December Publications

In Nancy J. Cohen's fourth bubbly Bad Hair Day mystery, Body Wave, Florida hairdresser Marla Shore agrees to help her snake of an ex-husband, Stan Kaufman, who's been arrested for the murder of his third wife, Kimberly, find the real killer. Cheered on by her heartthrob, homicide detective Dalton Vail, Marla goes undercover as a nurse and discovers that plenty of people, from Stan's jilted second wife to members of the victim's own well-to-do family, had reason to want Kimberly dead. (Kensington, $22 240p ISBN 0-7582-0068-7)

Just in time for Christmas comes Parnell Hall's latest puzzle mystery, A Puzzle in a Pear Tree. In this round, series heroine Cora Felton and her indomitable niece, Sherry Carter, must track down a killer who's been planting clues in acrostics rather than crosswords. The fate of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" pageant in which the two ladies are performing hangs in the balance. (Bantam, $23.95 352p ISBN 0-553-80242-9)

Carola Dunn offers a Christmas-themed crime story in Mistletoe and Murder: A Daisy Dalrymple Mystery, the 11th in her winning series of light whodunits set in the 1920s (after 2001's To Davy Jones Below). Here Daisy and family find their holiday stay at Brockdene, a Cornish estate modeled on the real-life Cotehele, rudely interrupted by murder. (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95 256p ISBN 0-312-28775-5)

Det. Supt. Harriet Martens, last seen in 2000's The Hard Detective, makes a welcome return in British veteran H.R.F. Keating's A Detective in Love. A high-profile investigation into a top tennis star's murder gets even more complicated when Harriet, hitherto a model wife and mother, falls in love with a fellow police officer. (St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne, $23.95 256p ISBN 0-312-29143-4)

The Potato Man, a serial rapist who eluded then—rookie cop Alan Markby 20 years earlier, resurfaces in Ann Granger's A Restless Evil: A Mitchell and Markby Mystery, the 14th installment in this inventive series. Once again, as Markby and lover Meredith Mitchell investigate some human bones uncovered in Stovey Woods, the author demonstrates her skill at updating the traditional English village murder mystery. (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95 256p ISBN 0-312-30655-5)

When three-year-old Emilia Troy goes missing in Susan Kelly's third dark British police procedural, Little Girl Lost: A Gregory Summers Mystery, Superintendent Summers has to contend with not only the obvious suspect, a social worker and neighbor of the girl, but also a figure out of his painful personal past, Chief Inspector Megan Davies. (Allison & Busby, $24.95 282p ISBN 0-7490-0533-5)

The fifth book in Crippen & Landru's Lost Classics series, Christianna Brand's The Spotted Cat and Other Mysteries from Inspector Cockrill's Casebook, edited by Tony Medawar, gathers all nine previously published short stories to feature the wizened, birdlike Kent police inspector, plus one tale and a three-act play heretofore unpublished. In his scholarly introduction, Medawar makes a cogent case for why Brand, the pseudonym of Mary Christianna Milne Lewis (1907—1988), is long overdue for revival. (Crippen & Landru [www.crippenlandru.com], $29 224p ISBN 1-932009-00-0; $19 paper -01-9)

Five Star offers five story collections from some top writers: The Scent of Spiced Oranges and Other Stories, by Les Roberts, author of The Irish Sports Pages (Forecasts, July 15) and other Milan Jacovich mysteries (Five Star, $25.95 195p ISBN 0-7862-4331-7); The Hard Luck Club, by Edgar winner Doug Allyn, who admits in his intro that "Writing about heroes is easy.... Writing about losers is a lot more fun" ($25.95 222p -4332-5); Shamus, Macavity and Anthony nominee Janet Dawson's Scam and Eggs, which includes two unpublished tales ($25.95 213p -4838-6); Macavity and Shamus winner Jan Grape's Found Dead in Texas, which includes an introduction by Marcia Muller ($25.95 219p -4841-6); and Tales from the Dark Woods, by Brendan DuBois, author of Killer Waves (Forecasts, May 20) and other Lewis Cole mysteries, as well as the suspense thriller Resurrection Day, which won the Sidewise Award for best alternative history novel of 1999 ($25.95 226p ISBN -4846-7).

The same publisher also presents two distinctive first novels: Tony Perona's Second Advent, in which former investigative reporter Nick Bertetto finds some odd connections between the death of the Italian-American patriarch of his hometown of Clinton, Ind., and a religious mystic who has visions of a pregnant Virgin Mary (Five Star, $24.95 263p ISBN 0-7862-4327-9); and John Russo's The Bennie Arnoldo File, in which Justice Dept. computer specialist Alison Grant's pursuit of a missing file leads to romance with Mark Ferris, a Treasury Department special investigator—and to the death of three Treasury Dept. employees ($24.95 263p 0-7862-4327-9).