This ghost-infused cozy has all the pieces but just doesn’t stack up. Blame the spirit world.
A Florida innkeeper’s latest attempt to build her haunted business is hampered by a murder.
Just because the circumstances under which she inherited the Haven House Inn in the Gulf Coast town of Haven are shrouded in obscurity doesn’t mean that Maureen Doherty won’t try her darnedest to make her new career as the inn’s owner and manager a success. And while she may not know the mysterious Penelope Josephine Gray who willed her the property, that doesn’t absolve her of the responsibility to the town’s locals to keep the century-old community hub alive. Christmas is the perfect time to build on the inn’s ongoing programming through a creative connection with Haven’s vintage theater, the Paramount, for a Twelve Days of Christmas extravaganza. Maureen gets her second-in-command, executive chef Ted Carr, to plan themed menus to complement the Paramount’s offerings in a sort of dinner-and-a-movie special. Maureen and Ted get into a groove of working with Paramount projectionist Decklin Monroe, whose history at the theater enables him to tell all the old stories, including a doozy about a patron shot midway through a flick 50 years ago. If the theater is still haunted, it’s in good company, for fashionista and ghost (but fashionista first) Lorna, Maureen’s unofficial roommate at Haven House, is accompanied by a rotating cast of spectral characters, including some of her dates. Though Ted and Maureen want to know more about the paranormal at the Paramount, a modern murder disrupts their digging. Has the past come back to haunt the present?
This ghost-infused cozy has all the pieces but just doesn’t stack up. Blame the spirit world.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4967-3137-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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