Title: What the Dead Know
Author: Laura Lippman
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 2007
Pages: 369
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 4-9 May, 2008
Thirty years ago, Heather and Sunny Bethany, 12 and 15,
disappeared without trace from a Baltimore mall.
A cold case, long forgotten by almost everyone.
Now a woman, arrested after fleeing from the scene of an accident,
blurts out that she's Heather Bethany.
Is she Heather? Or someone else?
She knows so much about the case,
yet there's something off about her and the police don't trust her.
Where's she been? Where's Sunny?
And why did she never come forward before?
We learn the truth by the end of the novel, …continue.
Title: Dancing with the Virgins
Author: Stephen Booth
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½
Publisher: Pocket
Copyright: 2001
Pages: 528
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 6-11 January, 2008
One woman has been mutilated and another murdered
on the bleak moors of Derbyshire.
Detective Constable Ben Cooper and
Detective Sergeant Diane Fry investigate.
The novel is at least as much about the tense relationship
between Cooper and Fry as it is about the mystery itself.
This is the second in a series of Cooper-Fry books.
Cooper is a local boy, deeply rooted in the rural community,
pleasant and trusting.
Fry is a bitter loner, who transferred in from a distant city.
Quickly promoted over Cooper, she can't understand
his easygoing nature.
The …continue.
Title: The Boy-Bishop's Glovemaker
Author: Michael Jecks
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½
Publisher: Headline
Copyright: 2000
Pages: 331
Keywords: mystery, historical
Reading period: 20-22 December, 2007
Days before Christmas 1321,
a glovemaker is murdered in the cathedral town of Exeter.
Sir Baldwin and his friend, Simon Puttock,
are asked to investigate by the Dean of the Cathedral.
Jecks juggles a complex plot with a large cast of characters,
and manages to keep them distinct and interesting,
while describing the intersection of cathedral and town life
and Christmas rituals in medieval England.
Title: What Came Before He Shot Her
Author: Elizabeth George
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ½
Publisher: Harper
Copyright: 2006
Pages: 722
Keywords: fiction, mystery
Reading period: 11-17 November, 2007
In Elizabeth George's previous book, With No One As Witness,
a senior police officer's pregnant wife is gunned down in London
by a 12-year-old boy in an apparently random act.
This book tells the story of how that shooting came to happen.
The three Campbell children are abandoned on their aunt's doorstep
by their feckless grandmother, months before the shooting.
They are mixed-race children with deep-seated damage:
their alcoholic father was killed in front of them a few years ago
and their mother has long …continue.
Title: The Monster of Florence
Author: Magdelen Nabb
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½
Publisher: Arrow
Copyright: 1996
Pages: 485
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 22-27 October, 2007
Nabb's recurring character, Marshal Guarnaccia, is a non-commissioned
officer in the carabinieri, the Italian military-style police,
who is stationed in Florence.
Guarnaccia is a slow, dogged plodder and a wallflower,
who is largely overlooked by those who encounter him,
but who nonetheless gets to the bottom of mysteries.
An old case, involving a series of double murders over a twenty-year
period, has been reopened for political reasons.
Several police officers, including the Marshal, have been seconded
to a task force.
The Marshal is troubled by what is clearly an attempt by …continue.
Title: To the Power of Three
Author: Laura Lippman
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ½
Publisher: William Morrow
Copyright: 2005
Pages: 434
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 16 September, 2007
Days before graduation, a shooting takes place in the girls' bathroom
at a suburban Maryland high school.
The popular, pretty Kat is dead;
the athletic Josie was shot in the foot;
and the drama star and shooter, Perri,
is comatose after shooting herself in the head.
The three girls had been inseparable since third grade,
though Perri and Kat had fallen out the previous summer.
What happened? What led Perri to such an act?
Lippman builds a compelling story,
weaving together the aftermath and
the events leading up to …continue.
Title: Club Dead (Sookie Stackhouse #3)
Author: Charlaine Harris
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ½
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: 2003
Pages: 258
Keywords: mystery, vampire, romance
Reading period: 15 September, 2007
Sequel to Living Dead in Dallas.
Sookie's vampire boyfriend, Bill, has gone missing
and seems to have had an affair with another vampire.
To get him back—and she's not sure she wants him back—she must go undercover
among the vampire glitterati of Jackson, Mississippi.
She retrieves him eventually, but not without some physical battering,
and emotional upheaval as she finds herself
attracted to another vampire and a very nice werewolf.
Entertaining, often funny, occasionally touching.
Harris offers an amusing and original explanation
for why Elvis continues to be …continue.
Title: Death by Chick Lit
Author: Lynn Harris
Rating: ★ ★ ★
Publisher: Berkley
Copyright: 2007
Pages: 242
Keywords: humor, mystery, chick lit
Reading period: 29 August, 2007
Lola Somerville, Brooklyn author,
recently married to geek-hottie Doug
(now there's a demographic I can relate to),
and best friend of hipster Annabel,
starts tripping over bodies of chick lit writers.
Someone is winnowing the chick lit bestsellers list
and Lola feels compelled to find the killer.
This gentle parody is a cross between chick lit and Nancy Drew.
Although happily married, Lola is as insecure and neurotic as ever.
No longer worried about getting Mr. Perfect,
she's more concerned about whether she's ready for a baby
and whether her …continue.
Title: Blown Away
Author: G.M. Ford
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Publisher: Harper Collins
Copyright: 2006
Pages: 315
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 28 August, 2007
Blown Away is the latest in Ford's series about Frank Corso,
investigative reporter, bestselling author, and abrasive jerk.
Corso is pressed by his publisher to look into a year-old case in Pennsylvania
where a victim was sent into a bank with a bomb chained around his neck,
then blown up in the parking lot when he was pinned down by the police.
Corso's questions provoke a couple of assaults upon himself,
and then the FBI drag him to Los Angeles,
where a series of identical bank robberies is taking …continue.
Title: The Art of Detection
Author: Laurie R. King
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
Publisher: Bantam
Copyright: 2006
Pages: 495
Keywords: mystery
Reading period: 23-25 August, 2007
Laurie R. King is best known for two series of detective novels.
One stars Kate Martinelli, an SFPD inspector living in present-day
San Francisco with her lesbian partner, Lee, and their young daughter, Nora.
The other is set in the 1920s and is written in the voice of Mary Russell,
the young wife of the still-active sexagenarian, Sherlock Holmes.
Here, King ties both series together.
Martinelli investigates the murder of Philip Gilbert,
the doyen of the local Sherlockians,
who recently came across a manuscript
that seems to have been …continue.
Previous »
« Next