DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ 2 Legendary Detectives Take Their Final Cases
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-31 | by ( Sarah Weinman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

It’s fall 1945, just after the end of World War II. Maisie has been asked to investigate the four orphaned teens who are squatting in the vacant, once-grand London mansion where she worked as a maid years ago. There, she inadvertently stumbles onto a decades-old mystery involving her first husband, who died while test-piloting an airplane. Maisie’s life will be forever changed by what she discovers: “Truth had at last come to the surface, had eased itself from the boundaries of the past as if it were a splinter rising up through skin.” Winspear gives Maisie the grace to face her pain, and wraps up the series with a deft touch.

Persons: Maisie, Winspear Locations: London

☆ In These Novels, a Lot of Crime and Only a Little Punishment
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-02 | by ( Sarah Weinman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

When police officers kill 17-year-old Darius Evers, his older cousin, Nate, a political activist, wants real justice, not just “another Twitter hashtag, another candlelight vigil, another graffiti memorial.” He starts reading up on older killings — “lynchings, primarily” — and bands together with Darius’s brother, Joshua, and two close friends to begin kidnapping descendants of people who had long ago committed racially motivated hate crimes. The four of them don’t free their victims until they’ve agreed to deposit hundreds of dollars weekly into a secret account. “We like to think of it as a community-building fund,” Nate tells one. “But you can consider it reparations.”Their plan works, until the day it catastrophically doesn’t, putting them all in the frame of white supremacists and vengeful cops. As everything goes up in flames, Mayfield leans all the way into the discomfort zone.

Persons: Darius Evers, Nate, ”, Darius’s, Joshua, they’ve, Mayfield

☆ ‘Murder’s Easy. We Did Something Much Worse.’
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-19 | by ( Sarah Weinman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

There’s a mordant theme to this month’s column; in three of the four books, dark humor undercuts despair and sardonic wit compensates for failure. Nowhere are these traits more on display than in DEATH OF THE RED RIDER (Pushkin Vertigo, 396 pp., paperback, $16.95), the second appearance of Yulia Yakovleva’s Stalin-era detective, Vasily Zaitsev, who goes about the ordinary business of solving murders while communities around him in 1930s Russia are purged and exiled en masse. This time Zaitsev is dispatched to Novocherkassk, a Soviet cavalry school in the south of Russia, to investigate the horrifying death of a famous rider and his horse midrace. Soon he’s given an assistant he didn’t ask for, Comrade Zoya Sokolova, who arrives with her own agenda. The events — aided by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp’s nimble translation — unfold slowly, but hold the reader’s attention.

Persons: Pushkin, Yulia Yakovleva’s Stalin, Vasily Zaitsev, he’s, didn’t, Zoya Sokolova, Ruth Ahmedzai Locations: Russia, masse, Novocherkassk, Soviet

☆ New Novels Brimming With Murder, Jazz and Sumptuous Sweets
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-03 | by ( Sarah Weinman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The journalist Valur Robertsson knows a fresh investigation will sell newspapers (and make his impatient editor ecstatic). He finds himself battling internal frustration and external impatience, all of which he expresses to his sister, Sunna, a slightly adrift graduate student. Despite secretive sources, legal threats and reminders that past and present are forever intertwined, Valur pushes hard to center Lara and her family in his stories. Sunna, too, will find herself drawn into the investigation, sometimes at her own peril. Jonasson and Jakobsdottir, beautifully translated by Victoria Cribb, demonstrate with understated brilliance how the truth rises to the surface, no matter how ugly it is or how powerful the players are.

Persons: Lara, Valur Robertsson, Valur, Victoria Cribb Locations: Reykjavik

☆ Once a Child Star, She Now Leads ‘Murder Tours’ in Hollywood
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-11 | by ( Sarah Weinman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Then, not long after she learns that Tawney’s old fiancé Cal, a director, is making a film about her life and still-unsolved murder, Salma discovers the body of a young actress, Ankine Petrosyan, in the pool at the same house where her sister lived, “suspended in the water, twisting gently like a ballerina in a music box.” Ankine’s resemblance to Tawney is so uncanny that Salma believes there must be a link between their deaths. She sets her sights on Cal: She’s always believed he was guilty, and to prove it, she needs to finagle her way onto his movie set. Sutton indicts our culture for its fixation on beautiful young women who died at the hands of others. Salma grimly notes how eager her customers are to “fork over $75 to let tragedy crinkle the edges of their cookie cutter … lives, sprinkling Dead Girls over their Instagram feeds like a game of brunch, brunch murder.”

Persons: Salma, Ankine Petrosyan, “, She’s, Sutton, Salma grimly, ” Organizations: Cal

Card 5 of 9New mysteries offer plenty of suspense. Background Image: In this illustration, a figure lies on a beach on a striped towel, a book over their eyes. On the left is a figure who recalls Sherlock Holmes. He is wearing a hat and smoking a pipe, and bending down to peer at the sand through a magnifying glass.

☆ Brave Dames and Melancholy Detectives
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-21 | by ( Sarah Weinman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

But Isaacs had never deliberately written a mystery series character until 2019’s “Takes One to Know One,” which introduced the former F.B.I. agent and occasional translator Corie Schottland Geller. Corie returns in BAD BAD SEYMOUR BROWN (Atlantic Monthly Press, 400 pp., $28), fully adjusted to life in her suburban Long IslandMcMansion with her handsome judge husband and daughter. license, and because of the pandemic, her parents have fled Queens and moved in, too. And like other Isaacs characters, Corie Geller is wonderful company for the reader.

Search resuls for: "Sarah Weinman"

7 mentions found