The Hidden Staircase Mystery Books recently updated its list of June 2012 hardcover mysteries as well as shelved new June 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 June.
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Title: Hearse and Buggy
Author: Laura Bradford
Series Character: Claire Weatherly, Amish
Format: Mass Market Paperback
What we know about the character: Claire Weatherly is a new resident of the Amish community of Heavenly, Pennsylvania.
Her first case: Claire has fled a high-stress lifestyle for a slower pace. She only planned a short visit to Heavenly but instead found herself opening an Amish specialty shop, Heavenly Treasures, and settling in.Claire loves her new home, and she's slowly making friends among the locals, including Esther, a young Amish woman who works in the shop. So when the store's former owner,the unlikable Walter Snow, is murdered, and the man Esther is sweet on becomes a suspect, Claire can't help but get involved.
Newly returned Detective Jakob Fisher, who left Heavenly — and his Amish upbringing — as a teenager, is on the case. But his investigation is stalled by the fact that none of his former community will speak with him. Claire's connections make her the perfect go-between.
As Claire investigates, she uncovers more than she wanted to know about her neighbors. And suddenly, everything she had hoped to find in this peaceful refuge is at risk …
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Title: The Azalea Assault
Author: Alyse Carlson
Series Character: Camellia Harris, Garden Society
Format: Mass Market Paperback
What we know about the character: Camellia Harris is a public relations director in Virginia.
Her first case: Camellia has achieved a coup in the PR world. The premier national magazine for garden lovers has agreed to feature one of Roanoke's most spectacular gardens in its pages — and world-famous photographer Jean-Jacques Georges is going to shoot the spread. But at the welcoming party, Jean-Jacques insults several guests, complains that flowers are boring, and gooses almost every woman in the room. When a body is found the next morning, sprawled across the azaleas, it's almost no surprise that the victim is Jean-Jacques.
With Cam's brother-in-law blamed for the crime — and her reporter boyfriend, Rob, wanting the scoop — Cam decides to use her skills to solve the murder. Luckily a PR pro like Cam knows how to be nosy …
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Title: The Third Gate
Author: Lincoln Child
Series Character: Jeremy Logan
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: Yale history professor Jeremy Logan is an enigmatologist.
His first case: Under the direction of famed explorer Porter Stone, an archaeological team is secretly attempting to locate the tomb of an ancient pharaoh who was unlike any other in history. Stone believes he has found the burial chamber of King Narmer, the near mythical god- king who united upper and lower Egypt in 3200 B.C., and the archaeologist has reason to believe that the greatest prize of all — Narmer's crown — might be buried with him. No crown of an Egyptian king has ever been discovered, and Narmer's is the elusive "double" crown of the two Egypts, supposedly possessed of awesome powers.
The dig itself is located in one of the most forbidding places on earth — the Sudd, a nearly impassable swamp in northern Sudan. Amid the nightmarish, disorienting tangle of mud and dead vegetation, a series of harrowing and inexplicable occurrences are causing people on the expedition to fear a centuries- old curse. With a monumental discovery in reach, Professor Jeremy Logan is brought onto the project to investigate. What he finds will raise new questions … and alarm.
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Title: Quilt or Innocence
Author: Elizabeth Craig
Series Character: Beatrice Coleman, Village Quilters
Format: Mass Market Paperback
What we know about the character: Beatrice Coleman is a retired art museum curator and amateur sleuth.
Her first case: As the newest member of the Village Quilters Guild, Beatrice has a lot of gossip to catch up on — especially with the Patchwork Cottage quilt shop about to close. It seems that Judith, the landlord everyone loves to hate, wants to raise the rent, despite being a quilter herself …
But when Judith is found dead, the harmless gossip becomes an intricate patchwork of mischievous motives. And it's up to Beatrice's expert eye to decipher the pattern and catch the killer, before her life gets sewn up for good.
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Title: Faithful Unto Death
Author: Stephanie Jaye Evans
Series Character: Walker "Bear" Wells
Format: Trade Paperback
What we know about the character: Walker "Bear" Wells is a preacher in Sugar Land, Texas.
His first case: No one knows that better than Walker "Bear" Wells, a former college football player now serving as a minister in this upscale Texas town, where famous athletes mix with ranchers and the local parish priest wants to arm wrestle. It's a beautiful master-planned community, but people can't be held to neighborhood restrictions, and Bear deals daily with emotional and spiritual problems, in both his flock and his own family.
But never murder. Not until a man is found dead on the nearby golf course, his skull crushed.
Bear has no interest in playing detective. His job is praying for the dead, not searching for their killers. But every time he turns around, another facet of the investigation tangles with his own life…like the fact that the murdered man's son — and a main suspect — is currently dating his own rebellious teenage daughter.
He made a promise to do the right thing. But keeping promises may be what led to murder …
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Title: Blind Goddess
Author: Anne Holt and Tom Geddes
Series Character: Hanne Wilhelmsen
Format: Trade Paperback
OMN note: Strictly speaking this is not the first appearance of Hanne Wilhelmsen in the US. She was most recently featured in the seventh book in this series, 1222, last December. But this is the first mystery in which the character is introduced and its first publication in the US, originally published in Norway as Blind gudinne in 1993.
What we know about the character: Hanne Wilhelmsen is a retired police inspector.
Her first case: A small-time drug dealer is found battered to death on the outskirts of the Norwegian capital, Oslo. A young Dutchman, walking aimlessly in central Oslo covered in blood, is taken into custody but refuses to talk. When he is informed that the woman who discovered the body, Karen Borg, is a lawyer, he demands her as his defender, although her specialty is civil, not criminal, law. A couple of days later, Hansa Larsen, a lawyer of the shadiest kind, is found shot to death. Soon police officers Håkon Sand and Hanne Wilhelmsen establish a link between the two killings. They also find a coded message hidden in the murdered lawyer's apartment.
Their maverick colleague in the drugs squad, Billy T., reports that a recent rumor in the drug underworld involves drug-dealing lawyers. Now the reason why the young Dutchman insisted on having Karen Borg as a defender slowly dawns on them: since she was the one to find and report the body, she is the only Oslo lawyer that cannot be implicated in the crime.
As the officers investigate, they uncover a massive network of corruption leading to the highest levels of government. As their lives are threatened, Hanne and her colleagues must find the killer and, in the process, bring the lies and deception out into the open.
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Title: Spoiled Rotten
Author: Mary Jackman
Series Character: Liz Walker
Format: Trade Paperback
What we know about the character: Liz Walker is a restaurateur in Toronto.
Her first case: Liz is the quintessential "broke all the time," cynically optimistic restaurateur. As the owner of a charming corner bistro in downtown Toronto, she doesn't mince words when glamour and romance elude her. Despite the foibles of running a notoriously risky business, covering cheques with her line of credit, and dealing with a fickle public, she wouldn't dream of doing anything else. Unfortunately, a missing chef, prickly health inspectors, and murder threaten to shut her down. When the body of her meat supplier, Mr. Tony of Kensington Market fame, is found dismembered, her star chef Daniel Chapin becomes the lead suspect, then goes missing. More problems arise when two people are poisoned at the place where Daniel has been moonlighting. Determined to get her chef back and clear her restaurant's name, Liz jeopardizes her life in pursuit of a ruthless killer, crossing paths more than once with Detective Winn.
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Title: The Paris Directive
Author: Gerald Jay
Series Character: Paul Mazarelle
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: Former Paris Inspector Paul Mazarelle is now a police officer in rural (and fictional) Taziac.
His first case: In a Berlin hotel room in the late 1990s, two former French intelligence agents hire Klaus Reiner, a ruthlessly effective killer, to eliminate an American industrialist vacationing in southwestern France. Reiner easily locates his target in the small Dordogne village of Taziac, but the hit is compromised when three innocent people are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Enter Inspector Paul Mazarelle. Formerly of Paris but now living in Taziac, the inspector is charged with bringing his experience and record of success in the capital to bear on the gruesome quadruple homicide at the height of tourist season.
Both Mazarelle's investigation and Reiner's job become complicated when Molly, a New York City district attorney and daughter of two of the victims, arrives to identify the bodies and begins asking questions. All evidence points to Ali Sedak, a local Arab handyman, but Mazarelle and Molly have doubts, forcing Reiner to return to Taziac to ensure they see things as he arranged them. Little does anyone in the picturesque French countryside know how politically charged this crime is: its global ramifications, stemming from the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, could overshadow everything.
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Title: Midwinter Blood
Author: Mons Kallentoft
Series Character: Malin Fors
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: Malin Fors is a police detective in Sweden.
Her first case: Thirty-four years old, blond, single, divorced with a teenage daughter, Fors is the most driven superintendent who has ever worked on the police force in her small, isolated town. And the most talented. In her job, she is constantly moving through the borderland between life and death. Her path in life is violent and hazardous.
Linköping, Sweden, is surrounded by a landscape of plains and forests — a fault line on the edges of society where time seems to have stood still and where some people live entirely according to their own rules. In the early hours of a frigid night, during the coldest February anyone can remember, the bloody body of an obese man, stripped bare and horribly mutilated, is found hanging from a lone oak tree in the middle of a frozen, snow-covered, and windswept plain not far from town.
The young superintendent Malin Fors is assigned to the case. Together with her colleagues from the Investigation Section of Linköping's Crime Unit, she must track down the identity of the man in the tree and the reason why he ended up there. And at the same time they must follow in the frigid wake of a killer who has just begun his work. It is a manhunt that will take Malin into the darkest corners of the human heart where the sins of the past — hidden away — all too often wreak havoc from one generation to the next.
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Title: Sunset
Author: Al Lamanda
Series Character: John Bekker
Format: Hardcover
What we know about the character: John Bekker is a former police detective.
His first case: Police Detective John Bekker had it all: a beautiful wife‚ a five-year old daughter and a job he loved … but all of that changed in the blink of an eye. Assigned to a special task force investigating organized crime‚ Bekker got a little too close to mob boss Eddie Crist. As a message to back off‚ Bekker's home is invaded‚ his wife murdered and all this witnessed by his five-year-old daughter.
A decade later Bekker‚ a drunk with an institutionalized daughter‚ comes face to face with Eddie Crist‚ now near death from cancer with a final wish — to go to his grave with a clear conscience. In an ironic twist of fate‚ the man Bekker believed responsible for his wife's death hires him to solve the decade-old murder.
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Title: Coorparoo Blues and the Irish Fandango
Author: G. S. Manson
Series Character: Jack Munro
Format: Trade Paperback
What we know about the character: Jack Munro is a private investigator in 1943 Brisbane (Australia).
His first case: Brisbane, 1943. A provincial Australian city has turned almost overnight into the main Allied staging post for the war in the Pacific. The social, sexual, and racial tensions stirred up by the arrival of tens of thousands of US troops provoke all kinds of mayhem, and Brisbane's once quiet streets are suddenly looking pretty mean. Enter P.I. Jack Munro, a World War I veteran and ex-cop with a nose for trouble and a stubborn dedication to exposing the truth, however inconvenient it might be for those in charge. He's not always an especially good man, but he's the one you want on your side when things look bad. When Jack's hired by a knockout blonde to find her no-good missing husband, he turns over a few rocks he isn't supposed to, and the questions start to pile up, along with the bodies. Not inclined to take no for an answer, he forges on through the dockside bars, black-market warehouses, and segregated brothels of his roiling city, uncovering more than a few surprises in this murky tale based on actual events in a little-known corner of the WW2 theatre.
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For a list of more hardcover mysteries scheduled for publication during June, 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 June 2012 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.
