February Publications
Michael Joens (Triumph of the Soul and other inspirational novels) has less than inspirational success with his mystery debut, An Animated Death in Burbank: A Detective Sandra Cameron Mystery. Sandy Cameron of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, a cop with killer looks, teams up with Tom Rigby of the Burbank Police Department, a recently divorced hunk, to investigate a string of suspicious deaths in the cartoon industry. The solution to the crimes supplies surface plausibility without being convincing, while characters are simply a collection of traits and possessions (Cameron's Barbie-doll trappings include a showcase house with pool and spa, a quarter horse and a steel-blue BMW roadster). Agent, Natasha Kern.(St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne, $24.95 352p ISBN 0-312-30716-0)
With its slow plot, static setting and undeveloped characters, We'll Always Have Parrots: A Meg Langslow Mystery, the fifth entry in Donna Andrews's bird-themed cozy series, falls short of its predecessors (Murder with Peacocks, etc.). In suburban Northern Virginia, Meg attends a fan convention for a hokey TV show, whose much-reviled star turns up dead in her hotel room. The attempts at screwball comedy mostly misfire en route to the unsurprising conclusion, while narrator Meg tends to sound whiny and impatient rather than wry and long-suffering. (St. Martin's Minotaur/Dunne, $23.95 304p ISBN 0-312-27732-6)
In Rett MacPherson's In Sheep's Clothing: A Torie O'Shea Mystery, the seventh entry in her delightful cozy series (after 2003's Blood Relations), her Missouri genealogist travels to Minnesota, where her Aunt Sissy has unearthed a 150-year-old diary. As usual, Torie finds evidence of past misdeeds that impinge in nasty ways on the present. (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95 272p ISBN 0-312-30178-2) The same publisher also offers How to Write a Damn Good Mystery, by Edgar-nominee James N. Frey, who confidently guides the novice through the crime-writing basics. ($22.95 288p -30446-3)
St. Martin's also rolls out two novels from British crime veterans: H.R.F. Keating's A Detective Under Fire: A Mystery with "Hard Detective" Harriet Martens, in which Det. Supt. Martens must conduct a delicate probe into possible scandal in the Maximum Crimes Squad (Minotaur/ Dunne, $23.95 256p ISBN 0-312-31657-7); and Patricia Hall's Death in Dark Waters: A Yorkshire Mystery, in which DCI Michael Thackeray, aided by reporter girlfriend Laura Ackroyd, takes on a grim case involving drugs and violence that may have links to a local Bradford mosque. (Minotaur, $23.95 288p -32155-4). In addition, the same publisher offers Catherine Aird's Chapter and Hearse: And Other Mysteries, which collects 22 short stories involving such favorite Aird characters as DCI C.D. Sloan and the Secret Service's Malcolm Venables. (Minotaur, $23.95 256p -29084-5)
