Tackling timely matters puts a serious spin on a usually lighter series.
It might be a #MeToo backlash when a fearless feminist’s rhetoric is used to frame her for the murders of several misogynists.
Though she’s always seen herself as a feminist firebrand, particularly compared to her neighbors in Zinnia, Mississippi, Sarah Booth Delaney has nothing on her newest client, Alala Diakos. Dr. Diakos is a Greek professor who’s come to town to work on her latest, a nonfiction book on women’s struggle for equality, and she’s been practicing what she preaches all over Zinnia. Her thoughts on the patriarchy, particularly on what should happen to male abusers, seem uncomfortably linked to a series of mysterious deaths of men from Alala’s academic circles, though she swears she’s being framed. Alala hires the Delaney Detective Agency after the latest fatality, well-known local wife beater Curtis Miller, who Alala insists wasn’t the victim of her extermination-focused justice. Another obvious suspect in Curtis’ death, his beleaguered wife, Tansy, seems easy to rule out because of the many times she let Curtis drive her home from the emergency room after he put her there; in fact, she was in the ER for a sprained wrist when Curtis was shot. But if Alala isn’t behind Curtis’ death, who is? Sarah Booth and her partner, Tinkie Richmond, dig in, though their usual meddling is hampered as Tinkie approaches what feels like her one-millionth trimester. Sarah Booth’s boyfriend, Sheriff Coleman Peters, provides some assistance, though there’s no time for much romance between the two. As for Jitty, the resident haint of Sarah Booth’s ancestral home, her cryptic “help” is only a sign that Jitty wants to steal the spotlight.
Tackling timely matters puts a serious spin on a usually lighter series.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-2502-5787-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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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