Police

Ann Cleeves: The Dark Wives

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Vera Stanhope #11

This is the eleventh book in Cleeves’ now classic Vera Stanhope series, and as always, the books are a slow burn with a smasher of an ending.  This book begins with an extremely compelling set up:  Vera is called to a local care home where one of the workers has been found murdered and one of the residents, a 14 year old girl, has vanished. Vera and her team aren’t sure whether she’s a suspect or a victim, but she’s 14 and missing, so the hunt is on to locate her.  Vera is under a bit of a cloud – at the end of the last book (The Rising Tide) she’d lost one of her team, Holly.  She’s hired a replacement for the strait-laced, disciplined Holly that’s as different as she can be.  Rosie Bell is brash and likes a drink with the girls after work, but she proves to have some unexpected qualities as the investigation proceeds. read more

Sarah Stewart Taylor: Agony Hill

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Series debut

Sarah Stewart Taylor starts a new series with Agony Hill, following Detective Franklin Warren as he tries to start his life over again. Set in the tiny Vermont town of Bethany in the 1960s, the novel immediately plunges the reader into small town, rustic life, and realities of the struggling farmers there. The characters are rich, and each of the three point of view characters especially get filled out into living, breathing people.

When Warren arrives in town, he gets little time to settle in, or even unpack. Immediately, there is a barn fire up on Agony Hill. At first, it seems like a clear-cut suicide. The victim, Hugh Weber, was always one for making statements, and he was deeply against the highway set to go through town. The barn was latched from the inside, too. With no alternate exits, it seems clear that Weber got drunk and took his ideals a little too far. read more

Michael Bennett: Return to Blood

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Hana Westerman #2

This is an interesting new series.  In the first novel, New Zealand cop Hana Westerman took down a serial killer – and then walks away from the job.  She’s not just a New Zealander, she’s a Māori. The Māori culture is infused into both books, lending them an interest and snap.  She was conflicted in book one: is she a Māori, or is she a cop?  Is she meant to enforce laws against her own people?  In book two she’s back in the tiny seaside town where she grew up, living down the street from her father, Eru. Her daughter, Addison, and her roommate, PLUS 1, are back in Auckland living in Hana’s old place – and to Hana’s annoyance their new puppy is peeing all over her beloved garden. read more

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

Val McDermid: Past Lying

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Karen Pirie #7

This is the series I think of as Val McDermid’s “gentler” series.  Unlike the gruesomeness of the Tony Hill books, these books are more cerebral.  Cerebral in an un-putdownable way. Karen Pirie heads up Edinburgh’s cold case squad – called in Scotland the HCU or Historical Cases Unit.  At the close of the last book, Karen and her squad mate, Daisy, had agreed to go into lockdown together as COVID was just taking its hold on the world.  At that moment, it seemed like lockdown would be a few short weeks, but as this novel opens COVID is in full swing. read more

Sarah Stewart Taylor: A Stolen Child

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Maggie D’Arcy #4

This is one of the strongest entries to date in Sarah Stewart Taylor’s Maggie D’Arcy series.  The first novel, The Mountains Wild, follows the grown Maggie, a detective on Long Island, as she goes back to Ireland to try and discover what happened to her cousin, who went missing years before.  She also reconnects with an old flame, and the next two books follow Maggie as she returns to Ireland on a case and tries to figure out what’s next in her life.  What’s next turns out to be Maggie giving up her job on Long Island, moving in with Conor, her old flame, and taking the class to restart her career as an Irish Guard. read more

Margaret Mizushima: Standing Dead

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Book eight of this strong, enjoyable and very readable series finds Mattie Wray on the precipice of avenging the family trauma that made her childhood an extremely difficult one.  Two books back (Hanging Falls) Mattie at last reunited with her long lost sister; in the previous installment, Striking Range, she reunites with her mother.  As this book opens, she and her sister are heading to Mexico to see their mother together, but when they arrive, she and her husband have vanished.

There’s quite a bit of backstory to wade through at the beginning of the book.  To set the stage for a new reader, Mattie is an officer in the Timber Creek, Colorado, police department, where she works with her K-9 companion, Robo, who always has a key role in the stories.  Mattie is involved (and on the verge of marrying) the local vet, Cole, and his veterinary work and family are part of the strong backstory of the novels that ground the books, making them pack an emotional and relatable punch. read more

Ausma Zehanat Khan: Blackwater Falls

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This book opens with a bang and doesn’t let up.  A young woman is found crucified on the door of the local Evangelical Church in Blackwater Falls, Colorado.  The dead woman, Razan, is a Muslim, which brings in Denver’s Community Response Unit, or CRU, who are called in on cases of racial sensitivity.  The squad is headed by Lt. Seif, but the book centers on one of his officers, Detective Inaya Rahman. The local sheriff is annoyed that his case is being preempted by the CRU and does his best to be unhelpful. read more

Brian Klingborg: Wild Prey

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This is the second novel about Inspector Lu Fei, who works in a small town outside of Harbin, China.  The charm of the first novel, Thief of Souls, were the inner workings of a small town Chinese police department and the lives of the officers, including and especially Lu Fei, who is an incredibly appealing character.  In Wild Prey Lu Fei remains appealing, but the topic Klingborg has chosen to spotlight is far more difficult.  The first novel was a serial killer story; this one focuses on the illegal (and immoral) killing of rare animals for food. read more

Charles Todd: A Game of Fear

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Through now 24 novels, Charles and Caroline Todd have provided their readers with excellence, pure and simple.  The first novel in the Rutledge series, A Test of Wills, is a classic, and the rest of the series, elegiac, carefully plotted, and richly characterized, have all been solid and worthy reads. Sadly, this is the last novel written in collaboration with Caroline Todd, who passed away in 2021. She leaves a huge legacy.

In this novel, set in 1921, Inspector Rutledge has been called in from Scotland Yard to look at a case in Essex.  He goes where he’s sent by his higher ups, but he is puzzled to be looking in a case that seems to involve a ghost.  No-one is better than the Todds at setting up a disturbing premise that sticks in your mind as you read, wondering what’s going on.  Twenty-four books in, I was pretty comfortable waiting to discover the solution. read more