By Tom Nolan

Shona Sandison, the Scottish journalist at the center of Philip Miller's "The Diary of Lies" (Soho Crime, 304 pages, $29.95), specializes in breaking news about "bad people doing bad things for bad reasons." The relentlessly single-minded Shona, who walks with the aid of a cane, lives from one exposé to the next. Her latest investigation begins when Reece Proctor, the head of a mysterious think tank, buttonholes Shona at a London awards ceremony and promises an explosive story for her next scoop. Reece, who has eyes "the color of belly button fluff" and teeth "like the keys of an electric keyboard," doesn't offer specifics but sets up a rendezvous at a townhouse. There Shona finds his dead body and flees a hammer-wielding assailant.

Shona, wary of telling the police, wonders if she can glean an explanation from Moriah, the well-placed anonymous source for her last big article. "Moriah was, perhaps, at the center of government -- conceivably a minister. Or a senior civil servant." Shona last communicated with Moriah through an intermediary who gave her a cryptic note: "Find Grendel." What's Grendel, besides the name of the monster in "Beowulf"? Is it connected to Reece's demise? And who's Moriah? "Such an odd cover name," Shona's editor muses, "the mountain where Abraham bound his son."

Mr. Miller's strikingly written novel, the third to feature Shona, is veined with symbols and images evoking Britain's Anglo-Saxon past. There is an allegorical aspect to this finely wrought work, which has surprising links to the two earlier series entries. Symbolism aside, what makes "The Diary of Lies" so engrossing is the author's accomplished prose, which evokes a dark and dangerous world.

Lisbeth Salander, the Swedish superhacker and avenging angel created by Stieg Larsson, continues her extraordinary adventures in Karin Smirnoff's "The Girl With Ice in Her Veins" (Knopf, 384 pages, $29). Ms. Smirnoff is the second writer to extend the series since Larsson's death in 2004.

In this exciting work, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death, Lisbeth deals with the disappearance of her hacking friend Plague. Marcus Branco, the head of a high-tech criminal outfit, is certain Lisbeth's brilliant niece, Svala, possesses the encrypted key to a bitcoin fortune he craves. He sets a coldblooded minion the tasks of kidnapping Svala and thwarting Lisbeth and her journalist associate Mikael Blomkvist from prying into his affairs.

Meanwhile, Svala is caught up with the efforts of a band of eco-protestors to halt the reopening of a polluted mine. When another protester is found dead at the bottom of a junkyard pit, Svala vows revenge on those responsible.

Other story strands follow a civic leader who has forged dangerous ties with a Greco-Chinese business tycoon, and an assassin, known as the Cleaner, who fatally disposes of Marcus' enemies. "The Girl With Ice in Her Veins" would be memorable for its over-the-top characters alone, but the book's mounting tensions and moral horrors guarantee that it is fully up to the standard of its celebrated predecessors.

"Gray Dawn" (Mulholland, 336 pages, $29), the latest novel in Walter Mosley's series narrated by the black Los Angeles private investigator Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, is set in the 1970s. Easy is 52 and at the peak of his career, the head of his own detective agency and living rent-free in a privately patrolled mountaintop home. Yet he feels discontented, "a prisoner in a paradise of my own making," and longs for the usefulness he felt as a younger man involved in "a simple and straightforward case. . . . Just thinking that there was somebody out there that I could find, a manhunt that needed doing, seemed to offer solace. It would be a joy to lose myself in a job."

Easy thinks he's gotten such an assignment when a brutish fellow named Santangelo Burris asks the detective to find his Aunt Lutisha. "There wasn't a doubt in my mind that this man was lying about something," Easy thinks. "But that didn't matter. . . . It was my job to reveal lies. That's what detectives do." Easy's hunt for Lutisha brings him to a house in the wealthy neighborhood of Bel-Air where she's said to have been working. There he finds three murder victims and a weeping young girl who clings to him. Clearly this isn't the simple case it was supposed to be.

"Gray Dawn" features other complex labors for Easy: his adopted son's problems with law enforcement; the reappearance of Easy's most dangerous old flame; more killings; and the revelation of a head-spinning secret from deep in Easy's past. One of the many pleasures of Mr. Mosley's series is seeing how Easy's tolerance and understanding mature -- even as his personal code of honor remains as solid as ever.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

September 12, 2025 10:34 ET (14:34 GMT)

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