Booked & Printed

by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo

Time is ostensibly linear, a force that moves, always, forward. As lived by humans, though, the force of time is indeed inescapable, but it can feel unfixed, malleable. One can approach age thirty and still feel they possess the internal emotional life of their vulnerable childhood; one can live in the twenty-first century, and still feel as if a previous century may have felt like more of their own time.

As it is in life, so it is in mysteries. This issue, Booked & Printed examines two novels whose crimes traverse eras. The investigators must overcome the vagaries of time to approach the truth about perpetrators and victims alike.

The Alchemist of Aleppo opens on the present day, introducing us to three disparate individuals: Michael Samaan is an art historian based in London, pondering his next book. Kat Musgrave is a geneticist on a flight over the Atlantic, talking in her sleep. And Sergei Badawi, a United Kingdom billionaire, is in his expensive car, keeping meticulous tabs on Michael Samaan. Then the narrative spins backward to an earlier member of the Samaan family, Elias, in the sixteen hundreds, arguing that he must travel with his family’s glassware from Aleppo, Syria, to London, England

A singular object connects them all: a storied glass goblet called the Luck of Edenhall, housed, in the twenty-first century, in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Michael and Kat meet over the Luck display, and the past and present converge in ways they do not understand—at first, they only understand sudden, all-consuming passion. A nameless woman stalking Michael around London soon presents grave threats to their lives and to the lives of Michael’s family members. Michael and Kat must work together to counteract antagonists that seem to be following them with the force of centuries. In the process, they spark a bond between them that possesses equal power.

The Alchemist of Aleppo’s protagonists are as alluring and unique as the novel’s structure. Michael Samaan is intelligent and loving, with a self-punishing depressive streak he can’t seem to break. Kat Musgrave is a brilliant geneticist troubled by nightmares and memories she isn’t sure are her own. Sergei Badawi is a well-heeled donor full of melancholic unshakable purpose. Timelines converge, sometimes crashing into acts of unspeakable violence, with more of the characters’ connections revealed through the Samaan glassmaking craft—and its consequences.

With chapters moving across countries, characters, and centuries, The Alchemist of Aleppo is a heady mystery. The book is laden with satisfying forays into philosophy, history, science and romance. The skill of the mystery’s arrangement lends itself to the pleasure of re-reading. After reaching the end of the book, readers will want to look again at the beginning, savoring the clues at each starting step. The hints move skillfully through time, changing readers’ perception of it.

In , the youngest member of the Finch clan, Remi, cautiously rejoins the fray of family. Remi’s eccentric parents are celebrating their anniversary at a beautiful, rural, California campsite. Her two older sisters, Eliana and Maeve—her lifelong, chief tormentors—will be present, to Remi’s dismay. Remi has made a life for herself far from them, albeit an isolated one; working at home, alone, with only her dog and her acute social anxiety for company. Remi is an adult in her late twenties, but in the presence of her parents and sisters, she time travels internally to the vulnerable child she was within the family system.

Remi thinks the family vacation will be a routine, grin-and-bear-it, brief camping trip, with momentary appearances by her equally eccentric grandmother, aunt, and other extended relatives. But when an old family friend, Guy Moran, approaches Remi with barely masked, sinister intentions, the trip takes a terrible turn.

Drop Dead Sisters is billed as a laugh-out-loud comedy; it’s a notable selection of comedian Mindy Kaling’s Book Studio imprint for Amazon Publishing. There are indeed many amusing moments in Drop Dead Sisters’ first-person telling, as well as one of the most memorably shocking first lines in contemporary mystery: “If you have an older sister, there’s a good chance that she’s almost killed you at least once since childhood.”

But Remi’s narration is often deeply sad. She endures her loneliness and anxiety and frequently remembers the suffering her sisters put her through as the vulnerable youngest child—pains compounded by her hippie parents’ benign neglect. (As a responsible Millennial, Remi treats her depression and stress with Prozac and therapy sessions.)

Of course, Remi’s memories of the pain Eliana and Maeve inflicted sets up a satisfying redemption arc. As they wend their way through the mystery of Guy’s death, wondering about the extent of their own culpability, the family reunion turns from grim to comically heartwarming.

A sudden romance for Remi offers a welcome subplot, giving readers an additional reason to cheer Remi on through a chaotic camping trip. The mystery of love presents yet another opportunity for Remi to defy the time-traveling pain of her past, and fully inhabit her present, perhaps for the first time in her life.

all points bulletin: Gigi Pandian has a new book coming out this month: The Library Game: A Secret Staircase Novel (March, Minotaur) • For more locked room mysteries, check out The Indian Rope Trick and Other Violent Entertainments, locked room mystery stories by Tom Mead with an introduction by Martin Edwards (Nov. 2024, Crippen & Landru) • A number of favorite AHMM authors can be found in Agatha and Derringer Get Cozy, edited by Gay Toltl Kinman and Andrew McAleer (November 2024, Down and Out Books), thirteen original mysteries written by Agatha and Derringer Award–winning authors: John Floyd, Barb Goffman, Tara Laskowski, BV Lawson, Robert Lopresti, Kris Neri, Alan Orloff, Josh Pachter, Art Taylor, and more • Pat Black introduces a new series with To Pay the Ferryman (Polygon, February 2025) • Rachel Howzell Hall breaks into a new genre with her December 2024 romantasy, The Last one (Entangled: Red Tower Books)