A sly love letter to the immortal detective, his creator, and the golden age of cinema.
Trapped on a Greek island and faced with a locked-room mystery, an aging actor obligingly reprises his most famous role: Sherlock Holmes.
It’s 1960, and Ormond Basil has mostly retired from the screen to live peacefully in Antibes, on the French Riviera, but he still enjoys an excuse to travel and indulge himself with some shopping. As so often happens among expatriate communities, his travels reunite him with an old friend, Pietro Malerba, a movie producer, and his inamorata, Najat Farjallah, a fading opera diva. The three are stranded on the small island of Utakos by a storm when a fellow guest of their hotel is found dead in a beach cabana, a probable death by suicide. There are details, however, that hint at foul play—the fact that there was only one set of footprints in the sand; a clean threshold; an anomaly with the rope—and so the proprietress and the other guests turn to Basil, who famously portrayed Sherlock Holmes in a number of earlier movies. Together with his Dr. Watson figure, a Spanish mystery writer named Francisco Foxá, Basil leans into the role, drawing on his excellent knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle as well as his own experiences inhabiting the most famous British detective. As he deduces and observes, alludes and concludes, everyone begins to treat him more and more like a real detective—including the murderer, who not only strikes again, but leaves taunting clues to draw him in. The novel’s tone is clever and entertaining but also somewhat melancholy, poignant—a reflection on a time gone by, a generation now passed. This version of Holmes has a weary dignity, a wry sense of self-awareness—he wants to stretch out the farce as long as possible rather than “return to melancholy afternoons of tedium and fog”—but Pérez-Reverte doesn’t hesitate to comment on places Basil falls short of the legend whom he both admires and resents while cheekily dropping names like shiny coins.
A sly love letter to the immortal detective, his creator, and the golden age of cinema.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9780316594349
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.
A news presenter and a police detective are brought together by murders in the British village where they both grew up.
There is precious little that can be revealed about the plot of Feeney’s third novel without spoilers, as the author has woven surprises and plot twists and suspicious linkages into nearly every one of her brief, first-person chapters, written in three alternating narrative voices. “Hers” is Anna Andrews, a wannabe anchor on a BBC news program whose lucky break comes when the body of one of her school friends is found brutally murdered in their hometown, a woodsy little spot called Blackdown. “His” is DCI Jack Harper, head of the Major Crime Team in Blackdown, where major crimes were rather few until now. The third is unnamed but clearly the killer’s. Happily, none of the three is an unreliable narrator—good thing because plenty of people are sick of that—but none is exactly 100% forthcoming either. Which only makes sense, because you can't have reveals without secrets. In a small town like Blackdown, everybody knows everybody, so it’s not too surprising that Anna and Jack have a tragic past or that each has connections to all the victims and suspects while not being totally free from suspicion themselves. Who is that sneaky third narrator? On the way to figuring that out, expect high school mean girls, teen lesbian action, mutilated corpses, nasty things happening to kittens, and—as seems de rigueur in British thrillers—plenty of drinking and wisecracks, sometimes in tandem. “Sadly, my sister has the same taste in wine as she does in men; too cheap, too young, and headache-inducing.”
Feeney improves on her debut with a taut suspense plot, many gleeful twists and turns, and suspects galore.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26608-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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