The Headhunters, by Peter Lovesey, $24 Jo and Gemma are friends who meet regularly for coffee at the Chichester Starbucks, where they find themselves one day jokingly plotting the murder of Gemma’s despised boss. Through Gemma, Jo meets Jake, a shy, inarticulate man with a prison record stemming from a freak injury inflicted on a cop during a long-ago environmental protest action.
They become friends, but after Jo discovers the body of a woman along the beach near where Jake works, both she and Jake fall under the relentless scrutiny of the law, as personified by Detective Chief Inspector Hen Mallin of the Chichester police force.
Hen is a small, pragmatic woman (who has appeared in two previous books) with enough sense to doubt that either Jake or Jo is the murderer but not enough evidence to suspect anybody else. And Jo, who finds herself as drawn to Jake as he is to her, despairs of his chances of avoiding another prison term.
The story, told alternately from Hen’s point of view and Jo’s, is fleshed out with an array of fully dimensional characters and studded with unobtrusive clues that in the end resolve themselves as neatly and inevitably as a sudoku puzzle.
Further, the author has the gift of making the most ordinary characters interesting and engaging, and knows when and how to ratchet up the suspense. “The Headhunters” offers proof once again that nobody can write the modern traditional detective novel as perfectly as Lovesey.
Assassins at Ospreys, by R.T. Raichev, $22.95 In his third book featuring detective-story writer Antonia Darcy and her husband, Maj. Hugh Payne, the Bulgarian-born author once again introduces a cast of dazzlingly eccentric characters caught up in an old-fashioned country-house mystery.
It all begins at a book signing in Hay-on- Wye. There, against her better judgment, Antonia agrees to take tea with an adoring fan and her stony-faced companion. They turn out to be Beatrice Ardleigh and Ingrid Delmar, brought together 30 years earlier after Bea was paralyzed and Ingrid miscarried in the same car crash.
Some months after taking Antonia to tea, Beatrice turns to her for advice when she learns that her former fiance, who was driving on that fateful night, now lies dying at Ospreys, a nearby manor house where much of the action of the novel unfolds.
It seems that several people are almost farcically intent on murdering the dying man before he can change his will in Bea’s favor, and among the suspects are a sleek, sybaritic priest working on behalf of the man’s nephew, the current legatee, and Ingrid herself, who has taken to impersonating Bea and absenting herself on mysterious errands.
Except for its modern-day setting, the book could have been published during Agatha Christie’s heyday, the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction, and readers who relish that period will be delighted by “Assassins at Ospreys.”
Assassins at Ospreys, by Boris Akunin, $14, and The Gentle Axe, by R.N. Morris, $14 Here we have two very different but equally rewarding writers who set their books in 19th-century Russia.
Akunin, a best seller in his native land, writes enchantingly of Erast Fandorin, a young, clever, debonair private investigator cast much in the Sherlock Holmes mold but more lighthearted and a bit on the foppish side. He’s featured in two novellas here, the first a sprightly story about a con man who matches wits with Fandorin and the second a much darker tale of a serial killer who is preying upon Moscow’s prostitutes during Holy Week 1889, and who is immediately suspected by Fandorin of being none other than Jack the Ripper.
In contrast, Morris has resurrected the police detective from Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Porfiry Petrovich, and sets him to investigating a series of gruesome murders in 1866 St. Petersburg.
Porfiry is cynical, devious, but ultimately fair-minded, and in the best tradition of European police procedurals, he is pitted as fiercely against his corrupt superiors as he is against the cunning criminal he eventually unmasks. We missed this darkly atmospheric historical thriller when it came out in hardcover last year; look for a sequel this June.
Tom and Enid Schantz write a regular column on new mystery releases.
