A likable heroine once again proves her chops.
A family feud and romantic difficulties are just minor problems for an organic cherry grower confronted by murder.
Shiloh Bellamy, who gave up a career in Hollywood to take over the family farm in Michigan, has improved the orchard and even helped solve some murders, but she still has to contend with drama. Her father and uncle each inherited half the farm, and after her uncle died, his daughter, Stacey, sold their portion. Now Shiloh’s discovered some valuable stock certificates her grandmother had hidden before her death, and Stacey thinks she’s entitled to half the money, which she wants for her theatrical enterprises. Though Shiloh is willing, her father isn’t, and somehow Shiloh gets all the blame. The good news is that Shiloh’s been selected to have a booth at the Cherry Farm Market, which is a great honor. As Shiloh watches the cherry-spitting contest, Dr. Dane Fullbright, a teacher and actor who’s just had a nasty argument with Stacey, appears to choke on a pit. Shiloh tries the Heimlich maneuver but can’t prevent his death, which proves to have been no accident. Someone who knew about his penicillin allergy may have used Stacey’s pills to coat that pit, so Stacey naturally insists that Shiloh clear her name by investigating. Although Stacey infuriates Shiloh, she can’t believe her cousin’s a killer. The local law officers, meanwhile, get help from Antrim County Sheriff Milan Penbrook, with whom Shiloh has a tenuous romantic relationship. To prove Stacey innocent, Shiloh must dig into Fullbright’s past and uncover secrets that could provide a motive for murder.
A likable heroine once again proves her chops.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781728273051
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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
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
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