5 riveting new mysteries to read in summer
“Mr. Flood’s Last Resort,” by Jess
Kidd (Atria).
Meet Cathal Flood. He’s a wealthy misanthrope, a “geriatric hell-raiser,” a “long, thin, raw-polluted” Irish giant of a man with a “blarney-coated voice,” hoarding secrets in a creepy Victorian mansion.
Meet Maude Drennan. She’s Flood’s caseworker, a compassionate, thickskinned fast-talking woman with a posse of invisible Catholic saints (yup, she sees dead people), particularly ones with attitude and open-toed shoes. Flood and Drennan have tragic pasts and more in common than at least Drennan is aware.
One day while Drennan is navigating Flood’s labyrinth of old National Geographics and cases of freak show curiosities, a photograph in a milk bottle lays bare a puzzle with “all the ingredients of a twisted crime story” that Drennan feels obliged to solve. She is Ariadne dodging “the raddled old Minotaur.” This novel has some serious Irish swagger and brilliant mythically inspired storytelling.
“Paper Ghosts,” by Julia Heaberlin
(Ballantine).
Grace is the volatile narrator in this fascinating psychological thriller about obsession, memory and murder. Grace believes Carl, who may have dementia, murdered her sister years ago during a killing spree. Carl was eventually acquitted, but Grace can’t let him go.
She talks her way into his halfway house as his long lost daughter, and hoping to force a confession, she takes him on a road trip across
Texas, stopping at the sites where she believes he killed his victims. Using photographs “to jog Carl’s conscience,” Grace’s own past comes into play like a
“photo wavering, half-developed.”
Heaberlin has skillfully refocused the serial killer novel with her clever narrative angle and the considerable emotional depth of her characters.
“Gale Force,” by Owen Laukkanen (Putnam).
Call me Ishmael! This is one of the most original thrillers out this summer. Captain McKenna Rhodes has inherited a business that’s leaking money. Her marine salvage company is going under unless she can get to the seas north of Alaska in time to salvage The Pacific Lion and earn the insurance fee. The freighter is packed with SUVs on its decks and a dangerous stowaway hiding in its hull.
Rhodes may be a skilled pilot, but she lacks confidence. Her past is dragging her down. The debilitating memory of a rogue wave that washed her father overboard still haunts her. When Rhodes and her crew lift anchor, they must race an encroaching storm and the greed of another salvage ship to reach the troubled freighter.
Laukkanen will appear in conversation with novelist Nick Petrie at 7 p.m. May 25 at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave.
“A Jar of Hearts,” by Jennifer Hillier (Minotaur, out June 12).
You’ll may never eat a Red Hot cinnamon candy again after reading this chilling thriller. Georgina Shaw “could have done a lot of things” the night her best friend, Angela, went missing, but she did nothing. Instead, she stumbled home, sealed the night away in a “mental lockbox,” and moved on with her life.
Years later, Angela’s body is discovered in a grave behind Geo’s house and what really happened that night unravels across the rest of the novel in a mesmerizing series of harrowing reveals. Find a comfortable lawn chair because you won’t move until the last page.
“The Line That Held Us,” by David Joy (Putnam, out Aug. 14).
Joy’s novel is an exquisitely written, heart-wrenching story about the consequences of a careless moment. Darl Moody, his best friend Calvin Hooper, and Calvin’s wife, Angie, are ordinary folk living hard lives, but when Darl accidentally shoots a neighbor while poaching on private land, the tragedy unravels their lives in “unthinkable” ways.
Joy’s descriptions are lyrical and lingering, his characters clinging to their humanity. The story unfolds in Appalachia where the roads “hugged the hips of the mountains” and as “tough as the men were… the women had always been stone.”
In the end, the line that holds Joy’s characters and their community is wrenched to its limits. Listening to excuses, a character says to another, this is a ”whole lot of fine storytelling.” It is indeed.
Carole E. Barrowman is a professor of English at Alverno College and co-author of several novels, including the “Hollow Earth” trilogy. Info: www. barrowmanbooks.com.