long before they have cleared their names, they read of the tragic death of Sherlock’s brother, Mycroft.

King is an established best-selling author, and she should be because she can write remarkably well. The level of tension is high, the dialogue smooth, and the action sequences suitably thrilling. She has no problem writing from the point of view of Russell or male characters, and her evocation of the time period all seem spot-on.

Unfortunately — and this is a complaint I lodged with the previous novel — this simulacrum of Holmes just never feels right. King avoids attempting to write in the style of Conan Doyle (which is wise, because that’s difficult), and her canonical details of Holmes all seem appropriate, but it’s just such a shock to see him married, and now with a son and granddaughter. He doesn’t quite speak the way one expects him to, and although there is one remarkable instance of deductive power, we don’t see very much of it (which, admittedly, is also tremendously difficult to write if you don’t have that power yourself).

So, a high-quality thriller set in Britain of the 1920s with strong characters, a dark plot of betrayal, and an exciting sequence of events. And if you’ve read THE LANGUAGE OF BEES, you have to find out how the story ends — just don’t expect too much from the Sherlockian angle. —Mark Rose

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In 1911, the famous painting that we know as Mona Lisa was stolen right off the wall of the Musée du Louvre. It was daringly appropriated by one Vincenzo Peruggia, who intended to return it to the land of its creation, Italy. He held onto the painting for almost two years, but was arrested when he tried to sell the painting to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Now, Carson Morton presents a highly fictionalized, but accurate in certain particulars account of this amazing, picaresque adventure in STEALING MONA LISA. The premise is that one Eduardo de Valfierno presents a confession on his deathbed to a reporter, and he tells the tale in flashback.

Valfierno is a con man, selling forgeries of the great masters’ works to unscrupulous collectors. They believe the pieces have been stolen from the museums, which, being anxious to avoid controversy, have replaced the stolen paintings with copies.

Valfierno’s capers with his engaging team of loyal first mate, Emile, and the flirtatious pickpocket, Julia, are charmingly described. Eventually, they hook up with a master forger, whose identity I will not reveal, but who was involved in the actual case, and their fortunes increase. This forger manages to produce six almost exact copies of the Mona Lisa, and Valfierno’s plan is to steal the original, then sell the copies to six different collectors. The theft of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting is well done, and mimics the actual theft fairly closely.

Morton’s powers of description, in both the time frame and setting, really bring you to the center of Paris and make you believe in the events. His skill with dialogue is impeccable, reflecting the gentlemanly (and con man-ly reserve of Valfierno), and contrasting it with the impetuosity of the thief Julia. Overall, this is a first-rate historical novel and a fascinating crime story. If the theft of Mona Lisa didn’t actually happen this way, one kind of wishes that it had. —Mark Rose

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A serial killer who is also a master at scrapbooking is the basis for CUT, PASTE, KILL, the fourth in the Lomax & Biggs series by Marshall Karp, now in paperback. What is truly original is how the killer decides upon her victims: via numbered ping-pong balls chosen by cats. Each one is associated with an intended target and a scrapbook to go along with it. Now, these victims are no innocents, but people who have bucked the law and never been prosecuted, making the killer out to be some sort of Charles Bronson vigilante with a Martha Stewart touch.

The novel opens with a murder of Eleanor Bellingham-Crump, who killed a young boy in a hit-and-run, but got off scot-free, due to her husband’s diplomatic immunity. Our detectives are sure they can solve the case, figuring it must be connected to the child’s parents. But things are never that simple.

It turns out that Bellingham-Crump is actually the third victim in a few short weeks, so it’s up to Biggs and Lomax to connect the dots to find the killer. This leads to our cops getting help from an unlikely source: a prisoner who might know who’s behind it all. There are some surprises to be found, but seasoned crime readers might figure out some key plot points beforehand.

Karp’s tight, little mystery keeps readers interested from cover to cover, from the main plot of the scrapbook killer to the various subplots revolving around the detectives’ lives. He has enough laughs in the book — even though there are just as many groans — that it keeps the bulk of the story light. People looking for a twisted, dark noir tale should look elsewhere, but those who like a few laughs with a gruesome crime will be pleased as punch.

Even never having read the previous three novels, I was never left in the lurch. Thankfully, Karp does not make the cardinal sin of ruining things with rehashes. I’m definitely going to check those out while looking forward to the next entry. —Bruce Grossman

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This debut novel from Tom MacDonald does a great job at capturing the Massachusetts city he is writing about. There have been plenty of books that take place in and around Boston, but MacDonald really captures the neighborhood feel with THE CHARLESTOWN CONNECTION, doing a fine job of mixing fiction with one of the more legendary robberies of our time. While the novel might begin as some super-gritty noir, the story shows its true colors with the investigation aspect that slowly transforms the book.

Dermot Sparhawk is taking it one day at a time. A former college football star on the road to the big time, he had his career stopped short due to an on-field injury and a botched medical job. Now you can find him working the pantry for a local parish. Then his godfather, Jeepster, shows up with a knife in his back, literally.

Jeepster can’t say much — only a mention of Oswego — and gives Dermot a key. But a key to what? As soon as word gets out, Dermot gets more than a few unexpected visitors over the next few days, all wanting to know what Jeepster’s last words were and if he gave him anything. Dermot enlists the help of his friends to figure out what all this means.

Again, CONNECTION throws a change-up at the readers in a way that they won’t realize initially just how well its pulled off. Of note are moments of Dermot dealing with a couple of Irish thugs and a meeting with a high-ranking IRA official. All Dermot is concerned with is the discovery he makes of a collection of paintings and how they tied to his godfather.

This book read like a breath of fresh air. The author has a voice worth following, with his mixture of Boston references and the inner workings of these communities. There is definitely a giveaway of when this book takes place, since there is a reference to one of the biggest collapses in Bruins’ history. (Too bad one of MacDonald’s characters could not have stuck around this past year.)

For readers who want a detective story in the vein of latter-day Ross Macdonald, this MacDonald will easily fill that void. —Bruce Grossman

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The title of CAMOUFLAGE is pitch-perfect. It all makes sense in the final pages, when the nameless detective of Bill Pronzini’s series breaks it all down. This novel deals with two cases, one of which is tracking down the first ex-wife for a man named David Virden.

The job seems easy enough, since all the detective has to do is get the woman to sign some annulment papers so David can marry his fourth wife in a Catholic church. But once he finds the ex, she wants nothing to do with signing anything and is very adamant about never being bothered again. David himself goes to see for himself why she won’t sign … and that is the last anyone sees of him.

The second thread deals with another detective in the agency, Jake Runyon, who is asked by his girlfriend to look into a very serious matter: Her 9-year-old son has been coming home from his father’s house with bruises and cuts. All suspicions naturally fall on the ex-husband until Jake makes the real discovery, which is nothing compared to what comes later and how he’ll be able to solve that crime.

Again, the title spells it out for the readers quite clearly, if only they pay attention. It’s all about what these characters want other people to see. Pronzini is a master at such sleight-of-hand mystery writing, with one little sentence being the answer to one of the cases; for the other, it’s just determination and solid investigation.

This entry in the series is fine for both longtime fans and new readers. I mean, it’s Pronzini, for crying out loud! That alone is enough for you to rush to buy it. —Bruce Grossman

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Todd Ritter’s debut novel, DEATH NOTICE, is an absolute corker, introducing us to a set of new potential series characters and the small-town atmosphere of Perry Hollow. This southeastern Pennsylvania town is presided over by police chief Kat Campbell, a competent, strong, mature policewoman and character, who is also the proud single mother of a boy with special needs. She’s the kind of police chief who knows and loves her town and almost all of its people.

That’s why it’s so shocking to her when local farmer George Winnick is found inside a coffin lying by the side of the road. He was murdered, with his lips sewn tightly shut. Winnick didn’t seem to have any enemies, and there are precious few clues.

So when Lt. Nick Donnelly of the state police shows up and mentions the Betsy Ross Killer, a serial killer who has performed similar types of crimes and is on the loose, it comes as a bit of relief to Chief Campbell that the culprit may not be from Perry Hollow. One disturbing oddity of the crime is that the man’s death was foretold. Prior to his murder, a fax was sent to the obituary writer of the local newspaper identifying the man, the date and even the future time of his death. Strange, but when the Betsy Ross Killer is found and he confesses, all seems to have been solved.

Of course, you know nothing has been solved. And months later, when another fax is sent to the paper, another death notice, the killings begin again.

Ritter’s expertise as a journalist shows with his concise and clear writing style. Dialogue is natural, and characters are, for the most part, fairly well-drawn. Chief Campbell and the obituary writer, Henry Goll, have a real depth to them, but other characters suffer a little in their role as bit players.

Ritter doesn’t really use his setting to much advantage, and there are a few holes in his plotting, but the story is so well-paced and with the tension level set to high, you end up racing through the book to make sure that the characters you care about are going to be safe at the end.

I think this is an excellent kick-off for a hoped-for new series, that will allow Ritter to explore in more detail the world of Perry Hollow, the personality of Kat Campbell, and the future lives of some of the other characters. —Mark Rose

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Karin Fossum is perhaps the most innovative of the horde of Scandinavian detective-fiction authors who have invaded our shores, evidenced by the writer’s meta-fiction of a character stepping into her life in order to get his story told in last year’s BROKEN. Now, in a fairly smooth translation by Charlotte Barslund, Fossum explores the concept of guilt and potentially criminal neglect in the refreshingly brief BAD INTENTIONS.

The stunning opener features three young friends in a boat out late at night on a frigid Norwegian lake. One of the men has had a nervous breakdown, and his two friends are visiting with him, trying to ease his anxiety. But this idyllic respite goes all pear-shaped when the young man slips over the side of the boat, committing suicide. His friends don’t really try to save him. So what exactly is going on here?

That’s what Inspector Konrad Sejer and Jakob Skarre try to find out as they interrogate the friends, the individuals at the sanatorium where the dead man stayed, and the man’s parents. Interspersed with the investigation are introspective chapters focusing on the two remaining men and their relationships with each other and the dead man. Threaded through this are occasional diary entries from the dead man, who was plagued with deep-seated feelings of guilt that do not seem mirrored by his friends.

Fossum is brief, blunt and Kelvin-scale cold in her descriptions of human behavior. Her dialogue is relatively crisp, and her characters well-drawn even when they flirt with the edges of believability. This is another excellent book from the reigning queen of Nordic detective fiction, and it’s definitely worth your time. —Mark Rose

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BLOODLINE is Mark Billingham’s eight novel featuring London’s Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, so at the very least we should celebrate the character’s induction into the select pantheon of series protagonists who manage to remain vital and interesting with each successive book. But that’s only one of the impressive points to this entry.

Thorne has seen plenty of domestic murders over the years. But what sets this one apart is the thin slip of X-ray film found in the dead woman’s hand. While interviewing next of kin, Thorne discovers that the victim’s mother was murdered some 15 years earlier by an infamous killer named Raymond Garvey. Thorne is familiar with the Garvey case, especially since Garvey killed seven women before his capture and death in prison.

Then, more bodies are found with similar X-ray fragments, and these victims are also the offspring of Garvey murders. Now Thorne’s investigation has a specific focus: Is this killer a copycat of Garvey, or carrying out some kind of deep-seated revenge?
 
Thorne and his fellow investigators seek out the remaining grown children of Garvey’s victims to warn them of the approaching danger. To his horror, he learns his investigation is being followed, and his efforts are leading the killer to the location of his next intended victims.

Thorne’s life outside of police headquarters has always been one of the attractions to these novels, and this latest is no exception. Just before the first dead body is found, Thorne is in the midst caring for his live-in girlfriend (herself a police officer) as she suffers a miscarriage. She is eventually released from the hospital, but Thorne immediately finds himself walking on emotional eggshells whenever he tries to gage her thoughts or feelings. He never fully dealt with the concept of being a father, so his own conflicting emotions are also why his life at home at the end of the day is far less than relaxing, with the exception of his indulging in his somewhat surprising love for country music.
 
Then, too, there is the labyrinth of departmental policy and procedure that Thorne must deal with as his supervisors argue over how best to deal with the media, the public and all others concerns surrounding this serial killer. It all becomes too much for Thorne as his feelings are scraped raw, and he oversteps his authority while trying to prevent more murders.
 
Such novels often tend to broaden their focus by shifting the point-of-view to the killer — usually in long, italic passages. Billingham nobly avoids this, and instead employs such techniques as an occasional journal entry, a few brief flashbacks, and shifting the POV not to the killer, but to the victims themselves. It can be slightly difficult to follow at times, but worth the effort as the author eventually puts an unexpected and unique slant to the subgenre. Those, along with his usual deadpan and dark-tinged prose style, make this another very satisfying addition to the Thorne canon.
 
Kudos to the newly founded Mulholland Books for including this very worthy British crime author to their premiere list. With luck, it will steer more American readers to Billingham’s earlier Thorne novels. Outside of a few usages of British slang, newcomers will find it easy to enter and enjoy the fictional world of his making. —Alan Cranis

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The TNT series RIZZOLI & ISLES, based upon Tess Gerritsen’s investigative duo, is about to launch its second season. In the meantime, longtime readers and new fans can get a satisfying fix with the author’s latest addition to the crime thriller series, THE SILENT GIRL.
 
Boston PD Homicide Inspector Jane Rizzoli and her crew are summoned to the rooftop of a tenement building in Chinatown, where they find the corpse of a red-haired woman dressed in black. But the dead body is missing a hand, which is soon found in the alley below the building.

Later, during an autopsy, Medical Inspector Mura Isles confirms that the dead woman’s severed hand was the result of an unusually sharp weapon, handled by someone who obviously knew what they were doing. Just as baffling, however, are the strands of silver hair found on the dead body. Further examination reveals that the hairs are not human, and quite possibly simian.
 
Then Rizzoli finds a link to the dead woman and a well-known case from Chinatown’s past: Nineteen years ago, a cook in a Chinatown restaurant shot and killed a waiter and several patrons in the restaurant, before taking his own life. The investigators at the time closed the case as a tragic murder-suicide, but as Rizzoli follows the link to this case, she finds that someone is convinced that the cook was not the real killer, and is intent on unveiling the truth after all these years. There also seems to be an elusive connection to the disappearance of the daughters of two of the families whose lives were changed by the restaurant killings.

Rizzoli interviews the survivors of the victims, which includes an elderly woman running a martial arts school in Chinatown. Most of the survivors are reluctant to revisit their painful memories, but a few are willing to offer what little help they can. The martial arts instructor in particular seems to hold many secrets she is hesitant to discuss.
 
Adding to all these complications is the source of those mysterious silver hairs. Someone — or some thing — is following the case and continues to wield his/her/its sharp weapon. Yet it is amazingly stealth and elusive, even to video security cameras. Could it possibly be the Monkey Warrior, a centuries-old hero of Chinese folklore?

With its ties to an old and previously closed case, as well as the mysterious presence with roots in Chinese mythology, THE SILENT GIRL is one of the more complicated in the series (and a very personal one, as Gerritsen notes in her opening acknowledgements). But the author steers the reader through all these complications and obscure connections with an energetic pace and several scenes of suspense and action in the shadowy back alleys and buildings of Chinatown. These lead us to a conclusion which, while not breaking any new ground, is nonetheless unexpected and satisfying — and even leaves a secret that might linger over successive books.
 
Gerritsen’s characters are another reason for staying with this novel from start to finish. Fans as well as newcomers will quickly recognize and understand the complications of duo’s private lives that often threaten their professional responsibilities and ultimately add depth to the stories. While they always cooperate and admire each other, Rizzoli and Isles are not what you’d call partners nor, at times, even friends.

Not surprisingly, while Gerritsen always devotes time to both of her protagonists, the main activity usually falls to one of the investigators. In the previous ICE COLD, it was Isles. Here, it is Rizzoli. Still, their activities always connect them, even when they disagree on their personal motivations or philosophies.
 
THE SILENT GIRL is another worthy addition to this already worthy series. While fans of the TV show will obviously find differences between it and the books, it’s a sure bet they will appreciate these differences and soon find themselves as devoted to Gerritsen’s novels as they are the episodes. —Alan Cranis

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Just because you own a bookstore specializing in crime fiction does not make you the next great detective. That’s the premise to Esmahan Aykol’s HOTEL BOSPHORUS, the first in a series that has been translated to English since its original publication.

Katie Hirschel is a German living in Turkey who proudly owns the only crime-centric bookstore in Instanbul. She is thrilled to find that an old friend of hers, an actress named Petra, has a staring role in a production filming in town. But when she calls her friend’s hotel room after a day of catching up, things are a bit strange — especially when a man answers the phone.

The man in question is part of the local police, who are investigating the murder of the film’s director, who was killed in his bathtub. This is the point that Katie takes it upon herself to find the killer, especially when the local authorities figure that it was a local mobster, but that all comes to naught and they have no other clues.

For lack of a better description, Katie becomes like an adult Nancy Drew: so full of life and spunk, she won’t be stopped or intimidated by anyone she thinks should be questioned. But Katie also has her own problem: the men who enter her life. As much as she wants to be a standalone type, she falls for them at a drop of a hat. Still, it does not dissuade from her investigation.

The novel also delves into the culture clash of Germany and Turkey, which left me a bit in the dark. But it’s such a minor part of the story that most readers will be fine. Also, the solving of the case comes as a bit of coincidence of events, and Aykol gives the readers a nice, big clue early on.

Hopefully, HOTEL BOSPHORUS will gain a wider audience now that there is an English translation, by Ruth Whitehouse, who does a fantastic job. Maybe Bitter Lemon Press will see fit to bring the other two books of the series into the fold, since a character like Katie Hirschel is a breath of fresh air — plus, she does not have some stupid dragon tattoo. —Bruce Grossman

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Spencer Quinn pens his third Chet and Bernie mystery in TO FETCH A THIEF, an able sequel to the first two best-sellers, DOG ON IT and THEREBY HANGS A TAIL. Bernie Little is the head of Little Detective Agency, and Chet is his 100-pound-plus goofball of a canine partner, and it is through his point of view that the novel is written.

This gimmick, while a favorite of a number of recent authors, is perhaps best mastered by Quinn. We may never know how much or of what a dog really thinks, but for dog lovers, Quinn seems to get it right with the happy-go-lucky attitude, the attention deficit, the sheer excitement of a squirrel chase, the enjoyment of tastes and smells, and the confusion at what must seem to be very odd human behaviors.

This can be charming, as when Chet forgets what he was talking about right in the middle of a sentence, or it can be cloying, and your reception will depend on just how much you love dogs. For me, who as I write this, gazes fondly at my own 90-plus-pound mash-up of German Shepherd and Husky as she dreams of running down woodland trails, well, the author’s work is always welcomed.

In this tale, a performing elephant named Peanut and her trainer go missing from some third-rate circus. No trace can be found. How does a full-grown pachyderm just disappear? Chet and Bernie follow what few leads they have, running down animal-rights activists, and investigating the possibility that Peanut may have been spirited away in a truck.

At the same time, Bernie’s divorce investigations have revealed a very unfortunate secret which threatens to destroy the status quo, and he is none too happy to have that changed. It all ends in a bit of violence, as these Quinn novels tend to do, and Chet and Bernie set the world back on an even keel.

If you loved the earlier books or have a thing for canines, this book will fit very nicely on your shelves. —Mark Rose

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If you’re scratching your head at that title, you probably have never seen the last great movie Chevy Chase ever did: FLETCH.

This week, I’m tackling part of the FLETCH series, which numbered 11 books. It’s one that can be kind of frustrating to a new reader, because the first three actually take place in the middle of the run. It’s been many years since I’d read about that reporter with a penchant for fake names, so I decided to dive back in. (And by the way, it’s Underwood in the book.)

FLETCH by Gregory Mcdonald — His name is I.M. Fletcher, but you can call him Fletch, and this 1974 novel is the first. We see Fletch as the divorce lawyer-dodging, top-notch investigative reporter. At the start, he’s offered a job from a stranger: Shoot the stranger so an insurance policy will pay big.

The stranger in question is Alan Stanwyk, a millionaire industrialist with a wife, a child and what seems to be a perfect life. But, as he explains to Fletch, he is dying of terminal cancer and only concerned with taking care of his family. But why was Fletch chosen? Because he’s a drifter which no one would ever suspect.

For those who have only watched the movie, do yourself a favor and read the book. There are some major changes, but what is amazing is how much of the book actually made it to screen. What didn’t was Fletch’s backstory, like his two ex-wives, his time in Vietnam, and winning the Bronze Star.

Macdonald really seems to have fun with his creation, with Fletch being one of the greatest bullshit artists out there. The author’s style is fun and breezy, while also having some dark moments. I’m really glad to revisit these books. Now where have I left my FLETCH DVD?

CONFESS, FLETCH by Gregory Mcdonald — Picking up sometime after the first novel, Fletch arrives in Boston, where after eating a nice dinner, comes back to the apartment where he is staying and finds a naked dead girl. Who, what, when and why all go through his head, but first, he calmly calls the police to report a murder.

This kicks off the events of this 1976 follow-up, which follows two plots. The first, of course, is the dead woman, and the cops who all think Fletch is the guilty party. In the second, we find out Fletch is once again engaged to an Italian woman named Andy, whose family has a title and no money, but used to have some very valuable paintings that were stolen. He’s in Boston to track them down.

CONFESS can be read by newcomers without the fear of the previous book being ruined, but certain plot points may leave them lost. It also introduces another character who Mcdonald would spin off: police investigator Flynn, who comes off a bit like Columbo, who knows more than he lets on. Throw in Fletch’s soon-to-be mother-in-law who comes to Boston with her eyes on finding the paintings for herself, and you have a solid mystery with enough laughs to go around.

Unlike the debut, the whole aspect of Fletch of being in trouble is not around. He’s pretty much allowed to do whatever he wants — well, with a couple of Boston’s finest tailing him when he does not give them the slip. It’s a solid entry and Mcdonald plays his cards close to the chest, until the final revelations are made.

FLETCH’S FORTUNE by Gregory Mcdonald — In the third book of the series, from 1978, we find Fletch living in his villa in Italy when he gets two unexpected visitors: two men from the CIA with an offer he can’t refuse … especially since they have information on his tax nonpayment that could put him away for some time.

They want him to attend a reporter convention in Virginia, where he is to bug the rooms of his fellow reporters, including newspaper tycoon Walter March, a Randolph Hearst stand-in. As soon as Fletch arrives, there is big news afoot: Someone killed March by sticking a pair of scissors into him.

Now, in this book, Fletch can’t play all the little games we have come to expect. Also Macdonald provides a little device that lets him move the plot along: all the bugging equipment, which provides plenty of expository material to pass along to the reader, freeing Macdonald from trying to shoehorn Fletch into important and private matters.

The story moves along quick enough, and Macdonald has some fun poking fun at the newspaper and TV worlds of reporting. I’m guessing some of the characters were loose adaptations of some known names. But fear not: Everything still reads fresh, except for one or two things. Remember, it was still a good-ol’-boys’ network in the ’70s. —Bruce Grossman

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Hannah Vogel, or Adelheid Zinsli, or Petra Weill (she has a number of aliases) returns to Berlin in A GAME OF LIES, the third of Rebecca Cantrell’s thrilling series featuring Germany and Nazi power just prior to the start of World War II.

As Zinsli, she has gone to Berlin to report on the 1936 Olympic Games, and to continue her espionage with SS officer Lars Lang. As she attends the games’ opening ceremonies, she is to meet with one of her former newspaper editors who has something for her. But when they meet, he takes a sip of his favorite whiskey from his flask, and dies almost instantly, a victim of poison.

Now Zinsli/Vogel/Weill must discover what the man wished to tell her, all while avoiding people who know her from the past, and most especially, the Gestapo. While Lang can protect her to some degree, Berlin has come under the iron fist of the Nazis even more so than in the previous book, and there are few avenues of trust left. While historically accurate, this is also a flaw in the book as our main character is prevented from moving around, and the ever-present danger becomes almost stifling.

Indeed, there is less plot in the book and more angst over being found out. Oh, there’s a bit about chemical weapons mostly toward the end, and an odd red herring involving a rare stamp (I mention this in case there is another person, like myself, who enjoys collecting mysteries that feature stamp collecting) but mostly it’s about Vogel’s fear of capture and the admittedly dynamic relationship changes she has with the dangerous Lars Lang.

The author is very smooth at integrating historic details, and she doesn’t overplay the background of the Olympic Games. One never gets the feeling that you’re reading research notes. It’s a notoriously difficult thing for a writer to hide their hard research work and Cantrell pulls it off admirably. Her character motivations, while sometimes frustrating, also seem realistic due to the overbearing lack of trust everyone feels around the Nazi power structure.

Overall, it’s a good addition to the series, but not nearly as exciting as the previous installment. Still, one looks forward to the next one to see how Vogel will continue to cope with the Nazi menace. —Mark Rose

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It is a joy to find a new voice in genre writing — a debut novelist that has something to say and says it well. Elizabeth Speller takes on the aftermath of World War I in her first mystery, THE RETURN OF CAPTAIN JOHN EMMETT. While this is probably a one-off, as our protagonist doesn’t strike me as a potential series character, I definitely hope the author continues to work in the mystery field as her style is crisp, her dialogue impeccable, and her plotting intricate.

Laurence Bartram is a WWI vet, a young widower who lost his wife in the act of childbirth while he was fighting the Germans in France. He is definitely damaged goods, having had his entire world shift to nothing all while experiencing the horrors of trench warfare. Of course, he is not alone.

The tremendous death toll in the fields of France meant almost every English family had some sort of loss during the war: dead or severely injured sons, brothers, husbands. And the ones who survived did not necessarily come through unscathed. Aside from missing limbs or facial disfigurement, there was the mental toll, the debilitation of the mind. We call this post-traumatic stress disorder, but there was a simpler name for it back then: shell shock.

Bartram is contacted by one Mary Emmett, the sister of the title character. She knows that Bartram and John Emmett were childhood friends. She wants Bartram to look into the mysterious suicide of her brother, John. Bartram is hesitant, but hopes to provide some solace, and so begins to look into the matter. As he discovers each new fact, the investigation expands, and Bartram becomes more and more intrigued. He enlists the help of a worldlier friend, Charles, who has contacts in high places and learns his deductive skills from Agatha Christie novels.

The fun here comes from how skillfully Speller handles the investigation. Bartram finds out something, goes to explore the lead, gets a question or two answered, but finds another thread that he must then pluck. He’s not always the best detective, and his humility and near shame at some of the things he thinks about tends to make him more likable to the reader. The search for the meaning behind John Emmett’s life goes in a number of unpredictable directions, and Bartram is just the man to follow as he leads us from mistaken perception to acknowledged fact.

The background of shell shock, nursing, and how it was treated (if at all) during the First World War is well-handled, and readers unfamiliar with the time will discover a few surprising things. Overall, this is a top-shelf period mystery from a new writer. Definitely worth your time. —Mark Rose

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INCOGNITO by Gregory Murphy is a genre-bender of a novel. Sure, it’s historical fiction, set in 1911 New York City, but it abjures the clichés of that genre in that we don’t unrealistically meet all the famous people of the day, nor is there some hidden secret that we only discover because these characters were involved.

It’s kind of a mystery, but there’s no real detection going on, and the horrific crimes and behaviors that are revealed basically go unpunished. It’s not really a literary novel, either, as it’s written without pretension or lofty airs, and you can guarantee the NYRB, LRB, TLS or BOOKFORUM probably don’t have it in their review lineup.

It’s a social novel, one of manners and mores, the kind we rarely see nowadays, but don’t let that put you off. Because what Murphy has crafted here is really fine storytelling, built at a measured pace that lets you explore your own feelings about the characters and their relationships, but which moves along at a pace quick enough for us ADD-addled modernists.

Lawyer William Dysart is asked by his firm to visit a lady who owns property abutting the property of one of the firm’s most valued clients. He is to purchase the land, as the valued client wishes to leave a park to the city in memory of her departed husband. This innocuous beginning slowly opens to reveal a rotting cancer at the heart of the story, one that manages to touch and infect almost everyone in the tale. It destroys Dysart’s already crumbling marriage along with his innocence, and threatens to ruin his career and the reputations of all those around him.

And all because that damn woman just won’t sell her property.

Dysart slowly realizes — and this is part of the author’s genius — that he is in love with the woman, and this drags him further into the trouble that is brewing. I kept waiting for Dysart to become some kind of superheroic Sherlock Holmesian, Gilded Age master detective, but instead, I warmed to him as a confused and lonely man who is trying to make sense of the world around him and the life he has come to lead.

Murphy layers his plot very neatly, with each twist coming as a logical progression of what transpires throughout. He is not a master of description, but decent enough at dialogue and realism. Come into this tale with no expectations except for a good story, of its time and place, and you are sure to be pleased. —Mark Rose

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Serial killer profiler Dr. Tony Hill and Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan join forces once again in the sixth entry of the Tony Hill series by Val McDermid, FEVER OF THE BONE. A 14-year-old girl is found dead with a polythene bag wrapped around her head, and her vaginal area basically cut out brutally with a knife. As the investigation starts, Jordan has a new boss at Bradfield HQ, and this boss indicates that Jordan’s team is on notice that while its performance is excellent, costs are high and the team perhaps a bit too maverick-y for his tastes.

And then comes the kicker: she is not allowed to use Hill’s services, which are too expensive. This doesn’t seem to affect Hill. He finds new work almost immediately, as another adolescent, this time a male, is found in the precincts of West Mercia.

That municipality has the budget for his work and so he heads there to help in the investigation. Of course, as we all know, these cases are connected, but it takes a while for Hill and Jordan to understand this. All the while, more young children are dying in horrific ways. This killer is out for blood, and lots of it.

McDermid may have only six books in the series, but she has written more than 20 well-received novels, and it shows. Simply, she can write. Her paragraphs of exposition are pure, clear, concise. Dialogue is always realistic and reflective of who is speaking, getting the speech patterns right. When she writes from the point of view of young people, she’s spot-on in that direction as well.

Her characters also inhabit a very dynamic world, especially so for series characters, who usually don’t change so much from book to book. In this tale, Dr. Hill finds out quite a bit more about his absent father, and by extension, his tortured relationship with his rather evil mother. This connection with his now-dead father has changed him profoundly, and it will be very interesting to see how McDermid continues the series and Hill’s relationship with Jordan.

This is a big book, a taut thriller, well-written, with fully realized characters, and part of an intriguing series. McDermid’s Tony Hill books should be on your shelves. —Mark Rose

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Hypnotism has always seemed to me like 90 percent con game and 10 percent people who are so gullible, they’re practically a danger to themselves. So I was leery of reading a novel that revolves around the efficacy and dangers of using hypnotism in psychiatric practice. But it’s Scandinavian crime fiction, my favorite subgenre, and so I gave THE HYPNOTIST by Lars Kepler — actually a male/female duo — a whirl. Sadly, I remain unconvinced.

The book is written well enough, is smoothly translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy, and possesses most of the hallmarks of Nordic mysteries: the strange insistence on constantly mentioning street names, insular lives shattered by crimes of a monstrously horrific nature, and tons and tons of secrets, all jealously kept.

But the characters never really jump to life, or become likable or interesting, and the work suffers because of this. The lone bright spot, CID inspector Joona Linna, finds a family brutally murdered, with only a 15-year-old boy surviving. Linna convinces psychiatrist and disgraced hypnotist Erik Maria Bark to put the boy under hypnosis, but when he does so, the kid implies that he killed his own family. Linna is soon convinced of this, and the boy vows revenge on the hypnotist.

And then, because the police in this tale seem rather inept, the kid escapes. Shortly thereafter, Erik’s son, who suffers from a rare blood disease and needs constant medical attention, is kidnapped. Has the killer taken him? The timing seems all wrong for it, and the two crimes may be unrelated.

Okay: fair premise for a contemporary thriller. But there are too many disconnects, and when Linna is out of the picture, the novel stalls. It takes our hypnotist way too many pages to remember that 10 years ago, his family was threatened by at least two of his patients, which I think the police might have enjoyed knowing about say, on page 30.

And we’re treated to a tediously long recounting of what happened to Erik a decade before, and how he was forced to stop performing hypnotic therapy. There’s a retired police inspector, conveniently related to Erik’s wife, who goes about and bollixes up at least two distinct crime scenes and leads. Oh, and Erik wakes up a man in a coma and gets usable answers out of him. It’s just too much, too much that is unlikely, too much that is strained.

It’s not a bad book by any means, but it is also certainly not the standard-bearer for the genre of Nordic detective fiction. —Mark Rose

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Åke Edwardson seems to have found a new translator since SUN AND SHADOW (a novel written later than the one currently under review, but translated earlier). This time, THE SHADOW WOMAN is translated from the Swedish by Per Carlsson, and the work reads so much better, smoother, without any jarring notes. There are still some infelicities, such as lengthy dialogue exchanges where the characters seem to get mixed up as to who is saying what, but now, one can concentrate on the plotting and characters.

And this time, Edwardson manages to put together an intriguing plot, of a woman found murdered and alone near the shore of a lake. At first, the woman is unidentified. She seems to be without a past, and no one has reported her missing. Seemingly unrelated, an elderly lady asks her apartment supervisor about a woman with child who used to play in the courtyard, but whom she no longer sees.

This is the lucky break that Chief Inspector Erik Winter needs to finally identify the dead woman. But the child is news to him, for she is truly missing. With a remarkable feat of Swedish police procedure, Winter manages to run down the individual who is still paying the dead woman’s rent. Even this just leads to further complications, and potential connections to biker gangs and crimes of the past.

Winter is an interesting enough character, still flirting seriously with the beautiful Angela, still working with his unusual colleagues: Aneta Djanali is viciously attacked early in the book, and Fredrik Halders loves making racist comments, but not so secretly admires and respects Djanali. The police activity is well-described, and the Swedish setting is exotic enough for us North Americans.

But there’s something missing in Edwardson that prevents me from lumping him with all the other generally excellent Nordic mystery writers. He seems a bit unfocused, a bit too meandering. The plot gets a little out of control, and important elements such as the short chapters written from the point of view of the missing child just end up going nowhere.

THE SHADOW WOMAN is far better than SUN AND SHADOW, so if you like Scandinavian detective fiction, this is still worth a read. Maybe Carlsson can translate the rest of his works so we have a proper collection of the cases of Winter. —Mark Rose

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Craig Johnson stormed onto the mystery scene in 2004 with THE COLD DISH, a remarkable contemporary Western featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire; his enigmatic Cheyenne best friend, Henry Standing Bear; and the crazy rural characters of tiny Absaroka County, Wyo. I pretty much raved nonstop about it, including it in my top 10 books of that year. Now we have the sixth title in the series, JUNKYARD DOGS, new in paperback.

We open as Sheriff Longmire is trying to figure out exactly why 72-year-old Grampus Stewart was tied to a 1968 Oldsmobile Toronado with 100 feet of rope and then dragged down the ice and snow-filled streets of Durant. Oh, he’s fine — in fact, he was even waving at people as he skidded along the way. It takes more than that to kill a Stewart. But it is the beginning of a troubled tale with clan Stewart and the housing development that abuts their beloved junkyard.

That opening vignette is a hallmark of Johnson’s style. He is quick-witted and there are moments, especially in the interplay between Longmire and his on-again/off-again girlfriend, Deputy Victoria Moretti, or with the wonderful character of Henry Standing Bear, that are truly funny. He also captures the rural Western spirit perfectly. I live in rural Washington State, and for sure, there are plenty of Grampus Stewart types around here, so ornery and tough that a bear would think twice before attacking.

And there’s a certain independence of mind — the pioneer spirit, if you will — that is still prevalent outside of the big cities and is a big part of why people live in these out-of-the-way areas. Johnson gets all that, writing sympathetically and lovingly of the Wyoming terrain and its inhabitants.

His mysteries are fun, riveting and involved, but never overcomplicated. If you’re looking for a good series character to follow, this is the one. Give Johnson and Longmire a try. You’ll be sitting on the porch with a long-necked beer, chuckling, and wishing you were out Wyoming way in no time. —Mark Rose

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Claude Izner’s third novel featuring the indomitable Parisian bookseller Victor Legris, THE MONTMARTRE INVESTIGATION, starts out gruesomely enough, with a horrific train crash and the murder of a young girl at boarding school. Set in late 19th-century Paris, the author goes to great lengths to depict accurately the nightlife of both the well off (dancing at Le Moulin Rouge) and the street life (the goatherd who lives among his beasts).

But Izner perhaps spends too much time acquainting us with street names, famous people of the day, and irrelevant historic details that are handled, oddly, by a few pages of footnotes. One comes away knowing that he has done a tremendous amount of research, and unfortunately, has tried to cram it all into an overwrought work.

It’s a shame because there are definitely some good elements here. The inhabitants of the bookstore — Victor; his colleague, Kenji Mori; and their assistant, Joseph — develop an interesting familial dynamic that gets more complicated by the end of the book.

The way that Victor investigates his case is very strong, as he slowly assembles bits and pieces from the few clues he has, and we can see the puzzle unravel as he and Joseph tackle each lead as it comes. This is tempered by the occasionally overblown dialogue and the possibly deliberate slightly antiquated writing style.

It’s all very romantic and theatrical, but a little grating too. Joseph’s mutterings about Victor, Joseph’s mother’s put-upon airs, the squealing of middle-age dowagers as they read supposedly scandalous but utterly banal serialized fiction to each other, sometimes just goes a touch too far. It’s like the caked-on makeup of the dancing girls: a bit too much window dressing to hide the drab interior. Perhaps it’s all an acquired taste. If you have an interest in Paris and the timeframe, it’s serviceable. —Mark Rose

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Now in paperback, HANGMAN is part of Faye Kellerman’s crime series featuring LAPD homicide inspector Peter Decker and his wife, Rina Lazarus. Like its predecessors, it involves multiple murder cases, while also taking us into the protagonists’ after-hours and family lives. The format may be predictable, but Kellerman’s inventiveness and energetic writing keeps it from going stale.
 
Peter is called to mediate a meeting between Terry McLaughlin and her husband, a professional killer who calls himself Chris Donatti, as Terry details her plans for a trial separation and care of their teenage son, Gabe.

The next morning, Terry disappears, leaving Gabe alone. Knowing that Terry might be dead, and that the boy’s life might also be in danger, Peter and Rina reluctantly take Gabe in while searching for Terry and Donatti’s possible involvement in the woman’s disappearance.
 
No sooner does Gabe arrive home when Peter is called to investigate a newly discovered murder scene. A young woman, a nurse, was found hanged from the rafters at a construction site. Peter and his investigative team immediately track down the murdered woman’s family, friends and associates to find some insight into the killing, while hoping that the overt nature of the murder is not heralding a series of similar deaths.
 
Meanwhile, Gabe slowly assimilates into the routine of the new roof he’s living under with the help of Peter and Rina’s teenage daughter. But Peter still feels that Gabe might know more than he is revealing about his mother’s sudden disappearance, and worries about how Gabe’s father will react. There is no way the abandoned boy can stay with Peter’s family, but anything else might make him the victim of kidnapping or worse.
 
Peter carries most of the narrative weight in this particular entry, due to his direct involvement in both cases. But Rita is hardly passive, as she acts not only as his emotional and professional touchstone, but also the unifying force holding the threads of their family life together.
 
The disruption of Peter and Rina’s family is the most notable element of HANGMAN. Work and related worries usually come home each evening, but their family traditions and devotion to their conservative Jewish faith usually keep such concerns at bay. Here, however, a work-related problem is literally living among them. But the murder case outside of the Decker/Lazarus household is also complicated and full of unexpected twists.
 
The pace bogs down slightly when Kellerman focuses on the action, and thoughts of Peter’s associates as they piece together the murder suspects. There is more than enough suspense and unanswered questions to help find our way past such road bumps as everything finally comes together in the end.
 
HANGMAN is another credible and satisfying addition to Kellerman’s series. Newcomers can easily introduce themselves to the series with this latest title, while fans will welcome the chance to spend more time with Peter and Rina in and outside their home. —Alan Cranis

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