dealer, and her new husband, Michael
Hendricks, a former spy now working for
a think tank on Pacific Rim issues, are
playing mah-jongg at home in Hawaii
when they hear the devastating news. Rei
ascertains that her family escaped serious
harm, but it takes a bit longer for her to
discover the fate of her mentor in the
antiquing business, Yasushi Ishida. To her
relief, Yasushi survived as well, although
he suffered a serious head injury. When
Yashushi asks her to come to Japan to help
him, she agrees immediately, to Michael’s
dismay. The book’s most effective portions
deal with Rei’s role in the relief efforts.
The whodunit takes a while to manifest
itself and could have been dispensed with
without loss. (BookLife)
SF/Fantasy/Horror
★ Dark Alchemy
Laura Bickle. Harper Voyager Impulse, $2.99
e-book (384p) ISBN 978-0-06-238986-2
This fun adventure in modern-day
Wyoming introduces Petra Dee, a geologist looking for her missing father and
trying to make peace with her past. What
she finds is a small town where the law
enforcement answers to the local cattle
baron, and a meth dealer is an alchemist
determined to recover the magical secrets
of the town’s founders. When Petra stumbles across an artifact that could be key to
those secrets, she catches the alchemist’s
attention. Then her attempt to save a
ranch hand from a vicious beating brings
her to the attention of the Hanged Men,
the local undead. Armed with a coyote
familiar and a stubborn sense of justice,
Petra doesn’t back down, especially when
she realizes that the alchemist might be
the only one who can help her find her
father. Bickle (Rogue Oracle) adds a dash of
romance to the charming adventure,
wrapped up with a perfect ending. Agent:
Rebecca Stumpf, Prospect Agency. (Mar.)
Dead Boys
Gabriel Squailia. Skyhorse/Talos, $15.99
trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-940456-24-9
Squailia’s uneven but promising debut
delivers some exquisite worldbuilding
alongside a mix of humor and philosophy.
In Dead City, Jacob Campbell is on a
quest to find the Living Man, an Orpheus-
side Paris, comes to England in search of
her 18-year-old daughter, Annable, and
Annable’s traveling companion, Dorothée
Caron. The two girls have been spending
the summer hitchhiking around the
country, but they have been out of touch
for weeks, their last communication a
postcard showing Lake Rudyard.
Coincidentally, Joanna and her husband of
nine months, pathologist Matthew Levin,
are on holiday at Lake Rudyard, and she
will soon assist in the hunt for Annabelle
and Dorothée. Meanwhile, two brothers,
Martin and James Stewart, find a note
from the French girls inviting the note’s
finder to meet them at the lake. Joanna’s
domestic concerns lighten what is basically a sad, dark story. Readers will enjoy
the neatly turned surprise ending. (Mar.)
The Prisoner
Omar Shahid Hamid. Skyhorse/Arcade,
$24.99 (304p) ISBN 978-1-62872-524-7
For his sobering debut thriller, Hamid
draws on his own experiences as a police
officer to plunge the reader headfirst into
the murky world of Pakistani politics and
justice. Constantine D’Souza, a relatively
honest Karachi police officer, finds himself seeking the help of Akbar Khan, an
estranged comrade and fellow crusader
against imprisoned criminals enjoying
political protection, in order to try to rescue
Jon Friedland, a kidnapped American
journalist. The U.S. is leaning on the
Pakistani president for quick action, and
the president, in turn, is leaning on military agencies. As D’Souza tries to make
sense of the present mess, he thinks back
to the events of the past decade, including
the late-night police raids and extrajudicial killings that the police resorted to in
hopes of reigning in the goons sponsored
by the ruling coalitions. Hamid does a
good job making D’Souza and his fellow
officers sympathetic. One only wishes that
the women in the story were more well-rounded. (Mar.)
The Kizuna Coast
Sujata Massey. Ikat, $16 trade paper (372p)
ISBN 978-0-983661-05-4
The earthquake and tsunami that dev-
astated Honshu, Japan, in 2011 kick-starts
Agatha-winner Massey’s moving 11th Rei
Shimura mystery (after 2008’s Shimura
Trouble). Rei, a Japanese-American antiques
Ethan Pruitt, Colin’s professional and
romantic partner, to ascertain the fate of
her missing husband, Edmond. The wor-
ried wife also calls in Scotland Yard after
finding a great deal of blood in a gardener’s
shed at their West Hampton home. The
police soon discover Edmond’s charred
corpse in a blackened depression in a nearby
road, identified by a ring that matches
what his wife described. A voodoo fetish
lies beneath the body. The relationship
between Colin and Ethan is underdevel-
oped, and Colin, who delights in showing
up his rivals on the force, misses no oppor-
tunity to denigrate them, to the point
where he comes across as obnoxious rather
than self-assured. The solution depends
too much on chance. Agent: Kathy Green,
Kathy Green Agency. (Mar.)
The Altar Girl
Orest Stelmach. Amazon/Thomas & Mercer,
$15.95 trade paper (300p) ISBN 978-1-4778-
2797-0
This harrowing prequel to the Nadia
Tesla series, which began with 2013’s The
Boy from Reactor 4, focuses on a severely
dysfunctional family saturated with
Ukranian angst. Nadia and her brother,
Marko, grew up in America, but their
parents never overcame the anguish of
being displaced persons after WWII.
Now Marko is the drunken owner of a
strip club in eastern Connecticut, and
though Nadia has become an overachieving New York financial analyst, she
still suffers from low self-esteem and feels
a need to prove herself to her immigrant
community. That’s why she stubbornly
insists that her godfather’s fatal fall down
his cellar steps in Hartford was not an
accident, even when almost everyone else
is willing to accept the official verdict and
a vicious Ukranian-American thug
threatens her. Although the book’s foreground characters sometimes feel flat, the
cultural background is fascinating. (Mar.)
Guilty Waters
Priscilla Masters. Severn, $28.95 (208p) ISBN
978-0-7278-8461-9
The Staffordshire moorlands provide
the atmospheric backdrop for British
author Masters’s briskly paced 12th procedural featuring Det. Insp. Joanna Piercy
(after 2013’s The Final Curtain). Cécile
Bellange, a French divorcée who lives out-
