June 1, 2020
In Out of Hounds, Brown's latest "Sister Jane Arnold" mystery, the good sister deals with local tensions--and murder--when town newbies threaten her crowd's foxhunting ways. In Chow's Mimi Lee Reads Between the Lines, second in the "Sassy Cat Mysteries," Mimi Lee must rely on her debonair talking cat, Marshmallow, when her sister is accused of murdering a teaching colleague. In Ellis's The Diabolical Bones, which follows up the film-optioned The Vanished Bride, Anne, Emily, and Charlotte Bront� find their writing interrupted by a new case: bones have been discovered bricked up in a chimney at moldering Scar Top House. Eriksson's The Night of the Fire brings back popular Swedish police inspector Ann Lindell, who's retired to the country but not for long--someone has set fire to the old schoolhouse, now housing asylum seekers, and three people are dead (35,000-copy first printing). Fletcher/Land's Murder, She Wrote: Murder in Season joins the holiday mystery lineup as Jessica Fletcher acknowledges that despite her work on the annual Christmas pageant, she can't ignore two sets of bones (one old, one new) found on her property. Sulari Gentill follows up her LJ-starred, Ned Kelly Award-winning After She Wrote Him with A House Divided, set in 1931 Sydney, Australia, and starring gentleman bohemian Rowland Sinclair, who insinuates himself into a high-stepping (and sometimes conservative) crowd to discover who murdered his beloved Uncle Rowly. Ready to retire, former FBI agent and police consultant Gregor Demarkian takes on his last case in Haddam's One of Our Own, trying to figure out how elderly Marta Warkowski ended up in a coma--and in a big plastic garbage bag--and why her dead super is locked in her apartment (30,000-copy first printing). With The Turning Tide, McPherson, whose Dandy Gilver mysteries have received CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger and Historical Macavity Award nominations, gives Dandy the task of figuring out why the local ferrywoman seems to have gone mad--and whether she has committed murder, as she claims. Finally, March's Murder in Old Bombay, winner of the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award, captures Capt. Jim Agnihotri's efforts to find out what really happened when two Parsee women plunge from the university tower in 1892 Bombay (30,000-copy first printing).
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November 9, 2020
Jane “Sister” Arnold, the Master of Foxhounds of the Jefferson Hunt, and her friends are now in their 60s and early 70s, but they remain as spry as ever, as shown in bestseller Brown’s stately 13th mystery set in Virginia hunt country (after 2019’s Scarlet Fever). The nefarious doings begin with the theft of a painting by Sir Alfred Munnings, a real-life English artist known for his horse paintings, from the home of a prominent member of the hunt. Other thefts are soon followed by murders, and Sister and her sweetheart, Gray Lorillard, become the target of a killer. Meanwhile, members of the noisy anti-hunting crowd are out in force making trouble. The mystery plot occasionally peeps through digressions on such topics as the ideal way to organize horse stalls and the evolution of riding habit styles through the centuries. The narrative is fattened by scenes in which talking dogs, horses, cats, foxes, and even birds put in their two cents’ worth on the actions of the humans. Animal lovers and those curious about the elite world of fox hunting will be rewarded. Agency:
Forland & Patterson.