Red Cat

Red Cat, Peter Spiegelman’s third John March mystery, is a taut little number about the fallout from an affair between the PI’s troubled brother and the mysterious redhead he met online. There are enough shady characters to keep readers guessing whodunit till the end, and March, a moody Manhattan loner, is always good company. Spiegelman writes simply, evocatively: a sunset over the Hudson River stains the sky like a ”faded bruise.” He likes to keep his stories lean, but his latest seems to lack a couple key scenes. A confrontation between March and the redhead, for instance, might have elevated this from a good airplane book to a great read, period.