A cut above; a satisfying mystery that also progresses the leads’ life journeys.
Vacationing best friends run afoul of authorities in Cuba while investigating a fatal car accident that claimed the lives of four immunologists.
“I hope you’re getting into some good trouble,” Sarah Golden’s long-distance lover tells her over the phone. There is nothing good about it. While on a “long-overdue” vacation to Cuba, Golden, a transplant nurse, and Jackie Larson, a freshly licensed private eye, are diverted from their drinking, cigar factory tours, and performing at the Buena Vista Social Club by the tragic news that four top immunologists died in a car crash in advance of a conference in Chicago. They were scheduled to discuss the findings of their research on inducing tolerance for kidney transplant patients. Golden finds the accident suspect, and Larson is all too eager to use her newfound PI skills and connections to make inquiries—breaking a deal she agreed to with her spouse to take only “benign work.” The duo are further embroiled in the mystery when the chief of transplant at the Havana medical center violates Cuban law by slipping Golden the results of his own off-the-record study using the protocol shared by the late doctors. Pressure from authorities and threats to their families only bolster their resolve. “The people don’t know who they’re dealing with,” says Golden. Peele’s third medical mystery featuring this entertaining duo is a breezily written, cozy-adjacent read. Peele has a deft way with exposition for those new to this series, while Larson acts as a reader surrogate for laypeople (“Can someone explain to me what ‘tolerance’ means in the transplant world?” she helpfully asks). This is how we learn that “the holy grail of transplant” would “convince the body not to reject…any organ without using any drugs long term.” It doesn’t sound like something big pharma would like, and indeed, its representatives are rendered with mustache-twirling gusto. “Since Canada and Europe have socialized medicine, we should enjoy our US gravy train as long as we can,” one CEO remarks when considering the ramifications of the four doctors’ study.
A cut above; a satisfying mystery that also progresses the leads’ life journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64742-245-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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