Hard Aground

February 1, 2018
As magazine writer Lewis Cole convalesces from his latest medical adventures, the old house to which he's effectively confined becomes ground zero for every scrap of intrigue in New Hampshire.Though he hasn't worked there for many years, the Department of Defense keeps coming up with new ways to ruin Lewis' life. The latest is a pair of alarming tumors, a delayed reaction to his exposure to some nasty gas while he was on the job. Once the tumors are excised and sampled for biopsies, Lewis is sent home to drain his wounds daily and wait for the test results. But there's more on the agenda for Tyler, the coastal town to which he's retreated. Elderly antiques dealer Maggie Tyler Branch is killed by a shotgun blast. Dave and Marjorie Hudson, a pair of history buffs visiting from Albany, show up on his doorstep demanding a tour of the building, where Dave's grandfather once barracked. Lewis' friend Felix Tinios reports the disappearance of a valuable old silver coin he inherited from his great-grandfather. A visiting lowlife is shot outside a nearby hotel. Lewis hears all manner of thumps in the house in the middle of the night. Through it all, he has periodic visions of his lost love, Cissy Manning, entreating him, "Let me go." The one thing that doesn't happen is his getting the results of his biopsy. Instead of being sent to the nearby lab, his tissue has made a side trip to San Diego, and the delivery service has lost track of it. No wonder Lewis grouses: "For an old house way off the road, we're sure as hell getting a lot of visitors."A low-impact chamber exercise best suited to fill the time between Storm Cell (2016) and whatever higher-octane adventure is around the next corner.

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Starred review from February 19, 2018
Unpretentious but thoroughly satisfying, DuBois’s 11th Lewis Cole mystery (after 2016’s Storm Cell) does a lot within its limited scope. Despite being basically confined to his Tyler Beach, N.H., house after surgery, Cole can’t escape disturbing pressures from the world outside: an elderly antiques dealer’s shotgun slaying, his shady pal Felix Tinios’s pursuit of missing antique silver, and the opioid epidemic’s corrupting influence on Tyler Beach. He also gets bothersome news bulletins from his current lover, reporter Paula Quinn, and from his local police detective friend, Diane Woods. Mean-
while, he’s bedeviled by an overbearing couple who want to tour his house—and by the inconvenient ghost of his one true love, “long-dead and long-missing Cissy Manning,” with whom he converses in his dreams. And, to top it off, the tumors that were removed from his back have gone astray en route to the lab that was to test whether they were cancerous or not. Somehow, DuBois fits all this into a tight, lively package that’s the epitome of superior storytelling.

March 1, 2018

Lewis Cole is homebound, recovering from surgery, when antiques dealer and local historian Maggie Tyler Branch is shot to death. With a girlfriend who is an editor at the local newspaper and another friend on the police force, he keeps on top of the investigation when they come to his house to change his medical drains. In fact, it seems his historic house has become ground zero. Lewis is convinced an intruder is trying to break into his home at night, and by day, he is harassed by two genealogists who desperately try to enter. Lewis has plenty of time to analyze the murder, find the local connection to the opioid crisis, and attempt to piece together the secrets that link to his house. VERDICT DuBois's 11th series entry (after Storm Cell) is a riveting Rear Window-type drama of a man trapped in a menacing environment, forced to rely on his wits, rather than brawn, to solve a crime. Suggest to readers of Laura Lippman's The Girl in the Green Raincoat or Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time. --Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2018
Friends of series hero Lewis Coleand they're all over the placedon't really want anything from him but his company. They want to sit back and chat with him on the deck of his oceanfront New Hampshire home, along with his security-consultant pal Felix, the master of one-liners. This should be a good time for talk, since Lewis is housebound, coping with drains in his back after surgery to remove cancers that were dangerously near his spine. But, like Nero Wolfe from another era, he finds that crimes come to him. An elderly antique dealer is brutally murdered, a rude couple force their way inside his house for no clear reason, a gang shootout comes dangerously close. And who is that sneaking into his house in the dark? There's mystification and action aplenty, but what lingers when the book is closed is DuBois' graceful writing and Lewis Cole's understated humor. And the stylish banter between Felix and Cole and the ladies in Cole's lifeand don't forget the sweet sadness that flows from him when you least expect it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)