A tough heroine who refuses to quit uses her own troubled background to crack the case.
A private investigator from Louisville, Kentucky, reluctantly takes a job that may be the death of her.
Annie Gore has hocked her watch again to pay her bills, so when a young man wants help finding his long-vanished sister, she’s glad to take on the job. Max Andrews has long been saving up for Annie’s retainer, and although her resume mentions Air Force service, college degrees, and private security, when he meets her, she’s not what he imagined. Max comes from a small North Carolina mountain town; Annie’s own experiences with a battered mother in a similar town make her well aware of small-town secrets and grudges. Max’s sister, Molly, was one of three girls abducted years ago. In each case, an applehead doll was left at the scene. When Jessica Hoyle, the child of a poor family, vanished, her case aroused little interest. A second girl, Olivia Jacobs, was returned two weeks after being kidnapped, perhaps because she’s autistic. Once Molly was taken, an all-out hunt was launched, and the FBI got involved, but neither she nor Jessica was ever found. Annie doesn’t get a warm greeting in Quartz Creek, and poking around doesn’t increase her popularity. The sheriff, who’s Olivia’s uncle, is hostile, but his deputy is willing to help. One of the first people Annie meets is Susan McKinney, who makes potions and reads cards. Some of the townsfolk think she took the girls because she was moved by the tale of a witch who traded apples to the starving mother of two girls and then turned them into birds. Eventually, Annie turns up so many suspects that she’s almost killed in a meth lab fire and narrowly escapes serious injury from a shooter.
A tough heroine who refuses to quit uses her own troubled background to crack the case.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9781250338686
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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