THE CONCRETE RIVER
by
John Shannon

Though there aren't notes from the review of this book our club enjoyed this book and the author's comments, when he came to talk to us about the book. It's set in current Los Angeles and is a terrific series.

STORY ON JOHN SHANNON

A CORPSE IN THE KOYO
by
James Church

Inspecter O, a detective in South Korea's police force is asked to stake out a road leading out of the country and to take a photograph of an unspecified car. Without a thermos and with a camera with a defective battery it is clear from the start that this is going to be a frustrating journey for the worthy detective.

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THE PALE BLUE EYE
by
Louis Bayard

... an intense and gripping novel set during Edgar Allan Poe's brief time as a West Point cadet.

JASS
by
David Fulmer

Fulmer's second Storyville (New Orleans) mystery, starring Creole detective Valentin St. Cyr

APR
2008

SILENCE OF THE GRAVE
by
Arnuldar Indridason

Inspector Erlendur returns in this gripping Icelandic thriller When a skeleton is discovered half-buried in a construction site outside of Reykjavík, Inspector Erlendur finds himself knee-deep in both a crime scene and an archeological dig.

SOME DANGER INVOLVED
by
WILL THOMAS

A romp through Victorian London with an 'Inquiry Agent' and his new bumbling but brilliant assistant. Most of us loved this book.

NUMBERED ACCOUNT
by
Christopher Reich

Nick Neumann had it all: a Harvard degree, a beautiful fiancee, a star-making Wall Street career. But behind the dazzling veneer of this golden boy is a man haunted by the brutal killing of his father seventeen years before.

THE WOODS
by
Harlan Coben

Harlan Coben's latest summer read, The Woods, takes off from the first page and hurtles through a page-turner of a novel about 4 teenagers who enter a nearby woods from their campground late on a summer night twenty year before the story begins. Two of the kids never return and have never been heard from leaving a trail of emotions and unfinished ends. Now new information is coming to light that will bring the two survivors together and lead to the untangling of a mystery that involves all the families.

LUCKY YOU
by
Carl Hiaasen

Grange, Florida, is, famous for its miracles-the weeping fiberglass Madonna, the Road-Stain Jesus, the stigmata man. And now it has JoLayne Lucks, unlikely winner of the state lottery. Unfortunately, JoLayne's winning ticket isn't the only one. The other belongs to Bodean Gazzer and his raunchy sidekick, Chub, who want the whole $28 million jackpot to start their own underground militia.

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KNOTS AND CROSSES
by
Ian Rankin

Detective John Rebus: His city is being terrorized by a baffling series of murders...and he's tied to a maniac by an invisible knot of blood. Once John Rebus served in Britain's elite SAS. Now he's an Edinburgh cop who hides from his memories, misses promotions and ignores a series of crank letters.

IAN RANKIN SHORT BIO & NOTES ON KNOTS & CROSSES

MURDER IN THE SENTIER
by
Cara Black

A trip through a part of Paris most tourists never see as Detective Aimee follows clues that show the mother she barely knew was the member of a radical political group in the turbulent 1970s.

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NOV
2008

MAISIE DOBBS
by
Jacqueline Winspear

"Meet Maisie Dobbs, who in 1929 launches her career as a private investigator and finds herself drawn back to the Great War she thought she'd long since put behind her"

STRANGERS IN DEATH
by
J.D. Rob (Nora Roberts)

In bestseller J.D. Robb's slick 26th not-so-near-future crime thriller featuring Lt. Eve Dallas (following 2007's Creation in Death), the New York City homicide cop investigates the murder of business tycoon.

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THE LAST EMBRACE
by
Denise Hamilton

From Publishers Weekly
Lily Kessler, a former OSS officer, fearlessly treads Hollywood's meanest streets in search of her late fiancé's actress sisterwho's gone missing while seeking juicy parts and wealthy lovers, in this evocative stand-alone set in 1949.

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MR. WHITE'S CONFESSION
by
Robert Clark

From Publishers Weekly
By opening with a long epigraph from St. Augustine's Confessions (in the original Latin, no less), Clark's ambitious, atmospheric rumination on good, evil and the gray area in between announces intentions far loftier than those of the standard dime-store detective novels to which the book bears an intentional but superficial resemblance. Set in St. Paul, Minn., in the bleak winter of 1939, this high-brow thriller retains enough lowdown grit and grime to qualify as both a suspenseful read and a surprisingly touching character study. When two young "dime-a-dance" girls are murdered, tough-as-nails homicide cop Lieutenant Wesley Horner hones in on eccentric recluse and amateur photographer Herbert White as the prime suspect. Looking like a cross between Humpty Dumpty and Paul Bunyan, and equally obsessed with Hollywood starlet Veronica Galvin and the voluminous scrapbooks and journals he keeps in order to compensate for his (narratively convenient) memory loss, White takes the fall with sympathetic dignity: astute readers will have fingered the real culprit many pages earlier. The true mysteries here are psychological: Horner's morally suspect relationship with teenage drifter Maggie is particularly fascinating. Having previously written a biography of James Beard (The Solace of Food), a cultural history of the Columbia River (River of the West) and a critically lauded first novel (In the Deep Midwinter), Clark here seesaws, most often successfully, between hard-boiled cliches and an earnest, self-conscious concern with the natures of memory and love.

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DOWN RIVER
by
John Hart

Adam Chase has a violent streak, and not without reason. As a boy, he saw things that no child should see, suffered wounds that cut to the core and scarred thin. The trauma left him passionate and misunderstood -- a fighter. After being narrowly acquitted of a murder charge, Adam is hounded out of the only home he’s ever known, exiled for a sin he did not commit. For five long years he disappears, fades into the faceless gray of New York City. Now he’s back and nobody knows why, not his family or the cops, not the enemies he left behind.

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THE LONG GOODBYE
by
Raymond Chandler

Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, who he's divorced and re-married and who ends up dead. and now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe.

Chandler is not only the best writer of hardboiled PI stories, he's one of the 20th century's top scribes, period.

Nobody but Chandler could have created a private eye hero as cool as Philip Marlowe, but writers have been trying ever since the author's precedent-setting '40s crime novels were published. Along with Dashiell Hammett, Chandler is revered as a noir father figure; his creation of a romantic L.A. full of dangerous women and crooked characters is so woven into modern consciousness that it's easy to forget that it was fictional.

ROSS MACDONALD PDF

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THE CHICAGO WAY
by
Michael Harvey

From the creator and executive producer of the television show Cold Case Files, a fast-paced, stylish murder mystery featuring a tough-talking Irish cop turned private investigator who does for the city of Chicago what Elmore Leonard did for Detroit and Raymond Chandler did for Los Angeles!

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GAUDY NIGHT
by
Dorothy L. Sayers

Having been acquitted of one murder in Strong Poison, and been instrumental in the solving of another in Have His Carcase, mystery writer Harriet Vane arrives for the reunion (or gaudy) at her alma mater. Here she encounters a tangle of poison pen notes, obscene graffiti, and dangerous pranks that she unravels with the help of Lord Peter Wimsey.

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THE CORONER'S LUNCH
by
Colin Cotterill

Colin Cotterill's "The Coroner's Lunch" proved to be a gem of a find and a treat of a read. It's a bit hard to classify this book because while it deals with serious themes of murder and corruption, it is also written in almost light hearted and witty manner, full of irreverent humour, and with a slight mystical overtone. But once you start "The Coroner's Lunch," it is really hard to put this book down: swiftly paced with a few disparate subplots that seem unconnected, "The Coroner's Lunch" was completely 'unputdownable'.

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AUG
2009

RED HARVEST
by
Dashiell Hammett

Red Harvest (1929) features the nameless detective employed by the Continental Detective Agency, "Continental Op." Developed in Black Mask, he became an archetype in the genre. The novel's plot combines four short stories from that magazine, but they are not tightly linked. As the Op says, "Plans are all right sometimes. And sometimes just stirring things up is all right." The "stir-it-up" approach prevails in Hammett's first novel, which emphasizes brilliant scenes, a traditional first-person narrator, dialogue that is funny, and highly stylized action rather than plausible plotting or characterization.

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SEP
2009

DANCE FOR THE DEAD
by
Tomas Perry

Native American heroine Jane Whitefield helps people disappear by creating new identities for them, but this time she must fight for two people who have lived under false pretenses for years. Jane Whitefield, an expert at helping people in danger disappear, slugs it out with three brawny hoodlums in an L.A. courthouse to begin this mystery. She has traveled across half the country trying to protect an eight-year-old heir to millions from the professional killers on their trail.

The same criminals want Mary Perkins, a fugitive savings-and-loan fleecer who also asks Whitefield for help. Perry launches a complex pursuit, during which Whitefield relies on her Seneca heritage for insight and on friends for crucial assistance.

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THE GALTON CASE
by
Ross MacDonald

Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared. Now Anthony's mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them. Devious and poetic, The Galton Case displays MacDonald at the pinnacle of his form.

The Galton Case "was a watershed book," Joe Gores wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983, "the one in which [Macdonald] shook free of the Chandler influence and began to speak in his own unique voice." "It marks," Champlin believed, "a new dimension in the Ross Macdonald body of work."

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NOV
2009

THE NIGHT GARDNER
by
George Pellicanos

George Pelecanos takes the urban crime novel as far as it can go in The Night Gardner, although, come to think of it, haven’t I felt the same way about all his books? A true anthropologist of his gritty Washington turf, he lays out a big grid to determine the drifting patterns of neighborhood gangs and citywide drug cartels as they change over time. But he always gets down on his hands and knees and digs in the dirt to examine the bones of a specific crime, and he never neglects to say a prayer for the human life buried in this pit.

A devotee of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, George P. Pelecanos has honed his street-smart style with a series of detective thrillers all set in the seamier corners of the D.C./Maryland/Virginia triangle.

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4 STARS — but our polarization represents two 5's and two 3.5's so those who loved it, really loved it.

DEC
2010

A PURPLE PLACE FOR DYING
by
John D. MacDonald

Travis McGee is off to Arizona.

3 STARS - Read our review

BLIND JUSTICE
by
Bruce Alexander

This launch of a projected series set in 18th-century "Regency" period of England's history introduces Sir John Fielding--blind, brilliant, compassionate magistrate of London's Bow Street Court--and Jeremy Proctor, the narrator, a penniless, intelligent 13-year-old orphan whom Sir John has taken into his household. Exercising the broad magisterial powers of the era, the judge investigates the death of wealthy Lord Richard Goodhope, who was discovered shot through the head, gun at his feet, behind the locked door of his library. Though the initial finding is suicide, Jeremy notices a clue that points to murder, a conclusion bolstered by the findings of surgeon Gabriel Donnelly. The investigation of Lord Richard's dissolute life seems to lead nowhere until Sir John commands all parties to gather at the murder scene, where he engineers a shocking solution to the crime. Lively characters, vivid incidents, clever plotting and a colorful setting make for a robust series kickoff from Alexander, a pseudonymous "well-known author of fiction and nonfiction."

Our rating: 4 STARS
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ROSEANNA
by
Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö

A young woman is found dead in a canal, molested and murdered. The case is almost instantly cold, as nobody can identify her and it is not clear where and by whom she was killed. The mystery grows when a search indicates that no-one is missing in the area, and no matches to the description of the woman can be found in the records. This just does not happen in the well-regulated, transparent social democratic kingdom of Sweden. What is going on? Eventually, the victim is identified as Roseanna McGraw, a tourist who took a boat trip through the region when she was murdered. A painstakingly meticulous investigation follows to determine who were with her in the boat.

Our rating: 2-1/2 STARS
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THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTO
by
Stieg Larsson

The Chicago Tribune Book Review:
It’s like a blast of cold, fresh air to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo . . . It features at its center two unique and fascinating characters: a disgraced financial journalist and the absolutely marvelous 24-year-old Lisbeth Salander—a computer-hacking Pippi Longstocking with pierced eyebrows and a survival instinct that should scare anyone who gets in her way.

Our rating: 4-1/2+ STARS
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In April we begin a new reading theme: alternating between male and female authors or main characters.

APR 2010

BONE BY BONE
by
Carol O'Connell

From School Library Journal:
Starred Review. Twenty years after the disappearance of his younger brother, Josh, Oren Hobbs quits his career as an Army CID investigator and comes home because he believes his father is dying. Instead, he finds that someone has been leaving human bones on the porch of his father's house and that his father is ready to bury both Josh and the past without further investigation. When the local sheriff is both obtuse and obstructive about the case, Oren reluctantly gets drawn into investigating what happened all those years ago. In the process, he stirs up memories for several troubled townspeople of this seemingly idyllic enclave. Oren must also face his own past and present crimes. Intriguing, complex characters and long-buried secrets help build suspense and a sense of dread in this new stand-alone by the author of the gripping Mallory series (Find Me). Although O'Connell explores new characters and crimes here, her focus remains tight on the damage that humans can do to each other. Highly recommended for all fiction collections.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Our rating: 2-1/2 STARS
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THE GOOD THIEF'S GUIDE TO AMSTERDAM
by
Chris Ewan

Charlie Howard doesn’t just write books about a career thief, he also happens to be one.
     In Amsterdam working on his latest book, Charlie is approached by a mysterious American who asks him to steal two apparently worthless monkey figurines from two separate addresses on the same night. At first he says no. Then he changes his mind. Only later, kidnapped and bound to a chair, the American very dead and a spell in police custody behind him, does Charlie begin to realise how costly a mistake he might have made.
     The police think he killed the American. Others think he knows the whereabouts of the elusive third monkey. But for Charlie only three things matter: Can he clear his name? Can he get away with the haul of a lifetime? And can he solve the gaping plot-hole in his latest novel?
     Shortlisted for the CrimeFest Last Laugh Award for the best humorous crime novel published in the British Isles in 2007.

Our rating: 4 STARS
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DEATH AT LA FENICE
by
Donna Leon

The twisted maze of Venice’s canals has always been shrouded in mystery. Even the celebrated opera house, La Fenice, has seen its share of death ... but none so horrific and violent as that of world-famous conductor, Maestro Helmut Wellauer – poisoned during a performance of La Traviata. Even Commissario of Police Guido Brunetti, used to the labyrinthine corruptions of the city, is shocked at the number of enemies Wellauer has made on his way to the top – but just how many have motive enough for murder? The beauty of Venice is crumbling. But evil is one thing that will never erode with age.

Our rating: 3-1/2 STARS

THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR
by
Thomas H. Cook

In 1926 Henry Griswald was a kid, a student of the lovely and unusual Elizabeth Channing, who had recently arrived in his coastal Massachusetts village to teach art at a private school run by his father. Decades later, the people of Henry's village are still racked by guilt and troubled by uncertainty — who, or what, drove Miss Channing to madness and murder? Henry Griswald, narrator of The Chatham School Affair, holds the key. [from amazon.com]

Our rating: 3 STARS

FACE OF A STRANGER
by
Anne Perry

This mystery introduces the reader to William Monk, a detective with the police in London of 1856, who, after recovering from a serious accident in a carriage, finds he has lost his memory. As he attempts to keep his amnesia a secret, he is assigned to investigate the brutal murder of an aristocratic Crimean war hero. In the process he makes discoveries about his own past — and is terrified of what he sees. Did he commit this crime himself?

Our rating: 4 STARS

A DEATH IN VIENNA
by
Frank Tallis

In 1902, elegant Vienna is the city of the new century, the center of discoveries in everything from the writing of music to the workings of the human mind. But now a brutal homicide has stunned its citizens and appears to have bridged the gap between science and the supernatural. Two very different sleuths from opposite ends of the spectrum will need to combine their talents to solve the boggling crime: Detective Oskar Rheinhardt, who is on the cutting edge of modern police work, and his friend Dr. Max Liebermann, a follower of Sigmund Freud and a pioneer on new frontiers of psychology. As a team they must use both hard evidence and intuitive analysis to solve a medium’s mysterious murder — one that couldn’t have been committed by anyone alive.

Our rating: 4 STARS

MONKEEWRENCH
by
P.J. Tracy

Haunted by a series of horrifying and violent episodes in their past, Grace MacBride and the oddball crew of her software company, Monkeewrench, create a computer game where the killer is always caught, where the good guys always win. But their game becomes a nightmare when someone starts duplicating the fictional murders in real life, down to the last detail. By the time the police learn of the connection between the murders and the game, three people are dead, and the game is just beginning.

Our rating: 3 1/2 STARS

THE SECOND DEATH OF GOODLUCK TINUBU
by Michael Stanley

Modern-day Botswana

When two guests at the remote Jackalberry bush camp in northern Botswana are murdered, police discover that one of the victims, Zimbabwean teacher Goodluck Tinubu, is already dead. Then the other guests at the camp start dying one by one. The local police have their own suspicions, but the wily Detective David “Kubu” Bengu believes that the obvious is not what it seems. Having discovered that everyone at the Jackalberry camp has something to hide, Kubu sets a clever trap to find the truth.

Our rating: 3 STARS

FINDING NOUF
by Zoe Ferraris

Modern-day Saudi Arabia

When sixteen-year-old Nouf goes missing, her prominent family calls on Nayir Sharqi, a pious desert guide, to lead the search party. Ten days later, just as Nayir is about to give up in frustration, her body is discovered by anonymous desert travelers. When the coroner's office determines that Nouf died not of dehydration but from drowning, and her family seems suspiciously uninterested in getting at the truth, Nayir takes it upon himself to find out what really happened.

Our rating: 4 STARS

LE CRIME
by Peter Steiner

Modern-day rural France

After former CIA operative Louis Morgon finds a dead body on the doorstep of his refuge in a rural French village he quickly determines it is a message that it will be harder to escape his past than he’d thought. As events develop, Morgon’s past sweeps his new friends into his world of intrigue, lies, and death.

Our rating: 3 STARS

APR 2011

BRUNO, CHIEF OF POLICE
by Martin Walker

Modern-day rural France

Benoît Courrèges, aka Bruno, is a small-town policeman in the South of France. When an elderly North African who fought in the French army is murdered Bruno must balance his beloved leisurely, country routines with the politically delicate investigation. He is paired with a young policewoman from Paris and the two suspect anti-immigrant militants. As they learn more about the dead man's past, Bruno begins to suspect a complex motive for his murder.

Our rating: 3 STARS

OSCAR WILDE AND A DEATH OF NO IMPORTANCE
by Gyles Brandreth

Victorian England

Literary sensation Oscar Wilde chances upon the naked corpse of sixteen-year-old Billy Wood, posed by candlelight in a dark and stifling upstairs room, and, with the help of fellow author Arthur Conan Doyle, he sets out to solve the crime. It is Wilde’s peculiar genius and his unparalleled access to all degrees of late-Victorian life that prove the decisive factors in their investigation of what turns out to be the first in a series of bizarre and apparently inexplicable killings.

Our rating: 3 STARS

AN EXPERT IN MURDER
by Nicola Upson

It’s March 1934, and crime writer Josephine Tey is travelling from Scotland to London for the final week of her celebrated play, Richard of Bordeaux — but joy turns to horror when her arrival coincides with murder. A second murder confirms that both killings are somehow connected to the play. The novel blends elements of the author’s real life with a fictional murder mystery in which crime writer becomes crime solver.

Our rating: 2-1/2 STARS

MURPHY'S LAW
by Rhys Bowen

Molly Murphy has to flee from Ireland and finds herself in deep trouble on Ellis Island in Murphy's Law, when she becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation. Wending her way through a vivid, Tammany Hall-era New York, Molly struggles to prove her innocence.

Our rating: 3 STARS

The Tellers — three brothers and a sister —are a model family. They have no secrets from each other, the brothers have married well, and they each accept their role in seeing to it that such a proud and respected name is carried on. But a piece of information accidentally uncovered, a sudden and inexplicable illness resulting in a disappearance, and a brutal murder half way across England release long-held resentments and jealousies that savage the Tellers. This is a crime so nearly perfect that Rutledge is faced with perfect solutions that only serve to obscure the real truth, and a train crash leads him to question his own future on this anniversary of his return to the Yard one year ago.

Our rating: 3 STARS