New Paper Backs From The Poisoned Pen

Is your summer reading stack getting low? Here is a list of the newest paperbacks:

Ames, Delano. Murder Begins at Home ($15)
Rue Morgue Press has just published a lovely reissue of this 1949 mystery. This is the second installment ( following "She Shall Have Murder") of twelve in the long-forgotten Dagobert and Jane Brown series of mystery novels written by Delano Ames.

Buzzelli, Elizabeth Kane. Dead Dancing Women ($14)

Escaping the city, and her coed-chasing ex-husband, part-time journalist and full-time failed mystery writer Emily Kincaid has moved into a cozy cabin nestled in the woods of northern Michigan. Emily spends her days writing for the local newspaper and crafting her latest forgettable novel. Then one morning her quiet life turns grisly when a severed head tumbles out of her garbage can.

The victim belonged to the Women of the Moon, a group of old ladies who sing and dance around a bonfire in the woods late at night. The members claim it's just a harmless act in praise of mother earth, but certain townspeople don't see it that way. Now, one by one, the women are turning up dead.

Between hosting her ex and his female "assistant," reluctantly raising a rambunctious new puppy, and forming an uneasy alliance with the fractious Deputy Dolly, can Emily put an end to the killings — and somehow preserve her sanity?

Corbin, Julie. Tell Me No Secrets ($14)

A wonderful debut.
They say that everybody has a secret . Mine lies underground. Her name was Rose and she was nine years old when she died ...Grace lives in a quiet, Scottish fishing village -- the perfect place for bringing up her twin girls with her loving husband Paul. Life is good. Until a phone call from her old best-friend, a woman Grace hasn't seen since her teens -- and for good reason -- threatens to destroy everything. Caught up in a manipulative and spiteful game that turns into an obsession, Grace is about to realise that some secrets can't stay buried forever. For if Orla reveals what happened on that camping trip twenty-four years ago, she will take away all that Grace holds dear ...A tense psychological thriller with an instantly familiar domestic backdrop, this exciting debut will leave you with the chilling feeling that this could happen to you.

David, Evelyn. Murder off the Books ($13)

A retired Irish Cop and a fast-food loving Irish Wolfhound search for the campus murderer while dealing with a scooter-riding senior with dreams of trenchcoat adventures, a crazed exterminator looking for his ride, and a makeup artist whose mid-life crisis isn't any the less stressful because her clients never complain. A half-million dollars has vanished and a college comptroller is dead. Mackenzie Sullivan, recently retired DC cop and newly-minted private detective, really has no interest in the murder. Mac just needs to find the embezzled money for the university's insurance company. Finding the killer is a bonus that he's not sure he wants to earn.

Hallinan, Timothy. The Fourth Watcher ($14)
This title earned a starred review from PW

The author of the Looking for Trouble travel book series, Poke Rafferty is ready to settle down in Bangkok with his fiancÉe, Rose, and his newly adopted daughter, Miaow. But trouble isn't ready to let him go; it's back in Poke's life with a vengeance, in the guise of his long-estranged father, Frank, the last person he ever wanted to see again. And Frank hasn't come empty-handed, arriving with a box of rubies, a wad of fraudulent identity papers, and one of the most dangerous gangsters in China in hot pursuit. With a rogue American Secret Service agent targeting Rose for her unwitting part in a North Korean counterfeiting operation, Poke can see trouble descending from everywhere to attack those he loves—and it will take every skill he possesses to keep them, and himself, alive.

Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia. Orchestrated Death ($15)

PW called this a " masterful debut, a beleaguered British detective struggles to solve a series of murders that shake up the world of classical music."


Kane, Cornelius. The Unscratchables ($14)

This charming book received starred reviews from both PW and Booklist
CRUSHER McNASH is the police force's most fearless detective, a barrel-chested bull terrier with a biscuit-thin temper and a barbed-wire tongue.

CASSIUS LAP is the finest agent in the Feline Bureau of Investigation, an imperturbable Siamese with a mind as sharp as a can opener.

SAN BERNARDO is their territory, a seething metropolis where fat-cats prance in the exclusive island enclave of Kathattan while working dogs wallow in the stinking squalor of the Kennels.

When a couple of Rottweiler gangsters are brutally murdered, Crusher McNash tries to convince himself that it's nothing unusual -- just another underworld territorial dispute. But after the sniffer squad identifies a feral-cat killer, McNash is forced to do the unthinkable -- team up with a prissy Siamese from the FBI. The trail leads from junkyards to gambling dens, from cat prisons to baronial estates, in the process unraveling an awesome conspiracy involving domination techniques, population control, and the megalomaniacal ambitions of fox media magnate Phineas Reynard.

Both a hard-bitten crime story and a sharp-fanged satire, The Unscratchables is the genre-bending mystery of the year.


Morrell, David. The Brotherhood of the Rose ($18)

This is a reissue PW called “Tough, ingeniously plotted, and always gripping.”

They were orphans, Chris and Saul–raised in a Philadelphia school for boys, bonded by friendship, and devoted to a mysterious man called Eliot. He visited them and brought them candy. He treated them like sons. He trained them to be assassins. Now he is trying desperately to have them killed.

Spanning the globe and full of heart-stopping action, The Brotherhood of the Rose is an astonishing novel of fierce loyalty and violent betrayal, of murders planned and coolly executed, of revenge bitterly, urgently desired.


Tyler LC. The Herring-Seller's Apprentice ($15)

This title earned a starred review from Booklist.
Ethelred Tressider is a mystery writer with problems, not the least of which is his incurably nosy, chocolate-chomping agent, who couldn't give two toffees for mystery novels. She does, however, have a passion for real-life mysteries, and that passion gets stirred up when Ethelred's ex-wife goes missing and Ethelred -- none too tightly wound at the best of times -- starts behaving in an extremely peculiar fashion.


Welk, Mary. The Rune Stone Murders ($14)

"We are surrounded by death, and there is no way to stop it. No way at all." Caroline Rhodes is skeptical of the dire warning. But a Gypsy fortuneteller's words prove true when the discovery of a Viking rune stone on the campus of Bruck University leads to murder during the school's annual Festival of Knights. Blackmailed into investigating the crime by the despised university president, Caroline is dismayed to find her suspects are as plentiful as the flowers on Bruck Green. Questions come easily to the veteran ER nurse, but the answers are not so obvious. Did Andrew Littlewort's famous temper get the best of him, or is the eccentric professor as innocent as he claims? Is Sid Burke the proverbial "bad seed", or just a troubled student from a famous family? How did Emma Reiser amass a fortune on a government salary? And why does Bruck's gardener call his flowerbeds 'paths of gold'? Most troubling of all, what is Agatha Hagendorf really gazing at through her telescope at the Rhineburg Boarding House and Home for Gentle Women? Caroline teams up with septuagenarian Professor Carl Atwater to track a killer without a conscience in little Rhineburg, Illinois.