Small town’s secrets, murders bring chills

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This article was published 09/09/2023 (1099 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A young Amish man, revered by all, bicycles down a dusty Ohio back road where not one but two crossbow bolts await him — a beyond-gruesome case for formerly Amish chief of police Kate Burkholder.

And then a second murder, and as Burkholder prepares for a wedding that her estranged family may not celebrate, she begins to uncover a darker side to her sleepy small town and hints that the victim may have had secrets so astonishing that — what, you expect spoilers?

Linda Castillo’s An Evil Heart (Minotaur Books, 320 pages, $25) is a crackerjack of a character-driven murder mystery, absolutely outstanding.

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One-name Reykjavik retired police detective Konrad suspects that a drug mule’s overdose death could be murder, especially when thugs torture her drug dealer boyfriend.

But what could that possibly have to do with the drowning of a 12-year-old girl in a city park pond decades before, a girl now revealing herself spectrally to an aged medium, whose father was partners with Konrad’s father and may have murdered him? (Pause for breath.)

Arnaldur Indridason’s just-translated 2017 Icelandic bestseller The Girl on the Bridge (Penguin Random House, 352 pages, $32) is a decent enough mystery, but suffers from stilted translation and is way too complicated.

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London, December 1917: a beloved, even saintly military surgeon who puts First World War victims back together is found butchered after being tortured in ghastly ways that’ll put you off your bacon butties.

Maybe the good doctor wasn’t the paragon he appeared to be, reckons Scotland Yard sleuth DI Harvey Marmion, as — who could have seen this coming? — more corpses appear on the home front.

Edward Marston’s Orders to Kill (Allison & Busby, 350 pages, $19), just now available outside the U.K., is an amiable read with likable characters that mixes the whodunit with the terror of every family who has someone in the trenches.

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Dozens of the top CSI types are attending ultra-special courses at the world’s niftiest private forensic research institute — who’d be nuts enough to try murdering someone there? Or two victims or maybe even three?

It’s the first day on her new job for former FBI superstar Dr. Ellie Carr, joining her new boss Dr. Rachel Davies and saying farewell to (redundancy alert) arrogant researcher Dr. Barbara Wright, departing to make her fortune with “borrowed” data — whoops, make that the late doctor.

Lisa Black’s What Harms You (Kensington Books, 336 pages, $37) is a crackerjack of a whodunit featuring two compelling women who previously met in the equally good Red Flags. The ending doesn’t match the devilish imagination of the first 300 pages, but it’s well worth a read.

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Newly married lawyer Daniel Pitt and pioneering pathologist Miriam fford Croft tackle a fearsome opponent in 1912 London — a media baron/investment genius who’s a fraudster with British and foreign key figures secretly indebted to him as war looms.

Anne Perry’s The Fourth Enemy (Ballantine Books, 352 pages, $39) is, for much of its length, intriguing and entertaining (albeit with Perry’s repetitive dialogue), though the suffrage movement plot promised by the book jacket just kind of disappears.

Suddenly, a courtroom drama becomes a melodrama, and even readers with no law degree want to jump up at every paragraph, hollering, “Objection, your honour, hearsay!”

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Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin gets the willies about crossbows ever since seeing The Red Wedding.