Murder at the Christmas Emporium
by Andreina Cordani
A handful of lucky people have been invited to a Christmas Eve shopping party at Verity’s Emporium, an old-fashioned store in London specializing in gorgeous handcrafted toys. “On behalf of Monty Verity and his team of elves, I wish you the very merriest of Christmases,” says a man at the door.
Imagine their dismay when it turns out that what they’ve signed up for is not a lovely evening, but MURDER AT THE CHRISTMAS EMPORIUM (Pegasus Crime, 352 pp., $27.95). Alas, their yummy cocoa has been laced with drugs, and someone has locked the doors, cut the lights and begun picking off the guests, one at a time.
“Something is going on, something weird and horrible and not even slightly festive,” observes Merry, one of the guests.
Cordani’s book, her second work of seasonal killing after “The Twelve Days of Murder,” is on the surface a homage to Agatha Christie’s locked-room classic “And Then There Were None,” complete with terrible secrets and ingenious methods of victim dispatch. But it also brings to mind Willy Wonka’s famous chocolate factory, with its creepy machines and hints at a dark history of colonial exploitation.
Cordani is an expert at misdirection. She leads you in one direction and then, slamming the door in your face, sends you down another path entirely. Pay attention to the seemingly mild-mannered Merry, who has a knack for messing with people’s heads.
The Predicament
by William Boyd
You know you’re in excellent hands with THE PREDICAMENT (Atlantic Crime, 258 pp., $28), the second book in Boyd’s delicious historical espionage series featuring Gabriel Dax, an English travel writer pulled into reluctant spydom in the early 1960s. Its predecessor, “Gabriel’s Moon,” put Dax in the center of the events surrounding the assassination of the Congolese president Patrice Lumumba in 1961. This book sends him to Berlin in 1962, where President John F. Kennedy is preparing to give his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech.
Luckily for Dax, he has a legitimate cover story to explain his trip: He needs more material to pad out his latest travel book, “Rivers,” and Berlin conveniently has a river he can use to help make the book long enough. “I’m doing the Spree,” he tells a suspicious character, by way of putting him off the scent.
Dax is less James Bond than “useful idiot,” as he puts it, destined never to completely understand whatever operation he’s sent into. (His obsession with the intoxicating Faith Green, his MI6 handler and occasional lover, isn’t helping him keep a clear head.) “All this pretense, all this duplicity — it was exhausting,” he thinks.
The book may be low on spycraft, but that’s part of its fun. At a repurposed chicken farm in East London, Dax is taught by an MI6 operative how to deploy items in his pocket — his keys, his wallet, his reporter’s notebook — as deadly weapons.
“You’re what I call a ‘man of peace,’ would that be correct?” the operative asks. “I suppose so,” he responds. “I’m a writer.”
Gone Before Goodbye
by Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben
Struggling to make ends meet after botching an operation and losing her medical license, Maggie McCabe is offered the sort of job anyone would be foolish to accept: performing surgery on a sketchy oligarch in the frozen depths of the Russian countryside. Before she’s even scrubbed in at the newly built state-of-the-art operating room, her sister’s debts have been paid off, the malpractice lawsuit against her has been settled and a cool $5 million has been deposited in her bank account.
GONE BEFORE GOODBYE (Grand Central, 352 pp., $32) is the 39th novel by Coben, but the first he’s written with Witherspoon, a fiction enthusiast as well as an actress. As always when a megaselling thriller writer collaborates with a celebrity, it’s impossible to know who wrote what. But Witherspoon says in the acknowledgments that she drew on her parents’ 40 years of service in military hospitals to help shape the character of Maggie, who can hold her own both in the operating room and when she’s being attacked by large men wielding scary weapons.
Before she knows it, Maggie has been drawn into a vast international conspiracy that seems to have something to do with the medical charity she and her late husband, Marc, set up. (But is Marc really dead? He was killed during a humanitarian mission in Africa, but Maggie’s been communicating with him by means of an A.I. “grief bot” that her brilliant sister set up for her on her iPhone.)
Kidnapping, illegal organ harvesting, a skeezy doctor known as the Boob Whisperer, money laundering, a man named Porkchop, a $4.1 million Bugatti Tourbillon — there’s a lot going on here. “Listen to me,” a man named Oleg says to Maggie. “You can’t trust anyone.”
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
The post Pulse-Pounding, Nail-Biting New Thrillers appeared first on New York Times.
