Enthusiastic readers of Deborah Crombie’s Kincaid/James police procedural series often have to wait a long time between books, but those readers are mollified by the excellence of the stories. The most recent book, A Bitter Feast, was a banquet for fans, with its Cotswold setting and closed country house plot. Following tradition, the new mystery…
Dave Beckett is barely twenty-one years old in the winter of 1979, but fears that he’s already becoming a death magnet. Even as a beat cop like he is in the city of West Valley, California, it’s fairly unusual for anyone to come across a murder in a place that averages only 18 to 25…
Years ago, I had lunch with some friends in a London restaurant. It was in a courtyard near Holborn, a strange cobbled yard with a stranger name: Bleeding Heart Yard. When I got home, I Googled the location and found that, in the seventeenth-century, a woman called Elizabeth Hatton (of Hatton Garden fame) was murdered…
Jesse Cooper is your average computer science student at American University. Perhaps the most unusual thing about him is that he lives with his double-first-cousin twice-removed, the redoubtable Ethel Crestwater. Now in her seventies, Ethel essentially runs a boarding house for federal agents and other law enforcement officers in her Arlington, Virginia home. Since Jesse…
Ecologically, New York City is an estuary; a giant, cleansing filter. Figuratively it is the same, and I know of no place on earth that can be so described in identical terms as accurate as they are disparate. Among the many gifts bestowed by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton, there is revolutionary 18th century NYC as…
The penultimate installment of the Department Q Scandinoir procedural series starts off with a bang, as a freak lightning strike kills six people standing outside a Danish university. One woman survives the direct strike, and responds to the paramedic attending to her with questions expected and reactions less so: “Yes, we were together. Are they…
Put your hands together, chère, for the first book in a new series, set in the Big Easy. Lafourche Parish, Louisiana. SUNDAY, JUNE 15, 10:15 P.M. The story opens with a bang. Rocky Hebert suspects his old acquaintance, a doctor, is in trouble, and he’s right. Rocky smelled death before “he withdrew a disposable glove…
CHAPTER ONE Joe Gunther crested the hill overlooking a small cluster of flashing, multihued vehicles below. They made him think of a swarm of fireflies, settled untidily by the side of the road, but in fact were a group of cruisers and unmarked cars much like his own. They appeared randomly scattered, as if abruptly…
Maggie D’arcy is an unforgettable character. In The Drowning Sea she throws caution to the wind and moves to Ireland for the summer. Her life-changing decision is made easier by the difficult circumstances that led to her losing her job as a homicide detective on Long Island, a story told in A Distant Grave. Her…
Ronnie FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2001 That last Friday afternoon in November, the day Esther went missing, I was supposed to be doing my homework at the desk in my bedroom. We finished early on Fridays—at two thirty—and Mum liked me to get all my work done before the weekend. Everyone in the class had to…
