November Publications

In Breaking and Entering: An Inspector Ghote Mystery, the prolific H.R.F. Keating (Doing Wrong) puts another notch in the belt of his popular hero, Bombay Inspector Ganesh Ghote. When Ghote is assigned to a series of jewelry thefts instead of a high-profile murder, his investigation might lead him to the murderer. (St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne, $23.95 272p ISBN 0-312-26952-8)

Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Mickey Spillane, Lisa Scottoline and Stephen King are just a few of the talents included in A Century of Great Suspense Stories, edited by Jeffery Deaver (The Bone Collector). These 36 stories, originally published in the likes of Black Mask and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, will delight mystery lovers. (Penguin Putnam/Berkley Prime Crime, $29.95 620p ISBN 0-425-18192-8)

Barry Shannon's (The Bold Stroke) The Sly Pass, second in the Revelations St. Jones trilogy, finds PI St. Jones back on the job after a year's hiatus at his Sierra Nevada foothills home, the Institute for Perpetual Indulgence, where he was recovering from the brutal murder of a girlfriend by a Colombian drug lord. Investigating a case in Miami, St. Jones hooks up with former acquaintances, and drugs, sex and danger abound as he realizes now might be his chance to avenge his dead lover. (TripleTree [www.tripletreepub.com], $14.95 paper 320p ISBN 0-9666272-3-7)

David Peace (Nineteen Seventy Seven) offers Nineteen Eighty, the third installment of his acclaimed historical suspense series, the Red Riding Quartet. The Yorkshire Ripper is still on the loose, the residents are terrified and ever-vigilant out-of-town police officer Peter Hunter steps up to the plate, further angering the corrupt and complacent Yorkshire cops. (Serpent's Tail [www.serpentstail.com], $24 382p ISBN 1-85242-683-7)

It's WWII-era England, and amateur supersleuth Jane Amanda Edwards pokes her astute nose in, again, when an arsonist strikes the defense plant where her brother works, and murders the owner. The police captain, her brother Arthur (who's a suspect) and just about everyone else in town defers to Amanda's bull-dozing intervention, and sure enough she's soon hot on the trail of a foreign plot in this reprint of Charlotte Murray Russell's (Cook Up a Crime) 1942 The Message of the Mute Dog. (Rue Morgue [PO Box 4119, Boulder, Colo. 80306], $14 paper 156p ISBN 0-915230-43-7)

Michael Z. Lewin (Family Planning) presents 21 criminal plots, including the Edgar-nominated title story, in The Reluctant Detective and Other Stories. "Danny" Quayle, the Lunghi family (Brits of Italian background), Rover the canine detective and Indiana police Lieutenant Leroy Powder are some of the featured investigators. (Crippen & Landru [www.crippenlandru.com], $17 paper 246p ISBN 1-885941-62-5)

Ron Goulart's debut collection, Adam and Eve On a Raft: Mystery Stories, follows two advertising industry men with wildly different approaches to the respective murder cases they stumble upon. Scrib Merlin, a copywriter who wants to be a comedian, decodes the strange final words of various murder victims but doesn't necessarily improve his own lot; and the anonymous California Adman, finding he's unable to dissuade some murderous acquaintances from their ghastly business, instead describes their behaviors. (Crippen & Landru, $17 214p ISBN 1-885941-58-7)

Jessica Parkerson, wife of a prominent Malibu defense lawyer, receives several threatening anonymous phone calls, precursors to terrifying acts of vengeance perpetrated by an embittered, twisted man. The lives of Jessica, her husband and their friends are upended and endangered in the psychological thriller Still Waters Run Deep, Wendy DeVere-Austin's first book. (Harlan [www.harlanpublishing.com], $21.95 232p ISBN 0-9676528-4-7)

Eminent mystery authors and editors Ed Gorman, Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff present Murder Most Feline: Cunning Tales of Cats and Crime, an anthology of stories in which cats engender and/or help solve mysteries. Contributors include Dulcy Brainard, Shirley Rousseau Murphy and Jeremiah Healy. Readers will think it's the cat's meow. (Cumberland, $14.95 paper 256p ISBN 1-58182-215-4)