Plenty of quirky characters lead up to a surprising denouement in this promising series kickoff.
Babysitting her mother’s needlework shop plunges a young woman into a morass of murder.
Now that Shelby Phillips has lost her job as office manager for a graphic design firm, she agrees to manage Nina’s Nimble Needle while her parents leave North Carolina for their dream RV trip. Shelby is sure that Jessica, her perfect older sister, could do it better, but her mom insists she’s the one for the job. Her mom’s friends, known as the NYAGs (for “Not Your Average Grannies”), are eager to help, especially with a trunk show featuring the work of Gina “Kat” Katsaros, a geeky type Shelby knew in high school, who now makes beautiful needlework designs and craft scissors that are “closer to silverware or jewelry than to standard scissors, fashioned as birds or flowers or delicate, ornate shapes.” The new Kat is totally different than she was in school, driving a wildly decorated van, sporting a purple streak in her hair, and giving off a vibe that unsettles Shelby, who’s been told by her mother that Kat would like to take over the Nimble Needle someday. On the morning of the trunk show, Kat is late, and when Shelby goes looking for her, she finds her dead in the van she uses for sharpening knives, an expensive one in her chest. The police seem to think she had an accident while she was sharpening it, but Shelby has her doubts, especially since the prickly Kat had quite a few enemies, even among her own family members. Kat’s brother has always wanted her van and is happy to have Shelby sell his sister’s valuable designs and scissors so he can score some cash. With help from old and new friends and even her sister, whose perfect life is spiraling out of control, Shelby searches for answers to her many questions about Kat’s death.
Plenty of quirky characters lead up to a surprising denouement in this promising series kickoff.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781496752000
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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