A fun escapist beach read best enjoyed with a frosty piña colada.
Murder and mayhem await an amateur sleuth aboard a luxurious Mediterranean cruise ship in Stoler’s mystery novel.
Jude Dillane is recovering from her last adventure, in which she took the life of a serial killer. The proprietor of The Corner Lounge, a bar and grill on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Jude is preparing for the weekend crowd when her boyfriend, accountant Eric Ramirez, walks in with a surprise offering. His wealthy client Milt Rogovich has gifted them a spectacular 10-day vacation on the Wanderlust Cruise Line’s newest elite small-ship wonder, the Allure. Off to London they go to begin a luxury vacation. To her surprise and delight, Jude spots Monica Delmar, her friend from the days when they both attended Cornell University’s hotel school; Monica is now the Allure’s director of passenger events. She shows Jude and Eric to their sumptuous cabin, complete with a separate sitting room and an invitation to join her at the captain’s table for the cruise’s first-night dinner. But an ominous cloud hangs over this seagoing paradise: In the middle of the night, Monica tearfully appears at the couple’s cabin door, reporting that she has just discovered the twisted, lifeless body of the assistant purser, Jamie McFarland, on the floor of a passageway. And so, the game’s afoot in this fourth volume of the author’s Murder on the Rocks mystery series. Jude is a jaunty, irrepressible narrator; in between snooping and ferreting out clues, she shares detailed descriptions of the Allure’s lavish decor and tempting gourmet meals and highlights of her tour of Barcelona, their first port of call. Despite the ingratiatingly upbeat tone, buoyed by light banter, Stoler builds tension with increasing danger, a plethora of likely suspects, and direct threats to Jude’s life. There’s a very creepy scene follows an unaccompanied Jude through the ancient underground tunnels of Rome’s Colosseum, “their stone walls stained and reeking of dampness,” and although there is no big concluding shocker, there are some clever and surprising twists.
A fun escapist beach read best enjoyed with a frosty piña colada.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781685122607
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Level Best Books
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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