Review | Round-up: Four new crime fiction to keep you entertained on long winter nights

Long Shadows

By David Baldacci

Grand Central, 432 pages, $37

This is David Baldacci’s 51st crime book overall, his seventh featuring Amos Decker, the FBI agent with the spookily phenomenal memory. Events find Decker in the bureau’s very bad books. He dresses too casually for his spic-and-span bosses, doesn’t mask his contempt for their by-the-book methods, is annoyingly successful for a guy who works investigative unorthodoxy for all its worth. In the new book, Decker is assigned to the murder of a Naples, Florida, judge (female) and her bodyguard (male). It’s a case Decker describes as dwelling “in almost total darkness with a few feeble points of light.” Since Baldacci is the absolute master of provocative mini-twists in his plots, the narrative slides through a maze of zigs and zags, a list that includes puzzling matters of sex, big business and politics.

In the Spirit of 13

By the Mesdames of Mayhem

Carrick, 408 pages, $19.99

Whimsy can be difficult to get right. That doesn’t stop some of the free-spirited Mesdames of Mayhem, a group of Canadian women crime fiction writers, from inserting a share of it into the fifth anthology of stories, 22 of them. The point is that, rather than stick to conventional crime stories, the authors have chosen to traffic in ghosts, hobgoblins and other fanciful forms. So it is that we get stories featuring a fake psychic, a dybbuk and a Korean ghost. More space goes to entities that are merely ancient — featuring a Hollywood back lot, Charles Lindbergh and characters from the speakeasy era. Not all of it works, but there’s more than enough to light up and surprise readers for many nights of pleasure, some of it in easygoing whimsy.

Sinister Graves

By Marcie R. Rendon

Soho, 240 pages, $36.95

It’s the 1970s, rural Minnesota, and the question is not so much whether a 19-year-old Ojibwe woman named Cash Blackbear will solve the murder; it’s whether she’ll survive her own scrappy chain-smoking, beer drinking lifestyle. Cash, on balance an altogether engaging character, is also a prize student at the local college and mixes her superior intelligence with an otherworldly ability to interpret strangers’ thoughts. Cash has a part-time job as an assistant to a nearby town’s sheriff and when floodwaters sweep into sight the body of a woman who is clearly a murder victim, the sheriff assigns Cash to the case. As a sleuth, she has a surprisingly traditional gumshoe approach, but she also draws on a little of her mind-reading specialty and other examples of Aboriginal spirituality.

Before There Were Skeletons

By Judy Penz Sheluk

Superior Shores Press, 261 pages, $19.99

Calamity Barnstable, the Ontario private eye specializing in missing persons, got her given name from the Wild West figure, but her personality from the version played in the Doris Day movies: a little smart alecky, but reasoned and charming. She operates out of Marketville, a town an hour north of Toronto. In this book, the fourth in the series, our Callie has three missing women on her hands, all slim and between the ages of 18 and 20 when they vanished in the winter of 1995, one of them a member of Callie’s own family. Are they kidnapping victims? Are the crimes connected? For that matter, are the three, perhaps, even still living? Callie’s sleuthing is clever, determined and the stuff of solid noir.

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