Looking for Summertime Suspense? Turn Up the Heat With These 4 Mystery Novels

The mystery and suspense novels coming out this month are some of the best this crew of mostly well-established writers has written. So let’s get to them:

El Dorado Drive is Megan Abbott’s most doom-laden novel yet. It’s set in the year 2008, in Detroit, which happens to be Abbott’s hometown. The three middle-aged Bishop sisters — our main characters here — can recall their father driving them around town in a “sapphire-blue Caddy” when he was general counsel to GM; but those days are mere rusty memories. The trio is beset by money troubles, until middle sister, Pam, invites her sibs into an all-female financial club she’s joined called “the Wheel.”

Here’s a brief description of the club’s Macbeth-like initiation rites:

There was a ritual to it: the women forming a circle around the coffee table, faces shiny, flyaway hair and lipstick smudged, heels off, … pedicured toes dancing in the carpet plush. …

“[A woman named Sue intoned the oath:] ‘We pledge to … commit to the secrecy of the Wheel, and trust in its promise. All together now: Women trust, women give, women protect.’

What these women think of as female empowerment, the Feds might consider a Ponzi scheme. The spell of this smart, socially-pointed suspense novel lingers long after the Wheel’s stash of cash — and one of its members — are no more.

The presence of the uncanny is even more potent in Dwyer Murphy’s new novel, The House on Buzzards Bay. Gothic chill wafts like ocean mist throughout this tale of college friends reuniting at an old house one them has inherited. The house was built by a band of 19th-century Spiritualists and, as the vacation gets underway, the friends are plagued by an uneasy sense that those Spiritualists may not have vacated the premises.

Dwyer’s restrained style heightens the ominous atmosphere. In this scene, a stranger, a woman named Camille, has turned up at the house. She says she was invited by one of the group who’s since disappeared. It’s nighttime and the friends invite her to stay. Here’s how Jim, the man who’s inherited the place, describes Camille’s reaction:

She said how kind we all were. Just as she’d known we would be. She must have repeated that three or four times, so that it sounded almost like she was making a joke.

Restraint is not a hallmark of S.A. Cosby’s crime fiction. His writing is rough, raw and violent. King of Ashes, Cosby’s latest novel, is set in the Virginia town of Jefferson Run which, like Abbott’s Detroit, has seen better days. Once a manufacturing hub where Mason jars were made, the town is now ruled by a gang called the Black Baron Boys.

Roman Carruthers, our antihero, left years ago for college and then moved to Atlanta to pursue a big career in money management. Roman knows his rise is thanks, in part, to his father, known as the “King of Ashes,” because his crematory made him one of the few prominent Black businessmen in town.

When the novel opens, Roman is summoned back home by his sister with the news their father lies near death after a suspicious hit and run. Turns out that Roman’s younger brother, Dante, has ripped off the Black Baron Boys in a drug deal and they don’t believe in repayment on the installment plan.

Cosby invests the classic noir plot of the ordinary man pulled into a nightmare with emotional depth. Roman scrambles to save his family by using his financial know-how to make the gang a fortune all the while plotting their annihilation. I warn you, that crematory gets put to use — a lot — but King of Ashes is so ingenious neither grit nor gore could make me stop reading it.

Laura Lippman’s latest novel resurrects a character from her beloved Baltimore-based Tess Monaghan series. Murder Takes a Vacation stars Tess’ former assistant, Muriel Blossom. The widowed Mrs. Blossom, as she’s known, has won the lottery and she’s treating herself to a river cruise, starting in Paris. But, when the handsome man who flirted with her on the plane is found dead, Mrs. Blossom’s vacation literally becomes a “getaway” as she tries to dodge both the police — who see her as a suspect — and the evildoers.

It would be easy to underestimate Murder Takes a Vacation — to assume it’s just a Miss Marple-type romp. That would be a mistake. Where Agatha Christie, through Marple, investigated the invisibility of older women, Lippman perceptively explores how older women often collaborate in their own invisibility — muting their appearance and their desires.

Whatever your desires for summer mystery reading, at least one of these novels should fulfill them.

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