A Season to Lie, Emily Littlejohn (Minotaur Books)
The second book to feature Littlejohn’s winning heroine, Colorado resort town police detective Gemma Monroe, A Season to Lie draws on its snowy setting to create an atmosphere of steadily building suspense. The mystery at the heart of the book starts out as a high-profile whodunit and why: the body of famous author Delaware Fuente is found behind a local school where he had been giving a series of guest lectures under an assumed name. Just back from maternity leave, Monroe juggles the investigation with the demands of her infant daughter, while the snow keeps falling (and another body might too). A satisfying procedural with colorful supporting characters, Littlejohn’s second outing establishes her as a skilled plotter who keeps her story engaging.
Heather, The Totality, Matthew Weiner (Little Brown)
This slim noir will certainly get plenty of attention because of Weiner’s status as creator and showrunner of AMC’s much loved and lauded Mad Men. For those who find it curious that Weiner’s first venture into fiction is a genre novel, I’d argue that Mad Men was, at its heart, a long con perpetuated by Don Draper which exposed the strictures of both family life and his business of advertising. In Heather, however, Weiner has created a very contemporary and creepy little novel about a teenaged girl and a fervent admirer. Rife with observations about Manhattan’s elite, Heather is both unsettling and satisfying.
The Shadow District, Arnaldur Indridason (Minotaur Books)
The first in a new series by popular Icelandic author Indridason, Shadow District introduces readers to several interesting investigators caught up in two crimes which occurred during the occupation by Allied forces in 1940s Reykjavik. The original investigators, Thorson and Flóvent, are called out to solve the puzzle of who might have assaulted a young woman behind the national theater, a known spot for Icelandic women to hold amorous meetings with soldiers (a situation considered so serious Icelanders actually refer to it as “the Situation”). The investigators connect the crime to a similar one committed in the area north of the capital as both women think they were attacked by the huldufolk, elves or fairies from Icelandic myth. But how can a fairy commit rape? And why are the women so reluctant to even discuss their attacks?
Poison, Galt Niederhoffer (St. Martin’s Press)
Cass and Ryan Connor have one of those lives you just know is going to get messy. Too attractive, too wealthy, and too much in love, the Connor’s have three children (two are Cass’s from her previous marriage), a big new house in Portland, Maine, where they’ve moved to escape the fast pace of New York City, and an enviable lifestyle. But something isn’t quite right. Cass, a former investigative journalist, starts to suspect her husband isn’t being totally honest with her about his whereabouts; while Ryan, a successful lawyer, has occasional flares of anger that frighten Cass. Eventually she becomes convinced he’s poisoning her—but proving it is much harder than Cass, or the reader, might think. This thriller has a slow and menacing pace, perfectly suited to the plot of suspected, sophisticated gaslighting.
Wonder Valley, Ivy Pachoda (Ecco)
Wonder Valley is an LA novel, as ingrained in its setting as anything by Michael Connolly (a fan of Pochoda’s), James Ellroy, or even Raymond Chandler. Pochoda’s LA, however, is vast and diverse: Pochoda offers stories of five characters, including a young man looking for his homeless mother in downtown LA’s Skid Row, a disaffected lawyer and family man from Beverlyville, and a former college athlete who escapes the pressure of competition on a strange chicken farm in the Twentynine Palms area between LA and Palm Springs. Throughout the stories, Pochoda’s steady hand and sharp eye keep all of her characters moving swiftly and gracefully through the variegated LA landscape.
