A breathtaking combination of police procedural and twisted psychological thriller.
The Scottish Highlands provide the scene for another complex and chilling case for a Glasgow detective with troubles of her own.
After closing another case in the Highlands, DCI Christine Caplan is saying goodbye to her local team before beginning her trip home to Glasgow. Her children are in recovery from a near-death experience on an island retreat, and her husband, Aklen, is too traumatized to leave the house. Before Caplan can depart, though, she’s called back to Cronchie, where a man has jumped or been pushed off the Connel Bridge over the Falls of Lora. It turns out that Ted Maxwell, the victim, was stabbed, and he was a psychologist who had been working on a book about children who kill. His death creates panic in officialdom because the notorious Girl A, who was accused of killing at least three people as a child, has just been released from a psychiatric institute—and the name she chose for her new secret identity is Lora Connel, echoing the site of Maxwell's death. She herself was nearly killed in a recent fire no doubt set by one of the millions of people who hate her, two of them her own sisters, and is now on the run. The laws protecting underage criminals with mental problems make it hard for Caplan to get information about her, but because she's actually Gillian Halliday, who lived with her family nearby and is well known to Caplan’s team, she soon learns her history. Meeting the family and Gillian herself moves Caplan to look into the older crimes. Much to her surprise, she feels that something is off about them even as the higher-ups push for a quick resolution to the Maxwell case and set a deadline to wrap it up.
A breathtaking combination of police procedural and twisted psychological thriller.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781448306763
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.
Lt. Eve Dallas’ 63rd futuristic case is less a whodunit than a manhunt for an unusually sympathetic killer.
Thirteen years ago, way back in 2048, scientific genius Steve Redman—father of the Banner-Wyst corporation’s Rainmaker Project—narrowly escaped death in a gas explosion that killed his pregnant wife and infant son and 200 other residents of their New York City apartment building the night before he planned to report his suspicions about the company to the FBI. Now the bill is coming due for Banner-Wyst. The first death to be discovered is that of Lawrence Chu, Redman’s colleague and trusted friend, whose tenure as director of bioengineering science ends when he’s beaten to death. For quite a while, Dallas and her partner, Det. Delia Peabody, know less about this mystery than their readers do. But when Ezra Dent, a consultant to Banner-Wyst who worked with Redman and Chu back in the day, is murdered in exactly the same ferocious way, Dallas and Peabody, with help from Roarke, Dallas’ tech-billionaire husband, promptly put the pieces together and determine who they’re looking for. The search for Redman, who went AWOL from his hospital bed without a trace six years ago, has its own challenges. So does Dallas’ attempt to get cooperation from partners Calvin Banner and Jacob Wyst, who are clearly in the crosshairs of a killer who seems a lot less monstrous than they are. If the breaks in the case are suspiciously convenient in arriving, readers can pride themselves on taking sides against a mega-corporation whose self-avowed ecological saintliness is undermined by its leaders’ underhanded dealing.
A satisfying thriller that will warm the hearts of fans who already take comfort in hating the forces of evil.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414564
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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