A Grave within the Woods
The sometimes unflappable Bruno Courrèges is aggravated. Whereas he was on medical depart, his place as chief of police was taken over by an overbearing new rent, and she or he has no intention of vacating it till he has been cleared to return to service. Furthermore, she has lectured him relating to his normal untidiness and inept record-keeping. In the intervening time, it’s higher for everybody involved if Bruno beats a hasty retreat to some place else, anyplace else. So, for A Grave within the Woods, Martin Walker’s seventeenth installment within the standard collection, Bruno is tasked with investigating (look ahead to it . . .) a grave within the woods. Three our bodies are within the grave, all courting again to World Struggle II: two German ladies and one man, an Italian submarine captain, oddly distant from his anticipated undersea context. Oh, and whereas we’re on the subject of water, Bruno’s hometown of St. Denis—a sadly fictional village within the Périgord area of France—is bracing for an epic, local weather change-fueled flood. The dams have held to date, nevertheless it’s getting dicey. As Bruno digs deeper into the grave scenario (sorry), questions courting again some 80 years are unearthed. Thus, there’s maybe extra historical past than thriller on this episode of Bruno’s adventures, however there’s nothing improper with that. There’s loads of what readers come to St. Denis for: the meals and wine; the camaraderie; and naturally, Balzac the basset hound, certainly one of the partaking four-legged supporting characters ever to grace the pages of a thriller novel.
Midnight and Blue
Wow, you miss one e book in a collection, and the protagonist transforms from the primary cop in Scotland to a jail inmate. As Ian Rankin’s newest thriller, Midnight and Blue, opens, John Rebus is cooling his heels within the slammer. His crime: tried homicide, which is beneath attraction, however the wheels of justice are turning slowly. At first, he’s incarcerated within the comparatively secure Separation and Reintegration unit, the place prisoners in peril (corresponding to ex-cops) are assigned, however he’s quickly to be rehoused within the normal jail inhabitants, partially due to a safe-passage assure from Edinburgh’s reigning crime lord, who credit Rebus for his ascent to the underworld throne. When a homicide takes place in a close-by two-person cell, Rebus’ detecting instincts bubble to the floor, though he have to be considerably extra circumspect than if he was out on the streets. In a parallel narrative, Rebus’ onetime colleague Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is investigating the disappearance of a teenage woman, a case that can come to have a tangential—or maybe greater than tangential—reference to the aforementioned jail homicide. Creator Rankin is in high type as he reinvents his flawed hero by having him navigate an equally flawed milieu, in what have to be one of the authentic locked-room mysteries ever.
Homicide Takes the Stage
One among my favourite plot units for a thriller—or actually any type of novel—is the revisiting of a well-recognized story by the angle of a special character, corresponding to Gregory Maguire’s retelling of the Cinderella story, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. Colleen Cambridge has mined this vein exceptionally effectively together with her collection that includes Phyllida Brilliant, housekeeper to Agatha Christie. This outing, the Christie entourage strikes to London for Homicide Takes the Stage, by which one of many creator’s tales has been made right into a West Finish play. Sadly, nevertheless, an actor whose surname started with the letter A turns up useless at a theater starting with the letter A. Then, the physique of an actor enjoying Benvolio is found at a theater starting with a B. You’ll be able to see the place that is going, proper? It’s a intelligent and scrumptious spin on certainly one of Christie’s higher recognized works, The A.B.C. Murders. Precisely one yr in the past, I opined that Cambridge’s earlier installment within the collection, Homicide by Invitation Solely, “straddles the road between historic fiction and complex, Christie-esque suspense fairly effectively, with out the cloying cutesiness that may generally plague mysteries on the cozier aspect of issues. And Phyllida Brilliant is just a gem.” I stand by that assertion 100%.
★ The Gray Wolf
An previous legend tells of two wolves that battle inside every of us: a black wolf that represents anger, greed, conceitedness, resentment, envy and ego; and a grey wolf that represents kindness, generosity, compassion, empathy, love and hope. Which one will win, you might ask? The reply is straightforward, but profound: The one you feed. The Gray Wolf additionally serves because the title of Louise Penny’s nineteenth entry in her critically acclaimed collection that includes Chief Inspector Gamache of the Sureté du Québec. The Gray Wolf is much and away Penny’s most bold novel to this point, touchdown Gamache and his staff squarely into the center of ecoterrorism on a scale hitherto unimaginable in sometimes tranquil Canada. However as knowledge begins to trickle in, it turns into obvious that the plot’s tentacles are farther reaching than anybody may fairly have predicted, involving an order of Québécois monks who’ve taken a vow of silence, the very best ranges of the Canadian federal authorities and even the Vatican. Equally troubling is proof suggesting that key members of the Sureté could have been compromised, leaving the core staff of Gamache, Beauvoir and Lacoste twisting within the wind because the stopwatch ticks away the minutes. The Gray Wolf is 432 pages lengthy, and I learn it in a single sitting, as a result of I couldn’t put it down.