A cleverly conceived book that will leave readers in a brown study long after the final page.
In Whitfield’s novel, a British teenager disappears—seemingly into thin air—one evening in 1939.
Quiet and private, Muriel always seemed out of place with her five siblings in the rambunctious Mead family; their home was “never still and was unruly even by the standards of the day.” Her parents held the reins slack, so her disappearance on the way home from school didn’t cause immediate panic—the case went unsolved for eight decades. Doubling down, Whitfield has conjured up two fictional books by two fictional authors about this fictional character’s disappearance: The first is From a Green Lane, by Dr. Cecilia Cardiff; the second, The Second Life of Muriel Mead, is by Seren Jones. Cardiff is an independent researcher, and her account reads like a step-by-step investigative report with a heavy academic flavor, festooned with footnotes. Her book purports to have been published in 1987, and she was unable to crack the mystery, even though she was convinced that Muriel was kidnapped and murdered by one Potter Shaw, a taciturn neighboring egg farmer. Jones’ book is quite different, being a portrait of Hariet Head, a quiet, private, very old woman who lives off by herself a long walk away from the author’s own place in a Welsh village. They become friends, and eventually Jones discovers that “Hariet Head” is indeed Muriel Mead. (The new name was not chosen to hide her identity but was simply a result of sloppy handwriting on a form.) It turns out that Potter Shaw was a very benign and wise friend to Muriel, who, stumbling upon a traumatic family secret, took off by herself in almost a fugue state. After working as a wartime Land Girl, she met her life partner, Paco, and they had a daughter, Francisca, who now lives in Spain. She is very accepting of her life, but when she finds Cardiff’s book by pure chance, she’s understandably agitated, and her past comes flooding out.
Cardiff’s search of records, diaries, and newspaper accounts is presented with such perfect pitch that one keeps forgetting that the premise is fictional, and that there never was a Muriel Mead. Cardiff salts her telling with references to actual sensational cases in Britain at the time and later, and the footnotes are really icing on the scone. Jones, on the other hand, presents a very down-to-earth and tender account of a caring woman who comes to love and worry about an eccentric nonagenarian (Jones and her daughters care tenderly for Muriel in her last days and see to her burial). And Muriel’s discovery of Cardiff’s book (references to Wales, where Whitfield lives, seem to playfully hover over this book) allows readers to make other connections, illuminating things in Cardiff’s account that needed correcting or that turned out to have been true, after all. Cardiff’s account is affecting in the way that she clearly comes to love this mystery girl and aches to see justice done. Muriel is in many ways a dispenser of grace—despite her pinched self.
A cleverly conceived book that will leave readers in a brown study long after the final page.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 29, 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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