MURDER WITH DARJEELING TEA
Smith, Karen Rose Kensington (352 pp.) $8.99 paper | May 24, 2022 978-1-4967-3398-6 A trip to buy a birthday present embroils a Pennsylvania tea shop owner in yet another puzzling mystery. Daisy Swanson wants nothing more than to support her family financially and emotionally, serve great food, and continue to develop her romantic relationship. So far, so good: Her shop in Willow Creek—part of Pennsylvania’s Amish Country—is doing fine, her daughter and son-in-law’s unplanned pregnancy has worked out well, her other daughter will soon be off to college, and her romance with former cop–turned-woodworker Jonas Groft is progressing nicely. When she visits the shop of oddly reclusive dog lover Wilhelm Rumple in search of a concrete dog statue for Jonas’ birthday, she overhears an argument between Rumple and wealthy Stanley King over money. Jonas and Rumple both volunteer at Four Paws Animal Shelter, which is run by a brother-sister team, and when Rumple is murdered in a dog run there, Daisy, who’s no stranger to investigations, feels compelled to see what she can discover. Although she turns everything she learns over to the police, who are struggling to pin down a motive, she still becomes a target for a killer who fears she knows too much. The deepest joys in this cozy are the relationships between people you actually care about.
A SUNLIT WEAPON
Winspear, Jacqueline Harper/HarperCollins (352 pp.) $27.99 | March 22, 2022 978-0-06-314226-8 In 1942, Maisie Dobbs gets embroiled in diverse cases that involve her own family. Jo Hardy, a pilot for Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary, is ferrying a plane across England when she’s shot at from the ground. When Jo and a friend return to the spot to investigate, they find a Black American soldier tied up in a barn who claims that his White soldier friend has been kidnapped. Later, Jo realizes that in the segregated American Army, Pvt. Matthias Crittenden is in deep trouble, and he’ll be held for the murder of the missing soldier. After Jo’s friend is killed during another plane delivery, Jo calls on Maisie, who’s living with her extended family in Kent, to investigate. Only the pull of Maisie’s highly placed American husband, Mark Scott, allows her to question Crittenden. Meanwhile, Maisie, who hates injustice of any sort, learns that her own adopted daughter is being bullied in school, another problem she resolves to straighten out. Maisie visits 44
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1 march 2022
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fiction
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the barn and finds new evidence that may prove a connection between Charlie’s disappearance, whoever shot at Jo’s plane, and the impending visit of Eleanor Roosevelt, which worries Mark because of a credible threat to Maisie’s safety. Maisie’s ability to talk to all sorts of people and discern the truth helps her untangle a complicated mystery involving miscreants whose lives have been so warped that they’ve lost all empathy for others. A superb combination of mystery, thriller, and psychological study with an emphasis on prejudice and hatred.
science fiction & fantasy BOOK OF NIGHT
Black, Holly Tor (320 pp.) $19.59 | May 3, 2022 978-1-250-81219-3
A former thief who specialized in stealing magical documents is forced back into her old habits in Black’s adult debut. Charlie Hall used to work as a thief, stealing for and from magicians—or rather, “gloamists.” In this world, gloamists are people with magical shadows that are alive, gaining strength from the gloamists’ own blood. A gloamist can learn to manipulate the magic of their shadow, doing everything from changing how it looks to using it to steal, possess a person, or even murder. Gloamists hire nonmagical people like Charlie to steal precious and rare magical documents written by their kind throughout history and detailing their research and experiments in shadow magic. Gloamists can use onyx to keep each other from sending shadows to steal these treasures, but onyx won’t stop regular humans from old-fashioned breaking and entering. After Charlie’s talent for crime gets her into too much trouble, she swears off her old career and tries to settle down with her sensible boyfriend, Vince—but when she finds a dead man in an alley and notices that even his shadow has been ripped to pieces, she can’t help trying to figure out who he was and why he met such a gruesome end. Before she knows it, Charlie is forced back into a life of lies and danger, using her skills as a thief to find a book that could unleash the full and terrifying power of the shadow world. Black is a veteran fantasy writer, which shows in the opening pages as she neatly and easily guides the reader through the engrossing world of gloamists, magical shadows, and Charlie’s brand of criminality. There’s a lot of flipping back and forth between the past and the present, and though both timelines are well
