Every time you think you know where he’s going, Mukherjee pulls the rug out from under you with pleasingly insolent ease.
The reappearance of an unwelcome figure from his past in 1922 India leads Capt. Sam Wyndham to an impossible case of murder.
Finally acknowledging his addiction to opium, Wyndham journeys to a remote ashram to take the cure. As he approaches his destination, he spots a man who tried to kill him 17 years ago, when he was a freshly minted constable in Whitechapel. Two days after Bessie Drummond, a housekeeper who’d stepped out with Wyndham before his superior pressed him to drop her and she instantly made an unsuitable marriage, was attacked in an East London street, she was beaten to death in her own room, which was locked from the inside. Wyndham’s own investigations, and his devil’s bargain with a pair of crime lords from Yorkshire, led the police to a suspect who swore he was innocent. Struck by his sincerity, Wyndham raced to pursue new leads, but all in vain. Now the man he’s convinced actually killed Bessie has turned up in the most unlikely place, and there’s every sign that he’s recognized Wyndham. The disappearance and death of one of his fellow residents at the ashram is only a prelude to a second fresh murder—an unholy echo of Bessie Drummond’s death in another locked room, with the added complication that the obvious manner of death seems to have been physically impossible. Mukherjee juggles his two time frames effortlessly, brings both the East End and upcountry India to vivid life, wittily places his hero under the thumb of his own sergeant, and supplies an improbably logical conclusion to Wyndham’s most baffling case to date.
Every time you think you know where he’s going, Mukherjee pulls the rug out from under you with pleasingly insolent ease.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-468-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
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