Frederick Ramsay. Poisoned Pen, $24.95 (272p) ISBN 978-1-59058-902-1; $14.95 trade paper ISBN 978-1-59058-904-5
Ike Schwartz has clearly seen better days than those confronting him at the start of Ramsay's tepid seventh mystery featuring the CIA op turned smalltown Virginia sheriff (after 2010's The Eye of the Virgin). A suspicious car crash in Washington, D.C
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Frederick Ramsay. Poisoned Pen, $15.95 trade paper (186p) ISBN 978-1-4642-1059-4
Unforgettable characters lift Ramsay’s sequel to 2017’s Copper Kettle, set in 1928 in Floyd, Va. When Sheriff David Privette tells Jesse Sutherlin, who runs a successful sawmill, that his father’s bludgeoned body has been found under the sawdust in...
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Frederick Ramsay. Poisoned Pen, $26.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-4642-0784-6
Set in 1920, Ramsey’s satisfying prequel to his contemporary Ike Schwartz series (The Vulture, etc.) provides fascinating details of a soldier’s life during WWI. Jesse Sutherlin has returned to his home on Buffalo Mountain in Virginia as a war hero.
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Frederick Ramsay. Poisoned Pen, $26.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-4642-0587-3
Ramsay’s third mystery set in Botswana (after 2010’s Reapers) tries too hard to mirror its human story line with a subplot featuring the country’s animals. One night in Chobe National Park, Ole Anderson, an expert on hyena behavior who’s leading a...
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Frederick Ramsay. Poisoned Pen, $26.95 (252p) ISBN 978-1-4642-0478-4
At the start of Ramsay’s middling 10th mystery to feature Picketsville, Va., sheriff and former CIA operative Ike Schwartz (after 2014’s Drowning Barbie), an explosion kills an undercover cop after he accidentally drives Ike’s car away from a...
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Frederick Ramsay. Poisoned Pen, $24.95 (314p) ISBN 978-1-464203-28-2
Ramsay audaciously sets his outstanding third Jerusalem mystery (after 2013’s Holy Smoke) at the very time of Jesus’s arrest. When Pontius Pilate, emperor’s prefect of Judea and overseer of Palestine, is arrested for murdering his rival, Aurelius...
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Frederick Ramsay. Poisoned Pen, $24.95 (268p) ISBN 978-1-4642-0216-2
The characters in Ramsay’s ninth mystery featuring Picketsville, Va., sheriff Ike Schwartz (after 2012’s Scone Island) make more of an impression than the crime solving. The discovery of the corpse of meth addict Ethyl Smut in a shallow grave atop...
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Frederick Ramsay. Poisoned Pen, $24.95 (260p) ISBN 978-1-4642-0092-2
Ramsay’s entertaining second Jerusalem mystery set in the first century C.E. (after 2012’s The Eighth Veil) finds Rabban Gamliel, the chief rabbi of Israel, drawn once again into a murder case against his will. When a burnt corpse surfaces at the...
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Frederick Ramsay. Poisoned Pen, $24.95 (264p) ISBN 978-1-4642-0055-7
Ramsey’s engaging eighth Ike Schwartz mystery (after 2011’s Rogue) takes the ex-CIA agent turned smalltown sheriff of Picketsville, Va., and his university president fiancée, Ruth Dennis, to Maine’s Scone Island for a vacation. With Ruth still...
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Frederick Ramsay. Poisoned Pen, $14.95 trade paper (286p) ISBN 978-0-9677590-5-0
A first-century rabbinic leader, Rabban Gamaliel, serves as sleuth, perhaps a first for a historical, in Ramsey’s superior second Jerusalem mystery (after 2007’s Judas). When a woman is knifed to death in Herod Antipas’s palace, Pontius Pilate taps...
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Frederick Ramsay, Author . Poisoned Pen $24.95 (260p) ISBN 978-1-59058-122-3
Small-town sheriffs come in all shapes and sizes, but Ike Schwartz, who dominates Ramsay's solid debut, is both engaging and extravagantly overqualified for the job. Ike retreats to his hometown of Picketsville, Va., and wins the job of sheriff...
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Frederick Ramsay, Poisoned Pen, $24.95 (260p) ISBN 978-1-59058-806-2; $14.95 trade paper ISBN 978-1-59058-808-6
Fans of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective series may be interested in a very different take on Botswana in Ramsay's second mystery set in that country (after 2009's Predators). When the body of a man who's been shot to death turns up...
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Frederick Ramsay, Author . Poisoned Pen $24.95 (279p) ISBN 978-1-59058-635-8
Ike Schwartz returns to his CIA roots in Ramsey's awkward cozy-thriller hybrid, the fifth in the series to feature the Picketsville, Va., sheriff (after 2008's Stranger Room
). While vacationing on the Delaware shore, Schwartz is asked by...
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Frederick Ramsay, Author . Poisoned Pen $24.95 (256p) ISBN 978-1-59058-535-1
Two locked-room murders, nearly 150 years apart, confound Sheriff Ike Schwartz of Picketsville, Va., in Ramsay’s suspenseful fourth regional mystery (after 2007’s Buffalo Mountain
). Schwartz discovers that both crimes, with sinister...
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Frederick Ramsay, Author . Poisoned Pen $24.95 (257p) ISBN 978-1-59058-369-2
I
n this subpar third outing for Picketsville, Va., sheriff Ike Schwartz (after 2006's Secrets
), deputy Whaite Billingsley finds a corpse bearing the ID of Randall Harris, a member of “one of the meanest families” in the backwoods...
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Frederick Ramsay, Author . Poisoned Pen $24.95 (245p) ISBN 978-1-59058-283-1
At the start of Ramsey's superb, perfectly paced stand-alone, Phoenix mystery writer Frank Smith heads for his 50th prep school reunion—at Scott Academy, near Baltimore—anxious about all the attendant grudges, passions, jealousies...
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Frederick Ramsay, Author . Poisoned Pen $24.95 (290p) ISBN 978-1-59058-188-9
Ramsay follows his solid debut, Artscape
(2004), with an even better sophomore effort, in which Picketsville, Va., sheriff Ike Schwartz looks into the murder of church organist Waldo Templeton at the struggling Stonewall Jackson Memorial Episcopal...
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