A Holiday Sampler of Award-Winning Mysteries

Heading into the holidays, I like to stock up on mysteries to help relax from the season's whirlwind of shopping and socializing, and I always check out the new crop of award winners. This year's Edgar Award for best novel, for example, went to Before the Fall by Noah Hawley, creator of the "Fargo" TV series. A private jet leaves Martha's Vineyard for New York, carrying 11 people, including two multimillionaires and their families as well as one failed artist invitee. It crashes into the Atlantic without even a May Day call, and the only survivors are the artist and the 4-year-old boy he saves. A media frenzy paints the artist by turns hero or villain, while the investigation tries to decide between tragic accident and sinister intention. Meanwhile, the 2017 Edgar Award for best first novel tapped Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry, a novel for fans of The Girl on the Train. Londoner Nora goes to visit her sister in the countryside, only to find her brutally murdered, and Nora soon becomes obsessed and fearful as the search for her sister's killer uncovers dark secrets. if your taste for foreign sleuthing is whetted, try British publishing's Dagger Awards, which selected The Dry by Jane Harper for a Gold Dagger and gave an International Dagger to The Dying Detective by Leif G.W. Persson. In The Dry, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his Australian hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago Luke lied to provide Falk with an alibi in a murder accusation. Now, amid an historic drought, Falk reluctantly joins a local detective to investigate Luke’s death and its connection to long-buried mysteries. You have to go north to Scandinavia for The Dying Detective, about a retired detective recovering from a stroke. In a race against mortality, the detective takes on the unsolved murder of a 9-year-old girl, conducting an investigation from his hospital bed with the help of his assistant, Matilda, an amateur sleuth, and Max, an orphan with a personal stake in the case. Meanwhile, the 2017 Anthony Award for best mystery selected Canada's veteran Louise Penny and A Great Reckoning. Penny's Quebec Chief of Homicide Armand Gamache is drawn into the death of a professor that involves an old map, a mysterious stained glass window, four police cadets, and Gamache's past. All together, that's a great trove of top mysteries to explore. For more ideas, see Amazon's mystery/thriller best-sellers: https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Mystery-Thriller-Suspense/zgbs/books/18

These Mysteries Play April Fool Tricks

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

After the Election, My Mystery Shopping Deluge

I'm not much of a holiday shopping fanatic, but I need something pleasant to anticipate after the end of this awful election season. So I'm beginning to put together my holiday book list for mystery lovers. Courtesy of Publishers Weekly, here are some ideas: I like the look of Steven Price's By Gaslight, about two men combing London's 1885 underworld to find the master criminal responsible for a woman's dismembered body; you can't beat foggy streets, smoky opium dens, and Victorian seance halls described with "literary sophistication." For anyone who likes the moody mystery of Edward Hopper's paintings, In Sunlight or in Shadow is a fascinating idea for a crime fiction anthology, with top authors like Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Jeffery Deaver, Stephen King, and Joyce Carol Oates each penning stories inspired by Hopper's art. I'm a big fan of Canadian Louise Penny, and the 12th mystery in her Armand Gamache series, titled A Great Reckoning, has the former Quebec Chief of Homicide back in the village of Three Pines and following an old map into a dangerous web involving police cadets, a murdered professor and a stained glass window with terrible secrets. I'm also a fan of Caleb Carr's The Alienist about a psychologist investigating crime in 19th century New York City, so I'm piqued by a new entry from Carr called Surrender, New York, about a psychologist and a DNA expert solving present-day crimes in upstate New York. Also set in New York City is best-seller J.D. Robb's 43rd Eve Dallas thriller, Apprentice in Death, which starts with three ice skaters shot dead on Wollman Rink in Central Park. Plus, best-selling favorite Karin Slaughter has debuted another novel featuring Georgia Bureau of Investigation's Will Trent and medical examiner Dr. Sara Litton; in The Kept Woman, the pair of lovers investigate the death of a dirty retired Atlanta cop. For more fiction and nonfiction options, see http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/71628-holiday-gift-guide-2016-all-our-coverage.html

A Chill in the Air With These Fall Mystery Imports

Cooler, darker fall days are around the corner, so it's time to stock up on mysteries for cozy holiday reading--including several foreign imports. If you miss genius punk hacker Lisbeth Salander, read The Girl in the Spider's Web by Sweden's David Lagercrantz, who continues the series of the deceased Stieg Larsson. This time Salander and unlikely investigative partner journalist Mikael Blomkvist take on the case of enigmatic computer scientist Frans Balder, a prominent expert in artificial intelligence ensnared in a global intrigue that even involves America's National Security Agency. The New York Times review praises Lagercrantz's "instinctive feel for the world Larsson created," his characterizations and high-velocity writing despite a less-than-convincing plot. Meanwhile, British author Ruth Ware has a debut for those who liked Paula Hawkins' best-selling Girl on the Train. In a Dark, Dark Wood is a psychological thriller in which reclusive crime writer Leonora, known to some as Lee and others as Nora, is invited by a friend she hasn’t seen in years to a weekend party in an eerie glass house deep in the English countryside. Forty-eight hours later, Lee/Nora wakes up in a hospital bed with the knowledge that someone is dead and wondering not only "what happened?" but "what have I done?" Then there is Those We Left Behind by Stuart Neville, author of the popular Belfast crime series featuring DI Jack Lennon. Those We Left Behind is a standalone mystery set in Northern Ireland and centers around Ciaran Devine, who made headlines seven years earlier as the 12-year-old “schoolboy killer" whose confession to the brutal murder of his foster father mitigated the sentence of his older brother. Now Ciaran's release brings big trouble to his probation officer DCI Serena Flanagan, who has always harbored doubts about his confession. Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, Louise Penny has brought back Chief Inspector Armand Gamache for an 11th installment set in the quaint Quebec village of Three Pines. The Nature of the Beast begins with the disappearance of a little boy who always cried wolf--except perhaps one of his tall tales was dangerously true. A search for the boy uncovers murder, an old crime, an old betrayal, and some soul-searching for Gamache. For more top fall mysteries, see the Publishers Weekly list: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/67177-fall-2015-announcements-mysteries-the-mystery-thriller-boom.html

Finding Mysteries North of the Border

I recently began reading the best-selling How the Light Gets In by award-winning Canadian mystery author Louise Penny. It's another entry in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series set in the Quebec village of Three Pines; this time, Gamache comes to the tiny town as a personal favor to look into the disappearance of a once-famous woman, only to find himself stalked by the same evil that turned her village sanctuary into a deadly trap. Since Penny is one of my favorites, I began to think about other Canadian mystery writers to explore. One place to start is the list of winners of the Arthur Ellis Award for Canadian crime fiction (named after the nom de travail of Canada's official hangman). The award is given annually to authors residing in Canada (regardless of original nationality) as well as Canadian-born authors. The 2014 Ellis winner for best crime novel is The Devil's Making by Sean Haldane, a psychotherapist/neuropsychologist and poet. The mystery's protagonist is a young English-immigrant policeman in Victorian-era British Columbia, who seeks to solve the murder of an American "alienist" (archaic term for psychiatrist) while navigating the tensions between Native American, British and American residents in the colonial outpost of Victoria. Two more Ellis Award honorees are Giles Blunt, author of the 2013 Ellis crime fiction winner Until the Night, which is part of his popular John Cardinal series set in fictional Algonquin Bay, Ontario, and Peter Robinson, the English-born Canadian resident who produced the popular Inspector Alan Banks series set in the villages of Yorkshire, which spawned BBC's "DCI Banks" TV series. Beyond the Ellis awards, there is Man Booker Prize finalist Emma Donoghue, an Irish-born Canadian resident, whose new mystery Frog Music follows the efforts of a French burlesque dancer in 1876 boomtown San Francisco to solve the murder of her friend, a notorious and secretive young woman, in a "lyrical tale of love and bloodshed." Even though she is a U.S. writer, I think personal favorite Kathy Reichs deserves a place among the Canadians when her forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan mysteries (basis for the "Bones" TV series) are set in Quebec and based on her actual experience with the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale of Quebec province. For more top-notch Canadian crime fiction, see the Arthur Ellis Award finalists and winners at http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/Awards/Ellis_Awards.html