A melding of Amish culture with a traditional cozy, with a cute goat to boot.
Amish and English worlds collide when the murder of a quilt competition judge places a possible witness in danger.
Millie Fisher and her closest friend, Lois Henry, are like chalk and cheese. But somehow the pairing of the Amish matchmaker and her purple-spiked-haired best friend works, maybe because the two share the same sense of justice in a sometimes troubled world. Though Millie is close to God and her Amish community, her penchant for solving mysteries means that she’s allowed certain modern affordances, like a phone line, that help keep her safe in her informal investigations. And investigations always seem to find Millie and Lois. The latest is the murder of Tara Barron, the difficult head judge of the local fair’s quilt competition, a competition in which Millie has entered a beautiful wedding-ring quilt. Millie knows that murder doesn’t discriminate among communities, so she and Lois use their separate connections to find a potential motive, while Lois tries not to get sidetracked by her own potential love matches. Being 68 makes Lois even more keenly aware of her desire for a partner, whereas Millie’s age and experience as a widow makes her nervous about finding a new man, even though Lois keeps pointing out that their longtime friend Uriah Schrock is interested in Millie as a match. As the investigation into Tara’s death intensifies, Millie meets Zach Troyer, a young Amish boy, and his beloved Pygmy goat, Scooter, whose presence at the fair may make them valuable witnesses to the crime—so long as Millie can keep them safe long enough for Zach to tell his story.
A melding of Amish culture with a traditional cozy, with a cute goat to boot.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781496737489
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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: today
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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