5 new mysteries akin to writers you love
It often happens around this time of year. Friends tell me they’re in a reading rut. They’ll say, “I really like so-and-so’s mysteries. What do you recommend that’s similar?” I recommend the following … and thanks for asking.
If you enjoy the ironic wit and criminal adventures of Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr, then you’ll want to read Timothy Hallinan’s “Nighttown” (Soho Press). Junior Bender is one of my favorite fictional felons and Hallinan is a writer with the kind of heart and healthy cynicism that I admire. Bender is hired to burgle an old Los Angeles mansion that “hummed with malice” and smelled of “baby powder.” The mysterious woman in a bad wig who hires him says, “I’ve even got a key. I mean what could go wrong?” How about everything?
Bender gets caught in a “tangle” that twists into “a snarl” and then becomes a “complicated knot” that he needs to unravel. “It says something about the priorities of the age in which we live” that Bender’s never known “a burglar who stole books.” Of course, Bender steals them. Another of the pleasures of reading Hallinan is he’s a pretty literate dude too.
If you love the ingenious points of view and the unusual plotting of Kate Atkinson’s novels, you’ll devour Tana French’s “The Witch Elm” (Viking). It’s about the consequences of a crime. It’s about how those consequences unravel a life in precise psychological ways. It’s about Toby an Irish “charmer,” a man for whom “worrying was a waste of time” and perception is all. It’s about Toby’s violent assault and suddenly he’s “claw[ing]” his way “out of this strangling dark.” It’s about a brain injury. French’s descriptions of Toby’s internal world post brain trauma are stunning and nerve-wracking and they drive the narrative forward with a claustrophobic intensity.
Toby is invited to recuperate at Ivy House, a family home where he spent happier times with his cousins, but the “strangling dark” remains like the “sharp-edged, fidgety breeze prowling the garden.” It’s about a skeleton inside a Wych elm and how that “fidgety breeze” becomes a gusting wind, uncovering things about Toby’s past that defy his perceptions.
If Dennis Lehane’s novels leave a profound mark on your psyche, then Lou Berney’s “November Road” (Morrow)
will rock you back on your heels in awe to 1963. Set against the backdrop of Kennedy’s assassination and an America looking seriously at itself for the first time, Frank Guidry is a Goodfella, a fixer, married to the mob, and “too old to learn new tricks” because the “old ones still work just fine.” Until they don’t.
Charlotte wants out of her desolate marriage and her dead-end life. She wants her daughters to eat more than pork and beans from cans she steals from the A&P. With their pasts chasing them, Charlotte and Frank meet on the side of the road and, like America, they drive toward an uncertain future.
(Lou Berney and Julie Hyzy will appear during Murder and Mayhem in Milwaukee Nov. 3 at the irish Cultural and Heritage Center, 2133 W. Wisconsin Ave. Info: www.murdermayhem milwaukee.com/.)
If you like your mysteries set in English villages seething with secrets and populated with more eccentric characters than an Oscar Wilde play then you’ll love the chiming … I mean charming “The Dead Ringer” (Minotaur), the latest in M.C. Beaton’s long-running series featuring the straight-talking, hard drinking, likes to be in love, Agatha Raisin. It’s Aggie who keeps me coming back to this splendid series and Beaton never lets me down.
The new Bishop has a past that involves a missing heiress and Agatha’s latest lover has more than one secret of his own. In fact, there are more murders in this mystery than tea shops in Cornwall, but, as always Aggie’s, for the most part, got this.
Finally, if you connect with the hightech plots and cool characters of P.J. Tracy’s Minnesota-based Monkeewrench novels then Chicago-based Julie Hyzy’s “Virtual Sabotage” (Calexia Press) is worth your real time.
Kenna Ward is a virtual reality “envoy,” a digital clean-up warrior, a cyberspace lifeguard diving into virtual reality scenarios when Virtu-Tech clients get overwhelmed and must be extricated from the adventure they’ve plugged into. Hyzy’s characters are as clever as the high-concept she’s created in this entertaining techno-thriller.