Tag: mystery

The Hunter’s Daughter: Is She As Evil As Her Father?

“And I didn’t ask any questions,” the narrator of Nicola Solvinic’s debut mystery-thriller The Hunter’s Daughter (Berkley ), says in her first-person account of what it’s like having been raised by a serial killer. “I truly didn’t want to know the answers. When the rifle went off, did I kill my dad? Or Agent Parkes? Did I miss them both, and did they fight it out? Did Dad get arrested, or did he kill Agent Parkes and run.”

These obviously are not the typical questions most children have regarding interactions with their fathers. But police officer Anna Koray is the daughter of a notorious serial killer, a fact she keeps hidden with the use of a different name, a move far from home, and estrangement from her mother who did little to protect her.  

It works for a while until a traumatic incident triggers long-repressed memories and Anna’s past, sealed off by her therapist in a controversial and experimental hypnosis treatment, begins to emerge. Her father, known as the Forest Strangler, murdered more than a dozen women, their bodies decorated and left as sacrifices to the god of the forest. But he also taught Anna to love the woods, to be one with the forest and nature. The dark dense woods with rustling trees that line the perimeter of her yard call out to her, beckoning her forward. In many ways, it’s where she feels most at home—the feel of dirt between her toes, the smell of the rotting leaves. But as much as it entices her, that forest also harbors secrets and possibly malignant forces that may harm or even destroy her.

There are many questions confronting Anna as she deals with her surfacing memories. Can she trust her lover who may be hiding his own addictions? Is her father, who is supposedly dead, really alive? And is Anna herself a killer—someone who has her father’s propensity as well as his genetics to do evil? She has killed, supposedly in self-defense. But is that true? Or does she enjoy killing just as he did? And will she do it again?

When her psychiatrist, the woman who hypnotized her into forgetting her past, is found murdered, Anna has to wonder if she played a part in the death. After all, she had broken into her office to steal her file folder before the police, who are closing in, can locate it and discover her true identity. Did she do more than take the file? Did she destroy the woman who can reveal her past?

Desperate to keep people from realizing that she is the daughter of the Forest Strangler, Anna also has to try to determine that even though she became a police officer to help others, she may be as evil as her dad.

A tense psychological thriller, terse plotting, and Anna’s own uncertainty about who she is, what acts she’s committed, and whether she can trust her own thoughts, feelings, and actions, keeps this book a page-turner.

About the Author

Nicola Solvinic has a master’s degree in criminology and has worked in and around criminal justice for more than a decade at local, state, and federal levels. She lives in the Midwest with her husband and cats, where she is surrounded by a secret garden full of beehives.

This review originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books.

How to Solve Your Own Murder

“Well-written with enough twists and turns to keep a reader turning the pages, Perrin weaves a taut and unusual tale.”

Frances Adams is a teenager in 1965 when she and two friends are visiting an English country fair on a lovely day. But the day suddenly turns dark when Madame Peony Lane, a fortune teller in a turban who sits behind a gaudy beaded curtain, makes a dire prediction, one that will haunt Frances her entire life.

“Your future contains dry bones,” Peony forecasts in a kitschy Hollywood way. “Your slow demise begins right when you hold the queen in the palm of one hand. Beware the bird for it will betray you. And from that, there’s no coming back. But daughters are the key to justice, find the right one and keep her close. All signs point toward your murder.”

Her two friends Emily and Rose don’t take it seriously, seeing it as so flimsy and fake so they tease her about it. But Frances is uneasy and becomes moreso with each word that Peony Lane utters.

After leaving the fortune teller’s tent, Frances gasps when Emily ties her hair up a ribbon and then fastens a bird necklace around her neck.

“A bird,” Frances says, her eyes narrowing. “The fortune teller said the bird will betray you.”

Emily dashes away and returns with two more silver bird necklaces, one for Rose and one for Frances.

“That way you’ll never know which bird betrayed you. You could even betray yourself,” she tells her friends with a laugh.

But life takes a strange turn. Within a year, they aren’t friends any longer and one of them has disappeared. In the open file kept by the police is a small plastic bag containing a silver chain with a tiny bird clinging to it.

The missing woman isn’t Frances, who embarks upon a strange and lifelong task of trying to solve a murder that hasn’t been committed yet. Sixty years later from when she first receives the warning, Frances is found murdered.

When Annie Adams arrives at her Great Aunt Frances’ estate in the country village of Castle Knoll she becomes determined to find her great aunt’s killer, a task that includes delving into voluminous amount of files and uncovering secrets in her search to find out what happened.

But there is a problem. It won’t be easy to solve the murder, even in as small a village as Castle Knoll. Frances so studiously peered into so many people’s lives in an attempt to discover her killer that almost everyone in the village has a reason for wanting her dead.

“I think of Great Aunt Frances’s murder board, all its crisscrosses of colored string and the different photos there. She suspected the whole town of having a reason to kill her, and seemed completely oblivious to the fact that her suspicious and  incessant digging probably gave them those reasons to begin with,” writes Annie who  tells the present-day story, which is interspersed with The Castle Knoll  Files that Frances started writing shortly after her encounter with the fortune teller.

And now as Annie tries to unravel the mystery, she gives all those potential murderers a reason to commit another one.

How to Solve Your Own Murder (Dutton 2024) is the first adult novel of Kristen Perrin who is originally from Seattle and worked as a bookseller before moving to England where she earned her master’s degree and PhD. How to Solve You Own Murder has garnered great buzz being chosen as A Jimmy Fallon’s Book Club Finalist for 2024, A GMA Buzz Pick!, One of Amazon’s Top 10 Best Books of April, The Top LibraryReads pick for March 2024, and A Publishers Marketplace 2024 BuzzBook.

Well-written with enough twists and turns to keep a reader turning the pages, Perrin weaves a taut and unusual tale.

This book was originally reviewed in the New York Journal of Books.

Poisoned Passover: Book 2 Torah Mystery Series

he Book Stall (811 Elm Street in Winnetka) is delighted to host mystery author Susan Van Dusen on Wednesday, April 17 at 6:30 pm for an in-store discussion featuring her new book, Poisoned Passover, the second book in the Torah Mystery Series. With no experience except watching TV detective shows, Julia Donnelly, the wife of the mayor, and her Torah group leader, Rabbi Avrum Fine, have been pressed into service to solve the town’s mysteries. 

This event is free with registration. To register, please visit their website or CLICK HERE.

More About the Book: Who’s poisoning Passover guests in Crestfall, Illinois? When Julia Donnelly brings chopped liver to her Torah group friend Devorah’s seder, she has no idea it will result in mass poisoning, murder, and a connection to past arson. Julia, wife of Crestfall’s mayor, and Rabbi Fine, Torah study group leader, become involved in a mystery surrounding Sophie’s Kosher Deli. Someone is trying to put her out of business. Is it Lester Pintner, a developer who wants to put up a building, her good-for-nothing son Milton who wants to transform the store into a pool parlor, Sweet Cheeks, a mysterious woman who has attached herself to Milton, or perhaps Nate, another deli owner who wants to buy Sophie’s store. 

Meanwhile, Julia must also deal with challenges on the home front when her son Sammy refuses to go to school. She has a full plate! How does she cope with everything? By teaming up with the Rabbi, using powers of observation, and logic from Jewish tradition to solve a confusing puzzle of danger and greed!

More About the Author: Susan Van Dusen is an international award-winning writer of books, editorials, magazine and newspaper articles. She was the Communications Director of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs and Associate Director of Public Affairs at the University of Illinois. Susan created “The Read In” project at the University of Illinois in Chicago and “Coming Together in Skokie and Niles Township,” acknowledging the diversity of those communities. In Israel and in Chicago’s Uptown area, while teaching English to non-English speakers, she wrote songs and plays to stimulate interest in language. Susan was the editor of a neighborhood weekly newspaper, then became the award-winning editorial director of WBBM-AM Newsradio as well as writing for newspapers and magazines. While studying with a Torah group for ten years, she realized it was the perfect vehicle for a series of books, with the first book in the series being The Missing Hand. Currently she is retired, a normal human being, a mayor’s wife, a mother and grandmother, and participant in several civic and writing groups.  

Reese’s Book Club Pick: “First Lie Wins”

“This is Ashley Elston’s debut adult novel and it’s a real page turner, so good you hate to turn the last page.”

“My mind splits, showing two different paths; This is definitely a crossroads moment,” recalls Lucca Marino alias Wendy Wallace alias Mia Blanchard and a whole long list of other names. “Taking the job Matt offers moved me deeper into the world but comes with the support that would make the feel of these cuffs biting into my wrist a distant memory. The other path requires me to go straight. To get out before I’m in any real trouble because as Saturday night proved, it will only be a matter of time before something else goes wrong.”

And, of course it does, in this complicated and entrancing novel, “First Lie Wins” (Pamela Dorman Books 2024).

Lucca, known by the people in her life as Evie Porter when we meet her, chooses the darker path. She’s agreed to work with Matt and his boss, Mr. Smith. The latter is just a mechanically altered voice over the phone, a devious man who likes to play his operatives against each other, but the pay is very good, and Evie is an expert at her work. Her job? To take on another identity and infiltrate the mark’s life, securing the necessary information that Mr. Smith wants. Sometimes it’s so he can blackmail them, sometimes to take over their business, or steal some vital data.

As Evie, she starts a romance with Ryan, her latest victim. She isn’t sure what Mr. Smith wants from him; her instructions are parceled out over time. But she soon learns that Ryan, who invites her to live with him and meet his family and friends, is more than just a successful small town businessman who has taken over the family business. He’s somewhat shady, just as she is, helping move stolen goods.

But Evie has a heart, as she has proven in her other jobs, and now, she’s falling for Ryan and the nice life he has to offer. Unfortunately, no one easily leaves Mr. Smith’s business. It’s not exactly the kind of job you retire from as she finds out when several other operatives meet untimely deaths.

Whom do you trust? Evie is discovering that she doesn’t really know. Even Ryan may be more than a unwitting dupe, he may be in the plot to destroy her that Mr. Smith has put in place, framing her for a murder she didn’t commit.

First Lie Wins is the ultimate cat-and-mouse caper, leaving you guessing until all the loose ends are neatly tied up. This is Ashley Elston’s debut adult novel and it’s a real page turner, so good you hate to turn the last page.

This article originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books.

Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody

Theodora “Teddy” Angstrom, a high school teacher dealing with the mysterious vanishing of her sister, Angie, ten years ago, is dealt another blow when her father drives his car off of a bridge on the anniversary of her disappearance.

She is, at this point, the last in a long line of the socially elite Angstrom family, only now irreparably tarnished by her father’s affair and desertion of his family to marry Teddy’s mother, a loss of money, and cratering social status.

This is how dire it is.

“I discover in my digging that Dad gave up around Christmas,” says Teddy in Rabbit Hole by Kate Brody (Soho Crime). “The bills have been past due for months. The cable company gives me a hard time clearing the balance because my name is not on the account. Mom’s name is not even on the account. They finally let up when I explain that the account holder can’t come to the phone because he launched himself to the bottom of a river. I use my own savings to take care of the remainder.”

. “The bills have been past due for months. The cable company gives me a hard time clearing the balance because my name is not on the account. Mom’s name is not even on the account. They finally let up when I explain that the account holder can’t come to the phone because he launched himself to the bottom of a river. I use my own savings to take care of the remainder.”

Teddy is left to take care of her mother, a spendthrift who refuses to deal with the fact they have no money except for her teacher’s salary and to unwind exactly what her father was up to before he died.

Besides that, she’s embarked on a love affair with the family’s former gardener, has to teach her students while she’s becoming emotionally undone, and finds herself being drawn into the Reddit discussions about what happened to her sister. She is, indeed, descending into a rabbit hole, one that has her chasing phantoms, making friends with people who are just as unstable as she is, and attempting to determine if her father was a bad guy or just someone so overcome with grief he couldn’t go on.

As if that isn’t enough to manage, Teddy’s dog, the one the family got as a puppy before Angie suddenly disappeared one night, is pitifully dying. It’s enough to drive anyone into a downward spiral, and that’s where Teddy finds herself as she learns that she can’t trust anyone to tell her the truth. And so, it’s left for Teddy to be strong enough to determine what happened to both her father and sister—and to live with the truth.

  • Amazon Editors’ Pick
  • Indie Next Pick
  • Aardvark Book Club Selection
  • Powell’s Pick

About the author:

Kate Brody lives in Los Angeles, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Lit Hub, CrimeReads, Electric Lit, The Rumpus, and The Literary Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA from NYU. Rabbit Hole is her debut.

This review initially appeared in the New York Journal of Books.

The Busy Body by Kemper Donovan

“I tell other people’s stories for a living.

“You can call me a ghostwriter, though usually I just say I ‘freelance’ which is vague and boring enough to put an end to strangers’ polite inquiries . . . That’s a lie . . . About my supposed friends. I have lots of acquaintances, colleagues, and associates—an assortment of people pepper my existence so that if you saw me from the outside you think my life was perfectly full. There are times it seems full even to me. But the truth is I don’t have any friends.”

Thus opens Kemper Donovan’s The Busy Body where we meet the ghostwriter who has just received the most plum assignment of her career, collaborating with Dorothy Gibson, who just lost the presidential election and has retreated to her lovely abode outside a small town in Maine. Readers might be forgiven for thinking of Hilary Clinton when meeting Dorothy and that’s because Donovan based her character on the former first lady. But she’s also an amalgam of other female politicians including Sarah Palin, Amy Klobuchar, and Susan Collins—according to the author.

Told in first person, the ghostwriter alludes to a distant tragedy in her past as the reason for her walling herself off from emotional entanglements though we never learn the entire story—possibly Kemper is saving that for future books as it appears our protagonist will become involved in future mysteries.

The ghostwriting project quickly gets put aside when a murder occurs at the Crystal Palace, a three-story glass maze of cavernous spaces and no stairs that serves as both an event center and hotel overlooking the Crystal River next door to Dorothy’s estate. The first murder victim is a not-so-successful actress, Vivian Davis who has improved her financial and social status in the world by marrying Walter, her plastic surgeon with cold blue eyes, and a hot young assistant with whom he is having an affair. Walter has rented the Crystal Palace and invited one of his medical school classmates, a successful West Coast entrepreneur, to get him to invest in a revolutionary new plastic surgery product he’s invented. The week doesn’t begin well and only gets worse when Vivian is found dead, after apparently downing too many sleeping pills and drowning in her bathtub.

Shortly before her death, Dorothy and Vivian had a chance meeting, and the obligatory celebrity photo was taken by Vivian of the two of them. The shot goes viral after a toxicology report showed there were no drugs in her system. Vivian’s death is now labeled as a homicide and Dorothy, with her ghostwriter in tow, decides to do some sleuthing much to the ire of the local police.

Kemper uses his acerbic sense of humor coupled with a fast-moving plot and an interesting assortment of characters, each with a reason to kill, to make The Busy Body, with its twists and turns, a witty and fun whodunit.

This review originally appeared in the New York Journal of Books.

We Lie Here: A Return Home Leads to Toxic Family Secrets

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.

A Sinister Revenge: A Victorian Mystery by Deanna Raybourn

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.”

This article originally appeared in the Northwest Indiana Times.

A mysterious inheritance leads to danger in Kate White’s latest book: “Between Two Strangers”

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

This article previously appeared in the Northwest Indiana Times.

Book: “What Never Happened” by Award Winning Mystery Writer Rachel Howzell Hall

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.

Follow Rachel Howzell Hall at rachelhowzell.com

This book review originally appeared in the Northwest Indiana Times.