Historical mysteries have an enduring popularity, but authors must be careful to balance history and mystery — particularly when fact and fiction are blended.
J. Sydney Jones’ “Requiem in Vienna” (293 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), a follow-up to last year’s “The Empty Mirror,” takes place in the Austrian capital in 1899.  Lawyer Karl Werthen is approached by a young woman, Alma Schindler, who believes her friend Gustav Mahler, the noted composer, is in danger (Schindler and Mahler are real-life characters).
And indeed he is.  But Mahler’s relationships with others are notably discordant, so Werthen and his cohort, real-life criminologist Hanns Gross, are faced with a symphony of suspects.
Like its predecessor, “Requiem in Vienna” is pitch perfect, with an intriguing plot, interesting characters and a wealth of Viennese color — including the rampant anti-Semitism that for so long marred Vienna’s culture.  And the musical lore is worthy of note, too, as Mahler and his world are recalled to life.

The Florida mystery-thriller has blossomed into a thriving subgenre, with skilled such practitioners as Carl Hiassen, Edna Buchanan and Tom Corcoran.  Some have a touch of humor and some detail police procedure, but all are awash in the Sunshine State’s dark side.
And, in the case of James W. Hall, with violence.
Silencer (276 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99) is the 12th novel in Hall’s series featuring Thorn, a middle-aged guy who lives quietly in the Florida Keys.  In this novel’s immediate predecessor, Thorn inherited a vast estate from a grandmother he didn’t know he had.
Now, he’s in the process of making a deal that would give his land east of Sarasota to the state for permanent preservation.  So is Earl Hammond Jr., who owns an even larger tract near Lake Okeechobee.
But before the papers are signed, Hammond is killed, Thorn is kidnapped and the mayhem spins out of control.  One of Hammond’s grandsons is his heir apparent; the other, a Miami mounted-unit cop, is the prodigal. Both, and the heir’s wife, play key roles in Hall’s addictive story.
Hall writes with grit and passion (and occasional lyricism when describing wild Florida), and Thorn is an endlessly engaging character.  Like this entire series,  “Silencer” will leave you in silent awe.

Classical music can be serene — or not — but the world of performing it is often tempestuous.
And that’s the case in “Paganini’s Ghost” (275 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), Paul Adam’s second novel featuring violin maker Gianni Castiglione and his police detective friend, Antonio Guastafeste.
Niccoló Paganini’s famous violin, il Connone (the Cannon) is kept in Genoa and is taken out only every other year, to be played in concert by the winner of an international competition. But this year’s winner, young Russian Yevgeny Ivanov, detects a troubling buzz. The violin is taken to Castiglione, who quickly fixes it, and the concert goes on.
But not long after, a Parisian art dealer François Villeneuve is found murdered, and his wallet contains a scrap of sheet music that belongs to Ivanov. When Ivanov goes missing, Adam lets his theme and variations play out contrapuntally.
Castiglione is a fully fleshed, fascinating character, and readers will enjoy his second appearance. And Adam creates another fine cast (with some recurring from his earlier book, “The Rainaldi Quartet”), as well as a complex and entertaining plot, in which much depends on Paganini’s history, recounted in fascinating detail as part of the storyline.
Adam writes with a welcome combination of panache and restraint, and he makes “Paganini’s Ghost” a stylish and sophisticated mystery that’s equal parts gripping yarn and music history.

Dare you to stop reading after this first sentence: “When Stacey Curtis found the dead man on the bed, she knew it was time to get her own apartment.”
Welcome to “Double Black” (306 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), the first in a projected series by Wendy Clinch, the founder of TheSkiDiva.com, an Internet community for women who ski.
Stacey has left her Boston home after finding her fiancé in bed with another woman. A ski enthusiast, she heads for Vermont, where she skis and works in a restaurant. But there’s not much money, so she’s either sleeping in her car or squatting in some vacation condos — which is how she finds the dead guy on the bed.
What follows is a spirited yarn of old money, new money, a cast of believable characters and plenty of New England color as the truth about the victim’s death emerges. You’ll want to take it with you to Wintergreen, Massanutten or Snowshoe — or read it in a comfy armchair under a throw.

To life’s swells, people in the background can seem insignificant — mere shadows who need not be noticed and who certainly don’t matter.
For the villains in Barbara Colley’s mystery series featuring Charlotte LaRue, that’s a big mistake.  In “Dusted to Death” (276 pages, Kensington, $22), Charlotte, who’s in her early 60s and owns and operates Maid for a Day in New Orleans, the business starts innocently enough:  A longtime client, elderly Bitsy Duhè, calls to say her grand house has been chosen as a movie set, and she wants Charlotte to keep it clean — and to keep an eye on Bitsy’s treasures.
Charlotte agrees — the film company will pay her $5,000 for a few days’ work — but it’s not long before she discovers the body of Nick Franklin, the boyfriend of leading lady (or leading brat) Angel Martinique.  Angel is arrested, but Charlotte and Angel’s chauffeur, Benny Jackson (an old high school friend of Charlotte’s son, Hank) think she’s being framed and set out to prove her innocence.
Colley again fashions an intriguing whodunit, but the primary pleasure is, as always in the series, Charlotte herself.  She’s a mightily appealing character, down to earth with plenty of common sense and integrity.  This time out, her personal life takes an interesting turn, too.  “Dusted to Death” will have you putting down the broom and picking up the book for a pleasant interlude.

That Leonardo da Vinci was a genius cannot be doubted, and one of the artist/scientist’s major interests was the flight of man.
In Diane A.S. Stuckart’s third entry featuring the Renaissance man, “A Bolt From the Blue” (324 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $14), the plot centers on his attempt to create a flying machine
It’s 1484, and Leonardo continues as the court artist for the Duke of Milan. Still among his apprentices is Delfina della Fazia, who has left home and disguised herself as a boy named Dino so that she can study under the master. But Delfina has a surprise in store: Leonardo has hired her father, a talented craftsman, to help with the machine.
Plans go awry when another apprentice is murdered, the flying machine is stolen and Delfina’s father, Angelo, is abducted by men who mistakenly believe he is Leonardo. At stake is peace in northern Italy, as the Duke of Pontalba wants the machine to wage war against Milan.
As always, Stuckart creates a fine story filled with historical detail and fully developed characters. “A Bolt From the Blue” continues her mastery of her subject and, perhaps, hints at a new direction.

The eloquent and erudite mysteries of Charles Todd (the pseudonym of a mother-son writing team) have won high acclaim — deservedly so — and the 12th entry in the Ian Rutledge series can only burnish the reputation.
“The Red Door” (344 pages, Morrow, $24.99) finds Rutledge, a Scotland Yard inspector, investigating the possible connection between two cases in 1920.
In Lancashire, a woman thought to be a war widow — her husband never returned from World War I — is found bludgeoned to death.  In London, former missionary Walter Teller goes missing from a hospital after suffering unexplained paralysis.
The dead woman’s name is found to be Teller, and her husband’s Peter Teller — and a Peter Teller is among Walter’s siblings.  But is there a link? And what is the Teller family hiding?
Todd surprises the reader with several twists on the road to solution, and this is a page turner of a story.  But of equal strength in all of Todd’s work is the portrayal of Rutledge, haunted by his experiences in the trenches of France.  With each book, though, he seems to be gaining a slightly firmer grasp on sanity.
And then there’s Todd’s evocation of postwar England, as haunted a nation as Rutledge is a man.  Todd’s work continues to be the best in the mystery field — and on some levels transcends the genre.  More than a whodunit, “The Red Door” is moving and memorable fiction.

The secret to a good mystery series is an appealing character. A good plot is essential, of course, but if the protagonist isn’t interesting, the series won’t last.
Maggie Barbieri came up with a winner in her first book, and her amateur sleuth, Alison Bergeron, is still provoking laughs and sympathy in the fourth entry, “Final Exam” (336 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99).
Alison, a professor at private St. Thomas College near New York City, has not pleased her superiors with her involvement in crime investigations.  So it’s a combination of punishment and necessity that leads them to call on her to temporarily replace Wayne Brookwell, who has disappeared, as resident director of a dorm.
But when an exploding toilet in the RD’s suite leads to the discovery of a brick of heroin, Alison just can’t help herself and starts looking into her predecessor’s disappearance.  Assisting are her boyfriend, police detective Bobby Crawford, her best friend, Maxine Rayfield, and Alison’s golden retriever, Trixie.
What follows is a romp, a serious situation and a study of what it’s like to be young and stupid.  Barbieri aces this exam, and let’s hope the “final” in the title doesn’t mean the demise of a rewarding series.

Opera and deadly viruses would seem to be a strange combination on which to base a novel, but Eugenia Lovett West pulls it off in Overkill (288 pages, Minotaur Books, $25.99), her second mystery featuring retired diva Emma Streat. 
Emma’s niece, Vanessa Metcalf, is in Venice for a recital when her assistant, Cathy Riordan, calls Emma and begs her to fly to Venice and warn Vanessa about the dangers of her new love interest, race-car driver Seth Barzalon. Emma does so, but the ante rises dramatically when she and Cathy find Vanessa’s accompanist, Mark Dykstra, dead in Vanessa’s hotel suite.
Vanessa is in the clear, and she and Emma depart for Boston.  But soon after arriving, Vanessa falls dangerously ill with what may be the first case of avian flu in the United States.  More death follows, and Emma enlists the aid of Lord Andrew Rodale (as she did in this book’s predecessor, “Without Warning”). In England, Emma, and Andrew tentatively renew their romance and agree to work together to determine who is trafficking in stolen viruses.
Second efforts after a successful debut are tricky, and “Overkill” does not contain the stunning twists in “Without Warning,” but this is imaginative and elegant entertainment.  Emma is well-drawn and amiable, and readers can hope to see much more of her.

Mysteries with a cooking angle have cropped up like corn in Iowa, and readers can endanger themselves by overindulging.  But the second entry in Laura Childs’ Cackleberry Club series, “Eggs Benedict Arnold” (336 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $7.99) is another tasty treat.
This time around, Suzanne Dietz and her friends Petra and Toni are still running their popular Cackleberry Club café, and Suzanne in particular is still pursuing amateur sleuthing.  When funeral director Ozzie Driesden is found murdered on his mortuary slab, Suzanne goes into overdrive while still trying to maintain a normal life.
Suspects abound — including Toni’s ne’er-do-well estranged husband — but the truth comes out in a surprising climax.
Childs incorporates well-drawn characters into her story, as well as more than a dollop of humor (there’s a hilarious scene involving Suzanne, Toni and a mule), and “Eggs Benedict Arnold” is a filling meal for fans of the cozy mystery.

The English-village mystery has been dear to the hearts of fans for decades:  the vicar, the gardener, the retired colonel, the little old lady, the calm setting.
Hannah Dennison’s Vicky Hill series is set in a British burg, but you might feel as if you’d stepped into the setting of “Cold Comfort Farm,” too.
In “Exposé!” (313 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $6.99), obituary writer Vicky suspects something is amiss in the Devon village of Gipping-on-Plym when a Scarlett Flemming, a local celebrity, dies and her husband, Doug, holds a private service for her.  Vicky sets out to investigate but gets caught up in the community’s craziness, including the annual snail races. 
Dennison provides plenty of laughs in this third installment in the series — and a tricky plot, too.  Miss Marple might not recognize Gipping-on-Plym, but it’s guaranteed to make you smile.

Veteran author Ann Purser, the author of five books in the “Round Ringford” village series and of nine (so far) in her mystery series featuring Lois Meade, has long shown her skill in portraying ordinary life and providing enjoyment for her readers. 
She has rarely gone into social issues but does so with expertise in “Tragedy at Two” (293 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $23.95), the ninth featuring middle-aged Lois, who lives in the English village of Long Farnden and operates a cleaning service.
This time out, Lois’ daughter, Josie, loses her partner, Rob Wilkins to mortality — and never mind that the relationship had been cooling.  Rob is found beaten badly in a ditch and dies without regaining consciousness. Although other suspects exist, many of the villagers fixate on a group of gypsies who have been camping on a nearby farm. It’s up to Lois to expose the truth, and she does so.
In addition to creating a dandy — and moving — whodunit, Purser makes an understated but powerful case for ethnic tolerance, as “Tragedy at Two” concerns itself equally with morality as with mystery.

A headless corpse is found in a freezer, and a man dressed as a stag is cavorting through London’s St. Pancras area.
Sounds like a case for Arthur Bryant and John May of the city’s Peculiar Crimes Unit.  But the unit has been suspended after treading too often on the toes of government officials.
From this concoction, British author Christopher Fowler again serves up a delightful dish in “Bryant & May on the Loose (337 pages, Bantam, $25), the seventh installment in his series featuring the octogenarian cops and their loyal assistants. 
The scene of the crime is being developed as an upscale business district that Her Majesty’s government hopes will teem with tourists when London hosts the 2012 Summer Olympics.  Convinced that the PCU might have better luck than conventional investigators from Scotland Yard, the unit is recalled to work the case.
And what a case it is, with Bryant again looking into mythological overtones of old London and May seeking concrete evidence.  Eventually, the truth is revealed, and Fowler again distinguishes himself with an extraordinarily complex and imaginative tale that’s at once amusing, absorbing and affecting — and that cries out for a sequel.

The day their fans have waited for through seven mysteries is here:  Veterinarian Jessica Popper and lawyer Nick Burby are getting married.
But only a few pages into Cynthia Baxter’s “Murder Had a Little Lamb” (367 pages, Bantam, $7.99), the eighth entry in her “Reigning Cats and Dogs” series, things come to a screeching (literally) halt.  Just as Jessica is about to say “I do,” a scream comes from the kitchen of the estate that’s the site of the outdoor wedding.  Running into the house, Jessica and Nick find the body of Nathaniel Stibbins, a distant cousin of Nick’s that he and Jessica didn’t even know was invited to the wedding.
Nick’s imperious mother, Dorothy, orders Jessica, who has had some success as an amateur sleuth, to find out who killed Nathaniel.  To do so, Jessica volunteers to teach a class at a private girls school on Long Island where Nathaniel taught art.
There, she discovers that Nathaniel was a lying, ambitious, womanizing cad.  But who killed him?  The scorned headmistress, the frustrated colleague, a disgruntled student — or someone from his more distant past?
Jessica ferrets out the culprit, of course. And Baxter concocts another pleasurable tale a plausible plot, an appealing heroine and a crew of lovable critters.
And as for Jessica and Nick, you’ll have to read this one yourself to find out. 

Uninvited guests can be a real pain, but when one gets herself killed ...
That’s the problem facing Tricia Miles, owner of Haven’t Got a Clue mystery bookstore in Stoneham, N.H., in “Bookplate Special” (320 pages, Berkley Prime Crime, $7.99), the third entry in Lorna Barrett’s series.
Tricia’s old college roommate, Pammy Fredericks, has been freeloading for two weeks when Tricia tells her it’s time to move on. Not long after, Pammy is found dead in a trash cart behind the restaurant owned by Tricia’s sister, Angelica.
Mix together a long-buried secret, a diary, blackmail, pumpkin vandalism and Tricia’s terrier-like determination to find the killer, and the plot moves quickly to an unexpected conclusion. And who could resist a cat named Miss Marple?
Barrett is skilled at making her characters flawed and fully believable. This book-based book is a perfect autumn read — right down to those smashed pumpkins — for mystery aficionados.

What a series of days for a former knight.
Crispin Guest returns for a second outing in Jeri Westerson’s “Serpent in the Thorns” (273 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), and the story’s even more exciting than “Veil of Lies,” the first in the series.
It’s 1384 in London, and Guest has been working as a tracker (a medieval private detective) since being stripped of his knighthood and property for participating in a failed plot against King Richard II seven years earlier; only the appeal of the king’s uncle saved Guest from execution.  This time around, he’s approached by a simple-minded kitchen girl who has found a body in the room she shares with her sister.
The body is that of a French courier sent with his colleagues to give a holy relic to Richard. The French hope that the gesture will end in a rapprochement between the two countries. As he investigates, Guest finds himself in mortal danger, under suspicion again of threatening the king’s life. Richard’s life is surely in peril, but Westerson’s plot twists several times before the would-be assassin’s identity is revealed.
Westerson is a devotee of all things medieval, and her scholarship shows in her fiction.  Combine the historical lore with an intricate plot and a winning protagonist, and this is a series with broad appeal.

It’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding.
It’s worse luck to kill her.
And it’s not good at all for Agatha Raisin in “There Goes the Bride” (277 pages, Minotaur Books, $24.99), the 20th entry in M.C. Beaton’s series featuring the intrepid if infuriating private detective in England’s Cotswolds.
Agatha and a group of friends have traveled to the wedding of Agatha’s ex-husband, James Lacey, to the lovely, dim-witted and much younger Felicity Bross-Tilkington. But Felicity is shot to death before she can arrive at the church, and Agatha and James fall under suspicion.
They’re soon cleared, but Agatha takes on the investigation, more bodies pile up and Agatha finds herself in peril before the case is closed.
Beaton’s books are quick, entertaining reads, and this one conforms nicely, with plenty of amusing excursions into Agatha’s life outside work.

The short story deserves a place on the endangered-species list, and the novella ... well, the novella may be nearing extinction.
But don’t tell that to award-winning novelist Peter Robinson, whose series featuring Detective Inspector Alan Banks of the Yorkshire police has won acclaim and popularity.
Now, in “The Price of Love and Other Stories” (356 pages, Morrow, $24.99), Robinson collects 12 shorter pieces, including two Banks novellas, two Banks stories and eight unrelated stories in a triumph equal to that of his novels.
The Banks novellas, of course, are the lure for longtime fans (and one of them, “Like a Virgin,” was written especially for this collection).  But don’t ignore Robinson’s non-Banks material.  “Cornelius Jubb” focuses on racial injustice during World War II, “Walking the Dog” turns the noir upside down, and “The Cherub Affair” plays off the private-detective stories of old, including the voluptuous blonde who shows up at the private eye’s shabby office seeking help. 
With an eye for the unexpected and a touch of the wry, Robinson treats readers to an old-fashioned, and extremely tasty, buffet.

The device is right out of Agatha Christie: The amateur sleuth gathers the suspects in the drawing room and unmasks the killer.
But in Mehmet Murat Somer’s “The Gigolo Murder” (255 pages, Penguin, $14), the amateur sleuth is an unnamed computer hacker by day and drag-queen club owner by night, and he/she’s a hoot.
Set in Istanbul and a sequel to Somer’s “The Kiss Murder,” this one’s a fine whodunit with elements of hacking, loan-sharking and blackmail, and an evocative picture of folks with different sexual orientations thrown together to solve a particularly nasty crime. 
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Instead of “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, perhaps we should ask “Who was Virginia Woolf afraid of?”.
It’s what the talented novelist Stephanie Barron does to dramatic and suspenseful effect in “The White Garden” (336 pages, Bantam, $15), an English period-piece mystery. And as she did in “A Flaw in the Blood,” a fictional take on Queen Victoria and the curse of hemophilia, Barron offers a shocking alternative to history.
The story begins when Jo Bellamy, a youngish garden designer from Delaware, wins a commission from a megamillionaire and his trophy wife to design for their estate in the Hamptons a copy of the white garden made famous by the British writer Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst Castle, where she lived with her writer and diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson.
But Jo has a connection beyond the professional one.  Her beloved grandfather, Jock Bellamy, was from Kent and had worked as a garden laborer at Sissinghurst before immigrating to the U.S.  And just a day after telling him about her new assignment, Jo is horrified to learn that the 84-year-old Jock has killed himself.
Once at Sissinghurst, Jo finds a diary marked “Jock’s book” that seems to have been the product of Woolf.  But the first entry is dated March 29, 1941 — a day after Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse but three weeks before her body washed up. But if Woolf didn’t die on March 28 and instead ran off to Sissinghurst to visit her former lover, Sackville-West, what happened in those three weeks that led to her real death? And where are the pages that have been torn from the book?
Jo sets out to learn more and connects with Peter Llewellyn, a rare-books expert at Sotheby’s who calls in his former wife, university professor Margaux Strand, for help. When Margaux absconds with the diary and Jo’s patron, Gray Westlake, inserts himself into the situation, Jo and Peter must try to regain the diary (and its missing pages) and solve its secrets.
Barron, whose prose is evocative and whose characters are engaging, excels at placing an ingenious stamp on the semi-historical novel, and her take on Woolf and her comrades in the British intelligentsia is fascinating, moving and disturbing.  The reader needs constant self-reminding that this is but a story, and it’s to Barron’s great credit that she makes fiction seem so unnervingly real.

If OCD stood for original chronic dread, Douglas Clegg would be its master.
The talented author of the spooky tale returns, in time for Halloween, with a little gem: “Isis” (128 pages, Vanguard Press, $14.95), a dark and chilling tale of calling back the dead.
Iris Villiers lives with her mother and two older twin brothers (the fourth child, the eldest son, is away at school) in her father’s ancestral estate in Cornwall.  Among the other inmates of the estate is her demented grandfather and a gardener who tells stories of recalling the dead to life.  And when a tragic accident claims the life of a beloved brother, Iris learns that she can speak to the dead, with terrifying consequences. 
Clegg, a native of Alexandria who lives in New England, is brilliantly adept at building the fright level at just the right pace, and “Isis” is no exception.  Turn down the lights and let this engrossing little tale cast its spell on an hour of your time. And let it teach you one of life’s valuable lessons:  letting go.