Miss Julia Takes the Wheel by Ann B. Ross

Miss Julia Takes the Wheel by Ann B. Ross --- 310 pages

When Doctor Bob Hargrove goes on an extended European vacation with his wife, leaving a locum tenens to hold the fort, Miss Julia visualizes all kinds of medical emergencies. But, never one to miss an opportunity to entertain, she invites Dr. Don Crawford and his painfully shy wife, Lauren, to dinner. While Miss Julia and Sam bemoan Lauren's lack of social skills, it's Hazel Marie and Binkie who pick up on some of the doctor's less amiable qualities.

Meanwhile, Lloyd has gotten his first car and is juggling three invitations to the Sadie Hawkins Day Dance. LuAnne Conover, newly divorced, has started a job at the Good Shepherd Funeral Home and is in urgent need of an occupation-appropriate makeover. And Julia's next-door neighbor, Mildred Allen, commandeers Miss Julia and Lloyd's services as chauffeurs to visit her husband at a rehabilitation center outside town. Miss Julia has more immediate concerns than the new doctor and his wife. Yet there is something niggling at her about the Crawfords, something just not right --- and being Miss Julia, she won't rest until she gets to the bottom of this mystery.


Ann B. Ross delivers in this 21st installment in her cozy mystery series about Miss Julia.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read reviews from Goodreads.com.

Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny

Kingdom of the Blind: A Novel by Louise Penny --- 389 pages including Acknowledgements.

The latest in Canadian author Penny's bestselling suspense mystery series featuring Chief Inspector Armond Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec, picks up just months after the conclusion of Glass Houses (2017) with Gamache still suspended from duty and under investigation for the actions he took to track down and eliminate a drug cartel bringing a potent new opioid into Canada.

 Now as a major snow storm in barreling down on the province,  Gamache and Myrna Lander, another recurring character from the small village Three Pines, and a seemingly guileless young man from Montreal, Benedict Pouliot, have all been summoned to meet a notary at an isolated, tumbledown old house some miles distant from Three Pines. There, they are informed that they have been named as executors of the will of a woman who none of them have ever met. The old lady’s death does not appear to be suspicious but the bequests in her will are so grandiose it would seem she must have been delusional --- except the notary is convinced she was not. When the executors meet the old lady's three adult children. they learn the woman's bizarre claims are founded on a contested inheritance dating back over a century between two branches of a wealthy Jewish family in Austria. 

But what seems at first like a pleasant distraction for Gamache turns serious when one of the old woman's adult children is found murdered under the debris of the collapsed house.

Meanwhile, Gamache and his team are still desperate to find the cache of lethal carfentanil that went missing somewhere in the city --- which Gamache deliberately allowed to go missing so as not to tip off the cartel to the trap being set for them.  Gamache's latest protégé, police cadet Amelia Choquet, found with drugs in her possession, is dismissed from the Academy and returns to her old life on the street, where she begins searching for the carfentanil. Her only lead: someone called David is getting ready to flood Québec with the drug. 

Another well wrought tale from Penny, who again walks the high wire balancing small town cozy and big city thriller.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from the Washington Post.

Click HERE to read the review from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.  

The Temptation of Forgiveness by Donna Leon

The Temptation of Forgiveness: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery by Donna Leon --- 300 pages

The 27th novel in Leon's evocative mystery series set in contemporary Venice.

A colleague of Brunetti's wife comes to him with suspicions that her teenage son is using drugs he is getting from a dealer with access to the students at the elite private academy he attends. Brunetti is under no illusions that the police can eliminate the scourge of illegal drugs inundating Venice, but he promises to look into it. He doesn't get very far before another incident occurs. The woman's husband is found unconscious and critically injured beneath a footbridge over one of Venice's many canals, in the middle of the night. Some of his injuries suggest that he was forcibly shoved from the bridge onto the stone pavement below. The investigation of this suspicious accident leads Brunetti to a medical scam targeting elderly patients and their prescription drugs. Confronted by Brunetti, the unlikely suspect freely confesses, but pleads extenuating circumstances that give Brunetti pause.

As he meditates upon love, loyalty and the rule of law, Brunetti calls to mind Sophocles' Antigone, and how even  the impulses of a loving heart can lead to terrible and unintended consequences.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from the New York Times.

 

Golden Prey by John Sandford

Golden Prey: A Novel by John Sandford --- 392 pages

John Sandford writes a mean and lean thriller,  and his latest, Golden Prey, combines his signature style with a new job  and new possibilities for his hero, Lucas Davenport.

Davenport has worked a variety of jobs in his law enforcement career, from beat cop to detective, to Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator, to politically savy troubleshooter for the Minnesota governor. But when Davenport thwarts an assassination attempt on Presidential candidate Michaela Bowden during a campaign stop at the Minnesota State Fair in 2016's Extreme Prey, he's rewarded with a job as a Deputy United States Marshal.

He's a Deputy U.S. Marshal with a special portfolio and clearly future President Bowden has plans for him, but pending her election Davenport can pick and choose what he wants to do.

Book 27 in the series sets Davenport on the track of Garvin Poole. Poole's been out of circulation for a while, holed up with his girl friend and living off the proceeds of his last job in an affluent Dallas suburb. But now he's been recruited by an old friend who's targeted the local operation of a Honduran drug cartel in Biloxi, Mississipi.  Poole and his pal get away with millions of the cartel's profits, leaving behind five dead bodies --- four of the cartel's local operators and a six-year-old gril who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Carelessly, Poole left some DNA at the scene, so now the authorities know he's involved.

Davenport starts with Poole's family in Nashville. Even though Poole left home long ago, it's possible he's maintained some kind of tenuous contact with them. But Davenport is one step behind the drug cartel, who have hired their own enforcers to get back their money and make sure no one else tries to imitate Poole's heist. Once again, Davenport pits himself against antagonists who will stop at nothing.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from the Twin Cities Pioneer Press.

Click HERE to read the review from the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Midnight Sun by Jo Nesbø

Midnight Sun: A Novel by Jo Nesbø. Translated from the Norwegian by Neil Smith --- 273 pages

A novel to pair with Nesbø's previous Blood on Snow, another quiet but tightly wound tale of a man on the run from retribution. The time is the 1970s. Ulf, a small time dope dealer in Oslo becomes --- unwillingly --- the "fixer" for the Fisherman, Oslo's drug kingpin. Which is a cruel joke of fate, because Ulf is not a killer, but he is hapless and much too frightened to tell the Fisherman the truth.  And he needs money badly, a great deal of money, so he agrees and hopes for the best.

But when push comes to shove, Ulf can't close the deal. The first time he's told to kill a dealer who's gotten behind in his payments to the Fisherman, he lets the target get away in exchange for money. Ironically the money comes too late for his need.

When the Fisherman finds out he's been doublecrossed, Ulf runs, to the far north, to the Finnmark, where he meets a young woman and her curious son, and finds feelings he thought were dead coming back to haunt him.

But the Fisherman is still to be reckoned with; sooner or later, his hit men will find Ulf under the pitiless glare of the midnight sun. So this time can Ulf find redemption, or is this just another cruel joke played by that bastard hope?

As a young man Nesbø lived for a time in the Finnmark, and he captures the starkness of the land, the implacable light, and the harsh creed of the Læstadian church. 

Click HERE for a review from the Los Angeles Times.

Click HERE for a review from the Washington Post.

Click HERE for a Youtube video of Jo Nesbø describing Midnight Sun.

 

Death of a Liar by M.C. Beaton

Death of a Liar: A Hamish MacBeth Mystery by M.C. Beaton --- 261 pages

Hamish MacBeth's new case starts when a woman who is known to be a habitual liar cries "wolf" once too often and is found murdered in her home in the remote Highland village of Cromish.

Feeling guilty because he ignored that last call, Hamish is determined to solve the crime, and soon finds circumstantial evidence that appears to link this death with two unpleasant newcomers who disappear abruptly from Hamish's own village of Lochdubh, with a preacher whom Hamish suspects is a clever con artist, and with a lonely old woman convinced the fairies are going to carry her off.  In the process, Hamish's constable Dick Fraser, is induced to move out of the Lochdubh police station with results that surprise and disconcert Hamish. Priscilla and Elspeth, two of Hamish's former flames, make brief appearances, and two new women arrive on the scene, but Hamish's luck in love is famously bad as ever.

Beaton's Hamish MacBeth is a reliably enjoyable cozy mystery mostly for the beauty of the remote Highlands setting and occasional folklore.

Click HERE and HERE to read reviews.