The Night of the Fire

June 1, 2020

In Out of Hounds, Brown's latest "Sister Jane Arnold" mystery, the good sister deals with local tensions--and murder--when town newbies threaten her crowd's foxhunting ways. In Chow's Mimi Lee Reads Between the Lines, second in the "Sassy Cat Mysteries," Mimi Lee must rely on her debonair talking cat, Marshmallow, when her sister is accused of murdering a teaching colleague. In Ellis's The Diabolical Bones, which follows up the film-optioned The Vanished Bride, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Bront� find their writing interrupted by a new case: bones have been discovered bricked up in a chimney at moldering Scar Top House. Eriksson's The Night of the Fire brings back popular Swedish police inspector Ann Lindell, who's retired to the country but not for long--someone has set fire to the old schoolhouse, now housing asylum seekers, and three people are dead (35,000-copy first printing). Fletcher/Land's Murder, She Wrote: Murder in Season joins the holiday mystery lineup as Jessica Fletcher acknowledges that despite her work on the annual Christmas pageant, she can't ignore two sets of bones (one old, one new) found on her property. Sulari Gentill follows up her LJ-starred, Ned Kelly Award-winning After She Wrote Him with A House Divided, set in 1931 Sydney, Australia, and starring gentleman bohemian Rowland Sinclair, who insinuates himself into a high-stepping (and sometimes conservative) crowd to discover who murdered his beloved Uncle Rowly. Ready to retire, former FBI agent and police consultant Gregor Demarkian takes on his last case in Haddam's One of Our Own, trying to figure out how elderly Marta Warkowski ended up in a coma--and in a big plastic garbage bag--and why her dead super is locked in her apartment (30,000-copy first printing). With The Turning Tide, McPherson, whose Dandy Gilver mysteries have received CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger and Historical Macavity Award nominations, gives Dandy the task of figuring out why the local ferrywoman seems to have gone mad--and whether she has committed murder, as she claims. Finally, March's Murder in Old Bombay, winner of the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award, captures Capt. Jim Agnihotri's efforts to find out what really happened when two Parsee women plunge from the university tower in 1892 Bombay (30,000-copy first printing).

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September 15, 2020
A pair of arsons and a handful of murders lead investigators into the dark world of young Swedish neo-Nazis. Upon retiring from the Violent Crimes Unit, veteran detective Ann Lindell leaves Uppsala for a rural cottage where she plans to make cheese. But when an anonymous caller warns police that "someone may die," Lindell's successor, Sammy Nilsson, decides to consult her. In the interim, a rural school attended by many Afghan refugees is burned to the ground, and some students go missing. Was this the subject of the anonymous call? As usual, Eriksson folds the lives of his engaging detectives into the mystery. A disillusioned Sammy contemplates separation from his wife, Angelika, and deals with his erratic new partner, Bodin, while Lindell rekindles a friendship with her ex, Edvard. Eriksson's nuanced portraits of suspects and witnesses add depth and texture. Villager G�sta Friberg recognizes one of the arsonists, and a couple of others have strong suspicions. Falsely telling Sammy that she can't identify the caller, Lindell decides to probe on her own. Soon after she questions G�sta and others, a dead badger is left gutted in her bed. When she goes to the city to question Justus Johsson, the man on the tape, he advises her to investigate young Swedish Nazis. Then there's a second fire at a farmhouse owned by suspected Nazi Daniel Mattsson. A female corpse is discovered inside the burned house, but where is Mattsson? The heroine's eighth case uses a clever whodunit to treat contemporary issues with complexity and compassion.

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Starred review from September 21, 2020
Eriksson’s exceptional eighth ensemble police procedural to be published in the U.S. (after 2016’s Stone Coffin) spotlights Ann Lindell, who has quit the Violent Crimes Unit in Uppsala, Sweden, and started a new career as a cheese maker in the village of Rasbo. Then an unknown man calls Lindell’s former office and insists on speaking with her. He says she’s “the only one who listens,” adding, “someone may die.” Before a former colleague can pass on the message to Lindell, a woman dies in a fire that burns down an old school in Rasbo being used to house political and war refugees. Though the investigators don’t find conclusive proof, the consensus is that it was arson. Lindell is drawn to the case, even as she’s the target of an unknown enemy, who leaves a dead badger in her bed, its belly slit open. When she finally listens to a tape of the caller, the voice sounds familiar. Eriksson adeptly teases whether there’s a connection between the call and the fire, even as violence claims more lives. This artful blend of mystery and psychology is sure to please Scandinavian noir fans. Agent: Anneli Høier, Copenhagen Literary (Denmark).

November 1, 2020
In this eighth Ann Lindell procedural, she and her former colleagues in Uppsala's violent-crimes unit try to find their footing as their lives and Sweden's social fabric shift. Former police inspector Lindell has decamped to Tilltorp village and left her confidante, Sammy Nilsson, to navigate Uppsala's crimes and his imploding marriage on his own. But when Sammy asks Ann to meet with an old informant, she takes a deep dive into Tilltorp's hidden neo-Nazi underbelly. Shortly after Tilltorp's refugee housing was torched by unidentified arsonists, another fire burns the smithy at the village's most prosperous farm. A woman's body, identifiable only by a swastika tattoo, is found inside, while the smithy's owner lies beaten to death near the drive. Investigative curiosity awakened, Lindell puts her interrogation skills to work digging into the village's secrets, certain that the farm fire and the recent arson of Tilltorp's refugee housing are linked to the informant's report of a large theft of explosives. A pivotal series entry, blending procedural details with nuanced character development and insightful social commentary.

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