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“where a good crime C r i m e can be had by all” c h r o n i c l e Issue #242 MArch 2006 AUTHOR OF THE MONTH Skeleton Man: A Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee novel Leaphorn comes out of retirement to help investigate what seems to be a trading post robbery. The simple kid nailed for the crime is related to a former colleague. Proving the kid’s innocence requires finding the remains of one of 172 people whose bodies were scattered over the Grand Canyon in an epic airline disaster 50 years ago. One of those passengers, a diamond dealer, had an attaché case containing a fortune in diamonds handcuffed to his wrist. Now his daughter is also seeking his body, and so is a most unpleasant fellow who is willing to kill to make sure she doesn’t succeed. These two tense tales collide deep in the canyon at the place where an old man died trying to build a cult-reviving reverence for the Hopi guardian of the Underworld. It is a race to the finish in a thunderous monsoon storm to see who will be brought to justice and who will finally unearth the Skeleton Man (Pb 19.95). Other titles in this excellent series starring two Navajo policemen include: Blessing Way, Coyote Waits (16.95), Dance Hall of the Dead (19.95), Dark Wind, The Fallen Man, Finding Moon, The Fly on the Wall, The Ghostway, Hunting Badger, Listening Woman, People of Darkness, Scared Clowns, The Sinister Pig, Skinwalkers, Talking God, A Thief of Time and The Wailing Wind (all 18.95 unless otherwise indicated). Another interesting title, which also includes a Jim Chee mini-mystery, is Talking Mysteries: A Conversation with Tony Hillerman (Tp 29.95). Hillerman discusses his craft, including his approach to plot, characterisation and setting, and the wrinkles and twists that make his brand of fiction unique. His wonderful series, which I can highly recommend, has earned him the Navajo people’s appreciation as ‘special friend to the Dineh’. - Peter 2 Modern Crime Paul ADAM M C BEATON Sleeper 384pp Pb 19.95 Death of a Bore Paul ADAM 256pp Pb 16.95 Enemy Within Rainaldi, a violin-maker, is 336pp Tp 29.95 discovered slumped over his workbench, Hamish Macbeth Mystery. Minor writer murdered with one of his own chisels, John Heppel has a problem - by all A respected modern historian and both the police and his friends are at accounts, he’s a consummate bore. When with a secure job at a red-brick a loss to discover a motive. Then it comes he’s found dead in his cottage, there are university, and a father of two in to light that he believed he was on the plenty of suspects. But surely boredom a happy marriage, Tom leads a contented track of an infamous Stradivari violin - couldn’t be cause for murder? Or so and fulfilled life. Then he is arrested and twin to one housed in the Asmolean thinks local bobby and sleuth Hamish charged with downloading child Museum and subject to 200 years of myth Macbeth, whose investigation of pornography. He is suspended from his and rumour. With nothing else to go on, Heppel’s soap opera script uncovers post and his wife cannot look him in the his two close friends pick up the search much more than melodrama. (American) eye. He knows he is from where he left off, plunging headlong innocent, but even Elizabeth BECKA into a world where great musical when he proves he Trace Evidence 356pp Tp 29.95 instruments change hands for millions, was 50 miles away Evelyn James, where forgery is an art form and where from his computer forensic pathologist murder is often a dealer’s chosen method when the images for the Cleveland of negotiation! (English) were downloaded, Medical Examiner, he knows he has to Deborah ATKINSON is called out to the find out who set Primitive Secrets river’s edge to take him up before 275pp Tp 32.95 a look at the body of anyone will truly Hawaiian Mystery. When Storm Kayama a girl, recently believe him. walks into her lucrative Honolulu law pulled from the (English) firm one morning, she is shocked and water. A Caucasian, grieved to find her adopted uncle at his the dark marbling desk, stiff and cold. Years before, Miles of decomposition KEY Hamasaki had fulfilled a promise to her has spread through her limbs like poison. academic father and brought her to be raised with After years in the job, Evelyn is used to his own family. As the questions such things - to the sight of victims banking surrounding Miles’s death grow and her washed up by poverty or grief - but this is adopted family closes ranks, Storm quite different, and much nastier. Her feet canine detectives suspects he has been murdered. have been encased in concrete, her body (American) wrapped in chains. Even worse, it seems clerical Lori AVOCATO the girl was alive when she went in - alive One Dead Under the Cuckoo’s and terrified, clawing at the dark water. cosy/malice domestic Nest 352pp Pb 16.95 And she isn’t alone - other girls have A Pauline Sokol Mystery. Sokol’s current recently met a similar fate. When the culinary/food undercover investigation into a sleazy daughter of a prominent family also psychiatric scam has hit a small snag: she disappears, she finds herself in a fbi has been forcibly committed to a mental desperate bid to put the pieces of the institution! She is certainly sane, but try puzzle together before she is called, once feline detectives telling that to the nuns who run the place. again, to the water’s edge. (American) Even her hunky, crime-solving sometime- Sallie BISSELL forensic cohort Jagger is unwilling to spring her, Legacy of Masks so she’s got nothing better to do than 432pp Pb 16.95 horse racing mystery keep digging. Then the strange death of a Ex-prosecutor Mary Crow didn’t expect a medical gender-confused ‘sister’ further hero’s welcome when she returned home complicates matters and she realises she’s to Pisgah County, North Carolina. But military in way over her head. (American) she never guessed her first case in her Colin BATEMAN own law firm would tear the town apart. native american Belfast Confidential (American) 416pp Tp 32.95 Alice BLANCHARD police procedural They say moving house is one of the most Life Sentences 384pp Tp 29.95 stressful things you can do. Well, as far as Daisy Hubbard, a genetic researcher in political/legal Dan Starkey is concerned, ‘they’ can stick a prestigious Boston lab, is driven to find it where the sun don’t shine because right a cure for a rare genetic disease that psychological now helping his wife with the unpacking claimed the life of her younger brother. is the least of his worries... No sooner has But her progress is halted when her private eye he moved into his new Belfast home, his mentally unstable sister, Anna, is best mate, Mouse, is murdered - leaving discovered missing from her California romantic suspense him to catch a killer, become editor of the home. Fearing the worst, Daisy drops obscenely successful scandal magazine, everything and flies across the country to sport Belfast Confidential, and compile the find Anna. Once there, she is informed by much-coveted Power List. (Irish) the LAPD that the known serial killer, spy Roy Gaines, has confessed to Anna’s murder, but he will only reveal where he suspense/thriller has hidden the body if he can lead Daisy AUTHOR’S NATIONALITY AT END OF BLURB to it himself. (American) CRIME CHRONICLE www.abbeys.com.au 3 Bill BONANNO & Joe PISTONE Kirsty BROOKS Marc CERASINI The Good Guys 368pp Pb 18.95 Millionaire Float Operation Hell Gate: Twenty Four The authors provide an inside look at 320pp Pb 19.95 Declassified 336pp Pb 18.95 both a Mafia crime family and the FBI. Cassidy Blair returns Within 24 hours, a Both end up looking for a Russian in her third sexy PI nightmare will be literature professor who has disappeared adventure with unleashed that could from Columbia University. When the more confidence, cause the death of Mafia ‘soldiers’ and FBI agents cross more money in her untold millions and paths, well, all’s fair in love and war. bank account and devastate a great (American) more Officer Sam nation. It’s a plot Sam BOURNE Tasker in her life being carried out by The Righteous Men 440pp Tp 29.95 than ever before. So the unlikeliest of A pimp is found dead in a rough New when Cassidy lands allies. A powerful York neighbourhood. A far-right a job infiltrating one mole within the extremist is fatally shot at his remote log of the city’s most deepest reaches of US cabin outside Seattle. An 18-year-old dangerous nightclubs while wearing the Intelligence has secretly conscripted the computer hacker is murdered on his way skimpiest of outfits, the odds are Sam very criminals he has been charged with home from working at a call centre in isn’t going to be too thrilled. Meanwhile, investigating - former IRA terrorists, India. One thing unites these victims. All Cass has to survive a battle with her Latino and Asian gang members, Middle had, at some point in their largely wasted crazed parrot, a complete body wax and Eastern assassins and others - creating and grubby lives, performed an act of the disturbing reappearance of her high one of the most insidious terrorist exceptional goodness.