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This legal thriller is told from the unique perspective of the Federal court judge presiding over the first death penalty case in Massachusetts in more than fifty years. The moral story here is highlighted by an occasional chapter dedicated to the telling of a true story of an 1806 hanging that was reversed two hundred years later.

A drive by shooting is at the root of the present day case; a Hispanic drug dealer and an innocent bystander are killed, and a sharp cop ends up nabbing the getaway driver who gives up a name, Moon Hudson, as the shooter. Moon is a family man, married with a baby, but also has a past that the jury will never hear about. The state’s case hinges on the word of a gangbanger who has agreed to testify in exchange for a lighter sentence, and Moon’s life hangs in the balance.

The death penalty case is compelling but the characters are not fully developed, leaving a bit of an emotional void. Richard North Patterson tackled a similar subject in Conviction with considerably more passion, but perhaps that is the impartiality of the judge as storyteller here.

Copyright ©2014 Booklist, a division of the American Library Association.

4/14 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch

THE HANGING JUDGE by Michael Ponsor. Open Road Media E-riginal (December 3, 2013). ISBN 978-1480441941. 376p.

Maggie Brown knew her affair with the much younger Nadal Brown was a mistake, and she broke it off but several years later she runs into him, and he is convinced her son Matt is his son.

That mistake is at the heart of this tragedy; Maggie is murdered, her son calls the police and he is moved into the foster care system. But Detective Richard Christie has a better idea; friends of his have been trying to adopt and he thinks the boy would be a good fit for them. The agency agrees, and the confused young boy finds himself in a new home. But Nadal is determined to get his son, and while Christie is working his department hard to find the killer, he also finds the boy’s biological father – a sperm donor.

There are a lot of players here but the story moves along rapidly, and while the child in jeopardy situation is a familiar one, the suspense keeps building as the fate of the boy hangs in the balance. Should appeal to fans of Mary Higgins Clark and Kate White.

Copyright ©2014 Booklist, a division of the American Library Association.

2/14 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch

A MEASURE OF BLOOD by Kathleen George. MysteriousPress.com/Open Road (January 14, 2014). ISBN 978-1480445604. 400p.

The protagonists, Elizabeth Pepperhawk and Avivah Rosen, are women who have served in Vietnam, as Wildwind herself did.

In Wildwind’s second mystery, First Murder in Advent (set in 1972), Army nurse Pepperhawk is between assignments when she receives a call from Benny Kirkpatrick, ex-Special Forces first sergeant. Their friend Avivah is in trouble, and with Benny and Avivah’s friend, has sought refuge in a convent in the mountains of North Carolina.

When Pepper goes to help, she finds military intelligence officer Darby Baxter, her on-again, off-again love interest, with three other men. What follows are days without electricity in a mostly empty convent, in a snowstorm.

Avivah, Pepper, Darby and Benny, along with a few nuns and some members of a paramilitary think tank, struggle to survive the cold amidst murder, secret passageways and lost wills–delicious reading with tangling sub-plots. Too bad this series didn’t get more attention as the stories are quite good.

4/14 Jack Quick

FIRST MURDER IN ADVENT by Sharon Wildwind. Five Star (ME) (October 2006). ISBN 978-1594145278. 323p.

This is the follow up to Silenced and the third entry of the terrific Frederika Bergman crime series by Swedish bestselling author Kristina Ohlsson.

Detective Alex Rechte remembers well the case he had of a missing girl a couple of years earlier, so when a dismembered young woman’s body is found, he realizes right away who it is. As the site is excavated, another body is unearthed; this one a man that has been buried for a much longer time, decades in fact, and then another body is unearthed.

Investigative Analyst Fredrika Bergman is assigned the task of looking into the young woman’s life and finds that she has been researching a children’s author, Thea Aldrin, who was convicted of murdering her partner and suspected of foul play with her missing teenage son. Aldrin seems to have some sort of association to all of the bodies, but she is mute and cannot help. Bergman disturbingly also finds her own partner’s name among the young woman’s effects, but things have been strained between them so she is reluctant to pursue it.

Rechte is a recent widow, and work is his salvation as he becomes obsessed with the case. The third member of the team, Detective Peter Rydh, recently reconciled with his wife, and has her support as he delves into the murders that threaten to consume them all. This is a complicated yet fast moving story, and the detectives all find themselves with personal connections to the case that eventually involve an internal investigation.

Ohlsson excels at creating multi-layered stories with three dimensional, substantive characters, and she does it brilliantly here; the intertwining storylines culminate with a shocking ending. Scandinavian crime fiction fans should be enthralled.

Copyright ©2014 Booklist, a division of the American Library Association.

4/14 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch

THE DISAPPEARED by Kristina Ohlsson. Atria/Emily Bestler Books (March 4, 2014). ISBN 978-1476734002. 416p.