Long-dead teens surface in Orkney whodunit

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/03/2025 (248 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Exiled from Glasgow, possibly autistic reporter Freya Sinclair returns to her native Orkney Isles and the local weekly paper — just in time for the earth to give up the bodies of two teenagers from her past who’d been murdered 17 years before and vanished without a trace.

While the powerful try to quash the story for suspicious reasons unknown, Freya takes risk after risk to track down shadowy figures in lonesome farmhouses, slowly piecing together the puzzle of murders and a far more unspeakable evil… all while committing the unforgiveable sin of not immediately returning emails from her editor.

Published in April 2024, Daniel Aubrey’s Dark Island (HarperCollins, 320 pages, $24) is quite the debut by the autistic ex-journalist — always heavy, always laden with dread.

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Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire and his BFF Henry Standing Bear reminisce about their first murder mystery: stranded in the Alaska Arctic and hunted by a monstrous near-demonic polar bear aboard a legendary ghost ship. Definitely not Wyoming.

Author Craig Johnson’s 21st Longmire mystery ignores that he still treats the pair as though they’re in their late 50s, when this 1970 adventure puts them mid-80s these days — you know they both survive, but that doesn’t make Tooth and Claw (Viking, 208 pages, $34) any less scary.

Toss in Walt’s early career in security, evil oil people (redundancy alert), contemporary pirates, environmental activists and an Inuit woman awfully handy with a rifle, and it’s a decent origins story — though Johnson hints it’s not Walt’s first rodeo sleuthing a murder.

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New Jersey bail bond enforcer Stephanie Plum and her eclectic crew go bounty hunting for a vicious mob boss pretending to be a fruit wholesaler, a possible killer who thinks he’s a vampire, a guy living in his parents’ basement accused of hijacking food trucks and driving them to homeless camps and a fellow with an exceptionally large… well, no spoilers.

Meanwhile, Stephanie has accepted marriage proposals from both of the terrific men in her life and suspects she may be pregnant, but by whom is the question. One friend suggests that if it’s twins, it could be both of her lovers.

Janet Evanovich’s Now or Never (Atria Books, 320 pages, $27) is the 31st book of amiable nonsense in the series, completely unbelievable and thoroughly entertaining, a lot of fun for everyone but the murder victims, leaving us craving cream-filled doughnuts and Morelli’s mother’s lasagna.

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Two New York City women whose children have been raped and murdered by a pedophile go all Strangers on a Train and agree to kill each other’s monster while the other establishes an alibi. Meanwhile, a third woman is in terror of a home invader who stabbed her repeatedly and may be stalking her to finish his botched kill.

Steve Cavanagh’s Kill for Me, Kill for You (Atria Books, 352 pages, $26) is a terrifying, tragedy-laden tale of destroyed lives with twists galore.

Could anyone possibly be lying? Could anyone possibly be about to kill the wrong person? What does it take to kill a total stranger? Just hope you don’t look exactly like — bang!

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What Second World War Nazi secrets could be so crucial to hide that a Ukrainian academic and a 90-plus year-old recluse both get murdered in Ottawa, while far-right villains slime through the shadows?

Inspector Mike Green, son of a Holocaust survivor, and his cop daughter Hannah Pollock pick up threads of powerful evil among us willing to kill anyone who gets too close investigating the trail of Nazis allowed to enter Canada after the war — all dead by now, but still killing the innocent from the grave.

Barbara Fradkin’s Shipwrecked Souls (Dundurn Press, 352 pages, $24) is a complex police procedural that’s tragic, heartbreaking and infuriating.

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Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin wonders why anyone is surprised that a newspaper reporter would succeed where everyone else has failed.