"Santa Clawed" by Rita Mae Brown

"Santa Clawed" is the 18th collaboration between Rita Mae Brown and her very wise cat, Sneaky Pie, in the Mrs. Murphy Series. This is one of those tried and true mystery series that you are always glad to read because you get to spend time with old friends in the process.

Harry Haristeen, her veterinarian husband, Fair, and their assortment of four-legged sleuths are always pleasant to revisit every few months.

The latest was published just in time for the Christmas season, and is set in the Haristeen's home town of Crozet, Virgina during the busy holiday preparations. A Christian brother is murdered at his order's Christmas tree lot, and there are eventually additional murders to turn the monastery and the town a little sour on the Christmas spirit.

As usual, Tucker the dog and his cat friends discover the murderer before their humans do. It's always interesting to to see how the animals get the message across to their owner when she is in the presence of one of the bad guys. The brave cats and dog always prevail.

A great holiday season read.

Liz Nichols

"The Cat Who Went Up the Creek" by Lilian Jackson Braun

I'm continuing to catch up on some of the mysteries I've been meaning to read for a few years. This one is part of Braun's cat tales from Pickax, UP, Michigan from 2002 and is a short, quick read for lovers of her character, Jim Quilleran, and his super cats, Koko and Yum Yum. Those who prefer his librarian friend, Polly Duncan, will be slightly disappointed in this novel because Polly and one of her crones is away on a grand tour of the eastern U.S.

Jim decides to take his own vacation at a nearby resort, the Nutcracker Inn, which experiences a plethera of murders while Jim is in residence. Of course, Koko and Jim solve the who done it and save the reputation of the inn.

For those who love this series, "The Cat Who Went Up the Creek" will be standard, entertaining fare. Others may want to pass it up for more substantial and recent works.

Liz Nichols

"Ghost at Work" by Carolyn Hart

The prolific author of the Death on Demand series is at it again with a new mystery maven, this one a heavenly spirit named Bailey Ruth Raeburn. There is promise at the end that Bailey Ruth may be back for more delightful and frequently funny mysteries.

The premise is that Bailey Ruth, a member of the heavenly Department of Good Intentions, is sent to earth to rescue of a second cousin in her hometown of Adelaide, Oklahoma. Through a series of bodily appearances and ghostly disappearances Bailey manages to figure out who killed the vestry president and attempted to frame the Episcopalian parish priest and his wife. Every time Bailey reveals herself she incurs the disapproval of her heavenly supervisor, Wiggins.

I'm looking forward to meeting Bailey again. Through Carolyn Hart's masterful skill she spins a good tale.

Liz Nichols

"Alone" by Lisa Gardner

I've been pulling books off my shelves that I acquired via the Mystery Book Club a few years ago and hadn't gotten around to reading.

One of these thrillers is "Alone" by Lisa Gardner, published in 2005. This mystery pairs a likable Massachusetts SWAT team member, Bobby Dodge, and a less likable socialite, Catherine Gagnon, who was the survivor of a horrendous abduction and rape as a child 25 years before. What Bobby needs to find out is whether Gagnon intentionally loured him into shooting her husband during a domestic incident, and whether Catherine is responsible for her own 4 year old son's chronic illness. When people surrounding Catherine start being murdered it becomes clear that Bobby, Catherine and her young son, Nathan, are targets.

As I read this suspense novel my own community has been gripped by the murder and attempted murder of two young boys. Their mother is accused of the crime and, reportedly, even she can't really identify why she did it. It is clear that children who face trauma of this type need a tremendous amount of psychological counseling and lots of support by family and friends for years in order to grow up feeling secure and in charge of their own future.

Dodge and Gagnon both suffered abuse and parental loss as children, and both showed the emotional scars into adulthood. With professional help, both managed to recover some semblance of normalcy, and the book does in that respect have a "happy" ending.

This book is not for the faint-hearted. There is a considerable amount of gore and multiple gruesome deaths in this book. It is an interesting psychological thriller, and one that is hard to put down once started.

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

Janet Evanovich's "Fearless Fourteen"

It's another home run for crimestopper, Stephanie Plum, in the wacky "Fearless Fourteen." She manages to find Loretta, a kidnap victim and catches the kidnapper who is looking for information leading to a hidden robbery treasure. The kidnapper seems to be everywhere and able to stop every plan to circumvent his plan to recover the treasure. When Stephanie is able to figure out how the kidnapper is getting all his information, she easily unravels the mystery.

In the meantime, the plot takes a lot of twists and turns through the lives of a bunch of wacky characters, including a teen video addict nicknamed Zook and his gamer buddies, a stalker named Gary who makes weird predictions about the health and welfare of an aging country rock star who is visiting Trenton. All these extra characters make Stephanie and her male buddies, Morelli and Ranger, look pretty normal.

This may be the most inventive and wacky of all Evanovich's Stephanie Plum books and gets an A plus on my list of summer reads.

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.

Diane Mott Davidson's "Dark Tort"

I rarely read a mystery twice. What's the point? You already know "who done it?"

There are a few mystery authors whom I read for the pure joy of the fluid way they write, or because the characters are absorbing.

Diane Mott Davidson's series about caterer, Goldy Schultz is such a series. Goldy has become an old friend. It's as if she were a friend from college or high school I get together with a couple times a year. It is easy to pick up the conversation, just as if we talked just the day before. That's how I define a lifetime friend-- someone with whom the conversation never stops even when you don't see them but once or twice a year.

I care about Goldy, her family and friends. They could be my family and friends. Davidson's books are written in first person and everything is seen through Goldy's eyes. The plots are so thick and the characters so numerous that it would be easy to get lost or forget exactly how she resolves a given mystery. That's why rereading Davidson's novels are just as enjoyable the second time around.

The second helping of "Dark Tort" was no exception. This time I watched the interplay between the characters a little more-- the various partners and staff of the H & J law firm and their wives; the interplay between the Claggetts and the Ellises, the relationship between Nora Ellis and her father, Uriah Southerland, the things that the victim, Dusty Routt, had to say in her journal about various members of the firm, her former boyfriend, the famous artist and chef, Charlie Baker, and the mysterious "Other Mr. O."

I didn't do any better at guessing the killer the second time than the first, but I did enjoy paying attention to the details more the second time.

Anything by Diane Mott Davidson comes highly recommended to any mystery reader, and especially to fans of women sleuths.

Liz Nichols

James Patterson's "3rd Degree"

I'm catching up on some mysteries I've had on my bookshelf for a few years.

The latest read was James Patterson's "3rd Degree," one of the books in the Women's Murder Club series. I got mildly interested in this series when a version appeared on TV this past year. The TV show, as usual, does not do the book justice. The characters are far more complex and interesting when explored in book form because there is so much more time to go over details in a book than in a television script.

In this particular title Lieutenant Lindsey Boxer of the San Francisco PD Homicide Squad literally runs into a bombing while on her Sunday jog around the neighborhood and uncovers a terrorist plot that is over 40 years in the making. She partners with a charming executive from Homeland Security, solves the serial killings with him and begins a long distance romance.

In addition to domestic terrorism we explore domestic abuse and the importance of developing strong friendship bonds to maintaining a satisfying life.

Patterson's books are particularly good for the ADD reader, and the reader who can only slip a few minutes of reading into the day. Each chapter covers one short scene or train of thought and is only two or three pages long. This way one can read for 5 minutes at a time and still feel as if something is accomplished.

Patterson is not my favorite mystery writer by a long stretch, but he does get the job done in an entertaining way that leaves one glued to the book. There are twists and turns that keep the plot from being predictable. Recommended

Liz Nichols