June Publications

British author Clare Curzon delivers another tantalizing puzzler in Body of a Woman: A Superintendent Mike Yeadings Mystery, following Don't Leave Me (Forecasts, Jan. 21, 2002). How did respectable Leila Knightley, a small-town gift-shop proprietor, end up dead in the woods in an evening gown and bird mask with her hair shorn? (St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne, $23.95 240p ISBN 0-312-28821-2)

London antiquarian bookseller Dido Hoare isn't too surprised when a valued customer's check bounces in Marianne MacDonald's baffling Die Once: A Dido Hoare Mystery; she'd seen the newspaper notice saying he'd jumped to his death from the balcony of his flat. Dido sets out to prove her customer was no suicide in a tangled yarn with special appeal to book-collecting fans. (St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne, $23.95 272p ISBN 0-312-28360-1)

In Father's Day Murder: A Lucy Stone Mystery, the 10th entry in Leslie Meier's engaging cozy series after Birthday Party Murder (Forecasts, July 8, 2002), Lucy is feeling guilty about attending a Boston newspaper conference while her kids take care of celebrating Father's Day with her husband back home in Tinker Cove, Maine. But her mood shifts when the suspicious death of newspaper tycoon Luther Read, a patriarch unbeloved by his offspring, sets Lucy on the trail of a possible parricide. (Kensington, $22 240p ISBN 1-57566-834-3)

Susan Wittig Albert, creator of China Bayles (Thyme of Death, etc.), offers gardeners a treat in An Unthymely Death: And Other Garden Mysteries. The collection includes 10 tales, four of them previously unpublished (the rest revised from their original on-line appearance), plus sidebars full of herbal lore. (Berkley, $14 paper 272p ISBN 0-425-19002-1)

May Publications

Following her arresting debut, The One That Got Away (Forecasts, June 4, 2001), Naomi Rand adds more depth to her New York investigator and brings Emma's chaotic life into fuller focus in Stealing for a Living: An Emma Price Mystery. On top of her impending divorce, Emma has a demanding nine-month-old, a troubled preteen son, a recalcitrant lover and two murders on her hands. Engaging and complex, Emma is a true original who deserves many future adventures. (HarperCollins, $23.95 256p ISBN 0-06-019936-9)

In Bob Sloan's interesting but ultimately unsatisfying third series entry, The Middle of Nowhere: A Lenny Bliss Mystery (after 1999's Bliss Jumps the Gun), the veteran NYPD homicide detective finds juggling his job and family life increasingly challenging after two bodies surface: one in the East River, which may be linked with a slumlord's gentrification schemes, the other in an affluent and influential family's Upper East Side apartment. Sloan succeeds at crafting finely etched portraits of the many people whose lives are touched by the crimes, but the various affecting vignettes don't make for a coherent whole, leaving the reader with a taste of a promising talent not fully realized. (Atlantic Monthly, $23 224p ISBN 0-87113-872-7)