All Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer-Fleming

Somehow, Revenend Clare Fergusson and Russ Van Alstyne have come to mean more to one another than just their weekly luncheon date.  Gossip surrounds their friendship, but neither will give it up. A tragic and brutal killing takes place in Police Cheif Van Alstyne' kitchen, placing him as one of the suspects.  As both he and Claire try to solve the murder of his wife, they are brought even closer together with a disturbing conclusion to the murder and to their relationship.

The Memory Collector by Meg Gardiner



China Lake by Meg Gardiner



The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection by Alexander Smith McCall



Sarah's Key (2007) by Tatiana de Rosnay



The Liar's Lullaby (2010) by Meg Gardiner



A darker domain (2008) by Val McDermid



The Sculptress (1995) by Minette Walters

Walters follows her dark debut, The Ice House (1992), with the even more striking tale of enormous, unloved Olive Martin, serving a life sentence after confessing to killing and dismembering her mother and sister. Rosalind Leigh, dispatched to interview Olive in prison preparatory to writing a book about the case, finds her unnervingly unrepentant, but finds as well suspicious discrepancies between her confession and the evidence of the crime scene and other witnesses. More and more convinced of Olive's innocence, Roz joins forces with Hal Hawksley--the retired arresting officer whose restaurant has come in for some mysteriously hard times--to dig up whomever Olive's been covering up for. The search will bring Roz up against some singularly nasty neighbors, a brace of spineless lovers, a supremely dysfunctional family--and a denouement whose horrors are touched with unexpected compassion. Walters brings a shivery mastery to the old-fashioned British whodunit, with plotting as twisted as the characters' secrets.

Started Early, Took my Dog (2010) by Kate Atkinson

As the novel opens, Jackson is searching not only for the "lost pastoral England that was lodged in his head and his heart", but for the "fake wife" who absconded with his fortune and the real parents of his current client, adoptee Hope McMaster, who appears to have sprung from nowhere. This quest leads him on a pleasurable travelogue around Yorkshire's ruined abbeys and genteel tea shops, and thence to Leeds. There the lonely, retired police officer Tracy Waterhouse encounters a screaming child being dragged around a shopping centre by a "prostitute, druggie, thief, all round pikey" named Kelly Cross and in a moment of highly unbelievable madness buys the girl for ready cash.

As Tracy goes on the run with little Courtney, Jackson's investigations – and other investigations he doesn't know about yet – disturb a long-buried crime from the 1970s: a murdered prostitute, a missing child, a police cover-up. Also in Jackson and Tracy's orbit is ageing actress Tilly, who with her slipping wig and handbag full of knives and forks is beginning to lose herself to dementia and, worst of all, to lose language ("all her words turning into mush . . ."). The book's scheme folds past and present together with Atkinson's customary flair, while in Tilly's mind the two coalesce, her memories running into the present like ink. Senility is a remembering as well as a forgetting – a career's worth of lines, fragments of poetry and prose, rising unbidden in her brain.

Tilly is not the only one feeling her age: this is a book about the bruising passage of time, and whether we grow hardened to the world or become raw with rubbing against it. "It's your age," says Jackson's most significant ex, Julia, explaining his new weakness for sublime landscapes and Emily Dickinson poetry; he in turn finds her a paler version of herself now she's mellowed by time and motherhood. Tracy, meanwhile, "had retired with a shell so thick that there was hardly any room left inside". The past is a "lost continent" for everyone, the whole book a wondering comparison of the good – or bad – old days with the strange new present ("Men weren't what they used to be. If they ever had been"). Characters ask themselves when men stopped wearing hats, when women started behaving like men. Atkinson's portrait of 1970s Leeds, in the shadow of the Ripper, carries echoes of David Peace's Red Riding trilogy – "the past was a dark place, a man's world" – but of course the sexism and corruption live on into the present day.

It's not lost on Tracy that in her desire to mother Courtney – to make up for all the others by saving one lost girl, "one fallen fledgling popped back into the nest" – she is dragging the child through danger and confusion. Courtney is the mystery at the heart of the book, an unreadable presence in a tattered fairy outfit, unavoidably reminiscent of this era's most famous lost girl, Madeleine McCann. But Tracy's awkward transformation into would-be parent is wryly moving, and Atkinson swerves the obvious sentimentality by channelling it all into Tilly, who has her own pity-soaked memories of maternal heartbreak. Tracy's new role is also mirrored by Jackson's adoption of a particularly winning dog, also rescued from an abusive supposed-carer (the difference between mistreating a child and a dog in public being that passers-by are much more willing to intervene on the dog's behalf).

So much of the narrative is retrospective or interior that there's not much urgency to unfolding events, however highly coloured. And there's a rhetorical whimsy reminiscent of some of Atkinson's earlier books, a devil-may-care gesturing at the novel's own fictionality, which can leave the characters threatening to float free of our trust in them. But we follow their digressive, meandering voices avidly as they circle around their own particular loves and losses, all knitted together with Atkinson's extraordinary combination of wit, plain-speaking, tenderness and control. She's an old hand at paradox now: "All roads lead home," says Julia. "All roads lead away from home," Jackson replies.

The Narrows (2004) by Michael Connelly

This instalment of the Harry Bosch series kind of threw me off on my Connelly reading. It doesn't feature journalist Jack McAvoy, but it focuses on the case he covered in Connelly's novel, The Poet. The Narrows takes place years after LAPD claimed the Poet had been shot and killed. But FBI Agent Rachel Walling knows that he's still out there. She receives the call that he has resurfaced. Coincidentally, a case investigated by Bosch as a faked suicide brings the two together to finally bring the Poet to justice. I like the books that reference cases from other books, and bring characters together. It's like finding old friends in a new situation (the general reason people like to read books in series, I suppose). The Narrows was more suspenseful than most in this series, and I did find myself glued to it late in the night. It did include the typical Bosch frustrations of jumping to the wrong conclusions and trusting and mistrusting the wrong people, but in the end all the ends ties up tightly and I was excited to move on to the next mystery.  (Review  thanks to Anne for Goodreads)

Twist of Fate (2007 ) by Jayne Anne Krentz

Cloistered as a faculty member at a small college, beautiful Hannah Jessett can almost forget her family heritage. Few know she's the niece of Elizabeth Nord, the legendary anthropologist who stunned the world with her revolutionary work--until her aunt dies, leaving Hannah in sole possession of her priceless unpublished journals. But Hannah has other matters to contend with. Her brother's company is about to be destroyed by Gideon Cage, a wealthy entrepreneur with a notorious reputation in the boardroom... and the bedroom. When she confronts Gideon, all she sees is a powerful man with a fast smile and soft eyes. Yet before she can catch her breath and really understand this puzzle of a man, her whole world is suddenly threatened: her brother, her aunt's legacy, her heart--and her life! (Google review)

Lost Light (2003 ) by Michael Connelly

Editorial Review - Reed Business Information (c) 2003

Adult/High School-After more than 25 years with the L.A. Police Department, recently retired Harry Bosch decides to finish the murder investigation of Angella Benton, a case he had been quickly pulled off more than four years earlier. Gaining additional background information from a former colleague, now a quadriplegic as a result of having been shot during the investigation, Harry begins contacting any and all of the people who could have facts pertaining to the crime. He believes that the murder is tied to a film scene and $2 million in cash, and that the entire caper was ingeniously set up well in advance. With dogged determination, he risks his life more than once to prove his theory correct. Connelly expertly weaves the many complex story parts together, resulting in an action-packed ending. As in real life, all aspects of the case must be researched thoroughly, and the bulk of the novel involves the time-consuming, labor-intensive effort that goes into finding answers. Several subplots-including ones involving jazz, Harry's ex-wife, and another murder-help to round out characters, inject other interests, and relieve the intensity of solving the murder. Young adults who read true crime and forensics, or who are interested in police procedures, will surely pick this one up.-Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA 

Fortress America (1999) by Edward J Blakely & Mary Gail Snyder

Gated communities are a new "hot button" in many North American cities. From Boston to Los Angeles and from Miami to Toronto citizens are taking sides in the debate over whether any neighborhood should be walled and gated, preventing intrusion or inspection by outsiders. This debate has intensified since the hard cover edition of this book was published in 1997. Since then the number of gated communities has risen dramatically. In fact, new homes in over 40 percent of planned developments are gated n the West, the South, and southeastern parts of the United States.Opposition to this phenomenon is growing too. In the small and relatively homogenous town of Worcester, Massachusetts, a band of college students from Brown University and the University of Chicago picketed the Wexford Village in November of 1998 waving placards that read "Gates Divide." These students are symbolic of a much larger wave of citizens asking questions about the need for and the social values of gates that divide one portion of a community from another.

Kill Switch by Neal Baer and Johnathan Green (2012)

• Kirkus' Review

KILL SWITCH 

The authors are qualified to write thrillers, but this milquetoast “homage” to Silence of the Lambs and other more venerable entertainments doesn’t even hold up as an airplane book. Baer and Greene’s careers as former producers of series like Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and A Gifted Man should give readers a sense of what they’re getting into. After a very slight prologue in which a girl is abducted in 1989, the novel opens on forensic psychiatrist Claire Waters’ first day working among the inmates of Riker’s Island. She’s been invited into this rare research fellowship by Dr. Paul Curtin, a severe taskmaster with his own agenda. “I want to fix them, or at least understand them,” Claire philosophizes about her chosen path. In the most simplistic psycho-speak, Claire believes that childhood is the key to understanding all deviants, not least her first patient Todd Quimby, due for parole soon. Quimby is a hard case with a history of drug and sexual abuse hurtling toward even worse crimes who fixates on his new doctor. Meanwhile, a Manhattan homicide detective named Nick Lawler is recovering from the death of his wife, looking after two young children, and is suddenly called back to homicide after a long exile in a dead-end assignment. Lawler runs across Claire while investigating the murders of young blonde women, with all evidence pointing towards Quimby. Claire is even more horrified when the next victim has been altered to look more like her. The investigative narrative is workmanlike but tolerable, much like the rerun of a TV serial. It’s toward the end, as Claire confronts the killer who abducted her childhood friend and the primary plot becomes a Fugitive-style medical mystery, that this novel starts to lose its edge.

The Harry Bosch Novels Volume One by Michael Connelly (2008)

The Black Echo: A body found in a tunnel off Mulholland Drive looks like a routine drugs overdose case, but one new puncture wound amidst the scars of old tracks leaves LAPD detective Harry Bosch unconvinced. To make matters worse, Bosch recognises the victim: Billy Meadows was a fellow 'tunnel rat' in Vietnam. Bosch believes he let down Billy once before, so now he is determined to bring the killer to justice.

The Black Ice: When the body of a missing LAPD narcotics officer is found, rumours soon emerge that he had been selling a new drug called Black Ice from Mexico. The LAPD are quick to declare the death as a suicide, but Bosch is not so sure. Fighting an attraction to the cop's widow, Bosch starts his own maverick investigation, which soon leads him over the borders, and into a dangerous world of shifting identities and deadly corruption.

The Concrete Blonde: When Bosch shot and killed Norman Church, he was convinced it marked the end of the search for one of the city's most bizarre serial killers. But four years later, Church's widow is taking Bosch to court, accusing him of killing the wrong man. To make matters worse, Bosch has just received a note, eerily reminiscent of the ones the killer used to taunt him with. As he battles to clear his name in court, Bosch faces a desperate race against time to find the killer...