A brisk and appealingly twisty mystery, reliably anchored by the series’ resilient lead.
A decades-old murder case resurfaces with more questions than answers in Arnold’s mystery, the 13th entry in a long-running series.
This latest entry in the author’s Madison Knight series characteristically begins with a crime—in this case, it’s the horrific rape and murder of teenage Emily Kane at a high school senior-class beach party by someone she knew (“As her brain screamed for oxygen, the spinning in her head began to slow. This is how I die!”). Fast-forward 24 years to the newly discovered corpse of Kane’s former classmate, 41-year-old Dylan Graham, found in his home next to a handwritten suicide note, computer printouts about Kane’s murder, and an accusatory diary entry pointing to classmate Troy Matthews as the girl’s real killer. Veteran Braybury police detective Carson Snow reopens the case and apprehends Matthews—who is a fellow officer—on the day of his wedding to police detective Madison Knight. Knight is immediately spurred into action to both solve Emily’s murder and absolve her fiance. With his bail posted, Knight gets to work sifting through clues and crime-scene evidence while the novel fills in some critical backstory by revisiting the night in question and the hard-partying group of teenagers (who all believed that Richie Klein, the boy who was eventually convicted of Emily’s murder, was actually innocent). Klein’s recent release from jail could afford him the opportunity for revenge against his boyhood friend, Troy. As Troy’s sister Andrea (the local police chief) and Detective Snow desperately investigate the crime, Madison’s faith in her fiance’s innocence never wavers. Arnold’s grasp of police-procedural conventions is assured. The mystery opens with a murder, and all of the primary players immediately fall into position with a few hairpin turns, conveyed in short, crisply written chapters that lead to a satisfying resolution. While this installment can be read as a stand-alone entry, readers new to the Madison Knight mystery series may want to backtrack several books to become familiar with the recurring cast of characters. Arnold has mastered the recipe for an engrossing, rousing, and ultimately gratifying mystery, and this installment is no exception.
A brisk and appealingly twisty mystery, reliably anchored by the series’ resilient lead.Pub Date: May 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781998095032
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Hibbert & Stiles Publishing Inc.
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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