Not every mystery is a tricky whodunit. The villain in Janet Dawson’s Water Signs isn’t hard to detect, but following a PI Jeri Howard investigation is so enjoyable that the reader won’t care. The mystery begins with the discovery of a security guard’s
 body near the construction site where
 he was working. Informed by his boss 
that Cal Brady had a
 drinking problem, the 
cops put it down to a 
workplace accident.
 Jeri isn’t so certain.
 An old co-worker of
 Brady’s, she had
 heard he no longer drank. So when the autopsy reveals he was stone-cold sober at the time of his death, Jeri rightly suspects he was murdered, and sets off to prove it. One of the major delights of Water Signs—and there are many—is found in its portrayal of an unusual set of homeless people. Technically, this group isn’t really homeless; they’re squatting on several of the many abandoned boats floating around the Oakland, California’s Bay Area estuary. Author Dawson treats us to descriptions of the many ways these folks survive, right down to the bathroom details (more interesting and complicated than landlubbers might think). Dawson also educates us about a massive real-life project called the San Francisco Bay Trail, which is putting together 500 miles of hiking trails to connect various California cities. Given the legal difficulties of such a grand plan, figuring out the fictional villain in Water Signs is easy. No matter. The beautiful descriptions of the Oakland-area estuary and the visits with the irascible floating homeless make this mystery smart and highly enjoyable.

Rick Van Lam, born to a Vietnamese mother and American GI father, orphaned and brought to the US, grew up in an adoptive family and became a New York City police officer. Now retired, he is living in Connecticut, working as an insurance investigator and teaching criminology at local Farmington College. When he spots the lonely and eccentric, but brilliant, Vietnamese computer science student Dustin Trang, he is intrigued and tries to befriend the young man, but is repeatedly rebuffed. Dustin, who grew up in the projects and is at the college on full scholarship, also rejects the gregarious Hank, a young Vietnamese officer on the Connecticut State Police force and Rick’s closest friend. Then the most popular professor on campus—also a friend of Rick’s—is suddenly murdered, soon after being seen in a heated argument with Dustin, and Dustin becomes a prime “person of interest.”

Rick and Hank are convinced that the usually meek Dustin could not be a killer, despite his occasional flashes of temper. They launch a private investigation into the circumstances, but are baffled and frustrated by Dustin’s refusal to cooperate or confide in them. Slowly, aided by a colorful cohort of friends that includes Rick’s landlady, business partner, and ex-wife, Rick and Hank piece together the sad circumstances of Dustin’s dismal home life. But as they get closer to finding out the truth of what Dustin might fear more than a murder conviction, they realize they may be putting and themselves, and others, in danger.

This intriguing whodunit is the fourth installment in the Rick Van Lam series that explores the Vietnamese community of Hartford, Connecticut. Richly character-driven, Child of My Winter explores the ways the past can poison the present and how individuals can adapt—or fail to adapt—to difficult circumstances.

Mystery movie buffs will have a great time with this book. The subject films are well-selected, and Ron Miller does an excellent job of summarizing the original print source for each, how the screen version follows it and how it diverges. Included are good books made into better films (e.g., In the Heat of the Night, The 39 Steps, The Thin Man), good books made into lesser films (The Lady in the Lake, The Case of the Velvet Claws, Black Widow), and occasionally films that equal their source material in artistic impact, sometimes while remaining faithful to the original and others while changing them in substantive ways (Laura, The Big Sleep, Rebecca, The Maltese Falcon, Strangers on a Train, In a Lonely Place).

Miller’s views and choices are generally sound, but often leave room for disagreement, which is half the fun of a book like this. Obviously he couldn’t cover every possible film, but the omissions of Green for Danger and Psycho are especially surprising.

The massive plot hole in the solution of The Kennel Murder Case, rightly regarded as one of the very best screen examples of the pure whodunit, goes unnoted here. It could have been done without revealing too much by simply pointing out the murderer had no reason to be where required by Philo Vance’s final summation.

In discussing The Black Camel, it’s a mistake to call Charlie Chan’s Japanese assistant Kashimo “dull-witted”—while it is true that he is annoying, is used as comic relief, and has a limited command of English, he ultimately does some effective police work. (Chan’s anti-Japanese prejudice in the Earl Derr Biggers novel is one of the few unattractive features of the Honolulu sleuth’s personality.) Miller correctly notes that Chan, though viewed by some as an example of “defamatory racist stereotyping,” was never intended that way by Biggers. And while I agree Warner Oland made the better Chan and appeared in more good Chan films, I fail to see what makes Sidney Toler’s depiction more racially offensive.

The discussion of Gypsy Rose Lee’s The G-String Murders, adapted for film as Lady of Burlesque, assumes what has long been believed, that Craig Rice ghosted the original novel. But both Rice biographer Jeffrey Marks and Lee biographer Noralee Frankel dispute this attribution.

Only his stage name made Ricardo Cortez (born Jacob Krantz) a Latin lover type, and there is no suggestion of that when he is playing Sam Spade or Perry Mason.

Apart from matters of opinion and interpretation, there are a few outright factual errors. Ross Macdonald’s birth name was Kenneth (not Ross) Millar. The underrated version of Farewell, My Lovely with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe is not set in England, though its follow-up, The Big Sleep remake, is. In Haunted Honeymoon, the film version of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Busman’s Honeymoon, not only is Lord Peter Wimsey played by an American (Robert Montgomery), but so is Harriet Vane (Constance Cummings, here identified as British).

Nearly Nero collects 10 appealing Claudius Lyon stories by the always reliable Loren D. Estleman. Claudius Lyon, who changed his name from something or other to that of a Roman emperor, is a wealthy, town-house-inhabiting amateur detective, with a jones for Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. His admiration for the “world’s greatest detective” has encouraged him to mimic, in an off-kilter bizarro fashion, everything about the great orchid growing homebody. He raises tomatoes in a rooftop greenhouse because orchids are beyond his horticultural talents. An ex-con named Arnie Woodbine is his assistant for no other reason than his name is similar to Wolfe’s investigator Archie Goodwin, which is where the resemblance ends, since Woodbine spends much of his time embezzling money from the boss. A Yiddish-speaking kosher chef named Gus prepares all his meals. Lyon is alcohol intolerant, and, unlike Wolfe, drinks cream soda, but he tosses his pop-tops in a desk drawer, as Wolfe does his bottle caps. His townhouse is located in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan, and his relationship with the local police is worse than Wolfe’s for the simple reason that he is unlicensed and Captain Stoddard of the local Bunco Squad spends a surprising amount of time trying to catch Lyon taking payment for his services.

Murder is nowhere to be found in the stories, and the solutions—solved in good fashion, Claudius Lyon’s finger always digging in his ear to stimulate the cortex—often involve wordplay that is clever and groan-inducing at once. The stories are all well-written, entertaining, humorous, and will appeal to both knowledgeable and novice readers of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe.

MatchUp, edited by Lee Child, is aptly titled since it pairs two thriller writers, along with their most popular series characters, for each story. The anthology is a who’s who of bestselling writers in the genre. A few of the “matchups” are C. J. Box’s Joe Pickett and Sandra Brown’s Lee Coburn, Kathy Reichs’ Temperance Brennan and Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, and Lisa Scottoline’s Bennie Rosato and Nelson DeMille’s John Corey. The quality of the stories, as is often the case in this type of anthology, varies, but most are very good and a few are exceptional.

“Past Prologue,” by Diana Gabaldon and Steve Berry, is a nicely devised story marrying the present and the past. Cotton Malone is attending an antiquarian book sale in Scotland when, during his morning constitutional, a wrong turn finds him lost in the confusing geography of the moors. Even more confusing to Cotton, he is seemingly in the distant past when the castle where he is lodging was a prison and bandits, rogues, and convicts roam the moors to everyone’s peril.


The best story in the anthology is Gayle Lynds’ and David Morrell’s “Rambo on Their Minds” featuring Liz Sansborough and, as the title suggests, Rambo. Liz is the victim of a Russian mafia kidnapping plot designed for a human ransom: Liz’s life for that of a recently arrested and seemingly low-level criminal. The kidnappers assigned to watch Liz are fascinated by, and spend a great deal of time talking about, the Rambo films based on David Morrell’s classic novel First Blood. Rambo never makes an appearance in the story, but his influence is in the form of What Would Rambo Do? And as it turns out, Rambo is more helpful to Liz than her kidnappers.

Penned by Tim Lebbon, Kong: Skull Island is essentially a reboot of the King Kong franchise, establishing the great ape as an adolescent circa 1975. It’s essentially a “first contact” novel, as a diverse team of scientists and soldiers descends upon an uncharted island, discovering that it contains a portal to another world, one that is zealously guarded by Kong. Much to their dismay, the explorers soon learn that Kong’s mission is not so much to keep intruders from invading Skull Island, but to keep the island’s more dangerous denizens from escaping.

No stranger to novelizations (his adaptations of 30 Days of Night and The Cabin in the Woods are highly recommended), Lebbon does an especially good job on this one, delivering welcome character detail, highly readable prose, and an abundance of ferocious action scenes, guaranteed to whet your appetite for the film. Here’s hoping he will also be chosen to work on the many intriguing sequels hinted at in the conclusion of this work.

Expecting to Die, the seventh Alvarez and Pescoli novel from Lisa Jackson, finds the duo investigating the death of a young girl named Destiny Montclaire, whose body was found in the woods on the outskirts of Grizzly Falls, Montana. The case is of special interest to the very pregnant Regan Pescoli, as her daughter, Bianca, was the one who discovered the body. Complicating matters for the police is the fact that Bianca claims she stumbled upon the body while fleeing a hulking, odorous beast that she thinks might have been Bigfoot. The news of her discovery sets the local gossip network, national media, and even the internet on fire, making an already difficult situation more complex.

Longtime fans of the series should find this installment satisfying, as Jackson continues to develop plot points and themes established in previous tomes, detailing how her two heroines navigate the often treacherous waters of their jobs and personal lives. Newcomers should also enjoy it, as it presents a satisfying, well-written, well-executed standalone mystery, which displays a general good humor even as it ratchets up the tension with each successive chapter.

Gina Royal’s life was normal. Or so she thought. Married to Melvin and the proud mother of two children, Gina is content to live a peaceful life in the suburbs of Wichita, Kansas—until the day it is revealed her husband is a serial killer, responsible for torturing and murdering more than a dozen people in his garage. Her world being ripped apart is bad enough, but Gina is also wrongly suspected of being an accomplice to her husband’s crimes and put on trial.

Four years after being acquitted, Gina has changed her name to Gwen Proctor and moved her kids to a house by a lake in rural Tennessee. She is now an accomplished marksman, has taught her kids every safety plan conceivable, and set up home security systems—all to protect her family from those who don’t believe Gwen's innocence, some of whom have posted threats to murder her kids. Despite the threat of danger and the constant fear of someone finding out who they are, the Proctors have begun to settle down by Stillhouse Lake and create a normal life. Gwen even develops feelings for a man, though she suspects he too, is trying to forget something in his past.

Then a body is found floating in the lake, killed in an identical manner to how her ex-husband murdered his victims. Gwen begins to suspect Melvin knows where they are, and that someone’s spying on them. Gwen doesn’t know if the killer is an internet troll trying to frame her, a friend of Melvin’s come to scare her, or something else altogether. But one thing is clear: a killer is nearby. And Gwen Proctor will use all her wits, training, and instincts to keep her children safe.

Stillhouse Lake is author Rachel Caine’s latest mystery, an intense, emotionally charged novel that will hook readers, who will empathize with Gwen’s desire to protect her kids, as well as the guilt she still feels because she truly didn’t know what her husband had been up to. The plot moves swiftly from one intense scene to another, giving readers a taste of the upheaval and sense of danger that the characters live through, and ends on a note that will leave readers anticipating a sequel.

Besides having relatable characters and an engaging mystery, Stillhouse Lake explores topics such as the harassment from online abusers, and the horror that children of killers experience as they slowly learn about the crimes committed by a parent they trusted. A thought-provoking mystery that explores guilt and innocence, suspicion and trust, Stillhouse Lake is highly recommended.