10 books to read from The Next Chapter's mystery book panel

This interview originally aired on Dec. 24, 2018.

The Next Chapter's latest mystery list is here! Bookstore owner J.D. Singh, McMaster University professor P.K. Rangachari and Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Cannon join Shelagh Rogers to deliver a brand new list of whodunits that are perfect for fans of mystery and thriller books.

Kingdom of the Blind by Louise Penny

Margaret says: "Regular fans who haven't encountered this series should start now and work backwards through the other nine books because this is a terrific series set in Quebec. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is, for those of you who do follow the series, still dealing with an opioid crisis in rural Quebec that has been carried over into this book. It is also a standalone story with a murder. It has wonderful characters and Penny does atmosphere so well."

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The Man Who Came Uptown by George Pelecanos  

J.D. says: "George Pelecanos has been a longtime favourite of mine. He's an American writer of Greek heritage. And I mention that because in the novels there's a great deal about the immigrant population in Washington D.C., where his parents and his grandparents came from. He's written some 20-odd novels with half a dozen different characters and I daresay if you read the novels with some chronological care you probably would get a very entertaining and accurate history of the D.C. area of the last three or four generations. This new novel is a standalone story about a private eye."

Broken Ground by Val McDermid

Margaret says: "This is a Karen Pirie novel. For those of you who follow the crime fiction series, this is absolutely fantastic. It's about a group who are trying to excavate treasure that was buried during the Second World War. They find the treasure but there's a dead body with it and the body is more recent than the burial of the treasure. It becomes both a whodunit and a whydunit."

The Stranger Upstairs by Melanie Raabe

P.K. says: "This book is translated from German. This is a story about a single mother with a husband who has vanished and nobody knows what has happened to him. She's struggling to bring up her son and suddenly out of the blue she gets a message saying that her husband is on a plane coming back. The story is about whether this person is actually her husband. It's very scary in some ways. It's a psychological thriller. It's grim, but it's a fascinating read."

Foe by Iain Reid

Shelagh says: "I would also like to offer up a Canadian companion to The Stranger Upstairs. Iain Reid's book is very much about identity as well. Who is real and do we ever know anybody?"

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Careless Love by Peter Robinson

Margaret says: "It is an Inspector Banks novel. There are mysterious murders happening, including a woman found in a car that didn't belong to her and didn't die where she was found. There's a really tight plot but there are also lots of asides and subplots. Just a terrific 'get away from it all' book."

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After the Crash by Michel Bussi

J.D. says: "He is a French writer of detective novels and a professor of geography if I remember correctly. The gist of the story is fairly simple. It's 1980 and a plane, en route from Istanbul to Paris, crashes in the mountains. Everybody on board is killed save for, miraculously, a very young child about three months old. The question is who is she? It's long winded, improbable and melodramatic but... I could not put this book down."

The Book Shop of Yesterdays by Amy Meyerson

P.K. says: "It's about a bookshop and a history teacher from Philadelphia who gets a call saying that her uncle has died. It's a mystery and there's a whole series of clues in the bookshop. This book is going to be extraordinarily popular with the book club crowd. It's all about books and the clues are from books ranging from Mary Shelley and Charlotte Armstrong to John Steinbeck. It's a fascinating book in that sense."

Signal Lost by Garry Disher

J.D. says: "He's an Australian writer of crime fiction and children's literature. This book is the seventh in his series with the main character, Inspector Hal Challis."

Transcription by Kate Atkinson

P.K. says: "This is a very amusing book. It's like a combination of John le Carré and Eric Ambler as written by P. G. Wodehouse. It is absolutely delightful. It's the story of an 18-year-old girl who gets drafted to work as a spy for MI5 during the war years. Turns out that it's not such an exciting job; it's a boring one where she's sitting in a room listening to conversations amongst housewives in London to tease out any German sympathizers. It's rather amusing in how the characters float in and out. The language is exquisite."

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The panellists' comments have been edited for length and clarity.