EQMM 2012-07 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Reviews: THE JURY BOX by Steve Steinbock

The Jury Box is crowded, but your foreman isn’t complaining. This month I had the chance to discover some new authors and reacquaint myself with some old friends. Please be sure to read to the end where I share a number of new books and reprints by regular EQMM contributors.

**** Ben Coes: Coup D’etat, St. Martin’s, $24.99. While former Delta Force operative Dewey Andreas, living in Australia, tries to put his past behind him, his old enemies are orch-estrating a war between Pakistan and India that will likely lead the U.S. and China into a world war. The best strategy for averting the war is to send Andreas into the region to unseat a radical Islamist head-of-state. Coup D’etat is a tightly told, well-researched thriller with a quietly engaging hero.

**** John Connolly: Burning Soul, Atria Books, $26.00. In his tenth book-length appearance, private investigator Charlie Parker is still uneasy receiving cryptic tips from his dead daughter. This time, Parker is called upon to help Randall Haight, who as a boy took part in the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl. Thirty years later, with Haight living in a quiet Maine village, another fourteen-year-old girl is missing, and someone is sending Haight threatening messages. The Boston underworld, local cops, and Parker and his crew collide in an adventure that is at once tender and breathtakingly chilling.

**** Kate Flora: Redemption, Five Star, $25.95. Detective Joe Burgess’s plans for a picnic with his girlfriend are put on hold when two boys spot a body off the pier in Portland, Maine. The case takes a sharp personal turn when the body turns out to be that of an old high-school and Vietnam War friend who has fallen on hard times. With its authentically masculine voice, the Joe Burgess series (of which Redemption is the third) has a distinctly different flavor from Flora’s Thea Kozak novels. But it still showcases Flora’s ability to tell a profoundly sensitive story and her eye for complex family dynamics.

**** Elizabeth Zelvin, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, Five Star, $25.95. Psychotherapist Zelvin is another female writer who has mastered the male voice in a series that doesn’t shy away from serious interpersonal issues. Narrator Bruce Kohler is enjoying a carefree summer in the Hamptons with a group of his fellow recovering alcoholics when the tide washes up the body of one of their housemates, a beautiful and provocative investigative journalist. Zelvin, who weaves a classical cozy plot into a contemporary setting, has a natural ear for efficiently melodic prose, something that readers have seen in her previous Bruce Kohler novels and short stories, as well as in her historical mystery stories and poetry.

*** Vilmos Kondor: Budapest Noir, Harper, $13.99. Set in Hungary on the eve of World War II, Budapest Noir is the first of four novels, and the only one thus far to be published in English, featuring crime reporter Zsigmond Gordon. When the body of a beautiful girl is found in Budapest’s red-light

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