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traveling funfair. The unsurprising answers
he finds connect with his anger issues. John
isn’t a sufficiently engaging protagonist
to compensate for the lackluster plot line.
Malone won’t win any new readers with
this one. (Mar.)
★ Murder in an Irish Cottage
Carlene O’Connor. Kensington, $26 (304p)
ISBN 978-1-4967-1905-8
O’Connor’s exceptional fifth Irish Village
mystery (after 2019’s Murder in an Irish
Pub) takes Kildane, County Cork, garda
Siobhán O’Sullivan and her fiancé, Det.
Sgt. Macdara Flannery, to the remote
village of Ballysiogdun. At the cottage of
Ellen Delaney, Macdara’s aunt, they’re
greeted by Ellen’s grown daughter, Jane,
who says she returned home from a
weekend in Dublin to find her mother
dead. A broken window points to a
break-in; other evidence suggests Ellen
was poisoned and smothered. Siobhán and
Macdara must work to gain the trust of
the supersti-
tious locals,
who wanted
Ellen’s cottage
destroyed
because it posed
a danger being
in the middle
of a fairy path.
O’Connor does
a fine job
depicting the
complex relationship between the spunky
Siobhán, who’s troubled by Jane’s failure
to provide an alibi for her well-timed
weekend away, and the reserved Macdara,
who’s reluctant to acknowledge his
cousin may have something to hide. Cozy
readers will have a hard time putting this
one down. Agent: Evan Marshall, Evan
Marshall Agency. (Mar.)
The Death of Me:
A Heloise Chancey Mystery
M.J. Tjia. Legend (IPG, dist.), $15.95 trade pa-
per (288p) ISBN 978-1-78955-048-1
Set in 1864, Tjia’s solid third Heloise
Chancey mystery (after 2019’s A Necessary
Murder) finds the English courtesan and
sometime private detective in Paris, where
she’s surprised to receive a summons
from Sir Simon Somerscale, an affluent
countryman, to the debtor’s prison where
he’s confined for failing to pay £500 in a
breach of promise suit involving a French
waitress with whom he had a one-night
stand. Somerscale tells Heloise that “certain
people at Westminster” have intercepted
a letter regarding a planned crime on
English soil; he was to pose as the letter’s
intended recipient and attend a meeting
with the unknown sender that night at a
Paris locale specified in the letter. He
persuades Heloise to go in his stead. A
special code in the letter will allow her to
recognize the sender. She soon learns that
the plot includes a terrorist bombing
campaign, and she must act fast to identify
the culprits before they can strike. Tjia
keeps the pace brisk and makes her
redoubtable lead plausible. Fans of Carole
Nelson Douglas’s Irene Adler series will
be pleased. (Mar.)The Missing Sister
Elle Marr. Thomas & Mercer, $15.95 trade
paper (330p) ISBN 978-1-5420-0605-7
UC San Diego medical school student
Shayna Darby, the narrator of Marr’s gritty
debut, flies to Paris after the U.S. embassy
informs her that her estranged twin sister,
Angela, was fatally shot and thrown into
the Seine. When Shayna visits Angela’s
Paris apartment, she discovers a message
written in the special code language they
used as children: “Alive. Trust no one.”
Convinced that Angela is indeed alive,
Shayna heeds her sister’s advice and falsely
identifies the body at the morgue as
Angela. Back at Angela’s apartment, she
finds additional clues, which will take
her clandestine search for her sister into
catacombs, an illegal brothel, and her
sister’s frenemy’s apartment, where she
stumbles on a dead body. While Shayna
has an engaging voice, readers will find
her train of thought at times difficult to
follow. Her substantial backstory gives
readers an in-depth look at the twins’
complicated relationship, though it
doesn’t necessarily add to the plot. Still,
the intriguing premise, along with a few
twists, lend this psychological thriller
some weight. Agent: Jill Marr, Sandra
Dijkstra Literary. (Mar.)Deprivation
Roy Freirich. Meerkat, $17.95 trade paper
(256p) ISBN 978-1-946154-21-7
On New York’s Carratuck Island,physician Sam
Carlson, the
hero of this
chilling thriller
from Freirich
(Winged
Creatures), is
confronted with
a perplexing
mystery when a
grimy boy, with
symptoms of
having been severely traumatized, shows
up on the beach. The child’s refusal to talk
or write down anything that would help
identify him hinders efforts to reunite him
with his family. His appearance seems to
trigger a bizarre outbreak of insomnia on
Carratuck, a baffling phenomenon that
leads Carlson to fear that some sort of
biohazard or terrorist weapon may be
responsible. After tests fail to reveal any
organic cause, Carlson speculates that
mass hysteria is keeping his neighbors
from getting any rest. The outbreak turns
fatal and, after days of sleep deprivation
among the islanders, panic rises, forcing
the doctor to take desperate measures.
Anthropomorphized inanimate objects
(“the moonlit sea pauses and sighs and
lifts itself, before falling back, and lifting
again”) add to the feeling of paranormal
menace. Horror fans looking for uncon-
ventional scares will be grateful. (Mar.)Girl at the Edge
Karen Dietrich. Grand Central, $15.99 trade
paper (368p) ISBN 978-1-5387-3293-9
At the start of poet Dietrich’s arresting
if flawed debut, teenager Evelyn Gibson
reveals: “Six months before I was born, my
father walked into Ponce de Leon Mall in
St. Augustine, Florida. When he walked
out, eleven people were dead. My father is
a murderer.” Her father, whom she has
never met, is now on death row in a Florida
state prison. Her mother, a preschool
teacher, has since remarried, and the couple
have always tried to provide a supportive
and positive environment for Evelyn, but
are unaware of her struggles to understand
her father’s actions and her own darkly
disturbing thoughts. As Evelyn says, “I
am alone in this, and that’s how it has to
be because who wants to stand with the
girl at the edge, staring down into the
nothingness below? Who wants to be