Entertaining and tender, with a charming protagonist.
In Bidulka’s novel, the titular detective visits his ailing mother’s Saskatchewan farm and becomes embroiled in an investigation into local malfeasance and murder.
Russell Quant, now approaching his 55th birthday, is confronting the painful fact that his 84-year-old mother, Kay, is showing signs of increasing dementia. He visits her farmhouse to begin sorting out her lifetime’s worth of assorted possessions. Kay is paying a condolence call to her friend Cecilia (CeeCee) Toth, whose husband, Clem, has recently died. Quant heads over to CeeCee’s house, where he learns that Clem left a suicide text on CeeCee’s phone—the message includes a confession about committing some sort of crime. Quant also learns that two weeks before Clem’s death, somebody sprayed poison over all the plants in some greenhouses in the neighboring town. CeeCee also owns a greenhouse, and when the police discover empty containers of Roundup in CeeCee and Clem’s yard, they assume that Clem was getting rid of the competition and, feeling guilty, died by suicide—but CeeCee is convinced he was murdered. And so, Quant and his investigative partner, JP Taine (who’s also his husband), have their next case. Bidulka’s ninth entry in his Russell Quant detective series offers a twisty mystery with enough red herrings to keep readers engaged. It’s also a touching tale of an adult coming to terms with the gradual mental decline of a beloved parent. The author sensitively limns well-observed small lapses—like ingredients missing in Kay’s much-loved recipes—and larger ones, as when she mistakes Quant for his deceased father. (“I’ll always remember that moment, the first time my mother misidentified me. Part of me wanted to turn and run away. Part of me wanted to engulf Mom in a hug until she knew it was me. I did neither.”) Despite the tale’s inherent poignancy, Quant’s edgy and often self-effacing sense of humor adds giggles and a delightful positive energy to the mix.
Entertaining and tender, with a charming protagonist.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781990495120
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
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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BOOK REVIEW
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