Saturday, June 24, 2006
By RON BERTHEL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Colleen McCullough has begun dabbling in crime -- crime fiction, that is. The Australian novelist known for such sagas as the hugely popular "The Thorn Birds" has taken up a new literary genre with her first whodunit.
Her book, "On, Off," is among the latest hardcover novels of mystery and suspense, which include works by Philip R. Craig, Robert B. Parker, Patricia Cornwell and Janet Evanovich.
McCullough's maiden mystery, "On, Off" (Simon and Schuster) is set in 1965 at a prestigious research lab in a university town in Connecticut. Discovered in the lab's freezer among the monkey corpses awaiting incineration is the torso of a teenage girl. The body is linked to the recent disappearance of several physically similar girls, leading authorities to believe that a serial killer lurks among one of the lab's brilliant, dedicated and eccentric scientists.
Another unexpected place to find a body would be the sand trap of a golf course. But that's just where a murder victim is uncovered in "Dead in Vineyard Sand" (Scribner), Craig's 17th book featuring Martha's Vineyard, Mass., resident J.W. Jackson. A fatal bullet has put a hole in one Henry Highsmith, a contentious environmentalist who teed off golfers and just about everyone else on the island. That includes Jackson, whose recent public squabble with Highsmith about a parking space makes a murder suspect of the former Boston police officer.
Also from Boston is private eye Sunny Randall, who appears in her fifth book, Parker's "Blue Screen" (Putnam). Randall has been hired by Buddy Bollen, the rich producer of poor films, as bodyguard for his girlfriend, starlet Erin Flint. But while Randall is guarding one body, another, that of Erin's murdered sister, is found in Bollen's fancy digs. Brought into the case is Jesse Stone, chief of police of Paradise, Mass., who stars in his own series of Parker novels.
And the appearance of "Twelve Sharp" (St. Martin's Press) means it's time for Evanovich's 13th book featuring Trenton, N.J., bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. Fellow bounty hunter "Ranger" asks Plum for help: His young daughter has been kidnapped, and he is a suspect. While he camps out at the Plum residence during the search for the girl, a black-clad, gun-toting stalker claiming to be Mrs. Ranger has picked Plum as a target.
Other new mysteries
In "The Pale Blue Eye" (HarperCollins) by Louis Bayard, the hanging of a West Point cadet in 1830 provides a case for a former New York detective and his assistant, a cadet named Edgar Allan Poe; and Poe's death in Baltimore in 1849 provides many unanswered questions, which are investigated by a young lawyer in "The Poe Shadow" (Random House) by Matthew Pearl.
Other historic settings include 1938 Paris in "The Foreign Correspondent" (Random House) by Alan Furst, in which the editor and staff of an underground newspaper work under constant threat of being found and killed by the Italian secret police; and first-century Greece, where Roman investigator Marcus Didius Falco and his wife pose as tourists to look into the suspicious deaths of several clients of a travel agency in "See Delphi and Die" (St. Martin's Minotaur), the 17th in Lindsey Davis' series.
Unexpected finds include a manuscript that might have been written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and might provide clues to the murder of a Sherlock Holmes memorabilia collector in "The Art of Detection" (Bantam) by Laurie R. King; and a tibia that seems to belong to a recent murder victim, unearthed by forensic professor Gideon Oliver while he's exploring an island off England's coast in "Unnatural Selection" (Berkley Prime Crime), Aaron Elkins' 13th in the series.
In "Killer Dreams" (Bantam) by Iris Johansen, a sleep therapist who specializes in night terrors is being stalked by someone who wants to acquire her research data and use it for sinister purposes. A counterterrorism agent hunts for the terrorists who destroyed Manhattan's bridges and tunnels on a July Fourth weekend in "Takedown" (Atria) by Brad Thor.
In "The Last Assassin" (Putnam) by Barry Eisler, contract killer John Rain enlists the aid of an agent for Japan's FBI, a former U.S. Marine sniper and an Israeli intelligence agent when he suspects that his former lover and their child are in danger, and in "Cold Moon" (Simon & amp; Schuster) by Jeffery Deaver, quadriplegic detective Lincoln Rhyme, appearing in his seventh book, is looking for a serial killer who leaves a moonfaced clock at murder scenes.
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