The best entry in this popular series.
The enigmatic “Ode to Billie Joe” is the theme song for a deeply Southern mystery full of questions that may have no answers.
Sarah Booth Delaney and her best friend, Tinkie Bellcase Richmond, are detectives rooted in the Mississippi Delta. Sarah Booth has a haint—that is, a ghost—named Jitty, who links her to the past but often plays tricks on her; they both live with Sarah Booth’s partner, Sunflower County Sheriff Coleman Peters, and a bunch of dogs, horses, and other pets on the plantation her parents owned before they died in a car crash. As she approaches the Tallahatchie Bridge in her car one day, the famous song about Billie Joe McAllister’s death by suicide playing on the radio, she thinks she sees someone jump. After calling 911, she stops by Tinkie’s house to tell her what happened, and right then Tinkie’s husband, Oscar, a banker, walks in and hires them to find Danny Anderson, an eighth-generation farmer he’s afraid may have killed himself because Oscar’s bank had to foreclose on his farm. Farmers are often on the edge of disaster; no matter their skills, they can’t control the weather, and drought has many on the verge of losing their farms. Finding Danny proves more difficult than Sarah Booth and Tinkie imagined, but when someone who looks like him starts robbing local stores, they push harder. Danny’s very close to Pearl Wingard, the wife of a local preacher, and rumors run wild about their relationship. Stories about Civil War treasure buried along the Tallahatchie River soon have Sarah Booth searching and getting shot at. There are no answers to the mystery of Billie Joe McAllister’s suicide. Can Sarah Booth and Tinkie solve their own complex puzzle?
The best entry in this popular series.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781250377678
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
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
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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