An appealing but messy character-driven whodunit.
A neurotic New Jersey bank president finds himself charged with murder in this mystery.
A bank employee has been killed, and the evidence against Baxter Bindle is overwhelming. Cops discovered his bloody fingerprint at the murder scene, along with some of his hair and the cosmetic he uses to hide acne scars. He also had a motive to kill the victim, John Kingsley, a bank examiner who uncovered money laundering at the Lowersex County Bank, where Baxter is president. Baxter’s cumbersome father, Barnaby, has tried molding his son into “a well educated, strong man.” But Baxter has become a passive hypochondriac who stutters in his father’s presence. Barnaby even hired a bank executive, Belle Logan, who covertly reports to him and ignores Baxter’s orders. Luckily, Baxter has an anonymous ally, who opens up a secret way to communicate with the suspect. Clearing him of the murder charge will entail unmasking the real killer, but time is short. With all the money laundering going on at Lowersex County Bank, the FBI, according to rumors, is aiming for a racketeering charge, which could land Baxter in prison without bail. So his incognito supporter sets about whittling down the suspect list. Copious pages in this murder mystery are spent developing the main character. There’s a lengthy but amusing section on Baxter’s failed dates and attempt at golfing with his father. These provide a modicum of sympathy for wealthy, privileged Baxter, whose father took him away from the doting aunt and uncle who initially raised him. The entertaining tale spotlights Baxter’s ally, whose identity readers eventually learn—though the reason for helping the banker remains unknown until the end. While Knight’s wry humor is effective without making light of homicide, the book’s extensive punctuation and formatting issues distract from the overall enjoyment. There are sentences ending with two periods; some missing quotation marks; and single quote marks for dialogue.
An appealing but messy character-driven whodunit.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4486-8848-7
Page Count: 314
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2020
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
© 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.
