A fast-paced, sensationalist mystery that will entertain fans of the genre, despite a few flaws.
As cartels move into Cancún, Mexico, an apparent serial killer emerges, and a Texas-born detective is hired to investigate in Johnson’s mystery.
JJ Tabasco, a 29-year-old with “a reddish-brown caterpillar crawling across [his] upper lip,” is a “Do-It-Yourself Detective” in Cancún, which means that he tells his clients what to do without doing the work himself, thereby skirting Mexican private-eye licensing laws. Aided by his handsome, amoral junior partner, Jesús María “Jesse” Obregón, and his kind but clumsy pal, Chief of Police Octavio “Tavi” Fuentes, JJ deals with a mystifying series of events. First, the dead body of Jaime Meyer, who hails from a prominent local Jewish family, is found after having been stolen from the morgue. Then Jayde Olivia Blackwood, a “blonde bombshell” with a shot-off pinky, hires JJ and pays a hefty sum to find out who’s following her; soon, three stalkers emerge—including a possible multiple murderer. Meanwhile, Jesse and Tavi’s fellow book club member, real estate agent Inez Jones, tells JJ that she has a feeling that something’s off in Cancún; multiple voodoo dolls left at JJ’s doorstep foreshadow danger. Two cartels attempt to move into town, each hire JJ to find the alleged serial killer, and a race to find a stolen painting by Hernán Cortés grows intense. Over the course of this complicated novel, readers may find it awkward that the mystery is centered on Nahua and Mexican experiences while starring a white protagonist. In addition, JJ’s frequent mentions of women’s attractiveness grows tiring: For example, upon spotting a group of “lovely ladies in small bikinis,” he notes, “I should have been thinking about the case and helping my client, but I was just engaging in sweet lazy voyeurism.” Still, the events of the novel proceed at a lively clip, with JJ’s wry, honest tone enlivening the narrative along the way.
A fast-paced, sensationalist mystery that will entertain fans of the genre, despite a few flaws.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781684633463
Page Count: 256
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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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