Crippen & Landru (first), 1996 Life just keeps getting easier. Publishers Crippen & Landru, sweeter-natured than their murderous namesakes, are providing gorgeous surprises for mystery lovers. Here we have a dozen of the best “Dr. Sam” stories by the ingenious Edward Hoch, attractively packaged with an afterword and chronology by Marvin Lachman and an introduction by the author (who is, to our joy, still authoring). Rather than scouring through anthologies and back copies of EQMM, here the stories are, ready to read and relish. Each is steeped in the history of early twentieth century America, and each is a perfectly plotted vignette in which an impossible event is neatly explained […]
Continue readingAuthor: Jeanne M Jacobson
Play with Fire by Dana Stabenow
Berkley (first), 1995 Spring has come to Alaska, and new growth is springing up where the land has been burned over by a forest fire. Kate Shugak is one of many Alaskans picking the bumper crop of mushrooms that buyers from all over the lower 48 states are flying in to purchase. It’s surprising, and sometimes appalling, where fungi will grow; as she picks, Kate uncovers a corpse. The mystery Stabenow tells is a compelling one: there are no missing persons reports to account for the body, and no reasonable way to explain that the dead man apparently died running, barefoot and naked. On another level, Stabenow has retold a […]
Continue readingIf I’d Killed Him When I Met Him… by Sharyn McCrumb
Ballantine (first), 1995 McCrumb’s three series can be placed on a continuum of laughter to tears. Her science-fiction-groupie series which led off with Bimbos of the Death Sun is laughter; in her stunning ballad series, set in Appalachia’s present and past, she displays a kaleidoscope of human tragedies, and shows us also endurance and the possibility of joy. If I’d Killed Him is the eighth book of her in-the-middle series featuring forensic anthropologist and Anglophile Elizabeth MacPherson, a series that has been weighted toward the funny side, sometimes resulting in a feast of laughter (The Windsor Knot; MacPherson’s Lament) and occasionally in an uneasy compromise between the humorous and the […]
Continue readingGrave Music by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Scribner (first), 1995 A concert by the Royal London Philharmonic, conducted by Sir Stefan Radek. Two pleasant romances linking the police force and members of the orchestra — Detective Inspector Bill Slider reunited at last with his lovely Joanna; his elegant assistant Jim Atherton charmed by the second violinist. Two deaths — with both victims as notable for their power over others as for their singularly unpleasant natures. Even more startling, when Stefan Radek dies in the midst of rehearsal, his right hand in spasm clutching at his collar, struck down by a bullet fired by the trench-coated figure who entered and left the rehearsal hall unrecognized, there were two […]
Continue readingLeave the Grave Green by Deborah Crombie
Scribner’s (first), 1995 Operatic in the dramatic colors and shadows of their relationships, Julia Swann’s family takes its style from its matriarch, bel canto soprano Dame Caroline Stowe, rather than from Sir Gerald Asherton, Dame Caroline’s husband and Julia’s father, or from Julia herself, a reclusive artist living with her parents rather than with her flamboyant, unfaithful, erratic husband Con. When Connor Swann’s body is pulled from the stream near his parents-in-law’s home, Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and Sergeant Gemma James are sent by Scotland Yard to investigate his death, their presence justified by the marks of violence on Swann’s body, and the illustriousness of his connections. Ironically, this death echoes […]
Continue readingCops for our times: K.C. Constantine and Barbara D’Amato
Brushback by K.C. Constantine Mysterious (first), 1998 Good Cop, Bad Cop by Barbara D’Amato Forge (first), 1998 The present febrile atmosphere may have long-term effects, such as limiting the appetite for public life to all but the most ego-enthralled office-seekers. In the end, this could be one of those periods in history remembered more for the ferocity of their prosecutions than for the severity of their crimes. Few such eras are remembered fondly. Joe Klein, The New Yorker, February 2, 1998 The protagonists of these compelling new mysteries are office-holders, rather than office-seekers, but the impulse to hold a position — or at least not to leave it unwillingly or […]
Continue readingJane and the Wandering Eye by Stephanie Barron
Bantam (first), 1998 “The actress’s magnificent form limned itself on the paving stones at my feet, like an enchantress materialising out of the common snow and dirt, and I knew her immediately for a woman any man might die to possess.” Surely Jane Austen would not have described a glimpse of a shadow in these grandiloquent terms. But though Stephanie Barron cannot approach the style and talent of her protagonist, in presenting her readers with Austen-as-sleuth she is on to a very good thing. In the third mystery in this series, a guest at a masquerade ball is stabbed just as a Shakespearean actor is declaiming lines from Macbeth – […]
Continue readingThe Running Woman by Patricia Carlon
Soho (first), 1998 An alluring eeriness characterizes Carlon’s books — heightened, or exacerbated, for her newer readers because her books come to us not only across the hemispheres but, in tumbled fashion, across decades. Their taut suspense, intensified by calm prose and apparently commonplace settings and events, created a coterie of eager readers; her American publishers have responded with The Running Woman, billed as “a new mystery set in a small town in Australia.” A mystery set in Australia, surely, but new only in the sense of being unfamiliar: rather than a book written in response to readers’ eagerness, we have a book written before those the current publisher chose […]
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