Westport Public Library BOOK blog

Claire Malloy – widowed mother of a teenage daughter and a bookseller in Farberville, Arkansas – has finally married town police Lt. Peter Rosen.

They are on their honeymoon in Luxor, Egypt, accompanied by her daughter Caron and Inez, Caron's best friend and frequent partner in (mis)adventure.

The girls claim they’re being followed by a sinister Arab with a scar, and then a young American woman is kidnapped and an archeological expedition is beset by murderous mishaps.

Enter one Lady Amelia Peabody Emerson, reputed to be the descendant of famous English archeologists!

Publishers Weekly says “Manipulating everything with a practiced hand, Hess concludes the story in a manner worthy of Hercule Poirot in the classic Death on the Nile.”

Joan Hess is the author of both the Claire Malloy and the Maggody mystery series.

Amerotke enters the twilight world of glorious Thebes where life can be so rich and yet death so swift and brutal when three prominent Egyptian scribes are poisoned.

PW says “Doherty, the author of a number of other historical series, manages to include an impossible crime among the puzzles the sage and insightful judge must solve.”

Hope that all of you mummies out there enjoy your special day on Sunday!

The Agathas were awarded at the Malice Domestic conference banquet. I was happy to be seated with author Kathryn R. Wall, whose 8th Bay Tanner mystery, The Mercy Oak, has just hit the Library shelf this week.

I was impressed with all of the new names and faces at Fresh Blood, the New Authors Breakfast, which is hosted by Mystery Scene magazine and met up with Rosemary Harris, whose first offering, Pushing Up Daisies is set right here in Connecticut.

On one of Sunday’s author panels, Harris had a few words in defense of the traditional mystery (Malice’s theme) when she answered the point blank “Are cozy mysteries credible?” with remarks about the credibility of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, traveling around with only a toothbrush and the clothes on his back. So much of fiction requires that “suspension of disbelief,” doesn’t it?

The very last book I cataloged right before I left for the conference was Elizabeth Zelvin’s Death Will Get You Sober and Liz was also at the breakfast. She had a short story which was up for an Agatha this year, although veteran writer Donna Andrews was the winner in that category.

This year’s Malice Lifetime Achievement Award went to Peter Lovesey, who in an interview with the venerable Robert Barnard shared his life story and how he came to love (and write) mysteries. For a young boy in bombed-out London books were hard to come by, but Lovesey’s father managed to get his hands on two. Lovesey devoured the first, which was a biography of the judge who presided over the numerous poisoning trials of the late 19th century. He put off picking up the second book, fearing it was a religious biography, but desperate for something new finally took Alias, the Saint in hand – and the rest is history.

There are not enough superlatives to cover Lovesey’s body of work which includes several outstanding stand-alones as well as series featuring Sergeant Cribb, a Victorian Scotland Yard detective, “Bertie,” Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), Peter Diamond a modern-day Bath, England police detective, and his newest series to date which features Hen Mallin, a woman police detective.

Mallin is featured in Lovesey’s very recent release, The Headhunters.

The Cribb stories were adapted for television and the series proved so popular that Lovesey wrote some original screenplays after all of the published titles were exhausted. He also adapted his novel Dead Gorgeous for television – another critical success – and was the consultant for the delightful Rosemary and Thyme series.

The next major mystery conference will be Bouchercon, to be held October 9-12 in Baltimore. Laura Lippman, will be the Guest of Honor and Lawrence Block will receive a special award for Distinguished Contribution to the Genre. All mystery fans are welcome!

Make sure to mark your calendars for the evening of Tuesday, July 15, when Lawrence Block will be speaking right here at our Library.

To give it "a burl" is to give it a try, and if you like your mysteries set in more unusual locations, here’s one for you, mate.

Part-Aborigine Emily Tempest returns to her tribal home in the beautiful wilds of Central Australia after being educated and traveling abroad in Adrian Hyland’s debut novel, Moonlight Downs, which won the Ned Kelly Award, Australia's highest crime fiction prize.

Emily is no sooner settled in when her best friend’s father, a highly respected community leader, is found strangled and missing a kidney and the bizarre nature of the crime points to the local sorcerer, Blakie Japanangka.

Author Hyland, who worked in remote Aboriginal communities, has woven Aboriginal spirituality into an intriguing tale that also touches on political issues and racial conflict between the ill-disposed "whitefellers" – who provide a lengthy suspect list after doubts arise about Blakie’s guilt – and the "blackfellers."

Included are two helpful glossaries, Australian and Aboriginal, to help you figure out what all the “blokes and sheilas” are “yabbering” about.

Shaken by a scrape with death, big-city detective Joe Cashin is posted away to a quiet town on the South Australian coast where he grew up.

When a prominent local is attacked and left for dead in his own home, the evidence points to three boys from the nearby Aboriginal community – whom everyone is eager to blame.

But Cashin – who has Aboriginal cousins – is unconvinced, and soon begins to suspect that the crime is far more complex than a simple robbery gone wrong.

Author Temple is also a Ned Kelly Award winner.

I did a quick Google to see if I could solve the mystery of her true identity and found out that there is quite a flap in the book world over the name because it turns out there is already a Danish mystery writer named Inger Wolf – no “e” at the end.

Several of the major blogs are abuzz about it. If you want to join the fray, check out Scrivener's Error and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

One of the comments posted on Confessions reminds of us a similar debacle in the past. Kenneth Millar started writing books as John Macdonald and then switched to John Ross Macdonald, and finally to just Ross Macdonald when John D. MacDonald cried “foul.”

The title of Wolfe’s book is The Calling. PW called it a “bracingly original mystery” but none of the review journals seem to have picked up on the lack of originality of her name.

In a remote Ontario town, 61-year-old Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef is trying to come to terms with a surprise divorce and a critical 87-year-old mother. When a lifelong acquaintance is murdered Hazel and her team are pressed into action, only to find that similar disturbing murders – a serial killer is leaving his victims with faces distorted into screams – are taking place in sleepy hamlets across the wide Canadian expanse.

His two mystery novels to date, Christine Falls and the recently released The Silver Swan are darkly set in 1950s Dublin and both feature pathologist-cum-detective Garret Quirke.

Christine Falls is one of this year’s Edgar nominees.

I thought Black cleverly chose his pseudonym because it is a print font, but in a Village Voice interview he explains that he was going to use Benjamin White after a character in some of his very early books, but chose Benjamin Black on the advice of his publisher who said, "We think Black looks better, sounds better . . . It'll get nearer the top of the librarians' purchase lists, which are all alphabetical.”

Her character, Hannah Wolfe, is a private investigator in London.

There are three titles in the series, written in the early 1990s, the second of which, Fatlands, won the Silver Dagger Award for Crime Fiction in 1993.

In the first book, Birth Marks, Hannah sets out to investigate the death of a ballet dancer who is eight months pregnant, and is drawn into a gripping story involving the ethics of surrogate motherhood.

The ballet theme brought to mind a classic from the fifties, Death in the Fifth Position, by Edgar Box – a pseudonym of Gore Vidal.

All three of the Box mysteries sold well and actually garnered a few good reviews from unwitting critics who had earlier refused to review his literary novels written under Vidal's real name.

Michael Connelly’s blurb, which is posted on amazon.com reads: “With its clever plotting and blood-and-guts characters, Quiver will certainly put Peter Leonard on the map. This is the start of something special.”

A crime caper set in and around the Leonard family’s home turf of Detroit, the book centers on a recent widow struggling with her teenage son when her first love, an ex-con, reappears, setting into motion a series of events culminating in a life-and-death confrontation with a gang of killers.

PW announced that the book had been sold to Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Minotaur in April of 2007, adding that “The elder Leonard, who was reportedly unimpressed with a short story his son wrote in college, has enthusiastically endorsed this new literary effort.”

The recent PW review was not so good, however: “A muddled plot, one-dimensional characters and a predictable ending will leave readers hoping for better things in Leonard’s next novel.”

Also like father, and in his case, mother, Jesse Kellman is the son of best-selling novelists Jonathan and Faye Kellerman.

Of his latest – and third – book, The Genius, also due in May, PW wrote, “Kellerman has a gift for creating compelling characters as well as for crafting an ingenious plot that grabs the reader and refuses to let go.”

Not bad at all, young man!

In an interview on bookpage.com Kellerman fils discusses how he feels about meeting expectations: "… there will inevitably be comparisons either in one direction or another: in genetic degradation, Kellerman fails to live up to his parents, or, as I'm sure my parents are waiting to hear, Kellerman surpasses his parents! We're just laughing about it. They're certainly not threatened by me. And if I were threatened by them, I would have been a lawyer."

This book will be the featured title for the Usual Suspects discussion next Sunday, April 13th, in honor of the Library’s 100th birthday.

This will also be the first anniversary of the Usual Suspects.

An outgrowth of the Victorian melodrama, the genre includes several Golden Age mystery writers and influenced a diverse list of authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The phrase "The butler did it", a popular mystery cliché, originated with Rinehart's novel The Door, in which the butler did do it, although that exact phrase never actually appears in the work.

Rinehart (1876-1958) was a prolific author and is often called the American Agatha Christie.

Dorothy B. Hughes, crime critic and novelist, has called her “the most important American woman mystery writer.”

The HIBK school was parodied by Ogden Nash in a poem called Don't Guess Let Me Tell You:

“Sometimes it is the Had I But Known what grim secret lurked behind that smiling exterior I would never have set foot within the door,

Sometimes the Had I But Known then what I know now I could have saved at least three lives by revealing to the Inspector the conversation I heard through that fortuitous hole in the floor.”

Hope you can join us on Sunday at 2. New members are always welcome.

Phone 291-4821 for a copy of the book. Call 291-4836 for more information on The Usual Suspects.

Set in the present day, Robert O. Greer’s sixth C.J. Floyd mystery The Mongoose Deception drags the reluctant Black bail bondsman turned Western collectibles dealer detective back through time into the JFK assassination.

An earthquake which damages the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel in Colorado reveals the corpse of Antoine Ducane, who had hinted that he knew the truth behind the murder and then disappeared in the 1970s.

The discovery sets off a chain of violent events that soon involve Floyd and take him all the way from the crisp and clear mountains of Colorado to the muggy swamps of Louisiana.

Greer provides us with flashbacks to mobsters Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello discussing the need to kill the president.

Another treat for conspiracy buffs – less vintage in nature – is Tom Cain’s The Accident Man.

One summer night in 1997, hired assassin Samuel Carver is positioned in a Paris tunnel ready to make a hit on a dangerous terrorist.

After causing a speeding black Mercedes – in which he believes his target to be the passenger – to smash into a stone pillar, he realizes that he has caused the death of Princess Diana.

He vows revenge on those who set him up and must work his way through the assassin underground while being pursued by the very forces that hired him.

Tom Cain is the pseudonym for an award-winning British journalist [David Thomas] with a twenty-five-year history of investigative reporting. The Accident Man is his first novel.

Agathas are handed out in five categories: Best Novel; Best First Mystery; Best Short Story; Best Non-Fiction; Best Children's/Young Adult Mystery.

This year’s nominees in the Best Novel category are:

The Penguin Who Knew Too Much by Donna Andrews.
In her 8th outing, Meg Langslow and her fiancé are moving into their new house when Meg's dad announces that he has discovered a dead body while digging a pool in the basement for penguins fostered from a bankrupt local zoo.

Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen.
Her family is quite broke, and when someone murders the man who had planned to seize the family estate, the killer's attention turns to Lady Georgiana when she starts asking questions to save her brother, who is the prime suspect.

Hard Row by Margaret Maron.
In this 13th Deborah Knott mystery, body parts begin to appear that turn out to belong to a farmer known for his exploitation of cheap immigrant labor. Deborah's new sheriff husband is charged with finding his killer.

A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny.
In his second case, Inspector Armand Gamache investigates when a much disliked woman is murdered, wading through a deep pool of potential murderers ranging from the victim's lover to her friends in a small Canadian community.

Murder with Reservations by Elaine Viets.
In her 6th appearance, Helen Hawthorne is working as a maid in a hotel where, six months earlier, a bank robber supposedly stashed his loot before he was killed in a shootout and now one of her co-workers has gone missing.

Ballots will be cast by attendees of the Malice Domestic XX Conference in Arlington, Virginia at the end of April. Fans are encouraged to attend.

Visit the Malice website to view a list of the nominees in all categories.

Magdalen Nabb was the author of the Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia novels, which are set in modern day Florence, although they often refer back to the recent or distant past and are mostly based on real crimes committed in the city.

A recent piece about her death in Booklist magazine says “Over the 14 Guarnaccia novels, Nabb developed her hero into a working-man’s Maigret, a bit of a plodder, yes, but hypersensitive to human nuance and to the sometimes overwhelming sadness that lurks beneath the surface of daily life.”

Nabb would have been pleased at this comparison, for, as her website biography relates, “Having been a fan of Georges Simenon’s novels for as long as she could remember, she was astonished and overjoyed when Simenon wrote to congratulate her on her first novel. Their correspondence continued until his death and, until then, the first copy of each book went to him. His presence is very much missed but in difficult moments she could still get advice from him by browsing through his books and his letters.”

Another author of what has been called the “renaissance of Italian crime fiction,” Michael Dibdin,
gave us Aurelio Zen, one of the quirkiest detectives in all of crime fiction.

Throughout the 11 titles in the series he is constantly appalled by the savagery of his fellow countrymen and entangled in the horrors of Italian bureaucracy, forever bending the rules to achieve results, much to the annoyance of his superiors.

Each title is set in a different region of Italy, starting in the beautiful medieval city of Perugia.

If you are a Michael Kitchen (Foyle’s War) fan, I highly recommend his reading of Dibdin’s Blood Rain and A Long Finish.

The late Batya Gur’s groundbreaking Chief Inspector Michael Ohayon mysteries took us across the Mediterranean to Jerusalem.

The 5th and final title in the series, Bethlehem Road Murder, got a starred review in Publishers Weekly, which called it an “outstanding police procedural” that “can hold its own with the best work of P.D. James.”

The brooding Ohayon is a restrained and understated figure who has often been called the Israeli Adam Dalgleish.

Visit our list of international detectives if you are shopping for a new series to read, and don’t forget to check Stop, You’re Killing Me! for a list of the series titles in their order of publication.

The gothic is widely acknowledged as the forerunner of the modern mystery novel.

In the twentieth century the gothic was revived by Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca (1938) is in many ways a re-working of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Du Maurier inspired a substantial body of writers of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, a list which includes Joan Aiken, Victoria Holt, Barbara Michaels, and Mary Stewart.

This was where many female baby boomers, myself included, turned once they had checked off every title on the Nancy Drew list. There was no such genre as “Young Adult” or “Teen” fiction in those days and the adult mystery section was definitely off-limits to this 60s teenager.

Author Diane Setterfield has been hailed for breathing new life into an old form with The Thirteenth Tale the next title for discussion by the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group, scheduled for Sunday, March 16th.

A story with echoes of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, at 406 pages it might prove a bit daunting for the mystery reader used to a slimmer volume, but I found it a thoroughly engrossing story.

I actually “read” this book via compact discs, which at nearly 16 hours playing time was a big investment of time, and I often carried an unfinished disc from my car player into the house to resume the story. The narration is done by two separate readers, a clever way of carrying the story which centers on two women and their loss of twin sisters.

There is a very clever little website devoted to this book which includes a Q&A session with the author, a reading guide for the book, traditional English recipes (!) and a bibliography of the finest gothic tales to be had.

Hope you can join us on Sunday at 2. New members are always welcome.

With help from none other than Judy Garland, Clark (You Made Me Love You!) Gable, and Raymond Chandler, Peters follows -- as the book description reads -- “a treacherous trail of clues … one as winding as the Yellow Brick Road, and deadlier than a field of poppies” to find a murderer even wickeder than the Wicked Witch of the West.

Have you ever heard those bizarre stories about a Munchkin suicide taking place during the filming of the Wizard of Oz?

Margaret Hamilton was badly burned when her flammable green makeup ignited, and the originally cast Tin Man, Buddy Ebsen, was sickened by his silver makeup, but absolutely no Munchlins were harmed in the making of this film!

At the end of the scene where the Tin Man has rusted shut and Dorothy oils him back to life, as the three main characters move down the road there is an image off in the background that many claimed was a hanged body – that of a munchkin who killed himself over a love affair gone bad.

Better quality prints and digitized copies of the film reveal that it simply one of the larger birds that the Los Angeles Zoo loaned MGM to give the indoor set used in this sequence a more "outdoorsy" feel.

So much for that mystery.

One of Barbara D’Amato’s freelance Chicago reporter Cat Marsala mysteries, Hard Road, also has an Oz theme.

Cat tracks down the unknown assailant who disrupted an annual Oz Festival by killing its security chief and attempting to murder the reporter herself.

In the telling of her story, D’Amato pays tribute to the extraordinary imagination of L. Frank Baum.

Hard Road includes an appreciation of Baum by D'Amato's son, Brian, and a 20-question quiz at the end – which you will surely ace after participating in this year’s Westport Reads Oz celebration.

If the name sounds familiar it is probably because Colucci pops up on television news shows, including Nancy Grace, Larry King Live, MSNBC and Fox News, all the time.

By the way, Colucci steadfastly maintains Skakel’s innocence, but you will have to read the book to find out why!

Another Greenwich related true-crime story is that of the Kissels, who are the subject of the recently released Never Enough by Joe McGinniss.

Successful investment banker Robert Kissel and his wife Nancy were living the seemingly perfect "expat" life in Hong Kong with their three children.

Robert began to suspect that she was having an affair, which he confirmed via a hired detective, and then suspected that Nancy was poisoning him. His body was found soon after.

Nancy was tried and convicted of his murder in Hong Kong, where she awaits appeal.

There is a truly bizarre subsequent chapter to this story. Robert's brother, Andrew, a Connecticut real estate tycoon facing prison for fraud and embezzlement, was also found dead in the basement of his Greenwich mansion, stabbed in the back by person or persons unknown.

We have also recently added The Best American Crime Reporting, 2007, a diverse collection featuring 15 of the year's best crime stories, written by noted journalists such as Tom Junod (Esquire), Sean Flynn (GQ) and Steve Fishman (New York) and edited by author Linda Fairstein.

This collection got a starred review in Publishers Weekly that said of the stories “… it’s often hard to believe they’re non-fiction.”

I am usually able to say something to the effect that this year’s nominees were announced with great fanfare, but somehow this year the fanfare went unnoticed by me and the dozen or so people who usually e-mail me the news! It appears the announcements were made back in January – I really had to go digging for details on the Internet after it suddenly popped into my head that the list was overdue.

At any rate, this years Best Novel nominees are:

Christine Falls by Benjamin Black (the pseudonym of Booker Prize winner John Banville)
Pathologist Garret Quirke uncovers a web of corruption in 50s Dublin surrounding the death in childbirth of a young maid, Christine Falls, and the deeper he delves into the mystery, the more it seems to implicate his own family and the Catholic Church.

Priest by Ken Bruen
Recovered from incapacitating guilt over the death of a child on his watch, alcoholic Galwegian ex-cop Jack Taylor is released from the loony bin only to become involved in an unofficial investigation of the death of a pedophilic priest, who was beheaded.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
An alternate history detective story based on the premise that after World War II, a temporary Yiddish-speaking settlement for Jewish refugees was established in Alaska in 1941. Meyer Landsman, an alcoholic homicide detective with the Sitka police, investigates the murder of a man who was a fellow resident in a fleabag hotel.

Soul Patch by Reed Farrel Coleman
Set in late 80s New York City, Moe Prager, an ex-cop turned PI, has a cryptic encounter with a former fellow officer who slips him a covertly recorded tape of an interrogation of a snitch claiming to know the secret behind the murder of a major-league drug dealer in the early 70s who then turns up dead himself.

Down River by John Hart
After being narrowly acquitted of a murder charge, Adam Chase is hounded out of his home town. Years later, within hours of his return, he is beaten and accosted, confronted by his family, and when bodies start turning up, the small town rises against him again and he finds himself embroiled in the fight of his life to prove his own innocence.

All outstanding novels, but my money is on Ken Bruen.

There is a terrific interview of Bruen by, interestingly enough, Reed Farrel Coleman – one of his fellow nominees – on the Mystery Readers International website.

And … there is an interview of Coleman himself by Megan Abbott there as well.

The winner will be announced at the 62nd Annual Edgar Awards Banquet on Thursday May 1, 2008 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.

This year’s Grand Master will be Bill Pronzini.

Smilla Jaspersen is the daughter of a Danish doctor and an Inuit woman from Greenland who lives in Copenhagen. When an Inuit boy she knows dies under mysterious circumstances, she refuses to believe it was an accident. She decides to investigate and discovers that even the police don't want her involved.

Smilla persists, and her investigation leads her from a fanatically religious accountant to a tough-talking pathologist and then to the secret files of the Danish company responsible for extracting most of Greenland's mineral wealth. Finally, she boards a ship with an international cast of villains laden with a large stash of cocaine bound for a mysterious mission on an inhospitable island off Greenland.

After a ten year absence from the literary scene, Hoeg has recently published a new book that, like Smilla’s Sense of Snow, is indeed a psychological thriller, something of a detective story, but, most of all, an intense character study.

Set in modern-day Denmark, The Quiet Girl centers around Kaspar Krone, a world-renowned circus clown with an unusual ability. Krone can access “acoustic essences” – auras of sound revealing the personalities of people in musical key signatures.

Sounds strange? It gets even stranger. Wanted for tax evasion and on the verge of extradition, Krone is drafted into the service of a mysterious order of nuns who promise him they can secure a reprieve from the international authorities if he will help safeguard a group of children who also have this mystical ability.

When one of the children goes missing, Krone sets off to find the young girl. He makes a shocking series of discoveries along the way about her identity and the true intentions of his young charges.

The book has met with mixed reviews, but Publishers Weekly promises that it will appeal to Hoeg’s “many fans and other readers with a taste for the literary offbeat.”

Even if you can’t make it to the party this year you can bring a taste of it home.

Julie Smith’s protagonist is Skip Langdon, a former debutante and carnival queen who has traded in her crown for a badge.

The first book in her series is New Orleans Mourning takes place during Mardi Gras. When the King of Carnival is gunned down by a party-goer dressed as Dolly Parton, Langdon scours the French Quarter and beyond for clues, interviewing revelers and street people with names like Jo Jo, Hinky and Cookie, and using her contacts from her white glove days.

New Orleans Mourning won the 1991 Edgar Award for best mystery novel.

Smith is the editor of New Orleans Noir, a recently released collection of eighteen short stories. The book is divided into pre-Katrina (pre-K, as the locals say) and post-Katrina sections, and many of the more powerful tales describe the disaster's hellish aftermath. A portion of the profits from this book are being donated to the New Orleans Public Library.

New Orleans is also home base for private-eye and former go-go dancer Scotty Bradley, star of Greg Herren’s gay noir series. Mardi Gras Mambo, the third book in the series, was delayed due to the author's forced temporary relocation from that city, although the author does not mention the hurricane in the book, since it is very much about the ultimate party city that was pre-K New Orleans.

If these sound just a little too dark for you, celebrate the day with Lou Jane Temple’s lively Red Beans and Vice. Temple’s detective Heaven Lee, a perky Kansas City restaurateur, travels to New Orleans for a food fest benefit for an ancient order of nuns in the city. Several catastrophes ensue, and ultimately a coffee importer turns up dead.

Booklist says “The attraction in this overstuffed story is the Big Easy: landmarks, well-known chefs and restaurants, and local color abound. You'll be longing for beignets by mid-murder.”

Ah, for a cup of Café du Monde coffee and a plate of hot beignets!

Local author Lawrence Goldstone will be our speaker on Monday, February 11th, to discuss his recently released forensic thriller, The Anatomy of Deception.

A young doctor is plunged into a maze of murder, secrets and unimaginable crimes and tracks a daring killer through the operating rooms, drawing rooms, and back alleys of 1889 Philadelphia.

Special guest appearance by controversial painter Thomas Eakins … I love it when historic personages turn up in novels.

Wondering if this book is for you? Read a sample on Amazon.com.

I will be here to do the author introduction at 7:30 (McManus Room on the lower level) and hope to see you there.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.

Members include authors, readers, publishers, agents, booksellers and librarians, who are, as their website states, “bound by our affection for the mystery genre and our support of women who write mysteries.”

In honor of its twenty-year anniversary, a new twenty story anthology, Sisters on the Case, has been released, edited, appropriately enough, by Paretsky herself. She has contributed a story featuring an eleven-year-old V.I. Warshawki who is searching for her missing father during the Chicago race riots of the summer of 1966.

This eclectic collection also includes stories by Margaret Maron, Barbara D'Amato, and Carolyn Hart, as well as the late Charlotte MacLeod.

Another new addition to the Library’s mystery story collections is Dead Man’s Hand, an anthology of fourteen poker-related stories, edited by Otto Penzler.

Michael Connelly fans will enjoy watching Harry Bosch's exquisite bluff in One-Dollar Jackpot. Other contributors include Alexander McCall Smith, Laura Lippman, and John Lescroart.

There are a number of mysteries that play out around the poker table, including the recent Cashed In, by Jackie Chance in which an amateur Hold 'Em player boards a high-stakes poker cruise where someone is turning card sharks into shark bait, and The Picasso Flop: A Texas Hold 'Em Mystery by Vincent Van Patten, set at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

By the way, Robert Randisi is ready to take you back in time to the mythical Vegas of yore once again in Luck Be a Lady, Don't Die, the second “Rat Pack” mystery. Frank needs Eddie Gianelli's help again when the woman he was planning to meet in Sin City disappears, leaving behind her luggage and a “stiff” in the bathtub.

So, stick with me baby.... and Luck, be a lady tonight!

Among many other terrific features, it has an A-Z listing of “everything you ever wanted to know about private eyes & other tough guys ... listed by character, with all appearances in novels, short stories, film, television, radio and other media.”

According to thethrillingdetective.com, Rick Riordan’s fictional detective, Tres Navarre “… is many things -- an unlicensed TexMex private eye, a tequila drinker, tai chi master and an outcast from Academia with a PhD in medieval studies.”

The first Tres Navarre mystery, Big Red Tequila (1997) managed to hit the bestseller lists, and even win a Shamus for Best First P.I. Novel. To date, there are seven titles in the series.

Along with his enchilada-eating cat and many other colorful characters, Navarre explores the dangerous, dark, and often bizarre back streets of San Antonio, Texas.

Author Riordan says “I want people to feel like they've been dropped into the middle of South Texas when they read one of my books” and he definitely succeeds at capturing the many flavors of his home town.

Besides being the triple-crown winner of the Edgar, Anthony, and Shamus Awards, three of the mystery world’s highest honors, Riordan is also a nominee for this year’s Nutmeg Book Award for The Lighting Thief, the first of a series of three (so far!) parts of the immensely popular Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

The Nutmeg Book Award encourages Connecticut children in grades 4-8 to read from a list of ten titles and choose their favorite. Voting is currently underway and the winner will be announced on February 14th.

From hard-boiled private eyes to Greek gods still at war with each other in our 21st century world, Riordan enthralls adult and juvenile readers alike.

John Lescroart’s Betrayal tells the story of Evan Scholler, a young National Guard reservist riddled with “survivor guilt” who is having difficulty readjusting to civilian life after his service in Iraq.

Seven men in Scholler’s platoon, as well as an innocent Iraqi family, were killed in a deadly incident because of the apparent mistakes of an ex-Navy SEAL and private contractor named Ron Nolan. Scholler publicly vows to kill him, and when Nolan is indeed murdered, is convicted of the crime.

When fellow attorney Charlie Bowen suddenly vanishes, Lescroart’s long-time protagonist Dismas Hardy agrees to take on his open cases, one of which is an appeal of Scholler’s conviction. It is left to Hardy to uncover terrible truths that take him far beyond the case and into the realms of assassination and treason.

The Mystery Gazette calls Betrayal “a fascinating timely thriller that is incredible when it looks into the legal accountability of contract guards in a war zone and into the post traumatic stress including survivor guilt of returning veterans especially those suffering physical injuries.”

Edgar and Gold Dagger winner Minette Walters’ latest book, The Chameleon’s Shadow, tells the story of Lt. Charles Acland who survived a tank bombing in Iraq that killed two of his men. He is badly scarred, both physically and emotionally. As his behavior becomes more and more irrational and violent he finds himself under investigation for a series of recent beatings and murders in London.

Publishers Weekly calls it a “sizzling psychological thriller.”

If you want to learn more about PTSD, the United States Department of Veteran Affairs National Center for PTSD (NCPTSD) has a huge website devoted to stress-related disorders. The Connecticut National Guard has also put up an “open letter to all returned soldiers” with information on the services available to Guard members returning from active duty as they readjust to life in the Nutmeg State.

A Person of Interest is set in Chicago – her hometown – where detective Craig McHugh is working undercover to bust a powerful Chinese gang that traffics in heroin. Meanwhile, his teenage daughter, Ivy, is caught with a small amount of ecstasy, and his wife, convinced he's having an affair, begins flirting with Ivy's boyfriend.

Schwegel deftly weaves these three subplots together. Her vivid characterizations of a family in crisis elevate the story beyond the crime thriller and into the realm of the literary novel.

Her first book, Officer Down, was an auspicious debut and won an Edgar for Best First Novel.

Although her stories are stand-alones, Schwegel hopes to be able to reintroduce some of her characters in later books, as Ed McBain did in his 87th precint novels.

In an interview in the November issue of Mystery Scene magazine she says, “I’ve developed such a relationship with these characters that I realize that some of them might be best to tell certain stories.”

Mystery Scene attributes her "taut pacing and hard-driving action” to her training as a screenwriter. “In screenwriting," says Schwegel, “you really have to be selective. You can’t write about the furniture. Every single thing on the page has a purpose and a place.”

In an earlier interview, Schwegel shares that she is a great fan of Ross Macdonald’s writing. What is it that she likes about him?

“First, the no-frills style: he’s one of those writers who manages to pinpoint a character in their entirety in the matter of a single sentence. Second, voice: when I read Macdonald, the crime is hardly the point. For me, Lew Archer and the people he bounces around are what make the story work.”

Here’s some good news for all Ross Macdonald fans. Crippen & Landrau, one of the smaller mystery presses, will be releasing The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator, Including the Newly Discovered Case Notes.

She is a "celebudroid" -- an android created to look and act like Marilyn Monroe.

Oddly enough, she begins to grow as a person in this new incarnation, and ends up partnering with a San Francisco police inspector to save mankind from a vast conspiracy.

Oh, why not?

This book is the newest title on the mysteries set in the future list.

The most famous, of course, are the J. D. Robb books featuring Eve Dallas, a futuristic 21st century New York City police officer, who had her debut in 1995 in Naked in Death. The series has progressed through more than twenty titles, with a new title, Strangers in Death, due in February.

The series is set in late 2050s New York City. Other planets have been discovered and humans have built man-made worlds, some as vacation destinations and some as penal colonies. Androids are commonly used as servants and office workers.

Other recent books include Penny Deacon’s mysteries, which take place in a vague post-apocalypse setting on England’s waterways, where people live on decaying barges and kill for food and evil crime bosses rule.

Philip K. Dick’s classic 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis of the film
Blade Runner, is classified as science fiction yet actually qualifies as a mystery as well.

SciFi giant Alan Dean Foster’s The Mocking Program offers a blend of police procedural and science fiction, featuring a police inspector in a megalopolis that encompasses Mexico and part of what used to be the United States.

David Drury’s All the Gold of Ophir (2005) features a private investigator called in after several unexplained deaths on a space station orbiting Jupiter.

So, if you could have a celebudroid made to order, whom would you choose?

There are a few other new additions to our collection of mysteries set in Connecticut.

Sisters in Crime President Roberta Isleib has a paperback series I discovered at the recent Crime Bake mystery conference -- the “Advice Column” mysteries featuring Dr. Rebecca Butterman, a Guilford clinical psychologist and advice columnist.

Besides Justin Scott’s new Ben Abbott mystery, Mausoleum, which I mentioned in a previous posting, there are two other new titles featuring popular Connecticut sleuths.

The third Annie Seymour mystery, Dead of the Day, from Karen Olson is here! You can get a head start by reading the first chapter on-line at the author’s website. Olson’s fans might want to join the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group on May 18th when she will be the special guest author.

Cora Felton, a.k.a. The Puzzle Lady, returns in The Sudoku Puzzle Murders, which is due in April. Will Shortz, New York Times crossword puzzle editor, has constructed original sudoku puzzles that help solve the mystery. If you haven’t met Cora yet you might want to check out one of her crossword puzzle mysteries and find out why Kirkus magazine dubbed her "Miss Marple on steroids!"

You can meet Will Shortz in person on Saturday, February 2nd at the Library's Ninth Annual Crossword Puzzle Contest. Online registration begins in January on our website.