“Your next must-read mystery series.” the bullet that missed
A DARK STEEL DEATH
Nickson, Chris Severn House (224 pp.) $29.99 | Sept. 6, 2022 978-0-72785-047-8
Sabotage and murder keep the depleted Leeds police force in a constant state of exhaustion as the Great War rages. Between the illness that makes his boss barely able to work and the frightening symptoms of dementia his own wife exhibits, Deputy Chief Constable Tom Harper has plenty on his plate. His wife, Annabelle, is being looked after by Belgian refugees they’ve taken in, and their daughter, Mary, is working two jobs as she grieves her fiance’s death. Then a fire at a munitions factory kills dozens of the women working there. Soon thereafter, there’s another arson attempt, and although the newspapers are banned from reporting it, gossip spreads quickly. Harper, collaborating with the army, is unpleasantly surprised when the next incident is the fatal shooting of a guard at a military hospital. The only clues are a sharpshooter’s bullet and the difficult shot, strongly suggesting that the killer was a trained marksman. A fingerprint on the bullet is not in the system, and a search for army sharpshooters reveals that all of them were sent home from the front mentally and physically unfit. Still, someone has stolen a sniper’s weapon from the local armory. Despite scheduling hours of extra manpower and calling in every favor, Harper’s force is getting nowhere. They identify one marksman with mental problems in a local hospital, but he seems harmless. When his boss dies and Harper is made acting chief constable, his problems only increase. There’s more paperwork, attempted bribes he doesn’t want, and more murder. Only a chance remark puts the police on the right track. A gritty police procedural with well-drawn characters.
UNDER A VEILED MOON
Odden, Karen Crooked Lane (336 pp.) $27.99 | Oct. 11, 2022 978-1-63910-119-1
Inspector Mickey Corravan, now promoted to acting superintendent of the Wapping River Police, investigates a real-life 1878 disaster whose tentacles reach throughout his homeland and into his own adoptive family. Mickey’s daily concerns are abruptly put on hold by the collision on the River Thames of Princess Alice, a wooden pleasure steamer, and Bywell Castle, an iron-built collier, that ends with Alice’s sinking and the deaths of hundreds of passengers and crew members. Suspicion quickly falls on John Conway, the Irish helmsman who replaced William Schmidt, Capt. Thomas Harrison’s usual pilot aboard Bywell Castle, at the last moment 44
|
1 august 2022
|
fiction
|
kirkus.com
|
when Schmidt was murdered. Members of Alice’s crew are all too ready to blame Conway for the accident, and rumors mounting in intensity link Conway to the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who are also charged with causing a disastrous recent rail accident outside the Sittingbourne station. Mickey, who’s Irish himself, is eager to find other suspects and even more eager to keep Colin Doyle, his foster mother’s youngest son, out of the trouble he seems determined to cultivate through his dealings with James McCabe, powerful leader of the Cobbwaller gang, and his unsavory lieutenant, Seamus O’Hagan. The cost will be high, but eventually Mickey will uncover a plot whose instigators Odden has shielded from suspicion by the simple expedient of omitting them from the “Select Character List” that introduces the tale. The appended “Reading Group Questions,” by contrast, are uncommonly provocative. A densely imagined anatomy of Victorian skulduggery with a heaping side of Irish troubles.
THE BULLET THAT MISSED
Osman, Richard Pamela Dorman/Viking (368 pp.) $27.00 | Sept. 20, 2022 978-0-59-329939-5 The Thursday Murder Club gets into another spot of bother, this time involving some British television celebrities, a Russian former spy, and an international money launderer—among others. This is the third book in real-life British TV celebrity Osman’s delightful series of mysteries set at Coopers Chase, a bucolic English retirement community. The first two have been bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic, and Steven Spielberg has bought the movie rights; if you haven’t read the earlier books, The Thursday Murder Club (2020) and The Man Who Died Twice (2021), it would be a good idea to go back and start at the beginning. As this installment opens, the four septuagenarian members of the club—former MI6 agent Elizabeth Best, retired nurse Joyce Meadowcroft, psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif, and longtime union organizer Ron Ritchie—are investigating another murder from their cold-case files. It seems that Bethany Waites, a local TV journalist, was about to crack a huge tax avoidance scheme when her car went over a cliff 10 years ago. Who was she going to meet late at night? Why wasn’t her car caught on more surveillance cameras between her home and the cliff? Of course, the friends aren’t content to do their research online; they inveigle their way into a variety of situations that enable them to question Bethany’s friends and colleagues, the chief constable in charge of the case, the drug dealer they put in jail in the last volume (who’s determined to kill Ron as soon as she gets out), and many other more or less savory characters. And that’s not even to mention the mysterious Viking who’s threatening to kill Joyce if Elizabeth doesn’t kill Viktor Illyich, a competitor-turned-friend who, when he worked for the KGB, was known as the Bullet. All of this enables Osman to engineer
