An often fun and suspenseful mystery.
A suburban private investigator suddenly gets entangled in a complicated espionage plot in Stuart’s cozy mystery.
Cameron Chandler is a widowed single mother and private detective at a discount detective agency located in a mall.On her way to work one morning, she stops in a coffee shop and ends up in the middle of a shootout that claims the life of local boy Callum Goldberg. During the incident, a man grabs her and gets her out of danger; it turns out to be Gary Miles, a local man she already knows, who tells her that the shooters were after him because he works for a shadowy government agency. He’s clearly caught up in something dangerous, and he asks Cameron to watch his dog,Bandit, while he’s away on a mission. He won’t tell her much about that mission, though, so Cameron recruits her friend and co-worker, Yuri, to help her figure out what to do. Then a man shows up at the detective agency looking for a dog that was lost during the shooting—a pooch that matches the description of Bandit. The stakes get higher later on when someone looking for Bandit—and his owner—track down Cameron’s kids and steal one of their phones. Then Callum Goldberg’s parents hire Cameron’s detective agency to look into his case, putting her in a position to find out what’s really going on with Gary. Overall, the novel offers plenty of tension, which gives the novel a sense of forward momentum. The story particularly shines, though, when it spends time with its side characters, especially Cameron’s clever kids; her mom, who has questionable cooking skills; the trivia-obsessed Yuri; and Cameron’s mysterious boss, PW. However, this entry doesn’t entirely work as a stand-alone, as some of the characters have history that newcomers won’t be privy to. Also, although Stuart spends time describing rooms in elaborate detail, she omits relevant details that she doesn’t reveal until the end. Overall, though, fans of Janet Evanovich’s work will likely enjoy this book.
An often fun and suspenseful mystery.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-94-044242-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walrus Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Fans will relish every high-energy moment without demanding rational explanations for every detail.
A retired hit man’s wish to impress his new love leads him back into a thicket of crime and corruption.
During the dinner date they’re finally going out on, Chicago area therapist Gwendolyn Lord shares with English professor Cameron Winter a story she’s just heard from forensic psychologist Livy Swain, an old school friend, of an impossible crime. Owen McKay, arrested six months ago for killing his wife and son and crying, “It’s still there! Still there!,” was shot to death with a nail gun inside his closely watched prison cell. Though his initial reaction is idle curiosity, Winter resolves to show off his prowess to Gwendolyn by solving the mystery. Dr. Billy Whitefield, the pathologist who conducted the postmortem on McKay, shares with Winter a monstrous revelation that he’s been blackmailed into concealing: He removed a spidery attachment from McKay’s brain whose existence was deleted from the official report. After a friend at his college links the implant to Thaumatix—a company whose motto is “We’re in the business of miracles”—Winter learns of another case that sounds eerily similar: the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a Connecticut high school student by a previously inoffensive carpenter who’s killed before Winter can question him. Surrounded by assassins and amoral corporate overlords, Winter leans more and more into his relationship with Gwendolyn, though the person he most wants to talk to is the Recruiter, the nameless boss he trusted to make life-or-death decisions when he worked as a contract killer. Miraculously, the Recruiter, who’s vanished, returns to Winter’s life. But what if he can’t be trusted any more than everyone else?
Fans will relish every high-energy moment without demanding rational explanations for every detail.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781613166864
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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