Tomorrow is April Fool's Day, and although I've never been a fan of its tradition of pranks (they often seem more cruel than funny), it really is an appropriate day for the mystery writer's penchant for fooling readers via surprise plot twists and red-herring clues. Here are three good novels that specifically play on the April Fool theme. April Fool by William Herbert Deverell, a well-known Canadian author and criminal lawyer, won the 2006 Arthur Ellis Award for best novel. It's just one entry in his series featuring the classically trained, self-doubting Arthur Beauchamp, QC, of the British Columbia criminal bar. Beauchamp is enjoying his retirement as a hobbyist farmer on B.C.’s Garibaldi Island when he is dragged back to court to defend an old client, Nick "the Owl" Faloon, once one of the world’s top jewel thieves. The diminutive Faloon has been accused of the unlikely rape and murder of a psychologist, and the combination of courtroom thriller and whodunit takes the reader on an entertaining ride of twists and turns. Another Canadian favorite of mine, Louise Penny, penned The Cruelest Month (referring to April), which won the 2008 Agatha Award for best novel. It is the third novel in her series featuring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and the small Canadian town of Three Pines. The tale involves a group of friends who visit a haunted house in Three Pines in the hope of ridding it of evil spirits. When one ends up dead, apparently of fright, Gamache and team investigate, and Gamache soon faces some old ghosts of his own. Finally, for fans of historial mystery settings and H.R.F. Keating, the noted English crime fiction writer best known for his series featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID, there is A Remarkable Case of Burglary. The story begins on the morning of April Fools' Day in 1871, as Val Leary--handsome, charming and broke--notices a young maidservant scrubbing the steps of a home as he walks through one of London's wealthiest districts. He is instantly inspired by the idea of a "remarkable burglary," but the seemingly perfect set-up soon gets complicated in the upstairs-downstairs world of Victorian England. For more April Fool's fare, see http://mysteryreadersinc.blogspot.com/2015/04/april-fools-day-mysteriesapril-fools.html
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