Pierce’s Picks: “Better Dead” — with a 10th Anniversary Book Giveaway

If Chicago private eye Nate Heller was not already a figure plucked from Max Allan Collins’ fertile imagination, some other novelist would surely by now have used him as the inspiration for a detective series. Consider just some of Heller’s career highlights: he’s looked into the “presumed” murder of bank robber John Dillinger (True Crime), the assassinations of Louisiana politician Huey Long (Blood and Thunder) and Las Vegas mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel (Neon Mirage), the mystery surrounding aviatrix Amelia Earhart (Flying Blind), the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr. (Stolen Away), the 1947 Los Angeles slaying of the enigmatic “Black Dahlia” (Angel in Black), the supposed suicide of actress Marilyn Monroe (Bye, Bye Baby), and an unsuccessful attempt on the life of President John F. Kennedy (Target Lancer). Is it any wonder that producers of the 1958-1961 TV gumshoe drama Peter Gunn recruited Heller as one of their creative consultants? (Oh, wait, that’s fiction too, not fact.)

In Better Dead (Forge), Collins’ new, 16th outing for his resolute but randy protagonist, Heller goes from observing the 1950 “Communist takeover” of a Wisconsin town—at the invitation of Reds-baiting Republican U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy—to being hired three years later by Pinkerton sleuth-turned-author Dashiell Hammett (a one-time member of the Communist Party of America, now representing a contingent of concerned literary leftists), who wants him “to conduct an eleventh-hour investigation into the alleged crimes of two people who are sitting on Death Row”: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a New York City couple convicted of conspiring to commit espionage by leaking American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Heller accepts that assignment, for a respectable fee. But then he turns around and convinces prominent Washington, D.C., syndicated columnist Drew Pearson—who helped hound Secretary of Defense James Forrestal to an early death in Collins’ 1999 novel Majic Man—to provide further funds for the project. (Any suspicions of Heller being less than a capitalist are firmly debunked by this dexterous arrangement.) Pearson wants reports of any fresh findings in the Rosenberg matter. Meanwhile, McCarthy and his odious chief counsel, Roy Cohn, lean on Heller to tell them as well what he learns, if only so they can be sure it won’t result in the Rosenbergs ever again enjoying life outside the walls of Sing Sing prison.

With assistance from Natalie Ash, a confessed Communist and beguiling young Greenwich Village art gallery manager (“tall, in that shapely slender Lauren Bacall way”), who was once a neighbor of the Rosenbergs, Heller interviews and re-interviews witnesses to the incarcerated pair’s putative treachery. Over the course of it, he discovers discrepancies in the trial proceedings, and even turns up evidence that could be used to poke holes in the prosecution’s charges. Furthermore, he exposes secrets that might result in the federal government coming down harder than ever on Communist sympathizers in the United States. And of course, our 47-year-old hero soon winds up in bed with his own Red—in the notably hot form of the aforementioned Miss Ash. Collins’ Heller novels resemble what P.I. tales of the 1950s and ’60s might have been like, had there been fewer societal restrictions on language and sex scenes.

But as promising as Heller’s probe into the Rosenberg case seems, the author isn’t changing history, so we pretty much know how things will turn out (including facts that have come to light only during the last decade).

(Left) Ethel and Julius Rosenberg during their 1951 trial.

The same can’t be said of the second investigation conducted in these pages.

Again, “Tail-Gunner Joe” McCarthy worms into the plot. He wants Heller’s aid in digging up proof that the Central Intelligence Agency is “riddled with Commies and security risks.” In addition, the CIA apparently has a file on the heavy-drinking McCarthy and his sexually suspect cohort, Cohn, that those two men would dearly like to get their hands on. However, it’s another senator, Democrat Estes Kefauver of Tennessee—the “hayseedish” foe of American criminality with whom Heller tangled in 2002’s Chicago Confidential—who really invites the detective’s entry into the separate but linked narrative comprising Better Dead’s latter half. It seems Kefauver has targeted a New York photographer, Irving Klaw, for distributing bondage-and-discipline shots of renowned pin-up model Bettie Page, and Page herself wants Heller to convince her fellow Tennessean to back off. Collins describes the Chi-town shamus’ initial impressions of his fetching new client thusly:

The beauty with the shoulder-brushing black hair in the pageboy cut was both exactly what I expected and not at all. Her face was perfectly framed by black locks, her make-up surprisingly light though the dark red lipstick brought Natalie Ash unsettlingly to mind.

But this was no Bohemian, nor a wicked girl into sadomasochistic fun and games. Her quality was more girl-next-door, if you were that lucky a bastard, with a wholesomeness and a winning personality that leapt at you like a friendly tiger. She wore a pink short-sleeved sweater tight enough that the white bra beneath bled through, with a dark brown leather belt cinching a wasp waist above a tan skirt that hit just under her knees. Her nylons were beige, not dark black, and her high heels were low-slung, not sky-high. Subtracting the heels, I made her as five foot five, and despite a towering personality, she seemed almost petite. The scent of Ivory soap wafted. ...

“Oh, Mis-tuh Heller,” she said, and smiled like a cheerleader, her Southern accent honeying her sultry second soprano, “ah would know you anywhere.”

Heller doesn’t have much trouble persuading Kefauver to scratch Page from his lengthy roster of prospective witnesses, and in almost as quick order the P.I. commences a mutually enjoyable affair with the brunette bombshell. That’s only the introduction, though, to a much more complicated episode. It seems that a bacteriologist and CIA employee named Frank Olson has contacted McCarthy, and the Wisconsin lawmaker believes Dr. Olson can help him gather dirt on the Agency. But what Olson knows about government-condoned experiments with drugs and biological warfare, as well as “radical interrogation techniques,” could have more significance consequences than merely embarrassing America’s “spooks.” It could undermine the nation’s contention that it won’t stoop to the sort of propagandized human guinea pig tests conducted by the Soviets.

“For a certain type of militaristic mind, Nate, biological warfare is the best thing to come along since sliced bread,” Olson warns. “With atomic warfare, there’s complete destruction of private property. But with biological weapons? Only people get destroyed.”

Olson is clearly haunted by his participation in these studies, so it comes as no shock when the scientist suddenly disappears, his unexplained absence followed by assertions that he had been suffering from anxiety, had become a danger to his family, and was “dragged off almost bodily to see a ‘shrink.’” More astonishing is what Heller, acting on behalf of Olson’s spouse, learns about the CIA’s use of the psychedelic drug LSD. When, days later, the scientist perishes in a suspicious fall from Manhattan’s Hotel Statler (today’s Hotel Pennsylvania, across from Madison Square Garden), Heller turns his sights firmly on Olson’s boss, looking for answers that might strip the lid from a particularly egregious CIA undertaking.


Pin-up model Bettie Page, of course.

Iowa writer Collins has made a name for himself by inserting his detective protagonist into some of America’s most infamous crimes, but over the last several novels, he has definitely outdone himself. Fortunately, he and his longtime research associate, George Hagenauer, are quite thorough in their historical inquiries, which brings greater credibility to these yarns than a less-punctilious novelist might have achieved. The result, in Better Dead, is that the backdrop of 1950s New York City—where Heller has one of his A-1 Detective Agency’s three offices (the other two being in his hometown of Chicago and in Los Angeles)—comes alive with identifiable details, including buildings and businesses such as the Waldorf Cafeteria, the Village Vanguard music club, and a country music nightspot called the Village Barn. Collins is no less meticulous in portraying the numerous real-life figures who populate Better Dead. While he lavishes a great deal of attention on Bettie Page and the considerably less alluring Senator McCarthy, and plays up the understandable camaraderie between Heller and Dashiell Hammett (“If you keep talking like Sam Spade,” the Maltese Falcon author says at one point, “I’m going to have to charge you royalties.”), he is no less generous in giving dimension to secondary players whom readers might not realize are plucked from the real past, such as Frank Olson. The author even tosses in the occasional mention of a place or person that only somebody very well acquainted with the setting might recognize—such as James S. Bolan, a former New York police commissioner whose 46th-floor office in the Empire State Building, once home to a detective agency Bolan founded after retiring from public service, has been taken over in this book by Heller and his A-1 operatives.

That Collins executes these feats without fanfare shows how secure he is with his research. That he does so while also delivering witty dialogue, explosive moments of gunplay, and playful amorous twists in a story that would still be interesting even if it did not involve celebrities of yore … well, that’s just plain talent. Collins is more practiced and polished at doing what he does than most of his competitors. Better Dead, an eminently readable introduction to the McCarthy era—a period of political paranoia and division not so dissimilar from our own—puts his skills on full display.

More than three decades have now passed since Collins—who is known as well today for moving the late Mickey Spillane’s numerous unfinished Mike Hammer works toward publication (among them this year’s Murder Never Knocks)—began recording Nate Heller’s escapades, beginning with 1983’s True Detective. And though his storytelling formula has become quite familiar, I’m continually surprised at his ability to plumb new interest from his leading man. Heller, the half-Jewish, half-Irish son of a socialist bookshop owner, who joined the Chicago police force against his father’s wishes and grew up into a man Life magazine heralded as the “Private Eye to the Stars,” is at once a romantic and case-hardened, morally ambivalent individual prepared, when necessary, to exercise summary judgment (as he does in a gun-smoke-laden finish to Better Dead’s Book 1 that brings to mind Spillane’s I, the Jury). With any luck, we can expect his adventures to continue. As Heller noted at his debut, he was born in 1905. Yet Better Dead’s last chapter, composed in the gumshoe’s first-person voice, includes mention of events taking place as late as 2008—when Heller would be 103 years old. 2013’s series entry, Ask Not, brought our hero’s timeline up only so far as 1964. There are 44 years in between, plenty of time for him to have solved more notorious misdeeds, bedded more ballyhooed lovelies, and ventilated more than his share of overconfident malefactors. I, for one, can hardly wait to read about it all.

* * *

This month marks 10 years since I launched The Rap Sheet. To help celebrate the occasion, Forge—Max Allan Collins’ latest publisher of his Nate Heller novels—has agreed to supply us with 10 books from that series, which we’re giving away to this blog’s loyal readers. Available are both five copies of Better Dead and five other copies of the previous Heller outing, Ask Not. If you would like to be entered in a drawing to win one of these fine freebies, all you need do is e-mail your name and postal address to jpwrites@wordcuts.org. Be sure to type “Better Dead Contest” in the subject line, and let me know whether you have a preference as to which of these two novels you would prefer to receive as a prize.

Entries will be accepted between now and midnight next Friday, May 20. The 10 winners will be chosen completely at random, and their names listed on this page the following day.

Sorry, but at the publisher’s request, this contest is open only to residents of the United States and Canada.

What are you waiting for? Get those entries in now!

READ MORE: “Better Red,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).

Pierce’s Picks

A periodic alert for followers of crime and thriller fiction.




The Strings of Murder, by Oscar de Muriel (Pegasus). This historical whodunit first caught my eye when the jacket of its British edition was featured among the 20 contenders in The Rap Sheet’s Best Crime Fiction Cover of 2015 contest; it wound up taking fifth place. Mexico City-born author De Muriel’s vivid, sometimes macabre, and often humorous tale has now (finally) made it to the States, and if you’re a fan of character-rich locked-room mysteries, you’ll want to pay it some attention. The story opens in November 1888, when foppish Inspector Ian Frey is dismissed from Scotland Yard amid a change of leadership, not only disappointing his well-to-do family (who always thought a policeman’s life was quite beneath him, anyway), but losing his fiancée in the process. Frey’s crime-solving skills have not gone unnoticed, however. In the aftermath of his losing that job, Prime Minister Lord Salisbury personally, but secretly, assigns him another: travel to Edinburgh, Scotland, to look into the vicious slaying of a violinist in his own home, a murder that’s frighteningly reminiscent of Jack the Ripper’s malevolent spree of just a few months back. Oh, and Frey will have to work in the Scottish capital with a dubious new police subdivision devoted to investigating apparitions and commanded by an eccentric, loud, bigger-than-life detective named Adolphus McGray, better known as “Nine-Nails” in recognition of his missing a finger. Frey has a longstanding antipathy toward the Scots, and he and McGray could hardly be more different from one another. Yet—despite their frequent exchanges of insults—the pair learn to work in concert, as they try to figure out who eviscerated virtuoso-teacher Guilleum Fontaine in his music studio, while leaving that room locked from the inside. Could this atrocity be linked to a purportedly famous, and perhaps also cursed, violin in Fontaine’s collection? Of what significance are the black magic symbols left on the floor? And why does Fontaine’s maid say she heard multiple musicians playing in that studio before the homicide took place? Although De Muriel’s insistence on making McGray speak in dialect slows his story a bit, there’s plenty here in the way of historical atmospherics, allusions to paranormal phenomena, and further killings to keep things charging ahead. Furthermore, the odd-couple partnership between the snobbish Frey and the uncouth McGray is entertaining enough to have spawned a sequel, A Fever of the Blood, which was released the UK earlier this year, and with any luck will make it to the States by 2017.

After so enjoying Laura Lippman’s After I’m Gone (2014) and Hush Hush (2015), I’m more than willing to be led into the dicey psychological depths of Wilde Lake (Morrow), her latest standalone thriller. Luisa “Lu” Brant is the ambitious central figure in these pages. She’s recently been elected as the first woman to serve as state’s attorney for Howard County, Maryland—a position once held by her eminent father—and is looking for a case that will justify voters’ faith in her abilities. She thinks she’s found it in the prosecution of a rather unbalanced transient charged with fatally assaulting a woman in her own residence. However, the trial preparations fetch up distressing recollections of another tragedy, from 1980. That was when Lu’s brother, A.J., apparently saved the life of his best friend at the cost of another man’s future. A.J. was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. But as Lu pursues the present-day investigation and its dependence on memories, she wonders whether she knows the truth about her brother’s actions—and whether America’s legal system can even provide the answers she needs. As the blog BOLO Books notes, there are echoes here of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, but Lippman strives for much more in Wilde Lake than mere imitation. The Washington Post’s Patrick Anderson calls it “one of her best novels and ... one of her most personal.”

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A periodic alert for followers of crime and thriller fiction.



Steps to the Gallows (Allison & Busby) is Edward Marston’s second boisterous adventure for Peter and Paul Skillen. Those identical twins are more-than-capable “thief-takers,” but when it comes to bodyguarding, they’re less than perfect. As this tale commences, it’s 1816, in London, and Leonidas Paige—an ex-soldier who has turned to the enemy-making enterprise of satirizing lawmakers and other pompous personages in newspapers and cartoons—has become worried for his safety. So he employs the Skillens and their associates to watch his back. Despite such protections, Paige is soon garroted and his lodgings set ablaze. The brothers, upset that they could not safeguard their client, commit themselves to identifying and bringing down his murderer. To do that, though, will require their watching over the stubborn and capable woman who’d peddled the deceased’s work; finding the artist who’d helped Paige lampoon his targets; investigating an assortment of prosperous men upset by their treatment at Paige’s hands; figuring out how to assist a prisoner under threat escape from his cell; and fending off their arrogant rivals in crime-solving, the Bow Street Runners. To bring this case to its conclusion, the siblings will also rush away to Paris, where Paul fears his actress inamorata may be in danger from a lecherous villain. Marston (aka Keith Miles), author of the Nicholas Bracewell mysteries and the Railway Detective series, in addition to last year’s debut for Peter and Paul Skillen, in Shadow of the Hangman, offers a sharp wit, prodigious plotting skills, and a manifest appreciation for historical atmospherics in his novels. Such delightful storytelling!

Skip back one year, to 1815, and you have the time period in which the events in Lloyd Shepherd’s The Detective and the Devil (Simon & Schuster UK) take place. Constable Charles Horton from London’s Thames River Police Office is summoned to the city’s East End to probe the gruesome slaying of a family, headed by a man who clerked for Britain’s East India Company. Horton’s persistent inquiries raise the hackles of that company, which is powerful enough and far-reaching enough in its political influence to shut down any threats to its reputation. They also bring the policeman into contact with the early 19th-century world of pseudo-science and the supernatural. Might the present homicides be connected to the looting of an alchemist’s library, as well as to the peculiar deaths of East India Company employees handling business with the tropical island of Saint Helena? The search for answers will send Horton and his wife, Abigail, off to the South Pacific in pursuit of a potentially demonic killer. Shepherd, who first made his name with the historical thriller The English Monster: or, The Melancholy Transactions of William Ablass (2012)—in which Charles Horton was introduced—delivers in this new novel (his fourth) a captivating blend of superstition and commercial subterfuge, enriched further by references to French former emperor Napoléon Bonaparte and the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway murders.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A periodic alert for followers of crime and thriller fiction.



The byline on the cover of The Father (Quercus) reads “Anton Svensson,” but that’s only a collaborative pseudonym employed by screenwriter Stefan Thunberg (credited with contributions to the Swedish TV series Wallander as well as a succession of films based on Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck novels) and investigative journalist Anders Roslund. The latter, together with Börge Hellström, penned Box 21 and Three Seconds. But The Father—part one of a two-novel sequence called “Made in Sweden”—is really Thunberg’s story to tell, because it’s based on the history of his own bank-robbing family. The Father’s taught and tragic narrative alternates between the present-day, where we witness a trio of young criminal brothers—Leo, Felix, and Vincent—and their friend Jasper, plan and execute a string of increasingly daring heists; and flashbacks that spotlight the siblings’ wrathful and abusive father, Ivan, who imparted to them all of the hatred and brutality that had poisoned him during the Balkan civil wars. With their futures circumscribed by violence and a troubled Stockholm cop on their tails, the brothers must ultimately confront the parent who shaped (or misshaped) them.

Although I don’t usually choose non-fiction works as “Pierce’s Picks,” I’m going to make an exception in the case of The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer (Henry Holt). Penned by Skip Hollandsworth, the executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, this is the sometimes-shocking but still thoroughly engrossing tale of what he calls “one of the great American murder mysteries of the late 19th century, a blood-curdling whodunit ….” Beginning in December 1884, and continuing for the next year, Hollandsworth explains, one or more villains crisscrossed the booming Texas capital of Austin, “striking on moonlit nights, using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women from every race and class.” Because the initial victims—attacked in their beds, some managing to escape with only minor injuries—were black female servants who worked for some of the city’s wealthiest white families, this elusive “madman” came to be known as the Servant Girl Annihilator. The scant witnesses there were to the attacks offered conflicting testimony about the marauder’s racial identity, yet Austin’s conservative white businessmen convinced themselves that responsibility lay with one or more black men. Sadly, they handed the task of catching said killer(s) to men little experienced in detective work; and local politicians shied away from hiring additional policemen, fearing that they’d suffer the wrath of voters if they raised taxes in order to pay for such safeguards. (It was a far better idea, some said, to simply encourage white residents to shoot any and all black strangers they thought might be intruding on their property.) The result was that, despite numerous arrests, the killer was never apprehended or even identified. There has even been speculation that whoever was behind the Austin murder spree also committed the Jack the Ripper killings in London three years later. Anyone who read Steven Saylor’s standalone mystery from 2000, A Twist at the End (which imagined short-story writer O. Henry—who actually lived in Austin in 1885 under his real name, William Sydney Porter—uncovering the truth behind the slayer’s identity), will be familiar with the basics of the Servant Girl Annihilator legend. But Hollandsworth wraps that historical framework in an abundance of detailed, colorful information about Austin life and residents of the time that adds welcome human dimension to the criminal horrors.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



Max Allan Collins is well on his way to doubling the number of Mike Hammer private-eye novels in existence. Counting the new Murder Never Knocks (Titan), he has penned eight Hammer books based on an abundance of unfinished, unpublished material that Mickey Spillane—whose 98th birthday would have been today—left in his care when he passed away back in 2006; during his 50-year career, Spillane himself produced only 13 novels starring his hard-headed, harder-fisted Gotham gumshoe. This latest collaborative work (which Spillane had originally titled Don’t Look Behind You) is set firmly in the mid-1960s, an era of economic and social decline for New York City, when it experienced labor strikes, “white flight” to the suburbs, a major power blackout, and the shuttering of at least two of its biggest newspapers, the New York Daily Mirror and The New York Herald Tribune. Murder Never Knocks kicks off with a contract killer’s attempt to bring an early curtain down on Hammer’s life. This is hardly the first time someone has taken a shot at our wisecracking hero … and the confrontation doesn’t end well for the hit man. Still, Hammer would like to know who paid to get him out of the way, as would his partner-lover, Velda Sterling, and Captain Pat Chambers, his police buddy who’s spent far too long trying to keep Hammer from being killed or killing others. Could there be some link between the recent assault, a past hit-and-run accident, and the injured newsstand hawker who’d observed that tragedy unfold? While Hammer tries to get to the bottom of it all, he and Velda are busy with the unusual assignment of body guarding the particularly beautiful body of a Hollywood producer’s fiancée at her bridal shower. Mob toughs, Greenwich Village habitués, real-life New York gossip columnist Hy Gardner, and an elusive malefactor all figure into the careening plot.

Although Elizabeth Wilson, a British fictionist and academic specializing in popular culture, first came to my attention with the 2013 U.S. publication of The Girl in Berlin (a novel about Cold War-era secrets and spies), that book—as Wilson explains on her Web site—was just one in an evolving succession of “linked crime novels set in the late 1940s and 1950s exploring the changed world of Britain and specifically London after 1945.” The new She Died Young (Serpent’s Tail) is the fourth entry in said series. It transports readers to 1956 London, where a lovely young woman has taken a tumble down the stairs of a seedy King’s Cross hotel and broken her neck. An accident? Crime reporter Gerry Blackstone, the son of a wealthy undertaker, doesn’t think so. The problem is to convince Detective Chief Inspector Jack McGovern of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch that his assessment of the situation is correct. He’s lucky in that McGovern wants Blackstone’s assistance in a different matter: keeping an investigation of dishonest Yard officers out of the news and helping him expose a corrupt cop. Meanwhile, concerns have surfaced regarding Soviet spies among the refugees flowing in to England from Eastern Europe. Throw in assorted other suspect secondary players, and She Died Young becomes a most engaging tale that, by the way, illuminates the rapidly changing postwar face of the British capital.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



In his first novel, Speakers of the Dead (Plume), Georgia English professor J. Aaron Sanders propels Long Island-born poet-journalist Walt Whitman (he of Leaves of Grass fame) into the role of amateur sleuth, tackling a mystery involving body snatchers, religious zealots, and political corruption. It all begins with the public hanging in 1843 of Lena Stowe, who with her husband, Abraham, founded the Women’s Medical College of Manhattan. She’d been convicted of slaying Abraham in retribution for his serial infidelities, one instance of which was his affair with Mary Rogers, the “beautiful cigar girl” whose real-life but unsolved murder in July 1841 was a public sensation (as well as the impetus for Edgar Allan Poe to pen “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” his sequel to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”). Reeling from the deaths of his two friends, Whitman—a manifestly impassioned reporter in his early 20s, working for the New York Aurora newspaper—sets out to prove that the Stowes’ deaths represent serious miscarriages of justice. In pursuit of this end, he recruits Henry Saunders, a former lover and now his new editor at the paper. However, the vast majority of responsibilities in these pages fall to Whitman himself, who proves quite capable of handling not only protesters fiercely opposed to anatomical dissection of cadavers at the women’s college (for they fear their loved ones will be deprived of “resurrection” if they’re missing body parts), but also short-sighted superiors, obdurate lawmen, and the occasional knife-wielding assailant. (In an interview in The Rumpus, Sanders says that “When I started the book I didn’t really understand Walt’s physicality. He was a strong, athletic man, and he did get into fights.”) The author’s historical research, while not flawless (Crime Fiction Lover notes a mention of “Whitman’s mother whistling “Onward Christian Soldiers” to him 30 years before it was composed”), certainly helped fill Speakers of the Dead with delightful curiosities, including the  existence of 19th-century “dead houses—places where loved ones can leave [the recently deceased] safely until they are no longer good for dissection.” It’s said that this novel is the first installment in a new series. A promising beginning, indeed.

After composing two more lighthearted novels as “Elaine di Rollo,” the writer now styling herself “E.S. Thomson” delivers Beloved Poison (Constable UK), a darker Victorian-era yarn that takes ample advantage of her expertise in the history of medicine. The setting is a ramshackle and slowly collapsing mid-19th-century London infirmary, St. Saviour’s, that’s expected to be demolished in favor of a new railway bridge. There we’re introduced to Jem Flockhart, an androgynous apothecary with a prominent birthmark, who was born a girl but reared as a boy. From her position as an outsider (a favorite kind of figure in mystery fiction), Jem sees clearly the failings of her infirmary associates, from the back-stabbing doctors employing sometimes dubious medical practices to the patients struggling to survive each day amid the hospital’s filth. Everyone in this place, it seems, has secrets—a few of which will inevitably be loosed by the murder of handsome but promiscuous Dr. Bain, whose planned next conquest might’ve been his boss’ winsome daughter. What hand struck Bain down, and how might his murder relate to the discovery, in the graveyard behind St. Saviour’s, of tiny coffins bearing bloodstained remains? Americans who don’t wish to order Beloved Poison from Great Britain should be happy to know that a U.S. edition of Thomson’s enthralling novel is due out this coming September.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



Shaft’s Revenge, by David F. Walker (Dynamite Entertainment). The last year has been a red-letter time for fans of Ernest Tidyman’s 1970s New York City private eye, John Shaft. November brought the publication of Steve Aldous’ The World of Shaft, a comprehensive study of the character as he’s appeared in various media. And David F. Walker, who in late 2014 began delivering a new series of Shaft comic books (more recently collected as Shaft Volume 1: A Complicated Man), has now debuted a second series of adventures for that “cat who won’t cop out,” Shaft: Imitation of Life. Walker is also offering Shaft’s Revenge, the first new Shaft novel brought to market since Tidyman’s The Last Shaft in 1975. I haven’t yet received a copy of this 288-page work, but Walker—in an interview with Comic Vine—explains that its story “takes place shortly after Shaft’s Big Score [1972], which was the third book by Tidyman,” and that it finds the gumshoe being “hired by Knocks Persons, the godfather of Harlem, who appeared in the first novel [Shaft, 1970]. Knocks knows he is about to be killed, and he basically hires Shaft to find his killer. As he works the case, Shaft is caught up in the middle of a conflict between corrupt cops and the killer of Knocks.” Walker adds that this book gave him the chance to “explore some of what makes Shaft tick, including aspects of his youth. We learn stuff about Shaft in this book that has never been revealed before, stuff that even he didn’t know about, which serves as something of a second mystery within the story.”

Another familiar face turns up in The Sign of Fear (Simon & Schuster UK), Robert Ryan’s fourth outing for Sherlock Holmes’ aging but faithful companion, Doctor (or, more recently, Major) John H. Watson, following last year’s A Study in Murder. It’s now 1917, and London is under assault by German bombers, a barrage that seriously unnerves the local citizenry. Watson, already grieving after the loss of one friend, is struck again by news that another warfront ally has been lost during a torpedo attack on the English Channel. Then his concert-going comrade, Sir Gilbert Hastings, is snatched, along with four others, and a ransom demand follows, telling of the ghastly events destined to take place if those demands are not satisfied. Anxious for help, Watson accepts it from a most unlikely source: ruthless German spy Miss Pillbody, aka the “She Wolf.” Although their aims are ultimately different, their investigative efforts prove fruitful, exposing a dastardly, high-level plot. Ryan’s portrayal of Watson as compassionate, intelligent, and surprisingly brave for an old gent is most satisfying, and his careful suspense-building makes this series well worth the reading time.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



Once a Crooked Man (Minotaur) finds David McCallum—yes, the Scottish-born performer who played Soviet secret agent Illya Kuryakin in television’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and currently appears in NCIS—offering up a comic thriller about a down-on-his-luck New York City actor who, after accidentally overhearing gangster brothers discuss how best to go about eliminating somebody in London with too much information about their disreputable affairs, tries to warn the intended victim … only to wind up becoming a target himself. A flirty British spy adds another welcome dollop of charm to this tale that suggests McCallum is no stranger to farcical crime capers cooked up by the likes of Donald E. Westlake and other authors.

Peter May’s Coffin Road (Quercus UK) returns readers to Scotland’s Outer Hebrides islands—the wind-ravaged setting for the same novelist’s award-winning Lewis Trilogy—where Detective Sergeant George Gunn (introduced in The Blackhouse) is pulled into a mystery involving the century-old disappearances of lighthouse keepers. Entwined with that promising plot line is a second, this one involving an amnesia victim who has washed up on the Isle of Harris with no clue to his own identity, save for a map identifying a route called Coffin Road. There is also a bonus, third story thread having to do with a teenage girl in Edinburgh, who has become convinced that the death of her scientist-father two years ago was not the result of suicide.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



After the Crash (Hachette) is French author Michel Bussi’s award-winning story about a 1980 airplane tragedy in the Swiss Alps, which kills more than 160 people, leaving just a single survivor: a 3-month-old baby girl. Unfortunately, there were two such youngsters on board, one of them from an oil-rich family, the other from a clan of much more modest means. Even 18 years later, the girl’s identity remains in question, and Crédule Grand-Duc, a private detective who’s failed to get to the bottom of that mystery, contemplates suicide. He’s stopped only by a previously unrealized clue, one he won’t be able to reveal, before he’s murdered—or so it seems.

No Mortal Thing (Hodder & Stoughton) finds British writer Gerald Seymour returning to the subject of organized crime in Italy, which he last addressed in 2009’s The Collaborator. This new novel introduces Jago Browne, an up-and-coming investment banker from one of London’s rougher quarters, who’s now based in Berlin, Germany. One morning he witnesses a vicious assault on a woman, but when he tries to intervene, things don’t go well. He subsequently reports the incident to police, but is surprised by their lack of interest or concern; they basically tell him to forget all about it. However, Browne learns where the perpetrator of the attack, Marcantonio Cancello—associated with southern Italy’s ’Ndrangheta crime organization, and on the lookout for ways to funnel their ill-gotten millions into legitimate European enterprises—is based, and embarks on a quixotic plan to strike a blow at the Cancello family. What he doesn’t know, though, as he calculates his opportunities and gains an ally in a woman named Consolata, is that his activities have put him smack in the middle of a sensitive surveillance operation being directed against the Italian mafia. Although No Mortal Thing is a UK book, Seymour also has another new book out this week in the States: Vagabond (Thomas Dunne).

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks: Emergency Gift Ideas

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

OK, all you sorry last-minute present buyers, listen up! If you’re still looking for books to buy for those crime-fiction lovers on your list, here are a few ideas to consider:

• The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper Stories (Running Press), edited by Maxim Jakubowski, which gathers together three dozen abbreviated yarns about late-19th-century London’s most notorious serial killer. Since that marauder of the night was never nabbed, or even identified, there’s ample room within his legend for writers to exercise their vivid imaginations. This volume features work by crime- and horror-fictionists both, among them Martin Edwards, Michael Gregorio, Barbara Nadel, and Sarah Morrison. Some of the authors focus on the killer and his dark motives, while others--including K.G. Anderson (better known as Karen G. Anderson, at one time a frequent contributor to January Magazine)--spin yarns about the policeman who, in 1888, tried to bring down “Saucy Jack.” Expect some interesting speculations about the Ripper’s identity, along with plentiful helpings of eerie London fog (even though, according to Christine L. Corton’s wonderful London Fog: The Biography, “each of the Ripper’s crimes was actually committed on a night without fog”).

• Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s (Library of America), edited by Tom Nolan, comprising several of the most “beautifully written” books that Macdonald (whose real name was Kenneth Millar) penned about Los Angeles private eye Lew Archer, including The Way Some People Die (1951) and his turning-point tale, The Galton Case (1959). This is the first of three Nolan-edited collections of this author’s detective fiction; the second, Ross Macdonald: Three Novels of the Early 1960s, is due out in April of next year. These are both fine tributes to Macdonald, the centennial of whose birth was celebrated earlier this month.

• Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & ’50s (Library of America), edited by Sarah Weinman, a two-volume collection of riveting tales by female authors who--aside from Patricia Highsmith and Margaret Millar--have been forgotten by most of today’s mystery-fiction fans.

• Murder on the Orient Express (Morrow), a beautiful new, facsimile edition of the original 1934 release of Agatha Christie’s best-known work featuring mustachioed Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot.

• The Lost Detective (Bloomsbury USA), Nathan Ward’s entertaining separation of truth from legend in Dashiell Hammett’s transformation from Pinkerton operative to hard-boiled detective novelist.

• The World of Shaft: A Complete Guide to the Novels, Comic Strip, Films, and Television Series (McFarland), by Steve Aldous, certainly the most comprehensive study of how journalist Ernest Tidyman created fictional P.I. John Shaft and how that character went from fame to flame-out in the 1970s.

• The Golden Age of Murder (HarperCollins). British lawyer-author Martin Edwards, who last month became the president of the Detection Club, here recalls the vital contributors made to crime and mystery fiction, during the early 20th century, by other members of that organization, especially Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, and Anthony Berkeley. “[B]ut the allure of the book,” opined Mark Lawson in his review for The Guardian, “is the parade of less usual suspects: Anthony Berkeley Cox, whose witty chillers included The Silk Stocking Murders and, under the pen-name Francis Iles, Malice Aforethought; Freeman Wills Crofts, a railway engineer whose murders often turned on discrepancies in train timetables; and Anthony Gilbert, the cross-dressing dust-jacket alibi of Lucy Beatrice Malleson.”

• Cocktail Noir: From Gangsters and Gin Joints to Gumshoes and Gimlets (Reservoir Square), by Scott M. Deitche. As this book’s press materials explain, true-crime writer Deitche “celebrates the potent potables [that crime novelists and real-life mobsters] imbibed and the watering holes they frequented, including some bars that continue to provide a second home for crime writers. Highlighting the favorite drinks of Noir scribes, the book includes recipes for cocktails such as the Gimlet described in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, the Mojito Mulatta T.J. English drank while writing Havana Nocturne, and the Dirty Martini favored by mob chronicler Christian Cippolini. Cocktail Noir also lets us in on the drinking habits of notorious organized crime figures, revealing Al Capone’s taste for Templeton Rye, Meyer Lansky’s preference for Dewar’s Scotch and Gambino family hit man Charles Carneglia’s habit of guzzling Cutty Sark.”

• The Mystery Writers of America Cookbook (Quirk), edited by Kate White. This 176-page illustrated work features more than 100 “wickedly good recipes” from such famous fictionists as Raymond Benson, Alafair Burke, Lee Child, David Morrell, Gillian Flynn, Bill Pronzini, S.J. Rozan, Sue Grafton, Harlan Coben, Laura Lippman, Gary Phillips, Sara Paretsky, and--with a perfect name for this endeavor--Thomas H. Cook. The dishes range from breakfast favorites to soups, salads, dinner entrées, libations, and desserts (with James Patterson’s “Grandma’s Killer Chocolate Cake” being an example of that last course). As White explains in her introduction, proceeds from sales of the cookbook will go to the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), which sponsors the annual Edgar Awards.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



The Sleeper (Mysterious Press/Open Road) finds Canadian J. Robert Janes taking another of his infrequent breaks from composing the Jean-Louis St-Cyr/Hermann Kohler series of historical mysteries (Clandestine) in order to present this story of David Douglas Ashby, an American with a potentially deadly secret. Following his military service in World War I, Ashby wed Christina von Hoffman, the well-proportioned, yet manipulative offspring of a German general, and with her fathered a child, Karen. As Adolf Hitler consolidated his power in Berlin and became ever more bellicose, though, Ashby--fearing for his daughter’s safety--essentially kidnapped the girl from her mother and fled with her to England. Ashby is now a popular teacher at a country boarding school, the headmaster of which is an old army comrade whose life he once saved, and whose wife has fallen more than a little in love with Ashby. Meanwhile, Karen has been placed covertly in the care of Hilary Bowker-Brown, a surprisingly resourceful young woman who lives on the Cornwall coast and dreams of writing novels. Impatient with Ashby’s determination to keep Karen from her, Christina pushes the German intelligence services to find and recover the child. This task may require the awakening of a “sleeper,” an agent in Britain who has remained quiet and under the radar for a long while, in anticipation of just such an assignment as this one. Concealed motives and rivalries between spy agencies help keep readers off-guard through most of this yarn.

Skeleton Blues, by Paul Johnston (Severn House UK), brings the swift return of maverick, near-future Edinburgh investigator Quint Dalrymple, who we last saw in Heads or Hearts, released just this last summer in the States. It’s 2034 here, and the various city-states that once comprised Scotland are holding a public referendum to decide whether to restore their union. That’s a touchy enough matter by itself, and is destined to be made even more difficult following the murder of a tourist in Edinburgh. Called in once more by the Council of City Guardians to help, Quint and his partner, Davie Oliphant, go looking for a prime suspect who is nowhere to be found, while the threat of violence hangs heavy over the former Scottish capital--social unrest that might be playing into the hands of nefarious parties. The U.S. debut of Skeleton Blues is expected in March 2016.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



The Mysteries of Paris, by Eugène Sue (Penguin Classics), was originally serialized in France’s Journal des Débats, spinning out on the front page of that newspaper over 150 issues, from June 1842 until October 1843. As Wikipedia notes, Sue’s yarn spawned a popular 19th-century literary genre known as “city mysteries,” in which “characters explore the secret underworlds of cities and reveal corruption and exploitation, depicting violence and deviant sexuality.” It’s said that the success of The Mysteries of Paris helped inspire Alexander Dumas to compose The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) and Victor Hugo to pen Les Misérables (1862). The Foreword to this new, Penguin translation of Sue’s story opines, “It is probably not going too far to say that The Mysteries of Paris is the most important work of 19th-century fiction that is virtually unread in English.” So what’s Mysteries all about? Having not yet digested it myself (the epic is, after all, more than 1,300 pages long!), I’ll quote from the back-jacket copy, which explains that it “unfolds around Rodolphe, a magnetic hero of noble heart and shadowy origins. When Rodolphe rescues Songbird, a young prostitute of breathtaking purity, from an attack by a ruffian called Slasher, he sets off the dominoes of a heroic narrative traversing the social divides of a city where the fortunes of the rich and the poor are more entangled than anyone can imagine.” This is “far from a casual read,” observes David L. Vineyard in Mystery*File. “It gives the term Victorian triple-decker new meaning. But it is also filled with exciting scenes, interesting characters, and if Sue lacks [Charles] Dickens’ more literary qualities, he quite shares his ability to tell a story and to involve the reader in the lives of his creations.”

Meanwhile, James Lee Burke’s House of the Rising Sun (Simon & Schuster)--a comparatively lean 448 pages in length--delivers readers into the company of Hackberry Holland, a sometime Texas Ranger (and grandfather of characters with whom Burke has peopled previous books). During an ambush by Mexicans, in 1916, of U.S. soldiers at a brothel, he acquires a jeweled artifact that may or may not be the elusive Holy Grail, but that an unscrupulous arms dealer named Arnold Beckman definitely wants for his own. While struggling to remain free of Beckman’s clutches, the deeply flawed Hackberry searches for his estranged soldier son and is bedeviled by three different women of notable complexity. This is essentially a Western redemption tale, with dialogue that’s crisper than bacon fried over a campfire.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



American Blood, by Ben Sanders (Minotaur), pitches us into the company of Marshall Grade, a former New York City cop who--thanks to an undercover operation gone wrong--is now in the federal Witness Security Program (WITSEC) and living out in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His chief task is to stay low and clear of the headlines. Grade’s interpretation of those instructions leads him to sublet the safe house provided for his use, have minimal contact with his WITSEC handler, and avoid leaving a paper trail. However, Grade still feels guilty for the mess he left behind in New York, and that leads him to make a serious error: he goes looking for Alyce Ray, a young woman who’s disappeared and who reminds him of somebody else he once knew. In the course of his search, Grade manages to piss off a couple of felons and draw exactly the sort of attention that could leave him dead at the hands of a hit man on his trail. This is pretty much a modern-day Western, written by a young New Zealander whose fiction I encountered initially while helping to judge the 2014 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel (his tale Only the Dead was among the eight longlisted nominees for that year’s prize). American Blood is so cinematic in its styling, it’s no wonder that Hollywood has already acquired film writes to Sanders’ yarn.

The Yellow Diamond (Faber and Faber UK) finds novelist Andrew Martin, familiar for his books about early 20th-century British railway sleuth Jim Stringer (Night Train to Jamalpur), launching what could become a second series. This one stars Detective Inspector Blake Reynolds, who has assumed command of a special unit of the Metropolitan Police set up to keep tabs on the super-rich. That unit’s creator, Detective Superintendent George Quinn, comes from a privileged background that has left him comfortable rubbing elbows with the champagne-and-Lambourghinis set; Reynolds, who grew up on a northern housing estate, is considerably less at ease in the same crowd. But Quinn has been shot and remains in a coma, so Reynolds will have to polish his shoes and his lifestyle, in general, if he’s to hobnob with the Russian oligarchs and others he must question in order to solve the attack on DS Quinn. Fortunately--even if it doesn’t seem so right off the bat--Reynolds has the help of Quinn’s personal assistant, Victoria Clifford. Might she, though, be concealing information he needs to do his job?

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



We have a couple of really cold cases here. First up: The Girl in the Ice (Bloomsbury USA), by Danish sister and brother Lotte and Søren Hammer. This sequel to 2013’s The Hanging reacquaints us with Detective Chief Superintendent Konrad Simonsen of the Copenhagen Homicide Division, who is flown--together with fellow cop Arne Pedersen--to Greenland, where the half-naked body of a young Danish woman has been found kneeling in a shallow grave carved into the ice. (Denmark, which historically held sovereignty over Greenland, granted it home rule in 1979, but apparently the Greenlanders still summon help from the Danish police when confronted with extraordinary crimes.) The corpse is located far from any traces of civilization on the world’s largest island, and has been there for a quarter-century. Only ice melt in our age of global warming has finally exposed it. As Simonson and his squad get busy trying to suss out the victim’s identity, they also unearth facts that could prove most inconvenient to certain powerful individuals, making their job even more trying. Most worrisome is that this isn’t an isolated murder; there have been previous victims, all of whom bear a remarkable resemblance, with perhaps more to come. The Girl in the Ice is a meticulously wrought police procedural with a complicated but credible resolution.

Meanwhile, Michael Genelin’s For the Dignified Dead (Brash) brings back Commander Jana Matinova of the Slovak Criminal Police (Siren of the Waters, Dark Dreams), who in these pages must untangle the circumstances behind the dumping of an anonymous woman’s remains in the frozen Danube at Bratislava. The deceased was slain with an ice pick, much like another victim recently recovered in Vienna, Austria. It’s a murderous but familiar methodology that makes Matinova, a fallible judge’s daughter turned cop, believe she could again be on the trail of an abhorrent adversary from her past, one she has no intention of letting get away again--even if it means chasing across Europe, unraveling a big-money scheme and making herself a target for hired guns. Lawyer-author Genelin once served with the U.S. Department of Justice in Central Europe, so he knows his turf well. Fans of Olen Steinhauer’s early Eastern Bloc thrillers (The Bridge of Sighs, etc.) should find similar delights in the Commander Matinova books.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



Crucifixion Creek (Minotaur), is the first book in a trilogy from Scotland-born Australian author Barry Maitland, a Ned Kelly Award winner (for 1996’s The Malcontenta). It introduces a new protagonist, Sydney Detective Sergeant Harry Belltree, who here must confront suburban transgressions aplenty. Bankstown, west of Sydney, has recently seen a woman shot by a meth-addled biker, an elderly couple commit suicide outside their favorite beachside café, and a builder, Greg March, fatally stabbed in a thoroughfare. None of those incidents might have attracted Belltree’s notice, were it not for the fact that March was his brother-in-law, and the man’s passing makes little sense. By the time a journalist approaches the DS with the out-there theory that these crimes are linked to a dodgy businessman and the resurgence of a local biker gang, Belltree is primed to test the hypothesis, especially since it could supply answers to the car “accident” that killed his parents and blinded his wife three years ago. Silence (Head of Zeus UK) is the third installment in Irish novelist Anthony J. Quinn’s series featuring Inspector Celcius Daly (Disappeared, Border Angels). It finds Daly mixed up in the case of Father Aloysius Walsh, who devoted his final years to amassing evidence of an extended homicide spree that, during the 1970s, took place along the bog-and-blackthorn-filled border separating the Republic of Ireland from Daly’s homeland, Northern Ireland. So what provoked Father Walsh to speed through a police blockade and off the road to his death? Why, when Daly arrives at the scene, does he find members of Special Branch having preceded him there? And why is the name of Daly’s mother, who perished three decades ago, on the priest’s map of the border land killings? A U.S. edition of Silence is due out next May from Mysterious Press/Open Road.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



Let me apologize for not delivering “Pierce’s Picks” posts during the entire month of October. Between Bouchercon in North Carolina and a subsequent death in my family, I couldn’t find the mind space necessary to be thinking about forthcoming crime, mystery, and thriller novels. But I think (I hope) I can get back on track now, so …

The Mulberry Bush (Mysterious Press), by former journalist and CIA “deep cover” operative Charles McCarry, brings us an unnamed young American narrator who, following the downfall of his estranged father--a brilliant but prankish intelligence agent whose persistent unwillingness to play by conventional rules doomed him at Headquarters (McCarry’s stand-in for the CIA)--sets out to revenge his parent by taking on a mission that appears to benefit Headquarters, but should ultimately leave it in ruins. After contriving his recruitment into the agency, the narrator is first sent to prove himself in the Middle East (where he arranges assassinations), but then infiltrates what remains of a leftist revolutionary group in Argentina with ties to Russia. That circle was once led by a magnetic idealist named Alejandro Aguilar, and it’s his 29-year-old daughter, the lovely Luz, who McCarry’s protagonist falls in love with and endeavors to employ--along with her influential but enigmatic foster father, and a crafty Russian embassy official--in carrying out his retribution plot. A Cold Death in Amsterdam, the debut novel by Anja de Jager (Constable UK), introduces Lotte Meerman, a cold-case police detective in the Dutch capital, still working through the emotional damage she suffered in her previous investigation. Thanks to a gas station robbery, she now becomes involved with a deep-pocketed media celebrity named Ferdinand van Ravensberger, whose nephew claims had a hand in the slaying, more than a decade ago, of Otto Petersen, the sullied head of a capital-investment firm. After reopening that homicide case, Meerman discovers several inconsistencies in the original probe, and comes to suspect that her father--a retired police detective with whom she has lost touch--accepted a bribe to “misplace” relevant files. While protecting (against her better judgment) her progenitor’s reputation, the driven Meerman struggles to figure out who really put an early end to Petersen’s life. When another murder takes place, it adds yet further levels of mystery to an already complicated and quite atmospheric tale.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Pierce’s Picks

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.



In Those We Left Behind (Soho Crime), Stuart Neville devises a plot with several main threads and two distinct time periods, and somehow makes it all work. Set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, this notably dark yarn centers mostly around brothers Thomas and Ciaran Devine, whose foster father, David Rolston, was slain in savage, headline-making fashion in 2007. Ciaran, then only 12 years old, pled guilty to the crime, but he and 14-year-old Thomas were both sent away to a young offenders’ institution. Now move on to the present day, where we find Ciaran finally being released back into society to join his sibling, who’s already been free a while. Hoping to aid in Ciaran’s return is his probation officer, Paula Cunningham. But Detective Chief Inspector Serena Flanagan--who played an important role in Neville’s 2014 novel, The Final Silence, and has just recently gone back to work after treatment for breast cancer--claims her own interest in the ex-convict’s future. She was suspicious of Ciaran’s confession from the start, and resolves to keep a close watch on him, now that he’s back on the streets and under the too-tight control of his short-tempered sibling. Also interested in the Devine brothers is Daniel Rolston, the natural son of Ciaran’s alleged victim, who has never been able to shake off the circumstances of his father’s demise, and is convinced that the wrong sibling paid for that horror. There’s significant menace and potential violence the deeper one travels into this novel, but Neville’s compassion for his characters and his sharp writing definitely make the reading worthwhile.

Tennison (Simon & Schuster UK) is a prequel to Lynda La Plante’s Prime Suspect series of police procedurals starring Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison of London’s Metropolitan Police Service. This new book opens in 1973 when Tennison, then a 22-year-old Janis Joplin fan, matriculates from the police training academy and enters a probationary period during which her intelligence, attention to detail, and resilience in the face of rampant male chauvinism will be tested. It’s lucky she catches the eye of WPC (Woman Police Constable) Kath Morgan, a more experienced investigator, who helps Tennison endure sexual harassment and negotiate the complications of her first homicide case. La Plante has already scripted a six-part TV series based on Tennison, which is set to air in the UK sometime next year.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.