Any resemblance between these fictional characters and any mystery writers living or dead is of course purely coincidental.
“Writing a murder isn’t the same as committing one,” Thea Morgan-Lane assures the Italian police inspector. Try telling that to whoever’s turned the latest MurderCon into a carnival of crime.
Thea’s visit to the Hotel Castellarosa, just opening after Greg and Sonia Wilson converted it from an isolated monastery, is bittersweet. Thea first met Fred Morgan at the monastery 20 years ago, when she was a graduate student, bonded with him over shared plans to write a murder mystery called Death Takes the Castle, married him, and launched their Death Takes a Holiday series. It’s nice that the latest entry has been nominated for the Poirot Prize, to be awarded at the mystery convention they’re attending, but not so nice that the collaborators’ marriage has been a sham ever since Thea caught Fred in bed with a writer’s assistant, or that Thea’s plan to end the series about their fictional alter egos Rick and Dora Charles is upended by Fred’s public announcement that he plans to continue the series with Poirot nominee Nadine St. George, or that International Murder Writers Executive Director Deb Andersen, one of Thea’s dearest friends, suddenly drops dead at the opening reception. And that’s before Thea realizes that the murder is an uncanny imitation of the first killing in Death Takes the Castle, as are the murders that inevitably follow. The treasure hunt Thea follows in search of clues and possible treasure and the airy backbiting among conference attendees provide welcome substitutes for the customary rounds of Q&A, and despite the mounting body count, the writing is as fizzy as that Castellarosa Pomegranate Spritz that was Deb’s last drink.
Any resemblance between these fictional characters and any mystery writers living or dead is of course purely coincidental.Pub Date: July 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780063398788
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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