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
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
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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