Nobody from Agatha Christie to Anthony Horowitz beats Stevenson for cleverness. Resign yourself to being stumped, and enjoy.
Hoping to set up shop as a private detective, Australian mystery novelist Ernest Cunningham winds up literally in the middle of the world’s most complicated bank robbery.
Ernest and Juliette, his fiancée and prospective partner, think they’ve been invited to a meeting at Huxley’s Bank in Sydney to secure a loan that will underwrite their agency. Of course not, bank director Winston Huxley informs them scornfully; he wants them to investigate the disappearance of his brother, Edward Huxley, the bank’s co-director, who vanished two days after changing the codes necessary to open the vault. Since the bank would be ruined if Winston let the authorities know it can’t access its own resources, it’s all up to Ernest, with a little help and more than a little pushback from Juliette. No sooner have they settled in than a masked thief enters Huxley’s and takes everyone in the bank hostage. In a way, that’s poetic justice, since every single hostage—from TV producer Remy Allard to unspeaking priest Father Gabriel to gravely ill 20-year-old Cordelia Bright and Laverna Bright, her grandmother and caregiver—turns out to have stolen something, and at least one of them is guilty of murder, too. Making throwaway deductions at a breathless pace en route to the climactic “parlour scene,” Ernest, who introduces himself in a flashforward that shows him locked in that vault with a limited air supply, saves plenty of ratiocination for this denouement, where he solves puzzles that many of his most devoted fans won’t even have recognized as puzzles at all.
Nobody from Agatha Christie to Anthony Horowitz beats Stevenson for cleverness. Resign yourself to being stumped, and enjoy.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780063434387
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
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
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