An appealing hero headlines a bracing legal thriller.
In this fifth installment of a mystery series, a Michigan attorney’s fight against his client’s stingy insurance company suddenly turns into a murder case.
While Burr Lafayette is an appellate lawyer, he has reluctantly participated in a few homicide trials. His newest client, Molly Fagan, is merely looking for a life insurance payout. Her radio-station-owner husband, Nick, suffered a heart attack at a restaurant and later died in a hospital. But just when Burr has a shot at getting her the money, Molly winds up arrested for murder. The local prosecutor claims she slipped poisonous mushrooms into Nick’s veal morel, which ultimately proved fatal. While it all seems circumstantial, the prosecutor keeps scoring wins in the courtroom, especially when he offers a potential motive—beyond the million-dollar policy. It certainly doesn’t help that the soon-to-be-retired judge doesn’t seem to like Burr and that Molly hasn’t been exactly truthful about everything. The lawyer has his work cut out for him, as he struggles to show that his widowed client, who many believe is “guilty as sin,” didn’t kill her husband. Fans of Cutter’s series will spot its distinctive, abundant hilarity. Even in the courtroom, Burr endlessly quips or slyly exchanges his chair for the prosecutor’s less-wobbly one. There’s likewise welcome banter between Burr and his assistant, Eve McGinty, and legal partner, Jacob Wertheim. Nevertheless, an engrossing court battle takes precedence and hurls obstacles Burr’s way. There are, for example, unsettling moments when the whip-smart lawyer is a bit off his game: “I have no idea where to start,” he thinks to himself before questioning a witness. Similarly, his affinity for alcohol becomes a serious problem and may derail him completely. Rapid-fire dialogue ignites the copious trial scenes, making this a brisk, enjoyable tale that many readers will devour in an afternoon.
An appealing hero headlines a bracing legal thriller.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781958363638
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Mission Point Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.
It takes a quirky sleuth to solve a baffling closed-door murder.
The author himself or, more accurately, some version of him, walks the reader through a “gruesome murder” that occurred in a rural farming village. At the center of the crime is the wealthy Ichiyanagi family, including the widow Itoko and her five children. The “heinous crime” occurs in the evening after the festive wedding of eldest son Kenzo to schoolteacher Katsuko. Yokomizo, part narrator and part raconteur, liberally shares digressions such as the fact that his favorite British author is A.A. Milne, who wrote The Red House Mystery as well as the books about Winnie-the-Pooh. Written in 1946 but set in 1937 before the devastation of World War II, this is the first novel featuring Kosuke Kindaichi, the legendary detective who appeared in more than 70 stories by Yokomizo. If Yokomizo is the Japanese Agatha Christie, Kindaichi may seem the Japanese Hercule Poirot—although actually, given his unkempt hair and apparently distracted manner, he’s more a cross between Poirot and Columbo. Shrewdly, his entrance is delayed until midway through the novel, after the police have stalled and both the family and the reader are anxious for a solution. The narrator’s garrulous charm, in a mystery long on logistics and forensic clues but short on detailed character portraits or extended interactions, is a key to the novel’s success, leavening the more intricate pieces of the puzzle. Armchair detectives will welcome the helpful character list that precedes the story.
The delightful debut of a classic, prolific detective.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: 9781805336549
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushkin Vertigo
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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