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
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.
A luxury liner bound for New York in 1924 becomes the scene of a twisty golden age pastiche.
When an unnamed third-class passenger discovers the body of an elderly man at the bottom of an exterior flight of stairs aboard the Endeavour, Capt. McCrory insists it must be an accident. But James Temple, a Scotland Yard detective who just happens to be aboard, says that no one would have ventured to the outdoor steps in the rain without a coat, so the death should be treated as suspicious. Unable to stop Temple from investigating, McCrory assigns ship’s officer Timothy Birch to accompany him, and Birch promptly becomes the world’s most unwilling Dr. Watson, constantly battling Temple over theories and procedures. Anxious that they have only four days to find a potential killer before the ship docks and lets its 2,000 passengers roam free in New York, he’s especially infuriated at the leisurely pace marked by Temple’s bromide, “Facts before witnesses.” There’s reason to sympathize with Temple, because the suspects in first and second class (the only classes that matter in this ultra-class-conscious world) are cardboard cutouts—the successful banker, his trophy wife, the aspiring artists, the gallery owner—who are much less interesting than the secrets they’re hiding. In his most anachronistic development, author Hindle shows Birch, unlike the imperturbable sidekicks he echoes, sunk in grief over his vanished daughter, Amelia, and his estranged wife, Kate, who left him after Amelia disappeared during one of his ocean voyages. He’d do anything to get his daughter back, he tells Temple, and his determination leads to the biggest surprise of all.
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9798217185740
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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