1) "The Various Haunts of Men" by Susan Hill
Whatever you do, don’t go clumping up the Hill.
At first, nobody thought much about Angela Randall’s disappearance, though it was odd that this prim, conscientious, middle-aged job-holder would simply leave without a word. But Sgt. Freya Graffham, new to the Lafferton CID, has a bad feeling and decides to investigate the case with some help from DC Nathan Coates. They make few inroads until a pudgy young girl goes missing, too. The vanished don’t seem to have much in common except for outings on the Hill and hints of depression that had driven them to alternate-therapy practitioners. Another woman, trying to deal with a life-threatening cancer, has also turned to the fringe element to deal with her problem. Freya and Nathan, now under auspices of the enigmatic but dishy Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler, must separate do-gooders from charlatans ranging from an acupuncturist to a spiritualist to a psychic surgeon (don’t ask). The suspense builds, climaxing with another death, then plummeting with the dénouement, which is nowhere near as gripping as the road leading to it.
Freya’s love obsession is a bit over the top, Simon is in need of serious fleshing-out, and surely it’s old-hat to deride New Agers, incense, herbs and vegans. All in all, an inauspicious series beginning from an author (The Risk of Darkness, 2006, etc.) once short-listed for the Booker Prize.
2) "A Real Basket Case" by Beth Groundwater
Drugs and jealousy add up to a Rocky Mountain murder.
Claire Hanover, a Colorado Springs empty-nester whose husband Roger’s self-image is tied to climbing the corporate ladder, is restless and lonely. Although Claire’s gift-basket business is fun and profitable, her divorced friend Ellen, who helped with the startup, suggests that gym classes will improve her mood and looks. When a buff aerobics instructor comes on to Claire, her old pal thinks a little fling would be just the thing. But after Enrique talks Claire into a massage at her home, he’s shot there, and Roger arrives in their bedroom holding the murder weapon. Claire can only watch stunned when he’s arrested for murder. Feeling betrayed, Roger moves out. Claire, certain he’s innocent, starts sleuthing with the long-distance help of another friend, Ute shamus Deb Burch. Enrique, it seems, was not only servicing women at the health club; he was apparently dealing drugs. His boss Leon admires Claire’s nerve but warns her not to poke around in his business. He suggests that she look at the ladies Enrique was involved with, a list that includes Ellen. Determined to find the culprit by enlarging the suspect pool before Roger’s depression sinks him, Deb proceeds to break into the apartment of Enrique’s girlfriend, intent on unearthing the necessary evidence before Claire’s investigation makes her the next victim.
A tense, exciting debut.
3) "Carved in Bone" by Jefferson Bass
Crime and science slug it out in this second book from writing team Jon Jefferson and Bill Bass (Death’s Acre, 2003), a neatly-done mystery aimed straight at the CSI set.
It’s just another day on the job for University of Tennessee forensic anthropologist Dr. Bill Brockton. Tom Kitchings, sheriff of hardscrabble Cooke County, has invited him out to look at a body, hoping that the crime-fighting professor will be able to draw a few clues from the corpse. Brockton’s investigation has only begun to get rolling, though, when suggestions start to come from the county’s hidden mountain hollows that this mystery might be better left unsolved. From there the tale turns into a whirl of backwoods shenanigans—cockfights, drug-running, family feuds—with just enough science thrown in to make readers feel like they’ve learned something. The book slows a bit whenever the story drifts to the agonies of the good doctor’s love life, but these digressions are mercifully brief. The whole affair grows more and more noirish, with the plot’s convolutions culminating in a finale that finds fresh bodies hitting the floor in an unexpected pattern.
Southern-fried forensics. Nothing too fancy, but it does taste good going down.
4) "Night Work" by Steve Hamilton
Hamilton gives private eye Alex McKnight (A Stolen Season, 2006, etc.) a rest and introduces a probation officer who’s being stalked by a crazy.
Solid citizen Joe Trumbull is honest, affable, dedicated to his job and good at it. In Kingston, N.Y., where he was born and grew up, people really like him. They also feel sorry for him. Three days before his wedding, his fiancée, Laurel, was strangled. Two years later, the killer is still at large. Now, for the first time since then, Joe, nervous as a teenager, prepares for a date with Marlene. Though it’s a blind date arranged by mutual friends, it goes so well that Joe experiences something unfamiliar and slightly unsettling: a jolt of optimism. It doesn’t last. Unbelievably, horribly, Marlene is strangled. In short order two more women with connections to Joe die violently in disturbingly similar ways, and the cops begin casting meaningful looks his way. Joe grasps that he’s being framed, of course. An insane but clever predator has set his sights on a bizarre plan to punish Joe. But who? And why? By the time Joe knows enough to answer those questions, he’ll wish he hadn’t.
It’s hard not to like a good guy like Joe. The plotting goes a bit Grand Guignol at the end, but Hamilton fans are prepared for that.
5) "Burning Time" by Leslie Glass
6) "Ordinary Grace" by William Kent Krueger
A respected mystery writer turns his attention to the biggest mystery of all: God.
An award-winning author for his long-running Cork O’ Connor series (Trickster’s Point, 2012, etc.), Krueger aims higher and hits harder with a stand-alone novel that shares much with his other work. The setting is still his native Minnesota, the tension with the region’s Indian population remains palpable and the novel begins with the discovery of a corpse, that of a young boy who was considered a little slow and whose body was found near the train trestle in the woods on the outskirts of town. Was it an accident or something even more sinister? Yet, that opening fatality is something of a red herring (and that initial mystery is never really resolved), as it serves as a prelude to a series of other deaths that shake the world of Frank Drum, the 13-year-old narrator (occasionally from the perspective of his memory of these events, four decades later), his stuttering younger brother and his parents, whose marriage may well not survive these tragedies. One of the novel’s pivotal mysteries concerns the gaps among what Frank experiences (as a participant and an eavesdropper), what he knows and what he thinks he knows. “In a small town, nothing is private,” he realizes. “Word spreads with the incomprehensibility of magic and the speed of plague.” Frank’s father, Nathan, is the town’s pastor, an aspiring lawyer until his military experience in World War II left him shaken and led him to his vocation. His spouse chafes at the role of minister’s wife and doesn’t share his faith, though “the awful grace of God,” as it manifests itself within the novel, would try the faith of the most devout believer. Yet, ultimately, the world of this novel is one of redemptive grace and mercy, as well as unidentified corpses and unexplainable tragedy.
A novel that transforms narrator and reader alike.
County Cat Link
7) "Imposter" by Davis Bunn
A crack federal agent investigates his own mother’s murder.
Bunn (Drummer in the Dark, 2001, etc.) lets us know early and endlessly that protagonist Matt Kelly is an enigma: “He’s like water. He flows around life, but there’s nothing to see.” Maybe Matt simply wants to present as little target as possible to censorious father Paul, a wealthy Baltimore developer who doesn’t let his campaign for the U.S. Senate be derailed by the explosion that kills his wife in the opening pages. Whatever the reason, Matt’s ability to “melt into any setting and become unseen” serves him well as an up-and-comer in the little-known bureau of State Department Intelligence. It doesn’t gain him any traction, however, when he tries to help the Baltimore PD in their investigation of his mother’s death. Smart money has pinned the blame on a group of neo-Nazis who recently purloined some assault rifles and explosives from the National Guard Armory, but Matt doesn’t think that scenario makes sense. With little love lost for “fibbies,” Baltimore’s finest do everything they can to keep him from honing in on their case. Grizzled but goodhearted flatfeet Connie Morales and Lucas D’Amico are also initially turned off by the quiet, preternaturally handsome rich kid (in addition to his secretiveness, the author can’t stop mentioning Matt’s good looks), but they warm to him after martial-arts-schooled Matt helps save a cop’s life during a shootout. Sexual tension between Matt and Connie simmers no more than is decent, the violence is strictly PG-rated and a high number of characters are regular churchgoers: Westbow is an imprint of Christian publishing powerhouse Thomas Nelson, after all. Thankfully, the author doesn’t moralize nearly as much as one would expect. Regrettably, he doesn’t develop the drama as well as one would expect, burying the makings of a fine thriller beneath layers of monotonous character development.
Mediocre thrills, though it may interest those looking for a good, clean read.
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