Heavy on background chatter, with a low-stakes mystery upstaged by friendship tremors.
A Michigan librarian finds the perfect distraction from planning her nuptials: researching possible motives and methods for a poisoning at her friend’s restaurant.
Minnie Hamilton is in the thick of it. After trying in vain to convince her aunt to plan her wedding to longtime love Rafe Niswander, she’s reluctantly taken charge of the details for the September ceremony. Now that summer is here, the date’s getting too close for comfort, even though Rafe is a perfect match whose patience as a middle school principal makes him endlessly tolerant of the trouble Minnie keeps getting herself into. It’s just that the details of a wedding aren’t as much fun as those of the numerous investigations Minnie has wrapped herself up in. But many decisions seem set in stone, with food provided by Minnie’s best friend Kristen Jurek’s restaurant, Three Seasons, and driven to the venue, the Chilson District Library’s community room, in Minnie’s bookmobile. It all seems perfect until the officiant drops out. As Minnie frets over this, she gets a series of calls and texts from Kristen, culminating in a dire “CALL ME NOW!!!” Worried that something might be wrong with Kristen’s babies, Minnie drops everything to check on her friend and is shocked to learn that eight people got sick after eating at Three Seasons, and two of them are in the hospital. Minnie knows she has to tell all this ASAP to her friend Ash Wolverson, a Tonedagana County deputy, but she thinks she may be the best person to do on-the-ground research. While Minnie and longtime companion cat Eddie search for the poisoner, Kristen seems to spin out, and Minnie wonders if there’s something more underlying her friend’s moodiness.
Heavy on background chatter, with a low-stakes mystery upstaged by friendship tremors.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780593547441
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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
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