This is another well written, interesting British murder mystery.

What I liked best is the lead — Detective Sergeant Smith. Now a widower, his superiors expect him to retire and enjoy his pension.

But Smith wants to stay on. He’s excellent at his job. And very funny in a subtle way.

The story opens with the apparently accidental drowning of a sixth form student in the Norfolk countryside. …

The latest trainee detective to work with him is the son of a member of his former team, and together they begin to unravel the truth about what happened to Wayne Fletcher. As the investigation proceeds, it becomes clear that others are involved – some seem determined to prevent it, some seem to be taking too much interest.

In the end Smith operates alone, having stepped too far outside standard procedures to ask for support. He knows that his own life might be at risk but he has not calculated on the life of his young assistant also being put in danger.

petergrainger.com

I read this murder mystery because it was set in Oxford. The crime on a narrowboat.

Murder on the Oxford Canal is the first in a series featuring CID DI Hillary Greene.

I believe the plot has a lot of twist and turns. They failed to interest me much.

I was even more turned off by the barrage of (mostly negative) comments about the looks of the female characters.

So … for me this book is a #fail.

The 4th book in the series featuring Joe Pickett, Wyoming Game Warden.

…Joe Pickett is fly-fishing with his two daughters when he stumbles upon the mutilated body of a moose.

Whatever—or whoever—attacked the animal was ruthless: half the animal’s face has been sliced away, the skin peeled back from the flesh. Shaken by the sight, Joe starts to investigate what he hopes in an isolated incident.

Days later, after the discovery of a small herd of mutilated cattle, Joe realizes this something much more terrifying than he could have imagined.

Local authorities are quick to label the attacks the work of a grizzly bear, but Joe knows otherwise.

The cuts on the moose and the cattle were too clean, too precise, to have been made by jagged teeth. Are the animals only practice for a killer about to move on to another, more challenging prey?

Soon afterward, Joe’s worst fears are confirmed. The bodies of two men are found within hours of each other, in separate locations, their wounds eerily similar to those found on the moose and cattle. There’s a vicious killer, a modern-day Jack the Ripper, on the loose in Saddlestring—and it appears his rampage is just beginning.

The second book in the Cork O’Connor series is much better than the first.

Cork quit smoking. Started running. Did a marathon, in fact.

He’s spending more time with his kids and is quite civil with his estranged wife.

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Former small-town sheriff Cork O’Connor leads a desperate search-and-rescue mission into the unforgiving Minnesota wilderness in this “gritty, bloody adventure” (Publishers Weekly).

The Quetico-Superior Wilderness: more than two million acres of forest, white-water rapids, and uncharted islands on the Canadian/American border. Somewhere in the heart of this unforgiving territory, a young woman named Shiloh—a country-western singer at the height of her fame—has disappeared.

Her father arrives in Aurora, Minnesota, to hire Cork O’Connor to find his daughter. Cork joins a search party that includes an ex-con, two FBI agents, and a ten-year-old boy. Others are on Shiloh’s trail as well—men hired not just to find her, but to kill her.

As the expedition ventures deeper into the wilderness, strangers descend on Aurora, threatening to spill blood on the town’s snowy streets. Meanwhile, out on the Boundary Waters, winter falls hard. Cork’s team of searchers loses contact with civilization, and like the brutal winds of a Minnesota blizzard, death—violent and sudden—stalks them.

williamkentkrueger.com

I’m enjoying learning more about the First Nations people of northern Minnesota.

Book #1 in the Cork O’Connor series.

Cork O’Connor is part Ojibwe and part Irish. He lives in northern Minnesota.

Author William Kent Krueger lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. And didn’t get this — his first book — published until age-40.

Embittered over losing his job as Sheriff — and over the marital meltdown that has separated him from his wife and children, Cork gets by on heavy doses of caffeine, nicotine, and guilt.

Once a cop on Chicago’s South Side, there’s not much that can shock him.

But when a powerful local politician is brutally murdered the same night a young Indian boy goes missing, Cork takes on a harrowing case of corruption, conspiracy, and scandal.

As a blizzard buries Aurora and an old medicine man warns of the arrival of a blood-thirsty mythic beast called the Windigo, Cork must dig for answers hard and fast before more people, among them those he loves, will die.

williamkentkrueger.com

An impressive debut novel by Vera Kurian, a psychologist living in Washington, DC. 

She writes what she knows in this novel.

It’s historically and technologically up-to-date. Mobile phone apps are central to the plot.

Studying young psychopaths at University — what could go wrong?

Meet Chloe Sevre.

She’s a freshman honor student, a legging-wearing hot girl next door, who also happens to be a psychopath. Her hobbies include yogalates, frat parties and plotting to kill Will Bachman, a childhood friend who grievously wronged her.

Chloe is one of seven students at her DC-based college who are part of an unusual clinical study for psychopaths—students like herself who lack empathy and can’t comprehend emotions like fear or guilt.

The study, led by a renowned psychologist, requires them to wear smart watches that track their moods and movements. …

verakurian.com