If life's too short to drink bad wine, it's definitely too short to read mediocre mysteries. Here are my recommendations for a few of the best this month: WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS?
by Kate Atkinson. Little Brown, 400 pages, $24.99
According to Jackson Brodie, the ex-policeman in Atkinson's crime novel, "a coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen," and as if she were writing a classic Greek tale, characters crash into each other, chance rules and fates are twisted. In the end, this novel is so satisfying it'll make you believe the gods had their hands in it.
Joanna Hunter witnesses her family's brutal murder when she's 6 years old. She then spends 30 years "running from the nightmare only to crash headlong into another."
She hires Reggie, a 16-year-old orphan who reads Homer and Aeschylus, as her son's nanny. Fate has not been kind to Reggie, but she's a survivor. Throughout the novel, she's the only one who seems to grasp what's really happening.
Meanwhile, Brodie is tracking a son he's never met while pining for Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, who is searching for meaning in her fractured marriage. When all their lives intersect in absurdly brilliant ways, characters concede "there are no rules -- we just pretend there are." Sophocles would be proud.
THE ARCHANGEL PROJECT
by C.S. Graham. Harper Paperback, 384 pages, $7.99
Since the "X-Files," the fringe sciences have been creeping in from the margins in our culture's zeitgeist. Graham's fast-paced thriller will help their cause.
Along with a conspiracy that's as convincing as anything Dan Brown has given us and a level of plausibility, that, well, is as convincing as anything Dan Brown has given us, the book has a heroine, October Guinness (Tobie for short), who makes this chase mystery one you really want to catch.
Tobie is ex-military, a student at Tulane, and she has the power of "remote viewing." With concentration she receives "flashes of sights, sounds and smells" of events in the future. This telepathic ability forces her out of the military on a psychiatric discharge and into the lab of a government-discredited researcher in the paranormal.
During a lab test, Tobie views something she shouldn't and her life in post-Katrina New Orleans is suddenly under siege. Add to this a covert government operation, a bad guy who went to school on Darth Vader, and a hot renegade ATF agent with a conscience, and Tobie has to run for her life.
THE SERPENT AND THE SCORPION
by Clare Langley-Hawthorne. Penguin Books, 304 pages, $14
If you like mysteries served with scones and clotted cream, this charming historical novel is your cup of tea. The year is 1912 and Ursula Marlow is attempting to change the world, one vote at a time: hers and all the other suffragettes with whom she organizes and marches, including Emily Pankhurst. Ursula and her friends are "struggling to assert their independence" at a time when most men insist that women should sit unflinching on their pedestals.
This is the second novel in Langley-Hawthorne's engaging series set in Edwardian England. Ursula is fighting to keep control of the textile empire she inherited from her father in the first book. When a friend is murdered and the death of one of her female factory workers follows soon after, Ursula's struggles to remain independent deteriorate. It doesn't help matters when her Bolshevik boyfriend reappears, she discovers that political turmoil in Egypt may be connected to the two deaths, and despite all reason she's falling in love with a handsome Byronic hero.
Dorothy L. Sayers' seminal female detective, Harriet Vane, has always been a favorite of mine and Ursula reads like her sister in arms.
Exit Music
by Ian Rankin. Little Brown, 432 pages, $24.99
Sooner or later this day had to come. Detective Inspector John Rebus faces his nemesis, Gerald Cafferty, for the last time. Like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, Rebus and Cafferty have been antagonists since their first encounter in a Glasgow courtroom years ago. With Detective Siobhan Clarke's help, Rebus investigates whether or not Cafferty is involved in the death of a dissident Russian poet.
On his way to work every day, Rebus passes "a statue of Sherlock Holmes," and it reminds him of Holmes' philosophy: eliminate "the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth." Problem is, this puts Rebus on the firing line of the investigation.
Coupled with his flair for flaunting police protocol, he's quickly forced aside, expected to hug the mahogany at the Oxford Bar until retirement. Yeah, right. Rebus needs the "bone-crushing tackle" that'll take Cafferty "out of the game." Rebus and his Moriarty are not going over Reichenbach Falls quietly.
Like most of the books in this accomplished series, Rebus takes on the "casual arrogance" of the "overworld" because it's no longer the "underworld" we should fear. Rebus' exit music is playing. It's the Rolling Stones, of course. Rebus can't always get what he wants, but in this, his last case, readers get what they need. Here's to you, Big Man. Cheers.
Carole Barrowman is an English professor in Madison, Wis. She blogs at www.carolebarrowman.com.
