Staff Reviews: Mystery

★★★★★ Robert Galbraith’s fourth Strike novel finds private detective Cormoran Strike and his partner, Robin Ellacott, hired by a high-ranking British official who is being blackmailed. The minister asks Strike to gather dirt that he could use against his blackmailers, which prompts Robin to go undercover in the House of Commons to do recon. When he dies of an...

★★★★★ Emma Davis is an aspiring painter on the verge of making it big in New York City’s art scene. But what inspires her work is something that’s haunted her since she was 13 years old, during her first (and only) summer at sleepaway camp: the mysterious disappearance of her three bunkmates. Camp Nightingale, an all-girls summer camp in upstate New York, has...

★★★ Cassie Bowden is a seasoned flight attendant who has worked for the same airline since her early twenties. Now in her late thirties, Cassie can barely keep her life in order, having fallen into a pattern of binge drinking and hooking up with random men in the various cities she flies to. While in Dubai, Cassie’s risky lifestyle catches up with her when...

★★★★★ Part ghost story, part murder mystery, this atmospheric novel captivated me from the first page. Centered around a now abandoned school for troubled girls, Idlewild Hall holds secrets of the past within its walls and grounds. The reader learns the stories of the abandoned girls who were forced to attend, the ghost who forces its victims to relive their...

★★★ When she was just 13 years old, Julie Whitaker was abducted from her bedroom at knifepoint. The kidnapping was witnessed by Julie’s younger sister, Jane, who watched in horror from the interior of her closet. The abduction, which was never solved, left the Whitaker family in shambles, forever changing the dynamic between Jane; her father, Tom; and mother,...

★★★★★ Naomi is a child finder. Once a lost child herself, she is now hired out by parents searching for their missing children. She has proven that she has great skill (and luck) at finding missing children, whether they are dead or alive. Her latest case, locating a 5-year-old girl named Madison, takes her to the Skookum forest where Madison went...

★★★★ Quincy Carpenter lives in New York City and is the curator of her own popular baking blog. But 10 years ago, she was the lone survivor of a brutal serial slaying in the middle of the woods, known as the Pine Cottage Murders. Though the rest of her college friends were stabbed to death by a deranged mental patient, Quincy survived and was branded by the...

★★★★ Imagine: you suddenly wake up to find yourself on a deserted beach. You have no idea how you got there, where you are, let alone your first name. What would you do? Meanwhile, a homicide detective is scouring the desolate island to find out who murdered the lighthouse's most recent victim. Who killed him, and does it have anything to do with the mysterious...

★★★★ From the author of The Girl on the Train comes a new story of secrets, complicated relationships, and a history of mysterious deaths. Women have been drowning in a small British town for centuries. First was Libby Seeton, a woman convicted of witchcraft in the 1700s. Recently, Katie, a fifteen-year-old girl, committed suicide by drowning herself in the same...

★★★★★ Seventeen-year-old Francie bolts from an audition and hops on a plane from New York City to Minnesota after receiving a troubling call from her great aunts Astrid and Jeannette. She hasn’t visited her aunts’ home in northern Minnesota since her father’s death seven years prior, but she has fond childhood memories of Enchantment Lake. However, she cannot...

★★★★★ Jamie, a descendant of John Watson, is still adjusting to life at his new boarding school and recovering from a recent and disastrous encounter with Charlotte Holmes (descendent of Sherlock Holmes) when the pair become prime suspects in the death of a fellow student. It seems someone is intent on framing the duo, but who could it possibly be? They weren’t...

★★★★★ Mayhem. Madness. Murder. This is not how the annual trivia night fundraiser at Perriwee Public School was supposed to go, culminating in the death of one of the school's parents. But as the story unfolds, we find that appearances can be deceiving in this small, seemingly perfect oceanside community, and that boiling tensions will eventually erupt. ...

★★★★ Grace Bradshaw is on death row for the murder of her infant son, William. When William was months old, he was always ill until he finally had a seizure and died. The investigation into William's death found traces of windshield wiper fluid in his bottle. Grace was diagnosed with Munchausen by Proxy and was found guilty for her son's death. Sophie,...

★★★★★ Kate Priddy is no stranger to anxiety and fear. After suffering a traumatic kidnapping in her past, the world around her becomes even more terrifying. When a chance arises to leave her cramped London apartment for a spacious, fancy apartment in Boston, Kate reluctantly makes the journey to a temporary change in surroundings. The day after she arrives,...

★★★★ What would you do if you woke up tomorrow and suddenly didn't remember anything from the past few years? What if you didn't know your husband, your friends, yourself? Kyra suffers memory loss from a diving accident, and depends deeply on her husband, even though she suddenly barely knows who he is. When Kyra starts seeing visions, she doesn't know whether...

★★★★★ In another fantastic novel by an author who quickly became one of my favorites, readers meet Zoe Walker, who is quickly pulled into a living nightmare after seeing her picture in a classified ad on her morning commute. Each day brings a new advertisement, and soon it's clear Zoe's every movement may be watched and other women are in danger along with her....

★★★★ 28 year-old Nicolette Farrell reluctantly returns to her North Carolina hometown after a 10-year absence in order to renovate and sell her childhood home and care for her father, who is ailing from Alzheimer's. While back in town, Nic reconnects with her brother Daniel, with whom she has a strained relationship; and her high school boyfriend Tyler, whose...

★★★★★ Manon Bradshaw loves her job as a detective sergeant in the Cambridgeshire Major Incident Team and excels at it, but her personal life is unfulfilling. She has grown weary of the internet dating scene, even as she plays the game of shaving a few years off her actual age (39) and cribbing her hobbies and interests from other people’s profiles. In her latest...

★★★★ Finley does not know what it feels like to really be alone. Sitting on the floor by her bed is a young boy playing with a train, and on her way down the hall she passes a woman watching her carefully, both of whom have been long dead. Haunted by a gift she neither wants nor understands, Finley is quickly pulled into a missing persons case. Merri has been...

★★★★ In a small, wealthy community in Connecticut, Jenny Kramer is violently assaulted in a wooded area outside a high school house party. With her parents’ consent, she is given a relatively new drug that erases her memories of the traumatic event, in hopes of sparing her emotional distress. Unfortunately, the emotional trauma remains, and those emotional...

★★★★★ In the Falkland Islands terror grips a small community when children start to go missing. Though no one can believe there is a murderer among them, everyone becomes involved when the third child disappears. Among them is Catrin, a woman who lost all of her children in a horrible accident three years ago, who now seeks revenge on the woman who used to be her...

★★★★★ In this unforgettable and deeply moving novel, Jenna Gray's life is catapulted into chaos one rainy night in November. To try to survive her nightmare, she escapes to a remote cottage on the Welsh coast. But her past never stays truly hidden, and she is plagued by what happened and the choices she made, even though she tries to heal from her mistakes. When...

★★★★ In his latest thriller, Harlan Coben introduces us to Maya, a pilot recently home from the war. When the unthinkable happens and her husband is murdered by unknown assailants, Maya focuses on caring for her daughter more closely. Maya's life is radically changed again when she sees the impossible: her dead husband playing with their daughter on the newly...

★★★★★ Luisa “Lu” Brandt, a middle-aged widow and mother of eight-year-old twins, is the new state’s attorney of Howard County, Maryland, a position her highly-esteemed father once held. Homicide is relatively rare in Howard County, so Lu is eager to prove herself as she tries the case of a homeless man being tried for strangling a woman to death in her apartment...

★★★★★ I absolutely loved this gripping new novel! Not only was it about a woman's difficult but ultimately uplifting journey of healing after an adoption gone horribly wrong, it was a captivating mystery about a missing little girl seen wandering in the woods. As Jess is on her way back from getting more wine to drown her emotions at her best friend's cabin in...