Jane Casey: After the Fire
Jane Casey has developed into one of the more reliable police procedural writers around. This is a bravura effort from her, seven books into her series about Detective Maeve Kerrigan, the vagaries of her love life, and her fellow detective, the irascible Josh Derwent. Tackling a fire that breaks out in a housing project (or as the Brits call them, Housing Estates, a fancier term for the same thing), Casey highlights various people who live on the estate, couched mostly in heartbreaking terms. Things only get worse after the fire.
This is one of those books that, as you read it, you know is a pinnacle for the author. It’s one of the best things Michael Harvey has written (which is saying a lot) and it may be the best thing he will ever write. It’s set in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston in 1971 and beyond, and focuses on two boys, Kevin and Bobby. Kevin is the secret pride of his family – a baseball star, an honor student who has tested out of Brighton to go to the best school in Boston, the Latin School – while Bobby is a slightly rough character who has been taken in by Kevin’s grandma, the family matriarch who owns a taxi business.
Q: You now have a very long running and successful series set in Paris, though you yourself are American. Can you talk about your affinity for France, and the reasons for setting your books there? 
This is the first one of Laukkanen’s books I’ve read – the subject interested me – and now I know what to say when someone has read every Harlan Coben title. Give Owen Laukkanen a try. This is a thriller with a heart and a brain, a difficult combination to resist. Laukkanen’s series characters are Minneapolis FBI agents Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere, and Stevens is caught off guard early on when one of his daughter’s classmates commits suicide.
This is a noir novel coiled inside the confines of a cozy one, as Lehane explicates layers of family ties and splits. He opens the book with a gruesome shooting inside the actual library. Libraries are one of the last remaining sacred spaces in American culture, and it was with a real sense of outrage that I read this passage. Of course, my eagerness to discover whodunnit was all the greater, which is the mark of a clever writer.
Candace Robb returns with a new series set in 1399 York, featuring a true badass, Kate Clifford. Kate has a rich backstory, fleshed out throughout the book while she veers from crisis to crisis. She’s a widow who moved to York from Scotland for safety’s sake, but as York at that time was a hotbed of political intrigue, nowhere is really safe. She’s lost her twin brother who “talks” to her (kind of like Hamish in Charles Todd’s Ian Rutledge books) and she’s looking after two wards, her dead husband’s bastards, now bereft of their mother. It’s an uneasy alliance.
One of the things crime novels excel at is investigating morality. The most common investigation in a more or less classic mystery involves absolute right and wrong. A noir novel tends to investigate the trickier edges of morality, as Steve Hamilton does brilliantly in his new novel, The Second Life of Nick Mason. The book opens with Nick walking out of prison, always a good start to any book.
Allison Leotta is the author of the Anna Curtis series, about a DC-based U.S. Attorney who specializes in sex crimes. The first three books were set in DC; last year, Leotta brought Anna back to Michigan (A Good Killing) and in her new novel, Anna is in a town that sounds oh-so-similar to Ann Arbor. Leotta, a native Michigander who also worked as a sex crimes prosecutor in DC, brings real life chops to this wonderful and engaging series. I read her new book, The Last Good Girl, in one sitting, and was thrilled she agreed to an interview.
The opening of Susanna Calkins’ new book is a real knockout – her central character, Lucy Campion, stumbles across what she thinks is a ghost rising out of London’s stinky, scary River Fleet as she makes her way home. The year is 1667 and Lucy is relieved to find the apparition is a woman, not a ghost, but the woman is weak, confused, and covered in welts and cuts. She takes her to the the nearest doctor.
This book marks the welcome return of Hellman’s original series character, filmmaker Ellie Foreman. While it’s been a good long while since Ellie’s debut, there haven’t been enough books about her as the prolific Hellman has chosen to explore other characters and other times and places along with writing about her signature character. I was more than glad to rejoin Ellie in suburban Chicago, as she’s hard at work on a project for a company that makes all kinds of aircraft. They are trying to appeal to the wider public and Ellie’s videos, meant to be posted on social media, are supposed to be a kind of a friendly gateway for their customers.