Mysteries to Read Before Summer Officially Ends

Summer is coming to a close, so set aside time for a few mystery indulgences before back-to-school and back-to-work. I'm betting on some proven favorites. One is a book I missed at the end of last year: Tana French's The Witch Elm. After happy-go-lucky Toby surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead, he retreats to the family ancestral home to recover from his injuries and care for a dying uncle. But then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree, detectives arrive, and Toby's beliefs about the past are challenged. As a fan of Karin Slaughter, I want to read her latest The Last Widow, too: First a scientist for the Center for Disease Control is abducted and then bombs blast the Atlanta neighborhood of the FBI and CDC. Medical examiner Sara Linton and investigator Will Trent are unraveling a deadly conspiracy when Sara is abducted, and Will must go undercover to save her and thousands of innocent lives. Plus, I'm putting the reliable Jo Nesbo on my list with the latest installment in his Harry Hole series, Knife, which plunges Harry, even though relegated to cold cases, into new danger. A new author I'd like to try is Ruth Ware. Ware's Turn of the Key is about a young woman who takes a live-in nanny post with an ideal family at a luxurious home in the Scottish Highlands, only to find herself in a nightmare that ends with a child dead and herself on trial for murder. For a very different locale, the reviewer-lauded Into the Jungle by Erica Ferencik takes readers to Bolivia, where a heroine running from her past arrives to take a teaching gig that falls through. She ends up following her lover into the depths of the jungle--and a fight for survival. For a different kind of primal confrontation, there's Daniela Petrova's Her Daughter's Mother. Lana meets and befriends her daughter's anonymous egg donor Katya in New York City. When Katya suddenly disappears, Lana begins to dig obsessively into her past, drawing the suspicion of police and unearthing shocking secrets. Meanwhile, parallel stories twist in a deadly knot in the opioid-plagued rural Kansas town of Laura McHugh's The Wolf Wants In as Sadie Keller tries to find out how her brother died, 18-year-old Henley Pettit desperately seeks to escape her family's crimes, and the police keep finding bones in the woods. For more ideas, see https://crimereads.com/the-most-anticipated-crime-books-of-summer/

Winter Can Be a Deadly Season

While crime generally proliferates as the temperature climbs, statistically peaking in summer, homicide is a less seasonal crop, a year-round blight on the human condition. Certainly, mystery authors find winter's bleak landscapes and frozen isolation apt settings for murder. And winter does have its own emotionally toxic aspects, such as seasonal affective disorder (SAD) depression and cabin fever, a very real condition per scientists. The isolation, lack of socialization and boredom when bad weather traps people indoors alone or with the same faces can express itself as cabin fever's irritability, restlessness, excessive sleepiness and negative feelings. Documented cases among Arctic and Antarctic scientists and explorers have included attacking each other with hammers, poisoning a colleague to death, and burning a research station to the ground, per a recent Popular Science article. Mystery and thriller authors have used frigid settings for some outstandingly chilly novels, and any list would have to start with Stephen King's The Shining, in which Jack Torrance goes murderously mad as caretaker of a creepy, snow-bound hotel. The Scandinavians naturally dominate wintertime mysteries. Keep hot cocoa handy to offset the chill of Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbo, writer of the Harry Hole detective series, about a surprisingly sympathetic contract killer; Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell, which launched the famed Kurt Wallander series with gruesome murders in a cold, remote farmhouse; and Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow about exotic Smilla's obsessive tracking of murder clues and secrets from Copenhagen to her icy origins in Greenland. Of course, Russia's snowy steppes and oppressive society are perfect for deadly doings, and Martin Cruz Smith's classic Gorky Park is a good example; Soviet detective Arkady Renko investigates three mutilated, frozen corpses in Gorky Park, a Moscow amusement park, and ends up battling both the KGB and ruthless Americans. In the snowy Pyrenees, acclaimed French author Bernard Minier has crafted a haunting tale with The Frozen Dead, in which a charismatic city cop must make connections between a series of gruesome murders, strange doings at an insane asylum, and a tale of madness and revenge from the past. Of course, England has a raft of wintry mysteries from the likes of Agatha Christie and P.D. James, but more recently there's Robert Bryndza's The Girl in the Ice, introducing Detective Erika Foster as she begins to investigate the discovery of a beautiful young socialite's body beneath ice in a South London park--and soon finds the trail of a serial killer. For mysteries debuting this winter, whether they feature frigid temperatures or not, see https://www.bookish.com/articles/winter-2019-must-read-mysteries-thrillers/

Time to Relax With Summer's New Mysteries

I'll admit that I have been lax in posting--overcome by summer heat and lethargy. But with a vacation ahead, I got busy looking for new mysteries to take along. I'm a fan of Scandinavian authors, so I quickly picked up the latest Jo Nesbo fare, The Thirst, in which Inspector Harry Hole hunts down a serial murderer targeting female victims on Tinder. Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz, best-selling author of Moriarty and Trigger Mortis, is described as a "classic whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie," so you know I was intrigued. In the Horowitz tale, the editor of a manuscript by a popular crime author, who sets his tales in Christie-style English villages, begins to suspect that the writer's latest fiction has hidden clues to a real murder. Far from English villages, Kristen Lepionka's "uniquely compelling" The Last Place You Look features a tough bisexual private investigator who must solve a 15-year-old murder case in time to save an innocent man from death row. Meanwhile, The Child is the latest offering from New York Times best-selling author Fiona Barton and starts with the discovery of a tiny skeleton by a workman, launching London-based journalist Kate Waters on the trail of a decades-old crime and the darker mystery that underlies it. I also gravitated to The Marsh King's Daughter by Karen Dionne, because it takes me back to old haunts in Michigan and is described as "sure to thrill fans of The Girl on the Train." The title alludes to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a child born to a monster and an innocent, and Dionne's psychological thriller follows Helen Pelletier, who lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula wilds, on her search for her father, an escaped convict who had kidnapped her mother and kept her captive for years. For more new summer mystery options, check out https://media.bookbub.com/blog/2017/06/06/new-mystery-books-coming-in-summer-2017/