Mysteries roundup: Rape, roses, royals and roads

MYSTERIES
Finding a fresh premise for a serial-killer tale must be the hardest part of writing thriller mysteries. But Linda Castillo has come up with a story of striking originality in Sworn to Silence (321 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.95).

When she was 14, Kate Burkholder was living with her Amish family in northeastern Ohio when she was raped. The attack came after four gruesome sex murders and left Kate traumatized. The horrific assault played a major role in her decision to leave the Amish life four years later for Columbus, where she became a patrol officer and eventually a homicide detective.

Now, 16 years after being assaulted, she's back in tiny Painters Mill as its police chief, and a serial killer with the same modus operandi as the earlier Slaughterhouse Killer -- he bled his victims to death -- is at work again.

Castillo ratchets up the suspense with each page, as Kate is faced with a diabolical murderer, an antagonistic town council member and a dark secret from her past that threatens to derail the investigation.

The first in a projected series, "Sworn to Silence" is filled with blood-chilling storytelling, fair play with clues and arresting prose ("Inside the behemoth structure, the wind whines like an injured dog."). But it's Castillo's fully fleshed characters that will linger in the reader's mind, with feisty, flawed -- and ultimately heroic -- Kate foremost among them.

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It may have been "roses, roses all the way" for Robert Browning, and Donna Andrews -- she of the laugh-out-loud mysteries -- may have fun with floribundas, but along the way the Reston resident puts her inimitable stamp on them.

Swan for the Money (320 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.95) -- the eleventh entry in Andrews' series featuring ornamental welder Meg Langslow -- finds Meg up to her eyeballs in intrigue in the fictional town of Caerphilly in eastern Virginia. Meg's parents have taken up growing roses, and her formidable mother has shanghaied Meg into organizing the annual rose show.

Trouble is, the show -- and the cocktail party the evening before -- are being held at the estate of Philomena Winkleson, a very large thorn in the side of all who know her. While Meg works to mollify the old bat, she learns that Philomena is a suspected abuser of animals and a known offender of humans.

When a rosarian who resembles the dreaded Philomena is found stabbed to death with garden shears and Philomena is poisoned (not, alas, fatally), Meg and her lovably loony family dig into the issue of who may be trying to make sure the wealthy widow is planted.

Complete with a intimidating black swans, fainting goats and a noxious killer, "Swan for the Money" is another attractive hybrid of humor and homicide that shows Andrews' talent in full bloom.

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She's 34th in line to the British throne, she's penniless -- and, as she tells us, "I was raised with no skills other than passable French, knowing how to walk with a book on my head and where to seat a bishop at a dinner table."

But Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie of Glen Garry and Rannoch -- Georgie to family and friends -- is smart and amiable, and she has occasionally solved some thorny problems for her high-born kinsmen and saved their lives.

In her third outing, Rhys Bowen's Royal Flush (320 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $24.95), Georgie again is called on to help the royal family. It's 1932, and several accidents that could be interpreted as murder attempts have befallen the family -- including the playboy Prince of Wales. The royals have decamped to Balmoral Castle in Scotland in the late summer, and Georgie is sent to her ancestral home, Castle Rannoch, a few miles away. There, she finds an eclectic house party that includes several Americans, the most notorious of whom is the prince's romantic interest, Wallis Simpson. When Georgie barely escapes death on a mountain-climbing excursion, and when another member of the house party is killed during a shooting party at Balmoral, she must use all her wits -- not to mention her family connections -- to derail evil plans born of dangerous secrets.

Bowen blends royal fact with robust fiction in concocting a story at once absorbing and amusing, tells it in graceful prose and peoples it with plausible characters -- some appealing, some appalling. Georgie's third adventure is worthy of the royal imprimatur.

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Three corpses -- all within a few miles of each other on England's North Sea coast -- ignite an investigational firestorm for Detective Inspector Peter Shaw and Detective Sgt. George Valentine in Death Wore White (390 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.95), the first in Jim Kelly's projected new series.

One body is found in an inflatable raft near the shore and one nearly buried in sand on a nearby island. But it's the third that's the kicker: He's in a pickup truck at the head of the line of eight cars stranded in a blizzard -- and there are no footprints in the snow.

As if that isn't enough, Shaw is the son of Jack Shaw, whose career ended when a judge implied that he and his partner manufactured evidence in a child's murder. The partner: George Valentine. The younger Shaw is a stickler for procedure, Valentine is more intuitive, and the two must figure out how to work together and solve a seemingly insoluble case.

If you wrote all the suspects' names on a whiteboard and drew lines to establish the connections, the result would be a network of links that would seem impossible to untangle. But Kelly directs his plot with commendable clarity, and the truth -- when it eventually comes out -- has the ring of the inevitable. And Kelly is a master prose stylist who evokes an English winter in spare but precise prose: "The snow was draining the light out of the sky, leaving the day stillborn."

Intricate and intimate, "Death Wore White" carries Kelly's work into a new series, one readers will want to see continue with speed.

Contact Jay Strafford at (804) 649-6698 or .