Sacrifice, by S.J. Bolton, $24.95. We suspect that this riveting debut novel, based on ancient legends and concerning creepy goings-on in the wild, isolated Shetland Islands, just might be the page-turner of the summer.
When Tora Hamilton, an obstetrician and a newcomer to Shetland, uncovers the well-preserved body of a woman in a peat bog on the property she owns with her husband, Duncan, she’s shocked to discover that not only is the corpse modern but that the woman’s heart has been cut out and mysterious runes carved on her back. And further, she had recently borne a child.
It’s not long before Tora realizes that something is terribly wrong on the islands, something way beyond the natural insularity of the natives and their distrust of outsiders. It soon seems that there is no one she can trust — not her colleagues at the hospital, not the police, not even Duncan or his family, who are all island born and bred.
But she does find an ally in another outsider, an equally courageous young female police sergeant who is as curious as Tora to find out what is going on. For it turns out that the body they recovered belongs to a woman who seems to have died twice.
There are many plot twists and turns, a cast of memorable characters, and some thrilling action sequences before the horrific secrets that Tora is after are finally revealed. It’s been a long time since we’ve devoured a book this length at one sitting, and we didn’t care that the story was entirely improbable. We were just grateful to find ourselves in the hands of as extraordinary a storyteller as S.J. Bolton.
A Deadly Paradise, by Grace Brophy, $24. It seems that American readers can’t get enough of police procedurals set in Italy, and now the likes of Donna Leon, Magdalen Nabb and David Hewson are joined by Grace Brophy, author of an outstanding new series featuring handsome Commissario Alessandro Cenni of the state police. He still mourns a fiancee lost to him years ago when she was kidnapped by political terrorists and, as a result, feels he has nothing to lose by following his own conscience in a heavily political bureaucracy.
Ignoring what his superiors want (a quick and expedient arrest), he’s anxious to find out who is really behind the grotesque murder of Jarvinia Baudler, an elderly German woman, retired cultural attache and former Nazi who was a brilliant, cruel and manipulative bisexual with as many enemies as she’d had lovers.
She had settled in the peaceful Umbrian village of Paradisio but had grown up in occupied Venice, and Cenni’s search for her killer leads him to the infamous wartime Nazi plot to flood Europe with counterfeit British pounds.
Just out in trade paperback is its predecessor, “The Last Enemy,” in which Cenni investigates the murder of a well-connected young American woman in Assissi during Holy Week. The author is an American, married to an Italian, who lived and studied in Italy for many years.
Scared to Live, by Stephen Booth, $25. We’ve long been fans of this series set in Eng land’s Peak District and featuring Constable Ben Cooper and Sergeant Diane Fry. She’s a prickly, ambitious outsider and he’s a laid-back local lad whose policeman father was well-loved in the district. For all their differences, they respect each other and work reasonably well together. Here they turn their attention to a house fire that took the lives of a young mother and two of her children and a seemingly unrelated home invasion that resulted in the murder of a reclusive spinster.
What follows is a long, complicated investigation that uncovers links with the Bulgarian Mafia and baby smuggling, but for most of the book, the detectives as well as the reader are totally clueless as to where the investigation is going. That’s because vital information is withheld for no apparent reason other than to prolong the narrative.
Everything else about the book is spot-on — the setting is well realized, the characters and their relationships interesting and the plot credible — but at more than 400 pages, it’s at least 100 pages too long.
Publishers seem to think that heft is what readers today want in their mysteries and writers are forced to go along with this dictum, but we can’t believe that we are the only ones who are getting cranky about it.
Tom and Enid Schantz write regularly about new mystery releases.
