> WHODUNIT
WATCH ME By Jody Gehrman St. Martin’s Press, 320 pages, $20
Kate is 38, a published thriller writer who teaches creative writing at a small American college and has recently been dumped by her husband. Sam, 22, is Kate’s most gifted pupil and has a mad passion for his teacher, which he doesn’t conceal from her. Kate, in a vulnerable state, feels flattered and more than a little attracted to Sam, though she’s wary enough to know it would be career suicide to encourage Sam’s attentions.
Where is this set of circumstances headed? Nowhere good is one destination that readers have no trouble figuring out. But as Sam’s many psychoses become evident and as Kate’s responses waver into dangerous territory, the story creeps toward scary consequences that make Watch Me a persuasive and disturbing thriller.
IN A COTTAGE IN A WOOD By Cass Green HarperCollins, 312 pages, $21.99
Halfway into this novel, a character named Neve “feels as though she is pulled back into a state of surging adrenalin every time she gets remotely close to relaxing.”
That’s about how readers feel for most of the book.
Neve is a 30-ish woman living in central London, helter skelter in her habits; she drinks and curses too much, usually at the most badly chosen of times.
But she’s sufficiently nervy to face head-on the strange circumstances she finds in a remote Cornwall cottage where even stranger circumstances have taken her.
The book’s plotting is of the standard type with plenty of red herrings, even more dodgy characters and lots of threats to Neve that could be either real or pretend. All of this, in Cass Green’s comfortable and assured writing, is conveyed all too convincingly.
BEAU DEATH By Peter Lovesey Soho, 415 pages, $27.95
In the first long stretch of Peter Lovesey’s latest book in the series built around DS Peter Diamond of the city of Bath’s Murder Squad, it looks as if Lovesey is doing a Josephine Tey number.
Tey was the excellent crime novelist of long ago in whose last book, Daughter of Time, her sleuth figure, a Scotland Yard man named Alan Grant, is laid up in bed with a broken leg and spends his confinement proving why Richard the Third could not have been responsible for the murder of the Little Princes in the Tower. In the same spirit, Diamond seems determined to solve the mystery of the exact burial place of Bath’s most famous citizen, the 18th-century dandy Beau Nash.
The quest is triggered by the discovery of a skeleton that may be that of Nash himself. Diamond gets rolling on his historical mission, but, alas, a quarter of the way into the book, he discovers that the skeleton is a couple of centuries too recent to be Nash’s, and while the rest of the book presents a worthy enough mystery, it’s not nearly so much fun as the part where things were headed down a Teysian path.
A RECKONING IN THE BACK COUNTRY By Terry Shames Seventh Street, 277 pages, $15.95
This is the seventh novel in Terry Shames’s irresistible series featuring Samuel Craddock, chief of police in the mostly law-abiding Texas town of Jarrett Creek. Craddock, middle-aged, a widower, patient and scrupulously fair-minded, finds both his patience and his fair-mindedness getting a severe testing when an apparently well-to-do local physician is murdered in a cruel crime involving vicious killer dogs.
Craddock’s determined investigation, pushed along by flashes of smart Holmesian deduction, plunges him into an unexpectedly dodgy side of Jarrett Creek society.
At the same time, his own romantic connections take a fresh turn, and he also becomes the surprised new owner of a rambunctious puppy. With all this going on, the book ranks as the most satisfyingly jam-packed in the Samuel Craddock oeuvre.
Jack Batten’s Whodunit column appears monthly — but he’s taking a small hiatus to write his next Crang mystery. He’ll appear again in April.