A thoroughly enjoyable mystery that’s humorous and absorbing.
In Parker’s comedic crime drama set after World War I, a small-time detective must deliver a ransom to an aristocrat’s kidnappers, but then he too is kidnapped.
Rusty MacDuff, this delightful novel’s memorable protagonist, isn’t a great or famous private eye, but he’s willing to do what other, more respectable professionals won’t: “I specialised in the shameful, the embarrassing and the peculiar, with lucrative sidelines in the awkward and the disgusting.” He’s hired by the Duke and Duchess of Pirbright—not to find their 20-year-old daughter, Hattie, who was kidnapped from her own home three weeks ago, but to deliver her ransom: £150,000 in the form of gold bars. However, while MacDuff is waiting to make the drop at Wealdcombe Manor—the Pirbright’s home in Sussex, England—someone steals the gold out of what he thought was a secure room. MacDuff decides to keep this news to himself, so he can investigate the matter; he methodically composes a list of 14 suspects, which includes Hattie’s“fatheaded fiancé” George Fields. The case is strange, indeed; for instance, the police dismiss the abduction as a hoax, believing the scant evidence left behind to be manufactured. Then, a postboy, Eleazar Jones, is bludgeoned on the property, and Barleycorn, the butler, claims to have seen an “eyeless savage” nearby—a shirtless man, lathered in mud. Meanwhile, MacDuff must contend with rivals, including a genuinely great and renowned detective, Father Oremus, a Dominican cleric who calls himself the “Mysterious Monk” and believes “crime-fighting was the highest form of theology.” The deeper MacDuff investigates, the more he begins to suspect that there’s more to the case than meets the eye.
Parker artfully combines a recognizable iteration of detective noir with snappy British humor that calls to mind Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse. Parker’s work is an homage to literary works of the distant past, and, as such, isn’t brimming with originality. However, it remains an impressively perceptive novel in which sharp comedic banter frames a thoughtfully conceived darkness. The plot is complexly tangled, but never gratuitously so, and moments of suspense act as welcome invitations to think through the mess. MacDuff is remarkable in how unremarkable he is; he’s hapless but deeply intelligent, and unprofessional but surprisingly brave. He also possesses a kind of cheerful cynicism that makes him both entertaining and admirable: “Why stay in a place where life was cheap and law was weak? Because you knew where you stood. And could fight back. And if someone was nice and decent after all, well, you could only ever be pleasantly surprised.” World War I lurks in the background of the story—a conflict that MacDuff calls the “suicide of Western civilization”; it’s a catastrophe in which the detective participated years before, “spending the prime of [his] life in European ditches.” This paroxysm of global madness sets the tone for the whole work, which explores what people will do to be happy in a chaotic world.
A thoroughly enjoyable mystery that’s humorous and absorbing.Pub Date: June 8, 2020
ISBN: 9780857198754
Page Count: 206
Publisher: Mysterious Door
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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