Harper Collins

Cara Hunter: The Whole Truth

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DI Adam Fawley #5

This popular UK series is being released in chunks stateside.  With the release of The Whole Truth, books 3 through 5 are now available.  If the rest of them are anything like this one, sign me up – if Harlan Coben wrote a police series it might be something like this insanely readable and provoking book.  Hunter, in golden age style, provides a precis of the characters at the beginning to aid the reader coming late to the series in getting up to speed. It remained a helpful reference as I sorted characters mentally. read more

February Book Club: Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

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Join us via zoom for our February book club at 2 p.m. Sunday, February 18.  Please message me at store (at) auntagathas.com for a zoom link.  If you’ve joined us in the past, it’s the same link.  We’ll be reading a top 10 pick of mine for 2023, Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers.  This charming, funny, clever book has also been nominated for and Edgar Award in the Best Paperback Original category.  You can read my review here, and below is the publisher’s description.  You can also read my Mystery Scene interview with Ms. Sutanto here. See you in February! read more

Jesse Sutanto: Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

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This charming, hilarious, sweet and beautiful book is a real breath of fresh air.  Vera Wong owns a tiny and underappreciated tea store in San Francisco.  She’s a widow, and her son is a busy professional, but that does not stop Vera from texting him instructions about sleep, food, and anything else she feels is important.  The tea shop is dusty and lonely and most days Vera just has one customer, an older man who leaves after 10 minutes to get back to his wife with Alzheimer’s.

Then one morning (very very early, as Vera likes to get up at 4:30), Vera comes downstairs – she lives above the shop – to start out on her morning walk when she discovers a dead man in the middle of her floor.  She calls the police, but as she waits she decides to make tea for them and to trace the outline of the body with a sharpie.  The police really don’t want her help and don’t seem to take the dead man too seriously.  As Vera is sure it’s murder, she decides to investigate on her own. read more

Rosalind Stopps: A Beginner’s Guide to Murder

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This book was – surprisingly – both charming and touching, along with being a suspenseful caper novel. Three older women – Grace, Daphne and Meg – are sitting in a London coffee shop together when a young, frightened girl lurches in.  She heads for the restroom, and not long after a suspicious man comes in, claiming she’s his daughter.  They tell him they’ve seen nothing and watch him leave, then they immediately scoot out the back, taking the young woman with them.

As the title indicates, these women are beginners in the art of murder, but their target is immediately obvious.  What isn’t obvious are the personalities and characteristics of the women, and the author goes back in time to flesh out each character’s backstory, so the reader can see what shaped each one.  While the three hadn’t really known each other well before the coffee shop incident, they are united in their desire to save the young girl, Nina.  The real heartbreaker of the book is Nina’s story. read more

Jane Casey: The Killing Kind

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This stand alone from Jane Casey is whip smart and terrifying.  I am a big fan of her Maeve Kerrigan series, with its combination of character, complex plotting and nuanced look at police work.  In this standalone, the central character is not a policewoman but a barrister, youngish Ingrid Lewis, happily involved with Mark.

As Ingrid goes through her court routine in the opening scene, which sets up not only the legal surround but some of the relationships and events that carry through the book, she lends a colleague her umbrella.  As she’s hurrying out later to another case, she sees that the umbrella borrower has been a victim of a hit and run.  As she is interviewed by a police officer about her colleague, she mentions a stalker from her past.  She’s afraid the man saw her umbrella and pushed the wrong woman under a bus. read more

Anthony Horowitz: Moonflower Murders

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This book will be published on November 10, 2020.

This is every bit as delicious a reading experience as Magpie Murders (2018).  I really wasn’t sure how Horowitz was going to manage a second book, as several of the main characters in the first one are dead or heading that way at the end of the novel.  But Anthony Horowitz is one of the smartest writers working right now, and this sequel to his (in my opinion) classic Magpie Murders is every bit as good as the first one.

The main character is editor Susan Ryeland, who has given up her successful career to head to Crete and help her partner run a small hotel there.  It’s not going well.  The hotel is having trouble and it’s a mountain of work, so when Pauline and Lawrence Treherne appear asking for Susan’s help in locating their missing daughter back in England, she readily agrees, especially when they sweeten the pot by offering her £10,000.  She’s tired of Crete, she needs the money, and she takes the offer. read more