Spring Books Are Popping Up All Over

Back when I was a nerdy teenager, in the days before computers infiltrated business offices and found their way into everyone’s pocket, one of my favorite escapes from an inclement afternoon was to visit a nearby library and page leisurely through the latest edition of Books in Print. Those regularly updated volumes were hefty hardbacks, flush with the titles of (and useful information about) new and forthcoming works, fiction as well as non-fiction. Bookseller Amazon didn’t yet exist to help me fantasize about yarns I might like to spend my disposable income on, but Books in Print served admirably as a precursor. Launched in 1948 by R.R. Bowker—the same company that also created Publishers Weekly in 1872 and Library Journal four years later—Books in Print was the ideal source for my daydreams of one day possessing my own beautiful library.

Like so many things that once existed solely on paper, Books in Print is now available on the Web, by subscription. However, it competes there with myriad other electronic sources of bibliographical knowledge, most of which cost absolutely nothing to access. It’s been years since I paged through Books in Print, but I frequently search the Internet for news of crime novels soon to be published on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean—as I did recently, in order to compile the list below of more than 350 books of interest scheduled to reach stores between now and the close of May.

This isn’t a comprehensive catalogue, by any means. It contains works that I would personally like to digest, had I sufficient hours and energy to do so, and others penned by authors who I know are popular with critics of my acquaintance. It’s the kind of assortment I would have delighted in browsing through as a nascent bibliophile, inviting literary-minded sorts to reacquaint themselves with familiar wordsmiths and discover new ones. You’ll find here imminent releases from Greg Iles and Julia Dahl, E.S. Thomson and Denise Mina, Lori Rader-Day and Brad Parks. There are brand-new entries to series by Sara Paretsky, Stuart MacBride, Jørn Lier Horst, Susanna Gregory, and Philip Kerr, as well as standalone fiction from Andrew Taylor, Bill Pronzini, Howard Norman, and Andrew Hughes. Beyond those treats are re-releases of notable tales by the likes of Georges Simenon, Margaret Millar, and Freeman Wills Crofts, and even a few non-fiction texts—identified with asterisks (*)—that should earn the curiosity of mystery-fiction fans.

As I usually do with this sort of list, I invite Rap Sheet readers to point out (in the Comments section at the post’s end) any works of particular merit I missed. And if you need further suggestions, let me recommend The Bloodstained Bookshelf, for U.S. titles, and Euro Crime, for releases on the other side of “the pond.” The bottom line here is that you should have no trouble finding entertaining reading material to carry you through our coming sunnier season.

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)

• The Cheltenham Square Murder, by John Bude (Poisoned Pen Press)

• A Climate of Fear, by Fred Vargas (Penguin)

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

• Conviction, by Julia Dahl (Minotaur)

• Cruel Winter, by Sheila Connolly (Crooked Lane)

• Cut, by Marc Raabe (Manila)

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

• 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)

• Heretics, by Leonardo Padura (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

• 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)

• I Wish You Missed Me, by Bonnie Hearn Hill (Severn House)

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

• The Logan Triad, by Nathan Walpow (Down & Out)

• Lola, by Melissa Scrivner Love (Crown)

• The Loving Husband, by Christobel Kent (Sarah Crichton)

• 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)

• Miguel’s Gift, by Bruce Kading (Chicago Review Press)

• 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)

• The Painted Gun, by Bradley Spinelli (Akashic)

• Parallel Lines, by Steven Savile (Titan)

• The Place of Refuge, by Albert Tucher (Shotgun Honey/Down & Out)

• 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)

• A Shattered Circle, by Kevin Egan (Forge)

• Shooting Creek and Other Stories, by Scott Loring Sanders
(Down & Out)

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

• The Third Squad, by V. Sanjay Kumar (Akashic)

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

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

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

• The Violated, by Bill Pronzini (Bloomsbury USA)

• The Wages of Sin, by Kaite Welsh (Pegasus)

• 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)

• Bay of Martyrs, by Tony Black and Matt Neal (Freight)

• Blood Tide, by Claire McGowan (Headline)

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

• Boundary, by Andree Michaud (No Exit Press)

• Butterfly on the Storm, by Walter Lucius (Michael Joseph)

• A Dangerous Crossing, by Rachel Rhys (Doubleday)

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

• The Darkness Within, by Alanna Knight (Allison & Busby)

• Deadly Game, by Matt Johnson (Orenda)

• Dead Reckoning, by Glenis Wilson (Severn House)

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

• Death Scene, by Jane A. Adams
(Severn House)

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

• Eleventh Hour, by M.J. Trow
(Creme de la Crime)

• The Escape, by C.L. Taylor (Avon)

• Everything but the Truth, by Gillian McAllister (Penguin)

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

• Family Matters, by Anthony Rolls (British Library)

• 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)

• The Hidden, by Sally Spencer (Severn House)

• Hoffer, by Tim Glencross (John Murray)

• Inspector French and the Box Office Murders, by Freeman Wills Crofts (Collins Crime Club)

• Inspector French and Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, by Freeman Wills Crofts (Collins Crime Club)

• The Killer, by Susan Wilkins (Macmillan)

• The Last Act of Hattie Hoffman, by Mindy Mejia (Quercus)

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

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

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

• Parallel Lines, by Steven Savile (Titan)

• The Pictures, by Guy Bolton (Oneworld)

• Quieter Than Killing, by Sarah Hilary (Headline)

• Raw Wounds, by Matt Hilton (Severn House)

• Sand, by Wolfgang Herrndorf (Pushkin Press)

• Sherlock Holmes: A Betrayal in Blood, by Mark A. Latham (Titan)

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

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

• Six Stories, by Matt Wesolowski (Orenda)

• Sometimes I Lie, by Alice Feeney (HQ)

• Still Dark, by Alex Gray (Sphere)

• 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)

• Where I Lost Her, by T. Greenwood (Atlantic)

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

APRIL (U.S.):

• The Agent, by Mark Dawson (Thomas & Mercer)

• Alice and the Assassin, by R.J. Koreto (Crooked Lane)

• All By Myself, Alone, by Mary Higgins Clark (Simon & Schuster)

• Antiques Frame, by Barbara Allan (Kensington)

• Bad Seeds, by Jassy Mackenzie (Soho Crime)

• Before I Go, by Leena Lehtolainen (AmazonCrossing)

• The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History, by Stephan Talty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)*

• The Burial Hour, by Jeffery Deaver (Grand Central)

• Burntown, by Jennifer McMahon (Doubleday)

• Chasing the Devil’s Tail, by David Fulmer (Crescent City Books)

• A Clash of Spheres, by P.F. Chisholm (Poisoned Pen Press)

• Cold Earth, by Ann Cleeves (Minotaur)

• A Criminal Defense, by William L. Myers Jr. (Thomas & Mercer)

• Cruel Is the Night, by Karo Hämäläinen (Soho Crime)

• The Curse of La Fontaine, by M.L. Longworth (Penguin)

• Dangerous Ends, by Alex Segura (Polis)

• Dangerous to Know, by Renee Patrick (Forge)

• Date With the Executioner, by Edward Marston (Allison and Busby)

• The Day I Died, by Lori Rader-Day (Morrow)

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

• The Devil’s Country, by Harry Hunsicker (Thomas & Mercer)

• Earthly Remains, by Donna Leon
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

• Every Body on Deck, by G. A. McKevett (Kensington)

• Every Night I Dream of Hell, by Malcolm Mackay (Mulholland)

• Executive Order, by Max Allan Collins
with Matthew V. Clemens (Thomas & Mercer)

• Fallout, by Sara Paretsky (Morrow)

• Fatal Music, by Peter Morfoot (Titan)

• A Fever of the Blood, by Oscar de Muriel (Pegasus)

• The Finishing School, by Joanna Goodman (Harper)

• The Fix, by David Baldacci (Grand Central)

• Flamingo Road, by Sasscer Hill (Minotaur)

• The Girl Who Was Taken, by Charlie Donlea (Kensington)

• Gone Without a Trace, by Mary Torjussen (Berkley)

• The Good Assassin, by Paul Vidich (Atria/Emily Bestler)

• The Good Byline, by Jill Orr (Prospect Park)

• Gumshoe for Two, by Rob Leininger (Oceanview)

• H.H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil,
by Adam Selzer (Skyhorse)*

• The Hunt, by Andrew Welsh-Huggins (Swallow Press)

• I Found You, by Lisa Jewell (Atria)

• If We Were Villains, by M.L. Rio (Flatiron)

• Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling, by Michael Cannell (Minotaur)*

• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, by David Grann (Doubleday)*

• The Last Chance Olive Ranch, by Susan Wittig Albert (Berkley)

• LAst Resort, edited by by Matt Coyle, Mary Marks, and
Patricia Smiley (Down & Out)

• Long Black Veil, by Jennifer Finney Boylan (Crown)

• The Lost Order, by Steve Berry (Minotaur)

• Maigret’s Memoirs, by Georges Simenon (Penguin)

• Marshall’s Law, by Ben Sanders (Minotaur)

• Of Books and Bagpipes, by Paige Shelton (Minotaur)

• One Perfect Lie, by Lisa Scottoline (St. Martin’s Press)

• The Perfect Stranger, by Megan Miranda (Simon & Schuster)

• Prussian Blue, by Philip Kerr (Marian Wood/Putnam)

• Ragdoll, by Daniel Cole (Ecco)

• The Red Hunter, by Lisa Unger (Touchstone)

• The Revolution of the Moon, by Andrea Camilleri (Europa Editions)

• The Ridge, by John Rector (Thomas & Mercer)

• The Scientology Murders, by William Heffernan (Akashic)

• The Secrets of Gaslight Lane, by M.R.C. Kasasian (Pegasus)

• A Single Spy, by William Christie (Minotaur)

• Song of the Lion, by Anne Hillerman (Harper)

• A Twist in Time, by Julie McElwain (Pegasus)

• The Two O’Clock Boy, by Mark Hill (Sphere)

• Unreliable, by Lee Irby (Doubleday)

• The Watcher, by Ross Armstrong (Mira)

• Water Signs, by Janet Dawson (Perseverance Press)

• A Welcome Murder, by Robin Yocum (Seventh Street)

• What Doesn’t Kill You, by Ed James (Thomas & Mercer)

• What the Dead Leave Behind, by Rosemary Simpson (Kensington)

• Where the Dead Lie, by C.S. Harris (Berkley)

APRIL (UK):

• The Age of Olympus, by Gavin Scott (Titan)

• American Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to U.S. Crime Fiction, Film & TV, by Barry Forshaw (Pocket Essentials)*

• The Awkward Squad, by Sophie Hénaff (MacLehose Press)

• Beyond Absolution, by Cora Harrison (Severn House)

• Bright Shiny Things, by Barbara Nadel (Allison & Busby)

• The Choice, by Samantha King (Piatkus)

• The Contract, by J.M. Gulvin (Faber and Faber)

• A Dark So Deadly, by Stuart MacBride (HarperCollins)

• Dead Woman Walking, by Sharon Bolton (Bantam Press)

• A Deadly Betrothal, by Fiona Buckley (Creme de la Crime)

• Death Message, by Kate London (Corvus)

• Die Last, by Tony Parsons (Century)

• The Dog Walker, by Lesley Thomson
(Head of Zeus)

• Domina, by L.S. Hilton (Zaffre)

• Don’t Let Go, by Michel Bussi (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

• Don’t Look for Me, by Mason Cross (Orion)

• Faithless, by Kjell Ola Dahl (Orenda)

• The Fourteenth Letter, by Claire Evans (Sphere)

• A Game of Ghosts, by John Connolly (Hodder & Stoughton)

• Game Over, by Quintin Jardine (Headline)

• Good News, Bad News, by W.H. S. McIntyre (Sandstone Press)

• He Said/She Said, by Erin Kelly (Hodder & Stoughton)

• Hope to Die, by David Jackson (Zaffre)

• In Deep Water, by Sam Blake (Zaffre)

• The Keeper, by Alastair Gunn (Penguin)

• The Killer on the Wall, by Emma Kavanagh (Arrow)

• Mary Russell’s War, by Laurie R. King (Allison & Busby)

• A Mask of Shadows, by Oscar de Muriel (Penguin)

• Miraculous Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards (British Library)

• Night Market, by Daniel Pembrey (No Exit Press)

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

• Parting Shot, by Linwood Barclay (Orion)

• Penance, by Kanae Minato (Mulholland)

• The People at Number 9, by Felicity Everett (HQ)

• Reservoir 13, by Jon McGregor (Fourth Estate)

• The Restless Dead, by Simon Beckett (Bantam Press)

• Sister Sister, by Sue Fortin (HarperImpulse)

• The Sixth Window, by Rachel Abbott (Black Dot)

• The Special Girls, by Isabelle Grey (Quercus)

• Three Envelopes, by Nir Hezroni (Point Blank)

• A Traitor in the Family, by Nicholas Searle (Viking)

• Treacherous Strand, by Andrea Carter (Constable)

• The Trophy Taker, by Sarah Flint (Aria)

• Want You Gone, by Chris Brookmyre (Little, Brown)

• What Alice Knew, by T.A. Cotterell (Black Swan)\

• What Goes Around, by Julie Corbin (Mulholland)

• You Can Run, by Steve Mosby (Orion)

MAY (U.S.):

• Aunt Dimity and the Widow’s Curse, by Nancy Atherton (Viking)

• Back to Brooklyn, by Lawrence Kelter (Down & Out)

• Beach Lawyer, by Avery Duff (Thomas & Mercer)

• Becoming Bonnie, by Jenni L. Walsh (Forge)

• Beneath a Scarlet Sky, by Mark Sullivan (Lake Union)

• Black Mad Wheel, by Josh Malerman (Ecco)

• The Boy in the Earth, by Fuminori Nakamura (Soho Crime)

• Broken River, by J. Robert Lennon (Graywolf Press)

• City of Angels, by Kristi Belcamino (Polis)

• The Chalk Pit, by Elly Griffiths (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

• Collected Millar: The Dawn of Domestic Suspense: Fire Will Freeze; Experiment in Springtime; The Cannibal Heart; Do Evil in Return; Rose’s Last Summer, by Margaret Millar (Soho Syndicate)

• The Coroner’s Daughter, by Andrew Hughes (Pegasus)

• Count All Her Bones, by April Henry (Henry Holt)

• Crime Song, by David Swinson (Mulholland)

• Crossed Bones, by S.W. Lauden (Down & Out)

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

• Death Comes to Lynchester Close, by David Dickinson (Constable & Robinson)

• Death in the Abstract, by Emily Barnes (Crooked Lane)

• Dragon Teeth, by Michael Crichton (Harper)

• The Dying Detective, by Leif G.W. Persson (Pantheon)

• Edited Out, by E.J. Copperman
(Crooked Lane)

• The Ends of the Earth, by Robert Goddard (Mysterious Press)

• Enemy of the Good, by Matthew Palmer (Putnam)

• Exit Strategy, by Steve Hamilton (Putnam)

• The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (Flatiron)

• Full Wolf Moon, by Lincoln Child (Doubleday)

• The Girl Who Knew Too Much, by Amanda Quick (Berkley)

• G-Man, by Stephen Hunter (Blue Rider Press)

• The Graves, by Pamela Wechsler (Minotaur)

• Guiltless, by Viveca Sten (AmazonCrossing)

• Hong Kong Black, by Alex Ryan (Crooked Lane)

• I Am Death, by Chris Carter (Atria/Emily Bestler)

• I’ll Eat When I’m Dead, by Barbara Bourland (Grand Central)

• Into the Water, by Paula Hawkins (Riverhead)

• It’s Always the Husband, by Michele Campbell (St. Martin’s Press)

• Justice Delayed, by Marti Green (Thomas & Mercer)

• The Killing of Julia Wallace, by Jonathan Goodman (Kent State University Press)*

• The Last Iota, by Robert Kroese (Thomas Dunne)

• Less Than a Treason, by Dana Stabenow (Head of Zeus)

• The Long Drop, by Denise Mina (Little, Brown)

• Marathon, by Brian Freeman (Quercus)

• Maigret at Picratts, by Georges Simenon (Penguin)

• Murder Between the Lines, by Radha Vatsal (Sourcebooks Landmark)

• Murder in the Bowery, by Victoria Thompson (Berkley)

• Murderous Mayhem at Honeychurch Hall, by Hannah Dennison (Minotaur)

• My Sister and Other Liars, by Ruth Dugdall (Thomas & Mercer)

• A Negro and an Ofay, by Danny Gardner (Down & Out)

• No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Short Stories, by Lee Child (Delacorte Press)

• The Only Child, by Andrew Pyper (Simon & Schuster)

• Perish the Day, by John Farrow (Minotaur)

• The Preacher: Aces & Eights, by Ted Thackrey Jr. (Brash)

• Proving Ground, by Peter Blauner (Minotaur)

• Rampage, by Justin Scott (Pegasus)

• Random Road, by Thomas Kies (Poisoned Pen Press)

• Resurrection Mall, by Dana King (Down & Out Books)

• A Rising Man, by Abir Mukherjee (Pegasus)

• Robert B. Parker’s Little White Lies, by Ace Atkins (Putnam)

• The Scholl Case: The Deadly End of a Marriage, by Anja
Reich-Osang (Text)*

• The Second Day of the Renaissance, by Timothy Williams
(Soho Crime)

• Shadow Man, by Alan Drew (Random House)

• Sidney Chambers and the Persistence of Love, by James Runcie (Bloomsbury USA)

• Silent Rain, by Karin Salvalaggio (Minotaur)

• Since We Fell, by Dennis Lehane (Ecco)

• The Sixth Victim, by Tessa Harris (Kensington)

• The Soak, by Patrick E. McLean (Brash)

• Some Rise by Sin, by Philip Caputo (Henry Holt)

• Sticks and Bones, by Carolyn Haines (Minotaur)

• The Stranger Inside, by Jennifer Jaynes (Thomas & Mercer)

• Testimony, by Scott Turow (Grand Central)

• The Thirst, by Jo Nesbø (Knopf)

• Too Lucky to Live, by Annie Hogsett (Poisoned Pen Press)

• A Twisted Vengeance, by Candace Robb (Pegasus)

• Two Lost Boys, by L.F. Robertson (Titan)

• Ultimatum, by Anders de la Motte (Atria/Emily Bestler)

• The Vinyl Detective: The Run-Out Groove, by Andrew Cartmel (Titan)

• What My Body Remembers, by Agnete Friis (Soho Crime)

• What She Saw, by Gerard Stembridge (Harper)

• Where Dead Men Meet, by Mark Mills (Blackstone)

• The White Road, by Sarah Lotz (Mulholland)

• You Will Pay, by Lisa Jackson (Kensington)

• Your Killin’ Heart, by Peggy O’Neal Peden (Minotaur)

MAY (UK):

• Bad Blood, by Brian McGilloway (Corsair)

• The Bowness Bequest, by Rebecca Tope (Allison & Busby)

• The City of Lies, by Michael Russell (Constable)

• Crimson and Bone, by Marina Fiorato (Hodder & Stoughton)

• Day of the Dead, by Mark Roberts (Head of Zeus)

• The Day She Disappeared, by Christobel Kent (Sphere)

• Deadly Alibi, by Leigh Russell (No Exit Press)

• Frost at Midnight, by James Henry (Bantam Press)

• The Girlfriend, by Michelle Frances (Pan)

• The Incredible Crime, by Lois Austen-Leigh (British Library)

• Kings of America, by R.J. Ellory (Orion)

• Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed, by Mike Ripley (HarperCollins)*

• The Liar, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion)

• Lone Wolf, by Michael Gregorio (Severn House)

• Love Me Not, by M. J. Arlidge (Michael Joseph)

• Need You Dead, by Peter James (Macmillan)

• The Night Visitor, by Lucy Atkins (Quercus)

• The Quiet Man, by James Carol (Faber and Faber)

• Rhyming Rings, by David Gemmell (Gollancz)

• Scared to Death, by Kate Medina (HarperCollins)

• The Shadow District, by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker)

• Shot in Southwold, by Suzette A. Hill (Allison & Busby)

• The Silent Death, by Volker Kutscher (Sandstone Press)

• The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood Star, by Vaseem Khan (Mulholland)

• Sympathy for the Devil, by William Shaw (Riverrun)

• A Talent for Murder, by Andrew Wilson (Simon & Schuster)

• The White Road, by Sarah Lotz (Hodder & Stoughton)

• You Don’t Know Me, by Imran Mahmood (Michael Joseph)

It’s That Girl Again!

Here’s a surprising bit of news from Crime Fiction Lover: American publisher Hard Case Crime has teamed up with Britain’s Titan Books to produce The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Millennium, a new comic-book series based on Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s best-selling novels. The first issue is due out on June 28. As Crime Fiction Lover explains, the work will run to

an impressive 64 pages, selling for $5.99 in the U.S., and starting at £3.99 for the digital version in the UK. In November, you’ll be able to get hold of volume one as a graphic novel format at £10.99.

Stieg Larsson’s story was adapted for the comic format by Belgian writer Sylvain Runberg, with artwork by José Homs and Man, and published in France by Dupuis in 2013. With its strong, expressive, style, the comic puts the emphasis on attitude and action like never before. This version has been translated into English by Rachel Zerner, and retells the tale of discredited journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his quest to help the wealthy industrialist Henrik Vanger find his missing niece. Blomkvist is helped, of course, by Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, whose mission is to avenge violence against women. …

This is the first time The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has appeared as a regular comic series in English. However, she has appeared in graphic novel format in the past. DC’s imprint Vertigo released Stieg Larsson’s three Millennium books as graphic novels starting in 2012 with the text adapted by none other than Denise Mina, and artwork by Andrea Mutti and Leonardo Manco.

You can see some of the art from issue one at this link.

Gentlemen Prefer Bonds

I could swear that I wrote about these gorgeous images at some earlier date, but a search through The Rap Sheet’s almost-11-year archive turns up, well, absolutely nothing on the subject. So allow me to introduce this artwork again for the first time.

Mike Mahle is a professional graphic designer/digital artist living in central Illinois. “I have a degree in design and over 20 years of experience in the field,” he explained during a 2015 interview with Hypable. “The rest of the time I’m either chasing after my twin boys or doing some piece of freelance work for either a client or just myself.” While examples of Mahle’s often sexy professional illustrations can be enjoyed on his Web site, it’s a succession of placards he created—for his own delight, but also to celebrate the first 23 James Bond films (all but 2015’s Spectre)—that concern us today.

“In 2012–2013 I worked on creating a poster for each and every official 007 film,” he told the James Bond 007 Dossier. “I didn’t want to depict certain scenes or characters, but rather just create a conceptual design based on each particular film.”

You will find all of those Bond placards here.




We can only hope that Mahle’s interest in Ian Fleming’s British secret agent won’t end here. I, for one, would be very interested to see what sort of imagery he could create for Spectre (not a great movie on its own, but with a magnetic leading lady in Lea Seydoux) and for whatever the 25th 007 picture will be called.



If you’d like to see more of Mike Mahle’s art, including works inspired by Batman and his various nemeses, plus a few of Jules Verne’s best-known novels and the current Amazon TV series The Man in the High Castle, simply click over to the Deviant Art site.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Origin of Evil,” by Ellery Queen

(Editor’s note: This is the 146th entry in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books. Today’s contribution comes from Seattle, Washington, blogger, screenwriter, and cultural observer Vince Keenan. A self-described “tippling gadabout,” he wrote Down the Hatch: One Man’s One Year Odyssey Through Classic Cocktail Recipes and Lore. With his wife, Rosemarie, Keenan also co-authored last year’s Design for Dying, the Agatha Award-nominated first novel in a series—penned under their joint pseudonym, Renee Patrick—that’s set in Golden Age Hollywood and stars the snooping duo of Lillian Frost, a former aspiring actress, and real-life fashion designer Edith Head. A second Frost/Head mystery, Dangerous to Know, is due out in mid-April from Forge.)

Sometimes a tourist’s eye is needed to take the measure of a place. Especially when that place is Hollywood. The locals tend to be jaded. Consider Raymond Chandler. In The Little Sister, Philip Marlowe says, “I used to like this town … a long time ago,” and he pines for the days when “Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful.” Ross Macdonald’s local boy made not-so-good, Lew Archer, opines in The Barbarous Coast that “Hollywood started as a meaningless dream, invented for money. But its colors ran, out through the holes in people’s heads, spread across the landscape and solidified. North and south along the coast, east across the desert, across the continent. Now we were stuck with the dream without a meaning. It had become the nightmare that we lived in.”

A visitor’s perspective might be a touch, I don’t know, brighter. As one-half of a pseudonymous mystery-writing duo hailing from New York, but with California dreams, I am naturally drawn to Brooklyn-born cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, who wrote under the name and created the character of Ellery Queen.

The Origin of Evil (1951) did not mark Ellery’s first Tinseltown foray in any sense. The mystery novelist turned occasional sleuth had by this point been the focus of a radio series, a TV show, and several films. The character had ventured west to try his hand as a screenwriter in the 1938 books The Devil to Pay and The Four of Hearts.

He returns there in The Origin of Evil, hoping a change of scenery will jump-start his latest project. As the book opens, Ellery sits in his rented digs considering the victim of foul play: “There she lay under a thin blanket of smog, stirring a little, and they said she was dead. Fair Hollywood. Murdered, ran the post-mortem, by Television.” A scribe can ply his trade anywhere, but “his trade being violent death, a city with a knife in its back seemed just the place to take his empty sample cases.” The occasional signs of life and garish make-up don’t fool Ellery. “Theatres with Movies Are Better Than Ever on their marquees had crossbars over their portals saying Closed; you could now get a table at the Brown Derby without waiting more than twenty minutes … and you could throttle a tourist on Hollywood Boulevard between Vine and La Brea any night after 10:30 and feel reasonably secure against interruption.”

Ellery simply wants to work, but then “every time he came to Hollywood something fantastic happened.” This trip will be no exception. His solitude is interrupted by Laurel Hill—“Probably Miss Universe of Pasadena,” he thinks sulkily of his young neighbor’s good looks—with a story he can’t resist. Her father, Leander Hill, died of a massive heart attack after receiving the unwanted gift of a dead dog. Hill’s partner in the jewelry business also received an anonymous warning, but refuses to divulge its nature. Ellery is initially dismissive. After all, “Hollywood was a playful place. People produced practical jokes on the colossal scale. A dead dog was nothing compared with some of the elaborations of record. One he knew of personally involved a racehorse in a bathroom, another the employment for two days of seventy-six extras.” But when a search of the Hill home turns up the note that accompanied the canine’s corpse, one hinting at a great crime committed years ago that has spawned a decades-long thirst for vengeance, Ellery sets his manuscript aside and starts investigating.

Cryptic offerings pile up at the home of Hill’s partner, the wheelchair-bound tyrant Roger Priam, but he angrily rejects Ellery’s offers of assistance. Priam’s family keeps Ellery close, specifically his seductress spouse, Delia, whose charms weaken even Ellery’s resolve, and stepson Crowe Macgowan, currently living as a modern-day jungle man in a tree house in the hills while he awaits the inevitable collapse of society. “I’m the only realist I know,” Crowe claims, and he may not be wrong given that the Korean conflict erupts in the middle of this book.

Dannay and Lee relish the texture of mid-century Los Angeles life. The maverick used-car dealer “Madman” Muntz has taken to the skies over the city, a pin-up girl is crowned “Miss National Casket Week,” and Ellery must remind himself that “in Hollywood dress is a matter of free enterprise … at least one man dressed in nothing but Waikiki trunks may be found poking sullenly among the avocados at any vegetable stand.” The extravagantly extended Priam clan itself is a singular Southland phenomenon; “Hollywood had always attracted its disproportionate quota of variants from the norm,” Dannay and Lee write, enumerating how Roger and his kin could never truly flourish in Seattle or Vandalia, Illinois.

But it is the eventual revelation of the killer’s identity, motive, and strategy that demands the broad canvas only the City of Angels can provide. “The pattern is fantastic,” Ellery declares once he tumbles to the truth, fearing that his L.A. Police Department ally “still suspects what Hollywood calls a weenie,” the term coined by actress and stuntwoman Pearl White (The Perils of Pauline) that prefigured Alfred Hitchcock’s fabled MacGuffin.

The grandiosity of both characters and scheme sent tremors through the Dannay/Lee partnership. By this stage of their collaboration they had become famous for fabulously ornate plots sold through skilled prose; the twists and turns of their undisputed masterwork Cat of Many Tails (1949) have lost none of their diabolical power. In a January 23, 1950, missive collected by Joseph Goodrich in his book Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen 1947-1950, Lee praises the Origin of Evil denouement presented in Dannay’s outline: “It is a great concept, bold, original, ‘big’—as a mystery idea well deserving the nomination for ‘classic.’” But he frets about filling in the psychology that would shore up this tale’s Byzantine plot, a task compounded by the “exaggerated, distorted picture of Hollywood” painted by the outsize Priams.

Dannay would have none of it. In his January 27, 1950, response, he wrote, “It seems to me that Hollywood is not only the natural place, but perfect place for this story … you underestimate what people outside of Hollywood think or know of the place. Hollywood has not reformed so much in the last ten years that it has completely lost its reputation for being the home to screwballs and crackpots.” Chandler’s characters, he argued, were “uniformly more vicious and, in my opinion, more exaggerated and distorted” than any he’d conjured up. He believed Origin could be “a milestone—not only for us, as a spectacular book, but also in the detective-mystery field itself. It is a staggering conception, and even now, months after the fact so far as I am personally concerned, I am still staggered by it.”

The cousins set aside their differences and produced a book that, if not quite a milestone, remains a marvel. Clues are literally studded everywhere in The Origin of Evil; to cite even one example would spoil the fun. Preposterous and endlessly inventive, it is not a show-business novel but one that could only play out in Hollywood.