Colorful genre trappings enliven this familiar take on a resolute amateur female detective.
A New York City bar owner embarks on a deadly quest to identify a serial killer in this mystery.
Life is going well for Jude Dillane on New Year’s Eve. Her Corner Lounge bar and restaurant at 10th Street and Avenue B has turned into a New York hot spot, and she has a terrific man in her life. When her business partner, top chef Pete, reports a special knife missing from his kitchen, it’s worrisome. But the last thing Jude expects is to have the knife turn up in the chest of a man related to one of her regular customers. Worse, she learns from the FBI agent assigned to the case that the murder is disturbingly similar to killings that began on New Year’s Eve in the area 19 years ago. Apparently, what had been a five-year lull between deaths is now over, and a threatening note tells Jude—the novel’s first-person narrator—that she is in the serial killer’s sights. What’s Jude to do but start investigating on her own—especially if her suspicions are discounted by law enforcement officials and those closest to her? The familiar trope of the amateur female sleuth determined to track a killer—regardless of the risks to herself and others and the possible personal consequences if she ignores warnings from loved ones and the authorities—isn’t every reader’s cup of tea. And Jude does seem rather cavalier about distressing her loving boyfriend and chef, Pete. (“But still, what harm could it do to do a little digging just to satisfy my curiosity and maybe save my life?”) Nevertheless, readers should enjoy the behind-the-scenes bar setting, mouthwatering references to Pete’s culinary efforts, and offbeat characters. The players include Jude’s ex-Marine pal/landlord, a slimy reporter who works for a “slagheap of pseudo news and innuendo,” and a cadre of male customers called the bar’s “10th Street Irregulars,” who may or may not be who they seem. This is the second installment of Stoler’s Murder on the Rocks mystery series, and with frequent allusions to what happened in the first volume, Bar None (2020), readers may want to start there.
Colorful genre trappings enliven this familiar take on a resolute amateur female detective.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-94-791594-7
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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