Fans of the Queen of Crime will delight in this modernized classic mystery, heavily laden with Christie lore.
Agatha Christie, who died in 1976, returns to solve some present-day mysteries.
Tory Van Dyne, a book conservator at Manhattan’s Mystery Guild Library, lives in an apartment on the top two floors of the Greenwich Village townhouse left to her by her grandmother; the building also houses the library and Tory’s basement workshop. When a woman claiming to be Mrs. Max Mallowan, aka Agatha Christie, appears in the Agatha Christie room—a replica of the author’s library in Devon—offering to solve a murder mystery, Tory thinks she’s a wandering nut job, albeit one who’s capable of trading esoteric Christie quotations with her. But in fact Agatha, who finds eternity dull, has been granted leave to solve a mystery, such as the one presented by Tory’s lookalike cousin, Nicola. Unlike the flamboyant Nic, Tory is quiet, and she’s no fan of Nic’s friend and fellow actress, the entitled Sailor Savoie. Nic thinks someone’s poisoned Bertram, her agent Howard Calhoun’s pug, and she suspects Sailor. Nic, Sailor, and their mutual friend, Wren, had starred in the off-Broadway version of Beauty and the Beast, and Nic’s desperate to land a part in the planned movie. Sharp-eyed Agatha notices that Nic’s wearing earrings made from the seeds of a plant that could have poisoned Bertram. When Nic turns up with handsome detective Sebastian Mendez-Cruz, Tory learns that Howard’s been pushed to his death in the subway. Eager for advice, Tory tells head librarian Adrian Gooding the story of Agatha, but he dismisses it as nonsense. Upon the death of Sailor, supposedly of food poisoning, Tory, Adrian, Nic, and eventually Sebastian get together with Agatha to explore means and motives.
Fans of the Queen of Crime will delight in this modernized classic mystery, heavily laden with Christie lore.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9780593818817
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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
© Copyright 2026 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.
