8 minute read
STORIES OF THE YEAR ed. by Lee Child
the not quite perfect murderer
the Amish that added new enemies to the ones she’d made with her wild ways, but it’s still hard to imagine who could hate her enough to batter her to death. Kate visits Rachael’s childhood friend Loretta, who still kept in touch with her and whose horsecrazy daughter reminds Kate of Rachael. Even though Loretta always seemed too shy to make a good friend for Rachael, their youthful bond still endures, and Loretta’s reluctant to talk about Rachael and their shared past. Kate enlists the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation for help in processing the scene and checking out all the leads. Rachael had done well for herself but seemed to be living above her means and certainly hadn’t mellowed with age. Kate, who’s fallen from Amish grace herself, identifies with Rachael in a visceral way that makes the case special for her. Acknowledging that someone from her present life may be the killer, she still believes the answer lies in the past, and her hunch is borne out when shocking secrets come to light that roil the community and put her own life in danger.
Another dive into the past to solve crimes among the Amish that explores the group’s tense relationship to the modern world.
THE MYSTERIOUS BOOKSHOP PRESENTS THE BEST MYSTERY STORIES OF THE YEAR 2021
Ed. by Child, Lee Mysterious Press (451 pp.) $16.95 | Sep. 14, 2021 978-1-61316-238-5
Editor Child, series editor Otto Penzler, and their colleague Michele Slung team up to offer 20 gems from 2021 in the first volume of a new series.
Many of this year’s best follow a familiar road: pitting a rugged male hero, often with military street cred, against the bad guys. Doug Allyn’s “30 and Out” features an Afghan War vet who hunts a colleague’s killer; Jim Allyn’s ex-Army police veteran worries about being teamed with an unreliable partner in “Things That Follow.” But a surprising number include less traditional crime busters. A young man entranced with the Irish language is the gentle hero of Andrew Welsh-Huggins’ “The Path I Took.” Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski, a familiar female gumshoe, makes a welcome appearance in “Love & Other Crimes” along with the female proprietor of Wilde Investigations in Janice Law’s “The Client.” Moms get into the act in Alison Gaylin’s “The Gift” and Tom Mead’s “Heatwave.” So do new friends, in Martin Edwards’ “The Locked Cabin,” and frenemies, in Jacqueline Freimor’s “That Which Is True.” And in a startling tribute to the power of sisterhood, Joseph S. Walker shows how quickly female strangers can bond if the need is urgent in “Etta at the End of the World.” Women take starring roles on the wrong side of the law in John Floyd’s “Biloxi Bound” and Joyce Carol Oates’ “Parole Hearing, California Institution for Women, Chino, CA.” Child’s selections seem especially appropriate for 2021, a year that promises change on so many fronts. The only exception is the unexplained bonus reprint, Ambrose Bierce’s “My Favorite Murder,” a bitter tale of a man who revels in the sadistic murder of his uncle. That one belongs to 2020.
Diverse and diverting.
SAMMY TWO SHOES
DePoy, Phillip Severn House (192 pp.) $28.99 | Oct. 5, 2021 978-0-7278-5066-9
A quick trip to New York turns deadly for a good-hearted former car thief who’s now a valued agent of the Florida Child Protective Service. Foggy Moscowitz can’t resist the allure of seeing two of his favorite singers in a New York club. His reputation as a mensch causes the news of his arrival to spread, and he’s soon greeted by his childhood friend Sammy Two Shoes. Sammy begs Foggy to help his girlfriend, Phoebe, who’s getting death threats, possibly from an actress named Emory, a crazy cast member of a show she’s managing. Soon after Emory’s found stabbed with a pencil, the cops arrest Phoebe. Sammy’s so desperate to get her out of jail that Foggy calls on his Aunt Shayna, whose brisket is the best and who’s still connected to the mob. Since everyone feared and hated Emory, Foggy keeps looking for other suspects, working with Helen Baker, Phoebe’s public defender, even after Sammy claims that he stabbed Emory himself. Hired by Helen to investigate, Foggy soon turns up another childhood acquaintance, Tanner Brookmeyer, a stone killer with a finger in every dirty pot in the city who’d like nothing better than to see both Foggy and Sammy dead. Sammy helps Foggy pull off a raid on Brookmeyer’s apartment, where the discovery of damning evidence may help clear the case—unless the hail of flying bullets kills them all first.
An amusing caper that takes the sting out of its brutality by emphasizing the hero’s good points.
THE NOT QUITE PERFECT MURDERER
Duffy, Margaret Severn House (224 pp.) $28.99 | Oct. 5, 2021 978-0-7278-5061-4
A married couple with a dangerous past struggles in vain to keep a low profile. Patrick Gillard and his wife, Ingrid, are leading a quiet life in a small English village while Patrick investigates insurance claims and Ingrid writes crime novels. Their friend DCI James Carrick of the Bath Criminal Investigation Department
is looking into the murder of a teen whose death may be tied to a gang of hapless robbers who break into houses and highend shops, steal valuable pieces, and leave a trail of dead bodies. Patrick and Ingrid, MI5 veterans who now do part-time jobs for the National Crime Agency, have just the skills needed to help Carrick, who’s broken his leg playing rugby. But do they want to make themselves targets of yet another criminal gang? In Patrick’s case, the answer is yes, for he finds his insurance work boring except for his latest case, which involves a rich man who blames his gardener for damage to his car. The gang members are mostly offspring of the dim Baker family, all of them rumored to take orders from a wealthy crime boss. As Patrick works to pull together the threads of the criminal tapestry, he’s surprised to learn that his insurance case may be part of a bigger picture.
The pair’s unusual background and complex personalities add interest to the workmanlike way they go about solving crimes.
A SURPRISE FOR CHRISTMAS And Other Seasonal Mysteries
Ed. by Edwards, Martin Poisoned Pen (272 pp.) $14.99 paper | Oct. 12, 2021 978-1-4642-1481-3
Edwards, who must either really love or really hate Christmas, presents yet another collection of seasonal mysteries originally published between 1893 and 1963, half of them during the 1950s.
The most serious disappointment is Catharine Louisa Pirkis’ “The Black Bag Left on a Doorstep,” the historically important but uninspired introduction of detective Loveday Brooke, which Edwards has evidently chosen to make the other 11 reprints look good. And so they do. The highlights are stories by celebrity authors tweaking their usual formulas. G.K. Chesterton’s ceremonious “The Hole in the Wall” replaces Father Brown with the lesser-known Horne Fisher. The vanishing knife in Carter Dickson’s “Persons or Things Unknown” offers a precursor to the historical mysteries he would perfect as John Dickson Carr. And the normally suave Julian Symons’ “Father Christmas Comes to Orbins” is an elaborately plotted jewel robbery that goes elaborately wrong. For the rest, Roderick Alleyn solves the mystery of an unpleasant bully electrocuted by his radio in Ngaio Marsh’s “Death on the Air”; raffish Arthur Crook rescues a student nurse and her doctor fiance when their innocent actions land them in the clutches of a gang of murderous drug dealers in Anthony Gilbert’s overlong “Give Me a Ring”; the shortshorts by E.R. Punshon, Ernest Dudley, Victor Canning, Cyril Hare, and Margery Allingham provide virtuoso lessons in how much action and atmosphere can be packed into 10 pages; and Barry Perowne’s “The Turn-Again Bell,” in which a Christmas miracle saves both a stubbornly anti-religious father who’s refused to participate in his daughter’s wedding to the rector’s son and the rector in question, ends the volume on the most Christmassy note of all.
Is the Yuletide well running dry? Only next year will tell.
EVERY HIDDEN THING
Flanagan, Ted Crooked Lane (336 pp.) $27.99 | Oct. 12, 2021 978-1-64385-764-0
True to its title, Flanagan’s debut novel exposes every hidden thing in Worcester, which comes across as the dirty-laundry capital of Massachusetts and maybe the world. Called to the scene of a premature childbirth, paramedics Thomas Archer and Julio Tavares find that City Hall clerk Daisy Fontana’s son, Miguel, has already been born with the active but maladroit assistance of ex-cop Eamon Conroy and that the delivery hasn’t gone well. Tavares implores his partner to keep it all quiet. But Archer, who, one of Flanagan’s gratuitously overdetermined flashbacks shows, was largely responsible for getting Conroy kicked off the force and sent to prison before Worcester Mayor John O’Toole, his eye on the governor’s mansion, wangled a pardon for him, files another complaint against Conroy, who retaliates with all the brutality you’d expect of the future governor’s fixer. In other news, veteran Courier police reporter Lu McCarthy, Archer’s one-time unofficial stepsister, is downsized but promised a safety net if she files some stories supporting Conroy, and Gerry Knak, a misfit aflame with conspiracy theories stoked by his late wife, takes several steps closer to active membership in the Mount Marne Militia, which his father-in-law, industrial egg farmer Avis Locke, co-founded. As all the players and pawns jockey for position, you may wonder just how all the explosive developments they promise will fit together—until you realize that every single one of them, good guys and bad, is fueled by raging senses of isolation and entitlement, even if they couldn’t agree less just what it is they’re entitled to: wealth, power, security, a peaceful family life, another dawn.
