It doesn’t take much effort to finger the culprit, but Atkins continues to provide the blend of plot development and...
The show must go on when a television hostess’s murder sends a sleuthing couple behind the scenes to determine which of her enemies had the most to gain from her demise.
In their time together, Ada Strauss and Lil Campbell have faced more than the challenges of being an aging same-sex couple. They've had to turn amateur investigators countless times (Best Place to Die, 2013, etc.) to solve the mysteries that keep popping up in little Grenville, Connecticut. When Lil receives an email from Lenore Says producer Barry Stromstein asking for more information about her “Cash or Trash” antiques column, she has no idea that more of the same awaits. Barry, under pressure to pitch something different to demanding host Lenore Parks, has taken inspiration from Ada and Lil about how to save his job. After a quick meeting with the two, he comes up with a mix of “Antiques Roadshow meets The Hunger Games on the set of Gilmore Girls” whereby each estate sale turns into a fierce competition. With Ada in place as the host, Barry is sure Final Reckoning will be a hit even though Lenore’s unimpressed. The show’s barely gone into production, however, when Lenore is gunned down in her dressing room. Though suspicion falls on Barry, whose relationship with the mercurial host was less than ideal, public speculation is that Lenore’s unstable daughter, Rachel, may have had a hand in her murder. With Lenore’s other child, Richard, serving as both Barry’s co-producer and Rachel’s only ally, Lil and Ada aren’t sure where to start in their own informal review of suspects and leads.
Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8374-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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