First mysteries
PUSHING UP DAISIES, Rosemary Harris, St. Martin's Minotaur. $23.95
A new series for horticulturists! Introducing Paula Holliday, a thirty-something media exec who traded in her stilettos for garden clogs when she moved from New York City to suburban Connecticut to start a landscaping business. When she finds a mummified body on the grounds of a dowager's estate, her career is off and running.
OBEDIENCE, Will Lavender, Shaye Areheart. $24.00
University students are given a rather strange assignment by their Logic and Reasoning Professor. Find a hypothetical missing girl. Follow a series of clues, but if "Polly" is not found by the end of term, she will be murdered. An intriguing premise for the students or
is there something more sinister going on?
THE EYE OF JADE, Diane Wei Liang, Simon & Schuster, $24.00
Introduces a female detective, Mei Wang, who works in today's Beijing. Her search for a missing artifact leads her to discover some dishonorable secrets of her nation's culture - and her family's past. The UK edition is the true first.
OSCAR SEASON, Mary McNamara, Simon & Schuster. $24.00
When a leading comic actor is discovered dead in the swimming pool of Hollywood's most fashionable hotel, the hotel's PR Director, Juliette Greson, finds herself enmeshed in an expanding murder mystery that involves Hollywood's biggest players.
BOUND BY BLOOD, Rick Nelson, St. Martin's Minotaur. $24.95.
Jack Brenner, a New Orleans homicide detective, hopes to repair his faltering marriage while his daughters are away at summer camp. Then he receives word that Emmet Lloyd Graves, a man on death row, has some information about his cousin David's unsolved murder. David was one of two civil rights workers killed in the summer of 1972.
ICE TRAP, Kitty Sewell, Touchstone. $24.95
A British surgeon's life is blown apart when he learns that he fathered a child \ in a remote part of Canada where he once lived and worked. He knows it cannot be true, but DNA tests don't lie. To save his marriage and his career and to make sense of the
impossible, he must travel to the icy North and confront demons he thought he'd left
behind.
STANDING STILL, Kelly Simmons, Atria Books. $23.00
An intruder breaks into Claire's home and attempts to abduct her daughter. Claire asks that the kidnapper take her instead. For the next week, Claire is tied to a bed in a strange hotel. Forced to lie still, Claire, who suffers from acute panic disorder, must confront her shadowy past and the dark corners of a life previously left unconsidered.
CRIMINAL PARADISE, Steven M. Thomas, Ballantine. $24.95
Robert Rivers is a small time thief in Southern California. But when he finds a photograph of a young girl in the safe he is robbing, he discovers that there are strange things going on in Orange County, deeds that make his own look like child's play.
PAVEL & I, Dan Vyleta, Bloomsbury. $24.95
In the winter of 1946-47 in Berlin, Pavel Richter, a decommissioned GI, finds himself at odds with a rogue colonel in the British Armed Forces and a Soviet general, when an American friend deposits a dead Russian spy in his apartment.