A Canadian police officer tackles a complicated kidnapping case in Crosbie’s taut second mystery featuring RCMP corporal John Drake (after The Dead List). In 2004, Drake, who’s working for the General Investigative Service in British Columbia, is assigned the case of five-year-old Hailey Logan, who’s disappeared from her bedroom. Hours after the abduction, someone claiming to have Hailey calls the RCMP and in an electronically disguised voice asks for Drake and one of his colleagues to be present when they call back at 12:01 a.m. Drake is on hand when the next call comes through, and he soon realizes the case cuts close to home: in flashbacks that alternate between Northern Ireland in 1969 and British Columbia in the ’70s and ’80s, Crosbie gradually reveals why Hailey’s father, Bill—a farm supervisor with an Irish background—may have cooperated with the kidnappers, and how buried secrets from Drake’s past may come to light if he wants to bring the girl home safely. Crosbie throws a lot of balls in the air, but he juggles them with ease and brings everything to a satisfying conclusion. It’s a sly and suspenseful winner. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 04/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

An unlikely friendship is tested by zany events in this darkly funny if diffuse novel from Semegran (The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island). Seff, a writer, finds a drinking buddy in Big Dave, the conservative plumber who lives next door in their Austin, Tex., suburb. Big Dave’s belief in climate change (“Ranchers and farmers... know better than to deny what Mother Earth is telling us”) and generally compassionate nature perpetually upends Seff’s stereotypical assumptions about right-wingers. When other neighbors’ pets start disappearing and some come back mutilated, Big Dave insists they install cameras. The cameras capture another nuisance: a man walking naked in the middle of the night, and Big Dave becomes fixated on tracking down the “pervert,” putting a strain on his and Seff’s friendship. The novel’s numbered chapters are intercut with short stories devoted to side characters, such as the trio of brothers who try to outsmart a dachshund that chases them on the way to school in “The Kirby Boys Battle Cindy the Weiner Dog,” and the young girl who tends a magical garden in “Melon Girl.” Not all of it hangs together, but Semegran has a knack for drawing colorful characters. This waggish slice of life is worth a look. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 04/04/2025 | Details & Permalink

Murray’s clever sixth clever case for Ginger Barnes (after A Score To Settle) finds the Pennsylvania gumshoe digging into the murder of an old friend. Hollywood actor Jan Fairchild—one of Ginger’s high school classmates—has returned to Ludwig, Pa., to film a movie. Jan and Ginger’s mutual acquaintance, Didi, hosts a pajama party with several of their other classmates to mark the occasion. Though the evening gets off to a low-key start, a comment during a game of truth or dare freaks Jan out, leading her to rush out the door. Ginger catches up with the film star and persuades her to return to the house, but when Jan is late to awaken the next morning, Ginger finds her dead on her bedroom floor with a shattered skull. The Ludwig police question the group, taking particular interest in Ginger. She sets out to identify Jan’s killer, drawing on their shared history to crack the case. Ginger’s charming everywoman qualities make her easy to root for, and Murray has the mechanics of closed-circle whodunits down. This satisfies. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

Expanded from a Writers of the Future Award–winning short story, Hankins’s fast-paced supernatural adventure and Grimsworld series launch balances the mythic and the mundane. On a routine pickup, the Grim Reaper is tricked into exchanging bodies with IRS auditor Frank Totmann. Now trapped in Frank’s failing middle-aged body while Frank runs off with his identity and scythe, Grim must find a way to reverse the process before Hell’s Auditor becomes aware of the mishap and comes to punish him. Ignorant of the ways of flesh, Grim contends with a mortal body’s embarrassing needs (cue the poop jokes), fumbles his way through Frank’s job, and desperately tries to make contact with the demon who inadvertently made the switch possible. Meanwhile, infernal forces move forward on a fiendish plot eons in the making, people stop dying with no one to collect their souls, and Grim runs into the ex he hasn’t seen in millennia. Flashbacks hint at a much larger scope to the setting and Grim’s complicated past as, in the present, he learns the hard way what it means to be human. The humor feels somewhat sitcomy, but the premise and subsequent mistaken identity hijinks are good fun. This is sure to entertain. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Finkle (Keys to an Empty House) offers a whimsical take on the locked-room mystery in this entertaining supernatural whodunit. New Yorker Daniel Freund, a writer who collects rare editions of The Great Gatsby, is delighted to find one he doesn’t own in a pile on a brownstone stoop. He brings it back to his apartment, where the book starts displaying magical qualities: certain words begin to glow, and an invisible presence guides Freund’s hand to phrases that seem to allude to an unsolved murder. Wondering if the paranormal activity is a beyond the grave message from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Freund visits the brownstone where he found the edition. There, he learns that his new Gatsby belonged to septuagenarian venture capitalist Fulton Cutler, who recently shot himself inside his locked apartment. Convinced that Cutler was murdered, Freund investigates who might have wanted him dead, and tries to deduce how they committed the seemingly impossible crime. Eventually, he teams up with a pair of retired detectives to crack the case. Finkle effectively suspends disbelief en route to a clever solution. It’s a gleeful good time. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Cox (A Christmas at Highbury) serves up a charming retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma set during the Great Depression. Melody Merriweather resents having to leave college to run the Merc, her family’s general store in Merriweather, Wis. But with her father recovering from a heart attack, she doesn’t have much choice. At first, Melody tries to modernize the store by offering luxury items, but no one in town can afford them. After learning that her father lost the family’s fortune in bad investments, she hatches a plan to save the store and their home by brewing and selling cider. For help, she turns to the store’s handsome but aloof butcher, Cal Fraiser, innocent shopgirl Harriet Mueller, and her father’s partner, the huffy old Mrs. Haufbrau. Neither the cider nor Melody’s attempts at matchmaking on Harriet’s behalf go as planned, and she soon discovers that her family’s situation is even worse than she’d thought. While Cox glosses over the darker aspects of the Great Depression—the townsfolk pinch pennies, but no one is in dire straits—she’s crafted a believable Midwest town filled with colorful characters. Silly and spoiled at first, Melody matures over the course of the novel and learns the importance of putting herself in others’ shoes. Readers are in for a treat. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/21/2025 | Details & Permalink

Sherwood-Fabre (the Early Case Files of Sherlock Holmes series) delivers a solid collection of stories featuring Doyle’s detective. Canonical entries include a creative fleshing-out of one of Watson’s untold tales (“The Most Winning Woman”), and a sequel to Doyle’s “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” which finds Carfax, a former client of Holmes’s, returning to seek help recovering jewels stolen by the criminals who kidnapped her in the original story. The author pulls off a shrewd and satisfying locked-room mystery with “The Adventure of Kisin’s Curse,” in which Holmes must ascertain how the assistant to an explorer was poisoned in a sealed room. Holmes’s deductive talents are captured with aplomb in “The Adventure of Lafitte’s Missing Treasure,” in which the detective tackles the case of an American woman’s missing husband, who disappeared while on a quest for a legendary pirate’s treasure. Throughout, Sherwood-Fabre plays it safe, delivering comfort-food pastiches that rely heavily on established tropes. Sherlockians will be pleased. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 03/14/2025 | Details & Permalink

Organized crime, police corruption, and ethnic tensions put increasing pressure on an Italian American family in this thrilling multigenerational saga. In 1914, 16-year-old Domenic Bassini leaves Italy for America. On board the ship, he protects young stowaway Ermino Lentini and has an intense affair with Francesca Bernardelli under the nose of her industrialist husband, Cologero. Settling into Boston’s North End, Domenic lands a coveted construction job, and for the most part manages to stay out of trouble, though he invites ire from the Irish American police after backing Ermino in a fight with the son of a cop. As the years go by, Ermino grows into an ambitious mobster while Domenic marries and has a son, Dommy, whose football career at Harvard is interrupted by WWII. Dommy returns to Boston as a war hero, becomes a cop, and refuses to go along with the department’s widespread corruption and graft. When Dommy’s moral rectitude has grave consequences, Domenic faces an impossible decision, one that reunites him with Cologero, Ermino, and Francesca in an explosive climax. Trubiano’s rendering of the period tends to feel like a Wikipedia entry, with dutiful if superfluous nods to anarchist Bartolemo Vanzetti and the Boston Molasses Flood, but the novel finds its rhythm once Dommy enters the police force. This loving portrait of a bygone Boston is worth a look. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 02/28/2025 | Details & Permalink

An orphaned teen takes on powerful men in this rousing series launch from Lane (the Ramsbolt series). Charlotte Morris and her younger brother, Emmett, hail from the coal mining town of Stoke, Pa., where her miner father agitated for better working conditions. After both of their parents die from illnesses related to pollution from the coal mine in 1900, Charlotte and Emmett go to live with foster parents in North East, Md. The Ryans, alcoholic Finn and stern Regina, offer the siblings a cold welcome and put them to work with fishing and other chores. When Charlotte sees the town’s mayor on a train platform meeting with the owner of Stoke’s mine, she suspects the mayor of corruption and starts connecting the dots between the pollution in Stoke and the massive fish die-off in North East. Gathering allies, including a group of suffragists, Charlotte concocts a plan to continue her late father’s labor activism and expose the truth behind the environmental devastation. Her crusade is complicated by increasing tension with Emmett, who chafes against Charlotte’s protectiveness, and Charlotte struggles with whom to trust. The pacing and character work are a bit rough, but Lane succeeds at making Charlotte a heroine to root for. Those who appreciate muckraking social realism in the vein of Mary Doria Russell’s Women of Copper Country ought to check this out. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink

Hawkins (Downpour) spins the familiar into the grotesque in this chilling collection of 13 horror shorts. The author excels at putting dark twists on everyday domestic circumstances. A painter escapes an unhappy marriage with some supernatural aid in “Moonrise Over Water with Sargassum, 2022. Oil On Canvas.” In “Green Eyes,” a child cares for her ailing mother even after the woman’s death. An uncanny children’s TV show takes center stage in “The Stumblyum Imperative,” while in “A Candle for the Birthday Boy,” a six-year-old’s birthday party goes horribly wrong. The exceptional gore—narrators perform revolting actions such as probing “the glistening yellow-gray” of their own exposed fat, which “yields beneath [their] touch like molded gelatin” (“Storms of the Present”)—makes looking away impossible. Not all the stories are quite as successful, however. If, as in “Interlude,” about a little boy whose parents think he has a rash, the buildup is too mundane in its purposeful misdirection, what should be a delightful shock ending turns into a cheap trick. Still, plenty of entertainment lies within these pages. Readers will be thinking about Hawkins’s skin-crawling fables long after they turn off the lights. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 02/07/2025 | Details & Permalink