A tense tale of doxxing and death.
A famous author seeks Sunny Randall’s help in Gaylin’s third Robert B. Parker outing.
Melanie Joan Hall, bestselling romance author, approaches her friend Sunny, who is “one of Boston’s premier private detectives.” Melanie has recently received a vicious one-star review of her upcoming memoir, Stronger Alone, by someone called Book Babe on the website ReadAnon. The anonymous reviewer is prolific and powerful, having posted 530 reviews. Only one—this one—receives a single star. Not only is the book trashed, but Melanie Joan is “brutalize[d]” as a human being. Deeply hurt, Melanie Joan posts a nasty, profane reply. Phew, the language. She promptly deletes it, but screen shots circulate immediately, and the world knows what she wrote. “Plenty of harm,” she admits. “And completely foul.” So now she wants Sunny to identify the reviewer so she can apologize in person. “If you don’t dox Book Babe…my career is over,” she pleads. Indeed, her publisher, Scepter, not only pulls her memoir but cancels her contract for future novels. There is more to this than a bad review, though. Who is Book Babe, anyway? Sunny intends to find out. Longtime Parker fans will recognize Melanie Joan as a recurring background figure who evolves into a major character with serious issues that require Sunny’s investigative chops. Gaylin builds the tension as Melanie Joan’s career crumbles and readers begin to wonder where the physical danger lurks. There are allusions to Sunny’s love life, past and present—she’s “engaged to be engaged” to her ex-husband—and to Melanie Joan’s past troubles with an abuser. The author takes her time dropping a dead body into the story, but then more violence follows, so Sunny doesn’t pack heat for nothing. In fact, the ending is intense. The plot is entertaining if a wee bit thin, hinging on the devastating repercussions of a single snarky review. Would that a reviewer had such power!
A tense tale of doxxing and death.Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9780593854402
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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