These books are too slow. Not enough Holmesian brilliance.

Not enough action.

A Letter of Mary is the third in the Mary Russell mystery series of novels by Laurie R. King. 

This is the first case that Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes work on together as husband and wife. …

August 1923

… an unexpected visit from Dorothy Ruskin, an elderly amateur archeologist from the Holy Land, who met the couple four and a half years earlier during the events from O Jerusalem (novel).

As a gift, Ruskin presents Russell with an inlaid box containing a papyrus scroll, which seems to be a genuine first-century letter by Mary Magdalene.

When she returns to London that evening, Ruskin is killed in a hit-and-run accident with only two witnesses.

When Holmes and Russell visit London to identify the body, they discover evidence of foul play. …

I’m thinking these Alex Cross books are getting better.

Alex Cross Must Die (2023) is quite good.

Suspend your disbelief and be entertained. 😀

“Drop whatever you’re doing, Detective Cross, and head to Reagan Airport,” DC Metro Police dispatch says. “A jet just crashed and exploded on the runway. The chief and the FBI want you and John Sampson there pronto.”

Cross and Sampson race to the crash site. The plane didn’t fail—it was shot down by a stolen Vietnam War–era machine gun. 

The list of experts who can operate the weapon is short. And time before another lethal strike runs even shorter.

Bad Blood (2010) is another intense murder mystery by John Sandford.

4th in the Virgil Flowers series.

One Sunday in late fall in southern Minnesota, a farmer brings a load of soybeans to a local grain elevator — and a young man hits him on the head with a t-ball bat, drops him into the grain bin, waits until he’s sure he’s dead (if the blow didn’t kill him, the smothering grain surely would), and then calls the sheriff to report the “accident.”

Suspicious, the sheriff quickly breaks the kid down… and the next day the boy’s found hanging in his cell.

Remorse? The sheriff’s not so sure, and in fact she’s beginning to wonder if one of her own men might not be responsible. She has no choice but to bring in outside help, and investigator Virgil Flowers of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is her man (in more ways than one — the sheriff’s awfully attractive, he notices).

As Virgil investigates, though, what at first seems fairly simple quickly becomes very complicated as he begins to uncover a multi-generation, multi-family conspiracy — a series of crimes of such monstrosity that, though he’s seen an awful lot in his life, even Virgil has difficulty in comprehending it… and in figuring out what to do next.

The 3rd book in the Virgil Flowers series ➙ Rough Country.

The earlier books in this excellent series are not nearly as good as later ones.

To me Virgil seems very two dimensional in this one. I didn’t much care about his investigation.

Virgil’s always been known for having a somewhat active, er, social life, but he’s probably not going to be getting too many opportunities for that during his new case.

While competing in a fishing tournament in a remote area of northern Minnesota, he gets a call from Lucas Davenport to investigate a murder at a nearby resort, where a woman has been shot while kayaking. The resort is for women only, a place to relax, get fit, recover from plastic surgery, commune with nature, and while it didn’t start out to be a place mostly for those with Sapphic inclinations, that’s pretty much what it is today.

Which makes things all the more complicated for Virgil, because as he begins investigating, he finds a web of connections between the people at the resort, the victim, and some local women, notably a talented country singer, and the more he digs, the move he discovers the arrows of suspicion that point in many directions, encompassing a multitude of motivations: jealousy, blackmail, greed, anger, fear.

And then he discovers that this is not the first murder, that there was a second, seemingly unrelated one, the year before.

And that there’s about to be a third, definitely related one, any time now.

And as for the fourth… well, Virgil better hope he can catch the killer before that happens.

Because it could be his own.

The 2nd book in the Virgil Flowers series ➙ Heat Lightning.

Virgil wasn’t nearly as compelling a character in the beginning as in the later books.

Still, I find these books fascinating. I’m totally hooked.

Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Virgil Flowers …

It’s a hot, humid summer night in Minnesota, and Flowers is in bed with one of his ex-wives (the second one, if you’re keeping count), when the phone rings. It’s Lucas Davenport. There’s a body in Stillwater — two shots to the head, found near a veteran’s memorial. And the victim has a lemon in his mouth.

Exactly like the body they found last week.

The more Flowers works the murders, the more convinced he is that someone’s keeping a list, and that the list could have a lot more names on it. If he could only find out what connects them all . . . and then he does, and he’s almost sorry he did.

Because if it’s true, then this whole thing leads down a lot more trails than he thought — and every one of them is booby-trapped.

23rd Midnight is one of the Women’s Murder Club (novel series).

Quite good.

Set in San Francisco, the novels follow a group of women from different professions relating to investigating crime as they work together to solve murders. 

Detective Lindsay Boxer put serial killer Evan Burke in jail. 
 
Reporter Cindy Thomas wrote a book that put him on the bestseller list.
 
An obsessed maniac has turned Burke’s true-crime story into a playbook. And is embellishing it with gruesome touches all his own. 
 
Now Lindsay’s tracking an elusive suspect, and the entire Murder Club is facing destruction.