The Rivals
By Jane Pek
Pek’s debut “The Verifiers” was the book I most wanted to review in 2022, but didn’t. It wasn’t perfect, but I admired the fresh, sweetly sardonic voice of the amateur sleuth and mystery-novel aficionado Claudia Lin, as well as the way Pek raised questions about living, dating and lying online.
THE RIVALS (Vintage, 401 pp., paperback, $18) sees Claudia co-running Veracity, “an online-dating detective agency sussing out whether the people … on matching platforms are lying about themselves.” As she spars will-they-won’t-they-style with her business partner, Becks, and contends with her fractious family, Claudia grows increasingly alarmed at the cutthroat tactics of the matchmakers used by some of Veracity’s clients.
When one of those clients dies in a suspicious bike accident, Claudia tracks down his ex, who’s employed by one of the aforementioned matchmakers, and convinces him to play double agent. Suddenly Claudia’s in a spy story, and so are readers, which allows Pek to have as much fun with genre tropes as she did in “The Rivals.” But beneath structural trickery and energetic prose lies the beating heart of human connection.
Buried Road
By Katie Tallo
Each mystery series installment is supposed to stand alone, to give new readers a starting point no matter which book they pick up first, but in truth this happens far less often than it should.
But you don’t need to have read the first two books in Tallo’s wonderful series (“Dark August” and “Poisoned Lilies”) to enjoy BURIED ROAD (Harper, 327 pp., paperback $18.99).
Augusta Monet is three years into grieving her lost love, a journalist named Howard who vanished while investigating a story. Her daughter Bly unspools the narrative, tasked with getting both herself and her mother through each day, a hard proposition for someone at any age, let alone a preteen.
Then Howard’s camper van is discovered in an abandoned airport hangar, with evidence that his death was probably a homicide. Gus is shocked out of her lethargy and into white-hot fury.
Bly asks her mother what could have happened to Howard. “I know she doesn’t know but I ask before the question burns a hole in my chest. Gus turns to me. She’s got that look. ‘That’s what we’re going to find out, Boo,’ she says.”
As Tallo directs the pair in unexpected directions, the languid pace picks up, propelling the narrative into heart-stopping thriller territory.
Echo
By Tracy Clark
The Chicago detective Harriet Foster, making her third appearance in Clark’s ECHO (Thomas & Mercer, 349 pp., paperback, $16.99) still operates in a fog after the deaths of her former partner and child. But Harri, as she’s called, refuses to allow her pain to subsume her investigative work. The case she’s just been assigned will definitely offer distraction: the death of Belverton College student and “golden boy” Brice Collier, son of the school’s biggest donor, found dead near campus.
“Brice Collier died of fatal ethanol intoxication, meaning he consumed far more alcohol than his body could tolerate,” the medical examiner tells Harri and her partner, before surprising them: “This has happened before. Thirty years ago. Same field. Same cause of death.”
Though that long-ago death was ruled a hazing accident, it turns out that Brice’s father and a friend — who happens to be Belverton’s current president — were implicated in it.
Clark’s understanding of how the search for justice can be perverted into revenge is acute, and informs the gasp-inducing conclusion.
Trouble Island
By Sharon Short
Oh, what tangled webs Short weaves in TROUBLE ISLAND (Minotaur, 327 pp., $29), which is rife with loss, bootlegging, betrayals and double-crosses. It’s set on an island nestled in the center of Lake Erie that’s technically in Canada but perfect for Americans flush with booze money made during Prohibition. Rosita McGee, the wife of a gangster, has taken refuge there in her family’s mansion, a “butter-yellow confection of porticos and verandas and tall windows,” along with her maid, Aurelia Escalante.
The accidental death of Rosita’s child in a gunfight has turned the island sanctuary into a place of sadness, not just for Rosita, but also for Aurelia, who’s in hiding from an act of violence that permanently altered her life. Then Rosita’s unpleasant husband, Eddie, sails up to the dock in his yacht with a coterie of crooks in tow, including one with grudges to burn. Eddie’s come to tell his wife they’re selling the island. Naturally, it doesn’t take long for a body to turn up.
The sheer number of ways in which all the characters lie — to other people, and to themselves — is breathtaking. Short, in her first stand-alone novel, handles every element with aplomb, showing how losing a loved one can corrode the brain like nothing else.
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