AN EGGNOG TO DIE FOR by Amy Pershing

with his wealth of knowledge as a forensic semiotician. After all, the University of Chicago doesn’t hire just anyone, and Evan’s expertise is so impressive that it sometimes makes Addie consider giving up her penchant for bad boys to pursue something with him. Although Evan and his research assistant can figure out the symbols are runes associated with the Viking Age, their discovery doesn’t shed much light on the murder. So Addie’s colleagues consult Ralph Rhinehart, a specialist in cultural anthropology and dark magic who wastes no time developing a profile of the perp. But Evan hesitates to adopt Rhinehart’s easy answers, and the rivals’ verbal one-upmanship does little to help the department catch a killer whose body count is rising.

Well-researched enough to satisfy those up for a deep dive. Casual readers may look elsewhere.

DOWN A DARK RIVER

Odden, Karen Crooked Lane (336 pp.) $26.99 | Nov. 9, 2021 978-1-64385-869-2

The Victorian setting remains the same, but Odden exchanges refined Inspector Hallam, last seen in A Trace of Deceit (2019), for conflicted, determined Inspector Mickey Corravan. Corravan was a poor Irish orphan who worked as a stevedore and bare-knuckle fighter before signing on with the River Police and then Scotland Yard. So he seems the perfect choice for a murder most likely committed on the Thames. The body of a young woman is found floating in a small boat. Her only jewelry, a locket with initials and a picture, soon identifies her as the missing daughter of a wealthy judge. Although Corravan’s boss orders him to make the case his chief concern, he continues his search for a missing woman, the wife of a shipping magnate, whom he finds in an insane asylum for the poor. She’s speechless and so terrified of returning home that she attacks Corravan, who takes her to Dr. Everett, a medical friend who treats mentally disturbed patients kindly, while he investigates her husband. When a second young woman is found murdered in a rowboat, Corravan starts looking for suspects who may have hated their loved ones. The upper classes close ranks, and only maids and friends of the dead women give him any information. As the body count grows, Corravan’s temper threatens to get the best of him, while Scotland Yard is relentlessly criticized in the newspapers and his job hangs in the balance.

A harrowing tale of unbridled vice that exposes the dark underbelly of Victorian society.

AN EGGNOG TO DIE FOR

Pershing, Amy Berkley (320 pp.) $7.99 paper | Nov. 2, 2021 978-0-593199-16-9

An amateur sleuth must juggle entirely too many suspects in the death of a self-righteous prig. Samantha Barnes is the perfect cozy sleuth. Neither supercilious nor improbably ditzy, she has a sarcastic tongue and a passion for life, especially food. She’s settled into the house on Cape Cod she inherited from an aunt and rekindled her romance with her high school crush, harbor patrol officer Jason Captiva. Sam makes do writing food reviews and producing videos on the same subject for the newspaper her parents owned for many years. In the lead-up to Christmas, she’s extra busy preparing for her parents’ visit by planning a special five-fish dinner and wrapping the thoughtful, inexpensive presents she’s bought or made for family and the many friends she’s collected since her return. One of her favorite restaurants is run by the Brunis, a brother and sister whose enemy, selectman Caleb Mayo, is an alcoholic’s son who can’t abide any place that serves spirits. When Sam mistakes the Brunis’ office for the ladies’ room, she finds Mayo dead from a blow to the head and can’t stop herself from investigating. She discovers that Mayo used his power to threaten many people over past misdeeds that could ruin their current lives. Sam’s memories of her high school physics class provide the clue she needs to separate the innocent from the guilty.

A delightful sleuth, a complex mystery, and lovingly described cuisine: a winner for both foodies and mystery mavens.

INTO THE SOUND

Reinard, Cara Thomas & Mercer (349 pp.) $15.95 paper | Dec. 1, 2021 978-1-5420-2974-2

Her sister’s disappearance forces an alcoholic ex-journalist into a reckoning with their troubled past. “Please come get me; I need to talk…. There’s somebody coming,” Vivian Eddy tells her sister, Holly Boswell, just before the phone call from Bay Shore Marina is cut off. Defying her protective husband, nuclear energy project manager Mark Boswell, Holly leaves their sons, Otto and Tyler, with him and races out in a storm to meet the sister who begged for help. But she’s too late: Viv has vanished, leaving behind a bevy of secrets. As SassyVivi38, she’s been carrying on a sexy online chat with somebody calling himself TomKat45. The struggles of her husband, criminal defense attorney Clayton Eddy, to keep his

“A reminder that detection’s golden age was golden only for the well-to-do.”

the dead cry justice

distance from the mobbed-up relatives of his latest client, Dr. Raymond Gallo, a physician accused of running a prescription mill, have been torpedoed by his affair with Francine Gallo, the defendant’s sister and the cousin of mob boss Nicky Bellini. And Frankie is not Clay’s only lover. Holly seems initially cast as the innocent in all this, but the scars her parents, endlessly manipulative psychology professors Cynthia and Henry Forester, inflicted on both their daughters, whom their mother especially treated as experimental subjects, lead her to a series of singularly bad decisions Reinard traces in merciless detail. As she sinks deeper and deeper into the mystery of Viv’s disappearance, Holly finds herself questioning every lodestar in her life.

Though the heroine’s emergence from this purgatory may be less compelling than her descent, it’s still one wild ride.

THE MYSTERY OF THE SORROWFUL MAIDEN

Saunders, Kate Bloomsbury (336 pp.) $26.00 | Dec. 7, 2021 978-1-40886-692-4

Hired to settle a family problem, a proper Victorian widow is dragged into more sordid matters when her investigation into a divorce turns into a murder case. Based on her reputation for looking into things discreetly, Mrs. Laetitia Rodd is approached by a neighbor seeking services for a friend. Mrs. Sarah Transome has long turned a blind eye to her husband Thomas’ indiscretions, but now he’s left her in order to set up house with the much younger Constance Noonan. Mrs. Rodd is familiar with Thomas from his longtime acting work and his displacement in the tragic fire that burned down the King’s Theater some 10 years ago. Now, after leasing the Duke of Cumberland’s Theater, Thomas has been widely admired as Romeo to Constance’s Juliet. Though Thomas is a thorough cad, Mrs. Rodd can’t help but be impressed by his charisma when she meets him to discuss allegations that he’s neglected his wife. But Thomas quickly dismisses what Mrs. Rodd has heard, even if he freely admits that it echoes what he’s said. He sometimes erupts in anger, he explains, content to move on with his life. Mrs. Transome, whose three adult daughters all appear to take Thomas’ side, is not so inclined. Mrs. Rodd, who arranges to work with Thomas’ lawyer toward an amicable resolution, is amused to learn that Thomas has hired top barrister Frederick Tyson, whom Mrs. Rodd knows more familiarly as her brother. Everything seems wrapped up until a body is discovered in the remains of the King’s Theater fire. Now the focus isn’t on a stingy husband shirking on support but a potential murder.

The fastidious manners, which fit the 19th-century setting, are leavened with enough humor to suit modern tastes.

THE DEAD CRY JUSTICE

Simpson, Rosemary Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | Nov. 30, 2021 978-1-4967-3334-4

A stolen sandwich plunges a society woman–turned-detective into a dangerous case. Prudence MacKenzie and Blossom the dog are enjoying a spring day in Washington Square Park, pondering whether Prudence should go to a law school just opened to women, when a desperate urchin steals her sandwich. The pair track him to a filthy cellar, where they find him with a wounded, unconscious girl whom Prudence and her cabman friend, Danny Dennis, take to a clinic run by Quakers. Not only has the victim been beaten and violated, but someone has removed her lashes and eyebrows and tattooed her to look like a doll. The urchin, her brother, stays by her side, but soon they both vanish back into the mean streets. Prudence’s partner, a former Pinkerton agent, is recovering from bullet wounds but pitches in to help in an investigation which soon uncovers moral horrors in the highest reaches of society. Someone has been kidnapping young women, some of them quite wealthy, and turning them into prostitutes for a circle of men as influential as they are depraved. A well-off man who turned detective to search for his missing sister joins their efforts, and slowly they piece together a horrifying story. Never one to shy from danger, Prudence visits places from a brothel to an unusually creepy doll shop in her search for the missing boy and his sister, putting herself at risk of a fate worse than death.

A reminder that detection’s golden age was golden only for the well-to-do, and not always for them.

MURDER UNDER HER SKIN

Spotswood, Stephen Doubleday (368 pp.) $27.00 | Dec. 7, 2021 978-0-385-54712-3

A second case takes genius detective Lillian Pentecost and her sidekick, Willowjean Parker, from Brooklyn to Stoppard, Virginia, where Willow’s reunion with the circus that once took her in is provoked by murder.

Time was every kid dreamed of running away to join the big top, but Willow actually did it, escaping her abusive family to make a new home with Hart & Halloway’s Traveling Circus and Sideshow. It’s been four years since she bade the troupe farewell, but she still has fond memories of them in 1946, when a telegram from owner/ringmaster Big Bob Halloway asks her boss to come investigate the stabbing of Ruby Donner, the Amazing Tattooed Woman. It’s a pleasure for Willow to rekindle her ties with Maeve Bailey, the All-Seeing Madame Fortuna, and

Frieda, the Impossible Rubber Band Girl, who was more than a friend to Willow back then. But she’s not happy to make the acquaintance of the Amazing Annabelle, the ambitious new assistant to Nedley Johnson, the Great Mysterio, or to regard any of her old friends as suspects, or especially to hear that Stoppard Police Chief Thomas Whiddle has arrested her old mentor, knife-thrower Valentin Kalishenko, who supplied the weapon someone stuck in Ruby’s back. Lillian, who has a glass eye and multiple sclerosis, pieces together some unlikely clues— the recent decease of the boa constrictor Bertha in Ray Nance’s House of Venomous Things, the persistent hints of heroin, the unexpected subject of Ruby’s very first tattoo—to produce a surprising solution.

Rich circus atmosphere and a satisfying puzzle.

SO FAR AND GOOD

Straley, John Soho Crime (288 pp.) $27.95 | Dec. 7, 2021 978-1-641-29253-5

Just because Sitka, Alaska, private eye Cecil Younger is in prison doesn’t mean he can’t bobble a new case as completely as any of his old ones. Sentenced to seven years for the crimes he confessed to in Baby’s First Felony (2018), Cecil’s focused on keeping on the good side of Albert Munro, aka Fourth Street, the powerful fellow prisoner whose communication skills with women (for instance, not calling them all “bitches”) he’s working to improve in preparation for Street’s next parole hearing. Cecil’s priorities change when his daughter, Blossom, tells him that her friend Georgianna Paul has taken a DNA test and discovered that her mother, Alaska legislator Ida Paul, isn’t her biological mother—and that George’s DNA is a match for a kidnapped baby. News quickly leaks out, and acting through Blossom, Cecil instantly recommends attorney Harrison Teller to Ida, but it doesn’t help; Ida’s promptly arrested for kidnapping. Before she can reply to the charge that she and her husband, Richard Paul, stole the newborn daughter of Thomas and Kristy Thompson and passed George off as their own, Ida’s found dead in the prison, an apparent suicide. The court orders George placed with the Thompsons, and that’s when things really go off the rails, leading to a series of variously amusing and horrifying complications that will require Cecil to go on a thoroughly unauthorized onenight furlough in order to take matters into his own uncertain hands.

The storytelling is lumpy, but how many genre novelists mix as many different kinds of events and reflections as Straley?

MIDNIGHT HOUR A Chilling Anthology of Crime Fiction From 20 Authors of Color

Ed. by Vandiver, Abby L. Crooked Lane (336 pp.) $16.99 paper | Nov. 9, 2021 978-1-64385-752-7

An exciting anthology of 20 crime and suspense tales by and about people of color.

Vandiver brings together a diverse group of short stories that chill and thrill in their exploration of the many human passions that lead to crime. Tracy Clark tells the tale of a young punk looking for easy money who makes the fatal mistake of choosing the wrong victim. David Heska Wanbli Weiden explores the theft of a book covered in the skin of a Native American that turns out to be much more than a theft for hire. Editor Vandiver’s tale of murder has a surprise you won’t see coming. Callie Browning’s story of hate and karma is set on tropical Barbados. Richie Narvaez’s account of blackmail and revenge in Puerto Rico has plenty of odd twists. A district nurse and a parrot help solve a convoluted case of murder during a robbery in Frankie Y. Bailey’s quick read. E.A. Aymar surveys the choices available to a man down on his luck. Jennifer Chow follows two old high school friends whose decision to meet in an escape room has unexpected consequences, and magic and a séance drive Gigi Pandian’s story of a clever escape from an abusive husband. This eclectic collection will appeal to mystery readers.

An excellent collection of stories told from many different viewpoints.

THE ATTIC ON QUEEN STREET

White, Karen Berkley (400 pp.) $27.00 | Nov. 2, 2021 978-0-451475-25-1

White finishes her Tradd Street series with panache. Doughnut-addicted realtor Melanie Trenholm’s ability to see and converse with ghosts has caused considerable turmoil in her life. The old house she inherited in Charleston has provided thrills, chills, and unhappiness. Her husband, Jack, a bestselling author and father of their twins, is still angry with her for finding a long-lost treasure while he was ill—a treasure that was stolen along with his book idea by villainous Marc Longo. Since Longo thinks more treasure, the mythical half of the Hope Diamond, is still hidden in the house, he’s constantly snooping around. Mellie’s even more concerned with the spirit of a young woman who died on the property in the 1800s. The ghost appears to Jack’s teen daughter, Nola, warning her to beware of a tall man. In addition, a creepy doll in a coffin pops up, along with piles of antique buttons. While Jack