1) "The Surgeon" by Tess Gerritsen
Top-grade thriller-diller from Gerritsen (the jaw-chattering Gravity, 1999, etc.), a former internist who gave up the stethoscope to raise kids and chills.
Blistering ER trauma-work spells the main melodrama: a gruesome serial killer who collects his victims’ wombs has over the years become quite skilled with his blade. The really awful part: he removes the womb while the naked woman lies awake and can see his power over her. ER trauma surgeon Catherine Cordell first met the killer, called “The Surgeon” by Boston newspapers, down in Savannah, where she was his last victim. Luckily for Catherine, after being raped she got a hand free from the cord binding her to the bed, cut herself loose with a scalpel, reached under her bed, grabbed a pistol, and seemingly killed Andrew Capra, the inept medical student about to pluck out her womb. Unable to bear Savannah, where everyone seemed to know she’d been raped, Catherine transferred to Boston, holed up for nearly two years, then took a job as a trauma surgeon without disclosing her past. Good grief! more wombless bodies start showing up in Boston. Did she really kill Andrew? Well, yes. Homicide detective Thomas Moore, a widower soon romancing sexually zapped Catherine, determines that she is on the killer’s list. Jealous, plainfaced, snappish young Jane Rizzoli, the only female on Boston Homicide, leads his investigation. Gerritsen goes to great pains working up a classical background for the killer, filling us in on Greek, Viking, and Aztec sacrificial practices while also getting strong pages out of scenes in a rape crisis center, where incidents vividly illustrate the lifelong black aftermath of a rape. Then The Surgeon leaves one victim alive as an ER birthday present for Catherine, so that she can sew up spilled bowels while working through her own rape trauma.
Sharp characters stitch your eye to the page. An all-nighter.
2) "Shooting Elvis" by Robert Eversz
Nice Mary Alice Baker gets involved with all sorts of nasty terrorists in this Saturday-matinee serial for the '90s. One day, Mary Alice is a normal California girl--abusive father, dead-end job snapping photos of tiny tots at Hansel and Gretel, shiftless boyfriend named Wrex with the same Doc Martens, leather jacket, and tattoos as everybody else's boyfriend. Then Wrex asks her to run an errand at the Los Angeles Airport--to swap a package he's got for another that's coming in at noon. Mary Alice has the requisite misgivings, but Wrex will go as high as $200 for the favor, and ``the more I drank, the safer the whole idea sounded.'' So Mary Alice agrees to make the swap, except a few things go wrong, and bang! the package blows up while she's still in LAX, sending her into hiding from (1) the local (and not-so-local) authorities; (2) Mike Fleischer, the mysterious buyer who never liked amateur couriers to start with and is sure this one has double-crossed him; (3) Frick and Frack, Fleischer's bullyboys, whose good terrorist/bad terrorist routine reminds Mary Alice of nobody so much as her father; and, for all she knows, (4) from the rotten apple among the bevy of exciting new friends she's met since transforming herself into pop-art photographer Nina Zero. There's demented filmmaker Cass, her randy painter friend Billy b, colorful Santa Monica gallery owner Bobby Easter, and a pair of private eyes named Ben and Jerry. All this sounds a lot more fun than it is, because the cheerfully crazy characters Mary Alice--sorry: Nina--meets aren't all that different from one another, the terrorist plot is familiar and featherweight, and Mary Alice's self-styled ``Confession of an Accidental Terrorist'' lacks a style as flagrantly goofy as the events it retails, probably because even as Nina Zero, Mary Alice remains invincibly nice. Eversz (False Profit, 1990, etc.) whips up a candy-colored terrorist parfait in which the copious blood might as well be strawberry sauce.
3) "Bubbles Unbound" by Sarah Strohmeyer
In an era of pluckier-than-thou females, a nitwit heroine could be a welcome change. Enter Bubbles Yablonsky—a breath of fresh air, most of it between her ears. Bubbles has all the requisites: a working-class pedigree, a mountain of debts, an overbearing mama, a rebellious teenaged daughter, and an obnoxious ex. And, because she had the foresight to get knocked up at the tender age of 17, she’s still on the sunny side of 40, with golden blond locks and a drop-dead gorgeous figure. But when it comes to supporting her loyal family, Bubbles’s gig as a hairdresser just doesn’t cut it, and she’s already flunked every course but one at the local community college. Journalism’s her last chance, and so desperate is she to snag a job at the Lehigh News-Times that she allows the night editor to send her out to cover a would-be suicide at the Fahy Bridge. Naturally, Bubbles manages to knock him from his precarious perch, and naturally, she also manages to rescue him. But on the way home, she and sexy photographer Steve Stiletto run across an even bigger scoop: a body in the park, flattened by an SUV. At the wheel, passed out drunk, is Merry Metzger, wife of steel magnate Henry Metzger, pillar of Lehigh society, and president of the local MADD. Bubbles can’t wait to file her story. The only problem: the Range Rover, Merry, and Stiletto have all disappeared.
More irony and less spandex would make Strohmeyer’s new sleuth better company.
4) "Dolled Up for Murder" by Jane K. Cleland
What could be more natural than a New Hampshire antiques dealer becoming a magnet for crime?
Perhaps because she handles many expensive objects that sometimes bring out the worst in people, Josie Prescott has gotten a reputation as an amateur sleuth. So it’s appropriate, if horrifying, that she’s on the scene when one of her clients is shot dead in her parking lot. Alice Michaels was a doll collector and a financial advisor who was about to be arrested for an alleged Ponzi scheme. She’d just put down a deposit on a doll collection Josie had agreed to appraise for the two sisters selling it. When Josie’s helper is kidnapped on the way back from collecting more of the dolls, the ransom demanded is the collection itself. Although the dolls are valuable, Josie is sure that there’s more to them than meets the eye. Sure enough, X-rays reveal wads of bills hidden in some of their heads—perhaps rare and valuable Civil War notes, which would be well worth the kidnappers’ efforts. There are plenty of suspects in Alice’s death, starting with all those who lost money in her scheme. Even the dolls themselves may have had motives for murder. The police chief is a friend who’s not about to turn down Josie’s help when it comes to solving antiques-related crimes, even when it puts her in danger.
Cleland continues to offer clever mysteries (Deadly Threads, 2011, etc.) studded with enough information on antiques to keep collectors coming back for more.
5) "Arcadia Falls" by Carol Goodman
Goodman’s latest melding of faux folklore and neo-gothic melodrama (The Night Villa, 2008, etc.).
When Meg Rosenthal is offered a teaching position and free tuition for daughter Sally at a bucolic boarding school in the Catskills, she can hardly refuse. She’s been exiled from Long Island by hedgie husband Jude’s recent business collapse, followed shortly by his sudden death of a heart attack. Originally an artists’ colony founded in the late 1920s by lesbian couple Vera Beecher and Lily Eberhardt, the Arcadia School is an ideal venue for Meg’s academic specialty, fairy tales. Indeed, its grounds ominously recall the setting of her favorite fable, “The Changeling Girl,” which Lily wrote and illustrated. During Arcadia’s annual fall pagan festival, a student, Isabel, falls off a cliff on the edge of campus. Years before, Lily fell to her death from the same cliff, much to Vera’s everlasting grief and chagrin, especially since she believed Lily had forsaken her for society painter Virgil Nash. Called in to investigate Isabel’s death, broodingly handsome local sheriff Callum Reade meets Meg, kindling sparks of incipient romance. At Vera and Lily’s former residence, Fleur-de-Lis, Meg discovers Lily’s lost diary, which reveals that Virgil impregnated her during an intemperate fling. Fearing Vera’s wrath, Lily accepted a commission to paint a mural for a convent, St. Lucy’s, which sheltered unwed mothers and orphans. Sixteen years later, having told neither Vera nor Virgil that she gave birth, Lily retrieved her daughter, Ivy St. Clare, from St. Lucy’s orphanage and brought the girl to Arcadia as her “protégée.” So that explains why now-ancient Ivy is the school’s dean, but not why she is so tightly wound and always skulking around spying on people. Given the early introduction of a convenient cliff and a changeling motif, one can expect many cliffhangers and switched babies, and in this Goodman does not disappoint. The denouement, however, will leave many readers baffled.
Passably engaging, principally for its meditations on the ever-shifting challenges facing women artists.
6) "Down the Rabbit Hole" by Peter Abrahams
7) "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry" by Rachel Joyce
Those with the patience to accompany the protagonist on this meandering journey will receive an emotional payoff at the end.
The debut novel by an award-winning British radio playwright (and actor) offers an allegory that requires many leaps of faith, while straddling the line between the charming and cloying (as well as the comic and melodramatic). The title character has recently retired from his office job at a brewery, lives with a wife who hasn’t loved him for decades—since their intelligent, perhaps disturbed son sparked her estrangement from her husband—and appears destined to live his life in everyday limbo until the grave. Then, one day, he receives a letter from a female co-worker with whom he had once been close but hasn’t been in contact for 20 years. She is dying from cancer and has written to let him know, to say goodbye. Without planning or preparation, he embarks on the title’s “unlikely pilgrimage,” somehow believing that if he can walk the hundreds of miles over the many months it will take him, she will remain alive to welcome him. On his journey, he meets a bunch of characters, becomes something of a celebrity and learns a little bit more about the meaning of life. These lessons are articulated in homilies such as “you could be ordinary and attempt something extraordinary,” and “Maybe it’s what the world needs. A little less sense, and a little more faith.” Maybe, but if such sentiments seem akin to those from one of Mitch Albom’s bestselling parables, the novel’s evocation of everyday British reticence, heartbreak and wonder occasionally suggest the depths of the great Graham Swift. The final chapters of the novel resolve the mysteries that have been underlying the rest—how the son divided his parents, why the co-worker had disappeared from Harold’s life—and there’s a powerful resolution in which all’s well that ends well.
Manipulative but moving, for readers who don’t mind having their strings pulled.
8) "Vanishing Act" by Thomas Perry
A most intriguing heroine, with an even more intriguing vocation, is the centerpiece for what could be Perry's most successful thriller since his Edgar-winning debut, Butcher's Boy (1982). Jane Whitefield is a Native American whose special talent is making people disappear. A battered wife, an informer on the run from the Mob, just about anyone with a real need to change identities and vanish can turn to Whitefield and find an avenue to remove them from the world. Because Whitefield is part Seneca and uses her Indian heritage and contacts to further her clients' interests, readers will get some insight into Native American life, but most are likely to be even more fascinated by the entire process of changing one's identity and becoming someone else. Whitefield comes home from helping a woman escape her brutal, sadistic husband to find a man called John Felker waiting for her. Claiming to be an ex-cop turned accountant, he says he's discovered half a million dollars in a bank account under his name and fears he is being set up as the fall guy for an embezzling scheme. He says there's a contract out on his life as well. Staying just one step ahead of four dangerous pursuers, Whitefield helps Felker vanish, but not before--against all her instincts and rules- -becoming romantically involved with him. Then things start to go horribly wrong, and the woman who always helped people disappear now has to turn her talents to finding her most recent client, a man who was not at all what he seemed to be. When events rush to a climax deep in the Northern Woods of the Adirondacks in upstate New York, she must rely on the tracking and survival skills of her ancestors--or die. A fine thriller, and Whitefield surely warrants a return appearance.
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