New on the Shelves at Albert Wisner Public Library: Mystery & Suspense

Five strangers witness a brutal murder in broad daylight -- but can they truly believe what they saw? With its grassy hills and breathtaking city views, London's Hampstead Heath is the perfect place to spend an afternoon with friends and loved ones--and on an unseasonably warm Valentine's Day, the lawns are especially full. So when an aggressive lovers' quarrel breaks out, there's an audience of park goers nearby to hear the shouts traded back and forth, and to watch as the violence escalates suddenly to murder, then suicide.  For the five strangers who observed the gruesome act, the memory of the gore is unshakable. But one of them--disgraced journalist Jen Hunter--is compelled to question the truth of what she thought she saw. Are the facts of the case plain as day, or were they obscured, in the moment, by the glaring sunlight? As she mounts an obsessive investigation for a seemingly-impossible alternative, the lives of the other witnesses begin to unravel, each in its own particular way. Soon one thing becomes clear: the crime they witnessed was more terrible, more twisted, and more far-reaching than they ever could have imagined.

Private detective Agatha Raisin is striding along a path in Mircester Park during her lunch break when she hears a cry for help. Rushing over, she finds an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Swinburn, in the middle of the green--with the body of an old man lying at their feet. The man, who the coroner determines died by poisoning, was known as "the Admiral," a gardener notorious for his heavy drinking, and Chief Inspector Wilkes writes the death off as an accident caused by the consumption of weedkiller stored in a rum bottle. Agatha is not convinced that anyone would mistake weedkiller for rum – and then she receives an anonymous tip that the Admiral's death was no accident. Local gossip points to the Swinburns themselves as the killers, spurred by a feud. Distraught at this accusation, they turn to Agatha to clear their name, and she takes the case--despite the warnings of Chief Inspector Wilkes. Agatha encounters one suspicious character after another, becoming further enmeshed in the Admiral's own dark and shady past. And when she's run off the road, narrowly escaping with her life, and then another attack occurs, it becomes clear that someone doesn't want the case closed--and will stop at nothing to prevent Agatha from solving it.

A haunting crime story about the broken characters inhabiting yesterday's Brooklyn (circa 1996 and 2001), this is the new novel from modern master of neo-noir William Boyle; an explosive crime drama –it evokes a mystical Brooklyn where the sidewalks are cracked, where Virgin Mary statues tilt in fenced front yards, and where smudges of moonlight reflect in puddles even on the blackest nights. A riveting portrait of lives crashing together at the turn of the century, Shoot the Moonlight Out is tragic and tender and funny and strange. A sense of loss is palpable--what has been lost and what will be lost--and Boyle's characters face down old ghosts with grim determination, as ripples of consequence radiate in dangerous directions.

Just how far will a grieving mother go to right a tragic wrong? Camille Gardener is a grieving--and angry--mother who, five years after her daughter's death, is still obsessed with the privileged young man she believes to be responsible. When her rash actions draw the attention of a secret group of women--the collective-- Camille is drawn into a dark web where these mothers share their wildly different stories of loss as well as their desire for justice in a world where privilege denies accountability. Fueled by mutual rage, the collective members devise and act out retribution fantasies via precise, anonymous, highly coordinated revenge killings. As Camille struggles to comprehend whether this is a role-playing exercise or terrifying reality, she must decide if these women are truly avenging angels or monsters. Becoming more deeply enmeshed in the group, Camille learns truths about the collective--and about herself--that she may not be able to survive.

Crime reporter Jordan Manning leaves her hometown in Texas to take a job at a television station in Chicago. Jordan is smart and aggressive, and often the only woman of color in the newsroom. Armed with a master's degree in forensic science and impeccable instincts, Jordan has been able to break every big story. From her time in Texas, she's covered the vilest of human behaviors but nothing has prepared her for Chicago. Jordan is that rare breed of a journalist who can navigate a crime scene as well as a newsroom--often noticing what others tend to miss. Again and again, she is called to cover the murders of Black women, many of them sexually assaulted, most brutalized, and all of them quickly forgotten. All until Masey James --the story of a 15-year-old girl whose body was found in an abandoned lot; Masey has come to represent for Jordan all of the frustration and anger that her job often forces her to repress. Putting the rest of her work and her fraying personal life aside, Jordan does everything she can to give the story the coverage it desperately requires, and that a missing Black child would so rarely get. There's a serial killer on the loose, Jordan believes, and he's hiding in plain sight.

Fresh off her wolverine study in Montana, wildlife biologist Alex Carter lands a job studying a threatened population of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic. Embedded with a small team of Arctic researchers, she tracks the majestic bears by air, following them over vast, snowy terrain, spending days leaning precariously out of a helicopter with a tranquilizer gun, until she can get down on the ice to examine them up close. But as her study progresses, and she gathers data on the health of individual bears, things start to go awry. Her helicopter pilot quits unexpectedly, equipment goes missing, and a late-night intruder breaks into her lab and steals the samples she's collected. She realizes that someone doesn't want her to complete her study, but Alex is not easily deterred. Managing to find a replacement pilot, she returns to the icy expanses of Hudson Bay. But the helicopter catches fire in midflight, forcing the team to land on a vast sheet of white far from civilization. Surviving on the frozen landscape is difficult enough, but as armed assailants close in on snowmobiles, Alex must rely on her skills and tenacity to survive this onslaught and carry out her mission.

When Ex-Detective Inspector Daniel Hawthorne and his sidekick, author Anthony Horowitz, are invited to an exclusive literary festival on Alderney, an idyllic island off the south coast of England, they don't expect to find themselves in the middle of murder investigation--or to be trapped with a cold-blooded killer in a remote place with a murky, haunted past. Arriving on Alderney, Hawthorne and Horowitz soon meet the festival's other guests--an eccentric gathering that includes a bestselling children's author, a French poet, a TV chef turned cookbook author, a blind psychic, and a war historian--along with a group of ornery locals embroiled in an escalating feud over a disruptive power line. When a local grandee is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Hawthorne and Horowitz become embroiled in the case. The island is locked down, no one is allowed on or off, and it soon becomes horribly clear that a murderer lurks in their midst. But who?

In the summer of '84, fourteen-year-old Frankie Jubilee is shuttled off to Litani, Minnesota, to live with her estranged mother, a county prosecutor she barely knows. From the start, Frankie senses something uneasy going on in the small town. The locals whisper about The Game, and her mother warns her to stay out of the woods and away from adults. When a bullying gang of girls invites Frankie to The Game, she accepts, determined to find out what's really going on in Litani. She's not the only one becoming paranoid. Hysteria burns through the community. Dark secrets emerge. And Frankie fears that, even in the bright light of day, she might be living among monsters.

Sherlock Holmes returns in an adventure that takes him to Egypt in search of a missing nobleman, a previously undiscovered pharaoh's tomb, and a conspiracy that threatens his very life. In 1910, Dr. John Watson travels to Egypt with his wife Juliet. Her tuberculosis has returned and her doctor recommends a stay at a sanitarium in a dry climate. But while his wife undergoes treatment, Dr. Watson bumps into an old friend--Sherlock Holmes, in disguise and on a case. An English Duke with a penchant for Egyptology has disappeared, leading to enquiries from his wife and the Home Office. Holmes has discovered that the missing duke has indeed vanished from his lavish rooms in Cairo and that he was on the trail of a previous undiscovered and unopened tomb. And that he's only the latest Egyptologist to die or disappear under odd circumstances. With the help of Howard Carter, Holmes and Watson are on the trail of something much bigger, more important, and more sinister than an errant lord.

As the heat rises on a New York summer, a suicide bomb set off in a Times Square subway station nearly claims the life of 68-year-old ex-madam Kathleen. Then a woman is brutally murdered, her body dumped on a marshy beach in Queens. The woman, Sharon, was last seen by 26-year-old Emily--a Deputy Press Officer working at City Hall--getting into a car in front of the building where she and Kathleen both live in far upper Manhattan. Emily requests an autopsy report from the Chief of the NYPD, but she doesn't realize the gravity of using her position to gain information. Things turn deadly when a bomb is planted in her building, gutting it with a raging fireball. Kathleen, Emily, and Emily's two-year-old daughter, Skye, barely escape with their lives. Could Kathleen's criminal history be at the heart of the violence? If Emily can't help her, Kathleen could spend the rest of her life in prison. And when Emily discovers a shocking connection between herself and Kathleen, the stakes become impossibly high. By the time Emily realizes she's in grave danger, it may be too late. She's beyond the reach of the cops, of City Hall, of her family...and a killer is closing in fast.

New York Times bestselling author and political leader Stacey Abrams, writing under her pen name Selena Montgomery, tells an unforgettable story of a high-powered Atlanta lawyer who is forced to confront her painful past and prove her innocence to the man she loves. Kell Jameson has the life she's always dreamed about. A partner at a prestigious Atlanta law firm that represents famous--if guilty--clients, she's far from her days as a lonely orphan in rural Georgia. But one frantic phone call will bring her back to the place she's spent years trying to escape. The head of her childhood orphanage has been accused of murder, and Kell is her only hope for freedom. From the first moment Kell meets Sheriff Luke Calder, tempers flare. Luke is a stickler for law and order, and while he finds Kell compelling, unfortunately she represents his prime suspect. Forced to work together, they dig deep into the town's scandals to uncover the truth. But Kell has a secret of her own...

One advantage of being caught up in a whirl of dress fittings and decisions about flower arrangements and breakfast menus is that Charlotte Sloane has little time for any pre-wedding qualms. Her love for Wrexford isn't in question. But will being a wife-and a Countess-make it difficult for her to maintain her independence-not to mention, her secret identity as famed satirical artist A.J. Quill? Despite those concerns, there are soon even more urgent matters to attend to during Charlotte and Wrexford's first public outing as an engaged couple. At a symposium at the Royal Botanic Gardens, a visiting botanist suffers a fatal collapse. The traces of white powder near his mouth reveal the dark truth-he was murdered. Drawn into the investigation, Charlotte and the Earl learn of the victim's involvement in a momentous medical discovery. With fame and immense fortune at stake, there's no shortage of suspects, including some whose ruthlessness is already known. But neither Charlotte nor her husband-to-be can realize how close the danger is about to get-or to what lengths this villain is prepared to go . . .

Edgar Award winner Otto Penzler returns with a new anthology of exhilarating mysteries, assembling Victorian society's lords and ladies and most miserable miscreants Behind the velvet curtains of horsedrawn carriages and amid the soft glow of the gaslights are the detectives and bobbies sniffing out the safecrackers and petty purloiners who plague everything from the soot-covered side streets of London to the opulent manors of the countryside. With his latest title in the Big Book series, Otto Penzler is cracking cases and serving up the most thrilling, suspenseful Victorian mysteries. This collection brings together incredible stories from Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Guy de Maupassant among other legendary writers of the grand era of the British Empire. So brush off your dinner jackets and straighten out your ball gowns for these exciting, glitzy mysteries.

After leaving her position with Charlotte and Thomas Pitt to get married, Gracie thought her days as a maid were behind her. But when her good friend's daughter, Millie, turns up on her doorstep just before the holidays, frantic because things are going missing from the kitchen in the household she serves, Gracie knows she has to find out what is happening. Millie, whose mother died years before, can't risk being accused of theft and getting thrown out on the street, with no character references for a new position. So Gracie takes on Millie's job herself, claiming Millie is sick and needs a few days to recuperate. At first, it seems that all is normal in the household, even if the couple's elderly granny keeps entirely to her bedroom upstairs. But Gracie begins to realize that Granny is suffering from neglect--and rather than helping her, the husband and wife have decided she isn't dying fast enough.

When a washed up Hollywood cowboy-turned-circus rodeo actor is shot dead in the midst of his performance at a New York sports-palace, in front of thousands of onlookers, it seems obvious that someone would have seen the perpetrator of the crime or at the very least, recovered the gun. But when the ensuing investigation fails to turn up any evidence, even after the newsreels made in the moment are reviewed, the net of suspicion widens across the troupe of performers and the circus staff. Who among them is cunning enough to have constructed such a baffling murder scene? Unluckily for the murderer, genius sleuth Ellery Queen is among the thousands that witnessed the crime, and he won't be satisfied until he cuts through the confusion to discover the truth of the execution. By the time he uncovers all the necessary clues and delivers his patented “Challenge to the Reader,” Queen (and his most careful readers) will be able to expose both the killer and the hiding place of the weapon - the titular American Gun that fired the fatal bullet. Reissued for the first time in over thirty years, The American Gun Mystery is among the most beloved of the early Ellery Queen novels.

A riveting work of dark suspense from acclaimed author Clea SimonGal, a middle-aged musician, is back in Boston to play a memorial for her late drummer/best friend, when she finds herself freezing on stage at the sight of a face in the crowd. The next day, she learns that the man she saw has been killed - beaten to death behind the venue - and her friend's widower is being charged in connection with his death. When the friend refuses to defend himself, Gal wonders why and, asthe memories of begin to flood back, she starts her own informal investigation. As she does so, she must reexamine her own wild life, her perception of the past, and an industry that monetizes dysfunction in a dark tale of love, music, and murder.