SAINT DEATH’S DAUGHTER by C.S.E. Cooney

DANGER ON THE ATLANTIC

Neubauer, Erica Ruth Kensington (304 pp.) $26.00 | March 29, 2022 978-1-4967-2591-2

The search for a German spy aboard the RMS Olympic is complicated by all the subplots you’d expect from the prewar romantic intrigue subgenre. Word is that the agent passing on intelligence to the Third Reich is either restaurant manager Heinz Naumann, ship bandleader Keith Brubacher, or Edwin Banks, who runs the photography office aboard the Olympic. But none of them behaves half as suspiciously as Miles Van de Meter, who swept minor heiress Vanessa FitzSimmons off her feet in Monte Carlo, married her within two weeks, and then disappeared shortly after boarding for their honeymoon voyage, followed soon after by his luggage. Vanessa is so voluble in pestering everyone about her missing bridegroom that Jane Wunderly and Redvers Dibble, the not-quite-a-couple who’ve booked passage as Mr. and Mrs. Wunderly so that they can identify the agent before he does any more damage, are hard-pressed to keep their eye on the spy. Redvers, a duly accredited operative of Her Majesty’s Government, has his methods, which seem mainly limited to getting his confederate, steward Francis Dobbins, to help him search all the first-class passengers’ staterooms over and over looking for evidence, but Jane, an amateur who seems hopelessly out past her depth, can do little but flirt with Heinz—the other two suspects are impervious to her advances— and keep an eagle eye out for Eloise Baumann, whose aggressively endless chatter makes Vanessa seem quiet. The mixture is eventually seasoned with murder, but both felonies and complications take much longer to arrive than romance.

As the heroine sagely summarizes her work: “The only thing I knew for certain was that nearly everyone was lying.”

DEAD WIND

Wegert, Tessa Severn House (240 pp.) $28.99 | April 5, 2022 978-1-4483-0712-8

Senior investigator Shana Merchant finally reaches something like closure with the human demon who haunted Death in the Family (2020) and The Dead Season (2020). Blake Bram, ne Shana’s cousin Abraham Skilton, seems to be at it again. Nineteen months after Shana escaped from his clutches and three weeks after he kidnapped 9-year-old Trey Hayes, the New York State Police find Hope Oberon strangled at the foot of a wind turbine on Ontario’s Wolfe Island. But Hope doesn’t seem to fit Bram’s usual profile, which runs to young and comely. The president of the Watertown development council, she’d been indicted along with Watertown city manager Sejal Basak and two other town officials for attempting to skim the profits from Green Wind Renewables’ bid to install noisy, lucrative, environmentally responsible wind turbines around the town. The placement of Hope’s body implicates other members of the Fraudulent Four, but when they all provide alibis, Shana and her partner, Tim Wellington, look more closely at Bram. Or rather, they look harder for him, since despite the efforts of Olivia Peck, the private eye Shana’s Aunt Fee has hired to find her long-vanished son, Bram is a will-o’-the-wisp who turns up only to threaten or kill someone new. Wegert melds the police investigation so deftly with Shana’s endless family drama, now complicated by the engagement of her ex-fiance, Dr. Carson Gates, to physical therapist Kelsea Shaw, Tim’s ex-girlfriend, that most readers won’t care that new suspects continue to pop up even as Shana’s doing her best to ring down the curtain on her childhood companion’s reign of terror.

Congratulations to Wegert’s hard-used heroine, who deserves a completely new adventure.

science fiction and fantasy

SAINT DEATH’S DAUGHTER

Cooney, C.S.E. Solaris (624 pp.) $27.99 | April 12, 2022 978-1-78618-470-2

In this debut novel, the first of a trilogy, a previously reclusive young necromancer ventures out into a dangerous world. Miscellaneous “Lanie” Stones is born into a family famous for its executioners and assassins; she herself has a violent allergy toward, well, violence and violent death…a sign that she is destined to have the power to reject death itself (up to a point) as a necromancer. As her abilities increase over the years, so do her responsibilities and troubles. Her ancestral home is on the verge of being lost to creditors. Her only reliable teacher in necromancy is the ghost of her great-grandfather, whom no one else can see and who absolutely cannot be trusted. Her glory- and money-seeking sociopathic sister, Amanita Muscaria, has accepted a commission from the Blood Royal for a series of assassinations that results in Nita’s own brutal murder, leaving Lanie with a (justifiably) resentful brother-in-law and a willful, vengeance-minded young niece. The murderer, the sorcerer-queen Blackbird Bride, is after Lanie’s niece (to kill her) and Lanie (to enthrall her into