A murder mystery that tries to be tongue-in-cheek but can’t quite pull it off.
After the murder of a literary superstar at a writing conference in remote Scotland, three American authors join forces to clear their names and uncover a killer.
It will be clear to readers from the very first pages that, despite claiming to be best friends, Cassie Pringle, Emma Endicott, and Kat de Noir do not get along. Cassie is a mother of six who writes cozy mysteries in her free time; Emma is a blue-blooded New Englander who specializes in historical fiction; and Kat writes erotic urban fantasy novels. Nonetheless, they manage to convince their agent to let them write a book together and foot the bill for them to travel to a conference at Kinloch Castle hosted by Brett Saffron Presley, the internationally bestselling author—and “spokesperson for the famous Presley How-to-Write-a-Novel software”—who owns the castle. When Brett is murdered and his body is found high in Kinloch’s tower, it falls to Detective Chief Inspector Euan Macintosh to interrogate the castle’s occupants, including Cassie, Emma, and Kat. While Euan can’t stand the American novelists—or Americans in general—it becomes quickly evident that they might be his only chance at finding out who killed Brett and why. The problem is that none of their stories about what brought them to the castle seem to line up. While three authors collaborating on a book about three authors writing a book together feels fresh and charming at first, especially as each chapter changes point-of-view, the writing is uneven and the plot disjointed. The result feels less like satire and more like secondhand embarrassment as Cassie, Emma, and Kat bumble their way through the Scottish countryside.
A murder mystery that tries to be tongue-in-cheek but can’t quite pull it off.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780063259867
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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