A charming cozy debut with characters as sweet as the titular tea, a mystery with numerous attractive byways, and a budding...
Forever tied to Charm Island, a native daughter returns to fulfill a dream.
Everly Swan left the quiet barrier island she called home to follow her cowboy on the rodeo circuit. After he’s injured, he refuses to support her enrollment in cooking school, so she drops out and returns alone to Charm, where she opens Sun, Sand, and Tea in a beachfront house she purchased because it was zoned for the shop that would pay her mortgage. Her major problem is Benedict Paine, a town councilman who’s opposed to any changes in Charm and who’s therefore harassed her from the get-go. When Everly finds him dead with a glass of her tea next to him, Detective Grady Hays, the new homicide investigator in town, suspects that she killed him. Paine was poisoned, and the rumor mill, abetted by a local blogger, paints Everly’s fledgling business as being in dire straits. Fortunately, the aunts who raised her stand behind her, together with some of her old friends, who pitch in to help her find the real killer—much to the dismay of Hays, a widower with a young child who’s attracted to Everly in spite of his professional objections to her interference. Paine was a troublemaker who certainly wasn’t universally beloved, and Everly finds an especially promising suspect in a bullying builder who wants to turn some of Charm’s lovely old homes into B&Bs, a plan Paine would have fought to the death. When someone smashes up Everly's shop just before a party she’s planned, the damage only makes her more determined to solve the crimes with a little help from her friends.
A charming cozy debut with characters as sweet as the titular tea, a mystery with numerous attractive byways, and a budding romance waiting to be explored.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-6475-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Fans who don’t think the supporting cases run away with the story will marvel at Connelly’s remarkable ability to keep them...
Harry Bosch, who just can’t stay retired, unwillingly teams up with a Hollywood detective who has reasons of her own for wanting in on his latest cold case.
It may be nine years since 15-year-old runaway Daisy Clayton was grabbed from the streets of Los Angeles and killed, but the daily presence of her mother, Elizabeth, in Harry’s life—she’s staying at his place while he helps her stay clean—makes it a foregone conclusion that he’ll reopen the case. On the night Bosch drops into Hollywood Division to sneak a look at some of the old files, he’s caught by Detective Renée Ballard, who was bounced from LAPD Robbery/Homicide to “the late show,” Hollywood’s third shift, after her complaint about aggressive harassment by a superior went nowhere. Bosch needs to find out who was responsible for what happened to Daisy; Ballard needs to work a case with teeth, even if she’s partnering with a reserve investigator in the San Fernando Police Department (Two Kinds of Truth, 2017, etc.) who’d rather work alone. Before they get what they need, they’ll have to wade through a double caseload as grueling and sometimes as maddeningly routine as you can imagine, from an apparent murder that turns out to be a slip-and-fall to an ancient gang killing whose repercussions flare to sudden life to the theft of some valuable Andy Warhol prints to a missing man who’s not just missing—not to mention Elizabeth’s sudden disappearance and Ballard’s continuing lack of support, and sometimes even backup, from her department. Not even the canniest readers are likely to see which of these byways will end up leading to the long-overdue solution to the riddle of Daisy Clayton’s death.
Fans who don’t think the supporting cases run away with the story will marvel at Connelly’s remarkable ability to keep them all not only suitably mystifying, but deeply humane, as if he were the Ross Macdonald of the police procedural.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-48480-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Sure, it’s kind of a rip-off, but it’s scary, it’s fun, and it’s one hell of a carnival ride.
Comedy duo and YouTube superstars McLaughlin and Neal (Rhett & Link’s Book of Mythicality, 2017) craft a novel about things that go bump in the night.
Stranger Things carries a lot of cultural weight by itself these days—the legacy of Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, and the many weird movies and books that don’t get the credit they deserve—but these comedy writers have hit that vein hard with this VHS-era kicker that references the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Kickboxer on the very first page. This is Bleak Creek, North Carolina, circa the early 1990s. We have three buddies, natch: Rex McClendon, whose dad owns a funeral home; his bestie, Lief Nelson; and their mutual crush, Alicia Boykins. They’re making PolterDog, an indie movie, because why not? Anyone who grew up in this era will be delighted by all the pop-culture references, from Goodfellas to Smokey and the Bandit. Of course, we need some reasonable adults around to help, too, so we get Janine Blitstein, a filmmaker just graduated from NYU film school, and her cousin Donna Lowe. Things get creepy in a hurry when Alicia is banished because of “bad behavior” to a local private school called Whitewood, founded in 1979. The big bad here is Wayne Whitewood, head of the school where every student is robbed of an identity and known only as “Candidatus”—Whitewood is the so-named “Keeper,” assisted by the Nurse Ratched–esque “Helper.” All the students are threatened at every turn by torture, most commonly “The Roll,” in which they’re confined in a carpet for days on end. Of course, there's a rescue mission, but because we’re in that Stephen King territory, there are also a bunch of supernatural threats, including a cursed spring and something known only as “The One Below.”
Sure, it’s kind of a rip-off, but it’s scary, it’s fun, and it’s one hell of a carnival ride.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984822-13-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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