It’s a Mystery: “Most things are both true and absurd”

It’s a Mystery: “Most things are both true and absurd”

At the start of Strangers, Joanna Berrigan is home alone in her house near Munich when she is confronted by a man who is a complete stranger to her. He has let himself into the house with a key and insists he’s Erik Thieben, her fiancé, and that they live together. As he talks, attempting familiarity, nothing he says makes sense. The more he tries to comfort, the greater her terror. Furthermore, there is nothing in the house that suggests anyone else lives there. So why, the creepier he becomes, does she feel like she’s the one who’s crazy?

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Robicheaux by James Lee Burke

Robicheaux by James Lee Burke

It's oddly comforting that the only lazy or derivative thing about James Lee Burke's 21st novel featuring tough-guy New Orleans sheriff's detective Dave Robicheaux is its title; there's no good reason why this latest book should be called simply Robicheaux – or alternately, no good reason why any of the previous 20 couldn't have been called that; it feels like the title you'd give the final book in your series, the one in which your hero finally heat-shots and throat-punches his way to Valhalla.

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An Innocent Client  by Scott Pratt

An Innocent Client  by Scott Pratt

The incredible profusion in the last fifteen years of TV shows, movies, and books about lawyers has not, miraculously, glutted the market;  readers’ fascination with the American legal system seems bottomless, which is certainly good news for anybody trying to break into that market.

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Black and White and Dead All Over by John Darnton

Black and White and Dead All Over by John Darnton

Fairly ominous, when a book’s very title is a cliché, a pun, or a play on words. More ominous still when it’s all three, as in John Darnton’s new novel Black and White and Dead All Over, in which the ailing print newspaper trade forms the backdrop for a series of murders. In the newsroom of the New York Globe, an editor is found dead, and Smart, Ambitious Female Detective and Crusty, Righteous Guy Reporter team up to find the killer. 

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