An engaging double mystery with a cute couple fans will want to follow.
In this cozy mystery, two New York state detectives try to solve a pair of cases while teasing readers about their romantic entanglement.
Sara Cain and Sean McKinley are homicide detectives with the Albany Police Department and work as a team. They are officially assigned the case of Aubrey Southgate, an investment adviser, who has been shot in what looks like a planned hit. But who did it? And why? Meanwhile, professional bowler Cliff Cunningham has been bludgeoned to death. Sara finds the body, but the case is assigned to the notoriously lazy and inept Det. Davenport. When Davenport decides, on little evidence, that Gladys White, Cunningham’s girlfriend and a pal of Sara’s mother’s, is the killer, the protagonists have little choice but to pursue that case off the books. These investigations involve quite silly undercover outfits and even the help of Cliff’s beagle, Magnum. The two detectives are determined to solve both cases. Aubrey’s death is a shocker but perhaps understandable. As to Cunningham’s murder, Sara and Sean attempt to get Gladys off the hook and find the real killer. In this engrossing series opener, Arnold is capable of some arresting phrasings: A police sergeant “gave the sirens life, and they wailed into the night air,” and “Sara peacocked her posture.” An enjoyable underlying story is the relationship between Sara and Sean. Clearly, they are deeply attracted to each other, but for some rather vague reason—having to do with APD policy—they are afraid to act on their feelings. Then Sean inherits a fortune—from a kindly millionaire with no family, a man whom the detective, always the mensch, befriended. Will good things follow? Arnold is a prolific writer and likely will be churning out these Sara and Sean mysteries for a long time. Some readers will wonder whether the appealing pair will become private eyes in a future installment, a Nick and Nora Charles for modern times.
An engaging double mystery with a cute couple fans will want to follow.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781989706893
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Hibbert & Stiles Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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