Ice and Stone

March 1, 2021

In multi-award-winning Andrews's Murder Most Fowl, Meg Langslow's husband is directing a production of Macbeth even as gung-ho reenactors erect an authentic medieval Scottish military camp nearby, which ends in the murder of the unpleasant filmmaker documenting the reenactment (40,000-copy first printing). A BAFTA and multiple mystery award winner, novelist/filmmaker Claudel limns the current refugee crisis, with the inhabitants of backwater Dog Island refusing to disrupt their age-old way of life when three unidentified bodies wash ashore, deciding instead to bury them. In Edgar Award winner Hirahara's 1944-set Clark and Division, 20-year-old Aki, who has moved with her parents to Chicago after their release from the Manzanar concentration camp in California, refuses to believe that her sister Rose's death is a suicide. Lightning Strike, a prequel to Krueger's "Cork O'Connor" series, features Cork's coming-of age in small-town 1963 Minnesota. In Muller's Ice and Stone, durable PI Sharon McCone is enlisted by the organization Crimes Against Indigenous Sisters when two more Indigenous women are brutally dispatched in what the police refuse to regard as a pattern (25,000-copy first printing). The Madness of Crowds, the next in Penny's sensational "Chief Inspector Gamache" series, sends the chief inspector home to Three Pines, Canada, after a sojourn in Paris. Following Trinchieri's well-received debut, Murder in Chianti, The Bitter Taste of Murder finds former NYPD Nico Doyle comfortably settled in his late wife's Tuscan hometown--until the ruthless wine critic who's just arrived is murdered.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 31, 2021
In MWA Grand Master Muller’s well-paced 34th Sharon McCone mystery (after 2018’s The Breakers), the Crimes Against Indigenous Sisters organization hires the San Francisco PI to look into the murders of two Native women over the past three months in California’s Meruk county, as well as many previous disappearances of Native women. Due to conflicting jurisdictions among the reservation police, the county sheriff’s office, and the FBI, any official investigation has faltered. McCone is CAIS’s last hope of finding out what has happened in their community. Posing as a journalist, McCone travels in the dead of winter to Meruk, where she soon discovers that the two deaths are just the tip of the iceberg. McCone, who learned only in middle age she had Shoshone roots, becomes a target for bigotry and abuse as motives for the killings shift into ever-darkening realms. Tough, tenacious, self-reliant, and empathetic, McCone is fiercely loyal to her friends and family. As always, it’s a pleasure to watch her in action. Muller does a fine job dramatizing a serious social issue. Agent: Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Agency.

Starred review from August 1, 2021

Muller hits the mark once again with her 35th Sharon McCone mystery (after The Breakers). Private investigator Sharon is asked by a group called Crimes Against Indigenous Sisters to go undercover in a remote Northern California county to investigate the murders of local Indigenous women. The motives for the crimes are not clear, and local authorities have not put much effort into solving the cases--rather, they seem determined to ignore them. As she digs deeper, Sharon's cover is compromised, and she finds herself in danger. Using the remote assistance of her crew at the detective agency, as well as her own social networks (Sharon's birth parents were both Northern Shoshone), she manages to piece together the puzzle and bring the investigation to a climactic end. Muller's McCone set the standard for fictional women detectives; after 35 installments, the detective's character has not diminished but continues to evolve and grow and meet all challenges head on. VERDICT A must-read for Sharon McCone fans; the series should also be explored by any fan of strong women detectives.--Sandra Knowles, formerly at South Carolina State Lib., Columbia

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.