A charming combination of mystery, Regency romance, and social mores.
A lady’s companion and her shrewd and curious employer take up sleuthing when a friend of theirs becomes a murder suspect.
When Lady Caroline Morton and her sister, Susan, are left penniless by the death of their father, the Earl of Morton, Caroline becomes the companion to Mrs. Frogerton, whose money comes from trade and who hopes that the dowry for her beautiful daughter, Dorothy, may be large enough to arrange an aristocratic marriage. Their acquaintance Dr. Harris, who’s taken a job in London, soon becomes a suspect in a murder investigation. Mrs. Frogerton, who’s been attending séances at the home of Madam Lavinia Dubois, convinces the skeptical Caroline to join her at one. Among the guests are a masked young woman; the equally skeptical Professor Brown, who’s doing a study on mesmerism and spiritualism; and others desperate to hear from loved ones. Caroline is shaken when Madam gives her a note with information about her that very few others would know. Dr. Harris offers to accompany her to another séance in order to judge Madam Lavinia’s authenticity; there he meets Brown, who’s a colleague of his. The event is interrupted by an irate Sir Alfred Fielding, who barges in to extract his mother, Lady Fielding. Harris tells Caroline that he needs to speak to Madam Lavinia privately and asks her to accompany him back to her house the next day—and when they arrive, they find the woman dead. Harris rifles through her desk and appropriates some papers, including letters addressed to both himself and Caroline. Provoked by the police, who fasten on Harris as Madam’s most socially acceptable poisoner, the duo manage to fit snooping into their busy social schedule. If Madam was blackmailing some of her clients, the field of suspects is broad indeed.
A charming combination of mystery, Regency romance, and social mores.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 9781496740618
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.
A snap of the yo-yo string yanks Harry Bosch out of retirement yet again.
Los Angeles Councilman Jake Pearlman has resurrected the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit in order to reopen the case of his kid sister, Sarah, whose 1994 murder was instantly eclipsed in the press by the O.J. Simpson case when it broke a day later. Since not even a councilor can reconstitute a police unit for a single favored case, Det. Renée Ballard and her mostly volunteer (read: unpaid) crew are expected to reopen some other cold cases as well, giving Bosch a fresh opportunity to gather evidence against Finbar McShane, the crooked manager he’s convinced executed industrial contractor Stephen Gallagher, his wife, and their two children in 2013 and buried them in a single desert grave. The case has haunted Bosch more than any other he failed to close, and he’s fine to work the Pearlman homicide if it’ll give him another crack at McShane. As it turns out, the Pearlman case is considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leads the unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch’s problems. The windup of the Gallagher murders, a testament to sweating every detail and following every lead wherever it goes, is more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic. Fans of the aging detective who fear that he might be mellowing will be happy to hear that “putting him on a team did not make him a team player.”
Not the best of Connelly’s procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-48565-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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