Books like Murder on Vacation

I'm amazed that more people haven't put Belinda Bauer up there with the top crime novelists. She's won plenty of awards, but her stuff should be mentioned along with Tana French, Val McDermid, Benjamin Black, and old hands like James Lee Burke and Dennis Lehane. Rubbernecker takes a wonderfully slim and elegant premise - a neurodivergent anatomy student is convinced that the cadaver he's dissecting was a murder victim. There's more, which I won't spoil, but the point is that her characters are wonderfully fleshed-out and real, and the suspense as taut as a good thriller should be. Add to that a fine literary style that's far from the Ludlum school of dreary punched-up prose. I'd recommend this and any book by Belinda Bauer.

Dennis Lehane has always been a writer I could rely on: never a false move, never a tired plot, never a phoned-in novel with cliched prose. While some of his books (Mystic River, for instance) are wide and sweeping in their scope, Small Mercies is more fine-tuned, focusing on the horrific relations between the Black and Irish communities in Boston. Set against the inflammatory conflicts of the 1974 desegregation crisis, the book tells the story of a mother with a missing daughter. In her determination to find the truth, she invades the sanctity of a local gangster and sparks a different kind of violence.

Small Mercies is revelatory if you haven't examined the dismal history of racism in the Northeast. Yet it's not didactic or preachy: it's an entertaining crime novel by a master of the genre.

All of Donna Leon's books are rich with colors and textures of contemporary Venice, including the amazing aromas of elegant sauces and tangy citrus. Death at La Fenice was her very first, with an introduction to Guido Brunetti, a deep and compassionate police detective.

Cerebral detectives with an undercurrent of emotion can be fascinating, and Leon’s Guido Brunetti is one of the best. Like Le Carre’s George Smiley, Brunetti is likable, thoughtful, introspective, and slightly lethargic. While Smiley is distant, Brunetti’s emotions are often on display, in a good way. Add the rich and complex history of Venice, and a startling performance at Teatro La Fenice, and Leon’s first novel, published in 1992, is a wonderful debut.

The setting is roiling Hong Kong just before the British turnover to China. A musician in the Hong Kong Philharmonic, searching for an unaccountably missing friend and colleague, becomes sucked into the back alleys of organized crime. Martin himself was a veteran professional orchestral string bass player in Hong Kong and has a consummate grasp of the pulse of the city and the vagaries of the music business. This gritty, rough-and-tumble page-turning thriller, with dialogue as spicy as the food and a noire feel, is an under-the-radar gem that in a fair world should be a best-seller. May be hard to find but so worth the effort.

Intense and intricate with complex human interactions subjected to the forces of history and destiny, Canone Inverso is both literary fiction and mystery. This gripping tale of evolving relationships centers around the field of classical music and a particular violin. With the setting in Germany, Austria, and Hungary during the turbulent 1930s and ’40s, a brilliant, working-class young violinist is secluded in a prison-like music conservatory with an aristocratic boy who befriends him. Gradually, their bond is severely tested. What is genius? What is friendship? What is the price paid for beauty and greatness? These are some of the issues we’re confronted with in this riveting novel.

If Canone Inverso is your main course, The Murder of Figaro is the perfect dessert. It is light, frothy, and witty as a Mozart comic opera. As it should be, since the main characters are Mozart and his wife Constanze. Together, the frolicking pair must speedily solve the backstage murder of the government censor; otherwise, Mozart’s new opera, The Marriage of Figaro, will never see the light of day. Larson herself was an accomplished opera singer and has thorough insight into the opera world: the music, the business, and the backstage backstabbing. Written as a delightful opera buffa, this book is an absolutely fun read.

Paul Adam takes readers on a tense, insiders journey through the shadowy netherworld of priceless antique violins in search for the holy grail of violins, Stradivari’s “Sister Messiah,” that leaves a trail of dead bodies in its path. The hero, Giovanni Castiglione (like Amadeo Borlotti in my Daniel Jacobus mystery, Playing With Fire) is an under-the-radar violin forger with a conscience. As a professional violinist for a half-century, I can attest that The Rainaldi Quartet is absolutely true to life from start to finish. I was unable to put it down. Adam hits the nail on the head in this gripping tale of byzantine intrigue. A virtuoso tour de force!