she hopes will become her new New Orleans “family” off the list of police suspects. Her sleuthing places her in all-too-foreseeable peril. Standard cozy fare served up Crescent City style.
THE HANGING TREE
Doherty, Paul Severn House (224 pp.) $28.99 | June 7, 2022 978-1-78029-139-0
In 1382 London, multiple murders surrounding a theft from the king’s treasury provide a dangerous puzzle for a coroner and a monk to solve. Brother Athelstan, parish priest of St. Erconwald, and Sir John Cranston, Lord High Coroner of London, have partnered to solve many a murky mystery, but few have been as troublesome as the theft of the money meant to pay a royal debt to Italian bankers and the murders surrounding it. Exchequer of Coin Henry Beaumont, who’s tasked with removing funds from the impregnable Flambard’s Tower, arrives there to find all his underlings dead and the treasure gone. When Master Thibault, Keeper of the King’s Secrets, calls upon the sleuthing pair to discover how the murders were committed and the coin stolen, they proceed to examine the tower and the bodies. They also look into the murders of the hangmen of London in search of possible connections. Athelstan finds more and more people dead, even one in his own parish church. The Italian bankers, who are naturally suspect, blame the Carbonari, a society of thieves, but after examining every avenue, Athelstan is sure this must have been an inside job. The little monk travels the squalid, dangerous streets looking for clues and finds the answer even more horrifying than he could imagine. Hair-raising descriptions of life in the Middle Ages enhance a challenging puzzle.
THE GIRL THEY ALL FORGOT
Edwards, Martin Poisoned Pen (352 pp.) $16.99 paper | June 7, 2022 978-1-46421-552-0
After an unprecedented gap of seven years, the prolific Edwards returns to the Lake District, where another cold case awaits DCI Hannah Scarlett and her squad, last seen in The Dungeon House (2015). When Bowness barmaid Ramona Smith vanished 21 years ago, her ex-lover Gerry Lace was arrested for her murder. Neither the not-guilty verdict in his trial nor his subsequent suicide brought closure to anyone but himself. Now that Gerry’s son, Darren, has walked into Morecambe Bay and drowned himself 42
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1 april 2022
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fiction
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kirkus.com
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on the 20th anniversary of his father’s death at the same spot, Hannah’s new boss, Police and Crime Commissioner Kit Gleadall, offers Hannah two new appointments to her Cold Case Review Team if she’ll look again into Ramona’s disappearance and speak with Darren’s outraged ex-girlfriend, car mechanic Jade Hughes. In the meantime, estate agent Kingsley Melton, who watched Darren drown himself without making any attempt to rescue him, is having even more troubles than his questioning by the gimlet-eyed authorities. Tory Reece-Taylor, the trophy widow he sold a residence in Strandbeck Manor, has thrown him over for Logan Prentice, an IT consultant/pianist/ actor Kingsley’s convinced has already murdered nursing home resident Ivy Podmore under the impression that she’d changed her will in his favor—and he’s convinced Prentice has equally greedy designs on Tory. There’s much more intrigue, down to the star-struck fan whom lawyer Louise Kind has lined up for her brother Daniel, who’s Hannah’s ex-lover, and Edwards juggles all the subplots with a master’s hand and even produces a pair of utterly surprising candidates for the title role. Welcome back, Cold Case Review Team. Please don’t wait seven years for the next update.
GUILTY CREATURES A Menagerie of Mysteries
Ed. by Edwards, Martin Poisoned Pen (320 pp.) $14.99 paper | June 7, 2022 978-1-46421-584-1
Fourteen more-or-less golden-age mystery stories, originally published between 1918 and 1967, featuring animals in a wide range of roles. The title is something of a misnomer, since most of the nonhuman creatures turn out to be quite innocent. The title character in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane,” the only story Sherlock Holmes narrates himself, is certainly guilty, and the jackdaw in Mary Fitt’s “The Man Who Shot Birds” will have some awkward questions to answer. But the monkey man in Headon Hill’s “The Sapient Monkey,” the retriever in G.K. Chesterton’s masterly “The Oracle of the Dog,” the apparently thieving fly in Vincent Cornier’s “The Courtyard of the Fly,” the slugs in H.C. Bailey’s old-fashioned yet strikingly contemporary “The Yellow Slugs,” and the cat in Clifford Witting’s admirably concise one-off “Hanging by a Hair” offer clues or red herrings instead of violence. The snakes in Garnett Radcliffe’s “Pit of Screams” and the dogs in Penelope Wallace’s “The Man Who Loved Animals” are collateral agents, not true malefactors. The racehorse threatened with doping in Arthur Morrison’s “The Case of Janissary”; the lowly worms in Edgar Wallace’s “The Man Who Hated Earthworms,” featuring more summary justice administered by the “four just men”; and the vanished baby gorilla in Josephine Bell’s “Death in a Cage” are all victims, not perpetrators. In a fitting sendoff to the volume, the title characters in
