Mix Alice in Wonderland with Jurassic Park. Add a dash of every science fiction sub genre but especially time travel. Voila, you have God’s Junk Drawer! Twelve-year-old Billy is found in Thailand after being missing for five years from Maine. He has wild tales of the missing years including encountersContinue Reading
The Strand is a British mystery magazine known best for publishing the first Sherlock Holmes story well over a century ago. The Best of “The Strand Magazine” anthology collects 29 tales published within the last twenty-five years. Their authors are as diverse as Michael Connelly, Shirley Jackson and H.G. Wells.Continue Reading
A group of five women met at Harvard as college roommates. For the past twenty years, they have been playing essentially a game of tag once a year. Each player draws a name and must retrieve that person’s medallion by shooting each other with water pistols. The winner got braggingContinue Reading
Are you ready for a fun little Christmas mystery set in a rural English village, where everyone knows your name, and all your business? The Cornish Christmas Pantomime Murder provides all that while also managing to be gently humorous too. It really is the perfect cozy mystery when you needContinue Reading
Seven people on the run from the police, a Mexican drug cartel, and/or the local human trafficker stop at a small motel in the desolate Texas desert. They are in for the longest night of their life in The Midnight Knock, a new paranormal thriller/locked room mystery genre mashup. AreContinue Reading
In Death at the Door, twenty-something Ruby has recently moved to Boston. Unfortunately, her apartment has the ghost of a recent suicide, or was it murder, named Cordelia, living there too. Luckily, they become best friends even though their communication method, a magnetic alphabet on the fridge, is difficult atContinue Reading
Murder in Constantinople had a great potential that was spoiled by an unlikeable and one-dimensional main character, multiple anachronisms, and worst of all an uneven pacing. I kept plugging through it but it never seemed to get better in my opinion. If you like historical mysteries, there are much betterContinue Reading
The Hitchhikers is an adrenaline fueled ride through rural Canada in 1976. Alice and Tom are on an RV adventure to see the Montreal Olympics. While traveling from their home in Washington state, they pick up two hitchhikers who call themselves Blue and Ocean. Little do they know that BlueContinue Reading
A serial killer uses Sharp Force to kill his victims on major holidays. But first he terrorizes them with a ghostly vision that seemingly can pass through walls without triggering alarms. It’s Christmas Eve. Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta is just finishing up an autopsy on a man found floating inContinue Reading
I’ve read a lot of mysteries with unreliable narrators. However, The Armchair Detectives is unique because Martin may, or may not, have dementia. He also may, or may not, have a former career as a spy. Martin’s thoughtful though somewhat reluctant sidekick, Albie, makes up the other half of TheContinue Reading
Take 1 part the locked room mysteries of John Dickson Carr and 2 parts Murder on the Orient Express and you have 6:40 to Montreal, a new whodunnit. Long married Agatha is a writer who has both a writer’s block and cancer. She attempts to solve one and forget theContinue Reading
Lady-of-a-certain-age Judith and her best friends Becks and Suzie are back on the case in Murder on the Marlow Belle. A local blowhard who runs the town’s drama society and playhouse is killed on a boat where everyone is a suspect. Was it his protégé who is now an eliteContinue Reading
Bad Things Happened in This Room is a weird fevered dream of a book. It is, perhaps, the best first person depiction of mental illness that I have ever read. That, of course, takes it down a rather unnerving and depressing path. Is our heroine just a victim of herContinue Reading
A mysterious host lures seven guests to a posh dinner party in Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests. While there, they each receive an envelope that includes a card with their age at time of their death. Most think it is a not-very-clever PR stunt. Until the bodies startContinue Reading
I have one word for the newly translated Icelandic thriller, The Mysterious Case of the Missing Crime Writer. Frustrating. This book has a mystery of a missing crime writer but so much more. It has a detective with a violent ex-girlfriend in 2012, a bank robbery being planned in 1965,Continue Reading
In For Duck’s Sake, Meg has had enough of planning huge events. When her town decides to have a parade and fair to support an animal adoption event, she successfully pawns off the leadership of it to her uber organized mother. That leaves Meg plenty of time to help theContinue Reading