Speaking of Mysteries

“There is nothing more frightening than the secrets our loved ones keep from us,” says Robert Crais about Elvis Cole’s latest case in The Big Empty. Traci Beller, an influencer known as The Muffin Girl, hires Elvis to find out what happened to her father who went to the outskirts of Los Angeles ten years... Read more »

Sharon Short first heard the story of Great Aunt Ruth—the inspiration for Aurelia Escalante, the protagonist of Trouble Island—right before her wedding when she was gifted Aunt Ruth’s ring, which she’s wearing in her photo. When Sharon’s soon-to-be sister in law suggested a trade for another family heirloom, Sharon’s response was to decline because, “What’s... Read more »

In Gathering Mist, the ninth installment in Margaret Mizushima’s engaging series featuring Deputy Mattie Wray and her K-9 partner, Robo, both Mattie and Robo find themselves seconded from the Colorado Rockies to a search-and-rescue operation in the forests of Washington State’s Olympic peninsula. A nine-year-old boy—the son of a movie star—is missing from a remote... Read more »

At the beginning of Fortunate Son, Andrew Bridgeman’s debut thriller, Ben Danvers thinks his biggest challenge is giving a presentation to the executives at his company. Then he finds he isn’t who he grew up thinking he was—and people want to kill him      

There’s a blizzard on its way—and not just the snow and ice kind—in Cold Trail, the fourth installment in Taylor Moore’s series featuring Garrett Kohl. Someone is blowing up natural gas facilities and it may—or may not—have something to do with the ecological demonstrators who have shown up. Oh, and environmental activists are the only... Read more »

Renowned Sherlockian, Les Klinger discusses Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell, with Nicholas Meyer, his sixth”edit” of a heretofore undiscovered manuscript by John H. Watson M.D. The stakes are always high, but especially so in tracking down the Zimmerman telegram. Should it not be intercepted the consequences could be nothing less than Great Britain’s... Read more »

Everyone needs more Will Trent in their lives. In This Is Why We Lied, Karin Slaughter’s 12th Will Trent mystery, Will and his bride Sara Linton are off on their honeymoon at the off-the-grid McAlpine Lodge. It’s an idyllic setting—until the screams start when the manager of the lodge is brutally murdered      

Tom Straw’s The Accidental Joe: The Top Secret Life of a Celebrity Chef, blends murder, mirth, high-stakes espionage, gastronomic highs and lows and killer locales for an appetizing thriller that launches a new series featuring peripatetic bad boy chef Sebastian Pike and his CIA handler Cammie Nova. Tasty, indeed       Photo of Tom... Read more »

Fans of Don Winslow are—understandably—in denial that City in Ruins is his final crime fiction novel. But if it’s true, if Don has put away the keyboard to devote himself to political activism, City in Ruins, the third and final installment of his Danny Ryan trilogy, just might prove that he saved the best for... Read more »

In Past Lying, the seventh novel in Val McDermid’s series featuring Karen Pirie, the action—or restriction thereof—is in and about Edinburgh during lockdown in Spring 2020, as Karen and her team investigate whether or not a partial manuscript found in the papers of a recently deceased crime fiction writer is a roadmap to the the... Read more »

Crime fiction fans rejoice: with The Spy Coast, Tess Gerritsen launches a new series featuring retired CIA Maggie Bird and her fellow former intelligence officers, all of whom now reside in Purity, Maine. And, while members of the Martini Club—as the ex-spooks call themselves—may be retired from active duty, their combined skills are formidable. And... Read more »

In The Last Applicant, Rebecca Hanover’s debut adult thriller, a parent desperate to secure her son’s admission to an exclusive Manhattan private school, in Rebecca’s words, “goes there” and stalks the school’s admissions director. To tell you anymore would spoil any one of the many twists and turns the story takes       Photo... Read more »

The stakes couldn’t be higher for Junie Lagarde, the protagonist in The Beautiful Risk, Lynn Hightower’s new thriller. Her dog Leo—who, as Junie’s hearing dog, is much more than a pet—survived the plane crash in the French Alps that killed her husband. Nothing will stop Junie from finding Leo and looking into the plane crash... Read more »

In a case of Herculean wordsmithing, Denise Mina is scheduled to publish two novels on August 1, 2023: The Second Murderer, which continues the story of Raymond Chandler’s immortal Philip Marlowe; and Three Fires, the story of the late 15th century Florentine Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola—he of the original Bonfire of the Vanities—that has resonance... Read more »

Not to put too fine a point on it, but having two titles published on the same day is a Herculean authorial accomplishment. But such feats of wordsmithing are not surprising to fans of Denise Mina, whose two titles The Second Murderer, a Phillip Marlowe novel, and Three Fires, the story of 15th-century Dominican friar,... Read more »

Sheriff Titus Crown, the protagonist in All the Sinners Bleed, S.A. Cosby’s recently published thriller, is not a man to be trifled with. He’s a man who, when he ran and—surprising himself, won—the election for sheriff “had made a choice to live in a no-man’s-land between people who believed in him, people who hated him... Read more »

Fans of Robert B. Parker’s extensive crime fiction universe, rejoice! Alison Gaylin is continuing the story of PI Sunny Randall, in Robert B. Parker’s Bad Influence. And in Bad Influence, Sunny—who’s never had a digital footprint —jumps into the world of social media with both feet when she’s hired to protect two Instagram influencers and... Read more »

In Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows, black-bag publicist Mae Pruett doesn’t worry about the truth, only The Story, because whether you call what she does picking up the pieces or placating The Beast, what she does is a nasty business. And Mae is great at it     Photo of Jordan Harper ©Brian Hennigan

Part domestic suspense, part espionage thriller, Alma Katsu’s Red London—the follow-up to Red Widow—is all tension. Mildly disgraced CIA agent Lyndsey Duncan is working to rehabilitate her reputation by taking an assignment in London sussing out a potential Russian defector, until she’s loaned out to MI6 in an effort to befriend the wife of a... Read more »

Cara Black took a break from her book tour to talk about Night Flight to Paris, the follow up novel to Three Hours in Paris, which introduced us to Kate Rees, the Oregonian sharpshooter whose considerable skills are put to work by England during World War Two. Clandestine work can often go sideways as it... Read more »