5 must-read crime novels offer thrills, chills and armchair globe-trotting

There's a world of trouble in five new thrillers, with locations ranging from rural England to blood-spattered Madrid and deceit-filled China.

Chris Hewitt | (TNS) Star Tribune

There’s a world of trouble in five new thrillers, with locations ranging from rural England to blood-spattered Madrid and deceit-filled China.

We begin our tour with an ending:

The Comfort of Ghosts, Jacqueline Winspear

It’s already been announced so this is not a spoiler: The 18th Maisie Dobbs adventure is also the last. In a foreword, Winspear says she’s done everything she intended with the English psychologist/sleuth, whose first appearance was around the time of World War I and whom Winspear has steered through peace time, another world war, two marriages, widowhood, adopting a daughter, coming into a title and inheriting a pile of dough.

Give the author credit for knowing it was time to step away from the Mary Poppins-esque Maisie, who has become a little too annoyingly perfect, and for giving her creation a worthy send-off. After the end of World War II, Maisie is trying to solve the murder of a wealthy Nazi sympathizer and figure out how to help four children left homeless by the Blitz who happen to have suspicious knowledge of wartime tactics. Fans of the series (I’ve read ’em all) will have to be patient with Winspear’s frequent recaps, which make “Comfort” work as a stand-alone but occasionally bog it down. Fortunately, fans also can speculate about whether Winspear might change her mind after a few years off, since she drops clues that she may not be as done with Maisie as she claims.

Look in the Mirror, Catherine Steadman

Both the most surprising and, ultimately, disappointing book on this list is this British Virgin Islands-set puzzler. The first half is buoyed by a difficult-to-pin-down premise: When her father dies, a British professor named Nina discovers he left her a luxurious island getaway, designed by him, that she didn’t know he possessed. The house, and the money it would have taken to build it, re-frame Nina’s idea of her dad. Things get even more baffling when she enters the home. Despite its gleaming, modern design, it seems to be a combination of a haunted house (Bathsheba, the virtual assistant, has shades of “2001: A Space Odyssey”‘s HAL 9000) and a deadly escape room. As long as we are in what-is-going-on-here mode, “Look in the Mirror” is entertaining, but the rushed conclusion is not as satisfying as Steadman’s previous books, including “The Family Game.”

Shanghai, Joseph Kanon

Ever since his debut, “Los Alamos,” Kanon has written about shadowy men on the margins of pivotal moments in 20th-century espionage, whether it’s the development of the atom bomb, intrigue on both sides of the Berlin Wall or, in this case, Japan-occupied China in 1939. Our hero, Daniel Lohr (if that’s his real name), is a Jewish man who flees Germany, headed on a ship to Shanghai, where he’ll end up with a couple of suspect jobs: helping his crooked uncle run a casino and keeping his ear open for gossip items to supply a creepy newspaper columnist. It sounds like a recipe to get shot at, and Daniel does.

He’s also trying to locate the femme fatale he fell for while on board the ship, who does what she has to do to survive in a country where she doesn’t speak the language and women are viewed as second-class citizens. I wish a book called “Shanghai” had more of a sense of place — these characters could be double-crossing each other anywhere — but Kanon has a great ear for noir-ish, hardboiled quips and a gift for believably plunging his characters into the relentless flow of historic skullduggery.

Black Wolf, Juan Gómez-Jurado

You might want to catch up with the first in this trilogy-or-more before cracking “Black Wolf,” which is the middle book. (“The Red Queen” was first and “The White King,” already out in Spain, should be available here next year.) Gómez-Jurado’s crime novels move like crazy between violent gangsters, duplicitous cops and a female criminal mastermind who could be pulling all of their strings. The real lure of the series, though, is a pair of memorable main characters: detective Jon Gutiérrez, who is gay, sardonic, obsessed with his weight and always on the outs with his bosses on the Bilboa police force (feel free to picture architect Frank Gehry’s masterpiece, the Guggenheim art museum in Bilbao, constantly lurking behind him). And Antonia Scott, who is brilliant, haunted by tragedy and increasingly dependent on a mysterious pill she uses to super-charge her already uncanny brain. They’re sent to Madrid to investigate a disappearance but the case broadens to include messes they left behind in “Red Queen.” (The books are the basis of the Amazon Prime series “Reina Roja.”)

Trust Her, Flynn Berry

Tana French may sell more books, but don’t sleep on Berry. Like French, she sets her books in Ireland (and England), but Berry is a more insightful writer. Her debut, “Under the Harrow,” was a twisty thriller that began when a young women went to the country to visit her sister, only to discover her corpse and a mess of secrets. Her new “Trust Her” can be read on its own, but it’s a sequel to previous novel “Northern Spy,” about sisters Tessa and Marian, whose lives are being made miserable by the Irish Republican Army. In “Spy,” Marian joined the IRA and Tessa, who narrates, managed to free her and help her create a new life. Both are living in Dublin, with young kids and new jobs, when the IRA finds them and pulls them back in. “Trust Her” is a page-turner with heart: Berry is great at tender observations such as Tessa’s recollection of bathing her newborn: “I still remember the face on him, when he felt the warm water slipping over him for the first time, his small bowed legs, his wariness, and then his bliss, rotating his head to feel the water moving against it.”

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