Six crime novels where past and present crimes are connected

S. C. Perkins is a fifth-generation Texan who grew up hearing fascinating stories of her ancestry and eating lots of great Tex-Mex, both of which inspired the plot of her debut mystery novel, Murder Once Removed.

At CrimeReads she tagged six crime novels where past and present crimes are connected, including:

The Unquiet Dead, by Ausma Zehanat Khan

Set mostly in and around Toronto, Canada, Khan’s novel deals with a present-day death that may have connections to the atrocities committed during the 1995 genocide of Bosnians by the Serbians at Srebrenica. Detective Rachel Getty and her boss, Esa Khattak, are part of Canada’s Community Policing Section (CPS), which handles cases involving ethnic minorities. When Khattak is asked to investigate the apparent accidental death of a man named Christopher Drayton, he asks Rachel, his best officer, to accompany him. Rachel finds the request a little strange, especially when they find Drayton’s fall from the nearby cliffs likely wasn’t accidental. It’s possible Drayton may actually be a former Serbian war criminal. The more Rachel and Khattak look into the matter, the more complex it becomes, and the more they have to look inside their own hearts and into their own pasts while they work to uncover the truth.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue