Death with a Double Edge

December 1, 2020

Haines's Independent Bones features PI Sarah Booth Delaney, caught up with protecting a visiting professor of Greek literature at Ole Miss whose radical feminism may have sparked murder (40,000-copy first printing). In Jonasson's latest, Una is teaching in a remote Icelandic village when she discovers dark secrets the polite if distant villages have kept hidden for generations--perhaps involving The Girl Who Died (50,000-copy first printing). A peasant girl is murdered in a northern Chinese village, and exiled inspector Lu Fei takes the case in Klingborg's Thief of Souls (75,000-copy first printing). Brought back by Lupica in 2018, PI Sunny Randall investigates the suicide of best friend Spike's 20-year old niece in Robert B. Parker's Payback. In 1910, a senior barrister is found dead in a notorious London slum, and junior barrister Daniel Pitt endangers his family by investigating in Perry's Death with a Double Edge. In Walker's The Coldest Case, applying the facial reconstruction tools used on ancient skulls to the skull of a long-dead murder victim leads Bruno, chief of police in fictional town in the Dordogne, to the activities of a Cold War-era Communist organization. With A Peculiar Combination, Louisiana librarian Weaver detours from her beloved Amory Ames books to launch a new series starring Electra "Ellie" McDonnell, who cracks safes with locksmith uncle Mick to make ends meet in World War II England and agrees to help the government when she's caught (40,000-copy first printing).

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March 15, 2021
The fatal stabbing of one of his colleagues in chambers leads Daniel Pitt on a trail of murder that stretches backward and forward in 1911 London. The good news is that the dead man the police find in disreputable Mile End isn't Daniel's friend Toby Kitteridge even though he's clad in Toby's coat. The bad news is that he's Jonah Drake, another member of fford Croft and Gibson. Naturally, Inspector Letterman wants to know which of Drake's former clients might have had reason to kill him. That's not an easy call, since Drake was clever enough to win most of his cases. So Daniel focuses on two of Drake's recent clients in high-profile cases: Lionel Peterson, an accused wife killer whose trial ended in a hung jury, and Evan Faber, fabulously wealthy shipbuilder Erasmus Faber's only son, who was pronounced not guilty of murdering his lover, Marie Wesley, a woman who was no better than she should be. Daniel can't believe Evan would have killed the lawyer who got him acquitted, and Evan's soon vindicated in a way as alarming as it is definitive: After a night of pub crawling with Daniel, he's found stabbed to death in the same Mile End neighborhood. Could the situation be any more dire? Certainly it could: Inspector Letterman could accuse Marcus fford Croft, head of chambers, of blackmailing him, and Lady Charlotte Pitt, Daniel's mother and the wife of Special Branch head Sir Thomas Pitt, could be kidnapped to stop the investigation dead in its tracks. The main mystery is sadly transparent and the red herrings halfhearted distractions. But Perry's legion of fans won't mind.

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April 15, 2021
Daniel Pitt returns for his fourth outing (after One Fatal Flaw, 2020), which also features his parents, Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, protagonists of Perry's earlier series named for them. This time the law office where Daniel is striving to make his name is rocked when a longstanding employee is murdered, with Daniel's card found in his coat. Thinking the murder may be related to a case the victim was working on, Pitt and his colleagues at the chambers get to work investigating; soon there's another murder, this time involving a client. As the deaths stack up and WWI looms, violence and intimidation get closer to home, and tension builds to a boiling point. Perry has written a cracking story, with characters, even minor ones, deftly drawn to show nuanced personalities, and with dialogue evoking the atmosphere of prewar London. Readers will be glad to see the return of Daniel's beloved Miriam and will look forward to more adventures with the affable, smart lawyer and his charming circle of friends and relatives. Recommend this to Maisie Dobbs aficionados as well as Perry fans.

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