Mystery Book Reviews

Keeping the adventures of a sleuthing duo fresh can be a challenge for any writer, but it seems as though Tower Lowe has figured out the secret to success. Within the pages of In Albuquerque, Abandoned, the seventh novel in her Cinnamon/Burro New Mexico Mysteries series, readers are not only sucked into the story of a mysterious fraternal murder, but also the strange depths of Cinnamon and Burro’s lives.

This uniquely named crime-solving team is not your average pair, and both have deeply rooted issues that define them as characters. From Burro’s schizophrenic visions to Cinnamon’s demons of abandonment, […]

Michael Attzs is a man with no past. He has but a flash of memory of a man leaving him in an orphanage in a Trinidadian village under the iron rule of Catholicism and colonialism, but this is all he has of his childhood. When his wife and child are brutally killed, a mysterious stranger wants to finger him for their deaths. Even police procedural documents show different events, while secrets and lies hide the truth – but why? Things get really strange when he marries a woman that seems to have just as little past as he does, and […]

With a sassy, case-cracking heroine in the form of Arianna Archer, A Killing Too Close to Home is an amusing and suspenseful mystery. Bored from a long break between cases, Arianna is a new consultant for the Meadowville Police Department and eager to sink her teeth into a new case, but what she doesn’t expect is for one of her closest friends to be the next murder victim. This emotional case is fast-paced, like the majority of the prose, and it is important to pay attention to the details, because Berg-Raftakis includes plenty of red herrings and classic tricks of […]