The day their fans have waited for through seven mysteries is here:  Veterinarian Jessica Popper and lawyer Nick Burby are getting married.
But only a few pages into Cynthia Baxter’s “Murder Had a Little Lamb” (367 pages, Bantam, $7.99), the eighth entry in her “Reigning Cats and Dogs” series, things come to a screeching (literally) halt.  Just as Jessica is about to say “I do,” a scream comes from the kitchen of the estate that’s the site of the outdoor wedding.  Running into the house, Jessica and Nick find the body of Nathaniel Stibbins, a distant cousin of Nick’s that he and Jessica didn’t even know was invited to the wedding.
Nick’s imperious mother, Dorothy, orders Jessica, who has had some success as an amateur sleuth, to find out who killed Nathaniel.  To do so, Jessica volunteers to teach a class at a private girls school on Long Island where Nathaniel taught art.
There, she discovers that Nathaniel was a lying, ambitious, womanizing cad.  But who killed him?  The scorned headmistress, the frustrated colleague, a disgruntled student — or someone from his more distant past?
Jessica ferrets out the culprit, of course. And Baxter concocts another pleasurable tale a plausible plot, an appealing heroine and a crew of lovable critters.
And as for Jessica and Nick, you’ll have to read this one yourself to find out. 

Uninvited guests can be a real pain, but when one gets herself killed ...
That’s the problem facing Tricia Miles, owner of Haven’t Got a Clue mystery bookstore in Stoneham, N.H., in “Bookplate Special” (320 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $7.99), the third entry in Lorna Barrett’s series.
Tricia’s old college roommate, Pammy Fredericks, has been freeloading for two weeks when Tricia tells her it’s time to move on. Not long after, Pammy is found dead in a trash cart behind the restaurant owned by Tricia’s sister, Angelica.
Mix together a long-buried secret, a diary, blackmail, pumpkin vandalism and Tricia’s terrier-like determination to find the killer, and the plot moves quickly to an unexpected conclusion. And who could resist a cat named Miss Marple?
Barrett is skilled at making her characters flawed and fully believable. This book-based book is a perfect autumn read — right down to those smashed pumpkins — for mystery aficionados.

What a series of days for a former knight.
Crispin Guest returns for a second outing in Jeri Westerson’s “Serpent in the Thorns” (273 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), and the story’s even more exciting than “Veil of Lies,” the first in the series.
It’s 1384 in London, and Guest has been working as a tracker (a medieval private detective) since being stripped of his knighthood and property for participating in a failed plot against King Richard II seven years earlier; only the appeal of the king’s uncle saved Guest from execution.  This time around, he’s approached by a simple-minded kitchen girl who has found a body in the room she shares with her sister.
The body is that of a French courier sent with his colleagues to give a holy relic to Richard. The French hope that the gesture will end in a rapprochement between the two countries. As he investigates, Guest finds himself in mortal danger, under suspicion again of threatening the king’s life. Richard’s life is surely in peril, but Westerson’s plot twists several times before the would-be assassin’s identity is revealed.
Westerson is a devotee of all things medieval, and her scholarship shows in her fiction.  Combine the historical lore with an intricate plot and a winning protagonist, and this is a series with broad appeal.

It’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding.
It’s worse luck to kill her.
And it’s not good at all for Agatha Raisin in “There Goes the Bride” (277 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), the 20th entry in M.C. Beaton’s series featuring the intrepid if infuriating private detective in England’s Cotswolds.
Agatha and a group of friends have traveled to the wedding of Agatha’s ex-husband, James Lacey, to the lovely, dim-witted and much younger Felicity Bross-Tilkington. But Felicity is shot to death before she can arrive at the church, and Agatha and James fall under suspicion.
They’re soon cleared, but Agatha takes on the investigation, more bodies pile up and Agatha finds herself in peril before the case is closed.
Beaton’s books are quick, entertaining reads, and this one conforms nicely, with plenty of amusing excursions into Agatha’s life outside work.

The short story deserves a place on the endangered-species list, and the novella ... well, the novella may be nearing extinction.
But don’t tell that to award-winning novelist Peter Robinson, whose series featuring Detective Inspector Alan Banks of the Yorkshire police has won acclaim and popularity.
Now, in “The Price of Love and Other Stories” (356 pages, Morrow, $24.99), Robinson collects 12 shorter pieces, including two Banks novellas, two Banks stories and eight unrelated stories in a triumph equal to that of his novels.
The Banks novellas, of course, are the lure for longtime fans (and one of them, “Like a Virgin,” was written especially for this collection).  But don’t ignore Robinson’s non-Banks material.  “Cornelius Jubb” focuses on racial injustice during World War II, “Walking the Dog” turns the noir upside down, and “The Cherub Affair” plays off the private-detective stories of old, including the voluptuous blonde who shows up at the private eye’s shabby office seeking help. 
With an eye for the unexpected and a touch of the wry, Robinson treats readers to an old-fashioned, and extremely tasty, buffet.

The device is right out of Agatha Christie: The amateur sleuth gathers the suspects in the drawing room and unmasks the killer.
But in Mehmet Murat Somer’s “The Gigolo Murder” (255 pages, Penguin, $14), the amateur sleuth is an unnamed computer hacker by day and drag-queen club owner by night, and he/she’s a hoot.
Set in Istanbul and a sequel to Somer’s “The Kiss Murder,” this one’s a fine whodunit with elements of hacking, loan-sharking and blackmail, and an evocative picture of folks with different sexual orientations thrown together to solve a particularly nasty crime. 
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Instead of “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, perhaps we should ask “Who was Virginia Woolf afraid of?”.
It’s what the talented novelist Stephanie Barron does to dramatic and suspenseful effect in “The White Garden” (336 pages, Bantam, $15), an English period-piece mystery. And as she did in “A Flaw in the Blood,” a fictional take on Queen Victoria and the curse of hemophilia, Barron offers a shocking alternative to history.
The story begins when Jo Bellamy, a youngish garden designer from Delaware, wins a commission from a megamillionaire and his trophy wife to design for their estate in the Hamptons a copy of the white garden made famous by the British writer Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst Castle, where she lived with her writer and diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson.
But Jo has a connection beyond the professional one.  Her beloved grandfather, Jock Bellamy, was from Kent and had worked as a garden laborer at Sissinghurst before immigrating to the U.S.  And just a day after telling him about her new assignment, Jo is horrified to learn that the 84-year-old Jock has killed himself.
Once at Sissinghurst, Jo finds a diary marked “Jock’s book” that seems to have been the product of Woolf.  But the first entry is dated March 29, 1941 — a day after Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse but three weeks before her body washed up. But if Woolf didn’t die on March 28 and instead ran off to Sissinghurst to visit her former lover, Sackville-West, what happened in those three weeks that led to her real death? And where are the pages that have been torn from the book?
Jo sets out to learn more and connects with Peter Llewellyn, a rare-books expert at Sotheby’s who calls in his former wife, university professor Margaux Strand, for help. When Margaux absconds with the diary and Jo’s patron, Gray Westlake, inserts himself into the situation, Jo and Peter must try to regain the diary (and its missing pages) and solve its secrets.
Barron, whose prose is evocative and whose characters are engaging, excels at placing an ingenious stamp on the semi-historical novel, and her take on Woolf and her comrades in the British intelligentsia is fascinating, moving and disturbing.  The reader needs constant self-reminding that this is but a story, and it’s to Barron’s great credit that she makes fiction seem so unnervingly real.

If OCD stood for original chronic dread, Douglas Clegg would be its master.
The talented author of the spooky tale returns, in time for Halloween, with a little gem: “Isis” (128 pages, Vanguard Press, $14.95), a dark and chilling tale of calling back the dead.
Iris Villiers lives with her mother and two older twin brothers (the fourth child, the eldest son, is away at school) in her father’s ancestral estate in Cornwall.  Among the other inmates of the estate is her demented grandfather and a gardener who tells stories of recalling the dead to life.  And when a tragic accident claims the life of a beloved brother, Iris learns that she can speak to the dead, with terrifying consequences. 
Clegg, a native of Alexandria who lives in New England, is brilliantly adept at building the fright level at just the right pace, and “Isis” is no exception.  Turn down the lights and let this engrossing little tale cast its spell on an hour of your time. And let it teach you one of life’s valuable lessons:  letting go.

Some authors dazzle with a debut novel, only to find themselves never able to replicate their first effort. Others start out with a fairly good effort and improve, and that is the case with “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (288 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), the second entry in Deborah Grabien’s series featuring aging rocker JP Kinkaid.
As the book opens, JP — one of the megastars of Blacklight — is doing session work in San Francisco for his friends The Bombardiers. Trouble is, the group’s lead singer recently died, and his replacement is an arrogant and abrasive creep. When the creep is found dead — smashed in the forehead with his guitar — JP and his longtime love, Bree Godwin, again find themselves involved in a murder case.
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is more of a whodunit than Grabien’s debut, “Rock & Roll Never Forgets,” with Grabien creating a cast of suspects and playing fair with clues. What hasn’t changed is the keen sense of life backstage and all the hard work that goes into creating music that Grabien imparts to the reader. Rockers — aging or not — will find this enjoyable and realistic.

Among its more notable inhabitants are writers Honore de Balzac, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde and Richard Wright; singers Edith Piaf and Jim Morrison; composers George Bizet and Frederic Chopin; painters Rosa Bonheur and Camille Pissarro; actors Yves Montand and Simone Signoret; and even Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin.
In a second novel in the series featuring bookseller Victor Legris, “The Disappearance at Pere-Lachaise” (304 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), Claude Izner makes the famous Parisian — tourist attraction and artistic wonder — the scene of murder.
The seeds of Legris’ second investigation are sown when Odette de Valois disappears while visiting her husband’s family’s tomb in Pere-Lachaise in 1890. Her frightened maid, Denise — knowing that Victor and Odette had once been lovers — tells the bookseller her story. Not long after, Denise is found drowned in the Seine.
With an eye for detail and an intuitive sense of human nature, Legris solves a series of murders. And Izard includes a wealth of Parisian color and a complex plot that shows that Paris, a city of great generosity, is also a place where great greed is not unknown.

Roman Polanski’s distinguished and popular film “Chinatown” took an unlikely subject for its neo-noir mystery: the Los Angeles water system.
In his debut novel, “The Baker Street Letters” (277 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.95), Michael Robertson doubles down, with L.A.’s subway network and a famous London address: 221b Baker Street.
Lawyer Reggie Heath’s offices are in a building that takes up the entire 200 block of Baker Street and, as such, often receives letters to Sherlock Holmes.  His younger brother, Nigel, finds one fascinating:  Twenty years ago, an 8-year-old girl from L.A. wrote to Holmes about her father, a geological surveyor who went missing while mapping out plans for the subway.
Before Reggie can say “forget about it,” Nigel is off to Southern California.  Trouble is, a body has been found in his office, and another turns up near the now-grown child’s L.A. apartment — with Nigel nearby.
Reggie heads to L.A. and is soon joined by his actress girlfriend, Laura Rankin.  Together, they try to extricate Nigel from the mess he’s in and solve the case involving the missing surveyor, finding it necessary to go underground — literally — to crack the mystery.
Robertson writes with ingenuity and inventiveness, and “The Baker Street Letters” is a winning first entry in a projected series.

Two gangsters have been murdered, and a hard-boiled cop and a smooth-talking cop are called in to investigate.
If you think that sounds like any number of mysteries, you’d be wrong.  In Cornelius Kane’s “The Unscratchables” (259 pages, Scribner, $14), the victims are Rottweilers, the rough cop is a bull terrier, the charming one is a Siamese cat, and the laughs come on every page.
With puns on names, sly references to “Cats,” “The Silence of the Lambs” and other benchmarks of popular culture, Kane has created a unique satire and an intriguing mystery, one with plenty to say about contemporary society and that allegedly superior species, homo sapiens.  Fetch this one and curl up with it. 

Blending a mystery of the past with one of the present is no small task, but Oklahoma writer Marion Moore Hill accomplished it with seeming ease in “Deadly Will,” her first entry in the “Deadly Past” series.  Published three years ago, the novel introduced readers to Millie Kirchner and provided a fascinating look at the Philadelphia of 18th-century and the city as it is now.
For her second effort, Hill takes Millie to Virginia. The result is “Deadly Design” (329 pages, Pemberley Press, $17.95), and it’s another winner.
Millie and her 9-year-old son, Danny, have traveled from their Dallas home to Lynchburg.  Millie has volunteered for an archaeological dig at Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s retreat in Bedford County, and Danny will attend a history day camp there.
Millie, who is sharing an old house in Lynchburg with three other women, soon learns that a volunteer at a dig at nearby Highgrove (unlike Poplar Forest, Highgrove is fictional) has been murdered.  Highgrove has been rumored to have been designed by Jefferson, and there’s a web of intrigue surrounding the house, but the young woman’s death has been explained as robbery gone terribly wrong.
It takes a lot of digging — literal and figurative — but Millie connects the current murder with an old grave in Lynchburg and an even older journal — but not before another contemporary killing and excursions to Charlottesville and Williamsburg. 
Hill weaves all this together with a plausible plot with a multitude of suspects, a plucky and personable heroine, several characters who recur from “Deadly Will” —  and a wealth of Virginia history.
A rich and complex story, “Deadly Design” works on multiple levels.  Mystery fans, history buffs and people who revere Mr. Jefferson will find it irresistible.

The deathbed message is often poignant,  occasionally perilous.  And in the multitalented hands of Charles Todd, it’s profoundly powerful.
Todd, a mother-and-son writing team, has produced 11 worthy entries in the Ian Rutledge series and one stand-alone novel.  Their latest, “A Duty to the Dead” (329 pages, Morrow, $24.99), begins a new series and introduces Bess Crawford, a British gentlewoman and World War I nurse.
In 1916, Bess is heading home aboard the hospital ship Britannic when it is sunk in the Mediterranean.  Bess escapes, injured but determined to carry out a duty she has been putting off:  delivering a message from a dying soldier she had nursed.
Arthur Graham implored Bess to communicate this: “Tell Jonathan that I lied. I did it for Mother’s sake. But it has to be set right.”
When Bess arrives at the Graham estate, Arthur’s brothers Jonathan and Timothy, and their mother, seem unconcerned with Arthur’s dying words.  But when Bess learns that the trio’s elder half brother, Peregrine, is in an asylum for having killed a servant girl when he was 14, their lack of interest seems sinister.
Bess, a woman of principle and determination, cannot let matters lie and soon finds herself mired in a swamp of deception — and murder. The plucky heroine of the mystery genre is well-known — and sometimes annoying — but Bess is someone special, appealing and admirable.
Todd’s novels are known for compelling plotting with a thoughtful whodunit aspect, rich characterization, evocative prose and haunting atmosphere, and “A Duty to the Dead” excels at each. Another moving entry in a growing and distinguished body of work, it is neither easily put down nor easily forgotten. 

Mysteries that cater to special interests — beekeeping, bookselling, quilting and the like — have proliferated in the past several years.  And though they surely appeal to readers who share the particular passion, they must have a strong story line to find a wider audience.
One such series that does in Terri Thayer’s “Stamping Sisters” books, which features a group of women with an interest in decorative stamping.  “Inked Up” (260 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $6.99), the second in the series, centers on April Buchert and her boyfriend, Mitch Winchester.
April has returned to her hometown in northeastern Pennsylvania, where new boyfriend Mitch is building affordable housing for low-income families.  The first house is under way and is to go to the Villereal family — dad Pedro, mom Xenia and five children.  But not all are happy with Mitch’s plans. Although all the Villereals are U.S. natives, anti-immigration activists are unsettled. 
When Xenia’s body is found in a corn maze at an autumn festival, suspicion falls on Pedro.  But April is determined to clear his name.
A quick read with an interesting plot and amiable characters, “Inked Up” is also a lesson in the perils of bigotry and fraud.  

Single male seeks single female.  Object:  matrimony.
Or maybe murder.
That’s the problem facing handwriting expert Claudia Rose in “Dead Write” (310 pages, Obsidian, $6.99), the third entry in Sheila Lowe’s series.  Claudia has been summoned to New York by exotic Baroness Grusha Olinetsky, who runs an elite dating service.
But three of her clients are dead — one while skiing, one while scuba diving, one of a peanut allergy.  Convinced that her previous handwriting expert messed up and that someone is out to ruin her, Grusha hires Claudia to find out who.
What Claudia finds is a plethora of possibilities among Grusha’s clients, as well as the obsessive-compulsive physician and the needy psychologist Grusha uses.  And it’s not long before our heroine is in deadly peril.
With a smart story and an appealing protagonist, Lowe makes “Dead Write” dead right.  It’s the best whodunit yet in her series.

She’s best-known for her Sookie Stackhouse, Southern Vampire series, but Charlaine Harris began her mystery career with a series featuring Aurora Teagarden, a feisty, single librarian in a small town in Georgia (fictional Lawrenceton) upon which Atlanta’s sprawl is encroaching.
Long out of print, Berkley Prime Crime has now reprinted all eight novels in the series, which ran from 1989 to 2003: “Real Murders,” “A Bone to Pick,” “Three Bedrooms, One Corpse,” “The Julius House,” “Dead Over Heels,” “A Fool and His Honey,” “Last Scene Alive” and “Poppy Done to Death.” Each paperback costs $7.99.
Aurora is likable and savvy, and Harris makes the other recurring characters equally fascinating. Plenty of humor accompanies the genuinely puzzling plots, and Aurora goes through a series of life changes that mirror reality.
A word of warning: Because of Aurora’s changes and the number of reappearing characters, it’s important to read these books in order.

When last we left the intrepid actress Rita Farmer, she and her boyfriend, private detective George Rowe, had solved a major case, and she had given up acting and decided to go to law school.
But bills must be paid — particularly those pesky law school ones — so Rita takes a job as an extra in the second installment in Elizabeth Sims’ riveting series, “The Extra” (400 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.95).
This time out, Rita witnesses the beating of and tries to rescue a teenager in South Central Los Angeles. Turns out that his grandmother, Amaryllis B. Cubitt, one helped Rita when income was a problem, and Rita now wants to return the favor by finding out what happened to the grandson.
Amaryllis, who runs a big-time homeless shelter, seems reluctant to accept. But hard-headed Rita, with George’s help, plunges ahead anyway and soon finds herself in an intertwined plot involving drugs and dognapping, ambition and abortion and guilt and greed.
Sims, whose “The Actress” won high acclaim, outdoes herself in “The Extra.” With a story line that veers into myriad directions — but that comes together seamlessly — and an engaging lead character in Rita, she creates an intelligent thriller that’s sure to appeal to fans of complex plots and strong women.

One spade.  Two diamonds.  Four spades.
Four shots.
Therein lies the basis for Gary M. Pomerantz’s fascinating “The Devil’s Tickets: A Night of Bridge, a Fatal Hand, and a New American Age” (300 pages, Crown, $26) — a true-crime story, sure, but much more.
On Sunday morning, Sept. 29, 1929, Jack and Myrtle Bennett sat down in their posh Kansas City apartment to play bridge with their upstairs neighbors, Charles and Mayme Hofman. One badly bid and poorly played hand led to Myrtle calling Jack   “a bum bridge player” and Jack grabbing Myrtle and delivering several hard slaps to her face.  Jack, a philanderer, announced that he was leaving, but before he could, Myrtle grabbed a gun and in a haze of rage fired four shots.  Two struck Jack and proved fatal.
Riveting in and of itself, the fatal shooting serves as a springboard for Pomerantz, an author and journalist, to recount the story of how a contract-bridge craze swept the nation during the Roaring Twenties, largely at the hands of the self-promoting Ely Culbertson. 
But back to the homicide.  Myrtle, defended by former U.S. Sen. James A. Reed, another philandering husband, a Missouri Democrat and a product of Kansas City’s Pendergast machine, won acquittal in 1931 and basically vanished from the public eye.  Pomerantz uncovers the rest of her life, and it’s an intriguing — and not unsympathetic —  story.
Pomerantz paints detailed portraits of his subjects — Myrtle Bennett, Reed and Culbertson are particularly engrossing — as well as a nuanced picture of America as the Roaring Twenties crashed into the Great Depression.  “The Devil’s Tickets” is bound to appeal to bridge players and true-crime fans and should also win admirers from anyone interested in American social history. 

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us!” cried Hamlet when he saw his father’s ghost.
And angels and ministers of grace are out to defend the living and the dead in “Angel’s Advocate” (304 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $7.99), the second installment in Mary Stanton’s Beaufort & Company series.
Brianna “Bree” Winston-Beaufort is a living lawyer whose Savannah practice is assisted by angels. Their mission: defend the dead whose judgment in the afterlife has brought them, shall we say, down.
But this time, Bree has a living client, too: Lindsey Chandler, a rich brat who has stolen a child’s proceeds from the sale of Girl Scout cookies. And then there’s Lindsey’s father, the late Probert Chandler, killed in an apparent car wreck and appealing to the celestial court his sentence to the ninth circle of Hell.
The proceedings are highly original and plain fun, as Bree and her angelic colleagues wrap both cases up successfully.
One warning: Before picking up “Angel’s Advocate,” you should read “Defending Angels,” the first book in the series, to see how Bree got started in her unearthly law practice.

In the early 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for a lonely man to advertise for a wife.  The tale of one such couple is the subject of Robert Goolrick’s richly imagined first novel, “A Reliable Wife” (306 pages, Algonquin, $23.95).
In 1907, Ralph Truitt is the richest man in his little town in northern Wisconsin. His first wife — and Italian countess he married during his lusty youth — is long gone, their daughter is dead and the son his wife bore by another man has left Wisconsin.
Enter Catherine Land, who responds to Ralph’s ad. With an agenda of her own, Catherine is surprised to find herself developing real feelings for Ralph, whose sexuality is revived by his beautiful, “reliable” wife.
Goolrick, the author of the acclaimed memoir “The End of the World As We Know It,”  gives his novel so many twists — some expected, some shocking — that the reader feels compelled to see how this story of hearts under siege ends. 
At once sordid and sweet, “A Reliable Wife” is a powerful cautionary tale about the destruction that the failure to forgive can wreak — and an ultimately uplifting testament to the redemptive power of love.  Unsettling and uncommon, it will leave you marveling at Goolrick’s ability tell a gripping story in breathtakingly original prose.