This novel scores big not because of its mystery but due to its pregnant protagonist and her inexorable fortitude.
In Banta’s (The Girls from Fourth Ward, 2012) second murder mystery to feature detective Matt Ryan, the murder of a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may lead to a killer within the church.
When Brother Dooley is found beaten to death in Abbottsville, Calif., people immediately suspect Bishop Paul Zimmerman; after all, he was at the scene holding the murder weapon. But Lt. Ryan, who’d previously worked a murder case involving members of the same congregation, has his doubts, as does the bishop’s pregnant wife, Carrie. Both Ryan and Carrie look into the murder, which might have ties to the church’s support of Proposition 8, which sought to outlaw gay marriage in California. Banta’s novel, which sometimes alludes to her previous work, is presented from two perspectives: Ryan’s first-person narration and Carrie’s third-person. The dual viewpoints tend to emphasize, with tongue firmly in cheek, the differences between churchgoers and non: Carrie’s “Oh my heck” and her sex suggestion from a magazine found at a hair salon versus Ryan’s decidedly colorful language and his meeting informants at their porn shop. The book is often blatantly critical of Mormonism, from its opposition to same-sex marriage to Carrie having to quit her job and become a mother full time after Paul is appointed bishop. Carrie’s recurring thought, “I love being a Mormon,” can come across as a bit derisive and cynical, even if she’s unaware of its effect. The investigation side of the mystery is occasionally skimmed, and it’s not always clear how Ryan or Carrie reach their deductions, especially since they investigate separately but manage to zero in on the same suspect. Carrie’s amateur sleuthing, however, results in the novel’s best sequence: A pregnant prowler, in her third trimester and clad all in black, she doesn’t creep into a crime scene—she waddles. This type of lighthearted but rewarding humor is retained even when Carrie is working with Ryan: During an unofficial undercover gig, he mistakes the expectant mother’s desperate need for a bathroom break as trepidation.
This novel scores big not because of its mystery but due to its pregnant protagonist and her inexorable fortitude.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492732211
Page Count: 230
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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