Missouri Mystery: A DECEPTIVE HOMECOMING, Anna Loan-Wilsey

The fourth in the Hattie Davish mystery series, A DECEPTIVE HOMECOMING, is scheduled for release July 28 -- just in time to slip it into the summer reading stack. Here's a well-written "traditional" mystery with intriguing setting, likeable amateur sleuth, and neatly chosen plot twists that keep the solution to Hattie's murderous puzzle out of reach until the final chapters.

Hattie Davish is a professional private secretary -- her typewriter and her shorthand skills are less important in the long run than her discretion and absolute loyalty to her employer. In the first three books of this series (A Lack of Temperance, Anything But Civil, A Sense of Entitlement), Hattie's embrace of this profession has set her aside as an unusual woman in the 1890s: one who is confident in her value and willing to take risks to protect her employer's life or reputation. Thus, Anna Loan-Wilsey brings us an "amateur sleuth" whose motives for investigating crimes (or even just extreme social disgrace!) are strong and compelling on behalf of the wealthy persons who pay for her services.

In this fourth book in the series, though, Hattie is on her own -- her employer is away, and she's abruptly responded to a request to return to her own hometown of St. Joseph, Missouri, where she attended Mrs. Chaplin's School for Women and developed her self-reliance and skills. She believes she's been asked (discreetly) to support her old schoolmate and friend Ginny, whose father has died. But things feel "off" somehow":

Ginny didn't show any visible signs [of sorrow] that I recognized: red-rimmed, puffy sad eyes, and bowed, trembling shoulders. [Instead,] Her countenance bore deep-seated dismay or displeasure and not grief. She hadn't even been holding a handkerchief. The Ginny I knew would've been inconsolable, not simply put out.

Had she changed that much in the time that I was gone?

For Hattie, being on hand for her friend was reasonable, despite the trip of halfway across the country from home. "When I'd learned of her father's sudden death, I didn't hesitate to attend the funeral and do whatever I could to ease her pain." But chapter 1 ends with Hattie's remarkable statement: "Now, after seeing the wrong body in the coffin, I wish I had never come."

There's much more wrong that a misidentified death in St. Joseph. Hattie's former teachers recruit her to visit the students and set an example for them -- everyone knows something about her recent investigative adventures! -- and almost immediately, she learns the school is in chaos: financial troubles that may involve fraudulent bookkeeping, damaged textbooks, distressed staff members and overexcited students.

The unanticipated reappearance of Hattie's suitor from her student years unsettles things further, but Hattie isn't just independent: indomitable and determined are traits she embraces. Even insisting that the rather frightening staff of the local State Lunatic Asylum allow her to look inside is something Hattie can handle, though her own past makes the experience doubly frightening for her.

Loan-Wilsey threads gentle humor into the suspense, without ever diminishing Hattie's dedication to truth and justice. Like her earlier books, this one is an enjoyable, satisfying read, meeting all the best expectations for a traditional mystery: red herrings, mixed motives, characters who have secrets (and what about Hattie's own?). No need to read the others first, though -- the books are nicely independent (like Hattie!), and although they are clearly well researched, the history never gets in the way of Loan-Wilsey's best skill: spinning a good story with ample rewards in the reading.

Laura McHugh, THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD: Ozark Mountains Murder Mystery

THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD is a debut novel -- but you'll only know that from the outside of the book, where it says so. Inside it, between the covers, this is expert storytelling from a librarian, software developer, mom, and above all, prime novelist. Laura McHugh's emotionally wrenching suspense gives us two memorable women: Lucy Dane, just finishing high school, and her vanished mother, Lila. Each unfolds her experiences from first-person vantage -- and yet in McHugh's hands, this clarity still hides from us the darkness of some souls nearby. Take your cue from short-term high school art teacher Mr. Gerardi, who returned to Chicago without completing a semester of teaching in the town of Henbane. Obsessed with the many references to the devil in local place names, the teacher even focused on the town itself:  "Henbane. Another name for nightshade -- the devil's weed. He's everywhere. He's all around you."

And indeed, the book opens with a death -- the death of Lucy's once best friend Cheri Stoddard, whose body has just been discovered. Lucy knows she wasn't the kind of BFF she should have been to Cheri. By not standing up for her friend, and not somehow preventing her death, Lucy's already failed her own self-standards.

But she's been handed a stacked deck and doesn't yet know it, as her dad never gave her the reak details of her mother's disappearance. Only as the counternarrative from Lila wraps around her daughters does the town's truly hellish characteristic appear: the power allowed to one twisted man who takes what he wants, including the innocence and freedom of whatever is lovely in this place.

And when Lucy's father warns her that there's evil nearby, he does it far too vaguely:

He stumbled around whatever he was trying to say. "Crete'll be looking out for you ... but you need to use your best judgment. You don't know what kind of folks you might run into up there, and ... you just need to mind your business and do your work and stay out of anything that don't concern you. And if anything makes you uncomfortable, let me know. I can give him some reason you gotta quit."

"What're you talking about?" I asked. I could tell he wasn't joking around, but I couldn't imagine what had him worried. "I'll be renting canoes and selling worms. It's not exactly dangerous."

But that's not true. And the danger is not the job itself, or even "stranger danger" -- it's as close as family and neighbors, and Lucy's father's decision to keep the details to himself leaves it up to Lucy to discover them. As did her mother before her.

Creepy, suspenseful, deeply human, and sustained by strands of loyalty, love, and friendship, the summer in front of Lucy is McHugh's many-layered portrait of a place, a community, a time, and the dangerous edge that some people continue to hone between men and beautiful women. In turn, it's Lucy's task to discover what happened to her mother -- and perhaps to save herself from repeating the same tragedy. But how will she know for sure, if nobody will tell her?

She'll find out. And so does the reader. McHugh sets it up so that every added scrap of the past revealed becomes another reason to follow Lucy, to whatever she can salvage for her life.