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/

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/

Weather Turns Witness in Forensic Meteorology

It's a rainy day in Southern California, and, as a mystery fanatic cozy indoors with a good who-done-it, it started me thinking about weather and murder--and the interesting role of "forensic meteorology" in investigations. I'm clearly not alone because The Weather Channel debuted its own true-crime series "Storm of Suspicion" last year, highlighting the role played by weather science in solving murders. For example, in one case, a husband claims that his wife was murdered, and he was knocked unconscious, by an intruder. Yet forensic meteorological analysis showed the lawn around the house would have been so soggy with dew at the time of the murder that an intruder would have left clear footprints. Lack of any footprints helped clinch the husband's arrest. In another case, footprints betrayed a murder-as-accident scheme: A woman is found dead at the wheel of her crashed SUV after apparently skidding off an icy road--until footprints in the snow are spotted walking away from the wreck. Yet another example hinges on lack of snow: An accused murderer claims he sustained a scratch on his hand while snowboarding and not during the attack--only it was raining at the time of the alleged snowboarding, melting a slight snowpack and leaving slopes too bare for the sport. The weather is such a common factor in tragic events that forensic meteorologists have been used as expert witnesses in murders, suicides, bombings, vehicle accidents, bad aircraft landings, property insurance disputes, hurricane and flood damage claims, building collapses, slip-and-fall insurance scams, and much more. Unfortunately, as global warming leads to more extreme and dangerous weather events, forensic meteorologists will be keeping busy! For an interesting article on how weather-related forensics contribute to solving crimes and settling legal disputes, see https://gizmodo.com/forensic-meteorologists-solve-crimes-youve-never-though-1586035339

Social Media Nourishes Murderous Misogyny

If you haven't noticed, there's a disturbing new trend of misogyny-inspired murder in the headlines. It started when Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14 others before killing himself in Isla Vista, CA, in 2014, leaving a manifesto about his "Incel" motivations. After Rodger introduced the world to a dark Internet subculture, his fellow "Incels" quickly awarded him iconic status. There followed other Incel-inspired mass killings such as Chris Harper-Mercer's 2015 rampage at Umpqua Community College in Oregon that killed nine and injured eight; Alek Minassian's 2018 Toronto massacre in which he used his van to kill 10 and injure 14; and Scott Beierle's Hot Yoga Studio attack in Tallahassee, FL, that left two women dead and injured four women and a man. Even the infamous Parkland killer, Nikolas Cruz, who gunned down 17 people and injured 17 more at Stoneman Douglas High School, posted online that "Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten." What is this Incel madness? Incel is short for "involuntary celibate," and these women-hating souls (almost exclusively white male heterosexuals) believe they are entitled to sex yet are being denied by women and society. They gather in Internet forums (notably Reddit) of shared misery but go beyond commiserating with each other over not being able to get a date. Incels glorify violence against sexually active women, harassment of women, and catfishing of women. Some warp concepts such as biological determinism, evolutionary psychology, and female hypergamy (that 80% of women desire only the top 20% of most attractive men) to justify their anger. But mostly they talk about their looks, penis size, loneliness, suicide, sex robots, rape, etc. And they cheer men who take revenge for sexual deprivation by killing people. This social media-enabled misogyny should be driving more national concern. The Incel subculture is just beginning to catch the notice of mystery authors--for example Lori A. Witt's 2018 debut Incel about a male-female detective team investigating a series of murders connected to Incel Internet forums. Meanwhile, though free speech lets Incels rant, I would urge media, law enforcement, legislators, and social media platforms to raise the alarm and focus on monitoring and intervention before the death toll goes higher. For Witt's novel, see https://www.amazon.com/Incel-Walker-Arruda-Book-1-ebook/dp/B07GLXGC45

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/