January 1, 2023
An Edmund White Award winner for her debut, Alcestis, Beutner draws on the actual 1897 disappearance of a Mount Holyoke student in Killingly, a gothic tale that plumbs missing Bertha's secrets and those of her loner friend, Agnes. Best-selling historical fiction pro Davis goes Spectacular in 1950s New York, where newbie Rockette Marion Brooks joins with Peter Griggs--a mental health specialist promoting psychological profiling--to help the police investigate a series of bombings that have shaken the city. In Edgar Award-winning Doiron's Dead Man's Wake, Maine Game Warden Investigator Mike Bowditch witnesses a hit-and-flee speedboat plowing into two swimmers and suspects murder when he learns that the victims were a badly slashed up man and his married lover (100,000-copy first printing). A troubled soul in high school, Wilfred "Wil" Threadgill returns to town as a major music star, but in the New York Times best-selling James's Hiss Me Deadly he's getting threats that lead to a band member's death and sets librarian Charlie Harris and bewhiskered kitty Diesel into action; originally scheduled for March 2022. Proprietor of a busy food stand at Taipei's largest night market, Jing-nan gets framed for several big-news murders unfolding during the Austronesian Cultural Festival in Lin's Death Doesn't Forget. After a first outing in Schellman's Suspense Magazine best-booked The Body in the Garden, Vivian Kelly returns in The Last Drop of Hemlock, now working full-time at the freewheeling speakeasy the Nightingale and determined to investigate the poisoning of doorman Pearlie, incongruously ruled a suicide (40,000-copy first printing). Long Island homicide detective-turned-Garda officer in Dublin, Ireland, Taylor's Maggie D'arcy is brought in on a case using her detective skills to locate the Stolen Child of a murdered model (50,000-copy first printing).
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May 1, 2023
The title here refers to the town of Killingly near Mount Holyoke College. It also hints at how women at all levels of society in the nineteenth century were treated throughout their lives--"killingly." The basis for this mystery is an actual cold case: Bertha Lane Mellish, a star Mount Holyoke student and the daughter of a minister from Killingly, Connecticut, disappeared from her dormitory in November 1897. Beutner keeps the reader guessing until the end as to whether Bertha escaped an impossible situation at college, was murdered, or died by suicide. The tension is maintained throughout by Beutner's unflinching expos� of just how repressive it was for all women of the time, even for the privileged, well-bred students at Mount Holyoke. Here, the strong-willed Bertha and her best friend, Agnes, yearn for more than being a helpmate to a missionary or a minister (the usual path, we learn, for Mount Holyoke students of the time). Atmospheric and disturbing.
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May 15, 2023
The disappearance of a Mount Holyoke student in 1897 threatens to unearth any number of unholy secrets. Most of the other residents in Porter Hall have little to do with Bertha Mellish, whom they regard as unstylish, plain, and not especially sociable. Even her senior mentor, the glowing and polished Mabel Cunningham, has little to say about her. Only two people are really close to Bertha: her much older sister, Florence, a schoolteacher back in Killingly, Connecticut, where they both grew up; and Agnes Sullivan, a fellow student who's notably gifted at drawing but who dreams of becoming a surgeon. Unlike anyone else at Mount Holyoke, Agnes knows everything there is to know about Bertha--maybe even, as Beutner hints early on, what happened to her when she vanished from campus. When someone identified as Bertha Miller is reported to have been seen in a neighboring town, Bertha's father, Rev. John Hyrcanus Mellish, goes to check her out but forbids Florence to accompany him. Later, Florence will go herself to identify the body of a young woman who's been fished from a nearby lake. Both leads are dead ends, leaving it uncertain whether Bertha's vanishing was connected to a series of petty thefts at the college; to Joseph Poirier, the unsavory millworker she'd taken up with; or to her home life back in Killingly. Beutner's decorous prose effectively establishes a hothouse atmosphere, but the suspense endures without ever quickening, and after a shocking revelation halfway through, the rest of the story, rooted in an unsolved real-life Mount Holyoke mystery, seems to wind down rather than winding up. Warning: serious violence against cats, who have a lot more to endure here than humans.
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