“Grave Surprise,” by Charlaine Harris (Berkley, 295 pages, $23.95)
Harper Connelly was struck by lightning when she was 15, by no means the worst thing that happened to her during an agonizingly unhappy childhood. It left her with chronic physical infirmities and a wild talent for being able to locate missing dead people and determine their cause of death. This has become her career, and with her beloved stepbrother/manager, Tolliver Lang, she travels all over the country helping people find their lost loved ones.
But her current gig is a little different. While doing a demonstration for a snarkily skeptical professor at a Memphis cemetery, she discovers the corpse of a child who had gone missing two years earlier, whom she had failed to find for the girl’s bereft parents. As a result she becomes a suspect in the murder, and it’s only with Tolliver’s unflagging support that she gets through the harrowing events that follow.
The author has a great gift for getting inside her characters and making them achingly real to the reader. Particularly poignant is the unique relationship between Harper and Tolliver, whom she loves and wholly trusts but can never have.
“Love, Lies and Liquor,” by M.C. Beaton (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 231 pages, $22.95)
Agatha Raisin is a prickly woman in her middle years with small bearlike eyes and an insatiable appetite for romance, who has calamitously retired from a public relations career in London to the once-peaceful Cotswolds village of Carsely. A shameless snoop, she soon has her fellow villagers expecting her to step in whenever a crime is committed in the area, which happens all too often. In fact, she has now opened her own detective agency.
A much-anticipated holiday with her next-door neighbor, James Lacey, to whom she was once briefly and disastrously married, turns sour when their destination proves to be the rundown Sussex resort town of Snoth-on-Sea. When a fellow guest is strangled with Agatha’s own scarf at their dubious hotel, after Agatha had been heard to threaten the woman with murder, she is in deep trouble with the local authorities. Laced with sly wit and gentle social commentary, the story ends with Agatha being no wiser in the ways of love than when it began.
“Gunpowder Plot,” by Carola Dunn (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 246 pages, $23.95)
A weekend house party in the Cotswolds to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day is the delicious setting for this 1924 adventure for the aristocrat-turned-journalist Daisy Dalrymple, now married to Scotland Yard inspector Alec Fletcher and noticeably advanced in her first pregnancy. From the start, Daisy is aware of ominous undercurrents among family members, but she is quite unprepared for the apparent suicide of her host and the murder of an unexpected visitor.
Conveniently, Alec is assigned to investigate and even reluctantly sanctions Daisy’s eager assistance, since she is uniquely positioned to observe the family and her fellow guests. It’s all pleasantly reminiscent – save for Daisy’s gentle brand of feminism – of the old-fashioned English mysteries of a bygone era.
Tom and Enid Schantz write a monthly column on new mysteries.
