GOOD MORNING, KILLER by April Smith

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

"This time Special Agent Grey is working on a kidnapping case - a fifteen-year-old named Juliana has been abducted in Santa Monica. Grey's counterpart in the Santa Monica Police Department is Detective Andrew Berringer. They've worked together before - and they've been more than just working together ever since." "It's Ana's job "to know the victim as if she were my own flesh and blood." But when Juliana turns up - traumatized into a state of total and paralyzing terror - it becomes clear that Ana has gone too far: she is viewing her own life from the perspective of Juliana's blasted emotional terrain. And in a moment of passion (Andrew has betrayed her) and panic (is it possible that he also means to harm her?) Ana points a gun at him and shoots." Now she is both criminal investigator and criminal as she breaks her bail agreement to continue tracking the abductor, torn between her powerful emotional connection with Juliana and the fraying connection she has to her own common sense and to the truths she knows about Andrew - and about herself.

RATING:

I had read nothing but great reviews for this one which is why I decided to give it a shot. While Smith certainly displays talent & writes with gritty determination ala Lawrence Block or Michael Connelly and Ana Grey is certainly not your conventional heroine, I felt the novel was disjointed at times & difficult to stay focused on. Not bad but not great by any means.

THE SHAPE OF SNAKES by Minette Walters

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of THE SCULPTRESS and THE BREAKER comes a brilliant new novel.

It is November 1978. The winter of discontent. Britain is on strike. The dead lie unburied, rubbish piles in the streets - and somewhere in West London a black woman dies in a rain-soaked gutter. She was known as "Mad Annie" and was despised by her neighbours.
Her passing would have gone unmourned and unnoticed but for Mrs. Ranelagh, the young woman who finds Annie as she dies and who believes - apparently against reason - that she was murdered. Whatever the truth about Annie - whether she was as mad as her neighbours claimed, whether she lived in squalor as the police said, whether she cruelly mistreated the many cats found starving in her house - something passed between the two women in the moment of death which binds Mrs. Ranelagh to Annie's cause for the next twenty years.
But why is she so convinced it was murder when, by her own account, Annie died without speaking? Why does the subject make her husband so angry that he refuses to talk about what happened that night? And why would any woman spend twenty years painstakingly uncovering the truth - unless her reasons are personal...?

A complex puzzle of deceit and discovery, The Shape of Snakes is Minette Walters at her most intriguing.

RATING:

Unquestionably one of Minette Walters' finest efforts -- a racially motivated murder mystery spanning twenty years & the woman determined to seek justice for the victim. Letters, e-mails, police reports, etc. are dispersed throughout interweaving with a compelling, absorbing story that will hold you until the final page & even then, that last page is almost heartbreaking. Understandably, this one received lavish praise from the critics & was a "NEW YORK TIMES Notable Book" and rightly so. A must-read!

THE RULE OF FOUR by Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

"Princeton. Good Friday, 1999. On the eve of graduation, two students are a hairsbreadth from solving the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a Renaissance text that has baffled scholars for centuries. Famous for its hypnotic power over those who study it, the five-hundred-year-old Hypnerotomachia may finally reveal its secrets - to Tom Sullivan, whose father was obsessed with the book, and Paul Harris, whose future depends on it. As the deadline looms, research has stalled - until an ancient diary surfaces. What Tom and Paul discover inside shocks even them: proof that the location of a hidden crypt has been ciphered within the pages of the obscure Renaissance text." Armed with this final clue, the two friends delve into the bizarre world of the Hypnerotomachia - a world of forgotten erudition, strange sexual appetites, and terrible violence. But just as they begin to realize the magnitude of their discovery, Princeton's snowy campus is rocked: a longtime student of the book is murdered, shot dead in the hushed halls of the history department.

RATING:

I had read so much about this & knew it was a huge bestseller but found it to be disappointing -- very slow through the first half or so plus the quality of the writing obviously shows as a first-time effort.

UPON A DARK NIGHT by Peter Lovesey

FROM THE PUBLISHER:

The doctor asks, "So how do you cope with stress?" Peter Diamond, whose blood pressure rises when his work-rate falls, proves his fitness by investigating two suspicious deaths. An unidentified woman has plunged from the roof of the Royal Crescent, and in a village nearby an elderly farmer is found shot through the head. With these puzzlers on his plate instead of his beloved omelets, Diamond doesn't have the stomach for distractions, particularly Ada Shaftsbury. Of a similar girth and temperament to the big man himself, Ada has a talent for interfering and being a pain in the rear. Now she is complaining that a fellow resident of the Harmer House homeless shelter is missing. The girl, called Rose, was found in a hospital parking lot suffering from amnesia. An extraordinary mixture of clues will soon link Rose to Diamond's two new cases. And Peter Diamond will face a killer driven by obsession and about to take the great detective on a breathless ride into the dark night of a remorseless mind.

RATING:

Lovesey never disappoints -- enjoyable read as always.