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Onion Street

Reed Farrel Coleman (Tyrus (F + W Media, dist.))

Edgar-finalist Coleman’s eighth Moe Prager mystery explains how the NYPD detective turned PI became a cop. The 2012 funeral of an old friend prompts Prager to recount the complex history he shared with the dead man going back to 1967 and involving radicals in the antiwar movement.

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Crime of Privilege

Walter Walker (Ballantine)

George Beckett, an assistant district attorney on Cape Cod, investigates a nine-year-old cold case involving a young woman’s murder and one of America’s most powerful political families. Along the way, Beckett finds his moral compass in this tale of class and crime.

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Sacred Games

Gary Corby (Soho Crime)

The Olympic Games of 460 B.C.E. form the backdrop for Australian author Corby’s third mystery featuring Athenian investigator Nicolaos, who has just a few days to solve the murder of a Spartan named Arakos, the fiercest rival of Nico’s martial arts friend, Timodemus. Solving the crime could avert a war between Athens and Sparta.

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The Kill Room

Jeffery Deaver (Grand Central)

A powerful, relatively new and secret government organization orders the assassination of an American citizen in bestseller Deaver’s timely 10th Lincoln Rhyme novel. An assistant district attorney in New York City is determined to prosecute the crime, but faces a host of obstacles, including a sadistic killer.

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Good Man Friday

Barbara Hambly (Severn)

In his 12th historical, Benjamin January travels from his home in New Orleans to 1838 Washington, D.C., where slave pens exist 20 feet from the Capitol and a variety of scoundrels—including venal legislators, grave robbers, and spies—lurk, ready to pounce on a free black man like January.

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The Shanghai Factor

Charles McCarry (Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious)

One day on a Shanghai road, the unnamed narrator and a beautiful young Chinese woman, Mei, collide while riding bikes. Is it an accident? Our American hero, “a rookie spook,” pegs Mei as an agent for the Chinese Ministry of State Security, but that doesn’t stop him from becoming her lover in this spy thriller from former CIA officer McCarry.

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Murder as a Fine Art

David Morrell (Mulholland)

Thomas De Quincy, author of the essay “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” turns detective in this crime thriller set in 1854 London from the creator of Rambo. A killer imitating the real-life Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, described in detail in De Quincy’s essay, throws Londoners into a panic.

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Enigma of China

Qiu Xiaolong (Minotaur)

In his eighth outing, Shanghai Chief Insp. Chen Cao, an ethical cop in a police state, looks into the apparent suicide of the director of the city’s housing development committee. The official story asserts that the corrupt director hanged himself out of shame, but Chen suspects otherwise.

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The Child Thief

Dan Smith (Pegasus Crime (Norton, dist.))

During the winter of 1930, a stranger stumbles into a Ukrainian village pulling a sled bearing two dead children whose bodies show signs of cannibalism. British author Smith examines the power of the human spirit when pushed to the brink in this atmospheric thriller.

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The Ghost Riders of Ordebec

Fred Vargas (Penguin)

In French author Vargas’s seventh crime novel featuring Commissaire Adamsberg, the chief of Paris’s Serious Crimes Squad ventures out of his jurisdiction to the small Normandy town of Ordebec. There he encounters the 1,000-year-old legend of the Ghost Riders, hellish riders who target four of the town’s most morally corrupt men.

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