In the year 1922 the US Supreme Court upheld women's right to vote in the United States, but it wouldn’t be until 1947 that women in India were granted the same right. That makes Perveen Mistry, the independent career woman at the fore of Sujata Massey’s series about Bombay’s first female solicitor in the 1920s, all the more remarkable for a woman of her time and place.

Perveen was introduced in the superb Widows of Malabar Hill, which won a 2019 Agatha Award for best historical novel and the Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award. As engrossing as Widows was, Massey’s The Satapur Moonstone surpasses it in another leap forward to open the curtain on Indian culture and women’s roles in the early 20th century.

Sir David Hobson-Jones, a top adviser to India’s governor and the father of Perveen’s best friend, Alice, asks her if she will handle a situation in the state of Satapur. The area’s two maharanis—the royal mother-in-law and daughter-in-law—are feuding over whether the current maharajah, 10-year-old Jiva Reo, should be educated in England or India. Because tradition demands the two women avoid contact with men, Perveen is particularly well-suited for mediating their dispute and making the recommendation for the boy’s education. Compassionate, ambitious, and upset that many see Indian women as “faceless, nameless, and passive,” Perveen views the assignment as a way to potentially increase business, since other women may need “a lady lawyer” to help them get things done.

Once in Satapur, Perveen discovers a palace, where two previous Satapur rulers died in recent years, rife with betrayal. Is Reo, who will become ruler in eight years, in danger?

Massey’s meticulous research for The Satapur Moonstone gives an intriguing view of India and its life under British occupation from the development of railroads and dams to societal issues of gender and caste. With a rich setting and an admirable protagonist, Perveen’s adventures should be the basis for a long series.

In The Second Sleep, Robert Harris turns his formidable talent for writing compelling novels about mysterious and original subjects to a dystopian post- technological world where the Church is the law and its only guidelines are superstition and fear.

A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, is sent to the small rural village of Addicott St. George to perform the funeral rites of Father Lacy, the local parish priest who died in a fall. When Fairfax arrives, he discovers a set of heretical tomes belonging to the late priest from the outlawed Society of Antiquaries—a group determined to find the truth of the past through archaeology and science. At Lacy’s funeral a stranger asserts that Lacy’s death was intentional. Much like Lacy’s heretical books, murder is something Fairfax would rather not consider. But when he is trapped in Addicott by a storm, Fairfax becomes an unwilling investigator into Lacy’s death and the much larger questions surrounding it.

The Second Sleep is a satisfying novel on multiple levels. It has the flash and bang of a thriller—mystery, suspense, and intrigue— and its ideas are poignant and thought-provoking, especially in our current climate when liberal democratic ideals are seemingly under assault from an international populist movement. It details a second Dark Age brought about by human fear and hubris, but the story is played as a tight mystery whodunit that flawlessly plants clues many readers may miss the first time around. The Second Sleep has appealing characters, led by Fairfax and the charming and intelligent Lady Durston, who pushes Fairfax past where he would otherwise have gone. The understated prose is the perfect companion for the tale, both its blisteringly clear large-world ideas and the nuts-and-bolts mystery. The Second Sleep is a smart and engaging novel.

I grew up in a house full of books. No, that’s not true. I grew up in a house with a large bookshelf in the dining room full of books. Well, that’s not entirely true either. I grew up in a house with a small bookcase in the dining room filled with Reader’s Digest condensed reads, and dusty books bought from antique shops because they looked pretty on the shelf, that helped to create the ”olde worlde“ look that complemented my father’s taste in interiors.

As a child I did not go to bookshops and there were no real books in my house. Yet my mother, my sisters, and I read all the time. So, if we did not buy books or own books, then where did our books come from? They came from, as clichéd as it sounds, a branch library—a five-minute drive, a gnarly Edwardian house standing on a corner, stained glass window, handrails beeswaxy sticky under our small fingers, heavy patterned carpets, polished brass rails, a curved desk in the center of the room encircling ladies with glasses on chains and knitted waistcoats.

And here we came every week, my sister, my mother, and I, and we had tiny tickets made of card that slotted into a tiny card folder and we were allowed first three books a week, then four when we were eight, then five when we were 11. I don’t know who decided that 11-year-olds could read more books than eight year olds could, but I think it was done more as marker of encouragement and reward than anything else.

And here in this tiny room I sat cross-legged in the children’s corner, where I traveled the world with Ant and Bee, unknowingly teaching myself to read in the process (Angela Banner’s books were designed to be self-read), and then went around the corner into the adults’ section where I discovered Agatha Christie. I took out five a week and within three months I’d read them all.

At some point I did come back to my father’s bookshelf; hidden between the strange junk shop titles was a scattering of Charles Dickens. I devoured these at the age of 12, in the absence of anything else to devour, and was all the richer for it. Each year my father would buy a book at the airport for our annual holiday—a Wilbur Smith, a Dick Francis, a Jeffrey Archer. I read these too, before they got thrown away or left at the hotel. I found in his bedside drawer a racy book about a famous British ’70s porn star called Linda Lovelace. Yes, I read it. It was rude, but it was also funny and had a great narrative arc.

In my early 20s I married a man who was bad and wrong in every way, apart from one. He read books. In an effort to improve me (he seemed only to have taken me into his life in order to improve me), he gave me his precious books to read, each one handed to me somberly and with a backstory. So, for five years I read men’s books only. I read Will Self and Julian Barnes and Martin Amis and Kingsley Amis and Stewart O’Nan and Bret Easton Ellis and Clive Barker.

The day I left my first husband, I slept in my sister’s bedroom in my mother’s house and found the only book she’d left behind when she left home: The Colour of Memory by Geoff Dyer, a slacker novel written before there were slacker novels. It remains one of my favorite books of all time, and a never-ending reminder that plot isn’t always everything. Then I fell in love with someone new and he wooed me with A Hundred Years of Solitude, and I did not like it but he did, and I read it to please him.

So for so many years, I read what was there, what was given to me, what was at hand, what my tiny branch library had room for on their shelves.

It wasn’t until my mid-20s that I began to buy books and decide for myself what I really loved. And what I really loved, it transpired, was everything. But in particular, I loved psychological thrillers. So now, I read and I write in the same genre. But if this sounds limited, it is not because of all that came before—the melange of borrowed books and other people’s favorites and things that looked nice on shelves and lurked sordidly in drawers and sat abandoned in empty teenage bedrooms. All of that is in there whenever I write a book, all of the books I didn’t choose, but which chose me.

Lisa Jewell is the internationally bestselling author of 18 novels, including the New York Times bestseller Then She Was Gone, as well as I Found You, The Girls in the Garden, and The House We Grew Up In. In total, her novels have sold more than two million copies across the English-speaking world and her work has also been translated into 16 languages so far. Lisa lives in London with her husband and their two daughters. Connect with her on Twitter @LisaJewellUK and on Facebook @LisaJewellOfficial.

Hi Everyone,

When William Kent Krueger’s father lost his oil company job over matters of conscience, he went back to teaching, then, as now, a poorly paid profession. And, as Krueger remembers, “We all got jobs to help support the family. So what I saw in the summer that I was 13 years old was the importance of standing by the things that you believe in profoundly, the consequences of that, and accepting the consequences in a spirit of perseverance, endurance, and courage.” These lessons were put to use in Krueger's highly anticipated This Tender Land. Teri Duerr, a fellow Minnesotan interviews the author in this issue.

In the 1970s, the 11 p.m. hour on ABC was wide open for something new and different—and along came ABC’s Wide World of Mystery. A young Michael Mallory was parked in front of the TV, enthralled, and all these years later still has fond memories.

Elly Griffiths has two popular—and very different—series: the Dr. Ruth Galloway mysteries about a forensic archaeologist in Norfolk, UK, and the “Magic Men” historical mysteries series featuring one-time members of a WWII special ops unit. John B. Valeri gets the scoop on this versatile author.

Wondering what to get that special someone this holiday season? Ponder no more, as Kevin Burton Smith brings us his annual gift guide for mystery lovers.

Turns out J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fantasy fame is also a major mystery geek. As Nanc y Bilyeau discusses in he r ar ticle , Ro w ling writ es solidly entertaining PI novels under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Amateur sleuth Samantha Washington dreams of owning a mystery bookshop and writing Britsh historical cozies—two dreams of her creator, V. M. Burns, as it happens. “With this series,” says Burns, “I’m able to live vicariously.” John B. Valeri maps out the author’s other dreams in his interview.

Also in this issue, we have interesting My Book essays contributed by Tara Laskowski, Marcia Rosen, and Bonnar Spring.

And now we come to some housekeeping matters. Brian and I took over Mystery Scene 17 years ago in 2002. At the time, the price was $32 a year for five issues, a schedule and price we’ve maintained for all these years. As you can imagine, our print and mailing costs have increased considerably in that time. But we still don’t want to increase prices, so we’ve decided to make Mystery Scene a quarterly publication starting in 2020. We will increase the page count of each of the four issues—in February, May, August, and November—to offset the change. The subscription price of $32 a year will remain the same. We think this is the best way to proceed. We hope you agree and that you’ll continue to be our partner in crime. Happy holidays to everyone and best wishes for an entertaining new year!

Kate Stine
Editor-in-chief