Book #2 of the English translations of his Detective Galileo series.

Police are frustrated trying to solve the murder of a businessman in his own home.

Poison.

Was the mistress? Or the rejected wife? Or someone else.

Finally they call in a genius — Manabu Yukawa, a university physics professor who’s something like a Japanese Sherlock Holmes. His nickname is Detective Galileo.

Slow paced, like book #1 in the series – Devotion of Suspect X.

Yet I was never bored in either book. The professor is a fascinating character. And the slow burn feels authentically Japanese.

Here’s how Yukawa was cast in one TV adaptation.

Kaoru Utsumi, a rookie female detective, is wonderful too.

The Prodigal Daughter by Jeffrey Archer (1982) is the story of Florentyna Rosnovski, the daughter of Abel Rosnovski of Archer’s Kane and Abel.

Florentyna becomes the first female president of the USA in this book.

Archer got the inspiration for Florentyna’s political life from the elections of Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi.

A good story. One of Archer’s most popular.

Click PLAY or watch the author introduce the book on YouTube.

This one didn’t work for me.

The plot thread with the Brit celebrity didn’t add anything to the story.

Many big fans of Joe Pickett weren’t impressed with the 2018 book.

Wyoming’s new governor isn’t sure what to make of Joe Pickett, but he has a job for him that is extremely delicate. A prominent British businesswoman never came home from the high-end guest ranch she was visiting, and the British Embassy is pressing hard. …

At the same time, his friend Nate Romanowski has asked Joe to intervene with the feds on behalf of an issue passionately felt by falconers, but inexplicably being blocked. It seems like a matter of lesser importance to Joe right now, but the more he digs into both cases, the more someone is trying to stop him. Is it because of the missing woman or the falconers? Or are they somehow connected?

CJBox.net

This one is quite good — even if the plot is farfetched. 😀

… a man camping in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness goes missing.

As the official search ends with no recovery in sight, Cork is asked by the man’s family to stay on the case. Although the wedding (his daughter’s) is fast approaching and the weather looks threatening, he accepts and returns to that vast wilderness.

As the sky darkens and the days pass, Cork’s family anxiously awaits his return. Finally certain that something has gone terribly wrong, they fly by floatplane to the lake where the missing man was last seen. Locating Cork’s campsite, they find no sign of him. They do find blood, however. A lot of it. …

williamkentkrueger.com

Scalzi is the author of the great 2005 book Old Man’s War.

The Dispatcher — a 2016 novella — was commissioned by Audible (Amazon) as audio first.

I’d call it SciFi young adult.

The plot is bizarre and fascinating.

In the wake of an unexplained phenomenon worldwide — when people are deliberately killed, they disappear from their site of death and reappear, reset to several hours earlier, in a safe place — the profession of “Dispatcher” evolves. Dispatchers euthanize mortally-injured people before their natural deaths, enabling them to reset.

Tony Valdez is a Dispatcher recruited by the police to assist in investigating the disappearance of another Dispatcher.

wikipedia

Murder by Other Means is a 2020 sequel novella. Equally good.

Murder would now seem to be impossible. Anyone you kill will simply transport back to their home, waking up naked.

Yet there is a way.

Tony Valdez gets caught up in the plot where people start inexplicably committing suicide.

… Or were they murdered by other means?

related – How writing an audio-first novella changed John Scalzi’s writing process

Easily her most complicated plot, through to 1934.

An impossible murder. Everyone could be involved.

Hercule Poirot travels back to England on the midday flight from Le Bourget Airfield in Paris to Croydon Airport in London. He is one of eleven passengers …

 As the plane is close to landing, a wasp is spotted flying around the rear compartment before a steward finds that Giselle is dead.

Poirot, who has slept through most of the flight, dismisses the belief she died from a wasp sting. Instead, he points out a dart on the floor, which is found to have a poisoned tip: Giselle was stung in the neck with it. The question remains how she was murdered without anyone noticing. …

Death in the Clouds

I read the first 3 books in the Inspector Gamache series.

Then gave up.

This is book #15 in the series and it’s far better than the first three.

Though the book should have been shorter, the plot is superb.

Gamache has a tough time determining the murderer.

The air is unbearably tense as Armand Gamache returns to the Surete du Quebec for his first day of work since being demoted from its command to head of homicide.

Amid blistering personal social media attacks, Gamache sets out on his first assignment.

He has been tasked with finding a missing woman, but while he leads the search for Vivienne Godin, Three Pines itself is threatened when the river breaks its banks, and a province-wide emergency is declared.

Seems I’d better continue reading Penny. The more recent Gamache books.

Windigo Island is the first of Krueger’s books to look at prostitution, child prostitution, of Native Americans.

One thing I like about Krueger’s books is insight into First Nations culture. It’s mostly positive.

This book, however, was hard to read.

When the body of a teenage Ojibwe girl washes up on the shore of an island in Lake Superior, the residents of the nearby Bad Bluff reservation whisper that it was the work of a deadly mythical beast, the Windigo, or a vengeful spirit called Michi Peshu.

Such stories have been told by the Ojibwe people for generations, but they don’t explain how the girl and her friend, Mariah Arceneaux, disappeared a year ago. At the request of the Arceneaux family, private investigator Cork O’Connor takes on the case. …

williamkentkrueger.com

Last Girl Ghosted is another of the recently popular sub-genres of PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLERS by female authors featuring mostly female characters.

This one didn’t really work for me.

She met him through a dating app. An intriguing picture on a screen, a date at a downtown bar. What she thought might be just a quick hookup quickly became much more. She fell for him—hard. It happens sometimes, a powerful connection with a perfect stranger takes you by surprise. Could it be love?

But then, just as things were getting real, he stood her up. Then he disappeared—profiles deleted, phone disconnected. She was ghosted.

Maybe it was her fault. She shared too much, too fast. But isn’t that always what women think—that they’re the ones to blame? Soon she learns there were others. Girls who thought they were in love. Girls who later went missing. She had been looking for a connection, but now she’s looking for answers. Chasing a digital trail into his dark past—and hers—she finds herself on a dangerous hunt. And she’s not sure whether she’s the predator—or the prey.