This entertaining, sexy adventure in not-so-dark academia checks all the classic detective-story boxes. Keep ‘em coming.
There’s no shortage of suspects when an unpopular professor is murdered.
This winning first mystery from novelist and memoirist Bloom features an English professor turned private eye with the perfectly hard-boiled name of Dell Chandler and a charming, ironic, super cool narrative voice to match. She’s hired to investigate an untimely death at Cromwell University, a private college in a snooty area of Connecticut: A professor named Oliver Bullfinch was bludgeoned to death in his office with a bust of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Low expectations of the local police lead college president Elizabeth Cutty to hire Dell, who can very much use the $500 daily fee. She brings to the task a solid background in lock-picking, file-snatching, and basic snooping, much of it gleaned from old episodes of Law & Order. Fortunately, she also knows something about the tenure-mad, prestige-hungry, and often alcoholic nature of the standard-issue academic, as well as their endless backbiting. And she’s no wimp. “I’m built fairly big and very solid. I look best in smooth, tailored clothes or in jeans. I look my very best stark naked. In ruffles and florals, I look like a pale side of beef with ribbons around it.” As for the naked part, we’ll learn more about this once Dell starts lusting after Sgt. Nat Baker, a strong, silent type on the local force. When someone cuts her brake lines, when someone throws a rock through her godfather’s window (he’s a local, and was a pal of Bullfinch’s), Dell can tell she’s getting close. Lots of action, late-breaking twists and characters, plus the emergence of a buried secret in Dell’s own past make the last quarter of the book a bit of a whirlwind, with a second highly educated corpse dropping into the mix, but Dell Chandler is a cool character and a quick study, and her sense of humor never deserts her.
This entertaining, sexy adventure in not-so-dark academia checks all the classic detective-story boxes. Keep ‘em coming.Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9781613167601
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.
A luxury liner bound for New York in 1924 becomes the scene of a twisty golden age pastiche.
When an unnamed third-class passenger discovers the body of an elderly man at the bottom of an exterior flight of stairs aboard the Endeavour, Capt. McCrory insists it must be an accident. But James Temple, a Scotland Yard detective who just happens to be aboard, says that no one would have ventured to the outdoor steps in the rain without a coat, so the death should be treated as suspicious. Unable to stop Temple from investigating, McCrory assigns ship’s officer Timothy Birch to accompany him, and Birch promptly becomes the world’s most unwilling Dr. Watson, constantly battling Temple over theories and procedures. Anxious that they have only four days to find a potential killer before the ship docks and lets its 2,000 passengers roam free in New York, he’s especially infuriated at the leisurely pace marked by Temple’s bromide, “Facts before witnesses.” There’s reason to sympathize with Temple, because the suspects in first and second class (the only classes that matter in this ultra-class-conscious world) are cardboard cutouts—the successful banker, his trophy wife, the aspiring artists, the gallery owner—who are much less interesting than the secrets they’re hiding. In his most anachronistic development, author Hindle shows Birch, unlike the imperturbable sidekicks he echoes, sunk in grief over his vanished daughter, Amelia, and his estranged wife, Kate, who left him after Amelia disappeared during one of his ocean voyages. He’d do anything to get his daughter back, he tells Temple, and his determination leads to the biggest surprise of all.
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9798217185740
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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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