Truly old-school detective fiction that rises above mere pastiche.
An investigator goes out on a limb when a prominent developer hires him to check out her family tree in Mason’s debut mystery.
Crime fiction fans are sure to like a book that begins with the punchy sentence, “The kid had it coming,” and a scene that follows shortly afterward in which ethically compromised, clarinet-playing ex-cop Marcus Heaton is advised to meet with one of the city’s boldface personages, who, he’s told, has “a little project you’d be perfect for.” Marcus is aware of the gulf between him and his client. As a real estate developer, Eleanor Hausman transforms neighborhoods; as a former officer with the New York City Police Department, Marcus dirtied his hands with acts of corruption that “you wouldn’t put in your report.” As another character comments, “You don’t just take a shower and wash that shit off!” But he’s trying; for starters, he did head-butt and punch out a commanding officer who wanted him to plant drugs. His work for a law firm is a bit more aboveboard, but he hasn’t lost his knack for working in the margins, just outside “the boundaries of the law.” It seems a bit out of character, then, that Eleanor asks him to simply find out more about her family history. Indeed, Marcus doesn’t buy it: “I see pretty much two reasons why a person like you hires a person like me,” he tells her. “There’s something you want to find out, or there’s something you don’t want other people to find out. General curiosity? Doesn’t make the list.” The fact that she’s adopted is only the first of increasingly convoluted developments that make for a brisk page-turner—and one that has a high body count. Mason, a lawyer and former federal prosecutor, writes with authority and a distinctive voice; he clearly knows where all the bodies are buried in this fictional world, and his hard-boiled patois lands as solidly as Marcus’ punches. Early on, the author leans a little too heavily on “If you think the name sounds familiar”–type exposition, but that’s a relatively minor quibble in an otherwise solid tale.
Truly old-school detective fiction that rises above mere pastiche.Pub Date: March 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-937484-98-9
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Amika Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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
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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