January 27, 2026

In his preface, author Con Lehane says that this is the last book in what seems to have been a well-received series featuring Raymond Ambler, the curator of a New York library devoted to crime fiction. Ambler’s personal life seems messy. He has an adult son, a grandson, and a new baby daughter with on/off partner Adele.

A researcher, Dr Robin Cartwright, had been using the library, and when she is found dead in a pay-by-the-hour hotel room, the police find Ambler’s details on her cell phone.The police are reluctant to treat the death as homicide. Yes, she died of suffocation, but there is no evidence of extreme violence. They even speculate that it might be a case of over-adventurous love making gone wrong.

It seems that Dr Cartwright, in researching past cases for her thesis, had come up with the name of someone from her past. Was her killer trying to prevent his (or her) name from being made public? The first thing that will strike even the doziest reader early in the book is its title and, by contrast, the less-than-salubrious hotel bedroom where the body was found.

Lehane throws in an early suspect, the over unctuous and pettifogging librarian Blake Beasley (rhymes with Weasly) but surely it is too soon in the narrative for the villain to be identified? Ambler works his way through Dr Cartwright’s case files of killers who escaped justice. There’s Ricardo Diaz, a charismatic lawyer who may have murdered his girlfriend with drugs; Cartwright had highlighted a decorated serviceman who was suspected of causing the death of one of her best friends; then there’s ‘Pastor’ Kilgore, a bogus small town preacher, at the wheel of the car that ended the life of teenager Anna Paxton, rumoured to have been seduced by him Also in the frame is Robin’s former husband George Nagy, terminally attracted to younger women, but with a renewed fascination for his former wife.

As with all amateur sleuths since the dawn of crime fiction writing, the abiding implausabiity is that of just how much time folk who are neither retired nor independently wealthy manage to devote to their investigations. Ray Ambler manages to hold down his job at the 42nd Street library despite frequent highway trips or flights to various parts of America. That said, this is a convincing, quirky and well written whodunnit with just enough of that ‘extra something’ to keep us interested. It will be published by Severn House on 3rd February.

Jeffrey Siger temporarily abandons his Greek crime thrillers to bring us to New York, where an elderly former intelligence agent lives a solitary life, cared for by his housekeeper, a Mrs Baker. The man, known to us only as Michael, lives in a grand townhouse numbered 221. So, we can see the drift. While this isn’t remotely a Sherlockian pastiche, the shadow of the great man hovers in the background. Michael is formidably rich, but rarely ventures beyond his front door step, preferring to observe the passers by in the park beneath his window. One of the park’s regular visitors is a young woman. When it transpires that she was forced by circumstances to part of a complex ring involving precious antiques, their sellers – and their clandestine buyers – Michael decides to come out of retirement. He ponders his decision:

“For so long, I’d taken such great care to maintain a detached existence for myself, a life safely confined to conjecture, reflection, and surmise, far removed from taking part in those human dramas that inexorably draw so many to misfortune, pain, and loss. I’d found my Walden Pond in the park, or so I’d thought.”

Michael rescues the young woman – Angel – and resolves to put an end to the racket which has put her life in danger. Angel was basically homeless, because she discovered the body of her former boss, a man called Carlucci, at the sleazy apartment where she and other girls employed in his racket, lived.

At the centre of the plot are a brother and sister, Dr Marilena Sinclair and Dr Brackett Fielding (one a psychiatrist and the other a psychologist) who have ‘acquired’ a priceless artifact from a deceased woman patient. The woman was the estranged wife of a notorious called Victor Persky mobster and she took the antique to spite him. Now, Persky wants his treasure back, and cares not one jot if Sinclair and Fielding have to die in the process.

The plot has another complication. A young woman called Maria, another courier in Carlucci’s crooked auction business, was allowed to die of a drug overdose in the squalid tenement where the girls lived. Her body was later found in a dumpster. Her brother, Daniel Rudolph, is ex military, and Michael eventually discovers that he was Carlucci’s killer. There is an engaging cast of supporting actors. Housekeeper Mrs Baker is certainly more forthright than the good lady who ran 221B Baker Street, and Michael’s old friend who runs a popular local diner, is a shrewd and resourceful ally, as Michael constructs an elaborate plane to defeat Persky.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable tale, quirky and sharp, although Michael’s ability to disarm and disable gang-bangers and mobster heavies with – literally – a twirl of his cane stretches one’s credulity somewhat. This novel, which looks to be the first of a series called Redacted Man Mysteries, will be published by Severn House on 3rd February.