Mystery Notes
by Staff -- Publishers Weekly, 1/6/2003
January PublicationsA wedding bomber and a murderer upset the peace of Molena Point, Calif., whose human denizens must turn for help to those crafty, crime-solving feline sleuths, Joe Grey and Dulcie, in Cat Seeing Double: A Joe Grey Mystery, the eighth in this warm and furry series by Shirley Rousseau Murphy (Cat Laughing Last, etc.). The author has won four National Cat Writers' Association Awards. (HarperCollins, $24.95 304p ISBN 0-06-620950-1)
In Judy Van Gieson's tantalizing Land of Burning Heat: A Claire Reynier Mystery, her fourth novel to feature the New Mexico archivist and sometime detective, Claire gets on the trail of a 16th-century document allegedly written by a Shephardic Jewish mystic fleeing the Inquisition in Mexico City. What does a present-day murder have to do with religious persecution centuries earlier? (Univ. of New Mexico, $24.95 264p ISBN 0-8263-3172-6)
Rue Morgue offers another in their vintage mystery series, The Black Shrouds (1941), by sisters Constance and Gwenyth Little. Aspiring actress Diana Prescott escapes a tyrannical father only to find herself pursuing clues in the murder of two old maids in a New York boarding house. (Rue Morgue [Tomenid@attbi.com], $14 paper 155p ISBN 0-915230-52-6)
Correction: The publisher of Death of an Innocent, by Sally Spencer, and Substantial Threat, by Nick Oldham (both Forecasts, Dec. 9), is Severn House, not Five Star.
