Review: Three mysteries for deep winter

When Maggie MacKay was 5 years old, she proclaimed to her mother that she had once been a man called Andrew MacNeil. Obsessed with psychics and mediums, Maggie's mother shared this revelation with the British public, adding that MacNeil had lived in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and drowned on the day Maggie was born. Not just drowned, mind you, murdered.

After a psychotic break at her mother's funeral, Maggie, now 25, travels to the isolated islands to poke at the memory that has tethered her fractured identity to a dead man for most of her life.

Set in the outer Hebridean islands of Harris, Lewis and the fictional Kilmeray, Carole Johnstone's "The Blackhouse" (Scribner, Jan. 3) spins Norse legends, Hebridean superstitions, Bronze Age history and canny Scottish wisdom into a deeply absorbing and wildly atmospheric mystery about the dangerous brew of self-loathing, familial duty and guilt.

In Celtic and Norse legend, a thin place is the space between dark and light, a penumbra where "the distance between this world and other worlds is shortest." Thin places exist in remote areas like the Outer Hebrides where "storms have carved deep wounds" into the land and those who live there. Like Charlie MacLeod, "who sings loudest in the pub … helps dig a neighbor's peat," but whose wife is "miserably unhappy." Or Robert Reid, a "slow puncture of a man." Several of Johnstone's characters have a thin space inside them, including Maggie.

Johnstone cleverly sets revelations, sometimes sinister, always startling, across her plot like the crushed shells carried in the "bitter Atlantic wind" that eventually become machair, a transformative place both beautiful and unworldly. This alchemy of place, plot and character is the "white-bright light" at the core of Johnstone's novel. I can see and feel it still.

Place is also strong in Kwei Quartey's "Last Seen in Lapaz" (Soho, in stores Feb. 7). The West African setting in Quartey's novel is fascinating in its detail. This is the third book in Quartey's acclaimed series, featuring PI Emma Djan and the Sowah Private Investigators Agency. This tightly crafted mystery immerses readers in the sights, sounds and characters of Ghana: the all-night food vendors, Accra's constant soundtrack of loud music, the exaggerated "imaginative appellations" of Ghanaians. It's also a novel that takes on international sex trafficking and rape in a stark manner. Even when I looked away, I had to keep reading.

Quartey's novel opens with the daughter of a dear friend of Emma's boss going missing. Ngozi, it turns out, has rescued a sex worker — that is, "stolen" property — from a luxurious hotel in Accra. Emma is given the case and it takes her into unfamiliar and dangerous landscapes. Emma is an audacious and compassionate private investigator with a keen awareness of her country's dangerous class hierarchies and deep cultural misogyny. Her skills are sorely tried when her investigation leads her from the murder of Ngozi's boyfriend, Femi, deep into the horrors of an international sex trafficking network.

Quartey jumps deftly between Emma's investigation and Ngozi and Femi's stories. This split narrative gives voice to Ngozi, in particular, and allows Quartey to put her actions into compassionate relief next to Emma's. Both are heroes. Quartey's novel also makes it unflinchingly clear how culpable other countries (Europe and beyond) are integrally linked to the trafficking of women and girls like Ngozi.

The Los Angeles setting of Minnesota author P.J. Tracy's "The Devil You Know" (Minotaur, in stores Jan. 17) is a key player in the story, too. In this third book in Tracy's terrific series featuring LAPD detective Margaret Nolan and Remy Beaudreau, "her enigmatic colleague" and "occasional lover," Tracy shines a spotlight on the city of "white wine and Pellegrino" built on narcissistic celebrities with "over-inflated egos" and their entourages. She also illuminates the lives of the regular folk who keep the city working with equal clarity of focus. With this second book, I'm convinced Tracy's creating a literary landscape similar to Margaret Millar and Robert Crais.

Evan Hobbes, a super famous actor, is disgraced in a deep fake child pornography campaign. He's quickly "convicted in the court of social media" despite authorities knowing he's a victim of a "convincing, sophisticated" smear. Hobbes' agent, Seth, is on serious damage control while negotiating his own dramas (self-inflicted mostly). Rebecca Wodehouse ("no relation to P.G.") is Seth's boss, a "malevolent eel," slithering around the investigation. Hobbes' studio executives help-not-help because of their own complicated lies. When Hobbes is found dead beneath a Malibu rockslide, the irony that his life had become rubble is not lost on Margaret. As she investigates, Margaret is motivated less by Hobbes' tragedy and much more by the "deeper tragedy" that the girl in the "fake" video is very real. (Events: P.J. Tracy will be at Once Upon a Crime, 604 W. 26th St., Mpls., at noon Jan. 21 and at Woodbury Barnes & Noble at 1 p.m. Jan. 28.)

Carole E. Barrowman is a writer and a professor at Alverno College in Milwaukee.