One of Our Own

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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Starred review from August 17, 2020
The excellent 30th and final series whodunit from Edgar winner Haddam (1951–2019) featuring the brilliant but all too human Gregor Demarkian, who frequently consults for the Philadelphia PD, finds him still dealing with the fallout from 2014’s Fighting Chance, in which he was shot by someone he trusted. Senator John Jackman and Police Commissioner Bill Jefferson ask Demarkian to help investigate an attempted murder. Someone bludgeoned an elderly woman into unconsciousness and placed her in a garbage bag, which accidentally fell out of the back of a van onto a Philly street, an incident witnessed by Demarkian’s close friend, Fr. Tibor Kasparian. Jackman and Jefferson suspect the assault may be connected to Cary Alder, an unscrupulous real estate magnate believed to have bribed “the mayor and half the building inspectors in the city,” because the woman had a gold coin in her possession that’s accepted as legal tender in some of Alder’s properties. As always, Haddam cleverly integrates political issues such as illegal immigration and affordable housing into an intricate and gripping plot. This is a fitting coda to the career of one of America’s best contemporary fair play authors.

September 1, 2020
Gregor Demarkian's last case. Marta Warkowski has lived all her 72 years in a three-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia's Alder Arms despite the best efforts of Miguel Hernandez, the building's super, to cajole her to leave or evict her. She knows all the dodges: Bring your rent check directly to Cary Alder's office; make sure to get a receipt every month; and don't let the bastards think they can get away with bullying you. About the only thing that will get her to move is death. Even when her body, stuffed into a plastic garbage bag, is tossed from a van onto the street, she's not quite dead, only comatose. It's Hernandez who's dead, lying on the floor of her coveted apartment. Father Tibor Kasparian and 14-year-old Tommy Moradanyan, who are on the scene, are already preoccupied with their own problems, which range from the imprisonment of Tommy's father, attorney Russ Donahue, to Tibor's recent placement of Javier, an abandoned child, in foster care. Since Russ Donahue's crimes include shooting Gregor Demarkian, who's also agreed with his wife, Bennis Hannaford, to take in Javier, it's only natural that the Philadelphia Police Department comes calling on Gregor for help. This time, though, the interest in the Armenian American Poirot's sleuthing is outpaced by Haddam's exposition of an all-too-plausibly widespread plot to smuggle undocumented people into the country and exploit them in every possible way. The result is a fitting sunset vehicle for Haddam, a pseudonym for Orania Papazoglou, who died in 2019 and is memorialized in a brief, glowing afterword. One last testament to the importance of community in maintaining the values that make America great, or at least human.

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