The Red Hand of Fury: A Silas Quinn Mystery

Set in England just before the outbreak of WWI, Morris’s convoluted fourth mystery featuring Det. Insp. Silas Quinn (after 2014’s The Dark Palace) presents Quinn and his Special Crimes Department team with a series of bizarre suicides. The first victim, a young man named Harold, takes off his clothes and climbs into the polar bear enclosure at the London Zoo with fatal results. All the other victims die naked, leaving behind a pile of their clothes. Each man wears the same sort of brown corduroy suit and gray calico shirt, each possesses a small card depicting a crudely printed illustration of a red hand, and all are associated with Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. After the third suicide, Quinn has himself committed to the asylum, where he hopes to figure out what drove these unfortunate people to act as they did. Secret motives, slow-simmering revenges, and overelaborate plot swings abound. Those expecting a sophisticated psychological explanation for the deaths will be disappointed; fans of traditional puzzle mysteries, on the other hand, will be rewarded. (July)