Themed anthologies are hit or miss; sometimes the concept creates a cohesive whole (and other times an incoherent hole). So far, Lawrence Block has edited three anthologies of stories inspired by art, and the newest—as people who’ve never stepped foot on a horse track say—is the Trifecta. The first, In Sunlight or in Shadow, focused…
Trace of Evil by Alice Blanchard marks the series debut for rookie police detective Natalie Lockhart set in the eerie town of Burning Lake in Upstate New York. I’ve been a huge fan of Alice Blanchard since I read her smashing 2003 thriller The Breathtaker, and she just keeps getting better and better. Trace of…
M.L. Longworth’s latest mystery, A Noël Killing, the eighth volume of her Verlaque and Bonnet series, is set in the small town of Aix-en-Provence. Actually, Aix-en-Provence counts 143,00 inhabitants, so not really a small town, especially for French standards. It is currently the twenty-second most populated city in France. Still, M.L. Longworth manages to create a…
The tidings of doom as this novel begins are coming less from actual fact than from a psychic acquaintance of Bryant’s whom he’s only too happy to insult as a cut-rate Cassandra. Still, Bryant can’t help but worry. Theirs is a partnership that relies on the other for balance, though the less generous could claim…
Mrs. Laetitia Rodd works hard for her money. She is the middle-aged widow of a clergyman—her beloved Matt—and neither of them expected a “vigorous man of one-and-fifty, who had known scarcely a day’s illness in his life,” to die suddenly and without “making provision for his widow.” It’s 1851, a turbulent time in England: horse-drawn…
First in a new series by Paige Shelton, Thin Ice follows thriller author Beth Rivers as she tries to escape a fanatic’s obsession in the wide-open spaces of Alaska. Paige Shelton is a prolific mystery writer with several popular series already under her belt: the Scottish Bookshop Mystery Series, the Country Cooking School Mystery Series, the…
A Madness of Sunshine is a complicated, compelling story that addresses the pain posed by the title of Thomas Wolfe’s famous book, You Can’t Go Home Again. This pithy description of the plot illustrates why readers will be drawn by the story. Anahera Rawiri left New Zealand at twenty-one, fleeing small-town poverty and the ghosts…
The Last Affair by Margot Hunt opens with a murder but quickly shifts gears to six months prior, as the novel starts its process of parsing through the series of events that ultimately led to the grisly killing. Really, the murder takes a backseat to the interesting intersections between the victim and possible suspects the…
Prudence is to serve as maid of honor to her good friend Eleanor Dickson at an opulent wedding that will unite the extremely wealthy (and Yankee) Dickson family with the Bennetts, Southern aristocrats fallen on hard times in the wake of the Civil War. Eleanor deeply cares for her fiancé, Teddy Bennett, and the affection…
Murder, She Wrote: A Time for Murder by Jessica Fletcher & Jon Land is the 50th entry in the USA Today bestselling Murder, She Wrote series, where two timelines converge as Jessica Fletcher returns to high school to investigate the murder of an old colleague while we meet Jessica as a young teacher solving her…
