Author: editor

Berkley
Published November 18, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

Margaret Finch is an odd woman. She’s unusually tall and “big-boned” and has trouble making friends because she is extremely literal and has high expectations. She works with a scientist at a university, keeping his lab clean and well-organized and assisting the professor with his research. She idolizes him and is devoted to the current project, deriving a substance from a highly poisonous plant that might hold the cure for cancer. But then the professor is found dead, apparently of a heart condition, and neither the police nor university officials want to listen to Margaret’s concerns. She saw the professor’s body and recognizes the signs of a poisoning.  Well, if nobody else is going to find out what really happened, she will have to do it herself.

Continue reading “The Botanist’s Assistant by Peggy Townsend”

Translated by Michael Meigs
Amazon Crossing
Published November 11, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

Julia Malmros is about to take a huge step forward in her career. After working as a detective in Stockholm, she began to write a series of crime novels, and while it has met with success, a new opportunity has arrived. She has just been asked to a new installment in the hugely popular Millennium series, continued by various authors after the original writer’s untimely death. She quickly researches and composes a new adventure for the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but things go spectacularly wrong and she’s left with an orphaned manuscript and a public scandal. Should she alter the characters’ names and publish it anyway? She’s still pondering her next move when an old childhood friend and five others visiting his summer residence near her island cottage are slaughtered by masked gunmen who escape without a trace. Joined by an eccentric but gifted young man with poor social skills, she sets out to discover what led to the mass murder, setting off a globe-spanning adventure of their own.

Continue reading “The Writing in the Water by John Ajvide Lindqvist”

Berkley
Published November 11, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

Leanne Everhart has returned to her hometown of Madrone, Texas, a small town in a rugged landscape near the Big Bend. While it’s a mecca to outdoorsy tourists, it has its dark side. Sex workers ply their trade at a nearby truck stop, and immigrants making the trek north often perish in the high desert. When a woman’s body is found near the highway, assaulted and bludgeoned, Leanne’s first task is to figure out who it is. She also has to persuade her chief the murder should be a priority. The police force is currently occupied with the return of Sean Moriarty, released from prison after his conviction in a highly publicized murder of a teenage girl was thrown out. Leanne’s beloved, now-deceased father was police chief when Hannah Rawls was murdered and Sean found guilty. Her father’s reputation has been tarnished, though many townsfolk still believe Sean was guilty. Leanne has to fight for the chance to investigate the death of a woman without an identity in the face of a  more notorious murder. Before long she discovers it’s not the first killing of an unnamed woman along the same highway, but it’s hard for her to make a case to her superiors.

Continue reading “Innocence Road by Laura Griffin”

Soho
November 4, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

Years ago the advice columnist Ann Landers  announced the shocking results of an informal poll that asked her readers: If you had it to do over again, would you have children? Some seventy percent of the ten thousand respondents said no. Fifty years on, at a similarly fraught time in America as gender roles shift and consensus seems impossible, Donna Freitas takes on the taboo subject of regretting motherhood. In her suspenseful novel, three mothers navigate life while caring for infants. As the novel opens, one of them has vanished from a store parking lot, leaving her car, phone, groceries, and a wailing baby behind. Was Lucy abducted, or did she simply walk away from a life that had become unbearably oppressive?

Continue reading “Her One Regret by Donna Freitas”

Severn House
Published November 4, 2025
Reviewed by Ruth Castelberry

Mark de Castrique’s third Ethel Crestwater mystery is brilliantly intriguing.

First, Ethel is the target of a recently released felon whose brother she killed 18 years earlier. Then there’s the father of the girl killed by the felon’s brother. His name is Tony Bagatelos, and he’s a lawyer with Mafia connections.

Now, Ethel is a retired FBI agent who rents rooms to government agents and occasionally gets involved in cases. Tony calls to set up a meet, disclosing that he has critical information he trusts only with Ethel. Right after the meeting, someone murders Tony. And Ethel’s cousin, Jesse Cooper, who is also staying with Ethel, is a witness, as he followed Tony to the parking garage and heard the crime.

Continue reading “Desperate Spies by Mark de Castrique”

This month, we read and reviewed a variety of mysteries, including two that seem especially appropriate for the spooky season. Altogether these offerings demonstrate just how differently writers can approach the genre. There’s offbeat humor, reassuring coziness, a thriller with clues in the art world, another rooted in indigenous archaeology, a creative take on time travel, and more. Our feline this month comes from a magazine founded in 1895 that published short stories, with cover illustrations by the publisher’s wife, Nellie Littlehale Umbstaetter Murphy. Rex Stout was among the writers whose work was published there, along with Jack London, Henry Miller, and O. Henry. The color of the cat seemed appropriate for Halloween.

Kevin O’Brien, Everyone a Stranger – “…an entertaining historical mystery with cozy elements and touches of a 1940s spy thriller, an appealing heroine up against steep odds, and a comforting resolution of all the loose threads in the end.” Barbara Fister

Sherry Thomas, The Librarians – “Come for the library setting and puzzle over the wide-ranging and intricate plotting, but the real pleasure of the book is getting to know characters you will care about.” Barbara Fister

Tom Ryan, We Had a Hunch – “Tom Ryan’s We Had a Hunch is structured like a TV series in which some episodes are solid, almost thrilling, and some are kind of beside the point, but overall, they make you want to keep watching.” Mary-Jane Oltarzewski

Kate Belli, The Gallery Assistant – “…gradually we get to know [the protagonist] as she begins to see in art something profound and meaningful just as we learn more about why she is such a mess. By the end, we’re firmly on her side as she untangles the mysteries surrounding the murder and the dark side of the gallery business.” Barbara Fister

Olivia Blacke, Death at the Door – “For a story about the ghost of a hard-drinking woman who died – maybe by suicide, maybe by murder – investigating a homicide committed on her old mortal turf, Olivia Blacke’s Death at the Door is a fun, breezy read.” Mary-Jane Oltarzewski

Alexander McCall Smith, In the Time of Five Pumpkins – “As with all the books in this series, In the Time of Five Pumpkins is an ode both to the human condition with all its joys and foibles and to Botswana and its traditions, a strong, supportive backdrop that informs the lives of all the characters.” Meredith Frazier

Ania Ahlborn, The Unseen –  “Ahlborn does a fabulous job of convincingly immersing the reader in the miasma of the characters’ confusion while allowing just enough understanding of the events to keep the reader engaged in the plot. Her descriptions of the setting and events use all the senses.” Sharon Mensing

Vanessa Lillie, The Bone Thief – “…a complex, absorbing, and sometimes demanding book…Lillie weaves into her story the past and present of the Indian nations native to New England, communities that predate colonization and are still fighting for recognition.” Barbara Fister

Eric Heisserer, Simultaneous – “…an absorbing, occasionally funny, and provocative take on time travel that avoids the usual paradoxes by simply rushing ahead with characters who grab hold of our imaginations and won’t let go.” Barbara Fister

 

 

Flatiron Books
Published October 28, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

A pipeline explosion in New Mexico catches the attention of a Homeland Security agent who works for an obscure department called “predictive analytics.” He’s on the case because they received a warning by phone before the explosion; he’s part of a small team that investigates situations where a tip comes in before a terrorist act. Normally, this leads the investigators to someone involved in the act, but in this case it’s puzzling. The person who called in the warning is a therapist in California who specializes in regression: helping her patients connect with a former life. She claims to have no information about what or who caused the explosion, which her patient described while in a therapeutic trance. This is either an elaborate ruse, or something in the treatment has gone down an unexpected path, a path that will lead the agent, the therapist, and her patient Marigold on a wild journey in pursuit of a body-hopping serial killer.

Continue reading “Simultaneous by Eric Heisserer”