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Week of January 11, 2010
The First Rule by Robert Crais
Making his second starring appearance (after 2007’s The Watchman), cop-turned-mercenary Joe Pike goes looking for the home invaders who did in his former colleague. With some help from gumshoe Elvis Cole, he confronts Eastern European gangsters and ATF hotshots, and faces old grudges and animosities that are anything but settled.
Week of January 4, 2010
Deadly Communion by Frank Tallis
While dealing with a private patient convinced that he’s spotted his doppelgänger in the streets of Imperial Vienna, psychoanalyst (and Sigmund Freud follower) Dr. Max Liebermann also helps police chase down a killer whose behavior is both darker and less predictable than usual -- a new nightmare of the early 20th century.
Week of December 28, 2009
Dying Gasp by Leighton Gage
Manaus, Brazil’s old jungle-surrounded rubber capital on the Amazon River, backdrops the third case (after Buried Strangers, 2009) for Chief Inspector Mario Silva. He heads there in search of a rich politician’s granddaughter and her friend, only to face a malevolent woman doctor and indifference from the local constabulary.
Week of December 21, 2009
A Murder on London Bridge by Susanna Gregory
Rebellion is in the air as Thomas Chaloner, 17th-century detective and former spy, investigates an assassination on London Bridge that could portend disaster for Restoration monarch King Charles II. Are religious animosities behind this killing, and is further violence ahead? Chaloner has his work cut out for him in his fifth adventure.
Week of December 14, 2009
Ticket to Ride by Ed Gorman
In his eighth adventure (after Fools Rush In, 2007), small-town Iowa lawyer Sam McCain finds himself in 1965, dealing with an ailing father, the loss of a budding love interest, and the murders of old friends/rivals after a Labor Day get-together. As his own world comes apart, can he put together the clues to solve those slayings?
Week of December 7, 2009
Faces in the Pool by Jonathan Gash
Antiques “divvy” and crime solver Lovejoy is back -- and back in prison. His release depends on him wedding a wealthy woman who’s searching for her missing ex-hubby. Although he fears being roped into a revenge plot, Lovejoy goes along with the plan. But first, he must deal with emigrants controlling large stockpiles of antiques.
Week of November 30, 2009
Murder on the Cliffs by Joanna Challis
While visiting Cornwall, England, in the wake of World War II, a young Daphne du Maurier -- not yet famous as the author of Rebecca -- stumbles upon the body of a beautiful woman in a nightgown. Intrigued and looking for literary inspiration, she pursues the mystery to a mansion ballooning with restless secrets.
Week of November 23, 2009
Lullaby for the Nameless by Sandra Ruttan
In their third appearance, RCMP constables Craig Nolan, Ashlyn Hart, and Tain investigate slayings that remind them eerily of the first case they ever worked together, in What Burns Within (2008). Could they have made mistakes that left a killer free to continue his crimes? Or is a copycat murderer on the loose?
Week of November 16, 2009
Village of the Ghost Bears by Stan Jones
Alaska State Trooper Nathan Active (White Sky, Black Ice) must connect his discovery of a dead, unidentified hunter in a remote creek with a deadly recreation center fire, the poaching of polar bears, and a plane crash in the state’s Brooks Range. Jones illuminates Eskimo culture as adroitly as Tony Hillerman did Native American culture.
Week of November 9, 2009
Washington Shadow by Aly Monroe
In Washington, D.C., with John Maynard Keynes, who is negotiating a post-World War II loan for Britain, agent Peter Cotton (The Maze of Cadiz) gets caught up in a power struggle involving a woman from the U.S. State Department, a Soviet ex-tank commander, and skullduggery behind the pursuit of a new world order.
Week of November 2, 2009
The Big Wake-Up by Mark Coggins
After flirting at his local laundromat with a young student from Buenos Aires, only to promptly see her murdered, San Francisco P.I. August Riordan is drawn into a bizarre case involving the peripatetic remains of Argentina’s most famous first lady, a mummification expert, and a legacy from the father he never knew.
Week of October 26, 2009
Quarry in the Middle by Max Allan Collins
Set during the Reagan years, this third Hard Case Crime novel (following The Last Quarry and The First Quarry) to feature hired killer Quarry finds him caught betwixt two Mississippi River casino proprietors, both claiming the same territory. Author Collins’ protagonist will need both smarts and firepower to survive their clash.
Week of October 19, 2009
The Geneva Deception by James Twining
Asked to probe the pilfering of a long-lost painting by Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, retired art thief Tom Kirk finds himself in the middle of a larger investigation involving the Italian mafia, a murderer who stages his killings to look like Caravaggio works and a Roman cop suspicious of official corruption.
Week of October 12, 2009
The Violet Hour by Daniel Judson
Caleb Rakowski, a young auto mechanic in a town full of wealthy beach-dwellers, is protecting a pregnant friend from her abusive hubby. But that tough assignment is nothing, compared with his trying to save a female hostage and help another friend who’s being pursued by killers unfamiliar with the meaning of mercy.
Week of October 5, 2009
The Monster in the Box by Ruth Rendell
The past is catching up with Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. After spotting a prosperous van driver, whom he suspected of murder in his long-ago first investigation, Wexford implores his partner to look more closely at the man. Meanwhile, the CI’s wife worries that the daughter of an immigrant family is being forced into marriage.
Week of September 28, 2009
Stardust by Joseph Kanon
Ex-serviceman Ben Collier returns to post-World War II California to find his film director brother, Danny, in critical condition. Was his fall from a hotel window related to his role in an investigation of Hollywood’s “red ties”? Collier must fend off opponents -- and the unexpected advances of Danny’s widow -- to discover the truth.
Week of September 21, 2009
The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny
The murder of a stranger at the bistro and antiques shop in Three Pines, Quebec, raises suspicions about that store’s proprietor, a beloved figure with a vague past and extraordinary business success. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache’s search for answers will lead him into the deep woods and down a few blind alleys.
Week of September 14, 2009
If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr
Leaping backwards in time from his adventures in A Quiet Flame, we find Bernie Gunther in Berlin in 1934, as Nazis expel Jews in preparation for that city’s coming Olympic Games. Gunther becomes dangerously entangled with a crusading journalist, a German-Jewish gangster, and crooked schemes to profit from the Olympiad.
Week of September 8, 2009
Evil for Evil by James R. Benn
Sent into Northern Ireland during World War II to find 50 rifles stolen from a U.S. Army base, Lieutenant Billy Boyle (Blood Alone) teams up with a lovely Irish woman working for British Intelligence. Together they try recover the weapons, while preventing IRA hostilities from harming the Allies’ fight against Nazi Germany.
Week of September 1, 2009
The Complaints by Ian Rankin
After penning 17 Inspector John Rebus novels, Rankin introduces a new protagonist: Edinburgh policeman Malcolm Fox, who’s tasked with investigating dirty cops. Here Fox is told to probe the activities of Jamie Breck. He doesn’t expect, though, to discover things about Breck that make him a danger to others -- including Fox himself.
Week of August 24, 2009
A Duty to the Dead by Charles Todd
Bess Crawford volunteers for the British nursing corps during World War I, only to wind up tending to the sick aboard the HMSS Brittanic. There she befriends a dying soldier, who asks her to carry a message to her brother in England -- a message that will thrust her deep into the midst of tragedy and murder.
Week of August 17, 2009
Hemingway Deadlights by Michael Atkinson
It’s hard to believe that nobody else ever thought to turn Ernest Hemingway into a detective before. Atkinson’s story is set in 1956 in Key West, where Papa -- ducking his fourth wife and writing frustrations -- decides to look into the death (by harpoon) of an old drinking companion. The start of a promising new series.
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Week of August 8, 2009
Blood Line by Mark Billingham
The supposed domestic slaying of a woman in North London turns weird after DI Tom Thorne discovers that her mother had herself been done in 15 years before by a serial killer named Raymond Garvey. Now, Thorne must work fast to save the children of Garvey’s other victims from a new and twisted killer.
Week of July 27, 2009
The Silent Hour by Michael Koryta
Koryta, the winner of this year’s L.A. Times Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller fiction, brings back Cleveland P.I. Lincoln Perry, now working for a convicted murderer who’s trying to find the Mafia don’s daughter he credits with having saved his life. But she disappeared under mysterious circumstances more than a decade ago.
Week of July 20, 2009
An Empty Death by Laura Wilson
As Londoners try, in the summer of 1944, to keep up their spirits amid the rain of German bombs, DI Ted Stratton is assigned to probe the murder of a doctor. He soon realizes that the killer must be someone who’s managed to change identities and now moves with uncommon freedom -- and lethalness. But who?
Week of July 13, 2009
Rain Gods by James Lee Burke
Burke spotlights one of his previously minor characters, Texas Sheriff Hackberry Holland, in this yarn about the machine-gun murders of nine illegal aliens -- prostitutes all -- on the Mexico border. The only witness, Pete Flores, is on the run and being chased by a local crime lord. It’s up to Holland to find Flores before the killers do.
Week of July 6, 2009
The Devil’s Company by David Liss
Making his third appearance (after A Spectacle of Corruption), 18th-century pugilist-turned-thief taker Benjamin Weaver is blackmailed into pilfering documents from the British East India Company. It’s his entrée into a complex plot involving corporate skullduggery, foreign espionage, beautiful women, and a wealthy schemer whose designs threaten Britain’s security.
Week of June 29, 2009
The Silver Locomotive Mystery by Edward Marston
Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck and his train-phobic associate, Victor Leeming, travel to 1850s Wales to locate a stolen silver coffee-pot in the shape of a locomotive and solve a subsequent hotel slaying, both of which appear linked to a famous theatrical troupe and talk of salacious doings among members of local society.
Week of June 15, 2009
Still Bleeding by Steve Mosby
“Murderabilia” plays a role in this tale of lost and slain women. It begins with the killing of Sarah Pepper by her boyfriend -- who later can’t remember where he dumped the corpse. And it leads to Detective Paul Kearney’s struggle to find another woman, before her body -- like others -- is found drained of blood.|
Week of June 8, 2009
The Tehran Conviction by Tom Gabbay
Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution serves as the backdrop to this story, which finds erstwhile U.S. agent Jack Teller reliving his history with the CIA in the Middle East while he tries to save the life of a former friend, now targeted for political execution. The roots of today’s troubled U.S.-Iran relations play out here in captivating fiction.|
Week of June 1, 2009
Gutted by Tony Black
While saving a dog from being tortured, Gus Dury -- an alcoholic ex-newspaperman whose life has definitely gone “tits up” -- stumbles over the corpse of a gang-connected lowlife. He’s thereby thrown into a case involving illegal animal fights, missing loot, and a homicide cover-up, all played out in Edinburgh’s darker, ranker corners.
Week of May 25, 2009
Midnight Fugue by Reginald Hill
Hill’s 23rd novel featuring Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe finds those Yorkshire detectives trying to help a fellow cop, whose fiancée wants to locate her missing husband, believed dead. But a news-hungry reporter, a politician’s concerned secretary, and a self-protective entrepreneur make the case both more complicated and more deadly.
Week of May 18, 2009
The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith
It’s 1956, and as Nikita Khrushchev cements his control over the Soviet Union’s Communist Party and criticizes the brutality of late leader Joseph Stalin, beleaguered detective Leo Demidov (Child 44) struggles to rescue his daughter, who’s been kidnapped by a woman gang member whose priest husband Demidov long ago relegated to a gulag prison.
Week of May 11, 2009
A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell
After discovering a photo of her beloved but murdered brother, cross-dressing lounge singer Ernst, at Berlin police headquarters in 1931, newspaper reporter Hannah Vogel dives into an investigation complicated the appearance of Ernst’s alleged son and her sibling’s dangerous connections to prominent figures in the ascendant Nazi party.
Week of May 4, 2009
The Dead of Winter by Rennie Airth
This final entry in Airth’s exceptional John Madden Trilogy (following River of Darkness and The Blood-Dimmed Tide) finds the former Scotland Yard inspector trying to figure out why an apparently innocent Polish refugee girl who’d been working on his farm was murdered in the middle of a World War II-era London blackout.
Week of April 27, 2009
Nobody Move by Denis Johnson
Rich in characters and clever dialogue, this homage to the American crime novel (originally serialized in Playboy) follows a fast-talking gambler with bad debts as he flees being beaten, only to hook up with an alcoholic stunner who’s being framed for embezzlement. Together, they’re going to steal millions -- if they can stay alive that long.
Week of April 20, 2009
The Language of Bees by Laurie R. King
Fifteen years after being introduced in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Mary Russell returns -- with her husband, Sherlock Holmes -- to both print and to Sussex, only to find a colony of bees gone missing and the Great Detective’s son in need of their investigative aid. But will Holmes, in the end, protect a killer for personal reasons?
Week of April 13, 2009
The Kill Call by Stephen Booth
The discovery of a man lying on a moor with his head crushed leads Peak District police detectives Diane Fry and Ben Cooper (Dying to Sin) into a mystery involving fox hunting and horse theft, dubious dealings by the victim, historical shenanigans, and a “plague village” that’s become the latest tourist draw.
Week of April 6, 2009
A Visible Darkness by Michael Gregorio
Early 19th-century Prussian investigator Hanno Stiffeniis is back, this time to stop the abductions and gruesome murders of young girls who’ve been recruited to collect valuable amber along the Baltic Coast -- a great source of wealth for French Emperor Napoleon, whose forces have overrun Stiffeniss’ homeland. An intelligent and consuming mystery.
Week of March 30, 2009
The Alchemy of Murder by Carol McCleary
Famous real-life “girl reporter” Nellie Bly is swept away from Manhattan to world’s fair-hosting Paris in 1889. Pursuing a killer with a scientific imagination, she’ll have to confront disease, anarchists and prostitutes in the City of Light, and seek aid from Oscar Wilde and Jules Verne to bring her ingenious quarry to ground.
Week of March 23, 2009
Sherlock Holmes in America edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon L. Lellenberg and Daniel Stashower
Even after 121 years, interest in Holmes hasn’t flagged. This new collection, which features stories from Gillian Linscott, Loren D. Estleman, Bill Crider and others, sends the consulting detective and Dr. John H. Watson into trouble in New York, Washington, D.C., and such “sunny yet sinister cities” as San Francisco.
Week of March 16, 2009
Chinatown Angel by A.E. Roman
New York City P.I. Chico Santana, down on his luck and dumped by his wife, figures to score easy dough by finding an up-and-coming film star’s cousin. But his maid’s “suicide” and suspicions that he’s being paid to overlook some uncomfortable facts cause Santana to dig deeper to learn what’s really going on.
Week of March 9, 2009
The Ignorance of Blood by Robert Wilson
This fourth and final outing for Seville’s Javier Falcón finds the inspector investigating a terrorist attack, confronting Russian mobsters and big-time dealers in drugs and prostitution, and aiding a friend who’s being blackmailed by Islamic fanatics, while also helping his lover deal with personal tragedy. Will it all push Falcón too far?
Week of March 2, 2009
Black Noir: Mystery, Crime, and Suspense by African-American Writers edited by Otto Penzler
With its oddly redundant title, this collection proves that noir fiction hasn’t been the exclusive province of white authors. From the 19th-century work of Charles W. Chesnutt to more recent twisted-morality tales by Chester Himes, Edward P. Jones, Gary Phillips, Paula Woods and Walter Mosley, this book celebrates the genre’s rich diversity.
Week of February 23, 2009
Blood Money by Tom Bradby
British TV political director and author Bradby brings back Joe Quinn (previously seen in 2005’s The God of Chaos), this time as a New York City police detective working in the run-up to the 1929 stock market crash. Quinn’s trying to get the bottom of a series of Wall Street slayings, which may link to a cop on the take.
Week of February 16, 2009
Murder in Four Parts by Bill Crider
After being invited to join a barbershop chorus, Sheriff Dan Rhodes becomes involved in the murder of its director, who may also be an embezzler; the escape of an alligator, who has no interest in being recaptured; and the picketing of a law office by a man who’s forgotten his pants. A typically fun, snafu-filled Rhodes novel.
Week of February 9, 2009
Spade & Archer by Joe Gores
Edgar winner Gores, who in 1975 placed Dashiell Hammett in the midst of fictional trouble, now recruits that author’s most famous private eye in this prequel to The Maltese Falcon. Set in 1921, it finds Sam Spade contending with a stowaway, gold smugglers, murderers and his ex-lover’s new hubby, the ill-fated Miles Archer.
Week of February 2, 2009
Shanghai Moon by S.J. Rozan
Estranged from her longtime partner, Bill Smith, investigator Lydia Chin is working with her former mentor to locate some missing European jewelry, unearthed in China and transported to Manhattan. But the stakes are raised, and Smith reappears, after it’s learned that one of the world’s most sought-after gems is part of the stash.
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