Quirky, lighthearted, but easy to forget—it could have been a gem with more polish.
A 30-year-old legal assistant musters the courage to talk to a woman in a pub and unknowingly inserts himself into a criminal plot.
The first novel by British comedian and memoirist Mortimer is a rom-com and mystery packaged in one. Our narrator, Gary Thorn, is alone in London with a dull job and no relationship prospects, but life gets more interesting when he goes for a reluctant drink with Brendan Jones, a private investigator who works closely with his law firm. While Brendan chats away, Gary is distracted by a woman sitting at the end of the bar with a book. When Brendan needs to leave after receiving an urgent call, Gary is free to ask the woman about her book, The Clementine Complex. This turns into a multihour conversation that ends abruptly—the woman disappears while Gary is fetching a drink. A defeated Gary is surprised to learn the next morning that Brendan has been found dead. Gary was likely the last person to see him alive. And what about the woman, whose name he never got? Is she in danger, too, or is she suspicious given that she left in a hurry? Gary has many questions, which he bounces off his neighbor Grace, who loves to gossip over meat pies. With heavy reliance on Gary’s rich interior dialogue, the book has little allegiance to the rule of “show, don’t tell.” Gary can’t resist the urge to figure out what’s transpired, so, with good intention and zero preparation, he plods his way through police stations and South London estates in search of answers, hoping to find the woman who's taken his fancy in the process. Gary’s quirky, self-aware nature is often endearing, especially in how much he subtly cares for others, but the surface-level humor Mortimer uses to give the story pep can be a tough sell, more awkward than funny. The narrative flow is derailed halfway through when our mystery woman becomes the narrator. Despite the whiplash, the fresh perspective—which is raw and humorless in a good way—is welcome. You’ll root for a happy ending despite the flaws.
Quirky, lighthearted, but easy to forget—it could have been a gem with more polish.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781668024164
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”
Idyllic Catalina Island turns out to be just as crime infested as the rest of Los Angeles County in the latest series launch by the creator of Harry Bosch, Renée Ballard, and the Lincoln Lawyer.
Det. Sgt. Stilwell has been bounced off the county homicide squad and rusticized to Catalina, where the exclusive Black Marlin Club won’t admit even four-term Avalon Mayor Doug Allen to full membership and the most serious infraction seems to be the killing and cutting up of a buffalo, presumably by Henry Gaston, who operates Island Mystery Tours when he’s not threatening endangered species. All that changes with the discovery of a body sunk in the surrounding waters. The corpse, most recognizable by its streak of purple hair, is that of Leigh-Anne Moss, a Black Marlin server recently fired for fraternizing with members and guests she sees as potential sugar daddies. Stilwell is sufficiently invested in her murder to compete vigorously over jurisdiction with Rex Ahearn, the LA County homicide detective who kept his job when Stilwell lost his. Their rivalry, fueled by mutual contempt, is only the first hint that Stilwell will end up fighting his counterparts in law enforcement and local government at least as hard as he fights crooks like hit man Merris Spivak and Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, Henry’s boss, who comes under sharper scrutiny when Henry disappears and ends up dead himself. Connelly handles his hero’s obligatory romance with assistant harbormaster Tash Dano and his increasingly wary alliance with assistant D.A. Monika Juarez with equal professionalism, and if the wrap-up leaves some loose ends dangling, well, that’s what franchises are for.
As the prosecutor sadly observes: “All this because of a dead buffalo.”Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780316588485
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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