Carrie Doyle Spins Another Quirky, Fun Mystery: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGONFRUIT TATTOO

The third Plum Lockhart mystery in the Trouble in Paradise series is at least as much fun as its predecessors, It Takes Two to Mango and Something's Guava Give. At first glance, Plum's plunge into entrepreneurship with her own villa rental company on the tropical island of Paraiso looks rash and foolish -- and could anyone really be such a murder magnet as this scrappy yet star-struck amateur sleuth?

But Plum can grow on a person! A refugee from corporate marketing and the now outdated world of New York City magazines, Plum is determined to salvage her self-esteem by out-competing the very nasty Damian Rodriguez in representing the best villa rentals on the island. If that means making nice with the glitterati on a luxury yacht in the neighborhood, Plum has the guts to do it.

When one of the staffers from the yacht wants to consult her about a deadly threat, Plum has trouble clearing time for this distraction. So when the girl with the dragonfruit tattoo gets attacked, is it Plum's fault? She'll clear some emotional space by dressing down one of the sleazy men on board:

"I don't like your behavior, Joel," said Plum, who crossed her arms angrily for effect. "You are humiliating your wife. Everyone on the boat watches you flirt outrageously with an actress young enough to be your daughter. It's pathetic. I hate what you are doing to my friend, and you should remember you're a married man in a position of power and not exploit it."

The left vein on Joel's temple started to throb, and Plum thought it might explode.

Doyle's plotting, as usual, is tight, and the action sparkling; if Plum's combination of courage and naivety stilts some of her trilled or whispered conversation and moves the plot twists to the quirky side, it's a fair trade for the fun of discovering how she'll handle the next intensely awkward situation. Not to mention whether she'll ever have a functioning romance with Juan Kevin, the security guard who's been trying to date her!

Don't take anything seriously in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGONFRUIT TATTOO. All the fun and frivolity may not give you the feel of a tropical vacation ... but a few hours away from real life might be almost as good as one of the many fruity cocktails that Plum keeps swigging.

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

Dark Longings and Dork Disasters, in THE MOTION PICTURE TELLER from Colin Cotterill

 Is it crime fiction or is it magical realism? Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri Paiboun forensic tales, set in the collapsed corruption and congenial community of working Laos, have already shown this author must blend the two. 

In THE MOTION PICTURE TELLER, Cotterill leaps to 1996 Bangkok and the run-down but almost cute -- in a very dorky way -- lives of two unambitious men running a video rental store. Pay attention to Supot, who delivers mail for the Royal Thai Postal Service. (Cut to a view of his uniform, shabby perhaps but worn with some muddled pride as he dodges unpleasant dogs with his pack of letters and parcels.) Supot's "real life" begins after work each day, assisting in a video shop and watching films with Ali, the official owner. (Ali can be quite mischievous to his customers, but he makes ends meet.)

When these two nerdy, film-obsessed guys discover a film called "Bangkok 2010" that could be the greatest ever -- the kind that makes Supot's almost girlfriend consider, for a moment, actually fooling around with him, before opting to watch the film again -- they tumble into a bottomless mystery: The actors are unknown. The production company has vanished. How could they be holding a copy of the greatest film ever, and be unable to find out anything about who made it and when it's going to be released? Wait -- is this the only copy ever made?

When Supot finally reaches someone connected with the mysterious film, mystery readers will know the tale has just taken on danger (beyond that posed by dogs to mail carriers), as the letter offers a strong of urgent questions:

Where did you find 2010? Is it a copy, or is it the original film? Has anyone else seen it apart from you? If your answer is yes, how many people have seen it? ... I want you to promise me that nobody else will watch it, and that no copies are made of it.

From here, the story threads get wilder and Supot is soon way out of his comfort zone. The charm of Cotterill's writing is that this video fanatic, in love with a vision of an actress, is so believable, so close to the dork in each of us, that the pages must keep turning. 

THE MOTION PICTURE TELLER could be the strangest mystery you read this year, or even this decade. And you absolutely won't forget it.

Releasing January 17 from Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press.

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

Outrageous Alaska Adventure from John Straley, BLOWN BY THE SAME WIND

The town of Cold Storage, Alaska, is John Straley's best invention: a place where almost any sort of humane criminal activity can and does happen, with a steady twang of Alaskan country music in the background and a slew of strong women enjoying cash-poor life as much as the men around them. The minute you aim for this locale, you give up control of what makes sense -- and ride with a mix of wild characters for the duration. Earlier Cold Storage novels began with The Big Both Ways, then Cold Storage, Alaska, and What Is Time to a Pig? 

It's crime fiction ... sorta. Remember the scene in The Godfather with the horse's head? That could happen in Cold Storage, on the chilly and salty coast. Except it could be a grizzly head. Still attached. And the person who held the door for the bear to come in would still be standing nearby, tipping back a beer (not the "craft" kind).

There was still no road into or out of Cold Storage, but somehow, in 1968, the world had arrived. In March, Lyndon Johnson announced that he had decided not to rub for president. Some said it was because of the Tet Offensive in the first part of the year. Boys from Cold Storage had gone to the war and three of them had died ... All of the boys had fished with their families and were memorialized on a hill off the road to the dump.

But the tale gets into gear with one of the boys who made it home, Glen Andre, with long hair, a tendency to not speak much, and an army jacket "with a bronze star pinned on the front." Because this is, after all, Cold Storage, you should simply nod hello with the rest of the crowd when the Kentucky anti-war monk Thomas Merton also arrives in town ... followed by a couple of obviously nasty criminals, and a probable FBI agent.

Still, even in Cold Storage, if a person wants privacy he can sort of get it, and if Thomas Merton wants to call himself Brother Louis, and teach something about God, that's up to him. The trouble is, he's explaining it to a striking young woman named Venus, who never met a boundary she didn't want to cross. Or a man who wasn't fascinated by her.

[The brother] began to see Venus not as an American teenager, but as a sprite from A Midsummer Night's Dream. On that night he followed Venus and the lights on her helmet up the hill, where at the summit he would try to reveal the mystery of both God's omniscience and His absence as Louis's heart beat like a steam engine in his chest.

By this point, either you devoutly want to read this novel, or you wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot bookmark. If you've embraced Donald Westlake, Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, or the Junior Bender books from Timothy Hallinan, I hope you're already ordering a copy of BLOWN BY THE SAME WIND. You're going to have a lot of fun and an occasional moment of thinking maybe you just figured out something you care about, a lot. 

Published, of course, by the boundary-challenging Soho Crime, an imprint of Soho Press.

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