The Jury Box

by Steve Steinbock

This installment of The Jury Box is being composed under unusual conditions. On November 19, the Pacific Northwest experienced a weather condition called a bomb cyclone, the epicenter of which was very close to my home. Trees took down power lines and cell towers all over Puget Sound, leaving me without power or heat for eight days—and still no internet. Inconvenient as it’s been, there’s something nice about writing a column with fountain pen and paper by candlelight. The fictional Ellery Queen and his father, Inspector Queen, experienced a similar sense of isolation when, during The Siamese Twin Mystery (1933); they were trapped in a mansion on a mountaintop during a forest fire. I’m on a mountain as well, but this one isn’t on fire.

In this month’s column we have a veritable Venn diagram of themes: two crime novels each with a female Indigenous American protagonist, two mysteries featuring ensemble casts of eccentric characters, two novels featuring photographer sleuths, and several mysteries with heroes who are aided by extraordinary (possibly paranormal) senses of intuition.

***** Richard Osman, We Solve Murders, Penguin, $30.00. When Osman’s first novel, The Thursday Murder Club, was published in 2020, it received universal accolades. But I missed it, as I did his three subsequent books. But after reading Osman’s newest book, the first in a new series, I promise I’ll go back and play catch-up with his previous works. Amy Wheeler, a private security officer from the U.K. working for Maximum Impact Solutions, is serving as bodyguard to Rosie D’Antonio, an exotic and highly successful media influencer and the world’s best-selling author—“if you don’t count Lee Child.” But someone is killing off Amy’s former clients, and now a complex criminal conspiracy is after her. Amy calls on the one person she can trust, her private investigator father-in-law, who helps her and the famous Ms. D’Antonio on a chase from North Carolina to Dubai, to the Caribbean, to Dublin, and to a quiet village in Hertfordshire. We Solve Murders is the first rollicking adventure in what I hope is a long-running series.

**** Ramona Emerson, Exposure, Soho Crime, $29.95. In a follow-up to her 2022 debut novel Shutter, Emerson weaves together two haunting parallel narratives set during a freezing New Mexico winter. Navajo forensic photographer Rita Todacheene, working with the Albuquerque police, is called on to help with the slain family of a local police officer. The police believe that the family members were shot by the teenage son, but Rita, guided by the spirit of a dead child, suspects otherwise. Rita has the “gift” of being able to see and speak with murder victims. Meanwhile, a tormented wandering lay priest is battling his own ghosts as he serves the homeless, along the way using a lethal syringe to relieve those who suffer and a hand scythe to punish the wicked. In a haunting narrative, Exposure provides a vivid portrayal of the challenges of a Navajo woman working in a white man’s world, as well as fascinating details of crime-scene photography. Exposure works well as both a horror novel and a police procedural set in a unique community.

***** Marcie R. Rendon, Broken Fields, Soho Crime, $28.95. Cash Blackbear, a young Ojibwe woman in rural 1970s Minnesota, does fieldwork for local farmers to pay for gas, beer, and cigarettes, from time to time helping out the local sheriff. While plowing a field for Bud Borgerud, she notices a car with the engine left running outside a house rented to the farmhands. Checking inside the house, Cash finds Borgerud’s dead body in the kitchen and a little girl cowering under a bed upstairs. Cash, haunted by a powerful perception that guides her to see what other people miss, is a vividly tragic and unforgettable character.

*** Jayne Ann Krentz, Shattering Dawn, Berkeley, $29.00. Amelia Rivers is a photographer and podcaster involved with the podcast Lost Night Files, in which members explore conspiracies, psychic murders, and fringe theories in order to help understand what happened to them during a night that none of them remember. Rivers hires private investigator Gideon Sweetwater to help her deal with a stalker. The P.I. isn’t sure if the Amelia is delusional or a fraud, but something compels him to help. Someone is hunting down former subjects of an experimental drug research project, all who exhibit hyperintuitive psychic talents. Shattering Dawn is part thriller, part romance, and part paranormal suspense novel.

**** John M. McMahon, Head Cases, Minotaur, $28.00. Gardner Camden, a socially awkward man whose brain is wired for solving puzzles, heads up a pattern-and-recognition team for the FBI, a team consisting of misfits which has earned them the nickname “The Headcases.” As pattern-and-recognition specialists, the team has the brainpower to recognize peculiarities and inconsistencies and to find connections and explanations. Seven years earlier, Camden tracked down a serial killer named Ross Tignon. But before Tignon could go to trial, he was killed in a home fire. Now, seven years later, his body has turned up, freshly killed in a manner similar to his own modus operandi. This is just the beginning, as several more serial killers meet their end in a puzzle that seems to have been written personally for Camden. Head Cases, which is under development as a streaming series on Max, is a riveting, head-spinning, and wildly entertaining thriller.

**** Deborah J. Benoit, The Gardener’s Plot, Minotaur, $28.00. Winner of St. Martin’s First Crime Novel award, Benoit’s debut work is a solidly written cozy. Recently widowed Maggie Walker has returned to her hometown in the Berkshires of Massachusetts to take over the Victorian home of her late grandmother. While dodging an overeager real-estate developer, a greedy cousin, and a cruel rival from her high-school days, Maggie volunteers to help a friend set up a community garden. But on opening day of the garden, a body is found in the newly plowed soil.

**** Darlene A. Cypser, The Consulting Detective Trilogy Part III: Montague Street, Foolscap & Quill, $16.99. In the four volumes of her Consulting Detective series—beginning with The Crack in the Lens (2011)—Cypser chronicles the early life of Sherlock Holmes while weaving in many of the untold adventures mentioned in the Conan Doyle canon. Montague Street opens in 1876 with the twenty-two-year-old Holmes continuing his education in criminology while solving a series of cases. Montague Street is an episodic novel featuring a series of connected adventures which lead to Holmes’s first meeting with Dr. John Watson and his move to 221B Baker Street.

Regular Dell Magazines contributor William Burton McCormick has collected the best of his short fiction in Deeds of Darkness (Level Best Books, $24.00 paperback, $9.99 e-book). The book includes twenty-four of McCormick’s short mysteries, thrillers, and tales of horror, several with historical settings and many set in Eastern Europe. Around half of these stories made their first appearances in the pages of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine or Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. The book includes a foreword by AHMM editor Linda Landrigan and an introduction by the writer.

My friends from Japan, the Talkative Middles, have published volume 3 of their Carr graphic series providing analysis, maps, and diagrams as well as illustrated commentary. Volume 3 covers a dozen of John Dickson Carr’s works published between 1938 and 1941 including The Crooked Hinge, The Reader Is Warned, and The Problem of the Wire Cage. While the book is primarily written in Japanese, the crime-scene maps and diagrams are annotated in English and Japanese. The book can be ordered directly from Moriwaki Akira at tao-owl@jcom.home.ne.jp. The cost is approximately $19.00 USD plus shipping.