By Tom Nolan

Fans of the inventive English author Anthony Horowitz have reason to celebrate the arrival of "Marble Hall Murders," the third entry in a terrific series started in 2016. This book, like the earlier two, is partly narrated by Susan Ryeland, a London editor who had coaxed the crime writer Alan Conway -- a bitter, malicious man who was eventually murdered -- through a popular series of detective novels set in the 1950s. After adventures in marriage and hotelkeeping on the Greek island of Crete, Susan is back in London, solo, working for another publishing house and helping a young writer named Eliot Crace continue the series Alan started.

Alan based his characters on real-life people in ways meant to expose their most shameful secrets. This led to his death and, for Susan, near-fatal injuries. Eliot is the grandson of Miriam Crace, a phenomenally successful children's author whose books are available in 47 languages, "including Latin and Welsh." Contrary to her public image, Miriam, who recently died of an apparent heart attack, was a despicable matriarch who ruled her extended family with an iron claw. Susan detects that Eliot, in his work-in-progress, is mimicking Alan's method of depicting real crimes and scandals. The editor foresees big trouble for Eliot and herself: "When was I ever going to learn?" she wonders.

Few other writers combine suspense and satire as smoothly as Mr. Horowitz, a writer who specializes in clever literary devices. As with its predecessors, "Marble Hall Murders" is told half in Susan's first-person voice and half in the third-person voice of the manuscript under her purview. Thus we get two separate mysteries, twice the surprise -- and double the payoff.

In "Nightshade," Michael Connelly introduces a new protagonist: Sgt. Stilwell of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. An 18-year veteran, Stilwell has spent the last year as the commanding officer on Catalina Island, a generally peaceful enclave where cops, visitors and civilians get around in golf carts. Catalina is a purgatory posting for officers who've committed career blunders and are hoping their good behavior will earn them a return to the mainland.

Most crimes here are mundane. ("Under California law, driving while intoxicated -- with a blood-alcohol concentration over 0.08 percent -- carried the same penalties whether you were in an automobile or a golf cart.") But at the start of a crowded Memorial Day weekend, a marina worker reports a body wrapped in an anchor chain beneath a yacht. Stilwell, an experienced diver, retrieves the decomposing corpse of a woman with a purple streak in her hair -- matching the description of a woman who was recently fired from a waitressing job at an exclusive marina club. Curiously, a small black-jade statue has just been reported stolen from the same venue.

In his empathy with the victim, Stilwell resembles Harry Bosch, another of Mr. Connelly's series protagonists. The author's new hero must turn over the homicide investigation to two policemen from "overtown" -- one of whom was instrumental in getting Stilwell banished to the "Island of Misfit Toys." Stilwell will focus on the statue theft, which seems linked to the murder and perhaps to a far-reaching conspiracy of greed and civic corruption. For the sake of the dead woman, he is willing to cooperate with his nemesis, "as long as together they brought her killer to justice."

The focal location of Chris Pavone's ambitious thriller "The Doorman" is the Bohemia -- "one of the most famous buildings in the world." Located on New York City's Central Park West, the Bohemia looks "like a Middle Ages castle, but with twenty-first-century floodlights and security cameras." The building is home to business billionaires and legendary artists -- all of them serviced by nannies, desk clerks, housekeepers and drivers who are privy to the residents' failings and vulnerabilities.

One apartment is home to Whit Longworth (whose fortune comes from the manufacture of body armor), his wife, Emily, and their children. A beautiful art consultant often mistaken for a movie star, Emily believes -- for reasons personal, moral and political -- that her husband is a "villain." Yet she hesitates to divorce him because of a prenuptial agreement she considers onerous: "There was absolutely no way that she and her children could live on nine hundred thousand dollars per year." Another apartment is home to Julian Sonnenberg, an art dealer who sells expensive paintings of mostly sound provenance to wealthy clients, the most recent of which is the litigious and vindictive Whit Longworth.

Silently surveying one and all, from street level to penthouse, is the afternoon doorman Chicky Diaz, a deferential ex-Marine who keeps his own counsel but makes a tally of who deserves loyalty and who merits contempt. "Chicky has always tried not to let anything bother him." But the recent loss of his wife and insurmountable debt have altered his outlook.

"Eight million people," Chicky ruminates of his city. "Every one of them can be killed." Mr. Pavone has written an outstanding book full of sociological detail and pulsing with the passions and prejudices of the times in which we live.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 23, 2025 10:18 ET (14:18 GMT)

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