What's the Point? Crossbow Murders

Have you ever noticed that when something unusual comes to your attention, it suddenly seems to pop up everywhere? During a recent show on the 2500-year-old tomb of Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the narrator mentioned that the invention of the crossbow was likely an important factor in his bloody unification of China in the 5th century BCE. Apparently, crossbows provide a more stable aiming platform and a stronger pull with less effort than traditional bows. This enabled men of lesser skill and strength to become competent archers. Nearly a thousand clay bowmen are among the massive army of terracotta warriors protecting this first emperor of China for eternity.

To me, crossbows are particularly horrible weapons, much more terrifying than knives or even guns, and the thought of someone being killed with one makes my fingernails curl. Perhaps because I was nearly struck by one many years ago, on a fog-shrouded South Carolina beach. That peculiar thwock sound and the still-quivering bolt two feet in front of my face have featured in several Fellini-esque nightmares over the years since. The shooter couldn't possibly have even seen the target he was aiming at in the dense fog. My outraged yell earned a gruff "Sorry," and I dimly saw the backs of two teenage boys leaving the beach at a dead run.

A crossbow bolt fired from within a limousine into the neck of the driver marks the first of a bizarre string of murders in Indulgence in Death, the 31st entry in J. D. Robb's Eve Dallas series. The book opens with a heartwarming chapter of Eve and her mysterious billionaire husband, Roarke, visiting his extended family in the Irish countryside before getting down to the serious business of the serial murders back home in New York. Each murder is performed with a different exotic instrument, all requiring some skill to operate. It gradually becomes clear that the end target of this nasty game will be Eve herself.

Somehow, these police procedurals laced with mild erotica and some weak sci-fi elements always leave me faintly underwhelmed. The author has developed a formula that works well for her, but it varies very little from book to book. Still, she churns out two Eve Dallas books a year in addition to those she writes as Nora Roberts, so some shortcuts are obviously necessary. These books makes for quick light reading.

Moving from theater snacks to a five-course meal, the first mystery in Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Gamache series, Still Life, is still a delight after two previous readings. Her books are as much character studies as mysteries, most set in a charmingly improbable location. Jane Neal, retired teacher in the Canadian village of Three Pines, had witnessed three teenage boys in ski masks throwing dung at the bistro owned by Olivier and his partner Gabri and screaming "Fags, Queers." She scolded them by name, causing them to run away. Then Jane, who has never shown her work to anyone, finally offers one of her paintings for a local show. A few mornings later, she is found in the woods––killed by an arrow through the heart.

Gamache and his team are called to the remote village––not on any map––to investigate. The book offers an interesting, if slightly unsettling, discussion of arrowheads designed for competition versus those for hunting, and the wound patterns left by each. Penny's books are excellent to reread, because even absent the suspense of that first reading, there is a great deal of thought-provoking content to linger over and enjoy.

The murder of a police detective in a posh convalescent center for injured police officers opens Watching the Dark, the twentieth in Peter Robinson's Alan Banks series. DI Bill Quinn, strolling around the grounds, is shot through the heart with an arrow from a crossbow. DCI Alan Banks is called to investigate, and among the victim's effects he finds pictures of the victim in compromising positions with a girl who has been missing for six years. DI Quinn had handled the investigation, never solved, into her disappearance.

The Professional Standards Unit is alerted, and they assign DI Joanna Passero to Banks's team to investigate the possibility of corruption on the part of the late DI Quinn. When the case requires Banks to travel to Estonia, much to his disgust he is accompanied by the humorless Passero while Annie Cabot, Banks's usual partner, handles the UK end of the case. While far from the best in the series, this is still a very good mystery, if a little heavy on the travelogue. I enjoy DCI Banks more when he works closer to home, with his own team around him.

Am I alone in my horror of crossbows? Knives, guns, even pitchforks, all make very effective  and fatal weapons in mystery novels without my batting an eyelash. But a crossbow introduced into the story immediately sharpens my attention. What particular murder weapon or weapons makes your hair stand on end?

Let's Do the Time Warp Again

Doing the Time Warp in The Rocky Horror Picture Show

To do a mind flip and a time slip, you don't need to be a left-and-right jumping, pelvic-thrusting Transylvanian in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. You can stay in your comfy chair and pick up one of the unusual books below. None of them are for everybody. They zig-zag between past and present in an examination of identity and perception or betrayal and redemption.

For someone who wonders if a house can haunt people as well as be haunted by them: The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai (Viking, July 2014). Marxist academician Zee Devohr, of the wealthy "Devohrcing Devohrs," moves into the carriage house of her mother's family estate, Laurelfield, with her husband Doug, a struggling grad student who needs peace and quiet while writing his dissertation on poet Edwin Parfitt. He can't seem to get his ideas onto paper and then is further distracted when another couple also moves into the carriage house. Doug's thoughts turn larcenous when he discovers Laurelfield was once an artists' colony and that files pertaining to his dissertation may be in Laurelfield's locked attic.

This is one of those books you read as if you're opening a Russian nesting doll. It's full of twists and surprises, some of them so small or unexpected that an inattentive reader won't catch them all. When you register one, it feels as if you're in on a little joke between you and the writer that excludes some of the characters. How often do you have a chance to experience this when you read? The many characters are introduced and wander through chapters titled 1999, 1955, 1929 and 1900. After reading this clever book, you'll change the way you think about interpreting history, look at unidentifiable people in old photos and view objects that have been in your family for generations.

If you like putting together those gazillion-piece jigsaw puzzles of a herd of zebras or enjoy the process of not knowing what the hell is going on and getting clued in, bit by frustrating bit: Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy (FSG Originals, 2014). The Southern Reach is a secretive governmental agency that sends expeditions into the mysterious Area X, a pristine wilderness in Florida, maybe, created by something strange and contained by unusual borders. Annihilation (see review here) involves the all-women twelfth expedition: a biologist, a surveyor, an anthropologist and a psychologist. Authority details the attempts of Control, the Southern Reach's interim director, to take charge of his agency. Acceptance concludes this trilogy's look at human identity with a visit to Area X by Control and someone connected with the twelfth expedition.

These three books must be read in order and even then your imagination will have its hands full. When I read Acceptance, I wondered if I'd unknowingly taken something that was affecting my mental processing. Fun. These books are fascinating sci-fi/detective sleuthing/dystopian fiction for the right reader.

Like your British espionage to be more than a frantic boiling of nifty gadgets, cold-blooded spies and hot babes? Try Gerald Seymour's 464-page The Dealer and the Dead (Thomas Dunne, February 2014). In 1991, some men and boys in the Croatian village of Vukovar wait for an arms dealer's promised shipment. It never arrives and they are slaughtered by the Serbs. Almost two decades later, a Vukovar farmer's field is cleared of land mines. An unearthed body reveals the arms dealer's identity: Harvey Gillot, a wealthy Englishman famous for the reliability of his word. The surviving Croatian villagers have long memories and are now bent on revenge.

Seymour outdoes himself this time with his many, and I mean many, characters, few of whom approach likability. If you appreciate a slow-burning, multi-threaded story that ultimately kicks into high gear, give this book about redemption and the shadowy world of arms dealing a shot. Or, pick up Seymour's 2013 book, A Deniable Death (reviewed here).

And now, I'll do the time warp and pick up Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2014). It slips time in its story about two friends, one of whom betrays the other. I'm enjoying Rahman's exploration of how well we can know the world and ourselves.

The Berlin Wall

As I'm sure you already know, this week saw the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall––or, as those pranksters in the old German Democratic Republic called it, the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart." I'm reading a fascinating book about it, Mary Elise Sarotte's The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.

If it were not for the tragic destruction of lives caused by the Wall, the story of its permanent breach in 1989 would be comic. One Politburo guy says the wrong thing at a press conference, suggesting the Wall is open, and the next thing you know, hordes of people from both sides swarm the area around the Brandenburg Gate and checkpoints throughout the city. On that cold night in November, there was almost a party atmosphere to the gatherings, especially once the guards, who had not been told in advance about any new rules, started letting people through.

Of course, there's a lot more to the story than one simple slip-up at a press conference. Sarotte zeroes in on a dozen people whose names you've likely never heard, and shows how their experiences illustrate the factors that came together to bring an end to the division between the two Berlins and, ultimately, the end of Communism in eastern Europe.

If you want to read more about the Wall than its collapse, the definitive history is Frederick Taylor's The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989. This is a masterful work of historical research and writing. One of the things Taylor reminds us is that, horrific as the Wall was for so many people, it served the political ends of both East and West. East Germany was losing all of its most productive citizens to West Germany, and this worked to ratchet up the tensions that threatened to turn the Cold War hot. The Wall stabilized the political situation and, in effect, those on the wrong side of it paid the price for a degree of peace and safety in the rest of the world.

About the only thing to regret about the end of the Cold War is that it nearly dried up the supply of Cold War espionage novels. To me, the very best spy stories are the Cold War stories, and you can't beat Berlin as the locale.

The lodestone is, of course, John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, made into a movie featuring Richard Burton as the depressive MI-6 operative Alec Leamas. Le Carré is the king of moral ambiguity, and there's plenty of that in this novel about double agents. The climax takes place at the Wall, shortly after its erection.

Len Deighton's Bernard Samson series consists of three trilogies and a prequel. The first book, Berlin Game, has jaundiced MI-6 officer Samson traveling to Berlin to deal with the crisis of their valuable agent, Brahms Four, wanting to defect. Complicating things, Samson is also aware that there is a mole among his colleagues, and the presence of that mole may jeopardize Samson's mission––and much more.

Berlin Game, and the other two volumes in its trilogy, were adapted to a 12-part miniseries called Game, Set and Match. Though this was televised in the late 1980s, it looks like it's not available on DVD or streaming video.

I've written about John Lawton's Then We Take Berlin here. It takes place mainly in Berlin, both immediately after World War II, when the city was divided up into zones controlled by the four allied powers and it was relatively easy for people to pass from zone to zone, and then in 1963, after the Wall has been built. Our protagonist, a Cockney known as Joe Wilderness, had a wild time when he was stationed in Berlin after the war. In his spare time from sniffing out Nazis for the army, Joe was a wheeler-dealer in the black market. In 1963, he's persuaded to return to Berlin to smuggle an old woman out of East Berlin.

John Lawton is one of my very favorite novelists, with characterization being his strong suit. Then We Take Berlin not only introduces a new and striking protagonist, it also has a large supporting cast of vivid characters, some of whom you'll recognize from Lawton's Frederick Troy series. The Berlin setting is a big bonus.

This one's not a spy novel, but I think it's a must-read for anybody interested in what life was like on the eastern side of the Wall. Anna Funder's Stasiland tells stories of various people who lived in East Germany. Some were resisters, but some were informants for the East German Ministry for State Security, aka the Stasi.

The Stasi was by far the largest surveillance agency in history. Some estimate that there was a full-time secret police officer for every 180 people in East Germany. Almost worse than the official Stasi officers was the fact that so many civilians routinely informed on their co-workers, neighbors, friends, family and even loved ones. Since the reunification of Germany, Stasi files have been made available, and many people have requested to read their files, with traumatic results.

Of course, there are many, many other books about the Berlin Wall and East Germany, both fiction and non-fiction, but this short list of some of my favorite books will give you a start if you're interested in diving in.

Japanese Crime Fiction across the Centuries

As an ancient culture, Japan has plenty of scope for the imagination when it comes to crime writing. You can pick and choose among tales told from times spanning a thousand years. My forays into Japanese crime fiction began in the very recent past. I started with I. J. Parker's Sugawara Akitada mysteries. The Japanese custom is to place the surname first because it honors the family rather than the individual.

Akitada was 25 years old and a junior clerk in the Imperial Ministry of Justice. He had won this position because he was an excellent student and had come in first in the university examinations. While he was a nobleman of the famous Sugawara clan, times were tough and he was excited to be given this job.

The series begins with The Dragon Scroll, which takes place in the year 1014. Akitada's first mission was to investigate missing tax shipments from cousins in a distant province. This excited him, because this was his first journey away from the capital, Heian-kyō, modern Kyoto.

He was also fortunate to be traveling with an old family retainer, Seimei. This elderly man was Akitada's mentor and he was skilled at many things, including herbal medicines, and had deep knowledge of Confucian teachings. Traveling the Imperial Highway was unsafe at the best of times, and it wasn't long before Akitada was attacked by a couple of thugs. It was his good fortune to be rescued by Tora, an ex-thug himself, who became a permanent part of his entourage.

Akitada was never ambitious enough for his mother, but he had a knack for solving crimes and the authorities, from the emperor on down, appreciated his skill. There are 13 books in this series. Akitada is inquisitive and intelligent, and his skills are in constant use as he unravels mysteries found in peasant hovels as well as the rarefied atmosphere of the Imperial Palace. He is a decent and honest man and he maintains adherence to the strict social codes of ancient Japan.

Naturally, all of the events in the series are imaginary or fictional, but the system of law enforcement, the educational methods and the customs and tastes of 11th-century Japan bring authenticity to the stories. These books are sprinkled with beautiful illustrations that resemble Japanese woodcuts. As an extra fillip, there is at the end of each book a brief historical endnote that enlightens the reader about pertinent aspects of life at this time.

I. J. Parker is a retired professor of English and foreign languages and won the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA) Shamus Award for Best P. I. Short Story in 2000 for "Akitada's First Case."

On my TBR and not too dusty is a Laura Joh Rowland series that features Sana Ichiro, a samurai who investigates matters for the shogun. It gives a taste of what life was like for the Japanese in the 1600s.

The first book, Shinju, takes place in Edo, a city destined to become Tokyo in later years. It begins with a double death involving a commoner and a beautiful noblewoman. Is it a typical shinju, a ritual suicide, or something more? Ichiro is a reluctant investigator. He prefers teaching, but he can't let the case be hushed up.

Another reluctant sleuth who would rather be teaching is Kyosuke Kamizu, nicknamed "boy genius," an assistant professor at Tokyo University. He makes his debut in Takagi Akimitsu's The Tattoo Murder Case. This case takes place almost a century into the future, during the American Occupation in the late 1940s.

All that is found are severed limbs in a locked room. Miss Kinue Nomura survived World War II, only to be murdered in Tokyo, her severed limbs left behind. What is gone is that part of her that bore one of the most beautiful full-body tattoos created by her late father.

Kamizu doesn't wear a deerstalker hat, but his approach to solving this crime is very Sherlockian. Just as interesting about the unusual case is the description of the culture that revolved around art tattoos. Despite the fact that Japan was occupied by US troops at the time, there was only one small mention of the military, as if it didn't really impinge on the routines of the ordinary folk.

The Tattoo Murder Case was originally published in 1948, and Takagi Akimitsu followed this by many books, most of which remain untranslated. Even though Kamizu was well liked, most of the books usually feature prosecutors or police detectives.

Seicho Matsumoto wrote his series in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As in his Inspector Imanishi Investigates, the plots focus on human psychology and ordinary life rather than intricate puzzles. The central character is Inspector Imanishi Eitaro, a more typically Japanese detective, fond of gardening and haiku. A corpse felt to be from the provinces is found under the rails of a train in Tokyo Station. The subject of Imanishi's investigation is not only the crime, but also the society in which the crime was committed. Matsumoto brings up the subject of police corruption, which was a new feature of Japanese crime fiction.

James Melville's books feature Tetsuo Otani, the superintendent of the Hyōgo Prefectural Police. Otani frequently runs into people who are afraid of the police because of their history of strong-arm tactics over the previous decades. He is constantly reassuring everyone that the police are not what they were, but it's a struggle to get cooperation from the general populace in solving crimes. For the most part, these books take place in the 1970s and '80s, when murder was uncommon in Japan and was usually related to gang warfare or domestic violence.

In the first series book, The Wages of Zen, Otani is called to a murder case while he is attending a Rotary dinner. This is but one example of the western influences during these years. A body has been found in a local temple, which is apparently also a foundation for East-West understanding. This is an unusual case, where all the suspects, as well as the victim, are foreigners who had come to spend time at a local Zen Buddhist temple. Otani joined Hyogo police during the postwar American occupation, and he was aware that policing had changed more than many other things In Japan. It is amusing to read about the convoluted ceremonial courtesies governing most interactions.

Melville depicts everyday Japanese life nicely, and he describes Japanese society morphing from strict traditionalism to a relentless drive to modernization. Otani has a team of colorful and streetwise detectives who spend most of their time confronting organized crime and political duplicity. Otani himself does not speak English, and he depends on his team to help him understand the foreigners among whom there is a killer.

In Sujata Massey's series, we meet Rei Shimura, an underpaid English teacher in Tokyo in the late 1990s who wishes she was doing something better with her life. You can read about her here, here and here.

Arimasa Osawa writes another series that is very popular in Japan. These books were written in the '90s as well, but although Shinjuku Shark, the first of many, won several prizes, it wasn't translated into English until 2008.

The central character in these mysteries is a complete turnabout from the traditional detectives I've just mentioned. He is Samejima, who goes by the nickname "the Shinjuku Shark." He is a maverick detective who has no friends in the police or the main Japanese bad guys, the Yakuza (organized crime syndicates), because he refuses to turn a blind eye to corruption. This leads to increasing isolation from the police force and he usually works alone.

Osawa describes an uneasy peace between the Yakuza and the police. The Police Organized Crime Department is known as the Marubo, and it kept a close watch on the Yakuza clans. The Yakuza usually didn't go out of its way to become involved in small disputes. It is all bound up with the concept of honor among men and the result of returning favors and a give-and-take granting the other face-saving concessions.

Shinjuku District

Samejima detests the Yakuza and he dislikes the way police officers fraternize with them, so he keeps making a nuisance of himself by going after any punk, regardless of his ties. It is no surprise that Samejima's career is stalled and he is relegated to the crime-ridden streets of the Shinjuku district. His street name came from his reputation that once he gets his teeth into somebody he doesn't let go.

When an elusive sniper begins targeting police officers in his district, Samejima sets out on his own to find the man responsible, no matter who he is. This is a rapidly paced noir entry that is gritty and realistic, although it is somewhat surprising that as much as Samejima is detested, he escapes the sniper's crosshairs. Samejima is still solving crimes and chasing the Yakuza in Osawa's most recent book translated into English, The Poison Ape.

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino is a more recent Japanese crime sensation and is mentioned here.

So pour yourself some sake or grab a bottle of Ramune (a carbonated beverage of exotic flavors that comes in a tricky bottle that uses a marble as a stopper) and settle in for a trip through time. Or flip that remote to Ninja Turtles reruns and be very grateful if your children or grandchildren aren't using them as role models.

November 11, 2014

More TV!

The Game

This six-part espionage miniseries began on Wednesday on BBC America. It's a moody, stylish production set in 1972 England, then in the midst of a lengthy miners' strike that caused power outages even at MI-5 headquarters. A KGB officer named Arkady Malinov gets himself arrested for public drunkenness and assault on a police officer so he can tell MI-5 that he wants to defect and act as a double agent. Malinov claims he wants to act as a double agent so he can reveal to the British what he learns about the Soviet-planned Operation Glass.

What's Operation Glass? Well, Malinov doesn't really know, but he knows it's huge and will change forever the status of the Cold War. It involves agents the USSR has in the UK, and Malinov says he'll let MI-5 know who they are whenever he finds out. Although they feel sure Malinov isn't telling all he knows, MI-5's counterespionage team, which calls itself the Fray, gets to work.

The team is headed by the MI-5 chief, code-named Daddy, and played by that craggy-faced lion, Brian Cox. Daddy's second is Bobby Waterhouse, a snakelike conniver who lives with his mother, a woman who could give Angela Lansbury's character in The Manchurian Candidate a run for her money. Waterhouse's deputy is Sarah Montag, a sharp and ambitious analyst. Her husband, Alan, is socially awkward, but a whiz at the electronic eavesdropping side of the business. Secretary Wendy Straw is a young thing who doesn't have much to say so far. Seconded to the team from Special Branch is Detective Constable Jim Fenchurch, who thinks these MI-5 guys are much too full of themselves.

Our protagonist is the seventh member of the Fray, the young and beautiful Joe Lambe. You might remember him from PBS shows like the Silk miniseries and the recent remake of The Lady Vanishes. Joe is tormented by a failed mission in Poland, one that only Daddy knows the facts about. One of the things that Daddy knows is that a Soviet agent involved in that mission is in the UK, he's part of Operation Glass, and Joe's personal desire to kill this agent will be both a spur and a hazard.

From what I've read, it appears that each week of the series will focus on a new target revealed to the Fray by Malinov, whom the team will then try to use to find out more about Operation Glass. After just one episode, it's hard to tell how this series will shape up, but I'll definitely keep watching. It's got that moody look and music appropriate to Cold War espionage drama, and the actors are fun to watch. (Though I do wish they'd enunciate! It's a sad state of affairs when even British-trained actors mumble so much these days.) Each member of the Fray has his or her own secrets, there are tensions and conflicts between them, and their office-politics intrigues may turn out to be as much a focus of the series as Operation Glass.

The Game is on BBC America on Wednesday nights at 10:00pm Eastern time.

Death Comes to Pemberley

Did you watch the two-part Death Comes to Pemberley on Masterpiece Mystery? I did, and even though it doesn't seem quite right to say this about a Jane Austen-ish adaptation, I thought it was a hoot.

Of course, this is based on P. D. James's novel of the same name. James imagined Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet six years after their marriage at the end of Pride and Prejudice. They are now living happily at Pemberley with their young son, and busily planning their annual dinner and dance for hundreds.

The festivities have to be cancelled when Lydia, Elizabeth's flibbertigibbet of a younger sister comes careening up the drive in a coach and then bursts out of its door, screaming that her husband, the ne'er-do-well Wickham, has been killed. Well, more's the pity, it quickly turns out that it's Captain Denny who's been killed. But Wickham is arrested for the crime, and that's even better than his being the murder victim if you're a Wickham hater––as all right-thinking people are, of course.

James's book was controversial. The most ardent fans of Jane Austen and P. D. James seemed to dislike it. A lot of Austen devotées dislike the whole genre of novels featuring later or re-imagined lives of Austen characters, and they disliked this book on principle; some especially because it was a crime novel. Many P. D. James fans thought the plot wasn't up to James's usual standards. But I liked the book. It wasn't a case of Mr. Darcy suddenly becoming a detective. Instead, there is a judicial investigation, and Darcy is stuck with having to try to clear a man he heartily detests, since having his brother-in-law hanged as a murderer will be a stain on the Darcy name. Meanwhile, Elizabeth learns a few things here and there that seem to provide some clues as to what really happened to Captain Denny.

The dramatization accentuates the soap-opera potential of the P. D. James plot. A love triangle involving Darcy's sister Georgiana is raised in importance, while the strain that this affair––and, of course, the murder––puts on Elizabeth and Darcy threatens their love. There are emotional scenes––well, as emotional as you can get in the Austen-esque environment. Elizabeth can't help but feel that Darcy is regretting his association with her family, especially since he goes into full Darcy remote mode as the pressure of events ratchets up.

Lydia stays at Pemberley during all this, and she's every bit as much of a drama queen as you'd anticipate. The Bennets come to stay as well, and Mrs. Bennet is just as you'd expect. It only takes a visit from Lady Catherine (played by Penelope Keith, who you'll remember from the Britcoms The Good Life a/k/a Good Neighbors, and To the Manor Born) to make the whole thing seem more like farce than a murder mystery. And I'm not complaining; as I said, I thought it was a hoot.

The acting is standard excellent British costume drama style. I do have a quibble, though. Anna Maxwell Martin plays Elizabeth and, while she's a wonderful actor and I loved her in The Bletchley Circle, she's not right for Elizabeth. Martin just isn't vibrant enough to play that character. She does it as well as she possibly could, but I was aware the whole time that she didn't fit the part. Matthew Rhys as Darcy is an excellent casting choice. I became familiar with him as Philip on FX network's Cold War espionage drama, The Americans, and he has more than enough handsome, brooding intensity for Mr. Darcy.

Find that Book! Lists of Useful Lists for Bibliophiles

Finding new or new-to-me books to read is no real challenge. My problems are discernment and moderation––both more difficult. If there were world and time enough, there are blogs and lists enough to keep me reading through several lifetimes. And e-readers have only made the problem worse; with no storage space problems, I can hide my addiction––at least until the bills come in at the end of the month! Meanwhile, here are a few favorite sites to begin feeding my mystery habit.

Stop, You're Killing Me! is one of the most comprehensive resources for readers of mystery series published in paper or audio formats. Run by Lucinda Surber and Stan Ulrich, its chronological lists by author or character are my most frequent first stop. Here you can also find books by genre, location, historical setting, and awards won. Their Diversity classification even includes a couple of authors who write books about the Romani, or gypsy people. Wow! I can wander through this site for hours, always learning something new. Their Dormouse feature lists one-book authors whose sole mystery was published over five years ago. The live links in their listings all default to Amazon, who pays them a small commission when you link through to buy a book. A good way to support an incredibly useful site.

If you are looking for a tasty little tale with no or minimal sex, violence, or bad language, the Cozy Mystery List may have just the thing. Cozies are one of the fastest growing sub-genres, and most feature characters with special skills and interests like cooking, crafting, or book selling. The site also lists books set during major holidays.

For rare or long out-of-print books, BookFinder is my first stop. It can search over 100,000 online booksellers, including all of the massive Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites, in seconds. You can search here for books by author, title, or ISBN in six languages, and buy them in many different currencies. I found the signed copy of Captain Corelli's Mandolin my sister wanted here, from a seller in the north of England. Best Christmas surprise ever!

Goodreads, that book club giant, has numerous lists of members' favorite mysteries here. These lists, compiled by readers' votes, are usually more interesting and varied than single-source lists. Their What's the Name of that Book? forum is helpful if you can't quite remember the title or author of a book you read (a frequent occurrence for me). A fair number of authors participate in discussions on the site, and you may be able to obtain pre-release copies of their books in exchange for a review.

The Reading Room's Looking for a Mystery? page is a librarian's list of mystery books maintained by retired librarian Linda Bertland. It lists British, Canadian, and Australian as well as American mysteries throughout the generations. It also offers extensive lists of mysteries by sub-genre.

Crime Thru Time is devoted entirely to historical mysteries. Their series timeline pages list mysteries set from 2000 B.C.E. through the mid-twentieth century. Pick your century and go!

Flashlight Worthy, while not as comprehensive as the major lists sites, has some of the quirkiest book lists I've found. Mysteries set at reservoirs, anyone? They list six. Readers are invited to submit lists of their own, in whatever category floats their boat.

And finally, the 1500 pound elephant in the room - Amazon. As of this morning, the 'zon lists over half a million mysteries in fourteen sub-categories. It's so overwhelming that I generally start my searches for new book recommendations on more intimate sites, or from Amazon's topical newsletters. The User Reviews, while some are obviously nonsense or shills, generally provide a decent guide for books I'll enjoy, as do blogs like, well, this one. These are only a few of my go-to sites. What are some of your favorite places to find new books?