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
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
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