The Hidden Staircase Mystery Books recently updated its list of April 2013 hardcover mysteries as well as shelved new April paperbacks on The Mystery Bookshelf.
In this series of monthly posts, which we call Firsts on the 1st, we're introducing readers to new series characters who will make their mysterious American debut in print during April.
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Title: Cat's Claw
Author: Susan Wittig Albert
Series Character: Sheila Dawson
Formats: Mass Market Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: Sheila Dawson is the first female police chief in Pecan Springs, Texas. The character was first introduced in the China Bayles series.
Her first case: As the first female police chief in Pecan Springs, Texas, Sheila Dawson has cracked many a mystery in collaboration with local sleuth China Bayles. Now Sheila puts her smarts to work, sifting through secrets to find a killer on the prowl …
Larry Kirk, Pecan Springs' computer guru, has been shot dead in his kitchen. At first Sheila believes it to be suicide, but further investigation reveals that Kirk's death wasn't self-inflicted. And the truth is reinforced by her friend China Bayles' news — Larry recently asked her for legal advice in regards to a stalker.
As a police chief in a male-dominated force, Sheila meets many challenges, especially when her theories rock the boat in high-profile cases like that of George Timms, who was caught breaking into Larry's shop. Now that Larry is dead, Sheila is sure the burglary is connected to the murder. But when Timms disappears instead of turning himself in, Sheila must prove she's got what it takes to hunt down a predator who's loose on the streets of Pecan Springs …
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Title: A Murder at Rosamund's Gate
Author: Susanna Calkins
Series Character: Lucy Campion
Formats: Hardcover and ebook
What we know about the character: Lucy Campion is a 17th century chambermaid.
Her first case: For Lucy Campion, a seventeenth-century English chambermaid serving in the household of the local magistrate, life is an endless repetition of polishing pewter, emptying chamber pots, and dealing with other household chores until a fellow servant is ruthlessly killed, and someone she loves is wrongly arrested for the crime. In a time where the accused are presumed guilty until proven innocent, lawyers aren't permitted to defend their clients, and — if the plague doesn't kill them first — public executions draw a large crowd of spectators, Lucy knows she may never see this person alive again. Unless, that is, she can identify the true murderer.
Determined to do just that, Lucy finds herself venturing out of her expected station and into raucous printers' shops, secretive gypsy camps, the foul streets of London, and even the bowels of Newgate prison on a trail that might lead her straight into the arms of the killer.
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Title: Follow Her Home
Author: Steph Cha
Series Character: Juniper Song
Formats: Hardcover and ebook
What we know about the character: Juniper Song is an amateur sleuth in Los Angeles.
Her first case: Juniper Song knows secrets — how to keep them and how to search them out. As a girl, noir fiction was her favorite escape, and Philip Marlowe has always been her literary idol. So when her friend Luke asks her to investigate a possible affair between his father and a young employee, Juniper (or "Song" as her friends call her) finds an opportunity to play detective.
Driving through L.A.'s side streets, following leads, tailing suspects — it all appeals to Song's romantic ideal of the noir hero. But when she's knocked out while investigating a mysterious car and finds a body in her own trunk, Song lurches back to the real L.A., becoming embroiled in a crime that goes far beyond role play. What's more, this isn't the first time Song has stuck her nose in other people's business.
As she fights to discover the truth about her friend's family, Song reveals one of her own deeply hidden secrets, something dark and damaging, urging her to see the current mystery through, to rectify the mistakes of her past life.
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Title: That Old Flame of Mine
Author: J. J. Cook
Series Character: Stella Griffin
Formats: Mass Market Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: Stella Griffin is the Fire Chief for the Sweet Pepper Fire Brigade in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.
Her first case: After knocking the lights out of her boyfriend when she catches him cheating on her, Chicago fire fighter Stella Griffin hops on her Harley and heads for Sweet Pepper, Tennessee, where she ends up becoming the small town's fire chief. When her dear friend Tory Lambert dies after her gingerbread-style house is set ablaze, Stella suspects arson and foul play.
As Stella investigates, she gets help from a most unlikely source — the ghost of Eric Gamlyn, Sweet Pepper's old fire chief. And if that isn't enough to rattle her, attractive police officer John Trump seems to have taken an interest in her. But Stella's got to stay focused if she hopes to smoke out a killer before her own life is extinguished.
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Title: The Cuckoo's Calling
Author: Robert Galbraith
Series Character: Cormoran Strike
Formats: Hardcover and ebook
What we know about the character: Cormoran Strike is a private investigator.
His first case: After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.
Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, thelegendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.
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Title: Murder at the P&Z
Author: Dorothy H. Hayes
Series Character: Carol Rossi
Formats: Trade Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: Carol Rossi is an investigative reporter for a weekly newspaper in Wilton, Connecticut.
Her first case: Scratch the surface of a small town planning and zoning department, and you'll uncover a story. That's what Carol Rossi counts on in the winter of 1983, and she's right.
A former teacher, age 47 and romantically involved with a much younger police officer, she needs a big story to make a success of her new career as a reporter for a Wilton, Connecticut, weekly newspaper, but murder isn't what she had in mind. When the victim turns out to be a woman on Rossi's beat, writing a story no longer seems enough, and she vows to find the killer.
Stalked and terrorized, Rossi soon finds herself in over her head, professionally and romantically.
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Title: Good People
Author: Ewart Hutton
Series Character: Glyn Capaldi
Formats: Hardcover and ebook
What we know about the character: Glyn Capaldi is a Detective Sergeant in Wales.
His first case: DS Glyn Capaldi, fallen from grace and exiled from Cardiff to the Welsh countryside, does his best to serve as the catchall detective in the big bit in the middle that God gave to the sheep. It's a place where nothing of any significance is meant to happen, a place where his superiors believe he can do little harm.
But trouble has a way of catching up with Capaldi. Six men and a young woman disappear after a night of rugby and drink. They don't all reappear. The ones who do are "good people", and they give a reasonable explanation for the absence of the woman and their friend. Only Capaldi remains unconvinced. In the face of opposition, Capaldi delves deeper and starts to uncover a network of conflicts, betrayals, and depravity that resonates below the outwardly calm surface of rural respectability.
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Title: Untold Damage
Author: Robert K. Lewis
Series Character: Mark Mallen
Formats: Trade Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: Mark Mallen is a former undercover cop in San Franciso.
His first case: Estranged from his wife and daughter, Mark Mallen has spent the last four years in a haze of heroin. When his best friend from the academy, Eric Russ, is murdered, an address found in his pocket points to Mallen as the prime suspect.
As the police turn up the heat and Russ's survivors ask him to come up with some answers, Mallen sets out to serve justice to the real killer. But first, he'll have to get clean and face the low-life thugs who want him dead. Surviving drive-by shootings and beat downs, Mallen discovers the motives behind a string of vengeful murders. But turning a life around is hard work for a junkie. Bruised, alone, and written off by nearly everyone, can Mallen keep clean and get back into his daughter's life?
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Title: Penance
Author: Dan O'Shea
Series Character: John Lynch
Formats: Trade Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: John Lynch is a Chicago police detective.
His first case: A pious old woman steps out of the Sacred Heart confessional and is shot dead by a sniper with what at first appears to be a miraculous and impossible shot.
Colonel Tech Weaver dispatches a team from Langley to put the shooter — and anyone else who gets in the way — in a body bag before a half-century of national secrets are revealed.
Detective John Lynch, the son of a murdered Chicago cop, finds himself cast into an underworld of political corruption and guilty secrets, as he tries to uncover the truth about what's really going on — before another innocent citizen gets killed.
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Title: Murder on Olympus
Author: Robert B. Warren
Series Character: Plato Jones
Formats: Trade Paperback and ebook
What we know about the character: Plato Jones is a former investigator with the Olympic Bureau of Investigation, now on his own in this fantasy series.
His first case: At first glance the Gods of Olympus are as different from one another as salt is from sugar, and despite their bickering, they share a universal bond, a thread of commonality that unites them: they're all jerks.
Against Plato's protests, he's drawn into a murder investigation where the murderer's targets are the Gods themselves. Plato has cracked some tough cases: exposing cheating spouses, capturing treasonous heretics, and hunting three-headed dogs, but this time he's in over his head. How can he solve a crime that's impossible to commit? And what chance does Plato — a mere mortal — have against something powerful enough to kill a God?
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Title: Another Sun
Author: Timothy Williams
Series Character: Anne Marie Laveaud
Formats: Hardcover and ebook
What we know about the character: French-Algerian Anne Marie Laveaud is a judge on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.
Her first case: Sun-drenched Guadeloupe is technically part of France, subject to French law and loyal to the French Republic. But in 1980, the scars of colonialism are still fresh, and ethnic tensions and political unrest seethe just below the surface of everyday life.
Anne Marie Laveaud relocated to this beautiful Caribbean island confident that she could make it her new home. But her day-to-day life is rife with frustration. Now she is assigned a murder case in which she is sure the chief suspect, an elderly ex-con named Hégésippe Bray, is a political scapegoat. Her superiors are dismissive of her efforts to prove Bray innocent, and to add insult to injury, Bray himself won't even speak to her because she's a woman. But she won't give up, and Anne Marie's investigations lead her into a complex tangle of injustice, domestic terrorists, broken hearts, and maybe even voodoo.
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For a list of more hardcover mysteries scheduled for publication during April, please visit our New Mysteries home page. If you're interested in new paperbacks, visit The Mystery Bookshelf, where you can discover a library of new mysteries, also updated with April 2013 releases. See also our regularly updated eBook site for new mysteries, suspense novels and thrillers, MysterEbooks.com.
Please also visit the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books where we are committed to providing readers and collectors of mystery books with the best and most current information about their favorite authors, titles, and series.
