Crime mysteries

A Song of Comfortable Chairs by Alexander McCall Smith, Little, Brown

Precious Ramotswe, owner of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and husband, J.L.B. Matekoni, owner of Speedy Motors, live on Zebra Drive Gaborone, Botswana. When he suggests she drop the “Ladies” from her business, she replies: “It’s justified after all these years of being held back by men.” At her office, assistant Grace puts a nameplate with BSC after her name (Botswana Secretarial College). Phuti, Grace’s husband, owner of Double Comfort Furniture Store, is facing bankruptcy. There’s no demand for chairs now people eat outside from cardboard boxes. But Precious and her “traditionally built” friends dish up beef and broad bean stew in comfy terrace chairs. Gentle and graceful.

The Only Child by Kayte Nunn, Hachette

Two timelines intertwine in this page-turner set on Orcades Island; the link between the two is Fairmile, a weatherboard mansion overlooking Puget Sound. In 1949 it was a home run by nuns for “sinful girls”, thrown out by their families, their babies given to “righteous Catholic couples”. In 2013 Fairmile is about to open as an inn, and former police officer Frankie Gray has moved from Australia to help her mother and hopefully mend her relationship with her own estranged daughter. A well-paced plot unfolds when a nun is discovered brutally murdered in Frankie’s grandmother’s nursing home. Buckle up.

After You were Gone by Vikki Wakefield, Text

We start with every mother’s nightmare – after a less than successful trip to a street market trying to introduce her stroppy six-year-old daughter, Sarah, to the wonders of weird exotic fruit, Abbie turns her back and Sarah has vanished. Soon the word abduction enters her sphere and single mum Abbie is “sat in the back of the police car, shaking so hard my teeth felt loose”. Six years pass and two days after Abbie gets married, she receives a phone call that sends her into a spin. Chilling and laced with dark suspense.

Murder in Williamstown by Kerry Greenwood, A&U

With her “Dutch doll” features, the Hon Phryne Fisher sits at her Bechstein grand piano. But all is not as it should be at the house on the Esplanade, St. Kilda. Threatening letters saying, “WHORE OF BABYLON!” have been dropping through the mailbox. Phryne’s lover, Lin Chung, is being targeted too, but it doesn’t stop our detective attending a magnificent ball at the house of mysterious Hong, where a shocking tragedy breaks out among the “boor-jwah”.

Exiles by Jane Harper, Pan Macmillan

Jane Harper’s endearing and troubled federal agent, Aaron Falk, from The Dry and Force of Nature is back. As the tale opens Falk is driving to the christening of his good mate Greg Raco’s son in South Australia’s rural wine region. Readers of The Dry will know him as the police officer we first met there, so we’re on pleasingly familiar ground... The christening also marks a year since Raco’s childhood friend Kim Gillespie disappeared, leaving her six-week-old daughter behind, a mystery Falk is soon to splash around in. The best-selling author is back on form with a murder mystery cloaked in the landscape and a rich tapestry of characters that fill that world.