A measured crime story that deftly forefronts its indelible characters.
In this procedural, Baltimore detectives help distill an alcoholic’s hazy recollection in order to unmask a serial murderer.
Sgt. William Mankiller and his rookie partner, Det. Maria Esperanza Ruiz, work a frustrating case involving missing women. The detectives have nothing to go on; the victims, who are all blond and have similar body types, vanished without a trace. A body washes up in the harbor—a woman who looks like the ones missing—and Mankiller and Ruiz think that a murderer, who’s thus far covered their tracks, has finally made a blunder. The good news? There’s a potential witness. The bad news, however, is that it’s Kyle Owen “KO” Bannon, a former prizefighter-turned-drunk who claims he saw a dragon kill a woman. The detectives are convinced the mythical creature from KO’s memory will ultimately reveal a critical detail about the perpetrator. While KO fights to stay sober, a psychologist makes a wild suggestion—“recreate” what KO witnessed by sending him right back to the bottle. There’s surprisingly little tension in Harper and Galehouse’s novel. Although readers get a glimpse of a frighteningly careful murderer, this villain spends most of their time avoiding detection. The story focuses on the lively cast, from the seasoned veteran cop and the rookie bonding over hot cocoa to the struggling alcoholic hoping to repair the severed relationship with his daughter. Likewise, a snowy Baltimore winter generates a memorable setting and sparks colorful passages: “The cold sank its claws into everything and kept its grip, even as the days inched toward February.” Despite the detectives’ ongoing investigation, the alleged dragon is the grandest mystery, and the most compelling dilemma is the ethical question of persuading KO to drink again. Still, it all builds to a riveting final act and a worthy payoff.
A measured crime story that deftly forefronts its indelible characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Papillon du Père Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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