The Secret Keeper
By Kate Morton

Secrets and passion drive Australian author Morton’s latest, which flashes between the present, as matriarch Dorothy Nicholson lies on her deathbed, and 1941 and 1961. Dorothy, Jimmy, and Vivien met in wartime London, and the consequences of their friendship ripple through generations. Murder, conspiracies, and switched identities haunt the plot, with daughter Laurel (who, as a youngster, witnessed her mother killing a man) trying to unravel the twisted skeins.

No Clue Where to Shelve These: 6 Women’s Fiction Novels That Think They’re Mysteries
By Rebecca Vnuk

Women’s fiction is the hardest genre to pin down—probably because it’s not even a genre, per se, it’s actually a “reading interest.” Women’s fiction books can be funny, sad, suspenseful, historical, and, yes—even mysterious. Following are six novels that couldn’t quite decide whether they wanted to be women’s fiction or straight mystery. Although most of these books have been billed as mysteries (and may even be so branded on the cover), libraries should consider shelving them in general fiction, as die-hard mystery fans may be less than impressed.

As Husbands Go . By Susan Isaacs. 2010. Scribner, paper, $15 (9781416573081).

Top 10 Crime Fiction Audiobooks
By Karen Harris

Crime fiction has gone global in this year’s list, featuring titles that appeared in Booklist from May 1, 2012, through April 1, 2013, and are set in locales spanning from North America to the UK and Europe. But wherever the setting and whatever the circumstances, the forces of law are ever present.

The Beautiful Mystery . By Louise Penny. Read by Ralph Cosham. 2012. 13hr. Macmillan, CD, $39.99 (9781427226099); DD, $23.99 (9781427226105).

A monastery of cloistered monks in Quebec is an unlikely place for murder, and it’s up to persistent and analytical Inspector Gamache, portrayed to perfection by Cosham, to solve the crime.

Sniffing Out Clues: 12 Children’s Mysteries Solved by Animal Detectives
By Ilene Cooper and Keir Graff

From Walter R. Brooks’ pig who turned detective in Freddy the Detective (1932), to Don and Joan Caufield’s bulldog, crow, and cat in The Incredible Detectives (1966), children’s mysteries have long offered a veritable Noah’s ark of possibilities. And why not? Animals’ noses are closer to the ground, all the better to sniff out clues. Here we round up a dozen favorite books featuring sleuths that include a rabbit, a raccoon, a lizard, a guinea pig, rats, bunnies—and, of course, cats and dogs.

Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery . By Deborah and James Howe. Illus. by Alan Daniel. 1979. Atheneum, paper, $5.99 (9781416928171). Gr. 3–5.

My Raygun Is Quick: 8 of the Best SF Mysteries
By David Pitt

Gene Roddenberry famously (and possibly apocryphally) pitched Star Trek to the networks in the 1960s as “Wagon Train to the stars”—a western, in other words, with newfangled costumes and weapons and ways of getting around. You see, even when we’re trying to boldly go where no man has gone before, we tend to imagine it will be like someplace we’ve already been. And science fiction is a relatively young genre: legendary magazine editor Hugo Gernsback may have used the term in the mid-1920s, but the phrase didn’t show up in a book title (we think) until The Pocket Book of Science Fiction was published in 1946. So it’s only natural that sf creators would borrow stories and themes from other genres as they defined the conventions of their own.