Full of Southern charm and an eye-opening look at the difficulties in ending domestic abuse.
Several missing women, an abusive husband, and a fight over money add up to murder and mayhem for a pair of Southern belles with deep roots in the Mississippi Delta.
Sarah Booth Delaney has her own haint—that is, ghost—named Jitty, who one day shows up in the guise of Edgar Allan Poe. Shortly afterward, Sarah gets a visit from a very-much-alive medium who’s been having disturbing dreams of a heart beating loudly in her house and a bathtub filled with blood. The biggest piece of gossip in town, though, is that Tope Maxwell, lawyer and college football star, is petitioning to have his wife, Lydia Redd, who’s been missing for years, declared dead. Rumor has it that Tope wants to remarry and is desperate to inherit Lydia’s money. Lydia is the only child of wealthy Elisa Redd, who wants Sheriff Coleman Peters, Sarah Booth’s boyfriend, to reopen the case. Before Lydia vanished along with her best friend, Bethany Carter, while they were working as human rights organizers in Afghanistan, people knew that Tope beat her and spent her money, but everyone was too afraid of Tope and his influential family to say anything. Since Coleman’s hands are tied, he suggests Elisa hire Sarah Booth and Tinkie Richmond, her partner in detection, to look into the case. Elisa is afraid that Tope murdered both women, and when his new fiancee falls or is thrown to her death, he becomes the likely suspect in that murder. The determined sleuths dig up a lot of useful information and possible sightings of the missing women, but will that be enough to find them and get Tope arrested?
Full of Southern charm and an eye-opening look at the difficulties in ending domestic abuse.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781250885852
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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