Pegasus
Published April 7, 2026
Reviewed by Julie Campbell
For Joe Gunner, his official war ended at Dunkirk when a shell damaged an eye and a leg. But he is soon roped back into his former job as a Glasgow polis. Parks uses an actual historical event as a jumping off place for this story, not totally successfully in my opinion, but well enough to make it exciting and intriguing.
Soho
Published March 2025
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet
Minneapolis-based author Marcie R. Rendon was an accomplished poet and playwright long before she began writing her Cash Blackbear series of mysteries. An enrolled member of the White Earth Band of the Minnesota Chippewa, her work painstakingly documents the struggles of Native Americans, especially women and girls, in the modern Great Plains communities. With Cash, however, she reaches a massive reading public. In the first of Cash’s adventures, we are introduced to the heroine as a teenage girl, a cynical graduate of a series of mostly abusive white foster homes, smoking, drinking at the dive bar the Casbah, and trying to survive. Her skills of ratiocination, helped by her dreamlike visions, interest her one decent guardian, Sheriff Dave Wheaton. While totally not being a white savior stereotype, Wheaton enlists Cash to help him solve crimes. He needs to: he can’t really function without her. As the series continues, Cash’s investigative victories pile up but she doesn’t really gain power in her limited post-colonial farmtown world. The series is riveting while never promising the reader–or Cash herself–more than reality can deliver.
Translated by Jamie Bullock
Harper Via
Published April 21, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
A man named Franz Escher who collects jigsaw puzzles is waiting for an electrician to come to his apartment to fix a loose power outlet. Bored, he picks up a novel to pass the time, one about Elio Russo, who has helped the authorities in Italy build a case against powerful mafia figures and is now in prison, awaiting release and a new life in witness protection. In the novel Elio, too, has a loose electrical connection. To pass the time, he reads a novel about a man who is waiting for an electrician. And so the story, or pair of stories, begin, like an Escher drawing, circling around themselves endlessly – though unlike the drawings, the stories do work their way to a conclusion as the stories eventually converge and resolve.
St. Martin’s
Published April 14, 2026
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier
Part historical mystery and part cozy murder-mystery, Jennifer N. Brown’s The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton doesn’t strictly conform to the “rules” of either form but is, nonetheless, a compelling hybrid with much to recommend it. And while no murder occurs until about three-quarters of the way through the book, there’s plenty of foreshadowing to keep the pages turning.
Continue reading “The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton by Jennifer N. Brown”
Flatiron
Published April 14, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Jane Harper has introduced readers to rural parts of Australia, where the landscape and climate play as profound a role in her mysteries as the secrets and conflicts among her cast of characters. In her sixth novel, she focuses on the dying town of Carralon Ridge, a once-idyllic village being gradually consumed by a neighboring mine. Many of the houses are vacant and decaying, the shops and medical clinic are mostly gone, and the remaining inhabitants eye each other suspiciously: who will stick it out, and who is likely to leave next? It’s a simmering conflict among once-close neighbors and between family members, but despite their differences, they gather once a year at a memorial for Sam, who returned home from university to work on research about the town five years ago and vanished.
Minotaur
April 14, 2026
Reviewed by Mary-Jane Oltarzewski
It’s absolutely possible to begin reading Spencer Quinn’s Chet and Bernie series with Cat on a Hot Tin Woof, the sixteenth and most recent entry. Each novel stands alone as a clever, quick-witted detective story narrated by Chet, the canine half of the partnership known as the Little Detective Agency. (The human half is Bernie Little, a tough talking, hard-hitting, big-hearted West Point graduate and decorated combat veteran.) Long-time fans, however, will recognize the significance of the title: it harkens back to the very early days of the partnership, when Chet, a huge, energetic rescue dog, failed out of a police K-9 training program despite his speed, strength, and utter enthusiasm for the job. On the final day of training, a mishap occurred that changed the trajectory of both lives forever.
A cat was involved.
Berkley
Published April 14, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
They can’t sleep. No matter what they try, they just can’t sleep, so late at night they go online to chat with one another until one of them suggests they meet in person once a week at a Manhattan all-night diner. Sybil drives in from New Jersey, where she’s at loose ends after her children headed off to college and she discovers her husband is having an affair. Zeke, who lives in a luxurious high rise penthouse nearby, is a talented Mets pitcher sidelined by an injury. Julian, who called them together, lives in Queens and owns a candy store, but is mourning his dead wife, his absent daughter, and a previous career that obsessed him. He invites Betty, the waitress who works the night shift, to join them at their table. She’s tight-lipped and wary, holding a secret close to her chest. Nevertheless, they are soon fast friends, enjoying their late-night companionship, until tragedy strikes and Betty finds a note on the diner’s back door: RUN. Though they don’t know what she’s running from, the Insomniacs set out to find her since they don’t want her to face it alone.
Atria
Published March 17, 2026
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier
The third novel in the Antique Hunter’s series by C.L. Miller, Murder at the Castle begins with Bella (one of the recurring characters in the series) arriving at a remote Scottish castle during a snowstorm. It doesn’t take long for her to find herself in real trouble, and her friends Freya and Carole (followed shortly by Sky) head north to find their friend. Instead, when they arrive at the castle, they find a body (happily, not Bella’s).
Soho
Published April 7, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Jing-nan owns a popular stall at the Shilin Night Market, a vast food court in Taipei, Taiwan, where he and his small staff serve popular skewer sticks and other delicacies. He’s an energetic salesman, posting regularly to social media and enticing tourists to try his wares. He’s also (by the fifth volume in this series) notorious for getting involved in crimes that land him in the news. This time, he stumbles across a dead body as he takes out the trash. The victim is a Filipino migrant who works at a local food factory staffed largely by foreign workers brought to Taiwan to fill gaps in the labor market. When the man’s grieving family stops by, wanting his death investigated, Jing-nan feels for them, and his uncle Big Eye, a local gangster, encourages him to go undercover at the factory to discover what is going on there that might have led to the man’s death.
Severn House
Published April 7, 2026
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier
Ellen Curtis and her daughter Jools don’t do house clearings: they declutter. They’re also not trained investigators. But somehow, in A Disorganized Death, Ellen finds herself doing a house clearance and investigating two deaths that may or may not be murders, all because of missing wills.