This Week in Books: 1/7/24 through 1/14/24

The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon—all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where “the most interesting things happen at night.”

A spectacular popular as well as critical success. The Name of the Rose is here reprinted for the first time with Umberto Eco's delightful and instructive postscript.

Riley Sager meets If We Were Villains in a compelling new psychological thriller by RJ Jacobs, following a tight-knit group of graduate students studying the psychology of lying. When one of them is discovered dead after an experiment, everything the group thought they knew about deception crumbles...

Campus is empty, a winter storm is blowing in, and someone is lurking in the shadows, waiting for their chance to kill again.

Forest, North Carolina. Under the instruction of enigmatic Professor Joe Lyons, five graduate students are studying the tedious science behind the acts of lying. But discovering the secrets of deception isn't making any of the student's more honest though. Instead, it's making it easier for them to guard their own secrets – and they all have something to hide.

When a test goes awry and one of them is found dead, the students find themselves trapped by a snowstorm on an abandoned campus with a local detective on the case. As harbored secrets begin to break the surface, the graduates must find out who's lying, who isn't, and who may have been capable of committing murder. It turns out deception is even more dangerous than they thought...

A foreboding new dark academia thriller of deception and suspense, This is How it Ends follows the unraveling of a close group of students as they contend with what it means to lie, and be lied to.

Harry Bosch is back as a volunteer working cold cases for the San Fernando Police Department and is called out to a local drug store where a young pharmacist has been murdered. Bosch and the town's 3-person detective squad sift through the clues, which lead into the dangerous, big business world of pill mills and prescription drug abuse.

Meanwhile, an old case from Bosch's LAPD days comes back to haunt him when a long-imprisoned killer claims Harry framed him, and seems to have new evidence to prove it. Bosch left the LAPD on bad terms, so his former colleagues aren't keen to protect his reputation. He must fend for himself in clearing his name and keeping a clever killer in prison.

The two unrelated cases wind around each other like strands of barbed wire. Along the way Bosch discovers that there are two kinds of truth: the kind that sets you free and the kind that leaves you buried in darkness.

In place of the mean and violent streets evoked by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the pioneering women crime writers of the 1940s and ’50s uncovered the roots of fear and mania in a quiet suburban neighborhood or a comfortable midtown hotel or the insinuating voice of a stranger on the telephone. This volume, the second of a two-volume collection, brings together four classics of the 1950s that testify to the centrality of women writers in the canon of American crime fiction. Each in its own way examines not only an isolated crime but the society that nurtures murderous rages and destructive suspicions.

Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief (1950) stages a parental nightmare in a midtown Manhattan hotel, as an out-of-town mother reluctantly leaves her child in the care of a stranger so that she can accompany her husband to a banquet where he is the guest of honor. This fateful decision unleashes the barely submerged forces of chaos that haunt modern urban life.

In The Blunderer (1954), Patricia Highsmith tracks two men, strangers to each other, whose destinies become intertwined when one becomes obsessed with a crime committed by the other. Highsmith’s gimlet-eyed portrayals of failed marriages and deceptively congenial middle-class communities lend a sardonic edge to this tale of intrigue and ineptitude.

In Beast in View (1955), Margaret Millar’s intricately constructed tour de force of insidiously mounting tension, a voice from a woman’s past unleashes a campaign of terror by telephone. As the threats mount, the facades of ordinary life are stripped away to reveal unsuspected depths of resentment and madness.

Two teenagers fresh out of stir after a bungled robbery set their sights on what looks like easy money in Dolores Hitchens’s Fools’ Gold (1958)—and get a painful education in how quickly and drastically a simple plan can spin out of control. The basis for Jean-Luc Godard’s film Band of Outsiders, this sharply told tale is distinguished by its nuanced portrait of a sheltered young woman who becomes a reluctant accomplice and fugitive.

DCI Alan Banks reluctantly investigates DI Bill Quinn with Inspector Joanna Passero. Quinn, convalescing at St Peter’s Police Treatment Centre, was killed by a crossbow on the tranquil grounds, and left compromising photos. Quinn may be disreputable, linked to a vicious crime in Yorkshire and to a cold case – English Rachel Hewitt 19 vanished in Estonia six years ago.