Susan Hill: A Question of Identity Sunday, Nov 25 2012 

Award winning novelist and Continued series winner and great read and mystery to die for and Series not to be missed , , , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:23 am

Can a person love two people at the same time?

Can a person BE two different people at the same time?

These are the main questions the wonderful Susan Hill addresses in the compelling new Simon Serailler mystery A Question of Identity.

Fans of the series will not be disappointed, as Hill explores Serailler’s relationship with the woman he loves, whose husband is dying.

She continues to weave in his sister, Cat, a young widow raising three children and working hospice, who faces more changes in her future just as she unearths a terrible family secret.

She also gives us an inside look for the first time into the mind of the killer Simon must unveil, by following snatches of his thoughts during the entire investigative process.

The cathedral town of Laffterton that Serailler inhabits hasn’t seen a crime as this: the brutal murder of an elderly woman, newly moved into a brand new housing scheme, posed in a way that marks the murderer’s signature. This is a careful killer, one who wears gloves, doesn’t leave a trace behind, and chooses his victims for their age and inability to react quickly to his appearance.

As the murders escalate, Serailler’s team keeps several bizarre aspects of the murder from the public. Then their investigation finds these signs to be the exact MO of a suspect previously charged with several murders who had been acquitted. But trying to find the murderer takes on an unreal aspect when Serailler learns the suspect has been given a new identity, and simply vanished. And the powers that be refuse to give him any details or acknowledge the man existed.

Hill ups the empathy with Serialler’s frustration by introducing the victims to the reader before the murders, weaving in his private life and snatched moments with his beloved Rachel at times, visits with his sister and her family at others. Realistic happenings in Cat’s life lend even more verisimilitude as she copes with teens, tweens, and the aftermath of a past case on a young doctor who has been living with her family. The first death doesn’t occur until page 137, plenty of time for Hill to ratchet up the suspense as readers come to realize who the victims will be.

This is a satisfying read in a continuing series that is what The Washington Post calls a “. . .  brooding series that rivets a reader’s attention.”

Ruth Rendell has this to say about Susan Hill: “Not all great novelists can write crime fiction, but when one like Susan Hill does the result is stunning.”

 

Lynda LaPlante: Blood Line Sunday, Nov 18 2012 

Award winning novelist and Continued series winner , , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:29 am

Prime Suspect‘s Lynda LaPlante is back with a new Anna Travis novel.

Blood Line follows Anna’s new case as a DCI, heavily watched over with increasing annoyance to her by her mentor and former lover, Superintendent James Langton.

Her first case was a slam dunk that she made her way through numbly, dealing with the aftermath of the death of her fiance`. The pacing here is different from the usual murder novel, as the case starts out as something entirely different and meanders its way into a murder investigation, when a court clerk whose son has disappeared asks Anna to look into the case. Langton concurs, trying to give Anna time to grieve before getting her feet under her in a real murder case.

Alan Rawlins is a good-looking chap, engaged to be married to salon owner Tina Brooks. A shy gentleman, Alan’s sudden disappearance has his father and fiancee` stumped.

Anna’s initial interviews reveal nothing specific. At first glance, Alan is a paragon of virtue, with savings in the bank and a steady job. Tina arrived home from her salon one day after he’d come home early from work with a migraine to find Alan gone; it is his father who insisted a Missing Person’s report be filed when there’s no word from Alan after two weeks.

Meeting Tina for the first interview leaves Anna with a gut feeling something is wrong. The flat is too neat, compulsively so. And despite supposedly in the midst of shopping for a wedding dress and ordering invitations, Tina shows little emotion when discussing her missing partner, stating she feels he’s gone off with another woman. At first Anna feels it’s possible Alan has taken off to escape marriage to Tina and the pressures of his mother’s dementia, especially when a potential second source of income is identified.

Then a better search of the apartment Alan and Tina shared turns up evidence of a blood pool behind the head of the bed, and more Luminol work shows a massive cleanup in the bathtub as the full-scale murder investigation swings into action.

Despite the evidence, the question of the identity of the victim becomes an issue. Someone was murdered in that flat, but just who it was becomes more and more difficult to establish in a series of twists that have Anna, under pressure to solve the case, becoming almost obsessed with all the trails she finds. And over it all, Langton is watching her like a hawk.
The book follows the extensive details and delays of real police work, from waiting for forensic reports to traveling to interview witnesses, always with the budget in mind. Anna also deals with the personalities of her hastily-thrown together team.

LaPlante’s lack of contractions may take some readers aback as it gives her dialogue a more formal feel; but it also serves to keep the British tone in the reader’s ear. This edition comes through the new line of mysteries from HarperCollins, Bourbon Street books.

 

Val McDermid: The Vanishing Point Sunday, Nov 11 2012 

Award winning novelist and great read and mystery to die for , , , , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:07 am

Prolific Scots writer Val McDermid is back with a stand alone that will grab you from page one and keep you flipping until its surprising and eventful resolution. If you aren’t a McDermid fan by now, despite Auntie M expounding this gifts through reviews of her several series and excellent stand alones, now is the time to meet her acquaintance.

The Vanishing Point opens with UK ghost writer Stephanie Harker and her adoptive son trying to enter the US for a much-needed vacation.

The metal in Stephanie’s leg always sets off the security alarm, and she’s prepped young Jimmy to mind their luggage whilst she’s escorted to the clear cubicle to await her pat-down.

Then a kidnapper, disguised as a TSA agent, leads Jimmy away, and Stephanie’s attempts to rescue him are seen by the real TSA agents as an attempt to breach security. She’s detained over her protests and ultimately tasered, helpless to prevent Jimmy being kidnapped as they disappear into the crowded airport.

Once the situation is finally explained, valuable time has been lost, but FBI agent Vivian McKuras soon realizes this is a highly unusual situation, one heightened by the confusing first moments which have allowed a kidnapper to spirit Jimmy away. The boy’s birth mother was the reality star Scarlett, who gave Stephanie custody of her only child when she was dying of cancer, believing the writer would be the best person to provide Jimmy a stable life after her death.

Scotland Yard detective Nick Nikolaides, who knows Stephanie and her complicated background, investigates in England. Both Stephanie and Scarlett have had negative relationships with men in their pasts, and Nick and Stephanie are all too aware of the various ways Jimmy’s abduction could turn out very badly.

This compelling thriller touches every parent on a visceral level, while the possible causes for the kidnapping multiply as McDermid has Stephanie explain the back story to the FBI agent.

The reader follows the timeline of Stephanie’s relationship with Scarlett and their blossoming friendship that led to Stephanie being named as Jimmy’s legal guardian. There are enough players and possibilities for suspects to chose from as their story unfolds: the boy’s pampered, drug-addicted father’s family; a stranger after ransom from the wealthy Scarlett’s estate; or even a demented fan who might have wanted a piece of Scarlett.

When the truth of the situation is made evident, this well-plotted thriller will have you in awe of McDermid’s talents to keep readers on the edge of their seats. Her powerful and unexpected climax is nothing short of a writer’s dream, which is why McDermid recently received the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for outstanding achievement in the field of crime writing.

 

Ann Cleeves: Silent Voices Sunday, Nov 4 2012 

Award winning novelist and Continued series winner and great read and mystery to die for and Series not to be missed Auntie M Writes Crime 12:57 am

Anne Cleeves marvelous four Shetland Island mysteries, previously reviewed by Auntie M, are joined by the fourth in her Vera Stanhope series. Silent Voices is Cleeves at her best, with the kind of involved plot that revolves around relationships we’ve come to expect  from this talented and prolific author, whose George and Molly books, Inspector Ramsey series, and several stand-alones rank high with the best of British crime writers.

Vera is an unlikely heroine, living with the ghost of her dead father in his house, overweight and lonely, but with an instinctive intuition that has made her a top detective.

This time she’s reluctantly following her doctor’s advice to lose weight, slogging away in the pool early mornings before work at the Willows, a former grand hotel showing its age, but still with pretensions. The Willows had been  taken over by a chain, who put the health club in its basement to increase its profits. Vera hits the steam room, sharing it with a slender, long-legged woman who looks utterly at ease, head thrown back in complete relaxation. Vera tries to copy the relaxed pose without success. Then as the steam clears a bit, she realizes the subject of her regard is dead, strangled in the steam room where she’d come for a bit of relaxation.

Vera swings into official mode, calling her sergeant, Joe Ashworth, to the scene, cordoning off the steam room. The woman is identified as Jenny Lister, aged forty-one, head social worker in the area for fostering and adoptions. She leaves behind a daughter, Hannah, eighteen, and host of unanswered questions.

With her team interviewing the Willows staff, Vera and Joe try to unearth a motive for the murder. They find a connection to a case Jenny had worked on that had led to the death of young child. Soon it emerges that the caseworker of that same boy has moved to the village.

Cleeves does a fine job of illustrating Joe’s struggle to keep his home life, with a wife and young children, on an even keel as the murder investigation heats up–and so does Vera’s joy at being involved in a murder. Death, and finding the killer, brings Vera a surge of renewed vigor that some might find distasteful but that bring Vera the feeling of worthiness she craves.

There are plenty of characters here to choose from, some with motives clear and others fuzzy, but things unfold in what seems a natural way as Vera pursues the killer. And then a young man is murdered just as a young mother and her child go missing, and suddenly the stakes are upped.

This series is being serialized on ITV3, and stars Brenda Blethyn and has twice been nominated for two Dagger awards.  Cleeves received the 2006 Duncan Lawrie Dagger for Best Crime Novel for Raven Black.

 

 

 

 

Laura Lippman: And When She Was Good Sunday, Oct 21 2012 

Award winning novelist and great read , , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:50 am

In an author’s note, Laura Lippman explains the genesis of the protagonist of And When She Was Good, Heloise Lewis, a character she first created in 2001 and wrote about years later in two short stories.

Now Lippman has taken the time to explore Heloise and her beginnings and her today, alternating her back story for a good part of the novel, so readers can understand this woman who is meticulously organized, financially comfortable, and oh, yes, a prostitute who runs an exclusive agency.

But Heloise so much more: she’s a successful businesswoman who protects her workers; she’s a self-educated reader with a fondness for history; and she’s fiercely protective of her son, Scott, whose biological father languishes in prison and is unaware of his child.

Despite her insistence on strict compartmentalization in her life between work and home, which has left her without close friends, Heloise finds the lines starting to blur. Her vice squad protector and friend is retiring and will no longer have her back. Then an employee or two break her firm rules. When the wisp of possibility that her son’s father may be released from prison, the carefully wrought life she has constructed is in danger. Heloise is not a perfect person, but she is one with an intelligent, thinking mind and a finely-honed instinct for survival.

Val Deluca has only one way to deal with people who have lied or become a threat to him: he has them killed. And it’s  only a matter of time before the former pimp and casual murderer discovers he is in prison in the first place because Heloise betrayed him.

It is to Lippman’s credit that she is not only able to satisfactorily explain how Helen Lewis became Heloise Lewis, in a direct and unflinching way, but she manages to create a tough and resilient character you will find yourself rooting for as the pages turn.

The New York Times has compared Lippman to England’s Ruth Rendell: “Ms. Lippman writes like a warmer-blooded American Ruth Rendell, keenly observant and giving a faintly spooky charge to every stray detail.”

 

 

 

Tana French: Broken Harbor Sunday, Oct 14 2012 

Award winning novelist and great read and mystery to die for , , , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:47 am

Auntie M is huge fan of Tana French’s novels set in Ireland, starting with Into the Woods, followed by The Likeness and the stunning Faithful Place. Now she’s back with Broken Harbor, and her novels get stronger and more compelling with each offering. In a recent essay on craft, French described her husband not allowing her to use dream sequences in her novels too much. She doesn’t need dreams; the world she creates is startling enough.

Mick Kennedy is a a top Murder Squad detective who’s earned the nickname “Scorcher” for his devotion to the job and its victims. He lands a tragic but high profile murder case on the half-deserted development now called Brianstown, one of the many high-end neighborhoods that have fallen with the down-turned economy, leaving their few owners to cope with shoddy construction and broken promises.

Mick brings along his new partner, Richie, a rookie detective on his first case, thrilled to learn from the master. But before it was Brianstown, the area was known as Broken Harbor, and Mick has his own disturbing and poignant memories of the area that will haunt him almost as much as the scene they find.

Patrick Spain is dead; his wife, Jenny, lies in intensive care. Their blood splatters the downstairs kitchen area. Upstairs, the Spain’s young son and daughter are found dead in their beds. The scene is shocking and disturbing.

What appears to be an easy case to solve quickly proves to be one of the most tangled and difficult of Mick’s career. There are unexplained things in the house: smashed holes in walls, with baby monitor cameras pointing at them; files have been erased from the Spain’s computer. And then Jenny’s sister Fiona tells the detectives her sister has been afraid of an intruder who slipped past their locks and alarms and helped himself to food from their refrigerator.

As he juggles teaching Richie about true detecting and not jumping to conclusions, Mick’s life is complicated by his younger sister, Dina. Her mental illness escalates and barges into his life and his thoughts, bringing back the memories of his family’s last summer at Broken Harbor. Adding to the layers are Mick’s new relationship with Richie. Partnerships are built on trust. But he doesn’t know Richie well enough to trust him–yet.

French’s sense of setting is acute; she brings all the senses to her descriptions and adds nuances that fill the atmosphere of the book with power and emotion. This is as gripping a novel as Auntie M has read this year, a mix of French’s usual police procedural and psychological thriller, created with realistic characters and situations, plot lines that weave and warp, and with a sense of setting so powerful you will feel as if you’ve been to Broken Harbor.

 

 

Donis Casey: The Wrong Hill to Die On: An Alafair Tucker Mystery Sunday, Oct 7 2012 

Award winning novelist and Continued series winner , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:32 am

Please welcome Donis Casey, who will tell us about her newest  Alafair Tucker Mystery

The Wrong Hill to Die On: An Alafair Tucker Mystery. 

            Alafair Tucker is a woman in her early forties who lives with her husband, Shaw, and their ten lively children on a prosperous horse farm in eastern Oklahoma during the booming mid-1910s. How, you may ask, does a woman like Alafair go about solving mysteries?  After all, this is one busy woman, and the truth is that she is not at all interested in getting involved with local episodes of violence and mayhem. But when you have ten children ranging in age from early twenties to infancy, somebody is always getting himself or herself in trouble, and needs her mother to get her out of it.  Alafair may not always know exactly what to do, but you can bet she’ll do something. She’s not one to stand by and let anything threaten a child of hers.

When you begin writing the sixth crime novel featuring the same protagonist, you need to shake things up a bit if you want to keep the series fresh and interesting.   After all, how many people can you kill in one small town in Oklahoma before people start to wonder if the residents are crazy for living there at all?*

Nineteen-fifteen had been a tough year for the Tuckers, and 1916 hadn’t started out all that well, either. It had been a tough winter, and Alafair and her husband Shaw deserved a vacation. So I decided to send them on a trip to sunny Arizona to visit Alafair’s witty, brilliant, and beautiful sister, Elizabeth.

But once I started writing, it didn’t take me long to realize that this trip wasn’t going to work out as planned. In the first place, Alafair didn’t want to go.  A daughter was getting married soon, another having a birthday, a son going back to college. After the awful events the family endured in the previous novel, Crying Blood, Alafair simply wanted life to get back to normal.  How, then, was I going to persuade her to go to Arizona?

During my research I discovered that the end of 1915 and the beginning of 1916 had been the rainiest months in decades, accompanied by severe flooding all over the Western United States.  Therefore, a lot of flu and bronchitis was going around that winter.  Handily for my story line, at the turn of the Twentieth Century, Arizona was known as a place for people with lung problems to come and be cured by the desert air.

Alafair may not want to go to Arizona, but her daughter Blanche, only ten years old, cannot shake the bronchitis that has plagued the family all winter. Her best chance to get well is to spend some time in a dry climate. So Alafair and Shaw bundle their sick child onto the train and make a nightmare trip–a thousand miles of diversions and detours due to damaged and washed-out track–from Oklahoma to Arizona.

Yet as soon as they arrive on a bright, seventy-two degree March day, Blanche begins to improve.  Alafair is overjoyed to see her sister Elizabeth again, and for added excitement, a Hollywood motion picture company is shooting a movie right on the streets of Tempe!

But no matter how wonderful it seems at first, all is not well in sunny Arizona.  Elizabeth’s marriage is falling apart, tensions are high between the Anglo and Latino communities following Pancho Villa’s murderous raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and Alafair suspects her sister is involved in an illegal operation to smuggle refugees from the Mexican Revolution out of Sonora and into the U.S.

On top of it all, here lies Bernie Arruda, on his back in a ditch, eyes wide open, seeing nothing on this side of the veil. Just the night before, he had been singing Mexican love songs at the party in Elizabeth’s back yard, his black eyes flashing as he winked at the ladies. He had been such a charmer! Or had he?  He may have romanced half the married women in town.  Or he could have been a spy for Pancho Villa.  Or was he a defector from Villa’s army?  Was it he who hid the money that rained down on the spectators when the movie company blew an abandoned building sky high? As Alafair is about to discover, there are a lot of people who have reason to want Bernie dead.

Alafair’s trip to Arizona didn’t turn out to be the restful get-away I had envisioned for her.  But it was quite an adventure.

___________________

*The fact is, if your book is set in 1910s Oklahoma, you can realistically kill off as many people as you want.  Everybody was armed and dangerous.

Donis Casey is the author of six Alafair Tucker Mysteries: The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, Hornswoggled, The Drop Edge of Yonder, The Sky Took Him, Crying Blood, and The Wrong Hill to Die On (Oct 2012).  Donis has twice won the Arizona Book Award and has been a finalist for the Willa Award and the Oklahoma Book Award. Her first novel, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, was named an Oklahoma Centennial Book. Donis is a former teacher, academic librarian, and entrepreneur. She lives in Tempe, AZ, with her husband, poet Donald Koozer. The Wrong Hill to Die On is available from Poisoned Pen Press in October, 2012. Readers can enjoy the first chapter of each book on her web site at www.doniscasey.com.

 

Judy Alter: Trouble in a Big Box Sunday, Sep 9 2012 

Award winning novelist and great read and Series not to be missed Auntie M Writes Crime 12:16 am

 

An award-winning novelist, Judy Alter has written fiction for adults and young adults, primarily about women in the nineteenth-century American West. Judy’s western fiction has been recognized with awards from the Western Writers of America, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the National Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame. She has been honored with the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Achievement by WWA and inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame at the Fort Worth Public Library.

Now she has turned her attention to contemporary cozy mysteries. Trouble in a Big Box, the third Kelly O’Connell mystery, follows Skeleton in a Dead Space and No Neighborhood for Old Women, which received good reviews and popular enthusiasm. Welcome, Judy!

 

 

In Trouble in a Big Box, Kelly O’Connell has her hands full: new husband Mike Shandy is badly injured in an automobile accident that kills a young girl, developer Tom Lattimore wants to build a big-box grocery store in Kelly’s beloved Fairmount neighborhood, and someone is stalking Kelly.

Tom Lattimore pressures her to support the big box, and when his pressure turns to threats, Kelly activates a neighborhood coalition to fight the project. She also tries to find out who is stalking her and why, and her sleuthing puts her in danger that terrifies Mike.

But he isboth powerless to stop her and physically unable to protect her and her young daughters from Lattimore’s threats or the stalker. After their house is smoke-bombed and Kelly survives an amateur attack on her life, she comes close to an unwanted trip to Mexico from which she might never return.

 

Kelly is fighting to save her neighborhood and its old-time small-town atmosphere and historic buildings, to keep from displacing a lot of mom-and-pop businesses. But she’s fighting a larger battle, though she doesn’t realize it. We’ve seen it played out across the country for years: Wal-Mart moves in and the small businesses in a town are forced to close; syndicates take over newspapers until there are only a few if any locally-owned papers in major cities; chains force independent bookstores to close. What do we value? Big business or the individual? Of course I didn’t realize all this when I wrote. I simply wanted to involve Kelly in a new adventure and tell a good story.

 

I’m reminded of Dorothy Johnson who wrote A Man Called Horse, The Hanging Tree, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, among many others (you have to be a bit old to remember). Dorothy once wrote me that she was astounded at all the symbolism critics—and teachers—found in her work, because she didn’t put it there. Maybe we’re all that way, even though our goal is simply to be good storytellers.

 

                                                                                                                                             

 

 


 

 

 

  Follow Judy on Facebook (at https://www.facebook.com/#!/judy.alter) or  http://www.judyalter.com or her two blogs at http://www.judys-stew.blogspot.com or http://potluckwithjudy.blogspot.com. Her mysteries are available in print or as e-books, and some of her western fiction is in e-book form.Judy lives in Fort Worth, Texas, with her two dogs and frequently sees her four children and seven grandchildren.

 

 

 

 

Wendy Corsi Staub: Nightwatcher Sunday, Aug 26 2012 

Award winning novelist and mystery to die for and new series , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:08 am

Today I received an incredibly haunting book trailer from New York Times bestselling author Wendy Corsi Staub for her upcoming release of NIGHTWATCHER.  

NIGHTWATCHER Official Book Trailer

Staub is the New York Times bestselling author whose thrillers have a wide following. This is the first installment of a trilogy featuring Allison Taylor, a sympathetic heroine from the Midwest determined to overcome her start in life and conquer New York’s fashion world.

The book opens on September 10th, so the setup couldn’t be more powerful right in the opening pages. What happens after the shock of 9/11 spins a new angle on those horrendous days, when a murderer is cut loose on a town already trying to comprehend the enormous tragedy they are living through.

Allison has few friends but does talk to several renters in her apartment building: her upstairs neighbor, Kristina, and a young man, Mack MacKenna, whose insomnia finds them sharing the front stoop before the events that will change everyone’s lives so dramatically.

Mack’s wife perishes in the disaster, and as Allison reaches out to help him cope, Kristina is found savagely murdered.  Allison’s carefully wrought existence in her adopted city falls apart even more than the buildings that have crashed to the ground. As more women die at the hands of a mad serial killer, it becomes apparent that Allison is the only one who can identify the killer. With her life in danger, Allison tries to help catch this crazed madman, even as she realizes she could be his next victim.

Staub evokes the atmosphere of 9/11 in a vivid and powerful way and uses the events of that day as the catalyst of this new thriller.  She captures the shock, paranoia, and tension of New York City as she weaves this suspenseful thriller into the  enormous ongoingdisaster.  Suspense Magazine called it, “Suspenseful, powerful, tense and—as usual—wonderfully written with an ending that will leave you guessing.  A great read!”

Getting inside the minds of many of the key players broadens the action and put the reader right into the thick of  the tension and escalating terror. The action never lets up and the results are startling. There’s plenty here to keep you turning pages, and the ending will leave you waiting for the next installment, SLEEPWALKER, coming this fall.

 

John Harvey: Good Bait Sunday, Aug 19 2012 

Award winning novelist and great read and mystery to die for and Series not to be missed , , , , , Auntie M Writes Crime 12:44 am

Auntie M is a huge John Harvey fan, and he doesn’t disappoint in his newest Good Bait, teaming up characters from previous novels in a winning way with overlapping storylines.

DCI Karen Shields heads the Homicide & Serious Crime Team, always working a multitude of cases and hoping for a result. Shields is still grieving over the death of her father and realizing her work commitments have left her with only one good friend. When the body of a teenaged boy is discovered on Hampstead Heath, their investigation leads to a connection with the small Eastern European country of Moldova. At first drugs or illegal trading is suspected as the impetus for the boy’s death.

Miles away on the western coast in Cornwall, DI Trevor Cordon is nearing retirement, which can’t come quickly enough. Passed by for promotions by colleagues with more modern attitudes, he’s part of the old guard and set in his ways. Then the mother of an young woman he’d taken under his wing in the past appears on his doorstep, begging him to look into her daughter’s disappearance. Cordon had tried to put Letitia on a different path from her mother’s life of drug addiction and prostitution. Cordon is soon drawn to London after the mother’s unexpected death, where he enlists the aid of former colleague Jack Kiley, now a private detective.

The working methods, personalities and private lives of Shields and Cordon couldn’t be more different, but the one thing they have in common is that both feel like outsiders. We feel their loneliness in their private lives as we follow the complicated path of Shields’ many cases and the thread of Cordon’s hunt for Letitia.

International money laundering, drug operations, and people trafficking are all involved, along with a heavy dose of Cordon’s music. It is the contrast of Shield’s aggressive and exhausting police work against Cordon’s melancholy and slower investigation that will result in an overlapping link in both cases that will lead to the ultimate resolution.
Harvey manages to weave in socio-economic issues by illustrating how they impact on police work without hitting the reader over the head with these issues. One of Harvey’s greatest strengths is his ability to develop his characters on a rich but subtle level, and this in inherent in all of his works, including the Charlie Resnick and Frank Elder novels.

This is a skilled craftsman writing at the top of his game, and any reader who enjoys a well-crafted police procedural illustrating different detecting methods will enjoy Good Bait.

 

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Auntiemwrites Crime-Mystery Author M K Graff

Award-winning Mystery Author on books, reading and life: If proofreading is wrong, I don't wanna be right!

Lee Lofland

The Graveyard Shift

Being Author

Sherri Lupton Hollister, author

Romance, mystery, suspense, & small town humor...

Liz Loves Books

The Life of Guppy

the care and feeding of our little fish

middlesisterreviews.com/

My train of thoughts on...

Smile! Don't look back in anger.

Killer Women