A character-driven puzzler that ends in a painful denouement.
Indomitable Inspector Vera Stanhope, whose lonely youth with a lawless father has given her a unique approach to crime and punishment, returns in a heartbreaking case.
On the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, off the northeast coast of England, the past drives the present. A small group of old school friends have been meeting there, at Pilgrims’ House, every five years for half a century. They first came to the island on a school trip organized by a young teacher hoping to "challenge their preconceptions" on "a kind of secular retreat." They bonded on that first trip, but what may have really brought them together was the death of Isobel, one of their number, at their first reunion five years later. At that time, Annie and Daniel were married and mourning the loss of a baby. Since then, Lou and Ken have also married, and now Ken has dementia. Rick has become a famous television personality, and Philip, a priest. Now, after a night of drinking and reliving the past, Annie, long divorced from Daniel, finds Rick’s body hanging in his room. The fact that Rick was recently fired from his job over allegations of sexual impropriety does not convince Annie that her notably vain friend would commit suicide and leave himself to be found naked. Soon after Vera and her crew are called in, she confirms that Rick was smothered and hanged. The Holy Island is an island only when the tide covers the causeway; indeed, trying to drive through the water caused Isobel’s death all those years ago. Although there are certainly present-day reasons why someone might have killed Rick, Vera and her team do a deep dive into the past and find an unexpected motive.
A character-driven puzzler that ends in a painful denouement.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-2502-0453-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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