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Overview
Three people cross paths in the north Georgia woods one night, setting into motion a race to catch a ruthless and chillingly inventive serial killer. On a run through the woods outside her north Georgia hometown, defense attorney Ama Chaplin encounters a mysterious hiker and recognizes him, too late, as a sociopath she successfully defended when he was a teenager. In the intervening seventeen years, Ama changed her name and moved to Atlanta, anxious to put her past behind her. Michael Walton, her young client, grew into a ruthless and inventive murderer. And now that he's caught her, he can put a twisted, years-in-the-making plot into motion. Neither of them knows that someone else saw her go into the woods alone: Eddie Stevens, whose daughter Hazel vanished on the same spot a year ago. The police think she ran away. Eddie believes the truth is much worse. Grieving and desperate, he'd planned to kill himself to return attention to his daughter's cold case, but he can't shake the feeling that something happened to Ama, the runner he saw disappear into the trees. When she doesn't come back out, he heads into the woods with a loaded gun to check on her. Meanwhile, the local police department's newest detective connects the dots between two cold cases and begins to suspect he's dealing with a serial killer--but time is running out to save Ama, and he'll need to make some unlikely allies to face down the dangers lurking in the woods.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9781643134086
- ISBN-10: 1643134086
- Publisher: Pegasus Crime
- Publish Date: May 2020
- Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
- Page Count: 320
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Whodunit: May 2020
Two genre stalwarts, a surprising genre-bender and a promising debut top the list of this month's best new mysteries.
★ Shakespeare for Squirrels
Nobody writes mystery novels quite like Christopher Moore. In one of his books, the protagonist is helped and plagued in equal measure by the Navajo trickster spirit, Coyote. In another, a prehistoric sea beast is aroused from a long sleep and emits a pheromone that inspires uncontrollable lust in anyone within range. His latest, Shakespeare for Squirrels, is the third in a series, following Fool and The Serpent of Venice. Each entry is roughly based on a play by William Shakespeare and features a main character named Pocket, who is a Fool—as in, a court jester. The bones of the story resemble Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although in much the same way that a dinosaur skeleton resembles a living, breathing dinosaur chasing you through a prehistoric field. From that loose starting point, Moore builds relationships that didn’t exist in the original work, fleshes out conversations that Shakespeare only alluded to and creates from whole cloth some conversations that were never had (with verbiage decidedly bawdier than in the original). And as hilarious as A Midsummer Night’s Dream is to begin with, Moore adds a contemporary dose of sly humor that I think would impress the Bard.
Before She Was Helen
It’s not often that I read a suspense novel in which the protagonist is older than I am, so I was delighted to meet Clemmie Lakefield, the feisty and likable 70-something heroine of Caroline B. Cooney’s clever new mystery, Before She Was Helen. Clemmie harbors a secret so big that it required a midlife identity change. But when you’re trying to hide from your past, you never know what random occurrence may blow your cover. She was just checking on a shut-in neighbor, using the key he had given her, when she saw an unusual door and, naturally, opened it. It led into an adjacent neighbor’s home, where Clemmie feasted her eyes upon a beautiful glass sculpture. She sent a photo of it to her grandnephew, who ran a Google image search and discovered that it had been stolen. So he posted a note to the artist’s website, saying: “Your rig is sitting on a table in the house next door to my aunt.” When the police find a body in situ and Clemmie’s fingerprints nearby, her carefully constructed secret identity is threatened—with potentially lethal consequences. Half cozy Miss Marple vibe, half gritty murder mystery, this genre-bender works better than I would have ever expected.
Editor’s note: Before She Was Helen was originally scheduled for publication on May 5, but its publication was delayed until Sept. 8 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Silence on Cold River
Early on in her debut thriller, Silence on Cold River, author Casey Dunn describes rural Tarson, Georgia, as “more like a morgue than it was like Mayberry.” It will prove to be a prophetic characterization as three people from wildly disparate lives rendezvous with destiny on a rarely traversed mountain trail: Ama Chaplin, a successful defense attorney; Michael Walton, Ama’s former client, erroneously acquitted of animal cruelty; and Eddie Stevens, returning to the scene of his daughter’s disappearance one year later, gun in hand, suicide in mind, to ensure that his daughter’s case is never forgotten. But life has other plans for Eddie. When he notices that Ama has not returned to her car after a reasonable time, he sets off into the woods to make sure she’s OK. An abduction and a shooting follow in quick succession, and one person lies on the forest floor, bleeding out. Enter police detective Martin Locklear, tentatively distancing himself from his demons and eager to prove his worth once again. From there, Dunn ratchets up the tension with each successive chapter en route to a satisfying conclusion. Silence on Cold River doesn’t feel like a suspense debut but rather the work of a genre veteran. Read it, and you will be on the lookout for whatever Dunn writes next.
ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Casey Dunn on fate and the importance of perspective.
Dead Land
Dead Land is Sara Paretsky’s latest mystery featuring the inimitable V.I. Warshawski. One of the major themes in the series is the political cesspool that is Chicago. Time and time again, Warshawski is drawn into investigating the shady dealings of Windy City businessmen and politicians. This time, those dealings still persist (hey, it’s Chicago, of course they do) but with international implications that date back to the repressive Pinochet dictatorship in 1970s Chile. A homeless folk singer is the link. Her deceased boyfriend, killed apparently at random in a mass shooting, was once an anti-Pinochet activist, and the repercussions echo forward to present day. As always, Warshawski is a dyed-in-the-wool, capital-L Liberal, and I suspect that her positions may ruffle a few capital-C Conservative feathers. But it’s only when our feathers get ruffled that we stand any chance of being motivated to rethink our positions on things. Paretsky might just be the Ruth Rendell of her era. Each time she releases a new book, it is invariably better than all the others that came before, and Dead Land continues this tradition with aplomb.
Whodunit: May 2020
Two genre stalwarts, a surprising genre-bender and a promising debut top the list of this month's best new mysteries.
★ Shakespeare for Squirrels
Nobody writes mystery novels quite like Christopher Moore. In one of his books, the protagonist is helped and plagued in equal measure by the Navajo trickster spirit, Coyote. In another, a prehistoric sea beast is aroused from a long sleep and emits a pheromone that inspires uncontrollable lust in anyone within range. His latest, Shakespeare for Squirrels, is the third in a series, following Fool and The Serpent of Venice. Each entry is roughly based on a play by William Shakespeare and features a main character named Pocket, who is a Fool—as in, a court jester. The bones of the story resemble Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, although in much the same way that a dinosaur skeleton resembles a living, breathing dinosaur chasing you through a prehistoric field. From that loose starting point, Moore builds relationships that didn’t exist in the original work, fleshes out conversations that Shakespeare only alluded to and creates from whole cloth some conversations that were never had (with verbiage decidedly bawdier than in the original). And as hilarious as A Midsummer Night’s Dream is to begin with, Moore adds a contemporary dose of sly humor that I think would impress the Bard.
Before She Was Helen
It’s not often that I read a suspense novel in which the protagonist is older than I am, so I was delighted to meet Clemmie Lakefield, the feisty and likable 70-something heroine of Caroline B. Cooney’s clever new mystery, Before She Was Helen. Clemmie harbors a secret so big that it required a midlife identity change. But when you’re trying to hide from your past, you never know what random occurrence may blow your cover. She was just checking on a shut-in neighbor, using the key he had given her, when she saw an unusual door and, naturally, opened it. It led into an adjacent neighbor’s home, where Clemmie feasted her eyes upon a beautiful glass sculpture. She sent a photo of it to her grandnephew, who ran a Google image search and discovered that it had been stolen. So he posted a note to the artist’s website, saying: “Your rig is sitting on a table in the house next door to my aunt.” When the police find a body in situ and Clemmie’s fingerprints nearby, her carefully constructed secret identity is threatened—with potentially lethal consequences. Half cozy Miss Marple vibe, half gritty murder mystery, this genre-bender works better than I would have ever expected.
Editor’s note: Before She Was Helen was originally scheduled for publication on May 5, but its publication was delayed until Sept. 8 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Silence on Cold River
Early on in her debut thriller, Silence on Cold River, author Casey Dunn describes rural Tarson, Georgia, as “more like a morgue than it was like Mayberry.” It will prove to be a prophetic characterization as three people from wildly disparate lives rendezvous with destiny on a rarely traversed mountain trail: Ama Chaplin, a successful defense attorney; Michael Walton, Ama’s former client, erroneously acquitted of animal cruelty; and Eddie Stevens, returning to the scene of his daughter’s disappearance one year later, gun in hand, suicide in mind, to ensure that his daughter’s case is never forgotten. But life has other plans for Eddie. When he notices that Ama has not returned to her car after a reasonable time, he sets off into the woods to make sure she’s OK. An abduction and a shooting follow in quick succession, and one person lies on the forest floor, bleeding out. Enter police detective Martin Locklear, tentatively distancing himself from his demons and eager to prove his worth once again. From there, Dunn ratchets up the tension with each successive chapter en route to a satisfying conclusion. Silence on Cold River doesn’t feel like a suspense debut but rather the work of a genre veteran. Read it, and you will be on the lookout for whatever Dunn writes next.
ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Casey Dunn on fate and the importance of perspective.
Dead Land
Dead Land is Sara Paretsky’s latest mystery featuring the inimitable V.I. Warshawski. One of the major themes in the series is the political cesspool that is Chicago. Time and time again, Warshawski is drawn into investigating the shady dealings of Windy City businessmen and politicians. This time, those dealings still persist (hey, it’s Chicago, of course they do) but with international implications that date back to the repressive Pinochet dictatorship in 1970s Chile. A homeless folk singer is the link. Her deceased boyfriend, killed apparently at random in a mass shooting, was once an anti-Pinochet activist, and the repercussions echo forward to present day. As always, Warshawski is a dyed-in-the-wool, capital-L Liberal, and I suspect that her positions may ruffle a few capital-C Conservative feathers. But it’s only when our feathers get ruffled that we stand any chance of being motivated to rethink our positions on things. Paretsky might just be the Ruth Rendell of her era. Each time she releases a new book, it is invariably better than all the others that came before, and Dead Land continues this tradition with aplomb.