A well-crafted outsider’s view of Cotswolds village life that will appeal to mystery buffs.
Californian Ellie Kent, the vicar’s new wife, is just breaking in her tweeds when she finds an unidentified body in Boatwright’s (Collateral Damage, 2012) charming mystery.
English literature professor Ellie is a skeptical outsider in the English town of Little Beecham in the Cotswolds. She quickly learns that her challenges not only include baking for the upcoming Christmas coffee event, but also facing comparisons with the vicar’s widely loved first wife. However, the author sets up even greater obstacles to Ellie’s happiness in this engaging, slyly humorous novel. Ellie sees a mysterious stranger in the woods and later finds the same man’s body in the churchyard on All Saints’ Day. A murder inquiry quickly focuses on the innocent Ellie, who desperately begins her own investigation. There’s no shortage of secrets to unravel: who was the victim, and why did he have no identification on his body? Why does a handsome man, Michael-John Parker, keep visiting the abandoned manor house? Priscilla Worthy (who’s first described as looking “like a fluffy bird with her cap of white hair, bright eyes, and layers of grey sweaters”) claims that she was in the woods gathering mushrooms; if that’s true, then why does she seem so flustered? Ellie’s skills at textual analysis, as well as her knowledge of the Italian language, help her as she works to clear her name. Anglophiles, especially, will adore this book’s many pleasures, which include winning character descriptions, a sexy vicar, plenty of tea, and a portrait of the lack of privacy in a small English town: “ ‘All the world’s a stage,’ she thought, was clearly written by someone who lived in an English village.” Although the pacing flags a bit in the middle, some loose ends are never tied up, and Ellie’s secretiveness with both her husband and the police may be frustrating, her literate good company more than compensates.
A well-crafted outsider’s view of Cotswolds village life that will appeal to mystery buffs.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1939816368
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Cozy Cat Press
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
© 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.
