Escapist reads
Engrossing mysteries and thrillers are sure to whisk away eager readers
In these difficult times, everyone is looking for an escape. Thriller and mystery novels can offer just that — there’s a reason so many are dubbed page-turners. Here are some new and upcoming titles to whisk you away:
THE BRAMBLE AND THE ROSE TOM BOUMAN
W.W. NORTON
Edgar winner Bouman’s third Henry Farrell mystery has the small-town cop in the Endless Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania perplexed by the headless body of a man partly eaten by a bear. The hideous remains are soon identified as those of a retired PI, and the forensics point to murder. Anxious
and prone to depression, Farrell also grapples with threats to his new marriage and an unhappy teenage nephew gone missing. Bouman is as exacting in his descriptions of the Pennsylvania wilderness as he is of its down-on-their-luck inhabitants. It’s as if Henry David Thoreau had lived into the age of pickup trucks, survivalists and fentanyl.
CAMINO WINDS JOHN GRISHAM DOUBLEDAY
John Grisham’s amiable jape of a “beach book” — the publisher’s term — is a followup to Camino Island (2017). In that one, bookstore owner and rare book dealer Bruce Cable stole F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts from the Princeton library and got away with it. In the new one, the “roguish though lovable character” helps solve the murder of a thriller writer bludgeoned with a golf club during a hurricane on an island off the Florida coast. The whole thing reads is as if the Hardy Boys were in their late 40s and had developed a taste for shrimp tacos and exquisite wines.
CITY OF MARGINS WILLIAM BOYLE PEGASUS BOOKS
In his fourth novel since his stunning debut, Gravesend, the grandly talented Boyle is still in the Brooklyn neighbourhood where he grew up. Mob goons, college dropouts, melancholy widows and pink-haired rockers mix it up in this deliciously convoluted tale that reads like a fresh new season of The Sopranos.
DEAD LAND
SARA PARETSKY WILLIAM MORROW
Sara Paretsky’s gloriously kickass private eye, V.I. (Vic) Warshawski, is back for the 20th time in a political-rot thriller that’s the definition of perfection in the genre. Vic is feeling her (unspecified) age in this one — creaky and “mildewed” — but that barely slows her down in her search for a missing singer-songwriter who had been living under a Chicago railroad viaduct. The robustly flavoursome cast of characters includes a semi-deranged land preservationist, a corrupt Nobel Prize winner, a Chilean Ayn
Rand disciple and several wonderful dogs.
DEATH ON TUCKERNUCK FRANCINE MATHEWS SOHO CRIME
Nantucket detective Merry Folger makes her sixth appearance in a mystery that’s so suspenseful it’s hard not to skip a chapter to see if certain deeply likable characters are still alive. Folger’s wedding with a rich, nice-guy cranberry farmer is threatened by (a) an approaching Category 3 hurricane and (b) the need to deal with a female corpse and a man in a coma who turn up on a grounded yacht along with a fortune in raw heroin.
The Washington Post