One of the highlights of summer is a ton of great reads from last season are now available in paperback, and here’s a roundup of some of the best ones, varied types for different reading tastes:

the 1930s come alive in Weavers’ series featuring amateur sleuth Amory Ames and her husband, Milo. In A Most Novel Revenge, the couple are summoned by her cousin Laurel to the estsate of Reginald Lyons. The assorted company includes the author of a fictionalized account of a murder that took place on the estate years ago, and now plans a sequel tell-all about what really happened that night.

Andrew Gross’ The One Man takes the thriller writer into a historical place, as a US intelligence officer must infiltrate the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz to find Professor Alfred Mendl. Not only must Nathan Blum sneak in, he must find the professor and sneak back out with him. Facing evil is heaert-pounding and makes this absorbing.


Elsa Hart’s The White Mirror takes readers to 18th-century China, where a traveling librarian and a storyteller team up to solve the murder of a Tibetan monk. Culturally and historically intriguing.

Hell Bay is Will Thomas’ Barker and Llwewllyn tale, where the Victorian-era private detectives undergo an assignment for the government to provide security for a top-secret meeting taking place on a remote island off the coast of Cornwall. What could possibly go wrong? Everything, including a sniper murder and a stabbing. A classic closed-environment mystery.


Paul Doiron’s Widowmaker continues his Maine series with game warden Mike Bowditch. It’s a complicated tale of family dysfunction with a beautiful woman at its heart, and raises the ghosts Bowditch was trying to tamp down. His search for the truth takes him to an unlikely fortress hidden in the wilderness where he find more than the answers he’d hoped for. A multiple award-nominated author, Doiron won the Barry and the Strand awards for Best First Novel with the The Poacher’s Son and the series continues at a fine pace.


Prolific author Charlaine Harris has five series in print. She returns to her earlier Aurora Teagarden series with All the Little Liars. Aurora has married crime writer Robin Crusoe, and the newly pregnant Aurora is infanticipating when four children disappear from the school soccer field–and Aurora’s 15 yr-old brother is among the missing. With a dead body complicating matters at the last place the youths were known to have gathered, the newlyweds run their own investigation to find Phillip and his friends. A bit darker than the earlier series but just as entertaining.


Archer Mayor’s Presumption of Guilt brings Vermont Investigator Joe Gunther a cold case when a 40 yr-old skeleton is found encased in concrete. Things heat up quickly for a cold case, with a fresh murder and a kidnapping, and Gunther and his team are stretched thin with tension. Well-plotted and compelling.