Ah, the perfect murder. It’s the quest that keeps mystery writers plotting and readers turning pages. Our spring roundup offers five novels designed to keep you guessing, including many homages to the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie.
The Midnight Taxi by Yosha Gunasekera
A New York City cabbie picks up a fare heading to the airport. When Siriwathi Perera arrives at LaGuardia , the man is dead in her back seat – and not of a heart attack. Police are convinced the young woman is the only one with opportunity, and they aren’t too bothered about looking for a motive. “We were in a locked, moving vehicle,” Siri says, confronting the nightmare she finds herself plunged into. “The man was alive when I picked him up and dead on arrival? Who else could have done it?”
Why We Wrote This
This batch of mystery novels involves a locked taxicab, a crime-fighting lepidopterist, an accused Welsh terrier, and a nosy aunty. The plots keep readers guessing.
Enter Amaya Fernando, a fellow Sri Lankan immigrant and public defender whom Siri had given a ride to earlier that day. With her court date approaching, Siri and Amaya have five days to figure out who really killed the guy in the back seat. Author Yosha Gunasekera, herself an attorney, has written a terrific debut, with a heroine to root for, a clever plot, a clear-eyed look at the legal system, and odes to both New York and the unsung workers who keep the city running. One caveat: Sharp-eyed readers might not solve whodunit, but the “whenithappened” isn’t too hard to puzzle out.
A Ghastly Catastrophe by Deanna Raybourn
If the idea of a lepidopterist challenging Bram Stoker to dueling hatpins makes you smile, I have good news: Veronica Speedwell is back. “We had fallen into the habit of murder – the sleuthing and not the committing,” Veronica confides about herself and her partner, Revelstoke Templeton-Vane, better known as Stoker. The 19th-century natural historians find themselves enlisted to solve a “suicide” and an exsanguination that Scotland Yard was ordered to cover up by the dead men’s own powerful families. Deanna Raybourn uses this 10th outing to bring in her first pair of 19th-century sleuths, Lady Julia and her husband, Nicholas Brisbane. And if longtime readers see certain similarities between the pairs, so do Veronica and Lady Julia when they compare notes.
“A Ghastly Catastrophe” is a romp from start to finish, including plenty of moments of an exasperated Stoker emphatically declaring that vampires (obviously!) do not exist. “Mock as you wish, but it is strange, and that which is strange must be explained,” Veronica returns. “A Ghastly Catastrophe” is not the best place for newcomers to jump in, but the book is tailor-made for Raybourn’s fans. And Veronica’s wit is still as sharp as her hatpins: “It was always so irritating when handsome young men were discovered to be liars.”
No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done by Sophie Hannah
A beloved family pet is accused of a crime, and his family takes him on the run in Sophie Hannah’s newest. The Lamberts’ beloved Welsh terrier, Champ, has been accused of biting a teenage girl. Sally Lambert, her two kids, and her reluctant husband, Mark, head out in the dead of night to prevent a miscarriage of justice.
“No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done” is a book within a book, with plenty of metafictional twists and turns. And it’s got a higher-than-expected body count for what starts as an English cozy mystery set in Swaffham Tilney, the kind of newly moneyed village in which people name houses things like The Hayloft.
Author Sophie Hannah has been entrusted with continuing the Poirot mysteries, and she knows her Agatha Christie cold. In this book, the local Christie book club disbanded after a fight about whether to include a Mary Westmacott title (Christie’s pen name). Faction No. 1 says that since Dame Christie herself wrote them, of course the Westmacott books count. Faction No. 2 says that Christie herself didn’t think they were Christies, therefore they are out. There are unreliable narrators and characters regularly concealing things (including a couple of bodies) from one another and the reader.
There is a simple test to see if this book is for you: If you think Furbert Herbert Lambert, the family’s previous dog, is an adorable name for a pup, dive right in. If it strikes you as overly precious, you are going to be too annoyed by the main character to enjoy the twists. Nota bene: To find out what (probably) happened, read to the very last page.
Murder at 30,000 Feet by Susan Walter
A high school baseball team, a wedding party, a rock star, and a U.S. marshal get on a flight bound for Puerto Rico. After turbulence severe enough to turn the flight attendants’ faces gray, one passenger is found dead in the bathroom. The marshal has to keep everyone calm and try to figure out who did it before the plane lands, with help from the FBI on the ground in San Diego.
Susan Walter isn’t the first to set a murder in “a flying tin can.” Christie did it first – and better – in “Death in the Clouds.” The idea that no one on a crowded plane heard someone being murdered in a tiny bathroom, even with severe turbulence, stretches credulity. But “Murder at 30,000 Feet” moves at a fast clip, and Walter makes the most of the claustrophobic atmosphere. She also comes up with entirely plausible motives for several passengers, involving both recent crimes and a years-old miscarriage of justice back at sea level. Even better, Walter doesn’t take herself too seriously, including a moment late in the book where I laughed out loud.
Detective Aunty by Uzma Jalaluddin
If, like me, you missed this delight when it was published last year, run to your nearest library or bookstore. Uzma Jalaluddin (“Ayesha at Last”) follows fellow authors Sherry Thomas and Jennifer Ashley in skillfully making the move from romance to mystery.
Kausar Khan has always been a noticing sort of person, but her husband and children preferred she kept her observations to herself. So, aside from clearing up a few school-based mysteries, she has limited her sleuthing to the stacks of Agatha Christie paperbacks by her armchair. Then, a year after losing her husband, she gets the “second-worst phone call of her life.” Her daughter calls from the police station: A man has been stabbed, and she is the prime suspect. Kausar, who hasn’t been able to return to Toronto since a family tragedy, catches the next flight back to the Golden Crescent neighborhood to either clear her daughter’s name or “help her get away with murder,” as her best friend, May, says.
Kausar and May have excellent taste: They bonded over their love for Louise Penny mysteries. And May, a retired teacher, believes Kausar deserves to keep living. “There’s more to life than sitting alone in your house surrounded by ghosts and memories.”
“Jack Reacher in a dupatta” is perhaps a stretch. But fans of Jesse Q. Sutanto’s “Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers” will love watching Kausar forge a new second act for herself as she tries to save her family. And in even better news: The second book in the Detective Aunty series, “Moonlight Murder,” comes out May 5
