From the back cover: Twelve hours after Kate Sumner's brutally murdered body washes up on the beach, her traumatized 3-year-old daughter is found wandering the streets alone. At first, the prime suspect is a young actor, obsessed with pornography. But now, the local English constable has doubts about the victim's husband. Was he really out of town when she was killed? And … [Read more...] about The Breaker by Minette Walters: B+
Mystery
A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George: A-
From the back cover: To this day, the low, thin wail of an infant can be heard in Keldale's lush green valleys. Three hundred years ago, as legend goes, the frightened Yorkshire villagers smothered a crying babe in Keldale Abbey, where they'd hidden to escape the ravages of Cromwell's raiders. Now into Keldale's pastoral web of old houses and older secrets comes Scotland Yard … [Read more...] about A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George: A-
Innocent Blood by P. D. James: B
From the back cover: Philippa Palfrey, adopted as a child, exercises her legal right to apply for a copy of her birth certificate when she becomes eighteen. Although she has always had a fantasy of being the illegitimate daughter of an aristocratic father and now dead mother, she soon learns the shocking truth about her parents—and finds that her mother is about to be released … [Read more...] about Innocent Blood by P. D. James: B
What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman: B
From the back cover: Thirty years ago two sisters disappeared from a shopping mall. Their bodies were never found and those familiar with the case have always been tortured by these questions: How do you kidnap two girls? Who—or what—could have lured the two sisters away from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness? Now a clearly … [Read more...] about What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman: B
A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine: A-
From the back cover: Like most families, they had their secrets—and hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that Vera Hillyard and her beautiful sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the fifties was not kind to women who erred. They had to fight it out behind closed curtains using every … [Read more...] about A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine: A-