Dark Tide Rising by Anne Perry

Dark Tide Rising: A William Monk Novel by Anne Perry --- 289 pages

This is the 24th entry in Anne Perry's atmospheric Victorian mystery series featuring William Monk, Commander of the Thames River Police, and his wife Hester, a nurse who volunteered to serve with Florence Nightingale on the front lines of the Crimean War. 

Kate Exeter, the wife of a wealthy London real estate developer, has been  kidnapped in broad daylight from a riverside walk in Battersea Park, witnessed by her cousin and confidante Celia Darwin.The kidnappers have demanded an enormous ransom, which her frantic husband Harry Exeter has barely managed to scrape together in the 24 hours allowed him. Exeter has been directed to bring the ransom to a meeting place deep in the waterlogged and sinking slums of Jacob's Island, and he asks Monk to accompany him --- to insure that he finds the right spot and gets his wife safely away after the money is handed over. Monk, who still suffers flashbacks from when Hester was kidnapped --- Corridors of the Night (2015) ---  takes five of his most trusted officers, hoping that once Exeter and his wife are safe, he and his men can return to track down the kidnappers. But on the night of the exchange, all their careful plans go disastrously awry when Monk and his men are brutally ambushed.

Who is to blame for what went wrong? Monk must face the terrible suspicion that one of his own men betrayed his plan to the kidnappers. Now he and his men have a murder to solve, but tensions mount because no one knows who can be trusted. Then a bookkeeper for the banker who helped Harry Exeter raise the money for the ransom approaches Monk with her suspicions that money has been quietly disappearing from a large trust fund that Kate Exeter was due to inherit within a year. Suspicions that point to Kate's cousin and trustee, Maurice Latham; to the bank manager, Roger Doyle; even to Harry Exeter himself.

Anne Perry at her best, with several overlapping mysteries to solve: kidnapping, murders, embezzlement and betrayal.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Deadline by John Sandford

Deadline: A Virgil Flowers Novel by John Sandford --- 388 pages

John Sandford latest Virgil Flowers police thriller is a really great fun read. There's plenty of action, lots of earthy Midwestern humor, and Sandford juggles three different plot lines and makes it look easy.

Asked to describe the book, Sandford said: "Sort of a dog-napping, meth-chasing, mutiple murder investigation in which most of the bad guys belong to the school board." He confesses that when he worked as a newspaper reporter himself, the assignment he dreaded the most was covering a school board meeting. Having worked briefly as a reporter myself, I can entirely sympathize with him on that.

Click HERE to read an interview with John Sandford.

Click HERE to read a review of Deadline from the New York Times.

Click HERE to read a review by a reporter who also covers school board meetings.