Frightful fun with haunted history and a blustery thespian.
Has an overconfident thief met his match in a haunted mansion?
In the early years of the 20th century, grandiloquent actor Jack Fitzglen heads a mediocre theatrical family, abetted by his adoring dresser, Augustus Pocket. When theatrical engagements are meager, Mr. Jack likes to augment the family’s income with some artful thievery, a sideline that fills Gus with trepidation, though not enough to make him refuse to assist his idol. Impersonations are such a key component of Mr. Jack’s heists that they’re almost better described as performances. His latest felonious obsession is a priceless relic called the Talisman Chalice, which carries a curse and is reportedly hidden somewhere in a Northumberland estate called Vallow Hall or in the ominous neighboring Bastle House. Rayne puts this plummy plot on a back burner to take the reader north and lay out complicated inheritance questions swirling around sincere, timorous Maude Vallow, who becomes the hapless heiress to these properties. The discovery of the corpse of a servant thought to have decamped only increases Maude’s anxiety It is in this forbidding atmosphere that the flamboyant Mr. Jack attempts to execute his plan. Rayne’s tale, a half-step away from the simmering suspense of her upscale Phineas Fox series and West/Flint ghost stories, feels delightfully unleashed from their milieu. She depicts hammy antihero Jack with relish, loads the last half of her bubbly, spooky yarn with lively set pieces like a suspicious fire, and ties her chalice to the dark fates of Richard II and Anne Boleyn.
Frightful fun with haunted history and a blustery thespian.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781448306404
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
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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