November Publications
Supt. John Lambert and his sergeant, Bert Hook, are enjoying a round of golf when an errant ball lands in a ditch containing the body of drug dealer Kate Warton in Death on the Eleventh Hole, the latest solid police procedural by J.M. Gregson (An Unsuitable Death). Did Kate's desire to get out of the drug game contribute to the young woman's premature demise? (Severn, $25.99 224p ISBN 0-7278-5814-9)
Accused of doping race horses, series heroine Claudia Seferius retreats to the island haven of her patrician friend, Leo, in Marilyn Todd's (Dream Boat) eighth diverting Roman historical, Dark Horse. Instead of peace, however, Claudia finds a pirate warship anchored in the bay, arson and murder. (Severn, $26.99 288p ISBN 0-7278-5861-0)
In Joan Lock's gripping Victorian mystery, Dead Born, the sequel to Dead Image, Detective Sergeant Best goes undercover to try to collar the fiend who's been leaving the bodies of dead babies around Islington. His quest takes him aboard the Thames pleasure steamer Princess Alice, which sinks in one of Britain's worst real-life disasters. (Hale [Trafalgar Square, dist.], $29.95 192p ISBN 0-7090-7016-0)
Edinburgh cop Bob Skinner undergoes the worst ordeal of his career—identifying the bodies of his wife's parents, strangled to death in their upstate New York cabin—in Head Shot, an uncompromisingly tough police procedural by Quentin Jardine, author of On Honeymoon with Death (Forecasts, Apr. 15) and other titles in this Scottish writer's Oz Blackstone mystery series. (Headline [Trafalgar Square, dist.], $29.95 310p ISBN 0-7472-7447-9)
When Chris "O.B." O'Brien, PI and former psychiatric nurse, investigates drug dealing and then murder at his local club, his West Indian assistant, Kelp, winds up with broken bones and a heroin overdose in Christian Thompson's lively debut mystery, That Which Doesn't Kill You. To find the bad guys, O.B. enlists the aid of Kelp's lovely sister, Debra, a vegan who shares his taste for good food. (Allison & Busby, $24.95 paper 254p ISBN 0-7490-0553-X)
October Publication
Deborah Turrell Atkinson smoothly blends contemporary crime and native Hawaiian legend in her second novel, Primitive Secrets. When Storm Kayama discovers her beloved adoptive attorney uncle, Miles Hamasaki, dead at his desk, her search for his killer takes her on a journey into her own painful past that illuminates the larger conflicts in the 50th state's diverse culture. (Poisoned Pen, $24.95 333p ISBN 1-59058-017-6)
