Mystery - July 5, 2012

Thursday, July 5, 2012

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Simple
by Kathleen George

A beautiful, talented law student, Cassie Price, has been murdered, and the police arrest Cal, a handyman who works in her neighborhood. Soon suspicion turns to her boss, a golden boy about to run for governor. With fantastic series characters and a stunning mystery, Kathleen George further proves herself to be a master of the police procedural.

Wildcat Play
by Helen Knode

Hipster movie critic Ann Whitehead pushed a Hollywood murder case to a bloody climax and almost died herself. Changed forever--less stupid and more fun--she has moved on to a place she knows well: the San Joaquin Valley, where her grandfather's closest friend, Joe Balch, owns the oil company that keeps one town alive. Balch gets Ann a job with the Oklahoma contractor drilling his wildcat well. It's hard work, but Ann loves both it and her crusty old boss, Emmet. Then a guy on her crew is killed by a falling hammer. Sheriffs rule it an accident but Ann's LAPD squeeze, Detective Doug Lockwood, says it's murder. Ann can't resist the challenge of chasing a killer.

Wicked Eddies
by Beth Groundwater

Fly fishing is dangerous? River ranger Mandy Tanner had no idea until days before a huge tournament in Salida, Colorado. True, the Arkansas River can be a man-eater, but the rapids weren't responsible for driving a hatchet into the neck of would-be competitor Howie Abbott--a secretive man who may have been cheating. While casting about for suspects, Mandy seeks clues from Abbott's family members, including her best friend, bartender Cynthia Abbott. But when Cynthia becomes the prime suspect, Mandy realizes that trolling for the true killer has plunged her way too deep into wicked eddies.

Trouble Brewing
by Dolores Gordon-Smith

A missing man leads Jack Haldean straight into danger . . . - Mark Helston, the rising star of Hunt Coffee Limited, was successful and popular, with plenty of money and everything to live for. Yet at half past seven on the evening of the ninth of January, 1925, he walked out of his Albemarle Street flat and disappeared. Desperate to know what happened to Mark, his uncle, old Mr Hunt, appeals to Jack Haldean. Inspector Bill Rackham of Scotland Yard thinks it's a thankless task. Perhaps, says Jack, but why should Mark Helston vanish? And then Jack finds a body . . .

Suzy's Case
by Andy Siegel

This wild ride of a debut thriller is packed with insider details that reveal the fascinating world of a New York lawyer who'll stop at nothing to secure justice. Introducing Tug Wyler, a dogged and irreverent New York City personal injury and medical malpractice attorney. He is as at home on the streets as he is in the courtroom, and larger than life in both places. Once you've met him, you won't ever forget him. When Henry Benson, a high-profile criminal lawyer known for his unsavory clients, recruits Tug to take over a long-pending multimillion-dollar lawsuit representing a tragically brain-damaged child, his instructions are clear: get us out of it; there is no case. Yet the moment Tug meets the disabled but gallant little Suzy Williams and June, her beautiful, resourceful mother, all bets are off.

Syndrome E
by Franck Thrilliez

Syndrome E tells the story of beleaguered detective Lucie Hennebelle, whose old friend has developed a case of spontaneous blindness after watching an extremely rare--and violent--film from the 1950s. Embedded in the film are subliminal images so unspeakably heinous that Lucie realizes she must get to the bottom of it--especially when nearly everyone who comes into contact with the film starts turning up dead. Enlisting the help of Inspector Franck Sharko--a brooding, broken analyst for the Paris police who is exploring the film's connection to five murdered men left in the woods, Lucie begins to strip away the layers of what is perhaps the most disturbing and powerful film ever made.

Robert B. Parker's Fool Me Twice
by Michael Brandman

Summer in Paradise, Massachusetts, is usually an idyllic season?--but not this time. A Hollywood movie company has come to town, and brought with it a huge cast, crew, and a troubled star. Marisol Hinton is very beautiful, reasonably talented, and scared out of her wits that her estranged husband's jealousy might take a dangerous turn. When she becomes the subject of a death threat, Jesse and the rest of the Paradise police department go on high alert. And when Jesse witnesses a horrifying collision caused by a distracted teenage driver, the political repercussions of her arrest bring him into conflict with the local selectment, the DA, and some people with very deep pockets. There's murder in the air, and it's Jesse's reputation as an uncompromising defender of the law--and his life--on the line.

The Portrait of Doreene Gray
by Esri Allbritten

Angus MacGregor and the zany staff of Tripping Magazine, a travel magazine that covers paranormal destinations,investigate a bizarre story in a town brimming with secrets. Forty years ago, Maureene Pinter painted a portrait of her twin sister, Doreene. In an eerie turn of events, Doreene hasn't aged, although her portrait has. When Doreene decides to sell the portrait, the Tripping team travel to Doreene's mansion in Port Townsend, Washington, a Victorian town wreathed in mists and mysteries, to get the scoop on this intriguing story. When strange strips of paper appear in her soup, Doreene invites Tripping to stay and solve the town's many puzzles.

Port Vila Blues
by Gary Disher

Wyatt, the cool, ever-evasive thief, snatches the cash easily enough. He bypasses the alarm system, eludes the cops, makes it safely back to his hideout in Hobart. It's the diamond-studded Tiffany brooch-and perhaps the girl-that undoes him. Now some very hard people want to put Wyatt and that brooch out of circulation. But this is Wyatt's game and Wyatt sets the rules-even if it means a reckoning somewhere far from home. In a murky world where the cops are robbers, old-style criminal Wyatt positively shines.

Pies and Prejudice
by Ellery Adams

When the going gets tough, Ella Mae LaFaye bakes pies. So when she catches her husband cheating in New York, she heads back home to Havenwood, Georgia, where she can drown her sorrows in fresh fruit filling and flakey crust. But her pies aren't just delicious. They're having magical effects on the people who eat them--and the public is hungry for more. Discovering her hidden talent for enchantment, Ella Mae makes her own wish come true by opening the Charmed Pie Shoppe. But with her old nemesis Loralyn Gaynor making trouble, and her old crush Hugh Dylan making nice, she has more than pie on her plate. And when Loralyn's fiancé is found dead--killed with Ella Mae's rolling pin--it'll take all her sweet magic to clear her name.

Only One Life
by Sara Blaedel

Inspector Louise Rick is called out to Holbraek Fjord when a young immigrant girl is found drowned, a piece of concrete tied around her waist and two mysterious circular patches on the back of her neck. Navigating the complex web of family and community ties in Copenhagen's tightly knit ethnic communities, Louise must find the remorseless predator, or predators, before it is too late.

Plotting at the PTA
by Laura Alden

Bookstore owner, PTA secretary, and single mom Beth Kennedy has to fit a murder investigation or two into her schedule in Alden's enjoyable if padded third PTA mystery (after 2011's Foul Play at the PTA). When Beth discovers that a favored customer at her Rynwood, Wis., bookstore, Amy Jacobson, has died from shock after multiple bee stings, she believes Amy's death was not the freak accident the police claim. Meanwhile, Beth promises an elderly friend to look into the death of her great-niece, Kelly, more than 20 years earlier, an apparent suicide by drowning. When Beth realizes that Kelly and Amy were close friends, she risks her own life to prove that neither the drowning nor the anaphylactic shock was anything short of cold-blooded murder. (Publishers Weekly

Not My Blood
by Barbara Cleverly

Scotland Yard Detective Joe Sandilands is caught off guard one night in 1933 by a phone call from a distressed boy named Jackie Drummond, who just might be the illegitimate son Joe never knew he had. Jackie is in trouble at his Sussex boarding school, where a teacher has been murdered. When Joe gets himself assigned to the investigation, he learns the boarding school case is more complicated than it appears: A frightening number of boys, all from wealthy families, have gone missing over the school's history, and by some coincidence none of the families have followed up on their sons' whereabouts.

Never Say Pie
by Carol Culver

Hannah is hoping to expand her customer base for her pie shop, The Upper Crust, by joining fellow local foodies at a local food fair. When an all around hated, vicious food reviewer is murdered and Hannah and the other vendors are suspects, Hannah once again sets out to solve the crime. Can she manage to solve the crime and get close to her old flame-police chief Sam?

The Murder of Gonzago
by R. T. Raichev

Lord Remnant's eccentric parties on his privately owned Caribbean island of Grenadin are the stuff of legends ... but then the 12th Earl suddenly dies in the course of an amateur production of The Murder of Gonzago , the play within a play in Hamlet. The Times obituary gives the cause of death as "heart attack." However, an anonymous video tape showing Lord Remnant's final moments makes it clear that the nobleman's demise was far from natural. As it happens so often, Antonia and Hugh Payne get involved in the sinister events surrounding Lord Remnant's death entirely by accident. They are intrigued by the boldness of the murder, which seems to have been committed within a full view of Lord Remnant's wife Clarissa and their four guests. Who killed Lord Remnant?

Miss Me When I'm Gone
by Emily Arsenalt

Author Gretchen Waters made a name for herself with her bestseller Tammyland -a memoir about her divorce and her admiration for country music icons Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton that was praised as a "honky-tonk Eat, Pray, Love ." But her writing career is cut abruptly short when she dies from a fall down a set of stone library steps. It is a tragic accident and no one suspects foul play, certainly not Gretchen's best friend from college, Jamie, who's been named the late author's literary executor. But there's an unfinished manuscript Gretchen left behind that is much darker than Tammyland : a book ostensibly about male country musicians yet centered on a murder in Gretchen's family that haunted her childhood. In its pages, Gretchen seems to be speaking to Jamie from beyond the grave-suggesting her death was no accident.

The Hanging
by Wendy Hornsby

When her television series is abruptly canceled, investigative filmmaker Maggie MacGowen accepts a short-term contract to teach film production at a local community college-an interesting diversion, she thinks, until the next TV gig comes along. But if Maggie expects her sojourn in the ivory tower to be peaceful, she is dead wrong. Instead, she finds herself in the middle of an explosive power struggle. In the current era of budget cuts and fee increases, community college president Park Holloway arouses faculty and student animosity with his expensive building program, especially an admin building derisively nicknamed the Taj Ma'Holloway. When Maggie finds the college president hanging in the building's stairwell, suspicion falls not on her, but on her young friend Sly Miller. A world-class artist, his sculpture was supposed to be hanging in place of the body. That's only the beginning of a twisty plot.