Westport Public Library BOOK blog

There have been seventeen full-length Phryne Fisher mysteries to date, plus an additional title, A Question of Death, which is an elegantly illustrated treasury of shorts stories interspersed with recipes and other miscellany.

The Honourable Miss Phryne (pronounced fry - née) Fisher, for the uninitiated, is a wealthy aristocrat who lives in Melbourne, Australia in 1928. She is a 28 year old woman detective, who, with the assistance of her maid Dot and several other recurring characters, solves all manner of crimes. She can fly a plane, drives her own car (a red Hispano-Suiza) and wears pants. Shocking! 1928, remember?

When asked what aspects of herself that she sees in Phryne, the witty Greenwood says “The only thing I share with Phryne apart from gender is extreme stubbornness.”

Next Sunday, the 29th, at 2 p.m., the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will be discussing the 3rd book in the series, Murder on the Ballarat Train.

Phryne decides to give the Hispano-Suiza a break and travel by train to Ballarat. The first night en route, she wakes up to the smell of chloroform and manages to save her fellow passengers. A head count reveals that someone is missing and a search turns up the body of an old, cantankerous woman at the side of the train tracks. Phryne agrees to investigate the murder for the woman's daughter, and is also determined to solve the mystery of a young girl on board who is suffering from amnesia.

New faces are always welcome. Please join us! I can’t promise cocktails, but we always have a good time.

To reserve a copy of the book, call 291-4821.

False alibis, erroneous statements, sudden deaths … some of the major ingredients of good crime fiction!

Rendell moved on to become one of the most celebrated mystery authors of our time and has won the Silver, Gold, and Cartier Diamond Daggers from the Crime Writers' Association, three Edgars and a Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America, and countless other awards.

For her literary efforts, she was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1996 and a life peer as Baroness Rendell in 1997. She turned 79 this year.

Many credit Rendell and P. D. James for transforming the entire mystery genre of the whodunit into the whydunit.

Chistopher Ray sums it all up quite nicely in a 1996 New Statesman article: “One rereads Dickens, Chesterton said, because the books are so memorable. One rereads mysteries, on the other hand, because they are so forgettable. But try not remembering Ruth Rendell. The only thing you forget in her company is yourself. If the novel's primary moral function is to help you see the world as others see it, Rendell is a moralist of the first water. Child killers, drugged-out wasters, catwalk models, care assistants, sociopaths, withered actresses, tormented middle-aged GPs – these are just a few of the alien lives this latter-day Dostoevsky has made sense of for those of us who like to think ourselves less troubled. “

Sadly, there are rumors that this will be the last title in one of the best-written detective series in the genre's history. The author has said, "I don't want to do any more Wexfords. I have other interests now." But, fans, take heart – her editor of 27 years says that the series will continue. Stay tuned!

Kind words from one of the finest traditional mystery writers around.

The Author's Note from Katherine Hall Page’s latest (and 18th) Faith Fairchild title, The Body in the Sleigh, is her thank-you letter to librarians everywhere. It is so nice to be appreciated.

Page says, “Ultimately librarians are matchmakers. They introduce us to new authors and subjects.”

One of the most enjoyable parts of my job is meeting the Library’s mystery readers and helping them find something new or something different … often by proxy, for a family member or friend who is unable to come in person.

We have a “Book a Librarian” feature here in Westport where you can arrange for a one-on-one meeting with a staff member who can help you in their field of expertise. Being the resident mystery maven, I am available for booking. I’m always happy to meet a fellow mystery fan!

If you would like to meet Katherine Hall Page, stop by the McManus Room Monday night, November 2nd, at 7:30 when she will speak about the new book. Copies will be available for purchase and signing after the talk.

It has a holiday theme, so this may be the perfect gift for some of the mystery readers on your list.

Caterer and clergy wife Faith Fairchild has two cases to keep her busy this Christmas as she looks for a connection between the death of a teenage drug addict whose body was found in an antique sleigh, and the discovery of a newborn baby boy in the manger in spinster Mary Bethany's barn on Christmas Eve.

The award-winning series began in 1990 when, the author says, "I had just finished a doctorate, my son was almost two, and my husband, who is a professor, took a sabbatical in France. And it was the first time that I really had free time -- the gift of time that all writers dream about.”

Recipes for some of Faith’s creations began to appear in the books with the fifth title in the series, The Body in the Cast, in 1993. After four years of Katherine endlessly sending recipes off to inquisitive readers, she decided to just put them in the books.

They are placed in the back so that readers could ignore them if they chose, because, as the author says, "I don't like those books where you have the badly bludgeoned body and then there's a brownie recipe..."

For a list of all of the recipes from the previous books, visit the author’s website.

Jane Wheel makes half of her living as an antique picker searching high and low at estate sales and antique shops and reselling her finds to other collectors. She makes the other half as a private detective, because she’s just as talented at digging up secrets.

In Scary Stuff, the sixth book of the Jane Wheel series by Sharon Fiffer, Jane returns to her family’s home – just in time for Halloween – to straighten out a mess her brother has gotten himself into. He says he's been verbally attacked three times by men who accused him of swindling them on eBay. It becomes obvious that he has a doppelganger, which fans out into a family drama that takes on Hitchockian airs. Jane finds that besides finding delight in plowing through the accumulations of peoples’ lifetimes, you sometimes uncover secrets that others wish to remain hidden, at all costs.

Blackwork, by the way, is an intricate reversible form of embroidery. Instructions for a blackwork pattern, “Witchwork,” appear at the end of the book.

When their boss Melody Mayfeldt’s flaming body plummets from the third-floor tower to her death, Melody's husband asks her to look into the death Carmela has to be careful she doesn't end up going down in flames as well.

Scrapbooking tips and recipes, including Mystery Muffins, are included.

Visit the Earthly Delights website for a devil’s food cake recipe sinful enough for the devil himself … or your own Halloween revels.

This is a rare opportunity to meet Lovesey, the author Publishers Weekly says “has no peer in presenting a traditional mystery with all the clues hiding in plain sight."

Skeleton Hill, his new Peter Diamond novel, is the tenth book in this contemporary series, which is set in Bath. The PW review says “Diamond remains one of the most realistic and human of fictional sleuths.”

Lovesey's trademark dark humor—which the New York Times Book Review has praised as his "joie de mort”—is evident on every page.

His other detectives include Victorian policeman Sergeant Cribb, Victoria’s son, Bertie, Prince of Wales, and Henrietta “Hen” Mallin, a contemporary police inspector in West Sussex.

Lovesey is one of an elite group of mystery writers awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger and in 2007 he received the Agatha Lifetime Achievement at Malice Domestic.

He won three awards—the Silver Dagger, Barry and Macavity—just for his 1996 Diamond mystery Bloodhounds which was hailed as old style whodunit set inside a thoroughly modern mystery.

His cumulative list of awards and honors is as long as it is varied.

More recently, we have been treated to Dead Gorgeous, a 2002 TV film based on his book On the Edge. Two ex-WAAFs meet again by chance and agree that peace holds little excitement for them and that their husbands are a dead loss. Then they think up an ingenious way of getting rid of them.

Lovesey was the story consultant for Rosemary & Thyme, a light-hearted 22 episode series about two gardeners turned sleuths.

Fans will be happy to hear that the Diamond mysteries have been optioned for British television by ITV in 2008—and they will undoubtedly make their way here eventually. Who will play our intrepid detective? I don’t know … but if you come to the program we can ask!

Hope to see you on the 25th.

The good news is that Easy’s fans can join in next Sunday, October 18th at 2, when the Usual Suspects discuss the first book in the Rawlins series, Devil in a Blue Dress. Published in 1990, it won the Shamus Award, and was followed by ten critically acclaimed titles. The series played out over a twenty year period, from the Jim Crow 1940s to the politically charged 1960s.

He gets into the detective business after getting fired from his job on the line at an aircraft plant for his "attitude." In danger of losing his home, he accepts a white man's offer to find a beautiful, mysterious Frenchwoman named Daphne Monet, last seen in the company of a well-known gangster.

A 1995 film based on the book featured Denzel Washington in the Rawlins role.

He says “Easy Rawlins lived in my father’s world and the world of my father’s, and my own, people. Leonid McGill, however, lives in a world writ large. In Leonid’s America the truth is never only skin deep. “

Two other Mosley series feature ex-convict Socrates Fortlow and bookseller Paris Minton.

The author is known for his strong, black male characters and his passionate musings on race, politics and the writing life.

When asked in a CNN interview if he missed Easy Rawlins at all, Mosley replied “No, he's right there on the shelf. All I have to do is reach up and pull him down.”

New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book, call 291-4821.

Mystery author Rex Stout was born in nearby Noblesville, Indiana and there are two popular fictional detectives who call Indy home.

Ronald Tierney’s character Dietrich “Deets” Shanahan is a 70-something former Army intelligence officer and semi-retired private investigator, and Connecticut author David Levien’s Frank Behr is an ex-cop private investigator.

The five Best Novel nominees are Trigger City by Sean Chercover, The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly, Red Knife by William Kent Krueger, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson and The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny.

The Cruelest Month has already won this year’s Agatha Award for Best Novel and is nominated for the McAvity and the Barry awards as well as the Anthony.

Penny’s detective is Armand Gamache, Chief Inspector of the Sûreté du Québec, in the village of Three Pines, in southern Quebec. The recently released The Brutal Telling is the fifth title in the series which began in 2005 with Still Life, which won numerous Best First Novel Awards, including the Anthony.

Harris’ amateur sleuth Paula Holliday is a 30-ish former TV executive who opens a landscaping-gardening business in fictitious Springfield, Connecticut.

If you would like a chance to meet Rosemary Harris and wish her good luck at Bouchercon, the Usual Suspects discussion group will be sponsoring a get-together with her on Saturday, October 10th at 2 PM at the Lakeside Diner in Stamford, which was the inspiration for Babe’s diner in the series.

There will be coffee and donuts, a free raffle and a good time, for sure. RSVP to me by e-mail or phone at 291-4836.

Evil for Evil finds Billy in late 1943 in Northern Ireland investigating the theft of 50 automatic rifles and 200,000 rounds of ammunition from a U.S. Army depot. The body of a slain IRA man is found a few miles away and Billy's military superiors fear the stolen weapons will be used in a Nazi engineered IRA uprising.

Billy, a former Boston cop and a nephew by marriage to General Eisenhower, on whose staff he serves, is part of a proud Irish-American family supportive of the Republican cause.

As Publishers Weekly explains, “Billy struggles to remain impartial as he investigates the various factions on both sides of the Catholic-Protestant divide. Benn offers no easy answers in this rich mix of Irish history and wartime intrigue.”

Booklist says "Benn continues to create fascinating behind-the-scenes mysteries from little-known facets of World War II history … A solid series that keeps getting better."

Benn will be joining us at the Westport Library on Sunday, October 25 at 2:00 pm along with Peter Lovesey, the award-winning author of over thirty-five crime novels, including the contemporary Peter Diamond series and the Victorian era Sergeant Cribb mysteries. They will be interviewed by Joe Meyers of the Connecticut Post.

Looking for tales of the war on the home front or World War II mysteries from a woman’s POV? Kathryn Miller Haines puts a delightful spin on Rosie the Riveter with her character, Rosie Winter, a desperate out of work actress who grabs a part-time job at a steamy, lowbrow detective agency. Her acting skills come in handy when her boss turns up dead and Rosie carries on alone.

Publishers Weekly finds Winter in June "Full of evocative period detail … this entry, for all its humorous and lighthearted moments, builds to a dramatic and sobering conclusion.”

Time to trot out some old Glenn Miller recordings and get into a few good reads!

The system works beautifully until the day Martin drops a client's toothbrush into the toilet and feels compelled to replace it. This simple act of decency changes his perspective entirely, and now he finds himself driven to break into houses to improve the lives of their occupants.

Booklist’s review asks “A loopier Bernie Rhodenbarr? A less lethal Dexter?” and concludes that “… he could be the next big thing.”

Connecticut author Dicks will be appearing at the Library on Monday evening, September 21st at 7:30, along with Margaret Berwin, another new author. Come learn more about their writing and first-time publishing experiences.

After his surprisingly glorious honeymoon in Paris, life is almost normal for Dexter Morgan, but once back in Miami -- where his Dark Passenger has been waiting for him -- the discovery of a corpse artfully displayed as a sunbather relaxing on a beach chair catapults Dexter back into action.

The Kirkus review calls it “The best of Dexter's four adventures to date.”

The Season 4 premiere of the television series Dexter, which is based on the novels, airs on September 27th.

Kiki Wallowingbull is found dead on the frozen banks of the Little Wind River and the murder appears to be the result of a drug deal gone bad. However, Kiki had recently returned from Hollywood where he was trying to uncover the mystery of his great-grandfather's disappearance while filming a 1923 Western. Many Arapahos and Shoshones went to Hollywood to find work in silent movies but Kiki's great-grandfather never returned to his wife and child. Are the two events somehow connected?

Kirkus gave the book an excellent review, calling it “Another of Coel's engaging blends of history, mystery, sexual tension and present-day life on the reservation.”

The author says “The story connects with the audience that loves mystery novels, novels about the West, its history and people, and novels about contemporary Native Americans. The Silent Spirit will also appeal to film buffs, since it moves back and forth between the present and 1920s Hollywood when the Arapahos appeared in many of the silent Westerns.”

She adds “The Silent Spirit is the 14th novel in my New York Times bestselling series, but readers can jump in at any time. They do not have to have read the earlier novels to enjoy the latest.”

For a complete list, visit Stop,You’re Killing Me!

You can see the author in a series of clips on YouTube in an interview with Barbara Peters of Poisoned Pen Press and Bookstore taped last November.

The cover art for The Silent Spirit is magnificent and I, for one, am glad to be back on the Rez with Father John, who was sent off on a sabbatical to Rome at the end of The Girl with Braided Hair, the previous book in the series published back in 2007. Glad they let him come home.

While some consider The Big Sleep or Farewell, My Lovely to be Chandler’s finest works, The Long Goodbye is ranked as his best by many critics.

Mystery great Anthony Boucher reviewed the book for the New York Times and described it as “rather off the hard-beaten path of Chandler-tana … both Marlowe and his creator seem to have mellowed somewhat ...”

“On the whole, despite occasional outbursts of violence, it's a moody, brooding book, in which Marlowe is less a detective than a disturbed man of 42 on a quest for some evidence of truth and humanity. The dialogue is as vividly overheated as ever, the plot is clearly constructed and surprisingly resolved, and the book is rich in many sharp glimpses of minor characters and scenes. Perhaps the longest private-eye novel ever written (over 125,000 words!). It is also one of the best -- and may well attract readers who normally shun even the leaders in the field.”

It has been said that the self-pitying author Roger Wade, whom Marlowe has been hired to save from alcohol-fueled self destruction, is an autobiographical character. This is just one of the topics that the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will discuss next Sunday, September 13th, at 2 pm.

New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book, call 291-4821.

A high-profile case comes his way when Jennifer Times—daughter of the powerful local D.A. and a contestant on American Star— walks into his office with an outlandish story about a man who stole her fingers. He later thinks this may have been a hallucination, but then finds a manila envelope on his desk containing risqué photos of Jennifer.

Kirkus called it “a wacky new take on the genre” and Library Journal said “Tremblay's debut is part noir throwback, part medical mystery, part comedy, and thoroughly, wonderfully entertaining. Highly recommended.”

A stolen manuscript is at the heart of the newly-released The Fitzgerald Ruse, the second title in Mark Castrique’s Blackman-Robertson series.

Former U.S. military CID Chief Warrant officer Sam Blackman and his partner Nakayla Robertson have opened a detective agency in Asheville, North Carolina. Their first client is Ethel Barkley, a charming elderly woman who hires them to retrieve a lockbox that she claims holds a valuable F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscript which she stole from the author in 1935 while he was living at the stately Grove Park Inn.

Sam and Nakayla no sooner retrieve the box – which is sealed with hardened metal bearing the imprint of a swastika – than someone steals it from their office, killing a security guard in the process. There is evidence that the theft may be part of an attempt to maintain the secrecy of a 1930s American fascist organization. Or … it may be payback from rogue Blackwater mercenaries who have a score to settle with Sam.

When Sam revisits Ethel he finds her now somewhat hostile and her subsequent murder raises the stakes.

Publishers Weekly says “Readers will hope to see a lot more of the book's amiable characters, in particular, Sam and Nakayla, whose comfortable banter lends the story much of its charm."

The first book in the series was Blackman’s Coffin (2008), and Library Journal praised the author’s “effortless storytelling.”

Want to read a bit of mystery by the man himself? You can view the text of The Mystery of Raymond Mortgage – a short story Fitzgerald wrote in 1909 when he was thirteen years old – online. The story resurfaced some 50 years after its initial publication and was included in the March 1960 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Janet Maslin of the New York Times calls his second novel, Six Suspects, "a Bollywood version of the board game Clue with a strain of screwball comedy thrown in" and adds “the whole thing feels handily confined to the kind of isolated, air-tight setting that Agatha Christie’s readers love.”

In a starred review Booklist said “If Agatha Christie wrote a mystery about modern India, it might be something like this.”

Seven years ago, Vicky Rai, the playboy son of a government official murdered a waitress at a trendy restaurant in New Delhi simply because she refused to serve him a drink. Now Rai is dead, killed at a party to celebrate his acquittal. Six of the guests are discovered with guns in their possession – a corrupt bureaucrat, an American tourist, a stone-age tribesman, a Bollywood sex symbol, a mobile phone thief, and an ambitious politician – each as likely as the next to have pulled the trigger.

When asked, in an interview on the publisher’s website, about the comparisons to Christie he answers “I prefer to characterize it as a social thriller. It does begin with a murder and there is an investigation of sorts, but for me the murder is more interesting from a sociological rather than a forensic point of view.”

Swarup says his inspiration for its structure came from Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and for its content, from real-life crimes in India including the Black Buck case and the Jessica Lall murder case.

For a little more armchair travel time in India, you might want to try three other recent releases.

Tarquin Hall’s The Case of the Missing Servant introduces mustachioed Vish Puri, a respectable family man who styles himself as India's forefront private investigator. He mostly runs background checks for prospective brides and grooms until a lawyer who has brought cases against corrupt government officials retains Puri to find a maid, Mary, who has gone missing from his household – and whom he is suspected of killing. The Kirkus review raves “What Cara Black does for Paris, Hall achieves for India in this lively and quick-paced series debut.”

If noir fiction is more to your liking, try Delhi Noir, a collection of 14 stories, praised by Publishers Weekly for being “briskly paced, beautifully written and populated by vivid, original characters.”

Sterling Glass is a small-town Virginia antiques appraiser. In Stealing with Style, her first case, she becomes embroiled in a plot involving several prestigious families, valuable antiques, and con men at some of New York's leading auction houses when a number of rare objects show up in a Goodwill store. The Library Journal review called it "a fascinating look at the world of antiques” which is probably due to the fact that its author, Emyl Jenkins, is a longtime antiques appraiser and has written numerous popular books on the subject.

In the recently released The Big Steal, Sterling is hired to assess the value of broken and missing antiques following a burglary at a Virginia estate. She soon finds that although some of the articles are worth tens of thousands of dollars, others appear to be fakes. The story comes complete with secret rooms, hidden treasures and discovered diaries … and the book includes an easy guide to identifying styles and periods in an illustrated appendix.

There is also Sharon Fiffer's Chicago based "antique picker" Jane Wheel and Sujata Massey's Tokyo based Japanese-American antiques dealer and part-time spy Rei Shimura.

Lovejoy fans take note! The “Divvy” -- a man who can spot a real antique in a warehouse full of fakes -- will return in December in The Faces in the Pool, a new novel by creator Jonathan Gash.

In the meantime, you can enjoy all of the Ian McShane episodes from the television program Lovejoy which have been released on DVD. The Library owns seasons one through five as well as a delightful “Christmas Specials” collection. Season six, the last of the run, is expected in October.

Riordan also wrote the multi-award-winning Tres Navarre mystery series for adults. Jackson “Tres” Navarre is not your stereotypical private investigator. He is a Tai Chi master with a Ph.D. in English from Berkeley.

There are seven titles in the series which began in 1996 with Big Red Tequila. Next Sunday, August 16th, at 2 pm, the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will discuss the third title, The Last King of Texas, published in 2000.

When a controversial University of Texas at San Antonio English professor is found shot to death, Tres Navarre is the only local academic crazy enough to accept the emergency opening. The police have assured him that they already have a suspect, and all Tres has to do is teach three of the dead man’s classes while they wrap up the open-and-shut case. But when the case starts looking just a little too perfect to Tres, he ends up on the bad side of not only the police but all of the drug dealers, gangs, and other unsavory characters in town in his search for the truth.

One of the reviews at Amazon.com raves “Riordan's style blends the hipness of Elmore Leonard with the sardonic humor of Janet Evanovich. And like Evanovich, Riordan draws on the colorful character of his locale–in his case the twangy chili con carnage of San Antonio academic life–to pepper his narrative with a mixture of medieval literature, Tex-Mex dialogue, and Sherlock Holmesian puzzles.”

New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book, call 291-4821.

For the definitive list of all Texas-based mysteries – including James Lee Burke’s Billy Bob Holland, former Texas Ranger, and many other favorites – visit stopyourekillingme.com.

Beginning with Death at Charity’s Point in 1984, he wrote twenty seven mysteries featuring Boston sports fisherman and lawyer-turned crime solver Brady Coyne. This includes three mysteries he co-wrote with the late Philip R. Craig in which Coyne teams up with Craig’s Martha’s Vineyard detective J. W. Jackson.

“I put Bill up with Robert Parker,’’ said Kate Mattes—owner of Kate’s Mystery Books, the venerable Cambridge store—in Tapply’s Boston Globe obituary. With Brady Coyne, Tapply created “a Spenser-like character, but more polished. He was a lawyer with Brahmin clients who always wanted to keep the police out of it.’’

“He had a very nice writing style and was one of the best plotters of all the mystery authors in the New England region.’’

Like his protagonists, Tapply was an avid fisherman. He wrote several books and nearly a thousand magazine articles about fly fishing and the great outdoors and was a Contributing Editor for Field & Stream and a columnist for American Angler.

Tapply was a professor of English at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he was also the Writer in Residence. In a story entitled Invisible Writing, which you can read on his website, he recalls his remarkable relationship with his father, who was also a writer, and shares how he received the most important writing tip of his life. Aspiring mystery writers should take note. Tapply had an enjoyable writing style and consistently turned out some of the best fair-play mysteries around.

He was a scheduled guest at the upcoming CrimeBake conference in November and I was so looking forward to meeting him. I will be participating in a panel called “L is for Librarians: Mystery-loving librarians reveal the world behind the check-out desk—how they pick mysteries and introduce authors to their patrons.” The guest of honor will be Sue Grafton and all of the programs have been named “something is for something.” CrimeBake is a conference for mystery writers and readers and is held in Dedham, Massachusetts every year. Check the official website for details.

Josephine Tey’s detective Alan Grant re-examines the historical mystery surrounding Richard the III in the perennial 1951 favorite The Daughter of Time.

But perhaps the most revered classic of this genre is James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, based on the sensational 1927 case of Ruth Snyder. Snyder was a Queens, New York, housewife who conspired with her lover to murder her husband so they could collect the insurance money. A photo of Ruth Snyder’s electrocution in the New York Daily News in 1928 shocked the nation.

Judd was sentenced to be hanged in February of 1933 and sent to Arizona State Prison. The death sentence was repealed and she was sent to Arizona State Mental Hospital. She escaped seven times, often at large for several years at a time, and was eventually released in 1971. She lived until the age of ninety-three.

Abbott’s protagonist Marion Seeley, a young woman abandoned in Phoenix by her doctor husband, finds a job at a medical clinic. She becomes fast friends with Louise, a vivacious nurse, and her roommate, Ginny. Marion is swept up in the exuberant life of the girls, who supplement their scant income by entertaining the town's most powerful men with wild parties. She becomes involved with a local rogue, Joe Lanigan, and when the other women confront Marion about her relationship with Joe, a heated argument leads to murder.

Publishers Weekly promises us a “shocking ending.”

An earlier novel by Abbott, The Song is You (2007), is based on the unsolved October 1949 disappearance of actress Jean Spangler.

This program was previously presented for the Jane Austen Society of North America’s New York Chapter in March and we are delighted to offer a repeat performance.

Emma has been known to show up on “top mysteries” lists from time to time and is described as a traditional mystery with no murder.

Jane K. Cleland will lay out the elements of a good mystery for us and then Margaret J. Ehrhart will discuss Jane Austen’s mastery of clues, red herrings, and suspense techniques, and how and why the mystery in Emma succeeds.

Cleland is the author of the best-selling and award-winning Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery series, which includes the recently released Killer Keepsakes.

Ehrhart is the author Sweet Man is Gone, a blues mystery, which was released last July. There is a sequel, Got No Friend Anyhow, in the works.

“Novel-writing, in Austen’s day, was regarded as a frivolity, for the simple reason that it depicted life as it was actually lived – and because its primary readers were women. Mystery novels fill a similar gap in the twenty-first century: in stories of detection, we study conflict and its resolution; we reimpose order on a chaotic world. Had she lived, Jane would be writing detective novels today.”

Of her development of Austen as a character in her own books, Barron adds “With her lively mind and acerbic tongue, Jane Austen is a sleuth to the manner born.”

Hope you will join the Janeites and fellow mystery fans for this event. This Jane is really looking forward to it! Check out our What Would Jane Do? table display in the Great Hall to see the amazing variety of books by and about Miss Austen.

The term originates with the ancient Greeks and Romans. Sirius, the "Dog Star," was the brightest star in the heavens besides the sun, and it rose and set with the sun in summer. The ancients believed that it generated the heat responsible for the hellish weather. The Dog Days were popularly believed to be an evil time "when the seas boiled, wine turned sour, dogs grew mad, and all creatures became languid, causing to man burning fevers, hysterics, and phrensies."

The Library will be hosting a series of delightful pet-oriented programs to counteract the otherwise unpleasant Dog Days in Westport, including sheltering your pets in an emergency on July 23rd, choosing the right pet on July 28th, and training your dog on July 30th.

Mystery fans looking for the perfect reading companion should try Spencer Quinn’s Dog on It. Meet Chet, the wise and lovable canine narrator, who works alongside Bernie, a down-on-his-luck private investigator. They are investigating the disappearance of a teenage girl who may or may not have been kidnapped, but who has definitely gotten mixed up with some very unsavory characters.

In one of its many starred reviews, Library Journal said "At last, a dog lover's mystery that portrays dogs as they really are....Quinn's characters are endearing, and his narrative is intriguing, fast-moving, and well written. Even cat lovers will find it entertaining.”

This cat lover did! I enjoyed it so much that I did a bit of research on the author in the hope of finding a sequel in the works, and much to my surprise found out that Spencer Quinn is a pseudonym of Peter Abrahams, one of my all-time favorite authors.

There is a sequel coming in January, 2010, called Thereby Hangs a Tail. And by the way, I highly recommend the Recorded Books version of Dog on It.

Check our catalog for the incredibly diverse selection of canine mysteries in the Library’s collection and join us in air-conditioned comfort for one of those Dog Days programs.

New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book, call 291-4821.

Dame Frevisse, a medieval Benedictine nun, seeks to recover the gold of a murdered Duke, aided by a sempster ("seamstress," as explained in an author's note, didn't come into use until the 1600s) and her Jewish lover. Their mission is jeopardized when a crucified body stirs up anti-Semitic sentiment.

Margaret Frazer is the pen name originally used by Gail Frazer and Mary Monica Pulver Kuhfeld in their collaboration on The Novice's Tale, the first of the Dame Frevisse books. This collaboration came to an end with The Murderer's Tale, the sixth book in the series. Since then, “Margaret Frazer” has been used exclusively by Gail Frazer. The series now numbers seventeen titles in all.

The Sempster’s Tale is the fifteenth title of the series, set in the summer of 1450.
Publishers Weekly praised the book’s “careful historical detail and characters you'll want to befriend.”

Several (but not all) of the books are set in or around St. Frideswide's, a nunnery in Oxfordshire. The main character, Dame Frevisse, is fictional, but she is related to Geoffrey Chaucer, and other historical personages make the occasional appearance. Several of the series books are named after Chaucer tales, but the stories are original.

Phillippa Morgan has a mystery series which features Chaucer himself acting as an agent for Edward III in the late 1300s. And P. C. Doherty writes the Nicholas Chirke Canterbury Tales mysteries in which the pilgrims tell the stories Chaucer didn't – stories of ghosts, intrigue and murder – while on pilgrimage from London to Canterbury.

The medieval mystery is an ever-expanding sub-genre.

There is an International Sister Fidelma Society, which publishes a 3-times yearly newsletter and coordinates trips to Ireland to visit Fidelma locations. What fun!

Kate Burkholder, a young Amish girl traumatized by the crimes, left the community, abandoned her heritage, and ultimately went on to study law enforcement. Sixteen years after the Slaughterhouse Murders, as they came to be known, a gun-toting, cursing Kate returns to Painters Mill as Chief of Police.

When a body is discovered in a snowy field bearing the earlier killer's signature -- Roman numerals ritualistically carved into the abdomen -- Kate vows to stop the killer before he strikes again. But successive murders follow, and she is torn between running a good investigation and protecting herself and her family -- because they know that this is NOT the same killer. They share a dark secret that could destroy them all.

Publishers Weekly praised author Linda Castillo’s “well-paced plot that illuminates the divide between the Amish and ‘English’ world.” Library Journal said that the recently released Sworn to Silence “marks Castillo's move from romantic suspense to straight mystery, and judging by this novel, the move is a good one.”

In praise of the first book in the series, Blood of the Prodigal (1999), Publishers Weekly said “Gaus brings a refreshing authenticity to his unusual setting and characters. There are no wisecracking gumshoes here, but instead believable characters whose faith is explored with respect. Anyone who enjoyed the film Witness should take to this fine mystery debut.”

She is perhaps the most famous of Agatha Christie's creations, despite appearing only in assorted short stories and twelve full-length novels, and she has been portrayed by almost that many actresses on the screen.

The first “movie” Marple was Margaret Rutherford, starring in Murder, She Said in 1961. Angela Lansbury starred in The Mirror Crack’d in 1980. There were also an Estonian and a Bengali Marple on the big screen.

In 1956, Gracie Fields brought the sleuth to American television audiences, and in the 1980s the legendary Helen Hayes made two Marple films for network television. There was a West German television Marple in the 70s.

There was even a Japanese anime series (2004-2005) that featured both Marple and Poirot.

But the incarnations that have had the greatest critical and popular success were those of Joan Hickson and her successor Geraldine McEwan who appeared in several television dramatizations filmed in England by BBC and ITC beginning in 1984, all of which were viewed in the states on the PBS Mystery program.

Get any group of fans together – even two will do it – and the argument begins. Hickson or McEwan? Who was the best Marple?

McKenzie, 67, says of her new role: "I'm very excited but also slightly daunted by the enormous responsibility that comes with taking on such an iconic role. Just about everybody in the world knows about Miss Marple and has an opinion of what she should be like. So I'm under no illusions about the size of the task ahead. And I suppose I'll have to remind myself how to knit."

Christie’s Poirot also returns – still portrayed so delightfully by David Souchet – for two new episodes based on Christie’s Cat among the Pigeons and Mrs. McGinty’s Dead.

You can read an interview with Souchet on the PBS website that covers a lot of topics, including his similarities to Poirot (they are both perfectionists), their differences (everything else), and Suchet's plans to continue on as the debonair Belgian.

You can find a complete listing of all of Chrisite’s mysteries on the Stop, You’re Killing Me! website, and a complete filmography at IMDb.

Check the PBS website for the complete summer-fall schedule, which will conclude with a new four-part Inspector Lewis series.

He also wrote a substantial amount of poetry, novels -- including the spy novel The Man Who Was Thursday) -- and the fifty two widely read Father Brown detective stories.

Somewhat overweight and inelegant, Father Brown seems an unlikely detective, but appearances deceive. With keen observation and an unerring sense of man’s frailties gained during his years in the confessional Father Brown succeeds in bringing even the most elusive criminals to justice. In The Blue Cross, when asked how he knows so much of criminal "horrors," he replies "Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?"

Chesterton based the character on Father John O'Connor, a parish priest who was involved in Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism in 1922.

Next Sunday, June 21st, at 2 pm, the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will discuss Father Brown: The Essential Tales, a fifteen story collection released by Modern Library in 2005.

P. D. James writes in her introduction, “We read the Father Brown stories for a variety pleasures, including their ingenuity, their wit and intelligence, and for the brilliance of the writing. But they provide more. Chesterton was concerned with the greatest of all problems, the vagaries of the human heart.”

Please join us! New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book, call 291-4821.

It is, like Sweetness, brilliant plotted and awash in rich atmosphere. It is set in post-World War II summer at a country estate that was home to the family for more than two centuries now in a state of decline, and deals with the massive social changes of the war’s aftermath. Also, a totally satisfying read.

Here’s what’s different – it is a ghost story and not a murder mystery. After being summoned by the Ayres family to treat a patient at Hundreds Hall, a doctor finds himself becoming entangled with the family and the supernatural presences in the house. During the doctor's repeated emergency visits – which are for the most peculiar reasons – he becomes smitten with the family’s daughter, oblivious of the Ayres’ self-destructive insularity and the ghostly avengers arisen from their past.

Reviewers have compared Waters in her latest effort to a prestigious list of gothic and literary masters including Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan le Fanu, Wilkie Collins … and Evelyn Waugh.

A Kirkus review called it a “gripping thriller from one of the most interesting novelists at work today.”

Put this one on your beach reads list, too!

James Dean is the prime suspect. There are rumors that he fathered the murdered woman’s child and that she was blackmailing him about this and other indiscretions, and he was seen leaving her apartment just before her body was found.

With actress Mercedes McCambridge playing Watson to her Holmes, the 70-year-old Ferber takes a walk on the wild side when she delves into the troubled lives of the teenage heartthrob Dean and his disparate friends.

Actually, the Publishers Weekly review thought of her as a Christie-style detective, calling her “an equally shrewd but tarter version of Miss Marple.”

Ex-con Mary Alice Baker (now calling herself Nina Zero) is a Hollywood tabloid photographer for the Scandal Times. She is sent to Fairmount, Indiana, where thieves have broken into James Dean's grave and stolen some of his bones. She comes to find out that this is not an isolated incident and that there is a grave-robbing cult selling relics from old movie stars to naïve youths who aspire to stardom.

With her beloved toothless Rottweiler in tow, the prominently pierced Nina makes for an intrepid and compassionate punk protagonist and Publishers Weekly called her “a character well worth meeting again.”

James Dean, James Dean,
You were too fast to live, too young to die, bye-bye!

It is 1950, at the beginning of summer. A dead bird has been left on the doorstep with a postage stamp pinned to its beak at Buckshaw, a decaying English mansion that is the de Luce ancestral home, and then, just hours later, Flavia finds a dying man in the cucumber patch.

Flavia is both appalled and delighted. “I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life.” She puts aside her flasks and Bunsen burners, determined to solve the crime herself -- much to the chagrin of the local authorities

At once both an enthralling mystery and a thought-provoking depiction of class and society, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie is a masterfully told tale of deceptions and an absolute literary delight.

And in answer to why a 70-year-old-man chose to write about an 11-year-old-girl in 1950s England, he explained “To me, Flavia embodies that kind of hotly burning flame of our young years: that time of our lives when we’re just starting out, when anything--absolutely anything!--is within our capabilities.”

There are five more books lined up in this series, and Bradley plans to keep Flavia in the same age bracket. “I don’t really like the idea of Flavia as an older teenager. At her current age, she is such a concoction of contradictions. It's one of the things that I very much love about her. She's eleven but she has the wisdom of an adult. She knows everything about chemistry but nothing about family relationships. I don’t think she’d be the same person if she were a few years older.”

Oh, to be eleven again and seeing a whole long, hot, lazy summer stretch out before me! I am tempted to join the Flavia de Luce Fan Club.

Put this one right at the top of your summer reading list.

Author Jeri Westerson has penned a medieval noir. In Veil of Lies, disgraced knight Crispin Guest, stripped of his rank and honor for plotting against Richard II, uses his wits to eke out a living in fourteenth-century London. He is hired to determine who killed a wealthy merchant rumored to be in possession of the Mandyllon, a cloth bearing the face of Jesus and possessing magical powers.

A starred review in Library Journal called it “A brilliant tale of survival in a hostile environment, where anything can lead to death.”

The Boston Globe dubbed Guest “A medieval Sam Spade.”

In a Mystery News interview in the December/January 2009 issue, when asked who or what inspired her creation of Crispin Guest, Westerson answered “Most definitely Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, with a bit of Errol Flynn thrown in.” She adds “Writing a tortured, conflicted hero is the best kind of fun!”

So much fun, it appears, that there will be a second book, Serpent in the Thorns, coming in the fall. Guest finds that he is the prime suspect in a murder with grave diplomatic implications. Visit the author’s website to read an excerpt.

Veil of Lies has been nominated for the 2009 Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery, along with Kelli Stanley’s Nox Dormienda, which is also an “historical noir,” this time set even further back in history in first-century Londinium.

The title, Stanley says, is taken from a line of verse by the Roman poet Catullus, and means “a long night for sleeping. A night you don’t wake up from. In other words, The Big Sleep.”

In an interview on her website, Stanley acknowledges that her major inspiration came – no surprises here – from Chandler … and from Catullus.

There is a second book, Maledictus, in the works. Until then, ave atque vale!

According to the The St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, "A typical Demarkian murder investigation includes a murder in a fully realized setting that allows the author to explore a community and satirize one or more of the foibles of modern America."

Papazoglou is noted for threading political arguments and social commentary throughout her novels and it has been said that one of her greatest strengths is her skill as a social observer. She is also recognized as an author who, despite a twenty-something-title run of her series, has not gone stale or become reduced to predictability.

The author has said “The best thing about a series is that it provides you with a continuing frame–you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you write a book. The biggest drawback is that there is no way for your continuing characters to have consistently exciting lives without the whole thing beginning to sound like a soap opera.”

Her technique, she says, comes down to putting “more emphasis on the suspects, who change from book to book.”

Her protagonist, Demarkian, is the retired founder and head of the FBI Department of Behavioral Science and his services are often in demand by friends or by the police to solve particularly difficult and perplexing murder cases.

Although he has been dubbed the “Armenian-American Hercule Poirot,” Demarkian is not at all like the mustachioed Belgian with his many idiosyncrasies.

The latest book in the series, Living Witness, received a starred review in Booklist which notes that the series shows no signs of slowing down and adds “How the author consistently manages to use the traditional mystery format to tackle some of contemporary society’s most volatile issues is itself something of a mystery, but it’s undeniably true that Haddam does what so many other writers fail to do: tell a story that challenges its readers to consider subjects of great social, political, and ethical importance.”

Evolution vs. creationism is the issue in Living Witness. A 91-year-old woman who is part of a group of small-town citizens who are suing the school board for adding creationism to the school curriculum is beaten nearly to death. The local police chief is one of the school board members and the first to admit he’s one of the prime suspects. He doesn’t trust the state police and turns to Demarkian for help.

The town is split into two camps, the evolutionists – the liberal, college educated “newbies” – and the creationists – the conservative, blue-collar “old-timers.” But the more Demarkian learns about the town's movements and prejudices, the more certain he becomes that the solution lies elsewhere. Meanwhile, the media are circling like hungry sharks, dubbing this a Scopes trial “replay.”

Kirkus also raved “Haddam, who usually has more on her mind than mere murder, defeats the anti-scientists with fact as well as tact. If another 'monkey trial' comes up, the evolutionists should ask her to write their brief.”

New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book, call 291-4821.

The St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers explains the enduring popularity of Gilman‘s detective Mrs. Pollifax so perfectly: “Emily Pollifax is more than the wish-fulfillment persona of aging women; she is a character with traits that anyone might emulate: she is courageous, clever, intuitive, open to new experiences, and, above all, to new friends of any age, of any race or creed.”

We meet this sweet, sixty-something widow from New Brunswick, New Jersey who has tired of a monotonous routine of volunteer work, garden club and women's associations in The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, the first of 14 titles in the series, which was published in 1966 and became an instant hit with young and old alike.

Remembering a childhood dream of becoming a spy, Mrs. P. takes a bus to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia and applies for a job.

Many of her adventures take place in the Cold War era and are set in Iron Curtain countries. The first book takes place in Albania, where the detective ends up in prison after her first assignment, a “meet” with a bookstore owner/secret agent in Mexico City, does not go as planned.

As the St. James Guide tells us, “By a series of coincidences that would seem merely absurd were it not for the author's charming and delightful way of telling a tale, Emily Pollifax is taken on as a courier for a single mission. She is hired because she looks and acts so completely unlike an agent, and becomes a part-timer whose brilliant improvisations and stunning successes are nothing short of fantastic.”

Another of the versatile Gilman’s series put her in the vanguard of the “woo-woo” or supernatural mystery genre. Madame Karitska, a clairvoyant who solves crimes for the police, made her debut in 1987 in The Clairvoyant Countess.

The Empty Mirror by J. Sydney Jones takes place in fin-de-sicle 1892 Vienna, a city terrorized by a serial killer whom the press calls “Vienna’s Jack the Ripper.” Four badly mutilated bodies have been found.

When the painter Gustav Klimt’s female model becomes the fifth victim, the police arrest the artist for the murders. Klimt’s lawyer, Karl Werthen, has an ace up his sleeve. Dr. Hans Gross, the real-life criminology pioneer, has agreed to assist him in investigating the bizarre crimes. Together, they must not only clear Klimt’s name but also follow the trail of a killer that leads them in the most surprising of directions.

Other historical personages appear as well, including psychiatrist Richard von-Krafft-Ebing, Mark Twain, Zionist founder Theodor Herzl, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The Publishers Weekly starred review says “Jones's absorbing whodunit succeeds both as a mystery and as a fascinating portrait of a traditional society in ferment.”

In The Frightened Man by Kenneth Cameron, rumors are flying that Jack the Ripper has returned when the mutilated body of a teenaged prostitute is found in London’s East End.

It is now 1900, and London is a sprawling, chaotic city, the perfect place for a man like Denton, an American with a violent past, to obtain some much desired anonymity. But his earlier notoriety as the author of several dark novels and an earlier career as a Western gunslinger sometimes prompt unwanted parties to seek him out.

When a terrified man shows up one evening and says that he is being pursued by the Ripper, Denton dismisses him as yet another lunatic. But then, disgusted by the lack of police concern after the girl’s body is found, Denton decides to find the murderer.

In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews says “Denton is a hero whose unheroic side only makes his character more appealing."

A Grave Talent was the first of five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, a San Francisco homicide detective.

King also has a long-running series which features Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes.

On her website, King explains her character this way: ”Mary Russell is what Sherlock Holmes would look like if Holmes, the Victorian detective, were a) a woman, b) of the Twentieth century, and c) interested in theology. If the mind is like an engine, free of gender and nurture considerations, then the Russell and Holmes stories are about two people whose basic mental mechanism is identical. What they do with it, however, is where the interest lies.”

With the creation of Mary Russell, King met with furious resistance from Sherlockian purists, but one reviewer said that the series "captures the spirit of the Holmes adventures with a great deal of love, while allowing room for female fans to more easily project themselves into the story." The Washington Post stated that King “… has relieved Holmes of the worst effects of his misogyny and, by so doing, salved the old hurt that comes to every female reader of literature … “

The ninth and newest book in the series is The Language of Bees.

Russell and Holmes return to their home on the Sussex coast after seven months abroad. There are two mysteries awaiting them – the inexplicable death of Holmes’ bees and the disappearance of the wife and child of Damian Adler, Holmes’ son by Irene Adler.

Russell finds herself on the trail of a killer more dangerous than any she has ever faced – and that’s saying something! The Booklist starred review promises us: “… a great deal about ancient sites in England; a major supporting role from Holmes’ brother, Mycroft; information on an occult set of beliefs possibly related to Aleister Crowley; a terrifying set piece on the horrors of early air travel; and discourse on the queasy pleasures of surrealist art,” all related in Russell’s wry and brilliant voice.

But an ever bigger treat is that Laurie R. King will be speaking at the Westport Library on Saturday, May 2nd, at 2 p.m. This is a program you do not want to miss!

This is a recommendation from the late Donald Westlake for Marshall Karp’s third Lomax and Briggs mystery, Flipping Out.

Add to that no faint praise from Publishers Weekly: “Blending the gritty realism of a Joseph Wambaugh police procedural with the sardonic humor of Janet Evanovich, Karp delivers a treat that's no only laugh-out-loud funny but also remarkably suspenseful.”

Here’s the storyline: Nora Bannister writes murder mysteries with a twist – a very lucrative twist. She buys a run-down house in LA, and while her business partners turn it into a showpiece, Nora makes it the scene of a grisly murder in her bestselling House To Die For series.

Wow, that sounds like a good idea for a television reality show.

As soon as the book goes on sale, there’s a bidding frenzy – it seems a lot of people are willing to pay a lot of money to live in a real house where a fictional character has died a violent death.

When the house-flippers start turning up dead, Lomax and Biggs are assigned the case, which turns out to be a real hot potato. The dead women were the wives of their fellow cops, and the next logical target is Marilyn Biggs – Terry Biggs’s wife.

Lomax and Briggs made their debut in The Rabbit Factory in 2006 and their second appearance in Bloodthirsty in 2007. You can find their “biographies” on Karp’s website, along with information about how to keep in touch with the author on Facebook and Twitter. This is one author who knows how to use the latest in social networking to his advantage!

This is Emerson’s second foray into the how-to genre, having also published The Writer's Guide to Everyday Life in Renaissance England in 1996.

As the author of two popular historical mystery series, the Face Down Mysteries featuring Elizabethan gentlewoman herbalist Susanna, Lady Appleton, and the Diana Spaulding Mysteries, set in 1888 in various U.S. locations featuring journalist Diana Spaulding, she certainly knows her stuff.

Susanna is something of an expert on poisons, having been inspired by her sister's fatal encounter with some poisonous berries to write a cautionary herbal for housewives. You can find a “facsimile” of the document on Emerson’s website.

And, just in case this is not enough to keep Emerson busy, she also writes a contemporary mystery series under the pseudonym Kaitlyn Dunnett featuring Liss MacCrimmon, a young professional Scottish dancer.

Four of the upcoming Murder 203 authors are also up for Agathas. Rosemary Harris’ Pushing up Daisies is on the Best First Novel list, Chris Grabenstein’s The Crossroads is on the Best Children’s/Young Adult Novel list, and both Jane Cleland and Toni Kelner are up for Best Short Story. Congratulations to all!

Page’s amateur sleuth Faith Sibley Fairchild is in her late twenties when we first meet her in the first story, The Body in the Belfry (1990), and happily married to Thomas Fairchild, "a New Englander born and bred, and, to make matters worse, a minister".

Each book has recipes at the back and her and Page’s publisher’s website has a feature called Recipes from Have Faith in Your Kitchen by Faith Sibley Fairchild which is called “A Work in Progress” and this fan can only hope that it is the promise of a
cookbook to come.

Good news for Page’s fans. The Body in the Sleigh – book number eighteen – is promised for October, 2009.

Katherine Hall Page will also be joining the group of authors assembled for the Murder 203 mystery festival to be held on April 18th-19th. Check the event website for registration information and further details or call Jane Murphy at 291-4836.

One does not usually think of Sarasota as a hotbed of criminal activity, but there is not just one, but two, popular mystery series set in this southwestern coastal Florida city.

Lew used to be an investigator for the State Attorney's Office in Cook County, Illinois, but when his wife was killed by a hit-and-run driver he quit his job, “packed his grief and headed south” to Florida. For $50 a day, plus expenses, “He tends to get involved, though he prefers to be left alone, with helping women and children in trouble.”

Although they have their lighter moments – mainly due to an entertaining assortment of odd characters – these books are generally dark in tone, and psychologically complex, dealing with questions of grief and depression.

Fonesca is just one of Edgar Award-winning Kaminsky’s distinguished and diverse protagonists: a Russian policeman (Porfiry Rostnikov), a Chicago police detective (Abe Lieberman), and a 1940s Hollywood private detective (Toby Peters).

The latest book – the sixth title in the series – is Bright Futures, which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. The New York Times Book Review said “Pacing a series is a tricky maintenance job. Move too fast, your hero loses credibility. Move too slowly, your readers get bored. Move just right, you produce Denial.”

Fonesca is digging for the truth on two cases: A recent graduate of a public high school for the gifted has been arrested for the brutal murder of a local curmudgeon who was campaigning to end state-sponsored school funding and a semi-retired and much beloved singer of children's songs is being threatened with exposure as a sexual predator.

And then there is Blaize Clement’s sleuth Dixie Hemingway – no relation to “you-know-who” – who has given up her stressful job as a sheriff's deputy in Sarasota to become a professional pet sitter.

Dixie, still mourning the loss of her husband and young daughter in a freak accident three years earlier, finds a good friend in her new neighbor Laura Halston in Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof, the latest – and fourth – book in the series. When Laura is stabbed to death in the shower, Dixie suspects her soon-to-be ex-husband, “a sadistic surgeon” who is known to wield a mean scalpel.

Although definitely lighter than the Kaminsky novels, Clement’s books should not be dismissed out-of-hand as just another humorous feline mystery series. According to Publishers Weekly “Clement blends elements of cozy and thriller to produce an unusual and enjoyable hybrid.”

By the way, “you-know-who” – Ernest Hemingway himself – will make his detecting debut next August in Hemingway Deadlights by Michael Atkinson. Set across the state in Key West (in 1956) Papa H. – while dodging tourists and autograph hunters – investigates the suspicious death of a local who is found impaled on a harpoon.

While a student at Oxford, Day-Lewis became part of W. H. Auden’s literary circle and helped him edit Oxford Poetry 1927.

In 1935 Day-Lewis needed a new roof for his house and decided to supplement his income from his poetry and teaching by writing a detective novel.

Using the pseudonym Nicholas Blake he became one of the leading writers in the “Golden Age” of detective fiction.

Blake wrote 20 detective novels between 1935 and 1968, 16 of which feature “private enquiry agent” Nigel Strangeways. Strangeways, an Oxford graduate, is the nephew of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, and puts his services at the disposal of Inspector Blount of the Yard, the British Secret Service, and his many friends.

These novels are full of literary references, from Shakespeare to Blake, Keats, and A.E. Housman.

Among Day-Lewis's best mysteries is The Beast Must Die (1938), the story of a father seeking revenge on the hit and run driver who killed his child. One of Day-Lewis's own sons was almost run over in circumstances similar to those in the story.

Critic and award-winning mystery writer H.R.F. Keating included The Beast Must Die on his list of the 100 best crime and mystery books ever published.

The Blake novels have been out of print for a long time, but our friends at The Rue Morgue Press have re-issued A Question of Proof and will be publishing other titles in the series. Visit their website
for a thoroughly detailed narrative on Nicholas Blake.

Long before cozy culinary mysteries were in vogue, Rex Stout’s readers were treated to cooking tips, food lore and gastronomical miscellanea. Besides orchids, the mainstay of his detective Nero Wolfe's leisurely existence was the enjoyment of good food. Wolfe (frequently described as weighing "a seventh of a ton") dined on three generous meals a day.

Wolfe had an unquenchable thirst for beer, usually downing at least 6 quarts per day. In a foreshadowing of the Weight Watchers counting points system, he kept the bottle caps in one of his desk drawers to track his daily/weekly consumption.

Wolfe's confidential assistant Archie Goodwin recorded the detective’s cases in 33 novels and 39 short stories over a forty year period from the 1930s to the 1970s, and most of them are set in New York City where the detective resides in a brownstone on West 35th Street.

There are a number of related works, including The Nero Wolfe Cookbook (1973), which contains 237 recipes and a wealth of pertinent quotes from the books and is smartly illustrated with vintage New York City photographs.

Wikipedia has an exhaustive entry on Nero Wolfe that includes a section on my favorite topic – Wolfe’s origins. In 1956 a theory emerged that Wolfe was the offspring of an affair between Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, although there is not a hint of it in any of the stories aside from the painting of Holmes that hangs over Goodwin's desk in Wolfe's office. There is, however, the curious coincidence of the same vowels appearing in the same order in the names "Sherlock Holmes" and "Nero Wolfe” as noted in 1957 by Ellery Queen.

Some have suggested Mycroft Holmes as a more likely father for Wolfe, and yet another camp came up with the French thief Arsène Lupin, citing that Lupin resembles the French word for wolf(e), loup.

Enjoyable speculation!

If you are a fan, you might want to join the Usual Suspects next Sunday, March 15th, for a discussion of The Golden Spiders, published in 1953. The group meets at 2 p.m. in the Seminar Room at the end of the hall on the top floor.

New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book, call 291-4821.

Rozan is the author of the acclaimed novel Absent Friends, set in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and the stand-alone novel In This Rain, in addition to her award-winning mystery series which features Lydia Chin, a Chinese American private eye, and Bill Smith, whom the author describes as “the classic American voice-over PI”.

She has said that “Lydia was created at first as a sidekick for Bill, and to be as different from him as possible … but she wouldn't sit still for that sidekick business.”

The Shanghai Moon revolves around a little known historical footnote -- about 20,000 Jewish refugees fled to China beginning in the mid 1930s to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany.

Estranged for months from fellow P.I. Bill Smith, Lydia Chin is brought in by her former mentor Joel Pilarsky to help with a case. In Shanghai, excavation has unearthed a cache of European jewelry dating back to World War II. The jewelry was clearly identified as having belonged to a Jewish refugee and then immediately stolen by a Chinese official who fled the country.

Hired by a lawyer specializing in the recovery of Holocaust assets, Chin soon learns that The Shanghai Moon, one of the world's most sought after missing jewels, reputed to be worth millions, is believed to have been part of the same stash.

After Pilarsky is murdered, Smith comes into the story and he and Smith work together again to unravel the truth about the events that surrounded the jewel’s disappearance sixty years ago. They follow the trail back home to Manhattan's Chinatown, where they eventually put the curse of the luminous Shanghai Moon to rest.

S.J. Rozan will be speaking at the library on Thursday, March 12th at 7:30 p.m. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

She will also be joining us for Murder 203 in April, along with thirty-four additional authors. Hope to see all of you then for the first-ever Connecticut mystery festival.

A treasury of thrillers that I cherished in my youth was one of the Alfred Hitchcock collections called Stories to Be Read with the Lights On.

A few of the authors who have signed on for Murder 203 write the kind of fiction and non-fiction that bring these stories to mind ... reminding me all of the times, having accidentally overheard about such terrible things, I feared my younger brother would be kidnapped, my little girlfriend next door would go missing or my older sister would never come home from a night out with one of her girlfriends. All of the nights I really did sleep with the lights on!

On the night Kate Cypher returns home to rural Vermont to care for her ailing mother, a young girl is murdered in the same way Kate's childhood friend, Del, nicknamed the "Potato Girl" by her mean-spirited classmates, was killed 30 years ago—a horrific crime.

Del's killer was never found, and the victim had since achieved immortality in local legends and ghost stories. Kate, beset by guilt for her own part in the girl’s persecution, reconnects with her childhood sweetheart, who is utterly convinced that Del's ghost is seeking its revenge.

In another of McMahon’s novels, Island of Lost Girls, Rhonda Farr is the only witness to the abduction of a six-year-old girl—by a person wearing a rabbit suit and driving a VW bug. Needless to say, everyone is skeptical of her story, but the kidnapping forces Rhonda to relive an earlier disappearance: that of her best friend from childhood.

It wasn’t until the adult Smith was writing an essay for a literary journal when, after making a brief mention of the story, she decided to investigate whether justice was served in her friend’s case and “build a memorial” of sorts to her. The resulting chronicle was called “Larger than the sum of its parts” by Publishers Weekly.

Instinct, experience and good police work eventually bring the killer, a chillingly remorseless psychopath, to justice even though for weeks there was no body, no crime scene, and no witnesses.

Jennifer McMahon will be at the Murder 203 Easton events on Saturday. Both Mary-Anne Tirone Smith and Kate Flora will speak together with true crime writer M. William Phelps here in Westport on Sunday afternoon on a panel called “We Didn’t Make It Up!”

Check the Murder 203 website for registration details.

Edgar Allan Poe is not the only one turning 200 in 2009! Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were both born in 1809 and on the same day, February 12.

The website for The Darwin Day Celebration, an international event, sums up their contribution to the world as we know it today quite succinctly: “Lincoln freed American slaves from physical servitude while Darwin freed the human mind from the bonds of supernatural dogma. The positive influences of their legacies are as relevant in the world today as they were in the 1800s.”

Ona Russell has written a recent historical mystery set at that trial, The Natural Selection, which incorporates all of the key figures, including H.L. Mencken, William Jennings Bryan, and Clarence Darrow, as well as actual courtroom excerpts.

Do not mistake this is for a cozy mystery. Sarah’s search for the truth is a harrowing one as she encounters bigotry and brutality and exhausts her physical strength and psychological reserves in the process.

Later the basis of the Hitchcock film Rope, in 1924 it was a crime that shocked the nation -- the brutal killing in Chicago of a child by two wealthy college students solely for the thrill of the experience.

After Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were arrested for the crime, their families hired Darrow, the most famous lawyer in America, to defend their sons.

Darrow’s adversary, the prosecuting attorney Robert Crowe, had ambitions of becoming Chicago's next mayor and was determined to see them hang.

Both sides trotted out numerous psychiatrists to testify whether or not Leopold and Loeb were indeed mentally ill. Darrow's gamble paid off in life sentences for the pair. Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936 and Leopold was eventually paroled in 1958.

Kirkus called Baatz’s book “A solid true-crime thriller that’s also a masterly analysis of postwar shifts in society’s ideas about crime and personality.”

For the Thrill of It was included on the 2008 Edgar Nominees List in the Best Fact Crime category.

Darrow also provided some remarkable fictional courtroom drama Caleb Carr’s 1997 thriller, The Angel of Darkness. Another mystery best to not mistake for a cozy.

The noir form will be more than adequately represented at the upcoming Murder 203 event by authors Reed Farrel Coleman, Peter Spiegelman and Jason Starr.

The retired cop in question is Moe (Moses) Prager, who takes on a new career as a private investigator in 1980s New York City. Coleman won multiple awards for both The James Deans, the third title in the series, and Soul Patch, which came after that.

Publisher’s Weekly called Peter Spiegelman “one of today's best practitioners of neo-noir."

Spiegelman’s detective is John March, the black sheep of a staid merchant-banking family working as a private investigator in Manhattan. The first March mystery, Black Maps, was a Shamus award winner.

Jason Starr has eight non-series novels to his credit, including the award winning Twisted City, and he collaborates with writer Ken Bruen on a series for Hard Case Crime.

His book The Follower was dubbed “this generation's Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”

Starr’s books are also set in New York City.

So don’t let the name Murder 203 fool you. We’re not just about suburban mysteries! There will be lots of talk about crime in the big city and one of our panels will address how urban crime differs from suburban crime.

Check the Murder 203 website for registration information.

After a career in journalism she began her first crime novel in 1984. She recalls that reading a Sara Paretsky mystery a "defining moment" because it was "a mystery with an urban setting that dealt with contemporary women's lives, that didn't shy away from engaging with the politics of the society it reflected, and that was fun."

McDermid made her lesbian sleuth Lindsay Gordon a reporter because, she says, "I had no idea how police investigate a murder, but I knew how journalists do their job."

There are six mysteries in the Lindsay Gordon series, but realizing that she "was never going to make a living out of lesbian crime fiction" she introduced her second detective, heterosexual private investigator Kate Brannigan in 1992. There are six titles in that series as well.

McDermid's third series features the crime-solving team of psychologist and criminal profiler Dr. Tony Hill and police detective Carol Jordan. The Mermaids Singing, the first title of the five titles in this series to date, won the prestigious Crime Writers Association's Gold Dagger Award.

The BBC developed an enormously successful television series, The Wire in the Blood, based on these characters.

The author worked closely with the screenwriters on the adaptation and had a cameo role as a journalist, appropriately enough, in one of the episodes.

McDermid considers her work to be “Tartan Noir,” a form of hardboiled crime fiction particular to Scottish writers which has its roots in Scottish literature but borrows elements from elsewhere, including the work of American writer James Ellroy.

Books will be available for purchase and signing.

MWA gives out the most prestigious mystery writing award, the Edgar, and the 2009 nominees were recently announced.

James Lee Burke and Sue Grafton have been named the 2009 Grand Masters.

The winners will be announced at the 63rd Annual Edgar Awards Banquet, Thursday April 30, 2009.

You can find a complete list of the nominees in all categories on the MWA website.

MWA-NY, the metropolitan area chapter, will be sponsoring the breakfasts at Murder 203.

The festival is a joint venture by the Easton and Westport Libraries for both fans and writers. Attendees will enjoy panel discussions, book signings, writing tips from the professionals, and a unique opportunity to mingle with authors and fellow crime fiction enthusiasts at the Cocktails and Crime reception on Saturday evening.

Fairstein’s outstanding soon-to-be released new novel, Lethal Legacy, involves the New York Public Library and its dazzling treasures. You can view a clip of her tour of the NYPL at Amazon.com.

Her character, Cooper, is a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney in the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit. Lethal Legacy is the eleventh title in the run, which began in 1996 with Final Jeopardy. You can get the full title list from our good friends at Stop, You’re Killing Me!

The event is $65 if you register before February 18. After February 18, registration is $75. You will get a lot for your money, including all of the panels, a Meet the Authors continental breakfast both mornings, lunch on Saturday and admission to Cocktails and Crime on Saturday night. Plus a nifty conference tote bag to fill with some of our fabulous giveaways, not to mention your freshly autographed books.

For more details and a list of our additional (30 plus!) guest authors, visit the Murder 203 website.

Applying this critical method, explains Bayard, allows him to be "more rigorous” than detectives and writers, “and thus to work out solutions that are more satisfying to the soul."

Arguing that Sherlock Holmes often drew false conclusions, Bayard offers an alternative solution to that reached by Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Probably the most infamous story in the Sherlock Holmes canon is Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem” which relates the events at Reichenbach Falls. On May 4, 1891, the detective met his archenemy Professor Moriarty on a ledge above the falls. The two became locked in a titanic hand-to-hand struggle before both tumbled over the precipice, presumably to their deaths, witnessed by Dr. Watson.

The outcry was so great that in 1901 Conan Doyle was forced to give in and he resurrected his detective by claiming that Holmes had managed to survive after all.

In King's book, another detective of the Victorian era — Carnacki the Ghost Finder — also witnesses the event.

Thomas Carnacki is a fictional occult detective created by English fantasy writer William Hope Hodgson who appeared in six short stories published between 1910 and 1912.

Carnacki rescues one of the men and whisks him away to Switzerland to treat his amnesia only to find that the survivor's nemesis has preceded them there.

Once Holmes recovers his memory with boosts from the electrical machine Carnacki has stolen from a sanatorium, the game is once again afoot, with all of its prerequisite disguises and deductions.

It includes Barbara Roden's story, The Things That Shall Come Upon Them which involves Holmes with yet another fictional occult detective mystery, Flaxman Low.

Flaxman Low was created by E. and H. Heron, the pseudonym of Hesketh V. Prichard and Kate O'Brien Ryall Prichard, a mother-son writing team.

Appearing in Pearson's Magazine in 1898 and 1899, Flaxman Low was the original occult detective.

The Occult Detective genre was very popular on into the 1920s, and in addition to Carnacki and Low included Saxe Rohmer's "Dream Detective" and "Doctor Thirteen" as well as various creations of novelist Dion Fortune.

Waugh's 1952 novel Last Seen Wearing was listed by the Mystery Writers of America as one of the top 100 mysteries of all time and in 1989 he was named a Grand Master by the MWA.

He used Connecticut as the setting for many of his stories, and had an eleven title series which featured Fred Fellows, chief of police in Stockford, a fictional small town.

Michael Crichton, whose main body of writing epitomized the techno-thriller genre, died on November 4th at the age of 66. He won an Edgar Award in 1969 for the mystery novel A Case of Need which he wrote under the pseudonym of Jeffery Hudson. Crichton also wrote eight mysteries as John Lange.

Crichton considered his thrillers cautionary science tales. His book The Andromeda Strain, published in 1969 while he was still a medical student at Harvard Medical School.

The mystery world also lost award-winning author Tony Hillerman on October 26th at the age of 83. Hillerman was .best known for his Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels, some of which were made into big-screen and television movies.

His mysteries, set in the Four Corners area of New Mexico and Arizona, explore the interaction of traditional Navajo culture with the belagaana, or white man.

Hillerman was named a Grand Master in 1991.

The creator of the humorous Fletch mysteries, Gregory Mcdonald, died on September 7th at the age of 71. Irwin Maurice Fletcher, an investigative reporter turned beach bum, appears in nine novels and Fletch was later played by Chevy Chase in the movie of the same name.

Two of the Fletch books were Edgar winners. The first book, Fletch, was named Best First Novel in 1975, and Confess, Fletch won for Best Paperback Original in 1977, the only time a novel and its sequel won back-to-back Edgars.

Best-selling author Phyllis A. Whitney, dubbed "The Queen of the American Gothics" by the New York Times, died on February 8th at the age of 104.

She wrote mysteries for both adults and children, often set in exotic locales, and won an Edgar for Best Juvenile Novel in 1961 for The Mystery of the Haunted Pool and again in 1988 for The Mystery of the Hidden Hand.

The prolific Whitney wrote 76 books and more than 50 million copies of her books are in print in paperback alone. Whitney was named a Grand Master in 1988.

Margaret Truman, who died on January 29th at the age of 83, wrote a critically acclaimed full length biography of her father, Harry S. Truman in 1972 as well as twenty four critically successful murder mysteries set in various locations in and around Washington, D.C. -- although there have been assertions that these were ghost-written.

I once heard her address the American Library Association after the first few books were in print and when someone in the audience asked when she was going to set one of her mysteries at the Library of Congress -- ever the politician’s daughter -- she replied that she could never, ever, kill off a librarian.

There was, eventually, Murder at the Library of Congress in 1999, but if memory serves me correctly, it was a free-lance researcher who was murdered, not a member of the staff. Thank you, Margaret!

In Michael Connelly’s The Poet, a serial cop killer in Los Angeles gets his victims to write suicide notes that contain snatches of Poe’s verse. This same character returns in The Narrows.

All of New York City is in the thrall of “The Poe Killings” in Heather Graham’s suspense novel The Death Dealer. There has been a string of homicides mimicking Poe’s macabre stories and all of the victims have been members of a literary society devoted to the author.

Chicago is the scene of recent Poe inspired crimes in Sheldon Rusch’s For Edgar.

And somewhere back in time Harry Houdini teams up with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to investigate a series of chilling murders that imitate those found in Poe’s stories in William Hjortsberg’s Nevermore.

Several authors have used Poe’s letters, manuscripts and/or rare editions of his works to weave their tales of mystery and intrigue, including John Dunning in The Bookman’s Wake, Joanne Dobson in The Raven and the Nightingale, Lawrence Sanders in McNally’s Caper and Nancy Zaroulis in The Poe Papers.

Both Joel Rose in The Blackest Bird and Randall Silvis in On Night’s Shore weave the ill-fated Mary Rogers into their novels about Poe. The connection between Mary Rogers – the basis of the equally ill-fated Poe character Marie Roget – and Poe is explored in fascinating detail by Daniel Stashower in the true crime narrative The Beautiful Cigar Girl.

The Poe Shadow, a novel by Matthew Pearl, explores the identity of Auguste Dupin, another of Poe’s characters.

Linda Fairstein’s Entombed brings a Poe investigation into the 21st century when a skeleton is found bricked up behind a wall in a New York City building where the author once lived.

Laura Lippmann’s In a Strange City involves P.I. Tess Monaghan in an investigation of the murder of the “Poe Toaster" – a mysterious man who places a bottle of brandy and a red rose on Poe’s grave in Baltimore every January 19th.

The Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will be discussing In a Strange City on January 18th at 2 p.m.

The Library will be hosting several additional events in honor of Poe, including an appearance on January 11th at 2 p.m. by Poe interpreter David Keltz, who will recite The Raven and other remarkable “Poe-try” for us.

Mark Schenker, one of our favorite speakers, will present a talk on Poe in the context of the American Gothic and 19th-century Romanticism on January 8th at 7:30.

Westporter Susan Jaffe Tane will talk about her extraordinary collection of Poe documents on January 12th at 7:30, and there will be a sampling of letters and manuscripts from her collection on display in the Riverwalk Case on the lower level.

Using some of the additional items in Tane’s collection, graphologist Arlyn Imberman will offer us a professional opinion of just what Poe’s handwriting reveals about the author on January 15th at 7:30.

Hope you can join us.

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

One possible explanation for this is a tantalizing one – that Poe deliberately obscured the truth and re-invented himself from time to time to manipulate situations to his advantage.

Another possibility, an equally intriguing one, is that he has been deliberately miscast by a succession of generations choosing to ascribe him an air of mystery and melancholia they deem consistent with his writings.

Alas, poor Poe was cast in the role of a depraved drunkard and drug-addled madman by the infamous Griswold obituary which stated that his death would “startle many, but few will be grieved by it.”

Rufus Wilmot Griswold was a critic, editor and anthologist who had a long-standing grudge against Poe. Griswold has faded into relative obscurity, but Poe’s literary reputation has grown and been enhanced with the passing of time.

Some consider Poe the first American literary critic. He was one of the first American crafters of short stories. Some identify him as a pioneer of the science fiction genre. Just about everyone agrees that he is the father of detective fiction.

According to the legendary H.R.F. Keating in the Crown Crime Companion, “When you look at the immense panorama of mystery fiction today … it is extraordinary to think that it all sprang from three short stories for magazines” in which, he adds, “… Poe laid down once and forever the rules and foundation for a new sort of fiction.”

Poe has himself been cast as a detective many times in mystery novels.

In Louis Bayard’s The Pale Blue Eye Poe, described as “shadowy,” is a cadet at West Point. There is a gruesome murder on campus and Gus Landor, a Holmes-like figure, recruits Poe to assist him in the investigation. Poe lies about his past, boasts of his genius, and flaunts his eccentricity causing Landor to remark that ''nothing about him was quite right.'' Poe’s genius does prevail, however, and we also get a taste of his fledgling literary talents in his written reports to Landor.

Poe lived abroad with his foster family from 1815-1820 and did, indeed, attend West Point from 1830 to 1831, but was dismissed from the school for neglect of duty and disobedience of orders.

The story begins with a first-person narrative by William Chivers, a Baltimore doctor who was in real-life one of Poe’s staunchest defenders against the Griswold attacks.

Harold Schechter has an entire series that offers us Poe as a detective in partnership with Davy Crockett in Nevermore, P.T. Barnum in The Hum Bug, Kit Carson in The Mask of Red Death and Louisa May Alcott in The Tell-Tale Corpse.

To be continued ...

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted – nevermore!

Many of Dickens' novels first appeared in magazines in serialized form, so he often composed his works in parts, in the order in which they were meant to appear. This practice allowed for one minor "cliffhanger" after another.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood was a work in progress when Dickens died and the novel was left unfinished. Fans and scholars have often speculated how it might have ended.

An early attempt at finishing the story was made in 1873 by one Thomas James, a young Vermont printer. James claimed to have literally “ghost-written” the text by channeling Dickens' spirit. Arthur Conan Doyle, a spiritualist himself, praised this version, declaring it consistent with Dickens' style and for several decades the “James version” of Edwin Drood was common in America.

Providing a conclusion to the story continues to challenge writers.

One notable attempt was made by Leon Garfield in 1980.

In the course of trying to rescue fellow passengers after narrowly escaping death in an 1865 train wreck, Dickens encounters a ghoulish figure named Drood, who had apparently been traveling in a coffin.

Wilkie Collins, Dickens’ real-life novelist friend, narrates the tale of Dickens’ newly acquired dark double life as he pursues the wraith through crypts and lime pits in the worst slums of London.

Despite the book's length – 784 pages – PW says “readers will race through the pages, drawn by the intricate plot and the proliferation of intriguing psychological puzzles.”

After I had read the review of Drood, Dickens’ name popped up twice in close succession the same day. Spooky!

In this first title in a new series set in British cathedral towns during the Victorian era, London attorney Thomas Ansell travels to Salisbury to take custody of a manuscript. Shortly after he arrives and meets his client, someone murders the man and the police suspect Ansell of the crime after finding him near the body, his hands stained with the victim's blood. Ansell turns amateur sleuth to clear his own name.

An intriguing character in many regards. At one point in the story Euthanasia meets up with Charles Dickens and tells him that Oliver Twist is too long!

The Library Journal review says “In this first volume of an engaging new historical trilogy, Burman, a well-known Swedish historian and author, reveals her knowledge of early Victorian England.”

What to buy … what to buy?

NPR has issued its list of the best books of 2008 and its list of holiday book recommendations.

The top five crime and mystery picks are: Small Crimes (Dave Zeltserman), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Stieg Larsson), The Chinaman (Friedrich Glauser), Death Vows (Richard Stevenson), and The Long Embrace (Judith Freeman).

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first American release for Steig Larsson, a deceased Swedish author (1954–2004) takes place 40 years after the disappearance of Harriet Vanger from the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family. Her octogenarian uncle, convinced that she was murdered by a member of their deeply dysfunctional clan, hires a journalist and an unconventional young hacker to investigate.

A best seller in Europe – having outsold the Bible in Denmark! – it is the first title in the late author’s "Millennium" trilogy.

Bitter Lemon Press has reprinted the work of Friedrich Glauser, who was born in Vienna in 1896 and died at the age of 42, having spent much of his adult life in psychiatric wards and prisons. In recognition of his literary achievements, Germany has named its most prestigious crime fiction award the Glauser Prize.

In Death Vows, gay detective Donald Strachey is hired by the concerned friends of one Bill Moore to check up on his suspicious groom-to-be. When one of the busybody friends turns up dead, Strachey feels compelled to clear the man he first was hired to investigate. NPR reports that Strachey’s novels are being filmed by the gay cable network Here!

As always, some unusual choices from the folks at NPR.

Amazon.com has their best of 2008 lists up on their website although the books they have chosen are generally from more familiar mainstream authors and publishers, but it is interesting to note that The Girl with the Golden Tattoo showed up as #5 on their list of editors’ best mystery and thriller picks.

Sookie’s fans will be pleased to hear that there will be a new book in the series, Dead and Gone, hitting the shelves in May, 2009.

You can read about Harris’ feelings about the television series and answers to some of the questions she has received from fans on her website.

The prolific and versatile author has several other series to her credit, including the Lawrenceton, Georgia librarian Aurora Teagarden mysteries, the Shakespeare, Arkansas housecleaner Lily Bard mysteries and the Sarne, Arkansas finder of dead people Harper Connelly mysteries.

Dancing with Werewolves, the first title in the paranormal investigator Delilah Street series by Carole Nelson Douglas. Don’t stop there. The second title, Brimstone Kiss, includes a werewolf mobster, a vampire movie mogul, an albino vampire rock star and a zombie.

Howling good and monstrously campy!

There has been a noticeable increase in the number of broadcast crime and investigative reporter mysteries of late.

Julie Kramer’s debut mystery Stalking Susan introduces Riley Spartz, a Twin Cities investigative TV journalist. On the come-back trail after a personal tragedy – the death of her police officer husband – had sidelined her career, Riley takes on two cold cases, each involving a murdered woman named Susan. As her investigation proceeds she uncovers other cases that fit the same pattern, and she finds reason to believe that the killer could be a cop. Kramer is a freelance news producer for the Today Show and Dateline.

Even the British detectives are showing up on the telly. Real-life BBC crime correspondent Simon Hall has created fictional TV crime reporter Dan Groves who becomes involved in the death of painter who is murdered after he creates a series of ten paintings containing a mysterious riddle. PW called The Death Pictures “a complex, modern, cunning murder mystery with a behind-the-scenes taste of a TV news reporter.”

My favorite sleuthing TV reporter is Charlotte “Charlie” McNally, “Boston's own version of Brenda Starr,” the creation of veteran Boston NBC investigative reporter Hank Phillippi Ryan, winner of 24 Emmys and multiple Edward R. Murrow Awards for reporting and writing. No one was surprised when Hank won an Agatha for Best First Novel for Prime Time, the first title in the series.

And let us not forget the stalwart newspaper journalist detectives.

Award-winning journalist Christine Barber’s first mystery, The Replacement Child, was the winner of the Tony Hillerman Prize for Best Debut Mystery. After editor Lucy Newroe takes a call from the notorious Scanner Lady, an anonymous tipster who phones in what she overhears on her police scanner, the woman is found dead. Lucy enlists the help of police detective Gil Montoya, who is working on the case of a seventh-grade teacher whose body was thrown off a bridge. As with Ron Shade and Alex St. James, Lucy and Gil come to find their cases intertwined with links between the two murders that run deeper than they could ever have imagined.

Shot Girl, the fourth Annie Seymour mystery from Karen E. Olson, has just hit the shelves. New Haven police reporter Annie has a talent for running into trouble. Her co-worker's bachelorette party at a local club turns into a crime scene and the dead bar manager on the sidewalk outside happens to be Annie's ex-husband — and the bullet shells around his body match the gun she has in her car.

By the way, Annie will be on extended leave from the newsroom while author Olson begins a new series featuring a Vegas tattoo artist. The Missing Ink is expected sometime in July. Stay tuned for more details.

The Goliath Bone pits Hammer against Al-Qaeda, Homeland Security, the FBI, Mossad, an Israeli vigilante group and a megalomaniac theatrical impresario, who are all scrabbling for a priceless artifact – a thigh bone whose owner stood over ten feet tall, recently unearthed in the Valley of Elah.

There is a great tribute to Spillane – dubbed “a master in compelling you to always turn to the next page” by the New York Times – on the Thrilling Detective website which includes not only biographical information, but a complete bibliography and filmography of his works as well.

He passed away July 17, 2006 at his home in South Carolina, “leaving behind a wife, a couple of ex-wives, four children, possibly as many as 200 million copies of his books in print and plenty of satisfied customers.”

Road to Perdition author Max Allan Collins was entrusted with a nearly finished manuscript by Spillane a week before the author’s death.

In 1921, Spade sets up his own agency in San Francisco and takes on a partner, one Miles Archer. According to the publisher’s website, “The next seven years see him dealing with booze runners, banking swindlers, gold smugglers, bumbling cops, and the illegitimate daughter of Sun Yat-sen …”

Check the Classic Film Pages website for some interesting background on the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon.

Surprisingly, Bogart was not the first choice to play the legendary Sam Spade. The role was initially offered to George Raft, who turned it down because he didn’t want to work with an inexperienced director – John Huston.

Some authors in this genre prefer the term "traditional" mysteries.

Cozies feature amateur detectives, generally accompanied by cats, knitting gear, pots of tea, and other domestic accoutrement, living in suburban or country settings, althought there is a sub-genre, the "edgy" cozy that often has an urban setting and a greater element of suspense because the protagonist's safety is in jeopardy.

According to Cozy-Mystery.com, the best website devoted to the genre, “Cozies don't usually involve a lot of gory details or explicit ‘adult situations’ either.”

Amatuer detectives generally have an occupation that allows for a flexible schedule, such as academia or journalism, and an “in” with the police either through their job or a personal relationship, sometimes marriage.

Diane Mott Davidson’s Goldie Bear is as much of a challenge to her long suffering police husband as Lucy Ricardo was to Ricky.

Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple, a keen observer of human nature, was connected to “The Yard” through her nephew.

On Saturday, November 22 at 2:00 pm the Library will host a Women of Mystery program featuring a panel discussion with three accomplished writers of cozy mysteries.

Rosemary Harris's Pushing up Daisies is the first in a series of mysteries featuring master gardener Paula Holliday.

Jane K. Cleland is the author of the Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries, which have been referred to as an “Antiques Roadshow for mystery fans.”

Hank Phillippi Ryan’s book Prime Time was this year’s Agatha winner for Best First Novel.

Books will be available for purchase and signing. The perfect kick-off for your holiday shopping.

The Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will be exploring the role of woman as detective in a two-book discussion series, “An Unsuitable Job for a Woman?”

Maigret attempts to prove that a murder has actually been committed without a corpse and he begins to suspect that his wife’s earlier strange encounter with a woman and her baby may hold the key.

Although Maigret is a police professional and Madame Maigret is a stay-at-home wife they often work together as a team.

According to the official Maigret website, “Mme Maigret provides the calm balance to Maigret's hectic working life … Her female insights are invaluable to Maigret and her wise answers to his apparently innocuous questions often help him with his cases.”

He is best known, however, for his 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Maigret. The first novel in the series, The Strange Case of Peter the Lett, appeared in 1931, and the last one, Maigret and Monsieur Charles, was published in 1972. The Maigret novels were translated into many languages and several of them were turned into films, radio plays and television series.

On December 21st, the Usual Suspects will discuss The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith. The first book in this beloved series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who uses her small inheritance to set up shop, drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.”

African bush tea will be served and we will hold our second annual mystery book swap at the conclusion of the discussion.

Hope you can join us. New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of either book, call 291-4821.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, by the way, was the title of a classic 1972 detective novel by P. D. James, which features a young detective in her early twenties named Cordelia Gray who inherits a detective agency. The responsibility of running such a business single-handedly might have persuaded most young women to sell it off and pursue a more "female" line of work, but Cordelia eagerly accepts the challenge, knowing full well that her youth and inexperience -- not to mention her gender -- might discourage prospective clients.

There have always been a host of canine and feline mysteries to keep animal-loving readers occupied.

There are two new zookeeper detectives of note.

PW remarked “Webb deftly weaves zoological lore into the fast-moving plot.”

And there are two new veterinarian detectives as well.

Waltner-Toews is a Canadian epidemiologist and veterinarian – a specialist in the epidemiology of food and waterborne diseases – so his descriptions, especially of the animal autopsies, are quite detailed. A compelling read, but not your usual animal cozy.

Long Island veterinarian-turned-amateur sleuth Jessica Popper and her animal menagerie also entertain in a fun and frisky paperback series from Cynthia Baxter.

Rita Mae Brown fans take note – the legendary Mrs. Murphy will be putting in her 17th appearance shortly in Santa Clawed.

Some of us just can’t get enough of that merry menagerie!

With Halloween upon us, you might want to indulge in some macabre fun.

Joe Barone’s first mystery novel, The Body in the Record Room, takes place in a state mental hospital in 1954, when a patient who calls himself Roy Rogers finds a dead body in the hospital records room.

“Roy” – along with his friend Harry and Harry’s dog Bullet – investigates and finds out that the present murder may be linked to a gruesome crime that occurred twenty years earlier, when a mutilated corpse was found lying on the altar of a Catholic Church. As he perseveres, he finds within himself the courage and moral strength of his hero, the real Roy Rogers.

The author was raised on the grounds of a Missouri mental hospital, where his father, a medical doctor, was the long-time superintendent. Barone has served as an ordained minister for 25 years. An unusual credential for a mystery author!

Peggy Webb’s Elvis and the Dearly Departed, features mortuary hairdresser Callie Valentine Jones – who “fixes up the hairdos of the dead.”

When the corpse of a prominent physician goes missing, Peggy takes off in hot pursuit of the recently embalmed, last sighted in Vegas. She is assisted in her investigation by “Elvis,” a basset hound who believes he is the reincarnation of the King of Rock 'n' Roll – and who really knows how to sniff out a killer.

Ain't nothin' but a hound dog …

Both of these books put me in mind of Bubba Ho-tep, a novella by mystery writer Joe R. Lansdale, which was adapted as a 2002 horror/black comedy film starring Bruce Campbell as a decrepit Elvis Presley – or a man who thinks he is Elvis Presley! – now a resident in a nursing home.

The film also stars Ossie Davis as Jack, who claims to be John F. Kennedy – he says he was patched up after the assassination in Dallas, dyed black, and abandoned by Lyndon Johnson.

Eventually, Elvis and Jack face off against a re-animated ancient Egyptian mummy stolen during a museum tour and then lost when the bus being driven by the thieves veered off the road and into a river near the nursing home.

The mummy takes on the garb of a cowboy and is dubbed Bubba Ho-tep by Elvis who is given a telepathic flashback of the mummy's life and death when he looks into its eyes following the murder of an elderly woman resident of the home.

Très bizarre – trick or treat!

Mayor is the author of the highly acclaimed Vermont-based series featuring detective Joe Gunther, described by the Chicago Tribune as “the best police procedurals being written in America.”

In addition, Mayor is a death investigator for Vermont's Chief Medical Examiner, and has served as a deputy sheriff, firefighter and EMT.

Marilyn Stasio, writing in the New York Times Book Review (Nov. 7, 2004) best summed up the scope of his work: “… these solidly built police procedurals don't trouble themselves with the theatrical antics of spree killers and serial murderers. (And wouldn't they look foolish if they did, since Vermont averages only about seven murders a year.) But over the course of 15 books, Mayor has devised a vivid overview of the kinds of criminal behavior -- from domestic violence to interstate drug trafficking -- that relentlessly wear down the social fabric in the postindustrial mill and factory towns of northern New England, giving people the uneasy feeling that they are losing control over their lives.”

The 19th Joe Gunther mystery, The Catch, was recently released.

When a deputy sheriff is shot to death during a routine traffic stop on a dark country road, it is believed that his killers – seen partially on the cruiser’s tape recorder – were a couple of Boston-based drug runners who had just crossed into Vermont from Canada, a hotbed of cut-rate pharmaceuticals.

The shooting gets Gunther involved in a major illicit prescription drug investigation which focuses on the activities of one Alan Budney, the disaffected son of an old-time lobsterman.

The Catch is a veritable alphabet soup of police and drug enforcement agency acronyms as the action moves – and does it ever move! – from Vermont to Massachusetts to Maine, and back and forth a few times in between as the collaborative investigation proceeds. Even the RCMP (The Mounties) are involved.

Great cop stuff! Archer’s website has a variety of video clips from his various appearances – which will give you a taste of the wonderful talk you are in for – my favorite being “The truth about cops and doughnuts.”

Reports of battle-related stress appear as early as the 6th century BC, and in 490 BC the Greek historian Herodotus described an Athenian soldier who, although not himself physically wounded, was rendered blind after witnessing the death of a fellow soldier.

The modern understanding of this psychological trauma dates from the 1970s, largely as a result of the problems experienced by Vietnam veterans, which is when the term post-traumatic stress disorder was coined.

The term “shell shock” was first used during the First World War. Symptoms varied widely in intensity, and often took the form of panic attacks – which sometimes caused men to flee the battlefield, which was invariably regarded as rank cowardice, resulting in court martial for desertion and often ending in execution.

Many shell shock victims recovered quickly, whereas many others continued to feel its effects for years afterwards.

Next Sunday, October 19th, at 2, the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will discuss the first of Charles Todd’s Ian Rutledge mysteries, A Test of Wills.

Set in 1919, Rutledge has returned from France with a medal of honor and a serious case of shell shock, which often manifests itself in the form of a nagging specter – Hamish MacLeod, a corporal whose only return from the war has been inside Rutledge's head.

Rutledge returns to his pre-war job at Scotland Yard and, despite his tenuous condition, is assigned a case involving the murder of a decorated war hero.

He travels to Upper Streetham, a town where, Kirkus says, “The 20th century hasn't happened ... which seems to have been cast out of Rebecca,” adding that Todd's prose is “a feast for the like-minded” fans of du Maurier.

Last month we discussed Maisie Dobbs, who was a World War I battlefield nurse. The stories are set much later in time, but we experience the horrors that Maisie witnessed through her recurring flashbacks and nightmares.

Likewise, Suzanne Arruda’s Jade del Cameron has moved on with her life by becoming an adventurer in colonial East Africa after her traumatic experiences as an ambulance driver in the same conflict.

If you want your action set during the war years, try the espionage mysteries featuring Anne Perry’s Matthew Reavley or Manning Coles’ Tommy Hambledon.

Manning Coles is the pseudonym of two British writers, Adelaide Frances Oke Manning and Cyril Henry Coles.

Many of Hambledon’s exploits were based on the real-life experiences of Coles, who lied about his age and enlisted under an assumed name during World War I while still a teenager, eventually becoming the youngest officer in British intelligence, often working behind German lines because of his extraordinary ability to master languages.

Charles Todd, by the way, is the joint pseudonym for the mother/son writing team of Charles and Caroline Todd, whose actual names are David Todd Watjen and Carolyn L.T. Watjen.

Hope you can join us on Sunday. New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book, call 291-4821.

Flora’s latest book, The Angel of Knowlton Park, received a starred review in Booklist, which said “Flora excels at portraying the police as real people with strengths and weaknesses who unite to bring some measure of justice to the dead and living alike. Flora's thought-provoking second police procedural marks her as one of the best in the genre.”

Burgess abandons his summer vacation plans when the body of Timothy Watts, an eight-year-old boy from an abusive family, is found wrapped in a blue blanket in a Portland park.

Although everyone in the neighborhood loved Timmy, people are unwilling to talk. Even Iris, Timmy's deaf sister, isn’t talking and soon disappears.

Burgess first appeared in Playing God, set in a wintry Portland. An oncologist who had a habit of picking up prostitutes is found dead in his car. It appears that his family and his colleagues knew about his sordid predilection, and yet – surprise, surprise – no one wants to talk to the police.

This book was called “a triumph in the police procedural genre.”

Professional detectives – not to mention male detectives – are rare in crime fiction in the “The Pine Tree State”.

Linda Greenlaw’s new mystery series features Jane Bunker, a former Miami homicide detective who has given up the big city for Green Haven, Maine.

But the state is more commonly thought of as the home of several popular female amateur sleuths including J.S. Borthwick’s Sarah Deane, Kaitlyn Dunnett’s Liss MacCrimmon, Sarah Graves’ Jacobia Tiptree, Karen MacInerney’s Natalie Barnes, Leslie Meier’s Lucy Stone, and Lea Wait’s Maggie Summer.

Not to mention Jessica Fletcher!

If true crime stories and/or the paranormal interest you, I found an interesting website that covers paranormal investigations into Maine’s most intriguing crimes, which include a decapitation and dismemberment with a hammer and a triple homicide barn burning.

For “cold case” fans, there is also an interesting page about Albert DeSalvo, who went to grade school in Searsport, Maine. On March 18, 1965, at the height of the Boston Strangler Murders, a chambermaid for the famous Bangor House was brutally raped and strangled to death with her nylons. A description of a man seen in the area, about 5’10 with brown eyes and short brown hair, fit DeSalvo to a tee. Bangor Detectives informed the Bangor Daily that a hundred witnesses were questioned, but they did not have enough evidence to proceed.

Which is not to imply that the book is dead weight by any means! Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and called it “a splendid flowering of the talent previously demonstrated in his crime fiction.”

In this departure from his Kenzie and Gennaro mystery novels, Lehane has written a “nail-biter” of a thriller.

The question of how to determine whether a book is a mystery or a thriller often comes up. Number sixteen of Carolyn Wheat’s Sixteen Differences between Mystery and Suspense states: Mysteries are usually three hundred manuscript pages. Suspense novels can be longer.

Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, Given Day is the story of two families—one black, one white. Beat cop Danny Coughlin, the son of one of the city's most beloved and powerful police captains, joins a burgeoning union movement and the hunt for violent radicals. Luther Laurence, on the run after a deadly confrontation with a crime boss in Tulsa, works for the Coughlin family and tries desperately to find his way home to his pregnant wife.

We meet Babe Ruth, Eugene O'Neill, W. E. B. DuBois, Calvin Coolidge, and an ambitious young Department of Justice lawyer named John Hoover, as the story courses through some of the pivotal events of the time—including the Spanish Influenza pandemic—and culminates in the Boston Police Strike of 1919.

Lehane’s fans will be happy to hear that Martin Scorcese has just finished filming Shutter Island, his 2003 mind-bending psychological thriller (400 pages worth) set in 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner visit the island to investigate the disappearance of a multiple murderess from a hospital for the criminally insane amidst hints of radical experimentation and horrific surgeries. And a killer hurricane is headed straight for them.

You can read all about it at IMDb!

If you have come across the recently released mystery award nomination lists, your eyes do not deceive you. Two mysteries sharing a title and a dark comic style are both in the running for major awards.

Head Games by Craig McDonald has been nominated for an Anthony Award in the Best First Novel category and Head Games by Thomas B. Cavanagh has been nominated for a Shamus Award in the Best Hardcover category.

When an old pal sets Pancho Villa's head on the table of a cantina in the Mexican desert, Lassiter is up for an adventure: delivering the head to Senator Prescott Bush (father of 41, grandfather of 43) so that it can be used in secret ceremonies at Yale's Skull and Bones Society.

A bit of backstory: In 1916 Woodrow Wilson had dispatched Black Jack Pershing and an army of 10,000 into Mexico to find and bring back Pancho Villa — dead or alive. Villa evaded capture, living in comfort and peace until his assassination in 1923. A short time later, an unknown person (or persons) dug up his body and stole his head.

McDonald’s second Lassiter mystery, Toros & Torsos, is due out this month.

Spanning the years from 1935 to 1959, it involves a serial killer who arranges dead bodies to resemble surrealistic art, Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles (again), and actual events including the Key West hurricane of 1935, the Spanish Civil War and Cuba's last days before Castro. Whew!

An old colleague shows up and offers him a chance to go out with a bang, leave his daughter with an inheritance and a chance to earn her respect. TJ Sommerset, a member of a hit boy band – who is the idol of Mike’s daughter – has gone missing, putting at risk a world tour and millions in endorsements. It isn't long, however, before Mike discovers that there are other people looking for TJ as well and when a headless corpse shows up, it’s clear that they’re not just after him for his autograph.

This is the second Garrity mystery. The series opener was the riveting Murderland, which is about a serial killer stalking tourists at a popular Florida theme park.

The third book in the series is the recently released Prodigal Son. With his cancer in remission after undergoing surgery to remove his tumor, Garrity takes on a case on behalf of a member of his cancer support group, who asks him to help track down the son she had put up for adoption twenty years earlier, but soon finds his search complicated by his client's disappearance and murder.

The full nomination lists for the Anthony, Macavity, and Shamus Awards are available on-line.

She is in the running for both the Anthony and Macavity Best Novel Award for What the Dead Know.

The brand-new, shiny Eiffel Tower is the pride and glory of the 1889 World Exposition. But one sunny afternoon, as visitors are crowding the viewing platforms, a woman collapses and dies on this great Paris landmark. Can a bee sting really be the cause of death? Or is there a more sinister explanation?

Young bookseller Victor Legris witnesses the woman’s death. Appalled by the media coverage of the event, he is determined to find out what actually happened and is caught in a race against time when there are more mysterious deaths.

Visit the official Maigret website for an interesting look at the detective and his world.

Cara Black’s protagonist Aimée Leduc is the owner of a detective agency specializing in corporate security. The New York Times Book Review has said “Aimée is one of those blithe spirits who can walk you through the city’s historical streets and byways with their eyes closed.”

You can find out more about Cara Black's Paris on the author’s website.

Fred Vargas’ detective is Chief Inspector Adamsberg. Publishers Weekly describes Adamsberg as “an endearing oddball sleuth in the tradition of John Dickson Carr's Henry Merrivale.” Fred Vargas is the pseudonym of French historian, archaeologist and writer Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, born in 1957 in Paris. The surname Vargas is in honor of the Ava Gardner character in The Barefoot Contessa!

Visit the Detectives Beyond Borders website for an article on Fred Vargas’ France.

The New York Times review for this book said “Prepare to be astonished …”

It received starred reviews in both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal and its many other laudatory reviews included terms such as engaging, inspired, delightful, poignant, compelling, and fresh.

Maisie entered domestic service in 1910 at the age of thirteen to work as a maid for Lady Rowan Compton. When her remarkable intelligence and innate love of learning are discovered by her employer, her education is taken in hand and she eventually enters Girton College at Cambridge University.

World War I intervenes and changes her plans. She serves as a nurse at the front and falls in love with a handsome young doctor, only to lose him.

In 1929, following an apprenticeship, Maisie hangs out her shingle -- M. Dobbs, Trade and Personal Investigations -- and soon becomes enmeshed in a mystery surrounding The Retreat, a reclusive community of veterans wounded in body and spirit. She uncovers a disturbing mystery there and, after a dramatic dénouement, Maisie finds the courage to confront the ghost that has haunted her for over ten years.

There have been four additional Maisie Dobbs mysteries, each as brilliant as the first, and I found the most recent, An Incomplete Revenge, to be the best yet. PW reported that “this jaunt back to a bygone era is as satisfying as a spin in Maisie's MG.”

The Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will be discussing Maisie Dobbs on Sunday, September 21st, at 2 p.m.

On Sunday, October 19th, we will discuss A Test of Wills, the first book in Todd's series.

Hope you can join us. New faces are always welcome. To reserve copies, call 291-4821.

Grabenstein won the Anthony Award for Best First Mystery for his debut Tilt a Whirl, the first in a series of John Ceepak mysteries set in Sea Haven, New Jersey. A former MP in Iraq, Ceepak brings his considerable physical strength, crime-solving skills and morality to the beachside town.

The second book, Mad Mouse, was selected as one of the Ten Best Mysteries of 2006 by Kirkus. It was followed by Whack a Mole in 2007 and the newly released Hell Hole.

The books are both suspenseful and humorous, the characters are endearing, the dialog is snappy, and the setting is a refreshing change.

The Crossroads got a starred review in Booklist which called it "An absorbing psychological thriller . . . as well as a rip-roaring ghost story."

I loved it. It reminded me of those wonderful Alfred Hitchcock stories I devoured in my youth. Definitely adult-worthy. You will admire Zack and his marvelous step-mother and the ghostly cast of characters who wander across the pages.

These books, too, have that wonderful Hitchcockian pacing and tone. If you are a recorded book fan, narrator Colleen Delaney does a terrific job of conveying Ingrid’s adolescent angst.

Abrahams will be in attendance at this year’s CrimeBake conference (November 14-16 in Dedham MA) and presenting a master class on "Writing for Young Audiences."

Check out the conference details. These conferences are for fans as much as for writers and would-be writers. CrimeBake is one of my favorites because it a small, cozy group in a relaxed setting. You park your car in the hotel garage when you get there and don’t need again until it’s time to head for home!

Harlan Coben will be this year’s guest of honor.

Real-life forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs has written eleven mystery novels to date (out of a contractual fourteen) which have been translated into 30 languages, beginning with Déjà Dead in 1997.

Her protagonist, Temperance "Tempe" Brennan, is also a forensic anthropologist whose lifestyle closely mimics that of her creator. “I based her on myself because it just seemed easier to model her on somebody I knew, though I gave her some flaws, like the alcoholism, that are strictly her own,” Reichs told Publishers Weekly in a recent interview.

Tempe is back home in Charlotte, N.C. and her attempts to identify two corpses unearthed during a housing renovation and an unidentified headless torso found in a nearby lake pits her against citizen vigilantes intent on a witch-hunt. There are disturbing clues possibly pointing to voodoo or Santeria and a local fundamentalist preacher turned politician, intent on using the deaths as the cornerstone of his crusade against immorality, claims that the bodies bear the mark of devil worshippers.

The television series Bones is inspired by Reichs' life and writing. All of the stories are original to the show but she reads every script and works with the writers to guarantee the scientific accuracy of the show. The series heroine is also Temperance Brennan, but her nickname is "Bones" rather than Tempe. As in the books, she is a forensic anthropologist and, in an interesting twist, she moonlights as an author who writes mystery novels about a fictional forensic anthropologist named Kathy Reichs.

To find more forensic mysteries you can simply search the library catalog under the subject heading Forensic mysteries.

There are a number of mystery novels which feature Harry Houdini.

Daniel Stashower’s The Dime Museum Murders takes us back to 1897, when Houdini is struggling to make it in the brutal entertainment business. Detectives call on him to attempt the most amazing feat of his fledgling career: solve the mystery of a toy tycoon murdered in his posh Fifth Avenue mansion.

Flash forward to the 1920s, when Walter Satterthwait's Escapade mixes spiritualism with a locked-room murder mystery in a tale featuring Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

In William Hjortsberg’s Nevermore Houdini also joins forces with Arthur Conan Doyle, in this case to solve a series of murders which eerily re-enact the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.

Houdini, Doyle and Poe. Who could ask for anything more?

There are two somewhat intoxicating mystery series on the shelves these days.

Nina Wright’s Whiskey Mattimoe is a recently widowed real estate agent in a small resort town in Michigan. She made her debut in Whiskey on the Rocks (2005) which received a starred review in Library Journal.

J. A. Konrath’s Lt. Jacqueline “Jack” Daniels is with the Chicago Police Violent Crimes Unit. When we meet Jack in Whiskey Sour (2004) her live-in boyfriend has left her for his personal trainer, chronic insomnia has maxed out her credit cards with late-night home shopping purchases, and a frightening killer who calls himself "The Gingerbread Man" is dumping mutilated bodies in her district.

There is plenty of edge-of-your-seat suspense, but lots laugh-out-loud humor as well.

Konrath is working his way through the bartender’s handbook, following the first book with Bloody Mary (2005), Rusty Nail (2006), and Dirty Martini (2007).

Publishers Weekly advises that fans won't want to miss this book “because of some surprising developments in Daniels's personal life and an ending that promises more shocks in the next installment.”

Author Linda Fairstein calls it “a hilariously heartstopping thriller.”

Sounds like just the thing for Stephanie Plum fans to pass the time until “fifteen” comes around.

To find other enjoyable crime fiction you can simpley search the library catalog under the subject heading Humorous mysteries.

By day, Bernie is the proprietor of Barnegat Books, a used bookstore in Greenwich. He has a cat named Raffles, named after the E.W. Hornung character.

According to Block, one of the reasons Bernie operates the bookstore is "to meet girls."

Block provides us with a convenient list of the titles on his website.

At a recent appearance at the library, the devious Mr. Block unfortunately could not – or would not! – tell us how soon we could expect another Bernie caper.

Next Sunday, August 17th at 2 p.m. the Usual Suspects Mystery Reading Group will be discussing The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams, book number six, published in 1994.

Bernie has actually been trying to earn an honest living but an unscrupulous landlord's threat to increase Bernie's rent by 1,000% is driving him back to a life of crime. When the cops wrongly accuse him of stealing a $1 million baseball card collection, Bernie cannot alibi himself since he was busy burgling a different apartment at the time . . . one that happened to contain a dead body locked inside a bathroom.

Hope you can join us on Sunday. New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book call 291-4821.

If you are looking for a more thorough list of “biblio-mysteries” – featuring authors, book store owners, librarians, publishers, etc. – you can check our catalog under the heading Bibliophile mysteries.

You can also check the Looking for a Mystery? site for bibliographies of all sorts of mystery themes.

If you want to keep ‘em cozy, then cozy-mystery.com is the place for you.

One of the hottest new series features 75-year old Gladdy Gold, Florida’s oldest private eye.

We meet Gladdy in Getting Old is Murder, the first title in a series of by Rita Lakin.

When Gladdy’s neighbor Selma dies, she is sad, but not shocked. Then when her best friend Francie dies, she begins to be suspicious since both women died around the time of their birthdays.

When the police won’t listen to her Gladdy starts investigating on her own with a gang of fellow Fort Lauderdale retirees.

The sassy Gladdy – whom author Carolyn Hart calls “Miss Marple in Yiddish” – returns in her fifth case this winter in Getting Old is a Disaster.

Mike Befeler’s recently released Retirement Homes Are Murder features Paul Jacobson, an octogenarian sleuth who suffers from short-term memory loss.

I am happy (and envious) that Nancy Drew gets to stay sixteen forever, but I am also happy to know that as I advance toward inevitable geezerdom myself that I will be in such good company when I get there.

I wonder how old Jessica Fletcher is by now?

There is an interesting variety of mystery and suspense fiction set on the campaign trail. Just in case you have extreme campaign fever and can’t get enough of the real thing, here are a few titles to try!

Killer Weekend by Ridley Pearson (2007)
New York State attorney general Elizabeth Shaler, a political lightning rod, is expected to announce her candidacy for president at a conference in Sun Valley. Authorities learn of a confirmed threat on her life, and the Secret Service, the FBI, and local forces begin jockeying for jurisdiction.

The Singing of the Dead by Dana Stabenow (2001)
When a Native American candidate for Alaska state senator starts receiving anonymous threats, PI Kate Shugak allows herself to be talked into a temporary bodyguard stint. The first body to turn up is the candidate’s fundraiser and future son-in-law.

Smoke and Mirrors by Barbara Michaels (1989)
The enthusiasm and idealism of Erin Hartsock, a young campaign worker, dissolves into terror when the campaign takes a malevolent turn. Someone has begun threatening Erin and her colleagues first with strange fires, then a seemingly accidental death.

Up in Smoke by Charlene Weir (2003)
Police Chief Susan Wren is a relative newcomer to Hampstead, Kansas. When the governor decides to kick off his campaign for the presidential nomination with a homecoming rally in town, he finds his efforts complicated by a local murder in which he and a campaign worker are implicated.

Sgt. Ben Carey is an ambitious young beat cop with a troubled marriage. After his wife kicks him out, Carey bunks in a decrepit Victorian mansion only to find it haunted by the spirit of a man who died there from wounds sustained in the second battle of Bull Run.

Carey comes to suspect that the man was murdered and takes a break from his official duties to solve the nearly-century-old cold case.

The story alternates between DC in 1862 and the same city 95 years later.

PW says it is a debut with “definite promise.”

Though Horwitz, the son of a DC police officer, died in 2004, he left behind several more Ben Carey manuscripts.

Elena Santangelo has a series featuring Pat Montella, a young woman who experiences the sights and sounds of 1863 – the vibrations of bullets hitting old wood, the smell of campfire coffee and roast pork, and the faraway hissing of a steam engine – and finds herself involved in mysteries rooted in Civil War era Virginia that are related to events in the present day.

If you like your Civil War mysteries served straight up, then the novels of Michael Kilian and Owen Parry will take you straight to the action.

One of Anne Perry’s popular William Monk mysteries, Slaves of Obsession, finds Monk and his wife Hester tracking a man they believe to be a cold-blooded murderer all the way from England to the bloody battlefield at Manassas.

You can find a lot of excellent Civil War background info at the History Channel’s website including battle maps and much discussion of about the extent of the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, one of the great unsolved American mysteries.

Craig’s protagonist is J.W. “Jeff” Jackson who has retired -- more or less -- to the Vineyard. His family gets by on his Boston PD pension and his wife’s income as a nurse, living on the cheap with furniture salvaged from the town dump and a fourteen year old Landcruiser. J.W. often puts dinner on the table by fishing and clam digging, and is a superb cook.

The Jacksons are a refreshing change of pace.

Although J.W. is not a licensed P.I., the odd jobs he takes on for a bit of supplemental income often land him in some dangerous situations.

Despite the danger, it is a joy to travel around the island with him both during the hectic in-season and the deserted off-season. If you have ever thought of Martha’s Vineyard as your dream retirement location, these books are for you.

As with all mystery series, you can get a nice online list of all of the titles and the order in which they were published at Stop, You’re Killing Me!.

Craig teamed up with William G. Tapply, author of the Brady Coyne series, for three mysteries featuring both Jackson and Coyne: First Light, Second Sight, and Third Strike.

The first-person narration alternates between the two characters and Publishers Weekly remarked on the “effective volley of tension back and forth between the voices of the veteran sleuths” adding that “The characters feel authentic, as does the flavor of Martha's Vineyard.”

Brady Coyne is a Boston lawyer who, like Perry Mason before him, seems to favor a hands-on approach to criminal justice.

Tapply’s series began in 1984 and there are over twenty titles on that list. Coyne is still going strong and will return in a new mystery, Hell Bent, in September.

Next week host Andrea de Leon will take us South to the Big Easy and a visit with Julie Smith, author of two New Orleans series, the Talba Wallis and Skip Langdon mysteries.

When I first heard that some upstart California mystery writer named Laurie R. King had dared marry off Sherlock Holmes to a young American woman I was horrified. That was, of course, until I started reading her books and couldn’t put them down.

Sherlock Holmes takes Mary Russell on as an apprentice in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. It is the early years of WW I, and Holmes is retired in Sussex Downs -- where Conan Doyle left him raising bees. She is an orphan rebelling against her guardian aunt's strictures and impresses the sleuth with her intelligence and acumen. Holmes initiates her into the mysteries of detection, allowing her to participate in a few cases when she comes home from her studies at Oxford.

Next Sunday the 13th at 2pm the Usual Suspects will be discussing the third book in the series, A Letter of Mary, which takes us forward in time to 1923 where we find Holmes and Russell happily married.

A Letter of Mary introduced many readers, myself included, to Mary Magdalene’s possible apostolic and wifely identity years before it was “revealed” in The Da Vinci Code.

Holmes and Russell are caught up in an exciting mystery when an archaeologist leaves them with a treasured find, a papyrus supposedly written by Mary Magdalene. When the archaeologist winds up dead and someone attempts to make off with the artifact, they become embroiled in a rollicking story filled with political intrigue and highbrow sleuthing.

Author King has a wonderful website which includes a feature called Mary Russell’s World where you can find background information on the historical period, a Russell and Holmes timeline, a crossword puzzle that appeared in the New Yorker, and excerpts from all eight titles in the series.

Hope you can join us on Sunday. New faces are always welcome. To reserve a copy of the book call 291-4821.

Rhode Island author Jan Brogan, who writes the Providence reporter Hallie Ahern series, recommended Mrs. Kimble by Jennifer Haigh Although it is not a mystery, it is nonetheless a compelling story about three women who marry the same man -- an enigmatic opportunist named Ken Kimble.

Local author Jessica Speart, who writes the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Agent Rachel Porter series, recommended Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford mysteries. Doc Ford is a marine biologist in Sanibel Island, Florida. Lots of beach.

Jane Cleland, author of the Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery series set in a small coastal New Hampshire town, recommended I Shall Not Want, Julia Spencer-Fleming’s new Clare Fergusson/Russ Alystyne book, and Clubbed to Death, the latest Dead-End Job mystery from Elaine Viets.

Jane was not only the Guest of Honor at the recent Deadly Ink Conference, but her second Josie title, Deadly Appraisal, won the David Award for Best Mystery of 2007 as well..

Hank Phillippi Ryan writes the Charlie McNally mysteries. Hank is an Emmy award winning television reporter in Boston, and Charlie is in the same line of work.

Hank won an Agatha in the Best First Novel category this past May for the first title in the series, Prime Time, which is now in the running for the 2008 Daphne Du Maurier Award.

Hank recommended two of her fellow Agatha award winners: Katherine Hall Page’s caterer Faith Fairchild series set in New England and Louise Penny’s Inspector Armand Gamache mysteries, which are set in southern Quebec.

Jane, Rosemary and Hank have graciously agreed to present a Women of Mystery panel here at the Westport Library on Saturday, November 22nd, at 2 pm. This will probably be your last chance to take some time to relax and enjoy yourself for an afternoon before the “holidaze” kicks in, so mark your calendar now! They are outstanding presenters and I know you will enjoy their warmth and humor.

Othman is an unemployed 32-year-old Moroccan man married to a wealthy 73-year-old French woman who has pampered him with fancy cars and expensive clothes. When his wife is murdered the police zero in on Othman as the prime suspect. He has been involved in a steamy affair with an attractive young aerobics instructor.

But is he guilty? Did he kill his wife for the money and his lover? Or is he an innocent man, framed by circumstance—and an overzealous and brutal police force?

Hamdouchi is one of the first writers of Arabic-language detective fiction. The author of eight novels, he is also an award-winning screenwriter for Moroccan television and cinema. All of his police novels, including The Final Bet, have been produced for Moroccan television.

The 2008 nominees are: Andrea Camilleri (Italy) The Patience of the Spider; Stieg Larsson (Sweden) The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Dominique Manotti (France) Lorraine Connection; Martin Suter (Germany) A Deal with the Devil; Fred Vargas (France) This Night's Foul Work.

The winners will be announced at the Awards Dinner in London on Thursday July 10th.

Janet Evanovich has used numbers in her Stephanie Plum novels, starting with One for the Money, although the brand new Fearless Fourteen is actually the seventeenth book in the series. Visions of Sugar Plums, Plum Lovin’ and Plum Lucky got shuffled into the run along the way. Stephanie is a Trenton based bounty hunter.

They are up to their seventh title, 7th Heaven.

Check Patterson’s website for a plot synopsis of each title, character profiles of Lindsay and her “partners in crime” and directions for making the perfect “murdertini.” You can also sign up for a newsletter so you will know a.s.a.p. when book number eight is on its way!

We first meet Private eye Kinsey Millhone in 1982 in A is for Alibi. The series continues from there in strict alphabetical order, the most recent being T is for Trespass.

Thrillingdetective.com describes her as “an accident waiting to happen,” adding “This is the private eye Annie Hall-era Diane Keaton was born to play.” Kinsey ‘s turf is southern California's Santa Teresa – a thinly disguised Santa Barbara.

Bookmark author Sue Grafton’s website if you are keeping vigil for “U is for …” and are curious what her after “Z is for …” plans are.

A lesser known, but extremely well received series by Ann Purser takes you through the days of the week.

Lois Meade, cleaner and part-time sleuth in Long Farnden starts her week out with Murder on Monday and wraps it up with Sorrow on Sunday.

Purser’s website promises that Lois and her family will continue in a new series to be published in November 2008. Interestingly enough, it will called Warning at One. I guess Lois will be working her way around the face of the clock this time.

You don’t want to miss these if British cozies are your thing.

I recently discovered the Murder by Month series by Jess Lourey, which begins, oddly enough, with May Day.

Twenty-something Mira James leaves Minneapolis for a part time library job in rural Minnesota. She's barely settled in there when she finds a dead body in the stacks.

Mira’s has worked her way through the calendar to her fourth adventure, August Moon.

This series may be more for chick-lit fans. Mira congratulates herself on "how much television had prepared me for life" – Charlie's Angels are her inspiration!

This book is the second of five Cliff Janeway mysteries that Dunning – who has been called “a master yarn spinner” – has written.

Each book leaves you informed on a unique aspect of book publishing and collecting, but one Booklist review warns: “… don't pigeonhole these surprisingly muscular novels into that wimpy PBS drawing room where murder is merely an excuse for intellectuals to talk fancy.”

This is the first in the summer series of discussions called Paper Chases. We will discuss A Letter of Mary by Laurie R. King on July 13 and The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block on August 17.

Newcomers are always welcome. To reserve copies of the books call 291-4821.

Keller, a lonely, wistful hit-man, originally appeared as a semi-regular feature in Playboy magazine in the 1990s.

This is a rare opportunity to hear one of the great mystery writers of our time. Don’t miss it!

The Brits have taken a decidedly noir turn. Scottish crime writer Val McDermid says “We have the rope of Agatha around our necks … we want to write about the society we live in and the Agatha Christie formula doesn’t work anymore.”

McDermid adds that her use of gruesome subject matter stems from her desire to address the systematic problems of today’s world.

Chandler and Hammett began seeping into the British crime writing consciousness some time ago, and the earliest manifestations were seen in P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh series which began in 1962 and Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series which began in 1964. There are psychological forces that far exceed the output of Hercule Poirot's “little grey cells” at work in these books.

Although most of the writers interviewed agreed that American noir fiction has had a huge influence on some of the newer authors, Peter Robinson, author of the Alan Banks series, says that the harder edge we are seeing in British crime fiction today is also due to the “changes in British society since the Thatcher era.”

If you want to take a walk on the dark side, PW recommends these four new summer debuts: Sacrifice by S.J. Bolton, The Blood Detective by Dan Waddell, Close by Martina Cole and The Shadow Walker by Michael Walters.

McDermid has launched her own independent publishing house, Bloody Brits Press, with the hope of creating a niche for British writers whose work was not being picked up by American publishers.

The one year gap between the UK and American releases seems to be closing somewhat, which is good news for fans.

Now, if publishers would only stop that confusing change of title thing that they do ...

Told from the pirate's perspective, it opens on board a ship carrying an unrepentant Silver to his execution in England. He shares the story of his early life and rise to infamy and chronicles his lifelong pursuit of an elusive treasure.

Silver is a man with a plan and hopes to secure his release by promising to reveal the whereabouts of the fabled trove.

Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called it a “swashbuckling debut” and a “riveting narrative” and it is, indeed, peppered with superb pirate dialogue – along with a murder, a map, ciphers and codes, and even a bit of romance.

The Three Musketeers appear to be on a reunion tour, having recently surfaced in Sarah D'Almeida’s The Musketeer's Apprentice.

When Porthos agrees to instruct a young nobleman in the art of fencing, his apprentice meets an untimely death by poison and the old gang bands together once again to catch the killer.

And, while we are on the topic of the “literary mystery” – move over Jane Austen, lady detective!

In Laura Joh Rowland’s The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Bronte, Miss Bronte
travels to London with her sister Anne in the summer of 1848 to clear her name when she is falsely accused of plagiarism. On the train they meet a young woman who is later murdered before Charlotte's eyes.

Charlotte and both of her sisters, Emily and Anne, set out to solve the crime and bring the woman’s killer to justice.

A change of pace for Rowland, author of the acclaimed Sano Ichiro – samurai and private investigator for the shogun – mystery series set in 17th century Japan.

He finds that the lyrics of old Grateful Dead songs help him make sense of it all.

“Trouble with you is the trouble with me, got two good eyes but you still don't see.”

When a world-famous ecologist is murdered on Pruitt’s turf the list of suspects include radical environmentalists, evil Asian timber “suits,” and an assortment of local folk with their own ideas about the future of the 1,000 acres of old-growth forest they call home.

If you, too, follow the Dead, crank up the old lava lamp and give this one a try.

Vaguely reminiscent of that really scary shark movie. A clue that this will not end well for everyone involved.

The denouement occurs on a boat foundering in a fierce storm at sea. Hmmm. That sort of thing doesn’t usually end well, either.

Slipknot is Greenlaw’s first foray into mystery writing. She is best known for her modern day sea adventure non-fiction, including The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain's Journey and The Lobster Chronicles: Life on a Very Small Island. She was profiled in Sebastian Junger's book The Perfect Storm.

Greenlaw's Slipknot got a starred review from Library Journal, which called it a story told “with great joie de vivre and incredible skill,” rich in “local color, small town culture, and firsthand knowledge of the fishing industry.”

I loved every minute of it. I could almost taste the lobster. I hope Jane Bunker has as long a run as that other Down East detective, Jessica Fletcher. She returns in July in the forthcoming Fisherman's Bend.