A raunchy but emotionally raw contemporary novel.
In Grady’s novel, a middle-aged pornography scriptwriter navigates messy relationships, questionable life choices, and unresolved romantic entanglements.
Jamie Katz is 40, divorced, and writing adult-film scripts for Scorch Studios, which happens to be owned by his ex-husband, Paul Loretto (who calls his writing “esoteric”). Jamie’s life in the Los Angeles enclave of San Fernando is a patchwork of dysfunction, whether he’s dealing with a frozen laptop, rewriting sex scenes, or drinking too much with friends from work. When Paul is found shot to death in the alley behind Scorch, Jamie becomes the prime suspect because he was fired that morning, smashed a glass wall in a rage, and has a documented history of torching Paul’s property. Determined to solve the murder before the cops pin it on him, Jamie investigates suspects at Scorch while navigating a complicated personal landscape. Joe Russo, his ex-boyfriend living in Miami, resurfaces after seven years of silence as a possible suspect; he also encounters Edgar Beaumont, a private investigator who may be connected to Paul’s murder as well. Grady’s novel is an unvarnished portrait of queer desire and the messy work of becoming accountable to the people you love. She’s crafted a protagonist who’s simultaneously self-aware and self-sabotaging, his sardonic narration cutting through sentiment with brutal honesty, especially when he reflects on his pattern of destroying relationships before they can destroy him. The prose shifts deftly between graphic sexual content and genuine emotional intimacy, never letting either overwhelm the other. Jamie’s relationships—with Paul (whose sex-toy experimentation gets memorable mention), with Joe (whose seven years of silence speaks volumes), and with Edgar (whose dangerous allure Jamie can’t quite shake)—reveal layers of longing beneath the main character’s self-destructive armor. The novel’s structure occasionally meanders, particularly in extended conversations that circle similar emotional territory. But Grady compensates with sharp atmospheric details, from the air at work to the humidity of Miami’s streets, that ground the narrative’s wilder moments.
A raunchy but emotionally raw contemporary novel.Pub Date: June 23, 2026
ISBN: 9798218894122
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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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