Historical Fiction Stars - Mystery, Suspense, Thrillers and Crime Fiction: 2004

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless otherwise noted.

Historical fiction is loosely defined on this page - a book set 25 years ago may qualify for inclusion.

• Murder on the Leviathan: An Erast Fandorin Mystery
  Author: Akunin, Boris
  Publisher: Random $ 21.95 ISBN: 1400060516 Date: 2004
  Kirkus
  Paris, March, 1878: When Lord Littleby is discovered in his rue Grenelle residence with his head bashed in, surrounded by the bodies of seven servants and two children who appear to have died from overdoses of morphine, the distinguished Paris police commissioner Gauche is determined to solve the case.
  Suggested Reading: Adult Books for Teens
  Updated 2.23.04
• Q
  Author: Blissett, Luther
  Publisher: Harcourt $ 26 ISBN: 0151010633 Date: 2004
  Booklist
  Amidst the chaos of the Reformation Age, a young theology student adopts the cause of heretics and the disinherited and finds himself pursued by those keen to spill the blood of any would-be supporter of Martin Luther.
  Updated 2.5.04
• The Siren Queen: Ursula Blanchard
  Author: Buckley, Fiona
  Publisher: Scribner $ 25 ISBN: 0743237528 Date: 2004
  PW
  The latest richly evocative and impressively researched mystery in a series that seamlessly blends riveting authenticity and masterful storytelling reveals the inside story behind Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots.
  Updated 10.4.04
• The Cloud Atlas
  Author: Callahan, Liam
  Publisher: Delacorte $ 22.95 ISBN: 0385336942 Date: 2004
  Kirkus LJ
  In a richly inspired debut reminiscent of Snow Falling on Cedars and The English Patient, this stirring novel, set against a magnificent Alaskan backdrop, reveals one of the most closely guarded secrets of World War II in a tale that is both a heart-quickening mystery and a unique love story.
  Suggested Reading: Fiction & Mystery Debuts | World War Stars
  Updated 3.1.04
• The Damascended Blade: The Third Novel Featuring Detective Joe Sandilands
  Author: Cleverly, Barbara
  Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 25 ISBN: 078671333x Date: 2004
  PW
  The deadly edge of the final days of the Raj is the backdrop for this third engrossing novel in the popular Joe Sandilands series.
  Updated 6.14.04
• Road to Purgatory
  Author: Collins, Max Allan
  Publisher: Morrow $ 24.95 ISBN: 0060540273 Date: 2004
  PW
  This powerful narrative follow-up to the acclaimed graphic novel Road to Perdition opens with Michael O'Sullivan returning to Chicago and his old war against the Capone mob. Interwoven is the parallel tale of his father, chief enforcer to Irish godfather John Looney.
  Updated 11.22.04
• The Accusers
  Author: Davis, Lindsey
  Publisher: Mysterious $ 25 ISBN: 0892968117 Date: 2004
  PW
  The 15th novel in the popular series finds the "Sam Spade in a toga" confronting forces that threaten him and his family's financial safety.
  Updated 2.16.04
• Garden of Beasts: A Novel of Berlin 1936
  Author: Deaver, Jeffrey
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 24.95 ISBN: 0743222016 Date: 2004
  PW Library Journal
  Called the reigning "master of ticking-bomb suspense" (People), Deaver has written a gripping international thriller--with a range of real political figures and Olympic athletes--that introduces his most psychologically complex hero to date.
  Suggested Reading: World War Stars | Adult Books for Teens
  Updated 5.20.04
• Dark Voyage
  Author: Furst, Alan
  Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 1400060184 Date: 2004
  Kirkus Booklist PW
  Tangier, April 1941. In the tradition of The Polish Officer and Blood of Victory, Dark Voyage is Alan Furst at his best - a superb adventure of historical espionage at sea and in the waterfront alleys of port cities, as a decent, good-hearted man becomes a fighting hero in an increasingly threatening world. - Publisher Marketing.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars| Espionage | World War Stars
  Updated 7.19.04
• The Grenadillo Box
  Author: Gleeson, Janet
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 25 ISBN: 0743246861 Date: 2004
  Booklist
  The debut novel from the bestselling author of The Arcanum transports readers to 18th century Georgian England for an intricate, romantic tale of murder and intrigue.
  Suggested Reading: Fiction & Mystery Debuts | Antique Mysteries
  Updated 11.25.03
• An Antic Disposition: A Medieval Mystery
  Author: Gordon, Alan
  Publisher: Minotaur $ 23.95 ISBN: 0312300964 Date: 2004
  PW
  In 1204 A.D., The Fool's Guild, on the run from an enraged Innocent III and the Papal troops, has established a secret guildhall in the Black Forest. While laying low, one of the great stories of the Guild's history is revealed--how in 1157 A.D., the Guild intervened in a complicated, soon to be bloody dispute over the crown of Denmark.
  Updated 12.29.03
• Murder in Montparnasse: A Phryne Fisher Mystery
  Author: Greenwood, Kerry
  Publisher: Poisoned Pen $ 24.95 ISBN: 1590580427 Date: 2004
  LJ
  Seven Australian soldiers carousing in Paris in 1918 unknowingly witness a murder and their presence has devastating consequences. Ten years later, two are dead under very suspicious circumstances. Phryne Fisher's friends, Bert and Cec--part of this group of soldiers--appeal to her for help.
  Updated 6.1.04
• Dead Water
  Author: Hambly, Barbara
  Publisher: Bantam $ 25 ISBN: 0553109642 Date: 2004
  PW
  The stunning, much-beloved January mystery series continues with a suspenseful installment that sets a free man of color on a perilous steamboat ride that becomes an inescapable passage to death and murder.
  Updated 7.6.04
• Lucifer's Shadow
  Author: Hewson, David
  Publisher: Delacorte $ 21.95 ISBN: 0385337949 Date: 2004
  Booklist
  When Daniel Forster, a young Englishman, arrives in Venice, he is soon drawn into a treacherous game of deception spanning three centuries, from the Venice of Vivaldi and Rousseau to the violence of the present day.
  Suggested Reading: Venice | Music and Fiction
  Updated 5.7.04
• First Do No Harm
  Author: Karp, Larry
  Publisher: Poisoned Pen $ 24.95 ISBN: 159058130x Date: 2004
  Booklist
  The past comes rearing up to bite the next generation when a son digs too deep into his family's past.... Martin Firestone can't figure why his father, the eccentric painter Leo Firestone, is throwing a fit. All Martin did was tell his dad he'd been accepted to medical school. Then, Leo tells Martin a story about his own father, Dr. Samuel Firestone, an extraordinarily gifted doctor and a living legend in the small city of Hobart, NJ, but a man with a serious character flaw. During the summer of 1943, while Leo worked as Samuel's extern, he witnessed some highly questionable behavior. Illegal abortions, supplying heroin to an addict, black-market pharmaceuticals, babies sold to adoptive parents-all in a day's work for Samuel Purdue, M.D. When Leo decided his father was covering up a murder, he and his girlfriend, stage-struck Harmony, followed a trail of clues into the Fleischmann Scrapyard. There, they ran afoul of old Oscar Fleischmann, Samuel's longtime nemesis. By the time Leo realized he and Harmony were in far over their sixteen-year-old heads, it was too late to call off the investigation. But there are loose threads in Leo's story. Martin picks them up, and sixty years after the fact, goes snooping in Hobart. And like his father, he comes away with a whole lot more junk than he'd bargained for. - Publisher Marketing.
  Updated 9.22.04
• Sunset and Sawdust
  Author: Lansdale, Joe R.
  Publisher: Knopf $ 22 ISBN: 0375414533 Date: 2004
  Booklist
  A fast-moving, steamy murder mystery set in depression-era East Texas, this new story is from a writer the Washington Post has praised as "a terrifically gifted storyteller with a sharp country-boy wit."
  Updated 3.22.04
• The Spectacle of Corruption
  Author: Liss, David
  Publisher: Random $ 24.95 ISBN: 0375508554 Date: 2004
  Kirkus Booklist
  Benjamin Weaver, the quick-witted pugilist-turned-private-investigator, returns in Liss's sequel to the Edgar Award-winning novel, A Conspiracy of Paper.
  Updated 3.22.04
• Amagansett
  Author: Mills, Mark
  Publisher: Putnam $ 24.95 ISBN: 0399151842 Date: 2004
  LJ Booklist
  Amagansett is a novel as sweeping and haunting as the landscape of sky and sea it evokes. Beautifully and powerfully told, it announces the arrival of a gifted writer who skillfully weaves together a delicate love story, a brutal murder, an unforgettable evocation of a place and time, and characters shaped by the epic forces of nature, class, war, and memory. - Publisher Marketing.
  Updated 8.12.04
• Chaucer and the House of Fame
  Author: Morgan, Phillipa
  Publisher: Carroll & Graf $ 25 ISBN: 0786714662 Date: 2004
  PW Booklist
  The famed Medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer must turn sleuth in this surprising and imaginative first novel.
  Suggested Reading: Debuts
  Updated 9.7.04
• Little Scarlet: Easy Rawlins
  Author: Mosley, Walter
  Publisher: Little Brown $ 24.95 ISBN:0316073032 Date: 2004
  Booklist PW Kirkus LJ
  An irresistible story of love and death, this latest Easy Rawlins mystery takes place during the devastating 1965 Watts riots. Easy's hunt for a killer reveals a new city emerging from the ashes--and a new life for Easy and his friends.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars | African American Stars
  Updated 6.1.04
• Death of an Effendi
  Author: Pearce, Michael
  Publisher: Poisoned Pen $ 24.95 ISBN: 1590580664 Date: 2004
  Booklist
  The latest in Michael Pearce's charming, award-winning series set in Edwardian Egypt. Cairo, 1909.The murder capital of the world, where deaths are two a piastre. But the death of an effendi? That is something different. Because effendis - the Egyptian ilite - are important. Especially if - in a country ruled by foreigners - they happen to be foreign. When Tvardovsky, an effendi and a foreigner, is shot at a gathering of financiers, Gareth Owen - the Mamur Zapt, Chief of Cairo's Secret Police - is called in to investigate. But is he the right man for the job? In some countries, if someone goes for a walk, or a boat ride, with the Head of the Secret Police and doesn't come back, it's best not to ask any questions. And there are powerful people who might have preferred Tvardovsky dead. As the maverick financier said, before going on the fatal shooting party, there were still crocodiles in Egypt. Of all kinds. And perhaps the place to look for them was Crocodilopolis, the ancient City of the Crocodiles, where the financiers were to hold their meeting. It is when the crocodiles start cooperating, said Tvardovsky, that you really have to watch out. - Publisher Marketing.
  Updated 6.10.04
• Shoulder the Sky
  Author: Perry, Anne
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 25.95 ISBN: 0345456548 Date: 2004
  PW
  The taut, inspiring sequel to No Graves As Yet continues Perry's acclaimed World War I series, which follows the lives of the Reavley family amid the horrors of war.
  Suggested Reading: World War Stars | Adult Books for Teens
  Updated 7.26.04
• Cottonwood
  Author: Phillips, Scott
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 23.95 ISBN: 0345461002 Date: 2004
  Kirkus
  The author of The Ice Harvest and The Walkaway returns with a novel set in 1870s and 1880s Kansas and California.
  Updated 11.24.03
• Five for Silver
  Author: Reed, Mary and Eric Mayer
  Publisher: Poisoned Pen $ 24.95 ISBN: 1590581121 Date: 2004
  PW
  The year is 542. While plague stalks Constantinople, an angel sets John the Eunuch on the trail of a human killer. Peter, John's elderly servant, claims a heavenly visitor revealed a murder to him. It transpires Peter's old army friend has indeed been stabbed, but then John discovers that Gregory was not what he appeared to be. Is the solution to the mystery to be found in a hidden identity, in the will made by a dying ship owner with a wayward son, or perhaps even amid the oracles in the merchant's garden? John's quest leads him to churchmen and whores, lawyers and bear trainers. Suspects include a dealer in dubious antiquities, a resourceful bookseller, a court poet fixated on bereavement, and a holy fool who outrages the city by dancing with the dead and invading the empress' private bath. Only a man of unbending principle could hope to find justice in a terrified city where the good and the bad are struck down indiscriminately, where disorder rules, and where witnesses may die before they can be questioned. A city, in short, where death is the murderer's accomplice. - Publisher Marketing.
  Updated 3.22.04
• Petty Treason: A Sarah Tolerance Mystery
  Author: Robins, Madeleine E.
  Publisher: Forge $ 24.95 ISBN: 0765304007 Date: 2004
  LJ
  Updated 9.20.04
• Judgment of Caesar: A Novel of Ancient Rome
  Author: Saylor, Steven
  Publisher: Minotaur $ 24.95 ISBN: 0312271190 Date: 2004
  Kirkus Booklist PW
  In the late days of the Roman civil war, Gordianus the Finder is caught in Egypt in the midst of the last struggle between Pompeii and Julius Caesar, and between Ptolemy and Cleopatra while he searches for his missing wife.
  Suggested Reading: All Stars | Egyptian Stars | Adult Books for Teens
  Updated 5.10.04
• Birds of a Feather
  Author: Winspear, Jacqueline
  Publisher: Soho $ 25 ISBN: 1569473684 Date: 2004
  PW
  Maisie Dobbs is back and this time she has been hired to find a wealthy grocery magnate's missing daughter. The case is complicated by the violent deaths of three of the heiress' friends. Maisie discovers that the answers lie in the unforgettable agony of The Great War.
  Updated 5.3.04