Need a little diversion? Our crime columnist has plenty of books to recommend.
With the holidays upon us after a long and fraught year, carving out a few hours to lose yourself in a good mystery feels restorative. Here are crime novels of all categories, new and old, which will help you do just that.
Many readers, myself included, loved Nita Prose’s debut, “The Maid,” which introduced the delightful neurodivergent hotel housekeeper Molly Gray. She returns in THE MYSTERY GUEST (Ballantine, 304 pp., $29), which builds upon “The Maid”’s many charms.
Three years on, Molly is in a good place; she’s the head maid at the five-star Regency Grand and in a fulfilling romantic relationship. So of course another dead body is about to wreck her careful equilibrium. The esteemed best-selling mystery writer J.D. Grimthorpe has chosen the Grand to give a news conference about future career moves. He takes a sip of tea, opens his mouth to begin the announcement and falls dead in front of fans, reporters, Molly and her staff.
“Let’s just hope there’s a good explanation,” one of Molly’s co-workers says. “But I’m telling you, Molls, this looks bad. Like true-crime bad.” The suspects pile up, and Molly is one of them, thanks to her long-ago connections to the murdered man. Prose peppers the mystery with sly jokes about the vagaries of crime writing, but Molly’s voice remains central and moving: “It strikes me — how a room is just a container. Any space can be poisoned by the memory of what occurred within it.”
Keigo Higashino is a master of puzzle mysteries that are rooted in the Japanese tradition of honkaku made famous by writers like Soji Shimada, Seishi Yokomizo and Yukito Ayatsuji. But the psychological complexities threaded through his most recent work, THE FINAL CURTAIN (Minotaur, 390 pp., $29), elevate it above most honkaku mysteries, which prize ingenuity over characterization.
Translated by Giles Murray, the novel — the fourth outing for Detective Kaga, who has the “eyes of a hunting dog that has found its prey” — centers on a confounding mystery, one that involves a strangled woman found in a stranger’s house in a city far from her small-town home. Kaga soon realizes this murder is somehow connected to the death of his estranged mother 10 years earlier. “If I can get to the bottom of the case, I might manage to learn something about my mother too,” he says wistfully. He’s a brilliant detective, but on some level, it seems, still the boy abandoned by his mother.
Those looking for meaner streets to travel should pick up Femi Kayode’s GASLIGHT (Mulholland, 380 pp., $29), which brings back the investigator Philip Taiwo after the impressive 2021 debut “Lightseekers.” Taiwo is now tasked to examine the goings-on at a megachurch in Nigeria’s Ogun State, and the stakes could not be higher: After Sade Dawodu disappeared, her husband, the church’s charismatic pastor, was arrested for her murder.
If this crime took place in the United States, the story would most likely follow the structure of a classic police procedural. But Kayode refracts those tropes through what actually ails Nigeria: rampant corruption, cavalier record-keeping and a sense that justice can never be achieved. Taiwo must struggle through murky depths to arrive at a truth that will please no one.
Books, dogs and food — and a well-structured sense of fun — connect almost all of Valerie Burns’s cozy mysteries, regardless of pseudonym. MURDER IS A PIECE OF CAKE (Kensington, 250 pp., paperback, $16.95), written under her real name, continues the sugar high of the first Baker Street mystery. Writing as Kallie E. Benjamin, she delivers SNIFFING OUT MURDER (Berkley Prime Crime, 339 pp., paperback, $17), in which a spate of small-town murders compels Priscilla Cummings, a middle-grade author, to sleuth out the culprit along with her beloved bloodhound, Bailey.
And finally, as V.M. Burns, she’s written MURDER ON TOUR (Kensington, 246 pp., paperback, $16.95). The ninth entry featuring the mystery writer and bookseller Samantha Washington finds her navigating insecurity, petty jealousies and other minor conflicts at a local literary festival — until the conflicts turn major when another writer ends up dead.
This novel, like Burns’s others, wipes the mind clean of anything but pure enjoyment, just as Samantha views her own books: “No one is going to read my book and start a movement that will end human trafficking, reduce the effects of global warming or save the Amur leopard from extinction,” she says. “I write British cozy historical mysteries.”
Faithful column readers know how much I adore Stephen Spotswood’s Pentecost and Parker series, and sometimes I feel — in these pages and in real life — like a broken record recommending these books, set in post-World War II New York City, to anybody and everybody. I swore I was going to let this new installment pass without comment, but when it’s just as good as the last three, how could I?
MURDER CROSSED HER MIND (Doubleday, 364 pp., $27) vaults the private investigator Lillian Pentecost and her plucky junior partner, Willowjean “Will” Parker, into a baffling predicament involving the disappearance of an older woman and her clandestine work hunting Nazi spies.
While investigating the case, Will gets jumped on a boardwalk late at night, and after beating herself up about it, gets right back to work. And Pentecost finally offers clues to her family life, which she has kept secret until, it seems, she no longer can. There’s a cliffhanger ending, which I shan’t spoil, but which raises my hopes very high for installment No. 5.
Finally, a holiday roundup would be incomplete without some recently reissued vintage gems. Let’s start with THE PENGUIN BOOK OF MURDER MYSTERIES (Penguin Classics, 323 pp., paperback, $17.99), a collection that leans heavily on overlooked and underappreciated mystery stories from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
As the editor Michael Sims notes in his introduction, “You will not find here many of the celebrity detectives who make the rounds of every mystery-fan party like board members an executive director was afraid not to invite.” Instead, readers will find excellent tales by writers like Charles W. Chesnutt, Ellen Glasgow and Auguste Groner. I particularly enjoyed Anna Katharine Green’s “An Intangible Clue,” which stars a New York City socialite turned detective named Violet Strange.
The lexicographer Eric Walter Blom (1888-1959) lived and breathed music, whether he was editing the fifth edition of “Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians,” publishing criticism in British newspapers or even writing his sole crime novel. DEATH ON THE DOWN BEAT (Poisoned Pen Press, 190 pp., paperback, $14.99), released in 1941 under the pseudonym Sebastian Farr, was soon forgotten — a grievous error that has now been rectified.
The mystery — who shot the boorish, obnoxious conductor Sir Noel Grampian in the middle of a performance — is recounted by Detective Inspector Alan Hope of New Scotland Yard in letters to his wife. It would seem that the fatal shot came from someone in the orchestra; all the musicians had reasons to dislike Grampian, though the score shows that only “the piccolo, two harps, the kettledrums” were not playing at the moment the gun was fired. “Death on the Down Beat” is a formally inventive and briskly paced novel, an utter delight.
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December 01, 2023 at 05:00PM
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