Double Scoop

Here, folks, are two more fine crime novels worth adding to your reading stack this summer:

Dark Places, by Gillian Flynn (Shaye Areheart Books). Author Flynn, I’m told, is a calm and respectable Chicago resident who is the former chief TV critic for Entertainment Weekly magazine. As a writer of thrillers, however, she’s something quite different: one scary momma. Dark Places--her second novel, after the Dagger Awards-winning Sharp Objects (2007)--is narrated by Libby Day, who, 24 years ago, was the only survivor of what newspapers called the “Prarie Massacre,” during which her older brother killed their mother and two older sisters in what seemed to be a satanic ritual. Flynn’s writing is strong and pared down to the bone. She never gives in to sentimentality. This one is already high up on my year’s-best list.

Darkness at the Stroke of Noon, by Dennis Richard Murphy (HarperCollins). Beginning her review of this Canadian novel, Reviewing the Evidence’s Yvonne Klein wrote: “RCMP Sergeant Booker Kennison knows way too much about corruption in the more senior reaches of the force and so he finds himself posted from Ottawa to Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories and not all that far south of the Arctic Circle. Before he has time to warm up, he’s sent even further north to an archaeological site investigating the graves of members of the ill-fated 1845 Franklin expedition to navigate the Northwest Passage. Two of the archaeological team have died, presumably in an accident, and Kennison is required to look things over and bring the bodies back.” As critic Sarah Weinman wrote, “What a shame that Murphy did not live to see his one and only novel published, and that he was robbed of writing more. His evocation of Canada’s most frozen north is strong enough to chill the bones, and his ability to merge multiple mysteries together in seamless fashion is on par with writers of lengthy series backlists.”