A twisty, gripping mystery that will keep readers guessing.
In this murder mystery, a man works at a Cornish estate connected to a curse.
When his father and two of his brothers are lost in a fishing accident, Kenal Gundry leaves his simple town for a life in domestic service in Edwardian England. And though his body is strong and his mind sharp, his religious values place him at odds with the decadence of the outside world. Soon, through the intervention of a mysterious stranger, Kenal finds employment in Cornwall at the Slanderley Estate—rumored to be plagued by a dangerous curse. While the tranquil, rolling hills and welcoming family belie these tales of terror, Kenal’s roommate, Mugwatch, is soon found dead on the grounds (“He lay like a fallen puppet, arms and legs oddly bent, his head lying with right ear on right shoulder. Worst of all, his eyes splayed open in astonishment”). As the curse comes to life around Kenal, victims soon pile up, as do secrets and suspects. From the hidden religious meetings of Lady Gladys to an American temptress named Thelma Grubb with an eye for lords and servants alike and a secret stairwell that leads Lord Leo right to his mistress’ cottage, there is no shortage of suspects and motives. As readers struggle to guess who amid the mayhem they can trust, Kenal himself becomes a suspect—leaving the audience to wonder if seeing is really believing. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, Stasz’s prequel will immerse readers in the social and political upheaval of Edwardian England, in which modernity and tradition collide. Against this backdrop, the author presents the story of a young man struggling to find his identity in a world that threatens his innocence and perhaps his sanity. Though frightening circumstances befall many characters in the tale, the book is not graphic. That said, serious adult themes are woven throughout. Tightly written and genuinely suspenseful, the story is certain to captivate fans of both manor fiction and cozy murder mysteries, many of whom will not foresee the villainy that Stasz unveils.
A twisty, gripping mystery that will keep readers guessing.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9967693-8-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
