Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery
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Rosemary Herbert, Down East (NBN, dist.), $14.95 paper (256p) ISBN 978-0-89272-852-7 9780892728527
Herbert, the editor of several mystery anthologies and editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, turns that wealth of experience to effective use in her intelligent and thought-provoking mystery debut. Liz Higgins, a feature reporter for the Beantown Banner with hard news aspirations, jumps at the opportunity to help cover the disappearance of Ellen Johansson, who goes missing from her suburban Boston home the week before Christmas in 2000, leaving a blood-spattered kitchen and some conflicting clues. Dogged reporting leads Higgins on a trail that includes Johansson's reading habits, her correspondence with an Israeli pen pal, a chance encounter with a New York City cab driver, and an incident buried in Johansson's childhood. Herbert makes artful use of the looming date of 9/11 as the action builds to an unexpected but satisfying outcome. (Oct.)
Bury Your Dead
Louise Penny, Minotaur, $24.99 (384p) ISBN 978-0-312-37704-5 9780312377045
At the start of Agatha-winner Penny's moving and powerful sixth Chief Insp. Armand Gamache mystery (after 2009's The Brutal Telling), Gamache is recovering from a physical and emotional trauma, the exact nature of which isn't immediately disclosed, in Québec City. When the body of Augustin Renaud, an eccentric who'd spent his life searching for the burial site of Samuel de Champlain, Québec's founder, turns up in the basement of the Literary and Historical Society, Gamache reluctantly gets involved in the murder inquiry. Meanwhile, Gamache dispatches his longtime colleague, Insp. Jean Guy Beauvoir, to the quiet town of Three Pines to revisit the case supposedly resolved at the end of the previous book. Few writers in any genre can match Penny's ability to combine heartbreak and hope in the same scene. Increasingly ambitious in her plotting, she continues to create characters readers would want to meet in real life. 100,000 first printing. (Oct.)
The Damage Done
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Hilary Davidson, Forge, $24.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2697-3 9780765326973
In Davidson's razor sharp mystery debut, travel journalist Lily Moore, who's been living in Spain, rushes home to Manhattan's Lower East Side on learning that her younger sister, Claudia, a recovering heroin addict, has apparently drowned in her bathtub on the anniversary of their mother's suicide. The corpse in the morgue, however, is that of a stranger who'd been posing as Claudia for months. So where's Claudia? An increasingly frantic Lily launches her private investigation while NYPD detectives Norah Renfrew and hunky "Brux" Bruxton oversee the official one. As Lily dodges the amorous attentions of Martin Sklar, her wealthy ex-boyfriend, who she suspects might've had a secret affair with Claudia, she discovers Claudia's connection to a recently deceased "pseudopsychologist" who had a habit of getting too involved with his female patients. Davidson, herself a travel journalist (Frommer's Toronto 2010), offers a great portrait of sisterly love, despite a dysfunctional past, as well as a highly satisfying mystery. (Oct.)
The Dead Detective
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William Heffernan, Akashic, $24.95 (340p) ISBN 978-1-936070-61-9 9781936070619
A lead whose psychology is underdeveloped and an easily solvable puzzle mar Edgar-winner Heffernan's contemporary whodunit, his first novel in seven years. When Florida homicide cop Harry Doyle was 10, his religious fanatic mother tried to kill him and his younger brother, Jimmy, to send them to heaven. The police were able to resuscitate Harry after he technically died, but were too late to save Jimmy. That trauma earned Harry the nickname of the "dead detective" when he joined the force as an adult. With his mother still writing him from jail on the anniversary of her crime, Harry finds distraction in a high-profile murder investigation. Disgraced teacher Darlene Beckett, who slept with one of her teenage students, has turned up in a nature preserve with her throat slashed and the word evil carved into her forehead. Heffernan (Tarnished Blue) has trouble providing clues to the killer's identity without giving the game away. (Oct.)
Fiber & Brimstone
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Laura Childs, Berkley Prime Crime, $24.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-425-23674-1 9780425236741
Halloween season in a revitalized, post-Katrina New Orleans provides the backdrop for Childs's colorful, briskly plotted eighth scrapbooking mystery (after 2009's Tragic Magic). When Brett Fowler, a Big Easy Ponzi schemer, gets fatally gored by the horns of a Minotaur head for the French Quarter's Monsters and Mayhem Torchlight Parade, suspicion falls on art appraiser Jekyl Hardy, the float designer who created the mythical beast's head. Jekyl's old friends and fellow float designers, Carmela Bertrand, the proprietor of Memory Mine, "a cozy little scrapbook shop," and Ava Gruiex, of Juju Voodoo, determine to clear his name. Catching the real killer is a job, of course, for NOPD Lt. Edgar Babcock, Carmela's main squeeze, but the detecting chops of artsy Carmela and her saucy sidekick, Ava, totally steal his thunder. Scrapbooking tips and recipes for dishes like candied fruit banana bread and Dr. Pepper tickle-your-ribs spareribs round out a volume sure to please cozy fans. (Oct.)
Bryant & May off the Rails: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery
Christopher Fowler, Bantam, $25 (368p) ISBN 978-0-553-80720-2 9780553807202
British author Fowler's outstanding eighth Peculiar Crimes Unit mystery (after 2009's Bryant & May on the Loose) easily conveys the main characters' rich backstories in the course of a typically bizarre series of puzzles. In the previous book, the PCU, spearheaded by elderly senior detectives Arthur Bryant and John May, apprehended the King's Cross Executioner (aka Mr. Fox), who beheaded his victims, but failed to keep him in custody. In making his escape, Fox killed a police constable. In order to continue being funded, the team now has a week to recapture the fugitive. A series of mysterious events in the London Underground may also be Fox's work: the fatal fall of a single mother down a flight of stairs and the disappearance of a drunken social engineering student after boarding a late-night train. Fowler has few peers when it comes to constructing ingenious and intricate plots—or integrating contemporary technology into a golden age mystery plot. (Oct.)
Outwitting Trolls: A Brady Coyne Novel
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William G. Tapply, Minotaur, $24.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-312-53127-0 9780312531270
Family secrets and emotional hangups dominate the comfortably satisfying 25th and final Brady Coyne novel from Tapply (1940–2009). When Sharon Nichols finds her veterinarian ex-husband, Ken, stabbed to death in a suburban Boston hotel room, she phones Brady, a former neighbor of the couple, who rushes to the scene. As Sharon's lawyer, Brady tries to redirect police suspicion away from his client by exploring the victim's entanglement in selling date-rape drugs while juggling bad debts. To put it mildly, Brady discovers that Ken and Sharon had a less than idyllic personal life. While trying to help the emotionally fragile Sharon hold herself together, Brady must also sort out his prickly relationship with his son and cope with the moods of his own current lover. Convincing characters and a pleasant New England setting enhance a genuine play-fair mystery, despite several false leads. (Nov.)
Esperanza
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Trish J. MacGregor, Tor, $24.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2602-7 9780765326027
Set in Ecuador, this so-so supernatural thriller from MacGregor (Kill Time) mixes time travel with a centuries' long struggle between good and evil. When two strangers—Tess Livingston, an FBI agent, and Ian Ritter, a Minneapolis journalism professor who looks like George Clooney—are marooned at a remote bus station high in the Andes, they wind up taking a detour to the town of Esperanza, where they attract the unwelcome attention of Dominica, a shape-shifting spirit who can inhabit human bodies. Dominica is stunned to realize that both Tess and Ian are "transitionals," souls of people "nearly dead in the physical world" who pose a threat to her kind, brujos, ghosts unable to move into the afterlife. In a flashback to Minnesota in 1968, Ian emerges from a coma with memories from his future existence and embarks on a half-hearted attempt to prevent some of history's tragedies like Martin Luther King's assassination. Action that often drags and characters few will care about don't help a half-baked premise. (Sept.)
The Mistaken Wife
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Rose Melikan, Touchstone, $15 paper (432p) ISBN 978-1-4165-6090-6 9781416560906
Set in 1797, Melikan's entertaining third historical thriller featuring Mary Finch (after The Counterfeit Guest) takes the British spy to France, where she poses as the wife of an American artist. With England and France at war, spymaster Cuthbert Shy asks Finch to befriend U.S. envoys in Paris, to foster "disagreement, confusion, and enmity" between France and America and plant the seeds for an alliance with Britain, to whom the Americans are bound by "ties of kinship, language, history, and temperament." Shy insists that she keep this vital mission secret even from her significant other, Capt. Robert Holland, though Holland himself winds up across the Channel to look into reports that the French have invented an undersea weapon whose tests have led to reports of sea monsters. Melikan successfully captures the spirit of the period while rooting her suspenseful espionage plot in actual events. (Sept.)
Lost Empire
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Clive Cussler with Grant Blackwood, Putnam, $27.95 (416p) ISBN 978-0-399-15676-2 9780399156762
Cussler and Blackwood's second adventure to feature husband-wife treasure hunters Sam and Remi Fargo deviates little from the familiar formula of the first in the series, Spartan Gold. When Sam and Remi find a huge ship's bell on a dive off the Tanzanian coast, they must work to find a way to recover it without running afoul of the Tanzanian government. Meanwhile, Mexican president Quauhtli Garza, a staunch nationalist, knows that this bell comes from a former Confederate ship that sank off the east African coast after the Civil War. Garza fears the discovery of a missing piece of a Quetzalcoatl statuette, which was aboard the ship, will undermine his grip on power. Once Garza dispatches his henchman to Tanzania to deal with the Fargos, the novel devolves into a standard chase thriller. Uninspired dialogue ("I love adventure as much as the next gal, but there's something to be said for good food and a warm bed with clean sheets," Remi tells Sam) doesn't help. (Sept.)
