R.V. RAMAN'S PAGE 2: Harith Athreya series 3 & 4...PRAYING MANTIS, and THE LAST RESORT

THE LAST RESORT (Harith Athreya #4)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: There's blood in the backwaters of Kerala…

BOLLYWOOD

Detective Harith Athreya is recuperating in the beautiful backwaters of Kerala when he meets a family of vacationing Bollywood royalty, who ask for his help making a murder mystery film.

BANKRUPTCY

But the family is not what it seems—there are rumours of major money troubles, links to organised crime, and rivalry between the scions.

BUTCHERY

When one of them is found dead, murdered exactly like a victim in the film, Athreya puts his holiday on hold to solve the case. Is this the work of an angry co-star, or something more sinister?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Latest of the four (to date) Golden-Age inspired mysteries set across the wildly varied, beautiful subcontinent of India. Using plots we've all loved for generations, techniques of obfuscation and misdirection that work as intended here like they have since Mary Roberts Rinehart began practicing her craft over a hundred twenty-five years ago, Author Raman brings new delights and fresh energy to the film-becomes-crime plot. We meet Mrs. Athreya at last! Dekight beams out of every passage she appears in, as her lifelong love of Bollywood and its films is meshing with the Gurua family's vacationing next to the resort she;s brought her husband to as he recuperates from dengue fever.

It's permaybehaps not my own favorite, that would be Grave Intentions, as this entry lacks some expansiveness of characterization that it could've used. No one involved in the aforementioed Guria family is realized all that well, in fact as the mystery unfolds it begins to feel as though Author Raman simply hasn't got much interest in them, leaving them mostly feeling like labels. The murder being a near-pefect echo of a famous scene in a Guria-produced movie really doesn't feel organic but put there to pique Mrs. Athreya's ongoing interest in the proceedings...a kind of authorial bribe to the character from the auythor that sadly doesn't keep her onscreen nearly long enough.

I'm so deeply pleased we gave the Dramatis Personae, two maps, and a pretty detailed Guria family tree; it is very helpful indeed. I'm always happier with these inclusions in any murder mystery. It's not always clear from dialogue and narration how everything fits together without maps.

A series I'm very happy I've discovered, and expect will continue.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


PRAYING MANTIS (Harith Athreya #3)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.25* of five

The Publisher Says: ISOLATION

Harith Athreya is taking a well-earned break at a boutique hotel in the Himalayan foothills. But his holiday is swiftly cut short when mysterious bloody handprints start appearing on the walls around the resort.

INCRIMINATION

When a woman then falls to her death, chaos and confusion reigns. The hotelier is convinced that the key to the case rests with four other young people who checked in at the same time as the victim, all pretending for some reason not to know each other.

INTRIGUE

Did one of these guests have something to do with it? Harith Athreya must get to the bottom of the case before the murderer strikes again…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The PreCrime Unit strikes again, this time in a very exclusive resort in the sweetest spot possible: a castle in a Himalayan valley. The owner is a friend of Athreya's who's harboring dark suspicions about a small group of guests staying in his resort. Unease is not proof of guilt but Javed is willing to bet these five are bad news and innkeepers, like bartenders, are usually correct in their darker suspicions.

It doesn't take loong for there to be a murder, and even less time for Athreya to see past spurious alibis, though the motivation for the specific crime committed is not really believable to me. I got a bit over the fashion focus of this entry in the series as well...you're in the Himalayas! Tell me more about them not about fabric colors!

Personal crotchet, that; others will feel differently. It's so good to have the Dramatis Personae, the maps, and our brief character descriptions to refer to. I'm not going to tell you I loved the story, a take on one of Dame Agatha's most famous stories which even naming will give everything away. It's a good enough hommage to its famous progenitor. It isn't my favorite thing to have a woman in the story who's pretty thoroughly demonized for what felt to me to be ridiculous, overblown reasons. I'm not convinced by them as you can tell.

I can't quite go all four stars given my reservations but I'll most definitely be picking up book four.

R.V. RAMAN'S PAGE: Harith Athreya series 1 & 2...GRAVE INTENTIONS, and A WILL TO KILL

A WILL TO KILL (Harith Athreya #1)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$2.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: MIST, MOUNTAINS, MURDER.

Ageing millionaire Bhaskar Fernandez has invited his relatives to the remote, and possibly haunted, Greybrooke Manor, high up in the misty Nilgiris.

He knows his guests expect to gain from his death, so he writes two conflicting wills. Which one of them comes into force will depend on how he dies.

Fernandez also invites Harith Athreya, a seasoned investigator, to watch what unfolds.

When a landslide leaves the estate temporarily isolated, and a body is discovered, Athreya finds that death is not the only thing that the mist conceals. . .

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First in a new series of private-investigator mysteries set in India. This Golden-Age style story about a murder yet to occur and fully expected by its purported victim that then morphs into a locked-room mystery is investigated by a Poirot-level famous private investigator. Or so we're told...I'm as always just a bit annoyed that I'm vouchsafed no evidence of this assertion, but that complaint is not one bit new or unusual.

I was set to love the read from the get-go because I read these reissues this summer. It's set in cool, misty mountains, and I about sobbed with jealousy as I compared that to the supersummer outside. *sigh* As I encountered more and more characters, beginning to wonder about a dramatis personae being notably absent. Such a simple thing to add, I mused, and so very helpful. It also struck me that the characters were more or less in the highwayman school: stand and deliver their piece of the narrative. That's a lot of time spent outside the narrative stagecoach waiting to get moving again.

A body is discovered. It means we're all in the stagecoach again, moving at a slightly bouncy, uncushioned pace. It becomes a locked-room mystery as we're moving along; no change of bouncing rocking pace as we clunk shins and bonk shoulders with characters who *are* going to say their piece, despite earlier attitudinal tics. It could have something to do with the sausage-fest we're having here, everyone is male and don't they just show it. A second body is discovered and there is more stand-and-deliver set-piece delivery. A big problem for me is no one who's died is at all, in any way, undeserving of their murder.

It's like a lesser Poirot story meant to convey the eerieness of The Pale Horseman. It works as a story well enough because we know where we're going. It's a bit less effective if the reader's not already on board with the Golden-Age conventions because then the solution, and its delivery by Athreya, ties everything to objects we're aware exist but not filled in on particulars about. It makes the solution a bit less impactful, more like the delivery of a sermon that we and everyone else, simply accept is true and so must be correct.

Points for period appropriateness, then, fewer for fair-play mystery solution, and please dear goddesses give me a damn list of who's who at the beginning. As a series starter I'm most definitely glad I've got all four in their reissue; I don't think I'd've picked up the second one (see below) if it had come out a year or more later.

The ebook is on sale, so definitely go get one!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


GRAVE INTENTIONS (Harith Athreya #2)
R.V. RAMAN
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Death, a cursed archaeological dig, and a beloved detective feature in this cozy stand-alone mystery set in contemporary India.

SECRETS

Seasoned detective Harith Athreya is back, this time to investigate suspicious incidences on a riverside dig in the heart of remote Bundelkhand.

SUPERSTITION

In this place, rich in myth and history, the legend goes that anyone who sets foot on nearby island Naaz Tapu would be cursed forever.

SLAUGHTER

When an archaeologist defies local folklore, the fallout is swift and deadly. Is the death a result of the ancient curse, or is it a more down-to-earth case of murder? Athreya needs to unravel the truth from legend before the curse strikes again….

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Archaeology! Possible supernatural stuff! A Dramatis Personae! Yes, yes, yes to all of these as good omens, and ways to get my repeat business.

On to the story.

Book two sets itself the task of telling us binaries exist for a reason, there is nothing we do not want to be expressed in a well-matched faceoff between, eg, two young women who are chilly career driven professional/warm, inclusive, family-loving opposites. Athreya is on a holiday with the latter, a nibling of his, and the former is the director of a "cursed" archaeological dig where a local wise guy seems to be stealing artifacts the dig is uncovering. A local legend of lovers kept apart by centuries old political feuding placing the area under a curse offers a modern murderer cover is the first thought a mystery fan would have; but who wants the specific person dead and why? What is the dig site looking for? Do local customs only matter if the people flouting them are white/colonizer people?

Again requested to solve a crime yet to take place, Athreya immediately zooms in on the artifact thefts but...well...are they thefts or rescues of cultural patrimony? Who decides this? What difference does it make, if the end result is the object ends up far far away leaving nothing in its place? Knowledge of the past that will never be accessible to the cultural descendants is no more complete a theft than a profitably sold antiquity....

In the quest to solve the mysteries via fair play, Author Raman snuck a valuable clue past me...in plain sight! Well done, sir. I enjoyed the Murder in Mesopotamia meets The White Tiger vibes. It felt more cohesive and less speechifyin' in tone than A Will to Kill (above) did. The read passed with admirable velocity, the Dramatis Personae made a big difference to my sense of the read as under my control, and Athreya's enough more familiar to me this time around that I felt prepared from the off to invest in his resolution.

A career spent making corporate presentations and mentoring young entrepreneurs has taught Author Raman to stay nimble, to choose a principle at the center of the story he wants to tell then to be sure his story relates to that principle all the way through. That serves him well in this second Athreya mystery/thriller.

MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD, Pushkin Vertigo brings prize-winning debut Japanese mystery to Anglophones

MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD
AKANE ARAKI (tr. Jesse Kirkwood)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An unlikely duo embarks on a road trip to find a serial killer before the apocalypse in this prize-winning Japanese murder mystery.

Perfectly blends the dystopian humor of Zombieland and the thrills of My Sister the Serial Killer!

From Japan’s most exciting new crime writer Akane Araki, this thrillingly funny, high-concept murder mystery follows a young woman and her driving instructor as they face a compelling moral dilemma: should they work to stop a serial killer before the end of the world? A meteor is on a collision course with Earth. The entire human race has 3 months to live. Uncontrollable panic has set in across the globe, but 23-year-old Haru is still determined to finally get her driver’s license.

When Haru and her ex-cop driving instructor Isagawa open their car trunk one day to find the corpse of a murder victim inside, they feel duty-bound to investigate. Together, they set off on a road trip through the crumbling landscape around them to hunt for the killer. As more bodies start appearing, more questions surge. Why would a serial killer begin work three months before the end of the world? And does justice lose its meaning with humanity on the brink of extinction?

And it turns out that Haru's driving instructor is not just an ex-cop but one with a manic devotion to justice. So, despite the small matter of an impending apocalypse, the pair team up to catch the culprit, no matter where it takes them. After all, the world's not quite over yet...

Quirky, fast-paced, and packed full of surprising heart, Murder at the End of the World will delight fans of Stuart Turton’s audacious plots and the humorous, life-affirming bent of dystopian favorites like Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I really liked The Last Policeman when it came out. I'm still salty that it never made it onto the screens of the world where I really felt it deserved to be. So I was all ready to be this book's fanboy.

I'm on record as not wanting to read about women being sexually abused and murdered for plot purposes. This story, led by an amateur sleuth who's female, does indeed have a woman abused and murdered in it, so why am I breaking my strong preference not to read that plot?

Because it's not the first death (that's her father's suicide), and it's not the glorified, prurient point of the victim's death, but is instead an indictment of a patriarchal system I found myself willing to spend my entertainment eyeblinks on this topic. It's a sleuthing excursion led by two women who found a shared compass in bringing justice to the victim. In spite of flaming death for the whole human race racing towards the planet.

That, mes vieux, is a moral compass. We're going to die. And that's still no reason not to bring justice to a terribly abused woman by making her abuser pay for his crime. Haru greets us, so to speak, by discovering her father has hanged himself; her response is to arrange his body respectfully and goes to finish her driving lessons. Her instructor Isagawa is a retired cop, determined like Haru to keep her world in balance and thus cope with the existential crisis of certain doom.

I'm quite taken by the nature of these end-is-nigh narratives; they add a weird frisson to the most quotidian conversations. Haru and Isagawa discover the horribly mutilated body of a young woman in the trunk of their randomly selected driver-training car, which would occasion much screaming and dialing of 911 if I happened to be there; the women are incensed, repulsed, but the police are not inclined to do anything as no one else is fussed about all the dead girls piling up around town...the world is ending, and Isagawa already knows the local police well so tells Haru this victim will receive no attention to speak of (nor would she ever have).

They discuss what to do. They really get into it. They have powerful feelings about it even as extinction faces them; ultimately they decide to investigate this murder for themselves. And it takes paragraphs (reported by Haru in first person) to do it. There is deeply important stuff at stake for Isagawa that might help her process her decisions leading up to her leaving the police in the first place. I'm all for redemption arcs.

Seriously y'all...there's a mutilated dead person in the trunk. These women stand there and talk. My hysterical, overemotional male self would be retching, screaming, generally freaking out at the top of my lungs as I speed-dialed the cops skatey-eight skabillion times to tell them to come get this corpse RIGHT NOW. Haru and Isagawa discuss, calmly, how to approach the process of identifying who killed her and why. While an asteroid's speeding towards Earth to end life as we know it. So, no...not ordinary circumstances, therefore not ordinary responses, and honestly the chats they're having would be fascinating no matter what but the existential stakes make them so deeply, touchingly human. These two very different people, Haru cheated out of a full life by the asteroid and Isagawa processing her much-closer end as a chance to do the right thing with her last actions on Earth, confront a serial killer...a thing I never want to do yet they're just doing it...and, in the least effective narrative choice made by Author Araki, that scumbag goes into the cliched villain monologue. More infuriatingly, Haru reveals she's known something central to the case, something coincidentally itportant, since the beginning. Fifth star sliding under the waves in 3...2...1....

I'm recommending this read to you because it is, for its structural flaws, a fascinating meditative tale. It delves into serious, interesting, well-thought-out moral discussions; it gives these two oddly assorted road-trippers ample scope to let their thoughts stew, serve them up, and discuss together and in company with odds-and-sods they collect along the road. It's often funny stuff, occasionally maudlin, usually prolix as anything.

As much as I really got annoyed I'm even more pleased that Haru and Isagawa brought me along with them as they maintained ma'at in extremis.

CALLUM McSORLEY'S PAGE: DCI Alison McCoist, honest to a fault, leads two exciting stories

SQUEAKY CLEAN (DCI Alison McCoist #1)
CALLUM McSORLEY
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Half the Glasgow polis think DI Alison McCoist is bent. The other half just think she's a fuck-up.

No one thinks very much at all about car wash employee Davey Burnet, until one day he takes the wrong customer's motor for a ride. One kidnapping later, he and the carwash are officially part of Glasgow's criminal underworld, working for a psychopath who enjoys playing games like 'Keep Yer Kneecaps' with any poor bastard who crosses him.

Can Davey escape from the gang's clutches with his kneecaps and life intact? Perhaps this polis Ally McCoist who keeps nosing around the car wash could help. That's if she doesn't get herself killed first.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Did Trainspotting or Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, those dialect stories, defeat you? Are you a bit on the squeamish side? Did The Wolf and the Watchman series' borderline body horror keep you grossed out and/or sleepless? Horseman, pass by.

Ready for inappropriate Scottish-inflected law-enforcement humor that you can't quote publicly to lodge in the folds of your brain, then, so let's us go.

DI Ally McCoist is in limbo, or maybe better to say purgatory. She really, really screwed up. She waited to unleash this screw-up until the stakes could not have been higher. Her colleagues are...not inclined to forgive, and unable to forget...so she's not allowed to forget and thoroughly ostracized. It's not like they can fire her (in the UK people have actual rights to employment security, amazing thought) so she's still a Detective Inspector, she's still a pair of hands, there are thinngs her bosses can assign her to do that no one else wants to do.

Or everyone else is scared to do.

Paulo McGuigan is the diametric opposite of DI McCoist. A criminal overlord with stunning amounts of influence over Glasgow's workings, he's been reputationally wronged by Davey, a nobody, a hapless loser; so he must save face by revenging himself on the perpetrator of the lèse majesté. a bloody beating; followed by indentured servitude in McGuigan's bloody underworld follows for dumb, hapless Davey. Who, logically enough, gets sick of it because he's sickened by it. How this loser intersects with McCoist, his equal in loserhood, is the point of the read.

What debut Author McSorley achieves in this pretty bog-standard mystery plot's confines is to bring cringe comedy into violent police procedural by way of social commentary. It's couched in thick dialect (why it gets less than four full stars) as its dialogue so it feels hyperlocal. That's most likely why it won the McIlvanney Prize for Best Scottish Crime Book of the Year in 2023. It's not like these voices would be heard outside Glasgow. Structurally everyone in the story wants something, always a very simple device but one that when missing is really missed. Readers may not *like* Ally, or Davey, or of course the Big Bad Paulo McGuigan (it'd be a little weird if you liked Paulo!) but they all want something and the others in the story either want it too or want to keep it themselves. It's easy to invest in characters whose wants one can readily grasp.

What happens when these separate wants collide is the reason to read the story. Author McSorley makes sure these collisions are quite...decorative, as in they're easy (if squirmy) to envision. I repeat: gore is your kryptonite, then go elsewhere. Adrian McGinty writes Enid Blyton pastiches compared to Author McSorley.

Ally and Davey and Paulo arrive at the plot's culmination with great finality. What is the set-up for another story, as this is a series? The concept of "failing upward" and of the adhesiveness of failure are great drivers of human activity. Ally is a character who's failed in multiple ways. She needs to figure out how to shed her failures, which we-the-reader all know is impossible but is lots of fun to watch.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

PAPERBOY (DCI Alison McCoist #2)
CALLUM McSORLEY
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A dark, raw, and comic Glaswegian detective thriller: the follow-up to Squeaky Clean, winner of the McIlvanney Prize for best Scottish crime book of the year.

DCI Alison McCoist is back in action, and her promotion hasn’t earned her any friends. In fact, it’s made her even more unpopular. Struggling to balance her new responsibilities with the growing pressure to prove herself, McCoist finds herself tangled in a web of crime and corruption.

Chuck Gardner owns a confidential paper-shredding business, but his addiction to gambling has left him deeply in debt. When he stumbles across some incriminating documents, Chuck becomes unwittingly caught in a deadly game of power and deceit.

Meanwhile, McCoist is called to the scene of a gruesome discovery—a rat-nibbled corpse under a flyover. As she investigates, both Chuck and McCoist are sucked into a deadly stramash of gangland wars and police corruption.

Can Chuck solve his gambling and gangster problems before some heed-banger feeds him into his own shredder? And can McCoist claw herself out of this latest shitemire without her own shady dealings coming to light? It might depend on how far she’s prepared to go…

Paperboy is the darkly comic follow-up to the McIlvanney Prize winner, Squeaky Clean. The author, Callum McSorley, has been hailed as one of the most exciting new voices in crime writing, and has been praised by authors like Chris Brookmyre and Kevin Bridges.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Praise from Chris Brookmyre is a gift to be treasured in a writer's career. Callum McSorley earned it with DCI McCoist's (mis)adventures. Author McSorley's creation is a person who screws up without bumbling. She fails upwards by seeing the problem that needs solving and unerringly choosing the less effective means of dealing with it; yet it's always, in the story-logic Author McSorley's set up, not instantly obviously a bad choice. Doing this multiple times in a series of stories is impressive. Doing it better the second time, well...that's mastery.

The cringe-comedy body-horror ("rat-nibbled corpse" anyone?) procedural mystery told in Glaswegian niche is now established and further developed by Author McSorley. In this follow-up story, the lineaments of the first story (Squeaky Clean, above) are reused. It's more like the stagecraft tradition of reuse of scenery and props than it is making a control-C copy and using control-F to find and replace the names, though.

I'm sure many will still find the Glaswegian voices impenetrable, adding to the increased use of very local humor in making the read a hillclimbing experience. It's going to keep these dark and funny stories abou the screw-ups of relatably clueless, naïve people out of many readers' hands. I'm sad about that because learning, by way of reading, just what it is that makes other people laugh, what worries them enough to need to tell stories that work it through, and what words can do in their clutches is a fast track to cultural amity. Or its opposite of course, some people don't get on with each other. But at least you know from experience, not simply rumor and report.

Newly-minted DCI McCoist got her promotion...was kicked upstairs...but she's no more respected in this story than she was when we met her. Still, she achieved something, she fixed a problem for her higher-ups that needed fixing and that means a promotion within that work culture. And it means another opportunity to fail as nearly everyone around her is just *waiting* to occur.

Most especially the corrupt cops Ally now has reason to know the identities of.

Fuck-up that she is, her luck *has* to run out sooner or later, and these dirty cops/bastards are fully prepared to give her the rope she meeds to hang herself and hope she trips over it before she ties the noose. Either way, they win, she fails, and status quo ante.

Not today, Satan(s).

With the necessary narrative pressure to act on the results that define the end of book one applied by Paulo McGuigan's widow, the PTB can't really say no to Ally poking the embers of that fire despite their...and her own...reluctance to expose the embers to more oxygen. Because middle-school science class taught you what happens next: it's hot, destructive, and really dangerous for everybody around.

And that's the fun of reading about it. I was really invested in Ally before I started this read. I met Lottie, the widow, and formed a fondness for her scary-tough self. Chuck, well, really can anyone care about Chuck the cuck? Like Davey from . he's an extra in the movie of his own life, lacking rizz or main-character energy or whatever you want to call it. See? I can't even muster the investment to choose a single word for the smear that is Chuck.

I get that most of my readers, based in the US, won't want to do the work of reading in a dialect of English they don't hear on the regular. I wish y'all would try harder. Honestly though I kiinda like being a lone weirdo in my immediate peer group because I liked feeling I inhabited a place I don't think I'll ever see IRL. It's the power of intentional storytelling informed by a real passion for the way he's telling it in Author McSorley's capable hands.

Start with Squeaky Clean for sure, nothing will make sense if you don't, but please start.

BRIDGET WALSH'S PAGE: The Variety Palace Mysteries series 1, 2 & 3

THE TUMBLING GIRL (Variety Palace Mysteries #1)
BRIDGET WALSH
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The first in a sharp, witty series of Victorian mystery novels, The Tumbling Girl sees an unlikely duo team up to solve a grisly spate of murders.

1876, Victorian London. Minnie Ward, the feisty scriptwriter for the Variety Palace Music Hall, is devastated when her best friend is found brutally murdered. She enlists the help of private detective Albert Easterbrook, who already has his hands full trying to catch the notorious Hairpin Killer. But Minnie can't help getting involved in the investigation, and as the bodies begin to pile up, Albert's burgeoning feelings for his amateur partner start to interfere...

A dazzling debut for fans of Sarah Waters and Elizabeth Macneal, and shows like Miss Scarlet and the Duke.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: What delight it is to find a dynamic duo, opposite genders and complementary skill sets uniting to solve a case not worth the police's time...the victim was "just" a performer and a female one at that...without slobbering over each other's sex appeal! Albert comes to realize what a treasure Minnie is without her body being his focus.

Minnie's clearly an unusual person, one who does not accept Authority's word as law. It makes her very much in step with my tastes in a person to read about. Albert is built up as a detective of skill and reputation, which made me a little disgruntled at some missteps he made that were Very Convenient for the plot...I didn't want to leave off that fractional fifth star, but for a while it looked like I'd be rating this story just under four stars.

What put the rest of the fourth star back on my opinion of the story was Albert and Minnie's response, a shared one, to the Hairpin Killer as a person. The killer has a deeply twisted motive for doing the revolting things done to the victims, and it offends Albert as much as it does Minnie because he sees the victims as real people in the way she does. He, the experienced detective, wants to catch the killer because he is mortally offended that these crimes *occur* to the killer, that it seems *okay* to do these things in a person's mind. Minnie, OTOH, is outraged that there's so little official interest in the killings because the victims are lower class.

All of that is sort of elliptical because it would be very easy to ruin the puzzle if I say more explicitly what the duo are responding to. It's not a cozy, y'all, and the crimes are not sugar-coated. I don't think, for my read anyway, that it's prurient in purpose to be as direct about what the results of murder are. It felt to me that the detective duo's different tonal responses to the realities of the aftermath were intended to make their partnership more nuanced, more relatable for future events in this story and later ones.

Of course I already knew there were more books in the series before starting this read, but that honestly made the ending bearable. The twist, if I'd had to endure a long wait for book two to come out, would've been excruciating! It was not an artificial, tacked-on, manipulative one; it was organic and it was kind of dreadful, but it worked. I'll warn you, gentle readers, to have book two to hand when you read book one.

I encourage you to read it. There is a lot to enjoy in a female-led Victorian detective duo solving nasty crimes by bringing justice to the perpetrator in spite of official indifference. Victims, in any afterlife that might exist, can feel their wrongs have been redressed.

On to book two!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE INNOCENTS (Variety Palace Mysteries #2)
BRIDGET WALSH
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The hotly anticipated follow-up to The Tumbling Girl, The Innocents follows Minnie and Albert on a new crime-solving quest in the world of a Victorian music hall.

Still reeling from the gruesome murders of the previous year, Minnie Ward is appointed manager of the Variety Palace. Times are hard, with performers shunning the 'cursed' music hall, and Minnie's relationship with Detective Albert Easterbrook is more complicated than ever. Despite the success of their last case, Minnie is terrified of the feelings that have started to grow between them. She has decided it’s definitely better for all involved if they stay as far away from each other as possible…

But when another killer begins to terrorise the city's streets, Minnie and Albert are thrown together once more. The crimes seem connected to a notorious tragedy that left nearly 200 children dead—and with so many lives affected by the incident, practically everyone is a suspect. As the investigation unfolds, dark truths begin to come to light, and Minnie is forced to confront her own past.

The Innocents is the 2nd book in the Variety Palace Mystery series, which can be read independently but continue the story of irresistible crime-solving duo Minnie and Albert. Taking place against the thrilling backdrop of the Variety Palace Music Hall in gritty Victorian London, it's perfect for fans of historical crime fiction, such as books by Sarah Waters, Stacey Halls and Elizabeth Macneal.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll start by noting that you really will enjoy this read a lot more if you read book one before picking this one up. (I'm soft-pedaling this because publishers are really anxious for y'all who resist series-reading unless the series is complete need you to buy the books.)

I'd say this was not *quite* up to the first one's standard of narrative refinement. The twist I mentioned that occurs in the last 15% of The Tumbling Girl is, to my surprise, allowed to keep affecting the action in this book. I felt that was surprising, not ordinary; I didn't mind it because the issue under investigation by Minnie and Albert is not an ordinary one, relating to and stemming from a decade-plus old cause. If we're seeing life unfolding as Life unfolds for us real people, let the recrudescence of complicating factors do the same. After all, ma'at is never done with us; why should plots be artificially tidy?

Because fiction isn't life, that's why.

Minnie is in a more complicated situation vis-à-vis the music hall in this entry, is still processing her complicated feelings for Albert, still juggling skatey-eight skabillion demands on her time...and still can not let an injustice, really a dereliction, with horrible real-world pain and anguish as its fruit go unaddressed once Albert makes her aware of it.

Albert's still the emotionally labile one of the pair. He loves Minnie and still doesn't demand anything of her just is there with her, supportive, while still giving her the impetus to use skills and talents she might be reticent to deploy as he guides her to do. She suffers the conflicted feelings that any PTSD sufferer would when confronted by a worthy, good partner: she isn't good enough, he deserves better, he is too good for her. Albert does not agree. Albert demonstrates this with patient kindness and sincere reassurance. It's like watching Ilya from Heated Rivalry tenderly reassuring Shane that everything's fine when stress causes a spin-out. Albert has earned Minnie's trust so he can focus her on protecting their friends from harm.

These stories are not sugar-coated. The terrible things that happen are not shied away from, minimized, in order to spare your 21st-century squeamishness. I'm okay with that, but in this story two things occur and get described that are...viscerally upsetting, child harm and cruelty to dogs. Both are condemned, both are presented as appalling to Albert, Minnie, and decent people everywhere. They're still in the story and not merely in passing.

I do not recommend this entry in the series to my sensitive pals. I had a hard time with the dog scene. I think y'all might as well skip this story who can't deal even with what I've told you.

Thicker-skinned folk will likely find the resolution to the multistranded miscreancy in this story worth powering past, or through, those dreadful byways. Minnie and Albert have annoying habits of not learning lessons from their pasts, but the author's set the books a couple years apart so that was enough of a fig-leaf for the issue in my reading experience.

It was a rather deus ex machina of an ending, though. Sort of late-career Agatha Christie vibes. It wasn't totally, utterly sprung on me but it was abrupt and not quite the very best work from Author Walsh. I'm still at four stars because Albert and the Variety Palace scoobygroup keep Minnie held together and moving forward in believable, investable ways.

Maybe you'll get as much from these two reads as I did by experiencing them back-to-back. I recommend it to the not-squeamish.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE SPIRIT GUIDE (Variety Palace Mysteries #3)
BRIDGET WALSH
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A witty, propulsive historical murder mystery investigating a secretive spiritualist cult in Victorian London—and the 3rd installment in the beloved Variety Palace Mysteries series!

1879, Victorian London.

Tea room sting operations, seedy music hall secrets, elaborate disguises, and slow-burn romance…

Detective duo Minnie Ward and Albert Easterbrook return for another exciting case to uncover the dark secrets at the heart of Victorian London’s spiritualist scene.

This time, an investigation into two mysterious deaths leads this famed detective duo to the doors of the Spirit Sisterhood, a female-only spiritualist group that facilitates communion with the souls of the dead. And recently several of its visitors have been found dead themselves.

Minnie isn't buying it: there is more to the Sisterhood than there first seems. The more Minnie looks, the more covert operations come to light. She goes undercover at the organization’s secretive countryside home, where she quickly finds herself drawn into the dark but strangely alluring world of spirits and ghosts.

But, isolated from Albert and everyone she loves, Minnie's situation quickly gets out of hand. Can she find a way out of this remote cult before time runs out? And can she keep her own demons at bay long enough to withstand the Sisterhood?

A rip-roaring murder mystery brimming with theatrical detail, loveable characters, and an addictive plot, the 3rd book in the beloved Variety Fair Mysteries will keep you guessing until the very last page.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Albert's more assertive in this book, more worried about Minnie's immediate physical safety, and so more motivated to behave in a protective way. It's not unreasonable. Minnie is separated from him in the remote place that the target of their criminal investigation, the Spirit Sisterhood, has sequestered themselves away from prying eyes (like Minnie's since Albert can't come, or even visit).

Weird things begin to occur; Minnie, as a theatre person, can't *quite* dismiss them all as illusions. That is the most unsettling aspect of her stay with the Spirit Sisterhood. She is not taken in, of course, by the cruder illusions, but she is deeply troubled by the weird...immanence...of violence. There have been two murders already, and without the safety of her ever-attentive Albert, can Minnie navigate the eerie and threatening world of the Spirit Sisterhood?

Of course she can; of course the redoubtable Albert is there when he is really needed. It's the way the series works. And it's the series getting a shake-up with the spooky trappings of the Sisterhood that makes this entry a hit with me. Developments occur in a balloon. Speeches are made, laconic people wax eloquent, the rotten-souled abuser who's preying on young women is thwarted...though we're not privy to the inner workings of a louse's soul like we are with the Epstein Files, we're similarly positioned to watch the fall.

Less physically violent action marked a pleasant change to my mind. I like Albert, and really want him to end up with Minnie in all her prickly glory. I'm really pleased at how his character develops in this story. Minnie needs every second of the peril in this story to do hard, necessary emotional work; her relationship with Albert can't grow if she refuses to.

I very much approve of this outing. I hope the dynamic duo will be back to enliven the music-hall stage (foreshadowing, that) while making London safer for the ordinary working souls.

ONE TRUE WORD, exhortation, plea, demand, or...?

ONE TRUE WORD
SNÆBJORN ARNGRÍMSSON (tr. Larissa Kyzer)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A #1 bestselling hypnotic psychological thriller from Iceland, in which a woman abandons her husband on an uninhabited island.

“So gripping I simply couldn't put it down. . . Atmospheric and original with an ending I did not see coming” — Eva Björg Ægisdóttir, author of The Creak on the Stairs

Why did she do it?

After a day of simmering tension on a trip to an uninhabited island, Júlia finally reaches breaking point. In a fit of fury she makes a reckless decision—leaving her husband Gíó marooned in the middle of a freezing fjord in the depths of the Icelandic winter. As the cold dark of night swiftly approaches, she leaves without looking back.

When she regrets her decision and returns, he is nowhere to be found. There is no trace of him, and no sign of where he may have gone. The police launch a manhunt, but soon their suspicion falls on his wife. In an attempt to shield herself from their speculation, Júlia weaves an elaborate net of lies, trying to convince the police—and herself—of her innocence. But as her story starts to crumble, dark secrets start coming to light.

As time runs out, Júlia races to discover what really happened. But is Gíó alive or dead? In hiding or hunting her down? And can Júlia get to the truth before it destroys her?

One True Word is a #1 bestseller in Iceland that has been acclaimed by authors such as Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the former Icelandic Prime Minister.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Júlía has a psychotic break and abandons her justifiably irritable "husband" on a little rocky islet in the North Atlantic Ocean. At night. In winter.

Despite the psychotic break, and the probable underlying paranoid personality disorder, she regrets her action and returns...the next day, after realizing she can't explain his disappearance away well enough to avoid legal problems, and fearing manslaughter charges...but he is not there.

This is bad. Epically bad. Contacting the police and spinning them a fantastical pack of lies, as she has done to evade blame her whole life (we meet the sister who hates her guts, and rightly so) she lives in fear that 1) the police will find his body, and b) he's alive and out there waiting to get revenge for what she did to him. And no blame on him if he is.

Her lies are ever more baroque and untenable. The legal system does what it is set up to do, poke into every corner and demand all the information, all the data, all the facts...but would Júlía even know a fact? Is there some...reason...for this psychotic break that she just can not face? Is she retrofitting details suggested, innocently enough, by the questions she has to answer?

In extremely short chapters and unadorned prose, this Icelandic thriller unwinds the worst moment of a wounded soul's life. It's tightly focused on Júlía, we never hear anyone else's thoughts or feelings except as they're expressed to, recalled by, her. It's not a nice place to be, Júlía's head...her perceptions are disturbingly off-kilter from the things she's reporting that she heard. Paranoid personality disorder? Abuse survivor? Both?

It's a book of questions, ambiguities, uncertain footings. If that and a very disjointed flow of story are not enjoyable to you, this ain't your read. I was drawn in by the sheer brio of a writer who focuses a noir thriller in the tightest focus on a woman who's undergoing a breakdown around her "husband"'s possible death, positive disappearance, at her own hands...unless she's dissociating, dissembling, desperately gnawing off her metaphorical arm to escape...what?

I detested Júlía, and thought her life was enough of a fantasyland that I was never fully sure Gíó, the vanished man she's not legally married to, was real. Could I even trust her to tell me the truth about that? Is it a lie or is her paranoia destabilizing my readerly radar that much?

I can't give five stars to the read despite the engagement and investment it elicited from me. Its ending was not on the same level of inventiveness as the rest of the story. It felt to me as though I was being dumped the minute after having brain-melting sex. Reality does this to me all the time; fiction should not!

I've also shaved off the partial stars because the short, choppy chapters that (I think) are intended to be in the places Júlía experiences breaks in her reality feel distancing, are in fact impediments to my connection to an already unlikable narrator. So I land on four of five stars but with the caveat that it's a better story, if not read, than this rating suggests.

CLINCH: The Stockholm Trilogy: Volume One, bisexual Swedish boxer turned enforcer has a bad day

CLINCH (The Stockholm Trilogy: Volume One)
MARTIN HOLMÉN (tr. Henning Koch)
Pushkin Vertigo
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Dashiell Hammett meets Raymond Chandler in this ultra-gritty piece of contemporary Swedish noir, set in a decrepit, highly atmospheric 1930s Stockholm

The writing's on the wall for Harry Kvist. Once a notorious boxer, he now spends his days drinking, and his nights chasing debts amongst the pimps, prostitutes and petty thieves of 1930s Stockholm. When women can't satisfy him, men can. But one biting winter's night he pays a threatening visit to a debtor named Zetterberg, and when the man is found dead shortly afterwards, all eyes are on Kvist.

Determined to avoid yet another stint in prison, Kvist sets out to track down the only person who can clear his name. His hunt will lead him from the city's slums, gangster hideouts and gambling dens to its most opulent hotels and elite nightclubs. It will bring him face to face with bootleggers and whores, aristocrats and murderers. It will be the biggest fight of his life.

Blending noir with gritty violence, Clinch is a visceral, compulsive thriller that packs a punch and leaves you reeling.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE GOODREADS M/M GIFT EXCHANGE. THANKS!

My Review: This one was a surprise to receive the year I got it. I had it on my list, and whaddaya know, in it came. I wasn't expecting to get a really dark, pretty nihilistic read but really feel glad I did.

Male bisexuality is all but invisible in all parts of our culture. No matter how much progress gets made, this is true. Gay guys are deeply suspicious of and fairly hostile to bi guys; straight women prefer their fantasy men either straight or gay, no spectrum tolerance there, either. I've never heard a lesbian express an opinion on the matter.

Harry is a rough-and-tumble guy. He's got the marks of a life in boxing on his body; he's got the marks of a beginning that leads a man into boxing on his being. He's on hard ground in his life because he's been in prison for fucking who he pleases instead of who society says to.

It's not like Sweden in the 1930s was the socialist paradise, however alloyed it may be, that it is today. Society was more aligned with the Nazi German model. Neutral Sweden provided a lot of raw materials to the Nazis and never helped the Jews...that was piecemeal, individually made decisions, not real help despite some of its diplomats doing their best. It's complicated, as what is not? Go look at Lise Meitner's experiences in Sweden, Othering was alive and well.

Harry, found guilty of sodomy, is shoved further down the social hierarchy until he arrives at loan-shark debt collector. It's here the action begins...his latest collection effort is found dead the day he comes to make good. Well, this ain't good. Harry's guaranteed to go back to prison if he gets convicted of the crime, and who the hell will make any effort to get him a fair trial rather than just pin the crime on him and go on with their day? Only Harry...so who saw him? Oh no, only a whore and a man in a snazzy sports car who tried his sexual luck with Harry. Not great choices.

Author Holmén, whose debut novel this is, creates a believably complex Harry, a pragmatic earthy survivor who loves animals and kids, helps anyone who needs it when he can (Lundin, his landlord the undertaker, is one), and satiates his needs as he experiences them however is available to him. He knows the deck is stacked against him so he doesn't hesitate to use violent means to get what he needs, to protect himself and others from predators, and even to become a predator when he must.

That flexibility and willingness to do what needs doing is what enables him to solve the murder he's wrongly accused of. It's a very dirty business that started him off on this search...it's not getting cleaner the further up the social hierarchy he goes. There are the usual noir novel twists, a resolution to the crime that requires a gigantic double-cross, and a setting where cold does the narrative job that heat does in Southern noirs: keeps everyone on edge, keyed up, on the point of suffering dire consequences.

It's a wonderfully gritty tale of an ugly side Sweden doesn't show the world. Voluntarily, anyway. Deeply satisfying.

THE BLACK SWAN MYSTERY, looking back nigh-on seventy years at a crime that rings familiar bells today

THE BLACK SWAN MYSTERY (Inspector Onitsura #1)
TETSUYA AYUKAWA (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5 of five

The Publisher Says: THE JAPANESE CRIME FICTION CLASSIC: A prize-winning railway murder mystery set in 1960s Japan—for fans of Agatha Christie and Seicho Matsumoto! Full of devious twists and turns, this brilliant puzzle mystery is considered to be one of the greatest alibi deconstruction mysteries ever written

Early one morning, the owner of a local mill is found lying next to the railway tracks just outside of Kuki Station. Suspicion initially falls on the workers' union, with whom the man had been embroiled in a labour dispute, then on a new religious sect that has been gaining followers recently.

Chief Inspector Onitsura and his assistant Tanna are called in to investigate, and soon set off in a journey across Japan, from Tokyo to Kyoto and Osaka, and finally to the island of Kyūshu, in a hunt for the killer.

But as they investigate, the killer strikes again, and again. Will they be able to catch the murderer before even more people are slain?

Fans of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington and Seicho Matsumoto’s Tokyo Express will delight in the devious twists and turns of The Black Swan Mystery, as well as in the characterisation and portrait of 1960s Japan.

The author, Tetsuya Ayukawa, is considered to be the master of alibi deconstruction mysteries–a talent that is on full display in this brilliant classic railway murder mystery, which won the prestigious Japanese Detective Writers Club Prize.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I really struggled to apply the tag "historical mystery" to the 1960s setting of this story. It was written in the time period, and wasn't ever revised by the author to reflect later knowledge; but people born in the 1960s are (great-)grandparents as I have cause to know. Historical mystery it is.

Japan's train-riding culture is alive and well today unlike the US version. That alone makes this short novel feel very much like historical fiction in 2025. That and the clues being heavily involved in facts of train-riding culture, so harking back to another of Dame Agatha's classic mysteries, The ABC Murders. An interesting side note on the choice of trains as the setting for this story is that the author was an employee of Japan's imperial colonial railway system in Manchuria until that regime ended in 1944.

The death of a wealthy industrialist embroiled in an ugly labor dispute is seldom cause for me to weep. As ma'at must be preserved, and as those who transgress must be made to feel the weight of their arrogation of the power of life and death, I was reluctantly drawn into the procedural search for a murderer whose crime seemed reasonable to my id.

There is a lot of to-and-fro travel as Onitsura-san does his evidence-gathering...it felt a lot like a train-travel brochure at times...but the result is one of those logic puzzles that, when it comes together, one can't unsee the pattern. I'm not a sympathetic audience to those who holler about spoilers. In the case of intricate designs like this, however, any tiny hint of the real way the thing happened can feel just too revealing too soon. The pleasure of this Japanese crime classic is matching wits with the criminal beside the sleuth. I'll assert my inalienable human privilege to be inconsistent and decline to say more about the mystery bit.

I'll tell you instead about the reading experience. Translator Karetnyk did a very good job of enabling me to feel I was reading a fresh, new work. I was not given the occasionally inevitable experience of dislocation, of distance from the story being told about a culture not my own in a time gone by.

That's quality work, that is. I really hope it sparks a demand to translate the entire series of Onitsura stories...I'm here for 'em. See if you are too.

THE MEIJI GUILLOTINE MURDERS, seeing the birth of Japan's modern police

THE MEIJI GUILLOTINE MURDERS
FUTARO YAMADA (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A classic Japanese mystery—a pair of sleuths investigate a series of bloody murders in 19th century Tokyo

A captivating locked room murder mystery perfect for fans of Stuart Turton and Janice Hallett!

Japan, 1869. A time of reform and rebellion.

Detectives Kazuki and Kawaji are assigned to investigate a series of seemingly impossible murders. Together with the help of a mysterious shrine maiden, can they solve each gruesome death and piece together the dark connection between them?

Taking us deep into the heart of 19th century Tokyo, The Meiji Guillotine Murders is a fiendish murder mystery from one of Japan's greatest crime writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: One of those wonderfully Japanese locked-room puzzles that regularlt defeat me, forcing me to rethink my self-image as an experienced mystery solver, all while the author's playing fair with the reader. It's exhilarating.

You read that right. I find being bested in these contests fun because I need to feel challenged in order to feel awake not simply trudging ox-like in the ruts already worn in. Chief Inspector Kawaji Toshiyoshi (a real historical man who established Japan’s modern police force) and his colleague, the fictional Chief Inspector Keishiro Kazuki, of the new Imperial Prosecuting Office, each feel that way as well. They decide to keep themselves sharp by engaging in a rivalry over the case resolutions each attains...to demonstrate they're both the cream of the crop, to share triumphs and get input on tougher cases.

Meiji Japan must've been as exciting a place to live as 1960s London as the stifling fog of overweening tradition was beginning to lift. It extended into such modern ideas as policing, crminal prosecution, and execution of the condemned. Kazuki, whose naming convention was altered to Western style while he was living in France (!!!–a Japanese person voluntarily living abroad!) returns to his new appointment to the Imperial Prosecuting Office to fight the scourge of corruption that lingers from the Shogunate's old-style power dynamics. Kazuki believes passionately in merit and fairness, being the beneficiary of them. He also returned with two guillotines: one device, one woman. The Frenchwoman Esmeralda Guillotine is Kazuki's mistress and a trained...medium/mystic/seer.

Kawaji is more of the old school, more deferential, more traditional..but steely in his determination to see crime and corruption extirpated. He is less the big-picture man in the dynamic duo of this novel (while it is seventh in the Japanese series order, it works fine as an introduction to it). A number of details he spots are crucial to resolving the seven cases in this novel. I feel it's more a braided-stories novel, but with far more robust linking material than that description usually implies.

Esmeralda was the real surprise to me. Kazuki bringing an intimate partner back from France where she faces truly appalling racism and equal fascination from the Japanese was the touch that set the stories apart. Her central contribution to crime resolutions isn't from detection but from more...esoteric...sources. I enjoyed this flip from the usual stereotype of Eastern mysticism I see in Western fiction: the exotic Westerner has access to the Beyond! she can help us!. And she does.

I hope Pushkin Vertigo commissions more translations of this series. It's very high-quality reading for the ma'at addicts. A wonderful, pausable way to distract yourself briefly from Yule duties, or an immersive read depending on your need of the moment.

MURDER IN THE HOUSE OF OMARI, modern iteration of the Japanese locked-room mystery

MURDER IN THE HOUSE OF OMARI
TAKU ASHIBE (tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Osaka, 1943: as the Second World War rages and American bombers rain death down upon the city, the once prosperous Omari family is already in decline, financially ruined by the terrible conflict. Then the household is struck by a series of gruesome murders.

Can anyone solve the mystery of these baffling slayings before the Omari line is extinguished entirely? To do so, and unravel the killer's fiendish plot, they will have to delve into the family's past, where a dark and deadly secret has been festering for decades...

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Dark secrets! Wartime as economic disaster! Lies and murder in a beauty-products business! What more can a mystery reader want?

How about a family saga (bookmark the list of characters or all is lost), with an old family business floundering after losing...somehow...the heir to the place, the prestige slice of the health-and-beauty market they'd banked on keeping to wartime supply and in general the economic depression inherent in postwar economies, and the new head (adopted after marrying the lost heir's sister) not having the power to make changes?

All that and more coming soon. First, though, understand the pace is not twenty-first-century but period-appropriate. The book was written and published in the 2020s, but it feels more vintage than it is. I myownself think this is a feature not a bug, but you might not. Take heed.

This isn't a story with huge revelations, or shocking twists, but with the women who decide to solve it working it through because, well, what's another death in a country so very recently ravaged by World War II and its often-fatal privations? Natsuko, a doctor, is primarily a rational thinker and a keen observer...doctors tend to be both...who sees things differently from the other women, Mineko and Tsuruko, who are her fellow sleuths.

It's not the fair-play playbook, but the clues *are* there; you can indeed solve the murders, and trace the lines of motive, if you're attentive. I paid attention and got it 50% right...it was one of two people and one indeed was guilty.

I found a lot of the interpolations of newspaper stories and the like to be pacing-killers (those missing stars), but enjoyed them nonetheless. I was kept happily engrossed the entire read. I hope you will be as well.

THE TOKYO ZODIAC MURDERS, a fair-play, betcha-you-won't-solve-it Japanese locked room mystery

THE TOKYO ZODIAC MURDERS
SŌJI SHIMADA (tr. Ross MacKenzie & Shika MacKenzie)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An amateur detective races to solve a decades-old murder mystery in this “bloody and bizarre” Japanese crime novel with a twist hailed as “one of the most original” (Daily Mail).

Astrologer, fortune teller, and self-styled detective Kiyoshi Mitarai must solve a macabre murder mystery that has baffled Japan for 40 years—in just one week.

With the help of his freelance illustrator friend, Kiyoshi sets out to answer the questions that have haunted the country ever since: Who murdered the artist Umezawa, raped and killed his daughter, and then chopped up the bodies of six others to create Azoth, ‘the perfect woman’?

With maps, charts, and other illustrations, this story of magic and illusion—pieced together like a great stage tragedy—challenges the reader to unravel the mystery before the final curtain falls.

This quintessential Japanese “logic mystery”—eerie, gory, and intriguing—combines the puzzle-solving of Golden Age Western detective fiction with elements of shocking horror and dark humor.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Japanese locked-room mysteries are pretty much exemplars of the genre. Unlike Dame Agatha's versions of the genre, they include a bit more gore...this one feels like it could easily have made itself a mild body-horror story with very little authorial effort...but the focus really is on the puzzle.

That focus is evident from the epistolary outset. The entire first thirty-plus pages is a letter written in 1936. It is the statement of purpose for the rest of the book: A murderer pens is intended crimes in detail, explaining why he intends to do these...vile, violent, violating...things to women.

Now, that right there? The crimes being committed against women for a man's gratification? That will get me to Pearl-Rule a book for good and ever. In this case I did not because I felt the facts presented in this introductory letter-cum-statement-of-purpose put the reader into the mindset of knowing the murderer's sickness. As a result, there was no prurient titillation of discovering the women's bodies to learn what had been done to them. I got in my head the purpose of the story, as it shifted into forensics, into crime-solving, because I knew what the crimes were for. I had already decided how twisted and sick the crimes were.

You should know this going in: Misogyny is on full display in very deeply disturbing ways.

Kiyoshi Mitarai, our sleuth, is in the modern day of the book...early 1980s Japan...solving an unsolved cold case. He's unusual in today's world for being a New-Age practitioner of astrology, a thing that was really prominent in culture at that time. He gets interested because the daughter of the police detective who failed to solve the case, dead now after a blighted career from this case, thinks her dad's soul can rest if the failure is reversed by solving it. Her brother horns in and sets our sleuth a serious time limit of five days to complete the puzzle, or the son will blow up old dirt about Kiyoshi.

As is necessary for a locked-room puzzle to get solved, Kiyoshi has a sidekick to think out loud to, and to do some legwork that the audience doesn't need to see. We'll learn it when mystery book lover, and importantly book illustrator, Kazumi Ishioka delivers the information anyway. (Side note: There is, for each timeline, a dramatis personae...prepare to use it A LOT.) The way the story is presented is largely through these two guys sitting and talking through what they know, how they know it, where they've been, and the like. Direct action? Not a lot. Fun little grace notes of these dudes preening for each other, making friend-jokes, talking about stuff that really does have something to do with the case but does not look like it? I'll read that over a run-around drenched in gore-fest. The world is violent enough.

The story's replete with floorplans and crime-scene illustrations (courtesy of Kizumi) and the details are numerous, hard to track, well-buried meanings abound. It is a delightful time for logic-puzzle reader. It turns meta when, approaching the end, the author directly addresses the reader, asking if we've solved the puzzle yet. Okay, thought I, now I'm aware that I have all the information I need to do it. So I sat me down to think. I flipped to some illustrations. I thought some more. I came up with a perp's identity. I read the rest of the story.

I was wrong. I was sure I was right, and I did not see until it was explained to me what I had missed.

That's a reading experience I really enjoy a lot. Get you one for some #Deathtober fun and games.

DARD NOIR: CRUSH; BIRD IN A CAGE; THE WICKED GO TO HELL; all 4-plus star Pushkin Vertigo French thriller translations

THE WICKED GO TO HELL
FRÉDÉRIC DARD
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: An undercover cop and a prison inmate play a tense game of cat and mouse in this brilliantly original thriller by the master of French noir

At one of France’s toughest prisons, an undercover cop is attempting to trap an enemy spy by posing as a fellow inmate. So Frank and Hal find themselves holed up together in a grimy, rat-infested cell, each warily eyeing the other. As they plan a daring escape, an unexpected friendship ensues—but which is the cop and which is the spy?

Gritty and hard-hitting, The Wicked Go to Hell is a tense, paranoid 1950s thriller about duty and conscience, deception and loyalty, and about what it means to be human—whether you’re the good guy or not.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Have you finished your Simenon shelf(s)? Are you tired of searching out Pascal Garnier books you haven't read? Pick up the scent of Frédéric Dard, the perpetrator of similar romans durs and noir-themed explorations of the human condition.

In this Jim Thompsonesque tale of convicted murderers who escape incarceration and, while on the run, develop a deeper regard for each other than they have for themselves. It's too short for me to say too much more, but the men are very much of a type that noir readers love to read about: Down on their luck men, violent and angry, who act out their lifelong received abuse all around them. They're very much victims of a system that cares nothing for or about them until they step out of line. Like Genet's homosexual versions, they're perpetrators of crime who see no wrong in getting what they need by any means necessary because absolutely no one anywhere will give it to them.

The twist ending is...foreshadowed a wee bit too strongly in the prologue. Maybe read that after you've finished the book. It won't take you much more than a long, cold Sunday afternoon to read, and it is as perfect a #Deathtober seasonal read as any I've found.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


CRUSH
FRÉDÉRIC DARD
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A slow-burning intelligent thriller with a wicked twist in the tail from one of the giants of French noir fiction

Bored with her mundane factory job, her nagging mother and her alcoholic father-in-law, Louise is captivated by a glamorous American couple who move to her industrial hometown in Northern France. The Roolands' home is an island of colour, good humour and easy living in drab 1950s Léopoldville, and soon Louise is working there as a maid. But once she is under her new employers' roof their model life starts to fall apart—painful secrets from their past emerge, cracks in their relationship appear and a dark obsession begins to grow, which will end in murder...

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Another long-afternoon read that feels so very French, and not the glamourous edge of Frenchness. We as foreigners probably don't think much about the huge bulk of France, a country that's close to the Netherlands on the north all the way to the Mediterranean in the south. It's about the size of Texas, for US readers, so very, very big and diverse.

This story takes place in the cold, rainy north, in a town of working-class folk...think Rust Belt/Great Lakes, US readers...being "invaded" by people who work for NATO, so are both foreign and educated. It's culture shock all around. This is always a chance for the chancers to move their station up...Louise, our narrator, is one who sees her chance to leave the boring beautyless trudge of her preordained life behind.

As always, the plan goes to hell once it connects with reality.

Louise is an unreliable narrator...you'll figure that out before page ten...and very much the manipulative minx. Her life was never going to be easy, but whose is? Does the twist at the end mean what its surface says it does?

You know by now Dard doesn't do wrapping-paper-and-bow endings. Go with him, pay attention to every word, and enjoy the places you'll go.

After all, you have the luxury of leaving them.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


BIRD IN A CAGE
FRÉDÉRIC DARD
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: It felt like the slipknot on a rope round my chest was being tightened without pity

Trouble is the last thing Albert needs. Travelling back to his childhood home on Christmas Eve to mourn his mother’s death, he finds the loneliness and nostalgia of his Parisian quartier unbearable… Until, that evening, he encounters a beautiful, seemingly innocent woman at a brasserie, and his spirits are lifted.

Still, something about the woman disturbs him. Where is the father of her child? And what are those two red stains on her sleeve? When she invites him back to her apartment, Albert thinks he’s in luck. But a monstrous scene awaits them, and he finds himself lured into the darkness against his better judgment.

Unravelling like a paranoid nightmare, Bird in a Cage melds existentialist drama with thrilling noir to tell the story of a man trapped in a prison of his own making.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Stupid decisions go hand-in-hand with horniness. Women want me, thinks the little head; men want me, thinks the woman's head, and they'll do whatever I want in hopes I'll deliver the goodies. Spoiler alert: fat chance she'll live up to her side of the bargain.

When did you last see Double Indemity? This is a careful take on that story in a French accent. I think of that statement as a compliment...if you decide to emulate something, do it carefully and well, so it raises the same admiring attention as the emulated thing. The "reasoning" behind Albert, the man in question, doing what he did is...poor. Suffice to say the crime he's involved in wouldn't've challenged Maigret, or any flic in 1961 France, too awfully much.

That said, even a good copy is a copy. So I stalled out at four stars.

THE NOH MASK MURDER, enjoyable gothic story, fresh after seventy-five years

THE NOH MASK MURDER
AKIMITSU TAKAGI (tr. Jesse Kirkwood)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A bewildering locked-room murder occurs as an amateur crime writer investigates strange events in the Chizurui mansion in this prizewinning classic Japanese mystery.

This ingenously constructed masterpiece, written by one of Japan’s most celebrated crime writers and translated into English for the first time, is perfect for locked-room mystery fans who can’t resist a breathtaking conclusion.

In the Chizurui family mansion, a haunting presence casts a shadow over its residents. By night, an eerie figure, clad in a sinister Hannya mask is seen roaming around the house. An amateur murder mystery writer, Akimitsu Takagi, is sent to investigate — but his investigation takes a harrowing turn as tragedy strikes the Chizurui family.

Within the confines of a locked study, the head of the family is found dead, with only an ominous Hannya mask lying on the floor by his side and the lingering scent of jasmine in the air as clues to his mysterious murder.

As Takagi delves deeper into the perplexing case, he discovers a tangled web of secrets and grudges. Can he discover the link between the family and the curse of the Hannya mask? Who was the person who called the undertaker and asked for three coffins on the night of the murder? And do those three coffins mean the curse of the Hannya mask is about to strike again?

The Noh Mask Murder’s legendary ending offers locked-room mystery fans the perfect coda to an ingenously constructed mystery.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A fun framing device of the author as a clumsy amateur sleuth, and a puzzle that really absorbed me. Set in a time and place...midcentury Japan...that's just foreign enough to make the attitudes and beliefs necessary for the plot to work credible.

I suppose that's a roundabout way to say "this story is of its time." I think that's okay...you should know that the conventions of that day aren't always polite to twenty-first century ears.

The locked-room aspects of the plot are the bits that get the praise. I'm always glad to read these because I don't expect to solve them. I didn't this time either. The resolution felt of a piece with the story, not pulled out of the parts bin and welded onto the frame built whether it fits or not. That made it satisfying to me, despite the reveal eliciting from me, "...really...?" when I first read it. Remember what I said about of its time. There's no way it would work in 2020s Japan.

So read it as an historical novel, a gothic-inflected piece of a past very much passed, and you're very likely to enjoy this trip into eighty-years-gone Japan.

Award-winning in its time, The Noh Mask Murder launched the career of an author synonymous with Japanese crime writing. It's clear from the translation that translator Jesse Kirkwood had a book to work with that was very well-crafted, and a job translating it that was enjoyable. There's that unexplainable sense of freshness that hangs over work that someone liked doing.

Four well-earned stars.

THE SEISHI YOKOMIZO PAGE (3): THE LITTLE SPARROW MURDERS & THE DEVIL'S FLUTE MURDERS, fifth and sixth of the Kindaichi series translated into English

THE LITTLE SPARROW MURDERS
SEISHI YOKIMIZO (Kosuke Kindaichi #6; tr. Bryan Karetnyk)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An old friend of Kosuke Kindaichi's invites the scruffy detective to visit the remote mountain village of Onikobe in order to look into a twenty-year-old murder case. But no sooner has Kindaichi arrived than a new series of murders strikes the village - several bodies are discovered staged in bizarre poses, and it soon becomes clear that the victims are being killed using methods that match the lyrics of an old local children's song...

The legendary sleuth investigates, but soon realises must unravel the dark and tangled history of the village, as well as that of its rival families, to get to the truth.

PAGE ONE IS HERE★PAGE TWO IS HERE☆
PAGE THREE IS HERE★
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: An interesting cross between Kawabata's masterwork Snow Country and a sideways take on Dame Agatha's lesser work Hickory Dickory Dock mixed with her absolute chef d'œuvre The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, only in 1950s Japan.

One factor that must be attended to by Anglophone readers of this series is that in Japan they are historical fiction. Japanese readers will be as "at sea" as any Anglophone reader would be; the story is sixty-five years old, and was about a bygone way of life even then. So there's a layer of anachronism baked into the modern reading experience irrespective of language it's read in. That doesn't mean it's not a good read. It is indeed a fun story to follow. Don't expect fair play in modern mystery terms, and all will be well. Read it for atmosphere, read it for the trip to the past...you'll enjoy it more that way.

Dysfunctional family dynamics are crime-fiction evergreens. The rage and hatred needed to work a person up to killing someone build in that pressure cooker. This story has a corker of a horrible family in it. The murder Kindaichi investigates took place twenty years before the present...remembering that present is 1959...and the victim is one of those folks who just need killin' in the old US Southern idiom. Mysteries exist because we, as a society, need to see ma'at maintained in our fiction because it seems so unmaintained in the world. The zeitgeist of 1950s Japan would reasonably suggest itself as a similarly traumatized one. I suspect the Kosuke Kindaichi series serves much the same function as the Poirot series did post-Great War...a superior intellect comes along and apportions blame for the guilt of tearing the already fragile fabric of a society in flux.

Letting the reader in on all the clues, all the information the superior intellect possesses, isn't the playbook for the crime stories of this period. I'm sure some sociology thesis treats this topic, but I don't have access to such material. I suspect it goes along with the social norms of trusting experts, even...especially...if they know more than The Authorities...which seems almost quaint in this day and time.

It's a series I get a lot from reading. I enjoy the historical aspects on several levels, within the story told and the storytelling itself. It feels, in these translations at any rate, like work that could have come from the same era as the original Japanese work.

That's a compliment. Four stars for solid enjoyment of a fun-to-read story.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++



THE DEVIL'S FLUTE MURDERS
SEISHI YOKIMIZO (Kosuke Kindaichi #5; tr. Jim Rion)
Pushkin Vertigo (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An ingenious and highly atmospheric classic whodunit from Japan’s master of crime.

Amid the rubble of post-war Tokyo, inside the grand Tsubaki house, a once-noble family is in mourning.

The old viscount Tsubaki, a brooding, troubled composer, has been found dead.

When the family gather for a divination to conjure the spirit of their departed patriarch, death visits the house once more, and the brilliant Kosuke Kindaichi is called in to investigate.

But before he can get to the truth Kindaichi must uncover the Tsubakis’ most disturbing secrets, while the gruesome murders continue…

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A peek at the very immediate aftermath of WWII in bombed-out Tokyo, and the dreadful inconvenience all this war nonsense with its barbaric social leveling brings to The Better Classes.

Deeply dislikable "noble" people doing disreputable things for ignoble motives, aaahhh there's the sweet spot for a story! The supernatural window-dressing was sort of fun. Seances are entertaining silliness in fiction, cynical and sordid manipulations in person. The one in this book is, oddly, both; the fact is the "supernatural" gubbins of the music playing eerily would not work at all in today's world, but was very amusingly handled so flew under my eyeroll threshhold.

Again, and as always in this vintage of Japanese crime novels (based on my limited sample size, anyway), be prepared for the sleuth to know things you do not. You're here to be Dr. Watson, or Inspector Japp, not Hercule or Sherlock. Accept this and enter in the spirit of "what did bombed-out Tokyo look like?" and this read will both entertain and educate you. Kosuke Kindaichi's rumpled Columbo-like presentation of self is a lot more...unusual, noticeable, in Japanese society both then and now. The author's choice to make him rumpled is making a statement about surfaces in a country where they're even more important than they are here in the West.

I land on four stars, per usual in this series, for the fun of being in this very, very dissimilar-to-mine world.