Captain Sam Wyndham and Sergeant Suran Banerjee are back in The Shadows of Men, the fifth installment in Abir Mukherjee’s series set in post-World-War I Calcutta. Banerjee has found himself in a spot of bother, in that he’s been accused of murdering a Hindu scholar in a same-as-it-ever-was story of political and religious tension as it segues from a smolder to a conflagration
Photo of Abir Mukerjee ©Nick Tucker
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Alison Gaylin opens The Collective, her latest thriller, with a quote from Euripides’ Medea, “Hate is a bottomless cup; I will pour and pour.” Meet Camille Gardner who, five years after the death of her daughter as the result of a violent sexual assault, is living at the intersection of grief, anger and vengeance. It was one thing when Camille’s dark space was solitary, quite another when she joins a forum where she can share
Photo of Alison Gaylin ©Michael Gaylin
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Syria isn’t the only thing aflame in Damascus Station, David McCloskey’s debut thriller set against the ongoing conflict: McCloskey’s protagonist, CIA officer Sam Joseph, has fallen for a source, strictly forbidden, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Only, when it comes to the CIA “F-ups happen to good officers. Deception does not. You can lie to your wife, your girlfriend, your kids. But not to the CIA.” Along the way, the double crossing is so dizzying the characters would be giddy if the consequences weren’t so deadly
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In Road of Bones, James R. Benn’s 16th installment of his Billy Boyle series of World War II mysteries, Billy is off to the USSR, where gaslighting is a way of life, a map cannot be found for love or money, and Night Witches take to the skies to silently rain terror on Germans fighting at the Eastern Front. With allies like the USSR, Billy wonders, who needs enemies?
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From the outside looking in, Paloma’s life in My Sweet Girl—Amanda Jayatissa’s debut thriller—seems charmed. Adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage at age twelve, Paloma has grown up with loving parents surrounded by affluence in San Francisco. Now, at 30, Paloma is grappling with events from her past and dealing with ghosts, some more real than others
Photo of Amanda Jayatissa ©Sandun Seneviratne
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In Striking Range, Margaret Mizushima’s seventh installment in her Timber Creek K-9 mystery series, Timber Creek County Deputy Mattie Cobb braves ice storms and murderers while looking into the death of a young woman and the kidnappers of the woman’s newborn
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At the start of Karen Cleveland’s new thriller, You Can Run, it’s just a normal day for CIA reports officer Jill Bailey, who postpones approving a new intel source to take a break and log into the video stream from her son’s daycare. Only he’s not there. To get him back Jill must do “just one thing” and never speak of it to anyone…
Photo of Karen Cleveland ©Jessica Scharpf
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Enola Holmes shares many of her much older brother Sherlock’s skills and she brings them to bear in maybe her most challenging case so far, Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche, the latest installment in Nancy Springer’s delightful series. Because back in the day in Victorian England, a husband, father, or, for that matter, a brother, could have an inconvenient woman “removed” to a sanitarium without any right of redress for such transgressions as reading a novel
Photo of Nancy Springer ©AP/Jaime F. Pinto
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Eight volumes in, Speaking of Mysteries co-founder Les Klinger talks about the astounding series of vintage mysteries that he edited, wrote introductions for and annotated for The Library of Congress Crime Classics. The choices may not be household names—in the homes of crime fiction fans, that is—but all them are significant for the quality of the writing; the variety of sub-genres, including procedurals, amateur detectives, procedural-amateur detective mashups, legal thrillers, nascent CSI investigation and humor; and, as Les wrote in the introduction of The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope, as “an accurate portrayal of the attitudes and behaviors of the time”
The eight books so far are: Jim Hanvey, Detective, by Octavus Roy Cohen; Final Proof, by Rodrigues Ottolengui; That Affair Next Door, by Anna Katharine Green; Last Seen Wearing, by Hillary Waugh; The Silent Bullet, by Arthur S. Reeve; The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope, by C.W. Grafton; Case Pending, by Dell Shannon; and The Dead Letter, by Seeley Regester (not all are pictured)
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When a young Afghani boy survives a massacre, undercover DEA Agent Garrett Kohl—the protagonist in Down Range, former CIA-analyst-turned-operative Taylor Moore’s debut thriller—takes him home to the Texas Panhandle to keep him safe. And while the Taliban may be thin on the ground in Texas, they aren’t the only threat to Kohl, Kohl’s family—and the boy
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