An English country house mystery infused with humor, verve, and plenty of surprises.
In this novel, a private secretary and a police detective investigate a murder at a British estate.
The Earl of Unsworth is atop the highest turret of his English castle, taking a brief respite from the large, extravagant 18th-birthday party he’s throwing for his favorite niece and ward, Fanny, when his butler interrupts him. The man informs Unsworth that an unknown young woman’s body has just been found in the garden. Hoping to avoid a scandal, Unsworth asks his highly efficient and capable private secretary, Mr. Quayle, to conduct his own discreet inquiries alongside the official police investigation. Despite misgivings, Quayle agrees. To his surprise, an old army buddy, now DI Wintle, turns out to be in charge of solving the crime. Despite their friendship, Wintle is not happy to have a civilian tagging along—or, in fact, trying to stay one step ahead. It soon becomes clear to both men that the Unsworth family is holding back its secrets and that not everything and everyone are what they seem. Their attempts to track down the identity of the murdered woman and how she came to be in the castle garden on the night of the party take both Quayle and Wintle far afield, including to London, as they try to sift through the conflicting stories offered by the members of the Unsworth family. The two sleuths interview Fanny—a surprisingly steely social butterfly—her domineering aunt Lady Constance, and her hapless, ne’er-do-well cousin Arthur, who has an unfortunate penchant for running away at crucial moments. Set in the 1920s, this second installment of Slayton’s series certainly checks all the boxes of the English country house mystery genre—a wealthy aristocrat’s estate, a long-lost relative, a missing family heirloom, a loyal household staff, and an enigmatic riddle. But the story never feels merely formulaic thanks to vivid writing, lively characters, and quietly snarky humor that will keep readers engaged from Page 1. This entertaining mystery hits all the right genre buttons in a fresh way.
An English country house mystery infused with humor, verve, and plenty of surprises.Pub Date: April 3, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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