New and Needed! Peter Lovesey's Story Collection, READER, I BURIED THEM

Peter Lovesey's British police procedurals have stacked up enjoyably over the past 50 years, without growing stale. If you're already a fan, the new collection of his stories, READER, I BURIED THEM, AND OTHER STORIES is a must for the shelf.

But there are a lot of great mystery authors in the world, so if you aren't yet familiar with Lovesey's tales, don't blush -- just go pick up this volume. Because in addition to marking his continuing career, the collection offers a fine introduction to his wry sense of humor and adept story twists.

The flavors of the stories make up more than a wide menu. "Formidophobia" (defined as a fear of scarecrows) has the enjoyable feel of a G. K. Chesterton mystery; "Remaindered" manages to combine a gangland spoof with a used bookstore; and "Agony Column" (British term for a Dear Abby sort of pursuit) is funny enough to make anyone in the room with you get exasperated as you giggle or snort.

There are also some clever homages, like "The Deadliest Tale of All," which pictures Edgar Allan Poe suffering through a visit from a journalist, and "A Three Pie Problem" (come on, you know the title this spoofs on), bringing in Peter Diamond's Bath, England.

For the serious collector, this volume is also a must because it offers 17 pages of a "Peter Lovesey Checklist." The author foreword also offers revelations and delight.

The release date from Soho Press is February 1 -- do pre-order, to be sure of snagging a first edition for your shelf, and for much pleasure in both reading and re-reading. Also, if you were about to take a course in how to write short mysteries, just think of all the money you'll save by getting this 384-page volume.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Brief Mention: New Cozies from Carrie Doyle and Linda Reilly

If your TBR (to be read) stack is getting a little short, or too "heavy" with crime, you can lighten it up with new January releases from seasoned authors Carrie Doyle and Linda Reilly.

Doyle's "Trouble in Paradise" series began with It Takes Two to Mango, featuring expert but disappointed real estate pro Plum Lockhart. Now, in SOMETHING'S GUAVA GIVE, Plum's got her own villa broker agency rolling on an island in the Caribbean. But her New York City corporate lift hasn't let go of her, because her not-quite-budy Gerald Hand up there demands a return favor that drags her into investigating a murder. Whenever Plum does this, she has to negotiate how closely she'll work with a hunky director of security that she can't stop admiring and drooling over. It's a great setup for both romance and comedy, and Doyle demonstrates once again her expert handling of this lively balance.

UP TO NO GOUDA is the start of a new cozy series by Linda Reilly, already known for her cat-focused mysteries. Carly Hale isn't letting widowhood stop her from trying her dream business: a Vermont grilled cheese restaurant (this is "A Grilled Cheese Mystery").  But just a few months into the restaurant's success, the town bully tries to evict her. Guess who ends up murdered on the restaurant doorstep? Carly's efforts to save both her business and her reputation become tangled with new directions of affection, but thank goodness, she's got terrific friends to help her through. Recipes at the back, of course!

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Soho Press/Syndicate Brings Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter PI Series Back Into Print -- All 12 Titles! (First 3 NOW)

[Originally published at New York Journal of Books]

Fadeout marks the debut of one of the twentieth century’s most memorable investigators. With this re-issue, a new generation will experience both Hansen’s rich writing and taut plotting, and a compelling view of how life may have, in many ways, changed for the better.

The Syndicate Books re-issue of Joseph Hansen’s 12 Dave Brandstetter crime novels begins with three titles at once, an excellent idea—because cracking open the first one, Fadeout, is an immediate reminder of why Hansen’s writing was startling and delectable in 1970. The Californian “death investigator” for an insurance company has much of the authority of a police officer to nose into questionable deaths, without having to focus on the law so intently. And he is, as publisher Paul Oliver says, “Tall, handsome, smart and successful.”

But author Michael Nava in his introduction to the re-issue nails the remarkable aspect of this neglected series: “Hansen is not only one of America’s best mystery writers, he is a great American writer. Period.” Nava asserts that the reason crime fiction readers don’t know Hansen’s books is their focus on the lives of gay men. Hansen’s investigator struggles with his committed relationship to another man, and all the cases he focuses on in this series involve men loving men.

They also include the brassy reality of gay nightclubs, paid sex, and vulgar drooling that objectifies both young men and older ones. But in each of the books, the motives for crime (and the pain Brandstetter feels) are always linked to love. A direction of love that was, at the time of writing, downright illegal and considered immoral and “sickening” by many.

Hansen’s writing steps away from those harsh edges through elegant description as well as page-turning plot and action. It also provides gorgeous examples of the Golden Age of American detective fiction, like this:

“In twenty years you could say and do a lot you wish you hadn’t. In twenty years you could store up a lot of regrets. And then, when it was too late, when there was no one left to say ‘I’m sorry’ to, you could stop sleeping for regret, stop eating, talking, working, for regret. You could stop wanting to live. You could want to die for regret.”

Or, of course, you could decide that killing someone else would ease your pain.

Fadeout opens with Brandstetter’s arrival in a box canyon above a California ranch town. An insured man’s car has been found in a dangerously flooded river, apparently accidentally landing there from a slick and risky wooden bridge. But no body has turned up. Should Brandstetter’s company pay out the life insurance benefit? Not if the man hasn’t died. And that’s what Dave Brandstetter must determine, through tracking down family, friends, recent activities, and yes, the course of love. All this, while he’s eye-deep in grief himself at the death (from cancer) of his 20-year partner, and blaming himself for the small things he could have done better, the added love he could have displayed, across years of tenderness and loyalty.

This kind of portrait of homosexual love turned preconceptions upside down when the books came out, of course, and for many, it still may.

When the break in the investigation arrives, it comes wrapped in the moody film ambience of the time: “A smoldering Valentino in white riding breeches ought to have been waiting in the motel office. It was a silent-movie set. Slot windows in deep white walls, guarded by grilles of black iron. Black carved beams, black chandelier. Floors of square red tiles. Tapestry-backed chairs with brass studs and gold fringe. But it wasn’t Valentino. It was Ito in a tidy white jacket.”

When this motel clerk pulls out a registration card and shares the information, Brandstetter is on his way to solving the case, although more risk and death follow. Neatly twisted and elegantly resolved, Fadeout marks the debut of one of the twentieth century’s most memorable investigators. With this re-issue, a new generation will experience both Hansen’s rich writing and taut plotting, and a compelling view of how life may have, in many ways, changed for the better.

 PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.  

NOTE:  Books 2 and 3 are also out now -- and reviewed at the New York Journal of Books: DEATH CLAIMS and TROUBLEMAKER.

Powerful New Crime Novel from David Guterson, THE FINAL CASE

 

[Originally published in New York Journal of Books]

“In The Final Case Guterson clearly denounces the forces of destruction in people who choose a dark and abusive anger over respect. It’s beautiful, profound, and an insistent page-turner.”

When the author of Snow Falling on Cedars steps into crime fiction, there’s every reason to expect an emotionally intense book with powerful and unforgettable imagery. And for The Final Case, those descriptors are exactly on target.

At the same time, the book’s page-turning progress of revelation and answers is less about the results of the upcoming trial—as the nameless narrator accompanies his father Royal through the frail and aging attorney’s defense of a horrible Seattle woman, his father admits that the woman and her husband “abused a girl they adopted from Ethiopia until she died of it.” With a fine understanding that he accepts this case to provide a defense for the indefensible, he outlines the possible reasons to stay out of it: “I guess I could tell myself that what she did just fills me with so much abhorrence that I can’t represent her.”

But Royal’s sense of how a trial should work, of the primacy of law, commits him to the effort: “If you convict someone because they’re abhorrent, and not because they broke the law, you might as well live in a dictatorship. And who wants that? I don’t. And another thing. I play my role according to my lights and I’m at peace with myself.”

In a sense, this moves the novel out of the traditions of crime fiction: Though the details of the case are excruciatingly stacked up, there is no suspense-riddled investigation to retrieve them—they are already available. And the punch to the gut is less in the horrific details of abuse than in the accretion of the beauty, courage, and honor of the short life of Abeba Temesgen, later Abigail Harvey. When her adoptive American parents destroy her, they crush something and someone that should have been a cherished treasure.

Guterson positions the book to take on more than this murder case, through his compact language that never relents in piling up truth. There are long sentences that feel like Proust, summoning all the details of a moment, an environment, an attachment. Unforgettable and most intense is a diatribe from the mother of Royal’s murderous client. For almost five pages, this Mrs. Huber justifies the evil her daughter lives by, beginning with, “You know what? You’re from Seattle. In Seattle, they elect communists to sit on their city council.” Through racism, accusations of brainwashing, predictions of an apocalyptic “next war,” and exalting of righteous and vicious Christians in a battle against “disrespect,” she vomits a diatribe that is frighteningly familiar.

Royal’s discouraged father admits in the car afterward, “I can’t put Betsy’s mother on the stand.” He explains: “She could have told the jurors a lot about Betsy, so they could come to understand her better. But no. She’s full of anger instead. The world’s a terrible place in her head, filled with terrible, horrible people who are one hundred percent wrong about everything.”

Royal’s son knows his father’s time is limited, that life is short now for the elderly man. He receives a blessing into this final case, this commuting and presence with his dad, and even going undercover to learn more about Betsy’s husband, by his wife Allison, a partner in this long-term affectionate and respectful marriage that mirrors the one his father lives in. The plain and sometimes exhausting labors that go into making family worthwhile are part of his chosen life, as they have been for his dad.

So the suspense of the novel becomes a question of how Royal and his family will sustain the enormous pressure of this trial, and its painful and indisputable revelations. In The Final Case Guterson clearly denounces the forces of destruction in people who choose a dark and abusive anger over respect. It’s beautiful, profound, and an insistent page-turner. Which, alas, will not be read by “the dark side.” But perhaps those of us following in Royal’s footsteps will gain courage from this final case that Guterson offers us, and become better able to make sure we do not live in what Royal describes as a dictatorship. We may be better prepared, after Guterson’s story.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.  

New Bibliomystery: THE DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, Eva Jurczyk

Poisoned Pen Press has cleverly caught a new bibliomystery, written by a Toronto librarian and book reviewer. In THE DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, Eva Jurczyk offers a glimpse into the high stakes of university funding, and at the same time provides a classic "follow the money" mystery with a strong-getting-stronger protagonist.

Liesl Weiss hasn't been able to get a top position at her university's most prestigious library—the special collections one, with the irreplaceable manuscripts. As an assistant to the amazing Christopher Wolfe, who manages both big-money donors and the collections themselves, she's been under a lot less stress than if she'd been at the top. So she was actually on sabbatical with a year off from responsibilities, when her boss lost the capacity to manage anything: 

Before Christopher's brain had set itself on fire, he had lacked a talent for details and had been reliant on Liesl to keep him to schedules and plans. Which was why ... she had called Christopher three weeks ago to remind him that the combination to the safe was scheduled to be changed. He was supposed to call her back once it was done and tell her the new code because it was prudent to make sure it was stored in more than one place. But Christopher and details being what they were, the call had never come.

Though Liesl can't open the safe for the university president, she quickly comes up with an alternative for that very day, to distract donors with another flashy item. "Another book was what Christopher would have proposed, Liesl was sure of it. As sure as she was that [university president] Garber didn't want a creative solution from Christopher's second-in-command. He wanted Christopher."

Though her distract-the-donors maneuver functions well enough for the moment, she's got to get the priceless manuscript out of that safe. And once the combination is discovered, she expects some relief. Unfortunately, the safe turns out to be empty. Surrounded by colleagues eager to see her fail, with one in particular ready to shove her down any handy staircase of issues, rediscovering the purloined "Plantin Polyglot Bible" is essential for her self-esteem and any hope of keeping the job she's temporarily holding down.

From here on, scholarly intrigue and greed run rampant. Swinging from one fraught situation to the next, Liesl is forced to set aside her mild and bookish approach. At least, in public. In private, in a moldy bathroom in the history department, she'll ball up a wad of paper towels, crush them against her face, and let loose a scream ... then gets back to a truly Sherlockian process of eliminating all possible suspects, until the one left is, let us say: highly improbable. At least, at first glance.

A true bibliomystery, rife with manuscript details and odd end of binding minutiae, is rare enough. Coupling it with a determined and maturing amateur sleuth doubles the achievement. Although this is Jurczyk's debut novel, her many articles and reviews have clearly honed her skills, and the pace is excellent, the writing smooth and exhilarating.

THE DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS will be released January 25, so this is an excellent moment to pre-order a copy for a very good read, indeed.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

The "Papers" of Mystery Authors: A Sisters in Crime New England (SinCNE) Event, Jan. 20

Ever wonder what happens to the papers of an author after they're gone? Here's an intriguing event that Sisters of Crime New England asked me to mention. Hey, it's a pandemic -- you might as well sign up for this, especially considering the promised "juicy secrets"!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

UNTOLD TALES FROM THE STACKS:
A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK AT ACQUIRING AUTHORS’ PAPERS

A webinar with Sue Hodson, retired curator of literary manuscripts, The Huntington Library, on January 20, 2022 at 7 pm.

Ever wonder what happens to the personal papers of famous authors? How do biographers unearth those juicy secrets about their private lives?

This presentation will tell the behind-the-scenes stories of how the personal papers of five authors - Charles Bukowski, Octavia E. Butler, Christopher Isherwood, Hilary Mantel, and Paul Theroux - were acquired by the Huntington Library. The Huntington is one of the world’s foremost private research libraries, located in San Marino, a suburb of Los Angeles.

Speaker Sara S. “Sue” Hodson, retired curator of literary manuscripts and a staff member for 38 years, acquired the collections for the library. She will tell the untold stories of the various ways these collections came to be housed at The Huntington.

This virtual event is free and open to the public. Please register at: https://bit.ly/3Cj6Bvy

A zoom link will be provided closer to the date.

This event is sponsored by Sisters in Crime New England. We are authors, readers, publishers, agents, booksellers, and librarians bound by our passion for the mystery genre and our support of women who write mysteries. 

PS:  Looking for mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.  

Well-Written Romantic Suspense from Colleen Coble, A STRANGER'S GAME

Real-life romance comes with doubts and concerns, not just amazing kisses — and seasoned author Colleen Coble presents that kind of well-rounded romance once again in her new book A STRANGER'S GAME.

The premise is new and interesting: Torie Bergstrom is actually the working daughter of a wealthy and powerful resort developer, and she doesn't often come back to the the Georgia property where her mother tragically died. But when her best friend also loses her life at the Jekyll Island resort, Torie slips into place under cover to dig into what's happened. 

Her charming meeting with a little girl and her dad, Joe Abbott, who are rescuing baby turtles, gives her a break from the tensions of grief, undercover work, and the actual security position she's stepped into. But unless she reveals the truth about herself to Joe, how can they build a friendship, let alone the romance that keeps tickling her heart?

Yet the minute Torie resumes her usual identity, she's got multiple risks in play: that Joe won't continue the friendship (or more), that the killer, if there is one, will target her, and that her relationship with her father may suffer.

Coble allows a reassuring glimpse of Joe's own integrity, losses, and motives by alternating the narrators of the book -- he and she both have their turns. Joe, for instance, is getting to know Torie when she drops some Latin on him:

"Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur," Torie said.

Joe blinked, then grinned. "I took Latin too. 'One's friends are known in the hour of need.'"

A pleasant warmth spread from his midsection at the realization she considered him a friend. It was a start.

Torie in turn gets to do some questioning on her own, with her father:

She stared into his blue eyes. "Why did you never remarry, Dad? You must have had plenty of opportunities over the years. Mom's been gone eighteen years."

He moved restlessly. "I've always been wary of anyone with an agenda. And too many women who flirt only want what my money and position will bring. They never look past the name to really see me."

"That's exactly how I feel! I didn't know you had the same fears."

In highly satisfying scenes, with just enough risk and plenty of insight, Torie and Joe learn everything they need, in order to figure out who's the criminal, and why—and what their own future may be.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here. 

Clever and Enjoyable Regency Mystery, TWILIGHT AT MOORINGTON CROSS by Abigail Wilson

At the opening of TWILIGHT AT MOORINGTON CROSS, many a mystery reader might guess at villainy: Mrs. Amelia Pembroke, a lovely young widow, is a long-term patient at Cluett's Mesmeric Hospital in Regency-period England. She's not getting better — her ailment involves falling asleep at moments entirely outside her control, along with some sort of seizure disorder. Mesmerism, of course, is another term for hypnotism; Amelia's not the only long-term patient here who seems stuck.

When the handsome young solicitor Ewan Hawkins arrives to help the hospital leader with a change to his will, the bequest directly concerns Amelia. To her astonishment, she is the main beneficiary of that will. But the conditions being pinned to this are, to say the least, astonishing: The widow must marry one of two candidates that Mr. Cluett has proposed, or else fail to receive the money. In fact, not only will she herself be tossed from her home at the hospital if she fails to make that marriage -- but the substantial inheritance will go to charity instead.

Amelia is appalled. The solicitor doesn't much sympathize -- he thinks Mr. Cluett was generous in giving her a choice of willing husbands, since a woman on her own couldn't possibly handle the bequest.

So who is the villain here? Is it Mr. Cluett, whose treatments have failed? Is it the solicitor, or one of the rather odd potential husbands? Could it be the long-term nurse who worked with the doctor? And which of these is responsible for the abrupt death, perhaps by murder, of Mr. Cluett as soon as an explanation of the will has been made?

The only people Amelia is sure are on her side are the other long-term patients, who have become her best friends. But when she accepts the young solicitor, Mr. Hawkins, as an ally in a suddenly ominously threatening institution, he's not as confident about any of the others:

I nodded and turned to leave but he grasped my arm: "Mrs. Pembroke, promise me one thing."

"Yes?"

"I need you to be careful."

"Of course I will, but—"

His fingers tightened. "I mean a great deal more so than usual. Lock your doors tonight. You might have a maid pull a trundle into [the neighboring] room if possible. And above everything else, don't trust anyone. Not until we know exactly who might be involved in Mr. Cluett's death."

Abigail Wilson's writing is smooth and deft, and her plot threads and red herrings are carefully placed. The story is lightly backed by Regency customs, and more so by the legalities of widowhood at the time, laid out effectively and without fuss. Both action and sleuthing are lively and believable, and the pace is well chosen.

All in all, TWILIGHT AT MOORINGTON CROSS presents a well-crafted romantic Regency mystery that's a delight to read, and may well lure readers to Wilson's other four titles in the same entertaining genre.

Released today under the Thomas Nelson imprint of HarperCollins.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.