> WHODUNIT
An Elderly Lady Is Up To No Good By Helene Tursten Soho, 184 pages, $12.99
In five darkly engaging short stories, the accomplished Swedish crime writer Helene Tursten makes the case in favour of an elderly killer. The old party in question is 88- year - ol d Maud who i s without spouse, children, relatives or friends. She has t he money a nd a s well a part - ment in Gotenberg to enjoy her solitary life and it’s at least partly to preserve it that she knocks off victims at the rate of one per story. All of this is carried on more or less in the spirit of the two spinster sister slayers in Arsenic and Old Lace, though Maud is both older and slicker than the Brewsters. The murders Maud pulls off are meticulously plotted and executed, and one of the pleasures of the stories lies in watching Maud in action and wondering, as the book moves along, if this next murder is the one where the cops finally catch on to the most unlikely of serial assassins.
The Midnight Witness By Sara Blaedel Grand Central, 336 pages, $12.99
Sometimes, with police procedurals, the reader hopes desperately that things never get as bad for homicide cops in the real world as they do in the novelistic world. That’s a regular r eaction to the Danish author Sara Blaedel’s series featuring Louise Rick and her colleagues on the Copenhagen murder s quad. The sleuthing life isn’t merely hectic for Rick and company; it’s chaotic and desperate and miraculous in the sense that it’s a wonder when Rick survives into the next book. In The Midnight Witness, the body count includes one cop and two journalists, plus a super-mysterious drug-dealing operation. Tying the clues together takes a close understanding of the forensic evidence. Rick’s not bad at this, but her sleuthing life is, as usual, complicated by her friendship with the ace investigative newspaper reporter Camilla Lind whose clever nosing into cases regularly threatens to derail Rick’s legitimate crime-solving.
Dig Your Grave By Steven Cooper Seventh Street, 368 pages, $15.95
The central figure in Steven Cooper’s reader-friendly series is Alex Mills, a likeable homicide detective in Phoenix, Ariz. Our guy Alex is resourceful and tireless, but sometimes, for a little extra edge at some points in his investigations, he feels a need to turn to his civili a n pal Gus Parker and Gus’sot her-worldly talents. It seems t hat Gus possesses what he variously refers to as his “psychic revelations” or his “sudden visions” or simply his extra powerful “intuition.” In short, the unassuming Gus detects stuff that is beyond everybody else’s range of comprehension. This is a gimmick that, in the hands of a lesser writer than Cooper, would become tiresome and even silly. But in the Cooper books, Gus and his powers seem entirely acceptable. Certainly, in this consistently attractive book, they work nicely in helping Alex Mills sort out a series of killings that somehow involve Phoenix’s upper crust of businessmen and politicians.
Kingdom of the Blind By Louise Penny Minotaur, 400 pages, $35.95
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache’s plate is overflowing. For one thing, it appears that Gamache, head of the Sûreté du Québec, has somehow l et l oose in the province a cache of opioids large enough to kill thousands. On a much smaller scale, but more entert a i ni ng, Gamache, for reasons unknown to him and everyone else concerned in the matter, has been named one of the three executors in the will of a woman unknown to the executors. The will itself involves manipulations, some of them obviously illegal, in the investment world. The more Gamache looks into these strange developments, the more he comes to doubt both the people named in the will as well as, shockingly, himself. In other words, the story is vintage Louise Penny with lots of space allowed to Gamache’s fellow residents of the lethally quaint village of Three Pines.