A strong mystery that clearly shows some secrets, like a few bodies, can’t stay buried.
A small-town Oklahoma cop in the mid-1960s investigates a supposed decades-old triple homicide—killings that may implicate a member of his own family.
In Kelsey’s third installment of a mystery series, Chief Emmett Hardy, on leave from the police force following a breakdown and a bout with alcoholism, goes to the state penitentiary at the request of dying prisoner Rufus Kenworthy. Kenworthy wants to “get right with the Lord” by confessing something big to Hardy. The crime involves the mixed-race Younger family. Townspeople believe Clarence Younger and his wife and son fled years ago after their home was torched by racists, but Kenworthy claims that after the fire, the three were murdered and their bodies dumped in the town lake. Kenworthy implies Hardy’s widowed father, who now deals with memory issues, was involved. Or could Kenworthy have confused Hardy’s dad with his father’s older brother, Ernest, who now works for mobsters in New York City? After asking local police and other townspeople to fill in the blanks in Kenworthy’s story, Hardy temporarily lands in the trunk of a car. Along with a dangerous professional life, he has a complicated personal one. Hardy’s lover, Karen Dean, who wears nightwear as “sexy as a repurposed feed bag,” works as a local police officer while his estranged, free-spirited wife, Sophie, lives in New York. She’s a journalist who sidelines playing drums in Greenwich Village jazz clubs. While in New York to find his uncle, Hardy looks up Sophie—and she hits all the right notes. The change of scenery to the big city opens up the story. The book—a smooth melding of mystery and historical fiction—details racial and policing issues that remain to this day. Kelsey deftly captures small-town life of over 50 years ago, and he doesn’t shy away from the most brutal actions of the Ku Klux Klan in the ’30s. The author succinctly recaps the previous volume in the series, which resulted in Hardy’s leave from the force. Other pluses that are woven throughout the engaging tale are references to music—a jazz fan, Hardy plays the horn—and to the hero’s beloved yellow Lab, Dizzy.
A strong mystery that clearly shows some secrets, like a few bodies, can’t stay buried.Pub Date: May 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68-433702-6
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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