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 […]
Continue readingAuthor: Jeanne M Jacobson
Jane 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 […]
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 […]
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