Eleanor Dash, the Aperol spritz-loving narrator of Catherine Mack’s fizzy series debut, EVERY TIME I GO ON VACATION, SOMEONE DIES (Minotaur, 340 pp., $28) is a chatty, self-aware sort, a novelist with a best-selling series called “Vacation Mysteries.” Her books feature the devastatingly handsome detective Connor Smith, who bears the same name as the man who has vexed her life — romantically and financially — for an entire decade. But no more: She’s going to kill him off in fiction. Too bad someone’s trying to kill the real-life Connor, too.
Eleanor has arrived in Amalfi for a 10-day trip with Connor and a group of lucky fans who have won a “once in a lifetime Italian vacation” with their favorite author. Not long after Connor informs her that he was pushed into the path of “one of those hop-on, hop-off buses full of bleeding tourists,” Eleanor starts to think someone might want her dead, too.
Mack, a pseudonym for the veteran Canadian suspense writer Catherine McKenzie, gleefully pokes fun at genre tropes while evoking Eleanor’s zany world. To my shock, I found all of it hilarious and not at all annoying — even the many, many footnotes, which advance the plot and Eleanor’s character.
ROUGH TRADE (MCD/FSG, 374 pp., $28) is Katrina Carrasco’s second historical thriller to feature the gutsy, Pinkerton-trained opium smuggler Alma Rosales, who loves nothing more than a good brawl. The novel brims with the sights, smells and sounds of Tacoma, Wash., in 1888, full of docks and taverns and illicit back rooms where all manner of appetites are explored discreetly, where secrets swirl and betrayals come quickly.
Alma — disguised to (almost) all as Jack Camp — is doing remarkably well in Tacoma, more or less recovered from the chaotic, criminal events that marked her appearance in“The Best Bad Things” (2018). But then she learns that the deaths of two blonde strangers might be connected to the opium she trades, which soon attracts all sorts of unwelcome attention — from lawmen, from a mysterious stranger named Ben and from her former Pinkerton partner, Bess Spencer, who’s now running a very different game.
The mystery smolders; desire and queerness suffuse the pages. When a lover runs her fingers over Alma’s bruised jaw, Alma brushes away her concerns: “It’s the only way I want to have a body,” she says. “Riding it hard. I’m not saving it for the next life.”
Ever since her 1977 debut, in “Edwin of the Iron Shoes,” the private eye Sharon McCone has investigated all manner of cases in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her creator, Marcia Muller, was one of the first to introduce a tough-as-nails female character into a largely male-dominated space, years before Sue Grafton or Sara Paretsky did. But Muller has never commanded the same love as either of those authors, which is a shame since her hard-boiled novels are so steady, unflashy and consistently entertaining.
In CIRCLE IN THE WATER (Grand Central, 210 pp., $28), the residents of a gorgeous, private Presidio Heights street have hired the firm owned by McCone and her husband to investigate vandalism occurring there. The police, uninterested, have chalked up broken windows and the like to “anything from neighborhood jealousy to hatred of the elite to just plain cussedness,” but McCone’s gut tells her that more is going on. “The sudden feeling was strong enough to make me reach into my bag for my .38. Tension built between my shoulder blades, as it always did when I found myself in a potentially dangerous situation. The instinct had seldom lied.”
Finally, it’s become an accidental tradition to close one of my spring columns with a posthumously published novel by a beloved crime writer. This year’s it’s ANOTHER DAY’S PAIN (Mysterious Press, 232 pp., $26.95) by K.C. Constantine, the pseudonym of Carl Kosak (1934-2023). He wrote about small-town Rust Belt Pennsylvania and crimes petty and serious in a way that danced around genre conventions, slow when he ought to have been fast and fast when he ought to have been slow. Somehow, it worked. Most of his 18 books featured the Rocksburg police chief Mario Balzic (a standout: “The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes,” published in 1982). But upon his retirement, Detective Ruggiero “Rugs” Carlucci became the series protagonist.
Rugs returns one last time in “Another Day’s Pain,” which Constantine completed before his death. Rocksburg is still operating on an unhurried schedule, where the most exciting events center on the madcap, profanity-laced antics of an older woman who won’t stay on her medication. For Carlucci, approaching retirement himself, things are more fraught, with an ailing mother to care for and a relationship that’s stuck in the wrong gear — and that’s before a gunman goes on a rampage.
The dialogue crackles and the emotions run high without tipping into treacle. It’s a fitting farewell from a crime writer who deserves greater attention.
