Fame is fleeting, but murder’s always exciting in Roker’s latest romp.
Even off the air, celebrity chef Billy Blessing finds his way to A-list adventure.
After scandal ended Billy’s spot on Wake Up, America!, a network morning show, and his restaurant burned down, the chef decamps to the decidedly untrendy North Fork of Long Island to start over. His new place, NoFo Eats, serves classic French dishes, but the clientele is a far cry from the sophisticates Billy entertained before. So when a young woman in a sleek tailored suit turns up at the bar drinking Uncle Nearest 1856, he knows that something must be up. Lisa Cowles admits she’s traveled from Manhattan for more than Billy’s steak au poivre. She wants the chef, who’s got a nose for murder, to investigate the disappearance of her father, fisherman Jack Landry. Landry left Cioffi’s Marina in his little boat several weeks ago headed for Gardiners Island. The sea got rough, and he never returned. Though she spent precious little time with her absentee dad, Lisa still wants to know what happened, and she’s willing to pay handsomely for the information. Since NoFo’s closed for the next week, Billy agrees, and a little poking around with Northold police chief Lola Bristow persuades him there’s something hinky about Landry’s disappearance. Before his investigation gets going, though, his former boss Gretchen Di Voss calls him with big news: streaming service Worldwide wants to launch a cooking show with Billy “front and center.” Worldwide couldn’t care less about the scandal that turned the network against Billy, and they want him back in New York immediately. Weighing Cowles’ hefty retainer against Worldwide’s bonanza and quiet, predictable Northold against the glitzy Big Apple is only the start of a dilemma inside a puzzle inside an enigma that the adventurous Billy faces.
Fame is fleeting, but murder’s always exciting in Roker’s latest romp.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9798200923243
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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