July Publications

Amateur sleuth Jolie Wyatt has her hands full with another round of suspicious deaths in her fifth down-homey whodunit, Barbara Burnett Smith's Skeletons in Purple Sage. It's monsoon season in the small Texas town, and the mysterious drowning death of a local doctor and the disappearance of a young and somewhat unpleasant wife have Jolie juggling investigative duties, interpersonal politics and complex family dramas, all with her characteristic wit and aplomb. (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95 304p ISBN 0-312-28463-2)

Tetchy Agatha Raisin's attempt at a little R&R in the wake of her beloved husband's defection to a French monastery gets her revved up for another mystery when she hears that a fellow vacationer was murdered. The real story in M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin and the Day the Floods Came takes place upon Agatha's return to her Cotswold home, when she learns of a young woman's apparent suicide and decides to investigate with the aid of her new neighbor, the dashing, cultured and vaguely lascivious writer John Armitage, and her own surprising flair for deceit and disguise. (St. Martin's Minotaur, $22.95 224p ISBN 0-312-20767-0)

Teacher Tom Mason and baseball pro Scott Carpenter's blow-out wedding ceremony is going beautifully—that is, until Tom finds his mortally wounded ex-boyfriend bleeding in a bathroom stall—in Here Comes the Corpse. Add in a troubled teenager, a secret sports pornography business, the dead man's mystery lover and a few more deaths, and there's a lot for the dynamic duo to figure out in Lambda Literary Award—winner Mark Richard Zubro's ninth appealing Tom and Scott mystery. (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95 304p ISBN 0-312-28098-X)

Janice Cameron's return to Hawaii is "the signal to set off a chain of events which [bring] discord and catastrophe," as well as murder, in Juanita Sheridan's The Kahuna Killer. Originally published five decades ago (though it doesn't feel like it), this detective story featuring charming Chinese sleuth Lily Wu has the friends and foster sisters investigating mysterious events—blood on an ancient altar, pagan rights and the appearance of a kahuna (a witch doctor)—and the death of a sultry hula girl in 1950s Oahu. (Rue Morgue, $14 paper 155p ISBN 0-915230-47-X)

It's one false lead after another for readers of The Red Herring by Sally Spencer—and it's not easy for Chief Insp. Charlie Woodend to figure out what's going on in this well-plotted British police procedural set against the backdrop of the Cuban missile crisis. Woodend is investigating the murder of a sexy young teacher when he's called off the job to search for a missing student, but this so-called "provincial bobby" senses that the cases are connected, and that someone on the inside doesn't want them solved. (Severn, $25.99 256p ISBN 0-7178-5707-X)

Dangerous Practice, the finale of the Lucy Sedgwick trilogy (after Guilty Knowledge and The Colour of Blood), finds the impulsive Londoner recently remarried and hot on the trail of another crime in this detailed period mystery. One of her new husband's patients seems to have attempted suicide, but Lucy thinks it's attempted murder—and her search for the truth looks like it might have lethal consequences in Clare Curzon's engaging post-WWI whodunit. (Severn, $26.99 256p ISBN 0-7278-5815-7)

Lawyer and mystery scribe Laurance L. Priddy crafts an unlikely hero in hotheaded and near-broke personal injury lawyer Jim McSpadden, who, out of desperation, takes a case no one else wants: proving that a mechanical defect rather than human error caused a deadly highway accident. Working for the widow of the man the trucking company says is responsible, Jim finds himself playing spy, sparring with a bigger lawyer and falling in love in Critical Evidence. (Sunstone [www.sunstonepress.com], $26.95 192p ISBN 0-86534-306-3)

Mammoth series regular Mike Ashley (The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunits, etc.) returns with his latest crime reference doorstopper, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Crime Fiction. "From cozies to noir," from Harold Adams to Mark Richard Zubro and from Alfred Hitchcock Presents to Year of the Dragon, Ashley compiles clear, educational entries for the felony buff, including a guide to Internet sites and an index of key sleuths and bad guys across the decades. (Carroll & Graf, $12.95 paper 800p ISBN 0-7867-1006-3)

Five Star offers four new story collections from its stable of talented mystery writers. Berkeley copper Jill Smith investigates the murder of a guru and a series of very bizarre burglaries in Macavity Award—winning author Susan Dunlap's Karma and Other Stories. ($24.95 268p ISBN 0-7862-4173-X)

Richard Colby offers two tales of revenge and three other suspensers, including the novella "Deadly Desire," in which a woman whose "lust made visible" gets a brutal comeuppance, in The Last Witness and Other Stories. ($24.95 292p -3558-6)

In Bohannon's Women, Southern California chronicler Joseph Hansen explores Wiccan rituals, survivalists and secret confessions in six stories, most of which feature crusty retired sheriff and current rancher Hack Bohannon. ($25.95 230p -4177-2)

A woman plots to kill her husband in "Lady Patterly's Lover," detective Augustus Fox tries to stem a theater company's "plague of misfortunes" in "The Dastardly Dilemma of the Vicious Vaudevillian" and drollery reigns in the 17 other tales in Charlotte MacLeod's It Was an Awful Shame and Other Stories. ($25.95 300p -4174-8)

June Publication

"If anyone wants to read this book as a simple mystery novel, that's his business," sniffs Argentinean journalist Rudolfo Walsh in an epigraph. Bill Verner translates Paco Ignacio Taibo II's spare, literary Frontera Dreams: A Héctor Balascorán Shayne Detective Novel, in which the one-eyed existentialist Mexican investigator searches for a lost love, ponders border crossings and drug traffickers, and communes with Pancho Villa's ghost along the "green mesh fence" separating the U.S. and Mexico. (Cinco Puntos [701 Texas Ave., El Paso, Tex. 79901], $13.95 paper 160p ISBN 0-938317-58-X)