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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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