13 minute read
THE RISING TIDE by Ann Cleeves
the rising tide
LAST BUT NOT LEASHED
Brady, Eileen Poisoned Pen (272 pp.) $8.99 paper | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-72824-934-6
A veterinarian, her friends, and several dogs save the day. Kate Turner is filling in for another vet whose yearlong absence offers her a great opportunity to live rent-free while paying off her student loans. In addition to becoming popular with the people in the Hudson Valley whose pets she cares for, she’s also garnered quite a reputation as a crime solver—though her boyfriend, Luke, who’s left a job with the police to go to law school, has recently seemed a bit distant. When Kate joins her vet tech, Mari, at a lecture about organizing everything in your life, she finds the body of the lecturer, Sookie Overmann, lying in a pool of blood. Both her Gramps and Luke know that she won’t be able to resist doing a little detective work between rounds of caring for her diverse clients. As Sookie’s assistant moves into her job, her husband becomes the leading suspect because of their impending divorce and a missing bunch of money. Meanwhile, a badly bitten pit bull left in the clinic parking lot and the feisty Chihuahua Little Man, one of Kate’s favorite clients who may have cancer, temporarily join her crew at home. At a New Year’s dance, Kate is pursued by a charming artist, and a woman apparently jumps to her death. Soon thereafter Luke breaks off their romance. With time on her hands, Kate has leisure for enough snooping to hit a killer’s nerve. Her savior turns out to be a tiny dog.
A pleasing mélange of mystery and pet lore.
DEWEY DECIMATED
Brook, Allison Crooked Lane (336 pp.) $26.99 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-63910-090-3
A librarian solves a very cold case with help from a friendly spirit. Carrie Singleton has had a wonderful year. She’s landed a great job at the Clover Ridge Library, joined the town council, and become engaged to Dylan Avery. Now that the library’s acquired the building next door on the town square, renovations are underway courtesy of Powell Construction, whose owner, Sean Powell, has an excellent reputation. Evelyn Havers, the library ghost whom very few lucky souls have seen, has often helped Carrie with problems. But she’s taken aback when the workmen find a body in the cellar of the building under renovation. Carrie plans to keep out of the investigation until the body is identified as that of Dylan’s uncle, Alec Dunmore, whose ghost turns up in the library with a very limited memory of who he is and who murdered him. The three members of the Whitehead family who owned the building and sold it to the town were dominated by the dishonest James, whom many can easily imagine as a murderer, and there are plenty of other suspects. In the meantime, the town council has to decide what to do with a neglected nature preserve: make improvements, turn it into a park, or build high-end condos. The pressure put on Carrie by a snarky reporter who’s joined her to investigate places her friendship with police chief Lt. John Mathers in jeopardy. Even so, she can’t resist a puzzle and hopes the past and present will provide some answers.
Books, ghosts, murder, fun.
THE RISING TIDE
Cleeves, Ann Minotaur (384 pp.) $23.99 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-2502-0453-0
Indomitable Inspector Vera Stanhope, whose lonely youth with a lawless father has given her a unique approach to crime and punishment, returns in a heartbreaking case. On the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast of England, the past drives the present. A small group of old school friends have been meeting there, at Pilgrims’ House, every five years for half a century. They first came to the island on a school trip organized by a young teacher hoping to “challenge their preconceptions” on “a kind of secular retreat.” They bonded on that first trip, but what may have really brought them together was the death of Isobel, one of their number, at their first reunion five years later. At that time, Annie and Daniel were married and mourning the loss of a baby. Since then, Lou and Ken have also married, and now Ken has dementia. Rick has become a famous television personality, and Philip, a priest. Now, after a night of drinking and reliving the past, Annie, long divorced from Daniel, finds Rick’s body hanging in his room. The fact that Rick was recently fired from his job over allegations of sexual impropriety does not convince Annie that her notably vain friend would commit suicide and leave himself to be found naked. Soon after Vera and her crew are called in, she confirms that Rick was smothered and hanged. The Holy Island is an island only when the tide covers the causeway; indeed, trying to drive through the water caused Isobel’s death all those years ago. Although there are certainly present-day reasons why someone might have killed Rick, Vera and her team do a deep dive into the past and find an unexpected motive.
A character-driven puzzler that ends in a painful denouement.
BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH
Flower, Amanda Berkley (336 pp.) $17.00 paper | Sept. 20, 2022 978-0-593-33694-6
Emily Dickinson uses the power of her family name to help solve a murder. After Willa Noble lands the position of maid of all work at the Amherst, Massachusetts, home of the Dickinsons, her life changes in many ways. When her younger brother is killed by a horse, stable owner Elmer Johnson blames him, but Willa is skeptical, since Henry had an affinity for horses, and on a recent visit to her he claimed to have a plan that would make them rich. Sensing Willa’s doubts, Emily supports her maid when the police question her, encouraging her to investigate her brother’s death. Emily doesn’t attend church, spends much of her time writing, and often seems lost in the clouds. But her intellect is formidable, and she uses her father’s position as a congressman to push the limits of respectable female behavior. Together with Emily’s dog, Carlo, the two women visit the stables where Henry died and learn that the horse that killed him has been deliberately burned. Jeremiah York, a young Black man who was a friend to Henry, was absent the night he died and refuses to say where he was. The women hope to find clues in the diary Henry left or in an anonymous threatening letter. Their investigations suggest a link between Henry and the Underground Railroad during a time when slave catches are coming north, igniting controversy. Emily insists that Willa accompany her family on a trip to Washington, D.C., where they learn a great deal, but not until they’re back in Amherst do they finally put the clues together.
Historical context adds excitement to the twin mysteries of murder and the poet’s hidden life.
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
Harrison, Cora Severn House (224 pp.) $29.99 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-72785-052-2
A Reverend Mother, a police officer, a newspaper reporter, and a Jewish doctor extend their long, successful record of solving crimes in Cork in the 1920s. Reverend Mother Aquinas has seen the worst of humanity, and nothing surprises her. But the Christmas double murder of an archdeacon of the Anglican Church of Ireland along with one of her most troublesome and downtrodden students makes her very angry indeed. Bishop Thompson comes himself to inform her that Dr. Scher, the police surgeon, thinks that both 7-year-old Enda O’Sullivan and the archdeacon were poisoned. Inspector Patrick Cashman and journalist and law student Eileen MacSwiney, two of the Reverend Mother’s most accomplished and beloved students involved in the case, rely on her wisdom to help solve a horrible crime with political implications. Apparently someone had tricked Enda into climbing into the cathedral, putting poison into a chalice, and then eating poisoned candy. Though the mischievous Enda had the voice of an angel, neither he nor his mother was popular in the Catholic community, and the Reverend Mother has to use all her influence to arrange a proper funeral. Patrick quickly learns that the archdeacon was disliked by a great many people for a great many reasons but wonders whether any of them are serious enough to kill for. Even in an Ireland free of England, members of the old guard still occupy many of the top positions. As a Catholic, Patrick relies on his Protestant assistant for insight. In the end, Dr. Scher’s knowledge of antique silver gives the Reverend Mother the answer.
Plenty of suspects dramatizing Ireland’s religious differences provide an excellent character-driven mystery.
FALL GUY
Mayor, Archer Minotaur (304 pp.) $28.99 | Sept. 27, 2022 978-1-2502-2418-7
A murdered burglar in a stolen car leads Joe Gunther’s Vermont Bureau of Investigation team into some truly nasty places. Despite the absence of any identification, the corpse is quickly identified as that of Don Kalfus, and the Mercedes in whose trunk he’s been found belongs to Lemuel Shaw, a New Hampshire native who returned home to live the good life after making his bundle in New York. Since a phone found on Kalfus contains images of child pornography and Angie Neal, the girl who answers the door when Joe’s task force goes looking for Lisa Rowell, the phone’s owner, is clearly the model for one of the images, the leading question immediately becomes who’s most invested in producing and consuming this smut. It’s not Lisa Rowell, who’s nothing but a fictional avatar for Kalfus. Could it be Melissa Monfet, Angie’s mother, or Trevor Buttner, her ex-con live-in? Or could it be Lemuel Shaw, whose Mercedes was stolen not from his bucolic estate but from outside the strip club he frequented—a club from which he’d been ejected that night after arguing with bouncer Don Thompson, another pseudonym for Don Kalfus? As Joe and his teammates cross back and forth between Vermont and New Hampshire finding more and more rocks to turn over, canny readers are likely to assume they know where this all is headed. But as a series of brutal revelations stacked up like wartime corpses in the last few chapters indicate, things are much worse than they anticipated.
A meticulous, professional procedural whose climax packs a wallop.
demolition
DEADLY SPIRITS
Miley, Mary Severn House (224 pp.) $29.99 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-44830-684-8
A talented investigator and a medium who occasionally hits the mark are involved in yet another murder case. It’s 1924, and life hasn’t been easy for Maddie Pastore. Fleeing an abusive family, she met and married Tommy Pastore, whose job driving a truck for the Chicago mob got him killed, leaving her and baby Tommy penniless. A chance meeting with the mother of a school friend who makes a living as medium Madame Carlotta Romany gives Maddie a new lease on life. When she runs into singer Sophie Dale, she recognizes her as the sister she hasn’t seen for many years. A few days later, Sophie’s husband, Sebastian Dale, calls to tell Maddie that Sophie’s been arrested for murder. Maddie’s friendship with Det. O’Rourke gets her in to see Sophie, who claims that during a big party where she was singing for wealthy Nick Bardo, she felt unwell and passed out in a bedroom, where she was later found holding a bloody candlestick with Bardo’s body on the floor. Sophie remembers nothing, and although Maddie is sure she’s innocent, she knows it won’t be easy to prove it. Maddie’s prodigious skills at digging up facts encourage her to investigate Bardo’s feuding family and his ties to the mob. She gets a hand from well-known police detective Alice Clement, who has a special interest in helping women. But Maddie has to keep Alice from learning that she works for a medium and fend off rival mobs’ efforts to get her to set up Al Capone for a hit. Walking a dangerous path, she still manages to uncover the truth.
Plenty of Roaring ’20s ambience and enough red herrings to keep things mysterious.
DEMOLITION
Oldham, Nick Severn House (224 pp.) $29.99 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-44830-694-7
Retired Det. Superintendent Henry Christie, taken off the shelf again to question a suspect who won’t speak to anyone else, finds himself investigating a rash of crimes committed before he was born.
When Celia Twain discovers her husband’s corpse only a few hours after she’d publicly threatened to kill him over his adultery, the Kendleton constabulary are naturally interested. Since Celia refuses to talk to anyone but Henry, who’s been around forever, DS Rik Dean offers him 500 pounds for a day’s work getting her statement, which naturally doesn’t include a confession of murder. Meantime, things have heated up dramatically in the village. Although James Twain had plenty of enemies, the news that he was a business partner of Marcus Durham, whose bullet-riddled body was recently found in his own swimming pool, strongly suggests that the same person may have killed them both. A group of young toughs have attacked wheelchairbound Veronica Gough, and one of them has tried to drown her. Then several of them break into her house, and one of them threatens her with violence, triggering her memory of her rape by another villager during the celebrations of VE-Day in 1945. The more closely Henry, now awarded the nonce title of Civilian Senior Investigating Officer, looks into the past, the more convinced he becomes that Veronica’s memories may hold the key to a pair of unsolved murders committed even earlier, back in 1941. As DS Debbie Blackstone, Henry’s old boss in the Lancaster Cold Case Unit, observes, “It’s all about people taking things from other people.” Even as Henry is making arrests, Oldham continues to multiply complications in the final chapter, and the story ends with quite a cliffhanger.
The busiest, saddest, untidiest village mystery ever.
SOUTH CENTRAL NOIR
Ed. by Phillips, Gary Akashic (280 pp.) $16.95 paper | Sept. 6, 2022 978-1-63614-054-4
Editor Phillips packs 33 square miles of one of Los Angeles’ most iconic neighborhoods into 14 compact stories. Many of the contributors choose historic venues as their settings. In Emory Holmes II’s “The Golden Coffin,” a Mississippi country boy discovers the grandeur of the Dunbar Hotel, “built by Black folks to cater to people of color in a segregated city.” In “All That Glitters,” Gar Anthony Haywood sets a family drama inside quirky Watts Towers. Naomi Hirahara chronicles the last day of the Kokusai Theatre in “I Am Yojimbo.” Other tales focus more on historic events. Penny Mickelbury reflects on the changing demographics of the Great Migration in “Mae’s Family Dining.” Désirée Zamorano offers a chilling look at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in “If Found Please Return to Abigail Serna 158 3/4 E MLK Blvd.” Still others offer tales of misery that know no time or place. A teenager tries to save her baby brother from their neglectful mother in Jervey Tervalon’s “How Hope Found Chauncey.” In “The Last Time I Died,” Jeri Westerson’s feisty schoolgirl meets her match at St. Vincent’s Academy, a Catholic girls’ school. A former ward of the state makes his uneasy way forward in Nikolas Charles’ “Where the Smoke Meets the Sky.” And two ex–GI’s make an uneasy adjustment to civilian life in editor Phillips’ “Death of a Sideman.”
