Unconventional Settings in Crime Fiction

A group of thirtysomething friends from Oxford meets to welcome the new year together, a tradition that started ten years ago as students. This year, they’ve chosen an isolated estate in the Scottish Highlands as their escape. With champagne in front of a fire and reminiscences of the past, they’re off to a great start for their trip. But the weight of their secret resentments for one another has grown too heavy to bear. A blizzard shuts them off from the outside world and two days later, on New Year’s Day, one of them is dead. Keep your friends close, but how close?

Mina tries to focus on her job as a flight attendant during the inaugural nonstop flight from London to Sydney but can’t stop thinking about her fracturing marriage or her five-year-old daughter. This changes when she receives an anonymous, chilling note from a passenger who intends to ensure the plane will never reach its destination. As passengers start dying, Mina knows she mush act but needs to decide whether to save her passengers or her family.

We’re pulled into a reading room at the Boston Public Library. The quiet is shattered by a woman’s terrified scream. Security guards instruct everyone to stay put until the threat is identified. Four strangers who coincidentally sit next to each other strike a conversation and learn each other’s reasons for being in the reading room that morning. But one of them is a murderer. In this unexpected literary mystery, Gentill examines the complexities of friendship and shows how dangerous words can be.

In this Murder on the Orient Express meets the Tour de France, Marc Moreau, a professional cyclist, is part of a top team for the Tour de France. The team is led by his best friend, an American star favored to win. But once the competition starts, a series of violent accidents take out racers one by one. From crushing ankles to food poisoning, the teams retreat into a paranoid lockdown despite having to race the next day. With his military past, Marc agrees to help the French police and is convinced the murderer is a cyclist who wants to win, no matter the cost.

Selena Murphy meets a beautiful stranger while commuting home on a train. Their conversation brings both to confess affairs in their life, Martha with her boss and, possibly, Selena’s husband with their nanny. The women part ways, expecting to never see each other again. But then her nanny disappears. Selena is pulled into the mystery of what happened while the fractures in her marriage grow deeper. Who was Martha really?