History Lessons
by Zoe B. Wallbrook
Daphne Ouverture, the main character in HISTORY LESSONS (Soho Crime, 373 pp., $25.95), has chosen a life of the mind, and believes she likes it that way. As a junior professor specializing in French colonialism at the Ivy-esque Harrison University, she prefers “spending her time with the dead over the living. At least the dead never sassed her back or asked why she was single.”
But could the dead, as Daphne wonders, teach her how to live? She’s about to find out when someone murders a colleague, a creepy anthropology professor named Sam Taylor. Daphne doesn’t really want to play amateur sleuth, but she can’t shake the mysterious text Sam sent her the night he died — and then someone attacks her on her own doorstep.
I’ve longed for an academia mystery that hearkens back to classic authors like Helen Eustis and Amanda Cross, and Wallbrook, who knows this world well, delivers. “History Lessons” brilliantly mixes pointed satire, fabulous characters (especially Daphne’s two besties) and a thoughtful meditation on whose fortunes get to rise, and whose are ground down on the altar of power.
The House at Devil’s Neck
by Tom Mead
Over four books, Mead has perfected his take on the locked-room mystery, one that owes a debt to John Dickson Carr. THE HOUSE AT DEVIL’S NECK (Mysterious Press, 288 pp., $26.95) reminds readers of a date — Aug. 31, 1939, the day before Germany invaded Poland — adding historical weight to what is already a dizzyingly plotted affair.
Joseph Spector, the amateur detective featured in Mead’s prior books, is en route with a group to hold a séance in a house on a tidal island off the Essex coast. Built by an occultist, the house, which served as a field hospital during World War I, is rumored to be haunted.
When a storm blows in, flooding the causeway and stranding the party there, someone — or something — begins picking them off, one by one. At the same time, the Scotland Yard inspector George Flint establishes a connection between two suicides, 25 years apart, that leads him straight to Devil’s Neck.
Mead keeps so many tops spinning that the narrative can feel overwhelming. But after the date changes to September and a new war begins, the locked room — who is kept in, who is shut out — takes on greater meaning.
The Red Queen
by Martha Grimes
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Grimes, now 94, has written another novel. THE RED QUEEN (Atlantic Monthly Press, 252 pp., $28) is the 26th outing for Detective Superintendent Richard Jury of New Scotland Yard, whose witty perspective has delighted readers, including me, for many years.
Jury’s task this time is to investigate the murder of a businessman, Tom Treadnor, who’s idly sitting on a stool at his village pub when he’s shot to death in view of more than two dozen other patrons, none of whom saw — or heard — anything.
As Jury struggles to reconcile the vastly differing opinions of Treadnor from the man’s widow, business partner and staff, his longtime sergeant, Wiggins, has to take time off to investigate a family issue: His sister, missing and long presumed dead, has apparently sent a cryptic postcard to their mother. Both plot strands will eventually converge, though the way they do strains credulity. And many of the developments — a doppelgänger, an incident involving some piglets — don’t further the story in any meaningful way.
So no, this isn’t one of Grimes’s best efforts. Reach back to earlier Jury novels, the ones published in the 1980s and 1990s, if you want to understand what made the series stand apart from the pack — dark humor, colorful characters and whip-smart plots.
Hotel Ukraine
by Martin Cruz Smith
The great Moscow detective Arkady Renko, first introduced in Smith’s 1981 classic “Gorky Park,” bids readers adieu in HOTEL UKRAINE (Simon & Schuster, 276 pp. $27.99). As Smith writes movingly in the acknowledgments, Parkinson’s disease, which he has had for decades and which Arkady also grapples with, “takes no prisoners, and now I have finished my last book. There is only one Arkady, and I will miss him.”
So will we. But “Hotel Ukraine,” set in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, is a fitting send-off.
Arkady’s newest case — the murder of a deputy defense minister — is one that his superiors aren’t thrilled to see him try to solve. When one of them tries to thwart the investigation by forcing him out on sick leave, his son is apoplectic. “Don’t they realize that even with Parkinson’s you’re the best they’ve got?” he asks.
Arkady knows “he could stay at home, do nothing, and surrender as his symptoms got worse,” but refuses to: “He was defined by who he was and what he could still do.”
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