----------------------------------------------------------------- July books --Ballantine-- RAINBOW'S END by Martha Grimes In the latest Richard Jury novel, three apparently unconnected deaths in Britain lead the Chief Superintendent to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and into an astonishing web of greed, murder, and mayhem; 345-39426-7 Paperback, 300 pp. DOUBLE JEOPARDY by William Bernhardt Something different from William Bernhardt, creator of the Ben Kincaid/JUSTICE series: a novel of suspense about a case of mistaken identity that sets an innocent man on the run; 345-39784-3 Paperback, 416 pp. IF WISHES WERE HORSES... by Tim Hemlin The launch of a murder mystery series positioned in the twin worlds of academe and cuisine -- by an author who is intimately associated with both. The bonus in this first novel: championship racehorses; 345-40318-5 Paperback, 256 pp. DON'T LOOK DOWN by Tima Smith A pilot/jump instructor and his ex-wife are the protagonists in this action-packed adventure; 345-39677-4 Paperback, 272 pp. --Fawcett-- THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS by Julie Smith New Orleans detective Skip Langdon is on a one-woman crusade against mayoral candidate Errol Jacomine. In her quest to prove to the world what she knows to be true -- that he is pure evil -- she chases clues into the bayou country just as a deadly hurricane blows in; 449-90937-9 Hardcover, 352 pp. A SHRED OF EVIDENCE by Jill McGown When a schoolgirl is found strangled near a playground, Detective Judy Hill and her boss (and lover) Inspector Lloyd work together to uncover a plot of adolescent passion and psychotic obsession. This is the seventh installment of the Lloyd/Hill series; 449-91066-0 Hardcover, 304 pp. DEATH ON THE DIAGONAL by Carolyn Banks Equestrienne Robin Vaughn and her food critic husband Jeet are off on another mystery adventure. In this fourth book, they find murder at a horse show; 449-14968-4 Paperback, 180 pp. --Ivy-- RIVER by Roderick Thorp This novel of the Green River killings by the author of DIE HARD follows two men on parallel journeys: a psychopathic serial killer and the detective who has to stop him; 8041-1535-4 Paperback, 300 pp. DEATH OF A TRAVELLING MAN by M.C. Beaton Sergeant Hamish Macbeth is back and frustrated by a sinister self-proclaimed gypsy who parks his rusty van in Macbeth's Highland village. When the troublemaker is killed, Macbeth's only regret is that the killer may be one of his friends; 8041-1211-8 Paperback, 170 pp. ----------------------------------------------------------------- August books --Ballantine-- THE KNOWLEDGE OF WATER by Sarah Smith The author of THE VANISHED CHILD returns with her second historical mystery. Set in Paris during the devastating flood of 1910, a concert pianist and her lover delve into an intricate network of plots and counterplots that prove to be more dangerous than the incessant rain; 345-39135-7 Hardcover, 400 pp. THE MUMMERS'CURSE by Gillian Roberts From Anthony Award-winner Gillian Roberts: another season, another murder. In this sequel to IN THE DEAD OF SUMMER, schoolteacher Amanda Pepper solves an assassination at the Philadelphia Mummers' festive New Year's Day parade; 345-40323-1 Hardcover, 240 pp. THE ALPINE GAMBLE by Mary Daheim California real estate developers are on the loose in Alpine, Washington. Emma Lord, making her seventh appearance as editor- publisher of the _Alpine Advocate_, keeps an open mind about the newcomers. But among other Alpiners, ugly suspicions lead to dark threats...and murder; 345-39641-3 Paperback, 304 pp. CALL NO MAN FATHER by William X. Kienzle When His Holiness the Pope schedules a trip to Detroit, a security nightmare ensues -- leading to the murder of a priest with radical views about papal authority. The latest thriller starring Motor City's most adroit amateur sleuth: Father Robert Koesler; 345-38801-1 Paperback, 352 pp. THE CASE OF THE LAME CANARY by Erle Stanley Gardner An illicit affair plus a nosy neighbor equals murder in this classic Perry Mason whodunit, originally published in 1937; 345-35162-2 Paperback, 192 pp. --Fawcett-- ANIMAL INSTINCTS by Eleanor Hyde In her second appearance, fashion editor Lydia Miller takes a sabbatical from her high-class job to work at an animal shelter, where she unknowingly stumbles upon animal theft, underage prostitution, and murder; 449-14941-2 Paperback, 240 pp. THE QUICK RED FOX by John D. MacDonald When a beautiful movie star seeks Travis McGee's help in stopping a blackmailer, his gut says not to touch the case with a ten-foot >>> Continued to next message... --- Blue Wave/386 v2.30 * Origin: Bitter Butter Better BBS, Tualatin OR, 503-691-7938 (1:105/290) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 244 MYSTERY Ref: DAA00004 Date: 06/05/96 From: CATHERINE VANICEK Time: 04:14am \/To: ALL (Read 4 times) Subj: FWD: Murder on the Internet (June) [3/6]04:14:3406/05/96 >>> Part 3 of 6... pole. Unfortunately there's another woman involved whose life is quickly turning into a disaster, and Travis McGee has never been the kind of man to sit back and watch...; 449-45613-7 Paperback, 280 pp. --Ivy-- DANGEROUS ATTACHMENTS by Sarah Lovett In her debut mystery, forensic psychiatrist Sylvia Strange, who serves as a consultant to the New Mexico prison system in Santa Fe, recommends that Lucas Watson not be released on parole. Soon, Lucas escapes and forces Sylvia to use all of her skill as a psychiatrist to keep one step ahead of him; 8041-1297-5 Paperback, 300 pp. LAST BUS TO WOODSTOCK by Colin Dexter In a reprint of the first Inspector Morse novel, Morse must solve the confusing case of an Oxford co-ed whose bludgeoned body is found outside a pub in Woodstock shortly after she is seen hitching a ride; 8041-1490-0 Paperback, 288 pp. ----------------------------------------------------------------- September books --Ballantine-- IN THE DEAD OF SUMMER by Gillian Roberts This sequel to HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION joins Philadelphia schoolteacher Amanda Pepper on a tenacious search for a missing student -- a quest that leads to malice domestic and malevolence public; 345-40650-8 Paperback, 288 pp. A CLEAR CONSCIENCE by Frances Fyfield Helen West, Prosecutor for the Crown, returns in this noirish suspense novel about the private and legal life of a battered woman. A CLEAR CONSCIENCE represents the latest U.S. paperback appearance of the acclaimed British novelist Frances Fyfield; 345-38508-X Paperback, 272 pp. THE SHADOW MAN by John Katzenbach The first paperback appearance of the acclaimed (and Edgar Award- nominated) novel by the author of JUST CAUSE. This thriller focuses on an elusive, anonymous killer who resurfaces after five decades of dormancy; 345-38630-2 Paperback, 448 pp. --Fawcett-- CHESTNUT MARE, BEWARE by Jody Jaffe _Charlotte Commercial Appeal_ reporter Nattie Gold finds herself in the thick of things once again when her show-horse circuit acquaintances receive death threats; 449-90998-0 Hardcover, 288 pp. L IS FOR LAWLESS by Sue Grafton Kinsey Milhone joins up with a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde in a romp that takes her halfway across the country and lands her in some serious trouble before she can solve a mystery that's decades old; 449-22149-0 Paperback, 336 pp. THE ROARING BOY by Edward Marston In the seventh installment of the Elizabethan theater series starring Nicholas Bracewell, playwright Edmund Hood receives an anonymous manuscript based on a true mystery; 449-22431-7 Paperback, 304 pp. MOURNING GLORIA by Joyce Christmas Lady Margaret Priam makes her eighth appearance in MOURNING GLORIA, when she is called upon to figure out which of her society acquaintances is a murderer; 449-14704-5 Paperback, 240 pp. --Ivy-- HORSE OF A DIFFERENT KILLER by Jody Jaffe The first mystery featuring Natalie Gold -- a woman who spans the high-society world of show horses and the high-powered newspaper world; 8041-1472-2 Paperback, 288 pp. IN OTHERS' WORDS------------------------------------------------- Julie Smith's NEW ORLEANS MOURNING won the 1991 Edgar Award given by the Mystery Writers of America for Best Novel, making Julie Smith the first American woman to win the award in that category since 1956. Detective Skip Langdon, introduced in NEW ORLEANS MOURNING, returned in THE AXEMAN'S JAZZ, JAZZ FUNERAL, NEW ORLEANS BEAT, and HOUSE OF BLUES, and is featured in the upcoming novel, THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS. Aside from being first-rate mysteries, all of these books evoke the wild, sultry, authentic atmosphere of New Orleans. We caught up with Julie Smith recently, and asked how her setting informs her books. Here is what she had to say: MOI: Why did you choose New Orleans as a setting for your novels? JS: New Orleans is the city I know best. I never even _began_ to get the hang of the town where I grew up -- Savannah, Georgia -- and I was writing about San Francisco when I decided to start a second series. I'd lived in New Orleans years ago and so I decided to work with it as a setting. As it turned out, the city was in my blood in a way I didn't even understand until I began writing about it. After living in San Francisco most of my adult life, I began spending a few months a year in New Orleans and eventually ended up moving back permanently. It turns out to be a perfect place to set a mystery series because it's so rich in so many ways -- rich in secrets, for one thing. Skeletons are forever emerging from closets and providing inspiration. Rich in crime, for another. We've become famous for having the world's only police department with two officers on Death Row, but aside from that, this is a city of outlaws. Ordinary tourists who come here for a weekend end up breaking more laws in the first hour they're here than they've probably done in the entire rest of their lives -- and this is before they even get drunk. MOI: How do you use the culture of New Orleans -- the music, the art, and so on -- in your books? JS: New Orleans at the moment isn't Paris in the 20s, but there may be similarities -- the arts are bursting out all over in exciting, ground roots kinds of ways. I try to incorporate that in the books -- especially the music, because the passion, the longing, the desire associated with music is so easily accessible to most people. When writers write about writing, it's self-conscious and a little tacky -- yet in all of us, I think, is a desire to explore that elusive phenomenon known as "the creative process" without actually getting so pretentious as to call it that. I use music as a metaphor for all art, and especially for writing. If I mention music, you can just about always read "writing." People ask me if I based the character of Skip Langdon on myself, but the truth is that there's really a lot >>> Continued to next message... --- Blue Wave/386 v2.30 * Origin: Bitter Butter Better BBS, Tualatin OR, 503-691-7938 (1:105/290) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 244 MYSTERY Ref: DAA00005 Date: 06/05/96 From: CATHERINE VANICEK Time: 04:14am \/To: ALL (Read 4 times) Subj: FWD: Murder on the Internet (June) [4/6]04:14:3506/05/96 >>> Part 4 of 6... more of me in a sixteen-year-old street musician who appears in JAZZ FUNERAL. MOI: How are your characters representative of the city? Could they live anywhere else? JS: The term "melting pot" doesn't even begin to cover what we have here in New Orleans. It's impossible to know every ethnic and economic group, but I try. I think in the end some of my characters could only be New Orleanians -- the St. Amant family in NEW ORLEANS MOURNING, for instance, because the things that happen to them over the generations could only happen here -- and I mean _only_ here. But some could live other places. I sometimes tackle a peculiarly New Orleans situation, like Mardi Gras or Jazzfest, in a given book, and sometimes I'm looking for more general themes. One book, for instance, involved Twelve Step programs, one computer bulletin boards, and the one out this summer (THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS) is about the devil. Not actually Beelzebub, but a very evil character based on someone I met once, though not in New Orleans. He was the Rev. Jim Jones, who ended up killing 900 people, which is more than anyone else in the twentieth century, I think, who wasn't a head of state. He started out in Indianapolis and moved on to San Francisco -- but _could_ he have lived in New Orleans? The city's just lucky he didn't. MOI: Do you base your characters on real people? If so, do these people generally have a connection with New Orleans? JS: Usually I start with some tiny aspect of a person I actually know -- maybe a mannerism or personality trait, maybe something I know about them ("killed 900 people" brings up a lot of possibilities) and build on that. I've been told that somewhere in New Orleans is a six-foot female cop who went to the same schools Skip Langdon did and, if I remember right, even belonged to the same sorority. Yet I've never met her and certainly didn't base Skip on her. My one worry about living here (besides termites, which never let up) is that I'll learn fabulous secrets that it would be unethical to write about and die of frustration. MOI: You have wonderful, colorful names for your characters, both major and minor. How do you come up with them? JS: I may not steal people's secrets but no name is safe from me. I find them in the phone book, I overhear them, I get plenty from the obituary column and, in truth, I grab em when I'm introduced to em. Last night I met a woman named Nini, who better get a deadbolt for her name, because she's about to get it burgled; the day my hairdresser introduced me to his friend Romalice (pronounced Rome-Alice), Romalice underwent an emergency name-ectomy that didn't hurt a bit. Delavon, a nasty villain in HOUSE OF BLUES, is a name I got off a clerk's nametag at Walgreen's. I mentioned what a nice name it was too -- I'm always trs polite while name-napping. MOI: Do you consider New Orleans itself a character in your books? JS: New Orleans is very definitely a character in my books -- sort of a shadow character, but very much a presence. No character in a book can ever be as complex as a real person, but if he or she recurs over the course of a number of books, you have a better shot at it. One of my goals in the Skip Langdon series is to write an ongoing biography of the detective -- to deepen the character in every book, to have her reveal a little more about herself, to let her grow. She's hugely depressed at the end of HOUSE OF BLUES and in THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS, she begins to work through her depression. She won't entirely process the events that happened in HOUSE OF BLUES for another two books, and she'll be stronger for it. Then who knows? She may get promoted or otherwise rewarded. Such is life -- cyclical; and such is the life of a city. In every book, I try to show a little more of the complex pageant of New Orleans, and I try to portray it in all its phases and cycles as a complement to what's going on in Skip's life. SIGNINGS, READINGS, AND SO ON------------------------------------ (Please note that times are subject to change) Joyce Burditt, BUCK NAKED, Ballantine, 345-40136-0 Santa Barbara, CA Sat 6/01 BORDER'S, 2:00 Taffy Cannon, CLASS REUNIONS ARE MURDER, Fawcett, 449-22389-2 San Juan Capistrano, Sat 6/08 THE GREEN DOOR, 1:00 CA Thousand Oaks, CA Sat 6/15 MYSTERIES TO DIE FOR, 3:30 Westminster, CA Thu 6/20 COFFEE, TEA & MYSTERY, 7:00 Robert Cullen, DISPATCH FROM A COLD COUNTRY, Fawcett, 449-91258-2 Washington, DC Sat 6/01 MYSTERY BOOKS, 12:00 Kensington, MD Sun 6/09 CROWN BOOKS, 1:00 New York, NY Tue 6/25 PARTNERS AND CRIME, 7:00 Mary Daheim, THE ALPINE FURY, Ballantine, 345-38843-7 Seattle, WA Mon 6/24 KILLING TIME MYSTERIES, tba Lee Harris, THE PASSOVER MURDER, Fawcett, 449-14963-3 West Milford, CT Sat 6/29 FOOTNOTES, tba Tim Hemlin, IF WISHES WERE HORSES, Ballantine, 345-40318-5 Sugarland, TX Fri 6/21 BARNES & NOBLE, 7:30 Sugarland, TX Sun 6/23 BARNES & NOBLE, 3:00 Dick Lochte, THE NEON SMILE, Ivy, 8041-1405-6 Venice, CA Fri 6/07 SMALL WORLD BOOKS, 6:00 Anne Perry, PENTECOST ALLEY, Fawcett, 449-90635-3 Toronto, Canada Tue 6/04 WHODUNIT BOOKS, 7:00 Lora Roberts, MURDER MILE HIGH, Fawcett, 449-14947-1 Grover Beach, CA Sat 6/08 SAN LUIS OBISPO LIBRARY, tba SPOTLIGHT ON: JILL MCGOWN-------------------------------------- Jill McGown started writing the Inspector Lloyd and Judy Hill mystery series in 1983. She first introduced the English detective team in A PERFECT MATCH, a brilliant story about a wealthy widow whose strangled body is left in the woods near a small village. McGown took a detour in her writing, producing several non-series mysteries before returning to Lloyd and Hill in 1989 with MURDER AT THE OLD VICARAGE. She has written five more books in the series since then. >>> Continued to next message... --- Blue Wave/386 v2.30 * Origin: Bitter Butter Better BBS, Tualatin OR, 503-691-7938 (1:105/290) --------------- FIDO MESSAGE AREA==> TOPIC: 244 MYSTERY Ref: DAA00006 Date: 06/05/96 From: CATHERINE VANICEK Time: 04:14am \/To: ALL (Read 4 times) Subj: FWD: Murder on the Internet (June) [5/6]04:14:3606/05/96 >>> Part 5 of 6... Inspector Lloyd (whose first name is still a mystery) is a by-the- book kind of police officer with impeccable deduction skills. Judy Hill is a tireless investigator and interrogator. Together they are a superior team, digging their way through the scandalous crimes that take place in Stansfield, England. But Lloyd and Hill face scandal in more than just their professional lives. They began a tumultuous affair in the first book of the series that has continued despite the fact that Judy has been, until recently, married. Their relationship takes another turn in the latest McGown mystery, A SHRED OF EVIDENCE. The quiet town of Stansfield is once more disrupted by a horrible crime. A teenage girl is found dead near a playground, and Lloyd and Hill are convinced the murderer is someone connected to the school. What they uncover is a multitude of secrets, and a tragic, twisted plot of sexual obsession. Jill McGown is an expert at exposing the dark side of country life. A native of Argyll, Scotland, she has lived in Corby, England, since she was ten. The Lloyd/Hill mysteries in series order are: A PERFECT MATCH, paperback (449-21820-1, 12/90) MURDER AT THE OLD VICARAGE, paperback (449-21819-8, 5/91) GONE TO HER DEATH, paperback (449-21966-6, 12/91) MURDER MOVIE, paperback (449-22070-2, 1/93) THE MURDERS OF MRS. AUSTIN AND MRS. BEALE, paperback (449-22162-8, 2/94) THE OTHER WOMAN, paperback (449-22272-1, 12/94) MURDER NOW...AND THEN, paperback (449-22311-6, 3/95) A SHRED OF EVIDENCE, hardcover (449-91066-0, 7/96) THE LAST WORD: DISPATCH FROM A COLD COUNTRY by Robert Cullen ---- Robert Cullen has been a reporter, abroad and in Washington, for nearly twenty years. As Newsweek's Moscow correspondent he won an Overseas Press Club award for foreign reporting. He is the author of four previous books, including SOVIET SOURCES (a _New York Times_ Notable Book of the Year) which featured Colin Burke, a reporter for a Washington newspaper. In DISPATCH FROM A COLD COUNTRY, Cullen has taken Burke back to Russia to find out what happened to a stringer, a young woman he encouraged to work in Russia, who was murdered in a most brutal and sadistic manner. In this excerpt, he introduces us to the characters who set the plot in motion. Read on.... Jennifer Morelli stepped gratefully to the front of the checkout line at the Hotel Northern Worker, a hostelry she hoped fervently never to visit again. It was a tired, cold hotel in a tired, cold district of St. Petersburg, a hotel that hadn't bothered to change the name it had been given in 1954, when the city was Leningrad, the country was the Soviet Union, and foreigners were carefully segregated from such places. In the new Russia, the Northern Worker had discovered that there were certain Westerners of limited means -- teachers, impecunious art buffs, and the occasional freelance writer like Morelli -- willing to pay dollars, though less than a hundred of them, for a small, musty room, bath down the hall. In the era of transition from communism to capitalism, this was like learning that the frail little babushka who shared your communal apartment had real jewelry hidden under her mattress. Behind Morelli, an old woman, wearing a parka and a black astrakhan hat, moved a dirty mop slowly back and forth over the granite floor of the lobby. In the far corner, an attendant dozed behind a portable bar marked _KAFE_. He had no customers; he was out of coffee. Morelli leaned over the counter of the cashier's booth, waiting for the woman behind it to tally the surcharge for her phone calls. Dexterously, the woman slipped wooden beads back and forth on an abacus. "Three hundred thirty-four thousand, three hundred rubles," she finally announced. It was the equivalent of about fifty dollars. "Any discount for the days when there was no hot water?" Morelli asked. The woman behind the counter looked at first stupefied. Then she giggled softly at this eccentric foreign attempt at humor. She shook her head. Carefully taking two slips of carbon paper, she wrote out a receipt in triplicate, and Morelli handed over a wad of rubles about two inches thick. Laboriously the cashier counted them. When she was satisfied, she handed Morelli the top copy of the receipt -- and her blue passport. She was free to go. Then she heard someone mention her name. She turned to her right, startled. Twenty feet away, in front of the registration desk, stood a man in an open and openly expensive leather overcoat. He had, she thought, an odd body, a body that was all torso and arms. His legs were short and bowed, he had no neck, and his ears were like wrinkled pancakes, pressed close to his bullet-shaped head. "Morelli," he was saying, in the kind of Russian accent she was used to hearing in peasant's markets. "Jennifer Morelli. What room is she in?" His voice was low and gravelly. She was about to walk up to the man and identify herself, but something about him made her stop. She could not have said what it was -- something in his tone of voice or the way he carried himself. So instead of identifying herself, she shrank. She was a tall woman, six feet even, and always had been tall, taller than all the boys all the way through grade school. Now her body reflexively went into the stoop-shouldered posture she'd employed then to make her gangling self inconspicuous and small. She took a step backward, until she was partly screened by one of the hotel pillars. The clerk at the registration desk said he was not allowed to give out guests' room numbers. It was the sort of routine bureaucratic obstacle that Russians of the post-perestroika era had learned to surmount with a small packet of rubles. But the man in the leather coat did not reach for his wallet. Instead, he laid an enormous, thick-fingered hand on the counter, palm down, knuckles lightly flexed. He put the other hand in the pocket of the coat and pushed it open a bit further. He was wearing a gun in a black leather holster. "Don't give me trouble," he said to the clerk. "Give me the room number." The clerk looked furtively behind him, perhaps checking to see if the hotel director was within earshot. There was no one there. He took a scrap of paper and picked up a pen. He scrawled something on the paper and handed it to the man in the leather coat. The man looked at it, nodded, and walked over to the stairwell, rather than the hotel's single, creaking elevator. He pushed open the fire door and disappeared. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Susan Randol Senior Editor Ballantine Publishing Group >>> Continued to next message... --- Blue Wave/386 v2.30 * Origin: Bitter Butter Better BBS, Tualatin OR, 503-691-7938 (1:105/290)