Mike Shea on the month’s new releases

James Hime

Scared Money

St. Martin's Minotaur

Houstonian JAMES HIME has built a global stage for retired Texas Ranger Jeremiah Spur and deputy sheriff Clyde Thomas to strut on in his second novel, SCARED MONEY (St. Martin's Minotaur). Spur (who also appeared with Thomas in Hime's debut, The Night of the Dance) has been enticed by the feds into giving them a helping hand with a missing-persons case involving a CIA hit man turned Dallas businessman—and $10 million. Thomas, meanwhile, has his hands full with a police brutality suit, a slander suit, and a series of drug-related deaths in tiny Brenham. Hime sets 'em up and knocks 'em down with élan in this edgy thriller—sophisticated enough to sprawl from the cafes of Vienna to the alleys of Brenham without skipping a beat.

Char Miller

Fifty Years of the Texas Observer

Trinity University Press

In compiling FIFTY YEARS OF THE TEXAS OBSERVER (Trinity University Press), editor CHAR MILLER has fashioned a loving tribute to the doggedly liberal rag and the iconoclasts who have produced and sustained it since its 1954 debut. The 91 pieces culled from the archives are a sort of journalistic Wayback Machine offering firsthand peeks at the likes of Willie Morris, Molly Ivins, Larry McMurtry, and other Observer stalwarts alternately shaking their fists at officious incompetents and lobbing bouquets to the heroes of the underclass. Most of all, it's an ice-cube-down-the-collar reminder that Texas is less than fifty years removed from bad times like the segregation filibuster of 1957. And it's painfully clear that the big-ticket items of the past (school finance, racism, pollution) continue to haunt our present and future.

Deborah Crombie

In a Dark House

William Morrow

Like a finely tuned Jaguar XJS humming along Britain's M1 motorway, DEBORAH CROMBIE's Scotland Yard mysteries have provided classy, reliable thrills since the Texan first launched the series, in 1993. The tenth installment, IN A DARK HOUSE (William Morrow), delivers more of the same as detectives Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James find themselves working side by side in South London trying to make sense of a series of fires, deaths, and disappearances among the Victorian-era structures of Southwark Street. Like many a police procedural, In a Dark House nearly crumbles under the weight of the multitude of suspects and sleuths, accusations and alibis. But Crombie's steady hand drives the story—and the likable Kincaid and James—safely home again.