Seattle: Thomas & Mercer, 2018.
This is the second in a reasonably enjoyable new police procedural mystery series set in Yorkshire, featuring DCI Jim Oldroyd, an old-style Yorkshireman through and through (even with his Oxford degree) and his young Detective Sergeant recently transferred up from London, but who is coming to prefer the Dales to the Smoke.
NY: Penguin, 2012.
I greatly enjoyed Blue Monday, the first installment in this superior series that combines British police procedural with psychological thriller and semi-domestic drama, and this second one is even better. Dr. Frieda Klein is a psychotherapist in London, a stubborn and often bloody-minded woman who only recently acquired a cell phone (it’s nearly always turned off), both loves and hates her city, and frequently spends the night walking long distances alone as a way of dealing with her own demons.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2015.
This is the seventh in an above-average series of murder mysteries featuring forensic archaeologist Dr. Ruth Galloway of northern Norfolk, and it’s a good deal spookier than most of the previous books. Because of its location, Norfolk hosted a number of Allied airfields during World War II, and there were the expected number of crashed aircraft and lost pilots, so it doesn’t really surprise anyone when an earth-moving machine uncovers a buried P-51 Mustang near the beach while leveling the ground for a housing development.
NY: Penguin, 2013.
This is the first in a new (well, new to me) mystery-thriller series set in London and featuring psychoanalyst Dr. Frieda Klein, who has nearly as many personal boogeymen as some of her patients. She’s a loner, doesn’t own a cell phone, and tries to relieve her frequent insomnia with long night-walks through the city. (She especially likes to trace the course of the underground and nearly forgotten River Fleet.)
NY: St. Martin, 2015.
I’ve read several of this author’s novels about homicide detective Erlendur Sveinsson of the Reykjavik CID, and they’re pretty good — in a rather dour, classically Scandinavian way. But this is the first one in a new sub-series about Erlendur’s early career, set in 1974, when Iceland celebrated the 1,100th anniversary of its first settlement. He’s a young cop in uniform, mostly handling traffic incidents, driving a police van around town on call on the night shift.
Seattle: Thomas & Mercer, 2018.
It’s always nice to discover a new author of detective novels, and this is the first in a new series — set, like several other such series, in the wild countryside of Yorkshire. Though it’s not as wild in the Digital Age as it used to be, when DCI Jim Oldroyd was a lad. He was educated at Oxford but he’s still a Yorkshireman through and through. His new Detective Sergeant, Andy Carter, however, has just arrived from London and the Met, and he’s finding that his Italian shoes don’t do well in the sheep pastures. But Oldroyd thinks he’s going to work out just fine anyway.
NY: Little Brown, 2018.
Rankin’s detective novels featuring DI John Rebus of the Edinburgh CID are consistently well-written and entertaining and there are now about two dozen in the series. Rebus actually has been retired for a few years now, but he’s still a detective by his very nature, despite age and emphysema, and he keeps up with what’s happening in that side of his city that the tourists never see. And he never forgets anything.
NY: Berkley, 2014.
God, I love a good complicated story, especially when it’s as skillfully plotted and as brilliantly written as this one. I know this is considered a “women’s novel,” but I really don’t care about such marketing labels A good book is a good book, and that’s all that matters. The setting here is (fictional) Pirriwee, on the Pirriwee Peninsula, near Sydney, Australia. It’s a storybook town and Pirriwee Public School is a “magical” primary school. The cast of the story is made up almost entirely of the parents of the new crop of five-year-old Kindergartners, and they’re a soap-operatic bunch if ever there was one. The focus, though, is on three women in particular and their spouses.
NY: Berkley, 2014.
This is a new author for me, though she’s written a large number of thrillers and detective stories. This one begins when a young mother in Bristol is walking her five-year-old son home from school. He breaks away from her and runs across the street toward their small house but is struck and killed by a car — which then drives away. DI Ray Stevens of Homicide gets the call and he and a young female Detective Constable (only in CID for a few months, but she’s smart and eager) start their investigation. Ray’s whole team puts in great effort, but it all goes nowhere.
NY: Little, Brown, 2018.
Harry Bosch retired from the LAPD several books ago, but that doesn’t mean he will ever stop being who he is. He’s a born investigator and a visceral seeker after justice, and it’s just not something he can let go of. Since leaving his old job, he’s been working mostly on cold cases as a reserve officer for the tiny San Fernando PD out in the Valley, which supplies the professional challenge he needs in his life.
As a retired public librarian (large system in a large Southern city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of others for 50 years now. Starting in 1999, I began posting my reviews to a personal website, but in 2009, I discovered Wordpress & shifted my reviewing jones to a blog.
