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/

The Special Charms of Indian Detectives

In India to visit friends and relatives for a few weeks, I naturally brought mysteries for travel days and hotel stays, and this time I chose Indian mystery authors--and I don't mean books by English writers with Indian heroes, such as H.R.F. Keating's Inspector Ganesh Ghote or Tarquin Hall's PI Vish Puri. I mean mysteries by authors who are Indian (or at least of Indian origin) and use an Indian setting. Best known internationally as a filmmaker, no list of Indian mystery writers is complete without the late Satyajit Ray. His 35 short mystery stories, featuring Bengali sleuth Prodosh Chandra Mitra a.k.a. Feluda, form a two-volume set, The Complete Adventures of Feluda, and follow Feluda's development from amateur to skilled investigator. However, fans of Agatha Christie may prefer Madhumita Bhattacharya's private investigator Reema Ray in The Masala Murder, Dead In A Mumbai Minute or Goa Undercover. Although technically not an Indian author since she was born in England and raised in the U.S., it's hard to leave out Sujata Massey because she has won both an Agatha Award for Best First Novel and a Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel. She launched a new mystery series in 2018 with The Widows of Malabar Hill, in which Perveen Mistry, the first female lawyer in 1920s Bombay, investigates a suspicious will on behalf of three Muslim widows and soon is embroiled in murder. If you're a "Jewel in the Crown" fan, then go for Arjun Raj Gaind's series about the detecting skills of Maharaja Sikander Singh of Rajpore, a Sherlock Holmes fan; the 2018 paperback Death at the Durbar has the Maharaja under pressure to help the British solve a murder before it upends their George V coronation celebration in 1911 Delhi. Back in modern times, murder is less romantically silk-draped and bejeweled; for example, Ankush Saikia just added More Bodies Will Fall, a 2018 paperback, to his detective Arjun Arora series. This time Arora investigates the Delhi murder of a girl from Northeast India, a tribal area facing violent unrest and outside prejudice. Another dark take on today's India is Fraudster by R.V. Raman. Critically praised in India, the story drags the reader into a corporate world where the employees of a bank are murdered one-by-one as soon as they get too close to large-scale financial fraud. For more Indian mystery recommendations, see https://www.thecuriousreader.in/bookrack/mystery-novels/

Mystery Authors Who Plotted Real Murders

In a made-for-reality-TV tale, romance novelist Nancy Brophy, who once wrote an essay "How to Murder Your Husband," was recently arrested for the actual murder of her husband. It is rare for murder mystery writers to be plotters of real murder, but there have been some noted instances. Anne Perry, one of my favorite authors for her Thomas Pitt and William Monk historical mystery series set in Victorian England, is a convicted murderer, for example. Born Juliet Marion Hulme in 1938 England, Hulme/Perry was convicted at age 15 in 1954 for participating in the murder of her friend's mother but, due to her young age, served only a five-year sentence. At the time of the murder, Hulme's parents had moved the family to New Zealand, but they were in the process of divorcing, and Hulme was going to be sent to South Africa to stay with relatives. Hulme was obsessively close to her friend Pauline Parker at the time (Hulme denies implications of a lesbian relationship), and the two girls did not want to be separated. Somehow their shared devotion and fantasies came to include eliminating Pauline's mother. The two went for a walk with Pauline's mother on an isolated path where Hulme dropped an ornamental stone so that the older woman would lean over to retrieve it. Pauline had planned to hit her mother with half a brick wrapped in a stocking, and the two girls assumed that one blow would kill her. But it took more than 20 blows. After her release from prison, Hulme became a flight attendant, lived in the U.S. for a bit, and eventually settled in a Scottish village with her mother. She created a new name, Anne Perry, using her stepfather's surname and launched a successful writing career with her first mystery novel, The Cater Street Hangman, published in 1979.  The 1994 film "Heavenly Creatures," with Kate Winslet as the teenage Juliet Hulme, is based on the Hulme-Parker murder. Here's an even creepier killer author story:  Noted Chinese crime writer, Liu Yongbiao, 53, received the death penalty this year for the murder of four people in a case that had gone unsolved for nearly two dozen years. The author and an accomplice had killed a couple and their grandson in November 1995 at their family-owned hostel in order to cover up the murder of one of the guests during a robbery. Police finally were able to crack the case by using DNA evidence from a cigarette at the crime scene. "I’ve been waiting for you all this time," Liu told officers when he was arrested in August 2017 at his home. He later admitted that he had used the gory details of the crimes as inspiration for his novels. Maybe he wanted to get caught; his novel The Guilty Secret is about a writer who commits a string of murders!  If you don't hold her past against her, check out Anne Perry's many excellent books at https://www.amazon.com/Anne-Perry/e/B000APAS2A

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

Mystery Fiction Embraces Genre-Bending

I've noticed, and a recent Library Journal article confirms, that the genre boundaries of mystery fiction are expanding and blurring. Mystery authors seem increasingly prone to borrow from other genres, ranging from romance, paranormal/fantasy, horror and thriller to Westerns. The resulting crossover novels may have the traditional mystery puzzle solving, but they've got a genre-bending persona. For example, how do reviewers categorize the hit Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn? The page-turning psychological mystery about a husband suspected in the disappearance of his wife seems to have jumped right over genre into "literary fiction" status. The current paranormal craze is especially infectious, with paranormal mysteries, like paranormal romances, proliferating. So no surprise that Southerner Maggie Toussaint (author of Cleopatra Jones and Mossy Bog mysteries) is going paranormal with her new book Gone and Done It about a landscaper/pet-sitter who uses dream-walking to help police. The crime-solving Western, following the trail of the late Tony Hillerman, seems to be another mystery crossover category; an example is the Western noir Bad Country by C.B. McKenzie (featuring a Native American rodeo-cowboy-turned-PI). Meanwhile, the success of the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series has paved the way for imports with a foreign accent, and not just from Scandanavia. I'm looking forward to the summer arrival of Bernard Minier’s Frozen Dead, set in the French Pyrénées and winner of several French literary prizes. Of course, American authors are also pumping out standard mystery fare and doing it well: Police procedurals, spunky women sleuths, historicals and small-town "cozies" abound. But based on sales trends, I'm thinking about penning an erotic paranormal mystery set in Iceland. For the Library Journal preview of 2014 mystery debuts, go to http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2014/04/books/genre-fiction/mystery/pushing-boundaries-mystery-preview-2014/

Is It Time to Escape on a Foreign Mystery Tour?

As you emerge from winter's grip, it's time to plan for some fun travel -- and there's no cheaper way than a global mystery tour. Enjoy sunny piazzas, pyramids and pagodas with fascinating sleuths for company. If you're already addicted to bleak Scandinavian landscapes by Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, consider Norway's "Queen of Crime" Karin Fossum and Swedish master Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander series. But then go sip white wine in a Paris café courtesy of one of the world's top-selling mystery writers, the late Georges Simenon, creator of the Commissaire Maigret mysteries. Add Italian zest with mystery fan favorites Andrea Camilleri, creator of Sicilian Inspector Montalbano, and Donna Leon, creator of Venice police detective Guido Brunetti. Best-selling Spanish novelist Arturo Perez-Severte can offer historical flair with his Diego Alatriste, a 17th century sword-wielding sleuth. Next leave Europe and go East. Sample Japanese Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X, a 2012 Edgar Award nominee, and Qiu Xiaolong's series about poetry-spouting Shanghai detective Chen Cao, including Death of a Red Heroine, an Anthony Award winner for first novel. Fly over the Taj Mahal and land with Kishwar Desai's award-winning Witness the Night, featuring Punjab social-worker-cum-crime investigator Simran Singh. Visit Africa with the Botswana-based Detective Kubu series by Michael Stanley (alias of a duo of South African professors). Finally, come back to the Americas and go south with acclaimed psychological thriller The Book of Murder by Argentina's Guillermo Martinez. And that's a very abbreviated world tour of great mysteries! For a much longer list by geography, go to http://www.mysterylovers.com/books/book_clubs/foreign.php