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It’s Spring Break and Neptune is the place to be. But when a partying coed goes missing, travel plans to the beachside city start to go south… and north. In fact, the Chamber of Commerce is worried that the missing girl and the town’s inept sheriff’s lack of action could be pretty detrimental to the season’s tourist dollars. Out of desperation they turn to Mars Investigations for help.

Business has been slow since Veronica chucked her plans to return to New York City and the chamber’s case is a welcome one. Keith is still recuperating and under orders to take it easy so no matter how much he’d prefer his daughter return to the big city and her potentially big career as a lawyer, even he can’t muster up too much of a fuss in her handling this one. And it’s not like either Mars is going to miss out on a chance to show up Sheriff Lamb.

The Thousand Dollar Tan Line is a solid new installment in the seemingly ever-growing (YAY.) Veronica Mars franchise. The plot is definitely worthy of Mars and sure to please Marshmallows, but newbies will probably want to start with the show before diving into the novels. For one thing, there are the characters’ established histories and the town of Neptune itself to consider. For another, Thousand Dollar Tan Line continues plot lines started in both the series and the movie.

1/15 Becky LeJeune

VERONICA MARS: THE THOUSAND DOLLAR TAN LINE by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham. Vintage (March 25, 2014). ISBN: 978-0804170703. 336p.

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Reggie Heath got a great deal on his new office lease, but if he’d read the paperwork he’d have understood why. It’s his brother who points it out to him – a clause that stipulates that they, the holders of the new lease at 221 Baker Street, are responsible for handling correspondence addressed to a certain famed and fictional detective.

When Reggie’s brother Nigel becomes overly interested in one of the letters he hightails to America to track down the letter’s writer. But Reggie only realizes his brother is gone after discovering a dead body in his office. Reggie is almost certain there must be a connection and is forced to follow his brother to Los Angeles where they both find themselves in the midst of a decades-old mystery.

This first in Robertson’s series is quite fun! It’s a light mystery paying a bit of homage to Holmes while not being overly focused on Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation. Rather the premise is that Reggie and Nigel – two trained lawyers – are dragged into a mystery thanks to the address alone. (Which means you don’t have to be a Sherlock Holmes aficionado to enjoy this one.)

The Baker Street Letters is the first in the series. To date there are three additional titles that follow.

12/14 Becky LeJeune

THE BAKER STREET LETTERS by Michael Robertson. Minotaur Books; Reprint edition (February 1, 2011). ISBN: 978-0312650643. 288p.

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If I lived up north, I’d keep this book for those days that I was snowed in. Since I’m in Florida, I would keep it with my hurricane supplies except hurricane season just ended and I couldn’t wait until June to read this. It is a big door stopper of a book, close to a thousand pages, and very much worth the time it takes to read it all.

I fell in love with locked-room mysteries when I was a kid and tearing my way through Agatha Christie – And Then There Were None is a splendid example.  It reawakened when I read Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane, and then again in college when I took a class on Noir/Hard-Boiled Fiction. We started with classics like The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, probably the earliest locked-room mystery, published in 1868, then to short stories in Black Mask magazine, and moved forward only to about the 1960s, where my professor believe noir to have ended. I tried hard to abuse him of that notion, and perhaps made some headway with books from publishers like Akashic Books and their series of city noir (Baltimore Noir, Brooklyn Noir, Tel Aviv Noir, etc.,) Bleak House Books, and of course, Hard Case Crime.

If you’re a fan of locked-room mysteries, do yourself a favor and pick up this tome. Included are such gems are Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” G.K. Chesterton, “The Invisible Man,” Dashiell Hammett, “Mike, Alec and Rufus” (“Tom, Dick, Or Harry,”) Stephen Barr, “The Locked Room to End Locked Rooms,” Bill Pronzini, “Where Have You Gone, Sam Spade?,” Erle Stanley Gardner, “The Bird in the Hand,” Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Poisoned Dow ’08” and many, many more.

This is an exceptional collection that Penzler has pulled together, and I highly recommend it to mystery fans.

12/14 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch

BLACK LIZARD BIG BOOK OF LOCKED-ROOM MYSTERIES, ed. Otto Penzler. Vintage (October 28, 2014). ISBN 978-0307743961. 960p.

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An Alex Mavros Mystery

Private Investigator Alex Mavros returns in his seventh adventure set in Greece. Local police have a problem; Greek billionaire Kostas Gatsos is missing and they need help to find him.

The highly dysfunctional family is offering a small fortune to launch the investigation with the promise of more to come when Gatsos is found, but they are not forthcoming about their activities.

Mavros has lost his wife, his elder brother has been missing for years, and with the dismal Greek economy, he is living at home with his mother. He cannot afford to turn down the money so he launches an investigation.

Gatsos made his fortune in the shipping industry, but was involved in many shady deals and made enemies along the way. Meanwhile Gatsos’s captors are putting him through mock trials, finding him guilty then sentencing him to torture.

In a seemingly disparate story, Jim Thompson is an Australian traveling the world and leaving wives in various ports. Thompson shows up at the denouement, helping to bring these storylines together in a riveting climax. Readers who can tolerate torture scenes will enjoy the beautiful international setting and all the action in this fast paced, twisty story.

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

10/14 Stacy Alesi, AKA the BookBitch

THE WHITE SEA by Paul Johnston. Creme de la Crime; First World Publication edition (October 1, 2014). ISBN 978-1780290676. 240p.