Top secrets

When it comes to crime, seniors are having a moment. Hulu’s hit Only Murders in the Building, with Steve Martin and Martin Short as investigating podcasters, will return for a third season, and Stephen Spielberg snapped up the film rights to Richard Osman’s bestselling The Thursday Murder Club. That 2020 mystery about four senior sleuths at an English retirement community  has led to two excellent follow-ups: last year’s The Man Who Died Twice and this month’s The Bullet That Missed (Viking, digital galley). The Thursday Murder Club members — Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, Ron — are puzzling over the cold case of TV reporter Bethany Waites, who was close to exposing a sales tax fraud when her car went over a cliff into the sea; her body was never found. They get some help from Bethany’s former colleagues and their police pals Chris and Donna, but matters are complicated by former spy Elizabeth, who is being blackmailed into carrying out a hit on a retired KGB agent. Oh dear! It makes perfect sense if you’ve read the first two books. Clever plotting, witty writing and engaging characters make for a good old time.

The same can be said for Deanna Raybourn’s frisky Killers of a Certain Age (Berkley, digital galley), which also features a quartet of savvy seniors. Billie, Mary Alice, Natalie and Helen were teenagers back in 1978 when they were recruited by the secret global network known as the Museum and trained as elite assassins.  All their targets were nasty criminals and killers, of course. Now the women have reached retirement age, and the Museum has sent them on a celebratory cruise. All is going swimmingly until the women spy a Museum colleague in disguise and realize they’re his targets. Someone at the Museum thinks they know too much — and they do, like how to hit back. Raybourn alternates the women’s present-day movements with flashbacks to their training and past missions.  All four make the most of being women of a certain age — often overlooked, practically invisible.

Remember Agatha Christie’s memorable  Miss Marple, whose age and mild demeanor hid her knife-sharp wits? Marple: 12 New Stories (Morrow, digital galley) is a treat for fans of the legendary sleuth as a dozen contemporary writers — Ruth Ware, Elly Griffiths and Lucy Foley, among them — put their own spin on Jane Marple. In “Miss Marple Takes Manhattan,” Alyssa Cole sweeps her off to New York City, where her nephew underestimates his aunt’s street smarts. The body’s in the kitchen instead of the library in Val McDermid’s “The Second Murder in the Vicarage,” and in Leigh Bardugo’s “The Disappearance,”  Jane’s old pal Dolly Bantry needs her help in solving another mystery at Gossington Hall. Christie would approve.

Who is Anomie? The quest to discover the identity of a creepy internet stalker and possible killer occupies detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott for a thousand pages in The Ink Black Heart (Little Brown, library hardcover), the sixth entry in the best-selling series by Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter author is no stranger to internet controversy,  and her familiarity with fans and trolls shows up not only in the complex storyline but also in the pages of Twitter threads and chat room transcripts. I did a fair amount of skimming these often confusing portions, eager to return to the investigation of the murder of Edie Ledwell, the co-creator of a quirky online cartoon, “The Ink Black Heart.”  The prime suspect is Anomie, who developed a free online game based on Ledwell’s cartoon and who was unmercifully harassing her, along with thousands of followers. But who is Anomie in real life? Numerous eccentrics present themselves, from jealous animators and actors, to former agents and business partners. Robin infiltrates the online game as Buffypaws, and Strike even disguises himself as Darth Vader at a comics con. But all is not fun and games. A parcel bomb explodes, someone is shoved under a train, a hostage situation unfolds. It’s to Rowling’s storytelling credit that The Ink Black Heart has enough suspense to keep readers interested in Anomie to the very end. Or maybe they want to know how the detectives’ love life plays out. Those two should get a room.

Savannah is a lovely city with an ugly past still shadowing the present. No one knows that better than society doyenne and widowed matriarch Morgana Musgrave: “I do believe there’s a poisonous vapor in this town, a sort of miasmal gas that rises from the storm drains and leeches into our blood. Would either of you care for cheese straws?” George Dawes Green mixes mystery and social commentary in his lush novel The Kingdoms of Savannah (Celadon Books, digital galley), where it’s midnight in that garden of sweetness and rot, secrets and lies.  The murder of an affable young homeless man named Billy and the disappearance of crazy-talking archaeologist Matilda “Stony” Stone sparks  Morgana’s adopted black granddaughter and aspiring documentary filmmaker Jaq to ask difficult questions in her search for justice. Her uncle Ransom, Morgana’s wayward younger son who lives in the homeless camp under the Truman bridge, reluctantly helps her. Meanwhile, Morgana’s failing detective agency is hired by the chief suspect, a sleazy developer/slumlord, to prove his innocence. A supporting ensemble cast of eccentrics — society matrons, ambitious cops, ghost tour operators, vicious meth heads, a mysterious nighttime whistler — wind through the immersive story, moving from mansions to dive bars to a swampy island upriver. A woman is imprisoned in an underground tunnel reached by storm drain.  I couldn’t stop reading, and I didn’t want it to end. Love the cover, too.

Where Green’s novel is dark and glittery, Sarah Addison Allen’s Other Birds (St. Martin’s Press, digital galley) is a dreamy pastel fable haunted by family secrets and a few lingering ghosts. Recent high school grad Zoey decides to spend the summer before college at her late mother’s apartment on quaint Mallow Island near Charleston, S.C. The small Dellawisp complex — named after the tiny turquoise birds fluttering in the courtyard — is also home to a reticent caretaker, a solitary young chef, a henna artist with an assumed name, a hoarder obsessed with a legendary writer, and her reclusive sister. Their stories, along with the wistful spirits of past residents,  connect past and present in magical and surprising ways. Allen’s touch is light, her prose lyrical, so it’s easy to suspend disbelief and become absorbed in the intriguing story. “Stories aren’t fiction. Stories are fabric. They’re the white sheets we drape over our ghosts so we can see them.”

Lisa Jewell’s 2019 chiller The Family Upstairs reminded me of one Barbara Vine’s twisted tales of a dysfunctional family. It wrapped up quite neatly so I was surprised to learn that there was a sequel, The Family Remains (Atria, digital galley). Jewell introduces several new characters, including an abused wife and a discerning detective, but mostly focuses on the continuing fortunes of siblings Lucy and Henry Lamb. Their parents died in a presumed murder-suicide when they were young teens, and the first book explores their peculiar upbringing. More revelations unfold in the second as grown-up Lucy and Henry reunite in London and begin the search for Finn, the boy who lived with them back in the day. Meanwhile, the police are trying to identify a bag of bones found by mudlarkers on the Thames, and authorities in France have discovered the murder of a man connected to Lucy. The Family Remains could be read as a stand-alone, but it’s better if you first read The Family Upstairs. Shiver.

Ready Reader One

Don’t wait another day to read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Knopf, review copy), Gabrielle Zevin’s immersive new novel about friendship, creativity — and video games. But don’t let the latter put you off. You don’t have to have died of dysentery on the Oregon Trail, or survived a zombie apocalypse, to appreciate this multi-leveled chronicle of two California kids, Sam and Sadie, who bond while playing Super Mario  in a children’s hospital. A misunderstanding interrupts their early friendship, but they reconnect as college students in the ‘90s — Sam at Harvard, Sadie at MIT — and the question “Do you still game?” leads to a partnership designing video games. The collaboration, although wildly successful, is also fraught by misunderstandings, jealousy and perceived betrayals. Egos collide, other people — Sadie’s manipulative professor Dov, Sam’s supportive roommate Marx — play significant roles. I’m a reader, not a gamer, but good books and games both depend on content and storytelling. Zevin, who also wrote book-club favorite The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, knows how to tell a story. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is both playful and serious, compulsively readable. Your turn…

Spying is often called the Great Game, and for a long time Berlin was a major playground. But in the winter of 1990, the wall has fallen and the rules are changing for the agents of Winter Work (Knopf, digital galley). Author Dan Fesperman is on familiar territory, though, as he crafts another intricate thriller, this one inspired by a true incident — the CIA’s fabled acquisition of important Stasi files with informers’ names.  Stasi colonel Emil Grimm hopes to trade the information for safe passage to the West for himself, his terminally ill wife and her caretaker. The Russians want the data for leverage and money, and they will kill to get their hands on it. The CIA is buying from whoever offers the best deal, and agent Claire Sailor is savvy enough to know her boss is keeping her in the dark even as she plays cat and mouse with enigmatic Grimm and the Russian henchmen. Sailor, who last appeared in The Cover Wife, gets some help from an old colleague who misses the game, but she’s not sure she can trust a new partner. Snow and secrets are so thick on the ground you might not spy the Easter eggs from Fesperman’s previous novels. Look out for a certain Paris snow globe.

Beginning with the excellent The Expats 10 years ago, Chris Pavone has proved he can do the twist with aplomb. He adds a couple of moves in Two Nights in Lisbon (FSG, digital galley), but I know when I’m being played. I don’t mind because I’m having too much fun. Ariel Pryce wakes up in Lisbon hotel room to discover her handsome, younger husband, John Wright, has disappeared. The police and American Embassy officials aren’t much interested that the financier has gone missing for a few hours, although they are surprised how little Ariel knows about her husband of three months. Still, they reassure her he’ll turn up. He doesn’t, but a ransom note does. Game on. Pavone neatly shifts between present and past to reveal his characters’ back stories and secrets. Most recently a bookseller in a small town with a young son, Ariel was once an actress and fled a bad marriage. She’s had several names. Surprise — John has, too. Pavone weaves international intrigue with domestic suspense and brings back a villain from a previous book, all the while building to an improbable yet satisfying ending.

“Fictional murder is oddly soothing in troubled times.” So thinks forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway at one point in Elly Griffiths’ The Locked Room (HarperCollins, digital galley), set during the early days of the pandemic in England’s Norfolk region. Ruth is hoping her brother has sent her a crime novel to read during lockdown, maybe something by Val McDermid or Ian Rankin. Ruth has excellent taste! Crime fiction is my go-to genre, and I’ve been reading scads of good ones this summer, including The Locked Room. Since it’s the 14th (and apparently penultimate) book in the series, it’s not recommended for newcomers who are likely to find the relationships among the characters as confusing as its puzzle of a plot. Covid lockdown complicates everything, from Ruth and her students unearthing a possible plague skeleton, to Nelson and his fellow police officers investigating a series of murders disguised as suicides. And someone has been locked in a lonely cellar. In Lauren Belfer’s  absorbing Ashton Hall (Ballantine, digital galley), there’s a secret room in an English manor house — and there’s a skeleton walled inside. The discovery by a curious, autistic boy sparks his mother, a frustrated academic, to research the house’s history going back to the Elizabethan era.

Fiona Barton, Megan Miranda and Ruth Ware are reliable authors for summer suspense. In Barton’s Local Gone Missing (Berkley Penguin, digital galley), a police detective on medical leave gets involved in a small seaside town’s local politics when two teens overdose at a music festival and a senior gadfly goes missing. People are always disappearing in Miranda’s twisty thrillers, and in The Last to Vanish (Scribner, digital galley), the mountain resort town of Cutter’s Pass has a long history of visitors going missing. Now, when a journalist investigating the disappearances also vanishes, his younger brother and the likeable manager of a local inn pick up the trail. Ruth Ware’s The It Girl (Gallery/Scout Press, digital gallery) toggles between the Oxford University of a decade ago and present-day Edinburgh. Back in the day, charismatic April was Hannah’s roommate and the center of a tight group of friends. Then she was murdered, and Hannah’s testimony put the killer behind bars. Ten years later, pregnant Hannah is married to April’s boyfriend Will when the killer dies in prison and a journalist suggests he was wrongly convicted. The Big Chill atmosphere and academic mystery seemed overly familiar to me, but I still kept turning pages.

Paging summer

Let’s agree that summer reading is whatever you want it to be, from the classic you always meant to read to the escapist tale set in sunny climes. That being said, I’d be happy to begin my summer every year with a new Jane Austen. Alas, that’s impossible, although  myriad other writers have tried to carry on with their own sequels, prequels and pastiches. Some have been fun, others dreadful. Claudia Gray’s The Murder of Mr. Wickham (Vintage, e-galley) is a delight. Both a clever comedy of manners and smart mystery, it assumes that Austen’s characters all know each other and are attending a summer house party at the Knightleys’ country estate. Emma’s the perfect hostess, but even she’s rattled by the sudden appearance of villainous George Wickham, still a rogue and now a swindler. Everybody would like to kill him, and, no surprise, someone does. But who? The two teenagers among the guests — Jonathan, the serious, socially awkward son of the Darcys, and Juliet Tilney, the charming daughter of now famous novelist Catherine Moreland — turn detective. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more from them in future books, which would be fine with me. As Austen said, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”

In Emma Straub’s funny and poignant new novel This Time Tomorrow (Riverhead, purchased e-book), Alice falls asleep on her 40th birthday and wakes up in childhood home on her 16th birthday. She doesn’t know what’s happened except that it’s really happening. “It was the wobbly nerves in her stomach, like the drop on a roller coaster; it was the hyperawareness of everything around her. Alice felt like Spider-Man, except all her powers were those of a teenage girl.” Actually, Alice now has the power of time travel, with certain limitations, and has the chance to be young again with her healthy, cheerful father Leo, author of popular novels about time-traveling brothers. And, maybe, just maybe, she can tweak the timeline so that Leo isn’t dying in the hospital 25 years in the future.  Kudos to Straub’s superpowers as as a writer for making this wishful-thinking scenario sweetly plausible, for including just enough pop culture references, for remembering what it’s like to be 16, and for creating characters who don’t always know what they’re doing but are true to themselves. A summer valentine.

Home renovation Iooks so easy on TV: demo to drywall, plumbing and paint, all in an hour. Ha! Just ask Georgia contractor Hattie Kavanaugh, the heroine of Mary Kay Andrews’ winning The Homewreckers (St. Martin’s, e-galley). She’s scrunched in the crawl space of a crumbling historic home in Savannah when a Hollywood producer taps her for a new home renovation show on reality TV. Hattie, a young widow who loves working for her father-in-law, wants no part of the TV scheme, except her current moneypit of a project threatens to bankrupt the family business. So she finally agrees to renovating an old beach house on nearby Tybee island with a handsome co-host. His hidden agenda isn’t the only secret the project holds — Hattie finds evidence in the house connected to the long-ago disappearance of a beloved high school teacher. Andrews (in real life, my friend Kathy Trocheck) is a pro at mixing mystery, romance and home design details, and she packs this page-turner with surprises galore. Don’t wait for the TV show.

Now, if houses could talk, you’d want to hear out Veronica Levy’s home on outer Cape Cod as depicted in Jennifer Weiner’s busy and big-hearted The Summer Place (Atria, e-galley). The house, the setting for Veronica’s step-granddaughter Ruby’s planned July wedding to her pandemic boyfriend, is full to the brim with assorted family members, their stories and secrets, both past and present. That the bride is having second thoughts is the least of it. Affairs of the heart and the bedroom abound to an inordinate degree, as do consequences and coincidences. Weiner’s plotting jumps the shark more than once, but her fans will fall for it, hook, line and sinker.

Lions and hyenas and rhinos. Lights, camera, action. Hollywood heads to the Serengheti in Chris Bohjalian’s thrilling The Lioness (Doubleday Knopf, e-galley), and there will be blood. In 1964, A-list actress Katie Barstow and her new husband David Hill invite a handful of family members and close friends on an African photo safari. But what begins as an exotic adventure with most of the comforts of home quickly dissolves into a dangerous nightmare when the group is ambushed and kidnapped by armed mercenaries with Russian accents. Bohjalian, who scared me with disease-carrying rats in The Red Lotus, ups the suspense by deftly mixing the characters’ present-day perspectives with their respective back stories. Imagine an episode of Survivor gone terribly wrong as the cast risks being killed and/or eaten at practically every turn. There are so many ways to die in the jungle. Oh my!

Emily Henry’s new rom-com has the irresistible title Book Lovers (Berkley, e-galley), and, yes, such a charmer proves hard to resist. Henry plays with some cherished romance tropes — enemies-to-lovers, fish out of water, big city vs. small town — and it’s all to the good. Cutthroat literary agent Nora Stephens reluctantly agrees to a vacation with her beloved younger sister Libby in the picturesque North Carolina town of Sunshine Falls. She even slows down and starts to enjoy herself, if only she didn’t keep running into her New York nemesis, book editor Charlie Lastra. The witty, back-and-forth banter is a bonus to a warm story of family ties and self-discovery. The ice queen thaws — maybe.

Spring mix

I didn’t go anywhere on spring break, but I’ve been everywhere. Thanks to books, I’ve traveled from New York to London, Paris to Venice, Berlin to Baltimore. I’ve even been to the moon and back, skipping through time and space via Emily St. John Mandel’s wonder-filled Sea of Tranquility (Knopf Doubleday, digital galley), a sort of companion novel to Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel. I suppose it’s science fiction, what with classic elements like time travel, spaceships and colonies on the moon, but its reality — past, present, future — is both familiar and strange, and its characters are achingly human. There’s an English expat wandering in the Canadian woods, a best-selling novelist on a future book tour, a curiously named stranger playing time detective. There’s devastating climate change, and another pandemic, and the world maybe, probably coming to an end, yet there is as much life as loss. It’s hopeful, too, and I’ve been carrying it around in my head like a half-remembered dream. I realize I haven’t given you much detail as to the shimmering plot, but I want you to experience that sense of discovery when the strands come together.

Back to earth, and we’re in Baltimore, where Anne Tyler has made ordinary lives seem extraordinary in numerous novels. She does it again in French Braid (Knopf Doubleday, digital galley), floating among members of the Garretts as they spin out and away from each other over several generations and decades. Not that they were ever very close, even on a family vacation in 1959 where younger son David avoids the lake and his overloud father Robin, while mother Mercy paints landscapes and ignores her teenage daughters. I lost all sympathy for Mercy when she later leaves a cat, who had curled on her bed like a ”nautilus,” at an animal shelter. She also effectively leaves her husband, moving bit by bit into a small artists’ studio. A granddaughter inherits her artistic talent, though, even as other offspring are imprinted with distinctive family traits. Tyler writes prismatically of the passage of time and the enduring mystery of family.

A teenage love triangle ends in tragedy in Stuart O’Nan’s Ocean State (Grove Atlantic, digital galley., which reads like a literary episode of Dateline. The little sister of the killer reveals both the identity of murderer and victim in the first line, while flashbacks tell the suspenseful backstory of young love and jealousy in a working-class Rhode Island town. It reminds me of O’Nan’s beautifully written novel of a few years back, Songs for the Missing, about a family stricken by the disappearance of a beloved daughter. O’Nan is very good at getting inside the heads of teens, their hothouse emotions stoked by hormones and peer pressure.

Other kinds of mysteries propel novels of crime and suspense. Donna Leon returns again to lovely, watery, crowded Venice in Give Unto Others (Grove Atlantic, digital galley), where police officer Guido Brunetti suspects a respected charity is a cover-up for fraud. Tech-savvy Claudia Lin whizzes around New York on a bike in Jane Pek’s clever The Verifiers (Knopf Doubleday, digital galley), checking out clients using a popular dating app. Alex Segura’s terrific Secret Identity (Flati ron, digital galley) is set in 1970s New York, where comic book fan Carmen Valdez ghostwrites a female superhero comic for a colleague, who then turns up dead.

Paris is always a good idea, right? Lucy Foley crafts a locked-room puzzle in The Paris Apartment (HarperCollins, digital galley) as Jess arrives to stay with her brother in his posh digs, only to discover he’s disappeared and his odd neighbors are of little help. In An Impossible Imposter (Penguin, digital galley), Deanna Raybourne has Victorian sleuth Veronica Speedwell confronting her past while investigating a long-lost heir at a Dartmoor mansion. Kelley Armstrong may be winding up her Rockton series with The Deepest of Secrets (St. Martin’s Press, digital galley) with detective Casey Duncan facing the closure of the off-the-grid community in the Canadian wilderness. Rockton’s not on any map, but it’s a must-stop for people looking to lose their pasts.

A map is at the heart of Peng Shepherd’s inventive The Cartographers (HarperCollins, digital galley), which deftly mixes mystery with a little bit of magic. There’s a body in the New York Public Library — that of noted cartographer Dr. Daniel Young. His estranged daughter Nell, her father’s protege until a famous falling-out, arrives at the scene of the crime with a mix of emotions. She’s even more confused when she finds a cheap, gas station map among his papers — the very map that caused the fateful argument — and learns that it’s the last of its kind and very much-wanted by a mysterious group known as the Cartographers. But why? That’s the secret someone will kill to keep secret, and it’s simply amazing, as Nell discovers with the help of her ex-boyfriend and her father’s friends from long ago. The Cartographers is amazing, too, and I’m already looking forward to a return visit.

 

As you like it

The Olympics. The Super Bowl. Wordle. Reader, it’s all about the games this winter, so time to play As You Like It, as in “if you like that, then you may like this.” Game on!

If you like crime novels like S. J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep,  in which amnesia plays a key role, then try Alafair Burke’s tricky Find Me (HarperCollins, digital galley). Hope Miller is not her real name. Fifteen years ago, an unidentified young woman was rescued from an overturned car with no memory of her past and befriended by Lyndsay Kelly, now a Manhattan defense attorney. When Hope goes missing shortly after starting a new life in East Hampton, Lyndsay goes looking for her and reaches out to NYPD detective Ellie Hatcher after a drop of blood connected to Hope’s disappearance also connects to an infamous Kansas crime. Ellie, whose police detective father died before he could arrest the serial killer eventually convicted for those murders, is intrigued by the link to her past and joins the search for Hope. If this sounds complicated, it is, but Burke is a pro at juggling multiple storylines and shifting perspectives. She spins quite a web of secrets and lies before cleverly unraveling several dark mysteries, the Kansas one inspired by real-life serial killer BTK, who terrorized Wichita in the 1980s. (I know, I was there. So was Burke).

If you like cozy mysteries like The Thursday Murder Club and quirky characters like Eleanor Oliphant, then check out Nita Prose’s The Maid (Ballantine, digital galley). Even though her co-workers think she’s an oddball, narrator Molly Gray loves the routine of her job at the Regency Grand Hotel and everything about it — the crisp white sheets, perfectly plumped pillows, her organized cleaning cart. But when she discovers the body of a wealthy guest in a room she’s assigned to clean, her subsequent actions, which make perfect sense to her, cast her as a murder suspect. Molly makes for a delightful narrator, and writer Prose crafts a fresh and tidy take on the traditional hotel murder scenario.

If you like hefty detective novels like Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White or any of Elizabeth George’s recent doorstops featuring Thomas Lynley, then you’ll want to dig into George’s latest Lynley, Something to Hide (Viking Penguin, purchased e-book). When an undercover police detective investigating incidents of FGM (female genital mutilation) in North London’s Nigerian community is murdered, her death reveals personal links to the illegal practice. Central to the story is the immigrant Bankole famly, which is planning an arranged marriage for a rebellious teenage son and a horrific surgery on an 8-year-old daughter. Lynley, DS Barbara Havers and DS Winston Nkata encounter culture clash, racism, sexism, domestic violence and blackmail in their investigation, which is much more interesting than the obligatory digressions about their personal lives. The book reminds me of an earlier entry in the series, Deception on His Mind, an equally involving story about Asian immigrants in an English seaside community. 

If you like The Secret History and are drawn to classical mythology, then you might approve of Mark Prins’ The Latinist: A Novel  (Norton, digital galley). Set in the hallowed halls of Oxford University, this modern reimagining of the myth of Daphne and Apollo does not wear its knowledge lightly, so brush up on your Ovid and the Roman gods and goddesses. Tessa Templeton, a star classics student getting ready to defend her thesis, learns that her beloved mentor, famous classics scholar Christopher Eccles, has been sabotaging her career, damning her with faint praise in letters of reference. Disbelieving and then furious, Tessa confronts Chris, who initially denies his part in any plot even as he continues to track her texts and emails. Totally obsessed with Tessa, he plans to keep her in Oxford as his assistant, but then she runs off to an archaeology dig and makes a important discovery about a minor Latin poet known for “limping iambs.” The novel is not so much about overheated passion and desire as cold-blooded power, ambition and revenge. 

If you like Agatha Christie — both her fiction and as a fictional character in other writers’ novels, than you’re in luck. Like last year’s The Mysterious Mrs. Christie and the movie Agatha, Nina de Gramont’s The Christie Affair (St. Martin’s, digital galley) is an inventive take on Christie’s mysterious 11-day disappearance in 1926. De Gramont blends fact and fiction, using some real names and some made up. Narrator Nan O’Dey is the stand-in for Archie’s real-life lover, Nancy Neele, and has a complicated background in Ireland that serves as catalyst for her later involvement in the Christies’ life. The resulting plot is clever but implausible, an entertaining mystery as long as you forget the the few facts of the case. Agatha Christie has more minor roles in two other tales, Colleen Cambridge’s Murder at Mallowan Hall (Kensington, digital galley) and Lori Rader-Day’s Death at Greenway (HarperCollins, digital galley). Set in 1930, Mallowan is the first in a series featuring Phyllida Bright as housekeeper at the manor house of the famous author and her second husband Max Mallowan. When a body’s found in the library, Phyllida decides to play Hercule Poirot and solve the case. The atmospheric Greenway is set during World War II, and focuses on trainee nurse Bridget Kelly tending to 10 babies and toddlers evacuated to the Devon country home of Christie and her husband, who are away doing war work. A fellow nurse called Gigi has more of a talent for fun than caring for children, but when a strangled body is found in the river and Gigi mysteriously disappears, Bridget is determined to discover what’s going on. For some real Agatha Christie stories, pick up the collection A Deadly Affair (HarperCollins, digital galley), subtitled “Unexpected Love Stories from the Queen of Mystery.” Indeed, romance often has fatal consequences in these 14 short stories featuring favorite Christie characters such as Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and Tommy and Tuppence. Now, how about a cuppa?

 

It’s a wrap

So many books. So many good books. While some of us were frittering away the first days of the pandemic trying to figure out Zoom, writers were writing. 

Not that writers weren’t affected by the pandemic. Ann Patchett found she couldn’t get into writing a new novel, but essays came more easily. The result, These Precious Days (HarperCollins, digital galley), is one of my favorite books of the year. It’s like having a conversation with a good friend, one who is smart and witty and shares your interests: the challenges of clearing out possessions,  the wonders of Kate DiCamillo’s books for children of all ages, the tangled ties of families. The title essay, which went viral when first published in Harper’s Magazine, chronicles the unlikely friendship between Patchett and Tom Hank’s personal assistant Sookie. There’s also a bittersweet epilogue. Before that, though, Patchett writes of the pleasures of co-owning a bookstore. “As every reader knows, the social contract between you and a book you love is not complete until you can hand that book to a friend and say, Here, you’re going to love this.”

I’ve shared my love for quite a few books this year. Here are some not previously mentioned that I’m wrapping up for friends this holiday season.

Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King (Grove Atlantic, digital galley): In the title story, a bookseller’s daughter plays matchmaker for her reclusive, awkward father. Other stories sparkle as King illuminates  transformative and unexpected moments. She’s especially good at capturing young teens on the cusp of adulthood  (“Creature,” “When in the Dordogne”), while ‘Timeline” reads like an excerpt from her splendid novel Writers & Lovers. “On the way back to Vermont, I thought about words and how, if you put a few of them in the right order, a three-minute story about a girl and her dog can get people to forget all the ways you’ve disappointed them.”

Still Life by Sarah Winman (Putnam/Penguin, digital galley): Sarah Winman is the most generous of storytellers in her expansive novel of love and friendship, art and war. British private Ulysses Temper meets aging art historian Evelyn Skinner in the wine cellar of a Tuscan villa in 1944, and she suggests he visit Florence before he leaves Italy. That visit marks Ulysses as he returns to post-war London, his old pub and friends, including free-spirited Peg, whom he married before the war and who now has a daughter Alys. An unexpected inheritance takes Ulysses and his family of friends back to Italy in the 1950s, but he doesn’t meet Evelyn again until 1966, the year of the great Arno flood and the race to rescue Florence’s great art treasures. Don’t miss the parrot and a cameo by E.M. Forster. 

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins, digital galley): In the turbulent first year of the pandemic, a small, independent bookstore in Minneapolis becomes a touchstone and refuge for assorted booksellers and booklovers. Outside, the George Floyd protests roil a city haunted by its racist past. Inside the store, bookseller Tookie, an irreverent ex-con and avid reader, is trying to exorcise the ghost of annoying customer Flora. A white woman who wanted to be Native American, Flora died on All Souls Day but is still hanging around the shelves. Erdrich mixes humor and heartbreak like a literary alchemist. Readers won’t be able to resist.

A Line to Kill by Anthony Horowitz (HarperCollins, digital galley): Anthony Horowitz the author has a great time again playing sidekick to fictional detective Daniel Hawthorne in a third clever mystery.  This time, the two are at a literary festival in the Channel Islands to promote the books Horowitz writes about Hawthorne. When the inevitable murder occurs, the other authors, with their quirks and pretensions, all fall under suspicion. It’s a tricky case, but Horowitz thinks they’ve got it all figured out — until the ever enigmatic Hawthorne turns the tables. More, please.

London Bridge is Falling Down by Christopher Fowler (Bantam/Random House. digital galley): The Home Office is again shutting down the Peculiar Crimes Unit, but this time it’s for real. Still, ancient detectives Arthur Bryant and John May discover an open case in the death of a 91-year-old woman, a former security expert. Her demise, though, is soon linked to that of several other peculiar deaths by way of a toy replica of London Bridge. If this is, indeed, the end of the PCU, it’s a doozy of a finale for Bryant and May. I’m going to miss them. Thanks for the mysteries. 

Wyman and the Florida Knights by Larry Baker (Ice Cube Press, ARC): Call it Florida Gothic. In the first half of his entertaining novel, Larry Baker recounts the fabled history of the Knights, who settle in the Florida wilds north of Orlando in 1866. In the second half, famous portrait painter Peter Wyman tries to escape his past by disappearing in Knightville in 2016, but his presence leads to the unraveling of Knight family secrets. There’s passion, betrayal, corruption, murder, an unmarked grave and a mythic black panther.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, hardcover): More like Conversations with Friends than Normal People, Rooney’s smart comedy of manners finds best friends Alice and Eileen worried about turning 30 and the sorry state of the world, but also about finding love and connection. Successful novelist Alice begins seeing factory worker Felix, while literary editor Eileen turns to her old childhood friend Simon. Rooney’s writing is addictive in its clarity and precision. 

 

When Ghosts Come Home by Wiley Cash (William Morrow, digital galley): A low-flying plane and a body on a rural runway kick off Cash’s Southern-noir tinged tale. But the murder mystery is just the frame for a layered portrait of a small-town sheriff dealing with racial tensions and personal problems in Reagan-era North Carolina. The ending may come as a surprise, but, in hindsight, it’s inevitable.

Keep calm, keep reading

Be afraid. Be very afraid. Not of State of Terror (Simon Schuster/St. Martin’s library e-book), which is the first thriller from Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny. It’s very good, and scary timely, and I’ll get to it in a minute. But what has me in a state of anxiety is the news that stores might be running out of books this holiday season because the pandemic has messed with the supply chain. Paper shortages, printing back-ups, shipping delays and rising costs have all contributed to the problem, which has publishers rescheduling some books until spring and advising readers to shop early because restocking popular titles will be difficult. Oh dear!ki

But really there’s no need to panic. You might have to wait a little longer to get your hands on a a particular title from the store or library, but we’ll find you another book (or two, or three) to read in the meantime. There are so many good new novels that I’ve had trouble keeping up, and I still haven’t gotten to Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land or Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway.  Honoree Fanonne Jeffers’ novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois is so big and rich that I’m taking it slowly, savoring every page. I’m looking forward to new short stories from Lily King, essays by Ann Patchett.  But first, what I have read that’s worth the wait  includes State of Terror, in which newly minted Secretary of State Ellen Adams faces the nightmare of terrorists getting hold of nuclear weapons. Thanks to Clinton’s inside knowledge, the plot proves all too plausible. Thanks to Penny’s crime writing skills, it’s a suspenseful, rollercoaster tale. It’s also unexpectedly funny as Adams deals with incompetent politicians and foreign heads of state who continually underestimate her. Then there’s the former president, Eric Dunn, aka Eric the Dumb, hiding out in Florida and scheming to get back in power. How far will he go? I expect Clinton and Penny had a good time writing this book. I sure had a good time reading it.

Reading Silverview (Viking, purchased hardcover) is bittersweet because it’s the last book from the late, great John le Carre. It’s a little elegiac as a young bookstore owner becomes involved in the secrets of a mysterious Polish emigre, whose wife is high up in British intelligence. But it’s also a classic hall-of-mirrors tale, silkily written, where even the minor characters make an impression. There’s a terrific set piece of old spies reminiscing about past operations and the very value of their careers,  and a collection of blue-and-white china plays the role of red herring. 

Who knew that a novel about a 12th-century nun could be so thrilling? “She rides out of the forest alone. Seventeen years old, in the cold March drizzle, Marie who comes from France.” Thus begins Matrix (Riverhead/PRH, digital galley), in which Laura Groff fiercely imagines the life of the historical writer and poet Marie de France. Awkward, ungainly Marie is slow at first to accept her fate when Eleanor of Aquitane sends her as prioress to an impoverished convent in the middle of nowhere. But she is smart and creative and ambitious in a patriarchal age, and her vision empowers the women around her. Groth’s lilting prose evokes both earthly desires and heavenly delights. Matrix is a nominee for the National Book Award, as is Laird Hunt’s lyrical Zorrie (Bloomsbury, library hardcover), a quiet, slender novel encompassing the ordinary yet remarkable life a woman in 20th century rural Indiana.

Colson Whitehead, winner of multiple awards for books such as The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, turns to crime with Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, digital galley), a hugely enjoyable heist tale/family saga. In 1960s Harlem, furniture salesman Ray Carney is “only slightly bent when it comes to being crooked,” but his dreams of respectability collide with his cousin Freddie’s schemes of quick money. Soon Ray, who contends with the disapproval of his wealthy in-laws, is dealing with local low-lifes, connected gangsters, shady cops and the always perplexing question: Where to bury the body? The identity of a dead body is somewhat in doubt in The Man Who Died Twice (digital galley), Richard Osman’s frisky follow-up to The Thursday Murder Club. It’s best to read that book first so you can acquaint yourself with the quirky senior sleuths solving crimes in an English retirement community. Here, they’re on the trail of some missing diamonds, as are several murderous villains.

Hard to believe it’s been 25 years since Alice Hoffman first introduced us to the Owens family of witches in Practical Magic. Since then she has written two prequels exploring the Owens’ family’s storied history and the long-ago curse that befalls anyone an Owens woman dares to love. In The Book of Magic (Scribner, digital galley), we’re back in the present, where the curse is threatening the life of college student Kylie’s beloved Gideon. While he lies in a coma, Kylie heads to England to find someone who can open a magical book that may tell her how to end the curse. Other members of the Owens clan are quick to follow, calling on their own powers and knowing that sacrifices will be required in a final reckoning. Hoffman enchants again.  If you are still bespelled by C.S. Lewis’ classic The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, then you’ll want to read Patti Callahan’s charming and imaginative Once Upon a Wardrobe (Harper Muse, advance reader copy), set in 1950 England. Oxford student Megs Devonshire braves the home of Lewis himself because her beloved younger brother George, who has a terminal heart condition, wants one question answered: Where did Narnia come from? Listening to Lewis’ recollections of his childhood and writing them down for George, Megs discovers the magic and power of stories, the hope contained therein. 

Timothy Schaffert’s atmospheric The Perfume Thief (Knopf Doubleday, digital galley) takes place in the shadowy world of 1941 Paris, where Clementine, an aging gender-fluid American ex-pat, mixes perfumes for a select clientele. She’s also a former con artist, and it’s those skills she calls on when she wants to steal a book of perfume formulas from Nazi bureaucrat Oskar Voss. She gains his attention by spinning tales of her own colorful life of crime. Voss is fascinated by Clem and her stories, and readers will feel the same. A shout-out as well to my former Orlando Sentinel colleague Geri Throne’s novel Secret Battles (independently published, digital galley). She draws on her own family history to tell a well-researched and involving story of love and war.  Walt and Nora Baran marry just before Pearl Harbor and are almost immediately separated. Walt hopes to avoid the frontlines by becoming a medic but ends up in North Africa, experiencing war’s horrors. Nora, stuck at home in New Jersey under her father-in-law’s thumb and with a sickly baby, waits weeks for Walt’s heavily censored letters. Neither is able to reveal the reality of their lives to each other, and both harbor secrets that test their bonds.

If you’re looking to get in the holiday spirit, may I suggest The Santa Suit (St. Martin’s Press, review copy), by my pal Kathy Trocheck, known to readers as Mary Kay Andrews. Moving into an old farmhouse in a small North Carolina town, Ivy Perkins finds it crammed with furniture and assorted junk. But an old Santa suit in the top of a closet is in great shape, and in one pocket Ivy discovers a note from a little girl with one Christmas wish — that her father return safely from the war. Who is the little girl and did she get her wish? Ivy goes looking for answers and finds secrets large and small, new friends and a new love. After all, it is Christmas. Put this one on your wish list.

 

Spies and lies and Gothic vibes

I often play detective when reading crime novels, puzzling over clues and sniffing out red herrings until I can spot whodunnit. But I don’t even try to guess with spy novels. I figure everybody is lying and playing a double — or triple — game, so I just sit back and enjoy the ride, the dizzying twists and turns. And so it goes with my old friend Dan Fesperman’s new novel, The Cover Wife (Knopf, digital galley), which is tense and timely even though it’s largely set in 1999 Germany. Paris-based CIA agent Claire Saylor isn’t too thrilled about playing the wife of a stodgy American academic with scandalous views of the Quran on a European book tour. She’s more intrigued by a mysterious secondary assignment in Hamburg, keeping an eye on a group of young Muslims gathering at a local mosque. Among them is an American expat trying to win the trust and approval of his new friends. To make matters more confusing, the FBI also has gotten wind of the operation without knowing the details. Perfectly plotted and neatly mixing fiction with fact, the book’s pages practically turn themselves. I had an idea where The Cover Wife might be going, but the ending was still a stunner. Brilliant.

When I first read Rebecca Starford’s An Unlikely Spy: A Novel (HarperCollins, digital galley), about a young British woman tapped by MI5 to infiltrate a group of German sympathizers in 1939 London, it seemed teasingly familiar. I finally figured out why. Starford was inspired by the wartime experiences of real MI5 agent Joan Miller, as was writer Kate Atkinson in her wonderful novel Transcription. But the two authors go in different directions in reimagining the story behind the story. An Unlikely Spy is the more conventional, as recent Oxford grad Evelyn Varley gets a job in the War Office. While a scholarship girl at boarding school, Evelyn made friends with wealthy Julia and her influential family; now, her innate cleverness and her acquired upper-class manner make Evelyn the perfect candidate to get close to members of the Lion Society. Still, the secrets Evelyn uncovers among the upper-classes thrust her into a conspiracy she doesn’t understand and test her loyalties.

There’s nothing like a good Gothic to put a chill in a sultry summer. Rachel Donohue’s atmospheric The Temple House Vanishing (Algonquin, digital galley) owes a lot to one of my favorite books and movies, Picnic at Hanging Rock, but stands on its own in its haunting depiction of obsession and desire.  In 1990 Ireland, scholarship student Louisa is a misfit at Temple House, a Catholic boarding school for girls on the dreary and craggy coast. Then she meets charismatic rebel Victoria, who seems to have a special relationship with the bohemian art teacher Mr. Lavelle, and is drawn into their orbit. On the eve of the Christmas holidays, Louisa and Mr. Lavelle vanish into the night, never to be seen again. Twenty-five years later, a journalist begins an investigation, and her present-day chronicle alternates with chapters written from Louisa’s point-of-view about her time at Temple House. Something Louisa learns early on at the school is that nothing is ever what it seems. You’ve been warned.

Megan Abbott is another writer who knows obsession and desire. Having written thrillingly about teenage cheerleaders (Dare Me) and rival gymnasts (You Will Know Me), she focuses on ballet dancers in The Turnout (Putnam/Penguin), a controlled burn of a book. The Durant sisters, Dara and Marie, are lifelong bunheads, schooled by their glamorous dance-teacher mother, whose popular studio they inherited. Dara’s husband Charlie, their mother’s former live-in student, can no longer dance because of chronic injuries and runs the business office while Marie and Dara teach. The annual run-up to a production of “The Nutcracker” is more fraught than usual after a fire destroys part of the school’s rehearsal space. Enter contractor Derek, who convinces the trio to up-renovate the school and bill the insurance company, even as he seduces vulnerable Marie. “Ballet is full of dark fairy tales,” Abbott observes in her mesmerizing narrative that sears the pretty off the pink. A little bit Gothic, a whole lot noir, The Turnout is fierce enchantment.

Several of my friends and I long ago dubbed a couple of manicured streets near downtown Orlando “Axe-killer neighborhood” because we never saw a living soul. We joked that something horrific could go on behind closed doors, and the neighbors would just say, “They were so quiet. We had no idea.” So I chuckled when I saw the title of Megan Miranda’s new domestic suspense tale, Such a Quiet Place (Simon and Schuster, digital galley). Hollow’s Edge was an idyllic enclave until Fiona and Brandon Truett were murdered in their home and neighbor Ruby Fletcher was found guilty of the crime. A year and a half later, the Truetts’ house is still empty, neighbors can’t sell their houses and Ruby, her conviction overturned, has moved back in with her astonished roommate Harper Nash. She has nowhere else to go, Ruby tells Harper, and immediately sets out to provoke the neighbors. Somebody lied at Ruby’s trial. But who?

 

 

Catch a crime wave

Injured in a fall, successful novelist Gerry Andersen is confined to a hospital bed in his new Baltimore penthouse, dependent on his colorless assistant and a stodgy night nurse. His drug-addled mind roams through his past and present like Marley’s ghost, but he is certain the woman calling on the phone at night saying she’s Aubrey is not Aubrey. Impossible. Aubrey is the main character in his best-selling novel “Dream Girl.” She’s fictional. Gerry made her up. She doesn’t exist. Or does she?

You’re not wrong if Laura Lippman’s entertaining new novel Dream Girl (William Morrow, digital galley) reminds you of Stephen King’s Misery. Lippman finds inspiration for her crime novels in  books, old movies, real-life crimes. But whatever the source, she has a way of turning the material upside-down and inside-out, making it her own. So, yes, her  Dream Girl (William Morrow, digital galley) pays homage to King,  but also to Hitchcock and her other literary and cinematic favorites. It’s a shout-out, too, to the process of writing and the writer’s life. Gerry’s mind may be playing tricks on him when it comes to phone calls from Aubrey, but the woman who turns up next to him one morning is very real — and very dead. Lippman’s novel is twisty and twisted, quite the nightmare for poor Gerry, who is an insufferable jerk. I didn’t like him at all, but I sure liked Dream Girl.

I detested Alex Michaelides’ second novel The Maidens (Celadon, purchased hardcover). Let me count the ways: poor writing, uneven pacing, unbelievable characters, absurd plot, ludicrous ending. I did like the setting — Cambridge University with its historic, shadowed halls of academe. But the story of a widowed psychotherapist convinced that a classics professor is killing his female students is a slog from slow beginning to ridiculous conclusion, a true disappointment for those who liked Michaelides’ The Silent Witness. Sorry I wasted the time and money, bamboozled by the hype and comparisons to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. If you want to read something else on the best-seller list (keeping in mind that “best” refers only to sales), try Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me (Simon & Schuster, digital galley), in which a woman’s husband disappears in the midst of a corporate scandal, and she and her teenage stepdaughter go looking for him. It’s a quick, suspenseful riff on the old “you never know really know somebody” plot. 

Thank goodness for Elly Griffiths and Laurie R. King. Neither writer misses a beat in the latest entries in their long-running detective series. In Griffith’s The Night Hawks (Houghton Mifflin, digital galley), forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway and her new colleague David Brown are called to a crime scene when metal detectorists discover Bronze Age artifacts, a new corpse and a skeleton on a Norfolk beach. Soon after, these same “Night Hawks” are at the scene of a presumed murder/suicide at an isolated farmhouse, and then one of their own turns up dead. DCI Harry Nelson, the father of Ruth’s 10-year-old daughter, doesn’t like coincidences, and he’s also suspicious of Ruth’s new colleague, who is a first-class meddler. The bits of history and folklore (there’s a gigantic hound) are fascinating, as is the mystery itself and the continuing relationship between Ruth and Nelson. History, mystery and myth also play into King’s lively Castle Shade (Bantam/Random House, digital galley), with Mary Russell and husband Sherlock Holmes helping Marie of Roumania — yes, the real Queen — figure out who is threatening her teenage daughter. Marie is ensconced in her beloved Castle Bran in the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania, once home to Vlad the Impaler. There are whispers of witchcraft and rumors of vampires among the villagers and castle servants, although Holmes’ brother Mycroft suspects Marie’s diplomatic enemies of trying to undermine her popularity. Russell and Holmes think someone inside or close to the castle wants Marie out of the way. King makes the most of the shivery atmosphere as her wily and witty detectives stalk things that go bump in the night.

Having wrapped up the infamous Ellingham cold case in the “Truly Devious” trilogy,  teen detective Stevie Bell returns in Maureen Johnson’s nifty The Box in The Woods (HarperCollins, digital galley). The new owner of Camp Wonder Falls offers Stevie and her Ellingham friends Janelle and Nate jobs as counselors in return for Stevie’s help with a podcast investigating the 1978 Box in the Woods murders. Back then at what was Camp Sunny Pines, four counselors were killed and three of their bodies hidden in an old hunting blind. Johnson has a blast moving the story back and forth between past and present, and using every summer camp trope from from familiar books and horror movies. You practically expect Jason to jump out from behind a tree. It’s also fun seeing the friends trying to fit in at camp — engineer Janelle proves to be super at crafts, while Nate, who wrote a best-selling fantasy novel at 14, is plagued by a critical camper, and Stevie discovers previously unknown outdoor skills. It helps that boyfriend David is camping at a nearby lake and knows the way her mind works — and her anxiety grows — when confronted with a puzzle. The Box in the Woods may be even better than its predecessors, The Hand on the Wall, etc., because the various mysteries are satisfactorily resolved by book’s end. But one remains — what will Stevie Bell do next?

 

 

Spring into summer

I know you think I’ve been languishing, and maybe I have a little. But mostly I have been reading, because as a recent Facebook meme put it, “Sometimes you just need to lie on the couch and read for a couple of years.”  Or a couple of months in my case. So many new books, and a few so good I want to read them again.  Katherine Heiny’s novel Early Morning Riser (Knopf, digital galley) is bright and funny but also smart and serious, and Heiny’s writing reminds me a bit of Laurie Colwin, which is always a good thing. Schoolteacher Janey falls hard for woodworker-handyman Duncan, who is handsome, sexy and kind, and who apparently has slept with every woman in Boyne City, Michigan. And he’s still friends with them, including his ex-wife Aggie, who is now married to Glenn but has Duncan mow her yard.  A lot of folks are Duncan-dependent, Janey realizes, especially his intellectually challenged assistant Jimmy.  That and the fact Duncan doesn’t want to get married again leads Janey to sadly move on. But then a tragedy down the road unexpectedly entangles her life with Duncan, Aggie, Glenn and Jimmy. You just never know what’s going to happen when you greet a new day. 

Jessica Anya Blau’s coming-of-age novel Mary Jane (HarperCollins, library e-book) is like a nostalgic blast from the past on the radio. You can’t help but smile.  It’s summer of ’75 in Baltimore, and 14-year-old narrator Mary Jane Dillard, whose parents are conservative country-club types, gets a job as a nanny with the unconventional Cones — psychiatrist Richard (he has a beard), artistic Bonnie (she’s braless) and five-year-old daughter Izzie (precocious) . Mary Jane is enchanted by their casual manners and friendliness, and they welcome her housekeeping and cooking skills. Then Richard invites rock star client and heroin addict Jimmy and his movie star wife Sheba to move in for some intensive therapy, and Mary Jane gets a close-up look at sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Wearing cut-offs and singing harmony to Jimmy’s hits, Mary Jane knows she’s courting her parents’ disapproval and ignores rising tensions at the Cones. A day of reckoning is inevitable, and there will be consequences. Still, you readily understand why Mary Jane thinks it’s the best summer ever. A bit of a priss at first, Mary Jane turns out to be a real charmer. So is Mary Jane the book.

Heading to the beach? Take your favorite adult beverage and Mary Kay Andrews’ The Newcomer (St. Martin’s Press, digital galley), a heady mix of family drama and mystery, with a spritz of romance. Letty Carnahan is so sure her wealthy brother-in-law Evan Wingfield is behind her sister Tanya’s death that she goes on the run with her four-year-old niece Maya. Like previous Andrews heroines, Letty is smart, feisty and good with people and interior decorating. She and Maya end up hiding out at an old-timey mom-and-pop Florida motel, where the snowbirds eye her and Maya with suspicion. But Letty, who has more secrets than shells on the beach, manages to win over the motel’s owner, get a job and spark with the local deputy. Evan and his henchman are hot on her trail, though, as are some of Tanya’s old “friends.” There’s treasure to be had on Treasure Island. Cheers!

Despite its evocative title and cover, Jennifer Weiner’s That Summer (Atria, digital galley) isn’t a breezy beach book. Rather, Weiner crafts an involving, non-linear saga of female friendship and empowerment hinging on a devastating “Me Too” incident. A misdirected e-mail initially connects Philadelphia cooking teacher Diana “Daisy” Shoemaker with successful business consultant Diana Starling. But as Weiner explores Daisy’s present life with her wealthy husband and restless teenage daughter — the memorable Beatrice — she also excavates Diana’s patchwork past. Turns out both women have history with Cape Cod and share more than a first name.  Weiner has a light hand with some heavy subject matter for the most part, although men generally do not come off well. Still, she’s preaching to the choir, and her many fans will appreciate the affecting story.

 

How about a few thrills and chills? Have I got the books for you. Both Alexander Andrews’ Who is Maude Dixon? (Little, Brown, digital galley) and Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot (Celadon Books, library e-book) are clever takes on the perils of literary impersonation and plagiarism. Andrews’ inventive tale is more of a caper as writer-wannabe Florence Darrow becomes the assistant to best-selling, reclusive author Maude Dixon. Maude is the pseudonym of hard-drinking Helen Wilcox, who decides a trip to Morocco will cure her writers’ block. And it’s in Morocco that Maude/Helen disappears and Florence wakes up in the hospital and decides she will become Maude. Delicious, devious complications ensue. The Plot also entertains, but it’s a more serious exploration of ambition and identity as once-promising novelist Jacob Finch Bonner decides to steal the sure-fire plot of a dead writing student’s unfinished manuscript. Devilish consequences snowball when Bonner’s book becomes a best-seller. So good. 

So is Flynn Barry’s tense Northern Spy (Penguin, library e-book), in which Tessa, a single mother and BBC news producer in peacetime Belfast is shocked to discover her sister is working for the IRA. Tessa, who grew up in the city’s Catholic neighborhoods, doesn’t know who to trust — family friends she’s known her whole life, or the British intelligence officer who wants her to inform on the IRA sympathizers. Desperate to keep her young son safe, Tessa becomes a double agent, knowing that she could be betrayed in a heartbeat. Errant sisters also figure in Carole Johnstone’s twisty and twisted Mirrorland (Scribner, digital galley). After a dozen years in California, Cat Morgan returns home to Edinburgh when her brother-in-law Ross lets her know that her estranged twin, El, is missing, presumed drowned in the Firth of Forth. The mystery of El’s disappearance lies in the twins’ dark childhood, during which they escaped into a fanciful world called Mirrorland. The twins’ blurrng reality and imagination spills over into Johnstone’s gripping but confusing narrative.

The real-life kidnapping of  Polli Klaas in 1993 California plays in the background of Paula McClain’s first suspense novel When the Stars Go Dark (Random House, digital galley). Missing persons detective Anna Hart takes a break from work after a personal tragedy, returning to her late foster father’s house near Mendocino. When the 15-year-old daughter of a well-known actress and her husband goes missing, Anna is brought into the case, even though it calls up traumatic memories of her childhood and the later disappearance of a teenage friend. It’s a well-written if unevenly paced story, and the villain is easy to spot. Be sure to read the author’s note at book’s end.