“All Mortal Flesh,” by Julia Spencer-Fleming (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 322 pages, $22.95)
Faithful readers of this acclaimed series already know the premise: Former Army helicopter pilot Clare Fergusson is the first female pastor at St. Aldan’s Episcopal church in the tiny Adirondacks town of Millers Kill, and she’s not at all what they were expecting. Lonely and frequently at odds with her conservative parishioners and diocese, she’s found a friend and kindred spirit in police chief Russ Van Alstyne, also an Army veteran and unfortunately very married. Over the course of four earlier books in this sensitively written series, the two have struggled with their feelings for each other while working together solving murders and raising a few eyebrows in the town.
Now the murder of Russ’ wife, from whom he has recently separated, turns their already conflicted world upside down. Both Russ and Clare are suspects, and both are assigned watchdogs by their superiors, he a politically ambitious investigator from the state police and she an overly helpful deacon sent by the diocese.
What follows is a dizzying roller coaster of a ride, with one wholly unexpected plot twist after another following in rapid succession. And just when things seem sorted out at last, the author has one last surprise in store for the reader, one that raises all sorts of questions about where the series is headed.
“The Lizard’s Bite,” by David Hewson (Delacorte, 417 pages, $22)
Police detectives Nic Costa and Gianni Peroni, in Venice on an enforced holiday, are drawn into the puzzling deaths of a glassblower and his pregnant wife on the island of Murano when a furnace explodes in the Arcangelo family glassworks. The Venetian authorities very much want it to be declared an accident, with spontaneous combustion one of the proffered theories, but it looks a lot like murder to the honest and stubborn Roman detectives and their colleagues, who undertake a full and unwelcome investigation of the incident.
Layered into the story are some complex relationships among members of the withdrawn and insular Arcangelo family, clinging to their ancient art in a world overrun by tourists looking for cheap trinkets, as well as a stalled love affair between Costa and former FBI agent Emily Deacon. And it is complicated further by a rich, powerful and amoral Englishman (from an earlier non-series book, “Lucifer’s Shadow”), who holds the key to the whole mystery but can’t be touched by the Venetian police. Venice itself, a “beautiful graveyard of a city,” as one of the characters calls it, is always the heart and soul of this rich, complex and thoroughly bewitching book.
Tom and Enid Schantz are freelancers who write a monthly column on new mysteries.
