A new generation of heroes and heroines is bound to delight a new generation of Austen fans.
Yet another murder confronts Jane Austen’s beloved characters and their extended families.
It seems a shame to visit an act of violence upon such an agreeable couple as Charles and Jane Bingley. But for fans, the fatal poisoning of Mr. Hurst, Mr. Bingley’s unpleasant brother-in-law, in the breakfast room of the Bingley estate at Netherfield Park, has a distinct upside: the opportunity to see Jane’s socially awkward young nephew, Jonathan Darcy, reunited with Juliet Tilney, the one person capable of igniting a spark of affection in the young man. The two have been apart since Juliet was publicly disgraced by a painter who incorporated her image into a scandalous work of art in The Rushworth Family Plot (2025). Now that same painter is offering Juliet the chance to repair her reputation by marrying him, a proposal that revolts her, but that her family pressures her to take seriously. Realizing that the local constabulary will never exert enough energy to solve Hurst’s murder, Jane wants Jonathan and Juliet, who’ve cracked crimes before, to come to Netherfield and catch the killer. Although propriety dictates that she summon each party to the investigation separately, perceptive Jane recognizes that the pair are successful at solving crimes only when they work together. And only together can Jonathan and Juliet tackle the complicated family dynamics that keep them from formalizing their romance through marriage. The puzzle of the murder and the conundrum of how the young lovers will overcome the many obstacles to their union sometimes vie with each other for space here. But Gray peoples her tale with so many lively, complex, and vividly drawn characters, and involves them in such a variety of intrigues, that the reader’s attention will never flag.
A new generation of heroes and heroines is bound to delight a new generation of Austen fans.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9798217008070
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.
Murder disrupts the filming of—what else?—The Word Is Murder, based on the first novel starring author Horowitz and his sometime partner, ex-copper Daniel Hawthorne.
With commendably dramatic timing, gofer Izzy Mays bursts into the middle of a pivotal shot on location at The Stade in Hastings to announce that Hawthorne’s been murdered. Of course, what she means (though Horowitz takes his time clarifying this ambiguity) is that David Caine, the rising star playing Hawthorne, has been fatally stabbed in the neck. Suspicion falls on James Aubrey, the agent Caine had just fired; Izzy, because Caine had caused her to be fired, too, though he ended up making his exit first; Ralph Seymour, the washed-up actor who’d returned from New Zealand to play Horowitz opposite Caine, his mortal enemy; and producer Teresa de León, who’s abruptly lost an important source of funding for the project; director Cy Truman; and screenwriter Shanika Harris, because why not? After Hawthorne builds meticulous hypothetical cases against several of these suspects, provoking Teresa’s apt rejoinder, “All those questions in the script and now you’re asking them for real,” he responds to Horowitz’s theory that he may have been the intended target after all by sharing a story from his early days as a private investigator in what ends up looking like the most elaborately extended red herring in the history of detective fiction. The two plots, past and present—or, to be more precise, past and present-day-adaptation-of-a-story-from-the-less-distant-past, are eventually woven together in ways only Horowitz’s most devoted fans will celebrate.
Yes, it has its playfully witty moments, but it’s a distinctly minor work in the author’s brainteasing canon.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9780063305748
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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