by Tom Spencer
Typically you already know instantly {that a} ebook goes to get underneath your pores and skin and keep there. I felt that manner only some pages into Spencer’s tart debut, THE MYSTERY OF THE CROOKED MAN (Pushkin Vertigo, 319 pp., paperback, $18.95), which vaults the reader into the world of Agatha Dorn, an irritable archivist and passionate devotee of thriller fiction — significantly the work of Gladden Inexperienced (assume Agatha Christie via a fun-house mirror.)
When Agatha discovers what seems to be a misplaced manuscript by Inexperienced, one with the potential to tilt the creator’s legacy on its axis, she turns into well-known. It’s not lengthy earlier than “The Canine’s Ball,” because the ebook is named, is revealed to be a hoax. Then Agatha’s ex-girlfriend — who had warned her to “watch out” with the manuscript — dies by suicide. Or did she? Agatha, who’s been canceled, thinks in any other case.
Is Agatha “a loopy lady, haphazardly however unmistakably drifting down and out, sick, unemployed, drunk, obsessive about fixing a homicide that had by no means occurred?” Or “a maverick, pursuing reality and justice … even at the price of [her] personal well-being?” Possibly she’s each.
by Jess Kidd
Nora Breen, the plucky, sensible sleuth in MURDER AT GULLS NEST (Atria, 323 pp., $28.99) has checked into the Gulls Nest boardinghouse in an English seaside city in 1954. She’s there to search out her pal Frieda, who has been writing faithfully to her every week till, abruptly, she doesn’t. Ominously, Frieda’s final letter had concluded, “I consider each one in every of us at Gulls Nest is concealing some sort of secret — I shall make it my enterprise to search out out and so I shall lastly have one thing riveting to write down to you, pricey pal!”
Nora arrives at Gulls Nest with some secrets and techniques of her personal, equivalent to the truth that she spent 30 years as a Carmelite nun, Sister Agnes of Christ. To analyze her pal’s disappearance, Nora should depart behind the a part of herself that clamored for the solitude of a spiritual order and reside totally on the earth, embracing its chaos. It isn’t simple, particularly when one other visitor at Gulls Nest turns up useless, poisoned by cyanide. Frieda’s handkerchief is tucked into one in every of his pockets.
