Category: Reviews

Poisoned Pen
Published August 25, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

Berit Gardner has returned to a place that holds a great deal of meaning for her: to a cottage on an island in the Stockholm archipelago. After solving mysteries alongside Ian Ahmed, a British detective inspector, in England and France, she’s back in Sweden wondering how to fix the roof and anxiously awaiting her birthday. She will be 51, the same age as her mother was when she died. Ian, who is on leave from work after breaking his leg, joins her on the island where, echoing Rear Window, he keeps an eye on a large modern house on a nearby island where an imperious art gallery owner has gathered her flock of resentful children. When Berit and Ian are invited to the elderly woman’s eightieth birthday celebration they realize how toxic she is. She seems to be putting on a show for them of family dysfunction. As the party attendees begin to disperse around the property, they hear a scream. The matriarch has fallen off a rocky shore to her death. It could have been an accident, of course – but Berit and Ian suspect one of the disaffected family members had a hand in it.

Continue reading “The Woman Who Wouldn’t Die Quietly by Katarina Bivald”

Berkley
Published July 14, 2026
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier

Set in London in 1930, The Cloak and Dagger Club plays homage to Golden Age mysteries and The Detection Club, using both as inspiration to create a clever, fun-to-read novel.

Continue reading “The Cloak and Dagger Club by Jackie McMahon”

Minotaur
Published August 11, 2026
Reviewed by Mary-Jane Oltarzewski

Annie Gore has seen plenty since leaving her hometown in rural Kentucky for a stint as a special investigator in the Air Force, followed by her current job as a private eye, but she’s still taken by surprise when a new client asks, “’Have you ever been to a snake-handling church?’” In Brimstone Hollow, Archer Sullivan’s second novel to feature the smart, resourceful detective, Annie explains that she’s never been to one, but where she’s from, everyone has heard of the “fervent fire-and … brimstone sermons delivered by preachers who shake snakes around during services as sort of proof of faith.”

Continue reading “Brimstone Hollow by Archer Sullivan”

William Morrow
Published August 18, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

Liv and Mandy Chisholm could hardly be more different. Liv is cautious, cerebral, and works as a dedicated public servant doing investigations for the State Department. Mandy is mercurial, joyful, and prone to impulsive acts. But every year the two sisters take a trip together. This time, Mandy has organized a rafting expedition through the Grand Canyon. While the title may refer to their mismatched personas and the stress it puts on the relationship, it’s actually someone else who has murder in mind.

Continue reading “My Sister is Going to Kill Me by Nina Simon”

Crooked Lane
Published August 11, 2026
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier

In Death at a Scottish Halloween, the fifth book in Lucy Connelly’s Scottish Isle Mystery series, Dr. Emilia McRoy and her friends have gone all-in for the week-long celebrations around All Hallow’s Eve, but when Dr. Em discovers a murder victim in the haunted house, suddenly, it’s not all fun and games. When a second body turns up on Dr. Em’s doorstep, Dr. Em and her “Scooby” crew decide it’s time to start asking more questions and finding more answers, all while navigating a corn maze, judging a costume contest, treating a strep-throat outbreak—and trying to avoid becoming the next victim.

Continue reading “Death at a Scottish Halloween by Lucy Connelly”

Knopf
Published August 11, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

Why does Tyler Sinclair dread going home to Stone Mountain, the upstate New York town he left at age eighteen? Now that he’s a highly successful singer-songwriter performing in a duo under the name Stone Mountain, he has been persuaded by his agent and partner in music  to return for a concert to benefit Doc, a former friend who landed in a wheelchair years ago after a teenage accident. As they drive up the mountain, he’s filled with a sense of doom, and the reception he receives bears out his reluctance. A lot of residents of the hardscrabble rural community resent the man who left as soon as he could and now uses their name, getting rich and famous by singing songs that evoke their hardscrabble lives. When he is about to sing his signature tune, “Under the Falls,” he’s interrupted, pelted with eggs, and when he freezes up has to be dragged off stage for his own protection. Why do they hate him so much? What was he running from when he left all those years ago without a word to his friends?

Continue reading “Under the Falls by Richard Russo”

St. Martin’s
Published August 4, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

Riley is sleeping in her car and desperate for a place to live and a better job than her low-wage nurse’s aid position after her ex-husband’s gambling addiction left her homeless and penniless. Being a live-in caregiver for an elderly disabled widow named Betty seems an ideal possibility, though there’s something odd about the place: It seems to be stuck in the mid-1960s, without television or the internet. Betty hasn’t gone out in decades, and doesn’t know anything about the world that has evolved outside her small house. Yet Riley soon learns Betty is in many ways unusually perceptive. In fact, she has a gift that was exploited by an obsessed and cruel scientist who experimented on her and three other young women during the cold war, testing them for extrasensory perception and other psychic skills that he’s certain will make him famous. Something went badly wrong with the program, leading to Betty and her husband fleeing from the university where the experiments were conducted and to hide from the outside world. But someone, it seems, is starting the research program again, and Betty is once again in danger.

Continue reading “The Women in White by Sarah Pekkanen”