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 smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does...
Written under her real name and her pseudonym, two books in one from megaselling Roberts/Robb.
Book one: Laine Tavish, gorgeous redhead and owner of a small-town antique store, isn’t about to tell the cops that she knew the old man who was hit by a car right outside her shop. Just before he took his dying breath, she recognized Willy Young, partner in crime to Big Jack O’Hara, her father. Their biggest heist: millions of dollars in hot diamonds. Her father went to prison, but not Willy, whose last words were “left it for you.” What did he leave—and where? Enter Max Gannon, insurance investigator and all-around stud, with thick, wavy, run-your-fingers-through-it hair, tawny eyes that remind Laine of a tiger, and a delicious Georgia drawl. He beds Laine pronto, and they solve the case. But some of the diamonds are still missing. . . . Book two: it’s 50 years later, and New York traffic is slower than ever: just try getting a helicab on a rainy day. But Samantha Gannon, author of a bestseller called Hot Rocks based on her grandparents’ experiences in the long-ago case, eventually makes it home from the airport to find her house-sitter Andrea dead, throat cut. Another investigation begins, spearheaded by Eve Dallas, a tough-talking but very appealing New York cop married to Roarke, a rich, eccentric genius who just barely manages to stay on the right side of the law. Is the murderer after the rest of the diamonds? And is he or she related to the master thief who betrayed Samantha’s great-grandfather? There are more burning questions, and Eve wants answers—but, first, get Central on the telelink and program the Autochef for pastrami on rye.
A smoothly written contemporary caper paired with a murder mystery and a little meet-the-Jetsons futurism. No one does Suspense Lite better than Nora.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15106-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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