A bride goes missing on the day she was to wed the scion of a wealthy family in this cozy village mystery set in Wales. Since the villagers have not yet met the erstwhile bride, who lives elsewhere, curiosity about her abounds. Penny Brannigan, a Canadian ex-patriate of a certain age who is the proprietor of the local manicure shop, agrees to give a woman claiming to be the bride a manicure on the morning of the wedding. Penny complies, but finds this an unusual request since the bridal party traditionally completes its pampering the day before the festivities. Later, when the bride fails to appear for the ceremony, it becomes apparent that the woman whose nails were so perfectly prepared for the sumptuous nuptials was an imposter, who made the appointment to delay discovery of the missing bride.

Penny finds herself embroiled in this case even as she mourns the death of her best friend--a beloved teacher. In the aftermath of her friend's funeral, it is the vivacious manicurist who supplies police with a vital and very spooky clue that quickly turns a missing persons case into murder.

Members of the bridal party as well as their relatives crowd a growing suspect list. Duncan is deft at descriptions and spot-on with her mostly charming characters--although there are so many crammed into this mystery that it is sometimes difficult to keep them in their proper places. Among the cast are a hunky detective chief inspector and his female partner who quickly discover that Penny's hunches pay off. When a friend of the manicurist is injured in a violent attack, the hunt intensifies. Ultimately, the motive for the murder may leave readers somewhat incredulous, but fans of cozies should enjoy this village and the characters that inhabit it.

Some fictional characters are so extraordinary, they outlive not only their archenemies, but their authors as well. Sherlock Holmes is a perfect--if you'll pardon the pun--case in point. This is the latest installment of the bestselling series featuring Sherlock Holmes' much younger wife, Mary Russell, and it comes on the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arthur Conan Doyle.

Just back from their latest sleuthing adventure in San Francisco, the couple are visited by a young man whom they had earlier learned was the son Sherlock never knew he had by Irene Adler. Damian Adler has come to ask for Sherlock's help in finding his missing wife and child. While they are away, Mary is busy investigating why one of their working beehives has suddenly and mysteriously been deserted by the bees.

Before long, Damian becomes separated from Sherlock and finds himself a suspect in a murder. Mary and Sherlock, first separately and then together, find themselves in a puzzling case involving a strange religious cult, astrology and Norse mythology.

Although Sherlock and his brother, Mycroft, figure prominently in the story, it is written from Mary Russell's point of view, so most of the action and detecting falls on Mary to accomplish. Having been trained in the martial arts and detecting by her husband, she is, in some respects, his female equivalent.

What makes this series work so well, in addition to the quality of the writing, is the respect King shows for the Holmes canon. She doesn't try to remake or modernize Holmes, merely make him older and a bit more mellow. As the series has progressed, Mary becomes less of an acolyte and more of a full partner in an unusual, but nonetheless believable, relationship.

Laurie R. King is one of only two novelists to win an Edgar (US) and a John Creasey (UK) award for Best First Crime novel. She is also the author of the series featuring San Francisco detective Kate Martinelli.

Peace negotiator Maggie Costello is pulled back into the fray when she's asked to mediate an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. But before there can be peace, there is more war when Shimon Guttman, a well-known, right-wing academic, is mistaken for an assassin and gunned down during a rally. Guttman's death sparks a series of retaliation murders that on the surface appear to be random. Joining forces with Guttman's son, Maggie learns that someone is targeting archaeologists and historians whose knowledge of ancient secrets may hold the key to the future of peace--and war.

Sam Bourne follows his 2006 debut, The Righteous Men, with another look at the Middle East. But Bourne, the pseudonym of British journalist Jonathan Freedland, overloads The Last Testament with so many complicated subplots that the story often is hard to follow. Still, Bourne delivers a heroine for the times in Maggie Costello, an intelligent negotiator who knows how to work her way around myriad political and cultural landmines. Her numerous flaws will make readers want to root for her, and Bourne's knowledge of the Middle East and all its vagaries elevates The Last Testament.

When Los Angeles Times reporter Jack McEvoy (introduced in The Poet) is given a pink slip, he decides to go out with a bang by filing a story that discloses the innocence of an African American youth accused of a particularly heinous torture-murder. His good intentions turn dangerous when the real murderer begins to target McEvoy, hacking not only into his bank accounts and credit cards, but also into the L.A. Times computers themselves. Soon McEvoy is on the run, running out of cash, and with a crumbling reputation as he's tracked from California to Nevada to Arizona as he attempts to connect with former lover, FBI agent Rachel Walling. While the torture-murders (several more are committed before the book's conclusion) are frightening enough in themselves, the true terror in this wake-up-call of a suspense novel comes from learning about the apparent ease with which computer hackers operate, spreading disinformation and ruining lives with the click of a mouse. These are new villains for a new age, villains who can--and do--negatively impact the lives of each of us. But The Scarecrow also serves as an elegy for the crumbling newspaper industry and the once-vibrant newsrooms that are now empty. Definitely read The Scarecrow for the thrills, but reread it for the warnings the book delivers. Not only can it happen here, it already has.

In the prologue of The Thin Black Line by the late Chicago Police Commander and mystery writer Hugh Holton, he mentions almost off-handedly that the first black officers were in New Orleans in 1805. These free men of color were called on to administer a particularly ironic brand of law enforcement: catching runaway slaves. As documented in another book, Black Police in America by W. Marvin Dulaney, Holton suggests that free blacks--some of mixed race--were part of the city guard and constabulary as early as 1803. Holton goes on to point out these black police, who had no powers of arrest over white citizenry, wanted to be seen as loyal to, and as much as possible a part of, the white power structure rather than be identified with their brethren in bondage.

Or as comedian Richard Pryor would so aptly opine, "Black cops had to do more shit to keep their jobs than white cops."

Often black cops had to repeatedly demonstrate to their white fellow officers that they were willing to be as hard on the black community as the white cops were. That racism and a kind of split personality pervades the world of blacks in law enforcement is a subtext in The Thin Black Line but, as Holton's very brief mention of the black slave catcher's dilemma indicates, it isn't the main focus of the book. This is not a heavy-handed sociological examination but an enlightening and entertaining set of interviews with men and women cops, parole officers and prison personnel.

As in a mystery novel, all the information to solve the puzzle isn't readily available to you. In the Editors Note in the front of the book, Robert Gleason, who completed the book after Holton's death, relates a story that isn't in the author's description of his law career. Gleason relates that when Holton, a Vietnam vet, returned home to Chicago, he applied to the police department in early 1969 and was turned down. In fact, 16 out of the 17 black applicants were turned down for flat feet and heart arrhythmias--ailments, Gleason notes, that are measured subjectively and largely unprovable. Hugh Holton went back home, put on his army uniform, and returned to do a second physical. He told them that if he was healthy enough for combat, surely he's healthy enough for the Chicago PD.

One of the white guys seeing this says, "Hell, Hugh, I didn't know you were a Vietnam vet. Forget about it. You passed."

If Gleason hadn't put that telling anecdote in, then you wouldn't have the full picture. Similarly, it's only by reading the interviews that you discover Holton's father, Hubert, was also on the Chicago PD. The senior Holton doesn't recount all the shit he undoubtedly had to put up with when he joined the department in 1955, the year of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. He doesn't go on about how he, like a lot of blacks who came north, was part of the huge migration from the Deep South (he was born in Louise, Mississippi) to the industrialized north seeking a better life. In the matter-of-fact tone of the other cops interviewed, he only notes that there were a small number of blacks on the force when he joined. He goes on to talk about the units he worked in, and that he and a white cop were the first salt-and-pepper team in a particular area in Chicago. We later learn in Hugh Holton's interview that, at one point, father and son served simultaneously as commanders--the only time this has ever happened in the Chicago Police Department.

Or take La Verne Dunlap, one of the first female, let alone black, officers hired in an unidentified rust belt town north of Gary, Indiana in 1971. Before becoming a cop she was traveling with a band in 1969 and was harassed by local law in a Mississippi town for swimming in the hotel pool. "I thought if I ever became a cop," she said, "I would put a stop to that kind of injustice."

The subjects in The Thin Black Line offer varying takes on their law enforcement careers. Some love the job and some, by the time of their interviews, had moved on to other arenas. Some, like Roger Tucker of the Philadelphia Police Department, are keenly aware of that tortured lineage begun long ago in New Orleans. "I also considered my police work to be mercenary work because I was policing my community for the majority of society." But his and the others' observations are not there to preach from a soapbox but to document how these professionals did their job and took some measure of satisfaction of being part of that thin black line.

George Pelecanos has been exploring the nature of masculinity since his first novel, A Firing Offense, was published in 1992. One way or another, all of his books are about what it takes to be a man, and how men negotiate the minefield that lies between violence and honor. That path toward manhood often is illuminated by the relationship between fathers and sons, a theme that is front and center in The Way Home.

As the book opens, Thomas Flynn is visiting his son at a juvenile facility, barely able to contain his anger and his pain as his son, the only white inmate there, stares at his parents with studied indifference. Chris had capped off a career of minor crime with a highly-publicized police pursuit that left cars totaled and people seriously injured. But he shows no remorse and tells his father that he knows "how to jail."

The story follows Chris and some of his fellow inmates as he begins to recognize the choices he has in front of him, then jumps forward in time. Chris has straightened out and is working for his father's flooring company, trying to stay out of trouble and make a life for himself as his parents watch warily for more signs of trouble. But he ends up being targeted by a couple of deeply evil men and has to decide how to respond.

The Way Home is a powerful book that derives its toughness and its grace from the relationship between Chris and his father as they try to find a way to connect to each other--and to the person each is striving to be. The plot is excellent, but the energy of the book comes from deep inside the characters. Pelecanos's project to understand manhood in America is beautifully realized in this novel. Highly recommended.

For those readers who thrive on outdoor mysteries, Wild Sorrow fills the bill. The heroine of this mystery series set in northern New Mexico is Bureau of Land Management agent Jamaica Wild, who is accompanied on her adventures by her pet wolf. As a blizzard rages through the mountains, Wild stumbles onto an abandoned Native American school while tracking a wounded mountain lion. Inside, she discovers a woman's battered body. When the storm abates, the FBI enters the murder investigation as Wild continues tracking the mountain lion, but soon learns that she herself is being stalked by a stone killer linked to the crime. She also learns that the school has been used for nefarious purposes, both past and present. This tale, with its emphasis on Native American heritage and the rugged wilderness still largely untouched in America, is both gritty and beguiling. Wild is a tough and engaging agent, who handles pure terror with panache. This is her second outing after Wild Inferno, which won the Mary Higgins Clark Award, and was hailed as one of the best mysteries of 2008. Her steely second outing will not disappoint.