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
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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