Readers & Writers: Mysteries, murders and thrillers in new releases
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We’ve got additions to mystery series’ today, as well as non-fiction about a sensational 19th-century murder case. We’ll start with the most anticipated — John Sandford’s 32nd Prey thriller and two thrillers by Brian Freeman, including his 11th featuring Duluth cop Jonathan Stride.
“Righteous Prey” by John Sandford (Putnam, $29.95)
Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are back where they belong — together — in their second joint book (after “Ocean Prey”).
Sandford’s most recent Prey novel was “The Investigator,” giving Lucas’ daughter, Letty, a chance to have her own story. She’s a gun-loving Wonder Woman but there was almost none of the banter and mildly off-color humor that made the Davenport Prey books so much fun over the years.
Happily, Lucas and Virgil are in top quippy form in “Righteous Prey,” in which they try to track down The Five, a group of bitcoin billionaires who sent a press release vowing to “murder people who need to be murdered” before a predator is killed by one of The Five in San Francisco. The group promises to pay a big amount in bitcoins to charities and victims via the dark net after each murder.
Davenport, now a federal marshal, calls in Flowers, who works for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, when The Five’s third victim is killed with a car bomb in her garage near Lake Minnetonka. She’s a greedy woman who has thrown people out of work.
Because the killers are operating nationally, there’s no clue how to begin to find the perps. Like previous Prey thrillers, the reader knows the motivation of each member of The Five. What Lucas and Virgil don’t know is that the group is manipulated by Vivian, a woman who wants money more than anything else. She coordinates the killings, one at a time, and writes the press releases. Only she knows The Fives’ names, and members of the group do not know one another.
Vivian makes a mistake and Flowers and Davenport catch a glimpse of her. She flees, hoping to get money from The Five. But for all their supposed good intentions, these rich, bored killers are ready to turn on one another.
Readers are going to have to suspend disbelief a little here. For instance, The Five are apparently citizens who have never committed any crimes, yet they seem very good at killing other human beings. Did fate really bring five latent psychopaths together who decide to kill, or are they truly motivated by their left-ish politics to murder people with right-ish views?
No matter. This is Lucas and Virgil, whose conversations show Sandford writes dialogue better than anyone around.
Here’s their exchange as Lucas illegally breaks into a house:
” ‘You’re getting puckered,’ Virgil suggested.
‘A little.’
‘Me too. Not as bad as you, though. Think how embarrassed you’d be to get caught burglarizing a house with your head inside a pair of boy’s underpants.’ ”
There’s also a scene where the guys have to hold hands and pretend they’re gay.
It’s good to have “the boys” back, even though Flowers is writing a novel and is no longer the carefree dude we knew in earlier books. Still, it’s like old times when another cop refers to him as “that f–ing Flowers.” And if Davenport is injured one more time he’s going to be held together with screws and wires.
Until then, we’ll stick with them all the way.
“The Zero Night” (Black Stone Publishers, $26.99); “I Remember You” ($24.95) by Brian Freeman.
Freeman, award-winning author of psychological thrillers, gives us two new books just three months apart.
Fans of his Jonathan Stride series have been waiting for “The Zero Night” (due out Nov. 1), in which Stride has been away from the police force for more than a year, recovering from a wound.
Stride can’t decide if he wants to return to work but his former partner, Maggie Bei, has taken his job as boss and she doesn’t like it. She’s persuading him to return just to see how it feels. He goes back — and feels good.
Bei needs help investigating the disappearance of lawyer Gavin Webster’s wife. Webster, who has just inherited $3 million, says he paid a $100,000 ransom but his wife was never returned. Bei and Stride think he’s not telling the entire truth.
Stride’s wife and police colleague, 43-year-old Serena, has learned that her mother, an abusive addict, has died alone on a park bench. Normally a tough woman who shows little emotion, Serena is unhinged by the death of her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in 25 years.
The news sends her into a dark mental and emotional spiral that leads her to relapse into alcoholism and contemplate cheating on Stride. When she loses control and pulls a gun on a fellow officer, she’s taken off the force. This only adds to the strain on the Strides’ marriage, which hasn’t been going well for months. They are totally out of sync, loving one another but not able to break through their emotional shields.
When Serena meets one of her daughter’s friends who’s in trouble, she sees in the girl the same abusive childhood she had. That leads her to reopen a cold case she brushed aside because it reminded her of how she became her party-loving mother’s parent.
“The Zero Night” is the most psychological of Freeman’s books. The missing wife plot is convoluted enough to be interesting, but his writing about Serena shines. He describes clearly her anticipation about holding the cold glass of liquor, the first taste, the hours of drinking.
It is not a spoiler to reveal that Serena and John return to the same bed and Maggie is happy to go back to being Stride’s second in command.
“I Remember You,” published in August, is also heavy on psychology because Hallie Evers dies at a Las Vegas party and when she wakes in the hospital her head feels crowded. She’d like to thank the doctor who saved her life at the party but she can’t find him.
Worse, she is having memories that don’t belong to her. She knows things she shouldn’t know. On a cross-country drive looking for answers, she fears that she might be a victim of the mental illness that runs through her family. Odd things are happening. Is she going crazy? Or did something sinister happen to her in the hospital?
“Death of a Snow Ghost” by Linda Norlander (Level Best Books, $16.95)
Norlander lives in Tacoma, Wash., but she’s a former resident of northern Minnesota where she sets A Cabin by the Lake mysteries featuring Jamie Forest.
Jamie was introduced in 2020 in “Death of an Editor,” in which she fled New York after her husband took off with a makeup artist and the cops pulled her out of bed on drug charges because of mistaken identity. Book number two was “Death of a Starling.”
“Death of a Snow Ghost” begins with Jamie driving in her car, thinking about hosting her first Thanksgiving dinner in her family’s cabin in the north woods. Suddenly, she sees through the snow squall what looks like a white ghost. It’s a young Hispanic woman in labor, who has her baby in Jamie’s car.
When Jamie discovers the young woman is living at a strange old house called Mary’s Place, where pregnant young women are supposedly kept safe, she suspects something is not right about the pastor and his wife who are in charge. When another young woman from Mary’s Place is found dead after trying to navigate the icy lake, Jamie is sure something evil is happening to these women, who barely speak English. Why is one of them terrified someone is going to take her baby? Why is she barred at Mary’s Place from seeing the baby born in her car, and why is the pastor’s wife so odd in her behavior? And why does the lawyer for the facility have smooth answers to all her questions?
These mysteries lead Jamie into the dark world of international adoption where some people are making a lot of money. And as she investigates she learns she can still be targeted for violence, even though she’s no longer a newcomer in her small community.
Jamie’s love life isn’t going so well either. Jim, a State Patrol officer, loves her but works in the Twin Cities where he has to care for a special needs son. The bright spot in her life is Bronte, her sweet dog named for her useless MFA in poetry. As she edits manuscripts to pay her bills, her thoughts often mingle — what’s going on at Mary’s Place with the sci fi manuscript she’s reading. She thinks things out by sharing her thoughts with Bronte, who’s a very good listener.
“Murder at Minnesota Point” by Jeffrey M. Sauve (North Star Editions, $14.99)
Subtitled “Unraveling the Captivating Mystery of a Long-Forgotten True Crime,” this non-fiction by a retired archivist at St. Olaf College in Northfield is about the 1894 “crime of the century,” in which a young, unidentified woman was found slain on the isolated sandy shores of Minnesota Point in Duluth.
For two weeks her corpse was displayed for the public in hopes someone could identify her. She was eventually buried in a pauper’s grave and the nation was enthralled as detectives worked to learn her identity. They only knew that the woman, later identified as Lena Olson, was a quiet but well-dressed woman who surprised her friends and landlady by marrying a smooth-talking Englishman. Eventually the detectives believed the wanted man was Albert Austin, a bigamist and serial killer who may have murdered three other people.
“Murder at Minnesota Point” is enhanced with old drawings and photos. It’s fast-paced and interesting in its depiction of 19th-century crime fighting.
The author, an award-winning historian, has written eight books and numerous articles for local and regional publications.
