Elly Griffiths: The Stone Circle Tuesday, May 7 2019 

Award winning novelist and complex mystery and Continued series winner and great read and mystery to die for Auntie M Writes Crime 12:39 am


Elly Griffith’s returns with her eleventh Dr Ruth Galloway mystery, The Stone Circle. For readers waiting anxiously for plot threads from the two previous books, some questions will be answered, but many interesting things raised in this knockout addition to the series that Val McDermid calls “One of my favourite current series.”

Readers return to the Saltmarsh that started the series off, when Ruth uncovers the bones of a young girl in a henge, or stone circle, not far from the original one in The Crossing Places. At the same time, DCI Nelson, her daughter’s father, receives an anonymous letter that highly resembles those he received during that first case.

But the writer of those first letters is dead. So who is writing this new set, and how are they connected to a decades-old cold case of a missing girl presumed dead?

When a new death occurs, all possible suspects will be scrutinized, and as things heat up in the case for Nelson, he makes a difficult personal decision, while Ruth, for the first time, considers making changes in her daily life.

Griffith’s has always had Ruth’s engaging voice contain the wry humor of someone we wish we could be friends with–a pragmatist who eschews much of the romanticism others covet, yet she yearns for something else in her life. Kate, the daughter she shares with Nelson, provides a continuing link besides their cases, and gives a counterpoint to the cases they investigate.

This series is one many writers list among their favorites, with good reason. Readers anxiously await the next installment of each book for the tight plots as much as the network of characters they have come to love and follow. With her strong sense of setting as the backdrop, the riveting plot and original characters make this an easy one to call “highly recommended.”

 

Death at the Dakota: Trudy Genova Manhattan Mysteries 2 Wednesday, May 1 2019 

amateur sleuth and Award winning novelist and complex mystery and great read and mystery to die for and police procedural and Series not to be missed Auntie M Writes Crime 4:12 pm

Auntie M is happy to announce that her second Trudy Genova Manhattan Mystery. DEATH AT THE DAKOTA, is out and availabLe on Amazon.com in trade paperback and soon to be in Kindle. Coming in Audible later this summer, too, read by the wonderful Lucinda Gainey, Dakota is already garnering 5-Star reviews.

Part procedural, part cozy, Death at the Dakota is a well-crafted and highly entertaining mystery.- Bruce Robert Coffin, #1 bestselling author of the Detective Byron mysteries.

Nurse Trudy Genova is making plans to take her relationship to NYPD detective Ned O’Malley to the next level, when she lands a gig as medical consultant on a film shoot at the famed Dakota apartment building in Manhattan, which John Lennon once called home. Then star Monica Kiley goes missing, a cast member turns up dead, and it appears Trudy might be next. Meanwhile Ned tackles a mysterious murder case in which the victim is burned beyond recognition. When his investigations lead him back to the Dakota, Trudy finds herself wondering: how can she fall in love if she can’t even survive?

Readers of Death Unscripted, the first book in the Trudy Genova Manhattan Mystery series, will find the same pleasures in this sequel: fast pacing, engaging characters, twists and turns on the way to a satisfying close. Once again M.K. Graff reveals her talents in crafting this delightful mix of amateur sleuth and police procedural.

I fell in love — not only with co-protagonists, Trudy and Ned, the richly detailed and historic setting of The Dakota, and the unique cast of characters, but with the unusual plot of Death at the Dakota. Sherry Harris, Agatha Award nominated author of the Sarah Winston Garage Sale Mysteries.

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Shirley Rousseau Murphy: Cat Chase the Moon Friday, Apr 26 2019 

Award winning novelist and Continued series winner and mystery to die for Auntie M Writes Crime 12:03 am

Readers know that any series that can stretch to its 21st installment must have a good following for a resason. Shirely Rousseau Murphy’s Cat Chase the Moon brings her Joe Grey cozies back with a new case that will involve the entire cat community, those that speak and those that don’t.

If you haven’t read a Joe Grey book yet, now’s the time to get acquainted with Joe and his partner, Dulcie, and their brood. Able to speak to several humans who keep their secret, Joe and Dulcie prowl around their town of Molina Point when their teenaged kitten Courtney goes missing. Stolen by Ulrich Seaver and ensconed in his pretty antique shop, Courtney doesn’t understand at first that her pampering days will soon lead to something far more dangerous. Soon the entire town in involved in a cat hunt for the pretty missing calico.

At the same time, a young woman is discovered in a shallow grave, left for dead. She’s rescued in time to be saved, and while under police protection, gives details of a theft ring that ties in to a family in town known for their spectacular domestic arguments. Unfortunately, a young girl is lost in the middle of these hostile parents who had managed to arouse angry feelings in their neighbors. But how far do their activites go beyond their own troubles?

Joe is the one who understands how these disparate threads are woven together as the humans investigate with a little help from their feline friends. Perfect reading for cat lovers, fans of Mandy Morton’s Hettie Bagshot series, or anyone looking for an inside look into the world of cats who can talk, framed in a cozy mystery from the author who has received eleven national Cat Writers’ Association medals for Best Novel of the Year.

 

Kjell Ola Dahl: The Courier Sunday, Mar 24 2019 

Award winning novelist and complex mystery and great read and historical saga and mystery to die for Auntie M Writes Crime 12:39 am

Kjell Ola Dahl’s The Courier starts out in Oslo, where in 1942 a young Jewish courier, Ester, escapes the Gestapo and the horrors of Auschwitz.

Turid is the young daughter of Ester’s best friend, Ase, murdered after Ase helped Ester flee to Sweden. And then there is Falkum, Ase’s husband, baby Turid’s father, and years later, Ester’s lover?

With the action alternating between events of the time, and now with Turid almost grown, the plot resonates with emotion in each period. The complex story never loses the reader yet brings the horrors of WWII to the forefront and it reverberations to so many.

It is an accomplished writer who can combine the tragedies of historical fiction with what is essenntially a murder mystery. The thriller aspects of each time period, the 1940s, the 1960s and the close present, are highly articulated and create a visual and cinematic timeline.

Dahl does a great job keeping the tension up as the narrative threads become increasingly intertwined and the truths of each era become apparent. The jumps in this timeline, far from disturbing, feel natural as the characters are well developed both in physical appearance and the way they change over the years.

The pace continues to pick up, from the opening when Ester sees her father being arrested, to the climax as the story becomes increasingly gripping.

A solid, dark mystery with elegant prose, Dahl won two award for The Courier when it was first published before being translated into English.

 

Three Thrillers: Berry, Margolin,Ryan Sunday, Mar 10 2019 

Award winning novelist and complex mystery and Continued series winner and great read and mystery to die for and Uncategorized Auntie M Writes Crime 12:09 am

For your reading pleasure this March, as the rains come and the winds blow: three thrillers certain to keep your mind off the weather! Watch this spot for Margolin and Ryan later this week!

Steve Berry’s Cotton Malone thriller, The Malta Exchange, has been compared to Brown’s The Da Vinci Code with its ties to the Vatican, but it has a more complex plot that will capture your attention.

Malone sure does get around, and readers have to hope Berry and his wife, who are co-founders of History Matters, a non-profit that preserves historic sites, manage to get in some travel to the places Malone does when Berry is doing research for a new novel.

In Italy on Lake Como, Malone is trying to track letters between Churchill and Mussolini. Having disappeared in 1945, these could literally change our experience of the history of that time. But as if that alone is not enough of a storyline, of course Malone is not the only one who’s on their trail.

This is all happening at the same time a conclave is in progress to elect a new pope. Kastor Cardinal Gallo, however, is off looking for a document in Malta that stretches back to the 4th Century, but are his motives pure?

The two trails will soon merge. Readers will learn the older history of the Catholic Church as well as the more recent the role of the popes during the rise of Fascism and Mussolini in Italy. The Knights of Malta play an important role and readers learn their history (they exist to this day), as one of the smallest sovereign nations in the world. All the settings are well described, readers will feel they have been there, without it ever coming across as a travelogue.

Because the story starts a day before the Conclave is about to begin, that time constraint adds to the fast pacing. There are older characters readers know, like Stephanie and Luke, but also new ones, including twin brothers. Sure to delight readers new to the series and repeaters.

 

Elly Griffiths: The Stranger Diaries Tuesday, Mar 5 2019 

Award winning novelist and complex mystery and great read and mystery to die for Auntie M Writes Crime 12:57 am


Fans of Elly Griffiths will be delighted to read The Stranger Diaries, the stand-alone that’s an homage to gothic literature of the highest quality.

At once atmospheric and stylish, this is a mystery chock full of literary gems, a very modern mystery with echoes of the past. Clare Cassidy is a literature teacher that her daughter attends, where she teaches a class on Gothic writer RM Holland, whose papers and library are at the school, a gothic marvel of its own.

When one of her colleagues is found dead, a line from relating to an RM Holland story by her body, detectives feel Holland’s works somehow hold the key to the case. Fearful the killer is someone she knows, Clare writes about her terror and suspicions in her journal, as is her routine, until the day she sees new writing in the diary in a different hand from hers. A second point of view is that of Clare’s daughter, Georgia, at once the quintessential teen, embarassed by her mother, but hiding her own secrets.

Both of these are engaging points of view, especially as Clare has the propensity to be rather snarky at times in a delightful way, as when directed toward her ex-husband, whom we loathe and pity at the same time. It keeps her very real.

And the there’s the third point of view. The investigating detective, DS Harbinder Kaur, is one early readers have been clamoring to see more of, and we can only hope that Griffiths will allows us that hope and bring her back in another book. At once highly original, Harbinder and her unlikely background make her an instant character who could support a series of her own, if Griffiths, already writing two popular series (The Ruth Galloway and the Magic Men mysteries) has that inclination.

Holland, the subject of a book Clare keeps intending to write, and his gothic story, “The Stranger,” become part of the plot and bring Clare into the sights of Harbinder. Notice Auntie M keeps calling these characters by their first names, as that is the level of identification readers will have for them.

As the bodies start to pile up, any preconceived notions we have about all of the characters seem to slip away and the suspense becomes tighter and tighter. This is an accomplished storyteller, a lover of literature, at the top of her game. Not to be missed. Highly recommended.

 

Sophie Hannah: The Next to Die Friday, Feb 22 2019 

Award winning novelist and complex mystery and great read and mystery to die for and Uncategorized Auntie M Writes Crime 12:55 am

The multi-faceted Sophie Hannah does it all: compelling stand-alones, resurrecting Hercule Poirot for Agatha Christie’s estate, and her Culver Valley police procedural series. But she doesn’t stop there–the hallmark of this series is that the protagonist of each book is a character involved in the action, not the detectives, centered on Simon Waterhouse and his wife, Charlie Zailer.

We learn of the continuing saga of the married duo as a secondary plot, insinuating itself into the main plot of the newest in the series, The Next to Die. And a strong feminist will muddy the waters by insisting the killer being sought is a misogynist pig, as three of the four victims are women. Could she be right?

There’s more than a bit of sly humor when your protagonist is a professional stand-up comedian. Kim Tribbeck has received a little white book, mostly blank, with a few lines of poetry inside. She’s tossed it away, but she does remember receiving it.

The importance of this becomes clear when a murderer takes to killing pairs of best friends, four in all over the last four months. In each case he’s given the victim one of these same hand-made books before killing them. Each contains a line of poetry. Each poet was a woman whose name started with an E. So where does that lead them?

Dubbed “Billy Dead Mates” by the police, the detectives have exhausted ways to link the victims. It becomes clear the case revolves around books, but in what way? And if these are truly killings of best friends, why was Kim Tribbeck given a copy and left to live? Could it be that the fact she hasn’t had a best friend in years have saved her life?

At once convoluted yet sharply intelligent, the plot wraps around itself until the superb mind of Simon Waterhouse allows him to see beyond the obvious and pull the case together.

There’s an almost gothic feel to the book, as the story unfolds by way of excerpts from a book Kim writes after the case is over, added to by conventional chapters of interviews and the thoughts of the various detectives on the team searching for this killer.

The characters are true to themselves, with distinctly-drawn personalities that show Hannah’s expertise at describing the psychology of different people with that wry edge that smacks of verisimilitude until they seem to leap off the page. The Independent has compared Hannah to Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendall with good reason.

 

Peter Robinson: Careless Love Wednesday, Feb 20 2019 

Award winning novelist and complex mystery and Continued series winner and great read and mystery to die for Auntie M Writes Crime 12:24 am

Peter Robinson’s 25th Inspector Banks novel, Careless Love, adds to his string of hits with a complex mystery at its heart.

When a young student’s body is found in a car on a lonely road, waiting to be towed, it first appears to be a suicide, but it soon becomes apparent the victim died elsewhere, raising questions about who else was involved.

At the same time, man in his sixties is found dead at the bottom of a gulley, his neck broken in a fall. Did he slip and fall, or was he pushed? Another suspicious death soon has Banks and his team sharing duties to figure out if these could possibly be connected, while waiting for forenscis tests.

And then a third victim is found, this one a clear murder, with ties to the first two victims, and the case heats up and extends.

The stakes get higher when an old foe of both Banks and his long-time patner, Annie Cabot, is found to be back in England. This side twist occupies both of their minds as the two head the team that will take them into the world of students and high finance to find what really happened to these victims.

Any fan of police procedurals will appreciate the solid police work amongst the Yorkshire setting. One of the delights of this series is the three-dimensional characters who populate it, and how readers see the threads of their investigations brought together to a rewarding conclusion.

Banks’s devotion to music has always been a hallmark of the series, and readers will learn about his preferences, from classical to 60s rock. Auntie M confesses to seeking out a classical violinist Banks recommended, and was thoroughly rewarded. The loner detective who yearns for companionship is never more attractive than here, seeking to understand poetry, playing his music to suit his moods, and figuring out the details of a complex murder investigation.

Highly recommended.

 

Ausma Zehanat Khan: A Deadly Divide Wednesday, Feb 13 2019 

Award winning novelist and complex mystery and Continued series winner and great read and mystery to die for Auntie M Writes Crime 12:27 am


Asuma Zehanat Khan returns with the fifth in her series featuring Canadian detectives Esa Khattak and Rachel Getty in A Deadly Divide.

Bearing her hallmark observation of each character’s story, imbuing each with realistic emotion, Khan’s elevates her novels from simple crime stories. While increasing the suspense as the book progresses, she manages to tell all sides of complex human rights issues, a nod to her background in international law.

This time the Community Policing detectives are called to a mass shooting at a mosque in Quebec. The local priest, found with a weapon in his hands, is released, while the Surete` detain a young Muslim helping the wounded on the scene.

But this is not a typical hate crime, and Khattak and Getty try to keep raging emotions calmed in a community reacting with fear, their efforts thrwarted by both a heavily right-wing university group and a right-wing radio host who inflames the popoulation.

Also at work are young Muslims trying to counteract his efforts with their own radio show, but there are secrets being kept from all of the detectives from all of these factions. And within the Surete` a mole is at work, adding to the fractures of the community with ill-timed leaks.

As if it isn’t enough to have this tension of political and religious differences, it soon becomes apparent that Esa and those he loves are in the crosshairs of someone else, someone egging him on and anticipating his moves and shadowing his circle.

How these things are connected is only half of the situation, as the two detectives grapple with their personal lives at the same time, making this a well-rounded portrayal of characters with emotional lives outside their jobs. Their very humanness, from postive to negative thoughts and actions, helps readers see everyone as fully fleshed. There are no cardboard characters here.

This ability to people her novels with characters who hold passionate beliefs, coupled with her thought-provoking, suspenseful plot, quietly educates readers while at the same time illustrating the complexities of living in the Western world as a Muslim.

Highly recommended.

 

Rhys Bowen: The Victory Garden Tuesday, Feb 12 2019 

Award winning novelist and great read and historical saga and mystery to die for Auntie M Writes Crime 12:50 am

Rhys Bowen’s newest stand-alone, The Victory Garden, brings the horrors of WWI close to home with its young protagonist, Emily Bryce.

The judge’s daughter, with a mother who is class conscious, has lost her beloved brother to the war. When she meets an Australian pilot convalescing at a local home, they fall in love, only to have that love thwarted by more than her parents.

Determined to make a difference, like her nurse friend Clarissa has done, Emily joins the Women’s Land Army, to her parents chagrin. Learning things that will come in useful brings Emily and a few of her cohorts to the small village of Bucksley Cross to work the garden of Lady Charlton, a widow who has lost her son and grandson to the war.

An unlikely friendship breaks out between the older woman and the educated girl, and when things change dramatically for Emily, she returns to the small, dark cottage Lady Charlton owns, where the journal of another young woman soon finds Emily concocting herbal potions that will do more than she could ever have imagined for the village and for herself.

With a hearty dose of self-determination, Emily finds a new family of unlikely friends at the same time that she finds her own strength.

Bowen encapulates the huge horrors of war by bringing them to the heartache of one young woman on a voyage of self-discovery. A satifying read from a talented writer at the top of her game.

 

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