A Thriller With Heart

I usually prefer mysteries to thrillers (no end-of-the world scenarios and villains with more lives than the Terminator) but Canadian author Linwood Barclay's No Time for Goodbye adds a great deal of unexpected humanity to his latest. Cynthia Bigge's parents and brother vanished without a trace the day after she had a tempestuous teenage argument with her father. Twenty-five years later, raising a daughter with her husband in Milford, CT but still haunted by her family's disappearance, Cynthia goes on TV to talk about what happened and plead for clues. A mysterious phone call leads her to believe that her father, at least, may still be alive, but as her excitement grows, so do her worries. It soon appears that her family held secrets she never suspected.

If Barclay is still an unknown quantity, here are his earlier -- more conventional -- outdoor thrillers.

Stone Rain

Bad Guys

Lone Wolf

Bad Move

Nomad Is An Island...

I've raved so much about Olen Steinhauer's series about police in an unnamed Eastern Bloc country (he spent some time in Romania as as Fulbright Scholar) that seeing the series end is like saying goodbye to a dear friend. "Victory Square" once again stars Emil Brod, who began in 1948 as an inexperienced investigator suspected by his colleagues; now it's 1989, and both he and the country have lived through many torrents of false hope and repression. Over the course of six days, as Brod's final case leads him back to his first, the Ceausescu government topples (also the subject of a terrific Rumanian film called "12:08 East of Bucharest") and Brod must find out why his own name is on a hit list while dodging riots, road closures and sniper fire.

The rest of the series:

The Bridge of Sighs

The Confession

36 Yalta Boulevard

Liberation Movements

The rather inept pun which headlines this piece has to do with a blog called Contemporary Nomad, of which Steinhauer is a member. Another fine, underappreciated writer on that blog is Kevin Wignall, who also has a new book about to be published:



British assassin Conrad Hirst wants out of the killing business, but there's work to be done first -- four associates must be eliminated before he can embark on a new life. Doubts begin to surface: is it possible that he's working for the CIA and not the German mobster he believes is his employer? A beautifully-written and plotted spy thriller that might make you think of Eric Ambler.

More by Wignall:

Among the Dead

People Die

For the Dogs

Celebrating the Sisterhood

20 years ago, at Bouchercon, Sara Paretsky led the battle to give mystery and thriller writers of the female persusasion more clout in the publishing arena. To celebrate the anniversary of the founding of Sisters in Crime, Paretsky has edited a superb collection of 20 stories by SinC members, at least 16 of which appear to be written especially for this anthology.

All of the stories by SinC members P.M. Carlson, Barbara D'Amato, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Susan Dunlap, Kate Flora, Linda Grant, Kate Grilley, Carolyn Hart, Libby Hellmann, (who has just edited another fine collection, Chicago Blues), Sue Henry, Rochelle Krich, Charlotte MacLeod, Margaret Maron, Claire Carmichael McNab, Annette Meyers, Nancy Pickard, Medora Sale, Eve Sandstrom and Patricia Sprinkle, are immensely readable, not the least of which is Paretsky's own contribution (she also writes an inspiring introduction) called "A Family Sunday in the Park" which turns out to be a riveting number about V.I. Warshawski's first case. The ten-year-old Tori risks her life to save her cop father in a race riot in Chicago's Marquette Park, and solves a murder with her new Baby Brownie camera.