Settle in for a Long, Cold Winter’s Reading

Seeing as how I’m in the midst of a major library reorganization—relocating hundreds of non-fiction volumes from my home office into a remodeled sitting room, and packing more crime fiction onto my office shelves—the prospect of additional, new books winging through the door is rather daunting. However, my luck might be worse: I could be deprived of fresh novels to enjoy in the near future.

There seems little chance of that, after paging through publisher catalogues and researching forthcoming releases online. I already recommended, in a recent Kirkus Reviews column, seven crime, mystery, and thriller yarns—all due out in the United States over the next three months—that I think deserve special attention. But those represent the merest fraction of what is scheduled to become available, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, during that period. Below, I have compiled more than 300 entries in this genre that are soon to debut in bookstores. Some of them (such as Jane Harper’s The Dry, Dan Chaon’s Ill Will, Reed Farrel Coleman’s What You Break, Edward Marston’s Date with the Executioner, E.S. Thomson’s Dark Asylum, and Ausma Zehanat Khan’s Among the Ruins) stir my personal curiosity, while others should satisfy different tastes. This list is not intended to be comprehensive; there will be many more crime and thriller works going on sale between now and April Fool’s Day (consult The Bloodstained Bookshelf and Euro Crime for supplementary options). Enough, I hope, to please all Rap Sheet readers.

Non-fiction titles are identified below with asterisks (*). The rest are fiction.

JANUARY (U.S.):

• The Absence of Guilt, by Mark
Gimenez (Sphere)

• Afternoons in Paris, by Janice Law (Mysterious Press/Open Road)

• Arthur and Sherlock: Conan Doyle and the Creation of Holmes, by Michael Sims (Bloomsbury USA)*

• The Beautiful Dead, by Belinda Bauer (Atlantic Monthly Press)

• Behind Her Eyes, by Sarah Pinborough (Flatiron)

• The Believer, by Joakim Zander (Harper)

• The Bid, by Adrian Magson (Midnight Ink)

• Big Law, by Ron Liebman (Blue Rider Press)

• Blind Man’s Bluff, by Sadie and Sophie Cuffe (Five Star)

• Blood and Bone, by V.M. Giambanco (Quercus)

• Clownfish Blues, by Tim Dorsey (Morrow)

• Coast to Coast: Private Eyes from Sea to Shining Sea, edited by Andrew McAleer and Paul D. Marks (Down & Out)

• Coco Butternut, by Joe R. Lansdale (Subterranean)

• Cold Heart, by Karen Pullen (Five Star)

• Collected Millar: The Tom Aragon Novels: Ask for Me Tomorrow; The Murder of Miranda; Mermaid, by Margaret Millar (Soho Syndicate)

• The Couturier of Milan, by Ian Hamilton (House of Anansi)

• Crimson Snow, edited by Martin Edwards (Poisoned Pen Press)

• The Dangerous Ladies Affair, by Marcia Muller and
Bill Pronzini (Forge)

• Dead Secret, by Ava McCarthy (Harper)

• Death Notes, by Sarah Rayne (Severn House)

• The Death of Kings, by Rennie Airth (Viking)

• Devil’s Breath, by G.M. Malliet (Minotaur)

• Different Class, by Joanne Harris (Touchstone)

• The Dry, by Jane Harper (Flatiron)

• Duplicity, by Ingrid Thoft (Putnam)

• Everything You Want Me to Be, by Mindy Mejia (Atria/Emily Bestler)

• Falling into the Mob, by Steve Zousmer (Permanent Press)

• False Friend, by Andrew Grant (Ballantine)

• Fatal, by John Lescroart (Atria)

• Fever in the Dark, by Ellen Hart (Minotaur)

• Fever Dream, by Samanta Schweblin (Riverhead)

• Fickle, by Peter Manus (Diversion)

• The Fifth Petal, by Brunonia Barry (Crown)

• The Final Day, by William R. Forstchen (Forge)

• For Time and All Eternities, by Mette Ivie Harrison (Soho Crime)

• The Futures, by Anna Pitoniak (Lee Boudreaux)

• The Girl Before, by J.P. Delaney (Ballantine)

• The Girl in Green, by Derek B. Miller (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

• The Heretic’s Creed, by Fiona Buckley (Crème de la Crime)

• Her Every Fear, by Peter Swanson (Morrow)

• Home Sweet Home, by April Smith (Knopf)

• Hope’s Peak, by Tony Healey (Thomas & Mercer)

• The House of Fame, by Oliver Harris (Harper)

• Human Acts, by Han Kang (Hogarth)

• Killing Adonis, by J.M. Donellan (Poisoned Pen Press)

• Kill the Father, by Sandrone Dazieri (Scribner)

• Kill the Next One, by Federico Axat (Text)

• K Street, by M.A. Lawson (Blue Rider Press)

• The Last Collar, by Lawrence Kelter and Frank Zafiro (Down & Out)

• Lightwood, by Steph Post (Polis)

• Little Deaths, by Emma Flint (Hachette)

• Little Heaven, by Nick Cutter (Gallery)

• Lock the Door, by Jane Holland
(Thomas & Mercer)

• Maigret at the Coroner’s, by Georges Simenon (Penguin)

• A Merciful Death, by Kendra Elliot (Montlake Romance)

• The Midnight Man, by David Eric Tomlinson (Tyrus)

• The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, by Lindsey Lee Johnson (Random House)

• Mrs. Sherlock Holmes: The True Story of New York City’s Greatest Female Detective and the 1917 Missing Girl Case That Captivated a Nation,
by Brad Ricca (St. Martin’s Press)*

• Murder on the Moor, by Julianna Deering (Bethany House)

• My Husband’s Wife, by Jane Corry (Pamela Dorman)

• Mystery in the Channel, by Freeman Wills Crofts (Poisoned Pen Press)

• Nasty Cutter, by Tim O’Mara (Severn House)

• The Nowhere Man, by Gregg Hurwitz (Minotaur)

• The Old Man, by Thomas Perry (Mysterious Press)

• The Ottoman Conspiracy, by Thomas Ryan (Thomas & Mercer)

• Paris Spring, by James Naughtie (Overlook Press)

• A Perilous Undertaking, by Deanna Raybourn (Berkley)

• A Pilgrimage to Murder, by Paul Doherty (Crème de la Crime)

• The Prisoner, by Alex Berenson (Putnam)

• The Prometheus Man, by Scott Reardon (Mulholland)

• A Puzzle to Be Named Later, by Parnell Hall (Minotaur)

• Quick Off the Mark, by Susan Moody (Severn House)

• Rather Be the Devil, by Ian Rankin (Little, Brown)

• The Return of the Raven Mocker, by Donis Casey
(Poisoned Pen Press)

• Right Behind You, by Lisa Gardner (Dutton)

• The Ripper’s Shadow, by Laura Joh Rowland (Crooked Lane)

• The River at Night, by Erica Ferencik (Gallery/Scout Press)

• Rogues’ Holiday, by Maxwell March (Ipso)

• The Second Mrs. Hockaday, by Susan Rivers (Algonquin)

• She Stopped for Death, by by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli (Crooked Lane)

• The Sleepwalker, by Chris Bohjalian (Doubleday)

• Snowblind, by Ragnar Jónasson (Minotaur)

• Southern Gothic, by Dale Wiley (Vesuvian)

• This Is Not Over, by Holly Brown (Morrow)

• The Trapped Girl, by Robert Dugoni (Thomas & Mercer)

• Trojan, by Alan McDermott (Thomas & Mercer)

• Two Days Gone, by Randall Silvis (Sourcebooks Landmark)

• Under a Watchful Eye, by Adam Nevill (Macmillan)

• Unpunished, by Lisa Black (Kensington)

• An Unsettling Crime for Samuel Craddock, by Terry Shames
(Seventh Street)

• Very Important Corpses, by Simon R. Green (Severn House)

• Walk Away, by Sam Hawken (Mulholland)

• Where I Can See You, by Larry D. Sweazy (Seventh Street)

• World, Chase Me Down, by Andrew Hilleman (Penguin)

JANUARY (UK):

• All of a Winter’s Night, by Phil Rickman (Corvus)

• Athenian Blues, by Pol Koutsakis (Bitter Lemon Press)

• Before the Dawn, by Jake Woodhouse (Penguin)

• The Bone Field, by Simon Kernick (Century)

• The Book of Mirrors, by E.O. Chirovici (Century)

• Cast Iron, by Peter May (Riverrun)

• Corpus, by Rory Clements (Zaffre)

• Death In Shanghai, by M.J. Lee (HQ)

• Deep Blue, by Alan Judd (Simon & Schuster)

• Deep Down Dead, by Steph Broadribb (Orenda)

• Defender, by G.X. Todd (Headline)

• Essex Poison, by Ian Sansom (Fourth Estate)

• Everything You Told Me, by Lucy Dawson (Corvus)

• The Executioner of St Paul’s,
by Susanna Gregory (Sphere)

• Good Me Bad Me, by Ali Land
(Michael Joseph)

• A Harvest of Thorns, by Corban Addison (Thomas Nelson)

• The House of Four, by Barbara Nadel (Headline)

• Jericho’s War, by Gerald Seymour
(Hodder & Stoughton)

• A Life to Kill, by Matthew Hall (Mantle)

• The Ninth Grave, by Stefan Ahnhem
(Head of Zeus)

• Perfect Remains, by Helen Fields (Avon)

• Puritan, by David Hingley (Allison & Busby)

• Rattle, by Fiona Cummins (Macmillan)

• Run, by Mandasue Heller (Macmillan)

• Rupture, by Ragnar Jónasson (Orenda)

• Safe From Harm, by R.J. Bailey (Simon & Schuster)

• Sirens, by Joseph Knox (Doubleday)

• Tell Me a Lie, by C.J. Carver (Zaffre)

• The Vanishing, by Sophia Tobin (Simon & Schuster)

• Watch Her Disappear, by Eva Dolan (Harvill Secker)

• Watch Me, by Angela Clarke (Avon)

• What Dark Clouds Hide, by Anne Holt (Corvus)

FEBRUARY (U.S.):

• Amberlough, by Lara Elena Donnelly (Tor)

• Among the Ruins, by Ausma Zehanat Khan (Minotaur)

• Angel’s Flight, by Lou Cameron (Stark House/Black Gat)

• August Snow, by Stephen Mack Jones (Soho Crime)

• Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow (Pegasus)

• Blackout, by Mark Dawson (Unputdownable)

• Black Water Lilies, by Michel Bussi (Hachette)

• Blind to Sin, by Dave White (Polis)

• Bone Box, by Faye Kellerman (Morrow)

• A Book of American Martyrs, by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco)

• Compromised, by James R. Scarantino (Midnight Ink)

• Copper Kettle, by Frederick Ramsay (Poisoned Pen Press)

• The Crow Trap, by Ann Cleeves (Minotaur)

• Cruel Mercy, by David Mark (Blue Rider Press)

• The Dalliance of Leopards, by Stephen Alter (Arcade)

• A Darkness Absolute, by Kelley Armstrong (Minotaur)

• Dead Letters, by Caite Dolan-Leach (Random House)

• A Death in the Dales, by Frances Brody (Minotaur)

• Death of a Ghost, by M.C. Beaton (Grand Central)

• Desert Vengeance, by Betty Webb (Poisoned Pen Press)

• Desperation Road, by Michael Farris Smith (Lee Boudreaux)

• The Devil Crept In, by Ania Ahlborn (Gallery)

• The Dime, by Kathleen Kent (Mulholland)

• A Divided Spy, by Charles Cumming (St. Martin’s Press)

• The English Agent, by Phillip DePoy (Minotaur)

• Envy the Dead, by Robert J. Randisi (Down & Out)

• Facials Can Be Fatal, by Nancy J. Cohen (Five Star)

• A Falling Knife, by Andrew Case (Thomas & Mercer)

• The Fifth Element, by Jørgen Brekke (Minotaur)

• The Freedom Broker, by K.J. Howe (Quercus)

• The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Moonstone’s Curse, by Sam Siciliano (Titan)

• Garden of Lamentations, by Deborah Crombie (Morrow)

• The German, by James Patrick Hunt
(Five Star)

• The Good Daughter, by Alexandra Burt (Berkley)

• Gunmetal Gray, by Mark Greaney (Berkley)

• Hellhound On My Trail, by J.D.
Rhoades (Polis)

• In the Shadow of Lakecrest, by Elizabeth Blackwell (Lake Union)

• I See You, by Clare Mackintosh (Berkley)

• Koreatown Blues, by Mark Rogers (Brash)

• The Last Night at Tremore Beach, by Mikel Santiago (Atria)

• Leon’s Legacy, by Lono Waiwaiole (Down & Out)

• The Lioness Is the Hunter, by Loren D. Estleman (Forge)

• The Lost Woman, by Sara Blaedel (Grand Central)

• Lucidity, by David Carnoy (Overlook Press)

• Maigret and the Old Lady, by George Simenon (Penguin)

• Marked for Revenge, by Emelie Schepp (Mira)

• Miss Treadway and the Field of Stars, by Miranda Emmerson (Harper)

• Most Dangerous Place, by James Grippando (Harper)

• The Murder of Willie Lincoln, by Burt Solomon (Forge)

• The Night Bird, by Brian Freeman (Thomas & Mercer)

• The Nightwalker, by Sebastian Fitzek (Pegasus)

• Old Bones, by Trudy Nan Boyce (Putnam)

• The Origins of Benjamin Hackett, by Gerald M. O’Connor
(Down & Out)

• Outside the Law, by Phillip Thompson (Brash)

• The Possessions, by Erin Moon (Harper)

• Prayer for the Dead, by James Oswald (Crooked Lane)

• The Proud Sinner, by Priscilla Royal (Poisoned Pen Press)

• Racing the Devil, by Charles Todd (Morrow)

• Road to Purgatory, by Max Allan Collins (Brash)

• Rush of Blood, by Mark Billingham (Atlantic Monthly Press)

• Rusty Puppy, by Joe R. Lansdale (Mulholland)

• A Separation, by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead)

• Shadows on the Lake, by Giovanni Cocco and Amneris
Magella (Penguin)

• Sherlock Holmes and the Eisendorf Enigma, by Larry Millett (University of Minnesota Press)

• The Shimmering Road, by Hester Young (Putnam)

• Shining City, by Tom Rosenstiel (Ecco)

• Six Four, by Hideo Yokoyama (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

• Snatch, by Gregory Mcdonald (Hard Case Crime)

• Spook Street, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)

• Swann’s Lake of Despair, by Charles Salzberg (Down & Out)

• Swiss Vendetta, by Tracee de Hahn (Minotaur)

• The 12.30 from Croydon, by Freeman Wills Crofts
(Poisoned Pen Press)

• Under the Knife, by Kelly Parsons (St. Martin’s Press)

• The Undesired, by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir (Minotaur)

• The Unseeing, by Anna Mazzola (Sourcebooks Landmark)

• Universal Harvester, by John Darnielle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

• War, Spies & Bobby Sox, by Libby Fischer Hellmann (Red Herrings)

• What You Break, by Reed Farrel Coleman (Putnam)

• Where the Lost Girls Go, by R.J. Noonan (Crooked Lane)

• Whirlwind, by Hilary Norman (Severn House)

• Winterlong, by Mason Cross (Pegasus)

• The Winter Over, by Matthew Iden
(Thomas & Mercer)

• Zodiac, by Sam Wilson (Pegasus)

FEBRUARY (UK):

• Agents of the State, by Mike
Nicol (Old Street)

• All the Missing Girls, by Megan
Miranda (Atlantic)

• The Black Sheep, by Sophie McKenzie (Simon & Schuster)

• The Caller, by Chris Carter (Simon & Schuster)

• The Chalk Pit, by Elly Griffiths (Quercus)

• Cursed, by Thomas Enger (Orenda)

• The Damselfly, by S.J.I. Holliday (Black and White)

• Date with the Executioner, by Edward Marston (Allison & Busby)

• Dead Girls Dancing, by Graham Masterton (Head of Zeus)

• The Doll Funeral, by Kate Hamer (Faber and Faber)

• The Draughtsman, by Robert Lautner (Borough Press)

• Every Pretty Thing, by Chris Mooney (Penguin)

• Exposure, by Aga Lesiewicz (Macmillan)

• The Fatal Tree, by Jake Arnott (Sceptre)

• Incendium, by A.D. Swanston (Bantam Press)

• The Intrusions, by Stav Sherez (Faber and Faber)

• The Killing Bay, by Chris Ould (Titan)

• The Mermaid’s Scream, by Kate Ellis (Piatkus)

• My Sister’s Bones, by Nuala Ellwood (Penguin)

• The Name of the Game Is a Kidnapping, by Keigo Higashino (Vertical)

• Purged, by Peter Laws (Allison & Busby)

• Ragdoll, by Daniel Cole (Trapeze)

• The Riviera Express, by T.P. Fielden (HQ)

• Stasi Wolf, by David Young (Zaffre)

• Under the Harrow, by Flynn Berry (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

• What You Don’t Know, by JoAnn Chaney (Mantle)

• The Women of Baker Street, by Michelle Birkby (Pan)

• Written in Bones, by James Oswald (Michael Joseph)

• Wrong Place, by Michelle Davies (Macmillan)

• The Wychford Poisoning Case, by Anthony Berkeley
(Collins Crime Club)

MARCH (U.S.):

• Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted, edited by Laura Caldwell and Leslie S. Klinger (Liveright)*

• The Ashes of London, by Andrew Taylor (HarperCollins)

• The Axeman of New Orleans: The True Story, by Miriam C. Davis (Chicago Review Press)*

• Bad Boy Boogie, by Thomas Pluck (Down & Out)

• The Black Tortoise, by Ronald Tierney (Raven)

• Blue Light Yokohama, by Nicolás Obregón (Minotaur)

• Bone White, by Wendy Corsi Staub (Morrow)

• Bound by Mystery: Celebrating 20 Years of Poisoned Pen Press, edited by Diane DiBiase (Poisoned Pen Press)

• The Bridge, by Stuart Prebble (Mulholland)

• Bum Luck, by Paul Levin (Thomas & Mercer)

• Catalina Eddy: A Novel in Three Decades, by Daniel Pyne
(Blue Rider Press)

• Celine, by Peter Heller (Knopf)

• Coney Island Avenue, by J.L. Abramo (Down & Out)

• Conviction, by Julia Dahl (Minotaur)

• The Cutaway, by Christina Kovac (Atria/37 INK)

• Cut to the Bone, by Alex Caan (Skyhorse)

• Dead Man Switch, by Matthew Quirk (Mulholland)

• A Death by Any Other Name, by Tessa Arlen (Minotaur)

• The Devil’s Feast, by M.J. Carter (Putnam)

• The Devil’s Triangle, by Catherine Coulter and J.T. Ellison (Gallery)

• Duplicity, by Jane Haseldine (Kensington)

• Dying on the Vine, by Marla Cooper (Minotaur)

• The Fall of Lisa Bellow, by Susan Perabo (Simon & Schuster)

• Find Me, by J.S. Monroe (Mira)

• The Forgotten Girls, by Owen Laukkanen (Putnam)

• Girl in Disguise, by Greer Macallister (Sourcebooks Landmark)

• Hap and Leonard: Blood and Lemonade, by Joe R. Lansdale (Tachyon)

• Ill Will, by Dan Chaon (Ballantine)

• Imperial Valley, by Johnny Shaw
(Thomas & Mercer)

• In Farleigh Field, by Rhys Bowen
(Lake Union)

• In This Grave Hour, by Jacqueline Winspear (Harper)

• Lenin’s Roller Coaster, by David Downing (Soho Crime)

• Lola, by Melissa Scrivner Love (Crown)

• Madame Maigret’s Friend, by Georges Simenon (Penguin)

• Make Them Pay, by Allison Brennan (St. Martin’s Paperbacks)

• Mangrove Lightning, by Randy Wayne White (Putnam)

• Mississippi Blood, by Greg Iles (Morrow)

• Mister Memory, by Marcus Sedgwick (Pegasus)

• Murder on the Serpentine, by Anne Perry (Ballantine)

• Murder, Stage Left, by Robert Goldsborough (Mysterious Press/
Open Road)

• My Darling Detective, by Howard Norman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

• Never Let You Go, by Chevy Stevens (St. Martin’s Press)

• The New York Times Book of Crime: More Than 166 Years of Covering the Beat, by Kevin Flynn (Sterling)*

• One by One, by Sarah Cain (Crooked Lane)

• Only the Truth, by Adam Croft (Thomas & Mercer)

• The Outsider, by Anthony Franze (Minotaur)

• Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly, by Adrian McKinty (Seventh Street)

• Quicksand, by Malin Persson Giolito (Other Press)

• The Road to Ithaca, by Ben Pastor (Bitter Lemon Press)

• Saratoga Payback, by Stephen Dobyns (Blue Rider Press)

• Say Nothing, by Brad Parks (Dutton)

• The Secrets You Keep, by Kate White (Harper)

• Signature Wounds, by Kirk Russell (Thomas & Mercer)

• Silent Approach, by Bobby Cole (Thomas & Mercer)

• A Simple Favor, by Darcey Bell (Harper)

• Skeleton God, by Eliot Pattison (Minotaur)

• The Trophy Child, by Paula Daly (Grove Press)

• A Twist of the Knife, by Becky Masterman (Minotaur)

• Unquiet Spirits, by Bonnie MacBird (Collins Crime Club)

• Vicious Circle, by C.J. Box (Putnam)

• The Violated, by Bill Pronzini (Bloomsbury USA)

• Wait for Dark, by Kay Hooper (Berkley)

• The Weight of This World, by David Joy (Putnam)

• The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes, by Lyndsay Faye (Mysterious Press)

• The Widow’s House, by Carol Goodman (Morrow)

• The Will to Kill, by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins (Titan)

• Wrath, by T.R. Ragan (Thomas & Mercer)

MARCH (UK):

• The Adventuress, by Arthur B. Reeve (Collins Crime Club)

• Arrowood, by Mick Finlay (HQ)

• Bryant & May: Wild Chamber, by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday)

• A Dangerous Crossing, by Rachel Rhys (Doubleday)

• Dark Asylum, by E.S. Thomson (Constable)

• Deadly Game, by Matt Johnson (Orenda)

• Death at Melrose Hall, by David Dickinson (Constable)

• Ed’s Dead, by Russel D. McLean (Saraband)

• Falling Creatures, by Katherine Stansfield (Allison & Busby)

• Follow Me Down, by Sherri Smith (Titan)

• Follow My Leader, by M.J. Arlidge (Michael Joseph)

• The Fourth Victim, by Mari Jungstedt (Corgi)

• The G-String Murders, by Gypsy Rose Lee (Saraband)

• A Handful of Ashes, by Rob McCarthy (Mulholland)

• Hoffer, by Tim Glencross (John Murray)

• The Legacy, by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir (Hodder & Stoughton)

• Let the Dead Speak, by Jane Casey (HarperCollins)

• The Long Drop, by Denise Mina (Harvill Secker)

• The Owl Always Hunts at Night, by Samuel Bjork (Doubleday)

• Parallel Lines, by Steven Savile (Titan)

• The Pictures, by Guy Bolton (Oneworld)

• Quieter Than Killing, by Sarah Hilary (Headline)

• Sherlock Holmes in Context, by Sam Naidu (Palgrave Macmillan)*

• The Silence Between Breaths, by Cath Staincliffe (Constable)

• Six Stories, by Matt Wesolowski (Orenda)

• The Surgeon’s Case, by E.G. Rodford (Titan)

• Tattletale, by Sarah J. Naughton (Trapeze)

• The Venetian Game, by Philip Gwynne Jones (Constable)

• When It Grows Dark, by Jørn Lier Horst (Sandstone Press)

• The Witchfinder’s Sister, by Beth Underdown (Viking)

So, have I missed anything? Please feel free to suggest other promising, upcoming crime and thriller works in the Comments section at the bottom of this post.

So the Edwards Era Begins

Congratulations to author Martin Edwards, who this year assumes the role of chair at Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association. “Of course, I am proud to have been picked to lead the CWA,” he writes in his blog. “And I’m startled to find that I’m the only person to have been both chair of the CWA and president of the Detection Club at the same time. Inevitably I’ll make a few mistakes as I try to move things forward, but I plan to do my best to make sure both organizations look after their members, and continue to play a significant part in the crime-writing world, here in the UK and further afield.”

Revue of Reviewers, 1-8-17

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

Rhapsodizing About Rebus

To celebrate the passage of 30 years since the release of Ian Rankin’s first John Rebus detective novel, Knots and Crosses, the Scottish author and his UK publisher, Orion Books, will stage RebusFest in Edinburgh, Rankin’s hometown. From Crime Fiction Lover:

The event will take place 30 June to 2 July, and is being curated by Ian Rankin himself. Interactive events, tours of the city, live music and talks on Edinburgh’s history and its influence on the author are all being planned. The full schedule will be confirmed on 17 March, there will be a press launch in Edinburgh, and you’ll be able to find out more at www.ianrankin.net.

The announcement of the festival comes shortly after news that Ian Rankin is to be made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, for his contribution to contemporary fiction. He is already an OBE, has won four [Crime Writers’ Association] Dagger Awards, and has an Edgar to his name as well. Rebus has become one of the best-known police detectives not just in UK crime fiction, but around the world. He was played on television by John Hannah and Ken Stott, and has appeared in over 20 novels and an array of short stories.

Shotsmag Confidential adds that “Over the course of the year Ian Rankin will be embarking on an international tour taking in countries across Europe, North America, the Antipodes, and South East Asia.”

And the “Bests” Keep Coming

Although they’re a bit late in being delivered, Euro Crime’s “favorite reads of 2016” posts are most welcome. Three critics so far have compiled their lists of British/European/translated crime, mystery, and thriller novels—Amanda Gillies, Geoff Jones, and Norman Price—with more still to come. Watch for additions here.

The Book You Have to Read: “Desert Town,” by Ramona Stewart

(Editor’s note: This is the 144th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
Paula Haller is a headstrong 17-year-old whose widowed mother owns a bordello and gambling saloon in the desert town of Chuckawalla, California. It’s the 1940s, the Second World War is over, and Paula is itching to grow up. She doesn’t really come off as that much of a bad girl, but her desire to give up on school and learn the family business raises the hackles on domineering mother Fritzi’s marabou pumps, and she’ll hear nothing of it. Nor is Fritzi enamored of Paula hanging around bronco busters, even if they are the local sheriffs as well as Fritzi’s business partners. Fritzi wants Paula to grow up a lady, but nothin’ doin’—Ramona Stewart’s Desert Town (1946) is a “cactus graveyard” where the movie theater “smells like an old cowboy.” There’s not much a mother can do when her little girl decides to pick her own route through life; except, perhaps, let nature take its course and allow her to learn the hard way.

Fritzi Haller is one tough cookie. With eyes that are “old with years of violent living and painful knowledge,” she commands the respect earned with bruises, fat lips, and heartache. She left a successful speakeasy business in New Jersey to make a new life for herself in the sunny warmth of California’s Imperial Valley, and picked up where she left off, showing the local judge and constabulary how much money can be made from human weakness.

Everyone in town “always gave Fritzi Haller one’s complete attention,” except for Paula. She refuses to heed the guidance of her life-tempered mother, and she wants to get out and play a role in the big wide world. Her chance arrives when “big-city racketeer” Eddie Benedict comes to Chuckawalla, hoping to lay low for a while. He draws Paula to him, and she gladly swaps algebra lessons for the chance to run with this new alpha dog—until she begins to understand his complicated relationship with sidekick Johnny Ryan, and their fatal relationship with Benedict’s dead wife, Angela.

Desert Town (adapted in 1947 as the film Desert Fury) is about power: who has it, who wants it, and how real power—the kind that has influence in the world—is patient, ruthless, and implacable. But the immature Paula only understands power in its simplest form: “In Paula’s picture of the world-jungle, the wise man casts his lot with the strong. And in that jungle, Eddie Benedict was a stronger force than Fritzi Haller.” The primordial urge that Benedict arouses in Paula can be felt by her but is not easily understood, which at the beginning of their relationship causes confusion in the teenager. However, page by page, with textbook coherence and clarity, Paula learns the nuances of power and the many forms it can take. In prose that’s controlled but not miserly, a somewhat prim Stewart hints at what lays at the core of the animal attraction that tugs at Paula’s bodice without tearing it off in view—even while Paula at times seems confused about who’s doing the tugging: Benedict, or the gentlemanly and sympathetic Deputy Sheriff Luke Sheldon, who shows Paula another type of power.

While she feels Benedict’s “tide of animal warmth which flowed into her palm [and] startled her,” Sheldon has also made a strong impression on Paula. He attempts to alert her to the depths of Benedict’s intentions, demonstrating the same brand of benevolence he also shows a neglected Chuckawalla wife—the town drunk, whose desirous suggestions he has managed to resist. Sheldon is a good cop and a good man; so good, in fact, that Sheriff Pat Johnson, Fritzi’s partner, is worried he might blow the whistle on Deputy Tom Hansen, a former rodeo champion whose heavy-handed jailhouse manner cost a drifter his life, and in the process attract unwanted attention to the town’s institutionalized iniquity. Paula responds to Sheldon, acknowledging that the “gentle gravity of his regard stirred her emotions as a stick stirs a muddy pool.” But while her interest is piqued, she remains intent on Benedict.

Finally at the bottom of her learning curve of relationships with men, Paula skips the junior high school prom and instead heads straight to the honeymoon suite. She mistakes Benedict’s worldly impetuousness for potency (“It was strong because it did not stop for consequences. It rushed headlong toward the fulfillment of its desire”), not understanding that it’s actually a weak man who willfully disregards consequences, whether business or personal. It takes sidekick Johnny Ryan to teach her that lesson.

Ryan soon begins to make his subtle domination over Eddie Benedict more apparent, masterful, and heavy-handed. He cunningly prevents Benedict’s growing infatuation with Paula from interfering with his and Benedict’s triumphant return to the rackets. And once Benedict’s frailties are revealed to Paula (“Everything I thought was his was Johnny’s”), she calls it quits.

Paula returns to Fritzi’s orbit, and resumes what had been her onetime career goal of breaking horses. Fritzi would rather have her daughter ultimately join the family business, and thinks Paula foolish for her choice, but she respects the teenager for striking out on her own and for working toward a future that will depend on hard work to be successful. True to character, she pays Paula the most genuine compliment a tough-talking but loving mother can give a daughter who has taken charge of her circumstances: “At least you’re a sucker with guts enough to go after what she wants.”

“Why Are You Lying?”

Sigh … Maybe it’s finally time for me to subscribe to the Acorn TV streaming service, which specializes in programs imported to the States from Great Britain, as well as Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. As Mystery Fanfare reports:

Agatha Christie’s The Witness for the Prosecution premieres in the U.S. on Monday, Jan. 30th, on Acorn TV.

This is the new BBC adaptation of Agatha Christie’s acclaimed story. Brits watched the first episode recently on BBC1, and Acorn TV picked it up for the U.S. market.

Witness the Witness trailer for yourself right here.

In All Their Felonious Finery

Today wrapped up Killer Covers’ “The 12 Dames of Christmas" series, that blog’s celebration of dangerous damsels and brassy bombshells. If, for some reason beyond human understanding, you haven’t been keeping up with the day-by-day roll-out of these handsome, vintage covers, you can catch up with them all by clicking here.

Let’s Get Acquainted

There were a number of Rap Sheet projects I’d hoped to complete before the end of 2016 … and, sadly, several of those remain on my to-do list. Among them is an exercise I have undertaken at each year's end, going back as far as 2008: compiling the names of authors whose work I read for the first time during the preceding 12 months. This task was suggested to me originally by Brian Lindenmuth, now an editor at Spinetingler Magazine. I enjoyed the initial effort so much, that I’ve kept doing it ever since.

2016 brought a couple of significant changes that affected my exploration of unfamiliar wordsmiths. After serving for three consecutive years as a judge of New Zealand’s annual Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, I had to bow out of the process for a while due to other obligations. That meant I was no longer being introduced to stacks of debut Kiwi authors, or older ones whose prose I had not yet discovered. This was also the year I backed away from the book group to which I had long belonged, after realizing I was less interested than normal in the works being selected by other members. Hoping to compensate for these alterations, I tried to step up my game as far as choosing new-to-me authors to write about in my crime-fiction column for Kirkus Reviews. Nonetheless, my reckoning of novelists freshly sampled in 2016 is down about 25 percent from the quantity I read last year; and I became acquainted with just over half as many non-fiction authors as I did in 2015.

It’s hard to tell yet what 2017 has in store. Now that I’m not writing for Kirkus anymore, I should have greater opportunities to read beyond the crime, mystery, and thriller shelves. And the timing is providential, since this last Christmas brought me a variety of volumes outside the genre (including Colson Whitehead’s National Book Award-winning novel, The Underground Railroad, and Reuters reporter David K. Randall’s The King and Queen of Malibu: The True Story of the Battle for Paradise). However, since I will also no longer have the professional obligation to attract a wide audience to my Kirkus contributions, I may feel inclined to pick up authors who are better known (but whom I’ve ignored for a while), rather than search out less-familiar crime-fictionists. It should be interesting, at the end of this year, to look back on how my reading habits were altered.

In the meantime, though, I’ve catalogued—below—the novelists whose works I read for the first time in 2016. Strangely (since I usually read much more broadly than this), they all turned out to be crime writers. Debut novels are boldfaced.

• Tim Baker (Fever City)
• Lou Berney (The Long and Faraway Gone)
• Stuart Brock (Just Around the Coroner)
• Elliott Chaze (Black Wings Has My Angel)
• John A. Connell (Spoils of Victory)
• Susan Crawford (The Other Widow)
• Julia Dahl (Invisible City)
• Richard Deming (Anything But Saintly)
• Oscar de Muriel (The Strings of Murder)
• Andrew Gross (The One Man)
• Michael Harvey (Brighton)
• Joe Ide (IQ)
• Ariel Lawhon (Flight of Dreams)
• David McCallum (Once a Crooked Man)
• Sara Moliner (The Whispering City)
• Thomas Mullen (Darktown)
• Andrew Nette (Gunshine State)
• Steven Price (By Gaslight)
• Dolores Redondo (The Invisible Guardian)
• Iain Reid (I’m Thinking of Ending Things)
• Thomas Rydahl (The Hermit)
• J. Aaron Sanders (Speakers of the Dead)
• J. Todd Scott (The Far Empty)
• Gunnar Staalesen (Where Roses Never Die)
• Phoef Sutton (Heart Attack and Vine)
• E.S. Thomson (Beloved Poison)
• David F. Walker (Shaft’s Revenge)

And here’s the inventory of non-fiction works I tackled over the last year, all of them penned by people whose names did not previously appear on my bookshelves. Debut works are again identified in boldface type.

• Skip Hollandsworth (The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer)
• Dean Jobb (Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation)
• Karen Huston Karydes (Hard-Boiled Anxiety: The Freudian Desires of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Their Detectives)
• Paul Nelson and Kevin Avery (It’s All One Case: The Illustrated Ross Macdonald Archives)
• Nicholas Shrady (The Last Day: Wrath, Ruin, and Reason in the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755)
• Lucy Sussex (Blockbuster!: Fergus Hume and The Mystery of the Hansom Cab)

Those, then, are my results for the last 12 months. How do yours compare? Which authors’ books did you first encounter in 2016? Please let us all know in the Comments section of this post.

You Thought We Were Done with These?

Since it’s only early January, there’s nothing wrong in continuing The Rap Sheet’s cataloguing of “best crime fiction of 2016” posts.

Criminal Element’s 11 picks include John Hart’s Redemption Road, Louise Penny’s A Great Reckoning, and James Church’s The Gentleman from Japan. MysteryPeople brings us three different lists of favorites: Scott Montgomery’s “top 10 of 2016” (Steve Hamilton’s The Second Life of Nick Mason, Megan Abbott’s You Will Know Me, Peter Spiegelman’s Dr. Knox, etc.); Montgomery’s “top five debuts of 2016” rundown (yes, David Swinson’s The Second Girl earns a thumbs-up); and Molly Odintz’s “top 10 international crime novels of 2016” (among them Tana French’s The Trespasser and Raphael Montes’ Perfect Days). Not surprisingly, Vintage Pop Fictions’ “favorite reads in 2016” are all older works, including Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Baited Hook (one I don’t think I’ve enjoyed yet) and Alistair MacLean’s Ice Station Zebra (which I most certainly have read). Rob Kitchin at The View from the Blue House anoints 13 books—fiction and non-fiction—as his “best reads of 2016.” Jen Forbus offers her own unique combination of crime-fiction and non-fiction picks here. Finally, I think I neglected to mention British critic Mike Ripley’s choices of top releases from last year, named in his December Shots column: Philip Kerr’s The Other Side of Silence, Alexandra Benedict’s Jonathan Dark or the Evidence of Ghosts, Andrew Taylor’s The Ashes of London, and Ruth Dudley Edwards’ The Seven.

READ MORE: “Favorite 2016 Books” (Pop Culture Nerd).

Blood Will Tell?

Here’s an odd coincidence, reported by The Guardian:

Researchers have discovered that Benedict Cumberbatch is distantly related to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author who created Sherlock Holmes, a role the actor has recently made his own [in BBC One’s Sherlock].

According to the website Ancestry.com, Cumberbatch, 40, and Conan Doyle, who died in 1930, were 16th cousins, twice removed. Their common ancestor was John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, fourth son of King Edward III and father of Henry IV.

John of Gaunt, who died in 1399, was Doyle’s 15th-great-grandfather and Cumberbatch’s 17th-great-grandfather, the website said.

(Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

Good-bye, “Kirkus” … Hello, Rennie Airth

Fellow authors Laura Wilson and Rennie Airth attend CrimeFest 2010 in Bristol, England. (Photo © Ali Karim)

“All good things must come to an end,” said 14th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and that turns out to be true of my nearly six-year career as the crime-fiction blogger for Kirkus Reviews. Today’s column—found here—is the last of more than 170 posts I’ve put together for Kirkus since I began my stint with that publication in March 2011. This separation wasn’t my idea. In late November, my editor called to tell me there were changes in the works for the Kirkus Web site, and one of the columns being cycled out was mine. I couldn’t help but be disappointed, as I’ve mostly enjoyed my association with Kirkus over the years, and I was already in the midst of planning author interviews and special-events coverage for the next three months. Some of what won’t now appear in Kirkus can be rolled into The Rap Sheet, and maybe I can convince editors of other print periodicals and Webzines to accept my humble contributions as well. We shall see.

In any case, I wanted my Kirkus experience to end on a high note. So I arranged to interview Rennie Airth, the now 81-year-old South Africa-born author of the John Madden historical mystery series. The fifth and latest novel in that line, The Death of Kings (Viking), has its official U.S. release this week, so I was grateful that Airth—who currently lives in Italy, and whose work I’ve admired ever since the publication of his first Madden yarn, the post-World War I-set River of Darkness (1999)—took the time to answer a lengthy collection of questions I e-mailed his way. Inevitably, though, I wanted to know more about his background (including his time as a foreign correspondent) and his fiction-writing efforts than could find a home in Kirkus. As a result, I wound up splitting the results of our exchange in two. Part I—which you should definitely read first, since it lays out the general plot of The Death of Kings and explains that book’s relationship to its predecessors—can be enjoyed in my final Kirkus column. Part II is embedded below.

J. Kingston Pierce: Who were your parents, and what did they do? What sort of people were they? Do you have siblings?

Rennie Airth: My father, Eric Airth, was born and grew up in England. He was a mining engineer who came to South Africa in pursuit of his profession and met and married my mother, Emily Dwyer, whose father was Irish. Harry Dwyer was his name and he had emigrated to South Africa, where he met and married my grandmother, who came of English stock. I have a sister.

JKP: Where in South Africa were you born, and what was life in South Africa like back in those days?

RA: I was born in Johannesburg, but we moved quite a lot as my father was transferred regularly from one mine to another. With the election of the Nationalist Government soon after [World War II], the policy of apartheid was introduced and I grew up in a racially divided country which remained that way until I left for London at the age of 20, and did not change until the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990.

JKP: Did you come from a family that valued books?

RA: No, none of my family apart from me were great readers. I started at an early age and the book that first caught my fancy was [Rudyard] Kipling’s Jungle Book. I read it again recently and found it had lost none of its magic.

JKP: Did you grow up wanting to be a writer?

RA: I did think about being a writer from quite an early age and never really considered any other career possibilities, other than journalism.

JKP: In the mid-1950s, you moved to England to work for the Reuters news agency. What sorts of duties/beats did you have with Reuters? And for how many years did you work with that media company?

RA: I worked for Reuters for about a dozen years, starting in London on the desk as a rewrite man and then later as a correspondent abroad. I was based in Europe initially, and was stationed in Geneva first and later in Brussels. But I also worked in various other European capitals during that time, most memorably Rome, where I was one of the Reuters team covering the [Summer] Olympic Games that took place there in 1960. Later postings included Washington during the Kennedy Administration, Havana, and Saigon.

JKP: When did you decide you wanted to pen fiction for a living?

RA: It was when I was working in Vietnam. At that point I felt I had to decide what to do next. On the one hand I could stay with Reuters, on the other I could move to a different branch of journalism and look for a job on a newspaper. But the urge to try my hand at fiction was growing and in the end I opted for that, and like others before me settled down on a Greek island—it seemed to me the sort of thing aspirant writers did—and wrote my first novel. It never found a publisher—quite rightly—but I think you learn more from a book that fails than one that succeeds, and I certainly drew some useful lessons from the experience. It wasn’t a thriller; it was a novel that showed all too clearly the author’s attachment to the works of Graham Greene, a writer I admired then (and still do). But one of the lessons it taught me was that you have to break with your literary heroes and find your own voice. At all events I left Crete—the island I’d chosen—and moved to Rome, where I wrote a book called Snatch, which couldn’t have been more different from my first attempt.

JKP: Yes, in fact you saw two of your novels published before the Madden series: Snatch in 1969 and Once a Spy in 1981. For people who have not read those books—including me—could you say a little about their stories and what your intentions were in writing them?

RA: Snatch was a story set in Rome about a gang of hapless kidnappers who carry out their scheme by switching babies. It was later made into a not-very-successful movie [1976’s The Big Operator] starring Yves Montand. Written in a style that seemed to fit the time, it’s outdated now and I’ve made no attempt to get it republished. My second book was entitled Once a Spy and featured a hero who had given up being an agent but been drawn back into the game to try to figure out why a number of his old colleagues were being murdered. What I was aiming to do was write publishable books. It was as simple as that.

JKP: My recollection is that you’d intended to write only a trilogy of books about 20th-century sleuth John Madden. What convinced (or enabled) you to keep going with that series?

RA: Yes, I did initially mean to write only a trilogy, but I found I had more to say about the Maddens and the people around them. They had come to fascinate me and I wanted to know how they would continue with their lives. It’s curious how one’s characters take on a life of their own, but they do.

JKP: Madden’s life and career have certainly changed over the years. He retired from his detective inspector’s post with Scotland Yard to become a gentleman farmer in Surrey; he remarried, and with his second wife, Helen, bore two children. But how have your impressions of Madden the man altered as this series has grown? Is he the same person now that you knew he could be when you composed River of Darkness? Or has he surprised you in some ways?

RA: Yes, he certainly changes from the man he was in River of Darkness. I pictured him then as silent, for the most part, and a man who seldom smiled. Thanks to Helen he changed, if slowly, and by the time I wrote The Dead of Winter [2009] he had become much more open and accessible. I might put a word in here for both [former Chief Inspector] Angus Sinclair and [Detective Inspector] Billy Styles, old colleagues from his days as a detective at Scotland Yard, whose friendship has always been important to Madden. Sinclair in particular has played a crucial role in several of the books. Being an articulate man—as opposed to the often laconic Madden—he is frequently called upon to explain things to the reader and push the story along.

JKP: In River of Darkness, you described Madden as a former soldier who was left very much alone after the deaths (from influenza) of both his first wife and their baby daughter. He’d returned to Scotland Yard “a different man,” someone “more like a monk than a policeman.” While we have learned much about his present family situation, his previous family remains largely a mystery. For instance, did you ever supply the names of Madden’s first wife and daughter? I searched through River of Darkness, but couldn’t come up with them.

RA: No, it’s true I never gave them names and the reason is that I wanted to underline how changed Madden was by the war he was trapped in. Nowadays we all know about post-traumatic syndrome, but it hadn’t been recognized then, and what the men who served in the trenches suffered through—repeated shelling and near-suicidal attacks across no-man’s-land—may well have been worse than anything experienced by soldiers today. Madden was one man before the war and another after it, and without Helen’s love and understanding of his condition he might never have recovered properly. He hasn’t forgotten his first marriage, but it must seem to him like something that happened in another world. But he hasn’t ceased to mourn his lost baby daughter, nor has he blocked out the memory of her tragic death from influenza, which he was a witness to.

JKP: One of the things I found interesting about The Death of Kings, your new Madden tale, is how large a role you awarded to Madden’s “stunner” of a daughter, Lucy, while his wife, physician Helen, is at best a secondary presence. What intrigues you about Lucy, and are you setting her up to have a larger impact on the series going forward?

RA: Yes, Helen is rather trapped in her role as the village doctor, while I would characterize her lovely daughter as definitely a loose cannon. I enjoyed showing Madden having to cope with his adored but unpredictable offspring. I don’t know that I’m setting Lucy up for a larger impact. You won’t find her solving crimes. But I like her presence in the story and can only hope my readers share that feeling.

JKP: Do you also have something more in mind for her elder brother, Rob, the naval officer now “serving on a cruiser in the Indian Ocean”?

RA: I’ve thought about bringing Rob in, and decided against it. There are quite a lot of characters in the series now if you include the police, and I don’t want to overload the books. I might give him the sort of walk-on part he gets in The Death of Kings, but not much more, I think. Except you never know …

JKP: So there are more Madden novels still to come?

RA: Yes, I am working on a new Madden novel now, but I haven’t settled on a title yet and I’d rather not go into the plot. I never discuss a book while I’m writing it. I feel you lose something by talking about it. The last thing I want at this stage is a reaction to whatever ideas are going round in my head. It doesn’t matter whether the response is favorable or not. Neither really helps.

JKP: Are there things about fiction writing or your own abilities in this field that you’ve learned over the decades, but that you dearly wish you had known from the outset?

RA: I certainly hope so. It would be awful to think one never learned anything from experience. But I can’t necessarily put my finger on what I’ve learned except to try to keep things simple and avoid anything that smacks of fine writing. As others have found, it’s often the passages you’ve taken particular pains over that call for a blue pencil. And yes, generally speaking I wish I’d known what I know now about writing when I started.

READ MORE: “Once Upon a Time in Havana,” by Rennie Airth (Mystery Fanfare); “Down to Airth,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).

Happy New Year, Everyone!

Holiday Homicide, by Rufus King (Dell, 1940).
Illustration by Gerald Gregg.

Let’s hope 2017 brings better luck to all of us than American and international observers have been predicting. Fingers crossed!

Enlighten Us All, Sherlock

As Mystery Fanfare reminds us, Season 4 of the British TV drama Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, begins its U.S. run this evening as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece series. Expect to see three 90-minute episodes this time around, beginning with tonight’s “The Six Thatchers,” starting at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

And rest assured, Season 5 of Sherlock is already in the works.

READ MORE: “BBC Sherlock Canonical References and Nods—‘The Six Thatchers,’ S4EI” (Buddy2Blogger); “Sherlock,” by Miriam E. Burstein (The Little Professor).