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There’s nothing like a well-plotted mystery to read on a summer’s day–or any day, for that matter. Here are five first-rate mysteries, fresh off the presses. In the course of each of these selections, you’re transported to somewhere that you never expected to find yourself, from the Austin music scene in Last Woman Standing to disco-era Detroit (Finding Mrs. Ford) to 1920s Portland, Oregon (The Paragon Hotel) to the England of Arthur Conan Doyle in Mycroft and Sherlock.
Finding Mrs. Ford by Deborah Goodrich Royce
If you’ve ever summered (or just dreamed of summering) in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, a popular locale for those in the money and in the know, you’d peg it as an unlikely place for a mystery to unfold. This is part of the magic when Deborah Goodrich Royce draws you into her plot via her dazzling treatment of this setting (which she knows intimately as co-owner of the Ocean House hotel, which towers invitingly over the local landscape) and other equally well-drawn locales, including disco-era suburban Detroit–complete with a protagonist who drives a Le Car–which figure heavily in the plot as well. Royce’s debut novel features equally three-dimensional characters and plot twists that are engaging and original as well. Once you’ve enjoyed Finding Mrs. Ford, you’ll find yourself expecting more great things upcoming from this author.
Mycroft and Sherlock by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse
An exercise many authors have enjoyed—I've tried it myself—is to try writing a fresh story using the characters, settings and conventions of Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s arduous to fit your plot and dialogue into this rigid format, but it's paradoxically liberating. One of the latest to try is basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who, along with co-writer Anna Waterhouse, has turned out two such pastiches in lieu of more typical sports-icon sidelines like opening a car dealership or appearing on a reality show.
Both novels, 2015’s Mycroft Holmes and the recent Mycroft and Sherlock, give readers a treat by focusing on the second-most-intriguing occasional character (after Irene Adler) in the Holmes canon, Sherlock’s even-smarter brother, Mycroft, who is happy to solve mysteries as long as he can do so from a seated position within his rabidly antisocial Diogenes Club. Though the story is marred by some clichés and redundancies (from Mycroft Holmes: “he … wiped the damp sweat [emphasis mine] off his neck”) and overwriting (from Mycroft and Sherlock: “had she been home, she would never have permitted jam on her spouse’s morning toast in such copious amounts that he could spill any portion thereof”), the plotting and character sketches are first rate, as is the authors’ sly interspersing of social commentary.
The Paragon Hotel by Lyndsay Faye
Equal parts historical fiction and crime drama, Lindsay Faye’s The Paragon Hotel is set in Portland, Oregon (not the Birkenstocks-and-sandals version of Portland in 2019, but the 1921 Jim Crow version that most Pacific Northwesterners are ignorant of or would rather forget). With a plot that involves an all-black hotel, a local KKK chapter and a refugee from the East Coast Mafia, The Paragon Hotel engages the reader on multiple levels.
Last Woman Standing, by Amy Gentry
Amy Gentry, the author of the acclaimed 2016 mystery, Good as Gone, has set her latest novel in Austin, Texas—though not, as you might expect, in the music or tech scene. Rather, Gentry explores the city’s comedy landscape. Here, protagonist Dana Diaz, is trying to succeed in stand-up, a quest made harder by the endless humiliations involved in breaking into what’s essentially a boy’s club. Much of the book is a new take on Patricia Highsmith’s/Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, but that description, while accurate, doesn’t manage to do Last Woman Standing justice in terms of the textures and issues it brings to the fore.
More News Tomorrow by Susan Richards Shreve
A protagonist in her seventies, Georgianna (Georgie) Grove and her teenage grandson, Thomas, share much of the multigenerational narration in Susan Richard Shreve’s latest novel. The plot gets going as Georgie takes her family on a canoe trip toward the setting of a crime from years ago, when her mother was murdered by (or so the law would have it), her father. That mystery, however, is only one of the concerns of the book; it’s also an exploration of less violent and more philosophical issues along the way.
