Love Bites: A Sofie Metropolis Novel
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Tori Carrington, Severn, $28.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-7278-6913-5 9780727869135
The fifth Sofie Metropolis novel (after 2008's Working Stiff) from Carrington (the pseudonym of Lori and Tony Karayianni) offers plenty of fang-in-cheek fun. When 19-year-old Roula Kalomoira disappears, to the dismay of the entire Greek enclave of Astoria, Queens, in New York City, suspected neighborhood vampire Ivan Romanoff asks PI Sofie to clear his family, including his slippery nephew, Vladimir, of any connection to the missing Roula or the blood-draining murders of local women by a killer dubbed "the Bleeder." As tabloids speculate on the existence of a secret vampire society in Queens, Sofie downs caffeinated frappés and savors the two heartthrobs in her life, Aussie "bounty hunter" Jack Porter and Greek baker Dino Antonopoulos. Meanwhile, a former movie queen wants Sofie to dig up dirt on disgraced physician Weston Westervelt (aka "the Chop Doc"). Zany Sofie, while rarely breaking a fingernail, closes another case in bubbly Greek style. (Apr.)
Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra
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Paul D. Gilbert, Hale (IPG, dist.), $24.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-7090-8904-9 9780709089049
Gilbert, the author of two collections of short Holmes pastiches (The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes and The Chronicles of Sherlock Holmes), delivers an atmospheric and suspenseful novel-length rendering of one of the most famous of Dr. Watson's notoriously tantalizing untold tales. In 1898, Scotland Yard asks Holmes to help explain why an unmoored tea cutter, the Matilda Briggs, was found abandoned near a London dock, with only a dying cabin boy on board. The detective also agrees to assist a new client, Daniel Collier, in interpreting a series of letters his explorer and theologian father sent him from the Far East. As in Doyle's own longer stories, Gilbert relates much of the action in flashbacks, and if the revelation of what the rat is fails to fully satisfy, his ability to conjure up the familiar Baker Street scene will make future such efforts welcome. (Apr.)
The American Café
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Sara Sue Hoklotubbe, Univ. of Arizona, $16.95 trade paper (256p) ISBN 978-0-8165-2922-3 9780816529223
Insights into present-day Cherokee life and race relations lift Hoklotubbe's folksy second Sadie Walela mystery (after 2003's Deception on All Accounts). Eager to make a fresh start in her native Cherokee country, 36-year-old Sadie buys a restaurant in Liberty, Okla., and renames it the American Café after the cafe that her late great-aunt, whom she resembles, owned during WWII. One day while Sadie is working on the menu, an old woman storms in and threatens Sadie with a sawed-off shotgun, angry that the cafe is about to reopen. Soon after, Sadie learns that the cafe's charming previous owner, Goldie Ray, has been shot to death, apparently by the same lunatic woman. Sadie helps local police officer Lance Smith investigate, but the deeper she delves, the more confused the hunt becomes. A wacky cast of characters complements a plot line that, while familiar, offers its share of twists. (Apr.)
Echoes of the Dead: A DCI Monika Paniatowski Mystery
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Sally Spencer, Severn, $28.95 (224p) ISBN 978-0-7278-6980-7 9780727869807
Spencer's crisp third police procedural to feature plucky Det. Chief Insp. Monika Paniatowski (after 2010's Ring of Death) offers an intriguing look at '70s style crime solving. After serving 22 years for the rape and strangulation murder of 13-year-old Lilly Dawson in 1951 Whitebridge, Lancashire, Fred Howerd, who admitted to the killing, claims his innocence in a deathbed confession to a Catholic priest. Scotland Yard sends Det. Chief Insp. Tom Hall to help Chief Constable George Baxter's team, chiefly Monika, reopen the case, which was the first big case of her retired former boss, Chief Insp. Charlie Woodend, for Scotland Yard's Murder Squad. Monika hopes the truth will clear Woodend or his then sergeant, Ralph Bannerman, of arresting or even framing the wrong man. Spencer unravels a complex cobweb of clues while smoothly flipping back and forth between 1951 and 1973. (Apr.)
Murder at the Villa Byzantine
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R.T. Raichev, Soho Constable, $25 (224p) ISBN 978-1-56947-914-8 9781569479148
In Raichev's middling sixth contemporary evocation of golden age whodunits featuring private detective Maj. Hugh Payne and his wife, mystery writer Antonia Darcy (after 2010's The Curious Incident at Claridge's), the couple reluctantly attend a birthday party for actress Melisande Chevret. The guests, an array of improbable eccentrics, include Stella Markoff, a woman who used to work for the rightful heir to the Bulgarian throne. When Markoff is later decapitated with a sword in the Villa Byzantine, the London home of her collaborator in a biography of another member of the Bulgarian royal family, the case appears open and shut, but Payne and Darcy are determined to look further. A sluggish plot goes hand in hand with the author's failure to rise to the challenge of making modern characters act and talk like ones from the 1930s without veering into parody. (Apr.)
Mimosas, Mischief, and Murder
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Sara Rosett, Kensington, $22 (272p) ISBN 978-0-7582-2685-3 9780758226853
Rosett's winning sixth Ellie Avery mystery (after 2010's Mint Juleps, Mayhem, and Murder) takes amateur sleuth Ellie, husband Mitch, and their two kids to Smarr, Ala., Mitch's hometown, where they're first slammed with the news of the sudden death of Mitch's elderly grandfather, Grandpa Franklin. When someone breaks into the late gentleman's home, the police are reluctant to confirm a burglary. Even after Grandpa and casket go missing, the authorities insist there's nothing further to investigate. Complications arise after the stranger who attended Grandpa's funeral turns out to be the corpse Ellie finds in Grandpa's guest room. The strange behavior of Uncle Bud and Felicity, the wife of Mitch's favorite cousin, has Ellie considering adding relatives to her list of suspicious characters. A rumor of hidden money, secret letters from a famous recluse, a fire, a threatening message, and a crazed gunman add to the cozy mischief. (Apr.)
Nightshade: A Hugh Corbett Medieval Mystery
P.C. Doherty, Minotaur, $25.99 (320p) ISBN 978-0-312-67818-0 9780312678180
Whodunits don't get much better than this outstanding historical, Doherty's 16th Sir Hugh Corbett medieval mystery (after 2010's The Waxman Murders). Edward I dispatches Corbett, keeper of the secret seal, to Essex to recover an ornate cross claimed by the Templars from Lord Oliver Scrope. The king also wants Corbett to censure Scrope for exceeding his authority in ordering the massacre of the members of a religious sect the orthodox Scrope had labeled heretical. On arrival, Corbett finds Scrope's community plagued by a killer known as Sagittarius, who has already claimed multiple victims. The murderous archer has created an atmosphere of terror with his apparently random attacks, heralded with the blast of a hunter's horn. Another murder committed in a locked room on an inaccessible island considerably ups the ante. The first-rate pacing will have readers racing through the book to learn the truth, which the author has artfully concealed. (Apr.)
Black Swan: A Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery
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Chris Knopf, Permanent, $28 (304p) ISBN 978-1-57962-216-9 9781579622169
A sudden storm drives Sam Acquillo and his girlfriend, Amanda Anselma, and their sailboat into harbor at Fishers Island in Knopf's tense fifth mystery featuring the ex-corporation man turned Long Island carpenter (after 2009's Hard Stop). While the couple await parts for their disabled boat, Christian Fey, the owner of the Black Swan, a small hotel Fey runs with his grown daughter and son, reluctantly gives them lodging. Other guests at the Black Swan, equally unwelcome, are Fey's three former business partners in a software company he helped found and to whom he apparently sold. When one of the former partners dies in circumstances that suggest a killer in their midst, Sam must ferret out the corporate secrets that threaten to engulf him and Amanda as well as the Feys. The vivid descriptions of an angry sea and the monster storm that strikes the island fairly dwarf the human threats facing Sam and Amanda. (May)
No Safe Haven
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Kimberley Woodhouse and Kayla R. Woodhouse, B&H, $14.99 trade paper (352p) ISBN 978-1-4336-7116-6 9781433671166
The two authors are a mother and her teenage daughter, and they borrow from reality—Kayla, the teenager, has a rare nerve disorder that prevents her from regulating body temperature or sensing pain—in presenting the action-filled tale of a mother and daughter, Jenna and Andie Tikaani-Gray (with the same disorder), whose plane is sabotaged and crashes into Sultana, the formidable neighbor of Alaska's Mt. Denali. A seriously injured Jenna and Andie must decide whether to trust the other crash survivor, Cole Maddox, in a plan to survive, and Maddox doesn't seem especially trustworthy. The story has its fascinating bits— Andie's unusual disorder, survival in the Alaskan wilderness, the native Alaskan background of the two women—as well as not very original plot elements: Maddox's weepy backstory, cartoonish villains, the sage hospital chaplain. The evangelical Christian formula of accepting-Jesus-as-your-savior helps drive the plot, which some will like and others won't. This has page-turning potential, but is too predictable and emotionally manipulative to earn a large audience. (Mar.)
Trades of the Flesh
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Faye L. Booth, Forge, $14.99 trade paper (304) ISBN 978-0-7653-2784-0 9780765327840
Lydia Ketch turns to the oldest profession in the world to keep her sister Annabel and herself out of a Victorian England workhouse after their mother's death. As a prostitute, Lydia encounters sadomasochism, disease, counterfeiting, pornography, and body snatching. When one of her clients, Henry Shadwell, a young surgeon, anatomy teacher, and photographer, asks her to pose as a pornographic model, she agrees, and eventually helps him procure corpses for experiments. Their sexual relationship remains strictly business even though Lydia has fallen in love with him and he seems to care for her. Lydia most of all wants out of the trade and wants to rescue her sister and friends from poverty. Booth (Cover the Mirrors) hits the mark with a historical that leaves behind the lords and ladies and focuses on a young girl with the odds stacked against her slowly figuring out her desires and plans for her future . (Mar.)
