by Tom Spencer
Sometimes you know immediately that a book is going to get under your skin and stay there. I felt that way only a few pages into Spencer’s tart debut, THE MYSTERY OF THE CROOKED MAN (Pushkin Vertigo, 319 pp., paperback, $18.95), which vaults the reader into the world of Agatha Dorn, an irritable archivist and passionate devotee of mystery fiction — particularly the work of Gladden Green (think Agatha Christie through a fun-house mirror.)
When Agatha discovers what appears to be a lost manuscript by Green, one with the potential to tilt the author’s legacy on its axis, she becomes famous. It’s not long before “The Dog’s Ball,” as the book is called, is revealed to be a hoax. Then Agatha’s ex-girlfriend — who had warned her to “be careful” with the manuscript — dies by suicide. Or did she? Agatha, who’s been canceled, thinks otherwise.
Is Agatha “a crazy woman, haphazardly but unmistakably drifting down and out, sick, unemployed, drunk, obsessed with solving a murder that had never occurred?” Or “a maverick, pursuing truth and justice … even at the cost of [her] own well-being?” Maybe she’s both.
by Jess Kidd
Nora Breen, the plucky, practical sleuth in MURDER AT GULLS NEST (Atria, 323 pp., $28.99) has checked into the Gulls Nest boardinghouse in an English seaside town in 1954. She’s there to find her friend Frieda, who has been writing faithfully to her each week until, abruptly, she doesn’t. Ominously, Frieda’s last letter had concluded, “I believe every one of us at Gulls Nest is concealing some kind of secret — I shall make it my business to find out and so I shall finally have something riveting to write to you, dear friend!”
Nora arrives at Gulls Nest with some secrets of her own, such as the fact that she spent 30 years as a Carmelite nun, Sister Agnes of Christ. To investigate her friend’s disappearance, Nora must leave behind the part of herself that clamored for the solitude of a religious order and live fully in the world, embracing its chaos. It isn’t easy, especially when another guest at Gulls Nest turns up dead, poisoned by cyanide. Frieda’s handkerchief is tucked into one of his pockets.
Kidd’s turn to cozy mysteries after several genre-stretching novels is a welcome one that tantalizes the prospect of more installments. As Nora adroitly observes, “There’s work to be done and deductions to be made.”
Midnight in Soap Lake
by Matthew Sullivan
Sullivan is channeling “Twin Peaks” in his latest novel, MIDNIGHT IN SOAP LAKE (Hanover Square Press, 409 pp., $28.99). Not only because of the Pacific Northwest setting, but because of the spookiness that permeates the narrative, thanks to a mineral-filled lake imbued with potentially otherworldly properties and a mythic, creepy figure called “TreeTop” who has terrorized the area for decades.
Abigail and her scientist husband, Eli, have just moved to Soap Lake. Having expected “ferns and rain, ale and slugs, Sasquatch and wool,” she’s somewhat disconcerted to find they’ll be living in the desert, “scabby with dark basalt, bristled with the husks of flowers.” Not long after Eli decamps to Poland for some research, she’s on a walk when she encounters a terrified little boy, caked in dried blood. It turns out his mother, Esme, has been murdered. That night, when Abigail gets home, a strange man wearing goggles, his mouth “shrouded in white fabric,” taps on her window with a latex-gloved finger. Is it TreeTop?
As he moves back and forth in time between Esme’s childhood in Soap Lake and Abigail’s present-day sleuthing, Sullivan evokes the richness of a small-town community as well as the secrets-filled uneasiness simmering just below its placid surface.
by Jesse Q. Sutanto
I appreciate the recent uptick in books featuring sleuths of a seasoned age, particularly ones as prickly, opinionated and delightful as Vera Wong, who returns for her second outing in VERA WONG’S GUIDE TO SNOOPING (ON A DEAD MAN)(Berkley, 324 pp., paperback, $19). After the thrill of investigating a homicide case in “Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers,” all Vera wants is to be surrounded by family — biological and chosen — in her beloved Bay Area tea shop, where she can dispense food, drink and advice (lots of it, mostly unsolicited). There’s just one problem: She’s bored. “Sometimes, all an old lady wants is a murder to solve. Is that too much to ask for?”
Then Vera meets a young woman rattled by the disappearance of a friend who, it turns out, is the social media influencer Xander Lin. It soon transpires that he has died in murky circumstances, and everything about him — real name, money sources, family background — is made up. Vera, undaunted, assembles a crew of friends and begins to unearth the dark secrets at the heart of Xander’s short life.
Further adventures cannot arrive fast enough.