A stellar collection for a year that hardly deserves it.
Award-winning Box, the spirit behind Joe Pickett, chooses “twenty perfect pearls” in the 24th entry of general editor Otto Penzler’s highly regarded series.
Box’s selections are surprisingly sunny considering the monster 2020 has turned into. Many of them celebrate human ingenuity. The title character in David Dean’s “The Duelist” bests a formidable opponent with scant bloodshed. An ambitious woman outwits a sleazy politician in Jeffery Deaver’s “Security.” A wily Texas Ranger rescues undocumented immigrants in James Lee Burke’s “Deportees.” A budding musician foxes her dead neighbor’s rapacious grandchildren in John Sandford’s linguistic tour de force, “Girl With an Ax.” Other tales highlight the strength of family ties, like David B. Schlosser’s “Pretzel Logic,” Michael Cebula’s “Second Cousins,” and Brian Cox’s haunting “The Surrogate Initiative.” Family ties don’t always mean blood ties. Tom Franklin shows a policeman going to the mat for his late girlfriend’s daughter in “On Little Terry Road.” And a surprising stepmom helps Sheila Kohler’s worried schoolgirl in “Miss Martin.” As Rick McMahan demonstrates in “Baddest Outlaws,” however, blood is still thicker than water, and a variety of other substances. The good guys aren’t always good guys, as Richard Helms suggests in “See Humble and Die.” And the bad guys aren’t always bad guys, as Robin Yocum’s aging mobster proves in “The Last Hit.” All in all, this year’s installment inspires hope that right will triumph, as it does in Pamela Blackwood’s aptly named “Justice.”
A stellar collection for a year that hardly deserves it.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-63610-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
A paragon of the locked-room historical mystery.
A vainglorious viscount is murdered in this 1910-set mystery—Montgomery’s first novel for adults and the launch of the Stockingham & Pike series.
As the novel opens, narrator Stephen Pike, not yet 20 years old and fresh from a two-year stint at a London prison, finds himself in Cornwall at World’s End, taking a job as a second footman at a remote manor house. (So far, so Downton Abbey.) He arrives at a time of high anxiety: Lord Stockingham-Welt has seen to it that the windows of Tithe Hall have been boarded up in anticipation of Comet Halley’s appearance—“This time, it will be the end of the world,” he insists. The comet spares the earth, but the night doesn’t spare the viscount: The next morning, he’s found dead in his study, which was locked from the inside, with an ancestral crossbow’s bolt in his eye. Who better than un-alibied recent inmate Stephen to take the blame for the murder? To Stephen’s aid comes Miss Decima Stockingham, the viscount’s elderly great-aunt, who makes Downton Abbey’s Violet Crawley seem like an earth mother. A frustrated scientist, Miss Decima hated her late nephew—“Conrad stole my inheritance, my sister, my career…everything”—but she hates Stephen’s victimization more. The book’s ingenious reveal, which hinges on a long-buried Stockingham family secret, is reached through a combination of Miss Decima’s scientific-inquiry-fueled deductions and Stephen’s precocious puzzling (the story features both a hedge maze and a spot-the-difference-style brainteaser). The odd-couple intergenerational sleuthing duo is a welcome new arrival on the historical-mystery scene, with Stephen’s squeamishness about Miss Decima’s filterless fuming a mainstay of the book’s unremitting humor (Stephen: “I’d never heard language like it…and I’d just spent the last month sharing a bunk with a man called Filthy Mick”).
A paragon of the locked-room historical mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780063458772
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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