The Yard Dog, by Sheldon Russell

1943.  A dreary Oklahoma town, where the Dust Bowl and Depression still hang heavily over the residents.  Hook Runyon is drifting from one drunken spree to the next, moving the old caboose where he lives when he wants some variety.  Hook, you see, is a yard dog – a railroad bull – ok, a guy [...]

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When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead

One theory of time travel is that all moments are happening simultaneously, and we can shortcut from one to the other. In A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle called it tessering.
In one of those moments, I have already finished writing this blog post, and I would appreciate it if my future self would tesser herself [...]

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Medicus, by Ruth Downie

Here is another story about the great Roman Empire interwoven with a murder mystery.  This is a fun, light read – and very enjoyable.
The year is 117 A.D., and expansionist Rome is dispatching the Army to the far reaches of its empire.  And so Gaius Petreius Ruso, a doctor with the 20th Legion, finds himself [...]

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SPQR: The King’s Gambit, by John Maddox Roberts

SPQR I: The King’s Gambit is an entertaining combination of murder mystery and light history lesson which takes us back to 44 B.C., to the bustling and powerful city of Rome.  The protagonist is Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger. As Head of the Commission of Twenty Six, his job is to solve the murders in his [...]

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Body Movers by Stephanie Bond

For some reason, which I cannot now recall, I was speaking with one of my colleagues about people who clean up crime scenes. Sadly, this has become a business–cleaning up people’s murders and suicides. In the course of the conversation, she mentioned a fiction series called Body Movers, which I decided to try. The first [...]

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Death of a Red Heroine, by Qiu Xiaolong

Finally, we end the week with another crime novel set in a totalitarian state. Death of a Red Heroine, by Qiu Xiaolong, takes place in China in the 1990s, just as Deng Xiaoping’s reforms to the Chinese economic system are opening the door to a more market-based economy. While many Chinese welcome these changes, and [...]

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The Coroner’s Lunch, by Colin Cotterill

As a young man, Siri Paiboun left his native Indochina to study medicine in Paris. After joining the Communist Party there in the 1930s because his sweetheart was a committed party member, Siri remained an active if not passionate party functionary for four decades. When the Pathet Lao finally triumphed in the decades-long civil war [...]

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Billy Boyle, by James Benn

If you like your crime fiction written in a fairly straightforward, no-nonsense style, with a lot of action and an appealingly imperfect main character, James Benn’s Billy Boyle series will be a good fit. Billy is a Boston policeman, just having been made a detective, when WWII begins. He is not the brightest star in [...]

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Murder in the Marais, by Cara Black

I had the good fortune while at the American Library Association Conference to spend some time talking to Cara Black, author of the finely written Aimée Leduc mystery series. It is always interesting to get an author’s perspective on her own books as well as on the rest of the field, and Cara suggested some [...]

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Siren of the Waters, by Michael Genelin

Some of the best contemporary crime fiction is being published by small presses. Soho Press is notable for its crime fiction with an international flavor. This week, Blogging for a Good Book looks at five Soho authors who set their stories in Slovakia, France, Laos, Shanghai, and England. All of these titles are in series, [...]

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