A thrilling and touching amalgam of wartime suffering, high crimes, and deadly secrets.
A sleuthing couple still recovering from the horrors of World War I investigate murder and treason.
Verity Kent and her husband, Sidney, are visiting Wiltshire to help Verity’s Aunt Ernestine, who’s bitterly unhappy over the state of her house, which was occupied by the RAF, and the fate of her only remaining son, who returned home blind. There are missing valuables and money problems, so a vanished maid is low on the priority list until her body is found in a shallow grave. Unbeknownst even to Sidney, Verity was a spy during the war, and for 15 months, she thought Sidney dead while he was also doing secret work. Both still suffer from wartime stress, and they’ve recently been involved in several cases of murder and possible treason involving the highly placed Lord Ardmore, who’s having them watched. When the body of Ernestine’s gardener is found, the police arrest his wife, who, broken by the strain of war, took to drink and constantly fought with him. Verity and Sidney must also chase down clues in coded messages from their friend Max Westfield’s murdered father that involve one of Lord Ardmore’s plots. Verity, suddenly plagued by nightmares of a wartime experience, finds herself marked for death by a fanatical officer who misunderstood her part in it.
A thrilling and touching amalgam of wartime suffering, high crimes, and deadly secrets.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-2847-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
Armstrong’s new twist on her Rockton franchise scores higher as wilderness adventure than as mystery.
The idealistic attempt to carve a new town out of the Yukon snow runs into criminal complications that threaten to reduce the tiny population to zero.
Det. Casey Butler has every reason to be deeply invested in Haven’s Rock. She and her husband, Rockton Sheriff Eric Dalton, have financed the new settlement, breaking away from the marginally more established refuge of Rockton, with money Casey inherited. Her eventful history with Rockton makes her eager for the new town, whose every resident will be hand-picked by Dalton and her, to succeed. So she’s alarmed to learn that three of those residents ignored the place’s paramount rule—don’t go into the forest—and only one of them returned. Yolanda the contractor, last spotted walking into the woods with Bruno the engineer, is back safe and sound, but finding Bruno will become the top priority of Casey and Dalton and their canine and human cohort. Soon after he’s rescued, Bruno goes AWOL from his hospital bed without more than hinting at what happened in the forest, and this time he turns up dead. Even worse, Penny, the architect who followed Yolanda and Bruno when she first saw them walking away from the town in progress, remains missing, presumed dead—until Casey and Dalton find a dead woman who turns out to be Denise, the second wife of Mark, a prospective resident who’s on a secret mission of his own. Few readers will be able to name any of the suspects an hour after putting this spinoff down, but they’ll still be shivering with cold.
Armstrong’s new twist on her Rockton franchise scores higher as wilderness adventure than as mystery.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781250865410
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sorry, Sherlock. Detective work has nothing on the perils of costume design.
Murder and a host of lesser but more time-consuming complications dog the production of costumer Joey Jessop’s latest film project.
An unknown woman running from a restaurant is struck and killed by a silver Lexus SUV. It’s a painful moment for everyone involved, but especially for Joey, who’d seen the woman dragged and chased out of the restaurant kitchen minutes earlier by a cook and another menacing man and hadn’t said anything about it. Tyrone Thomas, the head of the studio producing The Golden Age, which is filming nearby, is less interested in encouraging his crew to cooperate with the police than in making sure no whiff of bad publicity touches his stars. And so much intrigue swirls around leading lady Gillian Best—from her quarrel with personal assistant Rita Ranucci to her hush-hush exchange with personal manager Dan Lomax to her unpublicized relationship with personal videographer Armand Dubois—that keeping it all under wraps is likely to be a full-time job. But not for Joey, whose full-time job, once costume designer Gregory Bentham is called back to England by his husband’s illness and the production’s deal with boutique Italian costume manufacturer Bergati falls through, is arranging for the last-minute design and construction of hundreds of World War I–era costumes for a movie whose story McCown, intent on the worm’s-eye view, never bothers to share. Another violent death will provide a sop to genre fans, but this is really a relentlessly detailed account of the thousands of obstacles to producing a movie.
Sorry, Sherlock. Detective work has nothing on the perils of costume design.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781639106646
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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