Nominated for the 2023 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Mystery/Thriller, Rachel Howzell Hall’s We Lie Here (Thomas & Mercer) is the ultimate in twisty family secrets, murders, long standing grudges, and buried–both literally and figuratively–truths.
In this book, Hall, the New York Times bestselling author of And Now She’s Gone and These Toxic Things, tells the story of Yara Gibson, a L.A. screenwriter who returns to the small desert town of La Paz to help plan a family event. Yara has a lot of reservations about the trip and as her time at home progresses she becomes even more wary of what’s going on below the surface of what seems like a typical middle class family. She’s contacted by a woman claiming to be her cousin Felicia who leaves Yara a key to a remote lakeside cabin. Felicia has secrets to reveal about the family and the two agree to meet but then Fellicia’s body is discovered, setting Yara off on a quest to uncover what the family has spent years to hide.
But there’s more going on as well. Files in the basement of the cabin refer back to a tragedy that happened years ago. And as she investigates her family’s past and how it impacts her, Yara becomes concerned she’s losing her focus when things go missing including the medicine necessary to keep her from having an asthma attack. Or is there something more insidious going on?
Hall has again written a tightly woven mystery, one that keeps a reader in their seat, turning the pages to find out how it ends. Also available on CD and Audible.
Deanna Raybourn takes us back to Victorian times in “A Sinister Revenge” (Penguin Random House), the latest novel in her Veronica Speedwell series. Speedwell, a scientist, lepidopterist or butterfly collector, and lady adventurer, has traveled to Bavaria in search of Revelstoke “Stoker” Templeton-Vane (called Stoker for short), her lover and scientific partner, who understandably is upset to learn that her husband who she presumed dead, is still very much alive. Upon finding out the news, he leaves the country and now seems to have completely disappeared. Traveling with Speedwell is Stoker’s brother, Viscount Tiberius Templeton-Vane, and the two, while dining at a Bavarian inn and hearing the landlord talk about a disagreeable encounter he had with a wolf-like man believe they may have found Stoker.
But there’s more going on than just a missing lover and brother. Tiberius has received death threats tied to an incident that occurred years ago and he needs his brother’s help in unraveling the mystery in order to save his life.
Raybourn, a New York Times bestselling author and sixth generation Texan, knew from an early age that she wanted to be a writer. Influenced by such women writers as Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, Agatha Christie, and even Jane Austen, she describes her books as mysteries with enough romance to keep readers who like both genres happy.
“There was never a time when I didn’t make up stories,” she says, adding that she remembers being thrilled when she finally learned how to print so she could get them out of her head. There was also the time where she missed out on entire school lesson because she was busy writing a story about Maria Antoinette.
That might explain why she is a prolific author, having written not only eight Speedwell novels but also the Lady Julia Grey series, which are also historical fiction. Besides that she has stand alone novels including last year’s “Killers of a Certain Age” about a band of female assassins who are over 60.
Her Speedwell character is like many of the resolute women found in the pages of history and is inspired in part by Margaret Fountaine, a Victorian era lepidopterist who Raybourn says traveled the world collecting both butterflies and lovers. Both Fountaine and Speedwell are nothing like what people expect Victorian to be like says Raybourn.
“Fountaine was dynamic and intriguing,” she says. “She was my inspiration for Veronica.”
For the last 12 years, Skyler Moore has struggled with a crippling sense of guilt and an inability to be around large groups. An artist who specializes in collages, her work is about to be displayed in a prestigious art gallery and, hopefully, it will help her shaky finances as she wants to become pregnant through in vitro before her biological clock runs out.
But hearing she may have to speak to the large crowd expected at the gallery greatly increases her social anxiety. Add to that, she still is dealing with her mother who blames Skyler for what happened to Chloe, her younger half-sister 12 years ago after they became separated at a party.
Told Chloe had left, Skyler returned to the hotel where she was staying and, unusual for her, indulged in a one night stand with Christopher Whaley, an older, handsome—and married–man she just met. And so sets the stage for Kate White’s newest mystery, “Between Two Strangers.”
Her half-sister never left the party, her body was found days later at the bottom of a hill on the property. As for Whaley, he and Skyler never meet again but his lawyer contacts her a few nights before her gallery show. Whaley has recently died and left her several million dollars much to the anger of his family. Soon she is being harassed and threatened, her apartment broken into, and her career as an artist stymied when her collages, on display at the gallery are defaced. Skyler, unsure of herself as it is, must face the threats and accusations made against her by his family.
White, the author of 17 novels, was formerly the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine and uses her knowledge of New York and the New York art scene to create a fast paced novel that takes us into that world when Skyler works on a collage that she hopes will help unlock the secret of her half-sister’s death.
I ask White, during a long phone conversation, how she was able to write best selling novels and work as editor-in-chief of an extremely popular woman’s magazine, That, in itself, must surely have been a full-time job.
“I was definitely burning the candle at both ends,” she says, adding that when she first got the call to take over the job she had completed four chapters of her first foray into mystery writing. “I put those aside.”
Uber-successful at editing—she took Cosmo to the number one best seller of single issue copies (the magazine was famous for its covers and inspired advice to women), selling two million copies a month.
“I loved the job, my team, the magazine,” says White.
But she also loved mysteries, having become addicted to the Nancy Drew mystery series at age 12. And so despite being married with two children and working as editor-in-chief, she returned to the mystery novel she was writing.
When I ask where she gets her ideas, White says from many places. She keeps a file of news clippings and notes. A plot, which she is meticulously outlined, can come from overhearing a conversation on an elevator. Yes, she says. She eavesdrops.
After 14 years at the helm of Cosmo (how many other magazines have a nickname?), White decided to focus on writing full-time. Now she spends part of the year in Uruguay where she and her husband have a place in a small beach town where she enjoys the lavender sunsets, the food and being warm in the winter.
It is also the perfect place for White to write and she is already at work on her next mystery.
For more information on White including upcoming author events, visit her website katewhite.com
Twenty years ago, Colette “Coco” Weber survived the mass murder of her father, mother, and brother on idyllic Catalina Island off the coast of California. The man accused of the murder is now in prison and Coco, who moved away, married, and is now separated from her husband, has returned to the island hoping to jumpstart her life again.
But Catalina, so pretty with its colorful homes and eclectic boutiques and restaurants, has undercurrents as well. Sure some things haven’t changed. Her Aunt Gwen, who became the caretaker of Coco after the murders, still resents her and is hiding secrets possibly about the ownership of the house where she lives. At first it seems lucky that Coco is still best friends with the owners of the family run island newspapers who hire her to write obituaries—a special skill that Coco excels in. But rampant Realtors are buying up the quaint cottages that line the hilly streets of the island, turning out owners and repricing them at astronomical fees. Catalina, it turns out, may not be the place soon for anyone but the very wealthy.
That certainly includes Gwen, a former house and hotel cleaner with a penchant for stealing both baubles and expensive items from the places she cleans. It’s in a small part, a payback for all the scorn people in her position endure particularly those of color. But it’s also part of Gwen’s sneaky nature and her disdain for most people including her niece.
Before long Coco is involved with a handsome rich guy who works at the paper as a lark. His parents make enough money that he really can just dabble in whatever interests him. Soon, though, Coco suspects him of lying to her about his whereabouts at certain times when he goes radio silence so to speak and doesn’t answer his cell phone. And why has he chosen Coco when there are all these luscious beauty queen types in his past.
“As for her choice of jobs, her family’s obituaries were not special and didn’t capture who she knew they were. And now she has a chance to do for others what she wished had happened for her,” says Rachel Howzell Hall, an award-winning mystery writer about her latest standalone novel, “What Never Happened.” “This is also a story about a woman who’s trying to figure out where she belongs.”
Determining where she belongs also means figuring out who to trust and as she becomes immersed into island life during the isolated time of Covid, she soon learns that’s not easy to do. One big question is who is sending her threatening obituaries—her own—outlining the day of her death. It turns out there are many secrets and as she writes obituaries, Coco notices a stunning similarity in the deaths of many elderly women. They have refused to sell their homes which now are worth small fortunes. But unfortunately, it’s hard to get someone to believe her.
“Coco has been stunted in her growth and her ability to figure people out—she lost her parents during the time when they should have been guiding her and her aunt begrudges having to take care of her,” says Hall, who lives in Los Angeles and has visited the island on field trips with her daughter and also conducted extensive research that goes beyond the tourist brochures. “The way her family was taken away from her left her not knowing who she can trust and that becomes even more so with all that is happening on the island. And then she learns that this person she thought—and the law thought—killed her family, did not do it.”
Determined to find answers, Coco takes chances in trying to solve the mysteries swirling around her. She knows that is the only way she can remain on the island and survive.
“Horses are healing,” says Eliza Jane Brazier, author of “Girls and Their Horses”(Penguin-Random House), as she walks her horse around the arena while we talk on the phone. Brazier, who first started riding when she was five and has worked as a horse trainer, riding instructor and a head wrangler at a dude ranch, reconnected with her sport and those feelings helped her cope with the death of her husband.
“I have a horse in my backyard,” she says with a laugh about Tennessee, the draft horse she owns.
But the love of horses and the pursuit of championships along with the status of the horse owners in the rarefied air of Rancho Santa Fe Equestrian in exclusive Rancho Santa Fe, California can be much more toxic than healthy. This isn’t a jeans and cowboy boots sort of group hanging out in a drafty old barn with straw-covered dirt floors. The equestrian center is all stone and wood beams and the “barn moms” who gather there like it’s a social club can sum the cost of clothes that a new arrival like Heather Parker is wearing just by one quick glance (lucky for Heather she’s wearing an $800 blouse) and how much she’s worth by learning her address.
And Heather is worth a lot. Her husband stopped telling her how much he was making when it topped $150 million. But money doesn’t make Heather secure, it frightens her. She has other reasons to worry as well. She’s unable to stop her marriage from slipping away, her younger daughter Maple was brutally bullied when they lived in Texas and her older daughter Piper hates the move.
Their new home is so large that it’s easy to get lost and Heather also carries the scars of her impoverished upbringing and the abandonment by her father.
She’s determined to make life perfect for her children and she believes that joining the Rancho Santa Fe Equestrian will do just that, creating a bonding experience and also helping her relive and recreate her past. She still feels the pain of losing her barn family when her father left and they no longer had money. She lost friends and overnights and all the things that had made her happy. Now she has the money to give her kids what she missed and is still pining for after all these years.
Oh, if only it were that easy.
Her first day at the barn, Heather meets Pamela who takes her in hand. But Pamela has a hidden agenda. Her bank account is filled with nothing but fumes and she sees the rich Parkers as a way to help keep her in good graces with the barn’s owner so she can remain a member. And like Heather, she has a complicated back story as well.
Add to that, Maple doesn’t like horses. And Piper is jealous because Maple gets a horse the costs seven figures. It’s all so complicated.
And it becomes even more so when a mysterious death occurs in the barn.
Brazier’s opening chapter sums up the atmosphere of the rich barn culture perfectly.
“Oh, I can tell you exactly what happened,” replied the tiny young girl in an expensive riding habit told the police who had been waiting for her to finish her competition at an international horse show when asked if she knew of the murder and what had occurred in the first chapter of the book. “Do you have a mother?” Indeed, this is a wickedly fun murder mystery where the mothers are often more driven for their daughters to succeed than the girls are themselves. “Horses are like mirrors.
They reflect all the good parts and the bad parts of ourselves back at us,” is a quote from the book.
“It’s a mean girl kind of place,” says Brazier who is training in show jumping when she’s not writing mystery novels. “And things go deeper and deeper as time goes on.”
His mother-in-law has moved in with him, his young daughter has been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, his son’s school wants an ADD diagnosis, and his wife’s promotion to Chief Medical Examiner has turned her into a nemesis in some ways as she now expects her husband to no longer go rogue when investigating a potential homicide.
What’s a seasoned medical examiner to do?
For Jack Stapleton, whose irreverent style and sarcastic humor often get him into trouble, the answer is to find a very compelling case to dive into. And fate intervenes when the body of Dr. Sue Passero, his wife’s best friend, lands on Jack’s autopsy table. But even after the autopsy is completed, Jack is still at a loss as to how the seemingly healthy doctor died. Was it a drug overdose? A heart attack? None of the toxicology tests show that’s the answer. So Jack, trying to avoid the tension at home, starts investigating. He talks to Cherine Gardener, a colleague of Passero’s, who tells him that Sue believed there was serial killer roaming Manhattan Memorial Hospital, where the two worked together.
Gardener promises to meet Jack the next day to tell him more. And she does, but not in the way expected. Just as Sue showed up unexpectedly on his autopsy table the day before, now it’s Cherlne who is dead. Did she really die of a drug overdose? What about the witness who heard her scream, the sounds of fight, and a stranger fleeing down the stairs and out the door? Could she have been murdered to keep from revealing more about the death rate at the hospital? Jack’s good buddy, police detective Lou Saldano, suspects it was a homicide and warns Jack to leave the investigation to the police.
But Jack’s not good at following rules. And now the killer wants him dead, too.
Author Robin Cook, a medical doctor whose second bookComa, released in 1977, was a bestseller and made into a blockbuster movie, is considered to have created the medical mystery genre.
In Coma and his other novels, Cook adds another layer to his plots as he has his protagonists grapple with modern medical issues and the role of private equity ownership putting profits over patients in the hospitals they run. Because of that, the killer in Night Shift easily gets away with his crimes and adds to the obstacles Jack encounters when trying to determine not only how the two women died and why but to stop future deaths including his own.
In Night Shift, Cook’s 37th novel, he shows that he hasn’t lost his touch.
Two fraternity brothers taking a drunken joyride after too much Captain Morgan Spiced Rum crash their Jeep in the mountains of New Mexico on a freezing winter night. With no cell service available, they manage to find a cave to spend the night. Unfortunately for them they discover several other things as well. Besides ancient petroglyphs and a body resting in a prehistoric burial site which needs to be returned to ancestral lands, there’s also the remains of two students who went missing 15 years ago in a case code named “Dead Mountain.”
The students were among a group of eight experienced mountaineers who for some reason became so afraid that they fled their tent half naked into a raging blizzard. The bodies of some had been found but now one remains missing.
What happened that night so long ago and where is the missing student? With the case reopened, the services of archaeologist Nora Kelly and FBI Agent Corrie Swanson are called into action in this fourth book (though it works as a standalone) series about Nora Kelly written by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, the New York Times bestselling authors. Solving a cold case from so long ago is never easy, but the investigation is confounded by other issues as well. The parents of the deceased students believe there’s a cover-up going on and are actively protesting and Nora’s brother, Skip, has gotten into a tussle with a bombastic and media-seeking sheriff who is up for re-election, and now Skip is charged with attempted murder.
As Nora and Corrie continue investigating, they realize there are many long-buried secrets tied to the disappearance of the students and outside forces working against them to keep those secrets well hidden and now that the case is reopened, their own lives may be in jeopardy as well.
“As Corrie moved farther and farther down the passage, she began to feel like a character from some dreadful Twilight Zone episode: trapped in an endless tunnel of concrete, destined to walk down it forever and ever. . . .“
“Why are we whispering?” Nora answered with a short laugh. “There’s no one here.”
Corrie snorted. “You’re right. Only the dead…”
Soon after they discover the body of the last missing student.
“It took a moment for Corrie to pull herself together and examine the scene. A man lay on the bed, hands folded across his breast, looking more like a corpse laid out for viewing.”
But the two women were wrong about only the dead being nearby. Isolated in the frigid landscape of the mountains where the tragic deaths had occurred all those years ago, their investigation has led Swanson and Kelly to the truth and directly into the path of a group of men desperate to keep them from revealing it.
“The Vibrant Years” by Sonali Dev, the bestselling Indian American novelist, was the first book chosen by actress Mindy Kaling when she started her publishing imprint, Mindy’s Book Studio with the goal of bringing diversity to readers.
“Sonali Dev’s ‘The Vibrant Years’ captures the spirit of Mindy’s Book Studio,” Kaling said in the press release announcement. “It’s a joyful and empowering read following a group of unconventional women trying to find themselves.”
Dev, who lives in the Chicago area, found inspiration when she first began writing from all the Jane Austen novels she read while growing up. Though centuries and a continent separated the two, Dev liked the way Austen dissected British society with wit and flair.
“You both have a snarky well, I don’t mean snarky but…” I say fumbling with words. I obviously hadn’t had enough coffee that morning.
“I like that description because there’s so much in the world to be snarky about,” says Dev, who is always polite. “If we don’t laugh at the world around us, we’re just going to constantly believe all the lies they tell us, right? So I think snark is very healthy.”
Okay, so we’ll call it snark. I like that.
In “The Vibrant Life,” Dev writes about three generations of women. There’s 65-year-old Bindu Desai who has come into a fortune left to her by a man from her past—a past that she doesn’t want anyone to know about including her daughter-in-law who recently was divorced from her son and her granddaughter, Cullie. The latter is a technology whiz who created an app for coping with anxiety and she now has plenty of it, partly because she’s been betrayed by her boyfriend over the app’s future.
“I think of it as everything I’ve ever wanted to say about being a woman and the essentially feminine journey has been a central theme of all my books,” says Dev whose other books include “Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors” and “Incense and Sensibility,” both of which were bestsellers. “This book about three generations of Indian American women is a culmination of that.”
Working together, the three help Cullie in her attempts to regain control of her anxiety app while working on their own issues. Aly, the daughter-in-law, is struggling for recognition and advancement at the local news station where she works and where opportunities for Indian American women are limited. Bindu has used her legacy in part to purchase a condo in a posh Florida retirement community. But the members of her HOA board don’t like her attractiveness and vivaciousness. It’s like a replay of high school.
Dev says she was inspired in part to switch from her more romance-oriented novels to what she describes as women’s humorous fiction because of all the grandmother jokes she saw in fiction.
“Many older women characters in books are like cardboard, stereotypes,” she says. “They are either vinegary and outspoken or benevolent, wise and a font of affection kind of grandmother. But none of the women I know in their 60s and 70s are like that. I wanted to write characters that are like the older women in my life and the woman who I want to be when I am that age.”
Shelf Life 