However you categorize this story, it’s 100% Copperman and 100% hilarious.
Investigators Fran and Ken Stein start out with a case that should be right up their alley and end up way out in left field.
The pair technically have no parents, having been created in a lab by two brilliant but eccentric scientists who desperately wanted offspring only to disappear from their lives several years later, leaving them in the care of a radio newscaster they know as Aunt Margie. So it’s no coincidence that Fran and Ken have made a specialty of helping adoptees reconnect with their birth families. Austin Cobb, who’s on the autism spectrum, doesn’t exactly want to reconnect with his birth parents; instead, he wants Fran and Ken to carry out the very specific mission of finding out whether they gave him up because of his autism. But Austin’s adoption is shrouded in mystery, and even Fran’s long-established connections in the child welfare world can’t give her a line on who Austin’s parents were, much less why they surrendered him. The case gets curiouser and curiouser as Fran finds that a woman who might have been Austin’s mother was murdered and her husband disappeared. Add Fran and Ken’s parents’ eternal nemesis, Malcolm X. Mitchell, to the mix, and you have the kind of freewheeling nightmare only Copperman could concoct. It’s not clear whether it’s a family saga, a science-fiction tale, a murder mystery, or a love story. Even Fran and her maybe-boyfriend, NYPD Det. Richard Mankiewicz, are unclear about the latter.
However you categorize this story, it’s 100% Copperman and 100% hilarious.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781448315192
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2025
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
Slippery suspects and evildoers among the usually private and quiet Amish.
A series of brutal murders rocks the quiet community of Painters Mill, Ohio.
A young Amish girl playing hide-and-seek in a brushy area near a creek finds dismembered body parts. The early years of police Chief Kate Burkholder, who grew up Amish and has come to terms with leaving that life behind, give her insight into crimes committed in her county, which has a large Amish population. Although there’s always some crime among the Amish, something about the killing and dismemberment of landscaper and nursery owner Samuel Yutzy has a big-city feel. Kate’s husband, John Tomasetti, is an agent with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation who provides the services small-town police departments lack. Kate and John knew Samuel, and when they check his place of business, they find a dehydrated buggy horse and a lot of blood. Samuel’s parents admit that he had a wild rumspringa—a period when Amish youth try out the secular world before committing to the church—which included a girlfriend and some shifty non-Amish men, but say that he’d recently returned to the fold. A picture of the girlfriend leads them to a gentlemen’s club, and his parents reveal that he was being sued by someone over a landscape job gone wrong. When Kate tries to find Samuel’s best friend, Aaron Shetler, she learns that he’s been missing from work, and soon his body is found stuffed in a drum. Searching for the girlfriend gets Kate drugged and warned to drop the case. Never one to give up, she discovers a tangled web of deceit and a link to human trafficking that just may be the death of her.
Slippery suspects and evildoers among the usually private and quiet Amish.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781250781147
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 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.
