Perry, who died earlier this year, caps a well-upholstered tale of aristocratic murder with news of a surprising killer.
Elena Standish is sent to a most unlikely place to ferret out the killer of a fellow spy.
John Repton, who’d been active in MI6 during the Great War, had more or less retired by 1934. But the very last job he agreed to take on—secretly keeping an eye on Wyndham Hall in the Cotswolds—ended with the discovery of his body in a ditch nearby. Urgently needing to know what Repton had discovered and who’d shot him to death, Peter Howard sends Elena and James Allenby, two of his best, to Wyndham Hall to pretend they’re a couple while they ask discreet questions and gather evidence. It seems more and more likely that the motive for Repton’s murder was political. Sir David Wyndham has donated sizable sums to Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. His wife, Lady Griselda, is clearly more than just an acquaintance of Edward, Prince of Wales, and his mistress, Wallis Simpson. And now that Robert Hastings, the local MP who’s been spoken of as the next prime minister, has been accused by his aide, Timothy Rogers, of improper sexual advances that could put paid to his career, Lady Griselda has made it clear that she considers the pliant Chief Constable Algernon Miller the ideal replacement. What makes the assignment especially dicey for Elena is that Geoffrey Baden, David’s brother-in-law and the beau of Elena’s sister, Margot Driscoll, is another admirer of Mosley’s, and Elena correctly believes that Margot considers every indication her sister gives that she should proceed with extreme caution as a sign of Elena’s jealousy.
Perry, who died earlier this year, caps a well-upholstered tale of aristocratic murder with news of a surprising killer.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780593359150
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
