New Mystery Fiction

Rosemary Simpson delivers another Gilded Age Mystery with Death Brings a Shadow. Prudence MacKenzie and former Pinkerton Geoffrey Hunter take a private yacht bound for The Sea Islands along the coast of Georgia. Prudence is the maid of honor for her beast friend Eleanor Dickson who is to wed a Southern gentleman Teddy Bennett. Just days before the wedding the bride is missing. The frantic search of Bradford Island turns up poor Eleanor’s corpse in an alligator-infested swamp. Prudence is beside herself but gathers her wits when she and Geoffrey find evidence that Eleanor was held under the water purposefully. The pair navigate a morass of voodoo spells and dark secrets left from the days of slavery. Can they bring a killer to justice before anyone else dies? 

The latest Meg Langslow mystery by Donna Andrews is called The Falcon Always Wings Twice. Meg’s grandmother Cordelia has decided to host a Renaissance Faire at her craft center and puts the whole family to work: Meg handles the blacksmithing, Michael and the boys perform, and everyone dresses in full regalia. Meg’s grandfather, however, is most excited to spend time with the fair’s falconer and his hunting birds—the peregrine falcon and a red-tailed hawk. He’s also concerned about the birds’ well-being with all of the hullabaloo surrounding the fair, so he appoints himself their protector. One of the actors performing at the fair is found dead and, because the man was suspected of mistreating one of the falcons, Grandfather is one of the main suspects. Meg and company will have to beat the bushes for clues to clear Grandfather’s name and catch the real killer. 

M.C. Beaton’s latest Agatha Raisin novel is called Hot to Trot. Private investigator Agatha learns that her friend and one-time lover Sir Charles Fraith is to be married to a horrible woman. She takes it upon herself to do a bit of digging to find out what she can about the socialite but comes up empty. Naturally, Agatha crashes the wedding—out of selfless concern for Charles, of course. The public altercation is embarrassing for everyone, but just when Agatha thinks things can’t get worse, she hears a scream for the stables on the property and rushes to check it out. What she discovers is a murder and she and Sir Charles are the prime suspects. Some shifty evidence surfaces that seems to seal Charles’s fate and Agatha jumps into action to keep her friend from losing his ancestral home, his entire estate, and his freedom. On top of everything else, Agatha’s ex-husband is back in Carsely and wanting back into her heart. What is a girl to do? 

The Right Sort of Man is a mystery by Allison Montclair. As London is slowly recovering from World War II, two very different women come together to launch the Right Sort Marriage Bureau. The quick-witted and impulsive Iris Sparks, and the practical widow with a young son Gwendolyn Bainbridge are determined to achieve some independence and do some good in the rapidly changing world. Their promising start is threatened, however, when their newest client—Tillie La Salle—is found murdered and the man arrested for crime is the prospective husband they matched her with. The police are convinced of the man’s guilt, but Miss Sparks and Mrs. Bainbridge are not. In order to clear his name and rescue their business’s reputation, the two decide to do some sleuthing of their own. They use all the skills and contacts they’ve each acquired through their lives as well as their individual adventures during the recent war to find a killer. What they don’t know is that they are putting themselves in grave danger. 

Next to Last Stand is Craig Johnson’s latest Walt Longmire mystery. One of the most viewed paintings in American History is Custer’s Last Fight. Anheuser-Busch copied and distributed the painting at a rate of more than a million copies a year, but the original was destroyed in a fire at the Seventh Calvary headquarters in Fort Bliss, Texas in 1946. Or was it? When Charley Lee Stillwater apparently dies of a heart attack at the Veterans’ Home of Wyoming, Walt is called in to try and make sense of a partial painting and a shoebox containing one million dollars. Both were found in Stillwater’s footlocker. Walt is fond of the veterans who sit outside and wave at passing cars, and he felt a particular kinship to Charley which makes the puzzle more pressing in Walt’s mind. As he tracks down the providence of the painting and the source of the money, he encounters some dangerous characters along the way. Walt will have to make sure that this investigation doesn’t become his own last stand. 

Two Books; One Title

This week, I'm featuring two books that share the same title and both are mysteries. That is where the similarities end, however, as each is by a different author, each takes place in a different time period, and each has a very different plot.

The first book is What the Dead Leave Behind: A Gilded Age Mystery by Rosemary Simpson. Set in New York City during the Great Blizzard of 1888, this story follows heiress Prudence MacKenzie; who waits impatiently in her Fifth Avenue home for her fiance's safe return. As morning breaks, more than two hundred people are found to have died in the icy winds and freezing snowdrifts. Unfortunately for Prudence, her fiance, Charles, is one of the deceased. He is found with head crushed by a heavy branch and he is holding an ace of spades playing card in his hand. Prudence knows that the playing card was a code that Charles shared with his friend, Geoffrey Hunter, a former Pinkerton agent and attorney from the South. Convinced that Charles was murdered, Prudence turns to Geoffrey for help to find the killer and to help protect her inheritance from her shady stepmother who seems to be more interested in the money than Prudence's well-being.

The second book is What the Dead Leave Behind: A McKenzie Novel by David Housewright. Former St. Paul, Minnesota police detective Rushmore McKenzie is the unlikeliest of millionaires. He does the occasional unlicensed private investigation, mostly doing favors for friends and those in need. When his stepdaughter, Erica, asked for just such a favor to help out a college friend, Mckenzie doesn't have the heart to refuse. Her friend's father, Malcolm Harris, was murdered a year ago in New Brighton, just outside of the twin cities and the case yielded no clues and has gone cold. When McKenzie starts nosing around in the case, he turns up another case that is tangentially related to Harris's and both cases lead back to a group of friends with whom the victim was close. His case is full of odd, suspicious coincidences and nothing more, until someone decides that McKenzie is getting too close and decides to make things very personal.