For fans who like their mystery with a major dose of misery.
DCI Christine Caplan is flummoxed by an investigation into a family even more dysfunctional than her own.
When Caplan’s daughter Emma’s boyfriend announces the couple’s engagement over dinner, her unemployed son Kenny’s response is to ask his prospective brother-in-law for “a loan of ten grand.” A call about a possible fatality at Torsvaig Castle, an hour or so from her cottage on the coast of Scotland, offers Caplan an escape from the awkward conversation, but not before Kenny’s girlfriend, Jade, chimes in with an excoriating critique of Police Scotland. Once at Torsvaig, Caplan finds a scene that’s hard to process. Famous model Koi McQuarrie has lived there with her husband, photographer Gabriel Samphire, and five adult children, who’d been celebrating the recent success of the castle as a wedding venue. After an evening of drink and dancing, Koi retreated to the castle’s ramparts and vanished. Caplan and her team are faced with the classic police triad: fell, jumped, or pushed? Their inquiry is vastly complicated when Koi’s body, after appearing briefly on the rocks below, disappears. The complex dynamics of Koi’s blended family threaten to eclipse the police procedural, as the mental health needs of her grieving brood thwart all attempts to establish a coherent account of what happened that night. Ramsay’s richly detailed descriptions of the physical landscape of Torsvaig and of the private landscape of the McQuarrie-Samphires’ inner lives project a brooding melancholy, but the investigation doesn’t really get into gear until the last third of the book. The police turn out to be not at all as inept as Jade claims, though not for want of trying.
For fans who like their mystery with a major dose of misery.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2025
ISBN: 9781448314096
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.
Someone is stalking the streets of Lt. Eve Dallas’s New York, intent on bringing new life to sex workers by snuffing out their old ones.
In 2061, prostitutes are called licensed companions, and that’s Leesa Culver’s job description when she’s accosted by a plausible-looking artist who wants to hire her as a model for the night. Before the night is over, she’s been drugged, strangled, costumed, and posed as an uncanny replica of Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. The shock of the crime is deepened by the murder the following night of licensed companion Bobby Ren, whose body is discovered at an art gallery entrance costumed and posed as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy. The killer clearly has an obsessive agenda, a rapid-fire timetable, and access to unlimited financial resources that have allowed him to commission expensive custom-made outfits for the victims. This last detail both marks his power and points to the way Dallas, her gazillionaire husband, Roarke, and her sidekick, Det. Delia Peabody, will track him down by methodically narrowing the field of consumers who’ve purchased the costly costumes. After identifying the guilty party two-thirds of the way through the story, they’ll still face an uphill battle convicting a killer with no conscience, no respect for the law, and a budget that would easily cover the means to jump bail, remove his ankle tracker, and hire a private jet to escape to a foreign land with no extradition treaty. Robb keeps it all consistently absorbing by sweating every procedural detail along with her heroine. Only Dallas’ climactic interrogation of her prisoner is a letdown, because it’s perfectly obvious how she’s going to wangle a confession out of him.
High art meets low life in a tale a lot more sympathetic to the latter.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250370822
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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