Juxtaposing the lives of ordinary people and the seriously rich enhances this thorny tale of love, hate, and murder.
A series of horrific and inexplicable attacks on women provide a reporter a chance to solve yet another murder among the aristocrats of 1901 Rhode Island.
Though she still lives in Newport, journalist Emma Cross Andrews left society reporting behind to pursue other stories after she married wealthy newspaper owner Derrick Andrews. On the one hand, Emma’s been reluctantly accepted by the Four Hundred as a relative of Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt. On the other, her long-standing friendship with Newport Police Detective Jesse Whyte has involved her in many upper-crust murders. A luncheon at Vinland, a Viking-inspired mansion, in support of the Audubon Society attracts Second Lady Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and the cream of Newport society, who in deference to the Audubon supporters have forgone their usual extravagantly feathered hats. At the luncheon, where she detects undercurrents of tension, Emma meets Amity Carter and her niece, Zinnia Lewis, newly arrived from Florida and friends of Vinland owner Florence Twombly. Amity has recently inherited the empty property next door to Emma’s, which she and Derrick have been hoping to buy; they want to build a new house there and turn her family home into a school. Delighted to learn that Amity approves their plans, Emma invites her and Zinnia to leave their hotel and stay in her guest room until they return to Florida. Things work out less well for luncheon guest Lottie Robinson, who has apparently been poisoned by an unidentified toxin delivered in petit fours and is not expected to survive. As other poisonings follow, Emma investigates a collection of motives ranging from broken engagements to insufficient devotion to protecting wildlife.
Juxtaposing the lives of ordinary people and the seriously rich enhances this thorny tale of love, hate, and murder.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781496736215
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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