“Are those people your mother’s friends?  Too extraordinary.  What colour would you call that suit?  Aubergine?  Aubergine a la creme d’oursin? I must go to Huntsman and get one knocked up.  What do you mean you have no aubergine?  Everyone was wearing it at Eleanor Melrose’s.  Order a mile of it straight away.”  (from  At Last, Farrar, 1/31/12, p.1)

All the characters in Edward St. Aubyn’s novels talk like that and it gets very annoying after a few pages.  All upper class Brits may be twits, but surely they are not all equally snide and witty.  But what do I know?  English readers seem to like St. Aubyn and the critics there rave that he is “our purest living prose stylist” and “the most brilliant English novelist of his generation.”  I suspect American readers will find the characters repellant and the writing way overdone.

At Last is the fifth novel in the series that takes Patrick Melrose from the age of 5 to his mother’s death.  Born into an aristocratic but dysfunctional English family, Patrick endures a traumatic childhood–he is raped by his father and neglected by his alcoholic mother. Poor Patrick, at the age of 30 he has gone through his trust fund, having spent it all on heroin.  Things look up a bit after his marriage, but as a father he is appalling.  This is a comedy of manners about effete, abusive and cruel characters:  Jane Austen with characters from Stephen King.  Not my cup of tea.

–posted 2/3/2012

Detective Bill Slider fans are eagerly awaiting the new book,  Kill My Darling (Severn, 2/1/2012).  Many readers place author Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’ series at the very top of their list of best British police procedurals.  Not only are the puzzles tricky and the books well-written, but the detectives, criminals and victims are all so well-drawn.  This case begins when the body of a pretty young woman is found in a wooded area in Bill Slider’s slice of west suburban London (Shepherd’s Bush).  At first, suspects are few;  Melanie Hunter was a nice woman just beginning a career in paleontology, seemingly without any enemies.  Bill and his team eventually flush out some suspects:  her boyfriend is apparently a rather sleazy real estate agent, her step-father may be a sadist, and her neighbor is an ex-con convicted of murdering  his wife.  And, of course, we get to catch up with the members of Slider’s firm (English for team):  snappy Sergeant Atherton;  blustering Superintendent Porson whose malapropisms are legendary, DC McLaren and his drippy sandwiches, etc.

–posted 1/28/2012

Author Blaize Clement died of cancer in July 2011, leaving two Dixie Hemmingway mysteries in the works.  The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas, the last book completed by her, was released on January 3, 2012 by Minotaur.  In it, Dixie agrees to take care of two cats belonging to a football celebrity, which leads to her involvement in the surprisingly dangerous world of counterfeit high fashion.  Dixie Hemingway fans will be happy to hear that Blaise Clement’s son, John Clement, is under contract with Minotaur to write at least two more books in the Catsitter’s mystery series.

–posted  1/23/2012

Fans of Steven Havill’s Posadas County (NM) mysteries have a treat in store for them with the newest book in the series.   One Perfect Shot (Poisoned Pen, 1/3/2012) is a prequel that takes us back to the time when undersheriff Bill Gastner first meets Estelle Reyes.  His boss has hired her as a new deputy without consulting Bill. At 19, young Estelle is the first female road patrol deputy in the county.   Under Bill’s tutelage, she learns the ropes fast.  Gastner was already pushing  sixty when we first met him in Heartshot published by St. Martin’s in 1991. He was a grumpy overweight widower, so it is great to see him as a younger man.  Let’s hope Steven Havill continues to fill in the back story.

–posted 1/15/2012

Dana Stabenow fans will be happy to hear that her new book, Restless in the Grave (Minotaur, 2/14/2012), will bring State Trooper Liam Campbell and Kate together.  The smart and sexy Liam starred in four earlier books, the last one being Better to Rest (NAL, 2002).  It should be fun to see Kate and Liam together.  The case involves the question of possible sabotage when the small plane of an Alaskan aviation magnate goes down in flames.  To investigate, private eye Kate must go undercover as a waitress in a bar.

–posted 1/10/2012

British author Maureen Carter’s books are now becoming more available in the U.S.  She has written six crime novels starring Detective Sergeant Bev Morriss of the Birmingham, England police force.  Bev is the young and “lippy” protagonist in a series of gritty police procedurals with good plots and convincing settings.   As the series proceeds, she works her way through several failed romances, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other personal problems.   Mother Love (Crème de la Crème, 1/1/2012) is the second in a new series featuring Sarah Quinn, who seems to be the exact opposite of Bev Moriss.  DI Sarah Quinn is known as the ‘Ice Queen’ of the Birmingham police department.  Caroline King, a feisty local TV reporter, serves as a foil for the cool Sarah.  They are adversaries at first, but in Mother Love, they work together as a team.  Carter’s books deserve to be better known in the U.S.

–posted 12/30/2011

I just finished Wessel  Ebersohn’s page-turner  The October Killings (Minotaur, 2011) which stars an engaging young black woman, Abigail Bukula.   During the struggle against apartheid, her parents were killed, but she was saved by a young white soldier.  Sent abroad for college and law school, she returns to South Africa to take a responsible position in the new government’s Department of Justice.  When we meet her, she is just about to get entangled in a mission to stop a serial killer determined on revenge.  Abby braves one danger after another and the final secret isn’t revealed until the very last page.  So I am pleased to learn that a sequel,  Those Who Love Night, will be released on January 3, 2012 by Minotaur.   In the late 70’s Ebersohn wrote three thrillers featuring Yudel Gordon, psychologist at the Pretoria Central Prison. The novels, which were honest depictions of apartheid-era South Africa, ran into trouble with the South African authorities, but were popular abroad.  Yudel Gordon reappears as a secondary character in the Abigail Bukala books.

–posted 12/27/2011

You never can tell when a sequel might pop up and surprise you.  The Exterminators (Poisoned Pen, 1/3/2012) by Bill Fitzhugh is a sequel to the novel Pest Control (Avon, 1996).   After fifteen years, Fitzhugh has revived Bob Dillon, an exterminator whose search for the perfect organic bug control has gone high-tech.  Now Dillon is using gene sequencing to create an assassin bug that will kill all the other bug pests.  When the U.S. Department of Defense offers to fund Bill’s research, he can’t resist and finds himself in political hot water.  Then a menacing figure from Dillon’s past puts out a contract on his life.  If you like Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard’s darkly comic crime novels, you should like anything by Fitzhugh.  Though he has written other crime novels, these two are the only true sequels.

–posted 12/17/2011

Oh no, now Bill is writing thrillers.  At least that’s what I thought when I noticed The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen (Viking, 1/10/2012) by Thomas Caplan and President Bill Clinton.  But in fact he just wrote the introduction.  Still, his name on the book jacket should help this book sell.  Clive Cussler has called it “the most ingenious thriller I’ve even read.”  The protagonist is handsome and dashing Ty Hunter who was an undercover operative before he became a top Hollywood star.  International derring-do with jet-set glamor–how can it fail?

–posted 12/13/2011

Maggie Barbieri’s “Murder 101″ series stars the humorously insecure amateur detective, Alison Bergeron, who teaches English at her alma mater, St. Thomas College, a small Catholic school at the northern tip of New York City.  With its beautiful view of the Hudson River, St. Thomas should be a bucolic utopia, but somehow Alison keeps tripping over one murder after another.  Bobby Crawford, a New York Police detective, is the romantic interest in divorced Alison’s life. So far Barbieri has written six of these academic cozies–an increasingly popular sub-genre–and has acquired a loyal following of readers.  In the latest installment, Physical Education (Minotaur, 11/22/2011), Alison must fill in for a dead colleague and teach Phys. Ed.   And she also finds another corpse in the trunk of her car.

–posted 12/4/2011