DCL Book Chat

Red Cross nurse Nina Borg thinks she’s just doing a friend a simple favor when she agrees to pick up a suitcase from the train station. Little does she know this act will lead days on the run and a fight for her life, as well as the life of, yes, you guessed it, a vulnerable three-year-old she finds drugged inside the suitcase. Of course it’s not a simple choice to turn the boy over to the authorities. Instead, we learn how this bizarre event came to pass and the whys and wherefores of who wants what from whom. It’s a great story of good intensions gone horrible wrong. This Danish mystery keeps the pace whizzing along at the same time that it takes the time to give some real depth to its characters. This is the first book in a planned series.

Laura J.

British journalist McGrath wrote a nonfiction title on the Inuits of the Canadian arctic and now has written the first in a mystery series featuring a tough and resourceful half-Inuit guide and hunter, Edie Kiglatuk. The author’s research of the Inuit is apparent in her characterizations of the villagers, their ancient customs and how they deal with the white people encroaching on their land. She also gives the reader a wonderful, but killingly cold sense of place. Edie is a strong and independent woman, but she has weaknesses. Stubbornly working with the local police sergeant, Derek Palliser, she must overcome her failings to solve the mystery surrounding the shooting death of a man she had been hired to guide into the frozen wilds of Craig Island.

Allison

Ten years ago forensic archeologist Ruth Galloway helped uncover an Iron Age henge at the Saltmarsh on the Norfolk coast of England. Now she has been asked by DCI Harry Nelson to assist when bones are found in the marsh. Are they the bones of a girl who has been missing for ten years or are they another Iron Age find like the henge?

Griffiths deftly describes the harsh and lonely Saltmarsh which Galloway now calls home. She has also created very personable characters and an intriguing plot. This is the first in a series and is followed by The Janus Stone and The House at Sea’s End.

Griffiths won the 2011 Edgar Allen Poe: Mary Higgins Clark award for The Crossing Places.

Allison

Back of Beyond is another thriller from NYT best-selling, Edgar Award Winner C.J. Box. Cody Hoyt is a rogue cop that readers first met in Three Weeks to Say Goodbye, and he left Denver at the end of that story. Now, in Box’s newest thriller Back of Beyond, Hoyt is back home in Montana, where the Lewis and Clark Co. Sheriff’s Dept. has grudgingly hired him.

Hoyt drinks too much, chain smokes, makes snap decisions that don’t serve him well (like shooting the coroner), but he tries. He loves his son and wants to be closer, but due to his alcoholism his ex-wife isn’t real keen on getting drunken calls or visits. His partner, Larry, doesn’t like him, trust him or want to work with him. And to top it off – someone has murdered the only person who had befriended him and supported him – his AA sponsor.

After the murders start stacking up and lead him to a pack trip heading into Yellowstone – the one his son, Justin, is on with his ex’s boyfriend, Hoyt spins out of control and the wild ride into Yellowstone Park begins. Hoyt can barely keep his addictions at bay, let alone ride a horse into the wilderness. Readers will find they, too, are holding on tightly as the story twists, turns and bucks them from one dangerous scene to the next.

Box lets readers know that each person has come on the trip for a reason. There’s a dad trying to connect with his two daughters, one who loves nature and the other who loves cell phones, Hoyt’s son, Justin, and “Mr. Richness” who is hoping to gain the teen’s approval, the Wall Street guys seeking a City Slickers fantasy, the estranged couple, a mysterious single woman and the loner. They just don’t know that there’s a murderer among them.

Box writes of Yellowstone’s beauty and deadly features honestly because he’s been there so many times as a guide. He’s probably done more than 80 trips with a variety of nature enthusiasts, fly fishermen and greenhorns. This is exactly why his all of his books ring true. He writes what he knows. He creates a believable cast of characters that are as real as your next door neighbor. Back of Beyond will keep readers turning pages until the last one when they can finally let go and breathe again.

Lisa

This is the third book in French’s Dublin Murder Squad series and I think it is the best. The others were In the Woods and The Likeness.

I listened to the audio version which was read by Tim Gerard Reynolds. He did a wonderful job with different voices, all with Irish accents speaking French’s dialogue full of Irish black humor and idiom.

The main character in this book is Frank Makey, an undercover cop, who is called back to his boyhood home on Faithful Place when the suitcase of his girlfriend, Rosie Daly is found behind the chimney in a derelict house 22 years after they were supposed to have runaway together. Frank waited for her on that long ago winter’s night, but she never showed. He thought she went to London without him and he soon learns she never left at all.

Allison

I’m a big C.J. Box fan and while I didn’t like this one as much as I liked his last book, Nowhere to Run, this is a good read and strong addition to the Joe Pickett series. Box is great at combining political and social issues with his mystery plots. He also gives his readers a great sense of Wyoming’s wide open and windswept plains and wind plays a key role in the plot of this story. All of his characters are real people with moral strengths as well as failings, which adds to the depth of his stories.

Allison

This is the first novel by freelance journalist Paul Grossman and is a taut thriller set in the gritty yet enticing Berlin of 1932 just as Hilter is coming into power. The main character, Detective Willi Kraus, is an honored war veteran and is known throughout Berlin for capturing a notorious serial killer. He is also a Jew. Now he is investigating the suspicious, possibly drowning, death of a young woman with terribly deformed legs and the case of a missing Bulgarian princess who walked away from her hotel as if in a trance. His investigation leads him to believe that the cases are tied together and point to involvement by the Nazis. Kraus soon finds himself being the pursued and not the pursuer.

This book is full of period atmosphere and dramatic characters both real and imagined. Historical figures making appearances include Marlene Dietrich, Josef Mengele, Alfred Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and of course Adolph Hitler. I listened to the audio version which was read by Christian Contreras and he did a wonderful job performing many different voices with German accents.

Allison

Louise Penny is an amazing writer. Her stories are thought provoking and intricately plotted. They are also filled with a wonderful sense of place and quirky characters in addition to the reappearing police force led by Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec. I also enjoy her knack for dialog and word play. Bury Your Dead, the 6^th in her series, opens with Gamache in Quebec City recovering from physical and psychological injuries he received in a recent case. He is doing research at the Literary and Historical Society Library when a dead body is found in the basement. He reluctantly agrees to help the local police investigate the case. Even as Gamache works on this current case, his mind is drawn to the mistakes he feels he made in his last case. The events of this tragedy unfold slowly throughout the book along with a reexamination of a closed case and an ongoing search for the body of Samuel de Champlain. The interactions of the city’s English citizens and Francophiles add to the plot.

Allison

Doiron’s debut novel was recommended to me as a read alike to C.J. Box and I agree that it is. Doiron’s main character, Mike Bowditch, is a warden with the Maine Warden Service and like Box’s character, Joe Pickett, who is a Wyoming game warden, is headstrong, independent, honest and dedicated to his job.  Doiron is also as passionate about the Maine woods as Box is about his beloved Wyoming. 

  In The Poacher’s Son Mike Bowditch gets a brief phone message from the father he has not heard from or seen in two years. The next day Mike hears that a deputy sheriff has been murdered along with an executive of a timber company and that his father is the prime suspect.  Even though his father is a womanizing drunk and a poacher, Mike believes he is innocent while all those around him think Jack Bowditch is the killer. What follows is a fast paced thriller as Mike tries to find his father before he is tracked down by the police. He risks not only his future as a game warden but his life when he defies his commanding officers in his search for the real killer.

This is a great debut novel and has already been named one of the best crime novels of the year by Booklist.

Allison

Lilly Hawkins is having a really bad day. A news photographer (or “shooter”) for her hometown TV station, her job is already hanging by a thread because of a series of misfortunes (and her lack of people skills) when her boss tells her that she’d better deliver amazing video for her next story or else. And Lilly does take amazing shots of a homicide case but when she arrives a the station, it’s completely blank. Soon Lilly is on the run from criminals and the police who all think she has the video. Fast paced, sometimes wacky Lilly will appeal to Stephanie Plum fans.

Dedra