William Morrow

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

Alice Henderson: A Blizzard of Polar Bears

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These books – two so far – are a mix of adventure, climate change despair, and appreciation and love of the natural world and the creatures that share the planet with us.  In the first book, Henderson’s protagonist, Dr. Alex Carter, left Boston to study wolverines in Montana.  As that study winds down in book two, she’s delighted to get a call from a colleague, asking her to fill in for her on a polar bear study in Churchill, Manitoba.

Thrilled, Alex jumps at the chance and hops on a plane.  She’s used to solitude and her main points of contact are a buddy who is an actor and her father.  While Churchill would be no one’s idea of the big city, to Alex, it almost is, as she’ll be working at a large center with other scientists.  She’s happy enough to be able to stay in a motel on her own instead of the center’s quarters. read more

Lori Rader-Day: Death at Greenway

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The most towering figure in mystery fiction is Agatha Christie.  She created and influenced countless plots and tropes, and invented iconic detectives.  Surely no mystery writer can set a pen to paper without feeling in her debt.  Re-paying this debt with her impressionistic Death at Greenway is Lori Rader-Day, a writer known for multiple point of view novels and indirect storytelling.  Her style could not be further from Agatha’s, but – there’s still that debt to be paid.

The book is set during WWII at Mrs. Christie’s summer home, Greenway, in Devon.  During the war the Mallowans (for that was Agatha’s married name) lent their house to a war nursery – or to children evacuated from London, cared for by nurses.  Rader-Day has chosen to focus her story on Bridget Kelly, a failed nurse in training, who takes up the war nursery job out of desperation. read more

Book Club: When No One is Watching

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Join our book club on Sunday,  April 18 at 2 p.m. via zoom to discuss Alyssa Cole’s Edgar nominee, When No One is Watching.  All are welcome – message us on facebook or email us at store (at) auntagathas.com for a zoom invitation.  Here’s a precis of the novel:

Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community’s past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block—her neighbor Theo. read more

SJ Bennett: The Windsor Knot

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This book is adorable in the best possible way.  I usually hate it when real people are used as the detective, and in the case of this novel “the detective” is one of the most famous people on the planet, Queen Elizabeth II.  But SJ Bennett has real affection and reverence – in the nicest way – for her majesty and the actual detecting is mostly done by the Queen’s Assistant Private Secretary, Rozie Oshodi, a British Nigerian who shares the Queen’s affection for horses and would do anything for the “boss.” read more

Lauren Willig: Band of Sisters

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This is a slightly different book for Lauren Willig, as it’s more straight up history than romance or mystery.  It’s about a group of women, Smith College alums, graduating right before WWI, who form a relief unit and head to France to help the victims of the war in the French countryside.  They set sail for Paris in the summer of 1917, with ideas of what Paris will be like wildly out of sync with wartime Paris.  One girl is planning to buy her trousseau.

The two central characters are Kate, a scholarship girl at Smith who has been working as a French tutor, and Emmie, a wealthy daughter of a politically active suffragette.  The two had been best friends at Smith – Emmie’s sweet goofiness balanced by Kate’s practicality.  Kate wears a pretty big chip on her shoulder, though, and it often gets in the way of the friendship.  When they arrive in Paris, everything is topsy turvy. read more

Faye Kellerman: The Lost Boys

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I was a devout acolyte of Faye Kellerman’s early Decker and Lazarus books.  The Ritual Bath (1986) is, to me, one of the greatest first mysteries ever.  In it, Peter Decker, an LAPD detective, encounters the orthodox Jewish Rina Lazarus after a rape and murder at her neighborhood mikvah, or ritual bath.  Improbably, the two eventually get married and the series, now 26 books long, is a strong one.  The early books were marked by intensity of character discovery, intensity of violence, and Kellerman’s propulsive narrative skill. read more

Alice Henderson: A Solitude of Wolverines

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This book will be published October 27, 2020.

If this book isn’t the birth of a long running series, I would be stunned.  A definite relative of Nevada Barr’s long running and beloved Anna Pidgeon series, Alice Henderson has created an adventure suspense mystery with a foundation in the natural world.  While Anna Pigeon is a parks ranger, Alex Carter is a biologist who studies endangered species in their dwindling habitats.  Like Anna, however, Alex is definitely a bad ass.

Proving her hand with action scenes, the book opens with Alex attending an event celebrating the saving of a natural habitat within a city.  Her discovery of over a hundred species of birds who called the area home has prompted the city of Boston to create a protected space, upsetting plans for a development project.  Alex is due to be interviewed by a TV reporter – during the interview the two women are shot at and while Alex escapes, she is traumatized by the incident. read more

Sophie Hannah: The Killings at Kingfisher Hill

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Golden age detectives are the perfect characters to provide a continuation of a series.  Nero Wolfe, Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot – all have such well established character traits, and yet do not especially develop or change  – that they can be taken by another writer and made fresh.  Sophie Hannah is obviously familiar with Poirot and obviously loves him, as every reader does, despite his quirks.

Hannah also manages the feat of showing, not telling, Poirot’s cleverness and intelligence as he unravels a tricky case.  Like the great queen of crime herself, Hannah’s unraveling is only tricky from a certain angle, from another (Poirot’s) it’s more straightforward.  The telling is all in the angles.  This is a feat of sheer storytelling power. read more

Susan Allott: The Silence

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This is a very melancholy novel about people who live near each other, yet in isolation, thanks to a profound lack of communication.   It’s set in Australia in the late 60’s, with a portion in the late 90’s.  Two couples live side by side in a new neighborhood, right on the ocean.  Louise and Joe, immigrants from England, live in one house with their daughter, Isla.  Next door are Steve and Mandy, who are childless.  Mandy often looks after Isla.

As the book opens, the adult Isla gets a call from her father, who says the police have been by to discuss Mandy, who had disappeared from the neighborhood many years ago.  The central nugget of suspense in the novel concerns the relationships between the neighbors and between the couples themselves.  What happened in the past that caused Mandy to disappear?  Why would Isla’s father, who seems devoted to his family, have had anything to do with her disappearance? read more