I’ve got a few new books to tell you about. I don’t think I requested any of these (I’ve been requesting fewer these days, as I’m trying to get caught up), and if I didn’t request it, a book has to be really good to make the review list. Let’s see if any of these make the cut:

First, The One I Left Behind by Jennifer McMahon sounds really, really good:

The summer of 1985 changes Reggie’s life. An awkward thirteen-year-old, she finds herself mixed up with the school outcasts. That same summer, a serial killer called Neptune begins kidnapping women. He leaves their severed hands on the police department steps and, five days later, displays their bodies around town. Just when Reggie needs her mother, Vera, the most, Vera’s hand is found on the steps. But after five days, there’s no body and Neptune disappears.

Now, twenty-five years later, Reggie is a successful architect who has left her hometown and the horrific memories of that summer behind. But when she gets a call revealing that her mother has been found alive, Reggie must confront the ghosts of her past and find Neptune before he kills again.

This one just might make the review list.

Next, another one that I don’t recall requesting, but might just read anyway — The Bughouse Affair by Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini:

In The Bughouse Affair, this first of a new series of lighthearted historical mysteries set in 1890s San Francisco, former Pinkerton operative Sabina Carpenter and her detective partner, ex-Secret Service agent John
Quincannon, undertake what initially appear to be two unrelated investigations.

Sabina’s case involves the hunt for a ruthless lady “dip” who uses fiendish means to relieve her victims of their valuables at Chutes Amusement Park and other crowded places.  Quincannon, meanwhile, is after a slippery housebreaker who targets the homes of wealthy residents, following a trail that leads him from the infamous Barbary Coast to an oyster pirate’s lair to a Tenderloin parlor house known as the Fiddle Dee Dee.

The two cases eventually connect in surprising fashion, but not before two murders and assorted other felonies complicate matters even further. And not before the two sleuths are hindered, assisted, and exasperated by the bughouse Sherlock Holmes.

That sounds good! That might very well make the review list.

Now this last one, I know I didn’t request. Not sure if I’ll get to it, but it might be worth a look, Baksheesh by Esmahan Aykol:

Kati Hirschel, the owner of Istanbul’s only mystery bookstore, is fed up. It all started when her lover Selim insisted that she behave like the Turkish wife of a respectable lawyer. Looking demure and making witty small talk were the only requirements. Then her landlord announced an outrageous rent increase on her Istanbul apartment.

She has no desire to move in with Selim. She’d rather learn the art of bribing government officials in order to find a new place. Kati is offered a large apartment with a view over the Bosphorus at a bargain price. Too good to be true until a man is found murdered there and she becomes the police’s prime suspect. In her second novel Esmahan Aykol takes us to the alleys and boulevards of cosmopolitan Istanbul, to posh villas and seedy basement flats, to the property agents and lawyers, to Islamist leaders and city officials—in fact everywhere that baksheesh helps move things along.