Perfect for readers eager to have the wool pulled over their eyes again and again.
Herron brings his unexcelled skill for jaw-dropping twists to 11 short stories originally published between 2006 and 2019.
Even the most conventional of these tales, the four stories starring private inquiry agent Zoë Boehm and sometimes her husband and partner, Joe Silvermann, are filled with delicious surprises. In "Mirror Images," a successful author hires the couple to exorcise the late boathouse owner who keeps popping up to remind him that he got an unimportant detail wrong. Joe's hired to deliver a blackmail payment for a wayward wife’s porn video in “Proof of Love" and to rid his client of a stalker in “The Other Half.” Widowed, Zoë turns briefly and hilariously to psychotherapy in “What We Do.” The other seven stories more consistently showcase Herron’s gift for aha revelations that don’t just identify the culprit, but indicate that you’ve been looking at everything backward. A cuckold undertakes murderous vengeance in “Remote Control.” A couple blithely indulge in idle deductions about a stranger as a kidnapped woman lies in a car trunk outside their rest stop in “Lost Luggage.” In the title story, an abandoned husband insists in vain that his wife never would have signed her goodbye note with a nickname she detested. The uncharacteristically bright “The Usual Santas” recounts the attempts of eight department-store Santas to deal with the imposter who’s infiltrated their ranks. Even lesser efforts “An American Fridge” and “The Last Dead Letter” catch you looking the wrong way. And in “All the Livelong Day,” in some ways the most predictable of all these stories, a couple’s hike turns into an authentic nightmare.
Perfect for readers eager to have the wool pulled over their eyes again and again.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-641-29302-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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
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