Great reads

I was busy over the weekend reading two novels by Rennie Airth — River of Darkness and The Blood-Dimmed Tide.

Both are set in England after World War I — one in 1921, the other in 1932 — and both are detective stories dealing with serial killers. They’re what I’d call literary, mystery novels. Good stuff.

Airth has a third John Madden mystery coming out in a few weeks.

Last week I read Michael McGarrity’s Nothing But Trouble, the 2006 addition to his series of Kevin Kerney mysteries. This one was really two stories — Kearney taking leave of his duties as Santa Fe Police Chief to work on a movie being made in the New Mexico Bootheel, and Kearney’s Army officer wife looking for a fugitive in Dublin. There’s almost no overlap. Odd.

McGarrity’s Kerney books are interesting to New Mexicans because of the local settings and I’ve enjoyed several of the series, especially those after he got his formula well-honed and before he got bored with it. Nothing special about this one.

Also recently, I’ve read my first two Nevada Barr Anna Pigeon mysteries, the first and the fifteenth (and latest) of the series featuring the National Park ranger. The two are Track of the Cat, set in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, and Borderline set in Big Bend National Park. Barr’s mysteries are well done and the settings are particularly interesting to any fan of the parks. I’ll be trying a few more of these soon, picking by parks that interest me as much as anything else.

I read Borderline on my iPhone.