Spring is in the air!

NEW MYSTERIES AND THRILLERS

MARCH 2

Drink the Tea by Thomas Kaufman (Hardback)

The hottest new author this spring is Thomas Kaufman.  He is also the winner of PWA Best First Private Eye Novel Competition.

Synopsis: Willis Gidney is a born liar and rip-off artist, an expert at the scam. Growing up without parents or a home, by age twelve he is a successful young man, running his own small empire, until he meets Shadrack Davies. That’s Captain Shadrack Davies, of the D.C. Police. Davies wants to reform Gidney and becomes his foster father. Though he tries not to, Gidney learns a small amount of ethics from Shad—just enough to bother a kid from the streets for the rest of his life.

Now Gidney is a PI, walking those same streets. So it’s no surprise that when his closest friend, jazz saxophonist Steps Jackson, asks Gidney to find his missing daughter, Gidney is compelled to say yes—even though she’s been missing for twenty-five years. He finds a woman who may be the girl’s mother–and within hours she turns up dead. The police accuse Gidney of the murder and throw him in jail.
Maybe Gidney should quit while he’s behind. But when his investigation puts him up against a ruthless multinational corporation, a two-faced congressman, and a young woman desperate to conceal her past, Gidney has no time left for second thoughts. In fact, he may have no time left at all.

March 18

If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr (Hardback – USA)

If you love historical thrillers, look no further.

Synopsis:

Berlin, 1934: The Nazis have secured the 1936 Olympiad for the city but are facing foreign resistance. Hitler and Avery Brundage, the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, have connived to soft-pedal Nazi anti- Semitism and convince America to participate. Bernie Gunther, now the house detective at an upscale Berlin hotel, is swept into this world of international corruption and dangerous double-dealing, caught between the warring factions of the Nazi apparatus.

Havana, 1954: Batista, aided by the CIA, has just seized power; Castro is in prison; and the American Mafia is quickly gaining a stranglehold on the city’s exploding gaming and prostitution industries. Bernie, who has been unceremoniously kicked out of Buenos Aires, has resurfaced in Cuba with a new life, seemingly one of routine and relative peace. But Bernie discovers that he truly cannot outrun the burden of his past: He soon collides with a vicious killer from his Berlin days, who is mysteriously murdered not long afterward-and an old lover, who may be the murderer.

March 30

Expiration Date by Duane Swiercyznski (Paperback)

I enjoyed Swiercynski’s The Wheelman and loved The Blonde.  Expiration Date looks like another action-packed thriller.

Synopsis:

In this neighborhood, make a wrong turn…

… and you’re history.

Mickey Wade is a recently-unemployed journalist who lucked into a rent-free apartment—his sick grandfather’s place. The only problem: it’s in a lousy neighborhood—the one where Mickey grew up, in fact. The one he was so desperate to escape.

But now he’s back. Dead broke. And just when he thinks he’s reached rock bottom, Mickey wakes up in the past. Literally.

At first he thinks it’s a dream. All of the stores he remembered from his childhood, the cars, the rumble of the elevated train. But as he digs deeper into the past, searching for answers about the grandfather he hardly knows, Mickey meets the twelve-year-old kid who lives in the apartment below.

The kid who will grow up to someday murder Mickey’s father.

April 6

Nowhere to Run by C.J. Box (Hardback)

I’m a huge fan of C.J. Box’s great outdoor mysteries starring game warden Joe Pickett.  I can’t wait for this new adventure to take me back to Wyoming.

Synopsis:

Joe Pickett’s in his last week as the temporary game warden in the town of Baggs, Wyoming, but there have been strange things going on in the mountains, and his conscience won’t let him leave without checking them out: reports of camps looted, tents slashed, elk butchered. And then there’s the runner who simply vanished one day. Joe doesn’t mind admitting that the farther he rides, the more he wishes he could just turn around and go home. And he is right to be concerned. Because what awaits him is like nothing he’s ever dealt with, like something out of an old story, except this is all too real and too deadly. When he’d first saddled up, he’d thought of this as his last patrol. What he hadn’t known was just how accurate that thought might turn out to be.

April 13

The Burying Place by Brian Freeman (Hardback)

Freeman’s dark thrillers always get my adrenaline going.

Synopsis:

One cold night.  Two shocking mysteries.

In the quiet town of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a baby vanishes from her bedroom in an opulent lakeside home.  Was she abducted – or does her father have a terrible secret to hide?

That same night, a young policewoman gets lost in the fog and stumbles into the middle of a horrific crime.  Now a sadistic killer wants her to play his deadly game.

Lieutenant Jonathan Stride and his team need to move fast to save a child and stop a vicious killing spree.  As fear grips the frozen winter farm lands, Stride knows that every snow-covered field may be the next burying place.

Each twist in the investigation takes Stride into an elaborate web of deceit and desire.  But his biggest obstacles may be the very people he’s trying to help.  With everything at risk and time running out, Stride worries how far a desperate mother will go to rescue her baby – and how far a desperate cop will go to save herself.

April 15

Infamous by Ace Atkins (Hardback)

After last years’ Devil’s Garden, Atkins is on a roll.  This tale is set in the first days of the modern FBI.

Synopsis:

In July 1933, the gangster known as George “Machine Gun” Kelly staged the kidnapping-for-ransom of an Oklahoma oil­man. He would live to regret it. Kelly was never the sharpest knife in the drawer, and what started clean soon became messy, as two of his partners cut themselves into the action; a determined former Texas Ranger makes tracking Kelly his mission; and Kelly’s wife, ever alert to her own self-interest, starts playing both ends against the middle.

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April 27

The God of the Hive by Laurie King

Fans of Sherlock Holmes and Laurie King’s The Language of Bees are eagerly awaiting this sequel.

Synopsis:

It began as a problem in one of Holmes’ beloved beehives, led to a murderous cult, and ended—or so they’d hoped—with a daring escape from a sacrificial altar. Instead, Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, have stirred the wrath and the limitless resources of those they’ve thwarted. Now they are separated and on the run, wanted by the police, and pursued across the Continent by a ruthless enemy with powerful connections.

Unstoppable together, Russell and Holmes will have to survive this time apart, maintaining tenuous contact only by means of coded messages and cryptic notes. With Holmes’ young granddaughter in her safekeeping, Russell will have to call on instincts she didn’t know she had. But has the couple already made a fatal mistake by separating, making themselves easier targets for the shadowy government agents sent to silence them?

From hidden rooms in London shops and rustic forest cabins to rickety planes over Scotland and boats on the frozen North Sea, Russell and Holmes work their way back to each other while uncovering answers to a mystery that will take both of them to solve. A hermit with a mysterious past and a beautiful young female doctor with a secret, a cruelly scarred flyer and an obsessed man of the cloth, Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, and an Intelligence agent who knows too much: Everyone Russell and Holmes meet could either speed their safe reunion or betray them to their enemies—in the most complex, shocking, and deeply personal case of their career.

May 11

The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer (Hardback)

The Tourist was hands-down, last year’s best spy thriller.  Now Steinhauer is back with the sequel.

Synopsis:

Now faced with the end of his quiet, settled life, reluctant spy Milo Weaver has no choice but to turn back to his old job as a “tourist.” Before he can get back to the CIA’s dirty work, he has to prove his loyalty to his new bosses, who know little of Milo’s background and less about who is really pulling the strings in the government above the Department of Tourism—or in the outside world, which is beginning to believe the legend of its existence. Milo is suddenly in a dangerous position, between right and wrong, between powerful self-interested men, between patriots and traitors—especially as a man who has nothing left to lose.

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May 13

Strip by Thomas Perry (Hardback)

The author of Metzer’s Dog and The Butcher’s Boy may be starting a new series.

Synopsis:

An aging but formidable strip club owner, Claudiu “Manco” Kapak, has been robbed by a masked gunman as he placed his cash receipts in a bank’s night-deposit box. Enraged, he sends his half-dozen security men out to find a suspect who is spending lots of cash and is new enough to Los Angeles not to know he was robbing a gangster.  Their search leads them to Joe Carver, an innocent but hardly defenseless newcomer who evades capture and sets out to make Kapak wish he’d chosen someone else.

Meanwhile, the real culprit, Jefferson Davis Falkins, and his new girlfriend Carrie seem to believe they’ve found a whole new profession: robbing Manco Kapak. Lieutenant Nick Slosser, the police detective in charge of the puzzling and increasingly violent case, has his own troubles, including worries about how he’s going to afford to send the oldest child of each of his two bigamous marriages to college without making their mothers suspicious. As this odd series of difficulties explodes into a triple killing, Carver finds himself in the middle of a brewing gang war over Kapak’s little empire, while Falkins and Carrie journey into territory more strange and violent than either had imagined.

May 18

61 hours by Lee Child (Hardback)

The latest Jack Reacher thriller.  In recent years, Lee Child has been hit or miss.  We’ll see if this one lives up to my standards and finds its place among the great Jack Reacher thrillers, like One Shot, Bad Luck and Trouble, and Running Blind.

Synopsis:

A tour bus crashes in a savage snowstorm and lands Jack Reacher in the middle of a deadly confrontation. In nearby Bolton, South Dakota, one brave woman is standing up for justice in a small town threatened by sinister forces. If she’s going to live long enough to testify, she’ll need help. Because a killer is coming to Bolton, a coldly proficient assassin who never misses.

May 25

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Steig Larsson (Hardback – USA)

The third and last book in the Millennium trilogy.

Synopsis:

Lisbeth Salander—the heart of Larsson’s two previous novels—lies in critical condition, a bullet wound to her head, in the intensive care unit of a Swedish city hospital. She’s fighting for her life in more ways than one: if and when she recovers, she’ll be taken back to Stockholm to stand trial for three murders. With the help of her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, she will not only have to prove her innocence, but also identify and denounce those in authority who have allowed the vulnerable, like herself, to suffer abuse and violence. And, on her own, she will plot revenge—against the man who tried to kill her, and the corrupt government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life.Once upon a time, she was a victim. Now Salander is fighting back.

May 27

Junkyard Dogs by Craig Johnson (Hardback)

I’ve only heard great things about Craig Johnson, since his first Sheriff Longmire mystery, The Cold Dish.

Synopsis:

A missing thumb and dead developers are only the beginning for Sheriff Walt Longmire.

It’s a volatile new economy in Durant, Wyoming, where the owners of a multi-million dollar development of ranchettes want to get rid of the adjacent junk-yard. When a severed thumb is discovered in the yard, conflicts erupt, and Walt Longmire, his trusty companion Dog, life-long friend Henry Standing Bear, and deputies Santiago Saizarbitoria and Victoria Moretti find themselves in a small town that feels more and more like a high plains pressure cooker.

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