Lush tropical scenery adds a hint of spice to a standard-issue second-career cozy.
A travel writer juggles her new gig as a villa broker with a time-consuming hobby: solving murders.
After losing her glamorous job as editor-in-chief of a travel magazine, Plum Lockhart slinks off to the beautiful Caribbean island of Paraiso to regroup. But after a brief stint working at Jonathan Mayhew’s travel agency, she strikes off on her own, launching Plum Lockhart Luxury Retreats. Of course, Mayhew still controls the classiest of the botanically named properties at Las Frutas Resort, leaving Plum only the dregs. While contemplating what heroic measures might make dreary Villa Tomate habitable, Plum gets a frantic call from Gerald Hand, whose favorable article in Market Street Journal gave her struggling business a much-needed boost. It seems that Gerald’s boss’s daughter, Arielle Waldron, has gotten in a bit of a bother at Las Frutas’ main hotel due to her irremediable shoplifting habit. By the time Plum can sort out Arielle’s legal woes, the impulsive young woman has shuffled off to denim-duds-king Dieter Friedrich’s Villa la Grosella Negra, where she manages to get herself murdered. Now Plum is no stranger to detection, having single-handedly solved Paraiso’s most recent homicide in It Takes Two To Mango (2021). So in spite of the obligatory warnings from Las Frutas’ director of security, handsome law enforcement official Juan Kevin Muñoz, she launches her own unauthorized investigation, with results as predictable as they are grim.
Lush tropical scenery adds a hint of spice to a standard-issue second-career cozy.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72823-236-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
Focus on people and places; leave the red herrings to someone else.
Perrin’s third Castle Knoll mystery moves to London, where Annie Adams investigates the murder of her mother’s protégé.
Acclaimed painter Laura Adams is known for her solitary ways. So Annie is perplexed, and a little piqued, to learn that her mother has taken art student Felicity Rowe under her wing, even allowing Fliss to share her Chelsea town house. Annie isn’t hard up for lodgings, since she inherited a fortune from her great-aunt Frances, but her concern over her mother’s new living arrangements brings her down from rural Dorset to assess the situation in person. That concern rises to the level of panic when Felicity turns up dead in a dumpster behind the house. Laura’s clearly hiding something, and to unravel the complex puzzle, Annie needs the help of her old friend, police Detective Rowan Crane. Felicity’s murder turns out to have roots in the decades-old death of socialite Vera Huntington, who partied with Frances in London’s jazz clubs back in the 1960s. Perrin handles the twin narratives deftly, giving careful attention to each and permitting their connection to develop richly. She allows the love interest in each story to follow their own peculiar trajectory. And she draws a vivid picture of London, both past and present. The solution to the puzzle, on the other hand, is easily foreseen and too long in coming. Perrin is at her considerable best when she concentrates on drawing sympathetic, believable characters facing tough emotional issues.
Focus on people and places; leave the red herrings to someone else.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798217047505
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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