September Publications

Readers get two books in one with British author Mike Ripley's Double Take, which includes the first stand-alone novel by the creator of the Angel series and a screenplay adaptation. A heist at Heathrow Airport, inspired by an Agatha Christie plot, provides plenty of fast-paced thrills with a comic edge. (Do-Not [Dufour, dist.], $29.95 304p ISBN 1-899344-82-9; $14.95 paper -81-0)

Fans of more traditional Anglophilic fare will welcome Jane Bolitho's Killed in Cornwall, the author's sixth novel to feature artist Rose Trevelyan (Framed in Cornwall, etc.). Rose's occasional boyfriend, DI Jack Pearce, investigates a series of burglaries and attacks on young women, but as in previous books the mystery-solving takes second place to Bolitho's sensitive portrayal of the people of Cornwall. (Allison & Busby, $24.95 206p ISBN 0-74900-508-4)

In Craig Smith's The Whisper of Leaves, which has been revised since its U.K. publication under the title Silent She Sleeps (1997), a serial killer stalks a southern Illinois college town. When Professor Josie Darling returns to teach at Lues State 20 years after her mother's murder, she must contend with a lot more than the usual academic battles in this dark, cat-and-mouse thriller. (Southern Illinois Univ., $14 paper 336p ISBN 0-8093-2480-6)

Noir fans won't want to miss Moony's Road to Hell, by Denver attorney Manuel Ramos (Blues for the Buffalo and three other books in his Luis Montez series). The murder of an INS agent sends Denver PI Danny "Moony" Mora on a body-strewn quest that involves Mora's old enemy, lawyer Victor Delgado, and reaches back to the 1970s, when Chicano activism was at its peak. (Univ. of New Mexico, $19.95 208p ISBN 0-8263-2949-7)

New York taxidermy collector Garth Carson has just set a covetous eye on Pipsqueak the Nutty Nut squirrel, star of an old kiddies' cartoon show, mounted in a glass case in a north Jersey antiques shop, when a gun battle between a biker and the shop's apparent owner has him ducking for cover in Pipsqueak, Brian M. Wiprud's uproarious second mystery after last year's Sleep with the Fishes. Supported by blurbs from Harlan Coben, Steve Hamilton, Sparkle Hayter and other established pros, this is the wildest mystery to come down the pike in a stuffed squirrel's age. (Writers Club/iUniverse, $14.95 paper 232p ISBN 0-595-22727-9)

Spinster sisters Amanda and Lutie Beagle, having inherited a Manhattan detective agency from their late brother, look into the case of a headless corpse found in a theatrical lodging house in the reissue of Our First Murder (1940), by Torrey Chanslor, the pseudonym of children's book illustrator and Caldecott winner Marjorie Torrey. Their young niece, Marthy Meecham, narrates this quaint whodunit set at a time when the mean streets of New York weren't so mean. (Rue Morgue[Tomenid@aol.com], $14.95 paper 191p ISBN 0-915230-50-X).

Also lending a nostalgic view of an earlier New York, here the 1930s and featuring a schoolmarm sleuth, is Stuart Palmer's Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles, another entry in Crippen & Landru's Lost Classics series. (Crippen & Landru [CrippenL@Pilot.Infi.Net], $29 196p ISBN 1-885941-84-6; $19 paper -85-4). Available as well are two other original story collections: The Sleuth of Baghdad: The Inspector Chafik Stories, by Charles B. Child (the pseudonym of British author Claude Vernon Frost), whose hero provides some timely insight into Iraqi culture and politics ($27 196p ISBN 1-885941-74-9; $17 paper -75-7), and Georges Simenon's The 13 Culprits: (Les 13 Coupables), translated by Peter Schulman, which gathers 13 pre-Maigret tales never before published in English ($35 174p ISBN 1-885941-78-1; $16 paper -79-X).

August Publication

Why did the late Thelma Chadwick leave a bunch of old clothes to her friend, Mandy Dyer, Denver dry cleaner and sometime sleuth? Dolores Johnson (Hung Up to Die, etc.) supplies some surprising answers in her latest Mandy Dyer mystery, Buttons and Foes, another cozy crowd-pleaser. (St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne, $22.95 240p ISBN 0-312-28396-2).