The “good old days” had their share of bad days – and bad guys.
Past eras – from World War I to the 1960s – provide settings in new crime novels by Anne Perry, Carola Dunn and Faye Kellerman.
Their books are among the latest hardcover novels of mystery and suspense, which also include works by Robert B. Parker, Rita Mae Brown, Ed McBain and Ruth Rendell.
Perry’s “Angels in the Gloom” (Ballantine), the third in her World War I series, is set in March 1916. Soon after Joseph Reavley, a battlefront chaplain, returns to his village in the English countryside, a weapons scientist is murdered in a town nearby, apparently by the same elusive figure who killed Reavley’s parents just before the war.
It’s the summer of 1924 in “Fall of a Philanderer” (St. Martin’s Minotaur), Dunn’s 14th book featuring Daisy Dalrymple and her husband, Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard. The couple’s plans for a quiet holiday in coastal Westcombe go awry when they find the body of the local pub owner – a married man who tried to seduce just about every woman in town – at the foot of a cliff.
A serial killer terrorizes 1929 Munich, Germany, in Kellerman’s “Straight Into Darkness” (Warner Books). Homicide inspector Alex Berg investigates when the body of a young society woman is found murdered – her clothes and hair artfully arranged – in the city’s English Garden. Then the bodies of two more wealthy women turn up, apparently victims of the same killer.
Two books give evidence that school can be murder:
In Parker’s “School Days” (Putnam), Boston private eye Spenser tries to prove the innocence of a boy accused of having taken part in a school shooting in which seven died. Spenser doesn’t get much help from school officials or from the boy’s parents, who seem indifferent to their son’s dilemma.
In Brown’s “The Hunt Ball” (Ballantine), a prestigious girls’ school in Virginia becomes a murder scene when one of the decorative corpses at the Halloween dance turns out to be real – that of the school’s fundraiser. The case is being handled by series regular “Sister” Jane Arnold of the local hunt club, who is chasing a murderer as well as foxes.
In “13 Steps Down” (Crown), Rendell introduces readers to Mix, a London man with two obsessions: a supermodel who is out of his league and Reggie Christie, a serial killer hanged 50 years earlier. When Mix commits murder, he wonders what to do next and looks to Christie for inspiration.
Other new mysteries:
Mysteries of science unfold in “Tyrannosaur Canyon” (Forge) by Douglas Preston, in which a prospector in New Mexico is murdered for his notebook containing encoded instructions for locating a complete fossilized dinosaur; and in “Polar Shift” (Putnam) by Clive Cussler, about an antiglobalization group that plans to artificially trigger a geological phenomenon that can cause earthquakes and climate changes.
In “Nervous Water” (St. Martin’s Minotaur) by William G. Tapply, Boston attorney Brady Coyne is asked by his terminally ill uncle to find his estranged daughter, who has disappeared without a trace.
“Without a Word” (Morrow) is Carol Lea Benjamin’s tale of a New York private eye who tries to help a man find his long-missing wife.
When four men convicted of rape are later exonerated, they sue the city for millions of dollars in “Fury” (Atria), the latest in Robert K. Tanenbaum’s series about Butch Karp, New York district attorney; and an attorney in Wyoming defends a local man suspected of murdering three Indians and “displaying” them on a historic battlefield in “Eye of the Wolf” (Berkley Prime Crime) by Margaret Coel.
Four “creepers” – people who illegally explore abandoned structures – are not prepared for the horror they encounter after they enter a rundown hotel on the New Jersey shore in “Creepers” (CDS Books) by David Morrell.
In “Perfect Nightmare” (Ballantine) by John Saul, the disappearance of a teenage girl from her home during the night turns out to be only one of many similar events in the normally peaceful neighborhood.
A man who recently received a heart transplanted from a murder victim experiences disturbing memories not his own in “Friends, Lovers, Chocolate” (Pantheon) by Alexander McCall Smith.
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