THE BULLET THAT MISSED by Richard Osman

“Your next must-read mystery series.”

the bullet that missed

A DARK STEEL DEATH

Nickson, Chris Severn House (224 pp.) $29.99 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-72785-047-8

Sabotage and murder keep the depleted Leeds police force in a constant state of exhaustion as the Great War rages. Between the illness that makes his boss barely able to work and the frightening symptoms of dementia his own wife exhibits, Deputy Chief Constable Tom Harper has plenty on his plate. His wife, Annabelle, is being looked after by Belgian refugees they’ve taken in, and their daughter, Mary, is working two jobs as she grieves her fiance’s death. Then a fire at a munitions factory kills dozens of the women working there. Soon thereafter, there’s another arson attempt, and although the newspapers are banned from reporting it, gossip spreads quickly. Harper, collaborating with the army, is unpleasantly surprised when the next incident is the fatal shooting of a guard at a military hospital. The only clues are a sharpshooter’s bullet and the difficult shot, strongly suggesting that the killer was a trained marksman. A fingerprint on the bullet is not in the system, and a search for army sharpshooters reveals that all of them were sent home from the front mentally and physically unfit. Still, someone has stolen a sniper’s weapon from the local armory. Despite scheduling hours of extra manpower and calling in every favor, Harper’s force is getting nowhere. They identify one marksman with mental problems in a local hospital, but he seems harmless. When his boss dies and Harper is made acting chief constable, his problems only increase. There’s more paperwork, attempted bribes he doesn’t want, and more murder. Only a chance remark puts the police on the right track.

A gritty police procedural with well-drawn characters.

UNDER A VEILED MOON

Odden, Karen Crooked Lane (336 pp.) $27.99 | Oct. 11, 2022 978-1-63910-119-1

Inspector Mickey Corravan, now promoted to acting superintendent of the Wapping River Police, investigates a real-life 1878 disaster whose tentacles reach throughout his homeland and into his own adoptive family.

Mickey’s daily concerns are abruptly put on hold by the collision on the River Thames of Princess Alice, a wooden pleasure steamer, and Bywell Castle, an iron-built collier, that ends with Alice’s sinking and the deaths of hundreds of passengers and crew members. Suspicion quickly falls on John Conway, the Irish helmsman who replaced William Schmidt, Capt. Thomas Harrison’s usual pilot aboard Bywell Castle, at the last moment when Schmidt was murdered. Members of Alice’s crew are all too ready to blame Conway for the accident, and rumors mounting in intensity link Conway to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who are also charged with causing a disastrous recent rail accident outside the Sittingbourne station. Mickey, who’s Irish himself, is eager to find other suspects and even more eager to keep Colin Doyle, his foster mother’s youngest son, out of the trouble he seems determined to cultivate through his dealings with James McCabe, powerful leader of the Cobbwaller gang, and his unsavory lieutenant, Seamus O’Hagan. The cost will be high, but eventually Mickey will uncover a plot whose instigators Odden has shielded from suspicion by the simple expedient of omitting them from the “Select Character List” that introduces the tale. The appended “Reading Group Questions,” by contrast, are uncommonly provocative.

A densely imagined anatomy of Victorian skulduggery with a heaping side of Irish troubles.

THE BULLET THAT MISSED

Osman, Richard Pamela Dorman/Viking (368 pp.) $27.00 | Sept. 20, 2022 978-0-59-329939-5

The Thursday Murder Club gets into another spot of bother, this time involving some British television celebrities, a Russian former spy, and an international money launderer—among others.

This is the third book in real-life British TV celebrity Osman’s delightful series of mysteries set at Coopers Chase, a bucolic English retirement community. The first two have been bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic, and Steven Spielberg has bought the movie rights; if you haven’t read the earlier books, The Thursday Murder Club (2020) and The Man Who Died Twice (2021), it would be a good idea to go back and start at the beginning. As this installment opens, the four septuagenarian members of the club—former MI6 agent Elizabeth Best, retired nurse Joyce Meadowcroft, psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif, and longtime union organizer Ron Ritchie—are investigating another murder from their cold-case files. It seems that Bethany Waites, a local TV journalist, was about to crack a huge tax avoidance scheme when her car went over a cliff 10 years ago. Who was she going to meet late at night? Why wasn’t her car caught on more surveillance cameras between her home and the cliff? Of course, the friends aren’t content to do their research online; they inveigle their way into a variety of situations that enable them to question Bethany’s friends and colleagues, the chief constable in charge of the case, the drug dealer they put in jail in the last volume (who’s determined to kill Ron as soon as she gets out), and many other more or less savory characters. And that’s not even to mention the mysterious Viking who’s threatening to kill Joyce if Elizabeth doesn’t kill Viktor Illyich, a competitor-turned-friend who, when he worked for the KGB, was known as the Bullet. All of this enables Osman to engineer

scenes such as “three old men...the gangster, the KGB colonel and the trades union official” playing snooker, drinking whiskey, and thinking maybe this is all they really need in life. The mysteries are complex, the characters vivid, and the whole thing is laced with warm humor and—remarkably, considering the body count—good feeling.

Your next must-read mystery series.

MURDER AT THE SERPENTINE BRIDGE

Penrose, Andrea Kensington (304 pp.) $27.00 | Sept. 27, 2022 978-1-4967-3253-8

An aristocratic sleuthing duo seeks a killer in Regency London’s back alleys and drawing rooms. The Earl of Wrexford and his wife, Charlotte, have had a great deal of experience with mysteries, and their wards, Raven and Hawk, former street urchins with a scientific bent, are always up for a new adventure. So when their dog turns up a body floating in Hyde Park’s lake, the Serpentine, their curiosity is piqued. The late Jeremiah Willis—whose father was a formerly enslaved man from Virginia and mother a White Englishwoman—was an inventor of note, and Wrexford and Charlotte soon learn that his orphaned nephew, young Peregrine, stands to inherit a large estate from the other side of his family. But Peregrine’s Uncle Belmont, who turns out to be married to Charlotte’s brother’s sister-in-law, resents the fact that his older brother’s late-in-life son will inherit the estate he’d long regarded as his. The boys soon become friends, and Peregrine joins the Wrexfords in London, where a government representative asks Wrexford to find the person who killed Willis and stole the design for a revolutionary rifle and, of course, to recover the papers setting forth that design. The representative, who’s not above a little blackmail, hints that his higher-ups know that Charlotte is the gadfly illustrator A.J. Quill, who often criticizes government policy. In honor of a celebration of peace, London is awash in visiting leaders and royals, including the czar of Russia. Once Wrexford learns that there’s to be a secret auction for the papers, he determines with the help of his family and friends to find them first and uncover a killer.

A charming, action-packed mix of historical mystery and Regency romance.

SINISTER GRAVES

Rendon, Marcie R. Soho Crime (240 pp.) $27.95 | Oct. 11, 2022 978-1-641-29383-9

The discovery of a nameless corpse gives Ojibwe college student Renee “Cash” Blackbear another excuse to slack off from her studies. Norman County Sheriff Dave Wheaton may have rescued Cash from the car crash that claimed her mother’s life and taken her under his wing years ago, but that doesn’t mean she has to like every one of his ideas for her life. When North Dakota’s spring floods lead to the discovery on Little Lake of a pregnant woman who’s been bashed and smothered to death, it’s a godsend for Cash, because Wheaton once again calls on her for unofficial aid. Soon after the victim is identified as Edie Birch, a second body is washed up by the floodwaters: that of Lori White Eagle, from Devils Lake. Cash, who sees portents and feels emotional vibrations that pass other people by, is convinced that the two women can be traced to the church led by Pastor John Steene, whose wife, Lillian, is the organist. The Steenes are more than receptive to her appearance at the church, inviting her for meals and urging her to return. But her questions about the two child-sized graves on the church grounds are met with a stony silence that convinces her their cordial hospitality is only one aspect of their relationship with local young women. Rendon’s clipped style perfectly complements the laconic dialogue of Cash and her cavalier indifference to her schoolwork, her friends, her neighbors, and virtually everything else except for those two graves.

Not much mystery but lots of menace in this hyperunderstated character piece.

A DEATH IN DOOR COUNTY

Ryan, Annelise Berkley (336 pp.) $27.00 | Sept. 13, 2022 978-0-593-44157-2

An outdoor paradise turns deadly. Door County, along Lake Michigan, offers recreational boaters and sport fishers a “tiny slice of bliss.” But something beneath the water’s tranquil surface is leaving a trail of death. It starts with animals, a fish and a deer whose bodies appear to have been mauled by a giant creature on the scale of the Loch Ness monster. Later there are human victims with distinctive, disturbing bite marks: kayaker Oliver Sykes and salmon fisher Will Stokstad. Jon Flanders, chief of police on Washington Island, is concerned enough to hire Morgan Carter, who owns Odds and Ends, a shop filled with examples of nature gone wrong. Morgan, who spent her formative years traveling the world with her cryptozoologist parents in search of monsters including Nessie herself, has a healthy respect