It’s no mystery—a book, any kind of book, has to contain certain key ingredients to be good and generally the more of these ingredients it has, the better it’s going to be. Look at the case of People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry, which, although an example of the not always respected true crime genre, has more than enough of the right stuff to be a truly enthralling read.

Let’s start with plot, which, despite what the more literary than thou crowd says, is absolutely crucial, always has been, always will be. People Who Eat Darkness has a set up most thriller writers would kill for—Lucie Blackman, a twenty-one year old English blonde working in Japan as a bar hostess, goes on a date with a client (in Japan, as Parry explains, none of these terms require the ironic quotation marks they would over here) and fails to return. Her roommate, Louise Phillips, perturbed, asks around, learns nothing, contacts the disinterested police and eventually receives a disturbing phone call. The person on the other end says that Lucie is fine, but has decided to join a cult and has no interest in communicating with her old friends ever again. When Louise insists on speaking to her, the caller, a Japanese man, informs her that Lucie isn’t feeling very well at the moment and hangs up. He quickly calls back, saying Lucie is determined to start a new life and, by the way, what’s your address? He claims that he wants to return Lucie’s belongings, and when Louise points out that Lucie surely knows her own address, repeats that she’s not feeling well and can’t remember, and what did you say that address was again? A horrified Louise protests and the man hangs up for good.

Of course events are driven by character, and character in turn is revealed by events. Parry paints vivid portraits of killer and victim, or rather victims, as the impact of the horrific crime ripples out to affect entire families, communities and even nations. Some true crime books tend to idealize the victim, but here the loss of Lucie is even more poignant because of her imperfections—an insecure, somewhat naive young woman who stumbles into an evil few would anticipate.

Lucie’s family are also vividly portrayed. Her father, Joe, travels to Japan, working tirelessly to publicize her case and prod the authorities, yet also seems to enjoy the media spotlight a little too much, refusing to play the role of stereotypical grieving parent, and eventually, in a twist no fiction writer would dare attempt, commits a stunning act. His ex-wife Jane is more conventional, insisting on her privacy and snarling at the press, yet strangely determined to use the tragedy to further her personal vendetta against Joe. Her siblings and friends are also sharply defined by the glare of uncertainty and grief, as are, eventually, the friends and family of the killer.

But what about the killer himself? One of the reasons we read true crime is to try to comprehend the nature of a person who commit such crimes, but, brilliantly, Parry makes the criminals very impenetrability his defining feature:

Humans are conditioned to look for truth that is singular and focused, hanging for all to see like a clear, full moon in a cloudless sky. Books about crime are expected to deliver such a photographic image, to serve up a story as dry as a shelled and salted nut. But as a subject [the killer] sucked away brightness; all that was visible was smoke or haze, and the twinkle upon it of external light. The shell, in other words, was all that was to be had of the nut. But the surface of the shell turned out to be fascinating in itself.

As can be seen by the above excerpt, Parry’s prose is yet another strength, elastic enough to be  journalistic or poetic as the narrative demands.

And then there’s the setting. As the most modernized Asian culture, Japan fascinates because it is so superficially familiar, yet so fundamentally foreign, and there’s nothing like a mysteriously missing gaijin to highlight the disconnects. Parry is the Asia editor and the Tokyo bureau chief of The London Times and the perfect tour guide for this complex and occasionally absurd and unexpectedly sordid scene.

Finally there’s the underrated quality of pacing. Even though People Who Eat Darkness is 434 pages and portrays long periods of uncertainty and seeming inactivity, Parry draws the reader through his narrative with artful flashbacks, fascinating asides, foreshadowing, and more than enough skill to make the sometimes tedious process of real world justice just as absorbing as any fictional counterpart.

The desired result of all these ingredients is, of course, enjoyment, and Parry has fashioned an enthralling, disquieting, entertaining and profound book—with the added kick—it’s all true.

“…You have to suck at it for years until one day your experience pays off and you reach a point where you know what you’re doing.” “It’s like everything else, then, isn’t it?”

I was a big fan of the first book Minotaur published by Ed Lin, Snakes Can’t Run, and I enjoyed this one maybe even a little bit more.  Lin’s central character, Robert Chow, is a Chinese American Cop in New York City’s Chinatown circa 1976 (Carter and Ford are battling it out for the presidency).    Robert has a good backstory—he’s a Vietnam Vet, he was a drunk but is now sober, and he is now feeling his way through his job, hoping for a detective’s gold shield as well as trying to figure out  his relationship with his girlfriend, Lonnie.

Lin’s deceptively simple prose is actually very vivid.  Here’s his description of Lonnie’s dad, when encountered by Robert for the first time:  “I was a little taken aback to find that Lonnie and Paul’s dad was a fairly small guy, barely five feet tall.  In my imagination, he was a hulking linebacker brandishing a belt.  In reality he was a thin man in his late-fifties and his hair had thinned out to black streaks smeared over the top of his head like skid marks.”  Reading that brief description, you won’t forget this man.  All of the sidebar characters are this well delineated, making reading this actually very short book a very rich experience.  This distinctive prose is only part of Lin’s charm, though.

Lin is very interested in this novel in the different strands of the Chinese Communist party—the kick-off for the plot concerns the advance man for Mao’s daughter, Mr. Chen, who is murdered while he’s in town.  Robert becomes obsessed with Mr. Chen’s death because his girlfriend is the prime suspect: she was the last one to see him alive, after she’d interviewed him for her wire service.  Lonnie is being followed everywhere by detectives from Manhattan South and it’s driving Robert crazy.

The total setting for the novel is a very full one—the police department and the inner workings of the communists in New York, as well as the many ties Robert has to his community and family.  Lin is very interested in the way systems work—how does the police department work?  How do community and political ties work?  What ties are the most important, or are they interwoven?  Robert’s obligations of family and duty often butt up against each other, just as they do in everyone’s life.

Such concerns are seamlessly integrated into an absorbing story—as Robert follows the clues that lead him to Mr. Chen’s killer, some of his actions seem questionable after the fact.  Lin’s gentle moral prodding about the way the police department works will get you thinking.  It gets Robert thinking as well.  It’s part of what makes him such an interesting character, one you want to follow further.

The sly humor that’s a backdrop to the whole story doesn’t hurt, either.  Some of the observations about the Chinese culture are so wryly and beautifully observed that they stick with you.  Since the books are set in 1976, it truly is like entering another world.  The time remove just adds another layer of “otherness,” but since it’s the recent past, your own memories may step in as you read, adding to the total experience.  Lin is an original, gifted writer with an offbeat slant that lets you look at the world maybe a shade differently.  Any writer that can achieve that is well worth a look, in my opinion, and it’s the main reason I enjoy reading.  So remember this name:  Ed Lin.

In olden times Loren Estleman would have been regarded as a master craftsman.  He’s sixty plus books into a more than impressive career, setting the bar high in both the Western and the Private Eye genres, while also writing the occasional standalone as well as a couple other mystery series (Peter Macklin, Valentino).  This outing is the 22^nd in his Amos Walker franchise, the present gold standard for private eye mysteries.  Sure, there are other private eye masters at work right now – Robert Crais, Steve Hamilton, and S. J. Rozan come to mind – but for the pure, traditional private eye experience no one can beat Estleman.

His prose is only one reason, but it’s a big one.  Laced with sly humor and original descriptions of both people and places, reading an Estleman novel is a rich experience.  For a novel on the short side, the reader gets a lot of bang for their buck.  This one is set in the Mexicantown area of Detroit.  While it’s “Mexicantown” there’s a reference to the coiled and dark world of “Chinatown” (the film), and the overhanging, deteriorating beauty that is Detroit suffuses the book with atmosphere and menace.

Walker is strictly old school, smoking cigarettes, swigging vodka and tequila when he comes across it, getting around town in a beat up muscle car, unencumbered by familial baggage.  He’s the classic loner, working in the white knight mode dear to every P.I. from Lew Archer and  Phillip Marlowe down to the present.

He’s asked by an old frenemy, Inspector John Aldercyce,  to try and find the missing teenage brother of his son’s wife.  The kid, Nesto, appears to be caught up in a Mexicantown gang, and Alderdyce is hoping both to find him and scare him away from the gang life.  The understanding way Estleman writes about this particular teenager is dead on, with their mixture of lying, fear, bravery and stupidity.  Walker is more forgiving and understanding than some of the other folks in the Nesto’s life.

Things take a wrong turn when one of the Mexicantown leaders is gunned down – the death of El Tigre doesn’t go unnoticed by anyone, and Nesto seems like he’s in the frame for it.

In reality, every P.I. novel has a certain trajectory – the detective squeals around town interviewing suspects and looking for clues – what sets any of them apart is the point of view, the writing, and the characters.  Estleman’s writing always sparkles.  He also gets in a few digs at present technology.  Here’s a favorite:  “…you can become dependent on technology of you have constant access to it.  That made me the most independent detective in the 313 area code.”  And this of course underscores Walker’s good old fashioned detective work – like Holmes, Poirot and Nero Wolfe,  he relies on logical deduction and plain brain power.

The plot is suitably tricky, I was surprised at the end, and I enjoyed the Amos Walker guided tour of Mexicantown.  Twenty-two books in, this is still a fresh, vibrant, and classic series.

Q: First of all, what led you to add mysteries to your list of literary accomplishments? William Gibson has also moved from speculative fiction into the contemporary thriller. Do you see some kind of a trend?

A: I don’t know that it’s a trend; maybe more a kind of artistic serendipity. Several people have told me that Available Dark reminds them of Gibson’s recent work, which surprised me — I admire Gibson immensely but didn’t really see any similarities until they were pointed out. I guess perhaps we share an apocalyptic view of The Way We Live Now, and a perception of 21st century cities as bell jars for global culture.

I’ve never hewn very close to the straight and narrow as far as speculative fiction goes.  I have a low boredom threshold, and I get restless writing within a single genre, something which has probably cost me in commercial terms as publishers want you to stick with one thing to gain traction within a market.  Believe it or not, Generation Loss actually started out as a contemporary fantasy novel called Crossing the Dream Meridian.  I got a hundred or so pages of that written, and it just wasn’t working.  I tried reconfiguring it as a straightforward horror novel.  That didn’t work either.

I’m not sure how it was that I decided to recast it as noir, but I’ve always loved noir film and some of my favorite novels are contemporary noir novels — Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source, Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow, Kerstin Ekman’s Blackwater. For a long time I’d had it in the back of my head that I’d like to attempt a psychological thriller — when I first saw Silence of the Lambs I thought, Hmm, now that’s something I could do.  So I kept all the basic elements of Dream Meridian — the characters, the remote Maine setting, the protagonist from away who’s stuck on an island — and rewrote it as noir.

Obscure fun fact: one template for both Dream Meridian and Generation Loss is Michael Powell’s classic film “I Know Where I’m Going.”  I threw Powell’s “Peeping Tom” into the mix and bam — there was Cass Neary.

Q: Another trend is mysteries set in northern latitudes. Both of your Cass Neary books climax in very cold places. What draws you to them?

A: Since childhood I’ve had a lifelong love of what W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis term “northernness,” that brooding sense of mystery and adventure and threat that you get from the cold remote desolate places on the Earth.  I’ve still never read Stieg Larsson’s books or seen any of their film adaptations.  I’d never even heard of him till after Generation Loss was published and people told me it reminded them of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (nearly everyone said they preferred GenLoss: no lectures on the Swedish economic system!).

But as a kid I love the Icelandic sagas and Norse myth, and many of the earliest stories I wrote when I was eight or ten years old were dark, set in the north woods, or secondary worlds that resembled them. I’m just drawn to something in those landscapes — I find them incredibly beautiful yet also sinister.  I have a friend who owns an island downeast, and the first time I visited it, more than a decade ago, I knew I’d set a novel there.  I had the same feeling when I first visited Finland and Iceland.  Both places remind me of Maine in a lot of ways — gorgeous countryside; self-sufficient economies that once relied on fishing and farming and now rely heavily on tourism; killingly long dark winters where people self-medicate with alcohol.  Iceland’s tragic economic meltdown was like Maine’s collapse on a much larger and catastrophic scale.  I visited Iceland both before and after the collapse, and I was so distressed and enraged by what happened there — I wanted someone to pay for the havoc wrought on an entire country by a handful of greedy people.  That was the genesis of Available Dark.

Q: What were your influences from the mystery world? What mystery writers do you enjoy most?

A: Well, the writers I mentioned above — I’ve probably read Tapping the Source about ten times. (My 22-year-old daughter got a Tapping the Source tattoo after reading the book, and so did her father — I’d turned him on to it when it was first published.)  I’ve read Smilla’s Sense of Snow several times — such a beautiful book.  Same with Blackwater. I love Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels — I’m pretty much a sucker for sociopaths.  I like Yrsa Sigurdadottir — I’m reading her new novel and it’s great — and Arnaldur Indridason.  Henning Mankell, Kate Atkinson, Ian Rankin, Louise Welch, Tess Gerritsen, Paul Doiron.  Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, David Peace.

For whatever reason, I’ve always been drawn to European writers. They’re writing is often more fatalistic and less reliant on the great American trope of redemption.  Atkinson is fantastic — I love how she just cuts her characters loose and follows them. I liked Peace’s Red Riding books — no happy endings there!

Q: Cass Neary is such an intriguing character. How much of her comes from your life?

I knew the early NYC and DC punk scenes well — I skated on the edge for some years, but was very fortunate never to fall through.  I’ve often said that Cass is me if I’d had my moral and emotional brakelines cut in 1979 and gone off a cliff. I didn’t, but it’s easy and kind of cathartic for me to channel all that dark energy.  I know about photography from working at the Smithsonian in the 1970s-1980s, when I spent a lot of time (much of it off the clock) in a darkroom.  I’m a music geek, so I loved feeding all that rock and roll and black metal stuff into the books.

And Cass’s wiseass sensibility is definitely mine.  Everyone in my family shares a macabre sense of humor — Hand family gatherings inevitably end with us around the dining room table, sharing stories of cannibalism and shark attacks.

Q: In Generation Loss Cass deals with the sixties generation and in Available Dark it’s the post-punk black metal crowd. What’s next for her?

A: In Flash Burn I’m sending her to London, where she’ll touch down amidst riots and general chaos.  Over the last sixteen years, I’ve gotten to know North London pretty well, especially Camden Town, which is where Amy Winehouse lived and sang before her tragic death last year.  So I’m going to have a character who’s a bit of an homage to Winehouse, along with another who’s a tip of the top hat to the late great flaneur Sebastan Horsley. Think 70s glam rock survivors and 21st c techno/house/ambient/electronic/etc.  CCTVs are omnipresent in London, so writing murders that aren’t captured on video is a challenge, but a cool one.  I spend all my time there looking for places that aren’t monitored by CCTV.

Q: There always seems to be a tension in mystery books between the demands of a self-contained novel and an installment in a series. How do you achieve a balance between the two and do you find a different dynamic in mystery and fantasy?

A: Most of my earlier novels are stand-alone works, except for the first three SF books — I found I didn’t have a knack for, or the interest in, sustaining a SF series.  I do have a few characters, like Balthazar Warnick,  who show up in different works as cameos.

Mystery as a genre seems to be more character-driven — you can have an Inspector Poirot, a Maigret, a Rebus or Tom Ripley, set them down wherever you want and basically see where they go.  In Cass’s case, you get to see where she goes off the rails.  She’s a classic outsider with a specialized gift — her ability to assess photographs and to recognize genius in certain artistic works — and her loner status, in a perverse way, gives her access to worlds she might not normally be able to enter, like those inhabited by art collectors.  She moves in that shadowy interzone inhabited by drug users, drug dealers and various types of artists, and that’s a floating world — anywhere you go in the world, you’re going to find those people.

So I feel (I hope) that will keep both her and me on our toes — the fact that she’s got to be constantly on the move, like a shark.

I have two more Cass Neary novels firmly in mind, Flash Burn and a book tentatively titled Negative Space.  Each is progressively darker than the one before.  After that we’ll see.

Q: Esoteric rituals and the return of the pagan are recurring themes in your work. Would you say you’re more apprehensive or fascinated at the prospect of the archaic breaking out in the contemporary world?

A: I’m fascinated by it.  I don’t believe that eldritch gods or the like are ever going to actually appear (any more than I believe in the Rapture), but I’m intrigued by people who do.  As a lapsed Catholic, I’m fascinated by the notion of belief: how and why do people continue to believe in something despite any evidence to the contrary?

In the case of pagan and archaic belief systems, I’m even more intrigued —  in many cases we have physical evidence of their beliefs, artifacts and the like, but no written record.  So how do you recreate what those people actually believed in?  Their worlds and thought systems would probably be utterly alien to us.  I love the challenge of attempting to imagine how someone from such a different culture would think and breathe.  I got my undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology, and my favorite part of my studies was working as a participant observer in the field, embedding myself in a group then doing ethnographic interviews and analyzing the results.  It was a great experience for becoming a novelist.

Q:  Your next book is classified as a young adult novel, but so was Illyria which was equally suitable for not so young adults. tell us about Radiant Days.

A: Illyria was originally written and published as an adult novel in the UK, so Radiant Days is my first full-length effort at a YA novel.  There was a long learning curve.   I had trouble getting the voice down, and at my editor’s suggestion I made Merle, the contemporary protagonist, eighteen years old.  Which is roughly the same age as various characters in my adult novels.

Arthur Rimbaud, the other protagonist, was a challenge — how do you write a novel about someone who’s a bona fide genius, one of the greatest and most influential poets of all time, not to mention someone whose personal and artistic history has been covered by many far more experienced writers than myself?  Despite reading everything I could in both English and French, I’m not a Rimbaud scholar; I wanted to write a novel that young people would read, while exposing them to the work of someone who reached his creative peak at nineteen, and wrote some of his most famous work while only sixteen or seventeen.

So I have Arthur and Merle meet up in 1978, when Merle is a brilliant but troubled graffiti artist living on the streets (think of a lesbian Basquiat).  Their cross-time encounter is engineered by a mysterious and iconic guitarist who is himself homeless, and loosely inspired by the late Bob Stinson of the Replacements.  Which makes this one of the very few novels to feature avatars of Rimbaud, Basquiat AND the Replacements.

Think of it as “Before Sunrise,” with a time-traveling Arthur Rimbaud and a contemporary lesbian graffiti artist wandering the streets of DC and Paris.

Q: As a contemporary of yours, another thing I really enjoy about your work is that i get all the cultural references. Do you feel, as I do, that our “blank generation” has gotten shortchanged in popular culture?

A: That is a GREAT question.  That was the impetus for Generation Loss — I looked around and realized that my generation had somehow become this lost generation.  We suffered so many losses over the decades — first drugs and alcohol, then the ravages of the AIDS epidemic.  And the lifestyle choices of people who came of age at that time cast a long shadow over their later lives — speed and cocaine can cause longterm heart damage, among other things.

I felt that no one was telling their story.  Punk was co-opted by the media and mass culture, as every youth movement is, though it’s actually had a longer shelf life than some, and a wider influence.  You can draw a through-line from the black-clad beats to the punks to the Goths and on through black metal and every permutation of disaffected youth for the last forty years.

But so many of the people who were alive in that first wave of the early to mid-1970s and early 1980s are dead now;  musicians and artists and writers and fans.  I’ve lost many friends, some recently.  They lived hard and a lot of them died hard, in some cases on the streets where they’d ended up. They were a lost generation: they were my generation.

It gave a real urgency to my writing Cass’s story.  I felt that I wanted to bear witness to that time without romanticizing it, but still recognizing that there was a genuine dark beauty not just in the work created then but in the lives led and even the original nihilistic, nothing-to-lose impetus and aesthetic that fueled those lives — mine included.

Q: I love the story about how your life was changed by hearing Patti Smith’s music. How do you try to keep the spirit of those days alive in your life and work?

A: Patti Smith is a great role model.  She triumphed as an artist, became a wife and mother, remained true to her friend and soulmate, and never seems to have compromised what she believes in, as both an artist and someone with a family — her late husband; her children; her siblings and parents and friends and bandmates.  I think it’s important to remember that what you do on your home turf is at least as important as what you do in your art.

I try to maintain a certain integrity in what I write.  I set the bar very high for myself, and I often fail, and I’m hard on myself for failing.  But I try again and attempt, in Beckett’s words, to fail better.  I write slowly and made the decision a few years ago not to write anything that I didn’t have my heart in 100%.  So no more media tie-in work.  I do a lot of teaching these days, which is one way to pass on the creative flame and encourage new writers.  And I’m an activist on a very local, grassroots level — I try to be involved in issues in our very small community here in rural Maine.

A lot of early punk’s energy and rage was fueled by disillusionment — the realization that the hopeful visions of the 1960s weren’t going to come to pass, and that so many elements of the hippie movement were immediately swallowed then disgorged by media and corporate interests — flower children singing “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.”

And god knows, there’s still enough disillusionment to go around.  I keep waiting for today’s kids to get riled up about the political situation and the world they’re going to inherit — riled up in a positive way, not in the rioting that we saw in the UK last year.

I still listen to the music from that time.  I listen to a lot of other stuff, too, but I still get goosebumps when I hear the opening guitar solo to “Sweet Jane” on Rock & Roll Animal.

Q: Having dug out my old copy of Waking the Moon and seeing your author photo I have to ask you one more question. When did you get your tattoos and does each one have a special significance?

I wanted to get a tattoo since I was nineteen, when a boyfriend had a tattoo of a small gold ring with the letters PRB inside it, for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.  But people didn’t get tattoos then, even guys — you just never saw them except on old men.

I got my first one in 2001, right after Joey Ramone died.  That was when it really hit me, that my generation was disappearing before my eyes.  I thought What the hell am I waiting for?

So I went to a brilliant artist here in Maine (she’s since hung up her needle gun, alas) and asked for a ring of fire on my upper right arm.  It’s from Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss, the song “The Summation,” which is probably the best song ever written about the struggle to be an artist — its central metaphor is of passing through a wall of fire.

The “Too Tough to Die” tattoo that covers my upper left arm is Cass’s, and I got it for the same reason she got hers.

On my calf I have the Dionysian figure of the Boy in the Tree, who recurs throughout much of my work.  It’s based on an illustration from the Japanese edition of my novel Winterlong.  It’s now also an homage to the dear friend who inspired the Boy in the Tree and Illyria, among other stories, and who died suddenly last year.  He loved the tattoo, so I’m glad he got to see it.

The final tattoo is the most elaborate — it covers my lower left arm.  It’s a quote from Rimbaud, set against a pattern of entwined vines and flowers on a background of flames, and took several months to do.  (It’s actually still not quite finished.)  The verse is from Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell”; it’s in French, but here’s an English translation:

My eternal soul
Seize your desire
Despite the night
And the day on fire.

It’s a reminder to stay the course with my life and work.

Interview of Elizabeth Hand by Jamie Agnew.

In her first appearance, Generation Loss, Elizabeth Hand’s protagonist Cassandra Neary provides this memorable self-portrait:

I caught a glimpse of myself in a dark window: a gaunt Valkyrie holding a spear taller than I was, teeth bared in a drunken grimace and eyes bloodshot from some redneck teenager’s ADD medication.

“Hey ho, let’s go,” I said, and went.

Neary has many of the qualities more expected in a male noir protagonist. She’s violent, bad tempered, substance abusing, cynical, haunted, corrupt, but yet able to tell the difference between right and wrong at the crucial moment and equally able to act decisively on that knowledge.

Above all she’s a survivor, who despite her punk motto No Future, has found herself stubbornly living on. A devastating rape and the collapse of the New Wave into the Reagan years have left her barely functional, working (unhappy wretch!) in a bookstore, unable to connect with anyone or anything.

In Hand’s second mystery Available Dark, Cassie having to some small extent achieved redemption, not to mention cash, from her first adventure, finds the past reaching out to shove her into a perilous future. Her signal artistic achievement, a long out of print book of photographs called Dead Girls, a punk era chronicle somewhere between Cindy Sherman and Weegee, has developed an underground life of its own, becoming a sort of loadstone that attracts morbid, artistic and dangerous people into her life. On the strength of its continuing reputation she’s asked by a series of shady middlemen to travel to Helsinki in order to evaluate some one of a kind photographs being sold by a decadent, former superstar fashion photographer.

At the same time another powerful force compels her northward as she’s anonymously mailed her own old photograph of Quinn, the man described as “the only person I ever really cared about,” who she hasn’t seen in decades, the envelope postmarked Iceland.

She consents to embark on the grand tour of cold, stopping in Finland to be floored by the pictures, which, though morbidly suggesting serial murder and ritual killing are also stunning works of art. She then surreptitiously flies to Iceland on her employer’s dime, hoping to find Quinn.

It’s in Iceland that both the writing and the action crank up. Everyone involved with the Helsinki photographs seem to be getting killed, and when she finally encounters Quinn and his own group of shady associates, it’s obvious they’re also knee deep in the whole bloody affair.

Hand’s descriptions of Iceland are especially powerful – a country whose economy is as bleak as its landscape, a noir world of paganism and black metal where no one can be trusted and the very climate is deadly. It all ends in a violent resolution in the middle of frigid nowhere which reveals who the real criminals of the contemporary world are.

Available Dark is as lean and fast moving as its protagonist, but with a strong, meditative ballast and a stark view of the nature and even attractiveness of evil. The northern setting, though undoubtedly trendy these days, is an integral part of the book, the end result leaving the reader anticipating another visit from Cassandra Neary.  (Jamie)

For pure entertainment value, Rhys Bowen simply cannot be beat.  Whether it’s her light and funny Lady Georgie mysteries set in the 30’s, or her “flagship” series featuring Molly Murphy, her skill as a storyteller is almost unmatched.  I’d compare her to such different authors as Harlan Coben or Michael Connelly, in that once you pick up a Rhys Bowen book, if you’re very lucky, you won’t have to look up until you’re finished with it.

Molly, for the uninitiated, is an Irish immigrant who came through Ellis Island in the first book, which was set in 1900.  Now ten books into the series, Molly has had her own private detective agency (though the fate of her agency is up in the air), and she has at last married her long time suitor, New York City police detective Daniel Sullivan (see the last book, Bless the Bride).  Daniel has asked Molly, now that they are married, to settle down and give up her private detective agency.  So far his plan isn’t working out too well.

Molly defines the word inquisitive so she’s a natural detective, one who has worked with Daniel in the past on other cases.  The books have taken Molly all over New York – working undercover in a shirtwaist factory, to Chinatown, as an assistant to Harry Houdini, and many other places.  Her best friends, a gay couple who live across the street, Gus and Sid (they are female), bear a striking resemblance to Nancy Drew’s buddies Bess and George.  And Molly is very much a grown up Nancy Drew, with far more shadings, naturally.

In this outing Bowen takes the tropes of both the haunted house book and the locked room mystery to create a very uncomfortable honeymoon atmosphere for the newlywed Sullivans.  Because their honeymoon had gotten derailed they have taken up the seemingly generous offer of the powerful New York City Alderman, Brian Hanna, to stay in the guest cottage on his Newport estate.  While the Sullivans are staying in the guest cottage – one which very much reminds Molly of the cottages of her native Ireland – the rest of the Alderman’s family, squabbles and all, have appeared in the main house.

When Molly and Daniel arrive she thinks she seems a ghostly face in one of the main house windows, an idea Daniel scoffs at.  As their honeymoon progresses, the Alderman, not unsurprisingly, turns up dead, and Daniel develops a very serious case of pneumonia.  While I knew in my heart that Bowen had probably not painstakingly created the vivid character of Daniel over the course of ten books only to kill him off, she is so good at what she does that I was literally on the edge of my seat, worried about the outcome of Daniel’s illness.  I’ll just say anxious tears were shed.

Meanwhile, of course, this gives Molly free reign to investigate the mysteries of both the ghostly face in the window and the Alderman’s death.  Hanna’s family is somewhat hostile to the Sullivans and fairly dysfunctional.  The housekeeper also seems to be hiding something, though she’s sometimes friendly, she’s also sometimes standoffish.

Bowen is truly a classic mystery writer in that the story she has created is actually mysterious.  There are several threads, many puzzling ones, and there are fair clues, red herrings and a fairly laid out solution to the crime.  She’s also able to create vivid characters, not just the ones of Molly and Daniel, but all of the Hanna family, Daniel’s mother, and Gus and Sid, are completely realized.  Last time Ms. Bowen visited Aunt Agatha’s  I mentioned that I was sad that I had raced through the book so quickly – with a disgusted look, she mentioned how many months it had taken her to write it.  Well, so sorry, Ms. Bowen, but when you’re this good at what you do, readers are going to inhale your stories, just like I do.  As I’ve said to many a customer, happy reading.

Thanks to Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, the axis of the mystery universe has shifted.  Where American readers used to feel as familiar with the streets of London and the interiors of British country houses as with the streets of New York or LA, they can now feel familiar with the streets of Copenhagen, Stockholm, and many other Scandinavian locations. It’s been a slow seepage, but our international fiction section had to claim its own fixture a few years ago, with steady sellers like Cara Black, Colin Cotterill, Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbø and Arnaldur Indridason taking pride of place, and with the advent of the Stieg Larsson trilogy (those books actually have their very own special store location) the lust for foreign fiction has just exploded.

This book, The Last Good Man, doesn’t really have any of the artistic trappings some of the other international offerings have – Karin Fossum’s prose is exquisite, for example – but what it does have is a good old thriller structure that will be familiar to readers anywhere.  And what, really, is more optimistic than the thriller?  The hero or heroine, through their proactive behavior, saves either the planet or the missing/endangered family member/innocent victim at the last turn of the twisty plot.  This one is of the save the planet variety, and it couldn’t be harder to put down.  I enjoyed the novelty of the setting (this is Copenhagen rather than Stockholm, after all) and I liked the main character, Niels Bentzon, very much.

While the premise is slightly hokey, that just slots this book in with many other compulsively readable thrillers, and it bears more than a slight resemblance to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, though this is a far better and more original novel, in my opinion.  While the book starts out jumping all over the globe – from Beijing to Mumbai to Venice, the work of two policemen is highlighted.

One is a Venetian policeman, Tommaso di Barbara, who has begun linking a series of strange deaths, tied together by an odd tattoo or marking on the backs of the victims.  He has been collecting evidence and trying to present it to his uninterested superior officer, while also dealing with his ailing mother.  Tommaso has never “left the Lagoon” of Venice in his life, and the snips and details of daily Venetian life are fascinating.  The other policeman is a Copenhagen detective, Niels, who works as a hostage negotiator.  As readers we first meet him in a wonderful scene where he talks down an army vet who is holding his family hostage.  It predisposes the reader to like him, while showing, not telling, his character.  It’s very effectively done.

As the other parts of the story begin to slot together, the picture becomes clearer and tighter, eventually focusing almost totally on Niels, who, like Tommaso, has left Copenhagen but in fact has a pathological aversion to travel, complete with physical manifestations.  This keeps him far apart from his wife in South Africa, there on a year long job assignment.  His superior, like Tommaso’s, is skeptical of the cases when presented together, especially as the only common thread seems to be the fact that all of the victims were doing “good” in one way or another (so the victims are nurses, doctors, social workers, priests, monks, etc.)  Along with the weird tattoo on their backs, nothing else seems to be linking them together.

Niels’ boss, distracted by the climate summit in Copenhagen (with an appearance by Obama) sends him off on what he feels is the harmless and pointless task of warning all the “good” men in Copenhagen of possible danger, as one of the other clues points to a possible terrorist from Yemen.  As Niels makes his rounds, one of the people he encounters is a Rabbi, who shares with him the myth, discussed in the Talmud, of “God’s Righteous Men,” thirty-six good men and women on earth who hold off evil for the rest of us.  Without them, all of us would perish; each generation, they are replenished.

It’s only when Niels meets an astrophysicist who is married to one of the possible “good” men that the parts of the story begin to come together.  The husband has long left the woman, Hannah, who is mourning the death of her only son; what she’s really good at are systems of all kinds.  She sees patterns everywhere, and when she takes a look at the evidence that Niels has gotten from the Venetian policeman, the pattern of the crime begins to make sense.  Following her pattern and the suggestion of the “Thirty-Six” from the Rabbi, they figure out that the killer is up to number thirty-five.  From there on, it’s a race against the clock.

Each discovery is surprising, often original, and well presented.  The author, A.J. Kazinski, is actually two men, one of whom is a filmmaker, and indeed, the book reads a bit like an action film.  One with a bit of a brain and a spiritual twist, but still an action thriller.  Set in Copenhagen, London, or New York, a good thriller is a good thriller, and this is a good one.  I enjoyed the global tour, I loved some of the characters – Niels and Hannah especially – and I enjoyed learning some of the things the authors share as a part of their story, especially the Talmudic myth.  This is a really fun read.

The third book in Michael Stanley’s Detective Kubu series set in Botswana is the best one so far, which is saying a lot.  Stanley’s novels are a complex and nuanced look at Botswana and Southern Africa, combined with a good mystery puzzle and one of the best detectives in contemporary crime fiction.

Let me describe Kubu, and see if he sounds at all familiar to any crime fiction fan:  he’s overweight, doesn’t care, loves food and wine,  is a connoisseur of both, and is a brilliant detective.  While “Michael Stanley”  (actually two charming fellows, Stan Trollip and Michael Sears) discount any resemblance to Nero Wolfe, for any mystery fan, it’s plain to see the kinship between the two detectives.

Where Kubu (the Botswana word for “Hippo”) differs from Nero Wolfe is in his happy and committed homelife.  Also he has no servants. Also he will often and willingly leave home, though never without proper provisions. The snapshots of normal Botswanan family life are one of the strongest parts of  all the novels; in this one Kubu and his wife Joy are adjusting to life with their new daughter, Tumi.

The thing that made this book the strongest in the series, to me, was it’s portrayal of the culture of the African Bushmen, a tribe of tiny men and women who are able to disappear into the desert and regard all parts of life as interconnected: nature, men, animals.  To violate one part is to violate every other part and even yourself.

Africa and modern life are encroaching on the Bushmen.  As it happens, one of Kubu’s old school buddies is a Bushman, the two having bonded over being bullied in school (one for being fat, one for being a tiny member of another culture).  This man says passionately to Kubu:   “But what of the future?…The world is closing in like a pack of hyenas circling.  You can’t seal yourself in a time capsule and hope to escape.”

This passion on the part of Kubu’s old friend comes to light when two Bushmen are arrested for the murder of a government employee out in the Bush.  Kubu steps in and begins to unravel the case, one that leads to an obsessive mining prospector, looking for diamonds.  Like any good detective novelist, Stanley includes red herrings, plot twists, and unexpected developments along with good old fashioned police work and an adventure sequence in the wilds of Africa.

The grounding Stanley gives the novel in the culture of Botswana really makes it special.  The portions relating to the Bushmen and their culture make it sparkle even more – the virtual diamond already discovered by the reader.  Meeting Detective Kubu will likely make anyone want a closer acquaintance.  Here’s to many more novels in this wonderful series.

Every so often someone will come into the store, look around stupefied, and say something along the lines of You mean all these books are mysteries? I usually point out that we could fill several bookstores our size with completely different mysteries, and the truth is that Aunt Agatha’s, crowded as it may appear, represents a mere drop in the vast ocean of mystery.

Since the defining era of Holmes and Poirot, the big fishes of these waters have been the series sharks, gobbling much of the available attention and profits with the continuing adventures of a single character or school of characters swimming their way through a number of books. But there are other currents in the genre, rising from the dark depths of the ghost story and the gothic, solitary self-enclosed novels where the seemingly placid surface of everyday life grows slowly menacing and powerful riptides and unpredictable squalls appear. In a way stand-alones are even more unpredictable than series books because in the former no character is guaranteed survival in order to play a part in a future installment – anyone can be killed – or be a killer.

Such a creature is Wesley Stace’s excellent Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer. The tale of an early 20^th century composer, the eponymous Jessop, who, egged on by the narrator, Leslie Shepherd, a music critic, cuts a controversial and revitalizing path through the world of English music. The evocation of a certain time and social strata is masterful, full of skillful observation and sharply etched characters, but even as I was irresistibly drawn in I wondered, as I often do when presented with a “literary” mystery, if it was in fact a mystery at all. But the foreshadowing  implied by Jessold’s obsession with gory English folk songs and the notorious Renaissance composer and murderer Carlo Gesualdo soon turns very shadowy indeed.

Stace makes enthralling use of material that, let’s face it, sounds a little stodgy. Jessold is a true musical genius, calculating yet abandoned, willing to do whatever it takes to find inspiration and success. The not so good Shepherd is more the typically repressed English type, cleverly and coldly pulling strings, attempting to manipulate Jessold, the press, public opinion and even his own beautiful, enigmatic wife, until everything tangles into something that more resembles a noose. As the narrative’s perspective deepens, the horrific crime that’s almost a given throughout the story begins to assume a different and quite unexpected complexion.

Wesley Stace (better known in some circles by his stage name John Wesley Harding) weaves themes of adultery, murder, betrayal and self-destruction throughout with the assurance of a great composer, maintaining high literary quality while still affording a great read. The whole effect is rather like Ruth Rendell in Barbara Vine mode, a slow and powerful build up capped with a climax of swift, shocking yet somehow inevitable revelation.

I admit I’m more than a little late on this one – it’s a paperback original that came out in February 2011, but I’m very glad not to have missed it entirely. Had I read it when published it would have ended up on our best of the year list, and, even so, I don’t think I’ll read too many better books in the immediate future.

Buttons?  What kind of interesting or even passable novel could be written about buttons?  Quite an entertaining one, as it turns out, by old pro Kylie Logan, who readers may also know as Casey Daniels or Miranda Bliss.  The premise of this cozy is that the central character is the owner of a brand spanking new shop specializing in all kinds of antique and collectible buttons.

Set in Chicago, the brisk pace of the story seems to fit the Windy City quite well, as Logan opens her story with a gigantic bang: when Josie Giancola goes in to open her new button shop, she’s assaulted by two large, ski mask wearing men, who throw her to the ground and sprint away after having ravaged her shop.  As she’s left t regard the wreckage, picking up buttons she’d meticulously catalogued , she’s sure the men are tied to her ex with a gambling problem.

Some parts of the story were predictable, I’ll admit – when she meets up with the rumpled police detective with whom she’d had a disaster of a blind date, there seems to be only direction for that to go – but the rest of the story is buoyant and entertaining.  As Josie gets her shop thrown back together in anticipation of the arrival of a huge Hollywood star looking for antique buttons for her wedding dress, the stage is set for another layer of storytelling.

The Hollywood star arrives with many cowed assistants, followed by the paparazzi, and before she knows it, Josie’s shop has attained a certain notoriety, one cemented when said star is found dead in her shop a few days later, and the whole puzzle has a clever tie to buttons.

I give any cozy author kudos when they can draw their amateur sleuth believably into a detection story line using their character’s expertise, and Logan does this with real aplomb, using a rare handmade boxwood button as a clue.  The passion of the collector (and this could apply to any type of collector) is perfectly portrayed as Josie loses some of her common sense hunting for the source of the boxwood button, and perhaps a clue to the killer of the actress.

There’s just enough detail about buttons and button collecting to give the story some extra snap, but Logan is such a natural storyteller that it’s more of a cherry on top of the cupcake.  This is a book you’ll zip through with great enjoyment, knowing a little bit more about buttons than when you started.