Susan Gerhart, Nederland. 

“The best things in life make you sweaty.” Edgar Allan Poe

Every year when The Mystery Writers of America announce their picks for best novel, I read all the nominees and make my own pick. This is not always an easy task especially if there’s a cozy involved, and I am rarely right. Check out this year’s nominees, and see if you do any better. The winner will be announced in September.

The Strangler Vine by M. J. Carter is set in the untamed wilds of nineteenth-century during the Raj. William Avery is a young soldier with few prospects except rotting away in campaigns in India; Jeremiah Blake is a secret political agent gone native, a genius at languages and disguises, disenchanted with the whole ethos of British rule, but who can resist the challenge of an unresolved mystery. Tigers, elephants, fabulously wealthy maharajahs.

In his eleventh Bernie Gunther book, The Lady from Zagreb, Philip Kerr has Bernie at the mercy of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Set amid the killing fields of Ustashe-controlled Croatia, Bernie finds himself in a world of mindless brutality where everyone has a hidden agenda. Bernie is the ultimate cynic, working for justice in a totally unjust society.

Michael Robotham’s Life or Death opens with a man serving a long prison sentence who escapes the day before he is to be released. Audie Palmer has spent ten years in a Texas prison after pleading guilty to a robbery in which four people died and seven million dollars went missing. Now everyone wants to know: where’s Audie?

Where’s the money?

For those who like it spooky, Lori Roy delivers in Let Me Die in His Footsteps. At midnight one dark Kentucky night in 1952, exactly halfway between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, Annie Holleran trespasses on the property of her family’s longtime feuding neighbor to gaze into a well in hopes of seeing her future.

Disappointed, Annie turns from the well to discover a body, which leaves her with a lot of explaining to do.

Canary by Duane Swierczynski highlights the danger of doing drugs when honor student Sarie Holland is busted by the local police while doing a favor for her boyfriend. Unwilling to betray him but desperate to avoid destroying her future, Sarie has no choice but to become a “CI”—a confidential informant, assigned to a cop who is hungry for a career-making bust which is ultimately not good for Sarie’s health.

The Cold War is heating up in Night Life by David C. Taylor. Senator Joe McCarthy is running a witch-hunt for Communists in America. The newly formed CIA is fighting a turf battle with the FBI to see who will be the primary US intelligence agency. The bodies of murdered young men, most of them chorus dancers, are turning up in the city. Michael Cassidy, a cop with an unusual background, is assigned to the case, a case no one really seems interested in solving.

See you around the stacks.