February Publications
Fans of screwball Florida crime capers will welcome Tom Corcoran's Octopus Alibi: An Alex Rutledge Novel, the fourth in this well-received series (after 2001's Bone Island Mambo). Rutledge, a forensic photographer on Key West, has three sudden deaths to deal with, including the suicide of the island's mayor. Blurbs from Janet Evanovich and Steve Hamilton will help steer readers to this deserving author. (St. Martin's Minotaur/ Dunne, $24.95 304p ISBN 0-312-29127-2)
Hayburner: A Gail McCarthy Mystery, by Laura Crum (Breakaway, etc.), offers plenty of thrills for horse-loving crime fans. In her seventh outing, McCarthy, an equine veterinarian, investigates a series of barn fires—and must rely on her riding skills to evade a deadly arsonist. (St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne, $22.95 208p ISBN 0-312-29047-0)
Dog fans will lap up Susan Conant's The Dogfather, in which series sleuth Holly Winter (The Wicked Flea, etc.) reluctantly agrees to train mob boss Enzio Guarini's four-month-old Elkhound puppy. When someone bumps off Guarini's right-hand man, Holly realizes she might've done better to roll over and play dead than to accept a training job she couldn't refuse. (Berkley Prime Crime, $22.95 272p ISBN 0-425-18838-8)
In Custard's Last Stand: A Pennsylvania Dutch Mystery with Recipes, the 11th culinary cozy by Tamar Myers (after 2002's Gruel and Unusual Punishment), the murder of Col. George Custard puts an end to the tycoon's plans to build a fancy hotel in Hernia, Penn. In between recipes (mostly for custard), witty, eccentric Magdalena Yoder, the Mennonite proprietor of the PennDutch Inn, pulls together clues to the killer's identity. (NAL, $19.95 240p ISBN 0-451-20782-3)
The shooting deaths of a white man and a black man in a Fort Myers, Fla., motel spell trouble for secret lovers Bud Wright, a police detective, and Dan Ewing, the manager of a tony hotel, in It Takes Two, Elliott Mackle's first novel. Set in 1949, this mystery, with its authentic background (the author is the son of a leading Florida developer from the 1940s to the '70s), explores the changes in attitudes toward race and sex engulfing the South in the aftermath of WWII. (Alyson, $13.95 paper 280p ISBN 1-55583-754-9)
Come Into My Parlor: Tales from Detective Fiction Weekly, by Hugh B. Cave, collects 11 stories by one of the most prolific pulp writers of all time, still going strong at age 92. Tom Roberts provides the neo-pulp jacket art. (Crippen & Landru [www.crippenlandru.com], $42 220p ISBN 1-885941-80-3; $17 paper -81-3)
