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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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