This week, MacAdam/Cage editor David Adams talks about his favorite pick for fall. An excerpt from Our Lady of Pain is available for one week at our Book Club.

What is the book you are most excited by this season, and how did it come to your attention?
Our Lady of Pain, by Elena Forbes (978-1-59692-316-4).

My boss, David Poindexter, brought Elena’s first book, Die With Me, back from the London Book Fair last year. He was really excited about it, and asked me to give it a read to see if I agreed. The first chapter—written from the perspective of the story’s villain—convinced me that this was a book we had to do. The voice had just the right blend of the banal and the vicious, and the details of the setting and the crime were so imaginative and compelling that I knew the whole thing was going to hold together. It was clear we had the start of a promising series on our hands.

So we signed Elena up for a two-book deal, and published Die With Me to starred reviews and great bookseller response. Elena was already at work on the sequel, which she delivered to her UK publisher right on time. (We really ask a lot of these mystery writers.) I started Our Lady of Pain hoping that it was going to be as good as the first book, and was delighted to find that it was even better. The crime this time is the ritualistic murder of a young art dealer in London’s Holland Park; the lead investigator, Detective Inspector Mark Tartaglia, begins the case with one set of assumptions about the young woman, but gradually discovers that she was not nearly as proper as the superficial details of her life would lead one to believe.

Like all good mysteries, the plot is full of twists and turns, and once you start the book you feel that wonderful compulsion to finish. Elena’s greatest strength as writer, though, may be her ability to capture the fascinating nuances of human relationships. The members of the Barnes Murder Squad are full-bodied, credible characters, and the subtle dynamics of the relationship between Mark Tartaglia and his partner, Samantha Donovan, are particularly compelling. In that sense I see Elena as part of a great tradition of writers—Ruth Rendell, Donna Leon, Lynda La Plante, Tana French—who have brought a more sophisticated understanding of human relationships, and especially male-female relationships, to the police procedural.

What can you tell us about the author?
Elena lives in London with her husband and two children. She worked in portfolio management for a number of international investment groups before becoming a full-time writer. Her first book, Die With Me, was shortlisted for the 2008 John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award. She likes opera and Italy—Mark Tartaglia was inspired by a well-known Italian bass baritone.

Who will enjoy this book?
Fans of the TV show Prime Suspect. Readers of Ruth Rendell, Elizabeth George, Ian Rankin, P. D. James, etc. Mystery readers who like their plots to come with some real psychological depth. People looking to get in on the ground floor of a series with a great deal of potential.

What can you tell us about the excerpt published online?
The first two chapters of Our Lady of Pain are a great example of what distinguishes Elena in the very crowded field of crime writers. The book opens with a brief glimpse of our victim going for a jog in a snowy Holland Park—it is a descriptive, atmospheric beginning, and the moment of tension at the end is well done, if somewhat familiar. What is more unique, and really compelling, I think, is where we go from there—to Tartaglia’s sister’s house, where our main character is trapped in a rather probing discussion with a woman who has very obviously been invited to the family’s regular Sunday lunch as a potential romantic interest for the longtime bachelor Tartaglia. Their conversation and the family dynamics of the scene are awkward and all-too-real, and Tartaglia, polite as he may be, is visibly relieved to get the call that a young woman’s frozen body has been found in the park.