A suspenseful and resonant story that will captivate dedicated mystery fans and newcomers alike.
Bidulka’s whodunit digs beneath the surface of everyday Saskatchewan life to uncover hidden truths.
Merry Bell, a trans woman, recently returned to her hometown of Livingsky, “broke, alone, [and] about to turn thirty.” She hopes to earn enough money to move back to Vancouver, British Columbia, by opening a private investigation agency. Soon after starting her business, she receives a request to investigate the disappearance of Dustin Thomson, the star quarterback from the local pro football team, the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Shortly after she agrees to take the case, the player is found dead, drowned downriver under Sweetgrass Bridge. The police, initially uncertain whether to declare his death an accident, become increasingly convinced it was suicide. Merry is fairly certain that his death was due to foul play, and she refuses to give up her investigation, despite being stonewalled by the cops. As Merry digs deeper, she frequently flashes back to her childhood and her more recent experience of transition. Alongside this main story is a subplot involving Roger Brown, a cross-dressing man who’s married to interior designer Brenda Brown, whose office is next to Merry’s; he hosts a popular true crime podcast as his alter ego, Stella, and begins investigating who’s sending mysterious, threatening notes to Merry. These two storylines are each engaging in their own right and thematically similar, but they don’t always smoothly intersect. Nevertheless, the novel’s fast-paced storytelling, featuring carefully revealed clues and a series of double crosses, will ensure that readers stay hooked on the case. Throughout, Bidulka shows a command of natural dialogue, creates sharply defined, realistic characters, and maintains a relatively bouncy tone, despite the occasionally heavy subject matter. It’s a fresh narrative that effectively employs the familiar beats of classic detective fiction.
A suspenseful and resonant story that will captivate dedicated mystery fans and newcomers alike.Pub Date: June 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781988754543
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Stonehouse Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2024
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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