Beneath all the red sauce, Bruns offers standard cozy fare with a dash of detection on the side.
A young widow seeks the killer of a fellow restaurateur.
Tessa Esposito is slowly adjusting to the loss of her husband, Dylan, murdered 14 months ago. With the help of her assistant, Stephanie Beaudry, and her cousins Gabby and Gino, she's focused on making her Italian place, Anything's Pastable, the best dining spot in Harvest Park, New York. She has the full support of her handsome landlord, Vince Falducci, who intervenes when customers like Mario Russo get too friendly. Tessa dislikes Mario not only for being a letch, but for opening The Espresso Lane in direct competition with her old friend Archie Fenton's Java Time. So it would hardly have rocked Tessa's busy world to have Mario stabbed to death during Harvest Park's annual Festival of Lights if the police—meaning her cousin Gino, who's the local chief—didn't focus on Archie as the prime suspect. Desperate to help her friend, Tessa looks for alternatives and finds many: jilted lovers, shady loan sharks, and Archie's hotheaded son. There's also an old girlfriend in Mario's past who died after their last date. With all this sleuthing to do, you'd think Tessa would hardly have time for the obligatory romantic complications, but in addition to the attentions of hunky Vince, there's Justin, a firefighter with a sense of humor who's looking for a promotion from Dylan's best friend to Tessa's best squeeze.
Beneath all the red sauce, Bruns offers standard cozy fare with a dash of detection on the side.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8431-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Demands a careful reading and knowledge of the Victorian lady detective’s history.
A mystery that unwinds in reverse adds new twists to Thomas’ Sherlock Holmes–inspired series.
The new Charlotte Holmes novel continues the tense chess game that the gender-flipped Sherlock is playing with Moriarty and an incarcerated acquaintance turned villain. The events are narrated as a series of flashbacks interspersed with an interrogation in which Charlotte is under suspicion of murder. While her friend Inspector Treadles nervously observes, a senior policeman grills the unflappable detective about her recent movements. Even as she gives him a bland account of why she’s crisscrossed the English Channel in recent weeks, readers get drips of information about what she and her family and friends have been up to, all building to a reveal. Two other seemingly unrelated mystery subplots enter the picture, but it’s evident that new events and characters are connected to familiar ones from the past. With allusions to previous novels in the Lady Sherlock series and hat tips to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Final Problem” and the Guy Ritchie movie Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, the plot can be hard to follow, especially for new readers. The consistently well-drawn characters serve as an anchor, and the occasional glimpse of Charlotte’s love for her family and her lover, Lord Ingram Ashburton, adds a needed touch of warmth to the clever but clinical jigsaw structure of the mystery.
Demands a careful reading and knowledge of the Victorian lady detective’s history.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9780593640432
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Nobody from Agatha Christie to Anthony Horowitz beats Stevenson for cleverness. Resign yourself to being stumped, and enjoy.
Hoping to set up shop as a private detective, Australian mystery novelist Ernest Cunningham winds up literally in the middle of the world’s most complicated bank robbery.
Ernest and Juliette, his fiancée and prospective partner, think they’ve been invited to a meeting at Huxley’s Bank in Sydney to secure a loan that will underwrite their agency. Of course not, bank director Winston Huxley informs them scornfully; he wants them to investigate the disappearance of his brother, Edward Huxley, the bank’s co-director, who vanished two days after changing the codes necessary to open the vault. Since the bank would be ruined if Winston let the authorities know it can’t access its own resources, it’s all up to Ernest, with a little help and more than a little pushback from Juliette. No sooner have they settled in than a masked thief enters Huxley’s and takes everyone in the bank hostage. In a way, that’s poetic justice, since every single hostage—from TV producer Remy Allard to unspeaking priest Father Gabriel to gravely ill 20-year-old Cordelia Bright and Laverna Bright, her grandmother and caregiver—turns out to have stolen something, and at least one of them is guilty of murder, too. Making throwaway deductions at a breathless pace en route to the climactic “parlour scene,” Ernest, who introduces himself in a flashforward that shows him locked in that vault with a limited air supply, saves plenty of ratiocination for this denouement, where he solves puzzles that many of his most devoted fans won’t even have recognized as puzzles at all.
Nobody from Agatha Christie to Anthony Horowitz beats Stevenson for cleverness. Resign yourself to being stumped, and enjoy.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780063434387
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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