{"id":11479,"date":"2025-07-28T06:59:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-28T10:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11479"},"modified":"2025-07-27T19:12:30","modified_gmt":"2025-07-27T23:12:30","slug":"a-murderous-reading-vacation-right-in-your-own-back-yard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11479","title":{"rendered":"A Murderous Reading Vacation–Right in Your Own Back Yard"},"content":{"rendered":"
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So your friends are off to the Jersey Shore or Thailand or the Maritime Provinces. You can have your own exciting vacation right from the ol\u2019 lounge chair. Here are five recent crime stories that will give you a taste of sea, sand, and foreign climes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pele\u2019s Prerogative<\/a> by Albert Tucher<\/em><\/strong>
If a Hawai`i vacation is just what you need, you\u2019ll find plenty of local color to make you think you\u2019ve vacationed in that island paradise. Pele, you\u2019ll recall, is the goddess of volcanoes and fire who created the Hawaiian Islands. The flowing lava creates lava tubes, akin to cave systems. Seventy-three-year-old Langston Otsaka, is found dead at the bottom of a lava tube in his back yard, and the wound on the back of his head suggests it wasn\u2019t an accidental. Read my full review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Runaway Horses<\/a> by the Italian literary duo Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini<\/em><\/strong>
Lawyer Enzo Maggioni and his wife Valeria, traveling to Siena, encounter a violent hailstorm, take a wrong turn, and end up at an enormous villa, where they remain guests for several days. They\u2019ve arrived shortly before Siena\u2019s August Palio, a centuries-old event in which horses race three laps around the town\u2019s Piazza del Campo. The competition is vigorous and not always fair. Then there\u2019s the dead jockey in the library. My full review is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Killer Potential<\/a> by Hannah Deitch<\/em><\/strong>
This story sneaks up on you and before long has its claws in you good and solid. From the moment Evie Gordon walks up to her clients\u2019 quirky Southern California mansion and finds the front door wide open, you know she\u2019s about to uncover something better avoided. A young woman is tied up inside, and Evie\u2019s employers are dead. When suspicion falls on the two women, they go on the run across the US\u2014a 2025 Thelma and Louise. Here\u2019s the full review<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sayulita Sucker<\/a> by Craig Terlson<\/em><\/strong>
In this story, set in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, you\u2019ll visit back alleys and dicey neighborhoods not featured in any guidebook. Luke Fischer barrels through the pages as unstoppable as a locomotive. He\u2019s not always polite, prefers beer to wine, and raises a dust storm wherever he goes. Yet, he has an uncanny knack for finding missing people. This time, his client is a man whose teenager daughter has disappeared. Full review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Murder Takes a Vacation<\/a> by Laura Lippman<\/em><\/strong>
The acclaimed author\u2019s first cozy mystery is a delight. Muriel Blossom, widowed and newly wealthy, has planned her first trip to Europe\u2014Paris and a splurgy river cruise. You might suspect that Lippman has an older auntie or family friend who inspired her to so perfectly create open-hearted, na\u00efve Mrs. Blossom. From the first page, you\u2019ll peg her as the inevitable victim of an assortment of solicitous character. Read the full review<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n

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So your friends are off to the Jersey Shore or Thailand or the Maritime Provinces. You can have your own exciting vacation right from the ol\u2019 lounge chair. Here are five recent crime stories that will give you a taste … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1335,52,40,3,632,126],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amateur-detective","category-crime","category-fiction","category-mystery","category-police","category-reading-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Z9","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11483,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11479\/revisions\/11483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}