“After the Armistice Ball,” by Catriona McPherson (Carroll & Graf, 303 pages, $25)
It’s 1922, and Dandy (short for Dandelion) Gilver is at loose ends now that her country-squire husband, Hugh, is back from the Great War and her two boys are away at school.
A member of the privileged class living in Perthshire, Scotland, in somewhat reduced circumstances thanks to the war, she’s never had any money that was actually her own. So Dandy is thrilled when her friend Daisy Esslemont offers her a tidy sum to find out what happened to the Duffy diamonds, evidently stolen from the Esslemont country home after the Armistice Ball, where Lena Duffy had paraded them for all to see. Now Lena expects the Esslemonts to make good her loss.
But what starts out as a harmless diversion turns all too serious when boisterous young Cara Duffy perishes in a fire at a seaside cottage where she, her icy sister, Clemence, and her overbearing mother, Lena, have been on holiday.
Dandy is assisted in her inquiries by Alec Osborne, Cara’s fiancé, a young man with whom, she says, she might have fallen in love – had she been the type to fall in love. Together they unravel a plot so complicated it’s not completely pieced together until the final paragraph.
It’s a perceptive look at a society beginning to unravel in the aftermath of war, and Dandy, gamely resigned to a loveless marriage to a man with whom she has nothing in common except their largely absent children, is a heroine we’d like to see more of.
“The Trudeau Vector,” by Juris Jurjevics (Viking, 402 pages, $24.95)
The Trudeau Research Center is a Canadian outpost inside the Arctic Circle where scientists are dying bizarre deaths from an unknown agent. Jessie Hanley, a California epidemiologist who works in unconventional ways and has more than her share of personal eccentricities, is called to investigate on the strength of some spectacular intuitive leaps she’s made studying baffling phenomena.
The science behind the story is exquisite, and the descriptions of the eerie polar landscape during the long winter night provide a suitably chill and menacing backdrop. And it’s a pleasant bonus to discover that within this atmospheric thriller is a well-plotted detective story, for it turns out that a human force is responsible for unleashing the biological agent.
“The Grail Conspiracy,” by Lynn Sholes and Joe Moore (Midnight Ink, 343 pages, $14.95)
When we first picked up this book we figured we’d found another “Da Vinci Code” clone. But whereas the search for and discovery of what actually constituted the Holy Grail occupied the whole of Dan Brown’s mega-best seller, the grail in this fast-moving mystery is an actual cup and is handed over to our heroine, cable news reporter Cotton Stone, within the first few pages. In fact, though this book is labeled a “Cotton Stone Mystery,” it’s really more of a thriller with the authors doing very little to conceal any surprises.
We know Cotton is descended from a fallen angel, we know the cup is real, and we know that the bad guys want to use the blood of Jesus – sealed in the cup with beeswax – to clone a second coming. The only real surprise is seeing how and why Cotton stops them. Yet, somehow the authors manage to create an almost breakneck pace that keeps the reader turning pages waiting to see the greatest battle in history rejoined.
Tom and Enid Schantz write a monthly column on new mystery releases.
