There is so much to consider, so much to unpack, and so much to learn about in “Boss Lady,” the newest brainchild of coauthors Alli Frank and Asha Youmans. Fans of these writers know that they write intriguing novels about people we find extremely relatable; people who are stuck or need a bit of luck, but people with whom we can connect. Their main characters are always flawed, but we like that because aren’t we all flawed in some respect?
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Author Caroline Cleveland’s debut mystery novel, “When Cicadas Cry,” fooled me once, then again, then again. And maybe a few more times. Now THAT’S what I call a really good mystery. She wrote in an Afterword that she wanted to supply her readers with plenty of curves and twists. Mission accomplished. I was blindsided by almost all of them.
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Amazing, isn’t it. “Dog Day Afternoon” is author David Rosenfelt’s twenty-ninth entry in his Andy Carpenter Mystery series. And I’ve read either twenty-seven or twenty-eight of them. (It’s hard to remember because they appear so quickly one after another, and Rosenfelt is so prolific.) Yet even though the same cast of characters peoples every single mystery, and even though the novels all have the same basic structure, I consistently look forward to reading the next one and then the next one. And I am never disappointed. Every one inspires, or even forces, laugh-out loud responses from its readers. Including me.
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The cover of “I Hope This Finds You Well” leads one to believe that it’s a cute, clever, humorous novel about working in an office, in a cubicle, and the things that one might resort to to keep one’s job. Instead, I was surprised and delighted to find that Natalie Sue’s debut novel grabbed me and dragged me into the life of Jolene so completely that I kept reading until late in the night to find out more about Jolene and her journey working as a cog at a huge conglomerate, Supershops, Inc.
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In many of Catherine Ryan Hyde’s novels, journeys play a special part in terms of shaping and changing the main character or characters. Her latest novel is “Life, Loss, and Puffins,” and the protagonist, a “freakishly smart” thirteen year old and her new best friend Gabriel go on an adventure that changes their lives. Ru’s full name is Rumaki, because her mother thought it was the name of a famous Japanese warrior or philosopher. Unfortunately, it’s the name of an appetizer made from chicken liver, water chestnuts, and bacon, and it’s a name that Ru has been saddled with. In a manner of speaking, this misnomer is emblematic of Ru’s life, a life in which most of the people around her do not understand her or see her for who she really is. They see a child, but Ru is far from anything resembling a typical youngster.
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Kelley Armstrong’s time travel series “A Rip Through Time” is clever, with a fascinating premise and much informative detail about life in Victorian Edinburgh through Armstrong’s deft melding of fact and fiction. And those are just a few of the many reasons to read this series. In this latest mystery in the series, “Disturbing the Dead,” main character Mallory is “treated” to the Victorian fad of all things Egyptian as she and Dr. Gray attend a mummy unwrapping party. Of course, being that Mallory is from the 21st century and has been thrown back to Victorian Edinburgh, she retains modern sensibilities and knows that unwrapping a mummy is a completely disrespectful manner in which to treat the remains of a human being. Many in that time also share that belief, but what the aristocracy want, they get. As is wont to happen in a murder mystery, the unwrapping party leads to a murder that Mallory and her friends will spend the novel solving.
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Imagine sending an honest letter to those who have wronged you so that after your death, everyone knows how you really felt. Now imagine those heartfelt, very frank letters being sent accidentally before your death. In “One Last Word,” author Suzanne Park imagines that happening to Sara Chae, who has been working on an app she thinks has great potential. But when her honest emails go out to her former employers, her former landlord, her parents, and even a former high school crush, she has a lot to worry about.
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There are several mysteries in Sally Hepworth’s new novel, “Darling Girls.” The first, and the vehicle she uses to bring the main characters back to their childhood foster home of nightmares, is the bones found buried under the large farmhouse where they lived. Holly Fairchild, Miss Fairchild to the three sisters, took in foster children. It was decades later, when she sold the home and it was demolished, that the bones were found.
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Adam Gidwitz is a much loved children’s author whose fabulous tales have taken readers young and old from Grimm’s fairy tales (“A Tale Dark and Grimm“) to the Inquisition (“The Inquisitor’s Tale“) and now to WWII in “Max in the House of Spies: A Tale of World War II.” This historical fiction also contains Gidwitz’s trademark fantasy twist with two mythical creatures who accompany main character Max as he travels from Berlin to London as part of the Kindertransport, which took Jewish children from Germany to countries where they stayed in foster homes until the end of the war.
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Percival Everett’s brilliant novel, “James,” is a significant achievement, almost as important, perhaps, for what it is not, as much as for what it certainly is. It is not simply a “reimagining” of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Nor is it simply an “updating” or “retelling” of Twain’s magnificent contribution to American literature. It is, instead, a moving, fiery, anger-inducing, sad, and occasionally humorous account of a slave in 1860 America. That slave, Jim, is a friend of a semi-wild fourteen- or fifteen-year-old ultra-country boy named Huck.
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As fascinating as the murder mystery “The Murder of Mr. Ma” is, the afterward and acknowledgments at the end are almost, but certainly not completely, as intriguing as the actual mystery itself. Cowritten by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan, this series opener introduces two Chinese men, Lao She and Judge Dee Ren Jie, who are actual historic figures from China’s past. These two men collaborate to investigate the murder of a Chinese man, which death is quickly multiplied when more Chinese men, all of whom knew each other, are found murdered by the same weapon, an unusual butterfly sword.
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While there is a death at the very beginning of “The Stars Turned Inside Out,” author Nova Jacobs has much more in store for readers than a typical murder mystery. This very sophisticated story takes place in Switzerland, in the CERN facility, to be exact. And it’s in this place where physicists try to divide atoms into smaller and smaller pieces, and try to find dark matter, that mysterious concept most of us don’t fully understand, where the death takes place. And while the cause of death is clear, how it happened is not.
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