2011 Schedule

January 12

Dog On It
by Spencer Quinn

Meet Chet, the wise and lovable canine narrator of Dog On It, who works alongside Bernie, a down-on-his-luck private investigator. Chet might have flunked out of police school ("I'd been the best leaper in K-9 class, which had led to all the trouble in a way I couldn't remember exactly, although blood was involved"), but he's a detective through and through.

February 9

A Reliable Wife
by Robert Goolrick

He placed a notice in a Chicago paper, an advertisement for a "reliable wife" She responded, saying that she was "a simple, honest woman." She was, of course, anything but honest, and the only simple thing about her was her single-minded determination to marry this man and then kill him, slowly and carefully, leaving her a wealthy widow, able to take care of the one she truly loved.

March 9

April 13

The Blight Way
by Patrick McManus

Bo Tully, sheriff of Blight County, Idaho—and a fellow who dropped twenty pounds on Atkins—had been thinking about asking out Jan Whittle, his grade-school sweetheart. Problem is, he's already promised to celebrate his dad's seventy-fifth birthday with him. Thwarted romance proves to be the least of Bo's problems, however, when a dead body turns up on Batim Scragg's ranch.

May 11

Songs My Mother Never Taught Me
by Selçuk Altun

After Arda Ergenekon's domineering mother dies of cancer, the well-to-do 27-year-old seeks to learn more about his illustrious mathematician father who was murdered when he was 14. The lean prose and deft pacing make this more than a routine revenge tale.

June 8

Blood Detective
by Dan Waddell

When the naked, mutilated body of a man is found in a Notting Hill graveyard and the police investigation led by Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster and his colleague Detective Superintendent Heather Jenkins yields few results, a closer look at the corpse reveals that what looked at first glance like superficial knife wounds on the victim's chest is actually a string of carved letters and numbers, an index number referring to a file in city archives containing birth and death certificates and marriage licenses.

July 13

Sworn to Silence
by Linda Castillo

In the sleepy rural town of Painters Mill, Ohio, the Amish and "English" residents have lived side by side for two centuries. But sixteen years ago, a series of brutal murders shattered the peaceful farming community. In the aftermath of the violence, the town was left with a sense of fragility, a loss of innocence. Kate Burkholder, a young Amish girl, survived the terror of the Slaughterhouse Killer but came away from its brutality with the realization that she no longer belonged with the Amish. Now she's back as chief of police.

August 10

Nox Dormienda: a Long Night for Sleeping
by Kelli Stanley

Arcturus, the half-Roman doctor and occasional problem-solver has seen much in his thirty-three years. He is Agricola's doctor and friend. And Agricola is the governor of Britannia. On a frozen December afternoon, he learns the governor is in trouble. The Emperor Domitian has sent a spy to Britannia.

September 14

The Gigolo Murder
by Mehmet Murat Somer

Software programmer by day and drag-queen club owner by night, our girl is back again, just jilted and feeling so blue she's violet - until she meets the hunky married lawyer, Haluk Perkedem. When their conversation is interrupted by a phone call delivering news that his brother-in-law has been arrested for the murder of a notorious gigolo, she decides to put her sleuthing instincts and Thai kickboxing skills to work unravelling the crime.

October 12

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
by Joshilyn Jackson

While Laurel Hawthorne's life seems neatly on track—a passionate marriage, a treasured daughter, a lovely suburban home—everything she holds dear is threatened the night she is visited by the ghost of her 13-year-old neighbor Molly. The ghost leads Laurel to the real Molly, floating lifelessly in the Hawthorne's backyard pool.

November 9

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts
by Julian Rubinstein

Attila Ambrus was a gentleman thief, a sort of Cary Grant—if only Grant came from Transylvania, was a terrible professional hockey goalkeeper, and preferred women in leopard-skin hot pants. During the 1990s Ambrus took up bank robbery to make ends meet. Arrayed against him was perhaps the most incompetent team of crime investigators the Eastern Bloc had ever seen: a robbery chief who had learned how to be a detective by watching dubbed Columbo episodes; a forensics man who wore top hat and tails on the job; and a driver so inept he was known only by a Hungarian word that translates to Mound of Ass-Head.

December 14

Andean ExpressbyJuan de Recacoechea

A train ride across the high Andean plain serves as the stage for a high-stakes card game, a quick sexual encounter and murder. The large cast mirrors the political and social scene, including an older businessman and his teenage wife, a skirt-chasing college student, a revolutionary disguised as a priest, expatriates from Ireland and Russia, and a deadly one-legged mine worker who "struck at the floor with his crutches à la Long John Silver, his favorite fictional character."