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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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...

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

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.

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