A surprising, genre-blending journey with sentimental appeal.
Burton presents a novel about a widow with family troubles who must deal with threats after witnessing an attack.
Journalist Skyler Bennett loves to walk. Although she lost her beloved husband, Tim, some years ago, she stays in good spirits thanks to evening rambles with her black Labrador retriever, Mousse. One evening when Skyler is on a ramble in her Southern California neighborhood, she’s alarmed by a cry for help. One of her neighbors, a woman named Kate, has been stabbed, and Skyler manages to get a look at the assailant before he flees. She provides a description to the police, but later, she receives a threatening text, which may be from the attacker. Back in Skyler’s hometown of Edenton, North Carolina, her mother is terminally ill, so she makes the cross-country flight to try to mend her troubled relationship with her parent and her difficult sister, Kay, whom she later learns is struggling with alcohol addiction. After an inebriated Kay is struck by a car while crossing the street,the siblings’ relationship only worsens. After Skyler returns to California, her fear of retribution from Kate’s attacker returns; however, it turns out that she has some very helpful neighbors—and she’ll certainly need their assistance in the trying days to come. Burton’s narrative supplies a welcome amount of twists and turns, shifting from a mystery-thriller about an unknown threat to an affecting literary novel about a woman’s homecoming after a 30-year absence; the unpredictability of what will happen next keeps Skyler’s adventure humming along, particularly when she winds up dealing with some sticky situations. It is a dialogue-heavy adventure, though, with some occasionally bland small-talk and unhelpful descriptions, as when a character’s expression is said to shift from “confusion to uncertainty.” Ultimately, though, even a savvy reader won’t foresee the ending, or even many of the smaller developments along the way.
A surprising, genre-blending journey with sentimental appeal.Pub Date: April 14, 2024
ISBN: 9798885043847
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Manuscripts LLC
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2025
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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