PAST LIFE
back in high school, arrives at their store complaining that her mystery-night party planner has gone AWOL. Thinking that this gig could solve their problems, Emma offers to facilitate the party. Apart from the inevitable sniping from Tabitha and her equally mean friends, things go well until Tabitha’s latest husband, a college dean, is murdered in the middle of the party, leaving Emma and her aunt, a college professor and mystery writer, as suspects. Although Emma has no motive, Nora, who teaches at the college where Tip Baxter was a dean, is in a longrunning fight to get the English department moved to a better space. Of course the spouse is always a suspect, but Tabitha’s money and position help shield her despite the fact that she’s awfully friendly with one of her exes. If they’re to clear their names and keep Tabitha’s bad-mouthing from destroying their livelihoods, Emma sees that they may have to solve this murder on their own. A nice mix of interpersonal relations and a heroine working to sort out the obligatory red herrings.
Mark, David Severn House (240 pp.) $28.99 | Dec. 7, 2021 978-0-7278-9092-4 Aector McAvoy fans, rejoice! The highly regarded Hull police officer is back in a searing exposé of buried secrets. When a fortuneteller is found murdered and mutilated, Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh and her team catch a case which, for Aector, turns into a devastating replay of the past. Twelve years ago, Aector’s future wife, Roisin Teague, an Irish Traveler and the apple of her powerful father’s eye, was staying with her aunt, clairvoyant Eva-Jayne Puck, to keep out of the way of a vicious feud between her family and a rival clan. When someone killed and mutilated Eva-Jayne in her own apartment, Roisin barely escaped. Aector learned from a CCTV image that Roisin, whom he’d been unable to forget after having “half killed” some men who’d raped her several years earlier, was a witness to Eva-Jayne’s killing. Instead of turning her in, he searched for her, and she helped him survive a vicious attack by the hired killer known as Cromwell. Now married to Roisin, a conflicted Aector lives with the false belief that his father-in-law killed Cromwell. Roisin, who knows better, has recurring nightmares she refuses to discuss with her husband. Now Cromwell’s come for revenge, using Aector and Roisin’s children as bait. Aector goes rogue to protect his children, who are caught up in a case that has become ever more complex and brutally dangerous. Polished prose, lovable recurring characters, and a stunning revelation make this a mystery to savor.
COLD BREW CORPSE
Lush, Tara Crooked Lane (320 pp.) $26.99 | Dec. 7, 2021 978-1-64385-788-6
A yoga teacher’s disappearance disrupts a budding romance. Lana Lewis’ life is finally on the upswing. After a brief marriage and an equally brief career as a reporter for a Miami newspaper, she slunk home to the Gulf Coast after both went bust. But running a coffee shop in a Devil’s Beach building owned by her aging-hippie dad has its rewards. Perkatory has two killer baristas, Erica and Barbara, to help Lana serve her quirky customers with style. And she’s on the brink of a meaningful relationship with local police chief Noah Garcia. Unfortunately, their first real date ends before it begins when the receptionist at his swanky apartment house hands Lana a note from the handsome detective apologizing for being called away on a case. It seems that Raina Rose, owner of Dante’s Inferno, a popular hot yoga studio, has disappeared. Her boyfriend, Kai Lahtinen, son of a prominent politician, is beside himself. Raina has no reason to run away. She just led a successful yoga retreat to Costa Rica, and her business is booming. But there’s also no reason to suspect foul play. Lush dangles the mystery of Raina’s whereabouts tantalizingly for a gratifyingly long time before descending into the tried-and-true cozy tropes: a corpse, cascading revelations about the dark side of the deceased, and a plucky heroine whose sleuthing inevitably leads to peril. If only Lush had sustained her initial momentum, she’d have a recipe fit to beat Starbucks.
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1 october 2021
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fiction
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kirkus.com
A DEADLY ENDOWMENT
Maxwell, Alyssa Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | Dec. 28, 2021 978-1-4967-3490-7
A scheme to help support an entrenched English estate goes fatally awry. Now that World War I has upended the assumption of the English aristocracy, Phoebe Renshaw of Foxwood Hall has convinced her conservative grandparents, Lord and Lady Wroxly, to give house tours in the hope of boosting their faltering bottom line. The first tour group consists of village schoolchildren and members of the Greater Gloucestershire Historical Society. Lady Phoebe and Eva Huntford, her maid and confidante, soon find it difficult to keep the group together and are annoyed by snarky comments and people slipping away. When putative historical society author Arvina Bell is found strangled in the library, the lazy chief inspector ends up arresting her son, but Phoebe and Eva, who’ve had much experience of murder, |
