It's fun to see how Jo Bannister, already acclaimed for her solid police procedurals, has decided to update some of the conventions of the classic British mystery. In Echoes of Lies she presents the first case featuring Brodie Farrell, a young woman who finds things for a living and has set out her shingle--"Looking for Something?"--in a small seaside town.

The problem, we quickly learn, is that Brodie (who's not a private investigator as such but who will, for a fee, locate missing people as well as lost objects) can't answer for what happens to the information she provides after her clients have paid the bill. In a positively harrowing first chapter, a young man is mysteriously and horrendously tortured, and in the more placid but no less shocking second, a guilt-stricken Brodie believes herself responsible for the several days of agony leading to this poor stranger's ghastly death that she's just read about in the morning paper.

What the truth really is, you'll have to read Echoes of Lies to find out. And even though a fair suspension of disbelief is required as the story zigs and zags its way to several levels of denouement, there's no question that quitting before the end is next to impossible. It's simply one of those books that keeps upending your expectations and making you demand to know how it's all going to come out in the end. --Otto Penzler