A heartburning family tell-all just in time to gladden your Thanksgiving. Yes, your own relatives could be worse.
In Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania, the collapse of a wealthy financier at a charity gala to honor his incapacitated wife throws his adult children for a loop. And the loops are only beginning.
Impoverished poet/playwright Lucinda Fox’s behind-the-scenes make-out session with Aja (“Asia, like the continent”), a waitress she’s just met, ends up as kissus interruptus when the curtain is raised to disclose the pair to a bevy of scandalized charity supporters that include Lucinda’s father, Stefan Fox, who instantly clutches his heart and collapses. When his thoroughly dysfunctional family gathers in the hospital, they learn that he’s suffered both a heart attack and a stroke; later, Det. Lucas Kapinos, whose high school romance with Lucinda’s older sister, Valerie, was nipped in the bud by her father, informs them that he’s been poisoned as well. As the patriarch hovers between life and death, family attorney Corbin Piedmont tells Lucinda, Valerie, and their brothers that Stefan's plan to divide his estate among his children has been complicated by his creation of the Den, a secret family trust fund where he’s squirreled away $5 million. No sooner has Christian Fox, his father’s favorite son and heir apparent to Fox Wealth Management, announced his intention to challenge the trust than he’s killed in a suspicious car crash. Who’ll be next—his chronically unsuccessful brother, Jeremy, one of his sisters, or a corpse from out of left field? Reinard juggles suspects, motives, and family skeletons with such dexterity that it’s hard to imagine any of the Fox clan actually being innocent.
A heartburning family tell-all just in time to gladden your Thanksgiving. Yes, your own relatives could be worse.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-3976-5
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
This mystery’s promising premise bogs down in an overloaded cast.
When one woman takes on another’s identity to uncover a crime, they both become suspects in a murder.
Aubrey Price and Camille Bayliss come from different worlds, only crossing paths because of the discovery that Camille’s husband, powerful lawyer Ben Bayliss, is hiding something terrible that affects them both. As the novel opens, Aubrey is driving Camille’s Range Rover, then teetering into a bar on Camille’s high heels, with Camille’s dress and credit cards and a wig that mimics Camille’s hair, pretending to be her because Ben tracks his wife’s every move and expenditure, and Camille wants to create a smokescreen while she sneaks into his office in search of evidence of that unnamed secret. But the scheme goes awry, and the women become each other’s alibis after Camille finds Ben murdered in their home. The first part of the book builds suspense and misdirection well, with Aubrey and Ben’s straight-arrow partner, Hank Landry, serving as first-person observers in some chapters while others track Camille. She’s a wealthy and privileged woman but not a happy one, stuck under the thumbs of her husband and her tyrannical father, Randall Everett, who pretty much runs their small Louisiana town. Aubrey was orphaned as a teen when her parents died in a car crash and has proudly fended for herself ever since, coming to depend on her four roommates, who have become friends. But as the cast of characters grows, it seems as if almost everyone in town has a motive for killing Ben, and the piling up of suspects and movements among different timelines can sometimes be confusing. And it all comes to a frustrating end when, after a whole school of red herrings, the solution to Ben’s murder arrives out of far left field.
This mystery’s promising premise bogs down in an overloaded cast.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780593834459
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
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