An appealingly cozy whodunit in a well-observed setting.
In this second installment of a mystery series, a professor searches for answers when a body is found in her ransacked house.
At Rutherford College in Coowahchobee, Florida, history professor Ariadne Caulfield and English professor Judith Sheridan, both in their 50s, are fast friends. As Braendlin described in their first adventure, Love and Death in Venice (2016), the two became entangled in sinister criminal doings last summer, when Judith met her partner, Suzanne Hanks. (Ariadne was widowed a few years earlier.) This September, the friends are co-teaching a women’s literature course. One evening, Ariadne returns home to a shocking discovery. In the classic mystery novel tradition, there’s a man’s body in the study. It’s Randall Medina, an English department adjunct, but what on earth is he doing there? The room has been tossed, suggesting he was robbing the house, though Ariadne has no valuables and can’t seem to find anything missing. Investigating the crime is the attractively rugged Sheriff Beaufort “Beau” Hammell, 62. As events unfold, he questions students and teachers, developing a mutual attraction with Ariadne. Meanwhile, dark plans are hatched by a woman with a grudge against one student. Retired English professor Braendlin shows her familiarity with academia, such as its gossip, tenure-seeking professors, and underpaid adjuncts. She also vividly evokes the story’s Northern Florida setting, from bathtub-warm ocean water to pulled-pork sandwiches. A few references are dated (for example, an answering machine), and dialogue can be overcooked: “I wouldn’t mind having a tryst...but not out here in this oppressive insect-infested jungle.” That said, the novel offers a nicely balanced plot, including deft character sketches, a blossoming romance for Ariadne with Beau, and a few surprises, including late-breaking drama arising from cleverly sown seeds.
An appealingly cozy whodunit in a well-observed setting.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64066-098-4
Page Count: 230
Publisher: The Ardent Writer Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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