Sacrifice by S.J. Bolton

This is Bolton's first novel, and she promises to be a mainstay of British thrillers for a long time to come.

The author blurb indicates that the novel is borne out of Bolton's fascination for British folklore, and the basis for this book is a blood curdling folktale from the Shetland Islands that goes back to the Viking heritage of the isles. The heroine, obstetrician, Tora Hamilton, is a transplant from the mainland who moves to the Shetlands with her native born husband, Duncan Guthrie and discovers while trying to bury her fallen horse on their newly purchased farm a dead body of a woman who has both recently given birth and had her heart torn out from her body while she was still alive. Naturally, this sets off a forensic hunt for the killer or killers.

The frigid land and reserved people are finely drawn in this chilling tale. It is hard to know who to trust and whether most of the people Tora meets are in on a huge conspiracy to hide an ancient, bloody practice.

I must confess this book was hard to put down and I read it cover to cover in only two or three sittings, ignoring all kinds of other things I should have been doing.

This book is not for the squeamish, but those who can stomach a little gore will be well rewarded by the intrigue and twists and turns in the plot.

I can't wait for more by this new British author.

Liz Nichols

"River Ghosts" by B.R. Robb

B. R. Robb is the pseudonym for attorney, Bruce Steinberg of Chicago. He has one previous novel, "The Widow's Son," which won a first novel grand prize in Milwaukee in 2000.

"River Ghosts," is a masterpiece. It should be receiving critical acclaim for its author, whom I hope will write again much sooner than in eight more years. It has the same kind of psychological impact that "Lovely Bones" had and it should be getting the same kind of attention.

This is a police thriller and a commentary on racial prejudice in America, which is portrayed as still very much alive and well.

We are confronted with the release of a supposedly reformed Neo-Nazi who had been convicted of the murder of a racially mixed couple sixteen years prior in a smallish Midwestern city. He was convicted on the eye-witness testimony of the young son of the couple, who grew up to become a police officer in his home town. Understandably, the cop, Richard's sleep is regularly disturbed by images of his parents' murders and the man who committed the crime, whom he saw from his hiding place under a table.

This taught and beautifully written story uncovers how DNA evidence could have been manipulated to acquit a guilty man and how the young police officer and his partner managed to prove it.

Hopefully, that's not giving away too much of the plot. I believe anyone who reads this book will find it refreshingly literary. I know I did after a summer of reading good, but mostly formulaic mysteries by well known authors.

Yes, there is still a literary muse at work in new fiction!

Liz Nichols

Patricia Cornwell's "Book of the Dead"

Cornwell is one of the most enduring and reliable mystery writers on the face of the earth. The fact that she has been a police forensics professional and knows that subject from the inside out gives readers a real picture into the procedure of finding a killer-- not the pretend picture that we get from the crime scene investigation shows on TV.

"Book of the Dead" does not disappoint. Dr. Kay Scarpetta, her niece, Lucy, and the other cast of characters that have surrounded this super CSI for years have their hands on the latest devices to detect composition and origins for grains of sand left on the victims' bodies and latent blood left at the crime scenes. Crime scenes in this book span the globe from Rome to Charleston, SC to Hilton Head where the reader gets to soak up a sense of place as well as a sense of character.

To add some additional drama to the book, there is trouble in the lives of Scarpetta and her cohorts. Secretary, Rose, is down with a mysterious persistent cough, Lucy is disappearing for days at a time, and Pete has a new girl friend who is definitely a bad influence. Scarpetta and Benton are alternatively hot and cold, though all is well with their relationship in the end.

The team has settled in to Charleston to run a private lab. Things are going well in terms of business. There are plenty of cities and counties around the world that need the expertise of Scarpetta's private forensic lab. The problem is that her team has not entirely settled in. Scarpetta is not entirely trusted by the natives either.

This is a great addition to Cornwell's list of Scarpetta forensic mysteries, and is sure to please Cornwell's fans.

Liz Nichols

"Quicksand" by Iris Johansen

I believe Johansen's new novel has set a record as the third fastest 340 page read after the first two in the Harry Potter series. After sampling the first dozen pages yesterday I polished the whole thing off in one sitting today.

The book was so absorbing and so well crafted that I'd get to the end of a chapter, resolve to put it down to do something else, and be too interested in what happened next to put it down. I swear I'm walking around as if my legs won't move now after spending some 8 hours straight at it.

This is an "Eve Duncan Forensic Thriller." Eve Duncan lost her daughter to a serial killer several years before and embarked on a career as a forensic artist partly in an effort to find her own daughter's body and to stop the killer from taking other people's children.

I like the fact that the author delves deeply into the minds of the heroine, her police investigator lover and room mate, Joe Quinn, and the killer himself. I like that the plot is full of action, twists and turns and interesting settings. The scenes take us from rural Atlanta, where Eve and Joe live, to a forest in rural Illinois, to a national forest in Georgia and to the Okefenokee swamp, so there are a variety of richly described settings to take in.

The murders described are horrific, and they are described to some extent from the point of view of the child victims themselves, through the words of a psychic and the words of Eve's dead daughter. In this respect, the book reminds me of "Lovely Bones," but expanded to cover a number of settings and killings.

The plot takes a nice twist at the end and leaves the reader knowing that the next book in this series will contain new and different psychic revelations in the quest to discover how Eve's daughter, Bonnie was killed and where her remains are located. No doubt a new killer suspect will be revealed.