Payback

December 1, 2020

Haines's Independent Bones features PI Sarah Booth Delaney, caught up with protecting a visiting professor of Greek literature at Ole Miss whose radical feminism may have sparked murder (40,000-copy first printing). In Jonasson's latest, Una is teaching in a remote Icelandic village when she discovers dark secrets the polite if distant villages have kept hidden for generations--perhaps involving The Girl Who Died (50,000-copy first printing). A peasant girl is murdered in a northern Chinese village, and exiled inspector Lu Fei takes the case in Klingborg's Thief of Souls (75,000-copy first printing). Brought back by Lupica in 2018, PI Sunny Randall investigates the suicide of best friend Spike's 20-year old niece in Robert B. Parker's Payback. In 1910, a senior barrister is found dead in a notorious London slum, and junior barrister Daniel Pitt endangers his family by investigating in Perry's Death with a Double Edge. In Walker's The Coldest Case, applying the facial reconstruction tools used on ancient skulls to the skull of a long-dead murder victim leads Bruno, chief of police in fictional town in the Dordogne, to the activities of a Cold War-era Communist organization. With A Peculiar Combination, Louisiana librarian Weaver detours from her beloved Amory Ames books to launch a new series starring Electra "Ellie" McDonnell, who cracks safes with locksmith uncle Mick to make ends meet in World War II England and agrees to help the government when she's caught (40,000-copy first printing).

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2021
Many longtime Robert B. Parker devotees were skeptical when the Parker estate agreed to allow the late author's characters to appear in the work of surrogate writers, but in the case of Lupica, who has penned both Sunny Randall and Jesse Stone novels, and Ace Atkins, who has taken over the Spenser franchise, the experiment has been successful. Here, in his third Randall excursion, Lupica doubles down on that familiar trope in detective fiction--the PI takes a nonpaying case to help a friend--by having Sunny take two cases for different friends: Spike, who has lost his restaurant to a weaselly hedge-fund manager, and Lee, a cop whose college-age niece has been assaulted but won't take his help. Naturally, the two cases connect when the weasel and the niece are linked by a floating poker game. Lupica powers his way through the plot in fast-talking Parker style, reveling in the banter and the nicely delineated relationships between Sunny and various other Parker players (psychiatrist Susan Silverman, gangster Tony Marcus, and cop Jesse Stone, now Sunny's most significant other). It's all smart-alecky good fun in the hard-boiled tradition.

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