A mystery that doesn’t easily reveal its secrets.
In March 1940, a Hollywood script supervisor takes on another murder investigation as the U.S. ignores gathering war clouds.
Evelyn Galloway has moved to California, leaving her life and her former love, Alex Trayer, behind in New York, and is now sharing an apartment with dancer Mary Truman. Evelyn was fortunate enough to work with Alfred Hitchcock on his last picture and helped solve the murder of someone distinctly less fortunate. Now Hitchcock, who’s making a movie about “Boravian” (read: German) spies, is fighting the censors, who are pressuring him to keep the film balanced, since the U.S. has declared neutrality in the war. Visiting the ladies’ room, Evelyn meets a weepy Phoebe Dillon, who claims to have come for an audition, even though none are being held that day. Mary is pushing Evelyn to have more of a social life, especially now that Alex has moved to California; in addition to Alex, she thinks journalist Ted Dorton—whom Evelyn hasn’t trusted since he covered the first murder—would make a good partner. Then, when Phoebe’s body is found in a vacant lot, Ted’s newspaper runs a series of stories painting her as a tramp. Evelyn goes to see Det. Thomas Zeigler, with whom she worked before, and tells him all she knows. She’s incensed that someone seems to be insinuating that Phoebe was just asking to be killed. Ted apologizes for his past behavior and works with Evelyn to discover why and by whom Phoebe is being trashed. They discover quite a bit, but it’s not until Evelyn talks to Alex, who’s secretly working to combat German propaganda, that she learns the truth.
A mystery that doesn’t easily reveal its secrets.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2026
ISBN: 9781448320585
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.
An ordinary woman finds extraordinary adventures on a river cruise on the Seine.
Muriel Blossom acknowledges that she’s a “no-frills” person, a trait that served her well when doing surveillance for Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. When she gets an unexpected upgrade on her British Airways flight to Paris, she finds herself not only in business class, but on the other side of the looking glass. Allan Turner, a handsome stranger, befriends her in the Chesapeake Lounge, which her upgrade allows her to access. She misses her connection at Heathrow because of the weather, so he invites her to share his luxurious suite in a London hotel, paid for, he insists, by his firm. Then he sends her off on the Eurostar train to reach Paris via the Chunnel in time for her ship’s departure. Once in Paris, she meets another stranger, younger but equally attentive. Danny Johnson takes her to a friend’s atelier in the Marais where the plus-sized Muriel can find the fashionable clothing she deserves. A mysterious man in a bellman uniform knocks on her hotel-room door and invites her to leave her luggage in the hallway so it can be transferred overnight to her ship, but of course she realizes that’s nonsense. She also receives the news that Allan died in a fall from his balcony the night after she left London. When Danny turns up on her cruise, she knows something’s off, but she can’t put together the pieces. That’s because Lippman is unrivaled in her ability to lay out clues in a way that makes them seem not only mysterious, but downright surreal. Only at the end does everything fit together so naturally that it all seems blazingly obvious. Like Muriel, who’s patient and sensible to the end, you’ll just have to wait.
Another gem from Lippman, with a heroine who elevates being ordinary to an art form.Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9780062998101
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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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