May Book Club (05/20/2025)

  This Edgar Award finalist from the New York Times–bestselling author is a “suspense mystery of the highest order” (The New Yorker).
 

For London’s Chief Inspector Reg Wexford, it wasn’t an official call. He was just being neighborly when he agreed to talk to Joy Williams about her missing husband, Rodney. Apparently, he went to Ipswich on business and never came home. Wexford has an idea what happened: He most likely ran off with one of his girlfriends.

However, there are a few nagging concerns, like Rodney’s suspicious letter of resignation and his abandoned car. And is it just a fluke that his disappearance coincides with a rash of stabbings—all straight through the heart, all with male victims. Wexford’s detective instincts must take flight in order to bring down a murderer. Or two. Or three. Because, behind the seemingly placid domesticity of his Sussex neighbors, there is a growing web of tangling secrets, double lives, and triple-crosses.

“Rendell, winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s prestigious Edgar Award, is regarded as one of the top mystery writers working today. With An Unkindness of Ravens, she shows, once again, that reputation is well-deserved” (Los Angeles Times). 

 After a crossbow killing at a cheap roadside motel, Ozarks police chief Arly Hanks finds herself investigating her first murder case.

Her marriage over and career gone bust, Arly Hanks flees Manhattan for her hometown: Maggody, Arkansas. In a town this size, nothing much ever happens, so Arly figures she’s safe as the town’s first female chief of police—until the husband of one of the local barmaids escapes from state prison and heads for town. And that’s not all. An EPA official with ties to polluting the local fishing hole has suddenly vanished off the face of the earth.

As if two manhunts aren’t enough to contend with, a body has been discovered at the pay-by-the-hour Flamingo Motel, shot clean through the neck with an arrow. For some reason, Maggody’s residents—all 755 of them—have gone tight-lipped, stonewalling Arly’s investigations, and Arly hasn’t a soul to trust but her half-wit deputy. Now, as Maggody’s finest, she’ll have to show a little muscle and a lot of cunning to curtail the inhospitable mountain malice that’s overtaken her town. And she’ll have to watch her own back every step of the way.

From Agatha Award–winning author Joan Hess, Malice in Maggody is the novel that introduced police chief Arly Hanks—the indomitable sleuth of the popular and long-running Maggody series.
 

 1st of 37 Emma Lathen Best Sellers. 

The Sloan receives a request for an advance against a trust that does not permit it. John Putnam Thatcher gets involved by one heir, Arthur Schneider, President of Schneider Manufacturing, and grandson of the founder who left a trust for his grandchildren upon the death of all of their parents. The last parent is about to die from natural causes. One heir is missing and Thatcher, Trinkam, and Nicholls, all Emma Lathen regulars work to find the missing heir. Soon they learn a murder is involved and it takes Thatcher to unravel the Gordian knot. Emma Lathen at her best. 

 (Adam Dalgliesh Mystery Series #12)

The Dupayne, a small private museum on the edge of London's Hampstead Heath devoted to the interwar years 1919-39, is in turmoil. The trustees--the three children of the museum founder, old Max Dupayne--are bitterly at odds over whether it should be closed. Then one of them is brutally murdered, and what seemed to be no more than a family dispute erupts into horror. For even as Commander Adam Dalgiesh and his team investigate the first killing, a second corpse is discovered. Clearly, someone at the Dupayne is prepared to kill, and kill again.

The case is fraught with danger and complexity from the outset, not least because of the range of possible suspects--and victims. And still more sinister, the murders appear to echo the notorious crimes of th epast featured in one of the museum's most popular galleries, the Murder Room.

For Dalgiesh, P.D. James's formidable detective, the search for the murderer poses an unexpected complication. After years of bachelorhood, he has embarked on a promising new relationship with Emma Lavenham--first introduced in Death in Holy Orders--which is at a critical stage. Yet his struggle to solve the Dupayne murders faces him with a frustrating dilemma: each new development distances him further from commitment to the woman he loves. 

 September's Book Club selection is Madam, Will You Talk? by Mary Stewart. 

Dubbed the Queen of Romantic Mystery, Mary Stewart's first novel was published in 1955. She published many novels featuring strong women protagonists and international settings. Buy link for Madam Will You Talk? https://www.amazon.com/Madam-Will-Talk-Mary-Stewart-ebook/dp/B00GW4P044/ 

It sounds idyllic: a leisurely drive through the sun-drenched landscape of Provence. But Charity's dream holiday turns into a nightmare when she becomes embroiled in a sinister plot to kidnap a young boy. She soon finds herself in a deadly pursuit and must uncover who to trust . . . and who to fall for.

Whenever I look back now on the strange and terrifying events of that holiday in Southern France, I remember the minutes I spent gazing at the golden arches of the Roman aqueduct over the Gardon... the last brief lull before the thunder. 

 Agatha Christie’s debut novel was the first to feature Hercule Poirot, her famously eccentric Belgian detective.

A refugee of the Great War, Poirot is settling in England near Styles Court, the country estate of his wealthy benefactress, the elderly Emily Inglethorp. When Emily is poisoned and the authorities are baffled, Poirot puts his prodigious sleuthing skills to work.

Suspects are plentiful, including the victim’s much younger husband, her resentful stepsons, her longtime hired companion, a young family friend working as a nurse, and a London specialist on poisons who just happens to be visiting the nearby village. All of them have secrets they are desperate to keep, but none can outwit Poirot as he navigates the ingenious red herrings and plot twists that earned Agatha Christie her well-deserved reputation as the queen of mystery. 

The Circular Staircase, Mary Roberts Rinehart's classic tale of murder and intrigue in a pre-World War I mansion, is evocative yet strangely modern, a sort of CSI: Downton Abbey, with butlers and maids sprinkled in amongst the bodies and evidence.

With elements of romance, white collar crime, class, race, poverty, and privilege, it's a story told with such a deft hand that it will keep you guessing right to the end, all the while keeping you entertained with the trappings of the gilded age and a hint of the supernatural.

 The stark naked body was lying in the tub. Not unusual for a proper bath, but highly irregular for murder -- especially with a pair of gold pince-nez deliberately perched before the sightless eyes. What's more, the face appeared to have been shaved after death. The police assumed that the victim was a prominent financier, but Lord Peter Wimsey, who dabbled in mystery detection as a hobby, knew better. In this, his first murder case, Lord Peter untangles the ghastly mystery of the corpse in the bath. 

 Mrs. Virgil (Emily) Pollifax of New Brunswick, New Jersey, was a widow with grown, married children. She was tired of attending her Garden Club meetings. She wanted to do something good for her country. So, naturally, she became a CIA agent.
She takes on a “job” in Mexico City. The assignment doesn’t sound dangerous at first, but then, as often happens, something goes wrong. Now our dear Mrs. Pollifax finds herself embroiled in quite a hot Cold War—and her country’s enemies find themselves entangled with one unbelievably feisty lady. 

Sea Jade

 It was fitting that Miranda Heath’s first glimpse of the forbidding home at Bascomb’s Point was in the fury of a thunderstorm. Despite her late father’s caution to steer clear of his friend Obadiah Bascomb’s New England mansion, Miranda, destitute as she was, had no choice but to accept the old captain’s charitable request. Besides, her father and Obadiah’s adventurous past was as much a part of her heritage as their legendary ship, the Sea Jade. But it’s beyond Miranda’s imaginings when she finds herself swept up in an impetuous marriage with a friend of the Bascomb family, a virtual stranger to her.
 

More victim than bride, and at the mercy of her imposing new mother-in-law as well as Obadiah’s mysterious wife and a threatening housekeeper, Miranda fears the invitation to the isolated house was more a matter of revenge than rescue. She has no way of knowing that buried in her own past is the key to a tragic mystery that’s been left to her to solve—if she’s to make it out of Bascomb’s Point alive.
 

The recipient of the Agatha Award for Lifetime Achievement, Phyllis A. Whitney is “a superb and gifted story teller” (Mary Higgins Clark). 

The Red Carnelian

 Linell Wynn, copywriter for Chicago department store Cunningham’s, knows how to put a clever spin on everything. But she’s at a loss for words when, after closing time, she finds a corpse in a window display. There he is, as cold and lifeless as a mannequin, his skull pulverized with a golf club: valued store manager Michael “Monty” Montgomery. And while red might be the color for the new spring season, Linell never expected to see quite so much of it . . .
 

Linell had a history with the too-charming-to-be-believed victim—and being intimately acquainted with his cruel side has made her a suspect in his murder. But as everyone at Cunningham’s knows, finding someone who didn’t want Monty dead would be tough. When a second murder throws the store detective off track, Linell is plunged into the investigation. Now, she’s working after hours to find a killer, and she has more to lose than her job.
 

The recipient of an Agatha Award for Lifetime Achievement, “Phyllis Whitney is, and always will be, the Grand Master of her craft” (Barbara Michaels). 

 Older women often feel invisible, but sometimes that’s their secret weapon. They’ve spent their lives as the deadliest assassins in a clandestine international organization, but now that they’re sixty years old, four women friends can’t just retire—it’s kill or be killed in this action-packed thriller by New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award–nominated author Deanna Raybourn.

Billie, Mary Alice, Helen, and Natalie have worked for the Museum, an elite network of assassins, for forty years. Now their talents are considered old-school and no one appreciates what they have to offer in an age that relies more on technology than people skills.  

When the foursome is sent on an all-expenses paid vacation to mark their retirement, they are targeted by one of their own. Only the Board, the top-level members of the Museum, can order the termination of field agents, and the women realize they’ve been marked for death. 

Now to get out alive they have to turn against their own organization, relying on experience and each other to get the job done, knowing that working together is the secret to their survival. They’re about to teach the Board what it really means to be a woman—and a killer—of a certain age. 

A retired CIA operative in small-town Maine tackles the ghosts of her past in this fresh take on the spy thriller from New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen.

Former spy Maggie Bird came to the seaside village of Purity,  Maine, eager to put the past behind her after a mission went tragically  wrong. These days, she’s living quietly on her chicken farm, still wary  of blowback from the events that forced her early retirement.

But  when a body turns up in Maggie’s driveway, she knows it’s a message  from former foes who haven’t forgotten her. Maggie turns to her local  circle of old friends―all retirees from the CIA―to help uncover the  truth about who is trying to kill her, and why. This “Martini Club” of  former spies may be retired, but they still have a few useful skills  that they’re eager to use again, if only to spice up their rather sedate  new lives.

Complicating their efforts is Purity’s  acting police chief, Jo Thibodeau. More accustomed to dealing with rowdy  tourists than homicide, Jo is puzzled by Maggie’s reluctance to share  information―and by her odd circle of friends, who seem to be a step  ahead of her at every turn.

As Jo’s investigation  collides with the Martini Club’s maneuvers, Maggie’s hunt for answers  will force her to revisit a clandestine career that spanned the globe,  from Bangkok to Istanbul, from London to Malta. The ghosts of her past  have returned, but with the help of her friends―and the reluctant Jo  Thibodeau―Maggie might just be able to save the life she’s built.