6 holiday gift-worthy mystery novelists answer burning questions

Rounding the corner into peak holiday shopping season, there are so many promising mystery novels to choose from — debuts, series twists, bold departures by established authors — that we felt some introductions might be in order. Below is a kind of speed-date roundup of six standouts: Get to know their work and then hit them with three things we’re just dying to know about their characters, what brings them joy and the mystery icons they’d count on to get them out of a jam.

Glory Be
By Danielle Arceneaux
Pegasus Crime: 272 pages, $27

Glory Broussard is a proper Black Catholic in Lafayette, La., who doesn’t let her relationship with God get in the way of her bookie operation in a local coffee house. But then, Sister Amity Gay, a childhood friend with a colorful past, dies by suicide. Glory and her daughter Delphine, a successful Brooklyn attorney home for the funeral, team up to uncover layers of corruption, making “Glory Be” much richer than your typical cozy. Broussard shares some literary DNA with Barbara Neely’s iconic Blanche White, dishing up side-eyed social commentary as a Black Southern woman you’d underestimate at your own risk.

What makes your protagonist so interesting to write about?

Glory gets away with saying and doing things that are completely inappropriate in a social setting, and you’re rooting for her because of it.

What gave you the most joy in writing this novel?

More than once I laughed out loud while writing Glory dialogue. Sometimes I text friends in her voice for kicks.

If you were trapped in an escape room and had to team up with other mystery/thriller writers or their characters, who would make the cut?

I’d really love to have Flavia de Luce, heroine of Alan Bradley’s mystery series. Not only is she clever, but children are terrific decoys. And Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, who understands that doing what’s right sometimes requires doing something that’s wrong. But I respectfully request the version of Bosch portrayed by Titus Welliver on the Amazon series, because he’s easy on the eyes and escape room has “meet cute” written all over it.

Calico
By Lee Goldberg
Severn House: 320 pages, $32

Goldberg’s mystery/western mashup features Beth McDade, a hard-drinking, libidinous detective exiled by an LAPD scandal to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s station in Barstow, where “the interstate goes in only one direction: away.” But when a series of accidents and the vanishing of family man Owen Slader mysteriously take place on the same date — Feb. 2, 2019 — Beth has to clean up her act. McDade’s investigation in the present, juxtaposed with the authentically depicted 19th century-silver mining camp that became Calico Ghost Town, pushes the novel into “X-Files” territory, but the suspense is on the level.

What makes your protagonist so interesting to write about?

Owen is an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation, an “every man” without any super skills or an encyclopedic knowledge of the past. The only thing he can do is prepare a good meal. Beth is a disgraced cop seeking personal redemption in a brutally unforgiving place and profession. She can never go back and undo what happened, and it seems she has no future.

What gave you the most joy in writing this novel?

I believe the key to writing a genre mash-up is not to write one. The trick to accomplishing that contradiction is to create a narrative and emotional through-line that is so compelling that the readers are unaware of the genres at play, they are too invested in the characters and the story to ask themselves, “What am I reading?” And then you have to make it look effortless… as if this was the natural way the story had to be told.

If you were trapped in an escape room and had to team up with other mystery/thriller writers or their characters, who would make the cut?

I’d want to be with Donald Westlake‘s Parker (for his criminal and logistical cunning), Lee Child’s Jack Reacher (for his brute force and relentless determination) and Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe (for his brute intellect and sharp eye for detail).

The Spy Coast
By Tess Gerritsen
Thomas & Mercer: 364 pages, $29

The veteran mystery writer behind the book series “Rizzoli & Isles,” which became a TNT series, spreads her creative wings with this series debut. Sixtyish Maggie Bird retired from the CIA under a cloud but has rebuilt a life for herself in Purity, Maine, raising chickens and communing with a group of CIA retirees, a.k.a the Martini Club. But Maggie’s past comes boomeranging back in the shape of a mysterious female visitor, who shortly thereafter ends up dead. Now it’s up to Maggie to pick up where she left off and make things right. The reveals of Maggie’s past and the believable spy craft drive the action, but the silver-haired posse of the Martini Club is what will keep me coming back.

What makes your protagonist so interesting to write about?

Maggie Bird’s a woman who never talks about her past, yet she clearly possesses unusual skills. It made me want to find out what she’s hiding from the world.

What gave you the most joy in writing this novel?

I love the fact that Maggie’s older, like me, with a wealth of life experiences. She may feel “invisible” to a world that prizes youthful good looks, but she uses that to her advantage.

If you were trapped in an escape room and had to team up with other mystery/thriller writers or their characters, who would make the cut?

James Bond, because I’m sure Q would have given him some handy gadget; Jack Reacher because he’s big enough and clever enough to break out of anything. Also Lee Goldberg. Because he’d keep us laughing the whole time.

Kennedy 35
By Charles Cumming
Mysterious Press: 336 pages, $28

The writer of “the gold standard in espionage fiction” presents Lachlan Kite at two points in his life: as a young intelligence officer in Dakar and as a seasoned spymaster at a global intelligence service who takes some pandemic time off to salvage his marriage and meet his baby daughter for the first time. Juggling two timelines is a feature of Cumming’s immersive writing style — in this case, shuttling between the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the later effort to bring its perpetrators to justice. Enlightening and satisfying, “Kennedy 35” stands on its own but invites exploration of earlier Kite novels “Box 88” and “Judas 62.”

What makes your protagonist so interesting to write about?

In each book of the series, we see Lachlan Kite as a young intelligence officer early in his career but also as a middle-age spy in the present day. Readers can track how he changes over time. More than 30 years of spying takes a toll on both his personal and professional lives.

What gave you the most joy in writing this novel?

I made two trips to Senegal, a hot, chaotic, atmospheric country with great people, a fascinating history — and delicious food.

If you were trapped in an escape room and had to team up with other mystery/thriller writers or their characters, who would make the cut?

It would have to be George Smiley for his guile and cunning, James Bond for his remarkable survival skills and Graham Greene for some lively conversation.

Blood Sisters
By Vanessa Lillie
Berkley: 384 pages, $27

Lillie’s strong and timely third novel features 30-something Syd Walker, an Oklahoma-born archaeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs who appears white but is a proud Cherokee. Her professional and personal worlds collide when she unearths the skull of a young woman at a Rhode Island tribal site just as another skull is found on a neighbor’s farm in her mining-ravaged hometown of Picher — a farm where something happened to Syd that she’s worked years to put behind her. There’s more drama in the community, which she left behind with her pregnant wife, Mal. The story of Syd’s multiple investigations combines the informative power of nonfiction books such as “Killers of the Flower Moon” with the high-octane action of recent crime novels like S.A. Cosby’s “Blacktop Wasteland.”

What makes your protagonist so interesting to write about?

Syd Walker’s got so many contrasts: She’s Cherokee and deeply committed to helping tribes, but she works for an agency with a fraught history with Native people. The relationship between archaeology and tribal governments has been full of exploitation and erasure, but Syd still fights for a different future, despite the painful past, seemingly with a foot on each side.

What gave you the most joy in writing this novel?

Rayna was a lot of fun to write. She’s Syd’s cool older cuz, an ex-stripper in a padded bustier with great ex-boyfriend stories who’s loyal all the way down to her press-on nails.

If you were trapped in an escape room and had to team up with other mystery/thriller writers or their characters, who would make the cut?

I’d want Perry Firekeeper-Birch (in Angeline Boulley’s “Warrior Girl Unearthed”) because she’s got artifact heist-level skills and a great sense of humor. Jade Daniels from Stephen Graham Jones‘ “The Lake Witch Trilogy” because she’s a final girl with pop culture knowledge. And the smart crime solver Cash Blackbear from Marcie R. Rendon‘s series.

Here in the Dark
By Alexis Soloski
Flatiron Books; 256 pages; $28

Vivian Perry, the junior theater critic in Soloski’s debut, knows her way around a barb: “I sprang fully formed from ‘The Portable Dorothy Parker’ and a shoebox full of Playbills.” But then she meets David Adler, a graduate student who interviews her for his master’s thesis and digs a little too deep, cracking her hard shell. After he vanishes, Perry is thrust into a “Cats”-and-“Mousetrap” game that draws on Soloski’s own history as a theater critic (currently with the New York Times). She knows of what she writes and writes beautifully about it, but her portrait of the critic as a young millennial also keeps us at a chilly distance from the intricate puzzle of Adler’s disappearance.

What makes your protagonist so interesting to write about?

I’m a mother of young children and fundamentally risk averse. It’s no accident that I dreamed up a heroine who runs toward the danger. When it comes to fiction, safe choices aren’t any fun.

What gave you the most joy in writing this novel?

I’ve never written a play in my life, and I’ve never wanted to. To render a story exclusively in dialogue? God, it’s too hard. But there’s such joy in writing conversation, especially when the voices of the characters take over and the words zigzag down the page like forked lightning.

If you were trapped in an escape room and had to team up with other mystery/thriller writers or their characters, who would make the cut?

I’ll take two absolute masters of the locked-room genre, John Dickson Carr and Soji Shimada, although Shimada is a little gory for me. And while they’re busy freeing us, I’ll be chatting in the corner with Dorothy B. Hughes. Or maybe Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. What can I say? I love a man who gets hit on the head a lot.

Woods will be in conversation with Soloski about “Here in the Dark” at Book Soup at 7 p.m. Dec. 11.