The sentence is death A novel

the LOS angeles of James Ellroy's latest historical thriller, THIS storm (Knopf, $29.95), is the kind of place where rats as big as cats fearlessly scoot across the front porch, where lovers rendezvous in welcoming Tijuana, anonymous among the "child-beggar swarms" and "cat-meat taco vendors," and where sentiments of pure, undiluted venom ("Hate, hate, hate. Kill, kill, kill") express the prevailing state of race relations. We're talking about the Los Angeles of January 1942, when a New Year's Eve broadcast by Father Charles Coughlin laments that his warbattered listeners must stand shoulder to shoulder with the "rape-happy Russian Reds" in resistance to "the more sincerely simpático Nazis." In such a soul-crushing environment, a simple murder comes as a relief. Or so thinks Dudley Smith, a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, currently working for Army intelligence and devising all kinds of war-profiteering hustles on the side. Torrential rainstorms have unearthed a corpse, washed up in its very own pine box on a par-3 golf course - a "long-term decomp," in cop parlance, meaning the remains are sans flesh and all bones. By official guesstimate, man and box were burned in a fire, circa 1933. But the repercussions of the case will play out over the next several months. ("There was no better time to howl and throw parties.") For readers who keep track of these things, "This Storm" is the second volume, after "Perfidia," of Ellroy's Second L.A. Quartet. (For my money, the most notable novels in his great saga are "The Black Dahlia" and "L.A. Confidential," the first and third books of The L.A. Quartet. But honestly, you can pick up the story anywhere.) Here the characters in those previous novels are younger and dangerously reckless. And this time we take a long look at Hideo Ashida, "crack forensic chemist and sly sleuth," who barely escapes internment by covering up a bookie racket: "Great shame undermines his great luck." Until it runs out, his luck is also ours: Of all the flawed characters caught up in the swirl of this epic novel, he's the guy with the most heart. if YOU'RE going to be bludgeoned to death with a bottle of wine, it might as well be a vintage with a certain cachet. In Anthony Horowitz's new mystery, the sentence IS DEATH (Harper, $27.99), a celebrity divorce lawyer named Richard Pryce is murdered with a 1982 bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, which is not too shabby. Classier still is the metafictional plot construction, which allows Horowitz-the-author to play Horowitz-the-character in his own novel. "I like to be in control of my books," he says, explaining why he has positioned himself as the lead detective's sidekick. The victim wasn't short of enemies. In one unseemly public display, a pretentious feminist author poured a glass of wine over his head and thus positioned herself as a suspect. But as the detective, Daniel Hawthorne, bluntly notes after the author has shared his own theories, "It was all too bloody obvious, mate." NOT HAVING aged in the past 20 years, Aimée Leduc, the heroine of MURDER IN BEL-AIR (Soho Crime, $27.95) and other Parisian mysteries by Cara Black, is quite capable of being the mother of a darling, almost-l-year-old child named Chloé. To be sure, time goes slowly in this captivating series and it's still only 1999. Aimée is still wearing high-fashion vintage clothing and scooting around on her pink Vespa while solving computer security breaches for Leduc Detective - and the odd murder case for her own satisfaction. Here Aimée's in Paris's 12th Arrondissement, not for the opera or for a stroll in the Bois de Vincennes, but to solve the murder of a homeless old woman. Aimée is also in search of her unpredictable American mother, Sydney, who has disappeared after failing to pick up Chloé from her playgroup in Bel-Air. Aimée doesn't need to pack heat on these adventures; the stiletto heels of her Louboutin ankle boots are weapon enough. But something more lethal is called for when Sydney's secretive work as a former C.I.A. operative comes to light, threatening not only Sydney and her professional contacts but also her family, including (gasp!) baby Chloé. DID martin walker really kill off that nice American art history student in the body in the castle WELL (Knopf, $25-95)? Yes, he did, which is very daring, considering that this is one of his charming mysteries set in the beautiful Périgord region of France and featuring his amiable sleuth, Bruno Courréges. Nice young women like Claudia Muller are rarely bumped off in nice country mysteries with nice local detectives, especially not detectives who take their horses and their truffle hounds into the woods for the sheer joy of it. But Walker knows exactly what he's doing in this series, which artfully seasons its plots with regional lore about the sport of falconry and with lessons in French history, particularly the World War II resistance - all while gently teasing the locals for indulging in "the French love of ceremony and dressing up." Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

Horowitz succeeds on all levels with book two in the Detective Daniel Hawthorne series. As in The Word Is Murder (2018), Horowitz inserts himself into the plot as a fictional (yet very real) version of himself, playing Watson to Hawthorne's Holmes, once again irresistibly drawn into a mystery. Suspects are hardly in short supply in this case of murder-by-wine-bottle: Richard Pryce, a lawyer specializing in celebrity divorces, has been bonked on the head with a 1982 Château Lafite worth £3,000. The police enlist the aid of PI Hawthorne, who quickly summons Horowitz to help. (The latter is in the middle of filming a Foyle's War episode, adding another meta element to the plot, which will delight Horowitz's fans.) Hawthorne continues to try the author's and the reader's patience with outlandish behavior, but there are hints this time that he has gone to extreme lengths to conceal an unfortunate past, making him a somewhat more sympathetic character than in the earlier tale. Readers will enjoy Horowitz's insights into the publishing world and rack their brains deciding which stories are true and which are fictional. Literary references abound within the text, too, including a three-digit number scrawled on a wall, nodding to Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, along with other Doyle and Christie references. Despite these allusions and the Holmesian frame story, the overall voice of the series is fresh and original, Horowitz writing with the effortless élan that distinguishes all of his work.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Horowitz has the Midas touch, whether he is creating television series, writing children's books, or reinventing iconic crime-fiction characters, including those of Christie, Fleming, and Doyle.--Jane Murphy Copyright 2019 Booklist

Bestseller Horowitz's doppelganger, also named Anthony Horowitz, once again plays Dr. Watson to PI Daniel Hawthorne's Sherlock Holmes in the British author's superb sequel to 2018's The Word Is Murder. This time the astute, if irritating, detective ropes Tony into helping him investigate the murder of high-powered London divorce lawyer Richard Pryce, who was struck on the head with a bottle of expensive wine in his home. The obvious suspect is prickly poet and novelist Akira Anno, who threatened to hit Pryce with a wine bottle in a restaurant where they ran into each other days before the murder. Pryce was representing Akira's husband in a divorce settlement in which she felt she was getting a raw deal. Other suspects emerge in the complicated case, which may have its roots in a caving expedition that Pryce and two close friends took 10 years before in Yorkshire; one of those friends died while trapped in a cave during a rainstorm. Leavening the grim story line are deliciously comic scenes in which Tony typically makes a wrong deduction or suffers a personal slight (Akira disdains him because he writes popular fiction). Horowitz plays fair with the reader all the way to the surprise reveal of the killer's identity. Fans of traditional puzzle mysteries will be enthralled. Agent: Jonathan Lloyd, Curtis Brown (U.K.). (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Fired Scotland Yard detective Daniel Hawthorne bursts onto the scene of his unwilling collaborator and amanuensis, screenwriter/novelist Anthony, who seems to share all Horowitz's (Forever and a Day, 2018, etc.) credentials, to tell him that the game's afoot again.The victim whose death requires Hawthorne's attention this time is divorce attorney Richard Pryce, bashed to death in the comfort of his home with a wine bottle. The pricey vintage was a gift from Pryce's client, well-to-do property developer Adrian Lockwood, on the occasion of his divorce from noted author Akira Anno, who reportedly celebrated in a restaurant only a few days ago by pouring a glass of wine over the head of her husband's lawyer. Clearly she's too good a suspect to be true, and she's soon dislodged from the top spot by the news that Gregory Taylor, who'd long ago survived a cave-exploring accident together with Pryce that left their schoolmate Charles Richardson dead, has been struck and killed by a train at King's Cross Station. What's the significance of the number "182" painted on the crime scene's wall and of the words ("What are you doing here? It's a bit late") with which Pryce greeted his murderer? The frustrated narrator (The Word Is Murder, 2018) can barely muster the energy to reflect on these clues because he's so preoccupied with fending off the rudeness of Hawthorne, who pulls a long face if his sidekick says boo to the suspects they interview, and the more-than-rudeness of the Met's DI Cara Grunshaw, who threatens Hawthorne with grievous bodily harm if he doesn't pass on every scrap of intelligence he digs up. Readers are warned that the narrator's fondest hope"I like to be in control of my books"will be trampled and that the Sherlock-ian solution he laboriously works out is only the first of many.Perhaps too much ingenuity for its own good. But except for Jeffery Deaver and Sophie Hannah, no one currently working the field has anywhere near this much ingenuity to burn. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.