all your Reads in Here

Crime takes no holiday. That's obvious in Steven F. Havill's twenty-third Posadas County mystery, Lies Come Easy . It's set at Christmas, but the small sheriff's department in the county has to cope with child endangerment, family issues, and murder. As the story starts, Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman welcomes late night calls. One son, a world famous musician, is in Germany. One son is in college. And her physician husband is out of town at a conference. So, she responds when Deputy Tom Pasquale reports finding a two-year-old, Derry Fisher, walking along a snowy road. The boy's father dumped him out of his pickup and took off. Poor Derry won't have the best Christmas. His angry mother confronts his father at the hospital, and, while both parents are cuffed, it's Darrell Fisher who is arrested. The judge tears into him at his bail hearing, and his brother bails Darrell out. Fisher doesn't have long to celebrate. His wife's at work when Pasquale fi...

A new Monkeewrench novel by P.J. Tracy is always a treat. While the mother half, P.J., of P.J. Tracy died in 2016, Traci successfully keeps the series interesting. Some will want more of the Monkeewrench team in the current novel,  The Guilty Dead . As a fan of the police procedural aspect, I was perfectly satisfied with the latest book. A year after a junkie is murdered in Hollywood, that death kicks off a crime spree in Minneapolis. Homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth catch the case when the junkie's father dies. Gregory Norwood's death appears, at first glance, to be a suicide, but because the Minnesota businessman and philanthropist died of a single gunshot to the head a year after the death of  his son Trey, Magozzi is suspicious, and pushes the crime scene investigators to look further. While he and Gino focus on Norwood, Magozzi's partner, Grace MacBride, and her Monkeewrench team of computer geniuses are working on a prototype for a new software program...

Although I had heard of Margaret Mizushima's previous books in the Timber Creek K-9 mystery series, I hadn't read any of them.  Burning Ridge , the fourth book, is an excellent introduction, even for those of us who haven't read the earlier ones. Deputy Mattie Cobb is only beginning to trust her feelings for Timber Creek, Colorado veterinarian Cole Walker and his daughters. Mattie's childhood was traumatic, and she spent most of it in foster homes. With her past, there's a reason she worries about Cole's daughters when their dog finds a boot with a human foot in it. However, her job is to assist with the investigation, along with her K-9 partner, Robo. Robo does find the remains of a body, a man who was burned in a shallow pit in the national forest west of Timber Creek. And, she recognizes the name on the man's tattoo. Although she hasn't seen her brother, Willie, in twenty-five years, after they went to separate foster homes, she'd just been talkin...