Less original than the heroine’s striking debut, but still a superior puzzle.
Josephine Jones—an autistic American editor transplanted to Yorkshire—finds her stint as a landlady getting off to a rocky start, more or less literally.
The morning after her very first lodger, real estate developer Ronan Foley, checks into Netherleigh Cottage, the building that’s become the choicest remnant of the Ardemore estate ever since a fire destroyed the principal dwelling in Jo’s inheritance (The Framed Women of Ardemore House, 2024), she gets a shocking piece of news from the Abington police: Her inaugural guest has been found bashed to death. DCI James MacAdams’ inquiries into Foley’s background produce frustratingly little information. Jo’s friend Tula Byrne, innkeeper of the much more desirable Red Lion, reports that Ronan never tried to make a reservation there. Stanley Burnhope, Ronan’s employer in Gallowgate, maintains that he didn’t know the man well at all, and Stanley’s wife, classical musician Ava Burnhope, insists that she’s never heard of him despite repeated calls Ronan placed to their home from a burner phone. Ava and Sophie Wagner, Stanley’s partner in Fresh Start, an agency that settles refugees from abroad, can talk of nothing but their charitable work. And someone evidently packed the corpse in ice for at least part of the few hours it took to find it. As Jo and her sounding board, Gwilym Morgan, who plays “neurodivergent Watson to Jo’s Sherlock,” labor to unpack the many echoes of her troubled family past in the present mystery, MacAdams puzzles over the few facts he knows, which seem logically inconsistent with each other. Somebody, he reasons, must be lying about something important. Indeed, somebody is, and it’s a whopper likely to fool readers for as long as it fools the endearing detectives.
Less original than the heroine’s striking debut, but still a superior puzzle.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781335121875
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel.
The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best’s friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home. Elizabeth used to have an unspecified job, possibly as a spy, that has left her with a large network of helpful sources. Joyce Meadowcroft is a former nurse who chronicles their deeds. Psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif and well-known political firebrand Ron Ritchie complete the group. They charm Police Constable Donna De Freitas, who, visiting to give a talk on safety at Coopers Chase, finds the residents sharp as tacks. Built with drug money on the grounds of a convent, Coopers Chase is a high-end development conceived by loathsome Ian Ventham and maintained by dangerous crook Tony Curran, who’s about to be fired and replaced with wary but willing Bogdan Jankowski. Ventham has big plans for the future—as soon as he’s removed the nuns' bodies from the cemetery. When Curran is murdered, DCI Chris Hudson gets the case, but Elizabeth uses her influence to get the ambitious De Freitas included, giving the Thursday Club a police source. What follows is a fascinating primer in detection as British TV personality Osman allows the members to use their diverse skills to solve a series of interconnected crimes.
A top-class cozy infused with dry wit and charming characters who draw you in and leave you wanting more, please.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-488096-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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