A vigorous defense of women’s rights wrapped in a pair of unsurprising mysteries.
Barrister Daniel Pitt’s seventh case, set in 1913, is regrettably the last by Perry, who died in 2023, leaving it to be completed by her friend and “personal editor” Zackheim.
As usual, it opens with a bang. Learning that the parents of Toby Kitteridge, his senior colleague at fford Croft and Gibson, have been shot—his mother is dead and his father in a coma—Daniel is tasked with informing his old friend of this shocking news while he’s in the middle of examining a witness at the trial of Peter Ward, who’s accused of murdering Alexandra Stanton while attempting to rape her. Daniel accompanies Toby to the Suffolk village where his late mother and comatose father lived. But the week’s delay Toby’s judge has granted isn’t enough, for over the strident objections of his sister, Alberta Walsh, who insists that invading their mother’s body would be a moral outrage, Toby orders an autopsy. When Toby’s wife, Dr. Miriam fford Croft, a pathologist, conducts the procedure, she makes a telltale discovery that turns out to overturn the local constabulary’s presumptive verdict of murder and attempted suicide against Toby’s father, Rev. Justin Kitteridge. Since Toby’s not in the right place geographically or psychologically to resume his defense of Peter Ward, the job falls to the less experienced and less prepared Daniel. He bumbles the case with almost comical ineptitude before the denouement vindicates the guesses of most readers helped along by the virtual absence of alternative suspects in the murders of both Alexandra Stanton and Delia Kitteridge. Fans of the period franchise needn’t worry about Perry’s lurid title: Most of those deaths are set comfortably in the past, the victims never named.
A vigorous defense of women’s rights wrapped in a pair of unsurprising mysteries.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780593982518
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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