I guess it’s better than chips, or ciggies, though I won’t say I don’t have battles with those as well. For me, mysteries are the Valium of reading material. (Reading material used to be a euphemism for pot back in my old days; “¿Oyes, no tienes materia de lectura?”) I like to read mysteries in bed. If I can get away with it, I’ll spend an entire rotten-weather Saturday moving from couch to chair to nap to mystery until it’s over and in the clear. Yes, mysteries clear my head of the day since they have nothing to do with my job, my family, my economics, etc.

And I love Soho. The galleys come in all the time, sometimes in yellow wrappers and sometimes with a half-finished, glossy cover. There are cozies and foreigners and toughs and exotics. Here are two that I’ve recently read:

Assasins at Ospreys by R.T. Raichev
It’s not the plotting that’s riveting in this book, it’s the language and the characterization. Antonia Darcy and Major Hugh Payne set off one wintery day to rescue a damsel in distress. Darcy’d met the lady at an author meet-and-greet the last summer; Darcy is a mystery writer, Payne is, well, handsome, smart, and handy.

Goldilocks, as Darcy’d nicknamed her, had been in a wheelchair when they first met. Not any more. She’s lithe and light as champagne. She’s also a terrible flirt even though she’s a newlywed. Sound like a cliché? So do most of Raichev’s characters at first impression. Beware. It’s not that the author’s playing games with identity, it’s that he/she (?) develops his/her characters over the course of the story. And first impressions are not always accurate. Imagine!

Then, there’s the language. Pure delight. Everything from the titles of the chapters: “Malice Aforethought,” “The Enigmatic Mr Lushington,” “Ceaseless Turmoil,” “Unholy Dying,” but the sentences, word choice, dialogue, and conversation topics are delish and delovely. Assasins at Ospreys deserves a whole Saturday uninterrupted.


The Headhunters by Peter Lovesey
I know I’ve read something else by this author, but it was years ago and I’d have to see the cover to pick it out. Anyway, that’s irrelevant because nothing about this book fits easily into any category. Sure, there’s a murder – or rather, a body – in the second chapter, and another one about halfway through, but most of the time, I felt more like I was reading a novel than genre fiction.

For one thing, the detective is not the hero of the story even though it appears she is part of a series. Not only is she not a hero, she is shrill and prefers easy answers. For another thing, the characters behave like real people, speak like real people, and are often inscrutable – out of shame, shyness, or deviousness -- like real people. Finally, I had no idea who the perp was until nearly the end, and that only by process of elimination. That doesn’t happen too often without authorial tricks. Lovesey’s trick was all craft.