When it comes to crime, seniors are having a moment. Hulu’s hit Only Murders in the Building, with Steve Martin and Martin Short as investigating podcasters, will return for a third season, and Stephen Spielberg snapped up the film rights to Richard Osman’s bestselling The Thursday Murder Club. That 2020 mystery about four senior sleuths at an English retirement community has led to two excellent follow-ups: last year’s The Man Who Died Twice and this month’s The Bullet That Missed (Viking, digital galley). The Thursday Murder Club members — Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, Ron — are puzzling over the cold case of TV reporter Bethany Waites, who was close to exposing a sales tax fraud when her car went over a cliff into the sea; her body was never found. They get some help from Bethany’s former colleagues and their police pals Chris and Donna, but matters are complicated by former spy Elizabeth, who is being blackmailed into carrying out a hit on a retired KGB agent. Oh dear! It makes perfect sense if you’ve read the first two books. Clever plotting, witty writing and engaging characters make for a good old time.
The same can be said for Deanna Raybourn’s frisky Killers of a Certain Age (Berkley, digital galley), which also features a quartet of savvy seniors. Billie, Mary Alice, Natalie and Helen were teenagers back in 1978 when they were recruited by the secret global network known as the Museum and trained as elite assassins. All their targets were nasty criminals and killers, of course. Now the women have reached retirement age, and the Museum has sent them on a celebratory cruise. All is going swimmingly until the women spy a Museum colleague in disguise and realize they’re his targets. Someone at the Museum thinks they know too much — and they do, like how to hit back. Raybourn alternates the women’s present-day movements with flashbacks to their training and past missions. All four make the most of being women of a certain age — often overlooked, practically invisible.
Remember Agatha Christie’s memorable Miss Marple, whose age and mild demeanor hid her knife-sharp wits? Marple: 12 New Stories (Morrow, digital galley) is a treat for fans of the legendary sleuth as a dozen contemporary writers — Ruth Ware, Elly Griffiths and Lucy Foley, among them — put their own spin on Jane Marple. In “Miss Marple Takes Manhattan,” Alyssa Cole sweeps her off to New York City, where her nephew underestimates his aunt’s street smarts. The body’s in the kitchen instead of the library in Val McDermid’s “The Second Murder in the Vicarage,” and in Leigh Bardugo’s “The Disappearance,” Jane’s old pal Dolly Bantry needs her help in solving another mystery at Gossington Hall. Christie would approve.
Who is Anomie? The quest to discover the identity of a creepy internet stalker and possible killer occupies detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott for a thousand pages in The Ink Black Heart (Little Brown, library hardcover), the sixth entry in the best-selling series by Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling. The Harry Potter author is no stranger to internet controversy, and her familiarity with fans and trolls shows up not only in the complex storyline but also in the pages of Twitter threads and chat room transcripts. I did a fair amount of skimming these often confusing portions, eager to return to the investigation of the murder of Edie Ledwell, the co-creator of a quirky online cartoon, “The Ink Black Heart.” The prime suspect is Anomie, who developed a free online game based on Ledwell’s cartoon and who was unmercifully harassing her, along with thousands of followers. But who is Anomie in real life? Numerous eccentrics present themselves, from jealous animators and actors, to former agents and business partners. Robin infiltrates the online game as Buffypaws, and Strike even disguises himself as Darth Vader at a comics con. But all is not fun and games. A parcel bomb explodes, someone is shoved under a train, a hostage situation unfolds. It’s to Rowling’s storytelling credit that The Ink Black Heart has enough suspense to keep readers interested in Anomie to the very end. Or maybe they want to know how the detectives’ love life plays out. Those two should get a room.
Savannah is a lovely city with an ugly past still shadowing the present. No one knows that better than society doyenne and widowed matriarch Morgana Musgrave: “I do believe there’s a poisonous vapor in this town, a sort of miasmal gas that rises from the storm drains and leeches into our blood. Would either of you care for cheese straws?” George Dawes Green mixes mystery and social commentary in his lush novel The Kingdoms of Savannah (Celadon Books, digital galley), where it’s midnight in that garden of sweetness and rot, secrets and lies. The murder of an affable young homeless man named Billy and the disappearance of crazy-talking archaeologist Matilda “Stony” Stone sparks Morgana’s adopted black granddaughter and aspiring documentary filmmaker Jaq to ask difficult questions in her search for justice. Her uncle Ransom, Morgana’s wayward younger son who lives in the homeless camp under the Truman bridge, reluctantly helps her. Meanwhile, Morgana’s failing detective agency is hired by the chief suspect, a sleazy developer/slumlord, to prove his innocence. A supporting ensemble cast of eccentrics — society matrons, ambitious cops, ghost tour operators, vicious meth heads, a mysterious nighttime whistler — wind through the immersive story, moving from mansions to dive bars to a swampy island upriver. A woman is imprisoned in an underground tunnel reached by storm drain. I couldn’t stop reading, and I didn’t want it to end. Love the cover, too.
Where Green’s novel is dark and glittery, Sarah Addison Allen’s Other Birds (St. Martin’s Press, digital galley) is a dreamy pastel fable haunted by family secrets and a few lingering ghosts. Recent high school grad Zoey decides to spend the summer before college at her late mother’s apartment on quaint Mallow Island near Charleston, S.C. The small Dellawisp complex — named after the tiny turquoise birds fluttering in the courtyard — is also home to a reticent caretaker, a solitary young chef, a henna artist with an assumed name, a hoarder obsessed with a legendary writer, and her reclusive sister. Their stories, along with the wistful spirits of past residents, connect past and present in magical and surprising ways. Allen’s touch is light, her prose lyrical, so it’s easy to suspend disbelief and become absorbed in the intriguing story. “Stories aren’t fiction. Stories are fabric. They’re the white sheets we drape over our ghosts so we can see them.”
Lisa Jewell’s 2019 chiller The Family Upstairs reminded me of one Barbara Vine’s twisted tales of a dysfunctional family. It wrapped up quite neatly so I was surprised to learn that there was a sequel, The Family Remains (Atria, digital galley). Jewell introduces several new characters, including an abused wife and a discerning detective, but mostly focuses on the continuing fortunes of siblings Lucy and Henry Lamb. Their parents died in a presumed murder-suicide when they were young teens, and the first book explores their peculiar upbringing. More revelations unfold in the second as grown-up Lucy and Henry reunite in London and begin the search for Finn, the boy who lived with them back in the day. Meanwhile, the police are trying to identify a bag of bones found by mudlarkers on the Thames, and authorities in France have discovered the murder of a man connected to Lucy. The Family Remains could be read as a stand-alone, but it’s better if you first read The Family Upstairs. Shiver.
On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever 