I am Half-Sick of Shadows: A Flavia de Luce Novel / Alan Bradley

A film crew and a cast of characters from the local village are marooned at Flavia de Luce’s tired old family mansion Buckshaw near Christmastime after a blizzard cuts them off from civilization. A murder occurs (surprise, surprise) and Flavia is once again racing ahead of (and running circles around) the inspector, finding clues that he never even knew to look for. It all sounds a little like a game of Clue (Was it Mrs. Peacock in the Library with the rope?) or a plot borrowed straight from Agatha Christie's playbook, in fact one of the characters comments on this very thing, saying something like “This is like an Agatha Christie novel.” As clichéd as the plotline is, it doesn’t really have a very satisfactory resolution, and I found myself less concerned with the murder and more interested in Flavia’s attempts to capture Father Christmas and set off a secret fireworks show from the roof of the treasure home for the enjoyment and edification of the local villagers. I still find the main fascination with this series to be the character of Flavia. She’s just such an interesting creation. I didn’t mind so much this time that the plot was a little lame, but one wonders if the steam is running out on this franchise. Would someone please make a Masterpiece Mystery! series out of this? Someone in Norway seems to have given it a go (but mistakenly filmed it in France???)
This series has potential interest for tweens and teens.

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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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