Also of interest ...
in new mysteries and thrillers
The Finder
by Colin Harrison (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)
The evil that men do is inescapable in Colin Harrison’s “brilliant, deeply cynical” New York thriller, said Patrick Anderson in The Washington Post. Harrison “knows so much and writes so well” that you end up following him into a sewer and a complex stock-inflating scheme as eagerly as you do to the best seats at Yankee Stadium. The Finder “builds to a climax that’s also a comedy of errors.” It’s dark comedy, to be sure, and chilling.
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The Silver Swan
by Benjamin Black (Holt, $25)
“Coincidence plays too big a role” in the mysteries that Booker Prize winner John Banville writes under the pseudonym of Benjamin Black, said Clea Simon in The Boston Globe. But Garret Quirke, the guilt-ridden Dublin pathologist Black introduced two years ago, is “a wonderful protagonist.” When an old chum’s beautiful wife is fished out of Dublin Bay after an apparent suicide, Quirke both wants the truth and doesn’t want it, and we’re with him all the way.
Hollywood Crows
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by Joseph Wambaugh (Little, Brown, $27)
Readers of Joseph Wambaugh’s latest may wonder if the former cop is working toward writing “a full-blown comedy of manners,” said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. “Wambaugh’s formal ambitions” have set apart his previous novels, and here he’s woven a darkly convoluted murder mystery into an ensemble portrait of the community relations officers, or “crows,” who field some of Hollywood’s oddest 911 calls. At 71, Wambaugh’s still experimenting, and he still “owns” all things LAPD.
Hold Tight
by Harlan Coben (Dutton, $27)
A suburban couple’s decision to secretly monitor their son’s online activities launches “a terrifying journey” in Harlan Coben’s 15th thriller, said Bruce De Silva in the Associated Press. Coben “specializes” in taut prose and “stories about how easily ordinary lives can spin out of control.” Hold Tight may be his “classiest” effort yet.
Winter Study
by Nevada Barr (Putnam, $25)
“Prickly” ranger Anna Pigeon is back for the first time in three years in another of Nevada Barr’s “adrenaline-pumped” National Park mysteries, said Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times. This time, a wolf attack spreads fear on an island in chilly Lake Superior. The resulting manhunts through the frozen woods “are described with crisp, hard-edged beauty,” and the wolves themselves are “magnificent.”
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