New mysteries
Kate recommends:
Ruin Falls by Jenny Milchman
[Ballantine Books, $26.00; available April 22]
Liz Daniels has every reason to be happy about setting off on a rare family vacation, leaving behind her remote home in the Adirondack Mountains for a while. Instead, she feels uneasy. Her children, eight-year-old Reid and six-year-old Ally, have met their paternal grandparents only a handful of times. But Liz's husband, Paul, has decided that, despite a strained relationship with his mother and father, they should visit the farm in western New York where he spent his childhood. On their way to the farm, the family stops at a hotel for the night. In the morning, when Liz goes to check on her sleeping children, all her anxiety comes roaring back: Ally and Reed are nowhere to be found. Frantic worry and helplessness threaten to overtake Liz's mind - but in a sudden, gut-wrenching instant she realizes that it was no stranger who slipped into the hotel room that night. Someone she trusted completely has betrayed her...
Louise recommends:
Natchez Burning by Greg Iles
[William Morrow & Co., $27.99; available April 29]
Raised in the historic southern splendor of Natchez, Mississippi, Penn Cage learned all he knows of honor and duty from his father, Dr. Tom Cage. But now the beloved family doctor and pillar of the community has been accused of murdering Viola Turner, the African-American nurse with whom he worked in the dark days of the 1960s. Once a crusading prosecutor, Penn is determined to save his father, but Tom, stubbornly invoking doctor-patient privilege, refuses to even speak in his own defense. Penn's quest for the truth sends him deep into his father's past, where a sexually charged secret lies waiting to tear their family apart. More chilling, this long-buried sin is only a single thread in a conspiracy of greed and murder involving the vicious Double Eagles, an offshoot of the KKK controlled by some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the state. Aided by a dedicated reporter privy to Natchez's oldest secrets and by his fiancee, Penn uncovers a trail of corruption and brutality that places his family squarely in the Double Eagles' crosshairs. With every step costing blood and faith, Penn is forced to confront the most wrenching dilemma of his life: Does a man of honor choose his father or the truth?
Under a Silent Moon by Elizabeth Haynes
[Harper, $25.99]
In the crisp early hours of an autumn morning, the police are called to investigate two deaths. The first is a suspected murder at a farm on the outskirts of a small village. A beautiful young woman has been found dead, her cottage drenched with blood. The second is a reported suicide at a nearby quarry. A car with a woman's body inside was found at the bottom of the pit. As DI Louisa Smith and her team gather evidence, they discover a shocking link between the two cases and the two deaths. Haynes interweaves fictional primary source materials - police reports, phone messages, interviews - and multiple character viewpoints to create an edgy and compulsively readable tale of murder, mystery, and unsettling suspense.
By its Cover by Donna Leon
[Atlantic Monthly Press, $26.00]
One afternoon, Commissario Guido Brunetti gets a frantic call from the director of a prestigious Venetian library. Someone has stolen pages out of several rare books. After a round of questioning, the case seems clear: The culprit must be the man who requested the volumes, an American professor from a Kansas university. The only problem: The man fled the library earlier that day, and after checking his credentials, the American professor doesn't exist.
As the investigation proceeds, the suspects multiply. And when a seemingly harmless theologian who had spent years reading at the library turns up brutally murdered, Brunetti must question his expectations about what makes a man innocent or guilty.
I've Got You Under My Skin
by Mary Higgins Clark
[Simon & Schuster, $26.99]
Five years after her husband's murder, Laurie Moran, an award-winning TV producer and single mother, starts filming a new "cold case" series in which four women involved in the unsolved murder of a wealthy Westchester matron reunite to recreate the scene of the crime - along with the real killer.
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