A touch of romance and magic combine with detection in this charming cozy.
As usual, the tarot cards are correct in their warning of danger from a mysterious stranger.
Hope Bailey and her sister, Summer, are helping their grandmother Olivia Bailey, who’s joining her boyfriend, Morris Henshaw, for a weekend trip to his 50-year high school reunion. Each of them has packed enough for an around-the-world cruise. Olivia is going to miss the Halloween party the family usually holds at their mystic shop in Asheville, North Carolina, but which this year, as a favor to their friend Megan, Hope and Summer are giving as a joint party with her boyfriend's restaurant, the Green Goat, which has been having financial problems. As Olivia gets ready to leave, she's uneasy because Hope’s only tarot reading for the day turned up The Magician, a rarely seen card. Just as Olivia’s heading to the airport, two camper vans arrive, one carrying Lucas Deering, a friend from the sisters’ teen years. Morris’ son, Dylan, a down-to-earth doctor, doesn’t like Lucas flirting with Hope. He likes it even less when he learns that Lucas is a conspiracy theorist chasing down creatures like the chupacabra and sasquatch. The other van contains three people: quiet Erik, Collin, and his wildly jealous girlfriend, Amber, whose dish-throwing fight brings the arrival of Summer’s boyfriend, Nate Phillips, a police detective whose work could well clash with the family’s magical skills. All these conflicts pale in comparison to Hope and Dylan’s unplanned meeting in the Green Goat’s basement with Megan and her boyfriend, Daniel Drexler, who discover Collin's body in a pool of blood. Who most wanted Collin dead: his jealous girlfriend, a fellow conspiracy theorist, or someone who didn’t want him investing in the Green Goat? The motley crew must use all their skills to find his killer.
A touch of romance and magic combine with detection in this charming cozy.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781448310562
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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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