The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag / Alan Bradley

The second installment of the Flavia de Luce franchise reintroduces the reader to what may be the most original sleuth since Precious Ramotswe. If you can swallow the premise of a precocious 11-year-old in an impossibly twee English village, racing around on her bicycle, conducting advanced chemistry experiments in her family's treasure home, and solving complex murder investigations that confound the local constabulary, well this is the series for you. That description may make it sound a bit too like Nancy Drew meets Masterpiece Theatre... but don't get me wrong, because it does work as an engaging crime novel. And it's clearly not written for an eleven-year-old reader either. There's something about the nostalgia of the Agatha Christie settings and the aura of the English idyll that makes this series irresistible, at least to non-British readers. Apparently language and cultural inconsistencies introduced by Canadian writer Alan Bradley are jarring if you grew up in the UK, but for someone like me, Flavia's world seems pretty near perfect.

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The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...

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