A fascinating subplot has Billy encountering the Night Witches, an all-female band of Russian fighter pilots who took stealth bombing to a new level by turning off their engines as they approached their targets, silently gliding in to deliver their deadly payloads. Optics are everything, right? Billy must balance his investigation with his personal need to learn the fate of his friend and also somehow placate the Russians at every turn-no mean feat. If the Russians have their way, it will be an American taking the fall. Billy’s airplane makes it safely through to Poltava air base in Ukraine, where he has been tapped to investigate the murder of a pair of soldiers, one Russian, one American. Some of those aboard the disabled bomber parachute to an unknown fate below, but it is not clear whether Big Mike is among them. And then all hell breaks loose: German fighter planes drive the bombers into ground fire range, and one by one the American airplanes fall, including the one carrying Billy’s friend, Big Mike Miecznikowski. Army investigator is hitching a ride to Ukraine aboard a B-17 bomber. Benn’s 16th Billy Boyle novel, Road of Bones, opens, the U.S. I thought I had twigged to the ending before the Big Reveal, and I was quite proud of myself. As the story unfolds, the reader begins to recognize incongruities between the younger and older Palomas, incongruities that are not easily reconcilable and are increasingly unsettling. By the time the police arrive, the scene has been sanitized, leaving no trace of any such killing, but how can that be? Paloma doesn’t know, and neither do we. One evening, Paloma returns to her apartment and finds her roommate brutally murdered, after which she flees the scene and gets blackout drunk. The Paloma of the present day is estranged from her parents and haunted by hallucinations (or are they?) of a strange woman who eats the faces of beautiful young girls. Sri Lankan writer Amanda Jayatissa’s debut, My Sweet Girl, is a dark thriller of international deceit and murder, narrated in alternating chapters by 12-year-old Paloma, who is adopted from a Sri Lankan orphanage by a wealthy American couple, and her adult self 18 years later.

Louise Penny has somehow outdone herself again with her latest Inspector Gamache mystery.

My Sweet Girl by Amanda Jayatissa