An amiable, bite-sized work with appealing fairytale-like elements.
In Murray’s brief novel, a divorcee’s bucolic Southampton, New York homestead is thrown into chaos after old boyfriends start showing up.
Leslie Fitch, who’s gone through two divorces in the last decade, is now quite happy living a quiet life alone on her beach front property in the Hamptons with her small pack of devoted dogs. Her tranquility and peace of mind is shattered, however, when she returns home one day to discover her beloved golden retriever, Lucy, lying dead in the driveway, the victim of poisoning. She immediately suspects that one of her former lovers could be responsible for the heinous act, and she ends up purchasing a gun for protection. She soon finds herself the target of petty acts of mischief before receiving a particularly threatening letter, addressed to her and signed “Your Nemesis”: “You won't know another night of peaceful sleep. I will never forgive you for the way you treated me. Now it is your turn to suffer. You will reap what you have sowed.” This missive only sends Leslie into further mental disarray and distress. Into this maelstrom walks William Jones—one of Leslie’s many exes, whom she axed three years prior. Neither time nor the copious gin-and-tonics that he consumes daily has dulled his passion for Leslie, and he desperately wants her back. However, Leslie flatly refuses William’s romantic entreaties and wonders if he could possibly be her “Nemesis.” From here, the stripped-down mystery shifts its focus to William, who, unbeknownst to Leslie, has hit it big in the stock market and is making a good-faith effort to rein in his drinking. As she considers whether she should give William another chance, it becomes clear that her anonymous enemy has no intention of stopping his reign of terror anytime soon.
Over the course of this brisk book, Murray delivers a tight, unadorned mystery story that’s a pleasure to read. The dialogue is serviceable and direct, with simple actions and gestures cleanly conveying characters’ thoughts and feelings of unease or contemplation. The overarching narrative is consistently lean and propulsive, and the quick pace of the storytelling leaves little time to consider Leslie’s and William’s poor decisions in the moment. Why, for instance, doesn’t William use his considerable financial resources to hire a crack security team to safeguard Leslie’s beach house from further attack? Still, Murray provides just enough uncertainty and anticipation to keep the pages turning, while also saving readers from dwelling at length on such minor shortfalls. Neither will readers question the extravagant quality of William’s increasingly good fortune as the story goes on. Indeed, Murray’s ability to infuse the familiar and commonplace with some of the best elements of folklore also allows readers to willingly suspend their disbelief. In the end, it’s no surprise that William is the beneficiary of such profound good luck—to make it otherwise would be to betray the mysterious world the author has created.
An amiable, bite-sized work with appealing fairytale-like elements.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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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