Weddings More Fatal than Fun in Mysteries

The spring-summer wedding season is gearing up, and mystery writers are ready with their own murderous takes on wedded bliss as deadly secrets surface, relatives and friends feud, and, of course, money is the eternal catalyst tilting marriage to mayhem. Happily, this spring's crop of wedding-inspired mysteries includes some New York Times best-selling authors, starting with one of my favorites, Jonathan Kellerman, with Southern California settings and the unique sleuthing pair of psychologist Alex Delaware and LAPD detective Milo Sturgis. In The Wedding Guest, Sturgis and Delaware must crash a rowdy "Saints and Sinners"-themed wedding reception where a woman has been found with her throat slashed. Hundreds of guests, and the bride and groom, all claim ignorance of the woman's identity and innocence of any crime as Delaware and Sturgis literally try to separate saints from sinners. Also this year, Alan Bradley adds to his amusing and genre-irreverent Flavia de Luce series with The Golden Tresses of the Dead. This time, British 12-year-old chemist/sleuth/busybody Flavia is attending her sister's wedding in a small English town when a human finger turns up in the wedding cake! Of course, more delicious shocks lie ahead to challenge Flavia's detecting skills. Or maybe you want something a little cozier, then check out The Truffle With Weddings, 2019's installment of Laura Durham's Annabelle Archer Wedding Planner series (series debut Better Off Wed won an Agatha for Best First Novel). In her latest caper, society wedding planner Annabelle is struggling to please a demanding bride when a colleague drops dead after eating a poisoned chocolate, and her best friend and caterer Richard Gerard is suspected. For more cozy mystery series with a wedding theme, check out http://cozy-mysteries-unlimited.com/party-event-planner-list

Gay Detectives Come Out in Mystery Fiction

With the media giving special attention to presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who is openly gay, I wondered if mystery fiction reflects a similar LGBTQ acceptance. Overall, mystery and crime fiction have been more hospitable to hard-boiled homicide hunters and old lady sleuths than gay detectives or even gay characters, with homosexuality used most often as a plot point about a hidden identity, a lying witness, a family secret/conflict, or a motive for murder. But there are some great mysteries featuring gay detectives out there, such as Jim Morgan Wilson's Benjamin Justice series. The first novel in the series, Simple Justice, which won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel, debuts journalist Justice, disgraced by a Pulitzer-story scandal and mourning the death of his lover, who is pulled out of alcoholic hiding to investigate a seemingly motiveless killing outside a gay bar, a crime with unexpectedly deep personal and political ramifications. Writer and retired attorney Michael Nava, winner of six Lambda Literary Awards for works exploring LGBT themes, offers a series featuring Henry Rios, a gay Latino criminal defense lawyer in Los Angeles. His Rios novels run from The Little Death in 1986 to 2016's Lay Your Sleeping Head. Many reviewers see one of the most seminal gay detectives as Joseph Hansen's insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter. In the 1970 debut novel of the Brandstetter series, Fadeout, an entertainer's car plunges off a bridge, but the body is missing, and Brandstetter's queries convince him the man is still alive and in danger. Another popular mystery series features Katherine V. Forrest's Kate Delafield, a lesbian L.A. homicide detective. Four books in the series have been Lambda Award winners, most recently 2013's High Desert, in which Delafield must confront truths about herself as, a few months into retirement, she obliges her old captain by taking up the hunt for a missing police partner. For more gay detectives, see this list from writer Kristen Lepionka: http://www.criminalelement.com/the-quiltbag-detective-queer-characters-in-crime-fiction-comment-sweepstakes/

Cure Spring Fever With a Mystery Trip Abroad

With California's hills and gardens splashed by a super-bloom of flowers, I must admit to a touch of spring fever. What better cure than armchair travel courtesy of some great new 2019 mysteries? Certainly, you can't beat Italy as a getaway from any lingering winter blahs. Join Donna Leon's soulful Venetian detective Guido Brunetti in Unto Us A Son Is Given, for a case triggered by a rich man's mysterious adoption. Meanwhile sunny Sicily hosts Andrea Camilleri's The Overnight Kidnapper, in which Inspector Montalbano faces a series of baffling abductions of women bank workers. Enjoy the heat and spices of the exotic East with Abir Mukherjee's Smoke and Ashes, set in colonial 1920s Calcutta, or The Suspect, by Fiona Barton, in which journalist Kate Waters investigates two missing girl tourists in Bangkok. To keep you appreciative of the spring thaw, crack an icy Scandanavian noir like the award-winning After She's Gone by Camilla Grebe, in which a psychological profiler who’s lost her memory and a teenage boy with a secret become unwitting partners in a race to stop a killer, or Hunting Game by Helene Tursten, introducing a new series heroine, Detective Inspector Embla Nyström, a sharp woman with a dark past who is tasked with solving a peer's murder during a routine hunting trip. Still, give me that special brand of British country house/gothic anytime. In The Missing Years by Lexie Elliott, coming in April, Alisa Calder inherits half of an eerie Scottish manor, with the other half left to her father, a man who disappeared 27 years earlier. Or roam the bleak moors with my favorite DCI Banks as he tries to connect the baffling deaths of a local female student and an older male stranger in an expensive suit in Careless Love by Peter Robinson. With The Smiling Man, Joseph Knox's damaged detective Aidan Waits of the Manchester PD goes on a dangerous, mind-bending journey as he tries to ID a smiling body found in an abandoned hotel. A gothic tangle of twin brother and sister, a mother who committed suicide at their birth, a missing au pair, and a Norfolk coast estate launch the mystery of The Au Pair by Emma Rous. But if you have to have Paris in April, pick The Book Artist by Mark Pryor, pitting a U.S. Embassy security head against a murderer at an art exhibition and an assassin with a grudge. For a list of more new mysteries out in early 2019, go to https://crimereads.com/the-most-anticipated-crime-books-of-2019-part-1/